Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Last Stop Larrimah’ Review: The Unusual Suspects

    This true-crime documentary investigates a murder case in a tiny Australian town, showcasing its brash inhabitants.You might think that a murder case in a one-horse town of 11 people would be a little easier to solve. You would be wrong when it comes to the remote Australian outpost of “Last Stop Larrimah,” a true-crime documentary which gives free rein to the gossip and bickering of its mutually suspicious inhabitants.Fran the meat-pie queen, her pub-owning rival, Barry, and his dog-loving bartender, Richard, are among those holding forth on the mystery of Paddy Moriarty — a “larrikin” (in Aussie parlance) who sounds less and less endearing. Paddy and his dog disappeared one night shortly before Christmas in 2017. The sometimes entertaining residents of Larrimah spin theories about each other for the film’s director, Thomas Tancred, who adds their past incautious interviews for television.Tancred finds initial charm in the Australian embrace of big personalities like these sunbaked veterans of the Northern Territory. But the movie resembles reality shows that string together insinuations and trash-talk without knowing when to quit. The convoluted structure feels like overworked dough, with some dubious song cues and oddly dismissive treatment of police investigators. (As a murder mystery, the movie also games the system by postponing crucial information.)The bloat saps the fun and intrigue from the film, which can’t navigate between playing up eccentricity and committing to the notion that hell can be other people (even in a one-time refuge). The infighting seems quaint in the first hour, but by the second, you just want to get out of town.Last Stop LarrimahNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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    Book Review: ‘Madonna: A Rebel Life,’ by Mary Gabriel

    Mary Gabriel’s biography is as thorough as its subject is disciplined. But in relentlessly defending the superstar, where’s the party?MADONNA: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel“I want to be alone,” Greta Garbo’s dancer character famously said in “Grand Hotel,” a quote permanently and only semi-accurately attached to the actress after she retreated from public life. Garbo was first on the list of Golden Agers in one of Madonna’s biggest hits, “Vogue,” but the pop star has long seemed to embody this maxim’s very opposite. She wants to be surrounded, as if with Dolby sound.“Before Madonna even had a manager, she had a court of valets and minstrels following her everywhere,” the record executive Seymour Stein observed.Though technically a solo vocalist, Madonna has been backed by dancers from the beginning of her career in the early 1980s. She has six children: two biological, four adopted from Malawi. Many more consider themselves her spiritual offspring: gay men to whom she’s been den mother; younger female performers she’s inspired.And she’s trooped around the world with an elastic entourage of friends, writers, producers, directors, handlers, photographers, publicists, reporters and fans, all of whom helpfully populate Mary Gabriel’s big, indignant new biography of her: a dogged, brick-by-brick bulwark against any detractors bobbing in the moat of her castle.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is one of those books you measure in pounds, not pages: almost three, which would have been more if the publisher hadn’t decided to post the endnotes and bibliography online rather than printing them. It’s not going to fit on the little shelf of the StairMaster at the gym — a classically Madonna piece of exercise equipment — though you might hoist it afterward for wrist curls.If you wander into an aerobics class instead, not only are chances high that the instructor will play a song from Madonna’s catalog, but she’ll probably be wearing a hands-free headset microphone — and that is muy Madonna as well. As Gabriel notes, though the technology was used before by pilots and Kate Bush, it was her subject who popularized it on her 1989 “Blond Ambition” tour.For this book, though, the woman born Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1958, the same year as Prince and Michael Jackson, stayed quiet. Her voice is piped through from plentiful previous interviews, recorded performances and the occasional post on Instagram, where early in the pandemic she outcringed the Gal Gadot “Imagine” video with one of herself naked in a bath amid floating rose petals, declaring Covid-19 “the great equalizer.”The closest Gabriel gets to Madonna in the actual flesh is half a dozen conversations with her brother, Christopher Ciccone, whose best-selling 2008 memoir, “Life With My Sister Madonna,” caused at least temporary estrangement between the siblings, longtime professional collaborators. (Madonna’s sense of betrayal is hard to jibe with her ardent defense of free personal expression.)Gabriel also talks to 30-odd other sources, surprisingly few for the scope of the work, and turns up a few interesting archived nuggets, such as Norman Mailer, in an early draft of the more than 200 he wrote for a 1994 Esquire profile, describing Madonna as a “pint‐size” Italian American (he used an ethnic slur instead) “with a heart built out of the cast‐iron balls of a hundred peasant ancestors.”Previous Madonnagraphers have either been breathily unauthorized — Andrew Morton, J. Randy Taraborrelli — or taken a more “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” approach; universities have offered entire courses on her. Gabriel brings extra intellectual cred to the task. “Love and Capital,” her book about Karl Marx and his wife, Jenny, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; her group portrait of five female painters, “Ninth Street Women,” was rhapsodically received. But she doesn’t describe her own connection to this project, as she did the others, and this reader was left wondering if it might be less love than capital.Not that Gabriel doesn’t make a diligent case for Madonna’s cultural importance: inviting us to consider, for example, her Mylar-encased coffee-table book “Sex,” pummeled with judgment when it was published in 1992, in the same light as James Baldwin’s novel “Giovanni’s Room.” She airs at length the praise of the curator Jeffrey Deitch, who worked with Madonna on a 2013 multimedia installation called “X‐STaTIC PRo=CeSS.”Maybe we’ve all miscast Madonna as the Queen of Pop — a dubious analogue to Aretha Franklin’s Queen of Soul — and she’s closer, on a mass scale, to Karen Finley, the performance artist who used to smear her nude body in chocolate or honey? Indeed, describing the period Madonna lived in Miami, Gabriel writes of her “daily ritual of covering herself in honey and jumping into Biscayne Bay, where she floated until the honey melted away,” with no apparent concern for sharks.