Congratulations Maddie Barr

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Congrats to AV and AVY and the exceptional cast and producers of this important and original film. So happy to have been in Sundance with cast members and clients Amelia Workman and John Maria Gutierrez to see the first screening

premiere IN OUR PRIME Busan Film Festival

 Old friends, new friends, and second generation family grown-up: we are blessed these incredible humans have agreed to join our crew.

Are you seeking a binge-able comedy-drama series? Look no further than A League of Their Own.

Amazon Prime recently released a TV series rendition of A League of Their Own. The show reimagines iconic scenes and quotes from the original film while diving further into the untold stories of American baseball during World War II. Old and new Rockford Peaches fans have welcomed its refreshing focus on LGBTQ+ and BIPOC perspectives.

The series’ 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes demonstrates its success among viewers. Overall, viewers have received the show openly, celebrating its spotlighting of queer and BIPOC stories. TikTok and Twitter have showered the show with love and praise through memes, homemade paintings of the characters, and popularizing the series to the point that it is among the highest-streamed shows on Prime Video.

LGBTQ+ viewers have also appreciated the show’s inclusion of positive representations of queer couples and characters. Indeed, the series portrays healthy, loving relationships, most of which include gay characters. Furthermore, the show has spotlit actors like Roberta Colindrez, a talented queer Latina actor with an impressive acting career and performance that demonstrates the need for her to be a household name.

Happy holiday viewing

We started in the business together

I will always miss her thanks for the memories

Amanda Mackey Dies: Casting Director On ‘The Fugitive’, ‘A League Of Their Own’ & Dozens Of Other Films & TV Shows Was 70

 Returning cast members include Andrew Koji as Ah Sahm, Olivia Cheng as Ah Toy, Jason Tobin as Young Jun, Dianne Doan as Mai Ling, Kieran Bew as Bill O’Hara, Dean Jagger as Dylan Leary, Tom Weston-Jones as Richard Lee, Hoon Lee as Wang Chao, Joe Taslim as Li Yong, Langley Kirkwood as Walter Buckley, Perry Yung as Father Jun, Chen Tang as Hong, Miranda Raison as Nellie Davenport and Dustin Nguyen as Zing.

Additionally, Warrior has cast Mark Dacascos (Hawaii Five-0) and Chelsea Muirhead (Canada’s Slo Pitch) as new series regulars for Season 3. Dacascos will play Kong Pak, the former leader of a newly absorbed, Long Zii-affiliated tong and Li Yong’s old friend and mentor, while Muirhead will play Yan Mi, the unassuming but shrewd daughter of a local print shop maker based in Chinatown.

Season 3, spanning 10 episodes, is slated to make its HBO Max debut in 2023

Their game. Their rules. The new #LeagueOfTheirOwn series hits home August 12th on @PrimeVideo

HamishAllanHeadley.com

On Tuesday, Paramount+ announced that “Mayor of Kingstown,” Taylor Sheridan’s third hit series on ViacomCBS’ streaming service, has been renewed for a second season.

The drama series about the McLusky family is set in fictional Kingstown, Michigan. Sheridan co-created the gritty drama with actor Hugh Dillon, who grew up in a town with nine penitentiaries. Season 1 starred Jeremy Renner, Dianne Wiest, Kyle Chandler, Dillon, Taylor Handley, Emma Laird, Tobi Bamtefa, Derek Webster, Hamish Allan-Headley, Pha’rez Lass and Aidan Gillen. 

It launched in November 2021 and quickly became the service’s second most-watched original series after “Yellowstone,”  Sheridan’s first series for Paramount+. In December 2021, “1883,” the prequel to “Yellowstone” debuted to record ratings.

“’With Mayor of Kingstown,’ Taylor Sheridan and Hugh Dillon offer a nuanced portrayal of the United States’ harsh prison system,” Tanya Giles, chief programming officer at, ViacomCBS Streaming said in a statement. “The stellar crew and cast, including Jeremy Renner and Dianne Wiest, delivered a thought-provoking, intense drama that kept audiences captivated and yearning for more. We are thrilled to be the home of the expanding Taylor Sheridan Universe and we look forward to bringing fans back to Kingstown next season.”

“‘Mayor of Kingstown’ is such an important project that offers a comprehensive look into the brutal prison system and I am thrilled to continue the journey with Taylor and team for Season 2,” said executive producer Antoine Fuqua. Thank you to our partners at Paramount+, 101 Studios and MTV Entertainment Studios for believing in us to further explore this story.”

