Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    Ali Stroker Has Tips for Fellow Sleep-Deprived Working Moms

    The Tony winner and author talked about the Broadway shows she’ll see once she can stay up late again, and the podcast that comforted her during the pandemic.The actress Ali Stroker never thought she would write a book.“Growing up, I didn’t like reading,” said Stroker, who in 2019 became the first performer who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony Award. “Books didn’t have any characters I related to.”But when Stacy Davidowitz, the author of the middle-grade series Camp Rolling Hills, asked to interview her because a character she was working on had a disability and worked in theater, Stroker had an idea: What if they wrote a story together?“That’s what I always tell anybody who wants to do something they’re not sure they know how to do: Find somebody who does and collaborate with them,” Stroker, 36, who lives in Westchester County, said in a phone interview on the way to a rehearsal in Manhattan.Their partnership led to “The Chance to Fly,” a middle-grade novel published in 2021, and a sequel out this month, “Cut Loose!”“I needed characters like this in middle school,” said Stroker, who was paralyzed from the chest down after a car accident when she was 2.The Broadway star, who gave birth last year to a son, Jesse, talked about the shows she plans to see once she can stay awake past 9 p.m., and the activities and advice that are helping her out in the meantime. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Broadway (Eventually)I have not seen a lot of shows in the past year because mom life, and I’ve usually been asleep by 9 p.m. But I want to see “Sweeney Todd,” “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “Hadestown.”2‘Cook This Book’ by Molly BazThere’s a recipe in this book that I’ve made probably 100 times: the pastrami chicken. It’s so good. She’s coming out with a new book, and my sister and I are going to Brooklyn to get our books signed.3Cookbook ClubThis is something my sister, Tory, started last year. Women from the town we grew up in, Ridgewood, N.J., gather once a month to make a recipe from a cookbook. It’s been nice for me to have a community of moms to talk to and relate to.4Hudson Valley Farmers’ MarketsI live in Westchester, and it’s been so nice having farmers’ markets every weekend. We go to the Ossining and the Pleasantville ones. They make these cinnamon doughnuts, and they’re just to die for.5Accessibility at HomeI don’t want Jesse living in a world where Mommy can’t do things in our very own house. It’s important to model that you can get creative and make accessibility for yourself. For instance, I found a chopping block for our kitchen that’s my height so I can chop vegetables, and we have this induction hot plate that I use because the stove is high.6‘Rent (Original Broadway Cast Recording)’That show is so raw, and that recording is so emotional. Hearing the intro to these songs makes me feel like I’m in middle school again and listening to it in my room on my CD player. It captures for me first falling in love with theater.7‘The Goal Digger Podcast’What I love about Jenna Kutcher is that she’s so relatable. It feels like she’s like hanging out with you. I love hearing her talk about business and finance and all the ways you can elevate your life. She also brings on really cool people to interview. I started listening to her during the pandemic because my husband and I were out on Cape Cod, at the home of a family friend, and I would go for a push every day. It became a comforting ritual at a time when so much was unknown.8AudiobooksI like to listen to Audible in the car, especially on long drives, so I’ve been fortunate this year to have a lot of concerts booked. Two of my recent favorites are Stanley Tucci’s memoir, “Taste,” and “Driving Forwards,” by the TV presenter and disability advocate Sophie L. Morgan.9First Village CoffeeLuis, the [co-owner], and the people who work in this cafe in Ossining, N.Y., are just so wonderful. They feel like extended family. And the scones are so good. They’re fluffy inside, crispy on the outside, they have this amazing vanilla chai icing on top. They’re heavenly.10Taking Cara BabiesNo one can prepare you for what the sleeping situation is with a brand-new baby. But this woman, Cara, who’s a mom herself, has come up with these plans and tips for new parents — when to do naps or how often or schedules. New parents kept recommending her, and it has been so so helpful. More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    Alan Eisenberg, Longtime Actors’ Union Head, Dies at 88

    In his 25-year tenure at Actors’ Equity, he helped build Equity Fights AIDS and challenged the casting of the top roles in the hit musical “Miss Saigon.”Alan Eisenberg of Actors’ Equity Association was honored by the Actors Fund of America at a gala in New York in 2006. With him was the actress Lynn Redgrave.Peter Kramer/Getty ImagesAlan Eisenberg, a lawyer who during his 25 years as the top executive of Actors’ Equity Association helped to build its membership and stabilize the finances of its health plan, and also dealt with a highly publicized controversy involving the casting of the hit musical “Miss Saigon,” died on Oct. 7 in Rhinebeck, N.Y. He was 88.His wife, Claire Copley, said he died in a hospital of lung cancer.Mr. Eisenberg had worked at law firms for two decades before he was hired in 1981 as the executive secretary (his title was later changed to executive director) of Actors’ Equity, which represents theatrical actors and stage managers.In the 1980s, the union was confronted with the AIDS crisis, which had a particularly harsh impact on the theatrical community. Mr. Eisenberg was a champion of Equity Fights AIDS, the philanthropic fund formed within Actors’ Equity in 1987 to directly help members in financial need.Tom Viola, the executive director of the nonprofit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS (the two organizations merged in 1992), said in a phone interview that Mr. Eisenberg offered “ballast and direction” to the “emotional understanding of what needed to be done” that was provided by the actress Colleen Dewhurst, who was president of Equity Fights AIDS from 1985 until her death in 1991.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

