Aurelia Butler

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    Charles III’s Coronation: Music That Made Kings and Queens

    The coronation ceremony of King Charles III and Camilla, the queen consort, on Saturday has been described as a millennium-old tradition of pomp and circumstance, reaching back to Charles’s most distant forebears.But while the service and liturgy of the coronation of English and British monarchs stretches back to the 10th century, the tradition of its sound is far more recent — and less noticed. Many of the accounts of coronations before the 19th century have been lost, and the ones that remain make very little mention of music, if at all.The sound of the British coronation that has become so affixed in the cultural landscape is, in fact, a 20th-century invention, in a concerted effort to present the past as the present.Charles III has commissioned new works for his coronation, adding to the rich tapestry of pieces composed for the occasion. Here is a brief history of that music, exploring the sound of the divine right of kings.A scene from Elizabeth II’s coronation. The sounds of this royal ceremony are largely an invention of the 20th century.Getty ImagesEarly CeremoniesThe first coronation of an English monarch that resembles what we see today was for Edgar in 973. This coronation provided the overall structure that has been filled out since the 10th century: the procession and recognition, the oath, the anointing, as well as the investiture, enthronement and homage. The coronation itself is a religious ceremony, centered around the Eucharist, and so, from 973 to 1603, the coronation ended with a Catholic mass.In 1382, the “Liber Regalis” (“Royal Book”) was written to provide a detailed account of the coronation order of service, likely for Anne of Bohemia. The book provides the coronation text but gives no information on the music itself; coronations would have music composed specifically for them, and some works only became fixed in later centuries. The first coronation music was likely sung chants, which, starting in 1603 with the coronation of James I, were refashioned into coronation anthems now with English text.James II, 1685Music by more familiar composers appears with the coronation of James II. One of Henry Purcell’s settings of “I was glad” is used for the entrance anthem. Also known by its Latin name, “Laetatus sum,” the text is a setting of Psalm 122. The anthem is in two parts, beginning with a bright and lilting section in triple meter marking James’s entrance into Westminster Abbey.As James ascended the stairs toward the Chair of Estate, the King’s Scholars from the Westminster School shouted “Vivat” (also known as the Acclamation); this was the first coronation where that tradition was present. The second section, now in minor and in duple time, acts as a solemn prayer of peace and prosperity for the monarch and the nation. The section ends with the “Gloria Patri” (“Glory be”), and it is this Purcell version that inspired the tripartite structure for C.H.H. Parry’s setting of “I was glad” in use today.George II and Queen Caroline, 1727George II’s coronation is perhaps best known for introducing George Frideric Handel’s coronation anthems, including “Zadok the Priest” (HWV 258), along with several others. It is unknown, however, where in the service each coronation anthem was performed. “Zadok the Priest” sets text from 1 Kings 1:38-40, text that has appeared in some form at every coronation since Edgar.The anthem begins with a lengthy orchestral introduction, building tension up to the entrance of the choir, accompanied by pealing brass and timpani. It is believed that the introduction was written to help provide flow in the order of service, specifically giving time for the monarchs to change robes in preparation for the anointing. The anthem also includes the acclamation “God save the King! Long live the King!” — linking the anointing to the later acclamation from the Homage of the Peers, where those with hereditary titles swear fealty to the monarch.Victoria, 1838The coronation of Queen Victoria is the first time the entire musical service is transcribed, in part because of George Smart, who was in charge of the coronation’s music. The service features the Handel coronation anthems “Zadok the Priest” and “The Queen Shall Rejoice,” as well as the Hallelujah chorus from “Messiah,” which took place after Victoria received communion. The reliance on Handel and the lack of new musical material — except for one new anthem, “This is the day,” by William Knyvett — resulted in widespread criticism of the service, with The Spectator writing that “the musical part of the service was a libel on the present state of art in this country.”Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, 1902It is with Edward VII’s coronation that music becomes a significant part of the service, by royal decree. Frederick Bridge, in charge of the music for the coronation, wrote that “the King was most explicit in declaring his Command that there should be no curtailment of the musical part of the service,” when cuts were being made to shorten the service because of Edward’s health.For the first time, music was incorporated in the published order of service, including compositions performed both before and after the coronation. This featured marches by Wagner, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky and Elgar, whose “Imperial March” had been written for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Within the coronation service, Bridge outlined a program that would connect centuries of English church music together from Tallis to Parry, aiming to highlight Britain’s imperial might by showcasing the long centuries of its artistic power.Bridge commissioned new coronation anthems for the service, notably “I was glad” by C.H.H. Parry and a new setting of the “Confortare” by Walter Parratt, Master of the King’s Musick. Both have since become staples in the coronation service. Parry’s setting of “I was glad” is resoundingly jubilant, opening with brass over a full orchestra in a fanfare, before giving way to the chorus’s unaccompanied entrance. Parry incorporates the vivats into the anthem; here they are sung by the choir, punctuated by brass echoes and snare drums, while excising the “Gloria Patri.” Parratt’s “Confortare” (“Be strong and play the man”) revived a text not used since the 17th century. Parratt’s arrangement takes the antiphon from recited chant to full chorus with fanfare-like brass accompaniment.Elizabeth II and Charles IIIThe accession of Elizabeth II prompted the idea of a new Elizabethan age, one that would rival the artistic, cultural and military achievements of the 16th century, connecting postwar Britons with the glory of their ancestors. The coronation showcased that idea by featuring music by the premiere contemporary British composers: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, Herbert Howells, Arthur Bliss, George Butterworth, Gordon Jacob, Charles Villiers Stanford, Gustav Holst, John Ireland and William Walton.And at the most recent coronation, comparisons between Elizabeth II and Charles III are unsurprisingly being made. Composers writing music for this coronation include both expected and unexpected names, including Judith Weir, Master of the King’s Music; Tarik O’Regan; Paul Mealor; and Shirley Thompson; there will be a new coronation anthem from Andrew Lloyd Webber.Charles III’s coronation is set to usher in the new Carolean era, in the hopes that it will reflect its namesake Charles II and his contributions to art and music. Only the coronation and time will show if this new era lives up to that promise. More

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    Mo Willems Finds Yet Another Way to Entertain Kids: Opera

    The beloved author of children’s books is experimenting with new forms, alongside starry collaborators, at the Kennedy Center.WASHINGTON — Do you know the words to the Queen of the Night’s stratospheric showcase from “The Magic Flute”? Maybe the Duke’s famous tune from “Rigoletto”? Carmen’s Habanera?No, not those words. The other ones: the words, at least, as they are now known to my 6-year-old daughter and the hundreds of children who took grown-ups like me to the Kennedy Center here recently for the premiere of “The Ice Cream Truck Is Broken! & Other Emotional Arias,” an experiment, including a short new work by the composer Carlos Simon, in what it might mean to draw a very young and impossibly demanding audience into a life in opera.See, you might think that Carmen is relating her views on love, but no. Listen closely, and you’ll find that the singer should have shared her cotton candy with her friends, and absolutely will … tomorrow. “La donna è mobile”? That’s about how milk squirts out your nose if you happen to laugh at exactly the wrong time. The Queen’s aria? That’s still about anger, but it now invokes something far worse than the vengeance of hell.“This bicycle,” it begins, in a fit of preschool pique, “is such a poo-poo vehicle.”The director Felicia Curry, left, with Willems during a rehearsal for “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!,” a short new opera created with the composer Carlos Simon.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesWillems and Simon reunited after their first opera effort, “SLOPERA!,” also at the Kennedy Center.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesOpera’s great composers have a new librettist, and he is almost certainly the only person who could induce an institution like the Kennedy Center to do something like this, let alone get Renée Fleming to join him in hosting it; inspire a quintet of young singers to ham their way through it; and persuade Simon, one of the busiest composers around, to crown the show with a 20-minute piece that gives an attention-seeking, picture-book Pigeon the prima donna spotlight it has surely always craved.The writer for it all? Mo Willems, who, it turns out, really loves opera!“The commonalities between what my industry, or my main industry, does and what opera does are incredible,” said Willems, a six-time Emmy Award-winning former Sesame Street writer, who has earned three Caldecott Honors for picture books and reigns as a near-deity in children’s literature.