Aurelia Butler

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    Popcast (Deluxe): The Kid Mero on the Viral Characters of 2023

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, features a conversation with the comedian and podcast star the Kid Mero, dissecting the viral stars of the year, including:A conversation about The Kid Mero’s recent projects, including his Victory Light podcast and “7PM in Brooklyn,” his podcast with the basketball legend Carmelo AnthonyThe disgraced politician (and now Cameo star) George SantosThe popular Twitch streamer Kai CenatAbel Tesfaye, a.k.a. the Weeknd, a star and creator of the HBO drama “The Idol”The basketball firestarter Draymond GreenGerry Turner, a.k.a. the Golden BachelorThe pop-drill rapper Ice SpiceThe TikTok food critic Keith LeeSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Can One of Opera’s Greatest Singers Get Her Voice Back?

    Anita Rachvelishvili was pregnant when she began to lose her voice.It was the middle of 2021. She and her husband had tried for years to conceive, and it seemed like a child would be the storybook ending to being forced to slow down during the pandemic. Rachvelishvili, the Georgian mezzo-soprano, had spent the previous decade crisscrossing the world, blazing through some of the most difficult parts in opera.She made her name with a potent combination of capacious sound and interpretive subtlety. In 2018, Riccardo Muti, the pre-eminent Verdi conductor, called her “without doubt the best Verdi mezzo-soprano today on the planet.” Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, recently said: “She was the greatest dramatic mezzo-soprano singing. It seemed there was no big, meaty role she couldn’t tackle.”Rachvelishvili sang Carmen, the role of her 2009 breakthrough, hundreds of times, and was scheduled to ring in 2024 as Bizet’s classic antiheroine in the splashy premiere of a new production at the Met.Instead, the show will go on without her. Rachvelishvili, 39, will spend New Year’s Eve at home in Tbilisi, where she was born, as she tries to reconstruct the fundamentals of the voice that brought her stardom and then abandoned her.“It is a nightmare, a total nightmare,” she said over dinner in September at a rustic restaurant nestled in the woods outside the city. “I’ve had two years of nightmare at this point.”Transforming the body and causing sweeping hormonal changes, pregnancy is rarely easy for opera singers, who rely on a carefully calibrated physical apparatus to dependably produce huge waves of unamplified sound. Rachvelishvili had not quite felt herself in the handful of performances she did while she was carrying the baby — her voice, she said, came out “scratchy and strange” — but she assumed things would return to normal after the birth.Lioness: Rachvelishvili at the Tbilisi State Conservatory, where she studied after auditioning with a Whitney Houston song.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesShe delivered her daughter, Lileana, in late November 2021, and something still felt different, though the lower part of her voice was, if anything, bigger than before. She figured she could handle the low-lying role of Marfa in Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” which she was to rehearse in Paris just a month later — months sooner than many singers return after giving birth.“It was the worst decision of my life,” she said, sitting alongside Otari Maisuradze, her husband — who became her vocal coach, too, after a rift with her teacher early in her crisis.Over a week of conversations, meals, walks and drives in and around Tbilisi, Rachvelishvili described how rushing back to the stage had helped set off an agonizing dance of one step forward, two steps back. Seeming improvement would be countered by dispiriting nights, and the increased size of her low notes was offset by the sudden disappearance of her high ones. Her once-steady confidence and smooth column of sound were both fractured.“You start having big panic attacks, then you lose control completely,” she said. “Of breath, of body. Everything.”Her husband spoke softly. “She was my lioness,” he said. “I am very proud I have very strong women in my family. But these two years, with this trouble, she became like a little cat.”A VOICE IS A MYSTERIOUS, largely invisible amalgam of body and psyche — of tiny, vibrating vocal cords; muscles that provide support for the breath; cavities through which sound resonates; and the self-belief to fearlessly deploy it all. Problems are inevitable, though the path to overcoming them is uncertain, since medical interventions can be chancy. And talking about them is still stigmatized within the industry, perhaps in part because responses to artists are already so subjective that illness or injury can cloud later evaluation even if the difficulty has been “fixed.”“Every singer, at some point, will have some kind of vocal issue,” said the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who made an arduous recovery from surgery on her cords earlier in her career. “It’s like football players: Every quarterback has some shoulder issue at some point.”Rachvelishvili warming up with her husband, who has become her vocal coach.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesMaria Callas couldn’t undo her instrument’s unraveling. In an essay about her, the conductor and critic Will Crutchfield once wrote, “There is no example of an important operatic singer encountering serious vocal problems and returning to form.”That is true, to a point. The tenor Jonas Kaufmann has been open about vocal issues, yet has managed to keep singing challenging parts at a high level. But Rolando Villazón, another 21st-century star tenor, never recovered from his troubles.“Every singer goes through that fear of the high notes, or feeling not really comfortable with your voice,” Rachvelishvili said. “I just need to have this battle with myself, by myself. Nobody else can help me. I need to remember how I was, and how Anita did it.”THOUGH SHE CAME TO OPERA LATE — she sang a Whitney Houston song when she auditioned for conservatory — Rachvelishvili was not merely an intuitive natural talent but also a smart, dedicated musician. She slowly built on a firm technique and stuck to her relatively low signature role as she waited and worked.“I sang Carmen for so many years because I didn’t have easy high notes,” she said. “I took time to learn how to do those notes so that the body knew what it was doing.”Those notes grew stronger without her pushing, and she practiced diligently to incorporate the nuances, colors and seductive soft singing that set her apart from many who shared her repertoire. She sang the wild Azucena in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” with startling refinement in 2018 at the Met, where her triumphs culminated in a scorching run as the Princesse de Bouillon in Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur” early in 2019.Rachvelishvili and Otari Maisuradze with their daughter, Lileana, who was born in November 2021. Rachvelishvili’s vocal problems began when she was pregnant.