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Kevin Spacey Called ‘Sexual Bully’ in U.K. Trial
30 June 2023, 11:50
The prosecution outlined its case against the actor, who has pleaded not guilty to 12 sexual assault charges.The actor Kevin Spacey arriving at the London courthouse with members of his legal team.Kin Cheung/Associated PressThe actor Kevin Spacey is “a sexual bully” who “delights in making others feel powerless and uncomfortable,” a prosecutor told a British jury on Friday. Speaking at Southwark Crown Court, the prosecutor, Christine Agnew, outlined her case against the Academy Award-winning actor, who is on trial in London facing multiple charges of sexual assault.Ms. Agnew said that the actor’s “preferred method” of assault was to “aggressively grab other men in the crotch.” On one occasion, she said, Mr. Spacey had gone further and performed oral sex on a man while he was asleep.The actor “abused the power and influence that his reputation and fame afforded him” to take “who he wanted, when he wanted,” Ms. Agnew said.Mr. Spacey has pleaded not guilty to all charges.The actor, 63, faces 12 charges related to incidents that the prosecution says involved four men and occurred between 2001 and 2013. For much of that period, Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London.Ms. Agnew said that the complainants included an aspiring actor and a man whom Mr. Spacey had met at a work event. Under British law, it is illegal for anyone to identify complainants in sexual assault cases or to publish information that may cause them to be identified.Patrick Gibbs, Mr. Spacey’s legal representative, gave a short statement stressing his client’s innocence. He said the jury would hear some half truths, some “deliberate exaggerations” and “many damned lies.”He asked the jury to consider the complainants’ motivations, and to think about whether the encounters could have been “reasonably believed to be consensual at the time.”During Ms. Agnew’s statement, she discussed interviews that Mr. Spacey had given to the British police under caution. During one of those, she said, Mr. Spacey said that it was “entirely possible and indeed likely” that he had made “a clumsy pass” at other men but that he would never have touched someone’s crotch “without an indication of consent.”Throughout Ms. Agnew’s almost 60-minute opening statement, Mr. Spacey sat in a large transparent box in the middle of the courtroom, wearing a light gray suit, white shirt and gold tie, watching intently. On several occasions, he looked at photographs in an evidence bundle. When Mr. Gibbs spoke, Mr. Spacey nodded along and looked at the jury.Friday morning’s session ended shortly after Mr. Gibbs’s comments. The prosecution its scheduled to call its first witnesses on Monday. More
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‘The Democracy Project’ Brings Drama to Federal Hall
30 June 2023, 11:00
In a show staged in Federal Hall, five prominent playwrights tell the story of the site of significant events in the country’s founding, without glossing over the uglier parts.Tourists who pause outside Federal Hall, a Wall Street memorial maintained by the U.S. National Park Service, will find its neoclassical facade covered in scaffolding. Its front steps, which host a bronze statue of George Washington, are occluded, too. But until July 22, the man himself can be found inside, fussing over his dentures, his sleep and his coming inauguration.“Oh, hon,” his wife, Martha, says. “Don’t lead with your anxieties.”George (Tom Nelis) and Martha (Erin Anderson) are characters in “The Democracy Project,” a collaboration among five playwrights and two directors with a song composed by Michael R. Jackson. Commissioned by Federal Hall, the 45-minute site-specific performance, offered free of charge in the hall’s grand Greek Revival rotunda, is both a pageant-style survey of significant events at the site and an informed critique. Yes, George and Martha are here, but so too are Billy Lee (Nathan Hinton), an enslaved man owned by Washington, and Ona Judge, an enslaved woman owned by his wife, as well as Alexander McGillivray, the Creek chief who signed the Treaty of New York, a short-lived agreement of “peace and friendship,” as its text claims, between the Indigenous people and the fledgling nation.“We try to get as much information and complexity into it as we can,” one of the contributing playwrights, Lisa D’Amour, said of the show in a recent interview.The project began when Marie Salerno, the chief executive officer of Federal Hall, and Lynn Goldner, a producer, were strategizing how to raise the memorial’s profile ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026. Where Federal Hall stands (the original hall was demolished in 1812) was the site of Washington’s inauguration and the first Capitol building. Few besides history buffs — and “Hamilton” viewers — now recall this.“We needed to tell this story,” Salerno said.In 2017, she and Goldner reached out to the playwright Bruce Norris. He suggested bringing in other writers, and Tanya Barfield, D’Amour, Larissa FastHorse and Melissa James Gibson all joined Norris, each of them intrigued by the idea of a site-specific installation inside a national memorial.