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    Onstage in ‘An American Tail,’ a Family’s Jewishness Comes to the Fore

    The Children’s Theater Company production, based on the animated film, elevates the depiction of its characters’ religious and ethnic backgrounds.The 1986 animated feature film “An American Tail” begins with a mouse family, the Mousekewitzes, forced to flee their home after men on horseback (and accompanying cats) set fire to their village in Russia in 1885. They travel to the United States, because, Papa sings, “there are no cats in America, and the streets are paved with cheese!”At the time, some critics said the film didn’t render the family’s Jewish background sufficiently. In his review, Roger Ebert complained that “only a few children will understand or care that the Mousekewitzes are Jewish.”In a new stage adaptation of that film at the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis, there is no mistaking the Mousekewitzes’ background. The show begins with them chanting the Hebrew blessing for Hanukkah as a menorah is lit. They recite two other Hebrew prayers. There is talk of a “bar mouse-vah” for the protagonist, the young Fievel.The musical also enhances the representation of the story’s Irish and Italian mice and adds mice from Sweden, China and the Caribbean. The female lead, an Irish mouse in the film, is now a Black mouse who quotes “the great Frederick Dormouse.” (Murine puns abound.)Like other recent historical shows, “An American Tail” sought to prioritize authentic depictions of each character, whether that was racial, ethnic or religious. The show’s creators felt it was important to dive deeper into the Mousekewitzes’ Jewishness and encompass other groups in order to reflect the contemporary understanding that Americans’ identities are not subsumed into a larger one.Luverne Seifert, left, with Lillian Hochman and Matthew Woody as the Jewish mouse family. The director, Taibi Magar, described wanting to “tell a deeper, richer, more truthful story.”Glen Stubbe Photography“We do have different experiences, and it shapes us differently,” said Itamar Moses, who wrote the show’s book and co-wrote the lyrics to roughly a dozen original songs. (A few were retained from the film, including “Somewhere Out There,” Fievel’s song of yearning that became a hit for Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram.) “The only way a diverse democracy can work is through both acknowledging and honoring our differences.”Jewishness and antisemitism are also foregrounded in several recent plays and musicals, including “Leopoldstadt,” which follows a family of Jewish Austrians before World War II; “Parade,” which tells the story behind the 1915 lynching of a Jew in Georgia; and “Just for Us,” about attending white nationalist gatherings in Queens.For “An American Tail,” the artists and the dramaturg, Talvin Wilks, sought to represent the different groups who resided in the close quarters of downtown Manhattan — for that is where the Mousekewitzes arrive — in the 1880s.“The story that came out in 1986 was not fully reflective of all the immigrant populations that were there and were intrinsic to making New York City what it is,” Taibi Magar, the director, said. “Is it about being woke? Yeah, sure. But it’s also about telling a deeper, richer, more truthful story.”The concept for “An American Tail” originated with one of its executive producers, Steven Spielberg, and the hero bears the name of Spielberg’s grandfather. By extolling the melting pot theory, the film, directed by Don Bluth, embodied its era’s attitude toward multiculturalism: that immigrant groups would abandon their individual cultures in an effort to assimilate.“They didn’t want to double down too much on the particularity of Fievel’s ethnicity, because I think they wanted to keep the story as relatable, as universal, as possible,” said Jonathan Krasner, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.The decision to adapt the film for the stage arose from a conversation between Peter C. Brosius, the C.T.C.’s longtime artistic director, and Universal, which produced the film. It did not hurt that C.T.C., a past recipient of the regional theater Tony Award, has routinely produced shows that have traveled around the country. “A Year With Frog and Toad,” first produced by C.T.C., made its way to Broadway in 2003 and was nominated for three Tonys.The C.T.C. matched the songwriting partners Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler (who wrote the music and lyrics for the C.T.C. musical “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”) with Moses (a Tony winner for “The Band’s Visit”), and in 2018 they first met to begin developing the story.Becca Hart as Digit, a cockroach, with ensemble members in the show.Glen Stubbe PhotographyIn the movie, Fievel is separated from his family on the perilous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, and ends up in one misadventure after another after he arrives in New York. When a varied assortment of mice fight a gang of cats known as the Mott Street Maulers, they are eventually — thanks to a scheme Fievel comes up with — driven onto a boat headed far away.“There was an opportunity to understand the points of view of these different groups of mice, why it’s difficult for them to come together, and have Fievel be the reason that they do,” Moses said.“What do the cats represent?” Moses continued. “In Russia they’re the Cossacks, in Italy they’re the Mafia. They get to America, and the cats have a scheme for exploiting the mice for their labor.”To bring the story to life onstage, the creators turned to vaudeville, which was coming into its own at the time and place of Fievel’s adventures. They built a small set and cast 20 actors, several of whom double roles. A six-piece band backs the company on 16 songs.In both the movie and musical, the cats are defeated and the Mousekewitzes reunited. Yet the musical adds a weighty finale, “There Will Always Be Cats,” which supersedes the earlier hope of no cats with an argument for solidarity in the face of eternal oppression — feline or otherwise. “An American Tail,” a positive review in The Minneapolis Star Tribune said, “offers a peephole into a past that doesn’t seem so far away.”During rehearsals this spring, the show’s musical director, Andrea Grody, hosted the writers and crew for a Passover Seder — a ritual whose message of sympathizing with less privileged forebears is echoed in the final number.“If we’re not careful,” Moses said, “we can become the cats by not remembering what our ancestors went through.” More

