Entertainment
Review: ‘Randy Rainbow for President’ rolls through L.A. leading the anti-Trump resistance
Randy Rainbow, leader of the musical theater resistance to Donald Trump and his train of fascist Mini-mes, had a campaign stop at Los Angeles’ Orpheum Theatre for his “Randy Rainbow for President” tour on Friday.
His platform? Make America Gay Again. (He said he’s vying to be the first twink in the White House since Jared Kushner.) But what he’s really after is to restore the nation’s fabulousness with a concentrated dose of common sense.
Part video karaoke, part piano bar floor show, part infomercial for his own singular stardom, the evening showcased Rainbow’s many colors. For a performer who confessed that he thinks in show tunes, he certainly knows how to bewitch an audience with musical theater classics retooled to put lunkhead politicians with malicious agendas in their place.
Rainbow is accompanied on stage by a trio of musicians (music director Alexandre Marr on piano, David Wolbert on bass and Ryan Folger on drums). But his true co-star was himself on screen. He sang along to a selection of some of his own best videos. Sound and image weren’t always in sync, but the stage show (under the music supervision of Michael J. Moritz Jr.) never missed a beat.
Rainbow’s parody lyrics, which appear as subtitles, nearly upstaged him with their zingy brilliance. His high-profile admirers — including Lin-Manuel Miranda and the late Stephen Sondheim — are especially discerning when it comes to comic wordplay. Rainbow was wise to throw a spotlight on his verbal virtuosity.
“Grumpy Trumpy Felon From Jamaica in Queens!,” a version of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” inspired by Trump’s first indictment, was the evening showstopper. But there’s plenty of competition with a catalog as extensive as Rainbow’s. “Don’t Arraign on His Parade” — this one provoked by the Georgia indictment — brought out the singer’s Funny Girl brio.
Original material was intermixed with viral videos. Marc Shaiman collaborated with Rainbow on the show’s title song, “Randy Rainbow for President,” and Alan Menken co-wrote with Rainbow “Pink Glasses,” a song about the star’s signature accessory, which represents not only a bold fashion choice but a gently accepting way at looking at the world.
Mockery of all things Trump was the main order of business. Rainbow knows his audience, an older demographic (or at least older than I expected). A good percentage of those in attendance seemed on furlough from their nightly MSNBC marathon. Not a Lindsey Graham or Kim Davis joke sneaked past this politically astute crowd.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was roasted to a blond crisp in a revamped version of “Look at me I’m Sandra Dee” from “Grease.” I was hoping Rainbow would do an all-out version of his “Evergreen” MTG spoof, but singing that live would been risky and hearing the controversial Georgia representative described as “Trump with a purse, only worse” was worth the price of admission. The cultural warmongering of Gov. Ron DeSantis got spanked in “Welcome to DeSantis,” a bouncy borrowing from the musical “Hairspray” that rubbed LGBTQ+ salt in the failed Republican challenger’s self-inflicted wounds.
During his Jan. 19 show at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, singer and comedian Randy Rainbow announced he will release a new book this fall.
(St. Martin’s Press)
Rainbow had teased that he would be breaking news at his L.A. engagement, and I wondered if he might be announcing that “Randy Rainbow for President” was heading to Broadway. As it turned out, the news was about a new book he’d be releasing in the fall, “Low-Hanging Fruit: Sparkling Wines, Champagne Problems, and Pressing Issues from my Gay Agenda,” a follow-up to his 2022 memoir “Playing With Myself.”
In this agonizing election year, it would be a public service for Rainbow to bring his comic relief campaign to Broadway. But his well-manicured show would first need a theatrical boost.
Drag queen backup singers would help, to dispense with the low-hanging fruit. But Rainbow, who has a modesty about him, needs to be more ferociously unleashed. It sometimes seemed as if he might prefer to deliver his snarky quips via the safety of social media. Perhaps a bigger team of writers could give him the assurance that he had the comic goods.
