An unexpected fan of “Sex and the City” reflects on the impact the series and its sequel “And Just Like That …” had on his life and, ultimately, his move to New York City. More
When Navied Mahdavian, a cartoonist, and his wife, Emelie, a filmmaker, moved from San Francisco to Mackay, Idaho (population 473), they fixated on their new hometown’s theater. Or, rather, the ghost of a theater.A red and white marquee for the Mackay Main Theater dominated part of Main Street, and Mr. and Ms. Mahdavian, who had moved in pursuit of a cheaper and less frantic way of life, resolved with other community members to reopen the cinema, which had been defunct for years.Before the big reopening, one longtime town resident seemed less than enthusiastic about the plan, Mr. Mahdavian recalled, accusing the theater boosters of trying to import an “artsy-fartsy, social-justice-warrior” sensibility to the Idaho mountains.“We’re actually showing a western,” Mr. Mahdavian said.To which the resident replied: “John Wayne?”Instead, the Mahdavians chose “Damsel,” a new-age western from 2018 featuring a heroine played by Mia Wasikowska, a wimpy male character and a masturbation scene. It didn’t go over all that well.“We probably should’ve anticipated that the reaction in town would be mixed,” said Mr. Mahdavian, 38, who has chronicled his move to a rural area in the forthcoming book “This Country.”By taking an active interest in the West of the American imagination — and the ever-evolving notions about what a western story can, or should, be — the Mahdavians are part of a larger movement.“Every generation is going to interpret differently what it sees in the West,” said Richard Aquila, a historian and author of “The Sagebrush Trail.”Photo Illustration by Kim Hoeckele for The New York TimesCowboys ride in and out of popular culture every few years, propelled by a hunger for stories that are wild, tumultuous and unvarnished. Now, as western style spreads across fashion and entertainment once more, that spirit of reinvention is being applied to reinvent the western itself, inflecting an old genre with new viewpoints.Two cultural stars of the summer, Beyoncé and Barbie, have invoked western tropes. Beyoncé wore a disco cowboy hat tilted over her face and sat atop a silver horse in portraits promoting her Renaissance World Tour, the imagery reminiscent of an extraterrestrial cowgirl. Re-creations of the hat, for fans trying to mimic the look, have sold for over $100 on Etsy. “Barbie,” which has climbed to more than $1 billion at the box office, included a lengthy sequence of Margot Robbie venturing deep into the Wild West of Los Angeles while wearing a white cowboy hat, a pink bandanna and a western-cut pink ensemble. And Taylor Swift may no longer wear western gear in public, as she did early in her career, but there were plenty of cowboy boots and cowboy hats to be seen among her fans headed to the Eras Tour shows this summer.History rhymes, fusty fashions turn trendy and cult classics become newly beloved — so it’s no surprise that cowboys keep cycling back into the popular imagination.“There’s a longstanding tradition in American history of looking West,” said Andrew Patrick Nelson, a historian of American cinema and culture at University of Utah. “Part of the appeal is the idea you can live a more authentic, exciting and rugged life.”Coming out of a period of pandemic malaise, millions of people have gone that-a-way — in their clothing choices, social media posts, and selections of TV shows and movies. In fashion, high-end brands, including Prada, unveiled spring collections comprising get-ups that smacked of the Old West. On TikTok, thousands of women have posted videos of themselves modeling outfits billed as “coastal cowgirl” — linen shirts, boots, hats and well-worn denim shorts. The #CoastalCowgirl hashtag has racked up tens of thousands of views.“Glam western is probably the No. 1 trending thing in fashion right now,” said Taylor Johnson, 36, who owns the concert wear boutique Hazel & Olive.The silver cowboy hat worn by Beyoncé in promotional images for her Renaissance tour was a fashion inspiration for fans on their way to one of the singer’s concerts in New Jersey this summer.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesTaylor Swift fans, outside the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey in May.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesBarbie, played by Margot Robbie, went full cowgirl as she explored the world beyond Barbie Land in “Barbie.”Warner Bros. PicturesBrunello Cucinelli, the fashion designer, said the “ease and sportiness” of western style lent itself to perennial cycles of popularity. “As a younger man, I watched many Sergio Leone movies and listened to Johnny Cash,” Mr. Cucinelli said in an email interview. “While visiting America for the first time, I remember vividly my trips to Texas and how men dressed with their tapered jackets and those great belts with large buckles.”“Yellowstone,” the soapy “red state” rancher television series, was ranked by Nielsen as the top scripted program last year. In interviews, several TikTok users said their #CoastalCowgirl posts represented their efforts to mimic Beth Dutton, the ruthless main daughter of the show played by Kelly Reilly.Kimberly Johnson, 39, a stay-at-home mother in Delaware, said the series offered a reprieve from the Covid-era divorce drama of her own life. When she saw the #CoastalCowgirl trend, she said the thought that crossed her mind was: “Now I have an excuse to dress like I’m from ‘Yellowstone’!”“Yellowstone,” which is filmed and based in Montana, pumped some $700 million in tourism spending into the state’s economy, on top of $72 million in production spending from Paramount, according to a study from the University of Montana (which was sponsored by the Media Coalition of Montana and Paramount). Nearly 20 percent of visitors to the state in 2021 attributed their travel in part to watching the series, in what economists called “‘Yellowstone’-induced” tourism.Jordan Calhoun, a writer in New York who edits the how-to site Lifehacker, was one of the fans who went West because of the show. He said his affection for the series came about in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, when he was locked down in his Harlem apartment and felt the need for a landscape that looked different from what he was seeing out his window. He longed for rows of pines, big stretches of sky. And he wanted to experience the Dutton family’s way of life.“I don’t know how to fix a fence or ride a horse or grow crops,” Mr. Calhoun, 38, said. “Self-reliance, or country living, is something that got really appealing during the pandemic.”Jordan Calhoun, a writer and editor who lives in New York, went West because of his love for “Yellowstone.”Jordan CalhounHe spent five days on a Colorado ranch in 2022. Although the trip confirmed for him that it wasn’t what he wanted full time, it taught Mr. Calhoun, who is Black, that the western landscapes he loved on TV were something he could go and enjoy. That was a realization far afield from what he had felt watching westerns when he was growing up.