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesHer future seemed limitless. In addition to Azucena and Verdi’s Eboli and Amneris, major roles in “Les Troyens,” “Werther,” “La Favorite” and “La Gioconda” were on the horizon. With her powerful high notes, sumptuous tone and onstage intensity, it seemed that Wagner’s Ortrud, Fricka, Kundry and even Isolde — the province of big-voiced sopranos — might be possible.Then came the pandemic. Rachvelishvili had struggled to get pregnant in the past, but she said that the drastic reduction in travel and stress in 2020, as well as the hormones prescribed by her doctor, helped it happen.Fearful of losing the baby, she was cautious in the early days of the pregnancy, but she sang some performances in mid-2021. Muti said of their concert “Aida” in Italy that summer, “She was able in the past to hold long phrases without any problem, and now going in the high register she had some difficulty.”Still, he added, “you could feel, here and there, the great singer.”When she sang “Khovanshchina” in Paris so soon after giving birth, it was possible, because of the role’s low center of vocal gravity, to believe she was back in her old shape — even if a short excerpt posted by the opera company suggests that her tone had grown more fragile, her vibrato wider, even beyond her high notes.“It was like a completely different body,” Rachvelishvili said, “with a completely different voice.”“It was like a completely different body,” Rachvelishvili said of performing after giving birth, “with a completely different voice.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesIn the past, her muscular support had originated down by her pelvis, but that was disrupted by the pregnancy and birth. While she searched for a new approach, her next engagement, “Adriana Lecouvreur” at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in early 2022, was disastrous. The Princesse’s high notes, once easy for her, refused to come. At the premiere, Rachvelishvili fled the theater in despair before her curtain call, something she had never done.“It was the most horrible experience of my life, not being able to sing the way I wanted,” she said. “I couldn’t go out after a performance like that. It’s not the old Anita they’re used to, or I’m used to. I’m not going out; it’s insulting to them, to La Scala.”She canceled the rest of the run, then moved on to Munich, where she had a long rehearsal period before she was supposed to sing her first Didon in Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” A doctor saw inflammation on her vocal cords; it could have been allergies, acid reflux, a hormonal imbalance or laryngitis, or some combination of those factors.Unable to produce high notes or offer the elegant control of volume and texture for which she was admired, she left before the premiere. She began to lose faith in herself, which set off a vicious cycle with her physical problems.“I said to my therapist that I’d kill myself if it wasn’t for the baby,” she recalled. “I have a baby to take care of.”She was also her family’s breadwinner. Maisuradze had long ago devoted himself to supporting her career, and even star singers are freelancers.“The responsibility is huge, because everybody depends on me working,” she said. “I have my parents to take care of, and my family, and the baby. People said that if I couldn’t sing, I should just stop. And I said, ‘Will you feed my family if I stop?’ I have to at least try and try and try. I need to bring some money to the table.”But in summer 2022, she had to drop “Cavalleria Rusticana” in London and “Aida” in Salzburg before they opened. Leaving the “Aida,” Rachvelishvili released a statement citing back pain after the birth of her daughter and asking “all haters and even some colleagues” to “please stop inventing stories about me losing my voice or nonsense like this.”She retreated to Tbilisi to work. And early in fall 2022, she was able to creditably sing the generally low Dalila in Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” in Naples, though her high notes were still problematic.“I said to my therapist that I’d kill myself if it wasn’t for the baby,” Rachvelishvili recalled. “I have a baby to take care of.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesThe tenor Brian Jagde, her co-star in that “Samson” and several other productions during this period, sometimes went so far as to anchor her during scenes with a hand at her waist, to lend the lower muscular support that she no longer felt internally.“There’s nothing harder to watch than a person onstage with you that you believe in so much, and she’s struggling,” he said. “There were clear signs the top wasn’t working like she wanted it to, and she was working desperately to make it work. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t.”She canceled a fall run of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” at the Met, but arrived there to sing “Aida” in December. Rachvelishvili thought the first performance went passably, but the company’s administration disagreed.“It was obvious that she was not the same singer — at least temporarily not the same singer — who had conquered our stage so brilliantly up to that point,” Gelb said, and he decided to remove her from the coming “Carmen” and a solo recital that was to have taken place earlier this month.“I had a painful discussion with her in my office, because I wanted her to hear it from me,” he said. “I said that we needed to wait until she was back singing well again, and then we’d be happy to have her return. She had a hard time accepting that.”EARLY THIS YEAR, RACHVELISHVILI was able to get through another “Samson,” in Berlin, and a new role, Charlotte in Massenet’s “Werther,” in Athens, with her body feeling more dependable. But when she returned to Munich in the spring for “Aida,” she began having terrifying panic attacks onstage, paralyzed by fear of the high notes, and left after four of eight performances.“She’s such a tough character, but she’s human,” Jagde said. “That was what I saw progress for her in a negative way: less belief in herself because of what was happening. The physical affected the mental for her.”“On 50 seconds, we are working two or three days,” Maisuradze said of Rachvelishvili’s practice routine. “They must be beautiful, the voice and colors, and stylistically true.