Luaine Lee | Tribune News Service (TNS)

It’s not a pair that one would expect on television but Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin and comedy legend Carol Burnett are cozy co-stars in Apple TV’s next series, “Palm Royale,” premiering March 20.

Martin, who’s been performing since he was 12, says he was amazed to be playing opposite Burnett. “The energy that she brought onstage every day, it doesn’t matter if the call time was at five in the morning — it was light, it was love. And every time they said, ‘Action,’ we were together… It was incredible. I will always be forever grateful just to have the opportunity to be with her onstage and on set, and it was very beautiful,” he says.

The series is about the struggles to fit into an impenetrable elite society. And for Martin, whose career has been singing and songwriting, acting is an “elite society” that he’s not used to.

“Believe it or not, when I was 15 years old, I had the opportunity to do a TV series in Argentina for the first time, and for me, there was something about being in front of the camera and telling a story without music that really seduced me,” he recalls.

“And, obviously, music did its thing. And I just had to hop on the wave and surf. Then later on in life, I had the opportunity to do theater and a couple of times on Broadway, and then later on with working next to Penelope Cruz and Edgar Ramirez in another very important series (“The Assassination of Gianni Versace.”) At the end of the day, it’s about telling stories and owning the character and believing every word that you say,” he continues.

“And for me, music will always be there. It’s something that I will always be forever grateful for, but when I walk onstage telling my stories, the music that I write — or music that I don’t write — it’s about owning the script, which is a song, at the end of the day, without wearing a mask. It’s about being honest. This is how I feel every time I’m on set. It’s about being honest. It’s about being real and to also have a little bit of fear… I’m in love with this work, and I hope this is only the beginning.”

A drama series is a whole new world for Burnett too, who helmed her now-legendary variety show for 11 seasons. “I went to New York in 1954, and I didn’t have any jobs or anything — but I lived at a place called the Rehearsal Club, which was for young women interested in the theater, $18-a-week room and board. And I got to make the rounds and do things, and I auditioned in 1955 for Leonard Bernstein when he was doing (network TV series) ‘Omnibus,’” she remembers.

“He did it every week, and this one week they were doing a salute to musical comedy beginning in the early 1900s. And I sang for Lenny, and he said, ‘Take it up a key.’ Sang again, up a key, because he wanted me to belt. And he hired me to do a segment honoring (Broadway star) Ethel Merman … and that was my first experience.”

She says she was thrilled with the opportunity. “There was no billing or anything. I was just hired along with all the other young people to do scenes for a musical comedy, so that was my first one.”

Her big break arrived when she auditioned for legendary director George Abbott for the musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” and got it. It was a resounding hit for Burnett, who earned a Tony nomination for the role.

“Then I doubled on (the talk show) ‘The Garry Moore Show’ for two years. I was young — 25, 26 years old — so I could work that hard,” she says.

“And I realized when I did Garry’s show — at first I wanted to only be on Broadway in musicals like Ethel Merman and Mary Martin — and then I got on Garry’s show, and we started doing sketches, comedy. One of the writers on Garry’s show was Neil Simon, and so we had some pretty good sketches to do,” she recalls.

“And I realized that I would rather do different things every week than to be doing the same thing eight times a week on Broadway.

“So I never thought I would be a television person, but once I got with Garry’s show, that was it, that solidified it for me. And so when I got the chance to do my own show, instead of doing a sitcom — which CBS wanted me to do — I had it in a contract that I could do a one-hour comedy variety show, which was what I wanted. I wanted music. I wanted dancers. I wanted guest stars. I wanted a rep company. And so we wound up doing an original musical comedy revue every week, and that was my love,” she sighs, “and I feel very fortunate that we came along at that time.”

Burnett thinks it would be impossible to present a show like that today. “We had a 28-piece orchestra, we had 65-to-70 costumes a week … the guest stars and so forth. No network would let us do that now with that kind of money. And I even hired Vicki Lawrence, who was right out of high school.

