Aurelia Butler

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    Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Guts’ Review: She’s Seen the World Now, and She’s Livid

    On her second album, “Guts,” which flaunts rock brashness and singer-songwriter intimacy, the sudden pop star is showing just how fraught life is at the top.One of the fundamental conditions — or is it goals? — of pop stardom is hiding the work. You may see Beyoncé sweat, or note how Taylor Swift’s real-life travails inform her artistic choices, but the music created by the most famous performers in pop rarely refers back to the costs, literal and emotional, of making it.But what if you want to show the work?That’s the novel approach of Olivia Rodrigo, a modern and somewhat signature pop star. At the beginning of 2021, she released “Drivers License,” her first single outside the Disney ecosystem she was creatively raised in, and experienced the kind of supernova ascent that’s impossible to anticipate or recreate. Her jolting debut album, “Sour,” released a few months later, showed her to be a spiky, vivid writer and singer, but one who hadn’t quite seen the world.Two years later, on her poignantly fraught, spiritually and sonically agitated follow-up album “Guts,” Rodrigo has seen too much. “Guts” is an almost real-time reckoning with the maelstrom of new celebrity, the choices it forces upon you and the compromises you make along the way. As on “Sour,” Rodrigo, who is 20 now, toggles between bratty rock gestures and piano-driven melancholy. But regardless of musical mode, her emotional position is consistent throughout these dozen songs about betrayal, regret and self-flagellation.“I used to think I was smart/But you made me look so naïve,” she howls on the lead single “Vampire” — she’s referring to a toxic ex, but she may as well be singing about the spotlight itself. Or as she puts it on “Making the Bed,” “I got the things I wanted/It’s just not what I imagined.”Rodrigo is a songwriter of rather astonishing purity — even in her most stylized lyrics, she never wanders far from the unformed gut-kick of a feeling. Sometimes on this album, she triples down. “I loved you truly/Gotta laugh at the stupidity,” she chuckles on “Vampire.” “I look so stupid thinking/Two plus two equals five/and I’m the love of your life,” she croons on “Logical.” “My God, how could I be so stupid,” she sighs on “Love Is Embarrassing.”Don’t mistake Rodrigo’s weakness for weakness, though. Her self-doubt is a powerful animating force. Throughout this album, she kiln-fires her anxieties into lyrics that cut deep. “Pretty Isn’t Pretty” is about the existential struggle of self-love, particularly under an unrelenting public eye. The impudent “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl” captures the essence of outsider awkwardness.The dreamy — and perhaps “Folklore”-esque — “Lacy” is about being robbed of your illusions: “I despise my rotten mind/and how much it worships you,” Rodrigo sings. From a young star who’s had what appears to be frosty relations with Swift, an idol who was retroactively granted songwriting credit on Rodrigo’s first album, it reads like the bruise from a door slammed shut in her face.Several other songs are about being on the wrong side of a manipulative relationship. “Logical” and “The Grudge” tackle it via self-serious angst. But Rodrigo has more spark when she’s playfully ambivalent about how, or if, to break free. “Bad Idea Right?,” driven by throbbing bass and drizzled with layered, saccharine chanting, is about how holding on can be more fun than letting go. And “Get Him Back!” is a revenge fantasy — “I wanna meet his mom/Just to tell her her son sucks” — that’s maybe, just maybe, leaning in to double entendre.The real casualties documented in these songs are the relationships Rodrigo has, or had, with her actual friends. On “Get Him Back!” she imagines their disappointment as she sends a note to that risible ex. On “Love Is Embarrassing” she recounts telling them breathlessly about her new obsession, only to have him let her down immediately thereafter. It’s not that her old life is sitting in judgment of her new one, but rather that she’s lost touch with the anchors that grounded her, and she’s floating into a grotesque unknown. “Getting drunk at a club with my fair-weather friends,” she laments on “Making the Bed.”All of those songs are, in one way or another, about the perils of being wide-eyed. But Rodrigo is also beginning to harden her shell. On “All-American Bitch,” which opens the album, she details the impossible standard for young women in the public eye: “I’m grateful all the time/I’m sexy and I’m kind/I’m pretty when I cry.”And she sings with breezy confidence about physical intimacy in a way more akin to hyperstylized dance floor-focused pop stars who use sexuality as performance. On “Logical,” she replays how an ex belittled her: “Said I was too young, I was too soft/Can’t take a joke, can’t get you off.” The moody “Making the Bed,” uses the titular phrase as a recurring motif of restoration, or perhaps of papering over misspent nights with fresh sheets.Rodrigo writes her own lyrics, and “Guts” is produced by Daniel Nigro, who was also her creative partner on “Sour.” That small circle frees her from the committee-tested gleam of most mainstream pop. Her sudden success means she has not (yet?) needed to subject herself to the homogenization of the Max Martins of the world — she has succeeded by rendering her intimacies on a grand stage. That’s part of why “Guts” leans heavily into rock — pop-punk (“All-American Bitch,” “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl”), a little new wave (“Love Is Embarrassing”), theatrical folk (“Lacy”) — which gives her songs thickness and a little bit of rowdiness, too. But some of this album’s most punk moments, as it were, come when Rodrigo unleashes holy hell while Nigro simply plays the piano.On her debut album, Rodrigo made semi-subtle nods to earlier female pop stars — there can still sometimes be the sense that she is constructing her songs of pre-existing parts, whether from Swift or Alanis Morissette or Avril Lavigne or Veruca Salt. The winks come in the song titles — “Love Is Embarrassing” nods to Sky Ferreira, a parallel-universe meta-pop star of a decade ago who also trafficked in seen-it-all realness. And then there’s the album closer, “Teenage Dream,” which invokes Katy Perry, the archetypically glossy 21st century pop princess.Perry’s “Teenage Dream” is a naïve cupcake, an exhortation to live, laugh, love. Rodrigo’s is a morbid piano plaint about the falsity beneath all that. The dream is a mirage, and Rodrigo is pulling back the curtain on it: “I fear that they already got all the best parts of me/And I’m sorry that I couldn’t always be your teenage dream.”Here, and in the most potent moments on “Guts,” Rodrigo’s music pulses with the verve of someone who’s been buttoned tight beginning to come loose. Unraveling is messy business, but it is also freedom.Olivia Rodrigo“Guts”(Geffen) More

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    New Recordings Revive James P. Johnson and Mary Lou Williams Rarities