On video, Rainbow’s voice is remarkably adaptable, almost chameleon-like in its abilities. Over the course of a full show, without recourse to editing, its limitations become apparent. Not that he’s not tremendously gifted, but he needs to share the stage.
A Broadway presentation of “Randy Rainbow for President” would benefit from guest stars. Imagine if his partner-in-parody Patti LuPone made a cameo to perform her duet with Rainbow, “If Donald Got Fired,” a sendup of “If Momma Was Married” from “Gypsy.” Broadway could use a good variety show, and Rainbow has that same quality that made his beloved friend Carol Burnett the quintessential variety show host — ecstatic fandom.
More glitter, more special effects (Rainbow, who has a fey, puckish presence, really ought to fly across the stage at least once, à la Sandy Duncan in “Peter Pan”) and a little more comic danger. “Randy Rainbow for President” is diverting in its present form, but a critic can dream of a more souped-up edition that would theatrically draw out the brilliance of this internet sensation.
Movie Reviews
‘House of Criticism’ Review: A Pensive and Touching Portrait of Married Art Critics Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith (It Is Only, at Moments, a True-Life Christopher Guest Movie)
If you wanted to be funny about it, you could say that Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, who occupy the center of the documentary “House of Criticism,” are like characters out of a Christopher Guest movie. Both are venerable New York art critics — but the thing is, they’re married New York art critics, whose lives revolve entirely around art and art criticism and talking about art and art criticism. They eat, breathe, sleep and dream it. In the Guest mockumentary of my imagination, the two would be played by Bob Balaban and Parker Posey, and they would be blissfully cracked egghead eccentrics who think that art is the most important thing in the world because it’s the most important thing in the world to them.
At moments, “House of Criticism” does throw off unintentional comic sparks of art-world insularity. But I’m kidding, ultimately, since underneath that it’s a pensive and touching documentary, and it happens to be about two writers I greatly admire. Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic of the New York Times, and Jerry Saltz, the art critic of New York magazine, are writers of sway, elegance, legend. They’re two of the last powerful legacy critics in America, and both are fantastic writers. For them, the love of art is a mission, at once sophisticated and childlike. Roberta calls art “the most advanced operating system that our species has devised to explore consciousness, the seen and the unseeable.” The way art connects (and saves) these two on a daily basis is its own rarefied story, and it speaks to a certain vanishing culture of passionate New York literary brainiacs that used to be thought of as almost the essence of the city.
Early on, Jerry stands before Picasso’s epochal Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Museum of Modern Art and does a head-spinning riff on it, describing how 500 years of art history collapsed in the late 19th century (through Manet, the Impressionists, Van Gogh, Cezanne), leaving the blank slate for Picasso to fill. He compares the way the painting remade the world to the cataclysm of 9/11 (“When we believed in one course of history, and obviously there was another course of history, and they shattered”). Now that’s criticism.
As “House of Criticism” shows us, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith are luminaries and survivors who enjoy an idealized life together. Roberta is something of a contradiction, both the haughtier and more vulnerable of the two. She can be imperious in that Timesian way, but there’s a tremulous insecurity about her. Beneath a certain Midwestern patrician rigor, she’s full of self-doubt about her writing and is in constant need of encouragement, which Jerry is more than happy to provide. He’s blustery and big picture-oriented, while her insights are more delicate and intimate, blooming out of her holy communion with the work.
Jerry is a contradiction as well, a man who writes like a demon and looks like a dentist. But don’t let his fubsy aura fool you — he’s the social butterfly and loose cannon, plugged into social media (which he plays like a violin), and the audacious thoughts pour out of him. The most telling aspect of their relationship is that as writers they should be competitors, but instead they’re spiritual collaborators; they turn what could be a competition into a romance. They help each other on word choices, and even when they’re reviewing the same show, they’re really competing with themselves, with their own cultivated and highly different ideas of perfectionism.