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    James de Jongh, Who Put Stories of Slavery Onstage, Dies at 80

    His play “Do Lord Remember Me,” constructed from interviews with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, was first staged in 1978 and has been revived multiple times since.James de Jongh, a scholar and playwright best known for fashioning oral histories left by formerly enslaved people in the 1930s into “Do Lord Remember Me,” a 1978 stage work that painted an unflinching picture of the human cost of slavery, died on May 5 in the Bronx. He was 80.Robert deJongh Jr., a nephew, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Professor de Jongh was a longtime member of the English department faculty at City College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he specialized in African American literature and the literatures of the African diaspora. But briefly in his early career he had been an actor, and he continued to maintain an interest in the theater. In 1975, together with Carles Cleveland, he wrote his first play — “Hail Hail the Gangs!” — about a Black teenager who joins a Harlem gang.“I wanted to go in a completely different direction for the second play,” he told the public-access cable channel Manhattan Neighborhood Network in a recent interview.He was drawn to a book called “The Negro in Virginia,” a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people started by the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal, and completed in 1940 by the Virginia Writers’ Project. At first, he said, his idea was to construct a fictional story using that material as background, but as he delved further into archives of interviews at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, his thinking changed.“Many of them were quite eloquent, were quite moving, were quite touching, and some of them were in, really, the voices of the people themselves,” he said. “In other words, the interviewers had actually recorded word for word, rather than simply summarizing the content of what they said. And those words were striking.”He realized that he could create a play made primarily of the recollections of the men and women who had experienced slavery firsthand, augmented by the words of Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, and by some gospel and work songs. The result was “Do Lord Remember Me,” which premiered in 1978 at the New Federal Theater on East Third Street in Manhattan, with a cast that included Frances Foster, a leading actress of the day.“The play, strongly felt and single-minded, has an impact far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review for The New York Times. “The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past — when people were a commodity for speculation — linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness.”Ebony Jo-Ann and Glynn Turman in the American Place Theater production of “Do Lord Remember Me” in 1982.Bert Andrews, via The New Federal TheaterA revised version was staged in 1982 at the American Place Theater in Midtown, with a cast that included Ebony Jo-Ann and Glynn Turman. In a fresh review, Mr. Gussow called it “a moving evocation of shared servitude.”The play, which has been restaged a number of times over the decades, has dashes of humor and a theme of triumphing over adversity. But it is also blunt in its language and its depiction of the cruelties of slavery, the kind of historical realism that is being erased from educational curriculums in some schools and libraries today. In one scene, a woman shares the back story of her facial disfigurement: As a child, she was punished for taking a peppermint stick by having her head placed beneath the rocker of a rocking chair and crushed.In the interview with Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Professor de Jongh said that although he was not a particularly religious man, he saw creating the play as a sort of calling.“Somehow, I felt I had a task,” he said, “and the task had found me.”James Laurence de Jongh was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His father, Percy, was the commissioner of finance for the government of the Virgin Islands, and his mother, Mavis E. (Bentlage) de Jongh, was an assistant director for the U.S. Customs Service and ran a poultry farm and plant store.Professor de Jongh attended Saints Peter & Paul Catholic School on St. Thomas and then Williams College in Massachusetts, where he appeared in theatrical productions and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964. He received a master’s degree from Yale in 1967 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1983.Professor de Jongh continued to act for a time after his days at Williams College, but teaching was his vocation beginning in 1969, when he spent a year as an instructor at Rutgers University. The next year he joined the CUNY faculty; he remained there for decades and added the Graduate Center to his portfolio in 1990. He took emeritus status in 2011.Professor de Jongh wrote numerous academic articles on Black theater, the art scene in Harlem and related subjects, and in 1990, he published a scholarly book, “Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination.” He also served on the board of the New Federal Theater, whose current artistic director, Elizabeth Van Dyke, called him “a quiet, gracious powerhouse.”Professor de Jongh, who lived in the Bronx, leaves no immediate survivors.The 1982 production of “Do Lord Remember Me” was also presented to inmates at Rikers Island — according to news accounts, it was the first complete professional production staged at the prison. Professor de Jongh attended and found the inmates more boisterous than traditional theatergoers.“There was an element of risk in the entire situation,” he told The Times that year. “The audience reacted with anger as well as humor. It was not just a play about remembering — their own freedom was circumscribed.” More

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    In ‘Platonic,’ the Sex Part Doesn’t Get in the Way. No, Really.