“We are thrilled that shows like “Mayor of Kingstown” – original stories with layered characters and important themes – are able to thrive on Paramount+,” said executive producer David Glasser. “We can’t wait to delve back into the lives of the McLusky family for season two.”

“Mayor of Kingstown” is executive produced by Sheridan, Dillon, Renner, Antoine Fuqua, David C. Glasser, Ron Burkle, Bob Yari and Michael Friedman and produced by MTV Entertainment Studios and 101 Studios.

info@updates.mainefilmcenter.org

Two Wongs screens today in Maine International Film Festival .

Shot in Maine last summer.

https://miff.org/

It’s a funny feeling and not always a welcome one when a play reaches out across the centuries and punches you in the throat. This happens toward the end of “Dom Juan,” Ashley Tata’s gender-swapped production of Molière’s 1665 tragicomedy at Bard’s SummerScape festival.

Dom Juan (Amelia Workman), libertine extraordinaire, has finally reformed. Or has she? Turns out, her piety is just a pose. “In today’s world the finest role you can play is that of the morally upright person,” Dom Juan explains to her long-suffering, devious servant Sganarelle (Zuzanna Szadkowski). “The profession of hypocrite has countless perks.”

Her cynical avowal speaks — loudly — of politics today. But wait. It gets worse. This same speech seems to prefigure internet trolling (“hypocrites create a cabal of the like-minded, if you attack one, they all turn on you”) and the way that so-called cancel culture seldom cancels anyone in power (“they just bow their heads, sigh contritely, roll their eyes, and everyone forgives them”). Lines like these might suggest savvy interpolations by the authors of this new translation: Gideon Lester, the artistic director of the Fisher Center at Bard, and Sylvaine Guyot. But no, they’re faithful renditions of the 17th-century original. The language has barely been updated.

Great playwrights often have themes that they return to, over and over again. Molière’s is hypocrisy. Which should make Dom Juan, a freethinker who spends most of the play discarding social convention as casually as you or I might wad a Kleenex, a hero. Or as in this production, a heroine. Sure, Dom Juan remains a seducer. But a woman doing what she wants with her body? Sounds nice!

Dom Juan’s reality is more complicated — for Molière and for Tata, too. Here is how Sganarelle describes her boss: “The greatest scoundrel who ever walked the earth, a fury, a dog, a devil, a rat, a blasphemer who doesn’t believe in heaven or hell or werewolves or anything.” Which doesn’t sound as great.

“Dom Juan” asks questions — perennial ones — about what an individual owes the community and what she owes herself. As seductive as it is to see a woman resist subjugation, we are now years removed from #girlboss slogans, which is to say that the idea of freedom in the absence of ethics or solidarity has lost its shimmer. And a particular lesson of the pandemic has been how easily freedom can be weaponized, how it can make other people less free.

Tata’s busy, restless production introduces these complications, though it sometimes forgets them amid the commotion of the sock puppet, the rock band, the swordplay, the lace cuffs, the haze and some very cool visual and sonic effects. (Afsoon Pajoufar designed the set, with lighting by Cha See, video design by Lisa Renkel and sound design by Chad Raines.) I laughed out loud when the show’s curtain — a tapestry of a pastoral scene — appeared to shrivel and burn. Because what fun! But for a long time in the middle, the play goes nowhere, breathlessly, and pleasure palls before Dom Juan’s comeuppance arrives.

As Lester and Guyot have respected Molière’s original text, the gender-swap rarely feels complete. A woman could never have behaved this way in Molière’s day. She could barely behave this way now. Still, the swashbuckling role remains a showcase for Workman, an actress of both swagger and steel. Her Dom Juan is groovy, rowdy, but also adamantine, so unmoved by others that she is half-statue already. The supporting cast doesn’t always equal her, but Jordan Bellow offers lovely physical comedy as Dom Juan’s deserted husband, Elver, and Szadkowski’s Sganarelle has some fine unruly moments.

By Alexis Soloski

July 3, 2022 Dom Juan

Despite its adornments and seductions, the play is bitter at its heart. Invest too deeply in Dom Juan’s liberation or even in her punishment and the ending will leave a bad taste. The only alternative is not to care — to lose yourself instead in the production’s delights, which is not a particular chore on a sun-drenched afternoon.

Otherwise, you might find yourself thinking, uneasily, of the play’s prescient moral, spoken by Sganarelle: “To have power and a wicked soul — that’s a terrible thing.”

Dom Juan
Through July 17 at the Fisher Center LUMA Theater; fishercenter.bard.edu. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.