“I watched ‘Young Guns’ a thousand times,” he said. “There wasn’t much of me in it.”But as much as it is a place on the map, the West is also an idea, one that changes over time. And amid the latest round of fascination with cowboy culture, the western, a staple film genre since the early days of cinema, is being reimagined for a growing audience.From 2000 to 2009, Hollywood made 23 movies categorized as westerns, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. That number shot up to 42 from 2010 to 2019. Some of these new films feature Black cowboys, Native American protagonists, queer heroes and damsels far from distress. Some are directed by female filmmakers, like Jane Campion, whose 2021 movie “The Power of the Dog,” which features a most likely closeted rancher, received more Academy Award nominations than any other film last year.Alaina Roberts, an American historian who wrote “I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land,” was raised with all the classic images of what a western film looked like: Davy Crockett wrestling a bear, John Wayne squinting through the Texas dust. Her mother loved those films.But when Dr. Roberts started her own career as a scholar, those weren’t the visions of the West that captured her imagination. Instead, she wanted to research stories of her own Black family members, who were enslaved by the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes in what is now Ardmore, Okla. She also grew fascinated by the Buffalo Soldiers, all-Black regiments who policed the plains.“We shouldn’t be afraid of complexity,” said Ms. Roberts, 32, who consulted on the recent documentary series “The Real Wild West,” which focuses on Black and Hispanic cowboys, Buffalo Soldiers, Native leaders and women on the plains. “It doesn’t mean we’re trying to rewrite history.”TV shows and movies including “Yellowstone,” “The Harder They Fall,” “Bitterbrush,” and “The Power of the Dog” are reshaping the cowboy image.Top: Paramount Network, Netflix; Bottom: Magnolia Pictures, NetflixThe list of movies, TV shows and documentaries taking on these more tangled western tales keeps growing. There’s “The Harder They Fall,” a 2021 film from the director Jeymes Samuel about Black outlaws, sharpshooters, horse riders and frontier townspeople. The director Kelly Reichardt has put her stamp on the genre in two films: “Meek’s Cutoff,” which is centered on pioneer women played by Michelle Williams, Shirley Henderson and Zoe Kazan, who realize that a Native American man they meet on the Oregon Trail is more trustworthy than their white guide; and “First Cow,” about a pair of misfits, played by Orion Lee and John Magaro, trying to make a go of it in mid-19th-century Oregon. There’s also Chloé Zhao’s “The Rider,” a rodeo story about the Lakota Sioux tribe.Ms. Mahdavian, 41, who moved with her husband from San Francisco to rural Idaho, is another filmmaker who has trained her camera on the West. Her 2022 documentary, “Bitterbrush,” follows female cattle ranchers near her new home. “I don’t have an agenda to kill the western,” she said. “I find myself drawn to telling stories that feel true to a certain type of lived experience.”Western films have tended to reflect the experience of the people who produced them and the ideas in the air at the time of their production, film historians say. The westerns of the World War II era, for example, fulfilled a hunger for clear-cut messages. Some see “Stagecoach,” the 1939 John Wayne classic, as a parable for the New Deal: A group of Americans (a whiskey salesman, a drunken doctor) have to work together to prevail over what’s lurking around them.Then came the 1960s, when social changes raised questions about the old order, driving a desire for new types of anti-establishment western heroes, like Clint Eastwood’s antihero “Man With No Name” character, or the jovial outlaws played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”“It’s almost like a Rorschach inkblot test,” Richard Aquila, 76, a historian and author of “The Sagebrush Trail” said. “Every generation is going to interpret differently what it sees in the West.”John Wayne, the quintessential western actor, in the 1939 film “Stagecoach.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesFor die-hard lovers of western films and novels, the periodic resurgence of the genre is invigorating because it sends new fans toward old classics. W.F. Strong, a professor of communications and culture at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, delights in hearing from young readers who have recently discovered Larry McMurtry’s 1985 novel “Lonesome Dove,” which follows a group of lovably bone-headed cowpokes from their tiny hometown, Lonesome Dove, to the plains of Montana.Mr. Strong, 68, said he particularly loved how Mr. McMurtry, who died in 2021, was able to capture the lives of ordinary Americans in the novel. “He was writing about my people — and I didn’t realize you could do that as an author,” he recalled. “When I was young, I thought you had to be writing about glamorous things far away, like England.”For many people, including those taking part in the #cowgirl memes on social media, that’s part of the appeal — the idea that the western experience seems within reach, that wide-open plains are closer than they appear. Kyra Smolkin, a content creator in Los Angeles who has been posting her cowgirl-themed fashions on TikTok, said she grew up in Toronto “romanticizing small towns and ranches.”“What’s cool about cowgirl style is it’s attainable — there’s no barrier to entry,” Ms. Smolkin, 30, said. “I love that there’s an ease to it. It’s easy to make your own.”And for the Mahdavians, the couple who moved from San Francisco to Idaho, there was a thrill to making the western story their own, by setting up a home in the kind of landscape that they had long associated with the movies. They built a house on a small plot of land about a 20-minute drive from Mackay. It is surrounded by snow-capped mountains, and there are no people in sight.They have also gotten past the mixed reception they received for their opening night at the renovated theater on Main Street. They pulled it off by showing “The Quiet Man,” a 1952 western romance starring John Wayne.“We had, like, 70 people come, which for a population of 500 is a lot,” Mr. Mahdavian recalled. “People definitely responded to John Wayne.”First collage: Bettmann/Getty Images (background); Amir Hamja/ The New York Times, Maggie Shannon for The New York Times, Paramount Network, Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images (hats); Paramount Network, Jason Kempin/Getty Images (shirts); Gabriela Campos/Santa Fe New Mexican, via Associated Press, Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times, George Frey/EPA, via Shutterstock, Roy Rochlin/Getty Images (boots)Second collage: George Rinhart/Corbis, via Getty Images (background); Amy Sussman/Getty Images (body) More
The Shaw Festival in Canada is staging the novelist’s 1901 script, discovered only a few years ago. But how to get its mix of satire and melodrama just right?Edith Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, “A Backward Glance,” glances a bit more carefully at some things than others. She gives her close friend and fellow literary lion Henry James a chapter, but names her husband of 28 years exactly once. (And that’s only because she quotes James referring to him.)One subject Wharton doesn’t mention at all? “The Shadow of a Doubt,” a full-length 1901 play that got close to a Broadway opening before foundering under murky circumstances. It was all but forgotten — which is perhaps what Wharton had intended — until two scholars unearthed a script in 2016.Mary Chinery, of Georgian Court University in New Jersey, and Laura Rattray, of the University of Glasgow, found the script in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. (Crucially, the play was filed not under the center’s well-combed-over Wharton holdings but rather in its collection of “Playscripts and Promptbooks.”)