    About 20 years ago, the husband-and-wife writing and directing team of Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco went to a joint bachelor-bachelorette party in Las Vegas. Delbanco knew the bride-to-be a little, but the bachelor had been a close friend since college.The parties peeled off — the men to a steakhouse, the women to get sushi. Delbanco found herself rolling almost involuntarily with the bachelorette group.“I went with her, but I was there not because I had known her — I was there because I was a friend of his,” Delbanco recalled in a recent video interview. “I remember thinking, ‘Why does it have to be that way?’”The incident gnawed at her over the years, until she finally decided to address it in her work. “Platonic,” the new Apple TV+ limited series created by Delbanco and Stoller and starring Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen (who are also executive producers), playfully asks a timeless question: Why is it so difficult for people — especially married people — to maintain friendships with members of the opposite sex?“Platonic,” which premieres on May 24, isn’t a “will they or won’t they” romantic comedy like “When Harry Met Sally,” which is less about staying friends than about falling in love. It’s the story of Sylvia (Byrne), a happily married but slightly bored woman, who tries to rekindle a friendship with Will (Rogen), a middle-aged man-child going through a painful divorce. Sylvia and Will used to hang out, partying and laughing but never sleeping together. They eventually went their separate ways, largely because Sylvia didn’t care for Will’s wife. Now Will is back, lonely and a bit needy.He is ready to resume the party. He is also passively dismissive of Sylvia’s family life, with her extremely nice, extremely handsome husband (Luke Macfarlane) and their three kids.Sylvia, meanwhile, has a hard time taking Will seriously. He is a hipster brewery owner with a young girlfriend and an aversion to selling out and settling down. But Will’s footloose ways also make Sylvia look back and wonder where the years have gone. “Platonic” isn’t just a tale of friendship; it’s also a front-row seat to dueling, colliding midlife crises.The series reunites Byrne and Rogen, stars of the 2014 comedy “Neighbors,” directed by Stoller, about a young married couple living next door to a bunch of raucous frat boys. This time, however, their characters are in conflicting places in their lives.“I think my character is self-destructive in a lot of ways and immature in a lot of ways, and really trying to live a life that is just not the life someone his age should be living anymore,” Rogen said in a joint video interview with Byrne. “In his perspective, he’s just not shackled by this thing that she’s shackled by. So her judgment of him is confusing because he’s like: ‘Well, who cares? I don’t have a kid and a spouse.’”The series follows Sylvia (Byrne), a happily married but slightly bored woman, who tries to rekindle a friendship with Will (Rogen), a man-child going through a painful divorce.Apple TV+For her part, Sylvia is “a responsible and extremely high-functioning achiever,” as Byrne described it, “one of those sorts of characters who can do it all.”“Those people are intimidating,” she continued. “And then on the flip side of it, she can really party.”In one episode, Sylvia throws Will a divorce party, inviting all of his friends to a swanky dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. The guys want to go to a strip club after dinner; Sylvia is resistant, which annoys Will.“Fun has changed for me,” she tells Will. “It has evolved into something else.” Will’s rebuttal: “Your fun has evolved into something called ‘not fun.’” Then they end up doing CK, a mix of cocaine and ketamine, giving Byrne a chance to show off her physical comedy chops as she stumbles through the rest of the evening.The episode illustrates a big part of Sylvia’s dilemma. Part of her wants to be irresponsible, to shuck off her outwardly ideal life, her mom and wife duties, if only for a moment.“It’s a constant push and pull,” said Byrne, who has two children with the actor Bobby Cannavale. Sylvia was once a promising lawyer, but she gave up her career to have a family. “You do feel a sense of loss and grief and weird disorientation if you have been the primary caregiver for so long, and that is where she’s at,” Byrne added. “Then she’s at this crossroad when she reunites with Will, and it sends her off on a little spiral.”Both parties have confidants and protectors. Sylvia’s best friend is Katie (Carla Gallo, who also worked with Byrne in “Neighbors”). Katie is a bit more forgiving than Will’s younger friend and business partner, Andy (Tre Hale), who is both frustrated with Will’s pious attitude and suspicious of Sylvia’s sudden re-emergence in Will’s life.“There’s a beef there, with Andy wanting to make sure Sylvia is not coming in and messing with my dude’s head because he already has a bunch of stuff on his plate,” said Hale, a formidable former U.C.L.A. football player. “He is annoyed that he has to be the big brother in the situation, especially as it pertains to the bar and the business.”The first time audiences saw Rogen and Byrne together onscreen, in “Neighbors,” their characters were having furious, comical sex as their infant child sneaked a peek. In “Platonic,” however, the sexual chemistry is nil by design; you never really ask yourself if Will and Sylvia will fall into bed together. She has issues with Charlie, her lawyer husband, who is the opposite of a wild and crazy guy, but she isn’t about to cheat on him.Byrne and Rogen played a married couple in the 2014 big-screen comedy “Neighbors.”Glen Wilson/Universal PicturesAs Stoller put it, “Everything’s either sex or murder in TV and movies, and we don’t have either.”There is, however, jealousy. Sylvia is a little jealous of Will’s freedom. Will is a little jealous of Sylvia’s loving, supportive home life. And Charlie is a little jealous of this wisecracking arrested-development case partying with his wife — Charlie’s work friends start referring to Will as “your wife’s boyfriend” — which sets up some rich comic possibilities.