  • 75 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ and TV History

    Brie Larson plays the fictional host of a 1950s cooking show in this period drama. But the story is inspired by the real TV homemakers who flourished back then.In a scene in the Apple TV+ period drama “Lessons in Chemistry,” Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson) prepares for her new job as host of a local cooking show with scientific rigor. Poised with pad in hand, Elizabeth, a chemist, concentrates keenly on her home television set, as if she were observing a chemical reaction.“How does one study TV?” her neighbor asks playfully.“Turn on Channel 4,” Elizabeth retorts.Based on Bonnie Garmus’s 2022 novel, “Lessons in Chemistry” follows the brilliant but frequently undervalued Elizabeth as she jumps from one chauvinistic 1950s milieu — an elite research institute — to another: local television.While the character, her show (“Supper at Six”) and the Los Angeles TV station that carries it are all fictional, they are inspired by the robust culture of local broadcasting, rooted in radio, that flourished in the 1950s and early ’60s in cities across the nation. These early days before television went Hollywood, when local stations produced much of their own original programming, allowed for plenty of experimentation and gave women ample opportunity to work both behind and in front of the camera.In its depiction of a fictional cooking show, “Lessons in Chemistry” is a kind of companion piece to the series “Julia,” which tracks Julia Child’s rise to fame and returns next month for its second season on Max. Both follow protagonists who reinvent local television in their own iconoclastic images — Child, played by Sarah Lancashire, as a down-to-earth contrast to a pompous WGBH host (Jefferson Mays), and Elizabeth as a foil to an elderly predecessor who likes to drone on about stockings.Jefferson Mays and Sarah Lancashire in “Julia,” which depicts Julia Child’s rise to TV fame.Seacia Pavao/HBO MaxOne of the writers on “Lessons,” Elissa Karasik, used television chefs like Child, Alma Kitchell and Dione Lucas (who toured Australia), as models for how an “independent thinker” like Elizabeth might use the format of the cooking show to subvert gender expectations. While men like the BBC’s Philip Harben, generally considered to be the first TV celebrity chef, were staged in restaurant-quality kitchens and touted as professionals, female chefs were often filmed on sets meant to recall home kitchens and shoehorned into nurturing, domestic personas.In “Lessons in Chemistry,” this attitude is exemplified by an executive producer, played by Rainn Wilson, who pressures Elizabeth to endorse undesirable sponsors and rails against her penchant for wearing pants. “Big hair, tight dress, homey set!” he rants in one scene. “We need a sexy wife, loving mother that every man loves to see when he comes home from work.”Most daytime television, however, was not actually oriented around male viewers, according to researchers who have written about this period. Marsha Cassidy, a media scholar and the author of “What Women Watched: Daytime Television in the 1950s,” said that these shows were geared toward women’s tastes — even the non-homemaking segments like interviews, musical performances and games. And they were abundant at a time when many middle-class wives still stayed home during the day: Cassidy cited a 1952 Iowa State College survey that found that 72 of the country’s 108 local TV stations were producing homemaking programs.Such shows were mostly locally produced, and nearly every major market cultivated its own personalities in the genre, said Donna Halper, a media historian and professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass.Standouts included Monty Margetts, an actress — she would go on to appear in “Dragnet,” “Bewitched” and other network series — who was hired to host “Cook’s Corner” out of an NBC affiliate in Los Angeles. Unmarried, child-free and with little actual cooking knowledge, she was hardly a natural pick for the job, said Mark Williams, an associate professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth. But “she was quick on her feet,” he said, and she and her viewers created a kind of community around the effort to become more skillful housewives.“It was everything local television made affordances for,” said Williams, who writes about Margetts and that era in his forthcoming book, “Remote Possibilities: A History of Early Television in Los Angeles.”Ruth Lyons hosted “The 50/50 Club” and other shows in Cincinnati in the 1950s and ’60s.Cincinnati Museum Center, via Getty ImagesRuth Lyons hosted “The 50/50 Club” in Cincinnati. Though elegantly dressed in white gloves, she was “anything but a model for demure postwar femininity,” Cassidy said. “She was brash, outspoken, had a ‘sandpaper voice.’” She even teased her male co-stars on the air about who was really running the show, and audiences adored her for it.Lyons began on radio, like many early television performers, but not every radio personality made the jump. Some failed to look the part or find their audiences, said Halper, the media historian, and others simply chose not to go on camera. And still others, like Willa Monroe, didn’t have the institutional support in place.Monroe was one of the most popular personalities at Memphis’s WDIA, a white-owned radio station that catered to a Black market. “She took the genre of women’s show and made it appeal to the Black woman at home,” Halper said. “She had interesting guests, she did the recipes and homemaking tips and so on, but she also did a lot of appearances all over the city.”But because neither national television networks nor local stations (or their sponsors) were particularly interested in reaching Black women, Monroe never crossed over to this new medium. “Lessons in Chemistry” alludes to such racial disparities through the character of Elizabeth’s friend Harriet (Aja Naomi King), a Black attorney and mother. “You’re always talking about the things that keep women down, but who does that include?” Harriet asks her at one point. “Have you looked at your audience lately?”Left, Larson and Aja Naomi King in “Lessons in Chemistry.” The show touches on the racial disparities of the era.Apple TV+By drawing attention to race and class alongside gender, “Lessons in Chemistry” spotlights the shortcomings of midcentury feminist politics. In that vein, while wooing Elizabeth to take the job, her producer Walter (Kevin Sussman) vows, “This would be your show. You would be in charge of virtually every aspect of it.” But the dream of total creative autonomy ultimately did not bear out for most women in this era of broadcasting — nor does it materialize for Elizabeth.In 1952, the Federal Communications Commission lifted its freeze on new station licenses. The growth of the medium that followed, together with the establishment of a coast-to-coast coaxial cable, led to the ascent of national network programming at the expense of local stations. Live and prerecorded shows, mostly out of Los Angeles and New York, would come to take the place of locally produced homemaking series.Child would debut “The French Chef” as a weekly public television series in 1963 and go on to become a national treasure. While her local contemporaries are comparatively more obscure now, in “Lessons in Chemistry” Elizabeth Zott stands on their shoulders and channels their style and purposeful spirit. More

