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!
Sunday: I swear the New York Times’ fashion supplement T Magazine under Hanya Yanagihara’s editorship has more overt gay coverage than the Advocate does. This week’s cover story feature on young, queer black artists under 40 grew out of photographer Shikeith’s despire to pay tribute to Marlon Riggs’s groundbreaking 1989 documentary Tongues Untied, a beautifully poetic celebration of black gay male culture. The T Magazine event had several facets to it, beginning in Red Hook on August 1 with one of those history-making photo shoots gathering 24 artists in one place.
serpentwithfeet, Jacolby Satterwhite, Tune Olaniran, Troy Montez Michie, and Texas Isaiah, photo by Shikeith
The following day, five of them sat down with journalist Emil Wilbekin for a free-ranging conversation. Adam Pendleton, who recently had a splashy show in the atrium at MOMA, spoke directly to the discomfort many artists feel about having a minority-status adjective (black, queer, female, etc.) attached like a label to their work:
Adjectives are terrible, but generosity and legibility are important. And what I mean by that is: A project like this is almost a double-edged sword, in the sense that any instance where you’re identified is a terrible moment, actually. When you’re claimed as something — when you’re named as something — that’s not necessarily a moment of celebration or liberation. And that’s kind of what this being released into the world will mark. It’s funny because I actually never thought about any of this, so when you keep saying “Black,” “queer” — that’s not the language I used when I thought about myself as an artist. I was just like, “I’m an artist.” That was it.
I totally respect that apprehension, AND I will say for myself that I came out in the first post-Stonewall wave of gay liberation, and for me it has always been exciting when artists identify as gay or queer. It always makes me a little more interested in them. Not because I assume they will conform to some idea of what gay or queer art looks like — just the opposite. I’m thrilled to encounter yet another example of how rich and different and multifaceted queer art can be. So while this T Magazine feature included a few artists I already knew about (Jeremy O. Harris, Brontez Purnell, Jacolby Satterwhite, serpentwithfeet, Jaquel Spivey, and Ato Blankson-Wood, in addition to Pendleton), I now have a bunch more queer black brothers – poets, actors, musicians, designers, and visual artists — whose work I’m curious to investigate. I actively want to know what they have to say about beauty and desire, gender and politics, love and life. The names: Don Christina Jones, Abdu Ali, Jonathan Lydon Chase, Miles Greenberg, Devan Shimoyama, Hugh Hayden, Saeed Jones, Jonathan Gardenhire, Danez Smith, Clifford Prince King, Eric N. Mack, Edwin Thompson, D’Angelo Lovell William, Tunde Olaniran, Troy Montes Michie, and Texas Isaiah.
You can read an extended version of the conversation online here.
Hilarious side note: Leon Curry curated a Spotify playlist that provided the soundtrack for the photo shoot, and the T article includes a link. But the trap-heavy playlist has been thoroughly scrubbed of curse words, and the result is that some tracks make no sense at all because of the frequent dropouts that interfere with sound, sense, and flow.
Monday: The title and the structure of The Nipple Whisperer by the mononymous Lui suggests that the book is a step-by-step guide to cultivating nipple eroticism. It is that, but it is also a lot more. It is ultimately a stealth manual for sacred intimates.
The author has carefully surveyed key encounters with clients and lovers, and he shares with readers his trial-and-error experiments in sexual healing with a huge amount of grace, wisdom, and excellent writing.
Tuesday night: Touring the US for the first time, the Belgian synth-pop duo Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul took Bowery Ballroom by storm. Their debut album, Topical Dancer, dropped earlier this year – fun, effervescent, quirky, playfully political.
Best demonstration: “Blenda,” a hot hot groove (Bolis is the one-man band) while she sings, “Go back to the country where you belong/Siri, will you tell me where I belong?” In performance, they’re energetic and physically unafraid.