“It’s big emotions,” he added during an interview at the Kennedy Center before the premiere. “It’s direct communication. It’s interior dialogue. It’s self-discovery. And both forms really have been pushed off to the side of the mainstream, and I think that they have more power that way.”WILLEMS HAS ALWAYS BEEN a broader artist than just a writer of picture books, though that task alone is such that he calls it “as easy as describing the history of Byzantium in three words.” Some of his most celebrated characters — who include a venturesome plushie called Knuffle Bunny, the on-and-off best friends Elephant and Piggie, and that insatiable, inimitable Pigeon — had already starred in musicals that he had written before he formalized his long association with the Kennedy Center in 2019, when he became its education artist in residence. That three-year position coincided with the pandemic, to which he responded with invaluable “Lunch Doodles” videos, but it still let him explore a range of genres, including symphonic music, which he said “has always been important to me.”“Beethoven’s Fifth is the easiest example,” he explained, “but it’s basically the arc of an episode of television, or a movie: ‘Ba-ba-ba-baaam,’ oh, it’s exciting — and then you take the theme, you take the theme, and then you build with it. So when I was writing a show called ‘Codename: Kids Next Door,’ which is a silly sort of action comedy, I would literally write to the symphony.”Siphokazi Molteno, left, during a rehearsal for “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesA rehearsal for “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!,” which is based on Willems’s book “Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesFor the National Symphony Orchestra, Willems painted giant abstractions to accompany a cycle of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, and he worked with the musician Ben Folds to adapt one of his books, “Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs,” for the concert hall. Hearing plans for “Goldilocks” led Tim O’Leary, the general director of the Washington National Opera and a Willems-reading father of three, to inquire about a commission.At their first meeting, Willems was “feigning ignorance” about opera, O’Leary recalled, but the author quickly sent him a copy of an Elephant and Piggie book — “I Really Like Slop!” — with the inscription “Tim, this book really sings.” By their second encounter, Willems had the libretto in his head, a sketch of the characters in concert dress and a title: “SLOPERA!”“Obviously, once it was called the ‘SLOPERA!’ we had to do it,” O’Leary said.Willems says that opera is similar to picture books in that in both cases, the text cannot stand on its own.Lexey Swall for The New York Times“SLOPERA!” could only be performed live outdoors on account of the pandemic, but an indoor recording, with piano accompaniment, was shown virtually to more than 300,000 schoolchildren.” Piggie gets Gerald the Elephant to try slop, a stinky green delicacy among porcine foodies. He does, after his initial refusals upset his companion, and he endures the consequences in something like a bel canto mad (or death) scene. He recovers, though, and tells Piggie that while he might not like her food, he still likes her. Scored cutely by Simon, it is funny, catchy and in the end moving, a paean to friendship and trying new things.“Everything that I do as a picture book writer is reductive,” Willems said, reflecting on what writing his first libretto taught him, aside from the importance of placing consonants carefully. “If you look at a picture book manuscript, and you can understand it, it has too many words. If you look at just the illustrations, and you can understand it, the drawings are too detailed. They both have to be incomprehensible. It’s very similar with writing an opera, that the words that you’re using have to be dependent on the music, but the music has to be dependent on the words, and either of them shouldn’t really be able to stand alone.”WILLEMS CAUGHT THE opera bug and started planning a follow-up, “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!,” which O’Leary said was initially conceived as a monodrama for the inquisitive, intransigent Pigeon — akin to an avian “Erwartung.” Deborah Rutter, the Kennedy Center’s president, also suggested that Willems collaborate with Fleming, the center’s artistic adviser at large.Fleming sent Willems reams of classic arias to listen to, select from and rewrite to fit how kids might experience emotions like joy, disgust or shame. “They are sung beautifully,” Fleming said of the results. “They are sung in all seriousness. It’s just the text. A, it’s in English, and B, it’s really devised for 6-year-olds.”Curry, center, preparing the premiere of “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesSimon, right, the composer of “Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late!”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesSmushed together under the title “The Ice Cream Truck Is Broken!” so that nine rewritten arias surrounded the Pigeon opera, the hourlong show ended up being a bit of a mishmash, as if the remarkable sum of resources being drawn from all over the Kennedy Center — not least, its comedy budget — were being thrown around to see what stuck.The arias didn’t quite land, to judge by the polite but not thrilled reactions of the children sitting near me. Dressed to the nines, Willems and Fleming introduced them, laboring over a running joke about an “opera song” really being called an “aria.” Felicia Curry, a leading Washington actress, directed with a light touch, sharing with her collaborators a faith in the music itself to connect. Though the early-career singers — Suzannah Waddington, Siphokazi Molteno, Oznur Tuluoglu, Jonathan Pierce Rhodes, Shea