“We often don’t have the complete picture, especially with women writers from that period,” Chinery said. “Their work is so spread out that there’s a lot we still don’t know about.”Audiences will finally be able to see for themselves at the Shaw Festival, in the bucolic Canadian hamlet Niagara-on-the-Lake, which presents works written by and in the spirit of George Bernard Shaw each summer. Nestled alongside works by Shaw, J.M. Synge and Noël Coward this year is the world premiere of “The Shadow of a Doubt,” which opened Aug. 20 at the Royal George Theater.From left, Gauthier, Patrick Galligan and Claire Jullien, whose face is projected onto the set.David CooperTim Carroll, the festival’s artistic director, said he was constantly on the lookout for new works to add to the festival’s repertory. “I have friends all over the world sending me links to articles about new discoveries,” he said. “And 95 times out of 100, you realize this is a forgotten play for a reason.”But he said “Shadow,” a somewhat lurid mash-up of Oscar Wilde’s drollery and Henrik Ibsen’s noose-tightening melodrama, “ticked three boxes”: It was by a well-known author, it was written during Shaw’s lifetime and it had never received a full staging. (There was a BBC Radio adaptation in 2018, and the Red Bull Theater staged a reading the following year.)Carroll felt Wharton’s play was in that 5 percent of discoveries worth unearthing. “It’s not perfect, but it’s jolly interesting,” he said.As it happens, Wharton’s interest in the theater went well beyond the occasional stage adaptations of her novels. Before she found success with “The House of Mirth” in 1905, Chinery said, Wharton had forged relationships with several New York theater professionals and worked on adaptations and brief works that she called “dialogues.”“Shadow,” the story of a nurse who marries uneasily into a wealthy family after her patient’s death, was poised to become Wharton’s big step forward. The play entered rehearsals in February 1901 with the impresario Charles Frohman and the noted leading lady Elsie de Wolfe on the bill. It was scheduled to be performed as a one-off matinee at the Empire Theater, then a Broadway venue, which was a common prelude to a longer run, but it never got that far.Wharton, circa 1905.Culture Club/Getty ImagesWhy? Accounts vary, with culprits ranging from the subject matter (assisted suicide) to a discontented Frohman to an unenthusiastic de Wolfe. Wharton reportedly planned to “strengthen some of the roles” during the announced postponement. But for whatever reason, the postponement became permanent and essentially marked the end of her playwriting days.Much of the play’s raw material would soon provide fodder for her 1907 novel “The Fruit of the Tree,” which served as a useful resource for the cast and crew of the Shaw Festival’s new production. This was especially valuable since the script raised some questions of its own. Katherine Gauthier, who stars as the upwardly mobile (and potentially sinister) Kate Derwent, said she identified several aspects that she believes would have been tweaked after the initial Empire Theater performance.“It had kind of a smorgasbord of genres,” Gauthier said of the original text. “Our challenge has been to put all of these people in the same world.”Gauthier is a playwright herself, as is the director, Peter Hinton-Davis, who described the initial script as “a bit like getting a rehearsal draft” — to the point where he felt almost queasy about taking it on.“We really don’t know why it didn’t get produced, and part of me wonders if Wharton even wanted it produced,” Hinton-Davis said. “We all have stuff at the bottoms of drawers.”“It had kind of a smorgasbord of genres,” Gauthier said of Wharton’s text. “Our challenge has been to put all of these people in the same world.”David CooperHe said the “Shadow” actors, eager to make a good first impression on behalf of the piece, felt more beholden to the original text than they would have for a better-known work. All of the words being performed are Wharton’s, but Hinton-Davis described the rehearsal process as “a constant navigation between the found text and the edited text that we used.” For one thing, he arrived at rehearsals with a considerably leaner version, only to reinsert certain witticisms and plot points along the way.Hinton-Davis also added some audiovisual components, including real-time close-ups courtesy of four onstage cameras, that might have sent de Wolfe to her fainting couch. “Some people will be divided on this production, no question,” said Carroll, who contrasted this approach to what he called the “archaeologically exact sort of staging” common to so many period pieces.Gauthier drew a different comparison from the perspective of Shaw Festival audiences. “I think some people are coming in primed to see another ‘Gaslight,’” she said, alluding to last year’s reboot of another woman-in-trouble drama that played in the same atmospheric theater. “But while a lot of plays come to you, this one asks you to lean forward and listen.”Those who do will hear a fledgling playwright take a tentative but intriguing step toward many of the themes that would animate her novels — the persistence of class, the fluidity of our personas and how they change from relationship to relationship. “Given her mastery of multiple genres, I think she would have done well had she stuck it out as a playwright,” Chinery said.That possibility remains unknowable (unless other plays also surface, including a missing title called “The Tightrope” that Wharton alluded to in her letters). Still, “Shadow” offers a titillating look at what she might have done with — and to — the prevailing theatrical styles of the time.“A lot of people think of realism as the antithesis to artifice, as opposed to melodrama or farce,” Hinton-Davis said. “But I think of realism as the antithesis to idealism, and Wharton excelled at that. I see her as a wonderful satirist.” More
The best productions at the Ruhrtriennale festival created a sense of unity with their unique, often vast, settings.For six weeks each year, the Ruhrtriennale festival transforms the economically depressed Ruhr region of northwest of Germany into ground zero for cutting edge art and performance.Since 2002, this lavishly funded event, which puts on roughly 30 productions each summer, has lured artists and audiences to Germany’s rust belt with its robust and unexpected programming. And whereas many of Europe’s summer arts festivals can feel interchangeable, the Ruhrtriennale is devoted to works that can’t be experienced the same way anywhere else. Many have been created specifically for the postindustrial sites that dot the region.Earlier this month, the Ruhrtriennale’s artistic director Barbara Frey inaugurated her third and final festival program with her own staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” presented in the Kraftzentrale, the cavernous former power station of a disused steel and coal plant. It was the opening salvo in an interdisciplinary program, running through Sept. 23, that includes an immersive production of a Janacek opera and an art installation in a Brutalist church.The desolate set for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” designed by Martin Zehetgruber, features rusting cars half-sunken in the earth and sparse trees that suggest Shakespeare’s enchanted forest is on the verge of collapse. This is a gloomy “Midsummer,” both visually (thanks to Rainer Küng’s lighting) and atmospherically, and while it is enlivened by fine acting by a troupe of 10 performers, the production itself is oddly sterile and detached. Dorothee Hartinger’s wry and insouciant Puck and Oliver Nägele’s gruff and bittersweet Bottom are standouts. However, most of the time, the actors, drawn largely from the permanent ensemble at the Burgtheater, in Vienna, recite Shakespeare’s text with fine, crisp diction, but without truly inhabiting their characters.Cast members from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from left: Meike Droste, Marie-Luise Stockinger, Sabine Haupt, Markus Scheumann, Sylvie Rohrer, Gunther Eckes, Oliver Nägele and Langston Uibe.Matthias Horn/Ruhrtriennale 2023For a play that dances on the threshold between dream and waking, and art and reality, Frey’s production feels like a slow waltz. (The frequent music box-like tinkering by an onstage musician quickly