“The central joke there is that Luke is so good-looking,” Stoller said of Macfarlane. “He looks like a god, you know?”Delbanco added: “And Will is a wreck. His life is in shambles, and he’s got this crazy midlife crisis, and he’s bleaching his hair. There’s something so great about the most solid, handsome, upstanding man in the world being somehow undone by what he perceives as this threat to his marriage.”It all circles back to the main question: Can a woman and a man — a straight woman and man, anyway — maintain a close friendship?Delbanco recalled another Las Vegas story, this one more recent. Shortly before the pandemic, she spent a weekend there with two straight, married guy friends. “It was really fun, and I don’t think Nick was thinking, ‘Why are you in Las Vegas with those friends?’” she said. “We just had a great time, but a lot of people were like, ‘Wait, where is your husband?’”Stoller recalled the weekend from his end. “My friends kept asking, ‘Where’s your wife?’” he said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, she’s in Vegas with two of her guy friends.’” The near-universal response: “‘What? Really?’”“It is a constant source of amusement and fascination for me,” Byrne said of her friends’ incredulity at her ability to have friendships (that don’t involve sex) with straight men.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesThe common expectation for such friendships is that the parties have either had sex or will have sex (or that one of them was relegated to the Friend Zone). Byrne has a close male friend, an old roommate with whom she still likes to socialize, and many of her friends can’t believe they never slept together. “It is a constant source of amusement and fascination for me,” Byrne said of her friends’ incredulity. “That was one of the reasons I was drawn to the series.”In the end, perhaps the friendship issue boils down to the question of what it means to be a grown-up. The roads can narrow when you start a family, or immerse yourself in a career, or both. What once seemed like a routine social relationship starts to draw raised eyebrows. There were fewer rules when Will and Sylvia were tearing it up as 20-somethings.Years later, they have embraced different versions of adulthood. There’s a wistful quality to their rekindled friendship, something that represents times both wilder and more innocent.“They used to go out really late and get into all kinds of adventures and crazy shenanigans that are less and less available to you when you’re in your 40s and parents and that kind of stuff,” Delbanco said. “That’s some of the pleasure that they take in each other.“The question becomes, is there a way to incorporate that into your adult life without messing up the rest of it?” More

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    ‘The Fears’ Review: Group Therapy Was Never More Triggering

    For the fragile souls in this new play, presented by Steven Soderbergh, a Buddhist group that once offered them solace loses its way.“This is the weather … and we’re just in it,” says Maia, the facilitator of a Buddhist trauma group at the center of Emma Sheanshang’s new play, “The Fears.” She’s talking about the mood in the room — a small, underwhelming one with mismatched office chairs set around a low wooden table — where she and six others regularly meet to talk through storms of rage, sorrow and panic. Or at least try to: interpersonal conflicts, clashing neuroses and a falling domino effect of triggers cause more breakdowns than breakthroughs, until even the group’s philosophical foundation starts to fall apart.From the first scene of this intriguing but lacking play, presented by the filmmaker Steven Soderbergh at the Pershing Square Signature Center, we get a clear window into the characters’ personalities. Dan Algrant’s direction is precise and telling, particularly in the entrances. Thea (Kerry Bishé), the newbie, drifts in skeptically. Rosa (Natalie Woolams-Torres), a stickler for rules, bustles in authoritatively. Fiz (Mehran Khaghani, comical even as a gay stereotype) bursts in with a declarative flourish, while the measured Suzanne (Robyn Peterson), always at odds with Fiz, strolls by demurely. Maia (Maddie Corman), overdressed in multiple layers, flutters in like a light breeze, and Mark (a stiff Carl Hendrick Louis) arrives late, flustered and eager. Katie (a painfully fragile Jess Gabor), a young goth, rushes in last, and withdraws into herself.Each person’s trauma is either explicitly spelled out, or hinted at through their individual triggers, which help explain, for example, why Fiz’s sister is a touchy subject, or why Thea has an encyclopedic knowledge of every traumatic event the world has endured.Sheanshang’s depiction of spiritualism has a satirical bite, with Maia’s performative shows of empathy — purrs and “mms” of affirmation — and the group members’ rigorous policing of one another’s responses, which is more about control than about support. But sometimes it seems as if “The Fears” is targeting Buddhism rather than the derivative school of thought — developed by a revered yet unseen male figure — practiced by the group. And the use of the characters’ quirks as punch lines verges on cruel (especially because several were victims of childhood sexual abuse) and undercuts the show’s emotional resonance.And so much of the story is about these characters trying to build a safe space within the room, within their practice, in order to find comfort in themselves. But the world keeps barging in (thanks to Jane Shaw’s stunning sound design): construction noise and shouting strangers seep in from outside the window, and there’s the sound of people chatting elsewhere in the Buddhist center.