Eliana Willis

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    Morgan Wade Was Looking for the Spotlight. It Found Her.

    The day before Morgan Wade was set to perform at Lollapalooza for the first time, the country singer-songwriter was in a Chicago hotel gym at around 10:30 a.m. It was arm day: regular curls, hammer curls, triceps pushdowns, lateral raises, dumbbell presses, face pulls and shoulder presses. She stopped after around 45 minutes, but only because it was actually her second session of the morning — she’d been up for hours, and had already done another 90-minute workout, and also ran three miles.“It’s just been something healthy for me to be addicted to,” Wade, 28 and slathered in tattoos, said of her fitness routine, sipping a chocolate Muscle Milk she’d grabbed from a vending machine for a quick boost of protein.For the last couple of years, Wade’s music career has been ascendant. Her 2021 album, “Reckless,” was a critical favorite in progressive country music circles, and “Wilder Days,” its stoutly aching breakout single, became an unlikely mainstream country crossover success. “Psychopath,” Wade’s second album and first on a major label, will be released on Aug. 25.In almost every other way, though, the last couple of years have been destabilizing: the erratic schedule, the increasing obligations to the music business, a slate of health struggles, the full-scale immersion into the public spotlight. And Wade, who has been sober for six years, has been finding ways to cope: therapy, fitness, clean eating, reading, journaling.In recent weeks, those tools have been stress-tested at a profound level, as Wade has found herself the subject of prurient tabloid interest regarding her seemingly unlikely connection with Kyle Richards, one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Online chatter that the women might share a romance has taken Wade from CMT to TMZ in record time.“Trust me, I’ve Googled it, man,” Wade said the prior night, backstage before a midnight gig at Reggie’s Rock Club. “I’ve Googled how to deal with the beginning stages of fame. The Wikipedia articles on that aren’t very helpful.”“I’m just a private person,” Wade said. “I’ve always been just kind of quiet. And so when all this kind of came out, I was just, it felt like everything had been stripped from me.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesWhen Wade was performing acoustic gigs at FloydFest, the roots music festival in her Floyd, Va., hometown, in the late 2010s, that she might someday be simultaneously navigating the rollout of her major label debut and the public dissection of her personal life might have seemed unfathomable.But even then, Wade was deeply disciplined. She took music seriously, writing and performing her own songs long before meeting Sadler Vaden, who plays guitar for Jason Isbell and has become her go-to producer.“She already had taken on the challenge of addiction when I met her. And she was in sobriety,” said Mary Sparr, Wade’s manager. “I saw in her that she had already had this huge challenge and chose to go ham, you know?”Vaden, who first saw Wade in a video performing her track “Mend” on a flatbed truck, described her as something akin to “a country Melissa Etheridge,” noting how the specificity of her gritty and reedy voice locates her in a country lineage, which frees her to make music that’s more eclectic and less hidebound.“Reckless,” which contained songs that Wade had written over several years, had the lightly bumpy texture of a scar that’s never quite healed. Wade’s voice is rich and sinewy, and it can sound like a scold and a plaint all at once. “Wilder Days,” which made it into the Top 40 on the Billboard country chart and was certified gold, got her signed to a Nashville major label, but she is in no way a country centrist. She has opened for Luke Combs, Chris Stapleton and Ashley McBryde, all on the genre’s more stylistically earthy side.Wade onstage at the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, Calif., in April. In August, she made her Lollapalooza debut.Monica Schipper/Getty Images for StagecoachWhen it came to beginning work on “Psychopath,” Wade was feeling pressure, self-imposed, to follow the success of “Wilder Days.” The first batch of songs was recorded last summer, but Vaden sensed she needed some more breathing space. “We have to just make an album that we are proud of,” he said he told her.Her manager was concerned, too. “She was burning herself out really bad,” Sparr said. “She’s the type that will say yes till the end of the world and work herself to the death until she hits that boiling point. We’ve had to mitigate her drive in those cases to give herself some more balance.”The songs from a second batch, recorded in January, are both heftier and more assured, playing with emotion, or genre, or both. The chirpy “Fall in Love With Me” is in this set, as is “Alanis,” which directly takes on the difficulties of a female performer enacting her whole self in public. “Losers Like Me” is an agitation about small-town life that recalls Kacey Musgraves’s debut single, “Merry Go ’Round.” And “27 Club” is a cutting song about dodging the worst fate, and still being unsure of what comes next.During that stretch of time, Wade and Richards were forming a friendship. Richards discovered Wade on the radio and followed her on Instagram. Wade, ever the skeptic (and who had never previously watched “Housewives”), messaged her to ask why. They got close quickly. Soon, they had a Wordle group chat, including fellow Housewife Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave and Richards’s friend Jenn Leipart. Richards began filming content for a documentary about Wade’s life, both onstage and off. The two posted photos together working out in the gym, and one of Wade sitting in Richards’s lap. Wade performed at a charity concert Richards had organized to benefit the National Alliance on Mental Illness. (Wade will also appear in the upcoming season of “Real Housewives.”)Wade, left, and Kyle Richards on a red carpet in late April. The two struck up a friendship after Richards followed the musician on Instagram.Ella Hovsepian/Getty ImagesThe public adjustments have not all come smoothly. “She told me at the NAMI event she almost wanted to leave at one point — she was like, This is so stressful,” Richards said in an interview. “I