grew tiring.) There is much to admire, but little to quicken the pulse.I missed the site specificity of the festival’s most memorable productions. When Florentina Holzinger staged “A Divine Comedy” at the Kraftzentrale, in 2021, she made fuller use of the space to create an infernal cabaret-variety show. Although I was not a fan of that production, I must admit that Holzinger’s spectacularly overstuffed staging, featuring joyriding motorcycles and cars, and even a grand piano suspended from the ceiling, was visually stunning. By contrast, Frey’s production, which will transfer to the Burgtheater in September, seems designed for any theater with a rotating stage.There was greater sense of unity between the production and the venue at the world premiere of Gisèle Vienne’s “Extra Life,” at the Salzlager, in the city of Essen.Two years ago Vienne, a distinctive French choreographer and director, was at the Ruhr with her clammy and hallucinatory chamber piece “L’Étang” (“The Pond”). While that previous work was insistently small-scale, with two actors playing 10 roles on a mostly bare set, “Extra Life” embraces the vastness of a former salt storage facility.From left: Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick and Adele Haenel in “Extra Life,” at the Ruhrtriennale in Essen, Germany.Katrin Ribbe/Ruhrtriennale 2023Like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Vienne’s latest creation is a nocturnal piece. In the vast, often fog-shrouded confines of the Salzlager, she unspools a simple yet enigmatic tale about two estranged siblings (Adèle Haenel and Theo Livesey), who reunite at a party and rekindle their relationship, sifting through a painful family history. A third character (Katia Petrowick), who emerges during their long night of the soul, might be a kindred spirit who follows them from the party into the woods. Or perhaps she is a composite of figures from the siblings’ past, or of unconscious wishes.This is a demanding and elliptical production, in which much is implied, but little is ever settled. Vienne and her fellow artists achieve uncanny and cathartic effects through pared-down dialogue, controlled slow-motion choreography and dazzling laser stage lighting (by Yves Godin) that suggests both being at a club and inside a video game. Immersed in the swirl of fog, lasers and a synthesizer score by Caterina Barbieri, the audience seems bathed in postindustrial electricity.With its disquieting blend of surreal and blandly quotidian elements, “Extra Life” can be an exasperating puzzle. It’s best to just surrender to its visual and sonic rhythms over the course of its unhurried 140 minutes. Over the coming months, the production will travel to Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and France.This is Frey’s last summer leading the Ruhrtriennale. Her time at the festival has widely been judged a success, especially next to the troubled reign of her predecessor, Stefanie Carp. But the creators Frey championed were often extreme, or obscure.From next year, the Belgian director Ivo van Hove will be in charge. Like his predecessors, he is sure to put his stamp on the festival, and there is no doubting that van Hove has a questing and disruptive bent. The Ruhrtriennale will give him his biggest canvas yet. I’m curious to see how he chooses to fill the Ruhr region’s majestic cathedrals of industry.RuhrtriennaleThrough Sept. 23 at various venues in northwestern Germany; ruhrtrienniale.de. More
Fans of the reality show were not happy after a local ABC affiliate showed a preseason game between the Washington Commanders and Baltimore Ravens instead.Fans of “The Bachelorette” reality television show who live in the Washington, D.C., area were unable to watch the finale of the show’s 20th season on Monday night. It turns out their ABC affiliate showed an N.F.L. game instead — and a preseason one at that.If you know any “Bachelorette” fans, you can probably guess how the Washington-area ones felt about this particular programming call.“I was pretty frustrated,” Pegah Moradi, 25, who lives in Arlington, Va., said by phone early Tuesday.“It’s more important for sports to be live, obviously, than it is for a prerecorded reality show finale,” said Ms. Moradi, a graduate student. “But at the same time, it’s difficult when something that you’re accustomed to viewing at a certain time is just not there.”The practice of cutting one must-watch TV broadcast for another, more common in the past, has become rare in the streaming era. If something is important enough to broadcast live these days, networks and streaming platforms can usually find a way to do that.But on Monday, the “Bachelorette” finale was shelved in the D.C. area by ABC’s local affiliate in favor of a football game between the Washington Commanders and the Baltimore Ravens. (The Commanders won, 29-28, after kicking a field goal in the game’s waning seconds.)“It might be because the two football teams are regional favorites that people are obsessed with,” said Julia Swift, a professor in the Division of Communication and Creative Media at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt. “But people are also obsessed with ‘The Bachelorette.’”The “Bachelorette” finale was available on Charge!, a broadcasting network owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Charge! is free and does not require a paid subscription. But some fans, including Ms. Moradi, had never heard of it and could not figure out how to watch.Professor Swift said that it would have made more sense to air the episode on a streaming platform that belongs to ABC or Disney, the network’s corporate parent.Representatives for Disney did not respond to a request for comment overnight. Neither did a spokesman for the N.F.L.The latest season of “The Bachelorette,” a spinoff of “The Bachelor” and “Bachelor in Paradise,” stars Charity Lawson, a real-life child-and-family therapist from Georgia who is looking for a life partner. Ms. Lawson, 27, began the season with 25 suitors; by the finale, she was down to three.The ABC affiliate that cut the finale likely did so after calculating that more people would watch the football game, said Amanda Lotz, a professor of media studies at Queensland University of Technology in Australia who has studied the U.S. television industry. Whatever the reason, the decision illustrates how the federal policies governing American television today were designed decades ago to promote “local sovereignty” by giving local affiliates discretion over what to air, said Professor Lotz, the author of “We Now Disrupt This Broadcast: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All.”The concept of “local sovereignty” may sound anachronistic in the streaming era, she added, “but these were policies that were designed to protect local community differences so that they wouldn’t be overrun by the creation of a national culture.”One way to read Monday’s scheduling call would be as a kind of karmic victory for football fans, who were famously denied the ending of a nail biter of a game between the Jets and the Oakland Raiders on Nov. 17, 1968. With 50 seconds left, the television broadcast cut out abruptly to make way for “Heidi,” a made-for-TV children’s movie about a Swiss orphan.As for the “Bachelorette,” Ms. Moradi said she understood that the Commanders and the Ravens are both in her television market and have local fan bases. “But a preseason N.F.L. game versus the finale of a major franchise TV show is not a very difficult decision to make in terms of what to broadcast,” she said.After her viewing plans were scrambled on Monday, Ms. Moradi inadvertently saw a spoiler for the show as she searched for how to watch. At this point, she said, she wonders if watching the finale will even be worth her time.“Everyone I know who was watching it will have already seen it, for the most part, so I’ll just kind of be in the dark for 24 hours,” she said. “I won’t get to join in on this rare experience: watching live TV at the same time as everyone else.” More