  • 175 Shares199 Views

    in Television

    With a Chuckle and a Cool-Girl Smirk, Beth Stelling Moves Up a Comic Class

    The stand-up, who has a new Netflix special, delights in inappropriate laughs — none more so than in her bits about aging and childhood.The stand-up Beth Stelling reminds me so much of my best friend from high school.I relate this as full disclosure (comedy is subjective, especially when it intersects with your life) but also because it illustrates one of her considerable strengths. Some comics build a persona that is the best vehicle for their jokes. Stelling belongs to a different tradition: Her comedy emerges from an onstage character as rich and resonant as a great movie protagonist. Even if you don’t know someone like Stelling, her fully realized performance makes you feel as if you do.In “If You Didn’t Want Me Then,” a superb hour on Netflix that reveals a nimble storyteller who has leaped to a new artistic level, she carries herself with the steely cynicism of someone who has seen some things. Dressed all in black, she describes herself as grizzled by the time she was in high school and displays a delight in inappropriate laughs. She tells two stories about relationships with large age gaps and says, “I feel like the only time men believe women is when we’re lying about being 18.”After such lines, she tends to unleash a grunting chuckle that evokes Butt-Head more than Beavis along with a cool girl smirk. A laid-back dirtbag comic energy infuses her act. She never looks as if she were trying too hard. The feat of her standup is how it gradually makes her hard shell transparent, revealing vulnerability, compassion and feminist fire, through her revisiting of a childhood marked by divorce.Her last special, “Girl Daddy” (on Max), introduced audiences to her father, a conservative with a showman streak. “He moved to Orlando, Florida, to become an actor, which is not where you go,” she says, in a sentence that moves quickly before stopping on a dime. While he didn’t get many roles in movies or television, he did create a business dressing up in costumes as advertisements, like playing a leprechaun in front of an Irish bar. She once again uses him as a comic target, telling scathingly deadpan stories about his eccentricities, centering one bit on his raccoon collection. But watching her roast him you can’t help but think that some of his performance chops rubbed off on her.What stands out more in the new show is her sneakily loving portrait of her mother, who raised her in Dayton, Ohio, where the special was shot. The hour opens with a view of the city’s modest skyline alongside chunky red letters announcing the title with a heavy-metal guitar riff. When she says of Dayton that “not everyone showed us the respect we deserve,” Stelling could be talking about her mother, a teacher of more than three decades whom she has presented as a Marge Simpson type.Stelling opens with a story about a boy in her second-grade class who cracked an obscene joke at her mom’s expense that she had found hilarious. What follows is something of a fakeout. While she pauses to celebrate this boy’s joke, she’s setting up a belated if cheerful revenge, delivering the brutal comeback that she didn’t serve up when she was young and that her mom, a proper professional, never would.Her mother is unfailingly supportive of her career, always hyping her up, albeit clumsily, saying if she was in the Olympics, she would win the gold medal. Then Stelling, pausing and imitating her mother, finishes the compliment: “in women’s standup comedy.”One of Stelling’s sneakiest assets is her voice, a Bamfordian instrument that moves effortlessly from grunts to accents to girlish squeaks to bourgeois entitlement. She has a joke about how you’re a gymnast when you’re young because “you’re unaware of the many ways your neck can break” that gets most of its laughs from the change in speeds and intonations of its delivery.And yet, early in her set, she does a bit about how she plans to age and not get plastic surgery. “If I do get surgery,” she says, “it’s going to be a lobotomy.” Then comes her trademark chuckle before imagining telling her friend as if a whacked-out character: “Let’s get our heads done.” She then repeats the line but in a lower register closer to her own.She says she ran this joke by her mother and, imitating a cheerful Midwestern woman, the response was, “Wouldn’t that be nice.” Stelling looked stunned. “Curveball, Diane!” she marvels about her mom. Stelling clearly always saw herself as the dark one, but this special is a portrait of her getting older, wiser, seeing things anew. With a mix of melancholy and admiration, she adds, “I used to be able to shock her.”Shock is part of Stelling’s tool kit. She has two punchlines in this special that pull it off extremely well, both of which require too much context to ruin here. They produce the kind of belly laughs that can only come from surprising jokes not safe for work. But my favorite moments are the quieter ones, like the line about not being able to shock her mother, a soft laugh at best. It lingers because there’s subtext. She’s performing getting older and realizing her mother might be different than she thought.It suggests that the easy categories one might assume from her stand-ups — fun, reckless dad and square mom — don’t capture them in full. And through that realization, Stelling reveals a deeper version of herself. You might even recognize yourself in this moment. We all get older and see our childhood from new perspectives. And in your darker moments, getting your head done might even seem, for a moment, like sweet relief. More

