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    Review: Retracing the Path From Middle School Nerd to Rock Goddess

    Best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” the enchanting singer-songwriter Jill Sobule is the star of a winsome and defiant autobiographical musical.It is an established fact of human development that most of the people who grew up to be cool and original were nerds for a while, way back when.Case in point: the enchanting Jill Sobule, best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” and currently starring in the winsome and defiant autobiographical musical “F*ck7thGrade.” Seventh grade being, as she tells it, the year when it all fell apart — when she no longer fit in with the other girls at her school in Colorado, and they weren’t shy about telling her so.“They thought I was weird because I had a Batman utility belt and a camera that turned into a 007 gun,” she says, and your heart kind of breaks even as you smile, because she must have been darling, right? Then, with an air of baffled wonder: “I was the only one who wanted to be a spy.”She also dreamed of being a rock star, and longed for the girl she had a secret crush on to reciprocate. But it was the early 1970s, and Sobule didn’t fit the template of sugar and spice and everything nice. The girls who had been her friends rejected her. One of them lobbed a homophobic slur her way.“She didn’t even know what that meant,” says Sobule, who is now 61. “But I did.”Directed by Lisa Peterson, the show — at the Wild Project in the East Village — is described in promotional materials as a “rock concert musical,” a slightly awkward term that is nonetheless exactly right. With a book by Liza Birkenmeier, it truly is a musical, backing Sobule with a three-piece band whose musicians — Nini Camps, Kristen Ellis-Henderson and Julie Wolf (also the music director) — play assorted characters throughout the 90-minute show.Still, the performance on this small stage does feel like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley. The name of Sobule’s three-piece band is Secrets of the Vatican — made up of all girls when it existed only in her childhood imagination, and of all women now, which even in 2022 is rare enough to make a statement.On a set by Rachel Hauck whose principal feature is a wall of lockers, Sobule speaks and sings a slender story of her life, starting with the exultant freedom of pre-adolescence and her rocking ode to the bike she cherished then, “Raleigh Blue Chopper.”“When I was 12, I was a fierce little rocker who wanted to be Jimi Hendrix,” she says with the same sly, sunny, quietly confiding air that the video for “I Kissed a Girl” captured 27 years ago. “I didn’t have to tell anyone what I was,” she adds. “I just was.”The performance on this small East Village stage feels like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley.Eric McNattBut the wider world of the late 20th century was not much more hospitable to ambitious female musicians — let alone lesbians — than seventh grade had been. Sobule remembers a conversation she overheard at her record label in the ’90s, about Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge and how glad the label was that Sobule was straight. Which she wasn’t, as they might have guessed from “I Kissed a Girl,” but she also wasn’t about to clue them in.“I wish I would have said to all of them: it’s a big ol’ gay gay song,” she says. “But I didn’t. I was too scared. I wanted to do the smart thing. I wanted to be arty and transgressive, but I wanted to sell records. The compromising got me nowhere. And then I couldn’t stand my own song.”Shorter, sharper and more theatrical than Etheridge’s current Off Broadway show, “My Window,” Sobule’s is much more intimate in scale — although each pays brief tribute to “Day by Day,” from “Godspell,” with which both musicians’ teen years coincided.“Strawberry Gloss,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Sold My Soul” and “Underdog Victorious” are among the songs Sobule sings from her own catalog. Eventually, so is “I Kissed a Girl.”This is a show for Sobule fans, and for a queer audience, but it’s also for the many nerds who grew up to be the cool people. It will give you flashbacks to middle school, no matter how popular you were; that’s pretty much guaranteed. But it will also give you the cheering company of Sobule and her extremely non-imaginary, rocking-out band.F*ck7thGradeThrough Nov. 8 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    The One Where Matthew Perry Writes an Addiction Memoir

    BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When I pictured Matthew Perry, the actor frequently known as Chandler Bing, I saw him on the tangerine couch at Central Perk or seated on one of the twin recliners in the apartment he shared with Joey Tribbiani.In September, after arriving at his 6,300-square-foot rental house and being ushered through a driveway gate by his sober companion, I sat across from Perry, who perched on a white couch in a white living room, a world away from “Friends,” the NBC sitcom that aired for 10 seasons and catapulted all six of its stars into fame, fortune and infinite memes. Instead of the foosball table where Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross gathered, nudging each other through the first chapters of adulthood, Perry, 53, had a red felt pool table that looked untouched. There was plenty of light in the house, but not a lot of warmth.I have watched every episode of “Friends” three times — in prime time, on VHS and on Netflix — but I’m not sure I would have recognized Perry if I’d seen him on the street. If he was an ebullient terrier in those 1990s-era Must See TV days — as memorable for his full-body comedy as he was for the inflection that made “Can you BE any more [insert adjective]” the new “Gag me with a spoon” — he now seemed more like an apprehensive bulldog, with the forehead furrows to match.As his former co-star Lisa Kudrow confesses in the foreword to his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” the first question people ask about “Friends” is often “How’s Matthew Perry doing?”Perry answers that question in the book, which Flatiron will publish on Nov. 1, by starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018 that included pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen stomach surgeries, and the realization that, by the time he was 49, he had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities.Most of this is covered in the prologue. At one point, he writes in a parenthetical, “Please note: for the next few paragraphs, this book will be a biography rather than a memoir because I was no longer there.”The book is full of painful revelations, including one about short-lived, alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction, and another in which Perry describes carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his jeans pocket. (He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell out, he writes: “Yes, all of them.”)Perry said he had a moment after he recorded his audiobook when he thought, “Oh my God, what a terrible life this person has had!” Then he realized, “Wait a minute, it’s me! I’m talking about me.”Quietly and then, as he relaxed, at a volume that allowed me to stop worrying about my recording device, Perry settled into the conversation about his substance abuse. It started with Budweiser and Andrès Baby Duck wine when he was 14, then ballooned to include vodka by the quart, Vicodin, Xanax and OxyContin. He drew the line at heroin, a choice he credits with saving his life.“I would fake back injuries. I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same time,” Perry said. “I would wake up and have to get 55 Vicodin that day, and figure out how to do it. When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I go to this place, and I need to take three. And then I go to this place, and I’m going to take five because I’m going to be there longer. It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very, very sick. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.”Perry said he had been clean for 18 months, which means that he was newly drug- and alcohol-free when the “Friends” reunion aired in May 2021.“I’ve probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober,” he estimated.Most addicts don’t have Perry’s resources. But they have what he called “the gift of anonymity,” while his bleakest moments have been photographed, chronicled and occasionally mocked. For the record, Perry isn’t a huge fan of secrecy as it pertains to Alcoholics Anonymous, where he sponsors three members. He explained: “It suggests that there’s a stigma and that we have to hide. This is not a popular opinion, by the way.”Perry’s demeanor brightened when we talked about pickleball, his latest obsession. He built a court at the house he’s moving into in the Palisades. He plays with friends and hired pros. He said, “I thought it would be a good idea, to pump myself up, to play pickleball before this interview, but basically I’m about to fall asleep in your lap.”So what inspired him to write a book?After his extended stay in a Los Angeles hospital, Perry started tapping out his life story on the Notes app on his phone. When he hit 110 pages, he showed them to his manager, who told him to keep going. He worked at his dining room table for about two hours a day, no more: “It was hard to face all this stuff.”Perry has written for television (“The Odd Couple,” “Mr. Sunshine”) before but, “writing a book I had not really thought of before,” he said. “Whenever I bumped into something that I didn’t really want to share, I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going.”Over the course of the next hour, Perry returned to the idea of helping fellow addicts 15 times. The dedication at the front of the book reads: “For all of the sufferers out there. You know who you are.”He said: “It’s still a day-to-day process of getting better. Every day. It doesn’t end because I did this.”“I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center,” Perry writes.Danny Feld/Warner Bros.The memoir came together without a ghostwriter, which is rare for household-name authors. Megan Lynch, the senior vice president and publisher at Flatiron, said of the proposal she read last year: “There was a real voice to it. It was clear that he was going to share intimate details not just about his time on the show but about his entire life, and that felt revelatory. I’m not working on an assembly line of books by celebrities and it’s something as an editor I want to be very choosy about. For me, this really rose to a level that I do not ordinarily see.”Lynch, who watched “Friends” when she was 14 and credits it with providing a vision for a future life in New York City, added, “Unlike any celebrity that I think anyone has ever worked with, Matthew turned in his manuscript ahead of the deadline.”Although Perry hopes that “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” will eventually be shelved in the self-help section of bookstores, “Friends” fans will find poignant nuggets in its pages. Perry writes gratefully and glowingly of the 10 seasons he and his co-stars worked together, earning $1 million per episode at their peak.He recalls the time Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and said, “in a kind of weird but loving way,” that the group knew he was drinking again. “‘We can smell it,’” she said — and, he writes, “the plural ‘we’ hits me like a sledgehammer.” Another time, the cast confronted him in his dressing room.Perry also drops a sad bombshell about his onscreen wedding: “I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center — at the height of my highest point in ‘Friends,’ the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician.”In a phone interview, Kudrow said: “It’s a hideous disease, and he has a tough version of it. What’s not changing is his will to keep going, keep fighting and keep living.”She added: “I love Matthew a lot. We’re part of a family. I’m basically ending this with ‘I’ll be there for you’ [the ‘Friends’ theme song], but it’s true. I’ll always be there for him.”Perry’s childhood friends Christopher and Brian Murray echoed this sentiment. “He’s gone through more than any human being I know and he’s come out on the good side of it,” said Brian, the older of the two brothers who have known Perry since first grade. Riding bikes around their rural corner of Ottawa, the trio would belt out the theme song from “The Rockford Files” and rib one another in the cadence that Perry later immortalized on “Friends.”“A lot of it was tough to understand,” Christopher said. “You wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Fundamentally, his personality and his heart are absolutely in the same place they were when he was a kid.”“Alcohol really did save me for a while,” Perry said. “Then it didn’t. It’s like your best friend turns to you and goes, Now I’m going to kill you. And then you raise your hand and say, I need help here.”Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesFailed relationships were among the hardest things to write about, Perry said (“I’m lonely, but there’s a couple of people on the payroll to keep me safe”), though he hopes to marry and have children in the future. “I think I’d be a great father,” he said.Eighteen years after “Friends” aired its last episode, Perry is tickled by its staying power, and its popularity among the children of its original viewers. “There are 15-year-old people wandering around, seeing me and wondering why I look so old,” he said.When I mentioned I’d seen a young woman in my hotel gym wearing a “Friends” sweatshirt — you rarely see merch from, say, “E.R.,” which capped off NBC’s Thursday night lineup in the ’90s — he laughed. “You should set me up with that girl,” he said. “Just say, I know this guy, he’s as single as they come.”Perry’s candid, darkly funny book now earns him an honorary folding chair — and shelf space — beside David Carr, Caroline Knapp, Leslie Jamison, Nic Sheff, Sarah Hepola and other authors who have explored the minute-to-minute, tooth-and-nail skirmish of recovery.“There is a hell,” Perry writes. “Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’ve been there; it exists; end of discussion.”He said, “Now I feel better because it’s out. It’s out on a piece of paper. The ‘why’ I’m still alive is definitely in the area of helping people.” More