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesDropping out of all her engagements after early June, she had minor surgeries for stomach problems and to lessen the effects of acid reflux, and another procedure to remove what she said was a small polyp on her vocal cords. Since then, she has been at home in Tbilisi with her husband and daughter. Lileana, she said, is “worth everything. She’s even worth never singing again.”But she still hopes she can have both. Rachvelishvili and Maisuradze have been painstakingly reviewing her instrument and technique, going through scores phrase by phrase and restitching together her different registers, returning to the basics.“On 50 seconds, we are working two or three days,” Maisuradze said. “They must be beautiful, the voice and colors, and stylistically true.”Of her high register, Rachvelishvili said this month: “It’s not as perfect as I want, or as I had it a few years ago, honestly. But it’s much easier; it’s there; it’s not difficult anymore to take them.”The clock is ticking: A new role, Laura in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda,” is scheduled for April in Naples, before a revival of “Aida” in Munich. Noting her voice’s solid technical foundation, Muti was optimistic.“She is young,” he said, “so she will come back. We are waiting with great enthusiasm.”Rachvelishvili has fought her panic with therapy, antidepressants and meditation, but it still lurks. “All the physical problems, the vocal problems, are gone,” she said. “Right now, I’m just battling with myself and my head to make sure that when I go onstage soon, I will feel calm inside. The joy of being back is so big that it overtakes me sometimes.”She described a recent video call with her manager. “I was doing a high note in Dalila’s second aria,” she said, “and he stopped me: ‘I see the fear in your eyes. Don’t be afraid, just go for it. You can do it without fear in you.’ And I did it, and it was perfect.” More

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    How ‘The Nutcracker’ Has Been Reimagined, for Better and Worse

    A tour through five cases in which Tchaikovsky’s classical score has been taken up by jazz legends and misguided filmmakers.“The Nutcracker” is a cherished Holiday staple — one that, for every traditional treatment, inspires a left-field twist toward the contemporary.There’s a grain of truth in Lisa Simpson’s comment that everybody does “The Nutcracker” “because you don’t have to pay for the music rights.” As the critic Roslyn Sulcas once wrote in The New York Times, “Even less-than-great versions of the ballet exercise a kind of magic through Tchaikovsky’s score, which offers the same infinite potential for choreography as the texts of great plays do for staging.”That potential, however, can be double-edged. Here are five instances in which light tweaks and heavy rewrites have reframed — and occasionally ruined — Tchaikovsky’s famous music.Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn: ‘The Nutcracker Suite’Perhaps the most classic update of Tchaikovsky’s score, the Ellington-Strayhorn “Nutcracker” has inspired productions as different as Donald Byrd’s “The Harlem Nutcracker” and David Bintley’s “The Nutcracker Sweeties.” Its release, in 1960, also suggested an interesting switch in power dynamics between arranger and arranged: The original cover art gave Ellington, Strayhorn and Tchaikovsky the same billing.“Overture” sets the tone, with a wandering double bass that leads softly into classic Ellington orchestrations. But that softness is quickly dispelled by the high woodwind chirps of “Toot Toot Tootie Toot (Dance of the Reed-Pipes),” and there are flashes of Stravinsky harshness in the “March,” renamed the “Peanut Brittle Brigade,” which begins with dissonant stacks of harmony that could be straight from “A Soldier’s Tale.” Most powerful is the amount of textural space Ellington and Strayhorn afford; in the sparse, boozy “Sugar Rum Cherry” and the light yet expressive “Arabesque Cookie Arabian Dance),” less is definitely more.‘The Hip Hop Nutcracker’Some “Nutcracker” scores are reimagined; others are remixed. But “The Hip Hop Nutcracker,” a 2014 production by Jennifer Weber that has become a touring staple in the United States, is a remix in the fullest sense. Clara — here, Maria-Clara — goes on a quest to bring her parents back together, accompanied by a troupe of break dancers. The score is remixed onstage by a D.J. and an electric violinist. As in all revisions of “The Nutcracker,” the key is for the score to act like a double mirror: The act of shining fresh light on the original score should rebound to energize the new. The brittle electronic beats create solid new foundations for improvised flourishes and ensemble numbers alike.Brian Setzer Orchestra: ‘The Nutcracker Suite’Brian Setzer’s career has been defined by a revivalist energy. First, his rockabilly group Stray Cats looked back to the rock ’n’ roll of the 1950s through the eyes of the 1980s. After the group split, he founded the Brian Setzer Orchestra, a boogie-woogie, jump blues band straddling originals and jazzed-up covers.“The Nutcracker Suite,” originally arranged for Les Brown and his Band of Renown by Frank Comstock, wasn’t the only time that the Brian Setzer Orchestra dabbled in classical rearrangements. In the 2007 album “Wolfgang’s Big Night Out,” Beethoven’s “Für Elise” became the Django Reinhardt pastiche “For Lisa,” and Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube” became the bluesy swing chart “Some River in Europe.”An unlikely source brought the group’s take on Tchaikovsky into holiday tradition: Buddy, in the movie “Elf.” As the lights dim in Gimbels, the store that Buddy (Will Ferrell), has tasked himself with redecorating overnight, the Brian Setzer Orchestra trumpets strike up, playing the fanfare call from “March of the Toy Soldiers.” But what follows is not the impish, pizzicato response that usually accompanies the toys’ jolting movements: A drum kit crashes in, and snarling, swinging saxophones accompany Buddy’s commando rolls across the aisle behind a security guard. The whole arrangement pits clipped precision against swirling chaos.Drew McOnie and Cassie Kinoshi: ‘Nutcracker’Cassie Kinoshi, a composer and saxophonist associated with London’s jazz scene, has already had a fruitful foray into dance, collaborating with the group BalletBoyz alongside her work for theater, film and orchestra. Now she has reimagined Tchaikovsky’s score for Drew McOnie’s “Nutcracker” at the Tuff Nut Jazz Club, a pop-up speakeasy hidden underneath the Southbank Center in London.Like Strayhorn and Comstock’s arrangements before, Kinoshi’s score is based in jazz. But where the others have the golden dazzle of that full big-band sound, her music is much more contained, for a versatile four-piece group nestled in the corner of the performance space. Led by the bass player Rio Kai, the quartet lovingly dismantles Tchaikovsky’s music and brings in modern energy, switching effortlessly between chilled vamps and off-kilter meters. Moments of sugary sweetness — in a nice touch, the players are dressed in pajamas — add yet more sparkle to the heavily sequined production, for which the phrase “camp as Christmas” was surely coined.