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is organized as a busy, seven-decade, mostly urban travel itinerary. Like Franklin, Madonna lost her mother early and was raised in Detroit, where her father, who also had half a dozen children, “thought we should always be productive,” she said. Her Barbie would tell Ken: “I’m not gonna stay home and do the dishes. You stay home! I’m going out tonight. I’m going bowling, OK, so forget it!” Among her formative influences were J.D. Salinger and Anne Sexton (literary); the Shangri-Las and David Bowie (musical); Martha Graham and Frida Kahlo (visual). “The sight of her mustache consoled me,” she said of the latter.I might be biased as a native who craved rubber bracelets and lace socks and waited to hear if FM radio played “Borderline” through the “la-la-la-la,” but the section when Madonna arrives in New York City, though well trafficked, is one of the most compelling in this book. She eats French fries out of garbage cans; learns guitar at an abandoned synagogue in Flushing Meadows nicknamed “the Gog”; brings a demo tape to the DJ booth at Danceteria; and, signed by Stein from his hospital bed, hangs with a “coterie” of artists that included Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She was also raped at knife point on a rooftop, an ordeal not publicly aired until the punishing Abel Ferrara film “Dangerous Game” in 1993.Having segued to Hollywood (and later Broadway and the West End), she gave the middle finger to its male establishment: walking away from an early marriage to Sean Penn, cursing out David Letterman on the air and roundly shushing Harvey Weinstein when he offers feedback on “Truth or Dare,” her 1991 documentary. (“I don’t care what your point of view is,” she tells him. “I never want to hear it. Who the hell are you to tell me what kind of film I should be doing?”) Her onetime paramour Warren Beatty, who directed her in “Dick Tracy,” mocked how she wanted to live on-camera all the time; who with an iPhone now does otherwise?Madonna is rightly celebrated here as a pioneer of AIDS education — she lost countless friends to the disease — and a genuine philanthropist. But as she grows more practiced with the press and isolated by her fame, the book softens and suffers. The muchness of Madonna, her cross-disciplinarity — from MTV to “Evita” — seems impossible to corral.Madonna’s drug is work — she makes a discipline of even decadence — and “A Rebel Life” increasingly becomes a litany of remote description and tabulation: boundaries crossed, records broken, shows staged, money made, countries visited, foreign cultures sampled. “All artists appropriate,” is how Gabriel defends her against a frequent charge. “It is called inspiration.”Clichés sneak into her prose. Madonna is burning the candle at both ends, igniting a firestorm and is a lightning rod for controversy. She has never taken the road most traveled, but does take a long hard look in the mirror.Speaking of mirrors: Gabriel acknowledges Madonna’s talent for self-reinvention, but oddly ignores her transformation after cosmetic procedures and the resultant backlash — a sensitive matter to parse, but hardly irrelevant for someone whose oeuvre has been so entwined with image. “I’m going to make it easier for all those girls behind me when they turn 60,” the star said when promoting her 2019 album, “Madame X.” Well, some of those girls want to know why she can’t shake her skull-topped cane at the anti-aging industrial complex.“A Rebel Life” hits its marks but rarely soars, as Madonna did suspended by cables during her Drowned World tour. (Rather, the book is submerged in names, places and dates and historical exposition.) Then again, assessing Madonna’s legacy before she has a chance to recover from recent health setbacks may be an impossibly premature endeavor.“The verdict time and again would be that she had gone too far, that her career was over,” Gabriel writes. “Time and again, the jury was wrong.”MADONNA: A Rebel Life | By Mary Gabriel | Illustrated | 858 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $38 More

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    Errol Morris Did Not Like This Q&A About His le Carré Film

    John le Carré’s spy novels traffic in the philosophical, emotional and practical ambiguities complicating concepts like truth, deceit and self-awareness. Which makes their author, who died in 2020 at 89 and whose real name was David Cornwell, an ideal foil for the legendary documentary director Errol Morris, himself an artist compelled toward questions about those […] More

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    ’12 Years a Slave’: An Oral History

    A decade on, the Oscar-winning portrait of American slavery feels more potent than ever. The filmmakers explain its personal origins and ultimate triumph.“So, what do you want to do next?”The question shadowed the director Steve McQueen’s first tour of Hollywood, in late summer 2008. His debut film, “Hunger,” a mesmerizing and unsettling character study of the Irish revolutionary Bobby Sands, had electrified audiences in Cannes that May and won the prize for best first feature. In rounds of meetings in Los Angeles — McQueen’s first time in the city — executives and producers on studio lots and in restaurants cast themselves as allies-in-waiting, eager to help a visionary new talent mount his second picture.McQueen had thought his follow-up would tackle another formidable historical figure, perhaps the African American singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson, or the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer and political dissident Fela Kuti. But, emerging from the Hollywood meetings, he told his agent that he wanted to make a film about slavery. The decision, he said in a recent interview, had been inspired in part by the meetings themselves — an ineffable look he’d seen on people’s faces when they’d first laid eyes on him.“They didn’t know that I was Black,” said McQueen, who was born outside London to a Trinidadian mother and a Grenadian father. “I think because I had made a movie like ‘Hunger,’ these white guys didn’t think that they would be meeting with a Black person.”To McQueen, the mistaken assumption about his identity — to say nothing of the carelessness of not having bothered to look him up — was evidence of deep and unexamined prejudice. The legacy of slavery had haunted him since childhood; his mother kept a family tree that traced her ancestors back to Ghana. But, in Britain, his education on the subject had included “Roots” and little else. In America, a country with an ample history of anti-Black violence, he sensed a similar strain of mass amnesia.“There was a certain sense of nonresponsibility, like it was something deep in the past,” he said. “I wanted to hold people to account, to say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute — this happened here.’”“12 Years a Slave,” McQueen’s version of a wake-up call, was released 10 years ago this month. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Lupita Nyong’o — in her first feature film role — and written by John Ridley, it was based on the real-life autobiography of Solomon Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped in 1841, enslaved and later escaped. (In the end, it was McQueen’s third film. “Shame,” a frank portrait of sex addiction, came out in 2011.)Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, in “12 Years a Slave.” The film was based on the 1853 memoir of the real-life Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped, enslaved and later escaped.Jaap Buitendijk/Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentA serious, R-rated Black drama with no movie stars in the lead roles that would go on to gross nearly $190 million (most of it abroad) and win three Oscars (including best picture, the first for a film by a Black director), “12 Years” arrived in Hollywood like a U.F.O. landing. Its success paved the way for two other landmarks of Black cinema from the same production company, Plan B — “Selma” (2014) and “Moonlight” (2016) — and dispelled the longstanding myth that “Black films don’t travel,” one year before Disney announced “Black Panther.”The movie’s journey from gut impulse to unstoppable force was possible because of blind faith — that of an in-demand filmmaker impervious to industry dogma, and a coterie of producers who fanned his flame — and the efforts of actors and crafts people who faced the relics of human bondage, an actual lightning strike and the daily broil of New Orleans in July.These are edited excerpts from their stories.STEVE McQUEEN I knew I wanted to make a movie about a free man who got caught up into slavery.DEDE GARDNER, producer We had a subject matter before we had a narrative.JEREMY KLEINER, producer He has a kind of divining rod for taboos and just goes right to them.McQUEEN My wife [the author and filmmaker Bianca Stigter] said, “Why don’t you try to find some material instead of trying to write it?” John Ridley and I did some research and my wife did some research, and she found the book “12 Years a Slave.” When I read it, I said, This is it. This is the piece.GARDNER The urgency of John’s script, and how cinematic it was, was evident. We try to develop a film as far as we can before going to find the financing. Can we get it written? Can we get it cast? The hope is that eventually you cross a line of deniability.McQUEEN I met Brad [Pitt, co-founder of Plan B] and he was very receptive. He didn’t blink.GARDNER He loved the script and wanted to help get it made, which I think we all knew would entail his being in it. [Pitt plays a small but critical role as a Canadian carpenter and opponent of slavery who helps Northup secure his freedom.]Brad Pitt, left, a co-founder of Plan B, the production company behind the film, on set with McQueen. “I met Brad and he was very receptive,” the director said. “He didn’t blink.”Jaap Buitendijk/Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentMcQUEEN I had wanted to do a film about Fela with Chiwetel and I had him learning to play the saxophone. I remember calling him and saying, “Actually, I want to do this slavery film instead.” [Imitating Ejiofor] “Man, I’ve been practicing for the last three months!”BRAD WESTON, former president of New Regency, co-financer The script was great and the talent was undeniable.With a budget set at $20 million, financed by River Road, Summit Entertainment and New Regency, “12 Years” began filming in New Orleans on June 27, 2012. Shooting took place on four former plantations outside the city, not far from where the real Solomon Northup had been held captive. On the first day, the temperature hit 108 degrees.SEAN BOBBITT, cinematographer How hot does hot get?McQUEEN Horses were collapsing in the fields next door to us.ADAM STOCKHAUSEN, production designer It was a battle between wanting to take off as much clothing as possible and not wanting to be eaten alive by mosquitoes.McQUEEN It was brutal, but you realize how people had to live in those conditions.BOBBITT It was very important to Steve that it look real and that it be real. We talked a lot about simplicity and truth, about not having any frippery. The book is very straightforward and honest.STOCKHAUSEN There were terrible storms. One of our sets in the wharf [where a ship carrying Northup arrives in New Orleans] blew down two weeks before we were set to shoot.BOBBITT There was one day when a lightning bolt struck the edge of the ship set and blew out all of our electronics and sound. Everyone — maybe 100 extras and the key actors — hit the ground, screamed and ran away. Luckily, no one was injured, but the E.M.T.s rushed in and checked everyone out.Among the most challenging shoots was a much-discussed scene in which Patsey, an enslaved woman played by Nyong’o, is whipped by the volatile plantation owner Edwin Epps (Fassbender). It unfolds in a single, swirling four-minute shot.BOBBITT It was three or four takes, with one camera. We never used the word “coverage.” It’s anathema to filmmaking — anyone can go out and do 20 shots on each scene, give it to a very good editor, and you’ll get a movie. Will you get a great movie? From my point of view, it’s unlikely.A serious, R-rated Black drama with no movie stars in the lead roles, “12 Years” grossed nearly $190 million and won three Oscars, including best picture.Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentMcQUEEN We did a lot of rehearsal and [Nyong’o, Ejiofor and Fassbender] were incredible. Lupita made everyone raise their game. You could put her in a dustbin bag and she would work it out. [Representatives for the actors declined to make them available for this story because of restrictions around interviews during the actors’ strike.]BOBBITT It was emotionally draining for everyone, but the idea was not to give the audience the chance to look away, to drive home the true horror of what was perpetrated on the slaves for 200 years.McQUEEN We couldn’t shy away from it, we had to go to very dark places. But in the evenings, we would all come together, we would hug each other, we would eat together, we would get drunk together, and then we would come back the next day. It was beautiful.The film had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on Aug. 30, 2013. It received a rapturous standing ovation and was instantly hailed as an Oscar contender. But an obstacle came into focus a week later, during a news conference at the Toronto International Film Festival, when a white, visibly uncomfortable moderator repeatedly emphasized how “harrowing,” “brutal” and “tricky” it was.McQUEEN We had a little bit of a … not very good press conference in Toronto. I thought the questions were a bit silly. My response wasn’t great.PAULA WOODS, McQueen’s publicist He was a bit taken aback after having such a great premiere. It fed into this whole “Is it too difficult to watch?” conversation that we were all annoyed by.HANS ZIMMER, composer It was full of injustice, but it was full of human dignity, as well.McQUEEN Cameron Bailey [then the artistic director of the Toronto festival] took me to one side and said, “You know, this movie’s more important than you.” I had to put my emotions aside and get on with the job of promoting the movie.WOODS Before #OscarsSoWhite, people would write things that would never get written today. It’s part of the greater problem of systemic racism. I remember we were in New Orleans visiting one of the plantations with a journalist, and a man who was working there sidled up to me — with one eye on Steve — and said, “You know, it wasn’t nearly as bad as they say it was.”