Aurelia Butler

In Esther Yi’s weird and wondrous ‘Y/N,’ a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.Y/N, by Esther Yi“We’re more popular than Jesus,” John Lennon infamously said of the Beatles. As houses of worship shut down in droves while pop music fandom grows ever more extreme, it seems unfair anew that he got such a drubbing.“We no longer go to church once a week; we attend a stadium concert once a year,” declares Masterson, one of several minor characters given excellent Dickensian names in Esther Yi’s wondrous and strange first novel, “Y/N.” It’s a short book — just over 200 pages — but with big themes, like the precarity of love, and how the modern self is forged less in community than mass consumption.Though he’s oblivious to its implications, Masterson has just discovered evidence that his sort-of girlfriend, an anonymous narrator, has become obsessed with the youngest member of a Korean boy band. The star is called, with an inevitable echo of the Unification Church founder, Moon. His oldest bandmate is Sun, of course, with Jupiter, Mercuryand Venus rounding out the quintet. “There are so many lowercase gods in this secular, cynical era,”Masterson pontificates, waxing on about how philosophy has been supplanted by data, religion has become “a vending machine for manifestation and fulfillment,” and so on. Many of us have dated a Masterson.“Y/N” refers not to yes/no, as Moon will assume, but to the practice in fan fiction of leaving a space for Your/Name, so that readers can Mad Lib themselves into the narrative. But this abbreviation, too, has extra resonance. “He seemed to be asking ‘why’ of my existence,” the narrator thinks when Moon reads aloud the first letter in the elaborate fanfic she’s written for him. “‘Why’ I was what I was.”When another supporting character, who manufactures shoe soles and goes by O (shades of the erotic classic published under the pen name Pauline Réage), asks the narrator what letter she’d like to be, she chooses N, reasoning that “the two prongs of M perfectly captured Moon’s bipedal stability” — he’s an exceptional dancer, with a background in ballet — and she is comparatively “doddering.”Esther Yi, the author of “Y/N.”Sharon ChoiSwirling around in this alphabet soup of identity is the idea that a parasocial relationship might be as fulfilling as, or anyway no less delusional than, traditional monogamy. Reading the narrator’s obsessive Moon ruminations, I remembered more than once the weird intensity of Jerry Maguire’s line “you complete me.” During a livestream, she imagines another fan, a vegan, actually wishing to be “masticated by Moon.”What we learn about this unnamed narrator — let’s call her U.N. — is delightful in its specificity. A Korean American living in Berlin, she works as a copywriter for a canned-artichoke-heart business. “I don’t want my life to change,” she tells the flatmate she met online, who’s proselytizing for the band, “I want my life to stay in one place and be one thing as intensely as possible.” But though leery of fandom, she falls hard and fast after one concert. Not for nothing is fame now near-synonymous with “virality”; to be struck by its power is indeed a kind of sickness.Troubled by the news that Moon is retiring, U.N. consults on Zoom with a therapist in Los Angeles named Dr. Fishwife. “The best way to fall out of love,” he advises her, “is to realize there exists no love out of which to fall.” (“Y/N” is packed like a can of artichoke hearts with such useful epigrams.) Undaunted, she books a one-way ticket to Seoul, where she has an uncle, to track down and confront the object of her obsession, staying in an apartment building whose first floor contains, and this rings all too true, “a coffee shop where one could sit, and a coffee shop where one could not sit.”There’s also a pilgrimage to the Polygon Plaza, HQ of the entertainment company that masterminded the boy band, where a Music Professor, the president, does a bit of waxing herself about how “people were running around in circles and indulging their small adorable freedoms, like wearing this or that outfit or sleeping with this or that person. They confused their navigation through the stunning variety of meaningless choices as an expression of their individuality.” It’s a stinging indictment of what it’s become fashionable to call “late capitalism,” as if anyone had an idea of its endpoint.The main pleasure of “Y/N” is not so much its somewhat skeletal plot, which floats in and out of surreality like an adult “Phantom Tollbooth,” as its corkscrew turns of language (also Tollboothian). I loved how Yi animates objects and reduces humans to collections of cells. The celestial group refers to its fans as “livers” — maybe because it sounds like “lovers,” but more because “we kept them alive,” the narrator notes, “like critical organs.”Shelves of books snake through a dark library “in a disorderly line, not unlike intestines.” Electronic door locks emit “smug beeps.” Cosmetic sheet masks, a 30-day skin regimen packaged with images of the boy band, stay on way longer than they should. “In a month, my dead skin cells will fall away, and I’ll be left with the juicier cells underneath,” U.N. states flatly. “Then I’ll be closer to who I really am.”(This is how Sephora makes billions.)In real life, K-pop fans are a sprawling entity, bigger and more online than Gaga’s Monsters or Beyoncé’s Hive: “armies” that have increasingly made incursions into politics and faced government censure. In its clever compactness, “Y/N” resists the junkiness of the internet where they reside, the fanfics and the livestreams and endless comments.All that writing, that global “content,” is now so ubiquitous, so endless, so cheap — ChatGPT, bonjour — it comes to seem like a toxic cloud, against which a well-formed novel like this counteracts, a blast of cleansing heat.Y/N | By Esther Yi | 224 pp. | Astra House | $26 More

