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    Satires Like ‘Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul’ Reveal the Art of Acting Faithful

    In films like “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul” and shows like “The Righteous Gemstones,” pageantry is the top priority.In church satires there’s always a scene in which a ritual, tradition or show of faith becomes a grand spectacle. The joke isn’t the faith itself but the performance of faith — and a performance of virtue, even when that’s far from the truth. If you can pull off that show without a hitch, heavenly paradise may not be guaranteed. But worldly riches likely will be.In the movie “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul,” which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is both now in theaters and streaming on Peacock, the first lady of a once-popular Southern Baptist megachurch and her pastor husband aim to make a grand comeback after a sexual harassment scandal. When they fail to commit to the performance that in the past had brought success to them and their church, they endure a fall from grace.Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown) is the king and shepherd of Wander to Greater Paths church, where he employs his altar like a stage, delivering rousing sermons during which the spirit may cause him to quiver, shake and strip right out of his church clothes. He sits on a regal throne alongside his wife, Trinitie (Regina Hall). Together they maintain a costly image; Trinitie treats herself to an expensive, elaborate church hat from a shop in the mall, while Lee-Curtis shows off his expansive collection of designer shoes and suits, which he claims helps him with his ministry.Written and directed by Adamma Ebo, the film focuses on Trinitie and how she deals with the consequences of her husband’s sexual indiscretions with members of their congregation. Trinitie already has to put on one kind of performance, as a first lady who supports her husband, honoring their marital vows even when he has dishonored his. But she is also delivering an additional performance: as her husband’s beard. When the film reveals that Lee-Curtis’s transgressions were not with women but with young men, it juxtaposes this reveal with flashback scenes of Lee-Curtis ardently condemning homosexuality to a cheering congregation, showing that he was speaking through a now-transparent screen of hypocrisy and self-hate.The most striking part of the film, however, is how it reads as a bleak, cringe-worthy tragedy rather than a comedy; close-ups of Trinitie’s face show her cracking beneath the surface, and her exasperation and even resentment of her husband form visible watermarks on the perfect portrait of marriage they’ve constructed. Bedroom scenes show Lee-Curtis’s lack of sexual interest in Trinitie, despite her attempts at intimacy. And when Trinitie goes to her mother for marriage advice, she is brusquely shut down, told that even in the current circumstances she can only be a good Christian woman if she stands with her husband until death. Take it from a theater critic: There’s nothing more depressing than watching an unwilling actor trapped on a stage.Walton Goggins on the television series “The Righteous Gemstones.”HBO MaxThis concept is at the heart of many other church satires. In the hilarious HBO comedy series “The Righteous Gemstones,” a family of megachurch royals have their services broadcast on TV, and their masses and church events are as gaudy as festivals; the family even owns a Gemstones-themed amusement park on their sprawling multimansion estate. These Bible rock stars are not just TV preachers, but also recording artists: The siblings Aimee-Leigh Gemstone (Jennifer Nettles) and Baby Billy (Walton Goggins) first rose to fame with their touring religious musical act.In last year’s obscure — and utterly unwatchable — satirical faith-based comedy “Church People,” which features Thor Ramsey, two of the Baldwins (Stephen, William), one of the N*Syncers (Joey Fatone) and Turk from “Scrubs” (Donald Faison), an eccentric megachurch pastor (Michael Monks) comes up with new antics to up the church’s popular appeal, to the chagrin of Guy (Ramsey), a celebrity youth pastor. When a real-life crucifixion becomes the plan for the church’s Easter service, Guy aims to stop the proceedings and return the congregation to the Gospel teachings.Ebony Marshall-Oliver, left, and Cleo King in the play “Chicken & Biscuits.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe religious pageantry in these movies and TV shows is only one part of the satire; at the root is the underlying hypocrisy of the characters. In “Honk for Jesus,” it’s Lee-Curtis’s predatory grooming. In Douglas Lyons’s church comedy play “Chicken & Biscuits,” which premiered on Broadway last fall, it’s the newly deceased patriarch and pastor who, his family finds out during his funeral, has a few sinful secrets of his own. In “The Righteous Gemstones,” it’s Baby Billy and Eli (John Goodman), the iron-fisted commander of the church and the Gemstone family, each acting as upstanding shepherds of the faith to achieve money and celebrity while escaping the more unsavory parts of their past. It’s the immoral — and sometimes illegal — activities of Jesse Gemstone (Danny McBride) and Judy Gemstone (Edi Patterson).And the show’s wackiest story lines are offered courtesy of Eli’s youngest son, Kelvin (Adam Devine), who finds creative ways to fit his repressed homosexuality into absurd pageants of religious ceremony — like forming a group of muscular all-male, scantily clad disciples, the God Squad, who resolve conflicts by having cross-bearing contests.In the sharp, Tony-winning Broadway musical “A Strange Loop,” an usher named Usher is trying to write a “big, Black and queer” musical — the very show we’re watching — despite the disapproval of his parents and the unhelpful intrusions of his inner thoughts. His mother begs him to “write a nice, clean Tyler Perry-like gospel play.” Usher resentfully sings about writing the shallow, stereotypical artwork his mother wants, and near the end of “A Strange Loop,” the whole production transforms into an over-exaggerated, “overblown yet false display / just like in a gospel play,” Usher sings.Larry Owens, center, in the Broadway musical “A Strange Loop.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKnowing that his sexuality is at odds with the church values to which his mother subscribes, he puts on a performance mocking the sometimes cruel and exclusionary standards many church communities hoist onto their faithful. A threatening lit-up cross appears on set, where Usher condemns himself in a fiery sermon of self-hate while his inner thoughts appear as robed choir members singing a refrain of “AIDS is God’s punishment.” He tells his mother this is the only way he can write a gospel play, but she misreads his scathing satire as truth, tells him he can still save himself from the threat of homosexuality.But in the show’s final scenes, Usher drops the mock gospel play as his thoughts confront him about his intentions, how he claims he’s showing the audience “real life.” “And real life is making hateful anti-Black caricatures in a Tyler Perry-style gospel play?” one asks.So much of the meta show is about traversing the line between reality and fiction, and how we write ourselves in the stories of our lives — when we make ourselves valiant or pitiful, strong or weak, the hero or the villain. Usher can’t write his mother’s gospel play because it contradicts his identity; he’s unwilling to be dishonest, even within a fake play within a musical about a writer writing a musical.One of the saddest moments in “Honk for Jesus” sounds like it should be one of the funniest: Lee-Curtis goads Trinitie into praise-miming (which is, inexplicably, a real practice) on the side of the road outside their church in a desperate attempt to attract congregants. Hall deadpans to the camera, in her elaborate pastel-yellow church dress and matching hat, her face caked in a thick white-and-black mime makeup. Trinitie was once queen of the pulpit, and now she’s just the jester. She and Curtis-Lee stand side by side in front of the camera, but her rage is palpable, even beneath the calm facade. He uneasily tries to carry on with the show — to reestablish himself as the good-guy pastor — but his scene partner seems to have gone mute. More

