I love a whodunit – especially one with a light comic touch. Rian Johnson’s Knives Out and Glass Onion are two of my most rewatched recent films, and they owe a great deal to everything from Agatha Christie to Sherlock Holmes to Columbo to the criminally underseen film The Last of Sheila.

So now, imagine my delight at Netflix’s The Residence, a high-energy comic whodunit set at the White House.

The story is this: One night, during a state dinner honoring Australia, A.B. Wynter, the head usher of the White House — played by Giancarlo Esposito — is found dead. The chief of the D.C. police brings in the brilliant detective he trusts most: Cordelia Cupp, played with verve and poise by the wonderful Uzo Aduba. Looking every bit the tweedy detective, only far more stylish, Cupp sweeps in, won’t let anyone leave, and starts to question witnesses. FBI agent Edwin Park (Randall Park), assigned to help, can only try to keep up with her.

So who did it? Wynter had many conflicts with many people, we will learn. Was it the president’s top advisor, played by Ken Marino? Was it the loyal staffer, played by Susan Kelechi Watson, who was set to succeed Wynter as head usher? Maybe it was the president’s loathed brother, played by Jason Lee, or the temperamental pastry chef played by Bronson Pinchot. What about the boozy butler, the president’s mother-in-law, the social secretary, or the engineer?

The show will tell you. The answer will be fair; the murderer is not a random person who appears at the last minute. The evidence makes sense, and much of it has been there all along. It is, in other words, a properly executed whodunit, with all the pleasures that suggests. You will get red herrings and misdirections, but Cordelia is a reliable narrator and only says what she knows to be true. She’s an avid birder (just like President Teddy Roosevelt, she points out), so you know she is detail-oriented and patient. She’s also wickedly funny, but her delivery is usually dry as a bone.

At the same time, we also get scenes from the congressional hearings about the investigation that happen later, which take testimony in preparation for the release of a report. That might be one more framing device than the show needs, but Al Franken and Eliza Coupe are funny as they play senators bickering disagreeably.

There are eight episodes; the last is almost 90 minutes long, and it’s the segment in every great story of this kind where the detective gathers all the suspects, explains the crime, and announces the killer. The show probably doesn’t need 90 minutes of that; it could have used a trim in this section. That’s the closest thing to a beef that I have. But they’re being true to the roots of the genre by allowing Aduba to make a meal of it.

There’s a lot of respect for tradition here; the episodes have titles that pay tribute to other murder mysteries — there are episodes called “Knives Out” and “Dial M for Murder.” (And one called “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which is a good enough pun that it’s easy to forgive even if the original is not quite a murder mystery.) A good execution of a beloved formula is a wonderful thing, and you won’t regret letting this one suck you in.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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Officially, playwright and screenwriter Marco Ramirez began working on the Broadway musical “Buena Vista Social Club” a little more than six years ago. But if you start the clock when the Cuban supergroup’s music first seeped into his soul, he’s been penning it for decades. Like many Cubans and Cuban Americans, the silky crooning of band member Ibrahim Ferrer and the insatiable rhythm of “Candela” wafted through his grandparents’ living room and into his teenage ears. For him, the album represented a bond not just to Cuba, but to each other: “My grandfather is as much of a music nerd as I was,” says Ramirez. “We connected the same way two teenagers would, opening the liner notes and saying, ‘Look at these lyrics, look at this stuff.’ ”

The electrifying new musical began an open-ended run at Broadway’s Schoenfeld Theatre on March 19 and traces the origins of the Cuban music supergroup that rose to international fame after the success of their eponymous Grammy-winning 1997 album and the 1999 Wim Wenders documentary of the same name. The show’s creative team boasts a pedigree on par with the band itself, including Tony-nominated director Saheem Ali, two-time Tony-winner Justin Peck ( (“Illinoise,” “Carousel”) and his co-choreographer Patricia Delgado and Tony-winning producer Orin Wolf (“The Band’s Visit,” “Once”).