    A pair of new recordings bring holy grail artifacts by the composer-pianists James P. Johnson and Mary Lou Williams into the light.This September, audiences will at last possess a more dynamic, more elegant — and just plain improved — sense of how New York City’s jazz and classical scenes converged in the 1940s.Was eight decades a galling length of time to have waited? Naturally. But better late than never.The belated occasion is because of a pair of new recordings. Each one has located and dusted off a holy grail artifact, dating from an era when Black composers with sway in jazz circles dared to pursue hybrid musical styles, all while meeting various forms of resistance or disrespect. Their classical works were discussed as they premiered, yet were rarely programmed twice. Nor were they properly documented on recordings.That last bit of the story is what’s changing, starting this week. One CD, out Friday from the Naxos label, brings the world premiere recording of “De Organizer”: a one-act opera on labor politics jointly conceived by the composer-pianist James P. Johnson and the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.James P. Johnson, shown, jointly conceived the one-act opera “De Organizer” with Langston Hughes.Gilles Petard/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMary Lou Williams’s “Zodiac Suite” has long been popular in its jazz-trio form, but its chamber orchestra version had never been properly documented on a studio recording.Graphic House/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesOne week after that, the chamber orchestra version of Mary Lou Williams’s “Zodiac Suite” will enjoy its first-ever studio recording on the Mack Avenue label.When news releases for both albums hit my inbox nearly simultaneously, toward the end of the summer, my mouth hung open. Both Johnson and Williams were era-defining composers and improvising pianists: Johnson was an exemplar of Harlem stride and the author of the “Charleston”; Williams matured as a composer and player in the crucible of Kansas City’s boogie-woogie style, before arranging for Ellington and tutoring lions of bebop in New York. Why shouldn’t we have access to their ambitious classical works?Johnson and Hughes’s “De Organizer” had its lone stretch onstage in 1940, at a convention hosted by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. And then Johnson’s score promptly disappeared from public view until it was (mostly) recovered, and a restoration by the scholar-pianist James Dapogny premiered in 2002.After discovering a copy of every sung note in the opera, Dapogny was also given details on the original orchestration by Johnson’s foundation. The new Naxos CD documents the scholar’s edition, recorded by the conductor Kenneth Kiesler and the University of Michigan Opera Theater and Symphony Orchestra in a 2006 performance. (It also offers excerpts from another Johnson opera, “The Dreamy Kid,” based on the Eugene O’Neill play.)In “Organizer,” the result is a chameleonic work that melds the vibrato of operatic singing with select stylistic attributes of Black spirituals and the blues; its orchestral heft also has a place for touches of the Harlem stride style that Johnson pioneered. (Dapogny is the pianist in this performance.)The libretto — previously published in Susan Duffy’s book “The Political Plays of Langston Hughes” — can seem sleek to a point of slightness, on the page. But Hughes’s narrative and rhetorical designs hit in a new way when heard in tandem with Johnson’s ebullient, inventive music; his plot feeds Johnson’s capaciousness as a composer, making space for choral meditations and grand solo entrances, even as it presses forward with clear narrative drive and a sense of high spirits.When a local overseer crashes a meeting of Black sharecroppers to discourage their unionizing, Hughes’s text indicates that the rhythm involved should evoke the song “Mamma Don’t ’Low No Piano Playin’ Here” (a folk tune that has enjoyed a great number of variations over the decades) — signaling that one authority’s wishes will not present a major obstacle for the community that can sing out together.The new “Zodiac Suite,” on LP. Diehl credited the Knights’ artistic director and conductor for his ability to “translate” the piece’s jazz-ensemble aspects to the full chamber orchestra.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWith an all-Black creative team pushing for a progressive vision of labor solidarity, perhaps it’s no great mystery as to why the classical industry of the time did not promote the opera (or invest in its preservation). However the erasure of “Organizer” came about, Dapogny’s devotion to his restoration of the score, right up until his death in 2019, amounts to its own kind of artistic activism.A similar interventionist spirit was required when producing a new take of Williams’s “Zodiac Suite.” With its 12 movements — one for each astrological sign — the composer created affectionate portraits of admired artists and friends. While that composition has long been popular in its jazz-trio form, Williams was eager to adapt it for both chamber orchestra and a full orchestra. A document exists of the chamber version, capturing a live 1945 performance at Town Hall in New York, though that take’s lack of proper rehearsal time is audible in the final, muddled result.So her chamber version was also in need of a contemporary champion. It has found one in Aaron Diehl — a pianist widely admired in both jazz and classical circles.During the lockdown portion of the pandemic, he was joined by the New York Philharmonic as he played excerpts from the chamber “Zodiac” for the orchestra’s streaming channel. Yet on the new Mack Avenue recording, he’s joined not by the Philharmonic, but by the adventurous chamber orchestra the Knights, which is staffed by some of the brightest younger players on the classical scene. And they’ve clearly invested time in all 12 parts of Williams’s suite.The Knights as a whole balance lightness of touch with a forward sense of swing in the opening “Aries,” and in the regal flourishes that Williams deployed in movements like “Taurus” and “Leo.” Strings in particular seem to revel in the bluesy sliding tones of “Cancer,” which also includes the guest tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover’s elegant soloing (in a spot originally conceived by Williams for Ben Webster).The Knights flutist Alex Sopp emerges as a key figure as the suite progresses — including when she soars dreamily atop the rhythmic patterns of “Scorpio” for significant, exposed stretches. Diehl, the bassist David Wong and the drummer Aaron Kimmel are a consistent delight — as when providing authoritative piano-trio swing during “Virgo.”In an interview, Diehl lavished praise on the chamber orchestra. “It’s hard enough — even in a small jazz ensemble, five or six people — to agree on the eighth-note triplet,” he said. “When you have multiples of that — 25 or 30 people — that always makes it more difficult. It’s always about negotiating how you’re going to play, how you’re going to phrase.”Diehl credited the Knights’ artistic director and conductor, Eric Jacobsen, for his ability to “translate” the jazz-ensemble aspects of the “Zodiac Suite” to his full chamber orchestra.In a separate interview, Kiesler, the conductor of “De Organizer,” described how the Michigan performance of Johnson’s operatic music required a similar sense of open investigation regarding orchestral swing. He said he learned from Dapogny that, when it comes to swing, “the style is not always about the rhythm, but the weight — it’s about emphasis in places that we might not have it in so-called ‘classical’ music.”The interpretive insights on both new recordings are so strong, they stand alongside other recent triumphs in the American repertoire. The just-right balance of orchestral weight and lithe swing is also in evidence in a recent recording of Wynton Marsalis’s Symphony No. 4. And the engaged political elements of Johnson and Hughes’s one-act opera have a connection with the contemporary operas of the saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton, whose “Trillium X” premiered in Prague this summer.So: More evidence of the true breadth and nature of the American repertoire is steadily coming into view. What major orchestras and opera companies do with that information may be up to their donor bases. But in the meantime, both of these new recordings are capable of dishing out American art music ambrosia — and to a broad community of listeners. More

