The Beautiful Lady – Anne Bogart’s triumphant staging at La Mama brought Elizabeth Swados and Paul Schmidt’s 1984 cabaret musical about the Russian revolutionary poets to fiery life with across-the-board fine performances.
S T A R R Busby in The Beautiful Lady
2. Stereophonic – David Adjmi’s play meticulously reproduced the creativity and tension of life in a recording studio, focusing on a Fleetwood Mac-like band, with an excellent cast who play and sing songs by Will Butler (of Arcade Fire) beautifully directed by Daniel Aukin on David Zinn’s astonishing set.
Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler and the cast of Stereophonic
3. Buena Vista Social Club – This thrilling new musical at Atlantic Theater Company, developed and directed by Saheem Ali, wove together the histories of five Cuban musicians featured on the 1996 album (and the Wim Wenders documentary). The hot band, excellent singers, and exciting dancers combined to blast the audience with joy.
4. Infinite Life – Annie Baker’s characteristically spare and profound play about pain, time, and health used six superb actors masterfully directed by James Macdonald to cast a spell at Atlantic Theatre Company.
Kristine Nielsen, Brenda Pressley, Christina Kirk, Marylouise Burke, and Mia Katigbak in Infinite Life
5. Jaja’s African Hair Braiding – playwright Jocelyn Bioh knows her characters (the staff and clientele of a Harlem hair salon) and director Whitney White knows her audience – together with an exciting and hilarious cast, they blew the roof off of the Samuel Friedman Theatre on another dazzling David Zinn set.
Lakisha May (in chair) and Nana Mensah in JaJa’s African Hair Braiding
6. Sad Boys in Harpyland — Alexandra Tatarsky’s demonic cabaret/existential clownshow transformed the tiny upstairs space at Playwrights Horizons into a hilarious, theatrical, and dangerous hellscape, abetted by sound generator Shane Riley and director Irish McCloughan.
7. True West – I’ve seen many stagings of Sam Shepard’s famous play but this one stood out for its innovative all-Asian cast directed by Mei Ann Teo at People’s Light in Pennsylvania.
8. Days of Wine and Roses – Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara dived deep into this intense chamber opera about a couple’s descent into alcoholism by Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas, directed by Michael Greif at Atlantic Theater Company.
9. Helen. – Violeta Picayo’s production at La Mama of Caitlin George’s play for En Garde Arts rang many surprising twists on familiar figures from Greek mythology.
10. (tie) Ecosex and the City – Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens created a luscious three-day festival of panels, films, and live shenanigans at Performance Space New York “exploring the earth as lover.”
Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song – always-inventive filmmaker Michael Almereyda staged this one-night-only tribute to Dylan’s quirky survey of 20th century pop led by the great Meshell Ndegeocello and her band with the legendary André De Shields as magisterial master of ceremonies.
Best Music: boygenius, The Record; Romy, Midair; Everything but the Girl, Fuse; the National, First Two Pages of Frankenstein; Fred again… Tiny Desk Concert
Best TV:The Bear (great cast of rising stars – Jeremy Alan White, Ayo Edebiri, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Liza Colon-Zayas – and phenomenal guest stars like Jamie Lee Curtis, below), Somebody Somewhere, Reservation Dogs.
Best Films: I didn’t see a lot of blockbusters. Barbie, of course, and Oppenheimer, but neither of them blew me away as much as the wildly underrated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. I admired documentaries galore: The Disappearance of Shere Hite, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Navalny, Leaning into the Wind – Andy Goldsworthy, 32 Sounds.But my movie-watching this year largely revolved around my MUBI subscription, which got me to see tons of quirky vintage foreign films (the 1980 Hungarian animated feature Bubble Bath, below) and fascinating indie gems I otherwise would have missed, many of them international films directed by women. Some favorites: Rotting in the Sun, Kokomo City, The Five Devils, The Sweet East, Ava, Fremont, Amanda, Joyland, Tori and Lokita.
Culture Vulture had a rich international weekend of activity.