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    Florentina Holzinger Makes Everyone Uncomfortable

    The Austrian choreographer’s shows blend dance, stunts and sideshow-inspired acts to explore lofty ideas about gender and art. She pushes performers to extremes — and audiences, too.BERLIN — In a rehearsal hall on the city’s outskirts, Xana Novais was hanging by her teeth. On a recent evening, the tattooed 27-year-old performer was suspended a few inches above the ground, biting down on a piece of leather hanging from a rope, perfecting a new skill called the “iron jaw.” It did not look easy.Novais was practicing for a sequence in “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” a new work by the Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger that premieres at the Berlin Volksbühne theater on Thursday. As part of the performance, which blends dance, stunts and sideshow-inspired acts, Novais was meant to dangle like a fish caught on a hook for about half a minute. But after 20 seconds, she let go, lowered herself down, and grimaced. “This is about learning to manage discomfort,” she said.Discomfort is central to the work of Holzinger, 36, who has recently become a star of the European dance and performance worlds by pushing the limits of what performers — and audiences — can endure. Holzinger, whose interest in bodily extremes dates back to her own training as a dancer, has drawn acclaim for works that feature large casts of nude female performers and explore lofty ideas about art and gender while showcasing acts, sometimes involving bodily fluids, that obliterate the boundaries of good taste.In “Apollon,” a 2017 piece exploring the work of the choreographer George Balanchine and notions of artist and muse, performers bled and defecated onstage. “A Divine Comedy,” a 2021 riff on Dante’s epic poem about the circles of hell, included a scene in which a woman ejaculates explosively while using a vibrator. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of her performances are punctuated by audience members walking out.“Ophelia’s Got Talent” — an exploration of myths and narratives about women and water, including mermaids, sirens and the tragic, drowning figure from “Hamlet” — is the first of several original works Holzinger is creating as part of a multiyear agreement with the Volksbühne, one of the most influential theaters in the German-speaking world.René Pollesch, the theater’s artistic director, said he was partly attracted to Holzinger’s work because of her interest in showcasing a variety of strong female performers, including older women and women with disabilities, doing daring and demanding acts onstage. “This is a radical feminism, not a reform feminism,” he said.A scene from “Ophelia’s Got Talent.” Holzinger said she drew inspiration from dance history, mythology and action films, including the James Bond franchise.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesHolzinger, who has a self-deprecating wit and the physical intensity of a boxer, explained in an interview that she and her cast would pull fish hooks through their skin and hold their breath underwater for up to five minutes during the show. At one point, she said, cast members would form the shape of a fountain and squirt water from their noses. “That will be a nice image,” she said.She added that she drew inspiration from dance history, mythology and action films, including the James Bond franchise, but that she viewed the stage as a “laboratory” where ostensibly taboo acts can be performed freely. “I can maybe teach people something about what forms of shame are necessary and which are not,” she said.Life under capitalism encouraged individuals to perfect themselves, Holzinger said, adding that her work delved into the ways this shaped women’s bodies. “We are in a society where you are able to purchase and create your own femininity, and optimize yourself in ways the system wants you to,” she said. In her work, she added, she tried to find “unexpected” ways of using the body, which has been conditioned to look and move a certain way by social pressures.Barbara Frey, the artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a prominent arts festival in Germany that commissioned “A Divine Comedy,” said Holzinger had created a “new form” of performance that combines “dance, exuberant wit, great tenderness” and “the Roman gladiatorial arena” while exploring “the male gaze — and the female gaze — on the female body.”Some have compared her work to the Viennese Actionists, an Austrian art movement in the 1960s and ’70s whose (largely male) adherents staged performances in which they carried out extreme acts, including self-mutilation, as a way of confronting spectators with what they saw as repressed elements of Austrian society. Although Holzinger has previously said she draws little inspiration from the movement, the association with the Actionists, who are now a revered part of Austria’s art history, helped her gain early respect in her native country, she explained.“If people come to me expecting an evening of abstract postmodern dance, I fully respect their decision to leave,” Holzinger said.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesBorn to a pharmacist and a lawyer in Vienna, Holzinger came late to dance. She said that soon after she began her training, at age 17, she realized it was too late for her to perfect the skills necessary for a classic career as a dancer, and that she was “too strong, too muscular for ballet.”After being rejected from several traditional European dance academies, she enrolled in the School for New Dance Development, an experimental school in Amsterdam, where she began exploring alternative ways of using her body as a vehicle for spectacle. “If I’m training my body to pee on cue, then I’m exerting control over my body,” she said. “It could be seen as a form of dance technique, even if it’s not a grand jeté or a tendu.”After several eyebrow-raising collaborations with Vincent Riebeek, a Dutch choreographer, Holzinger said she reached a turning point in her career after a near-death experience during a 2013 performance at an arts festival in Norway, in which she fell from a height of 16 feet while doing an aerial stunt. Although she survived with a concussion and a broken nose, the accident, caused by a screw holding her weight that came loose, led her to take a more meticulous approach to her work and safety.Since then, she has focused on creating her more elaborate works for all-female ensembles. Four years after the accident, she debuted “Apollon,” a piece that wrestled with what Holzinger described as the “lived experience of ballet” and the “overdone femininity of ballerinas.” The show was widely acclaimed and toured internationally. That piece, as well as her 2019 follow-up, “Tanz,” drew parallels between the suffering experienced by dancers — including via the ballet shoe, which she described as a “torture item” that often deforms and bloodies dancers’ feet — and the staged violence of less highbrow acts, such as sword swallowing, or body suspension shows.Holzinger’s casts include trained dancers as well as performers with circus and sideshow backgrounds, and sex workers.Nicole Marianna WytyczakFinding performers for her works, she admitted, hasn’t always been easy. Some, like Novais, have a background in theater, while others are sex workers or sideshow performers. As part of her recruitment efforts, she said, she once advertised for “women with special talents” on Craigslist.But her work has also attracted performers with more traditional dance backgrounds, including Trixie Cordua, 81, a former soloist with the Hamburg Ballet who has worked with John Cage. Cordua, who has Parkinson’s disease and sometimes moves onstage with the help of a motorized wheelchair, said in a phone interview that she was drawn to working with Holzinger because of her “ability to combine things that don’t usually fit together to form a fully new constellation,” and because of her willingness to go “very, very far.”Holzinger said she was comfortable with the fact that the extreme elements of her works often led people to walk out of her performances. “If people come to me expecting an evening of abstract postmodern dance, I fully respect their decision to leave,” she said. “I’d rather be left with 10 people in the audience who find it cool.”Ophelia’s Got TalentSept. 15 through Oct. 25 at the Berlin Volksbühne; volksbuehne.berlin. More

