The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.

Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.

Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.

Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.

The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”

As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)

As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.

It’s funny how this film is marketed as the first Scream movie in IMAX, yet it’s their sloppiest work to date. Williamson accomplishes two decent kills. My praise goes to the prosthetic team and gore above anything else. The filmmaking is amateurish, lacking any of the tension build and innovation in set pieces like the Radio Silence or Craven entries. Many slasher sequences consist of terribly spliced editing and incomprehensible camera movement. There was a person at my screening asking if one of the Ghostfaces was killed. I responded, “Yeah, they were shot in the head; you just couldn’t see it because the filmmaking is so damn unintelligible.” 

Really, Spyglass? This is the best you can do to “damage control” your series that was perfectly fine?

I’m getting comments from morons right now telling me that I’m biased for speaking “politically” about this movie. Fuck you! This poorly made, bland, and franchise-worst entry is a byproduct of political cowardice.

The production company was so adamant about silencing their outspoken star, who simply stated that she’s against the killing of Palestinian people by an evil totalitarian regime, that they deliberately fired her, conflating her comments to “anti-semintism,” when, and if you read what she said exactly, it wasn’t. Only to reconstruct the buildup made in her arc and settle on a nonsensical, manufactured, nostalgia-based slop fest to appeal to fans who lack genuine film taste in big 2026. To add insult to injury, this movie actively takes potshots at those predecessors, perhaps out of pettiness that Williamson didn’t pen them or a mean-spirited middle finger to the star the studio fired. Truly, fuck you. Take the Barrera aspect out of this, which is still impossible, and Scream 7 is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, no-vision, enshittification of Scream and a bloody embarrassment to the franchise. It took a real, morally upright actress to make Ghostface’s knife go from metal to plastic. 

FINAL STATEMENT

You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become a Stab.

Neil Sedaka, an irrepressible songsmith who parlayed his compositional skills into pop stardom during the height of the Brill Building era in the 1960s and later staged an easy-listening comeback in the 1970s, has died at age 86. No cause of death was immediately available.

“Our family is devastated by the sudden passing of our beloved husband, father and grandfather, Neil Sedaka,” the songwriter’s family wrote in a statement to The Times. “A true rock and roll legend, an inspiration to millions, but most importantly, at least to those of us who were lucky enough to know him, an incredible human being who will be deeply missed.”

A chipper melodicist who never attempted to disguise his sentimental streak, Sedaka emerged at the moment rock ’n’ roll’s initial big bang started to fizzle. As a songwriter and performer, Sedaka treated rock ’n’ roll as another fad to be exploited, crafting cheerful, vivacious tunes targeted at teens who’d bop along to “Stupid Cupid” and swoon to “Where the Boys Are,” to name two songs he and lyricist Howard Greenfield wrote for early-’60s pop idol Connie Francis. Sedaka himself became a star through such bright confections as “Calendar Girl,” “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen” and “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” the 1962 chart-topper that became his signature song.

Already falling out of fashion by the time the Beatles arrived in the United States, Sedaka didn’t weather the rise of the British Invasion: By the end of the 1960s, his lack of a record label caused him to leave the States for England. Unlike his Brill Building peer Carole King — he wrote “Oh! Carol,” his first big hit, about her — Sedaka wasn’t able to refashion himself as a hip singer-songwriter. Instead, he relied on showbiz hustle and savvy commercial instincts, teaming up with the musicians that became the iconoclastic hitmakers 10cc on records that positioned Sedaka squarely in the soft-rock mainstream. Elton John signed the veteran vocalist to his fledgling label Rocket and Sedaka immediately had two No. 1 hits with “Laughter in the Rain” and “Bad Blood,” a success compounded by Captain & Tennille taking “Love Will Keep Us Together,” a tune from one of Sedaka’s albums with 10cc, to No. 1 in 1975.

Sedaka’s second stint in the spotlight didn’t last much longer than his first flush of stardom — by 1980, he was no longer a Top 40 artist — but his ’70s comeback cemented his status as a showbiz fixture, allowing him to carve out a career onstage and, at times, onscreen. Occasionally, the world would turn and place Sedaka back in the mainstream, as when he appeared on “American Idol” in the early 2000s or when his 1971 composition “(Is This the Way to) Amarillo?” was rejiggered into the World Cup novelty anthem “(Is This the Way to) The World Cup” in 2006.