Friday night I returned to the Irish Arts Center, where I saw a wonderful evening of Irish poetry just two weeks ago. The occasion for this visit was to see Céilí, a fascinating collaboration between Darrah Carr Dance, a company of fresh-faced youngsters devoted to invigorating Irish dance traditions, and Seán Curran Company, a funkier crew whose leader came up through the Bill T. Zones/Arnie Zane Company’s brand of innovative modern dance. The title of the show refers to a house party, and the evening did have a light-hearted, celebratory feel as various combinations of dancers took turns doing their party pieces. They mostly danced to sublime live accompaniment by fiddle-guitar duo Dana Lyn and Kyle Sanna, except for one virtuosic handclap-and-foot-stomp duet (“Box Tops”) by Trent Kowalik and Lauren Kravitz – all the more impressive because at this performance Kowalik went on as understudy for Benjamin Freedman; Evan Copeland covered Freedman’s other duties that night. Throughout the evening I couldn’t take my eyes off Kowalik and Copeland. Kowalik, one of the three kids who won the Tony Award sharing the title role in Billy Elliot: The Musical on Broadway, is tall and light-footed and seemingly effortlessly maintains the signature verticality of Irish dancing. Handsome bearded Copeland, a longtime Curran associate, stood out for the precision of the lyrical shapes his dancing created. It was a dense, continuous hour-long expression of joy.
A community jam session was taking place in the lobby as we left to go around the corner to Ardesia Wine Bar for a delicious dinner of small plates – portobello fries, tacos, charcuterie – and a bottle of Spanish mencia.
Saturday afternoon – More joy burst from the stage of the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater from the first notes of Buena Vista Social Club,the thrilling new musical built around the legendary Cuban musicians who appeared on the 1996 album (put together by record executive Nick Gold, guitarist Ry Cooder, and musical director Juan de Marcos González) and in Wim Wenders’ 1998 documentary. For the stage production, developed and directed by Saheem Ali, playwright Marco Ramirez crafted a narrative to weave together the histories of five key musicians and their lives in Havana in 1956 (pre-Castro) and 1996. He may have borrowed a page from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom to portray Omara Portuondo as a demanding diva around whose whims the recording sessions take place. But Ali has assembled an incredibly talented cast – Natalie Venetta Belcon as Omara, Kenya Browne as her younger self, Renesito Avich as Eliades Ochoa, Julio Monge as Compay Segundo, Mel Seme as Ibrahim Ferrer, Jainardo Batista Sterling as Rubén Gonzalez, and Jared Machado, Olly Sholotan, and Leonardo Reyna as the younger Compay, Ibrahim, and Rubén – and he and music director Marco Pagula put together a spectacular band.
As if the music blasting from the stage wasn’t deliriously exciting enough, Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck fill the stage with energetic sexy choreography for six terrific dancers. Anulfo Maldonado’s nimble sets, Dede Ayite’s dazzling period costumes, and Tyler Micoleau’s bold lighting all contribute to the visual excitement. For anyone familiar with the album and the film, layers of feeling can’t help piling on top of each other watching these extraordinary singers and musicians exude love and devotion for Cuban music. I can’t imagine this show won’t move to Broadway, where I hope to revisit it, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget the joy of sitting in the third row of an intimate Off-Broadway theater receiving the blessing of this gorgeous show.
Our friend Sari and her adolescent son Sam met us afterwards for a stroll through the Whitney Museum, whose current offerings introduce museumgoers to Japanese-American artist Ruth Asawa (I first learned about her from the postage stamp in her honor; see “Untitled” above), African-American painter Henry Taylor, and in the project room Indigenous sculptor Natalie Ball. I never know what’s going to catch my eye at the Whitney.
I felt indifferent to most of Taylor’s unbeautiful paintings, though I thought his room of portraits of artists was witty (Tyler the Creator on a suitcase, above; Deena Lawson “in the Lionel Hamptons,” below) and his installation dedicated to the uniforms of the Black Panthers arresting.
A complicated exhibition called “Inheritance,” curated by Rujeko Hockley, riffs on lineage and artistic legacies. Andrea Carlson’s ambitious Red Exit weaves evocative native symbols with abstract images.
Wakeah Jhane’s Grandmother’s Prayers goes there with one resonant image.
And I found multiple ways to appreciate Sturtevant’s homage to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1991 installation “Untitled (Blue Placebo),” in which viewers are invited to take a piece of blue-wrapped candy from a large rectangular field of them.
That tasty caramel tided me over until we had dinner at Osteria Nonnino on Horatio Street – paccheri with the spicy house sausage-and-vodka sauce and a bottle of nero d’avola.
Home from our expedition, Andy and I finished watching season 1 of Reservation Dogs on Hulu, one of the weirdest TV series in an era of extremely weird TV series. RezDogs mashes up Schitt’s Creek with Somebody Somewhere but in a blandly suburban Native community in Oklahoma. Taika Waititi co-created the series with Sterlin Harjo, and it has all the eccentricity and casual/jokey supernatural eruptions familiar from Waititi’s other work (Thor: Ragnarok, Jojo Rabbit, What We Do In The Shadows). The all-native cast is full of wonderful actors I’ve never seen before, some of them very young (see above), all of them masters at deadpan comedy. I usually give myself permission to enjoy the luxury of subtitles because dialogue flies by so quickly, but with this show it’s especially fascinating to read the native words that show up as regularly as the affectionate sobriquet “shitass”; also fascinating to see that the screenplay spells “Indian” as “NDN.”