Owens — were amplified and could not possibly have sung more clearly or enthusiastically, it was still hard for my young assistant either to follow the lyrics with her ears, or to sound out the supertitles in time. I found some of the texts ingenious, but it all felt a bit too earnest, too consciously instructional to inspire.She was there, in any case, to see a bird sing; and sing the Pigeon did. After eight of the arias and a fair bit of fidgeting came the Willems-Simon piece, which is based on “Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late!,” a past-bedtime classic in which the Pigeon works through a repertoire of tactics to ward off sleepy time. Tuluoglu, a young soprano whose most recent prior role was Barbarina at the Annapolis Opera, took on the title character. “When you train, you have to be able to sing Mozart, you gotta be able to be a pigeon,” she said before the show.Willems adds two cousins to the Pigeon’s flock, and in turn the pajama-clad birds try out a trio of techniques — “Negotiation,” “Guilt” and “Tantrum,” as their arias are called — on an audience that is encouraged to yell back in denial. Simon’s score is a delight, propulsive and charming with a swishing jazz number and a lullaby ripped from Brahms. The kids enjoyed it, and so did the adults.Now, Willems hopes to write the libretto of a full-scale opera.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesTHE HOLY GRAIL of so-called family or education programming must surely be something along those lines, but in the experience of this frustrated musical parent, the recipe is often wrong. Willems and his collaborators understand the same thing as their goal, although as the author said, “no one is a true expert in children’s, Al Yankovic-ing, spoofing opera pieces.” Experimentation is required.“You have to approach it with all the same seriousness” as a main-stage opera, O’Leary said, “and get all the greatest people involved, because actually kids are the toughest audience, the most discerning, and if you can make it work, then you know you’ve got something.”Willems has long written books that transcend generational divides: my children love them because they are silly, and I love them because they make me a sillier father than I would ever be without one in my hand. As a librettist — a description that must now be added to all his other job titles, as he enjoys the collaborative nature of opera so much that he hopes to write a full-scale piece — he inevitably thinks along the same lines. His arias, he said, were for me and my children alike.“She already thinks it’s cool because it’s great music,” Willems said, nodding to my daughter. “You have a history to it, and by stripping that history away hopefully you’ll listen to it differently. You’re coming into it with preconceived notions, and these guys aren’t, and then there’s somebody in the middle who just, like, saw a lot of Chuck Jones films, and has a vague sense of it.”“I struggle,” he added, “with the idea that a grown-up would bring one of the younger people in their lives, with the expectation that that person is going to learn something, but that the person bringing them isn’t. I want everybody to be open to a new experience.” More

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    ‘The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons’ Review

    A new documentary explores the artist’s sly conceptual works, and what it means when white people try to own something Black.The title of this new documentary about the artist David Hammons is a mouthful: “The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons.” It’s playing at Film Forum, and I don’t envy whoever has to make it fit the marquee. But they should figure that out because the title feels crucial to the aim of this movie, a sly, toasty, piquant consideration of Hammons’s conceptual art, the way it mocks and eludes easy ownership. Which is to say: the way his art is aware of — the way it’s often about — the stakes for Black people navigating the straits of the market.The movie has all the trappings of a serious nonfiction assessment: scholars, critics, curators and luminous comrades speaking to the humor, funk, atmosphere and texture of the Hammons experience, the acid and ingenuity, the bang of it. The way only he, seemingly, could tile whole telephone poles with bottle caps and affix a backboard and a basketball hoop atop each one, and then plant them, as he did in 1986 with “Higher Goals,” outside a courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, where they took on a tribal, sky-scraping, palm-tree majesty that winked at the long odds of reaching the N.B.A.’s summit. That piece is like a lot of Hammons’s work: tragicomic. A small forward would need to pole-vault up to those baskets.Maybe it would’ve been enough for this film, which Harold Crooks directed with the critic and journalist Judd Tully, to get into Hammons’s gift for withering, radiant transfiguration of everyday materials (Black hair, chicken bones, liquor bottles, those caps, fur coats, jelly beans, a hoodie’s hood), of the public’s opinion of art, of status. (In 2017, at the Museum of Modern Art, he hung a drawing by one of his mentors, the crucial, visionary Charles White, across from one Leonardo da Vinci made, which the British royal family owns.) It would have been enough to behold the assortment of thrilling