Their relationship is built, to a large degree, around Jerry’s belief that Roberta is the superior critic — but this, for Jerry, is a form of chivalry, the flower of their love story. “Your writing is so condensed, right on the object, focused,” he says. He’s intensely supportive, but Jerry, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2018, is arguably the greater writer (his poetic showmanship flies higher), and it’s my reading that deep down he knows it. It’s his perpetual self-deprecation and devotion that keeps the marriage balanced.
The two have no children and no apparent hobbies outside of their unrelenting obsession with art. They slip in and out of gallery openings, where they’re treated like royalty, and they attend 20 to 30 shows a week. By all rights, they should have a social calendar that rivals Andy Warhol’s in the ’70s. But here’s the joke: They adore their life together but are so devoted to their work, so monastic about it, that they never go out. Jerry calls them “happy losers” and describes their spacious apartment off Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village as “the house that criticism built.”
In the morning, he pours deli coffee over ice into a 7-11 Big Gulp cup, and he’ll consume three of those a day. It’s fuel, as is the food he eats. When his friend Adam Platt, the New York magazine restaurant critic, asks Jerry what his favorite food is, Jerry replies: the grilled chicken at Gristede’s (a slightly downscale New York supermarket). “That’s the life of the mind!” says Platt. “You’re as happy with prison food.” He’s not kidding. I live in the same neighborhood and use Gristede’s as a convenience store, and I would never consider buying the grilled chicken there. But as Jerry explains, popping a bag of spinach into the microwave, he and Roberta are so consumed with work that they subsist on this drone food. The two barely go to restaurants (though we see them having breakfast at their favorite diner). Do they drink? If I was them, I’d need a cocktail by the end of the day, but the movie never says.
“House of Criticism,” directed by Alison Chernick, has a sketchy but rather controlled vantage. There’s a lot you don’t learn (I would have liked to see more about the politics of the New York art world), and plenty you do — like the fact that Lena Dunham is their goddaughter. Late in the movie, she comes over to visit them and provokes a penetrating exchange on the subject of why they never had kids.
People don’t often think of critics in humanistic terms, but these two invest criticism with soul, and there’s something disarming about how they were both damaged people who came together by seeing, in each other, a mirror image. She was born in New York and raised in Kansas, moving back to Manhattan in her early twenties to be part of the art scene (her mentor was the artist and critic Donald Judd). She found her way to criticism as a role in life, yet there was something metaphysically lonely about her.
It’s Jerry who comes from trauma. His mother, who committed suicide when he was 10, was erased out of his life (she was never spoken of again). He tells a haunting story about how she dropped him off for a solo visit to the Art Institute of Chicago just two weeks before her death, and it was there, on that visit, that the art lightbulb went off: He realized that every painting is a story. He wanted to be a painter, and tried (he had some talent), but thought that he lacked the proper schooling. What he really lacked was confidence. In photographs from the time, Jerry looks like he could be Richard Dreyfuss’s sad-sack brother. He wound up becoming a long-distance trucker, driving 10-wheelers full of paintings (he did this for 10 years), and he confesses that at moments he would go back into the truck and stomp on paintings and damage them. That is seriously sick behavior (his self-hatred was off the charts), and it’s amazing that he became the menschy person he did.
These two have thrived as critics by evolving. Jerry says of critics, “We have to adapt to the times, or we’re bullies and geezers.” He’s right. The film culminates in Roberta’s ultimate evolution — her decision to retire from the New York Times. The time feels right, but the question hovers: Without that job, what will her identity be? In a moving moment, she tells Jerry, “You’re my infrastructure.” “You’re mine,” he says. (That’s the critic version of “You complete me.”) And seeing each other through the prism of art is both of their infrastructure. These two are standard-bearers for the glory of a culture that once was. It’s a culture where criticism is about judging things, but more than that it’s about exploring things — experiencing things, bringing you closer to life.
In the last decade or so, Angelina Jolie has been on screen less frequently. So when she is — and not in forgettable tentpoles like “Eternals” — it’s worth paying attention. There seems to be a thoughtful intentionality to the roles she now chooses, almost as if this astoundingly famous woman wants to tell us something vital about herself, offering clues into her understandably guarded personal life.