A weird thing happened just as we were turning in for the night. A couple of drunken guys got into an altercation on the street in front of my building, and the one getting beat up pressed all the buzzers until someone buzzed them in, at which point they proceeded to tromp up and down the stairs yelling and fighting. “Ehh, macho straight guys, let them settle it amongst themselves,” I thought. But then I heard a woman scream, so I called 911. The scuffling and yelling went on, someone spat on someone, which escalated the fighting. Eventually the friends of the fighters dragged them away. Shortly thereafter four wet-behind-the-ears NYPD officers showed up, looking scared and clueless. The fighters had apparently grabbed two fire extinguishers and sprayed each other with them, so a cloud hung over the hallway. Saturday night in the big city.
Sunday afternoon we trekked down to the East Village to see The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s valedictory film, a beautiful and trippy fantastic-voyage mythological yarn full of tiny references to characters and images from the Studio Ghibli pantheon. We came home and I made two fairly ambitious dishes from the New York Times Cooking app – a kale and squash salad with almond-butter vinaigrette (per Ali Slagle) and spicy roasted mushrooms with polenta (thank you, Yotam Ottolenghi!).
Reading the Sunday New York Times fed my soul with a couple of items. The Sports section on Sunday featured a full-page article about football star Jordan Poyer headlined “A Safety Finds Enlightenment In Ayahuasca.” Dan Pompei compiled a respectful and factually accurate summation of plant medicine as Poyer talked openly and vulnerably about how the medicine helped him bring his alcohol abuse under control. Also, in the Times Magazine “Talk” column, David Marchese interviews David Byrne, who speaks thoughtfully and personally about change. While discussing the Buddhist concept of no-fixed-self and how what we think about ourselves can change, Byrne is asked how he himself has changed.
“Wow. Well, I realized quite a few years ago that as much as I might like to deny it, I harbored a lot of racial biases. At that point, a younger liberal person would say, Oh, I’m not racist, or I believe in equality. But at the same time, I was aware that I was also harboring these inner biases that I could occasionally sense. I realized I may rationally say that I’m not racist, but I have implicit biases that I would like to deny but they’re there. Overcoming those is more difficult than just rationally saying, Oh, no, that’s not right. Those beliefs and biases, whether they’re about race or women’s rights or whatever they might be, those things can take a long time to fundamentally change within us. I would like to think that I’ve been engaged in that process and was trying in [his Broadway show] American Utopia.”
Marchese asks, How do you do it? “Good question. Let me think of some examples. People might say, Germans don’t have a sense of humor, or all Italians are really passionate; you might see a bunch of kids on a street corner and think, There’s trouble, I’m going to avoid them. In my experience, the way to work through some of that stuff is just to get to know other people as individuals a little bit better, and that starts to break those biases down. But that’s a slow process. And for somebody who’s not maybe the most social person in the world, that takes some work.”
I so appreciate David Byrne’s honest introspection. He sat in front of us when we saw David Adjmi’s superb play Stereophonic at Playwrights Horizons (he later wrote an essay about the play for the PH website), and I watched him chat freely with the fans around him, which I’ve hardly ever seen celebrities do in public. So I feel like I got to witness him stepping out of his comfort zone and practicing “getting to know other people as individuals.”
I’ve been thinking about how so much of the divisiveness in the world these days seems to boil down to people’s tolerance level for behaviors, identities, and beliefs that are different from their own. How much of that is learned, how much is inherent, how much is malleable? I feel like I have not only a huge tolerance but a deep and abiding appetite for experiencing difference. Was I born that way? Some of it surely has to do with realizing I was gay at an early age and looking at the world through a queer lens. I like the way another Times Magazine contributor, Venita Blackburn, put it, writing about the animated Japanese series Sailor Moon: “queerness is not just sexual…queerness is also existing under duress, where one’s instinct toward self-determination is a kind of spiritual expanse that grows from deep within the body and psyche then cascades out into an eventual shape unlike most others.”
But the other circumstantial piece that overwhelmingly influenced my experience of difference was growing up as a military dependent. My father grew up as a poor, uneducated farm kid in culturally homogeneous small towns in the Midwest. He didn’t lay eyes on a black person until he was 12, by which point he’d been indoctrinated with all the racist stereotypes of midcentury American culture. Ironically, his joining the U. S. Air Force and raising four kids meant that we got to travel all over the country and to Japan, which automatically exposed us to people, food, landscapes, and attitudes unlike our own.