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    A Look Back at ‘Black Girl’ and Other Ousmane Sembène Films

    At Film Forum, a retrospective of the Senegalese director’s work shows the care he took in telling female stories.A princess ascends from the water like a siren. The stony gaze of an African mask lures a beautiful maid homeward. The Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène rendered myth a visual map that rescued the African past from the sullying grasp of empire. In place of demigods and antiheroes, women were his preferred orbit.The director revealed his enduring preoccupations in the Sembènian heroine: Broadly speaking, she was principled, defiant, inclined to revolt, however outwardly hopeless her odds appeared. Where colonial literature either struggled to translate the finer contours of traditional African gender arrangements or offered only a cursory sketch of their subjection, Sembène stayed attuned to the shades of women’s displacement. He understood, for instance, in “Xala” (1975) how a woman who was too imperious to enter the house of her husband’s second wife could bear, in somber silence, when he took a third, even younger bride, and fractured further what little love was left to her, his first and eldest wife.Feminine multiplicity animated Sembène’s (literary and cinematic) corpus, and he took the cost of his characters’ bravery seriously. Their triumphs come hard-won or not at all. They frequently become the cherished apotheosis of liberation or, where denied by earthly circumstance, rebellion. The director nursed an abiding suspicion of all religion, but his films betray him: If he surrendered in faith to anything, it was the African woman.Dyella Touré as Ngoné in “Xala” from 1975.Ousmane Sembène, via Film ForumOn the occasion of the director’s centennial, Film Forum is hosting a two-week retrospective commemorating Sembène’s work, including the short film “Borom Sarret” (1963), one of the earliest narrative films made in sub-Saharan Africa, a feat that later crowned him the “father of African cinema.” No reading of Sembène (who died in 2007 at 84) is complete without understanding that he considered himself among the griots, a venerable caste of West African storytellers charged with preserving oral tradition. The formal brushstrokes of his compositions contain traces of his tutelage in Moscow, but the Indigenous orality to which he was heir defined his social-realist fables: peopled with all of folklore’s classical archetypes — the trickster, the headstrong princess, the jealous (possibly vengeful) wife — and designed in the shadow of its didactic architecture, replete with curses, the gluttonous elite and resourceful outcasts.For much of the director’s youth, French law prevented Africans from filming in Africa. If the imperial project is, fundamentally, erasure, to interrupt and rewrite history, we see how authorship emerges paramount. Sembène, therefore, regarded the griot as a historian. His early short “Niaye” (1964), about a young village girl impregnated by her father, a chief, would herald persisting themes: A voice-over declares the griots the “only memory of this country” and laments, “Our country is dying of lies and false morality.”Sembène began as a novelist, after he taught himself to read and write in French (many of his films are adapted from his novels and short stories). But the written word, too, inevitably proved an awkward province for his activism; literacy came enveloped in colonial intrusion. Cinema proposed to reconcile the tension among language, text and orality, a conflict he restages in “Black Girl” (1966), his debut feature and perhaps best known work.Ousmane Sembène at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967.Gilbert Tourte/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesHe was first compelled to recount the tragedy of Diouana (played by Mbissine Thérèse Diop) after he stumbled across a startling report about a Black maid in a French newspaper. He published “Black Girl” as a short story in 1962, two years after Senegal seized independence. Here, the ingénue becomes a doomed emissary of a long invaded nation, still bound psychically and economically to its interlopers.Diouana abandons her village in Dakar, possessed of quixotic visions of France, where she ventures to work as a nanny for a well-to-do white family. But the fantasy crumbles upon her arrival when the nameless “Madame” thrusts Diouana into the role of housekeeper. Confined to the cramped house, she toils away daily at domestic chores, overworked and mistreated by her employer. In flashbacks, we encounter a different Diouana: spirited, glamorous and, as it happens, perilously myopic.But the most telling sequence occurs when Diouana receives a letter from her mother (perhaps penned by the village schoolmaster, played by Sembène himself). Diouana listens wordlessly as her employers read the letter. They offer to transcribe her response, lies, of course, about her “good health.” But more important, their translation amounts to a symbolic personal (and political) violation; history disrupted, vocal theft. In protest, Diouana reclaims all she has left: her body.If women model the zeniths of revolutionary vitality, it was men, in Sembène’s estimation, who were generally useless. “Xala” dispenses a scalding indictment of Senegal’s government after the nominal expulsion of the white colonists. On his third wedding night, El-Hadji (Thierno Leye), a wealthy member of the country’s ruling class, finds himself afflicted with xala, the curse of impotence. He dismisses the obvious displeasure of his first two wives, both too traditionalist and dependent upon him for any objection to land meaningfully. Only his daughter Rama (Myriam Niang), the same age as his new wife, can truly kindle his rage, for she alone represents the noble independence El-Hadji superficially performs. He dons suits and drinks imported water; she refuses the water and his language. In a testament to their alliances, El-Hadji snaps at Rama, “Why do you always answer in Wolof when I speak to you in French?”In “Emitaï” and other Sembène films, men are considered generally useless.Ousmane Sembène, via Film ForumIn “Emitaï” (1971) — named for the Diola god of thunder — the French army absconds with the village’s young men and demands, too, their rice (a sacred crop) to feed soldiers. While the elders exhort their gods, the women hide the harvest, which they cultivate themselves. Sembène revels in these glimpses of communal ceremony through protracted sequences: a line of women, heads crowned with baskets of rice, maps the winding path from the wetlands home; elsewhere, they bend over, splashing the delicate stalks with fistfuls of river water. For the