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    How a Broadway Stage Manager Spends Her Sundays

    When Rachel Sterner was growing up in Boiling Springs, Penn., she saw a summer stock production of “South Pacific” at the Playhouse at Allenberry. She was hooked.“By 8, I was ushering. Two years later, I was running the spotlight that follows people across the stage,” Ms. Sterner said. “We did a new show every month from April through November. I loved it.”Now she’s on Broadway, serving as the production stage manager for “Almost Famous,” the musical version of Cameron Crowe’s 2000 movie of the same name.“People think stage managers are frantically running around backstage with a clipboard and a stopwatch. It’s the opposite,” she explained. “You need to be as far away from panic as possible. I’m the center of communication and the funnel through which everything is happening for the entire production.”Sometimes that funnel includes last-minute cast illnesses and overpriced or late supplies, if they’re available at all, because of the pandemic. Still, the show must go on, and it’s Ms. Sterner’s job to make sure it does.But she only has one more week to make the magic happen: “Almost Famous” is scheduled to give its final performance on Jan. 8.Ms. Sterner, 38, lives in Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn with her two cats, Lucy and Frankie.WAKE UP TO DRAMA I wake up around 8:30 or 8:45 a.m. to the sound of a chirping bird that gets louder on my iPhone. I take off my eye mask, which I learned to sleep with while I was touring, and check the phone to see if anyone is sick or needs to call out. Then I decide which understudy will go on for them and if they need anything. Penny Lane recently called out — that was a bigger deal. I drink a 32-ounce Mason jar filled with water, shower, stretch for two minutes, and make the bed because that’s the way I want to come home and find it.Ms. Sterner, a Broadway stage manager, prepped her food to take to work.Gili Benita for The New York TimesCINNAMON FOR THE WIN I feed the cats and make breakfast. I can go weeks making the same thing. I’m into English muffins and Beyond Sausage, which is fake meat that’s really good, and I drink a Kombucha. The flavor at the moment is Golden Pineapple. Then it’s coffee. I make Stumptown Coffee Roasters in a Le Creuset French press, add warmed Califia Farms creamer and some cinnamon. The pandemic taught me to find pleasures in simple routines. LIVING THE DREAM I’m out the door at 12:15. I take the Q at Prospect Park. I love going over the Manhattan Bridge. I never get over the view of the city. I’m out at 42nd St. and 7th. I cut through Shubert Alley, which is this historic theater space. I pass three other theaters to get to ours on 45th, which reminds me that I’m living the dream I’ve had since I was 6.PATTI VIBES Once inside my theater, I check in with the Covid safety manager who makes sure everyone submitted a test for that day. Our office is one level up. There’s four of us in a tight room, which was Patti LuPone’s dressing room from “Company.” The walls are still blue and the bathroom is pink, just as she had it.“I like to be physically present” before the show, Ms. Sterner said, “and for people to see me in case they have questions.”Gili Benita for The New York TimesPREP From 1:30 to 2:15, the stage wakes up. The crew resets the props. Wardrobe resets costumes, mics go out, sound is checked, lighting makes sure the video wall is set. I touch base with the various department heads. I like to be physically present and for people to see me in case they have questions. Forty-five minutes before the show, we have a lift call, where we run the opening number: William, who has a trampoline in his bed, is picked up and moved around the stage. It involves half of the cast. It’s like a fight call. If there’s something physically involved that requires practice, we do it every day.PLACES Then I stand onstage and yell to Ron, who mixes the show at the sound board, that we’re ready. A preshow playlist that Cameron put together himself plays. The doors open and the audience comes in at 2:30. I make sure the actors have signed in, then I page everyone in the building. I do a 15-minute call time, then a 5-minute call, a quick pee, and then call places at 2:56.Ms. Sterner writes a show report after every show. Gili Benita for The New York TimesCUES The challenge of “Almost Famous” is that the set pieces are huge and the theater is not. It’s very tight in the wings, and nothing fits. It’s like a game of Tetris. The big pieces need to come in and leave in a certain order exactly at the right time or the show will stop because it will become dangerous. I sit stage right, eight feet off the stage, with a headset talking to everyone and calling the show. I’m super focused because I cue the lights, the scenery, the sound effects and make sure everyone is where they need to be.THE REPORT A 17-minute intermission happens around 4:10. The crew is on deck setting for act two. Actors are changing costumes and wigs. There might be troubleshooting. If not, I start writing the show report. It’s an official record of what happened that day and is sent to the entire production team. I keep track of the show’s timing, if anyone was injured, how the audience reacted and responded, and if anything went wrong or broke. Then I call places for the second act.CURTAIN CALL Bows happen around 5:35. This is my favorite part. It ends with a little rock concert as each person sings our main theme. The audience is on their feet. When they leave, I cross the stage and go to my office. I finish the show report, submit payroll for actors and my team of stage managers, and send out a schedule to the entire company. Slowly, we have started to transition out of work mode. We laugh a lot in the office, which is everything.“People think stage managers are frantically running around backstage with a clipboard and a stopwatch. It’s the opposite,” Ms. Sterner said. “You need to be as far away from panic as possible.”Gili Benita for The New York TimesFRIDAY NIGHT I love the energy of a Sunday. It’s like our Friday night. We get out early, people are punchy and we’re all relieved to have the next day off. I’ve made many friends through other shows. Most recent was “Harry Potter.” I was the stage manager on that for four years, which I left to do this. Every couple of months, two other stage mangers, Andrea Saraffian and Johnny Milani, who I met through “Harry Potter,” and I, go to Gallaghers for steak and martinis. We all ran away with the circus, and it’s nice to connect with people in this specific way. We talk about the stress of the job, and I remember I’m not crazy — it’s a bonkers thing we do.THE FUN DECISION Around 9 or 9:30 we might go to Dutch Fred’s afterward. It’s not the right decision but often it’s the fun one. They make fabulous martinis. We run into more people we know and hear their stories. By 11 p.m. or midnight, I’m in an Uber home.HOME I feed the cats and see if there’s anything I didn’t put away from the morning. I have a weekly planner and I write down bullet points and succinct facts from my day. When my grandmother died in 2016, we found a bunch of these that she did. It’s her own personal history. When I toured with Cirque du Soleil, I started doing them, too. I was having these experiences and thinking, I’m never going to remember this, and I want to. It’s interesting to go back and see what I did a year ago. It’s a flashlight on your memory. “Friday night” dinner and drinks with her stage manager friends, Johnny Milani, right, and Andrea Saraffian, center.Gili Benita for The New York Times More

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    Bridgette Wimberly, Playwright and Librettist, Dies at 68

