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‘My Broken Language’ Review: Piecing Together a Life of Many Dialects
Source: Theater – nytimes.com More
Eliana Willis
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What’s on TV This Week: ‘Atlanta’ and ‘Black Panther’
The series staring Donald Glover concludes its fourth and final season. And the Marvel blockbuster airs on FX as the sequel premieres in theaters.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, Nov. 7-13. Details and times are subject to change.MondayPUSS IN BOOTS (2011) 6 p.m. on TOON. In this prequel spinoff of the “Shrek” franchise, Puss, the talking cat voiced by Antonio Banderas, is framed for a bank robbery and becomes an outlaw in his own town. He seeks to restore his honor and pay the debt he owes to his hometown by joining forces with Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis) and Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) to find the magic beans that lead to valuable golden goose eggs. The film is a “cheerfully chaotic jumble of fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters,” Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The New York Times. A sequel is set to be released on in late December.TuesdayELECTION NIGHT SPECIALS 8 p.m. on ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. As the polls close on Tuesday, several networks are airing the latest election and voting news in the U.S. midterm elections. Find out what’s at stake in our guide to the midterms, including how state races could have a huge effect on issues like abortion rights and voting.SAY HEY, WILLIE MAYS! (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. This documentary explores the life of the Major League Baseball legend Willie Mays as he navigated the sport during a time of segregation and racism. The director Nelson George tracks Mays’s experience growing up in Alabama and getting his start playing for the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro Leagues, as well as his career in the big leagues. The film features interviews with Mays, the baseball greats Barry Bonds and Reggie Jackson and the sports commentator Bob Costas.WednesdayLainey Wilson in October. The performer is up for six nominations at this year’s CMA Awards ceremony, which will take place on Wednesday.Jason Kempin/Getty Images For CmtTHE CMA AWARDS 8 p.m. on ABC. Luke Bryan and Peyton Manning will take the stage live in Nashville to host the 56th annual Country Music Association Awards. This year, first-time nominee Lainey Wilson is up for six awards, including new artist of the year, and Ashley McBryde, Carly Pearce, Chris Stapleton and Shane McAnally are each nominated for five. The evening will feature performances from Carrie Underwood and Katy Perry, among others.HARD KNOCKS IN SEASON: THE ARIZONA CARDINALS 10 p.m. on HBO. This reality sports series is based on the HBO franchise “Hard Knocks,” which documents a different N.F.L. team’s training camp each year. This series instead focuses on a team through its pro season. The second season follows the Arizona Cardinals, led by the quarterback Kyler Murray. The Cardinals have gotten off to a rocky start this season, currently in last place in the N.F.C. West.ICONS UNEARTHED 10 p.m. on VICE. Season 2 of this documentary series focuses on the long-running animated series “The Simpsons.” In the final episode, writers, directors, actors and network executives share stories about how the television show came together and established its place in pop culture.ThursdayBIGGER THAN LIFE (1956) 8 p.m. on TCM. Based on a 1955 article in The New Yorker, the film follows Ed Avery (James Mason), a teacher who is diagnosed with a fatal illness. After his doctor prescribes him cortisone, he is at first believed to have made a recovery. But he then develops an addiction to the drug that leads to his downward spiral.ATLANTA 10 p.m. on FX. This series wraps up with the show’s characters back in Atlanta after spending time in Europe in Season 3. Acclaimed for its acting, storytelling and depictions of modern day Black life, the series follows the rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), his manager and cousin, Earn (Donald Glover), and their friends Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and Van (Zazie Beetz).FridayChadwick Boseman in “Black Panther.”Marvel Studios/Disney, via Associated PressBLACK PANTHER (2018) 5 p.m. on FX. Need a refresher before watching the sequel? Catch this blockbuster film on the day of the premiere of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” In this movie, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) becomes the king of Wakanda, the isolated, technologically advanced African nation. As Black Panther, he rallies his allies and fights to keep his people, and their culture, safe. “In its emphasis on Black imagination, creation and liberation, the movie becomes an emblem of a past that was denied and a future that feels very present,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. “And in doing so opens up its world, and yours, beautifully.”SaturdayTHE SNAKE PIT (1948) 8:30 p.m. on TCM. Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) wakes up in a mental hospital, with no recollection of how she ended up there and an inability to recognize her husband, Robert (Mark Stevens). The film follows Victoria as she attempts to regain her memory with the help of Dr. Mark Kik (Leo Genn).SundayFrom left: Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig and Leslie Jones in “Ghostbusters.”Sony Pictures Entertainment, via Associated PressGHOSTBUSTERS (2016) 8:30 p.m. on Syfy. In this reboot of the science fiction comedy franchise, a transit worker (Leslie Jones) contacts three paranormal physicists (Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon) after she encountered a ghost in a subway terminal. The four women band together to fight off the ghosts that have invaded New York City. It is “a movie that is a lot of enjoyable, disposable fun,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. “It’s a lot like the old ‘Ghostbusters,’ except that it stars four funny women instead of, you know, four funny men.” More
- in Theater
Review: ‘You Will Get Sick’ Tells the Untellable, for a Price