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    Alan Cumming Uses Dance to Get at the Truth of Robert Burns

    GLASGOW — Rain pours down, thunder growls, lightning flickers. Fragments of melancholy melody emerge from the tumult, and a lone, silhouetted figure appears onstage, moving his upper body in sinuous circles, entwining his arms and gesturing with slow deliberation. Then he walks forward, opens his arms and smiles impishly. “Here am I,” he announces.Here he is: The Scottish poet Robert Burns, embodied by the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in the one-man dance-theater show “Burn,” coming to the Joyce Theater on Sept. 20.Conceived by Cumming and the choreographer Steven Hoggett, “Burn,” which had its premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival in August, is an unlikely hybrid: A movement-focused show performed by a famous actor with no dance training, about a man whose medium was words.Why dance? Why Burns?Cumming answered those questions at some length a few days after that Glasgow performance, in a video interview from Aberdeen, where — between performances of “Burn” — he was filming the second season of a Scottish travel series with the actress Miriam Margolyes. To boil it down: He loves a challenge, he loves dance even more, and he had been thinking about taking on another physically demanding role since reprising the role of the M.C. in “Cabaret” eight years ago. (He won a Tony Award for the performance in 1998.)Vicki Manderson, left, did the choreography with Hoggett (back to camera). Here, they are rehearsing with Cumming iin Glasgow.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“When that ended in 2015, I was 50,” he said. “I felt sad to think I’m never going to be as fit as this again, this is it. Then I slowly began to think, No, I have one more thing left in me.” He added, “I put it into the universe.”The universe responded. In 2018, he went backstage at the Joyce Theater after watching “The Tenant,” choreographed by Arthur Pita, the partner of his old friend and flatmate Matthew Bourne. While chatting with Pita, Cumming was introduced to Linda Shelton, the executive director of the Joyce. “She asked me if I had any dancey ideas,” Cumming said. “I do!,” he answered.He had been thinking about Burns at that time, he said, prompted in part by writing an autobiography and revealing dark aspects of his own past. “It made me think how we don’t have a holistic picture of our icons,” he said. “Burns is everywhere in Scotland — on statues, milk bottles, chocolate boxes — he is a sort of Scottish DNA wallpaper. But we don’t really know who he is. Somehow, at that moment, the two things, Burns and dance, merged in my mind.”He told the Joyce team that he wanted to do a dance-theater piece about the poet with the choreographer Steven Hoggett. But he neglected to mention he hadn’t yet asked Hoggett.“It’s true,” Hoggett said in a video interview from New York, where he is working on a coming production of “Sweeney Todd.” The two men — friends since 2007, when they collaborated on the National Theater of Scotland’s “The Bacchae” — were having dinner one night when Cumming asked him what he thought about the idea. “I said it sounded fantastic and he should do it,” Hoggett recounted. “He said, ‘Good, because you are doing it, too.’”Cumming wanted to work with Hoggett, he said, because the choreographer comes from an experimental background (he founded the physical theater group Frantic Assembly) and has extensive experience working with actors. “He brings that energy and aesthetic to the more commercial work,” Cumming said, “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Cumming, right, said that Hoggett, left, brings “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanCumming and Hoggett began a residency at the National Theater of Scotland, which produced the show with the Edinburgh International Festival and the Joyce. Although their first idea, Hoggett said, was to look at Scottish male identity, they changed focus entirely after Kirsteen McCue, a professor of Scottish literature and a director of the Center for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, talked to them about the poet. McCue suggested they read his letters and the research of her colleague, Moira Hansen, who posits that Burns might have suffered from bipolar disorder.