Michael Volle puts his noble voice to delightfully undignified use as the title character in Robert Carsen’s still fresh production of “Falstaff.”There’s a lot of fat-shaming in Verdi’s “Falstaff,” but the opera has never really been a candidate for revision or cancellation, probably because the victim of those insults refuses to see himself as one. Eloquent and self-aggrandizing, Falstaff proudly identifies with his stature.“This is my kingdom,” he proclaims, patting his belly, “I will enlarge it.”On Sunday, in the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Robert Carsen’s winning production, the baritone Michael Volle delivered the line in a room at the Garter Inn surrounded by butler’s carts spilling over with ravaged plates and wine-stained tablecloths. Falstaff’s kingdom — as within, so without. Such sly touches litter Carsen’s production set in the 1950s. A decade after its company premiere, it still looks fresh and earns the kind of enthusiastic laughter rarely heard in an opera house.Beyond the appealing visuals — the yellow-chartreuse kitchen cabinets and flattering cinched-waist dresses — Carsen has provided opportunities for profundity. His lighting design with Peter Van Praet, in particular, offers clues — the raw naturalism for Falstaff’s pessimistic aria “L’onore! Ladri!” or the dusky sunset for Falstaff’s humbled reflections at the top of Act III.Volle’s Falstaff leans into those subtleties. In his most recent Met assignments — as a futilely disempowered Wotan in the “Ring” cycle and a salt-of-the-earth Hans Sachs in “Die Meistersinger” — Volle has shown himself to be a Wagnerian of long, graceful focus. As Falstaff, he puts the noble grain of his voice to deliciously undignified use. This booming, endlessly interesting antihero comports himself as an entitled, well-bred gentleman who has tired of wearing dirty long johns and waiting for the universe to right his fortunes. His solution: some Tinder Swindler-style manipulations with two well-to-do married women.Expounding a personal philosophy of honor and its uselessness in “L’onore! Ladri!” Volle sang with professorial authority, his voice emerging as if from a deep well. His smug “Va, vecchio John” flowed with syrupy self-satisfaction. When he waxed poetic about his salad days as the page of the Duke of Norfolk, his voice turned light, proud and assured — grandiloquent, yes, but also creditable.The conductor Daniele Rustioni matched Volle’s conception, leading the orchestra in a rousing, confidently shaped performance. Verdi goes for deep sarcasm in his masterfully comic score — when the men make fools of themselves in bombastic monologues, the orchestration only intensifies — and there was nothing cutesy in Rustioni’s account of it. When the brasses trilled, they belly laughed. The bassoons galumphed; the strings ennobled passages of sincerity; and the horns had it both ways, sometimes jocular, sometimes expressive.The opera’s female characters, never taking themselves — or the threat posed by badly behaved men — too seriously, often sing in ensembles rather than solos. Even so, Ailyn Pérez provided warm, elegant leadership as Alice with a glowing lyric soprano. Her rise as one of the Met’s leading ladies has been a pleasure of this season. The contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, clearly having a ball onstage as Mistress Quickly, received exit applause for her uproarious scene with Falstaff, in which she flashed some leg and flaunted a lot of plumpy tone. The mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano was a mettlesome Meg, and as Nannetta, Hera Hyesang Park revealed a soprano as limpid as fresh water, even if a few top notes sounded hard and unsteady.As Ford, Christopher Maltman sang with a toughened baritone. Bogdan Volkov’s Fenton was sweetness itself.The relentless patter of Verdi’s vocal writing against a full, busy orchestra presents distinctive challenges. The women anchored the double vocal quartet of Act I when the men started to rush the tempo, but otherwise, ensemble singing was admirably tight. The final fugue had astonishing transparency — Lemieux’s pitched guffaws cut through effortlessly — and Carsen’s staging neatly introduced each new voice as it joined the increasingly dense musical texture on a crowded stage.Act III begins in a lonelier way — with Volle’s Falstaff crumpled in a small corner of a vast, empty space, where he is drying off and licking his wounds after being dumped unceremoniously in the Thames. A kindly waiter gives him a cup of warm wine, and he sings its praises with quietly arresting beauty. In that moment, the Wagnerian in Volle poked through, turning the humanity of Falstaff’s humbling into something sublime.FalstaffThrough April 1 at the Metropolitan Opera; www.metopera.org. More