“I’d never been asked to write a play for a building,” said D’Amour, a veteran of site-specific work.Norris, Barfield, FastHorse and Gibson picked seminal events to focus on that happened at the site — the inauguration, the treaty, the presentation of slave trade petitions that the founding fathers chose to ignore, the adoption of the Bill of Rights. D’Amour was charged with tying it all together. Over years of workshops and meetings, the writers debated how best to describe these events, many of which seemed, to contemporary eyes, flawed or insufficient.Nathan Hinton, from left, with Hart and Nelis in the show. “The Democracy Project” is the work of five playwrights and two directors, and concludes with an original song.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The performance is meant to shake up the reverential quality of the site, to put forward the unreconciled questions that are pervasive in our idea of who we are as a democracy and to say that our founding wasn’t pristine,” said Tamilla Woodard, a co-director with Tai Thompson.The show was originally scheduled for summer 2020, but the pandemic interfered. The events of subsequent months — the pandemic itself, the racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — only made these unreconciled questions seem more urgent. Workshops and meetings went on. A promenade approach, in which audiences would travel throughout the building, was forwarded, then scrapped. Scenes were condensed in favor of a 45-minute running time, so as not to exhaust tourists and school groups who would visit the memorial’s other exhibits. The resulting performance is, like America, a record of compromises. And until very recently, its conclusion was still undetermined.“It’s really difficult to reconcile everybody’s experience — not just the characters’ experiences, but also the writers’ experiences and to say something that each person feels OK with,” Woodard said. She estimated that a scene toward the end had been written and rewritten nearly 50 times.Eventually Jackson was brought on to compose a song, “Democracy Is Messy,” as a way to close the piece. It includes the lyrics, “Democracy is messy/And everybody’s dream is not the same/So we push up the hill/And we do our best to play an unfair game.”If this acknowledgment of mess does not entirely flatter the events at Federal Hall, the commissioners still sound pleased with it.“We don’t really know any other national memorial that has developed an original play by important artists to address its own history,” Goldner said.In the years they spent working on the piece, the writers, who all contributed to one another’s scenes, argued and bargained and conceded and learned to live with what they’d made. This, too, was a democratic project. Participating in it has made many of its creators think more rigorously about America’s project, too.Gibson, a Canadian American with dual citizenship, wrote George Washington’s opening scene. She had come into the process more forgiving of the founding fathers. But she learned much making the show, and feels less forgiving now.“I’m a skeptical patriot,” she said. “I love this country. But wow, we have so much work to do. We are so deeply in progress.” More
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Marvin Kitman, Satirist Whose Main Target Was TV, Dies at 93
29 June 2023, 18:53
He twitted the networks for 35 years as a critic at Newsday. He also audited George Washington’s wartime expense account and wrote a biography of Bill O’Reilly.Marvin Kitman, who survived longer as a television reviewer than most of the programs he mirthfully critiqued, and who as a satirist and amateur historian audaciously, if belatedly, audited George Washington’s Revolutionary War expense account, died on Thursday at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, N.J. He was 93.His son, Jamie Kitman, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Kitman joined the leftist but anti-Soviet magazine The New Leader as a TV critic in 1967, only after the magazine’s editor agreed that he could reveal in his first column that he had never regularly watched television.He began writing a syndicated column for the Long Island daily newspaper Newsday on Dec. 7, 1969 — “a day that will live in infamy,” he said, “as far as the TV industry is concerned.”Over 35 years he churned out 5,786 columns, championing groundbreaking shows like “All in the Family,” “Seinfeld” and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” while mercilessly panning others. He branded the 1980 debut of the sixth season of “Saturday Night Live” “offensive and raunchy” and wrote of “Kentucky Woman,” a 1983 TV movie starring Cheryl Ladd, the former “Charlie’s Angels” star: “Cheryl Ladd as a coal miner was a very moving television experience. It made me want to convert to nuclear power.”In 1982, Mr. Kitman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His last column was published on April 1, 2005. (“Newsday gave me a tryout,” he wrote, “and after 35 years we decided it wasn’t working out.”)He also wrote a number of books. The most notable was probably “George Washington’s Expense Account” (1970), for which he was listed as Washington’s co-author under the name Marvin Kitman, Pfc. (Ret.)A work of nonfiction and not satire, it included a facsimile of Washington’s ledger itemizing cases of Madeira for personal use and military outlays for his army’s frequent, if occasionally strategic, advances to the rear.One commentator wrote that in “George Washington’s Expense Account” — a work of nonfiction, not satire — Mr. Kitman straddled “the line that divides verity from travesty.”An article about the book in The New York Times said that Mr. Kitman’s interpretation straddled “the line that divides verity from travesty” — not unlike Washington himself, who “at times struggled mightily over whether a certain expense was public or