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Television

    ‘Billions’ Season 7, Episode 11: Courting a Centrist Candidate

    Prince and Axe jostle for the attentions of Gov. Nancy Dunlop.Season 7, Episode 11: ‘Axe Global’“So, well, there’s that.” You said it, Axe. The penultimate episode of “Billions” has now come and gone, and with it one of the show’s final opportunities to really blow us away with a patented five-steps-ahead scheme that ends in a sudden twist turning everything on its ear. That is … not what we got.Don’t get me wrong — the five-steps-ahead thing is still alive and well in “Billions”-land. Mike’s story line hinges on how, or whether, to respond to the latest attack from Chuck and company: an all-out legal assault on his private holdings by the Southern District of New York. These are the only companies in which Prince Cap remains invested after Mike orders everything else dissolved to reduce vulnerability to Axe’s financial machinations. He has already voluntarily taken a huge loss as a defensive maneuver; to lose further, from that position, would make him look fatally weak.The information finds its way to the Prince brain trust via the young Southern District prosecutor Amanda Torre, who seems to act on her own out of disgust with Chuck’s vendetta. Given what we come to learn of his plan, though, it seems more likely she’s only playing the informant while still working for the team. (Honestly, the only thing that stops me from saying “She’s in on it” is the trust placed in her intel by Kate, who is no dummy. On the other hand … well, more on that later.)Using a football metaphor as elaborate as it is unnecessary — seriously, guys, the iocane powder scene from “The Princess Bride” would have served perfectly well — Mike games out the various scenarios. Maybe this is the attack, and they should meet it full on. Or maybe Chuck is counting on a big response, so they should hold their fire. Or maybe he expects them to hold their fire, so they should attack. And so on, and so on, and so on.Then Mike realizes that Chuck’s plan is to immerse him in the dilemma of which proverbial cup to drink from. While he and his brightest minds are trying to untangle the legal and financial implications of Chuck’s maneuver, Chuck and Axe are out there advancing the real plan, which involves an assault on the political front.Chuck and Axe are out to woo the popular centrist Democratic politician Nancy Dunlop away from endorsing Mike after he torpedoed her candidacy at that gathering of the rich and powerful in Episode 8. While wounded, she’s not politically dead, and her support — perhaps even as a running mate — would make Mike the heir apparent to the White House, security briefings and all. But, again, she’s not politically dead, and could conceivably win the presidency herself, provided she has the backing of a big-money player like Axe.The results are as disappointing to Chuck, Axe, Wags, Wendy and Taylor as they are scathing about the political establishment. Here’s a woman with strong centrist-Democrat bona fides, described by Chuck as “my beau ideal” of a candidate, openly offering her services to the highest bidder. That turns out to be Mike, who offers her the vice presidency. Their big debate about the first-strike use of nuclear weapons is apparently water under the bridge when political power is on the table.Cynicism really is the order of the day in this episode. In addition to courting Dunlop, Axe takes a run at rehiring his old crew. Wendy and Taylor are on board, obviously, as is the much-missed Mafee. Victor, Dollar Bill and Rian all show up to hear out the offer but decline, dutifully reporting it to Mike after the fact. Tuk and Ben Kim also turn it down, though they know their affection for Axe is too strong to do so in person; as such, they feel no need to flag the communication.That’s their mistake. Dollar Bill and Victor are rewarded for their candor and loyalty, while Ben Kim and Tuk are given the ax for failing to tattle and for lacking the fortitude to decline the offer in person. Such men can’t be trusted. As for Rian, she walks away from both outfits, choosing to quit Prince Cap and travel the world.That leaves the anomaly of Winston (Will Roland). Anchored to Prince Cap by its legal takeover of the algorithm he developed on company time, he extorts a huge payout to adjust it to Mike’s new low-risk parameters. We are left to wonder about the inclusion of this scene, which seems to do little beyond giving the actor Stephen Kunken more time to shine as the truly awful compliance officer Ari Spyros, and allowing Roland to recite some lyrics from Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick.” (“Aqualung” gets all the attention, but real Tull-heads know.) Perhaps