“They guided us to his mental health, to his relationship with his patron Frances Dunlop, to things that aren’t so sexy, but fascinating,” Cumming said. “When you read the letters — and there are two thick volumes — you realize he is much more fragile, more florid, sometimes obsequious to rich people, a bit stalker-y to women, often depressed.”The men began to work on movement that could evoke Burns’s states of mind, and in the process started to “find out what Alan’s body did and didn’t do,” Hoggett said. “He wasn’t going to learn a rond de jambe,” he added, referring to a step in the basic ballet vocabulary.Instead they did exercises around some of the content of the letters: farming, writing, joy, love, lust, depression. “What happens to the body when you’re using farming implements? What does his joy feel like, where does it spring from?” Hoggett said. “What does it feel like, in the body, to be inspired?”Every day, they would do an hourlong warm-up, then try out various exercises. Together with Vicki Manderson, who choreographed the piece with Hoggett, they would create material and construct movement phrases.“He would try anything,” Hoggett said of Cumming. “I encouraged him to really feel whether something felt right and fit on his body.”Hoggett said of Cumming: “He would try anything.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanIt was hard both physically and mentally. “The sheer pain of it,” Cumming said, grimacing. “It was intense.” It was also scary, he added, to go into rehearsal and not have a structure. “Steven is used to just making things up in the room,” he said. “But actors like to have a script!”Asked whether it had been difficult to memorize movement sequences, and eventually an hour of choreography, Cumming clutched his head in his hands. “I kept thinking, I memorized the whole of ‘Macbeth,’ I can do this!” he said. “But of course, getting the muscle memory of movement into your body is entirely different.”He learned that to tell a story with your body, “you have to think in a different way, let the story touch you in a more nonlinear, visceral way,” he said. “It was an incredibly emotional thing to do. I felt very vulnerable, which is what I want to be.”And, gradually, he became more sure of himself. “The exercises, zoning into the themes we were focusing on in the show,” he said, “gave me more confidence about my body and storytelling. It was a shock to me that some of the movement started coming from me.”He also realized, he said, that he was playing both Burns and the Alan Cumming that people know. “I am asking people to look at me in a different way, and also to look at the character I play in a different way,” he said. “The form really helped tell the story.”Cumming and Hoggett knew early on, Cumming said, that they wanted to use the genre-defying music of the Scottish composer Anna Meredith, whom they both admired. “We press-ganged her a bit,” Hoggett said. “Then she came to a few workshops, saw how forensic we were being with her music, and sent us a lot of stuff that hadn’t been released before.”Meredith, whose memory of those workshops involves “mainly doing a lot of Scottish country dancing with an expert who had come to work with the men,” said that she “loved the ambition of the show,” and the way it revealed unusual aspects of Burns. The score, she said, is made up of both existing tracks and older, sometimes experimental, work that “I hadn’t found a home for.”Cumming working with Manderson.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“It’s a mix of acoustic and electronic,” she said, “some tracks untouched, others needed edits or extensions to fit the exact length of Alan’s words and rhythms.”Working with Meredith to shape the score also helped in creating a structure for the show, when the men reconvened at Cumming’s home in Scotland last summer. “By then, we had pared down the topics we felt were important to telling the story of who Burns was,” Cumming said. He ticked off key points: Burns’s upbringing on a farm; starting to write; his relationship with Jean Armour (who would be the mother of nine of his 12 children); his affairs with Mary Campbell and others; his poverty, depression, and his love for Scotland and its stories and themes.“To label ‘Burn’ as dance might be stretching a point,” Mark Fisher wrote in The Guardian, adding that Cumming has nonetheless “dared to put himself in an unfamiliar place.”As several reviewers pointed out, there is not a great deal of Burns’s famous poetry in the show. Instead Cumming and Hoggett focus on the autobiographical content of Burns’s letters, evoking the highs and lows of his emotional life through their words, digital projections (Andrzej Goulding), dramatic lighting (Tim Lutkin) and occasional stage magic, as quills scroll independently across a manuscript and a dress rises from the floor to incarnate a character.“When Alan is 90 years old, he can recite Burns poetry in a rocking chair, under a spotlight,” Hoggett said. “And he can do that beautifully. But we wanted to go further and do a show about the man and the way movement can reveal a reality that words often hide.” More

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    Six Lyrics That Show Why ‘Hamilton’ Is Tough to Translate