A descendant of Turkish and Ashkenazi Jews, Neil Sedaka was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on March 13, 1939. Growing up in Brighton Beach, Sedaka exhibited a musical proclivity at an early age, earning a piano scholarship to Juilliard’s children’s division when he was 8 years old. He studied classical piano for the next few years, his ears being drawn to pop music all the while. At the age of 13, he happened to meet a neighbor when they were both vacationing at a Catskills resort. She brought him to meet her son, an aspiring lyricist named Howard Greenfield, and the pair quickly became a songwriting team, with Greenfield writing the words and Sedaka handling the music.

As Sedaka and Greenfield developed their creative partnership, Sedaka sang in the Linc-Tones, a vocal group that evolved into the Tokens just prior to his departure; he left them prior to their hit single “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Although he didn’t abandon his dreams of performing, Sedaka concentrated on songwriting with Greenfield. Attempting to gain a foothold in the Brill Building, the pair first caught the attention of Jerry Wexler, who had Clyde McPhatter and LaVern Baker cut a couple of their tunes. Mort Shuman and Doc Pomus suggested to Sedaka and Greenfield that they would have better luck at 1650 Broadway, where Al Nevins and Don Kirshner had just opened their publishing company Aldon Music.

Aldon signed Sedaka and Greenfield to a publishing deal — still a minor, Sedaka needed his mother to sign in his stead — and the pair had their first big hit when Connie Francis took “Stupid Cupid” into the Top 20 in 1958. Not long after, Sedaka signed with RCA Records as a performer. “The Diary,” inspired by Francis refusing Sedaka and Greenfield access to her diary, became Sedaka’s first hit single in 1958 after the doo-wop group Little Anthony and the Imperials passed on the chance to record it first. Sedaka had difficulty delivering a successful sequel to his initial hit for RCA, so he constructed “Oh! Carol” to mimic the lovelorn yet sweet sounds filling the charts in 1959. Sedaka’s gambit paid off: “Oh! Carol” was a Top 10 hit, popular enough to generate an answer record — King’s husband, Gerry Goffin, wrote “Oh! Neil,” which failed to be a hit for King.

With many of rock ’n’ roll’s initial stars waylaid — Elvis Presley was in the Army, Chuck Berry was embroiled in legal problems, Little Richard left the music behind for church, Jerry Lee Lewis’ career imploded — Sedaka stepped into the breach, offering well-scrubbed, buoyant tunes designed to mirror teenage concerns. “Stairway to Heaven,” “Calendar Girl,” “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen,” “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and “Next Door to an Angel” all bounced to a bright beat and boasted ornate arrangements that highlighted Sedaka’s youthful cheer.

While he was ensconced in the Top 10, Sedaka continued to write hits for other artists, remaining a regular composer for Francis but also reaching the charts with Jimmy Clanton. He’d occasionally moonlight in the studio too: He plays piano on “Dream Lover,” one of Bobby Darin‘s biggest hits.

By the time the Beatles and the British Invasion took over teen bedrooms and the pop charts in 1964, Sedaka’s hit-making streak had run dry. Panicked, he recorded “It Hurts to Be in Love,” an operatic pop song co-written by Greenfield and Helen Miller. Rushing into a nearby demo studio, Sedaka cut a version that was ready for radio, but RCA refused to release it, on the grounds that it only released records made in its studios. Gene Pitney took the track, subbed his vocals for Sedaka’s and wound up with a Top 10 hit at a time Sedaka couldn’t break the Top 40. Sedaka later claimed, “It was horrible. That would have been my No. 1 song, my comeback song.”

After his deal with RCA expired in 1966, Sedaka started playing hotels in the Catskills and clubs on the East Coast, venues that grew progressively smaller with each passing year. He continued to get work as a songwriter, penning songs for the Monkees (“The Girl I Left Behind Me,” “When Love Comes Knockin’ at Your Door”) with lyricist Carole Bayer, and the 5th Dimension (“Workin’ on a Groovy Thing”) with Roger Atkins.