“The Fears” opts for a pat ending, and never makes a clear judgment on whether these broken souls can save one another or whether they are ultimately on their own. The questions at the center of its conceit remain unanswered: Are we all doomed to lives in which we barely manage our fears but instead let them rule us? Or is fear what draws out the most precious parts of ourselves?The FearsThrough July 9 at the Signature Theater, Manhattan; thefearsplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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    ‘Happy Valley’ Review: The End of the Hero’s Journey

    Sarah Lancashire returns in the long-delayed final season of one of the best, and most human, crime dramas on TV.Each season of the great British series “Happy Valley” begins the same way, with the rock-solid cop Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) facing the everyday bizarrerie of policing in a tired, depressed, grimly beautiful pocket of West Yorkshire: teenage sheep rustlers, a jilted boyfriend threatening to set himself on fire, unseen agitators heaving kitchen appliances out of upper-story windows onto patrol cars. Compassionate but impatient and prone to anger, smarter than the detectives who condescend to her, Cawood wears her black uniform and neon vest like a bulky suit of armor. She’s a contemporary knight errant, upholding a code of decency against the terrors of modern life.“Happy Valley,” whose final season premieres on Monday (streaming on Acorn TV and AMC+, broadcast on BBC America), is a pocket-size, prosaic saga — a hero’s tale contained in three six-episode seasons and embedded in a family drama. The emotions that buffet the characters are epic in scale, but the action, though it has occasional flashes of brutal violence, tends to be of the everyday, walking-and-talking variety. Like all mythical heroes, Cawood has an antagonist, the psychopathic rapist and killer Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), who is the father of her grandson. But for long stretches of the show, he is in prison, and he and Cawood spend much more time stewing about each other than actually facing off.The second season was shown in 2016, and that seven-year gap is reflected onscreen. Season 3 begins with Cawood counting the days to her retirement and enjoying atypically peaceful relations with her sister, the recovering alcoholic Clare (Siobhan Finneran), and with her now teenage grandson, Ryan (Rhys Connah). The center quickly fails to hold, however, as both the emergence of a body in a drained reservoir and Cawood’s discovery of a profound betrayal by someone close to her raise the specter of Royce, even though he is in prison for life.In its structure, “Happy Valley” is very much a traditional British crime series, with seemingly unconnected plot strands and investigations that wind themselves together against a backdrop of cop-shop politics. But in the hands of the accomplished writer and producer Sally Wainwright (“Gentleman Jack,” “Scott & Bailey), who has written every episode, it is also a powerful social drama that focuses unflinchingly on male violence against women without sliding into speechmaking or heavy-handed symbolism. In the new season’s major subplot, a less-than-sympathetic female character is caught between two seemingly more capable men whose weaknesses run deeper than hers.Overall, the final season is, as any faithful viewer could guess, the culmination of Cawood’s extended battle to the (at least figurative) death with Royce. In order to set up a satisfyingly visceral conclusion, Wainwright forces the action and pushes at plausibility a little harder than those viewers will be used to. The story’s focus also is diluted by her indulgence of characters from the first two seasons who are brought back but not given much to do.Those offenses are minor, though. And the mechanics of the plot fade in the face of the prodigious performances by Lancashire and Norton, both of whom calmly straddle the allegorical and the mundane: the stoic warrior who is a grouchy grandmother, the indestructible horror-movie monster who is a sad victim of his own sociopathy. Also wonderful to watch are Finneran — the relationship between Cawood, for whom weakness is anathema, and the softhearted Clare has been the show’s backbone — and Connah; a child of 10 when the previous season was filmed, he is excellent as the now nearly adult Ryan.Cawood’s mission in the final season has a new, even more personal dimension: She must protect Ryan from his father while also, grudgingly and tardily, acknowledging Ryan’s right to learn about the man for himself. In a time when television and film are playing catch-up with female superheros and action figures, “Happy Valley” has quietly provided a paradigm of local, human heroism. More

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    ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ Onstage, Lacks Some Intensity