    She had success with a play about abortion in 2001, and in 2015 wrote the libretto for the opera “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”Bridgette A. Wimberly, a playwright whose first staged work, a drama about abortion, was an Off Broadway hit in 2001 with Ruby Dee in the lead role, and who later made a mark in opera, writing the libretto for the widely produced “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird,” died on Dec. 1 at a care center in the Bronx. She was 68.Her family said the cause was complications of strokes.Ms. Wimberly took up playwriting relatively late. In an interview with The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2003, when one of her plays was being staged by the Cleveland Play House, she confessed that had someone told her a decade earlier that she would be a playwright, “I would have said that someday I’d be going to Mars, too.”Yet her first produced play, “Saint Lucy’s Eyes,” staged at the Women’s Project Theater in Manhattan in April 2001, was so well received — The New York Times called her “one of the country’s most powerful chroniclers of the Black underclass” — that after its initial run ended it was brought back for an eight-week summer run at the Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village.The play was developed through the Cherry Lane Alternative mentorship project, in which Ms. Wimberly worked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein.Ms. Dee, then 76, played a character known only as Grandma who, as the story opens in a scene set in Memphis in 1968, is preparing to perform an illegal abortion on a teenager. The action later shifts to 1980, with Ms. Wimberly’s script exploring the consequences of that abortion and another one that Grandma is preparing to perform.“The play is smart enough to realize that there are many truths,” Anita Gates wrote in a review in The New York Times, “some of them contradictory.” In Newsday, Gordon Cox wrote, “‘Saint Lucy’s Eyes’ doesn’t boast much narrative momentum, but Wimberly shows an admirable talent for the unhurried development of her characters and for dialogue that consistently rings true.”Several more of Ms. Wimberly’s plays were produced over the next dozen years, and then, in 2014, she was offered the chance to take her writing in a different direction.Daniel Schnyder, a Swiss-born saxophonist and composer, had been commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Gotham Chamber Opera to write an opera, and had landed on the pioneering jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker as a subject. He knew Ms. Wimberly through her brother, Michael, a percussionist with whom he had performed, and asked her to write the libretto of what would become “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”First, though, Ms. Wimberly had to overcome some personal reservations. An uncle had been a jazz saxophonist and had been somewhat obsessed with Parker. He had also begun using heroin, the drug that contributed to Parker’s death in 1955 at 34. Her uncle, 14 years younger than Parker, died at 35.“My grandmother hated Charlie Parker because she thought he got my uncle hooked on heroin,” Ms. Wimberly told The Times in 2015. “All my life, he was just a bad name.”Lawrence Brownlee, right, as Charlie Parker and Will Liverman as Dizzy Gillespie in Opera Philadelphia’s 2015 production of “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”Dominic M. MercierBut she took the assignment and developed a certain respect for Parker. “Yardbird” was commissioned as a showcase for the tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who portrayed Parker when the opera had its premiere in Philadelphia in 2015. The work imagined the period immediately after Parker’s death in 1955, with the jazz great pondering, among other things, his wives and other people from his past as well as the large orchestral work that he was never able to write.“In the end, he didn’t write an orchestra piece, and we weren’t going to have him write a false one,” Ms. Wimberly told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2015. “But I feel that what he passed on was that he inspired so many people to create, he opened up the doors, he set the birds free, the people free, the music free, like with what he did with the blues. What he did for jazz itself was allow others to do what he was not able to do in his lifetime.”Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the Philadelphia premiere for The Times, called the work “a 90-minute, swift-paced chamber opera with a pulsing, jazz-infused score.” The next year the opera had its New York premiere at the Apollo Theater, where Parker himself had played. It has since been staged by Seattle Opera, Arizona Opera and other companies, and will be performed in January by the New Orleans Opera.Mr. Schnyder, in a phone interview, said that, because it had a white, male, European composer, the piece needed a librettist who could bring an African American and a female sensibility.“It was a perfect match because she looked at the story of Charlie Parker from a really different perspective, focusing on his relationships with different women in his life,” he said. “That proved to be much more interesting than just focusing on the music.”Bridgette Angela Wimberly was born on Jan. 7, 1954, in Cleveland to John and Conchita (Smith) Wimberly. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University in 1978 and later did graduate studies at Columbia.Ms. Wimberly, third from right, and other former members of the Cherry Lane Theater’s mentorship project at a 2014 event celebrating the project’s 16th anniversary.Walter McBride/Getty ImagesShe was trained as a medical researcher and worked for a time at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center; later several of her plays, including “Saint Lucy’s Eyes” and “Forest City,” about Cleveland’s first integrated hospital, would touch on medical issues.She was interested in poetry and began sharing some of hers in a reading group that met in a Harlem theater where the conditions were not always ideal.“When it was cold, we froze,” she told The Times in 2001. “When it rained, we had to use our umbrellas inside. When it was hot, we burned up.”The poetry led her to dabble in theater. In 1997 she participated in a directing workshop at Lincoln Center. She wrote a scene for one exercise; others in the class, she recalled, told her, “You should finish this”; and the eventual result was “Saint Lucy’s Eyes.”Ms. Wimberly is survived by her mother; her brother; and a sister, Bernadette Scruggs.Seth Gordon, who teaches at the Helmerich School of Drama at the University of Oklahoma, directed the premiere of “Forest City” for the Cleveland Play House in 2003.“Bridgette gave voice to the stories of people who struggled quietly and with dignity, and to chapters of African American history that deserve attention,” he said by email. “She wrote with a striking poetic flair, and with a sense of grace that also defined her very generous spirit.” More

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    A Cop Called Coco, an Actor Named Mani, a Quebecer Exploring Quebec

    MONTREAL — Just five years ago, Mani Soleymanlou, a Quebec actor of Iranian origin, was playing characters named Ahmed, Hakim and Karim on French-language television shows produced in the province. Today, his roles include Patrick, a banker, in one successful TV series, and a corrupt police officer with the very Québécois name Robert “Coco” Bédard, in another.Coco appears in “C’est comme ça que je t’aime,” or “Happily Married,” a dark, rollicking comedy set in the 1970s in a suburb of the provincial capital, Quebec City — a time and place where the chances would have been slim of running into someone like Mr. Soleymanlou: an immigrant who was born in Iran, and grew up in Paris, Toronto and Ottawa, before landing in Quebec.