women’s insolence, the French platoon holds them captive, their silent demonstration dappled in blazing sunlight.But powerful men seem especially susceptible to colonial imposition. In “Ceddo” (1977), amid the triad of Islam, Christianity and the slave trade, the ceddo (nonbelievers) kidnap the princess to ensure the king’s allegiance to their freedom. But the king, flanked by a menacing, ambitious imam and his disciples, realizes too late that any dominion he once held has been usurped, if not foolishly delivered, to these outsiders with their foreign gods. It seems the leadership of men fails to challenge empire efficiently because they pursue some approximation of its power. No wonder that Sembène’s films routinely faced censorship; “Ceddo” and “Emitaï” were both banned in Senegal for years.Sembène was never deterred. His final film, “Moolaadé” (2004), bore him to the outskirts of Burkina Faso for a stringent reproach of female genital mutilation. Four girls flee their impending circumcision and find a noble champion in Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), a kindly woman who refused to have her daughter “cut,” much to the disapproval of the community’s elders. Somehow his most harrowing plunge into women’s suffering yielded his most ardent tribute to their courage.The series Sembène runs at Film Forum from Sept. 8-24. More information is at filmforum.org. More

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    Jorma Panula: The Teacher Behind the Greatest Conductors

    “He doesn’t like talking about himself,” Marja Kantola-Panula said, gesturing to her husband, Jorma Panula, across their dining table while he sat silently. He had been asked a question about his sprawling presence in classical music as arguably the world’s most influential conducting teacher. But instead of answering, he took a bite from a pastry.When Panula, 93, does speak, it’s brief and authoritative, at times abrasive and absolutely clear. At his home, a modest yet paradisiacal retreat tucked among trees in the countryside northwest of Helsinki, he explained, “I was in the orchestra, and most musicians, they hate talking.”He is not so different in the classroom, where he is famous for quietly listening, happy to offer advice if students ask for it but otherwise saying little, gruffly, and certainly never lecturing. His approach hasn’t really changed in the half-century he has spent shaping young conductors — at the storied Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and now through master classes and his own school.Think of major Finnish conductors working around the world today — there are a disproportionate number of them — and chances are they studied with Panula. If this country is the world’s top exporter of conducting talents, then he is something like a farmer, cultivating generations of artists: those leading the field, like Susanna Mälkki and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and those emerging in a blaze, like Klaus Mäkelä.“None of us would exist without him,” said Tarmo Peltokoski, the 23-year-old Finn who leads the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. “All the foundation of my conducting comes from him.”Susanna Mälkki, who studied with Panula, conducting the New York Philharmonic.Chris Lee/New York Philharmonic, via Associated PressPeltokoski in particular has a close relationship with Panula because of their shared background: Both grew up in Vaasa, in western Finland, and speak its dialect. It’s there that Panula hosts a conducting competition every three years. But it’s not where he first picked up a baton; he had prepared for a different life, one that led to his graduating, in 1950, from the Sibelius Academy as a student of organ and church music.That school is the namesake of Jean Sibelius, Finland’s most treasured composer, who was still alive, and in his 80s, when Panula moved to Helsinki. One day, a friend told him where the national hero liked to take a walk after lunch. “The next morning, it was rainy, but I took my bicycle to the little bay and waited,” Panula recalled. “It was freezing, and I waited, and waited. He didn’t come, so I went back home.”Later, that afternoon, he ran into a neighbor, who said that Sibelius had arrived right after he left. “Mamma mia!” Panula exclaimed, throwing up his hands in exasperation from a rocking chair in his living room seven decades later. “I was so close.” The two never met.Panula remained at the Sibelius Academy to study conducting, which he decided to focus on as a career, with success: By 1965, he was the music director of the Helsinki Philharmonic. His tenure was thoroughly Finnish, with repertoire heavy on homegrown composers, but also pioneering in his commitment to works by, for example, Shostakovich. He composed music as well, for both the concert hall and the opera house.His career as a conductor, however, pales compared with his teaching.Most of Panula’s students begin at a young age, though not always. Dalia Stasevska, 38, the chief conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, didn’t start until her early 20s. She played violin in a Sibelius Academy ensemble that he used in his classes. After seeing Eva Ollikainen (now of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra) at the podium one session, Stasevska told Panula that she was interested in conducting, so he took a receipt out of his pocket, wrote a phone number on it and said, “Call here.” She was so inspired by her first experiences with him, she said, “I couldn’t let go of the baton from my hands.”Express everything with your hands: Klaus Mäkelä, 27, said Panula first taught him to conduct with small movements, just “a postage-stamp-sized beat.”Miguel Angel Molina/EPA, via ShutterstockMäkelä, 27, and Peltokoski were both adolescents with no conducting experience when they enrolled in Panula’s classes, and they studied with him until adulthood. They got a crash course in his quintessentially Finnish school of thought, which Sakari Oramo, 57, a former student of Panula’s who now teaches at the Sibelius Academy, summarized by saying: “You have to be able to express everything with just your hands. We are a nation of few words.”And so, at least at first, Panula’s students are not allowed to speak while they conduct. They do communicate physically, though. Mäkelä recalled that he was never taught the basic patterns of gesturing time — something easy enough, an actor can pick it up for a role — but that he was immediately made to lead musicians with small movements, just “a postage-stamp-sized beat.” Once that was accomplished, he added, “we could do whatever we wanted.”“Clarity,” Panula said, “is No. 1, fundamental.”Very quickly, the reasoning behind his lessons becomes clear. To Peltokoski, Panula’s approach to communication set up how to interact with players efficiently, and honestly, to “not suck up to anyone.” And Mäkelä has since noticed how easily conductors develop mannerisms that his education resisted.Panula values close readings of scores, which to him entail more than simply following the notes on the page. “I can see in their faces if they know the music or not,” he said, which means also knowing a composer’s particular style, as well as background. “What kind of literature were they reading?” he added as an example. “What opera did they see? What ballet?”Dalia Stasevska, another Panula student, said, “He doesn’t hold your hand, and it teaches every student to become his or her own teacher.”Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesHe often proposes questions without offering answers, Mäkelä said, which makes it “so much more powerful when you find the answer yourself.” If students want more detailed explanations from him, however, he won’t deny them. “They can always ask,” Kantola-Panula said. “The best students will do that.”This method also avoids a pitfall in conducting pedagogy: creating clones. Rather, Oramo said, he “let me make music the way I wanted to do it.” Panula’s students have described him as a close listener, and never a pontificator. (Still, he does get vocal about one bête noire: a conductor who serves audiences instead of orchestra. “Remember who all these gestures are for,” he said. “That is a cardinal fault.”)“He doesn’t hold your hand, and it teaches every student to become his or her own teacher,” Stasevska said. “What is so brilliant about his teaching is that it leads to giving space to grow and find your personal style in conducting.”No two Panula alumni look the same onstage. Their similarities emerge during rehearsals: To this day, many of them speak to orchestra players succinctly and purposefully. Like, well, Finns.They do not, however, tend to pick up his personality traits, which are singular and notorious. There is his Finnish directness, and then there is his language — “this old man,” Mäkelä said of the first time he saw him, “swearing like crazy.”Part of his barbed persona was honed in his home region, Ostrobothnia. Oramo’s mother came from there, too, and was, he said, “very much of the same culture as Jorma.” Hearing Panula, he said, “was for me very familiar, almost homelike.”His sense of humor is quite dark, in a way that can be misread; Peltokoski once saw Panula walk out of a master class, then come back after rounding the block, a move that he described as “purely for theatrical effect.”“It’s not the sort of humor all people might like, but it’s very specific to him,” Peltokoski added. “And it’s also essential in understanding him — the sarcasm, the deliberate misleading of people, the wordplay, these sort of ridiculous overexaggerations.”Occasionally, though, Panula’s way of expressing himself has slid into the territory of offensive generalizations. In 2014, he gave an interview in which he glibly said that women were more suited to “feminine” music and were poor interpreters of repertoire like Bruckner symphonies. He was quickly criticized, including by former students.Panula, whose personality quirks are famous, is also known for maintaining relationships with students beyond graduation.Vesa Laitinen for The New York Times“People, of course, when they get old, become a little bit like characters,” Stasevska said. “There’s some kind of grumpiness. It’s in his personality. But I was surprised by that comment, because I don’t recognize my teacher in that. It was a sad thing for him to say, and I have no idea why he said it.”The Panula that endures in her memory, she said, is the one who nurtured her through artistic and personal struggles. Who took her and others out, almost daily, to lunches that he paid for. Who led “marvelous” discussions about culture and was devoted to his students “beyond anything I ever experienced.”He is known for maintaining relationships with students beyond graduation, checking in with terse but warmhearted phone calls. Peltokoski’s parents receive a visit when Panula is back in Vaasa. And alumni of his classes make up a far-reaching, still-growing family tree.“I’ve met people in various parts of the world who have been Jorma’s students: architects and pedagogues, people from different walks of life,” Oramo said. “The work he’s done has just been a huge piece of Finnish orchestral life and culture. And the fact that the profession of the conductor is so highly appreciated in Finland is largely the result of his work. He’s irreplaceable.”And Panula doesn’t plan to be replaced any time soon. The morning after the interview at his home, he and his wife were off to Hungary for a master class. In his latest call with Stasevska, she said, she could still hear the “sparkle” with which he discusses new students — who will keep coming as long as he’s alive.Because, asked whether he would ever truly retire, he responded with his trademark concision: “No. Why?” More

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    Lynn Lynn’s Journey From Rocker to Dissecting Myanmar’s Coup in Film

    Lynn Lynn was a musical idol when he volunteered in 2015 to protect the life of Myanmar’s new civilian leader. Forced to flee after 2021’s coup, he has reinvented himself as a film director.Long before he became an award-winning filmmaker, Lynn Lynn was already a star.His voice was ubiquitous on the radio, belting out rock songs, and he played sold-out shows in stadiums across the country. Everywhere he went, fans hounded him for selfies and autographs.But all that fame was confined to Myanmar, a country he had to flee after a February 2021 military coup.It wasn’t only his lyrics about the suffering of people under military rule that had made him a target of the country’s generals. He was also close to the country’s now-imprisoned civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, having once served as her bodyguard.Now living in the Thai city of Mae Sot, bordering Myanmar, the 39-year-old rocker has taken on a new identity: refugee.Despite the drastic changes in his circumstances, he has not given up on art, but he has changed his focus: to film.His first short movie, “The Beginning,” whose main characters are a fictional group of people from Myanmar, focuses on the importance of good will in building a democratic nation. Five months later, he followed with “The Way,” which captures the trauma and despair of a family suffering from a nation’s conflict; despite the dark themes, the movie is a musical — the first by a director from Myanmar.Both films have won multiple honors at international film festivals, with “The Way” also earning multiple accolades for its soundtrack.“I want to give the message that the military junta can oppress an artist physically, but the spirit and art cannot be oppressed,” Mr. Lynn Lynn said, speaking from his spartan music studio, a bedroom in a rented house in Mae Sot.Mr. Lynn Lynn walking behind Daw Aung San Suu Kyi when he was one of the bodyguards of Myanmar’s civilian leader.Lauren DeCicca/Getty ImagesMr. Lynn Lynn’s life story has been shaped by his country’s convulsive recent history, shifting from dictatorship to democracy to the present-day resistance.The youngest of four boys, he was born in the city of Mandalay to a railway worker father and a mother who stayed at home.When he was 5, he saw close at hand the brutality of the army whose leaders ruled the nation: soldiers pulling passengers from a boat and commanding everyone — regardless of age — to kneel. That scene of dominance and humiliation, he says, has stayed with him throughout his adult life.As a 9-year-old, he taught himself how to play guitar. After high school, he moved to Yangon, the capital at the time, where he cycled through a series of jobs, including bus conductor and security guard, while trying to start a musical career.His big break came in 2001, after he walked into a recording studio to drop off his demo tape and was soon hired to compose songs for some of Myanmar’s most famous singers. He established a reputation for composing original songs, a rarity in a country where nearly all the songs were copied from abroad.In 2007, he marched daily with the country’s monks during the Saffron Revolution protests. He read over and over again “Freedom From Fear,” a book of essays by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, at the time the leader of the country’s opposition, who was under house arrest.He learned how to navigate the country’s censors. Out of every five songs submitted, he was instructed to change the lyrics of three. Sometimes, he submitted different lyrics and then later swapped back in the original words, without anyone seeming to notice.