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
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.
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.
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.
It’s been such an unabashed pleasure to return to the stage post covid. Two years away only reaffirmed my love and commitment to the theater, so it’s been particularly delicious to have been cast as a leading lady not once but twice this season!
I started the year in a smart, timely and irreverent new play by Talene Monahan called Jane Anger. I had the pleasure of playing Jane Anger opposite Michael Urie’s William Shakespeare. The show was featured in American Theatre Magazine and made NY Magazine’s Approval Matrix. If you missed it the first time around, it’s available to stream at JaneAngerPlay.com until June 26th!
I’m currently at Summerscape at Bard University starring in a brand new translation of Dom Juan by Sylvaine Guyot and Gideon Lester. Our director Ashley Tata has assembled an incredibly talented and kind group of people on and off stage to bring her bold vision to life. I’m humbled to be working with such an incredible company and so excited to have such a rich and juicy part to sink my teeth into. Vulture says they can’t wait to see me play the “titular cad.” Performances run until July 17th. Information and tickets here!
The off-Broadway production of Jane Anger or The Lamentable Comedie of JANE ANGER, that Cunning Woman, and also of Willy Shakefpeare and his Peasant Companion, Francis, Yes and Also of Anne Hathaway (also a Woman) Who Tried Very Hard, will stream for two weeks this month.
The play will stream from June 14-26, and tickets are on sale now.
.www.janeangerplay.com
Inspired by the little-known author of “Her Protection for Women” first published in 1589, this bold new anachronistic Jacobean feminist revenge comedy is directed by 2017 Lucille Lortel Award winner Jess Chayes (HOME/SICK, The Antelope Party), with a cast including playwright Monahon (How to Load a Musket, The Government Inspector), Michael Urie (Grand Horizons, Chicken & Biscuits, Torch Song, Buyer and Cellar), Ryan Spahn (Daniels Husband), and Amelia Workman (Fefu and her Friends).
It’s 1606 and William Shakespeare is stuck in quarantine with his unpaid apprentice, Francis. It would be a GREAT time to write King Lear… if he weren’t plagued with writer’s block. In through the window climbs JANE ANGER, the Cunning Woman, with a large sack and a mind to change history forever.
“Ireland is no longer a country for young women,” declares one of the five passengers crowded into a small cabin on the Inchinnan, a steamer about to disembark on a three-month voyage from Belfast to Sydney. It’s 1850, and these desperate travellers are part of the Earl Grey orphan scheme, designed both to relieve Ireland’s overcrowded workhouses and to provide wives and laborers to England’s colony of Australia. Jaki McCarrick’s play, directed by Nicola Murphy, unfolds at the height of the Great Hunger, and death and devastation are rampant. These women are pawns of a cruel, paternalistic system, but they are also scrappy, independent agents of their own liberation. In a series of skillfully structured scenes, relationships are formed—through jokes, songs, intimidation, compassion, even love and violence. One by one, the women reveal the circumstances that brought them to this point, each story more harrowing than the last. Five wonderful actors—Caroline Strange, Sarah Street, Labhaoise Magee, Mary Mallen, and Aida Leventaki—create moving depths of characterization and communication.— Ken Marks
BELFAST GIRLS
Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage at the Irish Rep Now through June 26, 2022
1850, onboard a ship bound from Belfast to Sydney. Five young women seek to become “mistresses of their own destiny.” But some find they cannot escape the nightmare of the lives they are leaving behind. As they draw nearer to the promised land, their connection to the past grows ever more powerful, eliciting rage, love, despair, and above all, hope.