Unfolding across two timelines, the show follows the golden age Cuban musicians as they navigate Havana’s segregated social scene at the onset of the Cuban Revolution, and 40 years later during their twilight years as they hurtle toward the Carnegie Hall concert depicted in the documentary. While all of the songs are performed in their original Spanish, the dialogue is completely in English.

“Right now, you and I are a thousand miles away, speaking very different tongues, on a very different island,” explains character Juan de Marcos, inspired by his real-life counterpart. “But a sound like this? It tends to travel.”

Like the “Buena Vista” musicians, Ramirez also followed his dream thousands of miles from home, his artistic pursuits carrying the first-generation son of Cuban immigrants from his Hialeah hometown to New York, where he studied playwriting at NYU and Juilliard. Before he could even accept his master’s degree from the latter, he was off again, this time to Los Angeles, where he joined the staffs of award-winning television series, including “Sons of Anarchy” and “Orange Is the New Black.” More recently, he served as showrunner on “Daredevil” and “La Máquina,” and judging by the multiple projects he’s contractually-forbidden from discussing, he’s cemented his status as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand scribes.

Right now, though, Ramirez and I are thousands of miles away from L.A. in a very different metropolis: New York City,, where we break bread at Margon, a counter serve Cuban restaurant two blocks from the show’s theater on 45th Street. Our conversation lasted just 15 minutes before Ramirez was called back to the theater for a last-minute creative discussion about his Broadway debut. So, like the “Buena Vista” band members, we too took our show on the road, through Times Square, finally concluding at a nearby bar. After all, a conversation like this, occurring just days before opening night? It tends to travel.

You grew up with this music. What does this music mean to you now?

I think it’s entirely about honoring what came before us and also — we live in a world that is fascinated with what’s new and what’s young. Music is the only place where they really respect when an instrument ages. When a laptop ages, it gets thrown away. But in the world of music, it’s like, “This violin is 100 years old. This piano is 200 years old.” Age is seen as a sign of quality because it has endured.

Marco Ramirez speaks with The Times over lunch at Margon in New York City.

(Nicholas Ducassi, Los Angeles Times)

I’m Cuban. You’re Cuban. We grew up with this music. As you started working on this show, did you feel any anxiety or nervousness about holding up the mantle of — I don’t know — our entire Cuban identity?

I felt a responsibility to the music. As a kid having been born and raised in Miami — to me, Cuba was a place where music came from. That was my first real relationship to the island and that culture.

And so I have felt like a protector to some degree of the music throughout this process. … I’ve felt a little bit like Indiana Jones running through a temple where tons of things are being thrown at you and you’re just trying to save the one beautiful thing because you’re like, “This belongs in a museum.” That’s me. And I feel that way about this music really passionately.

Can you take us through the early days? How did you feel when you first heard about [the project]?

It was an immediate yes. It was like I was on “Family Feud” and they asked the question and I was like, WHAM, on the buzzer. A commercial producer named Orin Wolf approached me, and he had done a show called “The Band’s Visit” on Broadway, which was a very successful, very beautiful and very moving musical. He said, “I love this music. I don’t speak Spanish, but I think there’s a theater project here. Can we start talking about it?” And my response was “YES” in all caps. And from that point on, we were in lockstep and walking together on this journey. We went to Cuba several times. We met with a lot of the musicians. We went to Mexico to meet with some of the musicians’ families who lived there. We’ve been kind of globetrotting and we really feel protective over this music. And we’ve been doing it together.

Marco Ramirez speaks with L.A. Times reporter Nicholas Ducassi and friend Frankie J. Alvarez outside of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York City

(Nicholas Ducassi, Los Angeles Times)

One of the lines that jumped out at me is when Young Haydee tells her sister Omara [Portuondo], basically, “We have this potential deal with Capitol Records, and we need to leave the island. There’s this whole future ahead of us if we just leap and say yes to this.” When you —

(Laughs) That’s actually better than the line.