“He is a rebel,” said his wife, Chit Thu Wai, a well-known actress and singer.Mr. Lynn Lynn with his wife, Chit Thu Wai, a well-known actress, in his music studio in Mae Sot.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesIn 2008, Mr. Lynn Lynn released “Think,” an album with love songs that he had written initially for other singers. It was an instant hit and catapulted him to stardom.In 2011, the military initiated a range of sweeping political changes, including releasing Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who convened a gathering of the country’s artists at her house.There, Mr. Lynn Lynn told the Nobel Peace Prize winner he would be willing to do anything for her. He became one of her bodyguards during the 2012 by-election and the 2015 general election.After she won in 2015, becoming the country’s civilian leader, Mr. Lynn Lynn returned to music. Able to sing openly about the generals, he released an album called “The Fourth Revolution.”Then, in February 2021, two months after Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi won the 2020 election in a landslide, the military detained her and announced it had taken power in a coup.The junta charged dozens of actors and musicians, including Mr. Lynn Lynn and his wife, with “incitement.” After months in hiding, the family decided reluctantly to leave Myanmar.Mr. Lynn Lynn went first in August 2021, trekking across a jungle and then swimming to Mae Sot. Ms. Chit Thu Wai and their twin daughters, now 6, followed a week later.Mae Sot, the Thai border city where Mr. Lynn Lynn fled with his family.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn had never wanted to make movies in Myanmar. While he dabbled in script writing and supported independent filmmakers through a production company he owned with his wife, he considered most of the movies made in Myanmar to be too lowbrow to much interest him.He says he turned to film in part to “challenge” his artistic peers back home, many of whom allow the generals to use them for propaganda.Myanmar’s Directorate of Public Relations and Psychological Warfare has always exploited actors and actresses, using them in films to portray soldiers as honorable heroes. In return for staying silent, these celebrities enjoy perks, like being paid to attend galas such as the Myanmar Academy Awards.Mr. Lynn Lynn says he has noticed that the timing of these celebrity events often coincides with reports about more military atrocities. Nearly every week brings horrific news: 100 dead in an airstrike. Bombs dropped at an outdoor concert. Eleven children killed at a school.Midway through an interview in Mae Sot, Mr. Lynn Lynn lifted up his T-shirt to reveal his back. In neat, cursive script, there were 700 tattooed names and ages of some of those killed in the coup’s aftermath.Aung Myint, 32. Tun Win Han, 25. Khin Myo Chit, 7.“There are so many more to come,” Ms. Chit Thu Wai said.Mr. Lynn Lynn’s back is tattooed with the names and ages of 700 of those killed after the coup.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn says he looks at the names in the mirror to “compel a sense of urgency upon my consciousness.” The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a rights group, said more than 4,000 people had been killed in Myanmar since the coup.Mr. Lynn Lynn knew that shooting movies in Mae Sot, so close to Myanmar, was dangerous. Seventeen of 20 cast members of “The Way” stood accused of “incitement,” and they feared Myanmar military’s spies were everywhere, raising concerns they could be abducted or killed. In the movie, members of the central family sing about their suffering from conflict and their quest for peace and justice. Myanmar is never explicitly mentioned because, Mr. Lynn Lynn says, he wants the story to be universal.Two weeks before the shoot, he was still not sure how he would pull it off without the sophisticated equipment typically needed to make a film. He decided to borrow a friend’s iPhone 13 Pro to use as the camera. For the music, he gave himself a crash course in sound mixing.Mr. Lynn Lynn with a wooden ship that was used as a prop in his film “The Way.”Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn’s cast members had never acted before, but some had backgrounds similar to the stories that he wanted to depict. His directorial advice was to read the script and “feel it in your heart,” recalled Aung Lun, one of the actors, who had left his 5-year-old son and wife behind in Myanmar when he fled in 2021.Mr. Aung Lun’s character in “The Way” leaves his baby daughter at a school as soldiers set fire to their village. Years later, his character confesses that secret to his family.During that scene, Mr. Aung Lun cried so hard the crew had to pause the shoot for an hour.As Mr. Lynn Lynn waits to hear whether he and his family can be resettled in the United States, he has more film projects in the works, including a satire set in Myanmar before the coup.Wherever he finds himself, he intends to keep making films.“I want to use a language understood by the entire universe,” he said. ”I want to show that even while we are on the run, our art will continue to live powerfully.” More

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    ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3’ Review: A Noisy Sequel

    Nia Vardalos is back in a noisy sequel that cedes the punchlines, and the plotlines, to the more cacophonous members of the Portokalos clan.Nia Vardalos seized the movie industry’s attention two decades ago when she wrote and starred in the loosely autobiographical “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” an indie charmer that remains the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time.Audiences rallied behind her relatable Toula Portokalos, a wallflower Chicago waitress who straightened both her hair and her spine despite the protests of her domineering family. As Toula fought to leave her father’s restaurant, forge her own career and marry her non-Greek boyfriend (John Corbett), many moviegoers saw themselves in her hard-won successes.But so much for empowerment this time around. “It’s a badge of honor to take care of people,” Toula narrates humbly at the top of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3.” This is the first film in the franchise that Vardalos not only performs in and writes, but also directs — although, in truth, she’s barely the star.This noisy sequel cedes the punchlines and the plotlines to the more cacophonous members of the Portokalos clan, particularly Andrea Martin’s returning scene-stealer, the busybody Aunt Voula. (“I’m not a gossip, I’m a tattletale,” Voula huffs.) While the ensemble bickers and schemes, or, in the case of Toula’s preening brother Nick (Louis Mandylor), publicly shaves himself at inappropriate times, Toula’s laughs come only at her expense. (Hitting her head, falling off a donkey and so forth.) The script functions