private” and “usually resolved the issue in favor of himself.”The historian Robin W. Winks, writing in The Times Book Review, declared that the book was a vehicle for Washington’s famous cherry tree to inflict its revenge. As evidence of Mr. Kitman’s prodigious research into Washington’s intemperance, he cited a mention that the general had gained 28 pounds during the war, which lasted more than seven years.Washington magnanimously rejected the $6,000 annual salary offered by Congress (the equivalent of about $1.7 million in today’s dollars over eight years). Instead, Mr. Kitman wrote, the commander in chief sought reimbursement for $480,000 in expenses (about $17 million today).Mr. Kitman also wrote about Washington in “The Making of the Prefident 1789” (1989), which exposed the political machinations behind Washington’s nonpartisan election — and incidentally, with the unorthodox spelling of its title, satirized the writing style of the era.His first book was the audaciously titled “The Number One Best Seller: The True Adventures of Marvin Kitman,” published in 1966. His last was “Gullible’s Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era,” published in 2020.One of the liberal Mr. Kitman’s more surprising works was “The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly” (2007), which Jacob Heilbrunn, reviewing it for The Times, pronounced “a mash note” to Mr. O’Reilly, noting that Mr. Kitman saw the pugnacious conservative culture warrior as “a potent (and welcome) antidote to the pap served up for decades by the television industry.”Still, Mr. Heilbrunn wrote, the book ultimately revealed that Mr. O’Reilly’s work was less about conservative ideas than about “parading his seething personal resentments in order to become the very thing he purports to despise: a celebrity.”Mr. Kitman in 1964, when he ran for president in the New Hampshire Republican primary under the banner “I would rather be president than write.” He did not win.courtesy of Marvin KitmanPublishers Weekly wrote that it was “difficult to imagine a better researched or less biased work about such a divisive figure as O’Reilly.”Mr. Kitman was no stranger to the political arena himself. He briefly ran for president in the New Hampshire Republican primary in 1964 under the banner “I would rather be president than write.”When his delegate was reported to have received 638 votes in the primary, more than half as many as went to the perennial candidate Harold Stassen, Mr. Kitman demanded a recount. “There was some kind of fraud in my getting so many,” he complained.Had his mock campaign in 1964 actually succeeded, he could have faced the Democratic incumbent, President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose press secretary was Bill Moyers — who, as Newsday’s publisher in 1969, recruited Mr. Kitman.“I hired Marvin,” Mr. Moyers said in an email, “because we needed his wit, without which a media critic is a warrior without a sword.”“In the early days of television — the ’50s and ’60s — he thought the sure way to coax television to fulfill its cultural and creative possibilities was through satire,” Mr. Moyers added. “How could the big moguls in their plush counting houses high above Manhattan not read a guy who wrote that ‘on the TV screen pure drivel tends to drive out ordinary drivel’?”Marvin Kitman was born on Nov, 24, 1929, in Pittsburgh to Jewish immigrants from Russia. His family moved to New York in the 1930s. His father, Myer, was an inspector and clerk for Western Union. His mother, Rose (Kaufman) Kitman, worked at a glider factory in Brooklyn during World War II.“Some parents send their kids to Switzerland ‘for finishing,’” Mr. Kitman often said. “Mine brought me to Brooklyn.”After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, he attended the City College of New York. He parents hoped he would become a draftsman but he discovered a facility for writing when he worked on the student newspaper. He graduated in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree in English.Mr. Kitman began writing a syndicated TV column for the Long Island daily newspaper Newsday on Dec. 7, 1969 — “a day that will live in infamy,” he said, “as far as the TV industry is concerned.”In 1951, Mr. Kitman married Carolyne Sibushnick, who later became a photographer. In addition to his son, she survives him, along with their daughters, Suzy Kitman and A.J. Knight, and three grandchildren.After being drafted into the Army, Mr. Kitman served as a sportswriter on the base newspaper at Fort Dix in New Jersey from 1953 to 1955. He then moved to Leonia, N.J., where he worked as a freelance writer, writing a column for a horse racing tout sheet and consumer advocacy articles for the underground humor magazine The Realist.He was a founding editor, with Victor Navasky, of the satirical magazine Monocle, and a staff writer for The Saturday Evening Post.He later appeared on TV as a critic for WPIX and WNEW (now WNYW) in New York. He found himself no less disillusioned with broadcast television after working in the medium himself than he had been when writing about it. Particularly dispiriting was his experience helping to create and write a short-lived CBS sitcom titled “Ball Four” with the former major league pitcher Jim Bouton (who also starred, as a fictionalized version of himself) and the sportswriter Vic Ziegel, based on Mr. Bouton’s book of the same name.