‘The Nutcracker in 3D’Here is a warning that new takes on “The Nutcracker” can go too far.Set in 1920s Vienna, Andrei Konchalovsky’s deeply strange film, from 2010, presents the classic story as a Nazi allegory few, if anyone, saw coming. The combination of a tedious plot, poor acting, some howling digital effects and not infrequent references to the Holocaust made this largely nondancing “Nutcracker” an expensive Christmas turkey, costing $90 million to make but bringing in only $20 million at the box office.Among the worst elements of “The Nutcracker in 3D” is the music, which inexplicably gains lyrics by Tim Rice. And so “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” becomes “It’s All Relative,” a song for the Einstein-like Uncle Albert (Nathan Lane) packed full of banal sentiments like “Who’s to say what/Is or is not/Who writes your plot?/You do!” Later, “Dance of the Reed Flutes” becomes a sleazy, vaudevillian show tune sung by an anthropomorphic Rat King to his loyal subjects, a group of baying rodents dressed like SS officers. And, as if ruining “The Nutcracker” weren’t enough, the movie then plunders from the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, mapping kitschy lyrics for the chronically misunderstood child Mary (Elle Fanning) onto one of the composer’s most popular tunes. It’s grotesque. More

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    ‘Maestro’ and the Fake Nose Hall of Fame

    “Maestro” isn’t the first time a supersize sniffer set off a whiff of controversy. Here’s a look at the most notable schnozzes onscreen.In August, the first trailer for “Maestro,” a biopic of Leonard Bernstein, the composer of “West Side Story” and so much more, set off a backlash almost immediately: Bradley Cooper was wearing a prosthetic nose for the title role.Critics on social media accused the star, who is also the director, of playing into an antisemitic trope with the Size XL prosthesis — and asked whether someone who is Jewish would have been more sensitive about makeup choicesWhile Cooper and Netflix, where “Maestro” will begin streaming on Wednesday, declined to comment. In a statement at the time, Bernstein’s three children, who had been working with Cooper on the film, came to the actor’s defense, noting in a series of posts on X, “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose.” (The family declined to offer additional comment.)It’s hardly the first time an oversize septum has made an onscreen appearance or courted controversy. Here are 12 of the most memorable fake noses in cinematic history, sorted by size from dainty 🥸 to elephantine 🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸.Orson Welles, ‘Touch of Evil’🥸Universal PicturesLike Edmond Rostand’s poet and swordsman, Cyrano de Bergerac, Orson Welles was obsessed with his nose. (He believed his was too small; it was, of course, completely normal.) But instead of channeling his fixation into a healthy pursuit like, say, helping another man win the affections of his own beloved, he sported dozens of fakes over his career. One of the largest was the pugnacious pair of nostrils he wore as the corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan in the 1958 murder mystery “Touch of Evil.”Nicole Kidman, ‘The Hours’🥸Clive Hoote/Paramount PicturesNicole Kidman may have delivered a stirring performance as Virginia Woolf in “The Hours” (2002), but Denzel Washington joked that it was the prosthetic beak she wore that won her the best actress Academy Award. (“The Oscar goes to, by a nose, Nicole Kidman,” he joked when announcing her win.) Kidman wore a fresh one each day on set, though she told The Associated Press that she hung on to a silver one she was given when shooting wrapped.Ralph Fiennes, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2’🥸Warner Bros.Is that thing even functional? Probably not; snakes don’t have noses — just nostrils — and smell with their forked tongues. We wouldn’t be surprised if J.K. Rowling’s reptilian baddie in this 2011 franchise finale had one of those, too. But at least we may finally have an answer as to what Voldemort’s unnaturally long fingers are good for.: Nose-picking.Meryl Streep, ‘The Iron Lady’🥸Alex Bailey/Weinstein CompanyLike Kidman, Meryl Streep rode the prosthetic nose she donned to play the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd’s 2011 biopic to an Oscar win (her third). But this time, the transformation’s genius was in its subtlety — when the first photos of Streep on set were released, the press made nary a peep about the nose.Laurence Olivier, ‘Richard III’ 🥸🥸Laurence Olivier as Richard IIILondon Film ProductionsUnlike Welles, Laurence Olivier didn’t habitually don a fake nose for his roles because of a perceived insecurity about the size of his own; rather, it was just one of the suite of theatrical accessories, including masks and wigs, that he, and many other actors, used transform into various characters. In “Richard III” (1955), which Olivier also directed, his character’s nose is, as one blogger put it, “majestically prominent.”Rudolph, ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’🥸🥸Rankin/Bass Productions and NBCWith a workshop of Santa’s elves nearby in this 1964 special, the best Rudolph’s dad, Donner, could do to help his son fit in at school was make a fake nose from mud? He won’t be winning any father-of-the-year awards for that effort.Margaret Hamilton, ‘The Wizard of Oz’🥸🥸🥸MGMMargaret Hamilton came by some of the goods to play the Wicked Witch of the West naturally: She was known for her overlarge nose, which her own father had encouraged her to have surgically altered. But she got the last laugh when she landed the role of the now-iconic villain in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) — for which her nose was made even longer (and greener).Matt Damon, ‘Ocean’s Thirteen’🥸🥸🥸Warner Bros., via AlamySure, there are performers with bigger noses on this list, but Matt Damon might be the only one who planned a con around his. In this 2007 sequel, his character, Linus, dons the prosthesis — which Damon nicknamed “The Brody” in a nod to the actor Adrien Brody’s well, you know — in a bid to disguise himself and gain access to a case full of diamonds.Steve Carell, ‘Foxcatcher’🥸🥸🥸Scott Garfield/Sony Pictures ClassicsSteve Carell’s souped-up schnozz in this 2014 true-crime tale may have left some people scratching their heads — the real-life version of his character, John du Pont, the millionaire wrestling enthusiast-turned-murderer, wasn’t well known, so the attention to detail seemed excessive. But