In a new Off Broadway play, Linda Lavin shines as a woman paid to say what an ailing young man cannot.Disease, dying and death are usually depicted as wretched or bloody onstage. We’re meant to cry or recoil.As you might guess from its title, though, “You Will Get Sick,” which opened on Sunday at the Laura Pels Theater, is more matter-of-fact. It seems to promise a bald memento mori in the form of a fortune cookie.Yet the play, written by Noah Diaz, directed by Sam Pinkleton and starring the evergreen Linda Lavin, is far more than that. Neither prosaic nor clinical, it defies all expectations for a story in which the main character receives a fatal diagnosis, telling the tale in the most lively, surreal and surprising ways imaginable.For one thing, Lavin, who is 85, does not play the character who’s ill. Turning the template upside down, she instead plays the caregiver, Callan — if you can call someone a caregiver whose every act of care is minutely monetized. Never lifting a finger without naming a price, she’s more like an end-of-life TaskRabbit, having answered an ad from a man seeking someone to listen to him admit that he’s sick.That he can’t actually say the word reflects on the way his life as a millennial — he’s in his 30s — has failed to prepare him to envision such a fate. But for his initial payment of $20, he purchases the opportunity to practice his confession by telling Callan that his limbs are growing numb as his illness progresses. Soon he will be paying her more to break the news to his narcissistic sister (Marinda Anderson) and others in his orbit. Even his co-workers don’t know why he hasn’t been at work.The playwright, making his New York debut, is withholding too. He elects not to name the character (he’s simply called #1 in the script) or even the disease, which resembles multiple sclerosis. But in Daniel K. Isaac’s typically and appealingly restrained performance, we understand much more. This is a man who protects himself against too much feeling by keeping the flow of information to a minimum. The flow of money replaces it.From left, Marinda Anderson, Isaac and Lavin. All the actors except Isaac play multiple roles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSuch omissions and substitutions are part of the play’s overall approach. We never do hear #1 say the things he wants said; that service is provided instead by a disembodied narrator (Dario Ladani Sanchez) and of course by Callan, who, aside from the paid-for retellings, turns the story into a monologue for her night-school acting class.If this Cubist approach sounds too clever, it is in fact functional. The second-person narration (“Your hand goes numb,” says the voice) reproduces in the audience the sensation of dissociation #1 feels as his body starts to operate independently of his will. And the third-person monologue (“His balance isn’t right,” Callan declaims) demonstrates how our stories, even when buried, may yet leach into the world.For Diaz, theater is clearly part of that process; the slightly indulgent acting class sequences engage in some affectionate if too easy satire. (“There is no can’t,” says the teacher. “There is sometimes cannot … There is mostly maybe … We call that do.”) Yet when #1 accompanies Callan to a session one evening, the trite instruction to “live inside our bodies” becomes, in a quietly joyful moment between them, profound, experienced from opposing side of wellness.Lavin’s wit is in full bloom playing a woman who, unlike herself, is a terrible actor and a worse singer. (When prompted to walk like a lion, she’s suddenly Gwen Verdon doing Fosse.) Callan is as rich as any role she’s had in years — and even richer in some ways, because it doesn’t trade, as her characters in “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” and “The Lyons” did, on her innate glamour. Far from it: Her Callan is that woman you see on the subway, pawing through a dirty tote bag, her auburn perm three inches grown out.And yet, as a foul-mouthed, don’t-mess-with-me urban lady with sincere if hopeless dreams in her head, Lavin has never seemed more vital, sly and fearless. When she admits that she wants to play Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” — to which #1 incredulously responds, “Did this Dorothy see the trials of war and age 60 years?” — you somehow feel the deep sense of the ludicrous self-casting.Such underground connections are at the heart of “You Will Get Sick”; Diaz is working a surrealist vein that doesn’t mean to make an argument so much as to plant the seeds of one you can have with yourself later. That all the actors except Isaac play multiple roles — Nate Miller plays seven, marvelously — suggests layers of correspondence among them. Most of Miller’s are fearful, for instance, and Anderson’s are all hilariously tin-eared. When #1’s body starts turning into hay, you may begin to see that they are familiar archetypes as well.Anderson, above center, leads Isaac, Lavin and Nate Miller in animal exercises during an acting class.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe hay — not to mention the marauding birds, “The Wizard of Oz” and the narrative legerdemain — could easily have made “You Will Get Sick” too self-consciously poetic, its spray of images dissipating too quickly. But Diaz, who is 29, has had time to refine and tighten the script since he wrote it in drama school in 2018. In any case, it flies by, feeling even shorter yet fuller than its 85 minutes, especially as the imagery coalesces in a neat pull of strings at the end.That a play in which sadness is always biting at your fingers comes off this light and funny in performance requires a great deal of discipline. Some of that clearly comes from Pinkleton, whose direction trusts the material deeply enough to ask the audience to come toward it instead of the other way around. No surprise that he is also a choreographer, nominated for a Tony Award for his work on “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”; he’s alert to the play’s internal rhythms.The Roundabout Theater Company production is also alert technically, with a trick box of a set by the design collective dots, lighting by Cha See, costumes by Michael Krass and Alicia Austin, and — especially — a powerful sound design, both apocalyptic and psychological, by Lee Kinney. He helps you believe in the existence of the soul, and also the forces that threaten it.If this all makes “You Will Get Sick” sound avant-garde and difficult, that’s part of the problem Diaz is addressing. Disease, dying and death are the opposite of avant-garde; they’re old news. And they’re difficult only in the way old news is: They happen to other people, always in the past. When it comes to our own demise, we don’t want to talk about it. Perhaps that’s why, in “You Will Get Sick,” we gladly pay Diaz to do it for us.You Will Get SickThrough Dec. 11 at the Laura Pels Theater; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More
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Review: In ‘Where the Mountain Meets the Sea,’ Missed Connections