“It was the constant rewriting at night, how everyone was always so exhausted,” he recalled to The Record of Bergen County, N.J., in 2013, “and the input from the executives — all they knew about writing was the alphabet.”He went on to write for The Huffington Post and in 2013 began his own blog at marvinkitman.com, in which he expounded Marshall McLuhan-like on the anthropological impact of television. “Our kidneys had changed,” he wrote. “We had to go to the bathroom more often, like during the commercial breaks.”Resorting to his accustomed modesty, Mr. Kitman, tongue planted firmly in cheek, also soliloquized on his bona fides as a constructive critic rather than a chronic kvetch.“Thirty-five years of telling the commercial networks they were steering into an iceberg is the reason they are not being threatened today by cable, Netflix and everybody else streaming on hand-held devices, including the electric toothbrush. (Have you ever tried watching TV on it?),” he wrote in 2013.“The dinosaurs,” he added, “are dancing as fast as they can into the La Brea Tar Pits in L.A. and no longer need my help.” More
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‘The Great Gatsby’ Review: Raising a Glass to an American Tragedy
29 June 2023, 16:04
This immersive staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic invites audience members to join the party, but the pathos of the novel is stretched too thin.There ain’t no party like a Jay Gatsby party — in “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debonair poster boy of American ambition and the nouveau riche never lets the festivities stop. Neither does Immersive Everywhere’s “The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show,” a jovial feast for the senses that never, in its lagging two-and-a-half-hour running time, truly rises above the status of a mere attraction.In Fitzgerald’s classic book, Gatsby is a man who successfully, if shadily, works his way to a fortune, which he spends on a Long Island mansion where he hosts extravagant soirees. Gatsby’s neighbor, Nick Carraway, narrates Gatsby’s tragic — and, ultimately, fatal — fall from the world of the rich and famous. Gatsby hopes to woo Nick’s cousin Daisy, with whom he had a love affair that he’s never forgotten. But Daisy has married the brutish Tom Buchanan, a chauvinist blowhard with a violent temper and a mistress on the side. As the love triangle threatens to tear apart their lives, the glamour of bourgeois living proves to be no more than a guise covering their emptiness.Adapted and directed by Alexander Wright and presented at the appropriately swanky Park Central Hotel, this “Gatsby” has a humble side entrance next to a Starbucks — more 2020s than 1920s for sure. An entryway leads to a dazzling Art Deco-style ballroom with a large bar, stage and grand staircase where flappers dance, dapper-suited gentlemen drink and fashionable audience members blend in with the cast in a sea of sequins, beads, fedoras and fringe.Nick Carraway (played by Rob Brinkmann) moves through the crowd and begins his tale, as Gatsby (Joél Acosta) watches from the top of the staircase in a white suit with black lapels and a sharp pair of wingtip shoes. Main plot points, including major introductions and confrontations, are played as set scenes that everyone witnesses together in the main space. Otherwise Nick and the various characters peel groups of audience members away to separate rooms off the main ballroom: lounges and boudoirs styled with domestic extravagances of the time, including tufted velvet couches and chaises.This production faces a typical problem for immersive adaptations of literary works: how to translate a beloved text via a format that is better served by a de-emphasis on the text. After all, there’s only so much plot, dialogue and character development you can serve an audience that is constantly being divvied up.Fitzgerald’s work — a short read you could finish in an afternoon — is stretched too thin by the production, which has to elaborate on, conflate or create new minor characters to add enough material for its needs. You get the sense that this is “Gatsby: The Extended Version,” with filler and bonuses no one asked for.The writing of the characters’ dialogue is often shaky, and noticeably weaker when it gets too far from Fitzgerald’s pared-down style. Also buried is the book’s cynical examination of the gorgeous, unholy facade that is American power and status.Audience members are invited to drink, dance and interact with the cast at the immersive “Great Gatsby.”Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThe principal casting is well-done: Brinkmann’s Carraway is immediately recognizable, even before he speaks. He darts among different members of the audience, seeking understanding and reassurance, eyes moving with the nervous, earnest excitement of an outsider looking in. Acosta genuinely seems lost in time, a relic of old Hollywood with a classic beauty and charm. Jillian Anne Abaya, though always beautifully costumed in flirty white frocks, doesn’t quite offer the flighty, effervescent, pre-manic-pixie-dream-girl quality that Daisy requires, and Shahzeb Hussain has the bravado but not the menace of Tom. Claire Saunders gives Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s mistress, a sprightliness and sass that styles her as a romantic second-string diva who feels trapped in her life, particularly her marriage. And the ensemble, when weaving through the party or taking to the center of the floor to dance the Charleston, is always lively and engaged.But Wright’s direction often lacks nuance, and quickly grows tiresome. The performers strike a perfect balance between improvising with audience members and delivering