the nose did serve another purpose: It made audiences forget they were staring at Carell, who was known mainly for comedies at the time.Alec Guinness, ‘Oliver Twist’🥸🥸🥸🥸United Artists, via Alamy StockCharles Dickens wrote Fagin in “Oliver Twist” as a thoroughly antisemitic villain, and in the 1948 film adaptation, Alec Guinness, the non-Jewish actor who played the character, spoke in a droning lisp and appeared with hooded eyes and an enormous prosthetic hook nose. The nose was deemed “incredibly insensitive,” as The Jewish Chronicle wrote, and it provoked significant anger from Holocaust survivors.Billy Crystal, ‘The Princess Bride’🥸🥸🥸🥸20th Century Fox, via AlamyBilly Crystal was already so funny in “The Princess Bride” (1987) that the director, Rob Reiner, claimed that he had to leave the set during Crystal’s scenes as Miracle Max because he was unable to contain his laughter. Adding a bulbous tomato of a nose took Crystal’s physical comedy over the top. (Mandy Patinkin, who played Inigo Montoya, actually bruised a rib trying to stifle his own chuckles.)Steve Martin, ‘Roxanne’🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸Columbia PicturesYou could land a bird on that thing (which the director, Fred Schepisi, did.) Steve Martin’s five-inch appendage for the 1987 film took 90 minutes to apply every day and two minutes to remove. “God how I hated that thing,” he told The Washington Post. More

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    Can’t Make It to Broadway? Book and Movie Ideas for Theater Lovers.

    There are plenty of novels, memoirs, documentaries and livestreaming options sure to satiate fans of theater.A trip to the theater isn’t always possible, especially during the busy — and pricey — holiday season. When a craving for stage drama hits, fear not, there are options. In the world of literature, long-awaited memoirs by Barbra Streisand and Chita Rivera arrived this year, as did the first major biography of the playwright August Wilson. Whether you prefer a live capture of a popular Broadway show like “Waitress,” or a film adaptation of, say, “Dicks: The Musical,” an Upright Citizens Brigade sketch, there is an abundance of musical theater films. (And if all else fails, you can listen to our critics discuss two recent musical-theater highlights or hear the story of the success of “Wicked” from our theater reporter.) Here is a small selection of notable works of theater-related memoir, fiction and film.To ReadViking PressHarperOne‘My Name Is Barbra’Barbra Streisand’s memoir spans 970 pages of print and 48 hours via audiobook. But for an icon of her stature, whose personal life — her Brooklyn upbringing, her celeb lovers, her underdog charm, that famous nose — is almost as mythic as her career, a page count exceeding that of “Ulysses” could be considered restraint. While it’s filled with chatty, personable retellings of stories that may be familiar to Streisand fans, there are plenty of fresh anecdotes too. Alexandra Jacobs called it “a banquet of a book” in her review in The New York Times and advised that “you might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.” Read the review.‘CHITA: A Memoir’The Broadway legend Chita Rivera wants to share the spotlight with her successors, and so, though her book is a memoir, Rivera kept the next generation in mind while writing it with the arts journalist Patrick Pacheco. In a conversation with Juan A. Ramírez in The Times, she said, “It’s not as much of a memoir as it is an opportunity for kids to realize that if they want this, they can have it — but they have to work hard.” That endless striving earned her three Tony Awards and led to her collaborations with the likes of John Kander and Fred Ebb, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse. Her drive shines in this book along with glimpses of snark from her “fire-breathing alter ego, Dolores.”‘August Wilson: A Life’If the seminal American playwright August Wilson were to read his own life story, written by the former Boston Globe theater critic Patti Hartigan, he would most likely do so in the back of a seedy diner, drinking coffee and chain smoking, as he often did. In the first major biography of the playwright, Hartigan chronicles Wilson’s prolific career — including his Pulitzer Prize-winning plays “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” — and his immeasurable influence on capturing the experiences of Black Americans in the 20th century.‘The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race’In the scholar Farah Karim-Cooper’s book about Shakespeare and racism, she posits that “love demands that we reconcile ourselves with flaws and limitations.” Karim-Cooper, a director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater and a professor at King’s College London, applies this philosophy to the great playwright, scrutinizing his relationship with race and interrogating how his works shaped harmful Renaissance ideals — while still professing admiration. Pick it up for an expert perspective on a thorny theater subject, or to share a reading list with the prominent Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson, who reviewed the book for The Times.Tom LakeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Dan Greenburg, Who Poked Fun With His Pen, Dies at 87

    Women, sex and Jewish mothers were just some of the targets of his popular satirical writing in books, essays, screenplays and more.Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, best-selling author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, women and sex, and who later produced a series of humorous children’s books, died on Monday in the Bronx. He was 87.His death, at a hospice facility, was caused by worsening complications of a stroke he had a year ago, his son, Zack O’Malley Greenburg, said.Mr. Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his “How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual,” a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother.“Never accept a compliment,” Mr. Greenburg advised. For example: “Irving, tell me, how is the chopped liver?”“Mmmm! Sylvia, it’s delicious!”