footage of Hammons at work, in conversation and, in one contentious encounter, under interrogation by a group of students. And, for a long, satisfying stretch, that happens here. This is a substantial, patiently made, entertaining portrait, with a percussive, rhythmic jazz score by Ramachandra Borcar and some emphatic spoken word courtesy of Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets.But eventually, the rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process starts to vanish. Most of the critics, scholars and fellow artists go bye-bye, which means so long to the bulk of its Black participants. In come the gallerists, collectors and dealers. The money. This is where “The Melt Goes On Forever” seems like it wants to play Hammons’s game. It’s up to something that has to do with whether a Hammons can ever be owned and what it means for work whose foremost concerns are a kind of in-the-wild presentation to be for sale. Suddenly, it feels like Crooks and Tully have stopped making a straight-ahead documentary and started making … a piece.This was probably the case from the film’s outset. In 1983, Hammons created several dozen snowballs (out of real snow, big as a softball, small as a melon ball). He put them on a rug and sold them in the cold, near the corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place. Bliz-aard balls, he called them. The movie opens with a moony story from a woman who remembers, as a girl, buying one of the snowballs for about a dollar. (Hammons — in a roomy overcoat, kempt beard, ascot and winter fedora — seemed homeless to her.) She turns out to be a gallerist, and her story is a prelude of the movie’s big market-bound dismount, at the end of which is a separate childhood memory, from the dealer Adam Sheffer, of encountering Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale and the impact it had on him. (He remembers being afraid at the sight of Hammons out there that day.)Sheffer tells the filmmakers that, as an adult, he wound up working with and befriending Hammons’s daughter Carmen. To her bewilderment, Sheffer wanted to purchase a snowball for $1 million (a commission, presumably; the movie doesn’t ask him to clarify) and tried, tried, tried to line up an insurer first — but alas. Thwarted, he whips up an email to Carmen (“if you come across any other interesting Hammons …”) that her mischievous father prints, frames and displays alongside a permanent snowball for a rare retrospective at the Mnuchin Gallery on the Upper East Side, seven years ago. Sheffer says he tried to buy that, too.Someone else — someone who collects Hammons’s work, we’re told — makes a substantial offer on the same piece. And Hammons decides to — well, this movie really is worth seeing; and if you’re unfamiliar with his witty solution, you deserve to hear it from the film itself.But tales like these are where the movie gets that title. It comes from the artist Halsey Rodman, who, in an interview, is clever about the inherent conundrum of Hammons’s snowy ephemera. The work is incomplete, he surmises, because, in memory as much as in one’s hands, the melt goes on forever. A proverb that does the work of parody.An animated scene from the documentary shows Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale from 1983, when he offered snowballs for purchase near the corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place.Tynesha Foreman/Greenwich EntertainmentThis feels especially true once the movie ends in that blitz of auctions, acquisitions and shows: the sale of Hammons’s “African American Flag”; the Mnuchin event; the eviction of the late writer and assembler of interesting people Steve Cannon from his gathering spot and home. It’s a home one otherwise supportive gallerist calls “pretty cruddy,” a home where, on one of its walls, Hammons painted what he called “Flight Fantasy.”The film’s emphasis on possession and dispossession (Cannon’s story needs its own proper telling) becomes so strong that it kind of topples over the movie’s sense of scholarship. And without the intellectual rigor of a Bridget R. Cooks or Kellie Jones or Betye Saar or Suzanne Jackson or Robert Farris Thompson or Henry Taylor to continue guiding us (and the filmmakers, honestly), things get murky.With each alacritous tale of somebody trying to tame or take a Hammons, a kind of pungency set in. And all I wanted was to be in a clearer, cleaner, happier movie about white people trying to own something Black. I wanted to be in the movie about the time Nike wooed Michael Jordan. I wanted to be in “Air.” Both that and “The Melt Goes On Forever” are honest, in their ways, about the stakes of ownership and the racial eternity of this dilemma. I just think the people who made the Jordan movie are better storytellers. I left that movie high. It knows capitalism is an emotion. It knows the thorny racial transaction that makes this country run. And I know Nike doesn’t own Jordan or even his skill, just a symbol of them, his silhouette. Indeed, he’s never depicted in “Air” as more than a back of the head. And Hammons, here, never sits for an interview. (He’ll be 80 this year.)This movie’s homestretch should make me just as happy. Hammons seems like the victor in his attempt to satirize not so much the transaction of art for dollars but the covetous, oblivious, entitled nature of certain transactors. In “Air,” Jordan knows