Faced with dwindling prospects in the United States, Sedaka began to regularly tour England and Australia in the late 1960s. By the dawn of the ’70s, he realized that the times had changed around him: “The era of the singer-songwriter had begun and I was being left behind. I needed to be part of it. I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted it with a vengeance!” He returned to RCA with “Emergence,” a mellow record designed to follow King’s “Tapestry” onto the radio, but that airplay never materialized: Sedaka was still seen as a relic of the early ’60s.

Olivia Newton-John and Neil Sedaka performing in a BBC television studio in 1971.

(Warwick Bedford / Radio Times via Getty Images)

Frustrated with the disinterest in “Emergence,” Sedaka decamped to the U.K., working its club circuit until he was introduced to Eric Stewart, Graham Gouldman, Lol Creme and Kevin Godley, a group of British pop veterans who soon would form the art-pop outfit 10cc. The quartet brought Sedaka into their Strawberry Studios — a place where they recorded a number of bizarre bubble-gum hits under such pseudonyms as Crazy Elephant and Hotlegs — and backed him on 1972’s “Solitaire” album, whose title track was his first collaboration with lyricist Phil Cody; it’d later be covered by Elvis Presley.

“Solitaire” gave Sedaka his first U.K. hit in nearly a decade with “That’s When the Music Takes Me.” Encouraged, the singer-songwriter reunited with 10cc in 1973 for “The Tra-La-La Days are Over,” an album that featured the bubbly “Love Will Keep Us Together.” By the time Sedaka released “Laughter in the Rain” in 1974, he had severed ties with 10cc and found a new benefactor in Elton John.

Then at the height of his phenomenal 1970s popularity, John signed Sedaka to his recently launched American imprint Rocket Records. Rocket repackaged highlights from the 10cc records as “Sedaka’s Back,” adding “Laughter in the Rain” for good measure. The lush number slowly worked its way up the charts, eventually reaching No. 1 on Billboard in 1975. “Bad Blood,” a lively duet with an uncredited Elton John, followed “Laughter in the Rain” to the top of the pop charts later in ’75, arriving just after Captain & Tennille had a No. 1 with “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

Elton John and Neil Sedaka in 1975.

(Richard E. Aaron / Redferns via Getty Images)

Sedaka’s comeback cooled as quickly as it had ignited. He reached the lower rungs of the Top 40 a couple of times in 1976, parted ways with Rocket, then signed to Elektra in 1977, releasing a series of records that found him countering his satiny easy listening with a louche streak on such songs as “Sleazy Love,” “One Night Stand” and “Junkie for Your Love.”

“Should’ve Never Let You Go,” a duet with his daughter, Dara, became his last charting hit in 1980. He published a memoir, “Laughter in the Rain: My Own Story,” in 1982 and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983. By the mid-’80s, he had drifted toward the oldies circuit, revisiting his hits in the studio and onstage, turning his songbook into stage productions: The jukebox musical “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” arrived in 2005, and the musical biography “Laughter in the Rain” followed five years later. He returned to classical music for 1995’s “Classically Sedaka.” He recorded a collection of Yiddish songs, “Brighton Beach Memories,” in 2003, and a children’s album, “Waking Up Is Hard to Do,” in 2009.

Neil Sedaka performing in 2014.

(Robin Little / Redferns via Getty Images)

Occasionally, Sedaka would reemerge on a bigger stage. In 2003, he showed up as a guest judge on the second season of “American Idol,” declaring its runner-up Clay Aiken was “ear delicious.” “(Is This the Way to) Amarillo?,” a bubble-gum song Sedaka wrote and Tony Christie recorded in 1971, was revived in 2006, when it was used as the basis for the novelty “(Is This the Way to) The World Cup?”

On Oct. 26, 2007, Lincoln Center honored Sedaka’s 50 years in showbiz with a gala concert featuring Natalie Cole, David Foster and Clay Aiken. He continued to work steadily over the next two decades, releasing a handful of new records but focusing on concerts. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, he took his show online, holding mini-concerts on social media.

Sedaka is survived by his wife, Leba, daughter Dara and son Marc, and three grandchildren.