“I don’t know. First the chicken livers that the butcher gave me were dry. Then the timer on the oven didn’t work. Then, at the last minute, I ran out of onions. Tell me, how could it be good?”Though his own mother didn’t think it was particularly funny, “How to Be a Jewish Mother” sold more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone and opened the door for the 28-year-old Mr. Greenburg to embark on a long career as a writer.He subsequently published more than a dozen books for adults, including “How to Make Yourself Miserable” (1966), “What Do Women Want” (1982) and “Scoring: A Sexual Memoir” (1972), mostly based on his own neurotic and hilarious attempts at connecting with the opposite sex.He branched into other genres as well — horror, the occult and murder mysteries — and he later began writing humorous children’s fiction, turning out numerous volumes of the popular “The Zack Files” series, for which his son was the inspiration.The versatile Mr. Greenburg also acted, did stand-up comedy and wrote plays and movie scripts, including for the hits “Private Lessons” (1981) and “Private School” (1983).Though he was a native Chicagoan, Mr. Greenburg was among the angst-ridden, carnally obsessed Jewish writers, like Woody Allen, Jules Feiffer and Philip Roth, who emerged in New York during the sexually charged 1960s with shocking, comical and explicit explorations of their neurotic sexual fantasies and behaviors.He wrote more than 150 humor pieces for The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Vanity Fair and other publications. When asked by his Playboy editor over lunch at a Chinese restaurant in 1972 to take part in an orgy in order to write an amusing essay, Mr. Greenburg was flummoxed.Mr. Greenburg’s “How to Be a Jewish Mother” (1964) was an instant success and launched his career. He later wrote a series of children’s books, “The Zack Files,” inspired by his son.“My chopsticks suddenly became too heavy to hold, and I lowered them carefully to the table,” he wrote in Playboy that year. “I should tell you at this point that I am so shy with women that it took me till the age of 23 to lose my virginity, till 30 to get married, and today, at 36, I am still unable to go to an ordinary cocktail party and chitchat with folks like any regular grown-up person. The idea of sending old Greenburg to take part in an orgy was, frankly, tantamount to sending someone with advanced vertigo to do a tap dance on the wing of an airborne 747.”The woman he married at 30, in 1967, was the journalist Nora Ephron, who would find success and fame as a comedy screenwriter and director after their nine-year marriage — the first for both of them — ended in an amicable divorce. They had the friendliest split one could imagine. “When we got the divorce, we kept dating,” Mr. Greenburg said on a podcast in 2021.Mr. Greenburg’s disarming wiseguy prose earned grudging respect from the critics. His examination of the paranormal, “Something’s There” (1976), was praised by John Leonard in The New York Times for its “skeptical, muscular, street-smart in the nether world” look at the occult.“Fans of the author of ‘How to Be a Jewish Mother’ and ‘Scoring’ will be pleased to learn that Mr. Greenburg hasn’t lost his sense of humor, even if he has lost a portion of his mind,” Mr. Leonard wrote. “He is still, like Dean Martin, preoccupied with sex.”Daniel Greenburg was born on June 20, 1936, to Samuel and Leah (Rozalsky) Greenburg. His mother was a Hebrew-school teacher, his father an artist. Intending to follow in his father’s footsteps, Mr. Greenburg enrolled in the fine arts program at the University of Illinois but switched to industrial design. He graduated in 1958.Wanting to abandon Chicago’s cold winters, he packed up his secondhand Chevy and drove to Los Angeles. Knowing no one there and having few options, he applied to graduate school at U.C.L.A., where he earned a master’s degree in fine arts.He soon talked his way into a job as an advertising writer with a small agency. When he read J.D. Salinger’s novel “Catcher in the Rye,” he was so moved by it that he decided he should try his hand at mimicking writers like Mr. Salinger.He wrote a satirical version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and, after selling it to Esquire in 1958 for $350, began to envision himself as a satirist. But, by his account, he knew he had a long way to go to become a successful writer.Splitting his focus between advertising and magazine writing, Mr. Greenburg eventually landed in New York, where in the early 1960s he met the editor and publisher Ralph Ginzburg, who was starting Eros, a magazine about erotica. Mr. Ginzburg recruited Mr. Greenburg to be its managing editor. Mr. Ginzburg went on to earn notoriety when he was convicted of violating federal obscenity laws in 1963.Meeting a book publisher at a party, Mr. Greenburg pitched an idea for what he wanted to title “The Snob’s Guide to Status Cars.” The publisher, Roger Price (who was also a humorist), rejected the pitch but suggested that Mr. Greenburg come back to him with another book idea. Over lunch days later, the two lamented how their Jewish mothers had used guilt to get them to eat. As he recalled on the 2021 podcast, Mr. Greenburg wondered: “How do they do this? Do they have a handbook on how to be Jewish mothers?”A lightbulb flashed on, he recalled, and he thought, “I’ll write that.” Mr. Price liked the idea, offered a $500 advance, and “How to Be a Jewish Mother” was published by Price, Stern, Sloan in late 1964. It became a hit and effectively launched Mr. Greenburg’s writing career. It would go on to be published in 24 countries and was made into a musical, which had a brief run on Broadway beginning in December 1967.After divorcing Ms. Ephron, Mr. Greenburg in 1980 married the writer Suzanne O’Malley, with whom he had his son, Zack, his only child. They divorced in the 1990s. In 1998 he married Judith C. Wilson, a writer. In addition to his son, she survives him, along with a granddaughter. Mr. Greenburg lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.Mr. Greenburg outside his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 1998. He published more than a dozen books for adults and scores more for children.Librado Romero/The New York TimesA fearful child, Mr. Greenburg undertook a series of hair-raising adventures as an adult while mining material for his children’s books, which he began writing in the mid-1990s. He rode upside-down in an open-cockpit plane over the Pacific with a stunt pilot; was chased by an elephant in Africa; rode with New York City firefighters to fires and with the city’s police in high-speed chases; and visited a tiger ranch in Texas, where he learned to discipline 200-pound tigers.“I visit schools constantly,” he said in an interview for the website of Harcourt Books (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) in 2006. “I talk to kids. I try out ideas on them, and I ask them what they like to read. Both boys and girls tell me they love scary stories and funny stories the best, and the boys tell me they love to be grossed out. I’ve tried to put all three things in these books.”In a 1998 interview with The Times, Mr. Greenburg admitted to missing some of the ego rewards of writing adult fiction, but insisted that writing children’s books had been deeply gratifying.“It’s the most fun I ever had in my life,” he said. “There’s nothing more fulfilling than hearing that you’ve turned a kid on to books. That’s enough for a career right there.”Alex Traub More