A father and a son recall parallel journeys that reflect shared experiences of otherness in Jeff Augustin’s play, performed with music by the Bengsons.Migration doesn’t necessarily have a set endpoint. Looking for belonging in an unfamiliar place, and lingering over memories of what’s been left behind, can result in a perpetually itinerant state of mind. For the Haitian schoolteacher who legally gains passage to the United States in “Where the Mountain Meets the Sea,” that means giving up a fulfilling vocation to handle strangers’ baggage at the Miami airport while hoping to find love and start a family.It’s evident that Jean (played with an almost childlike wonder by Billy Eugene Jones) gets his wish, because he’s joined onstage by his son, Jonah (Chris Myers), who has moved across the country to study linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles — another act of flight toward the unknown. Set apart in time and place, father and son each carry a microphone and address the audience in alternating confessional monologues. In Jonah’s present, Jean is already dead, his ashes waiting to be retrieved and spread. Jonah intends to retrace in reverse a road trip his parents took from Florida to California when his mother was pregnant, to experience America as they did and perhaps understand something about his roots.Myers, foreground, with the Bengsons, far left, and Jones, far right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a bit of cross-pollination, that heritage includes folk music from the American South, or what Jean calls “mountain music,” which offered him echoes of Haiti and became a conduit for both the melancholy and joy of his adventures in displacement. This part-concert-style staging of Jeff Augustin’s play, a Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Wednesday at New York City Center, is performed with music by Abigail and Shaun Bengson, a husband-and-wife duo known as the Bengsons whose musical setup on the blond-wood, semicircular set (by Arnulfo Maldonado) includes acoustic banjo and guitar. Their mournful, evocative songs — about longing, loss and unresolved feelings — are interspersed throughout the men’s recollections, punching up the emotional tenor.Father and son recall parallel journeys that reflect shared experiences of otherness and their psychic separation. Jean remarks on moments of alienation he experienced as a Black immigrant, and Jonah points to those he encounters as a Black gay man. Both relay their histories by way of past lovers, an illustration of mutual appetites. But the depth of their characterizations are unevenly balanced, and the play is considerably more insightful about the psychology of its immigrant father than of his queer son. While Jean’s talk of lost loves tends to reveal more about who he is and what he wants, Jonah’s descriptions of conquests linger on surface details — a ginger daddy’s Haitian-blue eyes, a Nigerian’s lean muscular arms — that tend to deflect attention away from their observer. In performance, too, Jones lends Jean a warm and wistful soul-searching quality, while Myers’s more mannered take keeps Jonah at a distance.Under the direction of Joshua Kahan Brody, “Where the Mountain Meets the Sea” feels like a kind of formal experiment, combining spoken text, live music and, occasionally, freestyle movement to capture the nomadic experience of building a life without a homeland. The 80-minute show is most poignant when these elements work in concert rather than run alongside each other, as when Myers and Shaun Bengson (stepping in as a guy Jonah meets on the road) engage in a loose-limbed dance-off, or when Jones’s Jean sings a forlorn refrain. But at other times, the connective thread between the show’s different modes of performance feel tenuous and less than fully realized.That formal fragmentation, and the fact that Jean and Jonah don’t directly interact, highlights the ache and frustration of their estrangement. But at least some of that frustration may be passed along to the audience, particularly since Jonah’s interior life remains elusive even as he assumes a kind of dishy posture. The plainest glimpse we get into what he wants comes from sentiments that his father regrets leaving unspoken — that his son is smart, beautiful and enough — the kind of obvious wish fulfillment it would be tough to begrudge anyone, even a relative stranger.Where the Mountain Meets the SeaThrough Nov. 27 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More
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Douglas McGrath, Playwright, Filmmaker and Actor, Is Dead at 64
His one-man Off Broadway show, “Everything’s Fine,” directed by John Lithgow, had opened just weeks ago.Douglas McGrath, a playwright, screenwriter, director and actor who was nominated for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony Award, and whose one-man Off Broadway show, “Everything’s Fine,” opened just weeks ago, died on Thursday at his office in Manhattan. He was 64.His death was announced by the show’s producers, Daryl Roth, Tom Werner and John Lithgow. Their representative said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Lithgow also directed the show, a childhood recollection of Mr. McGrath’s about a middle-school teacher in Texas who gave him an inappropriate amount of attention.“He was a dream to direct,” Mr. Lithgow said on Friday. “None of us had ever worked with someone who was so happy, proud and grateful to be performing his own writing.”Mr. McGrath in his one-man play “Everything’s Fine,” which opened Off Broadway last month to good reviews.Jeremy DanielMr. McGrath had a wide-ranging if under-the-radar career in television, film and theater. In the 1980-81 season, just out of Princeton and still in his early 20s, he was a writer for “Saturday Night Live.” Over the next decade he wrote humor pieces for The New Republic, The New York Times and other publications.By the 1990s he was making inroads in Hollywood. He wrote the screenplay for the 1993 remake of the 1950 romantic comedy “Born Yesterday,” and the next year he and Woody Allen collaborated on the script for Mr. Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway.” The two shared an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.In 1996 he adapted the Jane Austen novel “Emma” for the big screen and also directed the film, which starred Gwyneth Paltrow. In 2000 he and Peter Askin shared directing and screenwriting duties on the comedy “Company Man,” in which he also starred, as a schoolteacher who stumbles into a career as a C.I.A. officer.That movie drew some unflattering reviews. But his next, “Nicholas Nickleby” (2002), an adaptation of the Dickens story that he both wrote and directed, was well received. In The Times, A.O. Scott said that Mr. McGrath’s adaptation was rendered “with a scholar’s ear and a showman’s flair.”“The director has produced a colorful, affecting collage of Dickensian moods and motifs,” Mr. Scott wrote, “a movie that elicits an overwhelming desire to plunge into 900 pages of 19th-century prose.”Mr. McGrath, center, on the set of his film “Nicholas Nickleby” (2002), with the cast members Barry Humphries, left, and Alan Cumming.United Artists, via AlamyIn addition to his screenwriting and directing credits (which also included “Infamous,” a 2006 film starring Toby Jones as Truman Capote), Mr. McGrath occasionally took small acting roles in other people’s projects, including several of Mr. Allen’s films. In 2016 he directed “Becoming Mike Nichols,” an HBO documentary about the film director, on which he was also an executive producer. He shared an Emmy nomination with the other producers for outstanding documentary or nonfiction special.Throughout, he continued to work in the theater. In 1996 he wrote and starred in “Political Animal,” a one-man comedy that played at the McGinn/Cazale Theater in Manhattan, in which he played a right-wing presidential candidate.