“I think,” Mr. Soleymanlou said in French, with an accent picked up in Paris, “Québécois culture has long been very homogeneous.”But that is changing — thanks in part to people like him.That Mr. Soleymanlou, 40, went from playing typecast outsiders to an insider named Coco Bédard in a few short years is also indicative of larger shifts in Quebec society.Though it still remains rooted in the French language, in ethnicity and in a shared history, Québécois identity is in flux right now — and what it means to be Québécois is what Mr. Soleymanlou has spent the past decade deconstructing in his other career as a playwright.With his family, Mr. Soleymanlou was among the Iranian exiles who streamed to France in the years after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980.At a recent performance at the Théâtre Jean-Duceppe in Montreal, the packed audience gave Mr. Soleymanlou a standing ovation for his trilogy, “Un, Deux, Trois.” For four and a half hours, he dissects his own search for identity after arriving in Quebec, which made him feel like more of an outsider than anywhere else, and he explores the meaning of identity itself and the place of French speakers in Canada, an otherwise overwhelmingly Anglophone country.Collectively, the three plays raise difficult questions that go to the heart of Québécois identity.Can an immigrant from Iran, or anywhere else, ever be considered Québécois? If the French language is a pillar of Québécois identity, what is the place of the French spoken by newcomers from the Maghreb or West Africa, accents heard more and more throughout the province? Is French Québécois identity fated to disappear because of demographics and geography? Or can it — should it? — reinvent itself by becoming part of the global Francophone world?If the success of Mr. Soleymanlou’s trilogy and the arc of his acting career suggest that Québécois identity is expanding, the recent provincial elections also show that the evolution hasn’t been smooth and isn’t a given. The provincial premier, François Legault, and his allies won in a landslide, partly by promoting a cultural nationalism that portrayed immigrants as a threat to Quebec society.Quebec nationalists, especially during the heady days of the independence movement in the 1970s and 1980s, upheld immigrants’ mastery of French as the key to acceptance and integration in Quebec society.But Quebec nationalists have moved the goal posts in recent years, emphasizing instead that immigrants must adhere to an amorphous notion of Quebec values. Politicians like Mr. Legault and his allies, while stressing the importance of French, have also described immigration as undermining Quebec’s identity.“They’re using identity to score political points, especially among older voters, because that’s where fear works,” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “And that’s the problem. They’re not talking to the new Quebec.”Mr. Soleymanlou’s trilogy, “Un, Deux, Trois,” explores identity in Quebec and the place of French speakers in Canada, an otherwise overwhelmingly Anglophone country. Mr. Soleymanlou spoke recently during an interview at a café in Hochelaga, a Montreal neighborhood where he lives with his partner, Sophie Cadieux, a Québécoise actress, and their son. Appointed to the prestigious position of director of the French theater at Canada’s National Arts Centre in Ottawa last year, Mr. Soleymanlou was in the middle of a tour of eight Canadian cities with his trilogy.“In his work, he was able to use humor and laughter and this technique almost like standup comedy to talk about his experiences,” said Yana Meerzon, a professor of theater at the University of Ottawa, contrasting his plays with the straightforward tragedies of some other migrant stories.She added that his work acknowledged the differences between adult immigrants and child immigrants. “They don’t speak from that culture, necessarily, they speak from their own culture, which is mixed.” Mr. Soleymanlou’s successful dual career as actor and playwright points to the opening up of French Québécois popular culture, which has long existed apart from the rest of Canada. Despite the province’s demographics being changed by successive waves of immigration over many decades, the stage and the screen had until recently been dominated by stories told by French Québécois for an audience of French Québécois. “We were very late,” Mr. Soleymanlou said, “but now we’re accelerating to catch up.”Born in Tehran a couple of years after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Mr. Soleymanlou and his family joined a stream of Iranian exiles to France. In Paris, he attended public schools and learned French, before the family packed up again, this time for Toronto, when he was 9.In Toronto, he went to schools with immigrants like himself and eventually “forgot about himself” — immersed in the ever-widening circle of multiculturalism that is the ethos of Canada outside Quebec.He arrived two decades ago in Quebec to study at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal. By then, newcomers from Francophone Africa, many of them Muslim, were reshaping the city’s landscape, the way previous immigrants from Europe and Asia already had for decades. Still, the arts were the domain of the French Québécois.That was made clear to him on his first day at the school where he and three others accounted for the only non-French Québécois students. Four was the most there had ever been in a school with more than 100 students.“Since my arrival in Quebec, I’ve never felt more like a guy from elsewhere, like a stranger, an exile, lost, an immigrant,” Mr. Soleymanlou said in his play “Un.” The school director at the time made a joke of struggling to pronounce his name, Mr. Soleymanlou recalled. Then, using two common French Québécois family names, she said, “They’ll stop criticizing us for having only Tremblays and Girards at the National Theatre School.”“I didn’t understand at all why we were being separated into two categories of students,” he said.That first day set off a search for identity — his own and that of the French Québécois — that, almost by accident, eventually launched his career.In 2009, he was invited to perform at the Théâtre de Quat’Sous in Montreal, which then showcased immigrant artists every Monday evening. Drawing on his life, he wrote and performed a monologue that would become “Un,” the first part of his trilogy.“Since my arrival in Quebec, I’ve never felt more like a guy from elsewhere, like a stranger, an exile, lost, an immigrant,” he said in the play. “Never have I had to explain so often where I came from, to justify my accent, to describe my path, to pronounce over and over again my family name.”His anguished search for identity in “Un” resonated in a province where the dominant French Québécois had long fought to preserve their own sense of self, surrounded as they are by an English majority.“Quebec is a society that’s had to protect and defend itself, always positioning itself in opposition to the other,” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “That’s something I didn’t understand in the beginning — that the Québécois want to know how you define yourself because they have to define themselves to protect themselves.”Mr. Soleymanlou continued his search for identity in “Deux,” in a dialogue with a bilingual Jewish Montrealer, and then in “Three,” which featured three dozen French speakers who were not French Québécois.Before 2017, Mr. Soleymanlou had never been offered a role with a French name. “There’s been a radical change in the past decade, a phenomenal paradigm shift in the arts in Quebec,” he said. As his theater career took off, the scripts sent his way changed. In 2017, while performing his trilogy in Paris, he got a call from Radio-Canada, the public broadcaster, offering him the role of “Philippe” in a new series. He had never been offered a role with a French name before.“Philippe on Radio-Canada? My God, yes,” Mr. Soleymanlou recalled answering.But when he got the script, he found that his role had been changed to a Greek named “Yaniss.” The producers said sorry, but he remained Yaniss.He had to wait two more years for his first meaty role as an ethnic French Québécois — that of the corrupt, though lovable, cop in “Happily Married,” a series about two couples in a very French Québécois suburb, Sainte-Foy, who turn to organized crime while their kids are away at summer camp.“The role of a police officer, in the 1970s, in Sainte-Foy, in Quebec, played by someone of Iranian origin?” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “Ten years ago, that would have been impossible.” More

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    Machine Dazzle: How Many Ways Can You Say Fabulous?