like a recipe for its own opening shot of baklava; flattened and bland, Toula exists only to constrain the nuts.The story starts after the passing of Toula’s father, Gus, the patriarch played with grumbling affection by Michael Constantine, who died in 2021. To honor Gus, a grab-bag of family members takes their first-ever trip to Greece to visit his mountainous childhood home, a near-abandoned hamlet near(ish) the beach. Only six people remain in the village, and two of them are secretly dating — the series’s core trope remains a hushed romance.This and dozens of other tiny conflicts ripple through the movie, resolving themselves with a hug or an absent-minded cutaway before any one problem swells into something worth our concern. The oddest disposable gag comes when Toula blurts her sexual attraction to a mustachioed stranger (Alexis Georgoulis). The man immediately reveals himself to be a relative.The ancient Greeks wrote tragedy after tragedy warning against hubris. Yet, Vardalos’s flailing crowd-pleaser needs a shot of self-confidence and logic. Why has Toula, a micromanaging former travel guide, flown her relatives overseas without thinking to book a hotel? Why would we believe that her square daughter (Elena Kampouris) is, with zero evidence, a wild child on the edge of sabotaging her life? And why do some of the rural Greeks speak English with a better accent than Aunt Voula? Nothing adds up.Not that I begrudge Martin a single one of her quips. If Vardalos is no longer comfortable at the center of the franchise, hand the whole thing over to her.My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3Rated PG-13 for a suggestive scene on a nude beach with strategically placed slices of watermelon. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Nun II’ Review: Back in the Habit

    The latest installment in the “Conjuring” franchise continues a formula of frights with a splash of religious world building.Jump scares abound in “The Nun II,” a sequel to the 2018 film, which was itself a spinoff of the “Conjuring” franchise. It continues the misadventures of Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) and the demonic force Valak (Bonnie Aarons).This time, the call is coming from inside a house of religious education. While investigating a string of murders across Europe, Sister Irene posits that Maurice (Jonas Bloquet), or Frenchie, as he’s known — her farm boy companion from “The Nun” — may have become possessed by the demon force and, if so, is unknowingly harboring it at the Catholic boarding school in France where he now works. It’s up to Sister Irene and her new companion, a skeptical novitiate named Sister Debra (Storm Reid), to race over and stop the demon before it unleashes its full horrors.The pacing of the film, set in the 1950s and directed by Michael Chaves, is too neat: It runs like haunted clockwork, shoving characters down dark alleyways or abandoned chapels every five minutes with little justification. Scene after scene builds fear and tension, and then a monster appears, and then … not much else, in most cases.Not everything in “The Nun II” is centered on screams. There’s also a good deal of lore involving Saint Lucy, patron saint of the blind, plus a holy relic that might point to Sister Irene’s ancestral origin. Maybe this is the sort of intricate world building that avid watchers of the “Conjuring” movies are deeply invested in. Or maybe — if the gasps and guffaws I heard in my theater are any indication — audiences are mostly there to watch a headmistress being bludgeoned to death by a thurible.The Nun IIRated R for ecclesiastical violence. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Charles Busch, Drag Legend, Tells All in His New Memoir

    “Leading Lady,” a mosaic of reminiscence and self-analysis, explores the ascent of a man who’s really good at playing women.Charles Busch, the celebrated male actress, Tony-nominated playwright and, most recently, exuberant memoirist, has been thinking that his bed might make a good stage. At his Greenwich Village duplex last month, he noted how the arched entrance to his blindingly white boudoir resembles a proscenium.The room is in the style of 1940s-vintage Dorothy Draper, an interior decorator known for her Modern Baroque sensibility. It is the sort of place, Busch observed, that you could imagine Gene Tierney bedding down as the chic advertising executive (and presumed murder victim) in the glamorous 1944 film noir “Laura.”The show Busch would like to perform here, though, would be a production of Lucille Fletcher’s radio play “Sorry, Wrong Number,” in which a high-strung, bedridden rich woman overhears her own murder being plotted via a crossed telephone connection. The role was memorably played by Barbara Stanwyck in the 1948 film.“I really should do it before I’m too old,” said Busch, who was then a few weeks shy of 69. With brushed-back, graying hair and a mandarin-collared shirt and trousers (drag is for the stage), he resembled a discreetly bohemian college professor.He figured an audience of 12 could be squeezed into the hallway. Busch himself, presumably in a luxe peignoir, would be waiting “in the bed, like Jessica Chastain,” who sat onstage in a wordless prologue in the recent Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House.”In his 2010 show “The Divine Sister,” Busch (here with Amy Rutberg) delivered a twisted tale of the secret lives of nuns.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBusch, too, would be in character from the get-go, “eating chocolates and being neurotic.” He plucked at the air with impatient, fidgeting fingers. Suddenly a doomed, desperate invalid woman seemed to loom before me. I felt dizzy, caught between a shiver and a giggle.I had arrived just 10 minutes earlier chez Busch, whose “Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy” comes out on Tuesday. But already much of the essence of this man who plays women had been established: the encyclopedic frame of reference, the conjuring of a sparklingly sophisticated Manhattan, the summoning of a decades-spanning parade of actresses and, above all, the giddy Judy-and-Mickey-style excitement of putting on a show.These elements are much in evidence in “Leading Lady,” a book that brings to mind “Act One” — Moss Hart’s classic account of a sentimental education in the theater — but with a lot more wigs and costume changes, as well as a blithe detour working as a rent boy for nine months. And, of course, a different roster of famous names as supporting players, who here include Liza Minnelli, Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury and Kim Novak.Though the book was 14 years in the making (“I wrote many plays in between, darling”), autobiography would seem to come naturally to a man who says, “While I am living an experience, I am turning it into narrative.” Assembled as a time-scrambling mosaic of reminiscence and self-analysis, “Leading Lady” chronicles the ascent of a motherless boy who discovered that he was really good onstage only when he put on women’s clothes.“When I play a male role, I’m fine,” he said, “but there’s somebody else who could do it better. But as far as being a male actress, I have a pretty healthy ego.”The late-career films of Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Susan Hayward inspired Busch’s role as a faded screen diva with murder on her mind in “Die Mommie Die!”