“Beyond the stand-up parody,” Ben Brantley wrote in his review in The Times, “the larger point of ‘Political Animal’ is that it takes a hollow, desperate man to run for president these days.”In 2012 his play “Checkers” — the title refers to a famous 1952 speech by Richard M. Nixon — was seen at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, with Anthony LaPaglia as Nixon and Kathryn Erbe as his wife, Pat.Then came Broadway: Mr. McGrath wrote the book for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” which opened in January 2014 and ran for more than five years. His book was nominated for a Tony Award.Last month Mr. Lithgow told The Daily News of New York that Mr. McGrath had sent him “Everything’s Fine” unsolicited, and that he had no intention of directing a play until he read the piece.“It was so play-able,” he said, “I could simply imagine an audience being completely captivated by it.”The show opened in mid-October to good reviews.“It is impossible to overstate Doug’s pure likability,” Mr. Lithgow said on Friday. “In his solo show, he told a long story about his 14th year, and it worked so well because he had retained so much of his sense of boyish discovery.”Ms. Roth, another of the show’s producers, said that Mr. McGrath had been thoroughly enjoying the way audiences were reacting as he unspooled the tale.“The wonderful response from the audience was cathartic, meaningful and joyful to him,” she said by email. “He often told me he was in his ‘happy place’ onstage telling his story.”Mr. McGrath on the set of “Infamous,” his 2006 film about Truman Capote.Van Redin/Warner Independent, via Kobal, via ShutterstockDouglas Geoffrey McGrath was born on Feb. 2, 1958, in Midland, Texas. His father, Raynsford, was an independent oil producer, and his mother, Beatrice (Burchenal) McGrath, worked at Harper’s Bazaar before her marriage.“People often ask me what growing up in West Texas was like,” Mr. McGrath said in “Everything’s Fine.” “I think this sums it up: It’s very hot, it’s very dusty, and it’s very, very windy. It’s like growing up inside a blow dryer full of dirt.”He graduated from Princeton in 1980.“Planning my future,” he wrote in a 2001 essay in The Times, “I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do, but a very blurry one of how to do it. I knew I wanted to write and perform in my own films in the manner of my idol, Woody Allen. But when I went, that once, to the Career Counseling Center and faced the bulletin board, none of the cards said, ‘Needed: writer-actor-director for major feature, no experience required, must be willing to earn high salary.’”Yet when a friend told him “S.N.L.” was hiring writers, he sent in some sketches and landed an $850-a-week job.“It seemed too good to be true,” he wrote. “It was. My year, 1980, was viewed then and still as the worst year in the show’s history, which is no small achievement when you think of some of the other years.”In a 2016 interview, Mr. McGrath said his disappointment with the way his screenplay for “Born Yesterday” was handled changed the direction of his career.“I remember thinking, well, if I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this, meaning watching someone else muck up what I did, there’s only one way around that,” he said. “I have to become a director.”Mr. McGrath, who lived in Manhattan, married Jane Read Martin in 1995. She survives him, as do a son, Henry; a sister, Mary McGrath Abrams; and a brother, Alexander. More
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How an LAPD Officer Helped Les Moonves Fight an Assault Complaint
A captain in the department, who had moonlighted as a security guard for CBS, disclosed to the network information about a confidential complaint made in 2017 against the C.E.O.When the New York attorney general’s office announced this week that the former CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves and CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, had agreed to pay $9.75 million after a state investigation found that they had concealed allegations of sexual misconduct against him, the news was accompanied by another revelation. The account from the office of Letitia James also made public how Mr. Moonves, who stepped down from CBS in 2018 after multiple misconduct allegations, and other network officials worked with a captain in the Los Angeles Police Department to suppress details of a formal sexual assault complaint against the entertainment titan. The complaint was filed with the department in 2017 by Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb, who had worked with Mr. Moonves decades earlier.The L.A.P.D. said this week that it had begun an investigation into the now retired captain’s conduct. But the circumstances surrounding the officer’s actions and Mr. Moonves’s eventual downfall, much of which has not previously been detailed publicly, highlight the powerful entertainment industry’s attempting to use any means at its disposal, including relationships with law enforcement, to try and keep allegations of misconduct quiet. And that can be especially true when the allegations involve a “V.I.P.,” as the Los Angeles police described Mr. Moonves in a referral to the county district attorney regarding the accusation, which was viewed by The New York Times.This account is based on numerous interviews, including with Ms. Golden-Gottlieb and Gil Schwartz, the former head of corporate communications for CBS; confidential notes of interviews of Mr. Moonves by CBS lawyers; a person directly familiar with how Ms. Golden-Gottlieb’s complaint was handled by the police; and documents obtained by the New York attorney general’s office. It is detailed in a forthcoming book by these two reporters, “Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy,” to be published by Penguin Press in February. The L.A.P.D. declined to comment for this article.In November 2017, a month after sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein exploded into public view, Ms. Golden-Gottlieb was watching late-night TV at her home in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles. Ms. Golden-Gottlieb, then 82, was a veteran television producer who had given up her entertainment career years earlier to teach special-needs children.