his worth — well, his mother does. When the white folks at Nike meet her demands, corporate justice is served. But that’s a fantasy that “The Melt Goes On Forever” scrubs raw.Maybe Crooks and Tully are actually better than I think at doing what Hammons’s art does and letting the gallerists’ and dealers’ values speak for themselves. Their movie’s not telling me what to feel at all. I’m just feeling it, feeling baffled, dismayed, leveled with, winked at. But I’d also like to know if these gallery folks know how anti-Hammons their aims are, how they’re losing at his game while excelling at their own. (What does Carmen Hammons think?!) The movie’s right. It’s a grand folly. The melt really does go on forever. But do these people get it? That’s not how the game works, of course. Obviously, Hammons knows that. And so, I suppose, do the people who keep trying to beat him at it.The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David HammonsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Oliver!’ Review: Tunes, Glorious Tunes, in a Grimly Cheerful Revival

    The Encores! production, directed by Lear deBessonet, looks to deepen and darken a musical that resists the change. But it’s still delightful.Though the orphan boys at the workhouse are beaten regularly and fed only gruel, the sign looming above them reads “God Is Love.”That grim irony, underlining the practice of child labor in the supposedly advanced society of 19th-century London, is echoed in the spooky sounds you hear as the Encores! production of “Oliver!” begins: brass murk, woodwind rasps and stringy insectlike buzzing. Has Lionel Bart’s musical, based on the Dickens novel “Oliver Twist” and first seen on Broadway in 1963, been turned into “Sweeney Todd”?The version that opened a two-week run at City Center on Wednesday, directed by Lear deBessonet, is certainly grimmer than any “Oliver!” I’ve seen, which isn’t many; it’s seldom done professionally, for both casting and structural reasons. But the underlying high spirits of Bart’s adaptation, stuffed with tunes that are merry even when they’re sad, cannot long lie dormant. Soon the boys — a wonderfully uncloying ensemble — are bursting with mirth as they sing and dance to “Food, Glorious Food,” a number so irrepressible (with choreography by Lorin Latarro) that even a heavy concept can’t weigh it down.Which is not to say a serious approach is unwarranted. Recall that Dickens, who was himself sent to work in a boot polish factory when he was 12, refers to Oliver in the first sentence of the novel as an “item of mortality” — more a death-in-progress than a life. And Bart, at least in his lyrics, does not stint on bleakness; even the bouncy title song is violent, proposing various ugly fates for the boy who dares to ask for more food.“What will he do when he’s turned black and blue?” Mr. Bumble, the workhouse beadle, asks gleefully, in six-eight rhythm.Foreground from left: Lilli Cooper, Raúl Esparza and Pajak deliver terrific turns in Lear deBessonet’s production, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut deBessonet’s entertaining and beautifully sung production, featuring terrific turns by Lilli Cooper as the proud doxy Nancy and Raúl Esparza as the criminal den leader Fagin — as well as a touching one by Benjamin Pajak in the title role — is at this point still too muddy to be convincing as sociology, let alone drama.Partly that’s the result of the extremely short Encores! rehearsal period, which compresses what probably needs months into 12 days. The staging is sloppy in places, and the violent bits involving Bill Sikes (Tam Mutu), which in a rethinking like this should be shocking, aren’t. Spoiler alert: It appears that Nancy’s dress, not Nancy herself, is bludgeoned to death at the end.The other difficulty in reframing “Oliver!” for 2023 is built into the material. Like many musicals made from doorstop novels, it cherry-picks the plot so vigorously that what’s left can hardly support the songs. (The Encores! production uses a further abbreviated script.) Oliver’s transit from the workhouse to an undertaker’s establishment to Fagin’s hide-out, spread across eight chapters in the Dickens, takes what seems like a blink of an eye here. It becomes thin gruel indeed.And the songs themselves are problematic. Though there is barely a dud in the score, and many (like “I’d Do Anything” and “Oom-Pah-Pah”) are so hummable that the audience joins in almost subliminally, they are not so much dramatizations of the action as ditties vaguely suggested by it. “Consider Yourself,” the number in which Fagin’s pickpockets, led by the Artful Dodger (Julian Lerner), welcome Oliver to the gang, opens out illogically into a full-company number featuring buskers, laborers, flower girls and 20 extras — children from New York City schools — in a way that screams unreconstructed musical comedy.Julian Lerner, center left, as the Artful Dodger in a number with Pajak, other cast members and students.