their scripted scenes, but they also spend a lot of time mugging to everyone in the room. And the constant shuffling of the audience means confusion, distractions and unsavory behavior — the bar access and participatory nature of the show enable those predisposed to booziness and loud interjections to be their worst selves. (Props to the actors, however, for always staying in character, as when a chatty, giggling pair of women in my show caused Abaya to snap in the middle of Daisy’s emotional breakdown, “I’m glad you find this funny. This is my life.”)Casey Jay Andrews’s exquisite set design, Vanessa Leuck’s stylish costumes and the ever-shifting mood ring effect of Jeff Croiter’s lighting beautifully coalesce into a vivid, comprehensive vision of 1920s New York. And it’s a feat to behold. But the equally beautiful sentiment behind Fitzgerald’s work can’t be found at the bottom of a tumbler glass.The Great GatsbyAt the Park Central Hotel, Manhattan; immersivegatsby.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More
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Review: This ‘Hamlet’ Under the Stars Is No Walk in the Park
29 June 2023, 02:30
The Public Theater’s alfresco production has plenty to offer audiences who know the play already. But it may not be so easy for newcomers.For those who remember the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing” — as I do, fondly — the sight that awaits them at this summer’s “Hamlet” in the same location is disturbing.Entering the Delacorte Theater, you are immediately faced with what looks like a copy of the earlier show’s set, which depicted the handsome grounds of a grand home in a Black suburb of Atlanta. But now it is utterly ruined. The facade is atilt, the S.U.V. tipped nose-first in a puddle, the Stacey Abrams for President banner torn down and in tatters. The flagpole bearing the Stars and Stripes sticks out of the ground at a precipitous angle, like a javelin that made a bad landing.For the director Kenny Leon and the scenic designer Beowulf Boritt, both returning for this “Hamlet” — the Public Theater’s fifth in the park since 1964 and 13th overall — it’s a coup de théâtre, if an odd one. However smartly the setting provokes a shiver of dread in those who recognize it, and dread is certainly apt for a play in which nine of the main characters die, it can only produce a shrug from anyone else. An approach that had been designed to welcome audiences to a new way of looking at Shakespeare in 2019 now seems destined to exclude them.I’m afraid the same holds for the production overall: It is full of insight and echoes for those already in the know, and features lovely songs (by Jason Michael Webb) and a few fine performances that anyone can enjoy. (Ato Blankson-Wood brings a vivid anger to the title role.) But this “Hamlet” has been placed in a frame that doesn’t match what the production actually delivers, leaving me glad to have seen it but wishing for something more congruent.Part of the problem is that the frame — both Black and military as in Leon’s “Much Ado” — is so prominent at the start and irrelevant thereafter. Instead of beginning the play as written, with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Leon stages his funeral as a prologue, with Marine Corps pallbearers, a praise team singing settings of Bible verses and Ophelia (Solea Pfeiffer) channeling Beyoncé.Only after this welcoming opening do we get the awful scenes in which the dead king, appearing to Hamlet, urges revenge on the brother who murdered him and then married his wife. As his giant funeral portrait comes to life through psychedelic special effects, Hamlet confusingly lip-syncs his beyond-the-grave voice, provided by Samuel L. Jackson in Darth Vader mode.But don’t be misled by that martial tone, any more than by the set, the Marines and the military cut of Jessica Jahn’s costumes for the men. (For the women they are colorful and gorgeous.) The war story they seem to promise is not in fact told in this production, as almost all the material concerning Denmark’s beef with Norway, and the consequent need to assure the royal succession, has been cut.Well, something had to be. Uncut, “Hamlet,” the longest of Shakespeare’s plays, would likely run more than four hours without an intermission; here it’s two hours and 45 minutes with one. How different directors make the trims is, in effect, their interpretation. Is the play a dysfunctional family melodrama? A moral inquiry into suicide and murder? A satire of royal courts and courtiers? All are in there.Leon focuses on the interior drama of Hamlet himself, inevitable when you cherry-pick the famous soliloquies. Blankson-Wood delivers them well, if not yet with the easeful expression that turns them into free-flowing thoughts-as-actions instead of words, words, words to be worked on.Still, because the soliloquies follow each other so closely, giving the staging the herky-jerky feeling of a musical without enough book, we get a clear sense of his Hamlet as someone whose interiority and sullenness precede the excuse of his father’s murder. You are not surprised when he turns Bad Boyfriend on Ophelia after (accidentally) killing her father. Ophelia herself is hoist with the same petard. Her descent into insanity, never clearly delineated in the text, is even more sudden with the cuts taken.Something similar happens to many of the other characters, like the interchangeably bro-y Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who make a first impression then all but disappear. The Players are similarly reduced, their version of “The Mousetrap,” with which Hamlet intends to “catch the conscience of the king” now a mime show. And Horatio barely seems to show up in the first place, even though he’s the character Shakespeare leaves standing at the end: enjoined, as Hamlet says dying, to “tell my story.”The show recreates the set from the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” which depicted the grounds of a home in a Black suburb of Atlanta, but now utterly ruined.