“For those of you tuning in to see my interview with Louis C.K. tonight, I have some bad news,” Stephen Colbert said that night on CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Louis C.K. had canceled his appearance after The New York Times published an article in which five women described him committing acts of sexual misconduct.For Ms. Golden-Gottlieb, the revelation was the latest painful reminder of her time at Lorimar in the 1980s, when she was in charge of sitcom development. She had her own stories to tell, and as she sat on her sofa in front of the television, she decided to take action that very night — not by calling a reporter but by filing a police complaint.At first, Ms. Golden-Gottlieb did not know where to go, but she quickly found the address for the Hollywood police station, just south of Sunset Boulevard on North Wilcox.Ms. Golden-Gottlieb told the officer on duty that she had worked with Mr. Moonves while she was at Lorimar and he was the younger, fast-rising head of movies for television. One day in 1986, she said, Mr. Moonves invited her to lunch. They got in his car, and he drove her not to a restaurant, as she was expecting, but to a secluded area. There he parked, unzipped his pants, grabbed her head and forced it onto his erect penis until he ejaculated.Two years later, she said she was in his office when Mr. Moonves excused himself to get a glass of wine. When he returned, his pants were down. She ran from the room.The next day, he berated her, then threw her against a wall. She fell to the floor and couldn’t get up. She lay there crying.That was the story she told the police. She requested confidential treatment, but her complaint did not stay confidential for long.The desk officers working that night had no idea who Mr. Moonves was. But, according to a person directly familiar with how the complaint was handled, a senior watch commander recognized Mr. Moonves’s name and alerted Cory Palka, a veteran police captain for the precinct, because there was a notification protocol regarding celebrities.Mr. Palka moonlighted as a security officer for CBS and worked for the network at the Grammy Awards show from 2008 to 2014. He knew and liked Mr. Moonves. Not long after Ms. Golden-Gottlieb’s visit to the police station, Mr. Palka called Ian Metrose, the head of special events for CBS, and left a message.“Hey, Ian, it’s Cory Palka,” he said in the message, which was included in the attorney general’s report. “I know we haven’t talked in a while. I am a captain at L.A.P.D. Hollywood. Somebody walked in the station about a couple hours ago and made allegations against your boss regarding a sexual assault. It’s confidential, as you know, but call me, and I can give you some of the details and let you know what the allegation is before it goes to the media or gets out. So, all right, talk to you after a while. Bye.”Mr. Metrose promptly alerted his boss, Mr. Schwartz, who recalled in a later interview that he was shocked. Reporters from several outlets, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, had been calling him about rumors involving possible allegations against Mr. Moonves. But Mr. Moonves had earlier assured Mr. Schwartz that CBS had nothing to worry about.Earlier that month, Mr. Schwartz heard that Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker, whose reporting had helped bring down Mr. Weinstein, was making calls about Mr. Moonves. Mr. Schwartz braced himself for more. But he heard nothing. But a police report was a reportable fact. Mr. Schwartz told Mr. Metrose to get a copy, and Mr. Palka obliged, even though the report was marked “confidential” in three places. (Mr. Schwartz died in 2020, and Ms. Golden-Gottlieb in 2022. Mr. Palka did not respond to a message left on his cellphone on Thursday. CBS declined to comment and also said Mr. Metrose declined to comment.)The incidents in the report were too old to prosecute Mr. Moonves, but Ms. Golden-Gottlieb’s allegations were graphic. If the contents of a formal police complaint became public, it could be a public relations nightmare for CBS, especially in the early days of the #MeToo movement. It was a Saturday, but Mr. Schwartz called Mr. Moonves, who was at his eight-year-old son’s soccer game.Mr. Schwartz outlined the allegations.“That’s preposterous,” Mr. Moonves responded, according to Mr. Schwartz’s recollection of the conversation.“Do you know the woman?” Mr. Schwartz asked.Mr. Moonves told Mr. Schwartz that he did, that he’d had consensual sex a few times with Ms. Golden-Gottlieb and that they had been “friendly before, during and after.”Mr. Schwartz didn’t want to hear much more, in case he got calls from reporters. That way he could honestly say he didn’t know anything.Mr. Schwartz assured Mr. Moonves that he didn’t see any immediate threat. The incidents were so old that the case would never be brought to court. None of them happened while Mr. Moonves was at CBS. Still, there was always the risk that the allegations could become public. Mr. Schwartz told Mr. Moonves that he had better notify a CBS board member so that there would be no surprises.Leslie Moonves resigned from CBS in 2018 after multiple women made allegations of sexual misconduct against him.Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Moonves promised he would, though he did not do so until much later, when questioned by a lawyer representing directors on the board. A spokesman for Mr. Moonves declined to comment this week.Mr. Schwartz drafted a response to potential media inquiries. If asked, he would confirm that CBS was aware of a police investigation of Mr. Moonves, say that the CBS board had been notified and nothing more. Mr. Schwartz alerted his press team over the weekend, sending an email to one: “Watch for messages and don’t miss any please. Will explain later. I wouldn’t bother you if this wasn’t serious.”Time passed, and no reporters brought it up. Mr. Schwartz heard from numerous people who were contacted by reporters who had heard more rumors about Mr. Moonves, but none had offered any concrete allegations. But Mr. Moonves wasn’t taking any chances. Without telling Mr. Schwartz, he hired Blair Berk, a criminal defense lawyer. Ms. Berk got in touch with Mr. Palka and asked him about the police report. On Nov. 15, Mr. Palka texted Mr. Metrose and Ms. Berk to say he’d “make contact & admonish the accuser tomorrow about refraining from going to the media and maintaining ‘her’ confidentiality.”He added that they would “be the first and only point of contact” regarding the investigation. Ms. Berk did not respond to a request for comment this week.Ten days later, Mr. Moonves arranged to meet with Mr. Palka and Mr. Metrose at a Westlake Village restaurant and vineyard. Mr. Moonves stressed that he wanted the investigation closed, and they discussed contacting other public officials.But that proved unnecessary. On Nov. 30, according to the attorney general’s report, Mr. Metrose told Mr. Moonves that he had heard from Mr. Palka that they could stop worrying: “It’s a definite reject,” Mr. Metrose said, adding that there were no witnesses or corroborative evidence.In the police referral to the Los Angeles County district attorney, Ms. Golden-Gottlieb was identified only as Jane Doe. Mr. Moonves was formally designated as a “V.I.P.” The assistant district attorney reviewing the matter noted, “The applicable statutes of limitation have expired as to all three incidents.”That was the end of it, or so it seemed.Less than a year later, Mr. Farrow reported in The New Yorker on several allegations against Mr. Moonves, including from Ms. Golden-Gottlieb. On Sept. 9, 2018, in his second of two articles on Mr. Moonves, Mr. Farrow revealed the existence of the police report. That same day, Mr. Moonves resigned from CBS.Mr. Palka wrote Mr. Metrose shortly after: “I’m so sorry to hear this news Ian. Sickens me. We worked so hard to try to avoid this day. I am so completely sad.”Two days later, he wrote Mr. Moonves directly: “Les -I’m deeply sorry that this has happened. I will always stand with, by and pledge my allegiance to you. You have embodied leadership, class and the highest of character through all of this. With upmost respect.” More