    A new West End adaptation, starring Lucas Hedges and Mike Faist, recasts Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story as a memory play.“This ain’t no little thing,” Jack Twist (Mike Faist) says of the depth of attraction he is experiencing in “Brokeback Mountain.”But the rodeo cowboy could equally be referring to the ongoing life of Annie Proulx’s celebrated short story. First seen on the pages of The New Yorker in 1997, Proulx’s distilled account of a tragically foreshortened affair has been an Oscar-winning film, an opera and now a self-described play-with-music.This latest iteration opened Thursday night in the @sohoplace theater in the West End, where it is scheduled to run through Aug. 12, offering a passing glimpse of some powerfully familiar characters. The bare bones of the narrative are there; the dramatically necessary flesh and blood and sinew are not.I was pleased to renew my acquaintanceship with the gregarious Jack and the more indrawn, troubled Ennis del Mar (Lucas Hedges), the two men who begin a furtive relationship in 1963 while herding sheep in the rural Wyoming locale of the title.But I’m not sure that the American writer Ashley Robinson’s adaptation actually deepens our understanding of material that many will inevitably associate with Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in a lauded movie that lasts a good 45 minutes longer than the play (Jonathan Butterell’s atmospheric production clocks in at 90 minutes, no intermission).In the production, the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader performs original songs by Dan Gillespie Sells to give voice to the characters’ emotions. Manuel HarlanTold piecemeal across 20 years, the play comes punctuated with an attractive sequence of original songs by Dan Gillespie Sells, the English musician with whom Butterell collaborated on the (very sweet) homegrown stage and screen musical, “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.”The seductive country twang of his music is punchily delivered here by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader and an ace band visible at the side of the stage: look closely and you’ll see the pedal steel guitarist B.J. Cole, who has worked with Elton John and Joan Armatrading, among others.The music exists to express emotions to which the men, and the women they marry, are reluctant to give voice outright. Reader, billed as the Balladeer, is granted an articulacy missing from the characters nearby onstage who live in their bodies and not their minds.A standout number, “Sharing Your Heart,” comes at the point at which Ennis’s wife, Alma (a sympathetic Emily Fairn), realizes that her husband’s lasting affections lie elsewhere. In a separate track, lyrics describe “the lavender sky,” which a film can easily depict but which here has to be taken on faith. Tom Pye’s evocative set keeps closer to the ground, bringing to life kitchens, campfires and the tent inside which Ennis and Jack first allow themselves to be intimate.Alma (Emily Fairn) and her husband, Ennis, onstage.Manuel HarlanThe two seek shelter from the cold only to find further comfort in each other’s arms, and the tent shakes on cue to signal the carnal activity going on within it. What we don’t get, beyond stolen kisses, is the layered unfolding of a relationship with an intensity that takes the pair by surprise, so movingly evoked in both the original story and the film.It’s one thing for Jack to look on, clearly intrigued, near the start of the play as Ennis washes himself. But the writing is too synoptic and the action too abbreviated to allow the full weight of what is happening between them to be felt.“I ain’t no queer,” Ennis says early on, eager to disavow the feelings that will come to consume his life. What’s missing is time properly spent in the pair’s company, so that we feel the ebb and flow of this impossible romance. As it is, we get a sequence of highlights, a seeming annotation of the play rather than the thing itself, with the advancing years indicated by the ages of Ennis’s two daughters and Jack’s son. Mentions of the Vietnam War and the draft offer a perfunctory nod to the wider world beyond.Onscreen, of course, you can age up the actors on the way to the story’s bleak conclusion. The innovation here is to recast the story as a memory play, with the Older Ennis (a grieving Paul Hickey) on hand throughout to show the continued impact of Jack upon Ennis. The effect, at least for me, was to cast a glance back to Sam Shepard’s “Fool For Love,” another play about a combustible relationship defined by a character named solely as The Old Man.The two leads, in their West End debuts, acquit themselves well given the formidable challenge posed by their screen forbears. Hedges may not have the immediate physical command that Ledger had onscreen, but he shares his late predecessor’s furrowed brow and a sense of roiling anguish at society’s intolerance, and to some degree his own. This is someone who will never know peace.And Faist, so memorably springy and vital as Riff in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story,” is really wonderful: engaging and likable from the start, only to reach a psychic abyss on the way to Jack’s signature comment to Ennis: “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Pausing to play a mean harmonica, Faist more than justifies a play that can otherwise feel a tad superfluous.You may or may not weep at this “Brokeback” — I did not — but just as Jack is to Ennis, I expect Faist’s performance will be impossible to forget.Brokeback MountainThrough Aug. 12 at @sohoplace in London; sohoplace.org More

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    How Hillsong, a Hip Megachurch, Became Entangled in Scandal