Take 2015’s “By the Sea,” which she wrote and directed. Coincidentally or not, that pained study of marital dissolution, co-starring Jolie’s then-husband Brad Pitt, intersected with the couple’s real-life breakup — not to mention Jolie’s grief over the death of her mother, Marcheline Bertrand. Two years ago, Jolie portrayed a version of the elusive, emotionally closed-off opera singer Maria Callas in “Maria.” The conception of the role, marked by a dim view of stardom’s suffocating alienation, was something Jolie clearly understood. Moviegoers should be careful not to read too much autobiography into an actor’s creative choices, but Jolie makes such speculation tantalizing, adding additional layers of drama to her films.
The intermittently affecting “Couture” feels similarly close to her heart, depicting a filmmaker whose life is interrupted by a cancer diagnosis — a reality Jolie knows all too well. In 2013, she underwent a preventive double mastectomy over concerns of her likelihood to develop breast or ovarian cancer. (Bertrand died of cancer in 2007.) Knowledge of Jolie’s circumstance will inform a viewer’s reaction to her wounded, resilient performance, but our inherent sympathies can only take French writer-director Alice Winocour’s ensemble piece so far.
Jolie plays Maxine, an American indie director hired to create a flashy opening film for Paris Fashion Week. Newly arrived in the City of Light, she has only a few days to put together the short, assisted by her trusted cinematographer Anton (Louis Garrel). As we deduce from the phone calls Maxine makes back home, she’s also going through an acrimonious divorce and has trouble connecting with her blasé teenage daughter. At least this Paris paycheck gig will bolster her finances — and get her ready for the feature film she’s been wanting to make for years.
Just then, though, Maxine’s future gets a rewrite. A French doctor (Vincent London) tells her she has breast cancer and needs a double mastectomy immediately. Maybe she can finish the Fashion Week film, but her passion project must wait. An artist and mother who has spent her adulthood in constant motion will have to learn what it means to stop everything and be still.
The film’s title would appear to be a reference to the story’s setting, but in French, “coutures” can also mean “stitches,” and indeed Winocour sews together three thematically linked story strands. As Maxine wrestles with her cancer diagnosis, an inexperienced South Sudanese model named Ada (Anyier Anei) works Fashion Week so she can send money home to her family. (Ada has no interest in modeling, hoping instead to become a pharmacist.) Meanwhile a makeup artist, Angèle (Ella Rumpf), longs to be an author, although she cannot get anyone interested in her writing. Each one becomes a part of the fabric of Fashion Week, but their disparate problems are a far cry from the glitzy event’s self-importance.
Winocour has often made films about women balancing their public-facing life with their private selves In 2019’s “Proxima,” Eva Green played an astronaut missing her young daughter. In 2022’s “Paris Memories,” Virginie Efira starred as an interpreter recovering from the shock of surviving a terrorist attack. Winocour shows us the intimate, vulnerable spaces within her characters that those on the outside don’t have access to.
“Couture’s” three principals rarely interact with one another, but those meaningful exchanges argue that, amid the mad clatter of the everyday, a brief, unguarded moment with a stranger can be supremely restorative. Unfortunately, the juggling of storylines ends up being more schematic than insightful. Angèle’s narrative never catches fire and while Anei is striking as Ada, that section of the film feels slightly patronizing, reducing this immigrant tale to yet another strained salute to perseverance.
This leaves Jolie as the movie’s magnetic center, with Maxine drifting through despair as she ponders what to do. Her doctor insists that the surgery cannot wait, but putting her ambitions on hold means losing a part of herself — a different kind of death sentence than the one she’s now facing.
The character is underwritten but Jolie picks up much of the slack through her silently shattered expression. As she’s gotten older, the Oscar winner has become more comfortable doing less in her performances, allowing for a fragile serenity that is belied by the anguish and anxiety roiling underneath. It’s not just our recognition of the real-life parallels that make Jolie so touching in “Couture” — it’s that ineffable star power she’s possessed for so long. In a story about a potential tragedy, what’s saddest is that Winocour’s film cannot match its lead’s effortless command.