Our critics debate how well shows like “Six,” “& Juliet” and “Once Upon a One More Time” engage with the inner worlds of women onstage.During the first act of “Once Upon a One More Time,” the Broadway jukebox musical that grooves to the Britney Spears oeuvre, a fairy godmother arrives with a present for Cinderella. A gown? No. Glass slippers? No. Cin has enough already. Instead, her godmother gifts her a copy of Betty Friedan’s 1963 best seller, “The Feminine Mystique.”It’s a clumsy gesture in the show, which plans to close next month. (Feminist thought has advanced in 60 years!) And arguably emblematic of a recent spate of Broadway musicals that set feminism to a pop beat, including “Six,” a zippy modern retelling of the lives of Henry VIII’s six wives; “& Juliet,” whose protagonist, miraculously alive, embarks on a girls’ trip of self-discovery; and “Bad Cinderella” (now closed), a chaotic rejiggering of the classic fairy tale. Aimed at girls and women (historically the majority of Broadway ticket buyers), these shows may be sincere attempts to engage with women’s issues — or they’re hollow efforts to capitalize on calls for change. Empty political gestures on Broadway? To quote a song used in two of these shows: “Oops! … I did it again.”On a recent morning, Laura Collins-Hughes, contributing theater critic and reporter; Salamishah Tillet, critic at large; and Lindsay Zoladz, pop music critic, gathered to debate facts and fairy tales. They discussed how narrowly these shows define empowerment, if they define it at all, and why Prince Charming gets the best song. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The recent musicals “Six,” “& Juliet,” “Bad Cinderella” and “Once Upon a One More Time” take female empowerment as their central theme. Are these shows actually empowering or legibly feminist?LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES I wouldn’t say any of them are feminist.SALAMISHAH TILLET Some are empowering, others are not. “Six” is partly feminist, because it shows the impact of King Henry VIII’s misogyny. With the exception of Anne Boleyn, most of his wives have been relegated to the margins. My 11-year-old daughter really loved that these women finally reclaimed their stories and did it with style! But I felt like I was at a fun pop concert rather than at a big Broadway musical.COLLINS-HUGHES “Six” drives me completely up the wall. It wants to have a good time in the neighborhood of spousal murder and abandonment, singing “I don’t need your love.” As if Henry’s love had anything to do with it. As if abuse is what a man’s love for a woman looks like.Lauren Zakrin, second from left, as Little Mermaid gets her voice back upon reading “The Feminine Mystique” in “Once Upon a One More Time.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLINDSAY ZOLADZ I like “Six,” but probably for the reason Salamishah doesn’t — it’s basically a pop concert. I do think the overarching problem with these musicals is the way they fail to define terms, presenting “empowerment” and “feminism” as given, unexamined virtues. Instead of the marriage proposal that supposedly leads to the happily ever after, it’s … empowerment ever after? “Once Upon a One More Time” provided the clearest distillation of the trend. Cinderella’s “feminist awakening” is spurred by her fairy godmother giving her “The Feminine Mystique.” Seriously. The book is treated like a magical talisman throughout the rest of the show, but its actual content is never engaged with. That seems beyond the show’s grasp. Though the book is on sale for $20 in the lobby gift shop.TILLET I gasped when she discovered the book.ZOLADZ Not in a good way, I’m guessing.Doesn’t Cinderella know that women’s studies syllabuses have moved on?TILLET Or that Friedan was heavily criticized for her bourgeois feminism back in the day? Is it weird that we are still locating the beginnings of feminism exclusively in the sexual liberation of straight, white, middle-class, stay-at-home 1950s wives? But that’s an ongoing problem, not just on Broadway.Why do you think we’re seeing these shows now? Is it a cynical attempt to appeal to female ticket buyers or something more organic?TILLET These shows, despite their best intentions, seem limited by their source material. There was a lot of Cinderella this year! The publicity appeal of anything Cinderella is obvious, so for Broadway theaters struggling to get audiences back into the theater, of course it is a ploy.From left: Justin David Sullivan, Melanie La Barrie, Lorna Courtney and Betsy Wolfe in “& Juliet.” With its thoughtful casting of a Black Juliet and the nonbinary character May, the show enables us to see Shakespeare differently, one critic said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCOLLINS-HUGHES “Bad Cinderella” could have been so much more than it was. It is a messy show, it’s always been a messy show, but in London it was actually fun. It had a bit of substance to it. And magic. The feminism, which was so clear and so dramatically propulsive in the London version, was wiped away for Broadway.I took my daughter to “Bad Cinderella” and afterward we had a conversation about the show’s messaging, which was confused at best. Is it asking too much of a musical to also have great messages?COLLINS-HUGHES This question makes me think we all live in fear of that riposte that often greets girls and women who won’t laugh along at a joke that’s not funny: “Where’s your sense of humor?” It’s perfectly legitimate to recoil from a show whose message bugs you, and all the more if it’s at odds with its girl-power, you-be-you marketing.And yet if a show is successful enough in other ways, the messaging may not matter. That was my delighted experience of “& Juliet.”TILLET This was definitely my favorite pop feminist musical of the year. I was genuinely intrigued by the conceit of what happens if Juliet doesn’t die. What life does she make for herself beyond the formula prescribed for her? The musical opens up possibilities for her as a protagonist. And with its thoughtful casting of Lorna Courtney as a Black Juliet and Justin David Sullivan as the nonbinary character, May, it enables us to see Shakespeare differently, too.COLLINS-HUGHES When it has a top-notch cast, “& Juliet” is a blast. But I am baffled that people perceive it as feminist. It really is not.ZOLADZ Say more!COLLINS-HUGHES I don’t mean that it’s anti-feminist, but I don’t think it’s particularly female-centered — not on Juliet, nor on Anne Hathaway [Shakespeare’s wife], who gets one of the subplots.