I’d seen her at a contest, and we hired her. And no network today would let me do that, would let us do that, a girl right out of high school with no experience. So I feel very fortunate that our show happened at the time it did. I don’t think it could be done today.”

‘Masterpiece’ misfires

PBS’ “Masterpiece” show, which airs every Sunday night, has struggled to maintain its incomparable reputation ever since Susanne Simpson took over as executive producer in 2019. The show, which imports the best of British television, has suffered from COVID but also from some sure-fire misses like the humorless “Tom Jones,” the tepid “World on Fire,” (now canceled) and a sluggish attempt to reconstruct Jane Austen’s unfinished manuscript, “Sanditon.”

“Masterpiece” is the source of such past greats as “Downton Abbey,” “I, Claudius,” the original “House of Cards,” “Prime Suspect” and “Pride and Prejudice.”

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But Simpson insists the glory is at hand with the contemporary romance “Alice & Jack,” which premieres on Sunday. She describes it this way, “This six-part series follows a love story over the course of 15 years as two people fall in love and come in and out of each other’s lives. (It sounds like the play and movie, “Same Time Next Year.”) It’s cinematic, it’s honest, it’s funny,” says Simpson. “It’s a modern-day romance starring Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson.”

While the series looks promising, unfortunately you can’t understand a word Riseborough says, though Gleeson is loud and clear. Another example of a British import desperately in search of subtitles.

Simpson also promises some gems for the future: Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis will be back in their roles as Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII in the final chapter of Cromwell’s story in “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.” The drama is based on the book by the late Hilary Mantel.

“MaryLand,” due May 5, stars Eve Best and Stockard Channing, with another series circumventing Austen, “Miss Austen.” Here Jane is dead and her sister is in search of some letters left by her famous sibling that may compromise her reputation. We’ll see.

Garai co-stars in ‘One Life’

Romola Garai is one of the stars in “One Life,” arriving in theaters Friday. It’s the story of a young man who, in 1938, tries desperately to save Jewish children before the Nazi invasion. Garai plays a member of the British Committee for Refugees in Czechoslovakia. Anthony Hopkins portrays that young man who, in older age, regrets he couldn’t save more. Garai (“The Crimson Petal,” “Atonement”) tells me that she didn’t intend to be an actress.

”Acting is play, just pretending, and I think that is something that’s always attractive to me,” she says.

“I did get taken to the theater a lot when I was growing up and my parents enjoyed the theater and would take us and I loved it. I always really loved it. And I remember seeing ‘The Seagull’ when I was 12 and thinking it was extraordinary — even if I didn’t understand it. I didn’t really think about doing it as a career until I was in my early teens. I kind of fell into it. I was in a school play and the casting director from a London agency had come to see her niece who was at my school in the same play and afterward she said, ‘Oh, you could come in and audition for something.’ So I did and it seemed like an accident really.”

Catching the moment on film

Ever wonder how those National Geographic photographers manage to create such enduring images? Jimmy Chin is one of them. When Alex Honnold was scaling El Capitan without a rope, Jimmy Chin was right behind him recording the mission with his camera for the doc “Free Solo.”

Chin admits his feats can be daunting. “I think not about the images that I’ve made, I often think about the images I missed,” he says, “because there have been some images in my life that I know I missed.

“Oftentimes when I’m in the mountains, I have to be a climber first … If you aren’t covering those bases, you’re dead. I’m a climber first, I get into these places and into those positions to take those photos, but I still have to make my decisions up there as a climber. When things are too dangerous or when I need to contribute to the climbing team in order to get us up or to get us down, I have to do that before I can take out the camera and shoot.”

The challenges facing some of the National Geographic photographers will be featured on the series, “Photographer,” premiering next Monday on the National Geographic channel and streaming on Hulu and Disney+.

(Luaine Lee is a California-based correspondent who covers entertainment for Tribune News Service.)

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