realized and appreciated later her hanging in there for me.”In the first week of July, news of Richards’s separation from her husband, Mauricio Umansky, hit the internet. Suddenly, Wade was being floated as a possible factor in the split. Strangers began dissecting her music, her lyrics, her past struggles with addiction and depression.Wade was at her family’s home in Virginia at the time. For three days, she didn’t get out of bed, she said. Sparr checked in like clockwork. “She was calling me like once an hour or every two hours and being like, What am I going to do? What are we going to do?” Sparr said. “She’s programmed to want to take an action. She wants to fix things. And, you know, sometimes there’s not anything to do but let time do the work.”Wade even skipped going to the gym. “For her to not go to the gym, I was like, OK, this is not good,” Richards said. “I’ve never seen her in two years not do that.”She continued, “I carried some guilt for having her be a victim of this because of me. I felt like it was collateral damage and I felt guilt about that, you know?”The gossip even traveled to Wade’s family; her grandfather suggested that land prices in their small town might go up. (“He has a damn flip phone!” Wade cackled.) Her 5-year-old half sister asked her why she was crying so much.“I seriously thought I was going to have to go to a rehab just preventively, to keep me from doing something stupid,” Wade said.Slowly, she got back on her feet. She returned to the gym, and set up twice-weekly therapy sessions. Getting a taste of public scrutiny, she said, made her regretful of the judgment she used to hold about celebrities. She tried to encourage her family and friends to see that she had now become the object of the kind of dismissiveness with which they had once regarded the famous. “You have to give people a little bit of grace,” Wade said.Wade said she’s going to go “Back to basics,” to articulate her post-fame version of herself on her next album.Lyndon French for The New York Times“I’m just a private person. I’ve always been just kind of quiet. And so when all this kind of came out, I was just, it felt like everything had been stripped from me,” Wade said anxiously, but with a touch of resentment. “And then too, your orientation, your sexuality, all that is just being discussed online by random people that don’t even know. It’s heartbreaking.”Sparr encouraged Wade to get offline, and to treat her relationship with social media “with a similar urgency and with a similar seriousness that she did with sobriety.”But Wade also had, depending on your perspective, either an ace up her sleeve, or a liter of gasoline about to spill onto the fire. In June, she had filmed a video for “Fall in Love With Me,” the cheeriest and poppiest song on “Psychopath.” The video features a slowly unfolding romantic rapport in a shiny “Desperate Housewives”-ish exurb between Wade, depicted in tight workout gear, and an infatuated neighbor, who watches longingly from a window in the house next door.The neighbor is played by Richards.It was inspired, in part, by avid Housewives fans who had already been speculating about their friendship online. “There was already a little bit of Reddit fodder — I call it fan fiction — about Kyle and Morgan,” before any of the “TMZ stuff happened,” Sparr said.The clip is playful, cheeky, a welcome blast of good mischief. “I’ve actually, my entire life, weaseled my way out of kissing someone on camera,” Richards said. Even though there’s a strategic millimeter between their mouths in the video’s most steamy moments, “This is the closest I’ve ever gotten, and it’s, spicy enough, I guess, that I would consider that breaking that streak.”The power of the video, far beyond the tabloid tease, is the conventional frankness with which it depicts same-sex attraction. Coming from an artist signed to a Nashville major label, it is deeply striking.“There was never any pushback from the label,” Sparr said. “But the greater feeling of everyone I talked to was like, I can’t believe you guys are going to pull this off.”There, again, is Wade’s discipline at work, steadily walking a path few before her have tried, emphasizing the representational value of the video while also toying with the story, real or imaginary, of her and Richards’s bond. And having been on the receiving end of scrutiny for the last several weeks, Wade has finally emerged on the other side, emboldened.“I don’t know why we’re in this day and time where we have to speculate about people’s sexuality,” she said, emphatically. “That is not appropriate at all. Like, let anybody be what they want to be — it’s none of your damn business.”She has more pressing things in front of her — an ultramarathon in November, just a couple of weeks before she is scheduled to undergo a double mastectomy (following a positive test for a BRCA mutation, a genetic risk for breast cancer). And she has already written a dozen songs for her next album.“Back to basics,” she said of the challenge of articulating the new, post-spotlight version of herself. “Taking elements of who I used to be and those core fundamental things and finding out like, Hmm. What I believed then and thought then, that part of me doesn’t exist anymore.” But, she added, there are some things “that I’m going to keep that didn’t die.” More

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    At 89, Still Making Art (and Bread) With a Message in Vermont

    Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater is going strong and, at 89, so is he. But what will happen to his company when he is gone?Under an unforgiving sun during a heat wave in July, Peter Schumann, the 89-year-old artistic director of Bread and Puppet Theater, rang a hand bell on a rolling hillside in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Before him a post topped with a giant grasping papier-mâché hand towered high like a maypole. Two dozen performers encircled it.“Walk slower, get closer to each other,” shouted Schumann, a tawny bearded man. More giant hands on poles rose up, seemingly reaching to the clouds in prayer. Then the group sang a dirge-like song as birds called from a nearby pine forest that is home to handmade memorial huts for friends and family. In two days, this surreal ritual was to be recreated in the debut of “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant,” part of the 60-year-old company’s season of Sunday shows.In addition to directing, Peter Schumann plays musical instruments, sculpts, paints on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard, and creates posters and printed chapbooks.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn July and August, the theater’s events run on weekends and are either free or modestly priced: indoor avant-garde performances, an outdoor circus featuring playful political sketches with towering effigy-like figures and a rowdy band, and side shows created by company members on compact stages are among the offerings.Schumann, a German immigrant who has retained his accent, came to New York City in the 1960s and found a potent way to respond in the streets to the war in Vietnam and social injustice: towering papier-mâché and cardboard figures. Influenced by John Cage and Merce Cunningham and exposed to the happenings of Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, he conceives his experimental collaborative pieces from a cauldron of ideas about the joys and ills of a conflicted capitalist world. Often they are drawn from the news, sometimes from legends. Some are reviewed well, others not. Schumann, uninterested in praise or media attention, keeps making them.In addition to directing, he sculpts, paints (on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard), and creates posters, calendars and printed chapbooks. He also uses an outdoor oven to bake coarse sourdough rye bread to feed audiences that can grow to a thousand or more in August.A horse puppet taking the field in “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant.”Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said on that pre-opening Friday last month while baking for about 50 summer company members. He knows that like his work, his bread can be challenging to chew, but hopefully nourishing and worth the trouble.Lately, Bread and Puppet Theater, which performs all over the world, has been growing. Its domestic touring schedule — to colleges, theaters, city plazas and small towns via a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life (coffee cups, flowers, the occasional “Ah!”) — included 66 stops last fall with a company of 30, twice the size of previous years. Print sales are up, too. Renewed interest in live performance and the current political climate may explain it. But appreciation for the company’s sustainable, handmade tactility and poetic anti-authoritarianism is nothing new.“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said of his sourdough rye bread, which he feeds to audiences.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAfter baking the bread in outdoor ovens, he brings the loaves into his kitchen to cool.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesHoward Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” cited its “beauty, magic and power” in a blurb for “Rehearsing With Gods,” a 2004 book about the company. Grace Paley marched with the group starting in the 1960s, and wrote a poem inspired by its policy of speaking up and speaking out. Julie Taymor, who used natural materials, papier-mâché and puppets in the stage adaptation of “The Lion King,” referenced some of Schumann’s stock puppet figures in her 2007 Beatles movie, “Across the Universe.” Kiki Smith, the sculptor, in an interview on the Smithsonian’s archive website, talked about the company’s “epic and biblical qualities” and of seeing its performances often in her youth.Guided by Schumann’s uncompromising views about greed, racism and militarism, the collective has questioned the World Bank, the treatment of Indigenous people and, to some in-house and public consternation, the providing of arms to Ukraine instead of ways to negotiate.The troupe presents free or modestly priced circuses, pageants and other performance arts on summer weekends.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“To live in a war and be a refugee is a lifelong education,” Schumann said of a childhood in which he experienced bombings in Germany’s Silesia region, which is now part of Poland. “There’s no equivalent to it in the U.S.”The printing press posters, chapbooks and calendars he designs drive his messages home and come from an uncompromising faith in “Cheap Art.” His manifesto about it states the importance of its unimportance — cheap, lightweight, undermining the sanctity of affluence and in opposition to the money-hungry “business of art.” For decades, his wife, Elka Schumann, who died in 2021, on a Sunday in August, oversaw the printing press that turns out countless pieces, all drawn with his bold and expressionistic hand and celebrating life while questioning abuses of power. (One poster of an iris reads “Resistance to the Empire”; a chapbook on courage urges “Dig through the dirt.”)But for all the questions firing like flares at society, with Schumann’s humor and pathos, there is one — far more insular in focus — on the minds of those around him: What will happen to his company when he is gone?“It’s been an ongoing conversation for 15 years, and we’re still figuring it out,” said his son Max Schumann, 59, an artist and the departing executive director of Printed Matter, a nonprofit based in New York City that sells artists’ books.Guides help audience members navigate the woods.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesSome of the puppets during the circus performance.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“This company has always been an iffy little enterprise that depends way too much on me,” his father said of Bread and Puppet, which has a million-dollar annual budget raised through touring, print sales, tickets and donations, but no direct corporate or government funding. “Is it sustainable when I’m gone and will people recognize it as important?”Those questions remain unanswered as Schumann’s incessant creation of new work keeps the focus on the present.INSIDE A BARN last month, a couple of hours after the rehearsal for the “Heart of the Matter” pageant, several dozen performers from around the world — paid puppeteers, interns, community volunteers — presented their proposed circus acts. Schumann typically reviews and critiques the sketches.Most of the acts had a whimsical tone. A man imitating a bee (collapsing bee colonies the inspiration) did a frenetic waggle around a cardboard city that transformed itself into a tangle of dancing urbanites. An orca ambushed yachting billionaire puppets. When somber-looking tree figures appeared with a narrator reading facts about boreal forests versus the more flammable monoculture ones burning in nearby Canada, Schumann became agitated.One of the circus performances.