“Bad Cinderella,” starring Linedy Genao, had a brief run this spring. “The feminism, which was so clear and so dramatically propulsive in the London version, was wiped away for Broadway,” one critic said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith the exception of “Six,” these shows are largely created by men. Does that explain anything?COLLINS-HUGHES Of course. It’s not that men can’t and don’t write women well or can’t imagine women’s lives. And it’s certainly not that artists should stick to writing only about people just like them. But they are writing from the outside. That can come with a lot of blind spots and a lot of misapprehensions.All of these musicals use a pop vernacular, “Bad Cinderella” somewhat less so. Is pop, particularly pop written and produced by men, a useful form for feminist discourse?ZOLADZ Something I’ve been thinking about regarding “Once Upon a One More Time” and especially “& Juliet,” which uses the songs of the massive millennial hitmaker Max Martin, is the lyrical limitation of a lot of modern pop music. Martin and the generation of pop architects who followed him treat lyrics almost as an afterthought. Martin has referred to his method of songwriting as “melodic math.” “& Juliet” was fun and more cleverly written than “Once Upon a One More Time,” but a lot of that had to do with the ironic distance between the lyrics themselves and the winking, metatextual way the characters employed them — like when “I Want It That Way,” by the Backstreet Boys, becomes not so much a love song as a narration of an argument between Shakespeare and his wife, who have conflicting opinions about how his latest play should end.TILLET I hated a lot of those pop songs and found them anti-feminist when they originally came out, but when I sang along with the “& Juliet” audience and my tween daughter, I found that they aged better than I had expected. Or maybe, because I’m now middle-age, I’m mistaking nostalgia for progress.COLLINS-HUGHES Inattention to lyrics is a limitation of jukebox musicals, but it doesn’t hold for original pop songs, which can be whatever the writer makes them. It would help, though, if more of the songwriters getting musicals produced were women.ZOLADZ I generally pay more attention to pop music than Broadway musicals, so I found the sound of these shows to be quite striking. Modern pop’s influence is everywhere, especially in a show like “Six,” which is full of electronic beats, hip-hop cadences and direct nods to artists like Beyoncé and Ariana Grande. Is that a trend you have observed over time? And given that this is such a golden age for female pop stars, do you think that crossover appeal has something to do with the rise of these empowerment musicals?COLLINS-HUGHES Musically, “Hamilton” changed Broadway, but it is very much a guy story. Having proved the hunger for modern pop musicals, it left a lot of room for female artists to fill.Do these shows do that filling?COLLINS-HUGHES Musically? Sometimes. But in terms of storytelling, generally no. There are such blinders on imagination, and there’s such an aversion to nuance. It’s a question of whom you’re trying to please. The perception of risk is about displeasing men, not the women and girls who might want to see smart, muscular new musicals.Megan Hilty, left, and Shoshana Bean in “Wicked,” which is partly about a girl learning to harness the power of her outrage to fight against injustice in the world.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDoes the success of the Barbie movie, directed and co-written by a woman, with its several song and dance numbers, point a way forward?COLLINS-HUGHES Absolutely, if the idea is to give the best numbers to the guys.ZOLADZ And the charisma! That’s what ultimately sank “Once Upon a One More Time” for me: Cinderella was often the least compelling character onstage. Juliet didn’t fare much better. I don’t know if blandly “empowered” female characters are the answer. Too often it just feels like a shortcut. Writing flawed, idiosyncratic and more interesting female characters seems like a worthier goal, but most of these shows don’t want to take the risk.TILLET If song choice in a musical is any indication of narrative priorities, “Once Upon a One More Time” had difficulty sustaining its attention on Cinderella and her awakening. Prince Charming got “Oops! … I Did It Again” and her stepmother had “Toxic.” When I watched “Barbie,” I realized how seductive patriarchy is onscreen or onstage, even when we say we are trying to smash it. Why do the Kens get that massive and amazing dance scene?COLLINS-HUGHES A story about or aimed at women is so seldom deemed interesting enough on its own. But Hollywood, like commercial theater, is often in the business of blandification. And who’s blander than Ken? I’d like to think audiences want more than that.These recent shows define empowerment narrowly, restricting it to questions of romantic and sexual relationships with men rather than any broader political awakenings. Why can’t these stories dream bigger or attempt something more intersectional?TILLET I do think a lot of these producers feel that they are being intersectional, simply through casting. But while I appreciate so much more diversity onstage, it is still not enough. The musicals would really have to try to dismantle various forms of oppression at once. That takes nuance, patience and a really radical imagination. An older musical, “The Color Purple,” was successful at this, which brings us back to the strength of the source material, Alice Walker’s novel, and then a sizable female team behind its Broadway staging. It is an understatement to say that the evolution of Celie, who endured such abuse and trauma, is far more compelling than Cinderella’s!ZOLADZ What I find missing from a lot of contemporary art about female empowerment is the way it focuses on the attainment of power and then stops there. What about stories about how easily power can corrupt those who have it? Yes, even women!COLLINS-HUGHES This is a thing that “Wicked” imagines. And two decades on, it’s still packing houses and making loads of money. That show is partly about a girl learning to harness the power of her outrage to fight against injustice in the world.TILLET I’ve seen “Wicked” twice recently. The depth of the storytelling — when the villain and heroine aren’t what they seem — it is just so good. Is it feminist? Maybe. Does it reveal the power and heartbreak of female friendship as the ultimate love story? Very much so. For that alone, it provides a wonderful model for how to really revel in the inner worlds of women onstage. More
One day last week, a vase spilling over with white lilies and roses arrived in Kristen Kish’s dressing room in Milwaukee, where “Top Chef” is shooting its 21st season.Padma Lakshmi, the model and author who became a household name during the 17 years she hosted the cooking-competition show, had sent them, along with a note: “Break a leg. I’m so proud of you kiddo!”For Ms. Kish, who was so nervous her first day on the set as Ms. Lakshmi’s replacement that she thought she might throw up, the flowers were a balm.“I know my job is to simply be me,” Ms. Kish said, “but I feel like I am not going to be impressive enough to hold my own space and follow in Padma’s footsteps.”Truth is, the aging “Top Chef” franchise, which has had its share of stumbles in an increasingly crowded constellation of food shows, needs her as much as she needs it. At 39, Ms. Kish represents a third wave of chef celebrity, far removed from pioneers like Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay, and the generation of tattooed, mostly white kitchen bros who followed.Ms. Kish is a gay Korean adoptee and a proud product of the Midwest. She hits the notes sung by culinary stars before her: She co-wrote a cookbook, opened a restaurant and makes much of her living on camera, a skill she polished on several other shows before landing the “Top Chef” job in July. On social media, she toggles seamlessly between charming brand promotions, food tips and sincere declarations — about love, self-care and even self-doubt — that can border on oversharing.Under all her casual confidence, she says, is a foundation of crushing insecurity.Ms. Kish has been on “Top Chef” as a contestant and judge, and is comfortable on the set in Milwaukee.Lyndon French for The New York Times“I have severe social anxiety and I’m on television, which is wild,” she said. “I know I’m a walking contradiction.”That’s hard to buy when you see her stride onto the set with the command of a model (which she once was). The show’s stylist selected heeled boots and wide pants for her tall, lean body as a way to project authority. She broke into a goofy dance one moment, then hit her mark perfectly the next. The first time she uttered, “Please pack your knives and go” — the chilling phrase Ms. Lakshmi delivered when a contestant was eliminated — the crew applauded.