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    Jeremy Renner Is in Critical Condition After Snow-Plowing Accident

    The actor, known for his role as Hawkeye in Marvel’s Avengers movies, was stable, his representative said.The actor Jeremy Renner was in critical but stable condition after being hospitalized with serious injuries from an accident while plowing snow in Nevada, his representative said in a statement.“His family is with him, and he is receiving excellent care,” the representative, Samantha Mast, said in a statement on Monday.The sheriff’s office in Washoe County, Nev., said Mr. Renner had suffered a “traumatic injury” in the Reno area on Sunday morning. He was the only person involved in the accident and was flown to a nearby hospital, the sheriff’s office said. Mr. Renner has a house in the Mount Rose-Ski Tahoe area, according to The Reno-Gazette Journal.Mr. Renner, 51, has played Hawkeye, a member of Marvel’s Avengers superheroes team, in several movies and a television series. He has also twice been nominated for an Oscar, for his roles in “The Hurt Locker” (2008) and “The Town” (2010).Mr. Renner has shared several updates on social media this winter as the area received large amounts of snow.“Nearly done With sledding hill For the kids,” said a caption on an Instagram video clip showing a snow plow last week.“Lake Tahoe snowfall is no joke,” he said in a tweet last month that showed a vehicle covered in snow.Mr. Renner stars in “Mayor of Kingstown,” a thriller whose second season is set to be released on the Paramount+ streaming service on Jan. 15. Another show, “Rennervations,” which follows Mr. Renner as he helps communities to reimagine purpose-built vehicles, is scheduled to air on Disney+ early this year.The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning over the weekend for the areas around Reno, in addition to a warning that was in place for the Lake Tahoe Basin. On Saturday and Sunday, the Tahoe Basin at lake level received between 20 and 24 inches of snow, the Weather Service in Reno said.The Weather Service on Sunday advised those with travel plans through the Sierra Nevada to prepare for winter weather driving conditions and warned of icy roads as additional storms arrive. About 22,000 customers in Nevada were without power early Monday after the storm, according to poweroutage.us, which aggregates data from utilities across the country. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Finding Your Roots’ and ‘Mayfair Witches’

    Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s genealogy series returns on PBS. And a TV adaptation of an Anne Rice trilogy debuts on AMC.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, Jan. 2-8. Details and times are subject to change.MondayINDEPENDENT LENS: CHILDREN OF LAS BRISAS (2023) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The aspirations and creativity of young musicians tug against political turbulence and humanitarian crises in “Children of Las Brisas,” a documentary that follows members of a Venezuelan youth orchestra coming of age during that country’s revolution and the fallout of the death of its former president Hugo Chávez. When the film played at the DOC NYC festival in 2022, its director, Marianela Maldonado, described the intent behind it. “It’s about the pain of growing up with dreams of being an artist while living in a dysfunctional society,” she said. “It’s a story of survival and redemption through music.”WHITNEY: CAN I BE ME (2017) 6:15 p.m. on Showtime. There’s a dramatized version of the singer Whitney Houston’s life in theaters right now: the biopic “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” For a nonfictional portrait, consider this feature-length doc, which pairs the voices of some of Houston’s friends, family members and collaborators with tour footage from the late 1990s. The result, Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The New York Times, is “a surprisingly conventional, dutifully respectful behind-the-scenes portrait.”TuesdayFINDING YOUR ROOTS 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In the first episode of the new season of his genealogy show, the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents the actress Julia Roberts with a book filled with research about Roberts’s family history. Roberts, lifting the tome, looks at Gates with a smile. “This has got some heft to it,” she says. That’s often true — in more ways than one — of the research that anchors the series, which uses D.N.A. analysis and historical sleuthing to uncover the often-complicated backgrounds of its celebrity guests. Tuesday’s episode, which kicks off the show’s ninth season, features Roberts and Edward Norton. Other guests this season include the movie stars Claire Danes, Viola Davis and Danny Trejo; the pop star Cyndi Lauper; and the activist and scholar Angela Davis.WednesdayBULLITT (1968) 8 p.m. on TCM. When this now-classic neo-noir opened at Radio City Music Hall in the fall of 1968, the critic Renata Adler wrote in her review for The Times that it was “a terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen — fast, well acted, written the way people talk.” But McQueen, the human celebrity, had to share the spotlight with a material co-star: a 1968 Ford Mustang, which has become as much a symbol of the movie as McQueen. Watch man and machine undulate and snap over San Francisco streets as McQueen’s Lt. Frank Bullitt chases mafiosos.ThursdayWes Studi, left, and Dale Dickey in “A Love Song.”Sundance InstituteA LOVE SONG (2022) 8 p.m. on Showtime. With a grand landscape and a modest story, this debut feature from the filmmaker Max Walker-Silverman centers on a widow, Faye (Dale Dickey), at a lakeside campsite in Colorado. She’s waiting on the arrival of her childhood friend Lito (Wes Studi), whom she hasn’t seen in years. Faye is isolated before Lito arrives, but things remain quiet even after he shows up; the chemistry between the two is expressed as much in silences and facial expressions as in words. It’s a “tender, laconic” movie, Jeannette Catsoulis said in her review for The Times. “More than one kind of love is being celebrated in that title, including the director’s affection for his home state, its wide-open spaces and wandering souls.”FridayRUPAUL’S DRAG RACE 8 p.m. on MTV. RuPaul’s mighty drag competition show moves to MTV from its old home, VH1, for its new, 15th season, which kicks off on Friday night with a two-hour special. The new season gathers 16 drag queens from around the country — the show’s largest cast ever — and is set to include guest appearances from Ariana Grande, Janelle Monáe and other celebrities.BOYS IN BLUE 8 p.m. on Showtime. In this four-part documentary series, the filmmaker Peter Berg (who brought “Friday Night Lights” to television) follows a high school football team in Minneapolis after the 2020 killing of George Floyd. The students had a unique and potent experience of that moment: Their team is mentored by Minneapolis police officers. Berg focuses on the tensions and conversations between players and officers.SaturdayPedro Pascal, left, and Nicolas Cage in “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.”Katalin Vermes/LionsgateTHE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT (2022) 9 p.m. on Starz. Nicolas Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself in this action comedy, which has its tongue stuck so solidly in its cheek that it would be hard to say “I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence.” The plot, such as it is, involves Cage attending the birthday party of a mega-rich fan (Pedro Pascal). “It’s another Nicolas Cage joint, a romp, a showcase, an eager-to-please ode to him in all his sui generis Caginess,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. “That’s the idea, at any rate. Mostly, though, it is a single joke sustained for 106 minutes, amid many rapid tone shifts, mood swings and set changes.”SundayAlexandra Daddario in “Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches.”AMCANNE RICE’S MAYFAIR WITCHES 9 p.m. on AMC. The novelist Anne Rice’s “Lives of the Mayfair Witches” book trilogy — “The Witching Hour” (1990), “Lasher” (1993) and “Taltos” (1994) — gets a TV adaptation with this new show, which casts Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding, a neurosurgeon who learns that she is a descendant of a family of witches haunted by a menacing force. If “neurosurgeon” sounds like surprisingly scientific territory for a novelist whose primary interest lies in the supernatural, consider this point that Rice made in an interview with The Times in 2021, shortly before her death. “I think some might be surprised by the sheer volume of science writing I own,” Rice said. “When you invent alternate worlds and supernatural cosmologies, it can be incredibly inspiring to read about how little we still know about the underlying fabric of the universe.” More

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    10 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2023