    A direct transfer of words was never going to work for such a complex show. So the team involved got creative.How does one translate “Hamilton” into another language? That was the challenge facing Sera Finale, a rapper-turned-songwriter, and Kevin Schroeder, a seasoned musical theater translator, when they were asked to collaborate on a German version of the show — the first in a language other than English.The project turned out to be just as complicated as they had feared: complex rhyme schemes, elaborate wordplay and so many songs. There were drafts and demos and revisions; a member of the “Hamilton” music team, Kurt Crowley, learned German to help coordinate the process, and ultimately Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator, had to approve or reject each line.Here are six lyrics that demonstrate some of the challenges the team faced as they sought to preserve the meaning and melody of the original, but in a language with different sounds and syntax. The first line is the original English lyric; the second is the German lyric; and the third is the so-called back translation, which is what the German words literally mean in English.Avoiding HyperboleBurr: How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a/Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten/Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor/Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?“Alexander Hamilton” (English)Gino EmnesBurr: Wie wird ein Bastard/der vom Schoß einer trostlosen Dirne kroch/Aus ’nem gottverdammten, verlor’nem Loch in der Karibik/Ohne Titel, ohne Mittel, ohne Werte/Am Ende doch ein Held und ein Gelehrter?(How does a bastard/Who crawled out of the lap of a bleak harlot/From a goddamned, lost hole in the Caribbean/With no title, no means, no merits/In the end still become a hero and a scholar?)“Alexander Hamilton” (German)Gino EmnesThese are the first words from “Alexander Hamilton,” the musical’s opening song, which introduce the title character with a description of his humble upbringing. The challenge here was to maintain the original lyric’s directness without overstating the case or demeaning the West Indies. The original proposed German lyric referred to Hamilton as a “Bastardblag,” an arcane word meaning bastard brat, to his mother as a “Hure,” meaning whore, and to the islands of Hamilton’s upbringing as “verdreckten,” meaning filthy. Miranda thought those words went too far, and asked for them to be dialed back. “The first draft was almost Trumpian,” he said, alluding to a coarse phrase the former president used to refer to Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations. “To me that’s not the intent of the lyric. I never wanted to comment on Nevis, or St. Croix. It was just this really small part of the world. That’s an example of something that could easily get lost in translation if you’re not on it.”✣ ✣ ✣Quoting Rap SongsBurr: Ah, so you’ve discussed me/I’m a trust fund, baby, you can trust me.“The Schuyler Sisters” (English)Chasity Crisp and Gino EmnesBurr: Schiess mich über’n Haufen, doch/Du bist’n Babe, ich möcht’ dein Badewasser saufen.(Shoot me down but/You are a babe, I’d like to drink your bath water.)“The Schuyler Sisters” (German)Chasity Crisp and Gino EmnesThe original “Hamilton” score includes a number of quotations from American hip-hop songs. Most of them were cut from the German version because the translations made them unrecognizable. But, in an effort to accomplish the same effect, the translators inserted several quotations from German hip-hop songs into the German score. In a section of the song “The Schuyler Sisters,” when Aaron Burr flirts with Angelica Schuyler, the translators found a place to insert a phrase meaning “You are a babe, I’d like to drink your bath water,” from a 1995 German song “Ja klar,” which was a hit for Sabrina Setlur, who rapped as Schwester S. Miranda, who listened to each German song quoted before approving the citations, said he views “Hamilton” as a love letter to hip-hop, as well as to musical theater, and that he considers the hip-hop quotations as a point of entry for some audience members. “A hip-hop fan who comes in, maybe, with their arms crossed, hears those references and goes ‘OK, the person who wrote this obviously loves this culture and loves the music’,” he said. “And so we wanted to continue to reflect that.”✣ ✣ ✣New ImageryAngelica: So this is what it feels like to match wits/With someone at your level! What the hell is the catch?/It’s the feeling of freedom, of seeing the light/It’s Ben Franklin with a key and a kite/You see it right?“Satisfied” (English)Chasity CrispAngelica: So kribbeln Schmetterlinge, wenn sie starten/Wir beide voll auf einem Level, offene Karten!