“It was emotionally draining for everyone,” said Sean Bobbitt, the cinematographer, “but the idea was not to give the audience the chance to look away.”Jaap Buitendijk/Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentNANCY UTLEY, former co-chairman of the distributor Fox Searchlight It was challenging, but that’s part of what we thought made it special — that it was willing to take you places that are difficult to go.STEVE GILULA, former co-chairman of Fox Searchlight We had a two-pronged approach with the campaign: One was the festivals, and the other was African American opinion makers.UTLEY We did screenings with Skip [Henry Louis] Gates Jr., the Equal Justice Initiative, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Museum of Tolerance.GILULA We didn’t want it to be pigeonholed as an art film. When we opened, it performed very well at African American theaters.After winning top prizes at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, “12 Years a Slave” entered Oscar night, on March 2, 2014, with nine nominations, close behind Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” and David O. Russell’s “American Hustle,” with 10 each. The best picture race was widely considered a tossup.McQUEEN I came with my mother and sister, and when we got out on the red carpet they just burst into tears.WESTON We knew that we were in the conversation in a real way, but you don’t let yourself go further than that. You never know.KLEINER There’s an old mythology that films that are a little tougher might not be to the academy’s taste. “Ordinary People” over “Raging Bull.”Nyong’o and Ridley were early winners in the best supporting actress and best adapted screenplay categories. But, late in the night, best director went to Cuarón.UTLEY That’s when your heart goes in your stomach, because often director and picture are paired.McQUEEN Will Smith [presenting best picture] looked directly at me and said, “12 Years a Slave.” It was amazing. I slapped it out of the presenter’s hand, gave my speech and jumped as high as I could.UTLEY It was a calling card for a lot of the talent in the movie, and for us, as well. Everyone got to make more stuff.KLEINER It felt significant that when people now think about how this industry has represented that period — “Birth of a Nation,” “Gone With the Wind” — they might also think of “12 Years a Slave.”BOBBITT There are states in America where that film would be banned from schools today, but it’s there, and it will always be there.McQUEEN We made history. At that point, there was no going back. More

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    Diving Into ‘The Exorcist: Believer’

    We knew Ellen Burstyn would be back. But what else? A discussion of some of the spoiler moments in the new sequel to the 1973 horror classic.The spooky season has arrived and among this year’s crop of horror franchise resurrections is “The Exorcist: Believer,” the first in a planned trilogy of sequels to William Friedkin’s 1973 classic “The Exorcist.” If you know anything about this revamped version, you’ll know it’s not just one little girl who’s hacked by Satan, but two. For everything else, keep on reading — meaning spoilers ahead.Like the director David Gordon Green’s previous trilogy of “Halloween” reboots, “The Exorcist: Believer” has been critically panned. Given the two movies set to follow — the second installment “The Exorcist: Deceiver” is scheduled for spring of 2025 — it’s a bad start for Green and company. Though I imagine they’re not banking on good reviews so much as the divine power of nostalgia and brand recognition.David Gordon Green narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Leslie Odom Jr. and Lidya Jewett.Eli Joshua Adé/Universal PicturesFor nearly two hours, the film tracks the possession and eventual exorcism of two 13-year old gal pals: Angela (Lidya Jewett), who is Black, and Katherine (Olivia O’Neill), who is white. “Believer” starts out in Haiti with a portentous prelude that hearkens back to the original, in which a Catholic priest stumbles upon satanic heirlooms in a very sinister-looking part of Iraq. Angela’s parents are on vacation in the island country when an earthquake hits, gravely injuring the mother and forcing the father, Tanner (Leslie Odom Jr.), to choose between saving his pregnant wife or the baby inside of her.In the present, Tanner is an affable single dad suggesting that he chose the babe. This assumption makes up the film’s emotional backbone. After the girls go missing and return three days later with their feet mangled and eyes tweaky, they hit a monstrous form of puberty. It’s teenage rebellion made sacrilegious, razed of all of the truly crass and nasty edges that made Linda Blair’s Regan, the possessed girl in the original movie, so shocking to behold.The film pivots away from the girls to focus on feels, courtesy of the original cast-member Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil (Regan’s mom), now the author of a book about Regan’s possession. Chris isn’t a final girl, and she’s not uniquely skilled at fending off the baddie. But because she’s a legacy character, “Believer” treats her with an air of reverence that gives her a preternatural connection to the devil — and it makes him, a supposedly omnipotent, unknowable being, a lot less scary. The demonic version of Katherine jabs a crucifix through Chris’s eyes, blinding her for the rest of the movie — a condition that parallels the film’s ideas about belief in the indemonstrable. Chris has long been estranged from Regan, who supposedly cut contact with her mother after the release of her book. Chris holds on to the possibility of Regan’s return, which she does, in a final-act cameo by Blair herself.“The Exorcist,” a master class in grief and dread, is quite unlike the formulaic fun of, say, slasher movies that easily breed follow-ups. Famously, Friedkin (and Burstyn, at least until “Believer”) wanted nothing to do with the extended universe that spawned after its release. You don’t need to watch any of the other “Exorcist” movies to understand “Believer,” which only draws from Friedkin’s version — and offers up this extension.The film’s equal-opportunity possession encourages cooperation between racially diverse families, and the jumbo-exorcism in the end doubles as a kumbaya circle for religious harmony. Both families assemble a supergroup of believers to perform the rites: a Protestant minister, a voodoo mistress, an Evangelical speaker-in-tongues, and an ex-Catholic nun. Because believing isn’t about any one religion, it’s a collective act of faith. Circling back to Tanner’s decision in the beginning, the devil, trickster that he is, demands that the parents choose one girl to survive. Katherine’s dad, the most weak-willed of the three, screams out his daughter’s name and — just like Tanner, who had asked for the doctors to save his wife — the opposite happens. Angela survives. But given the shoddiness of the exorcism itself, and the fact that the devil seemed to be calling the shots through the end, I’d imagine Satan has more in store for her. More

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    Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond? Yes, There’s a Connection.