Ha, thanks. When you were in undergrad, before you had booked a single professional job as a writer, what did you see as your future? What did you hope would unfold?

Broadway was not anywhere in the picture, but I thought, “I want to write plays. I want to get them produced or produce them myself,” which we did. And for some weird, arbitrary reason, I told myself, “And when I’m 40, I can write TV.” It was like a weird rule. Like, “[writing for television] is something 40-year-old people do.” But at the age of 18, 19, 20, all I was trying to do was get a couple productions of my plays done anywhere that would do them. … I got to write for TV before I was 30, which was nice.

What do you have left to do? I guess that means it’s all over for you.

I’m really hoping that next year I’ll get traded to the Miami Heat.

Early on in the play, when Juan de Marcos is trying to get [legendary Cuban singer] Omara [Portuondo] to record the album, he delivers this pretty stunning monologue: “This record, the one you did after it, and the one after that … they changed my life. They’re the reason I went to conservatory. They’re the reason I got two PhDs.” Who was your Omara Portuondo?

In a way, that’s me talking to the [“Buena Vista Social Club”] record, to the legacy of this record. This record for me was the high watermark of what music could do … and proof that Cuban compositions belonged right next to Beethoven. In some ways, that became kind of the rallying cry of the whole piece: We just want to fight for some space and some respect …. Like, when did the Mount Rushmore just suddenly become Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Rachmaninoff — all the other names that we know? Who’s to say that there aren’t other people from other places, from other continents who deserve to be considered canonically among the best music ever made? … I really do genuinely feel that way about some of these compositions. They are all-timers. The melodies are all up there with the most beautiful melodies ever made.

“Buena Vista Social Club” book writer Marco Ramirez speaks with the real life Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos at the show’s first rehearsal.

(Andy Henderson / Buena Vista Social Club on Broadway)

Toward the end of the play, as Compay [Segundo], you write: “These songs you like so much. They’re all about heartbreak, about longing … But they’re not beautiful because we wrote them that way … They’re beautiful … because we lived them.” As a Cuban American from Miami myself, as you are, there is a distance, both geographic and chronological, between the life that you lived, born and raised in Miami, and the life that they lived, born in and dying in Cuba. How did you close that distance?

I think the first step was acknowledging my privilege, but also that my lived experience was never going to be the experience of somebody who was born and raised and lived in Cuba. I identify as Cuban American, I identify as Cuban culturally, but I do not have the same lived experience as people who have lived both the joys and the sorrows of it.

Part of that is what made visiting [Cuba] so, so insightful. Just being there and interacting with a lot of people who had never left the island. But really just trying to inhabit the point of view of these artists who were born and raised and died there and what that must have felt like for them, for the outside world to keep looking at their music and saying, “Oh my God, it’s so lovely. It’s so beautiful. Everything is so filled with exotic flavor and it’s just so romantic.” But for them to not fully comprehend the level of suffering that went into the songwriting, the level of suffering that went into the performance, even just the agony of practice to be able to play like Leo [Reyna], our pianist, or Renesito [Avich], our tres player — the hours spent alone in a room with an instrument to be able to solo in a huge way and like be the Jimi Hendrix of the tres. That’s a lot of work and heartache and sacrifice. There were a lot of parties those guys didn’t go to so that today they could be the party.

Marco Ramirez poses with his grandfather Felix Delgado

(Marco Ramirez)

On that note, heartbreak and hardship is now unfortunately so part and parcel to the Cuban condition, but the show is also really funny. So many laughs come out of some of the most heartbreaking moments of the show. Was that intentional?

I don’t think it was an active choice. I just don’t think I would have been capable of doing it without comedy. I think my experience of Cuban culture has largely been an experience of Cuban comedy. Whether or not that’s the storytelling tradition of my uncle telling a joke at the table or my aunt or my mother, or my grandmother telling a joke. And especially, I think, when the songs are so heavy and so about heartbreak. Not all of them, but many of them are so heavy and about heartbreak. It’s like they’re either about heartbreak or they’re about sex. It was about the counterbalance.