“Kristen is a megawatt,” said Dana Cowin, the former editor in chief of Food & Wine and a “Top Chef” judge for seven seasons. She recently watched Ms. Kish confess her personal fears as she demonstrated how to make Korean-style corn dogs for a rapt audience at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colo. “She was just so vulnerable and open.”If Ms. Kish had a brand, it might be wrapped in millennial pink and laced with the ideals of a generation that values earnestness, diversity and being nice.“She’s been on a huge journey defining how we can be a chef in the post-celebrity-chef era and how we can think about our global community in a bigger way,” said her friend Gregory Gourdet, the Portland, Ore., chef who was both a judge on the show and a finalist.The Heir ApparentIt all started when Ms. Kish won “Top Chef” in 2013.“She is completely a creature of the franchise,” said Francis Lam, a frequent guest host and the vice president and editor in chief of Clarkson Potter, which published “Kristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques” in 2017. “On some level she can be a little bit of a cipher. People can put a lot on her based on their assumptions.”When Ms. Lakshmi announced that she would not renew her contract as the show’s host and executive producer, Ms. Kish was the clear choice, said Casey Kriley, a chief executive of Magical Elves, the unscripted-production company that created the show. Executives at NBCUniversal, which owns Bravo, the network it airs on, never interviewed anyone else, said Ryan Flynn, a senior vice president.“She checks all the boxes,” he said.Ms. Kish battled Brooke Williamson in Seattle to win Season 10 of “Top Chef” in 2013.David Moir/BravoMs. Kish got word that “Top Chef” wanted her while flying back to the East Coast with her wife, Bianca Dusic, after doing promotional work for a hotel in Thailand.“I was shocked,” she said. “I really wasn’t pushing for this because I never thought it was actually a possibility.”Ms. Lakshmi was the first person she called. “I hope I’ve been a sounding board for her over the last decade,” Ms. Lakshmi wrote in an email. “I’ve made it my mission to mentor young women like her because I didn’t have that coming up.”Ms. Lakshmi, a victim of sexual assault, often spoke out about sexual harassment in the restaurant industry, including accusations against a “Top Chef” winner, and pushed to make the show less Eurocentric.Ms. Kish said that although she will have no problem being blunt if she needs to, she intends to focus on the work, not the politics.“TV is populated by people who love to hear their own voice,” said Hugh Acheson, a chef who made his name with restaurants in Georgia and was a judge on the show for six seasons. “And that isn’t Kristen at all.”Tom Colicchio, the chef who serves as the show’s head judge, said he was excited to have someone new in the mix, especially an experienced chef. “She knows what she’s doing,” he said.Gail Simmons, the show’s other judge and a close friend of Ms. Kish, didn’t think she needed much advice: “The only concern I had was her own self-doubt.”Gail Simmons and Tom Colicchio, Ms. Kish’s new co-workers on “Top Chef,” said they she didn’t need much advice before shooting Season 21.Lyndon French for The New York TimesUnder ControlA precise and focused cook with French and Italian influences, Ms. Kish has long relied on organization to counter her anxiety. Growing up in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Mich., she kept a whiteboard in her room to keep track of her schoolwork, piano lessons and sports. Her older brother, Jonathan, an automotive engineer, gave her a cordless vacuum as a housewarming present when she recently moved to Connecticut with the Australian-born Ms. Dusic. She uses it every day she’s home.Ms. Kish is much looser about what she eats and wears. She prefers hoodies and a ball cap turned backward. Her favorite cosmetic is Carmex. She’d just as soon eat chicken tenders, sour candy and squares of presliced Colby-Jack cheese on a saltine.The Hamburger Helper that brought her joy as a child inspired a pasta dish of curly edged mafaldine tossed with mushrooms and pearl onions that is popular at her Austin restaurant, Arlo Grey.This baffles her mother, Judy Kish. “I truly did not use Hamburger Helper very often,” she said during a recent family interview on Zoom. “I really don’t understand why it’s so vivid in her memory, to tell you the truth.”The elder Ms. Kish was a high school teacher, and her husband, Michael, was an engineer at a company that made corrugated cardboard boxes. In 1984, the couple adopted the four-month-old Kristen, who had been abandoned shortly after birth at a clinic outside Seoul.They strove to keep her connected to her birth country, making sure she tasted kimchi, introducing her to a Korean exchange student and reading her “The Korean Cinderella” by Shirley Climo. (Ms. Kish had the story spray-painted on the restroom walls of her restaurant. Speakers softly play a recording of a woman reading it in Korean.)A young Ms. Kish giving her mother, Judy, a ride on a tractor. Courtesy of Clarkson PotterFor a long time, Ms. Kish tried not to think about her Korean roots. “I put it aside because I was scared that I was going to find out something that I didn’t want to find out about where I actually came from,” she said.Still, in her 20s, she had her Korean name and adoption case number inked on her wrist — the first of many tattoos marking important moments in her life.After she won “Top Chef,” she vowed to use some of the $125,000 prize money to visit South Korea, but couldn’t go through with it. Nine years later, Netflix sent her to Seoul on a five-day promotional trip tied to her work as a host on “Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend.” She didn’t search out orphanages, as some adoptees do. Instead, she focused on learning about the food.Can someone who didn’t grow up in a Korean family legitimately cook the cuisine? It’s a question she grapples with.“I’m trying to own that side of me so it doesn’t feel like I’m appropriating a culture that doesn’t belong to me,” she said. “I clearly can have a point of view about Korean American food. There is a connection. I’m allowed to explore it. But for a long time I felt guilty about it.”An Education in FameDespite her shyness as a child, she had a lot of friends. By high school she was firmly ensconced with the preps.“We had Abercrombie clothes, and I had purple contacts,” she said. “I was trying to be everything except me. I wanted to hide.”Especially, she said, her budding attraction to women.Her grades weren’t good enough to get into Michigan State University, where her brother and both her parents graduated. She spent a year at Grand Valley State University, but didn’t go back. Her parents, who said she always had a creative streak with food, sent her to Chicago to attend Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts. She loved it and graduated, but also discovered cocaine and the bars.“A lot of it was trying to mask and self-medicate my social anxiety and my sexuality,” she said. Ms. Kish convinced herself that being successful couldn’t include being gay.Ms. Kish brings her longtime hairstylist to the set, and likes to have a candle and candy in her dressing room. Lyndon French for The New York TimesShe kept partying, turning down jobs she thought were beneath her. Finally, her parents stopped paying for her nice apartment. She moved back home, depressed and defeated.They gave her one more chance. They knew of a room for rent in Boston, and offered to help pay for it if she found a job within three weeks.She did, cooking in a series of kitchens that led to a job at Stir, a cookbook store and demonstration kitchen owned by the chef and restaurateur Barbara Lynch. Ms. Lynch became a mentor, passing her name to producers who had called looking for new “Top Chef” contestants.Ms. Lynch wrote a letter that Ms. Kish had in her back pocket when she won. “So very proud of you,” it read. “Breathe and most of all enjoy the experience!!”Ms. Kish doesn’t have much to say about recent reports that Ms. Lynch verbally and physically harassed workers at her restaurants.