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“It’s too cliché, something everyone already knows,” he shouted. “You have to stop using so many words and solve things puppetry-wise.” Then he jumped to his feet and started moving people and puppets around. He had puppeteers throw the trees and then dance with them, causing some confusion.“It’s what you do, not what you say,” he said. “It’s puppetry, not preaching.”He told them he would return in a half-hour to see a revision. Then, as dinnertime approached, he excused himself to help the kitchen staff make potato pancakes — a recipe from his war-torn childhood.With admirable control, the puppeteers discussed how to rework their savaged piece, each giving the others time to suggest solutions. It was a utopian vision of collaboration, agile and practical — and typical of how the company functions.“Peter has a strong directional voice,” said Ziggy Bird, 26, a company member who took notice of Schumann’s work in a theater history class at Temple University. “It’s never personal and some of the most beautiful moments come from frustration, which can be a kick in the pants.”Bread and Puppet Theater performs all over the world, and travels domestically on a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesArt inside the bus, which reiterates Schumann’s uncompromising faith in what he calls “Cheap Art.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesVisitors tour a makeshift gallery featuring Schumann’s bedsheet paintings.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Schools of art are teaching solo enterprises, but what people do here is the opposite — they collaborate,” Schumann said while smoking a cigar, drinking a can of beer and stirring a vat of potato pancake batter to be fried on an outdoor stovetop. This collaborative process has birthed companies far beyond Vermont, including Papermoon Puppet Theater in Indonesia, Y No Había Luz in Puerto Rico and Great Small Works in New York City.“It’s a way of making art and living with a strong level of engagement and concern,” said Clare Dolan, a puppeteer and a Bread and Puppet Theater board member who assists Schumann. She was preparing a circus act about the sending of cluster bombs to Ukraine. “There are incredible ripples that come from Peter that show up in theaters, parades and art-making around the world.”John Bell, the board’s president and a professor who runs the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, has been with the company since 1973, around the time it relocated to Vermont from New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, first to Goddard College and then to the land in Glover.“In a way Bread and Puppet is an art project of Peter’s and we are only here to help him realize it,” he said. “So we don’t know what will happen once he’s gone, especially because he believes in responding to the present.” While Schumann is “dealing with being an older person these days,” Bell added, the moment he starts working, his pace accelerates.That seems an understatement.At the dress rehearsal on Saturday for the circus (canceled the next day because of a rainstorm that flooded Vermont) Schumann aggressively finessed the burning forest act and others. Later he performed in an indoor show billed as a mass, “Idiots of the World Unite Against the Idiot System”; it was a good-natured critique of everything from “the empire’s false sense of freedom” to a highway system that kills wild animals. He fiddled a hybrid violin and trumpet while making an abstract speech and then led the cast of 30 in an exasperated “Aaaagh.”“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral,” Schumann said. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAfter that a quartet performed a Beethoven fugue.Done listening, he drove his Subaru wagon up a dirt road to a studio to finish one of his “Heart of the Matter” paintings.“He’s always had a manic creative energy and right now he’s been working with wild abandon, trying to squeeze it all in,” Max Schumann observed. “When our mother passed away, his grief was intense, but the work helped keep him alive.”In fact, when Elka Schumann died, the circus and pageant carried on the same weekend.Now Schumann lives without the life partner who helped make many things work at Bread and Puppet. He thinks about her often and visits the memorial he made to her in his pine forest — a sculptural relief of a couple embraced. At night he sometimes sits on his porch listening to the parties down on his farm, pleased about what he and his wife have inspired and sustained. Sometimes he joins in, dancing with abandon.“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral, and I’ve already had a stroke and a second is probably on the way,” he said as he painted with a steady hand. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”He put the last paint stroke on his recycled bedsheet and stepped away.“OK, this series is finished,” he said. “Now I can go on to what’s next.” More

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    ‘A Eulogy for Roman’ Review: Farewell to a Friend, With Help From the Audience