/Das Herz in den Wolken, ich flieg’ aus der Bahn/Die Füße kommen an den Boden nich’ ran/Mein lieber Schwan!(So that’s how butterflies tingle when they take off/We’re on the same level, all cards on the table!/My heart in the clouds, I’m thrown off track/My feet don’t touch the floor/My dear swan!)“Satisfied” (German)Chasity CrispThe original language is packed with American metaphors and idioms that just don’t translate. So the translators were given license to come up with their own turns of phrase. This example is from the song “Satisfied,” in which Angelica Schuyler, preparing to toast Hamilton’s marriage to her sister, recalls the first time she met him. The images are completely different (and the references to Ben Franklin are gone) but the meaning remains. “That section sounds fantastic, and gives the same feeling of falling in love for the first time,” Miranda said. “The metaphor may be different, but it keeps its propulsiveness.”✣ ✣ ✣Prioritizing MeaningEliza: You forfeit all rights to my heart/You forfeit the place in our bed/You sleep in your office instead/With only the memories/Of when you were mine/I hope that you burn“Burn” (English)Ivy QuainooEliza: Du nahmst dir das recht auf mein Herz/Den Platz hier in unserem Bett/Ich lösch unser leben komplett/Dir bleibt nur die Asche/Du warst einmal mein/Ich hoffe du brennst(You took the right to my heart from yourself/The place here in our bed/I am erasing our life completely/All that’s left for you is the ashes/You used to be mine once/I hope that you burn)“Burn” (German)Ivy QuainooThere were many moments when Miranda et al. allowed the German translators to bend the original meaning in order to preserve lyricism and melody. But there were other moments when they insisted on literalism, and the end of the song “Burn,” in which Eliza Hamilton expresses her outrage at her husband’s infidelity, was one of those. The translators initially sought to have Eliza repeat “brenn’n,” a shortened form of the word for “burn,” throughout the song. But that meant changing the final line of the song from words meaning “I hope that you burn” to words meaning “All this shall burn.” Miranda rejected that idea, insisting that Eliza direct her anger squarely at her husband. So now the song ends with “brennst,” which is not a perfect echo of the word used earlier in the song, but which preserves the original meaning: “You burn.” “I really just wanted to make sure the last line was personal: ‘It’s not about the world — it’s about you. This is what you did, and these are your consequences’,” Miranda said.✣ ✣ ✣Protecting ChoreographyHamilton: Teach me how to say goodbye/Rise up, rise up, rise up/Eliza“The World Was Wide Enough” (English)Benet MonteiroHamilton: Weitergeh’n und Abschied nehm’n/Frei sein, frei sein, frei sein/Eliza(Move on and say goodbye/Be free, be free, be free/Eliza)“The World Was Wide Enough” (German)Benet MonteiroIn the show’s penultimate song, “The World Was Wide Enough,” Hamilton dies. As that moment nears, he repeats the phrase “Rise up,” perhaps alluding to ambition, or revolution, or perseverance, and pictures his wife. The German translators at first proposed a lyric that preserved the internal rhyme of the lyric, but altered its meaning, using the word “leise,” which means quietly, and which beautifully echoes the name “Eliza,” to replace “Rise up.” But choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler objected, because the movement at that moment has the ensemble becoming more active — more “rise up” than “quietly” — and he felt it was important to preserve the relationship between the words and the movement. The translators went back to the drawing board, and came up with something less poetic but more protective of the dance concerns. “The complicating factor is that Andy choreographs to lyric, so when the lyrics underneath the movement have changed, what adjustments have to happen?” Miranda said. “I’m trying to keep those connected.”✣ ✣ ✣A Pointed AdditionHamilton: America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me“The World Was Wide Enough” (English)Benet MonteiroHamilton: America, durch deine Brust pumpt Sklavenblut, Moral und Wut.(America, through your breast is pounding the blood of slaves, morality and rage.)“The World Was Wide Enough” (German)Benet MonteiroThe German translators saw an opportunity to interpolate a reference to America’s troubled history with slavery. “Our version is kind of a German perspective on America,” said Kevin Schroeder, one of the translators. “He’s saying ‘unfinished symphony,’ and that also implies there are some flaws.”Audio production by Arjen Mensinga and More

