How Cody Renard Richard Became One of Broadway’s Brightest Stars From Backstage
In the same year theatres shutdown, Cody Renard Richard's profile skyrocketed. After nearly a decade on Broadway, the stage manager is not just working in theatre—he’s shaping it for the better. Raised in Waller, Texas, a small town outside of Houston with a population of approximately 3,000, theatre changed Richard’s life. A self-described troublemaker, he spent much of his childhood working on his family’s ranch, taking care of animals, and participating in the rodeo before finding theatre in middle school. “I was pushed into the theatre. The theatre was not something that I chose. It literally chose me. I had a lot of energy growing up. I was a class clown. I would talk back to teachers. I would do anything to make people laugh. So I was always in detention. I was always at in-school suspension and the principals became my best friends. I was always in their office, and they essentially made me take up drama.” More.
What To Expect From The 'Gossip Girl' Reboot
Jordan Alexander, who plays Julien Calloway, lets slip that her character is popular. "I thought Julien was powerful and deep – she was more than that typical high-school popular girl," she says. "She has an interesting, powerful undercurrent." This version of the hit teen show will be much queerer. "We're making a series in 2020 and 2021," says cast member Emily Alyn Lind. "It's really important for us to not just talk about these things but also express them as normal things that kids deal with...it just exists. It's about normalizing things that used to be different or taboo." Alexander, who is queer in real life, echoed these thoughts, adding, "People are allowed to just be there and be whatever they are — whether it's queer or not." More.
'Batwoman' Writer Explains the Importance of the Show's New Nonbinary Character
Batwoman writer Daniel Thomsen opened up about adding a nonbinary character to the world of the Arrowverse in the show's latest episode. The episode "Gore on Canvas" was the debut of the nonbinary character Evan Blake, played by Lincoln Clauss. In the episode, Blake is an old friend of Kate Kane's and has an in with the mysterious Collective. The group allows the wealthy to purchase illicit works of art, and Batwoman and the Crows are both seeking a painting that might have a clue leading to Kate. More.
“The Lady and the Dale” Is a Fascinating Portrait of Trans Con Artist Elizabeth Carmichael
Zackary Drucker and Nick Cammilleri’s four-part HBO Max docuseries about Carmichael, The Lady and the Dale, is the complicated portrait Carmichael deserves. It begins in the childhood of her imagination before correcting to the childhood of her reality. But Carmichael’s life and Carmichael’s self-mythology are both important to who she was — this series understands that. Carmichael was born in 1937 into a comfortable middle class life in Jasonville, Indiana. She always felt destined for greatness and unconcerned with the limits of practicality. She spent decades taking on different identities, moving around the country, inventing new schemes, and collecting new wives. She had an easy likability that charmed everyone she met. Eventually she married a woman named Vivian and came as close as she ever did to settling down. Elizabeth and Vivian raised five children — largely while on the run from law enforcement. More.
We Worried About Kids and the Internet. We Should Have Been Worried About Adults.
“Youngsters Falling Prey to Seducers in Computer Web,” screamed a 1995 headline in the Los Angeles Times. The article by Kim Murphy detailed two instances of runaway teenagers whose parents were sure had been victims of adult predators who groomed them online. The subheading was catchy: “Once candy was the lure. Now strangers are using cyberspace e-mail to attract minors into harm’s way.” Articles like this in major newspapers as well as newsweeklies were part of the discussion of internet dangers that led to congressional action on the topic in the mid-’90s. But despite our fears over the past few decades, it was not children who were especially vulnerable to the corrupting influences of the internet. It was adults, millions trapped by a collective confabulation spun about pedophilia rings, a stolen election, and a messianic version of Donald Trump. More.
Halle Berry Reveals Her First Kiss Was With A Girl
The Oscar winner, 54, sat down with her good friend, fashion stylist Lindsay Flores, for a Bad & Booshy episode on Instagram Thursday where she said, "My first kiss was a girl." Berry explains: "I had this boyfriend named LaShawn Boyd and I wanted to French kiss him... But I didn't know how to French kiss, so I got my best girlfriend at the time to show me how to French kiss, so I could French kiss him... So she came over to my house and kissed me for like 30 minutes... Literally showed me how to French kiss a boy. And then the next night, I went and French kissed LaShawn Boyd." More.
Can Watching TV Reduce Prejudice?
Decades of psychology research have found that one of the best ways to reduce intergroup prejudice is simply to have members of different groups spend time with each other (under certain conditions). This idea, known as the contact hypothesis, has been tested extensively and shown to be consistently effective, making it something of a gold standard for prejudice reduction. But for many, intergroup contact is rare. The fact is, for better and for worse, we tend to spend time with people who are similar to us. As a result, for some people, the only prolonged exposure they get to members of certain minority groups is through characters in TV and film. But could this kind of exposure be a substitute for real-life contact, providing some of the same prejudice-reducing benefits? A number of researchers have started studying this question in the past few years and the answer appears to be: Maybe, a little? More.
10 LGBTQ Superheroes You Didn't Know About
While Marvel Comics have not always been good at providing LGBTQ+ representation, they have made significant improvements in the last decade. Many LGBTQ+ characters have been pushed to the forefront and given important storylines. For example, Wiccan and Hulkling finally got married as apart of a large crossover event called Empyre. Nico Minoru and Karolina Dean have been key players in the recent Runaways comics, and their relationship has been explored. Also, Iceman and America Chavez have had solo titles and were included on team books. However, some of these characters are underutilized and not as well known by the mainstream comic audience. More.
FILM REVIEW: Rosamund Pike Plays a Gay Grifter In The New Movie “I Care A Lot”
The gay con artist at the center of the tale is Marla Grayson, played by Rosamund Pike in her best role since Gone Girl. Marla has made a mega-scam out of legal guardianship for moneyed seniors. She colludes with doctors and administrators at senior homes to seize control of these unsuspecting folks’ lives, barring their families from getting involved. It’s a seamless grift. Marla’s brutal pursuit of wealth is horrifying. She sees her charges only in terms of dollar signs. And when she finally hits a snag in her masterminding, it’s not because some hero or executor of justice swoops in. It’s because she finds herself butting up against people just as sinister as herself. Her latest mark is too good to be true: a single, familyless, wealthy woman named Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest) who has shown some small signs of memory loss, but her doctor has no problem exaggerating those symptoms in order to get an emergency hearing so that Marla can scoop her up. More.
I’m Tired Of Comic Books Queerbaiting LGBTQ Fans
The X-Men have been fighting bigotry, metaphorically and literally, for decades. They stand for equality and resist the notion that they are less human or freaks of nature. And as society has become more accepting of LGBTQ people, more and more X-Men have come out of the closet, starting with Northstar in 1992. Prior to Northstar’s coming out, there were no other mainstream superheroes who had declared their sexuality on the page, despite the loosening of the rules years earlier. Everything else was subtext, the comic book version of being in the closet. More often than not, writers are still reluctant to make characters explicitly gay in order to avoid alienating the straight audience and wind up queerbaiting LGBTQ readers as a sort of messed-up and unfair compromise. More.
WATCH: Celebrity impressionist Christina Bianco perform your favorite Broadway stars as they put their stamp on songs from the movie musicals you haven't seen on stage yet!
Featuring: Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Idina Menzel, Alice Ripley, Bebe Neuwirth, Bette Midler, Christine Baranski, Kristin Chenoweth, Julie Andrews & Liza Minnelli.
Singing from movies like... well...watch and you'll see! 🤣
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