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    Mars Williams, 68, Saxophonist Who Straddled New Wave and Jazz, Dies

    He made his name in the 1980s with the Waitresses and the Psychedelic Furs, but his roots were in the exploratory jazz of Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman.Weakened by surgery to remove a tumor near his pancreas in January, followed by six months of chemotherapy, the high-wattage saxophonist Mars Williams learned this past summer that his treatment options were nearly exhausted.But rather than resting an ailing body, he chose to return to the road. He joined the Psychedelic Furs, a band he had performed and recorded with since the 1980s, as it toured the United States.“Being on a grueling bus tour would be exhausting for anyone,” Dave Rempis, a friend and fellow saxophonist, said in a phone interview. “By the end, he was sitting in a dressing room with blankets and heaters all around him. He could barely move. But he would still go out onstage and play as hard as ever. He just wanted to be back onstage where he felt most alive.”Mr. Williams died at a hospice facility in Chicago on Nov. 20. He was 68. His brother, Paul R. Williams, said the cause was ampullary cancer.Mr. Williams was angling for a career in jazz in 1981 when the Waitresses, an idiosyncratic New York-based new wave band, came calling, dangling a newly minted record deal with Polydor. The band, marked by the deadpan vocal stylings of Patty Donahue, scored with the indelible cult hits “I Know What Boys Like” and “Christmas Wrapping,” as well as the theme song to the celebrated, if short-lived, 1980s high school sitcom “Square Pegs.”With his explosive horn lines and electric stage presence, Mr. Williams captured the spirit of the band — never mind that his grounding in the exploratory jazz of Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman made him an odd fit in the milieu of MTV in its early days, when acts could find overnight fame on the strength of cotton-candy haircuts and passable synthesizer skills.“He was a goofball, like a lot of reed players,” Chris Butler, the Waitresses’ founder and chief songwriter, said in a phone interview. “I think it has something to do with all that back pressure on their brains when they’re blowing into a brass tube, you know. But he had such massive chops. When we played live, he would improvise, solo, fill the arrangements with this magnificent stuff. And it was different every night.”No instrument, it seemed, was off limits to Mr. Williams, including bells, whistles, and pots and pans. “I had a lot of freedom,” he said in a 2019 interview with the jazz journalist Howard Mandel. “I’m up blowing Tibetan monk horn solos over their rhythms. I’m able to do all these different styles within this pop band.”From left, Tracy Wormworth, Patty Donahue, Dan Klayman and Mr. Williams of the Waitresses at the Peppermint Lounge in New York in 1981, the year Mr. Williams joined the band. Michael Macioce/Getty ImagesHe joined the Psychedelic Furs, a British post-punk band, after the Waitresses fragmented in 1983. His new group was then trading its early Velvet Underground-style rawness for a slicker brand of pop following the success of alternative hits like “Love My Way” (1982).Mr. Williams lent his wailing horn lines to the band’s 1984 album, “Mirror Moves,” although he was not featured on the album’s sleeve or in the heavily aired videos for its songs “Heaven” and “The Ghost in You.” He toured and recorded with the Psychedelic Furs until 1989. After a long hiatus, he rejoined them in 2005.Ever the musical explorer, Mr. Williams performed with many rock and pop acts, including the Killers, Billy Idol and Jerry Garcia, and earned acclaim with several Chicago jazz outfits, including his own long-running ensemble, Liquid Soul, which performed at inauguration festivities for President Bill Clinton in 1997 and earned a Grammy Award nomination for its 2000 album, “Here’s the Deal.”“Mars Williams is one of the true saxophone players — someone who takes pleasure in the sheer act of blowing the horn,” the avant-garde jazz saxophonist and composer John Zorn wrote in the liner notes to “Eftsoons,” Mr. Williams’s 1981 collaboration with the jazz composer and bandleader Hal Russell, “and there are not many saxophone players I can truthfully say this about.”Marc Charles Williams was born on May 29, 1955, in Elmhurst, Ill., the fifth of six children of Jack Williams, who owned several pharmacies and served as an Illinois state representative, and Hilda (Van Outrive) Williams, who managed the Cook County ethics department. He picked up his nickname from a mispronunciation of his first name by his baby brother, Paul.In addition to his brother, his survivors include his mother and two sisters, Michele Williams-Piotrowski and Suzy Williams. His sister Valerie Williams and his brother Jack died.A classically trained clarinetist as a youth, Mr. Williams switched to saxophone after graduating from Holy Cross High School in River Grove, Ill., in 1973 and briefly studied music theory at DePaul University in Chicago.His musical journey led him to New York City, where he worked as a bike messenger and played gigs with punk bands at the nightclub CBGB while trying to build a career in jazz before taking a detour into pop that would last until his final months.Once his pop career took off, life on the road came with familiar perils, including drug addiction, which he wrestled with for years. He spent his last two decades sober, he said in interviews, while counseling other musicians in their struggles.Mr. Rempis said he last saw Mr. Williams on Oct. 25.“He had gotten back from six weeks on the road with the Psychedelic Furs,” he said, “and ended up in the hospital for a few days. When he got out, he said, ‘You know, I might not be able to do these tours in December in Europe.’ That’s where his head was at: Where am I going now? What’s the next thing?” More

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    Anthony Parnther Conducts ‘Black Panther’ in New York