    It was movie night at the Museum of Arts & Design in Manhattan, and the costume designer Machine Dazzle was ready for his entrance.The selection was the 1980 roller-disco fantasy “Xanadu,” and he had draped his 6-foot-5 frame in a shiny take on Olivia Newton-John’s purple Grecian goddess look, accessorized with pastel-rainbow pumps, sequined legwarmers and a Venetian-style ONJ mask on a stick.The movie, of course, was a mess — but the kind of wildly colorful, overstuffed, yes-to-everything mess that could have roller-skated right into his own work.“How many different ideas can find their way into a costume?” Dazzle asked the audience, plenty of whom came in their own homemade light-up headdresses, sparkly jackets and legwarmers. “A lot. If you don’t believe me, go upstairs.”“Upstairs” meant the museum’s fourth and fifth floors, where “Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle,” on view through Feb. 19, is currently offering perhaps the city’s most glittery, tinselly, witty display of bling this holiday season.The show, Dazzle’s first solo exhibition, brings together more than 80 costumes and other artifacts, from self-worn creations from his beginnings in the 90s downtown experimental drag scene to his outrageously extravagant costumes for Taylor Mac’s epic “24-Decade History of Popular Music,” which was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize.Costumes from “Treasure,” Machine Dazzle’s 2019 indie-rock cabaret piece about his relationship with his mother, who died soon after he moved to New York.Jenna Bascom/Museum of Arts and DesignIt’s a summing up, but also a bit of a pivot for Dazzle, who turns 50 on Dec. 30. Lately, he said, he’s been broadening his possibilities, “slowly moving uptown” — and not just because there’s currently a 30-foot photograph of him in rainbow-spangled drag on the museum’s facade, looking up Central Park West (or as he put it, “shooting lasers” at the nearby Trump International Hotel & Tower).This month, he designed and performed in “Bassline Fabulous,” a fanciful staging of Bach’s Goldberg Variations with the Grammy-winning Catalyst Quartet in a Versailles-themed gallery at the Metropolitan Museum (where his character, among many other things, constructed an elaborate topiary garden from ingenious props pulled from under the covers of a giant bed, and at one point did battle with a giant bottle of Elmer’s glue). Next up: costumes for Rameau’s “Io” with the Washington-based Opera Lafayette in the spring.“I love there’s this shift into classical,” Dazzle said. “It makes me want to dive into it more.”Before the commission, he said, he’d never heard the Goldberg Variations, but then he listened to them every day for months. “Music inspires me more than anything visual,” he said. “When I hear music, I see shapes.”Chatting in his studio on the top floor of the museum known as MAD, the evening before the “Bassline Fabulous” dress rehearsal, Dazzle — dressed in paint-splattered jumpsuit and sneakers, his Medusa-like head of dark curls tucked into a knit hat — came off as both knowing exactly what he was doing but also a bit hard-pressed to describe his indeterminate position in the intergalactic space between the art, theater and drag worlds.“It’s taken me years to describe what I am, what I’ve been my whole life,” he said. “I’m an emotionally driven, instinct-based conceptual artist in the role of costume designer” — he paused ever so slightly — “most of the time.”Three looks from “Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle”: left, a Jackie Kennedy-inspired costume from Taylor Mac’s “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”; center, a costume from Godfrey Reggio’s film “Once Within a Time”; and right, another costume from Mac’s show.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesIf the exhibition floors are a dazzling parade of exquisitely detailed looks, the studio is unabashed chaos, crammed with bits and pieces of costumes from previous projects. On a dressmaker’s dummy, there was his not quite finished Louis XIV-ish costume for “Bassline Fabulous,” including a bondage-tinged cage of ruched elastic over a lace caftan that had been pulled through the holes.“You get these weird blob shapes, which are kind of oozing,” he said. “You don’t want to lose the body, but there can also be sculpture.”Nearby was a neck corset, a pair of size 15 period shoes awaiting their blue-sky-and-clouds trompe l’oeil paint job, and a pile of cloth flowers in “weird Barbie flesh tones” set to be incorporated into a headdress. And, on the table, his sewing machine: a basic $250 Singer from Michael’s, the arts and crafts emporium.“I use a sewing machine the way I use a hammer,” Dazzle said. “I’m not a fine tailor. What I do with a sewing machine is attach two things together. It’s sort of like civilized glue.”“Civilized glue” — or maybe Krazy Glue? — might be an alternate title for the exhibition, which showcases the way his work bonds not just wildly disparate elements but trash and glamour, metaphor and materiality, emotion and intellect.“I love wearing ideas,” Dazzle said. “You can make something that’s really beautiful but gets boring after five minutes onstage. I like giving the audience some work to do. I want them to ask, ‘Why the hell is he wearing an apple pie on his head?’”Taylor Mac in Machine Dazzle’s 1776-inspired opening costume from “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, 2016.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMachine Dazzle with the Catalyst Quartet at a dress rehearsal for “Bassline Fabulous,” a staging of Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in December.Stephanie Berger/The Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe show was assembled by Elissa Auther, the museum’s chief curator. She’d seen photographs of Dazzle’s costumes for “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a 24-hour-long queer retelling of American history from 1776 to the present through songs of the time. “I thought I’d be lucky if I could find 10 costumes available,” she said.Instead, she was surprised by the profusion of material that came out of Dazzle’s studio, his apartment and friends’ basements. The title “queer maximalism” was her idea — and one meant to challenge aesthetic hierarchies.“In the art world, these kinds of maximalist styles are viewed as stylistic embarrassment, lacking in rigor or meaning,” Auther said. “But Machine really, really brilliantly demonstrates it as an embodied aesthetic category. These surface effects are really political effects of resilience and survival.”Dazzle, whose name is Matthew Flower, was born in 1972, and spent his early childhood in Houston, where his father worked as an engineer in the energy sector. He was always into crafting, and movies like “Grease” and “Xanadu.” On his 10th birthday, he was enchanted by a trip to “The Nutcracker,” which involved not just elaborate costumes but children like himself onstage.