In 1969, the musical theater composer-lyricist Jerry Herman achieved a Broadway milestone. With the opening of “Dear World” — joining his earlier “Hello, Dolly!” and “Mame” — he had three shows running at the same time.But the celebration didn’t last long: “Dear World” was a flop.Over-revised because of conflicting artistic visions and commercial pressures, it didn’t have the easier success of Herman’s hits, despite its elegant, French-inflected score and Angela Lansbury’s Tony Award-winning lead performance. Other beloved shows would come later — particularly the pathbreaking “La Cage aux Folles,” which in 1983 brought a gay love duet to Broadway — but as the decades went on, “Dear World” became a curiosity rather than canon.That, of course, is what New York City Center’s Encores! specializes in: brief revivals of Broadway rarities, grandly orchestrated and luxuriously cast. And that is where “Dear World” will return to the stage on Wednesday, as the first production to be conducted by the series’ music director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell.Campbell rehearsing the orchestra for “Dear World.” Her break conducting musicals came when she worked on a benefit concert of “Sweet Charity” with its composer, Cy Coleman.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“The thing to me that is most exciting about all this,” Campbell, 48, said, “is the celebration of the music and the celebration of live musicians making that music, in the way that you do at the symphony.”Campbell was brought up in the classical world, as a piano student bound for the concert hall stage; but she was also attracted to different types of music — especially musical theater. Which is what she was aiming for when she moved to New York after school. Just a few weeks later, a break came when she was brought on for a benefit performance of “Sweet Charity.” She found herself in a room with two legends: Cy Coleman and Gwen Verdon.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This Spring‘The Invisible Project’: The new show by the choreographer Keely Garfield at NYU Skirball is a dance, but it is also informed by her work as an end-of-life and trauma chaplain.Life in Photos: Larry Sultan’s photography, now starring in the play “Pictures From Home” and a gallery show, raise issues of who controls a family’s image.Musical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Coleman became a mentor of hers, and he wouldn’t be the last Broadway luminary to do so. Others have included Stephen Sondheim, whom Campbell worked with on “Company” in its Tony-winning 2006 revival. For that show, she and the director, John Doyle, took an idiosyncratic, chamber approach to the score in which the singers doubled as instrumentalists — even its lead, Raúl Esparza, who sang “Being Alive” from a piano.Now, she has arrived at Encores!, where her top priority is to lead a production of “City of Angels,” among other plans including a new outing for Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s “Love Life,” which had been scheduled to open in mid-March 2020 until the pandemic shuttered live performances.But first “Dear World,” about an effort to thwart oil-drilling in the Parisian neighborhood of Chaillot, which reunites Campbell and Donna Murphy, who is starring as Countess Aurelia, the role originally played by Lansbury. They had collaborated on Sondheim’s virtual 90th birthday celebration in 2020, “Take Me to the World,” in which Murphy sang “Send in the Clowns,” a performance the two had rehearsed, trickily, over phone and video calls.“We had been circling each other for a long time,” Murphy recalled. “But we got on very well, and I could see that she was an immense talent, who has such grace and humor.”When Murphy heard that Campbell would be the next music director at Encores!, she thought, “What a brilliant choice.” In between filming sessions for the next season of “The Gilded Age,” she has been hard at work on her Countess Aurelia, a role she has long admired. “I’ve been exploring this part, and the time in which the play was written,” she said, referring to Jean Giraudoux’s “The Madwoman of Chaillot,” the musical’s inspiration. “I love research.”Amir Hamja for The New York TimesAmir Hamja for The New York TimesThis Encores! production has required even more research to effectively create a new performance edition of the book and score. In an interview, Campbell discussed that and more about “Dear World.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Did you plan for “Dear World” to be your first Encores! show?It was intentional to do a score that I was excited about. Encores! has done so many amazing scores over the years, that it’s hard to find something, and this was one that was on my list that had never been produced. I have always loved the score.We spent time restoring “Dear World.” There was a lot of detective work, because there were a lot of different versions, and there’s sorting through all the original orchestrations. But to be able to restore a score and hear it as it was originally intended, to me, is our mission.Tell me more about the different versions of this score. The one from its out-of-town tryout is very different from the Broadway score, and it has since changed even further.It’s very exciting to go back generally and look at these great pieces that were created, and understand, from a newer perspective, how that might’ve happened, how those people might’ve been in the room together, how they were struggling out of town to find the right opening number. We have someone on the staff here at City Center, Josh Clayton, who’s sort of like a score restoration guru.My study of this has