    Nicole Scherzinger was exhausted. It was a week since Jamie Lloyd’s new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” had begun performances, and Scherzinger was playing the lead role of Norma Desmond — the forgotten star of the silent screen whose attempt at a comeback doesn’t end well.In Lloyd’s stripped-down, psychologically focused production at the Savoy Theater, Norma’s unraveling psyche is the heart of a story that is less about the loss of stardom than the emotional fallout of being passed over while in possession of all your gifts. At the end of the show the previous night, Scherzinger stood alone onstage, covered in blood and dazed, appearing to hardly register the audience’s wild applause.“It’s grueling,” she said last week while curled up on a chair in the depths of the Savoy. “But for many years I have been saying I am using a fraction of my potential, and now I feel I have really tapped into that.”The glamorous Scherzinger, 45, might initially seem like an odd fit for the role of Norma, immortalized by Gloria Swanson in the 1950 Billy Wilder film on which the musical is based. Scherzinger rose to fame as the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, a girl group formed in the early 2000s. And though she played Grizabella in a revival of Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” in the West End in 2014, her post-Dolls career has encompassed two solo albums and long stretches as a judge on “The X Factor” and “The Masked Singer.”When asked to star in “Sunset Boulevard,” Scherzinger said, “I wasn’t sure if the idea was flattering or insulting.” But she soon “fell madly in love” after reading the lines and listening to the music. Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesScherzinger herself was taken aback when Lloyd, the acclaimed experimental director added, asked to meet and suggested the part some 18 months ago. “There are many roles I wanted to play in musical theater, but this is not one of them!” she said over the course of an hourlong interview. “I wasn’t sure if the idea was flattering or insulting. But Jamie said to me, don’t watch the movie; read the lines, listen to the music. And I fell madly in love with it.”In a telephone conversation, Lloyd said he first thought about directing a revival of “Sunset Boulevard” during the pandemic, and “immediately thought Nicole should be in it.”Norma Desmond, had come to be seen as a role for an older actress. But he wanted a woman “who is in her prime, really brilliant, but has been discarded, just as we talk even now about women over 40 not having the opportunities they should have,” he said. “I felt there was a connection for Nicole, who had extraordinary international fame, but then didn’t have the opportunity to live up to her potential.”Talking about her career, Scherzinger said that although she had been a shy and awkward child, she had “always had a hunger and a drive.” Born in Honolulu to a Filipino father and a Hawaiian Ukrainian mother, she was raised in a religious and sheltered environment in Louisville, Ky., by her mother and a German American stepfather, whose last name she took.Although her parents were blue-collar workers with little money to attend concerts or the theater, she grew up singing and loving music (her mother’s family had a musical group called Sons and Daughters of Hawaii). She attended a performing arts high school, acted professionally in Louisville, and studied theater (“Stanislavski and Shakespeare and all that”) and voice in college.After leaving college early to join an acoustic rock band, Scherzinger auditioned for “Popstars,” a reality series that offered the winning contestants a place in a musical group and a recording contract. Her winning group, Eden’s Crush, was modestly successful, and “it got me out of Louisville,” she said about her move to Los Angeles.Clockwise from top left, Scherzinger with the Pussycat Dolls in 2007, as Grizabella in “Cats” in 2014, rehearsing for “Sunset Boulevard” this year, and judging “The X Factor” with Sharon Osbourne and Simon Cowell in 2017.MJ Kim/Getty Images; David M. Benett/Getty Images; Summers/Thames/Syco, via Shutterstock; Marc BrennerIn 2003, she auditioned for the Pussycat Dolls, a former burlesque act reimagined as a sexy singing and dancing girl group. Scherzinger became the lead singer and a household name, with the Dolls selling millions of records on the back of hits like “Don’t Cha” and “Buttons.”She was famous, but for a woman who “grew up singing in church,” she struggled with the group’s skimpy clothing and sexualized image, and spent over a decade obsessively exercising and battling bulimia. “I wish I could go back and enjoy it, realize this isn’t going to be forever,” she said. “Maybe that’s what Norma feels: It was her youth, she worked so hard, and she can’t get that back.”The Pussycat Dolls disbanded in 2010, and Scherzinger pursued a solo career with modest success. It was during this time that she performed “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” (from Lloyd Webber’s “Evita”) as part of a TV special celebrating Lloyd Webber, who, along with the director Trevor Nunn, asked her to join the cast of the 2014 revival of “Cats” on the West End. Scherzinger described the experience as transformative (every night “I got to shed my old self and be reborn again”), even though she didn’t stay with the production when the show moved to Broadway. She decided to join “The X Factor” instead, and Lloyd Webber was open about his annoyance.In a telephone interview, the composer said that he had been disappointed because he believed in her talent and “would have loved to have seen her show Broadway what she could do.” But they remained friends, he added, and was delighted when Lloyd suggested Scherzinger play Norma. “I believe she is one of the most gifted singer-actresses I have seen perform my work,” he said. “It’s a tough role, but Nicole is fearless musically and dramatically. I am a total fan.”“I knew exactly this feeling of abandonment, the constant thread of loneliness, the insatiable need for affirmation,” Scherzinger said. “I finally have the courage not to worry.