“I thought, ‘This is what I want to do! Look, there it is!’” he said. “But then I got depressed, since I was so far away from that. I didn’t come from a cultured place. I had to find it for myself.”A display of headdresses, costumes, photographs and ephemera, from “Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle” at the Museum of Arts and Design. Jenna Bascom/Museum of Arts and DesignWhen he was 11, the family moved even farther from Xanadu, to Idaho Falls, Idaho. In 1994, after art school at the University of Colorado, he bought the proverbial one-way ticket to New York City. (In his suitcase was a bag full of milk tops that said “HOMO,” for “homogenized,” collected from a favorite cafe in Boulder, which he later fashioned into a kind of chain-mail breastplate included in the show.)He worked a series of day jobs, including a 15-year stint as a costume jewelry designer. (In his studio, he pointed out one of the first pieces he made in the early 2000s, for a friend: a choker made of a piece of windshield retrieved from a burned-out car on the Brooklyn waterfront.) At night, he was a regular at venues like Exit Art, a performance-oriented gallery, and small downtown queer clubs like the Cock, the Slide and the Pyramid Club.He began making costumes for the Dazzle Dancers, a Solid Gold-style dance troupe formed in 1996 (represented in the show by writhing mannequins in barely-there costumes and a video for their raunchy cover of the theme from “The Love Boat,” which introduces them as “a naked sensation” that had “come to heal a broken nation”). A friend called him a “dancing machine,” and it stuck.Machine Dazzle’s costumes for the Dazzle Dancers, a downtown performance art troupe founded in New York City in 1996. A fellow member called Dazzle (who was born Matthew Flower) a “dancing machine,” and the name stuck.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHe also began making costumes for downtown performers like Julie Atlas Muz, Justin Vivian Bond and Mac, who in 2004 invited the Dazzle Dancers to participate in “Live Patriot Acts: Patriots Gone Wild!,” a “political vaudeville” that parodied the Republican National Convention.“I had my own rougher aesthetic, and Machine had a similar take on things,” Mac recalled. “It was about making a trash bag beautiful, and not so much about making something that was already beautiful beautiful.”“His costumes are always metaphors for something,” Mac continued. “With everyone else, if you say the costume is a cat, it’s a cat. But he would make a costume of what cats make you feel like.”They are also, Mac ventured, “a storage of pain.” “It’s a flooding of all the emotions and things a little queer kid wasn’t allowed to express, growing up in the time we did,” Mac said.Dazzle made what became nearly 100 costumes for “The Lily’s Revenge,” Mac’s six-hour, 40-performer play staged in 2009 at HERE Arts Center in Manhattan. It’s represented at the museum by a single flower headdress. But MAD’s entire fifth floor is dedicated to Dazzle’s dozens of costumes for “A 24-Decade of Popular Music,” including the companion costumes he made for himself. (For those who missed it, there’s a sizzle reel in the gallery, and an HBO documentary in the works.)Dazzle’s Civil War-era costume for Mac, right, from “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” featuring a hoop skirt made of hot dogs and barbed wire, inventions of the period. At right, Dazzle’s companion costume for himself, “Gay-braham Lincoln.” Jenna Bascom/Museum of Arts and DesignDazzle summed up what he calls his “recipe” for Mac’s show: a silhouette informed by what people wore at the time, but layered with references to inventions, technological and social change, and collective emotions. Take his costume for 1856-1866: a shredded military jacket on top of a skeletal hoop skirt made from barbed wire and strings of … sausage?“It was the Civil War, so there’s loneliness, dead people, sadness, winning, losing,” Dazzle said. “But also barbed wire, which was invented at the time. And hot dogs! I read in a couple places that the American hot dog was invented in this time, by German immigrants.”Representing the 1960s, there’s a Jackie Kennedy pink suit painted with Roy Lichtenstein dots, backed with giant “wings” of Pop-Art hands pointing like guns. For the AIDs era, there’s a robe made of cassette tapes, topped by a many-headed mushroom-cloud-like death mask.It was in 2016, during the performances leading up to the one-time-only, 24-hour marathon show at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, that Dazzle got the courage to quit his day job.“I’m Capricorn, Virgo rising — very responsible, practical, realistic,” he said. “I was really scared, but I decided to take the leap and follow my heart.”Dazzle in his studio at the Museum of Arts & Design. “I love wearing ideas,” he said. “You can make something that’s really beautiful but gets boring after five minutes onstage.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe show highlights some work with new collaborators, including his costumes for “Once Within a Time,” a 50-minute wordless art film by Godfrey Reggio (“Koyaanisqatsi”), which had its premiere last October at the Santa Fe International Film Festival. (One oversize mannequin wears the mud-cloth shaman number worn by Mike Tyson, who plays a character called the Mentor.)There’s also a moving suite of costumes for “Treasure,” his 2019 indie-rock cabaret piece about his relationship with his mother, who died soon after he moved to New York. (An album version was released in October.)And Dazzle is also working with Mac on a new, large-scale piece, “The Bark of Millions,” a suite of 54 original songs inspired by queer figures throughout history, written by Mac and the composer Matt Ray. At a recent preview concert at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Dazzle — who also sings in the ensemble — wore a jumpsuit and “a large poncho.” But this time, both he and Mac decided to trade their usual extravagant footwear for some maximal minimalism.“Being barefoot onstage is very punk,” Dazzle said. “It’s raw and it’s real and it’s kind of witchy.”Queer Maximalism x Machine DazzleThrough Feb. 19, Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, Manhattan, (212) 299-7777; madmuseum.org. More

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    In 2022, TV Woke Up From the American Dream

    How the TV of 2022 depicted the weird, warping pressures of work and ambition in a boom-and-bust economy.In the Peacock series “Killing It,” Brock (Scott MacArthur), an Everglades snake hunter and would-be YouTube influencer, gets shot in the face in an altercation over a sack of python eggs. It is the best thing that has ever happened to him.The shooting leaves Brock minus one eye. But it’s captured on video, and the upload gets millions of views, giving him the lucrative viral success he’s wanted for years.“American dream!” he says, beaming. “Getting shot in the face!”On TV, 2022 has been the year of the American dream — with a catch. For many of the hustlers, entrepreneurs and strugglers onscreen, that aspiration still exists. But as Brock experienced, it can cost you an important part of yourself.