led me to believe that Herman’s original intention was to write a smaller piece. But because of “Hello, Dolly!” and “Mame” and then adding “Dear World” to the canon and all of them running on Broadway at the same time — I also love, by the way, that all of them celebrate a fantastically strong woman at their center — the process was very fraught for “Dear World.” It went through, perhaps, an internal struggle of what they wanted it to be, and it went through some real trials and tribulations.So what version of the score did you end up with?The most important thing was: Let’s pick the version that supports a 28-piece orchestra. And so, we’ve really centered that in our debates and decisions about the different versions that exist. I think we read maybe 10 different scripts in the process. It’s been an enormous research project that I think not every Encores! production will be.What are the characteristics of Jerry Herman’s sound world?The chord progressions he uses and the way he uses voice leading is really distinctive. What I love about the orchestrations in Jerry Herman’s scores is that you can really hear how the brass are brilliantly used for storytelling; they provide such lush power. And with big string sections — when you hear a Jerry Herman song in its original, full orchestration, you’re, like, That’s a Jerry Herman song.This is not his best-known score, but the melodies are stunning. There’s a beautiful song at the end of the show, “And I Was Beautiful,” which I think is a gem that people don’t necessarily know. And what I love about that song is that it is foreshadowed through the entire score in a way that you don’t normally get. Normally, you have a song, and then you have reprises after it’s been introduced. This is the one song that gets foreshadowed for the entire score in underscoring. So, by the time you get to it, it’s like a warm bath.A lot of people will probably come to this more familiar with “Hello, Dolly!,” “Mame” or “La Cage.” How would you prepare audience members who know Jerry Herman for the hits?It’s quintessential Jerry Herman, but it also has European influence. And it has atonal influence. You can tell he was branching into some other territories. So, I think if you love Jerry Herman, you will love this score, but you will also be surprised by it in a positive way. More

The pop-country singer, who was briefly reprimanded by the industry after using a racial slur, has another blockbuster regardless: the 36-song “One Thing at a Time.”Two years after being momentarily shunned by the music industry — but not most listeners — for using racist language, the pop-country singer Morgan Wallen has another blockbuster album on his hands: “One Thing at a Time,” his third LP, debuts at No. 1 this week on the Billboard chart with the largest sales of the year so far.“One Thing at a Time” moved the equivalent of 501,000 units since its release on March 3, including sales, streams and downloads, according to the tracking service Luminate, making it the most successful debut since Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” sold 1.6 million last fall. Wallen’s total included 498 million plays on streaming services across the album’s 36 tracks — enough for fifth ever on the weekly streaming list and the most for an album not by Swift or Drake.The continued commercial dominance for Wallen, 29, a native of eastern Tennessee, comes after the bumpy ride that surrounded the release of his previous album, “Dangerous,” but never adversely affected engagement with his music. Anointed as country’s next mega-headliner and crossover hope, Wallen had an instant smash with “Dangerous” in January 2021, but saw his industry promotion paused after he was caught on video casually using a racial slur amid what he said later was “hour 72 of a 72-hour bender.”Still, “Dangerous” racked up 10 weeks at No. 1 and still sits at No. 6 on the Billboard 200 — its 110th nonconsecutive week in the Top 10. (The only album with more appearances there is the original cast recording of “My Fair Lady” with 173, according to Billboard.)Like “Dangerous,” which featured 30 tracks on its original version, “One Thing at a Time” is notable for its length, coming in at nearly two hours across its 36 vaguely regretful drinking and love songs, giving listeners on streaming services plenty to choose from.A move more commonly associated with rap releases, the seemingly endless album targeted at digital audiences has become a common industry tactic, with only four No. 1 albums in the last 12 months coming in at fewer than 12 songs, Billboard noted. “One Thing at a Time” has more songs than any chart-topper except the “Encanto” soundtrack in that same time frame. Just 24,000 units of the Wallen album’s equivalent sales total were physical copies of its two-disc CD, with more than 75 percent of listener activity coming from streaming.Riding the album-release momentum, Wallen’s single “Last Night” hit No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart on Monday, up from No. 5. This week, songs from “One Thing at a Time” occupy half of the Hot 100’s Top 10, a first for a country singer.On the album chart, SZA’s former No. 1 “SOS” holds at No. 2 with 82,000 units after 10 nonconsecutive weeks on top; Karol G’s “Mañana Será Bonito,” which was No. 1 last week, falls to No. 3 with 60,000 units; Kali Uchis’s “Red Moon in Venus” arrives at No. 4 with 55,000 units; and Swift’s “Midnights” is No. 5 with 48,000. More