‘Couture’
In French and English, with subtitles
Rated: R, for language, some sexuality, nudity and brief bloody violence
Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday, June 26 in limited release
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: June 26th, 2026 / 08:03 PM
SUPERGIRL movie poster | ©2026 Warner Bros./DC Studios
Rating: PG-13
Stars: Milly Adcock, David Corenswet, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, Diarmaid Murtagh, Jason Momoa, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham
Writer: Ana Nogueira, based on characters created by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster
Director: Craig Gillespie
Distributor: Warner Bros./DC Studios
Release Date: June 26, 2026
The new SUPERGIRL doesn’t have that “Eureka! This is how you do this now” spark that galvanized its immediate franchise predecessor, last year’s SUPERMAN. Director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira, basing the film on characters created by DC Comics’ Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, probably wisely, aren’t going for that.
Instead, the SUPERGIRL makers are intent on providing a lively adventure, getting to the point quickly and letting the action unspool with unquestionably strong motivation, abetted by plenty of punch-ups, kicking and frequent explosions.
Supergirl, aka Kara Zor-El (Milly Adcock), is from the now-dead planet Krypton, just like her cousin Clark/Kal-El/Superman (David Corenswet). However, where Clark has chosen to remain on Earth, where the yellow sun gives him superpowers that allow to help Earth’s residents, Kara likes to party on planets that have a red sun, where she has no unusual abilities.
This is because Kara seems to have taken to heart a dictum from a different comic book universe – with great power comes great responsibility – and decided the inverse is true: with no power comes no responsibility.
We get insight into exactly why Kara is so duty-averse over the course of SUPERGIRL, and it’s probably not a spoiler to say that she re-examines some attitudes as events unfold.
Kara plans to celebrate her twenty-third birthday on a backwater red sun planet. The bar where Kara chooses to drink is entered by preteen Ruthye Knoll (Eve Ridley), whose family has been murdered by brigands, led by the horrendous Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Ruthye is out for revenge. Kara thinks Ruthye is a bit young and pure-hearted to be on a murderous quest.
Even on a planet with a red sun, though, Kara is still handy with fists and feet. Ruthye sees what Kara can do and concludes she is the ideal ally. Kara absolutely refuses to help. Then something occurs that credibly rouses Kara to do whatever it takes to achieve her aims, which sort of line up with Ruthye’s.
No explanation is needed for why Kara feels such urgency, which we easily share. Her concern for Ruthye is understandable and her connecting to larger purpose is shown rather than spoken.
Intriguingly, the aesthetics of SUPERGIRL are largely those of STAR WARS, with some MAD MAX and BLADE RUNNER thrown in. The filmmakers have a good time with all sorts of utterly nonhuman alien people and figuring out how to make interplanetary versions of familiar items like vending machines.
The pace is pleasingly brisk and the structure doesn’t require much exposition. When they hit a hard-to-answer question like why Kara is Supergirl while Clark is Superman, they acknowledge it and then get out from under without irritating anybody.
For anyone wondering about the veracity of the recording from Superman’s parents that appeared in SUPERMAN, a quick line of dialogue here confirms it (sorry, Jor-El supporters).
There is the expected amount of CGI involved, including a great motion-capture performance by Kara’s dog Krypto (modeled upon executive producer/SUPERMAN director James Gunn’s dog), but a lot of the stunts and makeup appear gratifyingly practical.
Adcock is fine in all of Kara’s moods, from wasted to resistant to determined, with a delightful reaction to feeling her body’s response to the yellow sun. Ridley is an appealing young hero, and Corenswet offers wholesome support. Schoenaerts lets Krem revel in his own soft-spoken vileness, and Jason Momoa enthusiastically portrays an intergalactic bounty hunter. David Krumholtz is affecting as Kara’s scientist father.
SUPERGIRL isn’t going to redefine superhero movies, but it’s a perfectly enjoyable example of the form.
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