this dog will bark in the finale.Whatever may eventually happen with this almost vestigial story line, it doesn’t here. There’s no big prestige to whatever trick the writers Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Beth Schacter are pulling, not in this episode anyway. This one really is as simple as two groups vying for an alliance with a minor character we’ve seen only once, ahead of revealing her pick. Forgive me, but I still have visions of that fabulous shock ending from Season 2’s penultimate episode dancing in my head, a level of scheming, skulduggery and surprise that I want to see again before the curtain closes.We may yet get it. I simply refuse to believe that a show this beautifully bombastic won’t go out with a bang, in a finale with more twists and turns than a Mario Kart racetrack. Keep in mind that while the opposing armies seem pretty firmly established, they have every possibility of fracturing, reconfiguring or turning on themselves. Which leads to the biggest question of all, and no, it’s not whether Chuck and Axe can stop Mike Prince — it’s whether they will be back at each other’s throats if and when they do.Loose changeI don’t know about you, but opening an episode with a David Bowie cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” and closing it with Procul Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” is a guaranteed way to get on my good side.The laugh line of the night goes to this exchange between Mafee and Chuck, an odd couple if ever there was one, after Mafee repeatedly asks permission to smoke up during one of their meetings, claiming it sharpens his mind. “My doctor says I have a paradoxical reaction to weed,” he explains. “Your doctor says that,” Chuck replies, deadpan. “I mean, she’s not technically a doctor,” Mafee admits. “More of a spirit walker.”I’m broadly sympathetic with Mafee’s claim regarding the mind-expanding power of the devil’s lettuce, but “spirit walker”? He’d have been better off just saying, “The guy behind the counter at the gray-market shop where I bought it said it’s good for creativity.”I won’t soon forget Ari reciting “Jerusalem” to a deeply confused Winston and Kate during their meeting. I had no idea how badly I needed to hear Kunken proclaim “Bring me my chariot of fire” until I was actually hearing it.There’s a weird optics thing going on with Prince’s brain trust, right? Other than Prince himself, every member — Scooter, Philip, Kate, Bradford, even their informant Amanda — is a person of color. The Chuck/Axe/Wendy/Wags/Taylor alliance is as white as the surface of a mirror on Wags’s coffee table.That said, there are no doubt many cards yet to be played, and it would not surprise me at all if one or more of Mike’s minions is secretly plotting his downfall. As I alluded to earlier, my money is on Kate. Even aside from her co-signing of the possible double agent Amanda, her becoming this evil this quickly feels like a smoke screen for something else.On the other hand, Scooter betraying his liege lord at last would have an even more poetic ring to it. Philip seems like a true believer in the mission of making loads of money at this point, but in the past he’s been wise to what a weasel Mike really is, and in this episode he rather pointedly asks Scooter if he ever questions Mike’s will. As for Bradford, I don’t see him shivving his boss, but I also can’t imagine him sticking around if it seems he’s backing the losing horse.The point is that Mike’s support network does not seem as firm to me as it does to him. Doesn’t he learn this to his detriment in this very episode? His wife, Andy, leaves him for the mountain-climbing boyfriend he deliberately sacrificed on the altar of his own ambitions before Axe secured the guy’s liberation.Come to think of it, Mike’s near-total lack of emotional response to the apparent end of his marriage (campaign appearances aside) strikes me as a weakness in and of itself. Any man so fixated on a political prize that he breezes past rejection by the love of his life is vulnerable to attack from beyond his range of focus. Axe sneaking behind his back to free the mountain climber — and thus put the kibosh on the Princes’ marriage while the man was picking out tuxedos for his launch party — is in fact, a case in point.Tough to believe it took the show this long to set a scene in Rao’s, as it does for Axe and Dunlop’s big sales-pitch meeting. Perhaps they were saving the big guns for the final act.When Mike hears he has been invited to Camp David, he replies, “Boom,” with a subtle accompanying explosive sound effect. I’d say the show has made its stakes pretty clear. More

  • 125 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    Movement and Memory: Dance Love and Dance Rejection in Ireland