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesScherzinger said that “The X Factor” had given her the time and financial stability to pursue her own music, which she did while also taking on other projects, like voicing the character of Sina in “Moana,” and starring in a television version of “Dirty Dancing.” But she always believed, she said, that she would return to musical theater, particularly after performing in the television special “Annie Live!” in 2021.Now that she’s back onstage, how does it feel? She said that preparing to play Norma had been cathartic: “I felt I knew exactly this feeling of abandonment, the constant thread of loneliness, the insatiable need for affirmation, validation. Now, there is this epic, iconic score to throw all this into and create art from places of torment.”Lloyd said that Scherzinger was “constantly searching, questioning, finding details, deepening her understanding of the inner world of the character.” Her work ethic (asking questions, taking notes and sometimes working through breaks), he added, has been an inspiration to the entire cast. “You would never know, through this entire process, that she didn’t have an acting background.”Asked about future plans, Scherzinger said her dream was to write her own musical, loosely based on her life.“After all these years, I finally have the courage not to worry about what others think, to know I have something to say,” she said. “As Jamie always says, ‘You are brave, be braver.’” More

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    Harry Smith, a Culture-Altering Shaman, at the Whitney

    A solo show takes on the legacy of the painter, folk musicologist, filmmaker, obsessive collector and underground legend. It also hints at what has been lost.“Far-out” is an accurate, but inadequate, descriptor for the high-flying (and often plain high) cultural magus named Harry Smith (1923-91). And the label “polymath,” too, while true, falls short for this innovative painter-filmmaker-collagist-musicologist-designer-scholar-curator-collector/hoarder, whose very first and very strange (it could not be otherwise) institutional solo is at the Whitney Museum of American Art.When speaking of Smith, it’s hard to know where to begin, or end. To the degree that he is familiar at all in the art world (never mind in the real world) it’s as an experimental filmmaker. His chief reputation, however, lies in a different field, music, notably as the compiler of the six-disc 1952 LP -collection called the “Anthology of American Folk Music,” an ethnological document that had a subtle but palpable role in moving the nation’s sociopolitical needle in a revolutionary direction during the civil rights and Vietnam era.Booklet for “Anthology of American Folk Music” (Folkways Records, 1952). Smith divided the work into three sets of two LPs, “Ballads,” “Social Music” and “Songs,” and accompanied each with an illustrated booklet of notes.Smithsonian Folkways, Washington, D.C.How to present such a figure, whose work is so grounded in sound and visual motion, in a traditional museum setting naturally presents a problem, which the Whitney has handily solved by bringing in an object-based artist, the sculptor Carol Bove, as installation designer.Bove has created a big, film-friendly, black-box-style container for the show. And she has placed down at its center a zigzagging walled corridor for the display of little-known objects — paintings, drawings, prints, photographs — that Smith produced almost nonstop throughout his life and that he sometimes claimed to regard more highly than his films.That life began in the Pacific Northwest. Smith was born in Portland, Ore., and grew up in Washington State. He was lucky in his family. They didn’t have money: His father worked in the fish-canning industry; his mother was a teacher. But they encouraged his early interest in reading and art and folk music. And as practicing Theosophists, they made him comfortable with esoteric spiritualities and instilled in him their own pantheistic love of the natural world.Because his mother taught school on the local Lummi Indian reservation, Smith became fascinated with Indigenous culture. By age 15, he was already a committed ethnologist, participating in Lummi dances and religious rituals, absorbing Native music, photographing objects, sacred and secular — a handful of foggy slide photographs of masks, drums and weavings are the show’s earliest entries — while taking copious field notes on everything.Harry Smith, left, recording a Lummi ceremony around 1942. He documented songs, ceremonies and artistic traditions of the Lummi people through photography, painting, sound recording, and took copious notes of everything.Getty Research Institute, Los AngelesAnd a unitary concept of “Everything” was already the axis around which his worldview turned. He was intensely focused — a classic geek — but the focus was panoramic and panoptic, taking in many seemingly unalike things — dance, color, language — at once, all of which he perceived as interrelated. He would speak of illuminating such connection as the primary value of his work, the one he cared most about.In 1945, he moved to San Francisco with the intention of studying anthropology at the University of California in Berkeley. But classroom learning wasn’t his thing. (He attended some lectures but never registered.) He spent most of his time doing what amounted to field research in the city’s burgeoning Beat poetry cafes and in jazz clubs where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker regularly played.He lived in a minute apartment in the Fillmore neighborhood, then predominantly African American, and indulged what would be two insatiable lifelong appetites: one, for mood-altering substances (alcohol and a rainbow of perception-changing drugs), and the other for the bulk collecting of objects — books, music recordings, artworks (for him a spacious, nonhierarchical category), antique tools, tarot cards, textiles, toys, used bandages found at tattoo shops, and a Himalaya of newspaper and magazine clippings.Installation view of “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.Ron AmstutzIn San Francisco he was doing a lot of painting: smoothly geometric Kandinsky-ish, mandalalike compositions, as well as looser, brushier work in which the individual strokes were synced to the notes and chords in jazz recordings. And he used this gestural mode to create his first animated abstractions, painted directly on film stock, which was then edited and projected.The earliest surviving example of this “action painting,” “Film No. 1: A Strange Dream” (circa 1946-48), is in the show — it’s an eyepopper — as are a few more abstractions from the San Francisco years. They’re tip-of-the-iceberg evidence of the riches Smith was producing at the