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Barbra Streisand on Her Early Recordings: ‘That Girl Can Sing’
“Live at the Bon Soir,” a restored set of songs from November 1962, allows listeners today — and Streisand, herself — to rediscover the sounds of a star being born.For about 60 years, Barbra Streisand has had the same manager, Marty Erlichman. He’s 93 now and still remembers the night he knew there was nobody like her.It was 1960. She was 18 and had earned a gig performing at the Bon Soir, a small, chic club in New York’s West Village. Over the phone earlier this week, he recalled sitting at a front-row table with some other reps, including a guy from William Morris, and Jack Rollins, who managed Woody Allen at the time. When Streisand started her set, one of them leaned over and said, “See, it’s acts like that need someone like me.” She was doing it wrong. Why was she opening with a ballad? Why was she opening with a ballad in those clothes?Streisand’s two-week gig was extended to 11, then rebooked over the next two years, becoming a drag-your-friends, word-of-mouth must-see. The songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman caught it and had the same experience Erlichman did: cartoon birds flying around their heads. The Bergmans would go on to write the lyrics for the Streisand gems “The Way We Were,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” (with Neil Diamond) and the songs for her directorial debut, “Yentl.” But that night, they were simply in awe. Alan, who’s 97, told me over the phone that “the minute she sang less than eight bars, Marilyn was in tears.”What they all witnessed was a star, this singular source of incandescence — pillow-soft singing that was pow-right-in-the-kisser, too; phrasing that could turn a song into a literary event; and timing most stand-ups wish they had.Now, 60 years later, we can hear what they saw, on “Live at the Bon Soir,” a pristinely restored recording of three dozen songs from late November 1962 that’s due Friday. During the Bon Soir run, Erlichman got Streisand signed with Columbia Records, which arranged a recording of the show but shelved it in favor of an 11-song studio version, “The Barbra Streisand Album,” from 1963. So what was supposed to be the first Barbra Streisand album is actually the umpteenth.To Streisand, it’s just as well. “I was only, what, 20 years old, and I didn’t like the sound,” she said from her home in Los Angeles, describing speakers poised over her head the size of shoe boxes. “You could hear the hiss.” Now, technology can solve almost any sonic dilemma. So Streisand finally handed over the recordings from her vault to the engineer and musician Jochem van der Saag, who excavated the pure sound of the original show and restored what the Marty Erlichmans and Alan and Marilyn Bergmans of the world would have heard: something close to perfection.At 80, Streisand isn’t going out of her way to listen to music she’s already made. By her own admission, she’s too busy worrying about the state of the country to fuss over her work. But what she heard surprised her. “I didn’t realize, actually, that my vocals were that good ’til they played me the new one,” she said, before laughing. “I thought, ‘Oh my God. That girl can sing.’”That, of course, is the shock of “Live at the Bon Soir.” We’re hearing a voice that’s been at the center of American singing for more than half a century being heard for just about the first time. We thought we knew everything it has done, every way it could sound. And yet it’s mind-blowing to discover all it could do, in a little nightclub, with a crack four-man band and the crowd eating out of her hand — giddy and coquettish, yet accomplished and skilled, lunatic yet in control.Streisand is the kind of performer who, more than a year into her Bon Soir run, jokes to an audience, “People complain that I don’t do standards. Well, here’s a standard,” then launches into “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” with an impossible featherweight world weariness. The range of her singing isn’t just a matter of octaves. It’s the diversity of characters the voice can find for one song. On “The Big Bad Wolf,” it’s story time and operetta, Big Mama Thornton and Ethel Merman. For “Lover, Come Back to Me,” it’s something to rival Ella Fitzgerald in the way she can already take a tune, especially in concert, from botanical garden to boxing match. That performance certainly ranks up there with the supreme Streisand interpretations of anything. By 20, she’d achieved this near-mastery all with, what, by 1962, were standards, grandma music.That, of course, was what made the suits nervous: a repertoire that included Tin Pan Alley and show tunes, those dreaded ballads and jazz; Oscar Hammerstein, Harold Arlen and Fats Waller. Where were the big pop songs? The contemporary stuff. The “Surfin’ U.S.A.” The “Walk Like a Man.” The “Be My Baby.” The “Fingertips.” The “It’s My Party.”When Erlichman took her to audition — live — for Capitol, RCA and Columbia, “Everyone said the same thing,” he recalled. “‘She has a good voice.’” (If he ever wrote a book, he said, he’d call it “Good Closes on Wednesday.”) Obviously, she was capable of great art. “She wasn’t singing commercial songs,” Erlichman said. And “executives, they’re frightened to break new ground.”But Streisand could appreciate the splendor of an old object. That’s what the vintage outfits she’d wear onstage were all about. “I always bought antique clothes,” she said, “because I thought they were so beautiful. I admired the craftsmanship.” The craftsmanship of the 1890s.