    Michael Keegan-Dolan has collaborated with his partner Rachel Poirier on “How to Be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons,” coming to St. Ann’s Warehouse.“For some reason I wanted to be a dancer,” Michael Keegan-Dolan said of his younger self. “And then I realized I was really bad at it.” Keegan-Dolan, a choreographer and director, was talking on a video call from his home in Dingle, a remote spot on the southwest coast of Ireland where he lives with the dancer Rachel Poirier, and where his dance company Teac Damsa is based. “I was this kind of tragic character.”Sitting next to him, Poirier chuckled. “I didn’t see him dance then,” she said, “so thank God I don’t need to comment.”Keegan-Dolan’s dance-theater work “How to Be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons,” which opens at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Saturday, springs from the tension between this thing he loved beyond all others — dance — and the realities of his body.In a mix of stories and dance, he and Poirier trace the dogged efforts of a young Irishman, based on Keegan-Dolan, now 54, coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s, struggling to find his place in the world of dance. It plays out against a backdrop of ingrained ideas about masculinity, I.R.A. violence and his feelings of being an unwelcome outsider in England, where he went to advance his training.“I was a kind of tragic character,” Keegan-Dolan said of wanting to dance but not being much good at it. Poirier didn’t see him perform back then, she said, “so thank God I don’t have to comment.” With the couple is their dog Chamalo.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesIn ballet school Keegan-Dolan was told that his pigeon-toed feet were hopelessly untrainable. In the show he recalls being asked by a teacher, with as much kindness as she can muster, “Is there anything else you might like to do with your life?” He can’t think of anything.His salvation, it turned out, would be choreography, and through it, theater. After his last appearance onstage as a dancer in 1994, he turned to making dances and eventually rose to acclaim as a choreographer, first in opera and later in ensemble works of his own.In 1997 he founded Fabulous Beast Dance Theater in the Irish Midlands, which, after its relocation to Dingle, became Teac Damsa. (The name means “house of dance” in Gaelic.) With those companies Keegan-Dolan has explored themes from Irish history and myth in well-received works that combine live music, theater and dance, like “The Bull,” “Rian,” a reimagined “Swan Lake,” and “Mám,” recently presented at Sadler’s Wells.In “How to Be a Dancer” he turns his lens inward. There are just two characters, the Dance Man and the Dancer, played by Keegan-Dolan and Poirier.The work’s intimate scale is partly a product of circumstance. “How to Be a Dancer” was created during the pandemic and rehearsed at a theater down the road from Keegan-Dolan and Poirier’s house. (It premiered in 2022 at the Gate Theater in Dublin.)For Susan Feldman, the artistic director at St. Ann’s, the small scale offered an opportunity. “I’ve been aware of Michael for many years,” she said in an interview, “and I’ve seen many of his works, but our space isn’t really conducive to presenting large dance pieces.”Feldman was struck by the honesty and humor of the show. “I was really interested that it would be him dancing,” Feldman said of Keegan-Dolan, who hasn’t performed in decades and appears in a series of wigs. “At first I didn’t even realize it was him.”Keegan-Dolan turns his lens inward in “How to Be a Dancer,” which he developed in Dingle during the pandemic.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe material that makes up “How to be a Dancer” began to emerge before the pandemic, Keegan-Dolan said, but the period of forced inactivity gave him time to look back on memories that had dogged him for years. The number in the title comes from yoga practices that hold that 72,000 channels, known as nadis, circulate energy through the body.The stories in the show draw upon the kinds of memories — small revelations, as well as shameful or painful experiences — that help shape our inner lives. Keegan-Dolan describes sitting in his home in Dublin, the youngest in a large family, watching Gene Kelly on television as his mother ironed. And how he felt when he took his first dance class, at 18, towering over the barre in rugby sweats in a room full of “9-year-old girls in pink leotards,” he says. He should feel ridiculous, he adds, “but instead I feel like I am in exactly the right place.”After moving to London in the ’80s, a period of deadly bombings by the Irish Republican Army, he remembers being called a terrorist and worse. Often he reframes such painful experiences as absurdist comedy. But the sting is still there.Onstage, the stories roll out of him like well-worn yarns. And like all such tales, they contain some fabrication. “I like the idea that you can change a memory, like you can change a story,” Keegan-Dolan said. He is a natural storyteller, lively and funny, “un peu cabot” (a bit of a show-off), as Poirier put it in her native French.The storytelling is layered with snippets of movement and dance, as when Poirier and Keegan-Dolan re-enact a happy-awkward dance at an Irish disco in the ’80s, while bullies hurl insults from the sidelines. “I wait for him to go,” Keegan-Dolan says of one of them, “and when he’s gone I start dancing again.” Nothing can deter his joy in movement — not even the fear of being punched in the face.Keegan-Dolan, a natural storyteller, said, “I like the idea that you can change a memory, like you can change a story.”Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe more technical dancing in the show is left to Poirier, who has danced with the Rambert dance company and the Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group among other troupes. She is the dancer he would have liked to have been, Keegan-Dolan said — along with Rudolf Nureyev, Fred Astaire and Jacques d’Amboise.The climax of the piece is a 15-minute solo performed by Poirier that the pair choreographed together to Ravel’s “Boléro.” Here, the memories that rise to the surface are hers.“There are bits of steps hanging there, dance memories,” Poirier said, “and the feeling of what it’s like to be a dancer, all the struggles and the lack of money, and the greatness and the poetry that comes with doing the job we do.”And even as she pushes through exhaustion, the freedom and force of her movements, sustained by Ravel’s music, suggest something about the power of dance, the thing that has kept Keegan-Dolan in its thrall all these years.“It connects you to a part of yourself that is otherwise totally inaccessible,” he said. “And you don’t even have to be good at it.” More