Lucky me to have had that upbringing, and lucky me to have landed in New York City, where my craving for exposure to difference and other cultures can never be exhausted.
Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, and 100 of their friends took over Performance Space New York (the venue formerly known as PS 122) with “EcoSex and the City: Exploring the Earth as Lover,” which sounded in advance like a wacky weekend of West Coast woo. Andy characterized it as “Witchy Ladies Talking About Their Vulvas, and Trees.” Both descriptions are not inaccurate. But in its sneaky way, it was a profound and timely festival of ideas.
I was going to say they aren’t kidding about being environmental activists, but really they are kidding, and that’s the point. Let’s face it, although it’s possibly the most urgent issue of the day, the language that surrounds environmental justice – climate change, sustainability, infrastructure – can be pretty dull and veer toward solemnity, shouting, and shaming. Annie and Beth bring a lively, loving, queer, body-centered, sensual approach to the topic that doesn’t mean they’re any less serious about it.
Playfulness permeates the language they use. To heal the world, Annie said more than once during the festivities, “It takes a brothel!” Annie of course came to fame in the 1970s as a porn star and sex worker and then evolved into a performance artist and sex educator whose cartoony persona allowed her to smuggle cutting-edge queer/feminist sensibility into an increasingly wider world. She and Beth, whom she met in 2002, identify as “eco-sexual,” meaning “The earth is our lover.” They were married to the earth by shamanic performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and it’s not a platonic love affair. They get down in the actual dirt, they made a beautiful film called Water Makes Me Wet, they’re working on a new movie called Playing With Fire, and they published a book called Assuming the Ecosexual Position. They model getting very personal and political about saving the planet. But they’re not fundamentalist about it – you can be “eco-romantic” or, if you’re still trying to figure out your entry point to environmental activism, you can be “eco-curious.” Submit to the “eco-sexual gaze”! Find your “e-spot”! Rub up against oaks and call it “Treebadism”!
Friday night Annie and Beth entered like royalty and were greeted as such by friends, fans, and collaborators. Intersectional to the nth degree, the festival opened with veteran life-art practitioner Linda Montano bestowing a ceremonial activation/benediction, followed by a collection of short films laying out the territory.
Annie and Beth started off the next morning with a whirlwind tour of their intertwined lives and art work.
The meat of the program on Saturday were two panels. In the morning, “Strange Kin,” filmmaker Maria Yoon (The Korean Bride) showed excerpts from her new work about marrying the dead (Ghost Wedding). Queer astrologer Michael J. Morris connected the stars to the earth. Scholar Camila Marambio talked about her cancer treatment and generously noted how human researchers and patients have benefited from lab animals who have “a talent for cancer.” Urban Tantra founder Barbara Carrellas showed scenes from her practice of Equine Tantra.
In the afternoon, “Elders & Ancestors,” charismatic Courtney Desiree Morris demonstrated working with egun, which in Santeria is understood to mean the collective spirit of all the ancestors in a person’s lineage.
She also showed a clip from her film Oñí Ocan/The Heart of Sweetness, in which a succession of naked black bodies received a sensual libation of honey (she said they used 50 pounds of the stuff!).
Savitri D. spoke about the value of being connected to a place, while video showed a gigantic tree being cut down limb-by-limb in NYC. Sur Rodney (Sur) and Philip Ward spoke about the sacred task of maintaining the archives of departed artists (Fluxus member Geoff Hendricks and writer-performer Quentin Crisp), constantly having to distinguish sentimental value from historical value.
Trans pioneer Kate Bornstein gave an ecstatically received talk on “Exploring Gender in Four Dimensions.”
And Linda Montano, who confessed to having “panel anxiety,” schooled the audience in the art of asking for help and had the others on the panel read the text that she had written.
I was beside myself with joy at the honor of being in a room with such living legends, getting to meet the likes of Veronica Vera and Beth Stephens (in her Vaginas of Anarchy motorcycle jacket), exchanging books with Annie (she emailed in advance to say she was looking forward to fondling my new book, Daddy Lover God, which heavily features Joseph Kramer, whom she and Beth consider their husband), and hanging out with old friends and colleagues like Kim Irwin and C. Carr.
I’ve had the pleasure of communing with Annie Sprinkle at intervals over the years. I have fond memories to hanging out with her, Keith Hennessy, and AA Bronson at the 25th anniversary of Pride celebration in NYC in 1994.
I took part in the wonderfully silly “Liberty Love Boat” action in 1998 (a colorfully costumed queer invasion of the Statue of Liberty) and got to photograph her in her mermaid outfit with the great lesbian writer Sarah Schulman.