What drives you to write?

Oh, God. I’m not good at anything else, Nick. I’m not even sure I’m good at this … What was the question? “What drives you to write?” I don’t know … I do fundamentally believe in the power of storytelling and stories, whether or not that’s theater or movies or books. It is a way that we make sense of the world, and I believe in that as an art form. Like one believes in Santa Claus.

What’s it like to finally get to this point where you can’t touch it anymore? It’s out of your hands and this is the script that’s going to go in black and white forever?

A lot of therapy and a lot of meditation are going to help me get through the next week. … I genuinely hope that people like it. I’m proud of it. Most importantly, it’s been a lot of fun to make.

Thank you for your time. My dad’s coming to see it with me tonight for the second time. Thank you for bringing the old spirits back for him.

Thank you for the Margon chicken thighs. They were delicious.

It was about time that Disney would eventually get to reimagining their first-ever feature-length animated production in live-action after remaking many of their classic princesses, such as Cinderella, Mulan, and Belle, just to name a few. For a studio that has financially thrived over the past decade on live-action retellings of their most beloved movies, you would think that Snow White would be at the top of their list. It is the one that started it all more than 90 years ago and still holds up to this day as one of the defining achievements in animated cinema – not only in its staggering, artful animation but also in how it pioneered many techniques that animators still use to this day when creating fully-realized, hand-drawn worlds.

Yet, one had to wait until 2025, nine years after development on the remake started, to finally see what director Marc Webb and writer Erin Cressida Wilson had in mind when readapting the iconic Disney character to contemporary sensibilities. When Rachel Zegler, a burgeoning star who, fresh off the success of her towering breakout turn in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, was cast as the titular character, one would think that perhaps this one could be special. Disney isn’t making these for artistic gains but purely commercial ones. However, if I’m to view these remakes, it’d be great if they would at least infuse some life and excitement into their productions when many of them fail to recapture a magical feeling or, at the very least, tickle a child’s imagination, just like the animated originals continue to do so for the people who discover them for the first time. 

The best example of this is Jon Favreau’s photorealistic remake of The Lion King, one that strips the soul and artistry that made the original movie stand the test of time. It was only made for monetary reasons, and guess what? It was one of the highest-grossing movies of 2019. That’s why we had the Barry Jenkins-directed prequel (a step above the Jon Favreau film), and that’s why we now have the 2025 version of Snow White finally gracing our screens this weekend. My hopes for the remake weren’t terribly high, but Zegler’s casting certainly piqued my interest. She is a bonafide natural talent whose work on West Side Story deserved so many more accolades that Zegler received, but we all know she’s poised to become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, no matter the quality of the movie she stars in. 

If anything, Snow White is only worth watching for her. It’s incredible how much heavy lifting she does every single time the protagonist appears on screen, making us forget about its dreary visuals, garish CGI dwarves and animals, and thinly written supporting characters that add very little in this otherwise lifeless affair. Zegler’s singing voice is so powerful that even the biggest cynics can’t fully say the movie is an affront to everything cinema stands for, especially when she deftly captures the essence and vibrant energy of the character readapted through families by Disney’s transposition of the Brothers Grimm’s story in 1937. 

It’s hard not to smile at Zegler’s rendition of “Whistle While You Work” during a rousing number in which she inspires the Dwarves – Doc (Jeremy Swift), Bashful (Titus Burgess), Dopey (Andrew Barth Feldman), Grumpy (Martin Klebba), Sneezy (Jason Kravits), Happy (George Salazar), and Sleepy (Andy Grotelueschen) – to have a more positive outlook on life, even if the computer-generated characters are petrifying to look at. We almost forget we’re watching Zegler sing inside a fully synthesized environment, with little to no movement and expression in Mandy Walker’s photography (a crushing disappointment for a usually great cinematographer, whose work in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis should’ve won the Academy Award in 2023). That’s how good she is, and in infusing the movie with so much positive energy, she inspires us to keep watching, even when everything around her doesn’t work.