    A new documentary series explores the history of Hillsong, known for its celebrity congregants and fashionable trappings before being struck by a series of scandals.The global megachurch Hillsong was known for its hipster trappings, celebrity congregants and wildly popular worship music in the 2010s, but in recent years it has been more closely tied to a series of scandals, including the firing of its charismatic celebrity pastor, Carl Lentz, for “moral failures.”A four-part documentary series, “The Secrets of Hillsong,” premieres on FX on Friday and delves into the turmoil. The series, which is based on a 2021 article in Vanity Fair magazine, features the first interview with Mr. Lentz since he was fired in 2020.Here’s how the trouble unfolded.Why was Hillsong so popular?Brian Houston and his wife, Bobbie, founded Hillsong in Australia in 1983 and opened its first United States branch in New York in 2010. The church was a member of the Australian branch of the Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God, before it formed its own denomination in 2018.Hillsong’s expansion into the United States built on its enormous success in presenting worship music. Its services drew in young people in big cities, where services were held in concert venues, such as Irving Plaza and the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York. The congregants were fashionable and included celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Kevin Durant and Vanessa Hudgens.Mr. Lentz, the lead pastor of Hillsong’s New York branch, also became a celebrity.This hip veneer suggested that Hillsong supported a more progressive form of Evangelicalism, but the church was criticized for its position on L.G.B.T.Q. rights. In an August 2015 blog post, the church’s founder, Mr. Houston, said that gay people were welcome at Hillsong, but that it did “not affirm a gay lifestyle.”Carl Lentz: “hypepriest”Mr. Lentz mingled with celebrities including Mr. Bieber, whom he baptized in the bathtub of an N.B.A. player’s home. In 2017, GQ magazine called Mr. Lentz a “hypepriest” to reflect his trendy wardrobe, which included aviator glasses, skinny jeans and designer sneakers. He spoke frequently about racial inequality and in 2016 declared his support for the Black Lives Matter movement.It all came to a halt when he was fired from Hillsong in November 2020. The church said that his termination had followed discussions about “leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures.” Mr. Lentz said on Instagram shortly afterward that he had been “unfaithful in my marriage, the most important relationship in my life.” His wife, Laura Lentz, was also a Hillsong pastor.Since then, he has stayed out of the spotlight. Last week, he said in an Instagram post that his wife and children had been his “only priority” for the past three years.“Part of the healing from that heartache led us to the decision to be a part of a documentary that we do not control, that we don’t have any say in and that we haven’t even seen yet,” he said.He now works at Transformation Church in Tulsa, Okla.Carl Lentz was once the lead pastor of the Hillsong branch in New York but was fired in 2020 after what the church called “moral failures.”Andrew White for The New York TimesWhat happened after Carl Lentz left?More turmoil. Hillsong’s founder, Mr. Houston, resigned in March 2022 after the church said that an internal investigation had found that he behaved inappropriately toward two women, breaching the church’s code of conduct.He had already stepped away from his ministry duties in January 2022 to fight a criminal charge accusing him of concealing child sexual abuse by his late father, Frank Houston. Brian Houston has denied the allegations. The case is still in the courts, The Australian Associated Press reported.In March, Mr. Houston said he had been charged with drunken driving in the United States in February 2022. Mr. Houston said that at the time “it seemed like all hell had broken loose within Hillsong church.”Mr. Houston did not respond to a request for comment. In a video posted on his social media accounts in November, he criticized Hillsong’s leadership for how it had handled the allegations of misconduct made against him.“I didn’t resign because of my mistakes,” he said. “I resigned because of the announcements and statements that had been made.”What is Hillsong like today?In March 2022, nine of the 16 Hillsong churches in the United States cut ties with the organization, abruptly shrinking the church’s American presence. Hillsong’s website says it has seven churches in the United States, as well as locations in more than two dozen other countries.The website also says that about 150,000 people worldwide attend its services weekly, but that is an estimate the church has been using since before the pandemic. Hillsong did not respond to questions about current attendance figures.The documentary premiering on Friday includes interviews with congregants and looks at the history of the church’s relationship with money, sex and God. More

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    ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 8 Recap: The Wilderness Gets Choosy

    The Yellowjackets are outsourcing a lot of their decisions to “the wilderness” lately. Too bad for its latest victim.Season 2, Episode 8: ‘It Chooses’Earlier this season on “Yellowjackets,” young Natalie recruited her teammates to help her try to fish a moose out of the frozen lake. The moose proved too heavy to dislodge, and it disappeared into the icy water, leaving the teens defeated and hungry.Now, in the second to last episode of the season, Natalie is in a similar situation watching a body sink beneath the ice. Except this time she lets it sink in order to save herself and provide food for her fellow survivors. And it’s not an already unconscious animal. It’s Javi, the little brother of her sometimes lover Travis.The moment also calls back to another situation Natalie encountered. In hopes of easing Travis’s suffering, she previously lied and told him that Javi, who ran away during the group’s drug-induced frenzy last season, had died. Here, she is partly responsible for Javi’s actual death, all while Javi was trying only to lead her to safety.When