“Killing It,” created by Dan Goor and Luke Del Tredici of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” slipped under many TV watchers’ radar last spring, including, mea culpa, mine. In its first episode, it seems like a simple, wacky buddy comedy: Craig Foster (Craig Robinson), a Florida security guard with dreams of starting a prostate-supplement business, teams up with the ride-share driver Jillian Glopp (Claudia O’Doherty) in a contest to exterminate invasive pythons.But as the season goes on, it becomes a broad, big-swinging satire of an adversarial economy that can seem to be booming and busting at the same time. (Tim Heidecker has a boisterous turn as a testosterone-pumped motivational speaker who preaches the philosophy of “Dominine,” which is one more than “dominate.”)As Craig, Jillian and their opponents claw toward their prize, one foot of dead python at a time, they give us a tour of the hustler’s mirage, in which the promise of riches shimmers on the horizon, all yours if you only go to one more paid conference, pitch two more investors, take three more jobs.The work experience of Jillian, an Australian immigrant, is especially bleak-comic. She drives an Uber that tows a mobile billboard (which doubles as her home), gets a TaskRabbit stint helping a rich woman (D’Arcy Carden) perpetrate a tax-fraud scheme and takes a job murdering birds at an airport, all with a heartbreakingly cheerful spirit of optimism.The comedy is grotesque and blunt — Craig spends one episode with a dead snake nailed to his palm — but sneakily smart. In this hunt for the American dream, it says, every life form must find a lower life form to kill. And while the series is set in 2016, three years before the first stirrings of Covid, it feels pandemic-adjacent in its focus on the stratum of the work force for whom work is risky, physical and in-person. You cannot drive an Uber, or shoot a nail gun into a python’s skull, over Zoom.Nicco Annan and Brandee Evans in “P-Valley,” in which every dancer dreams of being something else.StarzThe pandemic plays explicitly in Season 2 of Starz’s strip-club melodrama “P-Valley,” about a line of work that is defined by in-person interaction. The proprietor of the Pynk nightclub, Uncle Clifford (a resplendent Nicco Annan), who is nonbinary and uses she/her pronouns, spends much of the season sporting a bejeweled mask, enforcing 2020-era Covid protocols while trying to keep her business afloat at 50 percent capacity.The Pynk is a magnet for dreams, and not only naughty ones. The “P-Valley” creator, the playwright Katori Hall, respects her pole dancers as artists and athletes, and she recognizes their work for what it is: a job that manifests the economy tangibly, translating desire into dollar bills flying in the air.And because dancers age out so quickly, the job also renders the pressures of the economy in time-lapse: You have just a few years to rise up the pole before your tiring muscles pull you back down.Every dancer enters the Pynk with an eye on something else — a showbiz life, a business career, or simply escape — but one of the most affecting journeys of Season 2 belongs to Mercedes (Brandee Evans), who comes to realize that she has reached retirement age without having figured out her next step. “You’re just going to have to learn how to dream new dreams,” Uncle Clifford tells her. That’s the price of dreaming: You can’t afford to wake up.The summer’s surprise buzz phenomenon, FX on Hulu’s “The Bear,” focused on the pressures of a different sort of service industry. Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), a high-end restaurant chef, comes home to run his family’s struggling Chicago sandwich joint after his drug-addicted brother’s suicide. The pandemic isn’t a factor in the story. But the show’s depiction of work as a kind of barely restrained combat (which sometimes boils over into actual combat) feels like a bespoke fit for the post-reopening economy of labor shortages and supply chain issues.The memorable, high-decibel work sequences make “The Bear” look and sound like a war story that happens to take place in a kitchen. Work here is furious, violent and relentless. Flames roar up the sides of pans, pots clatter like artillery, slabs of beef are dragged and hoisted like casualties. Hands are burned, fingers slashed; the pace of the prep rush turns the kitchen staff into sweating, shouting bodies, meat cooking meat.All the while, Carmy flashes back to memories of being mocked and belittled by his Michelin-starred boss in the restaurant where he used to work. At times, you wonder why he chooses to stick with this job that often makes him so unhappy. In the season finale, reminiscing about his brother at an Al-Anon meeting, he seems to hit on an answer: Sometimes our dreams are not ours alone, nor are they even our choice. “Me trying to fix the restaurant was me trying to fix whatever was happening with my brother,” he says. “And, I don’t know, maybe fix the whole family.”Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White in “The Bear,” which depicts work as a kind of combat.FXIn politics, “the American dream” has long been used aspirationally, to evoke family and home. But as my colleague Jazmine Ulloa detailed earlier this year, the phrase has also lately been used ominously, especially by conservative politicians, to describe a certain way of life in danger of being stolen by outsiders.The typical counterargument, both in politics and pop culture, has been that immigrants pursuing their ambitions help to strengthen all of America. (The Dream Act has its name for a reason.) But some recent stories have complicated this idea by questioning whether the dream itself — or, at least, defining that dream in mostly material terms — can be toxic.The third season of Hulu’s “Ramy,” starring the comedian Ramy Youssef as a rudderless young Muslim from an immigrant family, takes on the theme directly. The title character’s parents, Maysa (Hiam Abbass) and Farouk (Amr Waked), have found prosperity tantalizingly out of reach, signing up with ride-share and grocery-delivery apps in their middle age.Maysa has grown resigned, but Farouk remains in a poignant unrequited love affair with the dream. He chases real-estate deals; he gins up a hapless business selling ad space on takeout containers; he fantasizes about appearing on “Shark Tank.” (Ramy, meanwhile, has hit it big in the jewelry business, having partnered with some contacts in Israel, but finds himself more spiritually adrift than ever.)In the season’s final episode, Maysa and Farouk, having come across a stash of hallucinogenic mushrooms, reminisce about their early days in the country when they would feed Ramy and his sister hot dogs, not knowing they contained pork. Stoned, they make a run to buy convenience-store franks, bite into the seductive, non-halal treats and realize that they taste disgusting. “Why did we sell our souls?” Farouk asks. “We gave it all up for hot dogs.”Most recently, Hulu’s “Welcome to Chippendales” — about another kind of commercialized American meat — reconsiders the immigrant dream from the vantage of success. The story of Somen Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani), the founder of the male-stripper empire, it is in many ways of a piece with this year’s glut of scam-and-scandal docudramas; it’s a rise-and-fall series in which the fall is less interesting and takes twice as long. (The creator, Robert Siegel, gave us the prosthetic fantasia “Pam & Tommy” earlier this year.)The series stands apart, though, for showing how Banerjee, born in India, uses a learned idea of American appetites to pursue a received idea of the American dream. In some ways, being an outsider makes his success possible — much in America is novel to him, so he’s receptive to new ideas (like seminude dancers in bow ties).“Welcome to Chippendales” on Hulu is based on the real-life origins of the famous male-stripper empire.Erin Simkin/HuluBut his embrace of Americanness (for instance, he goes by “Steve” rather than “Somen”) cuts two ways. He experiences racism before and after he hits it big, but he also uses discrimination as a business tactic, ending up in court because of a scheme to bar Black patrons (whom, he concludes from experience, will make white customers see his club as less “classy”).Banerjee has perhaps internalized the American dream too thoroughly. He gets his first intimation of this when he returns to India for his father’s funeral, his suitcase stuffed with gifts of electronics and Velveeta, hoping to be welcomed as a conquering success. Instead, his mother scolds him for leaving the family printing business to run a fleshpot. “We are middle-class people, Somen,” she says. “We did not need saving by America.”He leaves, weighed down with rejection and processed cheese. Beyond his mother’s personal disappointment is the verdict that he has stopped being himself, but in the process he has not really become a new person either. He is simply a reflection of another culture’s artifice, an imitation of an imitation.This is the danger of the American dream when you scale it down from the national to the individual level. You risk devoting your life to wanting something because it’s what you’ve been told you should want. Everybody loves a Cinderella story, but sometimes your dream, in reality, is just a wish somebody else’s heart made. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: Kennedy Center Honors and New Year’s Eve