For their last number, they both jumped off the stage and cut a Soul Train swatch through the audience, communing and boogeying down with the ecstatic crowd. (Their next gig is at a festival in Bentonville, Arkansas!) Our posse of Body Electricians met beforehand for a drink and a bite at Loreley Beer Garden, and we took a stroll down Freeman Alley checking out the ever-changing artwork.
Wednesday: MUBI subscribers get free admission to one indie-film-in-need-of-an-audience every week. This time it was The African Desperate by Martine Syms at the Quad, a very smart, edgy portrait of a black female artist’s last 24 hours in an MFA program at a rural upstate New York campus (filmed at Bard). It opens with Palace Bryant (a brave performance by Diamond Stingily) sitting for a final studio visit with her four white faculty advisors, each with their own brand of excruciating micro-aggressiveness. As she packs up for home in Chicago and navigates stolidly ambivalent farewell partying with her classmates, frenemies, and gender-fluid flirtations, the name-checking of art theoreticians flows as freely as the party drugs.
Syms gives herself a huge amount of freedom to play with the kind of jump cuts, layering, and sound games you’re more used to encountering in music videos and TikToks than in feature films, not unlike, say, Janicza Bravo’s Twitter-inspired Zola or Michaela Coel’s mini-series I May Destroy You. (Although didn’t the recently departed Jean-Luc Godard do all of that first?) I’m not the only person who referenced Gaspar Noë’s Climax during some of the extended, chaotic, nerve-wracking sex-and-drugs sequences. One of the quirks that cracked me up was when friends would be sitting around dishing other people and the soundtrack would blank out the names, as if they were blind items in a gossip column. Speaking of soundtracks, you can listen to the music from The African Desperate on Spotify here.
Thursday: Someone at the Metropolitan Museum’s Live Arts department had the inspired idea of inviting Aroof Aftab, the sublime queer Pakistani Grammy-winning singer, to perform at the Temple of Dendur. Taking the stage, Aftab declared this was the most epic performance the group had ever played, which is saying something because she’s been touring (a lot of festivals) continuously since the release last year of her sublime album Vulture Prince.
She’s an incredible singer in the ghazal tradition, which conveys fragments of poetry in long slow exquisite lines without being show-offy. But she also has a wonderful dry sense of humor. She noted that people tend to classify her music as sacred because so much of it is slow, somber, soulful. But she specifically included one song in English on her album (taken from a Rumi poem, its entire text goes “Last night my beloved was like the moon/So beautiful”) to indicate that all the songs she sings are about being intoxicated and unhappy in love.
After opening the show with the album’s gorgeous first song, “Baghon Main,” she chatted for a while, admitting to the audience that she usually talks a lot and tells jokes between songs but she was a little intimidated by the august venue, so maybe not. In place of her usual glass of red wine, she had whiskey in a paper cup to sip throughout the show. And she said she’s lately taken to tossing roses into the audience, but she worried that security would tackle her if she tried that at the Met. Well, after a few more sips of whiskey, all her inhibitions flew out the window, and she cracked jokes about her fancy outfit, which made her feel like a car (and which she swapped out halfway through the show for a more comfortable but still glam long silvery coat). And she doesn’t shy away from sly political commentary, noting that the Temple of Dendur “may or may not be stolen.” (It is, after all, located in the Sackler Wing, named after the family whose pharmaceutical company has been castigated and prosecuted for its part in the opioid crisis.) And one by one all those long-stem roses onstage wound up in the hands of pretty ladies who caught the singer’s eye.
The acoustics were perfect for her mostly acoustic band, an oddball ensemble of harp (Maeve Gilchrist, tall blond whose high heels doubled as percussion), guitar (Gyan Riley), violin (the gender-queer glory that is Darian Donovan Thomas), and bass (Shahzad Ismaily, who also adds some crazy spice on the synthesizer keyboard he balances on his lap). She said they’d learned a lot about song order on tour, so they closed with their “happy” number, their “banger,” “Mohabbat,” which only in the world of ghazal could be considered a “banger.” The show was being filmed so will undoubtedly manifest online somewhere, but if you’ve not yet had the pleasure of hearing this exceptional vocalist, I would encourage you to check out her “Tiny Desk Concert” filmed during the pandemic for NPR.