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    A Bollywood Favorite Is Remade for the Stage, Raising Eyebrows

    Some have taken issue with the reframing of the musical, which now focuses on the love story of an Indian American woman and a white American man.SAN DIEGO — It is one of the most successful Bollywood movies of all time. Though released in 1995, it still plays daily at a movie theater in Mumbai. Its songs are a mainstay at weddings. Its lead actors became Bollywood superstars. And now “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge,” or “DDLJ,” has hit the stage.“Come Fall in Love — The DDLJ Musical” is currently in previews at the Old Globe here before a planned Broadway run. Fans of the film had been abuzz after producers announced the stage adaptation last fall, but when the show’s cast was revealed this summer, social media lit up with criticism. The news that a white actor, Austin Colby, would play the role of Rog, who was known as Raj in the film and played by the Indian star Shah Rukh Khan, led many fans of the movie to accuse the musical of whitewashing.The show’s creators say they want to tell the story of two cultures coming together. But critics of the casting decision see a missed opportunity. Amid increasing demands for more inclusive hiring and storytelling in the entertainment industry, South Asians are still underrepresented onstage and onscreen.“Just when you think we are moving on wards & upwards we are right back to square one,” Andy Kumar, an India-based performer known as VJ Andy, wrote in a tweet. “Why can’t our stories be told as they are? Without a white wash??” On Instagram, negative comments were sprinkled among the responses to Colby’s excited post about his casting. “Haven’t y’all colonized enough,” one user wrote. Another commented: “It is embarrassing that as a white man you are willingly stealing opportunities from men of color. This isn’t something to be proud of.”The chef Vikas Khanna, who was born in India and lives in New York, has also expressed his disapproval on social media. “They took away a star from us,” Khanna said during a video call. “All these guys would have gone in for auditions and the parents would have been: ‘My God, my boy is going to be Raj!’” More on IndiaA Predator’s Return: Scientists are bringing cheetahs back to India to see whether the animal’s population there can be restored after being hunted into extinction.Economic Trends: As global economic growth slows sharply, with many major economies gripped with worries of recession, India has been a conspicuous exception as its economy continues to grow.An Electric Vehicle Push: India’s success with two- and three-wheeled electric vehicles that sell for as little as $1,000 could be a template for other developing countries.Keeping the Milk Flowing: Indian scientists are getting creative in an effort to help the country’s dairy producers, and animals, adapt in a hotter world.“Doing this, you’re making our kids feel less than,” he added. “Let’s not move back. We’ve worked really hard to be on the stage.”“DDLJ” was one of the first Indian films to center on a love story between nonresident Indians (known as N.R.I.s), a reflection of the large numbers who were emigrating. It focuses on two young N.R.I.s living in London — the party boy Raj (Khan) is rich, entitled and Western, quite the opposite of the old-fashioned Simran (Kajol) and her hardworking traditional father, who says to Raj in the film: “You call yourself an Indian? You give India a bad name.” But when Simran ‌returns to India for her‌ arranged marriage, Raj and Simran try to persuade her father‌‌ to let their love conquer all. In addition to the central love story, the movie also resonates because of its focus on love of country and family.The film “touched a nerve” with N.R.I.s who were “navigating between two or three cultures,” Rajinder Dudrah, a professor at the Birmingham Institute of Media and English, explained in an interview. Individuals were having to grapple with the tension between Indian tradition and Western ideas just as this movie was highlighting them. “The idea of ‘dil hai Hindustani,’ the heart is Indian,” was also conveyed in the film, Dudrah added, “meaning that no matter where in the world you were, if you were of Indian descent, you had an attachment to India.”Narayan, with ensemble members, in the musical, which has nods to the film and a similar narrative arc.Jim CoxWhile there are nods to the film — pigeons, fields of mustard flowers, a mandolin cameo — and the narrative arc remains, this “DDLJ” is decidedly American. Raj has been transformed into Roger (or Rog), and the leads now live in Massachusetts, meeting as Harvard students in Cambridge. Aditya Chopra, who directed the movie, is also directing the stage show; the book and lyrics are by Nell Benjamin, who wrote screen-to-stage adaptations of “Legally Blonde” and “Mean Girls.”In August, Chopra posted a statement on Instagram explaining his original vision for the film involved a white male lead. (Apparently his first choice was Tom Cruise.)‌ “The most powerful way to depict a country’s culture and values is to see it from the perspective of someone who does not belong to the same culture,” Chopra wrote, explaining his goal is to showcase Indian culture to a global audience. “That is the starting point of ‘Come Fall in Love,’ the story of Indian Simran, her culture and heritage through the eyes of American Roger.”In an interview earlier this month, Benjamin said she was not surprised by the reaction “given the lack of representation” in the theater, but the uproar was still unsettling. “I was distressed that people thought that Adi [Chopra] or me or anyone would want to whitewash this movie,” she explained. “That would suggest that ‘Oh, well, when we do it, she’s going to fall in love with this guy because he’s better than the options.’ That’s not the story. I believe people who come to see the show will get that.”The musical’s writers stressed that the production still showcased a predominantly South Asian cast, including Shoba Narayan, who plays Simran, and a production spokeswoman said that South Asians represented more than 50 percent of cast members.Benjamin said the creators had considered writing the male lead as an Indian American or a half-Indian man but believed it would have been an “easy choice” that wouldn’t have worked as well. “If you don’t excavate it, you don’t add value to it,” she said, adding that Chopra “is perfectly capable of doing the exact movie as a musical, developing it in Mumbai and then renting a theater in New York, but that’s not what we wanted to do together.”Not everyone was critical of the direction the stage musical has taken. The Bollywood screenwriter Shibani Bathija (“My Name Is Khan,” “Fanaa”) saw the advantages in changing the lead’s ethnicity to make the story work for a general audience. “I think having him be South Asian would be more problematic, because where is all this objection coming from,” she said, referring to the family’s disapproval of the central couple’s relationship. The United States focuses less on caste and class differences than India or Britain, she said, so the possible differences between two South Asians would not be as apparent to an American audience. “If you hadn’t watched the film, you wouldn’t get it,” she said. “There would need to be another level of explanation that maybe wouldn’t serve the creative.”The musical’s composers, Vishal Dadlani and Shekhar Ravjiani, known as Vishal & Shekhar, also disagreed with the criticism. Ravjiani said they were proud to represent India through the musical, for which they have created an 18-song score. (The two did not write the film’s original songs, which have become classics, and only a few melodies from the movie are briefly heard in the musical.) Dadlani reiterated that Chopra wanted to tell this specific story and that it was “ridiculous” to say that “just because you’re an Indian filmmaker, you should write the story differently.”“It’s not about color, it’s not about white or brown,” Dadlani added. “It’s about a boy who’s in love with a girl and whose family is different than the girl’s family.”However, Benjamin, interviewed separately, thought of color as a storytelling tool. She explained that in her view, “with the change to Rog, you’re talking about color” and discussed how Roger’s “whiteness” gave him privilege, making things easy for him, until he faced Simran’s father.Despite the criticism of the show, among the three dozen or so audience members interviewed in San Diego, the response was mostly positive — from those familiar with the film and those who weren’t.One of the few dissenting voices was Shebani Patel, who flew in from San Francisco to see the show: “I was not pleased with the casting. I don’t hate the show, but it’s not our show.” More

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    Jimmy Fallon Studies Trump’s Golfless Golf Course Gathering