time. But they also hint at what’s been lost.Chronically indigent and often high, Smith was careless with his art and collections. When he couldn’t pay rent he’d be out on the street, his possessions with him, up for grabs. He’d sometimes destroy things in a rage. So, materially speaking, there’s now relatively little output to see. Three beautiful “jazz paintings” in the show exist only as lightbox transparencies made from slides of originals lost who knows when. As a result, a show of big ideas — organized by Dan Byers of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard; Rani Singh, director of the Harry Smith Archives; and Elisabeth Sussman, Kelly Long and McClain Groff of the Whitney — feels small.Still from Smith’s “Film No. 1: A Strange Dream,” circa 1946–48, the earliest surviving example of his “action painting” from the San Francisco years. via Anthology Film Archives, New YorkSmith’s “Algo Bueno [Jazz Painting], circa 1948–49,” a lightbox projection from a 35-millimeter slide of lost original painting. The individual strokes were synced to the notes and chords in jazz recordings.Estate of Jordan BelsonSmith was blessed with protective friends — the poet Allen Ginsberg and the filmmaker Jonas Mekas were two — and sporadically with supportive patrons, including, briefly, Hilla Rebay, the first director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (the forerunner of the Guggenheim Museum).On a visit to San Francisco in 1948 she saw Smith’s extraordinary animated abstractions and offered him a stipend to do more. With the money he moved to New York City, settling first on the Lower East Side, and later and longer, in the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street. Here he worked on some of his most ambitious projects.In 1952, the Manhattan-based Folkway Records released his “Anthology of American Folk Music,” the long-time-coming end product of Smith’s childhood passion for preserving materials from sources he perceived as marginalized. And although the LP set had a low-key landing — it was niche marketed, primarily to libraries — it gained a passionate and eclectic audience that included Bob Dylan, Philip Glass and the Grateful Dead.(The full “Anthology” set, which Smith regarded as an art object in itself — he even signed it as if it were a painting — can be sampled in a section of the show set aside as a listening station, as can the fabulously erudite and poetic commentary that Smith wrote for all 84 cuts.)Harry Smith, “Untitled,” circa 1950–51, casein and paint on board,Harry Smith Archives, Los AngelesIn New York, he also created his most complex and inventive films, none of them, strictly speaking, abstract. “Film No. 11: Mirror Animations,” made around 1957, adheres to the “jazz painting” model of aligning music and visuals. The music in this case is Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso,” but the images now include Buddhist figures and Kabbalistic emblems.For “Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic Feature,” also in the show, Smith supplied his own score of everyday noises: dogs barking, babies crying, wind blowing, glass breaking. He also proposed a story line — a woman with a toothache goes to a dentist, gets injected with some kind of drug and ascends to heaven — which is enacted by figures clipped from Victorian-era print sources.The ingenious animation feels delightfully witty at first, but over the span of its hour length, makes for creepy watching. There’s wild, violent stuff going on. If this is heaven, we want to stay clear. Smith has a reputation for being an occultist, but he was never a religionist. Like Joseph Cornell, he was an uninnocent mystic. However spacey his art, the world is very much in it.Still from “Film No. 11: Mirror Animations,” circa 1957. Using cutup animation and collage technique, he synchronized the work to Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso.”via Anthology Film Archives, New YorkStill from “Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic Feature,” circa 1957–62. It depicts a woman with a toothache who goes to a dentist, gets injected with some kind of drug and ascends to heaven, a story line enacted by figures clipped from Victorian-era print sources.via Anthology Film Archives, New YorkIt’s certainly there in the magnum opus “Film No. 18: Mahagonny,” (1970-80). The score is a full two-hours-plus recording of the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht opera “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” And the visuals, projected on four square contiguous screens, are a collage of color films Smith shot in Manhattan in the 1970s: on its streets, in the Chelsea Hotel and in Central Park.A mathematically calculated visual puzzle, it’s also a record of a time and place, filtered through Smith’s favored themes: outsider-insider culture, embodied in figures from the city’s avant-garde (Ginsberg and Patti Smith make appearances); material accumulation (tabletop arrangements of food, liquor bottles and drugs); and some promise of transcendence, in this case through Nature (childhood: he keeps going back there).In the 1970s, New York was in trouble, and so was Smith. Years of alcohol and drug intake were catching up. “A stoned, drunken, hunched-over demonically creative gnome” is how his New York psychiatrist described him. Penniless and in failing health, he was crashing with friends who passed him on to other friends. At one point he ended up in a Bowery flophouse. (This phase of his life — indeed his entire life — is empathetically chronicled in John Szwed’s indispensable new biography, “Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith.”)Andy Warhol, “Screen Test: Harry Smith,” 1964, a four-minute 16-millimeter film transferred to digital video, black and white, silent.The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PABut he never stopped working, which meant collecting: He carried a tape recorder, always turned on. And there were late upbeat moments. In 1988 he was invited to teach at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colo., a Buddhist-inspired college, where he was treasured and cosseted.In 1991, he was awarded a special Grammy for the “Anthology” and flew to New York, five kittens in tow, to accept it. He wore a rented tuxedo. No one would have guessed that by this point he was surviving entirely on instant mashed potatoes, NyQuil and cigarettes and would soon be lost in hallucinations of who he would meet in the afterlife. He died, at the Chelsea Hotel, that year, “unique, devious, saintly,” as Ginsberg eulogized, and far-out right to the end.Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry SmithThrough Jan. 28, 2024, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212-570-3600, whitney.org. More