    Check your cynicism at the door: Brendan George is earnest and endearing as he mourns Roman in this one-man show.Delivering a eulogy is never easy at the best of times, and it’s an especially tough slog for Milo, whose best friend, Roman, has recently died. The pair had been close since childhood, and Milo, who is in his early 20s, appears especially shaken. It quickly becomes obvious that he will need a supportive hand from those attending the service.And that means us, the audience members at Peter Charney and Brendan George’s “A Eulogy for Roman,” a modest but sneakily affecting show that just opened at 59E59 Theaters.It is not long before we are roped into helping the flustered Milo (played by George, a graduate student at New York University who also wrote the play). He asks a theatergoer to help him sort index cards on which he has scribbled some thoughts about Roman. Then he wonders if anyone can share tips for dealing with loss. “Dogs,” a woman volunteered at the performance I attended.Of course, Milo’s gentle prompts serve to move around the show’s emotional building blocks, but he is such a charming presence that it feels as though he is including the theatergoers in a conversation rather than simply manipulating them to serve his storytelling needs.There is a bit of unease, however, as Milo’s emotion is decidedly self-centered — he doesn’t tell us anything very revealing about Roman. Then again, isn’t part of the grieving process the act of figuring out how one continues to live?To overcome his disarray, Milo decides to complete a project he had embarked on with Roman: getting through a “Life Points List,” a lengthy catalog of experiences “that would remind us that we are alive and make us feel alive.” A few of them still hadn’t been checked off when Roman died, and perhaps, Milo suggests, the memorial-goers might want to help him achieve closure. The remaining tasks include suggesting songs for a playlist (my fellow audience members spontaneously latched onto a candy theme) and teaming up with Milo to do 100 push-ups. As amusing as those scenes are, they can feel like activities at a children’s birthday party, even if the show tends to stay on the right side of that dangerous line.The use of a list as a way to deal with death, combined with audience participation, brings to mind Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s hit play “Every Brilliant Thing,” though “A Eulogy for Roman” does not weave the more discomforting sides of our existence into its fabric as effectively as that show did.Still, George has an endearing presence and Charney, who is credited with concept and direction, moves the action along at a steady pace. And there is something refreshing about the show’s commitment to earnestness. We have been so conditioned to expect a certain degree of cynicism that I spent a good portion of the evening wondering when we were going to discover that Roman or Milo or both were psychopaths. But no: The bravest thing about “A Eulogy for Roman” is its embrace of kindness, resilience and community.A Eulogy for RomanThrough Sept. 3 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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    Name These Books That Became Broadway Musicals

    Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s monthly quiz about books that have been made into television shows, movies, theatrical productions and more. This month’s challenge is about books that were adapted into Broadway musicals; coincidentally, all of the correct answers were adapted into films before they made it to the stage. Tap or click your answers to the five questions below.New literary quizzes appear on the Book Review page every week and you can find previous installments in the Book Review Quiz Bowl archive online. More

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    This Netflix Anime Uses Alt-History to Explore Gender Norms

    “Ōoku: The Inner Chambers” tells a complex love story in an alternate-reality Edo Japan in which an illness upends gender roles.Gender is a trap. The binary is a lie. And flexible sexual politics can lead to real change.That’s some of the subtext in the fascinating Netflix anime series “Ōoku: The Inner Chambers,” which tells a complex love story in an alternate-reality Edo Japan in which an illness upends society’s gender norms and expectations.The show’s story, adapted from a popular manga that also spawned several live-action series and movies in Japan, is framed as a historical record of how this alt-Japan and the shogunate came to be.When the shogun, the last male heir to the Tokugawa clan, dies from an aggressive strain of smallpox that targets young men, he is secretly replaced by an illegitimate daughter, Iemitsu, who is taken to the palace and raised as a man. (Iemitsu is based on the real-life shogun of the Tokugawa clan with the same name; “Ōoku” cleverly builds up its world from select real historical characters and events.)As the male population dwindles and the economy fails, Iemitsu lives a life secluded in the palace with the ōoku, or the “inner chambers,” where thousands of beautiful men live as concubines for her. Forced to present herself as a man, Iemitsu grows into a brutal, violent misogynist. And although Iemitsu wants to live her life as a woman, she also resents her body; a few years into her reign, she is a victim of sexual assault, and a subsequent miscarriage debilitates her with rage and grief. She struggles to find her place within the limitations of the gender binary. Her manhood and womanhood are never in service to her understanding of her own identity; whether she’s passing as a male ruler or having a child to secure the Tokugawa bloodline, her actions must always be in service to the shogunate.Then a handsome monk, Arikoto, is abducted and forced to forsake his sacred vows so he can become the groom of Iemitsu’s bedchamber. Arikoto eventually becomes content with his lifetime sentence in the ōoku and falls in love with Iemitsu, who softens under Arikoto’s patient affections.Abduction, coercion, abuse, assault: Arikoto and Iemitsu’s romance isn’t exactly a Hallmark love story. Arikoto is not the traditional gallant prince; he is deeply dedicated to his life of chastity and charity until that life is upended and his spirit is broken in the ōoku. Nor is Iemitsu the lovely damsel; she’s embittered by the ways her station has dictated how she must see and use her body.But the most affecting moment in the love story between her and Arikoto is when they realize their love for each other while both in drag. Iemitsu doles out gendered punishments to the men around her: She gives the grooms of the ōoku women’s names and demands they dress up as women for her entertainment. But when she sees Arikoto, who isn’t shamed but instead embraces his femininity while dressed as a beautiful woman, she is dazzled by his fairness and grace. They hold each other, him as a woman and her as a man. The difference between their gender expression and biological identity is irrelevant; they are two people who have come to an understanding based not on gender but on love.What could have easily been a more traditional love story is instead an intriguing look at how two people are forced to negotiate their ideals, their identity, their