News

The Performer | Kyle MacLachlan

The Show | Twin Peaks

The Episode | “Part 16” (Aug. 27, 2017)

The Performance | When Dale Cooper sprang to attention, so did we.

To best celebrate MacLachlan’s reprisal of the loquacious, square-jawed FBI agent, we should first acknowledge the baseline he set with weeks (upon weeks) as that muted simpleton, Dougie Jones. Because it is the contrast of the performances that made Dale’s “return” all the more vivid.

From the moment the previously comatose electrocution victim reported level of woke as “100 percent,” followed by his abruptly expressed appetite for sandwiches, MacLachlan announced, loud and clear, that the Cooper...

This Tuesday on Shooter (USA Network, 10/9c) — in what turned out to be Season 2’s penultimate episode — Julie Swagger will have her own drama to deal with while husband Bob Lee labors to extricate himself from a Mexican prison (ideally to make it home in time for daughter Mary’s first communion).

Because while Bob Lee and Isaac were getting the drop on Solotov’s money man, “something snapped” inside Julie, her portrayer Shantel VanSanten says, prompting her to “push back” against a creep who was crowding her at a local gun range — by discharging her gun right next to his ear.

Season 1 of USA Network’s Shooter was about how former Marine Corps sniper Bob Lee Swagger (played by Ryan Phillippe) was framed for the assassination of a foreign dignitary, and his subsequent mission to clear his name.

Season 2, premiering Tuesday at 10/9c, won’t repeat that formula at all, but instead give a face to Solotov, the infamous Chechen sniper who years ago was responsible for killing Swagger’s best friend, Donny Fenn — and now has the rest of that unit in his cross hairs.

VideosShooter Team Talks ‘Bigger’ Season 2, Ptsd Julie, Memphis’ Setback

On the heels of bingeing the thrilling,...

Musical theatre star known as 'the champagne soprano'

Lizbeth Webb, one of the great forgotten stars of British musical theatre in the 1940s and 1950s, has died aged 86. Known as "the champagne soprano", she was the first to sing one of the BBC's most requested songs of all time, This Is My Lovely Day, written for her by Vivian Ellis and AP Herbert and included in their musical comedy Bless the Bride (1947).

Starting out during the second world war as a teenage singer with dance bands – she worked later with such conductors as Mantovani, Geraldo, Max Jaffa and Vilém Tauský – Webb was discovered by the bandleader Jack Payne and turned into a West End star by the impresario Charles B Cochran in 1946. Over the next 10 years she made her mark as a soprano of great range (often singing in two different registers), vibrancy and vivacity. She was dark, petite and...