And one of my prize possessions is the Annie Sprinkle Aphrodite Award “for sexual service to the community,” given to participants in Joseph Kramer’s sacred intimate training in 1992.
I love and respect Annie so much for her courage, her honesty, her vivaciousness, her sense of humor, her deep spiritual commitment to nature, and the revolutionary way she gives herself permission to do what she thinks must be done without asking for approval from anyone.
Company – Marianne Elliott’s gender-reversed staging of the Sondheim musical won me over, with terrific performances especially by Patti Lupone and Claybourne Elder in his underpants
Into the Woods – Lear de Bessonet’s star-studded revival leapt from Encores! to Broadway where it instigated an unusually, and justifiably, ecstatic response from the audience
Merrily We Roll Along —Let it never be said this Sondheim show “doesn’t work.” Maria Friedman’s production at New York Theater Workshop nails it by remaining extremely attentive to George Furth’s book as a smart, emotionally perceptive drama with exquisite songs by Sondheim, performed by a spectacular cast (Jonathan Groff first and foremost, closely followed by Lindsay Mendez, Daniel Radcliffe, Krystal Joy Brown, and Reg Rogers).
Fat Ham – This year’s unlikely Pulitzer winner rocked the Public Theater with its witty queer take on Hamlet
As You Like It – Shaina Taub’s musical version returned to Shakespeare in the Park as a magnificent community event beautifully staged by Laurie Woolery
Funny Girl – We held out to see Lea Michele and it was worth the wait
The Gold Room – This tiny two-hander, slyly written by Jacob Perkins and bravely performed by Scott Parkinson and Robert Stanton under Gus Heagerty’s shrewd direction, stuck with me
Kimberly Akimbo – David Lindsay-Abaire joined forces with the great Jeanine Tesori for this musical adaptation of his poignant play with fetching performances by Victoria Clark, Bonnie Milligan, Justin Cooley, and Steven Boyer
Some Like It Hot – The classic screwball/drag film comedy rethought for 2022 by song-and-dance masters Casey Nicholaw (director-choreographer), Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (score) and Christian Borle (triple-threat performer) joined by new Broadway talent Matthew López and Amber Ruffin (book) and their new stars Adrianna Hicks and J. Harrison Ghee
Underneath the Skin — One of John Kelly’s best pieces ever was a beautiful, sexy, instructive biographical portrait in words, images, movement, and music of Samuel Steward, the writer, educator, tattooist, and diehard fellationist who intersected with a curious array of fascinating figures from the 20th century (Thornton Wilder, Alfred Kinsey, Gertrude Stein, represented on video by the great Lola Pashalinski).
I also liked Shhh, written and directed by Clare Barron; Scot Elliott’s production of Tariq Trotter’s musical Black No More; Aleshea Harris’s On Sugarland; Rashaad Newsome’s mind-blowing multi-disciplinary spectacle Assembly at the Park Avenue Armory (above); the girl-group pop musical Six; Lileana Blain-Cruz’s production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, on Adam Rigg’s dazzling set at Lincoln Center Theater (below);
Tracy Letts’s spooky play The Minutes; Mary Wiseman in Bryna Turner’s At the Wedding; Martha Clarke’s God’s Fool with a lovely lead performance by Patrick Andrews as St. Francis of Assisi; the Broadway transfer of Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop (shout-out to Kyle Ramar Freeman, the understudy whom I saw play the lead); Tyshawn Sorey’s somber Monochromatic Light (afterlife) at the Park Avenue Armory; JoAnne Akalaitis’s staging of Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud/Drowning for Mabou Mines; Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt; David Greenspan’s one-man version of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts; Suzan-Lori Parks’s Plays for the Plague Year at Joe’s Pub; Mike Birbiglia’s The Old Man and the Pool; Jordan Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo’ with its exceptional ensemble of quick-change comic performers, most notably Crystal Lucas-Perry.
LIVE MUSIC:
This was the year I invested time, energy, and resources in checking out EDM concerts at Avant-Gardner (Bonobo), the Knockdown Center (Fatboy Slim, Honey Dijon), and Forest Hills Tennis Stadium (Odesza –pictured above – with Sylvan Esso, Jamie XX/Four Tet/Floating Points). But three concerts topped my concertgoing year – first and foremost, Khruangbin at Radio City Music Hall; Arooj Aftab at the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur; and Charlotte Adigery and Bolis Pupul, touring behind their wonderful album Topical Dancer at the Bowery Ballroom (below).