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf that story is a bit foggy in this production, others are absolutely clear. As Claudius, John Douglas Thompson brings his usual grave authority to bear but also a fascinating note of insecurity that helps explain the character’s ruthlessness. Daniel Pearce makes of Polonius a hilariously pedantic desk jockey and bad idea bear. (The downside: You don’t mind when he gets knifed.) In Nick Rehberger’s rendering of Laertes, the character’s grief, fury and forgiveness all ring true, even though, as cut, they are nearly simultaneous.And Lorraine Toussaint is an exceptionally subtle, emotionally intelligent Gertrude, grieving her husband’s death but alert to the necessity of loving his killer. For me, she is the center of this production’s tragedy, giving fullest expression to Claudius’s observation that “When sorrows come, they come not single spies,/But in battalions.”That’s an unusual path to cut through the play, but having seen it so many times, I’m happy to go for a ride on its less-traveled roads. Throughout this production I heard arresting poetry I’d somehow missed before (“a pair of reechy kisses”) and saw old ideas revivified by bright new details. (When Polonius sends Laertes off with his tired advice, he also slips him an N95 mask, as other fathers might slip their child condoms.)Yet I worried that those less familiar with “Hamlet,” let alone those more invested in a traditional rendition, would be left unanchored on its heaving sea of meaning. Though performed, and often well, under the open sky of Central Park, its thoughts (as Claudius says) “never to heaven go.” They’re atilt like the house, and, like that javelin, too strangely angled.HamletThrough Aug. 6 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More
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‘Grief Hotel,’ an Absurdist Play With a Touch of Anemia
28 June 2023, 23:07
Liza Birkenmeier’s abstract play is a unique exploration of romantic relationships but suffers from sleepy direction and a lack of character enrichment.Absurdist theater is like the naturalistic play’s overachieving older sibling. Traditional theater attempts to describe the chaos of the human condition, but absurdist works dare to enact it. Liza Birkenmeier’s “Grief Hotel” is one of those enactors, a strange, snack-sized play that closes out Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks series — a proud incubator for strange plays.Birkenmeier’s deft writing (in previous works like “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House”) and her affinity for morbid humor return here, and despite its title, “Grief Hotel” doesn’t simply dwell on the grim; it’s actually a dark comedy. And while all of the amusing oddness successfully depicts the madness of grief and the complexities of millennial relationships, it does so to the detriment of the play’s message and the production’s intrigue.Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert) is the straight-shooting mastermind behind the grief hotel idea — a bespoke getaway for people who have experienced a tragedy: an illness, a breakup, a manslaughter charge. She’s trying to present her concept to the audience, but Birkenmeier interrupts Bobbi’s marketing pitch with a series of conversations among younger characters who are grappling with their own sense of loss: Em (Nadine Malouf), Winn (Ana Nogueira), Rohit (Naren Weiss), Teresa (Susannah Perkins) and Asher (Bruce McKenzie).Although some characters are dealing with death head-on, “Grief Hotel” lingers more on the impermanence of relationships than it does the impermanence of life. Just try to keep track of this: Em and Winn were college girlfriends. But now Em is in a relationship with an unexciting man named Rohit. Rohit is slightly attracted to Teresa. But Teresa, who is nonbinary, is already in a romantic partnership with Winn. Winn craves a novel experience and strikes up a sexual fling with Asher, a straight, married man. Em reserves most of her lust for an A.I. chatbot named Melba. In Em’s mind, the bot looks exactly like Winn.On the surface, this salacious cross-pollination might sound entertaining, but without enough exploration of these people or enough time to invest in the mess of their affairs, “Grief Hotel” feels more like a vague social experiment about impulse and desire than a provocative, character-driven piece of theater.Vagueness seems to be its intention. The scenic design collective called dots cloaks the set with the drab, midcentury décor of a three-star motel. And Tara Ahmadinejad’s languid direction fails to pump the production with much-needed blood. The overall lack of unifying energy surely parallels our fractured, new age of digital dating (a good chunk of Birkenmeier’s script is composed of text messages read aloud), but I found it exhausting IRL.At times, I wondered if the hotel was a purgatory for all of these partnerships — the anxiety-inducing, interstitial space where relationships go to die or thrive. We never land on this, or any, conclusion, but toward the play’s end, Bobbi offers a remedy to the group’s literal and metaphorical mourning: gratitude. Gratitude for the memories shared with past loves and the ones yet to be made with future ones. This — more than time, more than medication — begins to heal all wounds. And regardless of the production’s faults, I was grateful for the reminder.Grief Hotel Through July 1 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More