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t want to prevent that; there’s too much pleasure to be reaped. Bart was an untrained tune savant, a latter-day Irving Berlin; if the songs are so hummable it’s probably because his composition method was built on humming them to an amanuensis.For “Oliver!” that meant delightful numbers even where a modern musical would say none was needed. “I Shall Scream!,” served up with raucous good humor by Brad Oscar and Mary Testa as Mr. Bumble and Widow Corney, is utterly beside the point, as is “That’s Your Funeral,” a similarly bouncy number for Mr. Sowerberry and his wife (Thom Sesma and Rashidra Scott) even though they are funeral directors.However inapt as drama, and however much real estate they steal from the development of a richer plot, such songs serve an important function, like the witty prose of the novel. They make the darkness of the tale bearable, almost literally — bearing you through the story.Nor is it just the music that has that effect, though it’s always jaunty. (Except when, in songs like “Boy for Sale,” “Where Is Love?,” “Who Will Buy?” and “As Long as He Needs Me,” it’s show-stoppingly lovely.) The lyrics do similar uplifting work. Though deBessonet has referred to them as “harrowing,” that quality is often undermined by the intricate rhymes, many built on cockney pronunciations (uppity/cup o’ tea) that can’t help but produce a smile.That makes the project of darkening the show difficult. Though the busily atmospheric orchestrations by William David Brohn, created for a 1994 production at the London Palladium, expand the number of musicians to 21 from 12, I’m not sure that the originals, with more of a music-hall than a symphonic quality, didn’t match the material better. Likewise, the overlay of deBessonet’s vision sometimes obscures more than it reveals.But perhaps we do not need “Oliver!” to be a Gesamtkunstwerk. Dickens intended the tale, after all, as popular entertainment, serialized over the course of two years and highly indulgent of gaudy melodrama.Also, of course, in its presentation of Fagin, indulgent of antisemitism. Compulsively referred to as “the Jew” in the novel and often played with a prosthetic nose and a Yiddish accent in earlier productions, Fagin is an awful caricature even though Bart, born Lionel Begleiter, was Jewish.Esparza — sallow-eyed, greasy-haired and perpetually sniffly, but without prosthetics — dials that down almost to zero, though the music still bears traces of Fagin’s religion in the klezmerlike violin-and-clarinet accompaniment to the song “Reviewing the Situation” with which deBessonet thoughtfully ends this production.The song asks: “Can somebody change?” Fagin’s doubtful answer is “S’possible.”I too am doubtful about the possibility of change, at least for musicals like “Oliver!” (And keep in mind that in the Dickens, Fagin is eventually executed.) They can’t all be “Sweeney”; they don’t have the bones for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reinvesting in what made them meaningful in the first place, if dividends of delight keep coming. For that, I’d do anything.Oliver!Through May 14 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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    ‘Queens of the Qing Dynasty’ Review: Secret Soul Mates

    When a young woman hospitalized after a suicide attempt forms a bond with an international student, they create a different kind of relationship.The wonderfully bizarre Canadian drama “Queens of the Qing Dynasty” understands queerness the way that bell hooks did: as a “self that is at odds with everything around it.” Directed by Ashley McKenzie like a dream — or a bout of dissociation — the film is a love story, absent sex or romance, about a teenage psychiatric patient in Nova Scotia, Star (Sarah Walker), and a Shanghainese exchange student volunteering at the hospital, An (Ziyin Zheng). The pair make an odd couple, and yet their bond is intuitive, electric.The story kicks off in the aftermath of Star’s suicide attempt, the film’s tone at once bleakly clinical and deadpan absurd. Star, a neurodivergent foster kid with a sardonic sense of humor, clearly doesn’t register the gravity of her actions. Eyes glazed, she seems out of touch with her own body, and she’s not one for rules, like when she’s kicked out of an apartment for opening it to partiers. Eventually, she is institutionalized.Walker, captivatingly raw, makes Star both charming and frustrating in her aloofness. The cinematographer Scott Moore shoots in close-ups that blur at the edges, while the eerie sound design by Andreas Mendritzki gives the frosty Cape Breton location the feel of life on Mars, approximating Star’s dazed point of view.An, a poised international student with bladelike long nails, dreams of transitioning, and — through a kind of buddy system — connects with Star, regaling her with stories of ancient Chinese courtesans, scheming, glamorous dames who never have to work. The two communicate by text: An sends singing videos with their face prettified by a filter; Star, a stream-of-consciousness barrage of messages and voice mail messages that usually go unacknowledged. She doesn’t seem to mind and An isn’t driven away by them, either. They part and reunite and part again.Estranged from their communities, the two embody a different kind of relationship, and McKenzie doesn’t rely on the usual uplifting messaging and strained empowerment arc to humanize An and Star. In one beautifully uncanny scene, the duo stop by a virtual reality gaming studio and, equipped with headsets, plug into the fantasy, playing as flying sorcerers as they shoot the breeze. Their friendship remains mysterious, yet the film, as if by witchcraft, makes their connection feel palpable and true.Queens of the Qing DynastyNot rated. In English, Mandarin and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hour 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Review: ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’ Probably a Lot