MOVIES I LOVED:
(no particular order) Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers; Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero; Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car; Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary Flee; Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once; Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s collaboration with Tilda Swinton, Memoria; Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Romanian comedy-drama film written and directed by Radu Jude; Brett Morgen’s filmic essay on David Bowie, Moonage Daydream; Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s trippy Afro-futurist fantasia Neptune Frost (pictured below); Martine Syms’s The African Desperate, with its riveting star performance by Diamond Stingily; and Martin McDonough’s The Banshees of Inisherin.
Also: Jordan Peele’s Nope; Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s Lingui –The Sacred Bonds; Francois Ozon’s homage to Fassbinder, Peter von Kant; Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom’s documentary Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill; Scott Cooper’s spooky murder mystery The Pale Blue Eye; and Billy Eichner’s Bros.
TELEVISION I LOVED:
The Andy Warhol Diaries; Atlanta; Better Things; How to Change Your Mind; The White Lotus season 2; January 6 Committee Hearings
The fall season took off like a roar. The last few weeks have been jampacked with music, movies, theater, and art.
October 27 – On the ninth anniversary of Lou Reed’s return to spirit, Laurie Anderson hosted a gathering of what was jokingly called “the cult” – the folks who loved and supported and collaborated with Lou. It was a mash-up of musicians, performers, and Tai Chi aficionados. Master Ren, Lou and Laurie’s teacher, led a rudimentary Tai Chi practice on the roof, while I nibbled crudites and chatted with New York Times reporter Sam Anderson and clocked a crowd that included Michael Imperioli, Julian Schnabel, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, and Gina Gershon.
Downstairs, Jason Stern (above) – Lou’s tech director and right-hand man – talked about the recent releases from the archives and the exhibition “Caught Between the Twisted Stars” at the New York Public Library, curated by Don Fleming, who also spoke (below).
I chatted with Rameshkar Das (below top), who co-authored Ram Dass’s last couple of books, and Shahzad Izmaily (below right), who plays bass and keyboards with Arooj Aftab.
Stewed bull pizzle was served.
October 28 – The Gold Room at HERE, a very sexy and smart two-actor one-hour play by Jacob Perkins featuring Robert Stanton and Scott Parkinson who shift seamlessly through a dozen characters apiece, beautifully staged by Gus Heagerty.
We had dinner afterwards at Lupe’s with Parkinson (below right, whom we know as Scooter) and Marc Antoine Dupont, Body Electric buddies.
October 29 — Thomas Ostermaier’s bizarre and slapstick-y production of Hamlet started out at the Schaubuhne in Berlin in 2008 and completed its round of touring at Brooklyn Academy of Music. This stripped-down version employs six actors playing all the roles on a stage filled with dirt. The show starts with something that’s not in the play, the burial of Hamlet’s father, so that the wedding banquet literally takes place astride the grave. Many familiar, seemingly crucial scenes and lines were cut. “To be or not to be” occurred several times. And maybe because we were reading the subtitles while the actors spoke German, I encountered lines I swear I’ve never heard before in the umpteen productions of Hamlet I’ve seen in 50 years of theatergoing, such as “Eat a crocodile.” Surely Shakespeare didn’t write that? Guess again.
In the title role, Lars Eidinger has been given license to ham it up and ad-lib like crazy. There were lots of empty seats after intermission, and when some people got up to leave in the middle of the second half he muttered, “Rats leaving a sinking ship!” And as the final scene approached, he roamed around the audience looking for someone to go onstage and fight Laertes in his place. These antics served to keep the show lively, but I’m not sure they illuminated anything about the play. My friend Stephen Greco’s pithy review: “Not enough sadness.”
The lobby of the BAM Harvey hosted an exhibit of pertinent work by women and femme-presenting artists.
October 31 – On Mubi, I watched the early Godard film A Married Woman, from 1964, a love triangle – woman (Macha Meril), her husband and her lover (very handsome Bernard Noel).
It’s hardly a straightforward narrative but a combination of essay, poem, collage, photo album. Its style is referred to as modernist, I guess because it thrives on the things that film can do – quick cuts, juxtapositions. A recurring motif: zooming in on a public sign so that the few letters showing spell out a pertinent word. Crisp black and white, quite sexy, a lot of skin, and a few very long speeches or long dialogues interspersed with long sections without any faces or words. Very free and inspiring.