    “Succession” returns, the Spider-Verse spawns a sequel, Kelela hits the road and Michael B. Jordan makes his directing debut with “Creed III.”Miguel and Carlos CevallosMargaret LyonsThe Scheming Roys of “Succession” ReturnBrian Cox as Logan Roy in Season 4 of “Succession,” which returns to HBO in the spring.Macall Polay/HBOWhile there are no sure bets in television, and plenty of once-great shows have fallen into bland disarray, I am counting the days until “Succession” comes back for its fourth season. (HBO says it will air in the spring.) Oh, I can hear the jangly piano theme now, and just knowing that the bereft and broken Roys, their gorgeously cruel dialogue and endless, joyless quests for power will soon be back on my screen fills me with elation. God, I hope Kendall sings in front of an audience again, and Greg stammers his way into failing up somehow, and Gerri and Roman’s erotic entanglement deepens and Shiv continues her reign of ecru terror. Logan will be grumbly! Connor will be a dingus! Tom will be in hapless agony! And I will be so, so happy, reveling in the show’s mastery of tension, its push-pull of crumbling and coalescing.Maya PhillipsThe Spider-Verse Slings Into a SequelBefore Michelle Yeoh faced off against Jobu Tupaki and her everything bagel of oblivion in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and before Doctor Strange fought bizarro Strange with weaponized music notation in “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” in 2018 “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” provided a much-needed shock to the multiverse concept in film. Though it introduced a whole gang of Spider-people, each with his or her own unique back story, universe and aesthetic, “Spider-Verse” made plenty of space for its protagonist, Miles Morales, a young Afro-Latino Spider-Man whose heartfelt, humorous character arc, along with the film’s stunning animation and killer soundtrack, wasn’t lost even amid the infinite vastness of the multiverse. In June the sequel, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” will offer a more mature Miles and a new cast of Spider-variants voiced by a stellar cast, including Issa Rae as an Afro-wearing Spider-Woman, Daniel Kaluuya as Spider-Punk and Oscar Isaac as Spider-Man 2099.Jon ParelesKelela Hits the Road With Her Avant-Garde R&BThe singer and songwriter Kelela has floated on the avant-garde fringe of R&B since she released her first mixtape, “Cut 4 Me,” in 2013. Working with some of the most innovative producers around, Kelela often places her voice within eerie electronic backdrops, creating unexpected intimacy in virtual realms. But she has been elusive. She released her only full-length album, “Take Me Apart,” in 2017, and re-emerged with a few singles in 2022, starting with the enigmatic “Washed Away” and moving toward dance music and pop with “Happy Ending” and “On the Run.” Those songs are previews of her second full-length album, “Raven,” which is due in February, followed by a club tour — titled “Rave:N”—- that brings her to Webster Hall in New York on March 17. Both should reveal her latest convolutions and innovations.Mike HaleTwo Spins on the Mystery of the WeekNatasha Lyonne plays the crime-solving heroine of Peacock’s “Poker Face,” created by Rian Johnson.Phillip Caruso/PeacockTwo new crime dramas are taking different approaches to a venerable format, the mystery of the week. Fox’s “Accused” (Jan. 22) is a pure anthology, with 15 self-contained episodes set in different locales and featuring different casts. This presumably expensive venture — a lot of actors, including Wendell Pierce, Margo Martindale, Michael Chiklis, Rhea Perlman and Malcolm-Jamal Warner, need to be paid — is a joint venture of Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa (“Homeland”) and David Shore (“House”). Peacock’s “Poker Face” (Jan. 26), on the other hand, achieves its episodic structure by putting its crime-solving heroine on the road, where she finds new mysteries to tackle each week. Created by Rian Johnson (“Knives Out”) and starring Natasha Lyonne, it also requires an extensive cast, which includes Adrien Brody, Cherry Jones, Chloë Sevigny, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nick Nolte and the busy Rhea Perlman.Jesse GreenA Rare Revival of a Hansberry DramaLorraine Hansberry, photographed in her apartment in 1959; her play “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” will be presented at BAM beginning in February.David Attie/Getty ImagesOnly two plays by Lorraine Hansberry were produced during her short lifetime. “A Raisin in the Sun,” in 1959, was the big deal: an instant classic, forever revivable. But “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” which opened on Broadway in 1964 and closed days before she died in 1965, has barely been seen again. Now it will be, in a starry production (Feb. 4 through March 19) directed by Anne Kauffman for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan play a bohemian Village couple — much like Hansberry and her husband, Robert Nemiroff — struggling to align their racial, sexual and cultural positions within the treacherous crosscurrents of contemporary politics. In some ways a Black critique of white liberalism, it leaves no group unscathed in its portrait of do-gooders doing what, for Hansberry, they do best: making a mess with the best of intentions.Salamishah TilletMichael B. Jordan Gets Back in the RingShot on IMAX cameras, “Creed III” promises to get