Friday: I returned to Forest Hills Tennis Stadium (where I saw Bon Iver and Odesza earlier in the summer) for another extravaganza featuring EDM superstars Jamie XX, Four Tet, and Floating Points. The latter two took the stage together, taking turns driving.
I’m a big fan of Floating Points (a happy bespectacled nerdy Brit named Sam Shepherd) and his bass-heavy grooves; he put out an extraordinary album last year called Promises featuring the London Symphony Orchestra and the legendary jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, who died the day after the Forest Hills concert. Four Tet (another Brit named Kieran Hebden with very eclectic tastes) used his turns to conduct noise experiments that didn’t thrill me. A group of five little girls danced and frolicked behind them every so often. After an hour, Four Tet got the stage to himself and got more fun.
Jamie XX (aka James Thomas Smith, former member of the XX) definitely knows how to please a crowd by mashing up his own tuneful beats with surprises for the audience to sing along to (“Psycho Killer”! Ariana Grande’s “Into You”!).
Andy and I met up with our friends Jay and Paul, who just moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey and needed to let off some steam. Mission accomplished!
Saturday: Our friend Allen was visiting from San Francisco so Saturday afternoon we took him to the Museum of Art and Design and introduced him to the genius that is Machine Dazzle, who gets two whole floors to display his “Queer Maximalism.” The fifth floor showcases some of the mind-boggling outfits Machine created for Taylor Mac’s “24-Decade History of Popular Music.”
The fourth floor covers his non-Taylor costumes for shows at the Guggenheim, at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, and for the Dazzle Dancers.
The detail and the beauty is insanely overwhelming. You could make separate trips to the show just to study the handbags, the shoes, and especially the kkkkkrazeee headdresses.
After beers at the 9th Avenue Saloon, Allen went off to Brooklyn, and we continued the day of Queer Maximalism by seeing the David Bowie movie MOONAGE DAYDREAM.
Not exactly a documentary, it’s more of a cinematic essay that collages rare concert footage, talk show appearances, and period cultural artifacts to present Bowie as more than a rock musician or pop star and more of a philosophical artist on a quest for meaning, for understanding his place in the universe. It’s written, directed, and produced by Brett Morgen, but the real wizardry is Morgen’s spectacular editing.
Sunday: I was feeling a little overwhelmed and oversaturated, but I raced down to the East Village on an electric Citibike (the trains were not running properly) to see Mud/Drowning at Mabou Mines at 7:30…only to learn that the show was at 2pm that afternoon. I rescheduled for this coming Friday, sandwiched between Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), the Tyshawn Sorey concert staged by Peter Sellars at Park Avenue Armory, and two very different shows on Broadway — MJ The Musical and Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt. Next week: another wacky, eclectic marathon starting with Flying Lotus at BAM, continuing with David Greenspan’s one-man version of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, and at long last Funny Girl on Broadway!
Produced under the auspices of the annual Russian-flavored Cherry Orchard Festival in association with a few other producers, The Orchard is an extremely ambitious, experimental adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard conceived and directed by Igor Golyak with a whole raft of crucial collaborators. How often do you see these credits on the title page of a playbill: Emerging Technologies, Robotics Design, Interactivity Design, Virtual Sound Design? The show was devised to be experienced in two ways, live onstage at BAC and online, accessible from anywhere worldwide but timed so that you’re exploring online at the same time as a live performance. I haven’t done the online experience (yet), but I attended the live performance that New York Times critic Laura Collins-Hughes watched online (after seeing the matinee live), and I had a very different experience than she did.