  • 100 Shares179 Views

    in Television

    Late Night Sums Up Sidney Powell’s Plea Deal

    The former Trump lawyer could testify against the ex-president in one of his cases — “and you don’t even know which one I’m talking about,” Seth Meyers marveled.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Get Out of Jail Free PleaSidney Powell, a former lawyer for Donald Trump, pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case, agreeing to testify against other defendants, possibly including the former president. Powell, who will avoid prison time, will also have to pay a $9,000 fine and write a letter of apology to the people of Georgia.On Thursday, Seth Meyers said it was still shocking to him that “when discussing a former president, I have to say ‘one of the four criminal cases’ — and you don’t even know which one I’m talking about.”“It could be the election interference case, the stolen documents case, the hush money case, the Georgia case, or, because the news is so insane, there could be some other criminal case you totally forgot about, like the investigation into what the hell he’s hiding under that bulky jacket. Looks like a grandpa trying to sneak a bunch of kids into an R-rated movie.” — SETH MEYERS“Being Trump’s craziest lawyer is like being the most divorced dad at an Embassy Suites.” — MICHAEL KOSTA, guest co-host of “The Daily Show”“As part of the deal, Powell gets six years’ probation and appears to be cooperating with prosecutors in their case against the others, which includes Trump. Oh, man, the Chicken McNuggets are coming home to roost, aren’t they?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Just a letter? This woman actively tried to steal an election. The least she could do is apologize door to door like a sex offender.” — RONNY CHIENG, guest co-host of “The Daily Show”“She got treason down to an apology letter. Like, that’s an amazing negotiation. Is she still practicing? Because I might want to hire her.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Punchiest Punchlines (Just Don’t Edition)“After failing to get elected speaker of the House twice this week, congressman Jim Jordan said that he’s not dropping out and will keep running. When Jordan said that he was running a third time, even Nike was like, ‘Just don’t.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, Jordan wants to be speaker of the house so that he doesn’t have to go back to his old job of being the villain in ‘Scooby-Doo.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Republican congressman Carlos Giménez said yesterday that his office has received robocalls encouraging him to vote for Ohio congressman Jim Jordan. But then he remembered he actually saved Jordan’s number as ‘Scam Likely.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Kimmel got an interview with the “Bachelor in Paradise” star Sam Jeffries, who left the show after an extended bout of constipation.Also, Check This OutLayla Mohammadi in “The Persian Version.”Yiget Eken/Sony Pictures ClassicsMaryam Keshavarz’s semi-autobiographical film “The Persian Version” is about a rising Iranian American director and her tumultuous family life. More

  • 113 Shares109 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Free Your Mind’ Does Little to Challenge the Brain