extremely close to the frenzied action of a boxing match. Michael B. Jordan, making his directorial debut, is back as the light heavyweight champion Adonis “Donnie” Creed, now a thriving family man with Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and their daughter (Mila Davis-Kent). While Sylvester Stallone doesn’t star in this installment of the franchise, Jonathan Majors plays Donnie’s childhood friend Damian, who leaves prison after nearly two decades and turns into his fiercest competitor. Both men are among the most charismatic, talented and nuanced actors of their generation and I expect they’ll deliver some powerful performances inside and outside the ring. Look for the movie on March 3.Zachary WoolfeA New Staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the MetA design sketch for a new staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Metropolitan Opera, with Piotr Beczala in the title role.via Metropolitan OperaOf the core repertory, the 25 or 30 titles at the center of the Metropolitan Opera’s history, none has been absent from its stage longer than Wagner’s “Lohengrin.” This is strange, since “Lohengrin” is probably the most performed Wagner work worldwide; it’s done all the time. But the Met’s radically minimal, painstakingly still Robert Wilson production posed extreme demands on singers and technicians alike, and was last seen in 2006. So it’ll be a major event when, on Feb. 26, the opera finally returns to New York in a new staging, directed by François Girard, whose thoughtful “Parsifal,” set in a stylized present day, was a success. (His muddled “Der Fliegende Holländer” early in 2020, less so.) Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, conducts a cast that includes the plangent tenor Piotr Beczala in the title role, the budding Wagnerian Tamara Wilson as Elsa, Christine Goerke as the aggrieved Ortrud, Evgeny Nikitin and Günther Groissböck.Gia KourlasPina Bausch Takes a Trip to BrazilIn “Água” by the choreographer Pina Bausch, Tsai-Chin Yu, foreground, spins with Nicholas Losada behind her.Ursula KaufmannThe choreographer Pina Bausch found inspiration in places and in cultures in the latter part of her career, transforming those experiences into shimmering, visceral dances. While they don’t have the darkness and bite of her earlier works, they do have the potential to wash over you like a vacation — albeit one in the theater. This spring, from March 3 to 19, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will host one such trip to Brazil. In “Água,” created by Bausch during a 2001 residency, the radiance of the landscape is celebrated with voluptuous, exuberant dancing and sumptuous color. It’s been six years since Tanztheater Wuppertal, now under the artistic direction of Boris Charmatz, a French experimentalist, performed at the Academy. As usual with a Bausch work, the hair will flow, the dresses will shimmer and the soundtrack will be eclectic. This one includes music by PJ Harvey, St Germain and Tom Waits. Strap yourself in.Jason FaragoTangled Webs of Modern Invention at the GuggenheimGego installing “Reticulárea” at Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas in 1969.Fundación Gego; Juan SantanaHer birth certificate read Gertrud Goldschmidt — but the German-born Venezuelan artist always preferred Gego, a shrinking of her first and last names that reverberated with an art of slender brilliance. Born to a Jewish family in Hamburg in 1912, she studied architecture before fleeing to Caracas in 1939, and only in her 40s did she begin gathering copper wires, aluminum rods and plastic dowels into striking yet splintery abstract clusters. Beguiling and forbidding by turns, her works could be suspended like a mobile, or stream from the ceiling, or else could propagate across a room like a massive spider’s web. On one point Gego was uncompromising: These metal assemblages were not sculptures, she insisted, but “drawings without paper” that took a very different route to abstraction than the clean geometries many other Latin American artists favored. (They’re also delightfully resistant to social media transmission, their finely interlaced wires beyond the ken of even the highest-resolution cameraphone.) “Gego: Measuring Infinity,” opening March 31 at the Guggenheim, will fill the museum’s white spiral with her spindly aggregations — and, amid extreme refugee crises in both Europe and Venezuela, her themes of fragility and enmeshment have lost none of their force.Jason ZinomanSara Schaefer Spoofs the Comedy WorldSpoofing the cult of comedy in the language of Scientology, the wry, incisive stand-up Sara Schaefer adopts the pose, jargon and microphone of a guru in her new solo show about how to make it in the stand-up business. “Going Up” (a riff on the Scientology term “Going Clear”), which has been performed a few times but will get a wider hearing in 2023, is ambitious and nimble, sneakily personal with enough inside-baseball jokes to make it a must-see for comedy nerds. The most impressive example of this, and the bit I am most looking forward to revisiting, is when Schaefer illustrates every kind of modern stand-up by doing the same genre of joke, over and over again, in a multitude of styles. It’s a feat of comedy as well as criticism that captures an entire scene in just a few minutes. Her show should be a staple of festivals, but early in the year, it will stop in, among other places, San Francisco, Austin and New York when she performs at Caveat on April 6. More