    “Yeah, Trump was smart. He was like, ‘How about nine of us meet on the green with no clubs, so it doesn’t look suspicious?’” Fallon said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Executive CourseThere’s been speculation about why Donald Trump made an unannounced trip to the Washington area, where he was photographed on a golf course with his son Eric and several other men — none of whom had golf clubs. Jimmy Fallon called it a “very diverse group,” saying “they had polo shirts of every color. ”“Looks like backstage at a fashion show for Marshall’s.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, Trump was smart. He was like, ‘How about nine of us meet on the green with no clubs, so it doesn’t look suspicious?’” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump was like, ‘So, I think I buried the documents somewhere around here. So start — start digging, boys.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Whatever it was, it must not have been too important because Eric was there, riding up front with Daddy like a big boy.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Emmys Edition)“The Emmy Awards ceremony was held last night. Our show was nominated and, honey, clear some space on the mantle, ‘cause they had snow globes at the airport!” — SETH MEYERS“John Oliver beat us for like the 485th time in a row, and congratulations to John. But I’ll tell you something: Even though we didn’t win last night, it was an honor just to get Covid from those who did win last night.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“As they all are nowadays, this was the lowest-rated Emmys show ever. Only 5.92 million people watched the show on NBC. But that’s not really the whole story — it’s not fair. It was also on Peacock, so when you add in the people who streamed it there, it’s still 5.92 million people.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingEthan Hawke answered the “Colbert Questionert” on Tuesday’s “Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe newly minted Emmy winner Quinta Brunson will talk about her big night on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutLee Jung-jae, left, who won the Emmy for best actor in a drama series, and Hwang Dong-hyuk, who was honored for his directing, after an impressive showing for “Squid Game” in Los Angeles on Monday.Aude Guerrucci/ReutersAs “Squid Game” racked up multiple Emmys, it was hailed as the latest example of South Korea’s rise as a cultural powerhouse. More

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    New Musical From ‘Strange Loop’ Writer to Run Off Broadway

    “White Girl in Danger,” a soap opera satire by Michael R. Jackson, will be staged in New York next spring by Second Stage and Vineyard theaters.As a child, Michael R. Jackson would religiously watch soap operas with his great-aunt. “Days of Our Lives.” “Another World.” “Santa Barbara.” “The Young and the Restless.”He kept watching through high school. He interned at “All My Children” in college. And then he moved to New York, hoping to become a soap opera writer.Instead, he became a dramatist, and an acclaimed one at that: His first musical, “A Strange Loop,” a meta take on a Broadway usher writing his own musical, won both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best musical, and it’s now running on Broadway.Next spring, his sophomore musical will arrive Off Broadway. It’s called “White Girl in Danger,” and it’s a race-conscious sendup of the soap opera genre.“White Girl in Danger” imagines a soap opera set in a town called Allwhite, with a group of Black characters, called Blackgrounds, who are featured only in story lines about slavery and policing. One of those characters, Keesha, seeks to break that pattern by seizing a central story line from a trio of white protagonists, Meagan, Maegan and Megan, but in so doing she also risks running afoul of an Allwhite killer.“There’s a lot of genre elements coming from the soap opera, Lifetime movie, melodrama world,” Jackson said. “The idea for the show was going to be a broad satire, but then these conversations around representation, diversity, equity, inclusion started to happen in the theater world, and I started to think about those issues, and suddenly one molecule attached itself to another.”Jackson has been developing the musical since 2017, and last summer the incubator New York Stage and Film presented a two-day, concert-style reading of it in the Hudson Valley.The musical, with a 12-person cast, will be jointly produced by two New York nonprofits, Vineyard Theater and Second Stage Theater, and will be staged next spring at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. The show, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly, is scheduled to start previews on March 15 and open April 10. More

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    Broadway’s ‘Music Man’ Revival Will End Run on Jan. 1

    The show’s producers have decided not to recast after stars Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster finish runs of slightly more than a year in the show.An enormously popular Broadway revival of “The Music Man” will end its run on Jan. 1, reflecting a decision by the producers not to recast after the departure of the show’s stars, Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster.The production began performances Dec. 20, so Jackman and Foster will have been in the show for a little more than a year once it closes. And both of them have been working on the project for several years, because it was, like many other shows, delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.“We managed to get Hugh and Sutton until the first of January, which is a remarkable commitment, and I felt really strongly that they have created such a unique event between them, trying to think of somebody who could follow on that became impossible,” Kate Horton, one of the lead producers, said in an interview. “This was its own particular magic.”At the time of its closing, the revival will have played 358 regular and 46 preview performances, according to the production. Like many other shows, it lost some performances to coronavirus cancellations, including during an ordinarily lucrative stretch over the holidays last December when both Jackman and Foster tested positive for the virus.Horton said that the production has not yet recouped its $24 million capitalization costs, but that it will do so before closing. “The stops and starts were costly in lots of ways, including financially,” she said. When performances had to stop last December, it “was a big body blow to the show, and I had a moment of not knowing if we were going to be able to really keep it going — we were all over the place in terms of what Covid was throwing at us, and it’s probably one of the most challenging moments I’ve had in my career,” she added. “The fact that we continued and are going to recoup might not seem like a miracle, but it feels like it for me.”Horton is co-producing the show with the billionaires Barry Diller and David Geffen. The three took over when the initial lead producer, Scott Rudin, stepped away from his role amid accusations of bullying behavior.Despite tepid reviews from many critics, and despite winning zero Tony Awards, the show has consistently sold out, with a high average ticket price. The revival has been the top-grossing show on Broadway throughout its run; for a long time, it was grossing over $3 million a week, which is huge for Broadway, although recently its grosses have softened slightly to a still enviable level of $2.7 million to $2.9 million a week.As of Sept. 4, the revival had grossed a total of $106 million and had been seen by 400,435 people.“The Music Man,” a classic of golden age musical theater, was written by Meredith Willson and first played on Broadway in 1957; this revival is directed by Jerry Zaks and choreographed by Warren Carlyle. More