    This year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony airs on CBS. And various networks offer New Year’s Eve festivities.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Dec. 26-Jan. 1. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE YEAR: 2022 9 p.m. on ABC. For over a decade, ABC and its anchors have offered an annual retrospective look at the year’s biggest news stories. (Of course, whether a look back at the past year sounds like a gift or a nightmare is something viewers will have to decide for themselves.) The 2022 program includes segments on pickleball, Taylor Swift’s Ticketmaster saga and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.TuesdayHalle Berry, left, and Patrick Wilson in “Moonfall.”Reiner Bajo/LionsgateMOONFALL (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. You know you’re in for a particular kind of movie when its trailer shows characters yelling “Hang on!” in three different scenes. And you know you’re in for the “hang on” kind of movie when it’s directed by Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow”). Both things are true of “Moonfall,” a sci-fi disaster flick about two former astronauts (Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson) who join forces to save the planet after a geeky amateur researcher (John Bradley) discovers that the moon is heading for a collision with Earth. In a New York Times review, Ben Kenigsberg wrote that the movie’s off-planet element “flirts with the transcendently goofy,” but that “Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth.”AMERICAN MASTERS: GROUCHO & CAVETT 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). “If Groucho never existed, we would sense a lack in the world of comedy, like the planet in the solar system that astronomers say ought to be there.” Those words, attributed to the TV host Dick Cavett, kick off this feature-length documentary, which looks at the friendship — and mentorship — between Cavett and the pioneering comic Groucho Marx. Through new interviews with Cavett and archival footage of Marx (who died in 1977), the documentary follows Marx and Cavett’s relationship from their first meeting, at the funeral of the playwright George S. Kaufman in 1961, until Marx’s death, and looks at how their friendship was a bridge between two generations of comedy.WednesdayTHE 45TH ANNUAL KENNEDY CENTER HONORS 8 p.m. on CBS. This year’s Kennedy Center Honors recognized a multigenre, multigenerational group of artists: the singer Gladys Knight; the actor and filmmaker George Clooney; the rock band U2; the singer-songwriter Amy Grant; and the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León. The ceremony earlier this month, footage of which will debut on CBS on Wednesday, featured tributes to the honorees from an array of familiar faces, including Garth Brooks, Mickey Guyton, Ariana DeBose, Matt Damon, Sheryl Crow, Jason Moran, Alicia Hall Moran and Eddie Vedder.REAR WINDOW (1954) and THE WINDOW (1949) 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on TCM. Here’s a novel midcentury-mystery pairing: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and “The Window,” a 1949 film noir directed by Ted Tetzlaff, who a few years earlier was the cinematographer on Hitchcock’s “Notorious.” These two movies also have somewhat similar setups. The classic “Rear Window” casts James Stewart as housebound photographer who believes there has been a murder at a neighboring home; “The Window” centers on a nine-year-old boy (Bobby Driscoll) who suspects the same.ThursdayREADY PLAYER ONE (2018) 11 p.m. on TBS. To see two wildly different sides of Steven Spielberg, consider pairing his semi-autobiographical period drama, “The Fabelmans” (now in theaters), with his sci-fi bonanza “Ready Player One,” a movie that manages to be nostalgic despite being set in 2045. That’s because its dystopian world uses late 20th- and early 21st-century pop culture as its building blocks. The story, adapted from Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel of the same name, centers on a young man (Tye Sheridan) searching for treasure left behind by a dead virtual-reality world-builder (Mark Rylance).FridayRosamund Pike and Ben Affleck in “Gone Girl.”Merrick Morton/20th Century FoxGONE GIRL (2014) 7:25 p.m. on HBO. The musicians Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, of the band Nine Inch Nails, composed the scores of two movies playing in theaters right now: Luca Guadagnino’s “Bones and All” and Sam Mendes’s “Empire of Light.” For an earlier example of their movie music, see this thriller from David Fincher, about a husband and wife (played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) whose lives derail when the wife, Amy, goes missing, and the husband, Nick, becomes a suspect in her disappearance.A SOLDIER’S STORY (1984) 8 p.m. on TCM. The playwright Charles Fuller won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” about an investigation into the murder of a Black Army sergeant on a segregated Louisiana military base in the 1940s. And he wrote the screenplay of this film adaptation, which was directed by Norman Jewison and scored by Herbie Hancock. Fuller died in October, which makes the end of the year a poignant time to revisit the film.SaturdayNew Year’s Eve decorations in Times Square earlier this month.Justin Lane/EPA, via ShutterstockNEW YEAR’S EVE SHOWS on various networks. How do you take your New Year’s Eve programming? With sugar? See MILEY’S NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY, hosted by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton, at 10:30 p.m. on NBC. With extra twang? How about NEW YEAR’S EVE LIVE: NASHVILLE’S BIG BASH, hosted by the singers Jimmie Allen and Elle King and the anchor Rachel Smith, at 10:30 p.m. on CBS. With a Times Square neon glaze? Try DICK CLARK’S NEW YEAR’S ROCKIN’ EVE WITH RYAN SEACREST 2023 at 10:30 p.m. on ABC. For those without cable TV, or who just want to watch the New York ball drop with minimal fuss, there’s a free livestream of the Times Square scene at timessquarenyc.org.SundayDIONNE WARWICK: DON’T MAKE ME OVER (2023) 9 p.m. on CNN. This new documentary about the singer Dionne Warwick’s art and activism pairs archival materials with an impressive slate of interviewees that includes Quincy Jones, Gladys Knight, Olivia Newton-John, Smokey Robinson, Elton John, Snoop Dogg, Gloria Estefan and Alicia Keys. The doc picked up solid reviews when it opened at the Toronto International Film Festival last year; it makes its wider debut on Sunday. More

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    Is It Time for a ‘White Lotus’ Vacation?