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    Dave Attell Bids a Heartfelt (and Hilarious) Farewell to Carolines

    Each year, the comic headlined the club during the holidays. With the space closing, his final show there was a mix of deadpan and melancholy notes.How do you honor the death of a comedy club? First, you kill.Walking onstage late Friday night at the final headlining show at Carolines on Broadway, which after three decades is closing its doors, Dave Attell handled that job quickly, spraying punch lines, roasting the front row and making sure the raucous audience knew it was part of history. In one galloping tangent, Attell urged anyone not laughing to leave. “Take a table and chair with you, because we have to clear this place out,” he said.Attell has performed at Carolines between Christmas and New Year’s for 13 years, a holiday tradition for audiences who wanted something significantly dirtier than the Rockettes. This time, he mixed in a few heartfelt, even melancholy notes into his virtuosic deadpan rhythms to eulogize the passing of a legendary comedy room. But comedians mourn differently. When a waiter walked past the stage toward the door, Attell, dressed in a characteristic black jacket and baseball cap, asked him where he was going, pausing before the joke: “Unemployment.”Like a drama queen writing her will, New York is perpetually and loudly dying. Hardly a day goes by without teeth gnashing over a beloved part of this city calling it quits. Every closed diner is the end of an epoch. The most mundane and predictable demise, the end of a Broadway run, receives extended soul-searching and public autopsy. To me, this seems (mostly) sensible. It’s healthy to mark the end of things, and what is better than a great finale? But I’ve been covering show business in this dynamic city too long to get too sentimental. We shouldn’t overly fetishize institutions. One of the legacies of “Stomp,” which closes next month after a 29-year run, is all the shows that did not get produced in its theater. Change is good.Dave Attell performing at Carolines on Friday. For 13 years, he played the club over the holidays.And yet, I couldn’t help but feel a little melancholy walking down the steps into Caroline’s for the last time, a steep descent that gave you a chance to adjust from the gaudy lights of Times Square. Caroline’s isn’t technically gone; after a final show on New Year’s Eve, it is producing the New York Comedy Festival and other unnamed projects. Still, with the stage backdrop, stools and other parts of the club soon to be shipped to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, N.Y., the loss of this room is significant.When Caroline’s opened in Chelsea in 1981 (it had two homes before moving to the theater district in the next decade), New York comedy clubs were essentially dive bars with stages, featuring packed bills of short sets by lowly paid or unpaid comics desperate for performing time to work out jokes. Caroline’s introduced a new model: hour sets by more established talent, bigger pay days and a more upscale atmosphere. There was plush carpeting and a dressing room. Instead of a brick wall, the comics stood in front of a checkerboard pattern artfully missing a few pieces. In a 1985 story in The Times, Robert Morton, a producer on “Late Night With David Letterman,” described Caroline’s as “the first yuppie comedy club,” becoming maybe the last person to use that word as a compliment.Memorable performers at the club have included, from left, John Mulaney, Tracy Morgan and Leslie Jones.The stairs down into Carolines allowed patrons a chance to adjust after the gaudy lights of Times Square.Many were exposed to the club via the television show “Caroline’s Comedy Hour,” which ended in the mid-’90s. Its impressive lineups offer a history of modern stand-up. On one 1992 episode, Attell performed with Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Jon Stewart, Susie Essman and Colin Quinn.That Caroline’s was located in the heart of Broadway mattered, adding a touch of class to stand-up, an art form rooted in vaudeville and