    Anthony Parnther has a flourishing career as a classical conductor who also works in the fast-paced world of commercial entertainment.Anthony Parnther has a job that routinely takes him to fantastic places. Parnther, 42, makes his New York Philharmonic conducting debut this week. His destination? Wakanda: With a wave of his hand, he’ll evoke lush jungles and shimmering citadels as the film “Black Panther” screens overhead.Back home in Los Angeles in January, Parnther will pass through idealistic college classrooms and anxious laboratories, headed to a date with destiny in Los Alamos, when he conducts the sweeping score to “Oppenheimer.”But in a recent video interview, Parnther was finding his way to someplace quite different: Whoville.“I’ll be very honest with you,” he said in a video interview. “I’m sitting here trying to rapidly memorize the words to ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.’”He was cramming for a Christmas concert with the San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra, where he has served as music director since 2019.“I could tell you that I’m sitting here studying the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto, which we’re doing on this concert,” he said. “But I’m actually more worried about the Grinch, because I’m the soloist.”Posts at San Bernardino and the Southeast Symphony Orchestra — a Los Angeles ensemble that is one of the nation’s oldest primarily Black orchestras — allow Parnther to explore and expand the repertoire. An enthusiastic communicator, he talks his audiences through his programs regularly, so singing isn’t that big of a stretch.Parnther conducting the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra in its 2022 Carnegie Hall Debut.J. Adam Fenster/University of RochesterBut his “Black Panther” and “Oppenheimer” engagements shed light on a less visible aspect of his growing career, which has included appearances with major ensembles, including the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Even if you don’t know Parnther by name, you’ve likely heard his conducting — on film soundtracks like “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Turning Red”; television series like “Fargo” and “Only Murders in the Building”; or video games, including “League of Legends” and “Guild Wars.” If you’ve streamed “Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl,” a concert performance of the animated Disney film featuring the original voice cast, you’ve seen him in action.Ludwig Göransson, who composed the scores for “Black Panther” and “Oppenheimer,” views Parnther as an invaluable collaborator. In a video interview from Los Angeles, he said: “If something doesn’t sound right, I’ll hit him up on the podium and we’ll talk about things — how to adjust a couple of notes or change a voicing — and he can immediately relate that information to the musicians.”One reason he works so effectively with studio musicians, Göransson says, is because he emerged from their ranks. For Parnther, working with Göransson on the “Star Wars” TV spinoffs “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett” was especially meaningful. As an eighth grader in Norfolk, Virginia, he learned his middle-school band would play music from “Star Wars” on a coveted trip to the theme park Kings Dominion. Thumbing through a musical reference book, he flipped past “A” and the accordion — it brought up unfortunate associations with “The Lawrence Welk Show” — before landing on “B” and the bassoon. He took up the instrument as his way to tag along.Parnther, the son of Jamaican and Samoan academics, was exposed to gospel in the Baptist church, but it was soundtracks by John Williams that sparked his interest in music. The timing wasn’t ideal: In high school, when he decided to pursue music professionally, his family was living in public housing after losing their home in a fire; his mother was fighting cancer.She bought her son the best bassoon she could afford, a Schreiber S91 Prestige: not state of the art, but a durable instrument.“She had to literally make the choice between paying the electric bill and making the payments on my instrument,” Parnther said. “She decided to make the payments on my instrument, so there was a fire lit in me: I wanted to repay my mother for the sacrifices that she made.”Parnther went on to earn music degrees from Northwestern and Yale. He then took a position at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tenn., gaining confidence as a conductor while earning a music education degree.His tenacity and ambition paid off. The kid who had been inspired by “Star Wars” to pick up the bassoon would go on to play his hardy Schreiber for Williams in the soundtracks for the last three feature films in the series. He also played bassoon on sessions with high-profile pop artists, including Beyoncé, Rihanna and Snoop Dogg. (When his instrument was stolen from his car in 2020, its theft and recovery made headlines.)“The conductor of the future, in order for the orchestra to remain relevant,” Parnther says, “will have to find a way to center the orchestra and not the genre.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesHis work as a versatile, open-minded conductor brought him attention beyond the studios. In addition to his San Bernardino and Southeast Symphony posts, in 2020 Parnther was named conductor of the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra, an elite annual aggregation of classical musicians of African descent, whose Chicago debut he will lead in April.Conducting also brought unanticipated collaborations — with the singer John Legend, the hip-hop producer Metro Boomin and the metal band Avenged Sevenfold, among others. Parnther hasn’t lured those artists into his concert-music realm yet, but it’s not out of the question.“The conductor of the future, in order for the orchestra to remain relevant, will have to find a way to center the orchestra and not the genre,” he said. “Sometimes that means you mix genres on the same concert, if there’s a story line or a relevant through line.”And the skills he’s picked up in the fast-paced world of commercial entertainment have proved transferable. Engaged last year to record “The Central Park Five,” Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, with the Long Beach Opera in just two days, Parnther took the company into a Glendale film studio. He used a metronomic click track and other tools of the trade to maximize efficiency.“The click track lends a certain precision,” Davis said in a video interview, “but there are times when I want a little more flexibility to let the music breathe” — crucial in sections involving improvisation. “It was a great experience, having the tightness of the music, yet also allowing space for the creative expression of individual musicians.”Parnther has used his platforms and rising profile to champion Black composers like Davis and Adolphus Hailstork, while nurturing artists who straddle worlds as he does, including Kris Bowers, Chanda Dancy and Tamar-kali. But his Hollywood affiliations have their own perks.“I’m not a famous conductor,” Parnther said, “but I have been picked out in so many public spaces as the conductor from ‘Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl.’” He’s seen a video of his symphonic concert with Metro Boomin rack up over six million views on YouTube. “And a comment that I ran across is like, Oh my God, this is awesome — but wait a minute, is that the same conductor from ‘Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl’?” More