    Two childhood friends navigate cultural differences in this pleasantly uncontentious romantic comedy.A glossy lesson in how to pour nontraditional content into a traditional rom-com mold, Shekhar Kapur’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” shapes competing notions of happily-ever-after into comfort food. And in case we’re unclear about its middle-of-the-road ambitions, Kapur also gives us a film-within-the-film whose title is “Love Contractually.” Accordingly, anyone who takes longer than 10 minutes to forecast the ending simply doesn’t get out of the house enough.Moving between graceful London locations and a vibrant celebration in Lahore, Pakistan, the story centers on Zoe (Lily James), an English documentary filmmaker, and her childhood friend, Kazim (Shazad Latif), a British-Pakistani doctor. She is a chronic right-swiper on disappointing men; he considers love at first sight a mental health issue and has opted for an arranged marriage to a shy Pakistani beauty (a wonderfully nimble Sajal Ali). Kazim’s journey to the altar, Zoe decides, will make a perfect topic for her new documentary.Written by Jemima Khan, channeling some of her own experiences as the former wife of a Pakistani prime minister, “What’s Love” bundles its perky-sweet tale in Kapur’s signature visual sumptuousness (courtesy of the cinematographer Remi Adefarasin). Bland conversations about love and longing, and a mostly sunny tone, neuter potential conflict in a movie that neither promotes nor disparages arranged marriage. Sadly, its most divisive feature is a grating turn by Emma Thompson as Zoe’s attention-hogging mother, whose behavior is often embarrassing and usually inappropriate.By contrast, the lovely Shabana Azmi gives Kazim’s mother a droll, knowing dignity. “Not too dark,” she warns, instructing a matchmaker on her daughter-in-law preferences. Apparently the filmmakers made the same choice.What’s Love Got to Do With it?Rated PG-13. No sex, they’re British. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Jai Paul Emerges From the Shadows, Somewhat

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicWhen a collection of Jai Paul demos leaked online in 2013, it had the makings of a celebration, not a catastrophe. Paul had previously released two rapturously received singles, and anticipation for his music was high. The songs on that collection were shared widely, and beloved. But rather than capitalize on the good will generated by the unintended release, Paul retreated, making almost no public noise or appearances for the following decade.This year, he returned — first, with a pair of performances at Coachella, and then a pair of smaller headlining concerts in New York. He was shy and a little awkward onstage, but the music he played was sure-footed. Whether it was the conclusion of his prior arc, or a prelude to a new era, wasn’t clear.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Paul’s anti-career trajectory, the persistence of fan enthusiasm for him even in his absence, and how mystery on the internet has changed over the past couple of decades.Guests:Lindsay Zoladz, a pop music critic for The New York Times and author of The Amplifier newsletterJia Tolentino, a staff writer at The New YorkerConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    ‘You Can Live Forever’ Review: Do You Love Me Now?

    Religion comes between two girls falling in love in the 1990s in this sweet coming-of-age film bathed in grunge hues.In “You Can Live Forever,” Jaime and Marike do many things teenagers in love do, like looking soulfully into each other’s eyes and making out in a car’s back seat. They also knock on doors to proselytize for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.Yeah, that last one is going to be a problem for budding lesbians.Complicating matters further, Jaime (Anwen O’Driscoll) is a recent transplant to their small Quebec town and goes along for the religious ride only to be with Marike (June Laporte), a believer who was raised in “the Truth.”The intersection of homosexuality and faith has been explored in film before — Sebastián Lelio’s “Disobedience,” set among the Orthodox Jewish community, is a high-profile recent example — and Mark Slutsky and Sarah Watts’s story benefits from being rooted in Watts’s own experience growing up gay in the 1990s. As if to underline that the film is set in that decade, Jaime never seems to take off her flannel and beanie, and kisses Marike to the sound of the Breeders; Gayle Ye’s cinematography is also a nice washed-up hue, as if bleached of bold colors — very true to the grunge sensibility.Otherwise “You Can Live Forever” sticks to a fairly common coming-of-age trajectory. There is a sense of a missed opportunity in that we see the action through the eyes of Jaime, who is more accepting of her sexuality from the start, leaving Marike a tantalizing blank. She initiates every move with Jaime, only to segue into Bible study or a double date with boys. How does Marike rationalize this new love and her faith? Even the Breeders don’t have a song for that.You Can Live ForeverNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More