    Things turn out badly for most of the show’s well-heeled characters. But that hasn’t stopped some fans from booking a trip.For some fans of “The White Lotus,” watching the show was not enough. They want the full experience.Last month, Will Potter, an executive at Sotheby’s who lives in Brooklyn, booked a stay at the San Domenico Palace, the Four Seasons resort hotel in Taormina, Sicily, where the show’s second season was filmed.“There’s very few shows where, as I’m watching it, I’m going, ‘This is so good,’” Mr. Potter, 38, said.During the first season of the HBO series, which was set in Hawaii, Mr. Potter was especially taken with Tanya McQuoid, the bumbling heiress played by Jennifer Coolidge, he said. As he watched the second season, with his wife, on Sunday nights after they had put their two children to bed, he found himself falling for the show’s idyllic Sicilian setting. Weeks before the murderous finale aired, he had booked a summer family vacation there.“We were like, ‘This looks amazing, to do a full adventure,” Mr. Potter said. “It looks like a beautiful hotel.”Hotel staff members greet the guests in a scene from season two of “The White Lotus.”Fabio Lovino/HBOHe added that the family plans to go on side trips inspired by the show’s characters’ forays away from the hotel property. “We were watching the Noto region episode,” he said, “and we were like, ‘What if we mix it up and explore that?’ And then we ended up putting the exact itinerary together.”The San Domenico Palace, a former Dominican monastery perched on the edge of a promontory overlooking the Ionian Sea, was converted into a hotel in 1896. Its guests have included Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren.After the second season of “The White Lotus” began airing in October, the hotel experienced “a spike in web visits from the U.S. market, and the U.K. and Australia,” Ilaria Alber-Glanstaetten, the resort’s general manager, said. Some of the $4,200-a-night suites are still available in 2023, she added. “Bookings have been affected, but the biggest impact has been on awareness,” Ms. Alber-Glanstaetten said.Like the majority of “White Lotus” characters, some guests have had stays that were less than tranquil. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, arguably the most headline-generating celebrity couple of the mid-20th century, became part of San Domenico lore after a dramatic argument on the terrace in 1963. “Liz apparently broke a mandolin over Dick’s head,” Ms. Alber-Glanstaetten said. “The reason for the fight was allegedly jealousy.”The terrace of the San Domenico Palace.AlamyThe manager attributes the sometimes stormy mood of the place to Mount Etna, the active volcano that is visible from many of the suites. “It’s hard to describe, but when you are there you really feel it,” Ms. Alber-Glanstaetten said.Ida K. Mova, 37, a design consultant for Waterworks, a manufacturer of bath and kitchen fixtures, who lives in San Francisco, visited the San Domenico Palace in August. After watching “The White Lotus,” she is up for a second trip. “I can’t wait to go back,” she said.The online travel giant Expedia calls the trend of television- and film-related tourism “set-jetting.” Nearly two-thirds of travelers who took part in a recent survey reported having booked a trip inspired by a movie or TV show, the company said.The first season of “The White Lotus” was filmed at Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea in Hawaii. Like the San Domenico in recent months, that hotel had a spike in reservations last year, but it was hard to tell if it was because of the HBO series or because the pandemic lockdown had lifted soon after it aired.“We strategically wanted to try and reopen after the filming had been done,” Robert Delaney, the resort manager at the Four Seasons Maui, said. He added that many guests ask about the Pineapple Suite, a room that exists only in the “White Lotus” universe, and the most ardent fans “talk about little intricacies of the characters in the show.”A “White Lotus” scene at the San Domenico pool.HBOMike White, the creator of “The White Lotus,” has not always portrayed hotel staff members in the most flattering light. In the first season, the manager, Armond, went on a drug binge and had sex with another staff member in his office. In the second season, Valentina, the manager of the Taormina resort, makes use of an unoccupied suite to have a fling with a prostitute.Mr. Delaney said he found the depictions of hotel workers to be lacking in accuracy at times. “The portrayal of some of the activities that the characters or the managers took part in was not a fair portrayal of what the everyday role is for someone like me, for example,” he said. More

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    Day 25: That Time an Orthodox Jew Celebrated Christmas

    The first and only time that Alex Edelman’s family celebrated Christmas, their tree was topped not by a star, but a teddy bear wearing a yarmulke.Mr. Edelman, who was 7 or 8 at the time — he doesn’t remember the exact year — was also wearing a yarmulke. All of his male family members were. Mr. Edelman, 33, grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in Brookline, Mass., and he says his family’s one-night fling with Christmas, which he chronicled with withering precision in his recent Off Broadway comedy show “Just For Us,” was a thoroughly Jewish endeavor.The story has become an integral part of Mr. Edelman’s comedy routine: A non-Jewish friend of Mr. Edelman’s mother had a tragic year, and no one to celebrate Christmas with. So Mr. Edelman’s mother decided that, religion notwithstanding, she would do a mitzvah — the Jewish concept of a good deed — and invite her to celebrate with them. In order to make that happen, of course, she’d need stockings, cookies for Santa, and that ever-important tree.“So we had Christmas,” Mr. Edelman says in his act. “We did a pretty good job, for Jews. We went whole-hog, except no hog. Kosher Christmas.”By decking their halls, Mr. Edelman said, they were performing an essential Jewish act: welcoming the stranger into their home, with love and open hearts.On Christmas morning, Mr. Edelman and his younger brother opened presents with their parents and Kate, their non-Jewish friend, who had spent the night and gone to bed delighted by the celebration. The brothers then headed off to school, as the Jewish day school that they attended was not closed on Christmas Day. Later that evening, their father would get a phone call from the school principal, who was deeply concerned. The Edelman brothers, it seemed, had been telling other students that Santa Claus had visited their home. Why would the Edelmans allow Christmas into their life? Mr. Edelman’s father was quick to answer: Clearly, he told the school principal, you don’t understand the true meaning of Christmas.“It was a moment of great parenting. Not to give too much credit to my parents, but all credit to my parents,” Mr. Edelman said in an interview. “The only thing that is universally Jewish is intentionality. You cannot have Judaism without intention. And what’s so Jewish about this event is there was so much empathy, but also much intentionality, when my parents decided to do this.”These days, the story remains Mr. Edelman’s favorite comedic bit in his show, “because afterward people tell me their own stories of human kindness,” he said. “It highlights what I love about my Jewish values, with empathy as the true north. It’s a good demonstration of how Jewish values can be applicable, even when you’re celebrating Christmas.” More