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBusch’s crowded résumé includes screenplays (his movie with Carl Andress, “The Sixth Reel,” in which he appears in and out of drag, will be screened in New York this month), national cabaret tours and the authorship of a hit Broadway comedy, “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife.”But as the memoir’s title suggests, Busch is above all a leading lady. His self-starring plays — inspired by the female-centric melodramas of vintage Hollywood — usually find him elaborately bewigged and begowned, cherry picking gestures and inflections from the likes of Stanwyck, Jean Harlow, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford. These traits coalesce into a single, swirlingly allusive portrait, usually of a strong, fabulously dressed woman in jeopardy.John Epperson, Busch’s longtime friend and, as the great Lypsinka, his peer in the downtown cross-dressing pantheon, sees both their work as part of a tradition of live performance that dates to drag antecedents like Charles Ludlam, the founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which presciently blurred the lines between both genres and genders. It was a sensibility taking fresh forms in East Village bars four decades ago like the Pyramid Club and the Limbo Lounge, the birthplace of Busch’s breakout work, “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.” “As someone once said to me, ‘Observe the absurdities in the culture,’” Epperson said. “I think I was already doing that! And that’s what he does, too, in his own angled way.”Staged Off Broadway with minimal budgets and maximal inventiveness, Busch’s plays have usually been everything their redolent titles promise — “Vampire Lesbians” (which had a five-year Off Broadway run in the mid-1980s), “The Lady in Question,” “Die Mommie Die!,” “The Divine Sister” and, most recently, “The Confession of Lily Dare,” which ran in New York shortly before the pandemic.“The Confession of Lily Dare,” a 2020 show, found Busch evoking Helen Hayes, Ruth Chatterton and other stars of pre-Code mother-love weepies.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt first, they’re just a hoot. Shaped by a mix of sincere affection and amused distance, they echo the experience of watching the films that inspired them. It’s an approach that has allowed Busch to maintain a singular position in the increasingly crowded world of drag, which has become both the stuff of prime-time entertainment (see: “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and its progeny) and a political lightning rod. With its gleeful emphasis on the extravagantly made-over self, drag would seem to be a perfect fun house mirror for a culture ever more obsessed with the illusions — and truths — of self-presentation.At the same time, men dressing as women now routinely evokes fire-breathing outrage from American conservatives. “That’s all just a snare and a delusion,” Busch said of the right-wing attacks on cross-dressing. “It’s like ‘Footloose’ or something,” he added, referring to the 1984 film about a small town that prohibits teenagers from dancing. “It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.”For years, Busch bristled at being called a drag queen; in early interviews, he insisted that performing as a woman was purely an artistic choice. It is a stance that now embarrasses him. “If you base your entire creative life around female imagery, it has to come from somewhere profound,” he said.From the moment he first donned drag for a play about Siamese twins he wrote while a student at Northwestern University, he realized that a female persona allowed him a confidence and expressiveness he lacked performing as a man. Today, he is happy to be called a “godmother of drag.” Reached on tour in California, two notable stars from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” confirmed Busch’s claim to that title.BenDeLaCreme said Busch’s performances were “like this distillation of our collective queer conscious.” Jinkx Monsoon, who met Busch for lunch, found him to possess “all the grandeur and sparkle of an opera diva, the self-awareness of a vaudeville clown and the grace of a first lady giving a tour of the White House.” The actor Doug Plaut, who worked with Busch on “The Sixth Reel,” views him as a surrogate mother, as well as “the most fascinating person who has ever lived.”Busch burst onto the New York theater scene in the mid-1980s with the long-running Off Broadway hit “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.”Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesBusch’s own mother died of a heart attack just down the street from their home in Hartsdale, N.Y., when Busch was 7, and her absence pervades “Leading Lady.” His father, who owned a record store, was affable but inattentive, and Busch’s maternal aunt, Lillian Blum, a smart, arts-loving widow who lived in Manhattan, stepped into the vacuum.She was in essence “both my mother and my father,” he said his therapist pointed out. Busch sees her as the true hero of his book. She died in 1999.Busch was also very close to his sister Margaret, who was three years older. “We were like empaths,” he said. “We were both really good mimics. And she was the most feminine, fragile little thing, but her Jimmy Cagney had as much nuance as my Greer Garson.” She died of heart disease on July 13, and when I visited Busch a few weeks later, he was still raw from the loss.He choked up talking about the comedian Joan Rivers, the most dominant of the mother figures he’s been drawn to throughout his adult life. “After she died, I was kind of sniffing around a bunch of older ladies, thinking I’d find another one,” he said. “But you can’t replace people.”Busch is working on a show about the playwright Henrik Ibsen’s widow, who is “sexually awakened by a sailor.”Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesHe did seem a bit washed-out that day, especially amid the vibrant portraits of him throughout the Chinese-red living room to which we had adjourned. These included Busch à la Dietrich, on a sofa cushion; Busch as Sarah Bernhardt in moody black and white; Busch as a springy human exclamation point per the theater illustrator Al Hirschfeld; and a host of diversely made-up busts Busch created from his own face mask.It felt like the natural setting for someone who habitually shifts among different selves. As we talked, his voice most often brought to mind not his beloved movie goddesses but the aw-shucks wholesomeness of the boy-next-door matinee idol Van Johnson or a young Jimmy Stewart.The women would surface, though, in bursts of ripe annotation — the breathless booming of Bette Davis, the stateliness of Norma Shearer or the “deadpan look that’s slightly mad” that shows up, he said, in every performance by Vivien Leigh, his favorite actress.He’s thinking of at last incorporating the patrician tones of Katharine Hepburn, circa “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” into his next production, “Ibsen’s Ghost: An Irresponsible Biographical Fantasy.” It’s about the epochal dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s widow, who is “sexually awakened by a sailor,” and is scheduled to arrive in New York early next year.“It may be my farewell performance,” he said solemnly. I reminded him that he had said the same thing about “Lily Dare” a few years ago.“Yes, that was going to be my farewell performance,” he agreed, a bit testy. “But I don’t know.” He then landed the requisite one-liner with a dry Eve Arden drawl: “I don’t have enough hobbies.” More