To be fair, the modernization of the story by way of Wilson’s screenplay isn’t entirely bad. Snow White isn’t relying on a prince to save her; that character is reinterpreted more as a friend than a romantic interest for a good chunk of the runtime, and how she unites everyone to defeat the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) does possess an uplifting, inspiring message that resonates with the current times we live in. Unfortunately, Webb’s execution of these ideas is so poor that one thinks we’re watching a Snow White fan film, not a $270 million Disney blockbuster. Where is the money on the screen? Where’s Walker’s usually expressive cinematography that should theoretically transpose the imaginative frames of the animated original in an entirely new light through live action? I have no idea because we instead get entirely artificial, sludgy, colorless digitized locations and photography with zero depth of field that turns everything into pure mush. This ultimately puts us at arm’s length with Snow White’s friendship formed by either the dwarves or the prince known as Jonathan (played here by Andrew Burnap).

While their arc evolves in a more romantic light as the movie progresses, the two possess little to no chemistry together. Burnap can’t, sadly, match Zegler’s ineffable, effervescent charm as Snow White. The writing certainly doesn’t help him – he barely gets a form of development other than being a member of a group of bandits who want to reclaim the kingdom to what it once was before the Evil Queen took over. Unlike Snow White, whose arc is fully formed and possesses enough agency for young girls to latch onto and be inspired by, we don’t get to know him at a cellular level. Zegler genuinely lights up the screen, but she can only go so far when the camera is never positioned to serve her, the computer-generated dwarves are nightmarish, and Gal Gadot is so terribly miscast as the tale’s legendary Evil Queen. 

The Wonder Woman star seems to be in an entirely different picture than her lead star and possesses none of the emotional texture and range to position herself as a formidable foe for Snow White. Even when playing the old lady who gives the protagonist the poison apple (“true love’s kiss” is still the antidote, even if Wilson overhauled the prince and made significant changes in their romantic storyline), the contrast between Zegler and Gadot is far too great, especially when both sing. The difference is so notable that one can easily spot autotune in Gadot’s interpretation of “All is Fair,” while Zegler requires none.

While we’ve had many Evil Queens reinterpreted away from the Disneyfied version of the character, most recently (brilliantly) played by Charlize Theron and Julia Roberts, Gadot’s version had the chance to bring the ultimate version of the Disney villain to life in ways none of the animators who worked on the original film would think possible. Sadly, the only memorable aspect of her iteration is Patrick Page’s Magic Mirror, whose note-perfect intonations give real gravitas to one of Snow White’s most memorable visual aspects.

This version of Snow White has no tangible image that will stick with us long after the credits have rolled, let alone last 97 years in the public consciousness. Worse yet, this remake contains no memorable songs, at least the original ones written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Even if Zegler sings her heart out and imbues her performance with so much raw emotion that explaining it in words will not do justice to just how incredible she is, none of the newer songs will ruminate in my memory as much as “I Always Wanted a Brother” did for Mufasa: The Lion King. Say what you will about Jenkins’ film, but it at least tried to give expressivity and create visual poetry through a technology that strips an artist of his individual touch. Jenkins was challenged and wanted to prove to everyone that making art with these limitations was possible. That artistic statement made it surprisingly moving. 

But Marc Webb doesn’t have an artistic statement or vision, no matter if he surrounds himself with highly gifted artists behind the camera (Walker as cinematographer, Sandy Powell as costume designer, and Kave Quinn in the production design department). That’s why his remake of Snow White will have little to no lasting effect on audiences beyond the cementing of Rachel Zegler as a true talent within Hollywood, one who deserves to enjoy a fruitful and hopefully storied career in film, television, and theater, whose performances will touch generations to come as she deservedly becomes a star. That alone can’t make me entirely mad, irrespective of how mind-numbingly boring this remake is, reaching a new low for Disney’s live-action IP-milking canon.

Watch it for Zegler – and Zegler only.

SCORE: ★1/2

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