Javi is declared dead, Van solemnly says, “the wilderness chose.” But did the wilderness really choose? Or did the girls?As this season draws to its conclusion, the desperation of the Yellowjackets in the wilderness hits a new high — or rather low — point. Lottie is bruised, internally and externally, from Shauna’s beating. Akilah realizes that her little mouse friend has been dead all along, it’s cute, fuzzy body just a desiccated corpse. And everyone is starving. Really starving. And extreme hunger means rational thought has gone out the window.Lottie tells Misty that, if she dies, the others should not let her body go to waste. But Lottie holds such sway over the group that they cannot fathom losing her guidance. So instead of allowing Lottie to perish, they invent a new ritual. Standing in a circle around their makeshift altar, they all pick cards. Whoever gets the Queen of Hearts will be sacrificed. In this inaugural drawing, Natalie draws the losing card.Whatever discussions were had about how the ritual would unfold were left offscreen, so it all seems eerily practiced. We never hear any talk of the rules of this deadly game that might demystify it, so the ease with which it is played is uncomfortably natural. There’s no debate over how it is going to work. It just does, and everyone accepts that with the powerlessness of those who haven’t eaten in too long.Shauna puts Jackie’s necklace on Natalie before drawing a blade to her throat from behind. Natalie accepts her fate, but with a condition: Shauna must face her when she slices. Shauna hesitates, and Travis rushes to the rescue, tackling Shauna and urging Natalie to run. The girls, bloodthirsty, pursue Nat through the wintry landscape while Javi comes to her aid, offering to take her to his hiding spot.While Lottie’s followers claim to know something about what the “wilderness” wants, Javi has actually learned its secrets. The only other person who has a sense of what he discovered is Ben, who uses Javi’s drawings to discover a cavern filled with tiny animal bones under a tree, where the young boy resided in apparent solitude.And then Javi dies. The ice cracks open and he falls in as the weapon-wielding chasers catch up. “If you save him, the others will get you,” Misty tells Natalie as she draws her away from the hole. Natalie, realizing that Misty is right, stops fighting. Javi will become the next meal, we assume.The legacy of these cannibalistic traditions bleeds into the present day action.The contemporary scenes feature mostly a lot of exposition that we as an audience already know but the rest of the characters do not. After Shauna explains that Adam’s remains have been found, Van, not clued into the whole cover-up situation, throws away Shauna’s keys so she can’t drive home to Jeff. Lottie brings the group all into the “sharing shack,” which proves true to its name.Shauna shares that Adam wasn’t actually blackmailing her before she murdered him, it was Jeff and Randy — and that she may also have shared too much with the police. (Speaking of sharing …) Tai shares that she was the one who hired Jessica Roberts (Rekha Sharma) to do research on her teammates to protect her political campaign. Misty shares that she kidnapped Jessica and then “took care of it.” And, of course, they all share how they helped Shauna cover up Adam’s killing. (We see the gruesome fruits of their labors in the images the cops show to Jeff in hopes of getting him to talk.)After all these confessions, Lottie emerges with an idea and some beverages. One of the cups is spiked with phenobarbital. Lottie’s plan is another sacrifice. “We give it what it always wants,” she explains. “One of us.” Her rationale is that it — whatever it is — will help them survive the various travails they are enduring if they offer it another sacrifice.She leaves who should die up to chance. That’s what the wilderness would want, she says. “We don’t get to decide,” she explains. “It chooses.”But these women still seem to be doing a lot of projecting about what the “wilderness” is requesting — and, in turn, absolving themselves of any guilt related to their own actions. Natalie could have continued trying to save Javi, but she didn’t. That’s not the wilderness, that’s a choice. It’s Lottie who is presenting her friends with potential death. Not the wilderness.The series has yet to convince me that there’s anything truly supernatural going on. Instead, we’re seeing a lot of desperate and frightened humans doing cruel things to save themselves while letting others suffer. It reminds me of Jackie’s death at the end of Season 1, which was the result of plain teen meanness rather than any sort of ghoulish presence.The surviving Yellowjackets can blame the wilderness for only so much. At some point, they have to take responsibility for all the pain they’ve caused. Still, maybe the guilt would be worse than just drinking Lottie’s death potion.More to chew onI’m a general fan of the “Yellowjackets” music cues, but a couple in this episode felt a little too on the nose for me. Walter is listening to “Not While I’m Around” from “Sweeney Todd,” a musical about cannibalism. As Natalie tries to evade capture, we hear Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” in which Billy Corgan sings, “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.” Also maybe a little too apt.That said: Nice house, Walter.It’s nice that we finally know what was likely going on in the pilot’s opening sequence, even if we don’t know who was being chased. (I’m not sure that last detail is going to end up mattering.)Callie’s Shawn Mendes poster in her bedroom is a very funny production design choice.Melissa is reading a copy of “Sassy.” Long live “Sassy.”I’m glad Misty finally called Mari out. Someone had to. More