I can’t imagine anyone seeing this show who wasn’t familiar with Chekhov’s play; otherwise, they’d be completely lost. Nothing is straightforward. The stage space is behind a scrim, onto which are projected snippets of the playscript (translation by Carol Rocamora), snowfall, and random images that presumably play a larger role in the virtual production. The stage floor is covered with cherry blossoms which are, like all the furniture and most of the objects onstage, colored blue. All four acts of Chekhov’s play are condensed into an intermissionless two hours, and the gist of the drama remains intact: aristocratic Lyubov Ranevskaya’s estate has fallen into disrepair, and her land with its distinctive cherry orchard is being auctioned off to pay the mortgage. The cast is terrific, with excellent performances by Jessica Hecht as Ranevskaya, Mark Nelson as her brother Gaev, and especially Nael Nacer, a Boston-based actor making his New York debut as Lopakhin, the wealthy merchant who buys the property that his father and grandfather worked on as serfs. Nacer is a kind of sexy nerd – bald, handsome, mustachioed — not the blustery boor we usually see as Lopakhin. Wordless bits of business convey his unrequited crush on Ranevskaya, who is determined that he should marry her adopted daughter Varya, who struggles to keep the estate running; his awkward, ultimate non-proposal to Varya is quietly devastating. Baryshnikov plays Firs, the estate’s dotty old hard-of-hearing manservant, and perhaps you could say the most impressive thing about his performance is that it is so unimpressive – he manages to suppress the charisma and magnetism he has evinced onstage for decades in order to play a character who rattles around in the background barely noticed. (Online, apparently, he plays Chekhov and has more to do.)
photo by Maria Baranova
The weirdest and most original thing about the production is the gigantic mechanical device at the center of the stage, which is never named or described or explained in the program. It’s a ten-foot-tall object with a long arm that wheels around, spins, holds a tray of tea cups, serves sometimes as a light source, as a tree, as a camera that picks up the images projected onto the scrim (and I’m guessing all over the online version). I guess you could call it a robot; there’s also a robot dog that skitters around the stage adorably. I’m told by the publicist that the robot is named Ronin and is considered non-binary by Kuka, the company who created it. If I were going to speculate, I would say this robot represents technology, a phenomenon that is so inextricably bound up with our lives that we barely notice it, it’s part of the family, for better (the smartphones we can’t bear to be out of our reach) and for worse (the surveillance cameras that track our every move).
photo by Pavel Antonov
Halfway through the show, the character Chekhov refers to as “Stranger” who intrudes upon the estate appears in the form of a loud, drunken Russian soldier with a walkie-talkie, who rounds up the household, paws the women, and terrorizes all of them before stumbling away into the dark. I took this jarring episode to be the director’s small way of referring to the situation in Ukraine – an example of finding a way to connect the heart of a classic play to the state of the world right now.
6.16.22 –God’s Fool is a company-created piece about St. Francis of Assisi. Like almost all of Martha Clarke’s work, it is a kind of exquisite performance collage using dance, music, text, masks, and visual elements without ever solidifying into something that could be called a play, or a musical, or a dance piece (although I notice that the Times sent a dance critic to cover it). I love that about Clarke’s work, and this piece is beautiful. Fanny Howe’s elliptical text captures many aspects of Francis’s personality, his spiritual ties as much to nature and animals as to anything having to do with the church of Rome. The superb cast of 8 (led by Patrick Andrews, who’s fantastic as Francis, and John Kelly as The Devil) creates sublimely gorgeous music, most of it a cappella, selected and arranged by Arthur Solari.
The simple evocative set and the animal masks were designed by the legendary Robert Israel, a longtime Clarke collaborator.