“Opening night, I wore a black, high-necked velvet beaded top,” she said. “I had my tailor make me a little black velvet skirt that went with that top. But I didn’t know you’re not supposed to dress like that. I didn’t know that when you sing in a nightclub, you’re supposed to have kind of a gown or something elegant, made out of fabulous silks or satins.” At some point on “The Bon Soir,” you can hear her tell the audience that she’s wearing her boyfriend’s suit. She told me that “the masculine and the feminine was what felt comfortable on me.”That admiration she harbors for well-made things obviously extends to the Great American Songbook: superior craftsmanship. Its hundreds of dynamic, adaptable songs rely on characters, stories, wordplay and variations on a theme. For a singer, figuring them out is like doing math or the crossword or architecture. They’re also an opportunity to act, which is what Streisand says she wanted to do in the first place. During the Bon Soir run, she was splitting her days between nightclubs and Broadway, where she was loudly making a name for herself as the secretary Miss Marmelstein in “I Can Get It for You Wholesale.”The wit and drama of the Songbook lyrics lend themselves to a theatrical approach. An imaginative singer can phrase a standard any way she likes. And, in that regard, Streisand has one of the great imaginations. Each Bon Soir song, she said, had a different character for her to play. And what comes through now is a devastating understanding of tone, shading, pitch, diction but also emotional variability. At the Bon Soir, she makes “Cry Me a River” an exploding torch song. When she finishes, one of her musicians — the guitarist Tiger Haynes or the bassist Averill Pollard — says, “Let’s go home now, let’s go home.” Yes, because Streisand just burned the place down.“She wants to know every single word, and if a word doesn’t make sense to her, she’ll stop and go, ‘I don’t understand. Why this word?’” the composer, conductor and arranger Bill Ross said in a video call. He’s been collaborating with Streisand on live shows since the early 1990s, and said one thing that makes Streisand Streisand is that she’ll spend so much time, “just on the lyrics trying to make sure they make sense to her.” Once she’s got that down, only then can she ask what the melody is. “I’ve never seen any other artist like that,” he said.Streisand is such a rigorously engaged interpreter yet also a kind of Method performer that she can’t imagine herself doing anything the same way twice. “I want to be in the moment,” she said. “That’s what you learn as an actress, that you have to be in the moment. That’s why no two takes of mine are the same. You know, it’s hard to edit me because I don’t phrase it the same. If I’m in the moment, I can’t sing the same. That’s why when I did ‘A Star Is Born,’ I said I have to sing live.”With that approach, if the soundtracks, say, for “Funny Girl” or “Hello, Dolly,” get recorded months in advance, “Well, how do I know how I’m going to feel when I’m singing ‘My Man’ at the end of ‘Funny Girl’?”That spontaneity is what made an impression on van der Saag, the engineer who spent months deep inside the “Bon Soir” recordings. He told me a great vocalist ought to have superb intonation, phrasing and sense of melody. Besides Streisand being “absolutely the best” on those first three, she has “this other thing,” that’s probably a result of being an actor, what he calls transference of emotion.Someone can get a song technically correct, which is a feat. “But to be able to just sing to the listener wherever they are and make them feel an emotion,” he said, “and to that extent? That is another level. And, you know, it’s very rare that you come across vocalists who have that.”Streisand’s use of Jewish American humor, Jewish American vibrancy (throwaway lines, ba-dum-bum comedy, the border she permeates between Brooklyn and Buckingham Palace) is also an emotional transmission. “This next song is from a record-breaking show,” she says before doing a quickie called “Value.” “It lasted nine previews and one performance. It was called ‘Another Evening with Harry Stoones.’” Streisand extends the “o” in Stoones for a lick of derision then, lowering her voice a touch, buries her dagger: “No wonduh …” It’s expert comedy. The song is a riot so fast and moving, uninhibited and exhibitionist, that it’s as close as singing gets to streaking.Streisand said she grew up around all kinds of people and all kinds of life. She moved through the city with an open heart. “I lived as a young girl in Williamsburg,” she said. “You know, Williamsburg was not what it is today with highfalutin apartments and fancy shops. I was in a Black neighborhood with a church across the street. And I loved bowing to the fathers and the sisters because I didn’t have a sister or a father. And my best friend was Joanne Micelli, who was Christian. I mean, we had an Italian grocery across the street.”That’s what Streisand evokes on “The Bon Soir.” A single person doing the work of an entire neighborhood. Sixty years later, her neighborhood has become the world. And Streisand frets about its future. But there’s something else on this new album — some other emotional transmission. And it’s the opposite of catastrophic. It’s confidence and poise and security and daring and honesty and a belief in the power of a perfect song, great bandmates and raw talent.Barbra Streisand was giving all of that to people, first at the Bon Soir, then everywhere that was smart enough to book her. That’s what else you can hear on this album, what Streisand herself heard upon rediscovering this long lost self. It’s hope. More
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How Female Playwrights Are Adapting, and Revamping, ‘Macbeth’
With “Macbeth” adaptations like “Peerless,” the inner lives of young women come into focus.When the playwright Jiehae Park was in high school, applying for college was a competitive sport. One of her friends, she recounted recently, applied to every Ivy League college and only got into one: the University of Pennsylvania. Instead of feeling joy, her friend started weeping, bemoaning what she considered to be the inferior Ivy. “Which is a bananas thing to say,” Park noted.For her part, Park went to Amherst, not an Ivy League school. But that high school experience stayed with her, becoming the inspiration for “Peerless,” a “Macbeth” adaptation about twin sisters who are so determined to get into an elite college that they resort to murder. This Primary Stages production, onstage at 59E59 Theaters through Sunday, follows the major plot points of “Macbeth,” but the setting and story couldn’t be more different: the cutthroat environment of college admissions among the students at a Midwestern high school.Each year brings new stagings of Shakespeare’s plays, but a few recent works, inspired by “Macbeth,” have stood out because they were written by female playwrights who refocused the story on the inner lives of young women. In addition to “Peerless,” there are Sophie McIntosh’s “Macbitches,” about a group of college students who backstab one another in order to get the lead role in a school play, and “Mac Beth,” by Erica Schmidt, who condensed the text to 90 minutes and set her work in an all-girls high school.In “Peerless,” ruthless competition and the toxicity of the model minority myth are among the issues addressed. The twins, who are Asian American, decide to kill the competition: the Native American and Black students they believe unfairly got their spots. This scenario speaks to the objections to affirmative