politics, their relationships — sexual and platonic — and their position in a government hierarchy as the expectations of them as man and woman, as consort and shogun, bear down on them.The show also ventures beyond the ōoku to depict how different strata of society respond to the decreasing male population. Women adjust to being the workers and breadwinners. Lords who have lost their sons to the epidemic force their daughters to pass as their male heirs but then resent them for learning, perhaps even enjoying, stereotypically masculine activities like horseback riding and swordsmanship. The remaining young men, considered too valuable and fragile to work, are expected to stay home and lounge. For money they may prostitute themselves to women desperate to be impregnated.At first the series seems to be leading us in the direction of a completely gender-swapped society, but in one episode the voice-over narration declares outright: “It wasn’t that the status of men and women was reversed. To be precise, men ceased to do anything besides father children. Including child-rearing and house chores, all the labor in the world was placed on women’s shoulders.”So even though the shogun is a woman, she is still surrounded by advisers who are men. Though women keep the economy afloat with their labors and the realm going with their child-rearing, the men retain their titles and social superiority, reaping society’s rewards even as they are rendered impotent in every non-procreative sense of the word.“Ōoku” isn’t so fantastical that it completely sloughs off the ways gender and sex dictate how individuals live in a society, often for bad. Antiquated notions of gender roles are so entrenched, the show suggests, that society is determined to preserve them even as they become less and less feasible.So perhaps “Ōoku” can just serve as a thought exercise, particularly for Americans right now, as transgender rights and women’s rights are under threat: What might it look like when we decide our notions of gender no longer serve us? That may be the real love story waiting to happen. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: The Weeknd in Concert and ‘Praise Petey’

    HBO airs the concert filmed in Los Angeles and the animated Freeform show wraps up its first season.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, Aug. 14-20. Details and times are subject to change.MondayLaurence Olivier and Greer Garson in “Pride and Prejudice.”Everett CollectionPRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1940) 4 p.m. on TCM. Before we were introduced to Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen as the moody but endlessly charming Mr. Darcy, there was Laurence Olivier in the role. The story, based on the novel by Jane Austen, follows the Bennet family, who are excited by the prospect of two wealthy and eligible bachelors coming to town. Upon meeting, Elizabeth Bennet (Greer Garson) and Mr. Darcy fall into one of the most memorable enemies-to-lovers arcs of all time.TuesdayTHE LOVE EXPERIMENT 10 p.m. on MTV. If the many dating reality shows that already exist (see: “Love Island,” “Love is Blind,” “The Ultimatum,” “Are You the One?” “Bachelor in Paradise”) don’t tickle your fancy, MTV has a new one. This show is as if you were in a dating app and all the men are actually ready for relationships: the three best friends Marcia, Paige, and Tamara (who are in their 20s and 30s) are put inside a “dating utopia” where they go on dates, test compatibility and do some challenges to try to find their lifelong partners.WednesdayGORDON RAMSAY’S FOOD STARS 9 p.m. on Fox. On this show you can’t just be good at cooking — you also have to be an entrepreneur in the making. As this season wraps up, the three final contestants compete for Gordon Ramsay to make a personal $250,000 investment. Who knows, the person who wins this season could also have six restaurants in Las Vegas, just like Ramsay himself.TEMPTATION ISLAND: SECRETS REVEALED 9 p.m. on USA. Just like “Love Island” has its unseen bits episode or how “Big Brother” lets you watch livestreams inside of the house even when episodes aren’t airing, “Temptation Island” is releasing their own version of that. The finale of the fifth season will air later in August, but before that happens, they are showing bloopers and some interesting moments that happened between couples that were left out of the final edit of the show.Saycon Sengbloh in “The Wonder Years.”ABC/Matt MillerTHE WONDER YEARS 9:30 p.m. on ABC. This remake of the 1980s sitcom about a Black middle-class family in Montgomery, Ala., is wrapping up its second season this week. In the hour long finale, there is a birthday celebration, a trip to Florida and some classic family squabbles.ThursdayTHE WEEKND: LIVE AT SOFI STADIUM (2023) 8 p.m. on HBO. On Netflix you can throw on Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” tour. On Disney+, you can watch the BTS “Permission to Dance” concert. And now, The Weeknd has joined the ranks of many artists to come before him who have released televised versions of their concerts. Filmed in Los Angeles in November 2022, his set includes a pretty intense light show and performances of some of his most famous songs.FridayA still from “Praise Petey.”FreeformPRAISE PETEY 10 p.m. on Freeform. This show could be “Schitt’s Creek” in an alternate, cartoon universe. In this show, Petey learns that she has inherited a small town from her dead father, but it turns out he is still alive and running a cult in the town. The kicker is that both shows star Annie Murphy. The cartoon is wrapping up its first season and has not yet been renewed for a second.Saturday50 FIRST DATES (2004) 6:30 p.m. on TBS. Set in Hawaii, this movie follows Henry (Adam Sandler), a marine veterinarian, as he tries to woo Lucy (Drew Barrymore) every day. The problem? Lucy has short-term memory loss and relives every day over and over, which obviously makes it hard for Henry who has to reintroduce himself to her every single day. The movie is a comedy but a Psychology Today article points out that it is a pretty realistic interpretation of a condition called “anterograde amnesia.”HER NAME WAS GRACE KELLY 7 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Grace Kelly captured the attention of the world as she lived what seemed to be a real life fairy tale: After starring in popular