6.18.22 — Out-of-town guests provided the perfect occasion to book tickets for Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure, the immersive art show put together by Basquiat’s sisters, Jeanine and Lisane. The exhibition, which includes over 200 artworks, many of which have never been shown before, takes place throughout a sprawling 15,000-foot space designed by the remarkable Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, who created (among other things) the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
It’s a touchingly personal and informative survey of an insanely prolific, fertile, original artist whose star continues to rise 34 years after his death at the age of 27. I have not yet gotten my fill of his work. It speaks so deeply to me of an artistic intelligence alive in the world, taking in everything, spilling over with thoughts and connections and reflections.
Cabeza (1982; acrylic and oil stick on blanket mounted on tied wood supports)Jawbone of an Ass
Adjaye’s installation collects paintings and objects in many thematic galleries, and it also includes three special environments: a replication of the Basquiat family home, very much the tidy middle-class refuge of an immigrant family, with a shelf of the World Book Encyclopedia; a recreation of Basquiat’s studio on Great Jones Street (above), scattered with books and records and a gigantic pile of VHS movies on tape along with works both finished and unfinished; and then a replica of the Mike Todd Room where VIPs at the Palladium, a hip Manhattan nightclub, could lounge beneath a couple of gigantic spectacular Basquiat murals.
I found myself surprisingly emotional walking through the show, starting with the map of Basquiat’s New York, which completely overlaps with my first years in New York, 1980-88: Area! The Mudd Club! Tower Records! Tony Shafrazi Gallery! Pearl Paint! Club 57! Yup, all there…and all gone.
Later that day, I took in an entirely different kind of immersive art experience. Memoria, the latest film by the amazing, eccentric Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, stars Tilda Swinton as a Scottish botanist living in Colombia who starts hearing at odd intervals a loud bang and sets out to understand what’s going on. The movie is an experiment conducted in several different dimensions – it’s the director’s first full-length film not shot in Thailand, with a leading actor who’s not Thai, with dialogue primarily in Spanish, and it centers so specifically on sound that the film is only playing a day or two at a time in theaters whose sound systems have been reconfigured to accommodate the film. (I saw it at Lincoln Center.) Like all of Weerasethakul’s work, the film operates as a dreamscape. Odd images come and go without explication. The scenes unfurl in long takes, sometimes with very little action.
In their audience talkback after the New York Film Festival screening, the director (who encourages everyone to call him Joe) and Swinton talked about waiting 17 years for this collaboration to come about. The person she plays is named Jessica, said Weerasethakul, after a character in the movie I Walked With A Zombie. Swinton herself said, “Jessica isn’t a character but a predicament.”
Early in the film she consults a young sound engineer named Hernán who sits with her in the studio meticulously trying to recreate the sound in her head. (Weerasethakul has for some time suffered from a malaise known as “exploding head syndrome.”) Later in the film she encounters another Hernán, who both is and isn’t the same person – same name, different actor, and this guy lives out in the woods, has never seen movies or TV, and stores all his memories in stones. Jessica consults a doctor she hopes will prescribe Xanax to make the noise go away; the doctor tells her that Xanax takes away your empathy and instead hands her a pamphlet about Jesus. Jessica’s sister is an anthropologist studying 6000-year-old bones uncovered by a construction crew that may be exerting some kind of malicious spell over her; there is talk of uncontacted indigenous people in the Amazon jungle, and there is a crazy moment that suggests supernatural involvement.
Memoria is very poetic, enigmatic, rapturously beautiful, weird, scary, puzzling. Not for everyone, but very much for me.
My cultural round-up has usually centered on theater. This year theater finally did come back and hooray for that but late in a year otherwise unusually dominated by TV and movies (I logged 158 on my watchlist). It’s hard to know how to make any kind of ranked list – Best Things Of The Year – but my #1 discovery was AROOJ AFTAB, the queer Pakistani-born Brooklyn-based singer whose gorgeous album Vulture Prince nabbed her a Best New Artist Grammy nomination and whose show at Pioneer Works was my first indoor concert since the Before Times.
LAURIE ANDERSON’s six Norton Lectures wandered deeply and widely over history, literature, science, politics, and personal reminiscence.