“I had been removed from her company for 10 years, so I don’t know,” Ms. Kish said. “What I do know is that if she never said, ‘Kristen, you can win Top Chef,’ none of this would be happening. And that’s a fact.”Over a cheeseburger at Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan last month, Ms. Kish pondered how to navigate her fast-rising fame. She guards the name of the town where she lives, and is careful what she says when she’s out somewhere, because people eavesdrop. She is trying to get better at responding to the strangers who approach her in places like the supermarket.Bianca Dusic, Ms. Kish’s wife, often travels with her to jobs, and is close with Ms. Kish’s family.Lyndon French for The New York Times“When I get insecure and uncomfortable and socially anxious, I kind of become, for lack of a better term, a bitch,” Ms. Kish said. Ms. Dusic prompts her to snap out of it with a code phrase: “Nasty Nancy’s here.”The two met when Ms. Dusic was the corporate executive assigned to help Ms. Kish open her Austin restaurant in the LINE Hotel in 2018. After six months of intense work side by side, they shared a high-five that lasted a little longer than they expected.They were married in their backyard in April 2021. As with their engagement, Ms. Kish announced it on Instagram.Ms. Dusic, 44, left the restaurant industry when the stress of working during the Covid shutdowns and grief over her father’s death from cancer made her sick. Now she is a “mind-set and transformation coach” who offers breath work and other therapies, which she uses to help Ms. Kish. She also has persuaded Ms. Kish to stop ordering so much takeout.Ms. Dusic frequently accompanies Ms. Kish when she works. At home, they putter in the garden, drink tea and are in bed by 10 p.m. It’s all about managing a life that just keeps getting bigger.“This was never the plan,” Ms. Kish said. “The plan would have been for me to just work in a little restaurant, making ends meet, doing my life and just keep trucking along.”Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More
In his Broadway debut, the illusionist Antonio Díaz does levitation and teleportation. But it’s simple tricks, with cards and balls, that really wow.Not so long ago, landing a helicopter on a Broadway stage was kind of a big deal. In “El Mago Pop,” the charming, thrilling, silly Broadway show by the Spanish illusionist Antonio Díaz, it is one of the more minor stunts. The stage is empty. Then it’s ornamented by a red and silver copter. Then it’s empty again, except for lights and sparks.Díaz grew up on the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain. Like most professional magicians, he discovered magic early and worked at it obsessively, a process he details in a long video sequence that begins the brief show. (Excluding the video and a padded curtain call, the live action runs perhaps an hour.) At 37, he claims to be the youngest illusionist to present a show on Broadway, but as with many of his effects, that’s a tricky thing to verify. Doug Henning seems to have been the same age.Díaz bops onto the stage of the Ethel Barrymore Theater in a white shirt, skinny black pants and a skinnier black tie, the outfit of an excitable 1960s mod. He is short and slight, with long, nimble fingers — watch those fingers when you can, the precision and economy are gorgeous — and a high, fast voice. In contrast with the heavy eyeliner and gothic fripperies of magic’s 2000s efflorescence, he seems indefatigably nice and bountifully cheerful as he bounces up and down in his sneakers, which seem to have helium lifts. He is a prestidigitator you could take home to mother.As if to underline that sweetness, each ticketholder receives a candy jar upon entering. The jars feature in a fairly modest mathematics-focused magic trick. Still the gesture is nice. This boy-next-door persona sometimes feels at odds with the director Mag Lari’s extravagant staging, a symphony of blinding lights and so very many open flames. A day later I am still picking confetti out of my clothes. But maybe that’s what happens when the boy next door comes to Broadway. And yet his skills are never in doubt.“I intend for you to see impossible things tonight,” Díaz says. Fairly often, he delivers.There is a recent trend in magic, popularized by performers like Derek DelGaudio and Helder Guimarães, to weave tricks into some larger narrative, often a personal history. Díaz gestures toward that, but he doesn’t actually share much of himself. The video suggests the story of a boy who dreams of achieving the incredible. And Díaz tells the audience that this brief stint on Broadway culminates those dreams, which nods to an emotional undercurrent. But there’s little narrative here, just the sense of a canny and dexterous performer checking off another box on a “Become an International Sensation” to-do list.Díaz’s rise, like his stage maneuvers, is presented as unfailingly smooth, with doubt, quirk and adversity scrubbed away. In place of narrative, there are cartoon video interludes — Díaz as a superhero, Díaz as an old man — and a relentlessly basic playlist Díaz relies on: “Power of Love,” “Shut Up and Dance,” the “Star Wars” theme, multiple Coldplay numbers. (Díaz and Jesús Díaz are credited with the music selection; they are not related.) There is also, absurdly, an extended clip from “Forrest Gump.”Díaz’s best tricks were simple — achieved by practice, determination and flabbergasting dexterity.Emilio Madrid“El Mago Pop” alternates between large-scale illusions and smaller ones, performed in the aisles of the orchestra and shot by roaming cameramen. This means that if you are seated in the back of the theater or in the upper tiers, you will see the show mostly onscreen, which has a way of diminishing awe. Most of us have been spoiled by too many special effects, editing tricks and filters to trust the evidence of screens. For me, the close-up stunts performed in the opposite aisle felt far less astonishing than one that happened just a few feet away, in which a volunteer’s ring shot through the air and landed, rattling, inside a covered shot glass.Levitation is one of Díaz’s specialties. Teleportation is another. The teleportation tricks are probably his best. When assistants or ostensible audience members appear, in a blink, in a vitrine on the opposite side of the stage, it produces a giddy feeling of wonder.His audience interaction is less certain. For one trick, he selected a very young child, who looked uncomfortable, even terrified, to be brought onstage. The child didn’t speak, but when Díaz asked, “Do you like magic?” a vigorous shake of the head was given: No. That got a laugh, so Díaz repeated the question. The child squirmed. Was this worth it for a routine with a wristwatch?Díaz’s best routine was performed alone to a peppy Jacques Brel song. Breathlessly, Díaz manipulated a ball (a tribute to Cardini’s classic billiard ball routine), many cards, even his own right shoe. His hands would be empty. His mouth would be empty. You would swear to it on any available Bible. Then they would be full, cards raining to the floor. He sent a few cards whizzing through the air in a way that reminded me of Ricky Jay, the scholar and magician, who died in 2018. I may have teared up a little. This was Díaz’s simplest sequence and also his most beautiful. Who needs a helicopter when you can make magic like that?El Mago PopThrough Aug. 27 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; elmagopop.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More