films, she married Prince Rainier III and became the Princess of Monaco. A car accident in 1982 took her life, but she has remained in the public’s imagination ever since. This documentary features archival footage and home videos of Kelly, with tapes going back to three years old.BRIDESMAIDS (2011) 8 p.m. on Bravo. “I’m ready to party with the best of them” is what Annie (Kristen Wiig) says after she takes an Ambien and a glass of whiskey on the plane ride to the bachelorette party of her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph), before wreaking absolute havoc on the flight. (I say the same thing every time I watch this movie.) The story follows Annie as she reaches emotional rock bottom, all while trying to support her childhood best friend during her pre-wedding festivities. The plot almost takes a back seat to the amazing chemistry between Wiig and Rudolph.SundayFROZEN MARATHON 4:35 p.m. on Freeform. As we settle into the mid-August heat, I wouldn’t hate a trip to Arendelle. If you want to be transported to Elsa’s frozen land full of amazingly catchy songs, sisterly drama and, more important, sisterly love, you can catch both FROZEN (2013) and FROZEN II (2019) back to back on Freeform. More

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    Edinburgh Festival Review: ‘Food’ Is an Acquired Taste

    At the Edinburgh Festival, Geoff Sobelle presents a dinner party as a theatrical spectacle, in which silliness is the end in itself.In an auditorium in Scotland, the American theater artist Geoff Sobelle is hosting a dinner party. The stage is taken up by an enormous square table, laid out with plates and cutlery. Around three of its sides sit twenty-four audience members. At the center of the fourth is the waistcoated figure of Sobelle, who brings wine, hands out menus and takes orders. When one lady requests a baked potato, he produces a bucket full of earth and empties it out onto the table; he plants a seed in the mound, waters it and waits a while before reaching in to pull out a large spud.After several skits in this vein, Sobelle withdraws into himself and proceeds to binge silently: He eats one apple, then another, and then another and another, followed by a bowl of cherry tomatoes, a few radishes and carrots, a concerning quantity of ranch, a number of raw eggs, an entire onion and some bank notes.Sobelle’s one-man show “Food,” which runs at The Studio through Aug. 27 as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, is billed as “a meditation on how and why we eat.” But, aside from a short preamble about the primordial nature of our relationship with grub, there is little attempt to intellectualize. Audiences primed to look for meaning will find none here: Silliness is the end in itself; the enjoyment is in the buildup of nervous energy in the room as Sobelle carries out his buffoonery with the focused determination of a doctor performing lifesaving surgery.Sobelle trained as a magician, and then as a clown, before turning his hand to absurdist theater. In an artistic mission statement on his website, he declares that he sees his body of work as “a colossal practical joke.” This checks out.Midway through the show, Sobelle carefully gathers up the guests’ wine glasses, then returns to his seat and violently pulls away the tablecloth, amid much clattering of plates. Underneath, it turns out, is not a table, but a field of dirt: The set is transformed into one big muddy landscape. A remote control tractor trundles across this terrain, and sheafs of wheat sprout upward in its wake. The trappings of modern civilization materialize; toy trucks are handed to the diners and passed around the perimeter of the dining table-turned-landscape. Sobelle clambers onto the scenery, sticks his hand in it and strikes oil; tall buildings start popping up here and there. We begin to suspect there may be someone underneath the table.The audience was bewildered, but charmed, and for 90 minutes reduced to a state of childlike wonder, reveling in the frisson of anticipation, awkwardness and unease. The immersive setup produced some amusing unscripted moments, like when a theatergoer’s cellphone got swept away as Sobelle removed the tablecloth; his demeanor as he handed it back was a picture of dumb officiousness, both apologetic and vaguely affronted.Sobelle’s comedy of affable idiocy may be witless, but it is also timeless — every bit as primal, one suspects, as our love of eating. (There’s a reason “Mr. Bean” is still so popular around the world.) In drawing much of its mirth from sheer ridiculousness or grotesquerie, “Food” channels a comic sensibility from less exalted sectors of the entertainment world — think provincial circus troupes, or competitive eating championships.In the comparatively rarefied environs of the Edinburgh International Festival, the show’s sensibility feels like an ironic curio. I was reminded of Freddie Mercury’s line about wanting to bring opera to the masses: Sobelle, it seems, is doing the inverse, bringing low culture to the cosmopolitan elite. A perverse kind of altruism, perhaps.FoodThrough Aug. 27 at The Studio, in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk. More

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    The International Puppet Fringe Festival Draws the World of Puppetry to New York

    This year’s International Puppet Fringe Festival surveys puppetry traditions from around the globe, and celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer Ralph Lee.Forget the sunglasses, the baseball caps, the featherweight clothing. Heat or no heat, it’s time to choose a fantastical mask and a wild costume and head to the Lower East Side to join a Wednesday evening parade. Hades himself will welcome you.The occasion? It’s Halloween in August, the theme of the third International Puppet Fringe Festival NYC, which officially begins with this open-to-all procession on Suffolk Street. This year’s festival, which arrives with more than 50 performances, as well as cabarets, craft workshops, panels, open mics and films, celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer and theater artist Ralph Lee.Lee, who died in May, invented one of New York’s most popular puppet revels — the Village Halloween Parade — and Wednesday’s street stroll will feature not only his Greek god of the underworld but also his Fat Devil and Yama, the Chinese Lord of Death. Such creations underscore one of the festival’s core principles: that puppetry is more than child’s play.