November 3 – I went to Playwrights Horizons to see Bruce Norris’s Downstate against my better judgment because I’ve deeply disliked his other plays. Indeed, it turned out to be exactly the kind of play that I hate: ostensibly addressing a provocative subject populated by constructs, not people, behaving implausibly from the get-go, in dialogue that is flagrantly exposition-heavy. The play lost me from the top. No one who works with sex offenders or their victims would ever counsel or approve of an adult survivor meeting a sex offender 1) at the sex offender’s residence 2) with three other residents wandering around in various states of undress eavesdropping. And what wife, accompanying her traumatized husband to such a meeting, would take a banal phone call in the middle of his reading a painful confrontational letter he’s waited his whole life to deliver? No. No. Just no. When the set-up is so flagrantly bogus, it’s hard for me to give credence to anything the playwright is trying to convey. Among the performances, K. Todd Freeman is brilliant as ever, even in a crappy play like this. Mine is clearly not the only possible reaction to Downstate. The friend who recommended it offered this analysis: “Everyone in the play has sexual needs. Some of these needs cause damage to others, others are not totally expressed but all here are punished. I don’t think in any way it’s about excusing or forgiving these people, but it’s about the reality of the desires that exist.” On Twitter, Paul Rudnick paused his Trump-trolling to say, “Bruce Norris’s play Downstate, now at Playwrights Horizons in NYC, is a miracle of writing, acting and directing. It’s harrowing, funny, thrilling and everything that great theater can be. Do not miss.” So go figure.
November 4 — I was delighted to win, through the lottery, a pair of tickets to the first performance of Suzan-Lori Parks’ new shows, Plays for the Plague Year, at Joe’s Pub. It’s a musical starring her (above) as The Writer, comprising the plays she wrote every day for 13 months starting March 13, 2020. The sketches and songs alternate between family life with Hubby (the wonderful Greg Keller) and Son aka Pumpkin Pie (the tall and rambunctious Leland Fowler) and public life – the pandemic, applauding the essential workers, the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, RBG and Larry Kramer, her first husband Paul Ocher. “A banquet of the unbearable.” SLP is wonderful. She has a great expressive face, cuts a very charming figure onstage, and plays decent guitar. The scenes are often very short and to the point. She goes to Atlanta to work on a TV show (the Aretha mini-series, presumably) with her husband, and they go to double-check with the real estate agent that the owners of the house they’re renting know that Suzan-Lori is black. The agent hadn’t done so, assumed that because the owners were gay, they would not be bothered. But the couple insist, in such a way that makes you imagine all the unpleasant experiences they’d had in the past that led to ask the question so insistently. The owners did indeed turn out to be cool.
When we walked in, we were handed two slips of paper to be filled out and placed in baskets at intermission: thinking back on the lockdown year, what/who do you want to remember? What/who do you want to forget? The first one she read was, “I want to forget having a threesome with my roommates.” I thought the show was terrific, even if a little long – almost three hours. I think it will have a run.
My guest was filmmaker and queer community treasure Adam Baran, who knows Niegel Smith, the director (who stages most of Taylor Mac’s stuff), so I got to meet him. In the lobby they were selling copies of the script. I went to buy one, and a young woman standing next to me jokingly said, “Will you buy one for me?” Impulsively, I did. An actor just out of college at U. of Michigan, she had seen A Raisin in the Sun, which she said was fantastic. Her name is Shaunie Lewis (@itz_shaunie_k on IG). Ask for what you want, girl!
Chilling later with Andy, I shared with him the high points from the new “Super Deluxe” edition of the Beatles’ Revolverthat Giles Martin put together, with early, middle, and late takes of “Yellow Submarine,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
November 5 — Saturday afternoon was the Dessoff Choirs’ concert at Union Theological Seminary, an acoustically ideal venue for choral music, especially when it can feature the impressive pipe organ. This concert featured two ravishing pieces (a madrigal and a motet) by Vicente Lusitano (1520-1561), the first black composer to have his music published. It was another instance of musical rediscovery by Dessoff’s musical director Malcolm J. Merriwether (below), whose championing of 20th century black composer Margaret Bonds has led to more and more performances of her long-neglected work. (On YouTube, you can watch a half-hour conversation about Lusitano between Merriwether and Joseph McHardy, director of music for His Majesty’s Chapel Royal in London.) The concert continued with the Requiem by Maurice Duruflé with its ravishing polyphonics, its long-held hushed final notes, and a brief interlude with soloist Lucia Bradford and cellist Thapelo Masita. David Enlow masterfully handled the pipe organ throughout.
We had an early dinner afterwards with some of the singers at an Italian place on Broadway. Then we came home just long enough for Andy to change out of his tuxedo to go to see Kimberly Akimbo, which we liked very much. I didn’t see the 2003 iteration of the play, which David Lindsay-Abaire wrote for the amazing Marylouise Burke, but when he and Jeanine Tesori turned it into a musical, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. A teenage girl with that disease that ages you rapidly moves to a new school and falls in with a posse of ice-skating show nerds. Andy had never seen the great Victoria Clark and was blown away by her performance in the title role. As her ne’er-do-well yet infuriatingly charming aunt, Bonnie Milligan steals the show whenever she can; I smell a Tony Award. Stephen Boyer, playing Kimberly’s father, turns out to have a surprisingly lovely singing voice. The high school kids are adorable, especially Justin Cooley as Kimberly’s tuba-playing partner in the great adventure of Living Every Day Like It’s Your Last. I think it’s going to be a hit.