    A huge new performance space in Manchester, England, opened with a show that trumpets the building’s possibilities, but doesn’t push any boundaries.There was a sense of momentous occasion on Wednesday at the opening of the new Aviva Studios performance space in Manchester, England. Political and cultural figures made sweeping declarations: This was Britain’s most significant cultural project since the Tate Modern opened in London over 20 years ago; the largest government investment in the arts since forever; the most important new theater space in Europe; and a generator of work, well-being and regeneration in Britain’s underserved north.“It’s a big day not just for Manchester, but for the U.K.,” said Lucy Frazer, Britain’s culture secretary, at a news conference several hours before the opening performance of “Free Your Mind,” a large-scale spectacle directed by Danny Boyle that inaugurated the building.The 144,000-square-foot Aviva Studios (named for an insurance company that gave around 35 million pounds, or $43 million, to the project) is the new home of Factory International, the organization that produces the Manchester International Festival. The building was designed with multipurpose and multidisciplinary intent by Ellen van Loon from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the Dutch firm founded by Rem Koolhaas, costing “around £240 million,” or $290 million, according to a spokesman for the venue.There is a conventional 1,600-seat theater (“the Hall”) and a 700-foot long, 226-foot high performance space (“the Warehouse”) that can accommodate 5,000 people. The spaces can be used individually, combined or divided to create several distinct, acoustically isolated performance areas.The seats in the theater can be taken out for gigs; the floors can flood and drain; you could hang 100 cars from the ceiling of the Warehouse. “We want people to imagine seemingly impossible things,” said John McGrath, Factory International’s artistic director, during a tour of the building.The massive 144,000-square-foot space hopes to revitalize the arts scene in Manchester.Marco Cappelletti, via OMA and Factory InternationalLiving up to these ambitions in an opening show is a tall order, even for Boyle, the Academy Award-winning film director (“Trainspotting,” “Slumdog Millionaire”) who masterminded the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. For “Free Your Mind,” he teamed up with the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy, the composer Michael “Mikey J.” Asante, the designer Es Devlin and the writer Sabrina Mahfouz to create a show loosely based on the “Matrix” movies, with their prescient themes of artificial intelligence taking over human life.At the news conference, Boyle talked about using “The Matrix” (directed by the Wachowski siblings) and its sequels as a widely available cultural reference, and “Free Your Mind” is mostly interesting as a statement of intent. It’s accessible, fun, visually spectacular and entirely unchallenging. But on the evidence of opening night, the show draws an impressively young, hip and diverse audience.“Free Your Mind” opens in the Hall, with a lecture delivered via an old-fashioned television screen and new-fashioned technology by the mathematician Alan Turing, who developed an early vision of modern computing. There is a quick history of Manchester as the home of the machine, and a question asked early: “Should we be worried that machines could think?”Dancers in trench coats appear, moving with robotic jerkiness and Neo (Corey Owens), the hero of “The Matrix,” emerges from the front row and is confronted by a dark-glasses-wearing, sinister group, before the scene changes to a cluster of faceless figures encased in stretchy white fabric that is attached to the ceiling. As they move in a circle, the tubes of fabric entwine like a maypole; visually arresting and oddly old-fashioned, reminiscent of the choreographer Alwin Nikolais’s experiments with form and fabric in the 1950s and 1960s.The show begins with a monologue delivered by an avatar of the mathematician Alan Turing, which the visual effects company Union VFX created from a photograph.Tristram KentonThe show’s movements are directed by the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy.Tristram KentonThese figures are presumably the humans whose energy is being harvested by an evil artificial intelligence: the truth revealed by the omniscient Morpheus to Neo in “The Matrix.” A series of episodes move us through a meeting between Neo and the female warrior Trinity (Nicey Belgrave), confrontations with the police and the machine Agents who guard the Matrix, and the trial of the first robot to kill a human.Sandy’s movement language, drawn from hip-hop and street dance vocabularies, is boldly graphic, and he adeptly moves the 50-dancer cast in crisp, cascading formations, but there is little subtlety or variety either here or in Asante’s serviceable atmosphere-creating score. (The sound system, however, is fab, as is Lucy Carter’s lighting.) The only standout dance moment comes in part two, when Sandy himself, as Morpheus, performs a compelling solo of sweeping, martial arts-inflected motion, legs kicking high as his body arches backward.In the intermission, Matrix-agent figures were suspended around the huge lobby and bar space (rather more effectively Matrix-y than anything onstage), and white rabbit-headed figures danced with audience members. (A reference to the message, “Follow the white rabbit,” that appears on Neo’s computer screen in the movie, but surely also to the Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit,” with its lyrics about mind-bending pills.)Part two, in the Warehouse, is more abstract, with Devlin’s spectacular set as the star: a huge cocoon of white Manchester cotton rounding out the angles of the space and enclosing the audience, mostly standing on each side of an enormous catwalk. Long narrow screens above this stage offer a montage of Manchester cultural history — footage of millworkers, British soap operas, references to pop bands like Joy Division — then show an incessant stream of images that blur into a kind of visual wallpaper as one scene after another plays out beneath.The show’s sets are by the designer Es Devlin.Tristram KentonPart two of “Free Your Mind” plays out on an extended catwalk in a part of Aviva Studios called the Warehouse.Tristram KentonThis section is presumably our present in which data, rather than energy, is being harvested from us humans. Amazon packages are delivered, Twitter ticks, the Apple logo and Google are referenced in Gareth Pugh’s costumes; dancers move while unable to take their eyes off their phones. Finally we get the battle between Neo and Smith, with a re-enactment of the famous bullet-stopping sequence in the original film, before a group finale to Asante’s portentous chords. The final image is of the screens, showing human figures effaced by vertical lines of code. (Oh dear.)The audience, which clearly knew and loved “The Matrix,” didn’t seem depressed by that, and gave the show a rousing ovation. “Free Your Mind” is a good night out and a decent demonstration of the new building’s capacities, even if its muddled mix of pure-dance display and clumsy propositions don’t say much about what it means to be human. Something stranger and more genuinely boundary-pushing would have been a welcome opening salvo from the often-visionary minds at Factory International. Perhaps that’s next.Free Your MindThrough Nov. 5 at Aviva Studios, in Manchester, England; factoryinternational.org. More