“People have this misconception that it is just for, like, birthday parties or children’s television shows,” said Manuel Antonio Morán, the artistic director of the festival, which is produced by Teatro SEA, the Latino theater that he founded; his own agency, Grupo Morán; and the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, where Puppet Fringe performances will run through Sunday. “Yes, it is for that, too,” he said in an interview, but in many countries, it’s “part of the folklore, it’s part of the tradition.”A donkey puppet is another part of the musical “The Crazy Adventures of Don Quixote.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesFolklore and mythology continually inspired Lee, who collaborated on this year’s festival despite his declining health. His work, including incarnations of the ghost of Henry Hudson, a mermaid and Coney Island sideshow characters, will appear in Brendan Schweda’s “Barnacle Bill the Husband,” one of a special group of brief, intimate works for small audiences. On Saturday, the festival will host a round-table discussion with Lee’s troupe, the Mettawee River Theater Company. But the greatest breadth of his creativity will be on display in two exhibitions: “Theater Unmasked: Photographic Glimpses of Ralph Lee’s Work,” on view through Sunday, and “Myths, Legends and Spectacle: Masks and Puppets of Ralph Lee,” which is on display through Aug. 31. (The festival’s exhibitions and outdoor performances are free; indoor shows are $20 each, and day passes $75.)“What I want people to experience while they’re here is that the world is whatever you decide to make it for yourself,” said Matthew Sorensen, who curated the shows of Lee’s work.The more than 60 pieces in “Myths, Legends and Spectacle” cover six decades and range in tone from the fiercely haunting raffia-haired mask of a Japanese demon from the play “The Mask of Kitamura” (1983) to the 11-foot-tall, sweetly smiling Grandmother Earth puppet from “Nanabozho,” a staging of a Native American tale (1980). And everywhere, Lee gave castoffs new life: Piano keys serve as puppet teeth, and can lids as eyes. An open mailbox becomes the head and jaws of a dragon; the ribs of a baby carriage form its body.This exhibition “opens up people’s ideas about materials,” said Casey Compton, Lee’s widow and frequent artistic collaborator, as she helped install the show. Many, she added, illustrate Lee’s method of taking “what’s just right there” and “exploring what it can do.”This year’s International Puppet Fringe Festival celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer and theater artist Ralph Lee, pictured here in 1998 alongside some of his creations.Sara KrulwichBeyond Lee’s creations, an innovative approach to materials also distinguishes the other festival offerings, like “Sapientia,” a 10th-century play by Hroswitha of Gandersheim, sometimes called the West’s first female playwright. The title character, a Christian, opposes the pagan emperor Hadrian, who responds by torturing her young daughters. Scapegoat Carnivale, a Montreal-based theater company, stages the play as satirical object theater: Hadrian is portrayed by an espresso pot, Sapientia by a hand mirror and the children, who in the story are miraculously spared pain, by teacups. The torture devices include an iron and a George Foreman grill.“The objects are able to kind of deconstruct and reveal almost the absurdity, but also support the miraculous nature” of the play, said Mia van Leeuwen, who worked on the adaptation and directed it.Another humble substance stars throughout the Puppet Fringe: paper. “You can bind it together, you can rip it, you can make a pop-up of it, you can chew it up and spit it out,” said Yael Rasooly, an Israeli puppeteer who does all of those in her slightly macabre solo show “Paper Cut.” Rasooly, who will also teach a puppetry master class at the festival, portrays a secretary whose Hollywood fantasy world is made up of old movie magazine cutouts.A more joyful exploration of paper’s possibilities unfolds in “The Paper Play,” which the Taiwanese company Puppet Beings Theater will present outdoors at the festival and indoors in a separate performance on Sunday at Flushing Town Hall in Queens. Consisting of two parts — one a gentle fable and the other a celebration of its medium’s transformative powers — this American premiere exemplifies the Puppet Fringe’s less spooky side.Behind the scenes at the International Puppet Fringe Festival.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe family-friendly fare also includes four productions from Teatro SEA. In “The Crazy Adventures of Don Quixote,” a musical Morán wrote with Radamés Gavé, don’t be surprised to see Cervantes’s 17th-century characters duel with “Star Wars”-style light sabers. They will also speak both English and Spanish, a bilingual approach adopted by all Teatro SEA puppetry shows. Another production, the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater’s urbanized “Little Red’s Hood,” will be performed once in Spanish and once in Mandarin.“From the beginning, I’ve been wanting to be a very inclusive festival,” said Morán, who founded the biennial Puppet Fringe in 2018. (The second edition was held in 2021 because of the pandemic.) That has meant featuring shows in different languages, producers from minority groups and female puppeteers like Heather Henson, who has curated two festival short-film programs from Handmade Puppet Dreams, her company’s collection of works by independent artists: “Frights and Delights,” featuring fanciful ghosts and monsters, and “Kidscapes,” a series for children.Puppetry “is very cross-disciplinary,” said Henson, who noted that her father, the renowned puppeteer Jim Henson, often produced art that “would have never worked on the stage.” Jump cuts, extreme close-ups and scene dissolves can make puppet films more exciting — or unsettling.But however audiences experience puppetry, its power often derives from the extraordinary interplay between human agency and physical artworks.“There’s lots of corny words for it, like magic,” said Compton. “But it is very special, when those elements come together, and there’s a life that can be shared.” Ralph Lee, she added, “was always going for that.” More