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Victoria Bailey Wants Bigger and Broader Theater Audiences
28 June 2023, 19:48
The Theater Development Fund’s departing director reflects on two decades of work expanding access to theater and the paths that lie ahead for Broadway.When Victoria Bailey assumed the leadership of the nonprofit Theater Development Fund in 2001, she was told that the organization’s marquee program, the TKTS discount ticket booth, had not missed a day in nearly three decades of operation.So much for that. A few months after she took the job, the booth was shut down because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and in the time since it has been closed by a blackout, a hurricane, a strike and a pandemic.It’s been an eventful 22 years for Bailey, and on Friday, the day she turns 67, she is stepping down as the executive director of the organization, which sold 615,000 tickets at its TKTS booths this fiscal year and which works to make theater accessible — to those who find the cost of tickets prohibitive as well as to students, veterans and people with disabilities.Bailey, who received a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater earlier this month in recognition of her service to the industry, will be succeeded on Aug. 7 by Deeksha Gaur, a co-founder of the theater reviews platform Show-Score.In an interview at her office, Bailey, who is known as Tory, reflected on the state of the theater industry. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How is Broadway is doing?Broadway is back. There are audiences. I don’t think they’re as reliably robust as we would want. The pieces we’re missing are the suburban audience and Chinese tourists. There’s a lot of diverse work, there are a lot of different voices onstage now. How do we bring the audiences along for that, and how do we grow the audiences for that? It’s a be-very-mindful time. I don’t think we can sit back and go, “Everything’s fine.”Your final big event is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Times Square TKTS booth. What is its significance?There really are many people who cannot afford full-price tickets. If you’re a New Yorker, and you’re an avid theatergoer, there are a lot of ways you can get discount tickets; the booth is only one of many, and you use it or don’t use it. But for tourists who are infrequent theatergoers, or for anyone who is not on the inside, that’s the only way they know.One of the most visible changes during your time was the construction of the red steps over the booth, where many people now congregate.It is this very theatrical gathering place in the middle of Times Square. I love to stand there and watch people sitting on the steps. It just makes me happy.How do you think Times Square is faring?Times Square itself is feeling pretty good. Eighth Avenue is still a little rougher than it was before the pandemic. The challenge for Times Square is the whole office worker thing. People are at their desks two or three days a week, and that’s a huge challenge for all of the businesses in Times Square that rely on office workers.Tourists queuing at the TKTS booth, a program run by the Theater Development Fund that sells tickets at discounts of up to 50 percent.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow does that affect the theater industry?One of the things that drives ticket purchases is word of mouth. When you’re on Zoom, you have a meeting and then you’re done. When you’re in the office, you’re getting a cup of coffee and someone says to you, “I saw this great show last night. I think you might like it.” I don’t think that’s happening in the same way now. There’s a diminishment of casual exchange of information between people.TDF has programs to make theater more accessible to those who have hearing, visual and mobility impairments, and during your tenure you introduced autism-friendly performances.There was an unfortunate incident in the West End where a mom with a child on the spectrum came and was asked to leave, and it got a lot of attention. We talked about it. Disney was way ahead on understanding the needs of that population because of the theme parks, and so we partnered with Disney for “The Lion King.” We buy out the entire house at a significantly discounted price, so that we can sell the tickets at a discounted price. Everyone there understands that there’s going to be noise and people are going to be up and down and we’re creating a safe space for the families. We did it once, and we all just wept. And now we do five a year. We do “Wicked,” we’ve done “Harry Potter” and we did “Six” a few weeks ago. And for the first time, last year we did “The Nutcracker” at New York City Ballet.You also started making tickets available to veterans.The thought was, and is, that this is a population that might benefit from going to the theater together. It’s presumptuous to say theater is healing, because I don’t presume to say who needs healing, but going to theater together is an activity that enriches you. More
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in Television
Does ‘And Just Like That …’ Signal the End of Stealth Wealth?