November 6 — Instead of making myself crazy watching the inconclusive results roll in from the midterm election, I took myself to the movies to see Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin. I’m a big fan of McDonagh, and this film reunited the stars of his first full-length feature, the hilarious In Bruges, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. Here they play best friends in a tiny town on a tiny Irish island in 1923 who have a falling out. The dialogue is absurd and hilarious, both heightened and mundane, the action is violent and mysterious (cf. his play A Behanding in Spokane), the surrounding characters are eccentric, a pet miniature donkey figures in the story, and if you know your McDonagh, animals hardly ever come out well in his work.
To me the spiky buddy-buddy relationship smacks of Sam Shepard (who was a big McDonagh fan) but I just listened to an interview where he said his biggest influences were Mamet and Pinter, that his early attempts at playwriting were all attempts to recreate The Birthday Party and American Buffalo. It doesn’t take a genius to detect in this slim tale a fable about the bloody civil war between North and South Ireland, but the movie doesn’t lean hard on that parallel.
November 10 — On my way home from the post office I decided to stop in at the Museum of Modern Art to check out the exhibition devoted to JAM (Just Above Midtown), the peripatetic gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant in midtown and eventually relocated downtown, showing a vast array of black artists (superstar David Hammons was an early and very active participant in the gallery’s operations, which were as much about community building as exhibiting art). I like this emerging trend of museums showcasing the work of legendary art spaces as if they were individual artists. I loved the frankness and transparency of this show, which includes a whole wall of JAM’s unpaid bills.
I enjoyed seeing work by artists I’ve admired in other contexts (painter Cynthia Hawkins, illustrator Valerie Maynard) and encountered some striking stuff new to me, like this provocative piece about Indigenous and English language by Edgar Heap of Birds.
Down the hall from the JAM shows was a retrospective of work by surrealist Meret Oppenheim, about whom I knew almost nothing except for her famous fur-lined teacup. It excited me to witness the range and breadth of her art practice, which explored almost every possible medium without ever resolving into a recognizable style. The pieces that stood out most for me don’t look anything like each other.
I also enjoyed this canvas, displayed prominently in a hallway next to the atrium where Barbara Krueger’s installation still reigns triumpantly. As the T-shirt says, I too am not interested in competing with anyone. I hope we all make it.
That evening I spent some time poking around MUBI to make the most of my monthly subscription and found myself watching a quirky queer short film called Starfuckers (gay sex workers in Hollywood plot revenge) and then a completely engrossing film I’d never heard of called Lucky, a bravura showcase for Harry Dean Stanton (below) by John Carroll Lynch, son of David Lynch, who plays a small, crucial role.
November 12 – Cameron Crowe’s stage adaptation of his autobiographical movie Almost Famous, with music and lyrics by Tom Kitt, clearly lost some luster in its transfer from the Old Globe in San Diego, where it received ecstatic reviews in 2019, and its opening on Broadway, where it did not. The staging by Jeremy Herrin feels a bit limp. Still, there are pleasures to be had watching the cast inhabit the fantasy of Rock Star Life on the Road, circa 1973. Drew Gehling and Chris Wood have fun fronting the midlevel band that teenage journalist William Miller (Casey Likes) attempts to profile for Rolling Stone; ditto Rob Colletti as Lester Bangs, William’s snarling rock-critic hero-mentor. I kept thinking the show and the music were tame in their depiction of rock ‘n’ roll. But listening to the movie’s original soundtrack album later, I took in the point that the album and the movie make, which is that those rock bands — the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Lynard Skynard — didn’t do hardcore headbangers nonstop. They all had songs that inhabited a quieter, acoustic, folky/CSN territory. It was funny to emerge from the theater to commotion in the lobby – there was Cameron Crowe, happy to meet and greet and take selfies with excited fans.
It’s always fun delving into the background after seeing a show, reading reviews and interviews and other source material. A really fun complement to seeing Almost Famous was checking out the Netflix documentary Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torreswhile writing postcards to Get Out the Vote in Georgia for the Senate runoff race there. Ben Fong-Torres is best-known as a writer and editor in the early days of Rolling Stone (he’s a character in both the movie and the musical Almost Famous) but he has gone on to have an admirable career as a community organizer as well as broadcast journalist. And he kept all the tapes of the musicians he interviewed over the years!
another eye opens 