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    Russell Batiste Jr., the Drumming Heartbeat of New Orleans, Dies at 57

    A pyrotechnic funk and R&B mainstay, he was a vital figure in his home city as a member of one of its celebrated musical dynasties.Russell Batiste Jr., a pyrotechnic drummer and scion of one of New Orleans’s most celebrated musical dynasties, whose furious style and genre-busting approach provided the rhythmic pulse for bands like the Meters and Vida Blue and musical artists like Harry Connick Jr., died on Sept. 30 at his home in LaPlace, La., outside New Orleans. He was 57.The cause was a heart attack, said his brother Damon Batiste, a former percussionist with the Batiste Brothers Band and a former producer for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.As a member of a family that has put its stamp on New Orleans music for generations, Russell Batiste was a mainstay of the city’s funk and R&B scene, performing with a long string of prominent local bands like George Porter Jr. & Runnin’ Pardners, the Wild Magnolias and Dumpstaphunk.A multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, he pushed boundaries with the trio Vida Blue, named after the Cy Young Award-winning pitcher of the 1970s and ’80s. He formed the group in the early 2000s with Page McConnell, the keyboardist for Phish, and Oteil Burbridge, a bassist with the Allman Brothers Band. With its atmospheric blend of jazz, funk and electronica, the trio recorded three albums, starting with its debut release in 2002, and toured extensively in that decade.Even so, New Orleans was where Mr. Batiste’s music seemed to belong. His bands Russell Batiste & Friends and Russell Batiste and the Orchestra (sometimes spelled Orkestra) From Da Hood packed local clubs like the Maple Leaf Bar and Le Bon Temps Roule for years, channeling the city’s rich, diverse musical heritage.“He captured the spirit of Congo Square,” Damon Batiste said in a phone interview, referring to the New Orleans site where enslaved people were allowed to gather for music and dance in the early 19th century. “Everything he played was funk, but he blended in marching band, second line, Haitian, Cuban and African rhythms. He was playing to the spirits of our ancestors.”Playing with a ferocity that would sometimes shatter his foot pedals, he added, Mr. Batiste “was like lightning and thunder, all at the same time.”Even as a sought-after sideman on albums like Mr. Connick’s “She” (1994), Mr. Batiste said he was more interested in finding musical transcendence through collaboration than in gaining individual glory.Mr. Batiste in July at the Essence Festival in New Orleans. He was a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter.Erika Goldring/Essence, via Getty Images“Anybody can solo,” he said in a 2005 interview with Modern Drummer magazine. “Anybody can sit behind the drums and go nuts. Anybody can play riffs on the bass, and anybody can play songs on the piano. But playing music is when two or more people get together from out of nowhere and turn it into something.”David Russell Batiste Jr. was born on Dec. 12, 1965, in New Orleans, the oldest of three children of David and Patricia (Cummings) Batiste. His parents divorced in the early 1970s.Born into a family of musicians, young Russell seemed to have his course mapped out for him from an early age. His father played with soul luminaries like Jackie Wilson and Isaac Hayes in the 1960s and ’70s and was a member of the Meters, the seminal New Orleans funk band, before starting his own influential funk band, David Batiste and the Gladiators. It later merged into the noted family ensemble the Batiste Brothers Band, led by his brother Paul.Russell’s younger cousin Jon Batiste is the Grammy Award-winning pianist, singer and songwriter and former bandleader for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”“When I was growing up, I’d see Russell at the Maple Leaf and his band the Orchestra From Da Hood,” Jon Batiste said in a recent television news interview. “He was our kind of blueprint.”Mr. Batiste earlier this year performing with his cousin Jon Batiste at the Maple Leaf, one of several New Orleans clubs that his bands packed over the years.Josh Brasted/WireImage, via Getty ImagesRussell did not take long to establish his identity within the family. He started gigging with the Batiste Brothers Band at local clubs when he was 6. “When I was 8 years old, I opened up for the O’Jays and the Drells and the Chi-Lites at City Park Stadium,” he said in a recent interview on the podcast “The Jake Feinberg Show.”At St. Augustine High School, Mr. Batiste played drums in the school’s nationally famous Marching 100 band.After graduating in 1983, he enrolled at Southern University at New Orleans, where he studied under the jazz saxophonist Kidd Jordan (who died in April). But he left college after two years to become the drummer for the singer Charmaine Neville (who comes from another New Orleans music family). He joined the Meters, which evolved into the Funky Meters, in 1989.By that time, however, Mr. Batiste was battling substance abuse, which impeded his career for a time, Damon Batiste recalled. “Imagine being a rock ’n’ roll star, and people loved to be around you and you’re naïve,” his brother said. “He didn’t have his family around him.” Russell found sobriety in the 1990s.In addition to his brother Damon, Mr. Batiste’s immediate survivors include his father; his mother, Patricia Johnson; his stepfather, Newman Johnson; his sisters, Tasha Batiste, Lakisha Johnson, Monique Santiago, Merinda Bell, Tish Allen, Eboni Batiste and Chanell Batiste; four other brothers, David Guys, Aaron Duncan, Jamal Batiste and Ryan Batiste; his sons, Christopher and Darryl; and a daughter, Nareal.Considering the family he came from, Mr. Batiste could never have imagined another career, he said late in life. “I was born with a pair of sticks in my hand,” he told Mr. Feinberg.Recalling an old family 8-millimeter home movie, he added: “I’m not even 1 yet, and I’m sitting on a lady’s lap behind a set of drums with a pair of sticks hitting the drums. That’s the way I was born, man. It was just in me.” More