28 June 2023, 15:05
So does the pop culture and fashion wheel turn.And just like that, stealth wealth, the aesthetic made viral by “Succession,” with its toxic billionaires in their Loro Piana baseball caps and Tom Ford hoodies locked in a C-suite cage match to the death, has been swept off screen.In its place: logomania, branding that can be seen from whole city blocks away and accessories that jangle and gleam with the blinding light of bragging rights.The outfits, that is to say, of Carrie and Co. in Season 2 of “And Just Like That …,” the “Sex and the City” reboot come recently to Max — the streamer that, as it happens, also gave us the Roys in their greige cashmere. Both shows are set in New York City, the home of strivers and entrepreneurs, of “Washington Square” and Wharton, of constantly evolving social castes highly, and literally, invested in their own identifiable camouflage.If watching “Succession” was in part like engaging in a detective game to suss out what character was wearing what brand, so insider were the fashion politics, watching “And Just Like That …” is like attending brandapalooza: the double Cs and Fs and Gs practically whacking you on the head with their presence. (Warning: Spoilers are coming.) All the over-the-top fashionista-ing is back. The room-size closets!It’s the yin to the “Succession” yang: a veritable celebration of the comforting aspirational dreams of self-realization (or self-escapism) embedded in stuff that may actually be the most striking part of an increasingly stale series. Certainly, the clothes, which often serve as their own plot points, are more memorable than any dialogue.Well … except maybe for that instantly classic line in Episode 1, uttered by Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) on her way to the Met Gala in reference to her gown and feather hat: “It’s not crazy — it’s Valentino.” But that’s the exception that proves the rule.Lisa Todd Wexley stopping traffic on her way to the Met Gala in Valentino.Craig Blakenhorn/MaxThere is Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), with her multiple Manolos and Fendis, self-medicating with shopping, returning home one day with six Bergdorf Goodman bags. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) toting her Burberry doggy poop bag (also possessed of a Burberry apron and Burberry ear muffs) and bemoaning the fact that her teenage daughter hocked her Chanel dress to fund her musical aspirations.Lisa Todd Wexley dropping her kids off for camp in a bright green Louis Vuitton jacket and scarf. And Seema (Sarita Choudhury), the character that passes for a restrained dresser thanks to her penchant for neutrals (and the occasional animal print), loudly lamenting the theft of her caramel-colored Hermès Birkin — one of her totems of self, ripped directly from her hands.Lisa Todd Wexley dropping her children off for camp in Louis Vuitton.Jason Howard/Bauer-Griffin/GC ImagesSeema with her caramel-colored Hermès Birkin.Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin, via GC ImagesThere is Loewe and Pierre Cardin; Altuzarra and Dries Van Noten. There is also an effort to repurpose clothes, like Carrie’s wedding dress, in order to promote the virtues of rewearing, but it’s pretty much lost in all the rest of the muchness. There is a dedicated Instagram account on which the costume designers Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago share their finds, with 277,000 followers. @Successionfashion, by contrast, has 184,000.All of which means what, exactly? Is the era of quiet luxury, so recently embraced by TikTok, already at an end? Have our attention spans, so famously abbreviated, moved on? Has the physics of fashion exerted its force and produced an equal and opposite reaction to an earlier action?As if. In many ways, the fashion in “And Just Like That …” seems to protest too much. In part that’s because it seems like a regurgitation of the fun that came before, which was itself a reaction to the minimalism of the early 1990s, which itself was born in that decade’s recession.The fact is, no matter how much lip service has been paid to quiet luxury or stealth wealth or whatever you want to call it, and how it is 2023’s “hottest new fashion trend,” it was never a recent invention. It has been around since way back when it was referred to as “shabby chic” or “connoisseurship” or “old money,” all synonyms for the kind of product that didn’t look overtly expensive but was a sign of aesthetic genealogy — the difference between new money and inherited money that fashion co-opted and regurgitated to its own ends. Just as more obviously coded consumption has been around since Louis Vuitton plunked his initials on some leather back in 1896 or since Jay Gatsby started tossing his shirts.Note the Fendi bag on the back of Carrie’s chair.HBO MaxFind the Burberry-branded doggy poop bag tucked on Charlotte’s arm.HBO MaxWe’ve been declaring the “end of logos” and, alternately, the “rise of stealth wealth” for decades now. There are cycles when one is more ubiquitous than the other (usually having to do with economic downturns when flaunting disposable income is not a great look), but they exist in tandem. They help define each other.Consider that during the current economic uncertainty, exactly the kind of environment that tends to fast-forward the appeal of low-key high-cost items, the most successful global brands have remained the most highly identifiable: Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermès. Or that in his recent debut for Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams introduced a bag called Millionaire that costs — yup — $1 million. (It’s a yellow croc Speedy with gold and diamond hardware.)What is more interesting is, as Carrie and the gang continue on their merry wardrobed way, how clichéd both styles now seem, how performative. Once they have trickled up to television, it’s impossible not to recognize the costume. Or the fact that whichever look you buy into, they are simply different ways of expressing wealth, in all its decorative strata. And wealth itself never goes out of fashion. More

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