Television has never been my go-to but I felt deeply fed by watching all four seasons of the Australian series Please Like Me, and I have The New Yorker’s Alex Barasch to thank for making me curious and then a big fan of creator and star Josh Thomas (his second series, Everything’s Going To Be Okay not so much). I generally resist the big shows everyone loves and talks about (will I ever watch Succession? Doubtful) but I broke down and watched Ted Lasso, shocked by how good the writing and performances were; ditto The White Lotus and Hacks.
Documentaries I always have time for, and this year the music docs were stellar. Questlove’s Summer of Soul made going back to the movie theater rapturous. Also great: Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground and Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers. In a category of its own was Peter Jackson’s revisiting The Beatles: Get Back, eight hours of bliss for this Beatlemaniac. I’m a latecomer to Frederick Wiseman’s long slow masterpieces but this year his City Hall blew me away with its portrait of Boston city government and charismatic mayor Marty Walsh (now running Biden’s Department of Transportation). Hulu’s Pride series impressed me by going above and beyond familiar (white) faces and names in front of and behind the camera.
Also in another category was Can You Bring It, the documentary about BILL T. JONES, the dance company he created with his late partner Arnie Zane, and recreating the AIDS-era piece D-Man in the Water. Jones also created one of the finest live performances I saw this year, deep blue sea at the Park Avenue Armory, a fierce mashup of Moby Dick and Martin Luther King, Jr., with a cast of 100 dancers and state-of-the-art visual design.
I saw lots of feature films, online and on the big screen, my favorites being Nomadland (with stunning performance by Frances McDormand, above), Zola, The French Dispatch, and Judas and the Black Messiah. Art-house streaming services turned me on several great unheralded foreign films: Aquarius, directed by the Brazilian master Kleber Mendonça Filho, with an astonishing lead performance by Sonia Braga, and Arab Blues, a French-Tunisian comedy by first-time director Manele Labidi.
SARAH SCHULMAN (above) figured heavily in my cultural year, first with Let the Record Show, her exceptionally thorough and well-written history of ACT UP, and then the Criterion Channel allowed me to catch up with Stephen Winter’s 2015 Jason and Shirley, in which Schulman and Jack Waters give mind-boggling performances as documentarian Shirley Clarke and Jason Holiday, the subject of Portrait of Jason. Another book that excited me this year was Paul B. Preciado’s essay collection An Apartment on Uranus, which also served the function of making me track down the powerful, legendarily transgressive film Baise-Moi by Preciado’s former partner Virginie Despentes.
Between the pandemic shutdown and the post-George Floyd racial reckoning, whose work gets shown and how we get access felt quite transformed this year. The best live theater I saw were two highly experimental pieces – Lucas Hnath’s Dana H., performed by the ever-great Deirdre O’Connell (above) directed by Les Waters, and Tina Satter and Half Straddle’s Is This a Room, with an unforgettable frail-tough performance by Emily Davis as government whistle-blower Reality Winner (below in white shirt) — that wound up playing in rep! on Broadway! Another live triumph: Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s Cullud Wattah at the Public Theater, sharply staged by Candis B. Jones on Adam Rigg’s spectacular set with five strong performances. Streaming allowed me to catch Kristin Wong’s excellent solo show Sweatshop Overlord after its run at New York Theater Workshop.
Almost always in a category of his own, WALLACE SHAWN distinguished himself playing Lucky in Scott Elliott’s remarkably effective Zoom version of Waiting for Godot and had the good fortune to have Lili Taylor perform his monologue The Fever at the Minetta Lane. But one of the absolute best Things of the Year was the release of two exquisitely produced theater-of-the-ear six-part podcasts (available online for free) of Shawn’s dark drama The Designated Mourner and his surrealist comedy Grasses of a Thousand Colors, performed by the original New York casts (including Shawn himself) directed by Andre Gregory with phenomenal sound design by Bruce Odland.
another eye opens 