action, making the play especially timely as the Supreme Court considers race-based college admissions. Alexis Soloski called it a “sly and polished adaptation” in her review for The Times.The sisters “are the logical result of the system,” Park said. “It’s so effective at setting up ways in which groups that have less power, but perhaps more power than another group that has even less power, will stand against those less powerful groups. But the people with the most power? They’re just chilling.”From left, Caroline Orlando, Morgan Lui, Natasja Naarendorp, Laura Clare Browne and Marie Dinolan in “Macbitches,” Sophie McIntosh’s riff on “Macbeth” that ran at the Chain Theater this summer.Wesley VolcyThe actor Sasha Diamond said starring in “Peerless” — and previously in “Teenage Dick,” Mike Lew’s adaptation of “Richard III” — has helped her to feel included in a part of the literary canon that she’s always felt excluded from. “The way that we are educated as Americans is with a Western European literary history,” said Diamond, who is Chinese and white. “The texts that we draw from and the things that we learn are not about us. And so when these playwrights adapt the stories that have been taught to us as ‘the canon,’” she said, and then make them specific to “our cultures or the world that we live in, it is a reclaiming. And it is empowering.”Revisiting the Tragedy of ‘Macbeth’Shakespeare’s tale of a man who, step by step, cedes his soul to his darkest impulses continues to inspire new interpretations.On Stage: Earlier this year, Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga starred in Sam Gold’s take on the play. Despite its star power, the production felt oddly uneasy, our critic wrote.Lady Macbeth: In Gold’s revival, Negga, who was nominated for a Tony Award, infused the character, and her marriage to Macbeth, with intensity, urgency and vitality.Onscreen: In the “Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s crackling adaptation of the Scottish Play, Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand embodied a toxic power couple with mastery.Break a Leg: Shakespeare’s play is known for the rituals and superstitions tied to it. How does the supernatural retain its hold on the theater world?Schmidt said the mixture of magic and murders most foul led her to write “Mac Beth,” which Red Bull Theater produced. “Macbeth,” she said, is “so satisfying, and it has so much dark comedy in it that people keep coming back to it.” (In her Times review, Laura Collins-Hughes remarked on the “unusual immediacy” of a production that made the characters “we know from ‘Macbeth’ legible in new ways.”)The playwrights all agreed that a woman’s perspective is a natural fit for Shakespeare’s play about power and corruption. After all, Lady Macbeth is arguably the more ruthless of the pair: she encourages Macbeth to murder the king. “Lady Macbeth is the most interesting person. She’s the best part of the play,” said Park, whose “Peerless” has been produced around the country since its 2015 premiere at Yale Repertory Theater.For McIntosh, whose “Macbitches” was presented at the Chain Theater in August, these retellings consider what ambition can look like in women. “Male ambition is almost universally respected to a certain extent,” McIntosh said. “With female ambition, there’s almost an expectation of pettiness to it. And the expectation of, ‘She doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into. She’s being needy. She’s being catty. She’s being selfish.’”These adaptations also embrace the violence of the source material. Macbeth kills the king, then his rivals, and a child. Eventually, Macbeth is also killed and Lady Macbeth commits suicide. Schmidt wanted to examine young people’s susceptibility to violence, and drew inspiration from school shootings and the so-called Slender Man stabbing in 2014 (the case in which two 12-year-old girls stabbed a classmate multiple times after luring her to a park). In “Mac Beth,” a group of teenage girls meet in a field to do their own version of “Macbeth.” What begins as playacting becomes more gruesome, with the girls eventually killing a schoolmate.“I feel that we all have this capacity within us for killing people, that this is part of our nature as humans,” said Schmidt, whose play has also been performed around the country. “And I think that it’s really difficult for people to accept that or to believe that or to see that in themselves. And so when you have all these school shootings, or you have young women behaving in this extremely violent way, suddenly it forces you to think about what’s happening in a different way.”Lily Santiago in Erica Schmidt’s “Mac Beth,” which had an acclaimed run at Red Bull Theater in 2019.Richard Termine for The New York TimesWith “Macbitches,” McIntosh, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, wanted to deliver contemporary social commentary, citing the toxic power dynamics she said she witnessed between students and faculty members at the college. As she met other young artists after graduating, she said, “I was really surprised to hear that so many of their experiences paralleled ours so closely.”In her riff on “Macbeth,” McIntosh dispenses with plot points, instead evoking similar themes — abuse of power and the price of ambition. A group of young women audition for a college production of “Macbeth,” but when the freshman gets the coveted role of Lady Macbeth, the others become jealous. As the play escalates toward violence, it is clear that something is rotten in the state of the drama program, with abuses of power on the part of the faculty.It’s “Macbeth” by way of #MeToo. And Juan A. Ramírez, in his Times review, commended it for juggling “headier themes while remaining a lively college drama.” McIntosh, who served as dramaturge for a college production of “Macbeth,” said she wanted to highlight how ambition in the entertainment industry can be used to excuse all kinds of misbehavior. She also wanted to call out the sentiment that “art has to be suffering,” she said. “If you defy that, it means that you’re not a good actor, you don’t have what it takes, you’re not committed to the craft.”These reimagined productions of Shakespeare haven’t come without criticism, though. During a production of “Mac Beth” in Seattle, Schmidt recalls audience members laughing at the actresses playing male characters. “Another source of criticism was like, ‘Why isn’t there something explaining to us why they’re doing the play?’” Schmidt said, which to her feels like a “devaluing of the teenage voice, or the young woman.”Park said some audience members have issues with her protagonists being young Asian American women, and of her portrayal of Asian Americans who are unapologetically villainous. “It’s so tied up in the model minority expectation, of who’s allowed to be anything other than perfect,” she said. “It’s a legit question of, are we at the point culturally where there’s space for more complex representations? I hope so.” More