minstrel shows that was then rarely afforded the critical respect of theater and film. Caroline Hirsch, the founder of the club, played a key role in raising the stature of stand-up. You can even make the case that she helped set the stage for the transformation of Times Square, opening just a few years before Disney arrived in the neighborhood.On Friday before the show, when I asked about her most memorable nights at the club, Hirsch recalled the time Robin Williams took over a Jeff Garlin set with some inspired heckling and a string of performances by Kevin Hart. She also told a story about how Don King walked into the club when John Witherspoon was telling a joke about him. Her recollections underlined the real importance of Caroline’s: the staggering number of memorable experiences had there. I had more than my share.Caroline Hirsch opened the club in 1981; it moved a few times before settling into the Theater District. Caroline’s was the only place where I saw veteran stars like Dick Gregory, Richard Lewis and Damon Wayans. Before he was on “Saturday Night Live,” I caught Michael Che there. And years before he had a special, I knew that Ricky Velez would get one after watching him do an electric opening set. The most memorable part of a Tiffany Haddish show was when she spotted Whoopi Goldberg in the audience and tearfully described how important it was as a child to see the veteran star on television.Caroline’s was not dogmatic about the kinds of comics it booked. It didn’t have a house style, which might have hurt its brand but made it unpredictable, featuring talent from an array of ages, backgrounds and styles. Bo Burnham cut an album there early in his career, and Phoebe Robinson got her start by taking a comedy class at Caroline’s.One of the all-time funniest shows I ever saw was Rory Scovel doing an hour at Caroline’s. A decade before John Mulaney toured arenas with bits about fame and addiction, he performed a hilarious hour at Caroline’s in which he told jokes about his marriage and his alcoholism.Caroline’s was also not above oddball bookings (Larry “Bud” Melman performed there). I once saw a 13-year old do a standup act and also made the error of taking my 7-year-old daughter to a Ron Funches show, only to rush out when the jokes became too dirty.The audience at Attell’s final show at Carolines. The club didn’t have a house style and the bookings were eclectic.Toward the end of the night, Attell asked his opening acts, Ian Fidance, Jordan Jensen and Wil Sylvince to join him onstage. They riffed with one another, before Attell turned to the crowd and asked with an odd formality: “May I?” Then he took out a blue recorder, which he described as “somewhere between a flute and a bong.”In between raunchy jokes, he played simple, wistful songs. He remarked on the sadness of the instrument’s sound. Then he opened his jacket and brought out a second recorder, a yellow one. Seeing this gruff, grizzled legend wield two colorful pipes was its own sight gag. It was also a reminder that while Attell’s much imitated delivery has its own musicality, when it comes to expressing certain kinds of emotion, no joke can really match a few notes played with conviction.Then he beckoned Caroline Hirsch to the stage, called her “a force” and thanked her for “making us all better.” Describing the moment as “bittersweet,” she said she would be producing more shows in the future. Then everyone took selfies onstage to commemorate the moment and awkwardly shuffled off the stage. More

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    How a Broadway Stage Manager Spends Her Sundays

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

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    Bridgette Wimberly, Playwright and Librettist, Dies at 68

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

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

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

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    Machine Dazzle: How Many Ways Can You Say Fabulous?

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