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    ‘Back to the Future’ Musical to Open on Broadway Next Summer

    The show, now in London, has a creative team that combines veterans of the film with some Broadway stalwarts. Performances will begin on June 30.Filmdom’s most famous DeLorean is getting ready to park itself on Broadway.A musical adaptation of the hit 1985 film “Back to the Future” is planning to open on Broadway next summer, its producers announced Friday. (Look at your calendar: Friday is Oct. 21, which is when devoted fans celebrate “Back to the Future Day.”)The musical, with a creative team that combines veterans of the film with some Broadway stalwarts, has already had a life in Britain.It had an ill-timed opening at the Manchester Opera House on March 11, 2020; that production closed a few days later because of the coronavirus pandemic. The show then transferred to London last fall, where it has had much better luck: It won this year’s Olivier Award for best new musical, and it is still running at the Adelphi Theater.The beloved science-fiction film, about a teenager who travels back in time in a DeLorean and disrupts the lives of his future parents, spawned sequels and a variety of spinoff ventures, and also contributed to the fame of its star, Michael J. Fox.“Back to the Future: The Musical” features a book by Bob Gale, the screenwriter who co-wrote and co-produced all three films, and songs by Alan Silvestri, who composed the film’s score, as well as Glen Ballard, a record producer and songwriter. The musical also includes pop songs featured in the film, including “The Power of Love.”The director is John Rando, who in 2002 won a Tony Award for “Urinetown.”Two members of the London cast have signed on to reprise their roles on Broadway: Roger Bart as the inventor Doc Brown, and Hugh Coles as George McFly, the protagonist’s father. Casting for the main role, of the teenager Marty McFly, has not yet been announced.The musical is scheduled to begin performances June 30 and to open Aug. 3 at the Winter Garden Theater, which is now home to a starry revival of “The Music Man” that is planning to close Jan. 1.The musical, with Colin Ingram as its lead producer, is being capitalized for $23.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Gale, who has been working on projects related to “Back to the Future” for more than four decades and is the de facto guardian of the franchise, said he is delighted to finally be working on Broadway, more than 15 years after Leslie Zemeckis, the wife of the film’s director Robert Zemeckis, saw “The Producers” and suggested “Back to the Future” could also be musicalized. “Broadway is the gold standard — musical theater was really invented there — and I’m delighted that we are finally going to get our shot on the Great White Way,” Gale said.Gale said the creative team has been making tweaks to the script and the set as it prepares for a Broadway run, incorporating lessons from the productions in England. They are small changes, he said, “but little things add up.”“One thing people appreciate about the movie: the more they watch, the more details they see,” he said. More

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    ‘The Gold Room’ Review: Gay Sexuality on Shuffle Mode

    Two men circling each other for a hookup talk through fantasies and everyday doubts in this play by Jacob Perkins.Showing up to a stranger’s house for sex may seem provocative to some, but it’s become a mundane interaction among gay men who use apps like Grindr. Still, such encounters are loaded with profound questions that are often dispensed with in a blink. What does it mean to separate sex from intimacy? How does shame interfere with vulnerability?The two men circling each other in “The Gold Room,” now playing at Here, perform an abstract excavation of gay sexuality, its present-day mores and psychological undercurrents (spoiler alert, daddy issues ahead). But the playwright Jacob Perkins does not throw stones (the set by Emona Stoykova is appropriately glass-walled), indicting the broader cultural forces that influence and constrict gay men, a familiar mode for artists who’ve traversed similar territory. “The Gold Room” rather turns inward, to fantasies and everyday doubts that many who share the playwright’s experience will recognize.A chlamydia scare is not the icebreaker one would think to use with a hookup, but Robert Stanton’s character, an unnamed early career playwright, is recalling how it hurt to pee while his prospect, played by Scott Parkinson, grabs beers in the next room. Did he forget to mention that it was only a dream? The next moment, they’re engaging in aggressive verbal role play, then agreeing to another round. Stanton continues to probe his character’s psyche (he recounts a second elaborate dream, about his father cross-dressing) as Parkinson takes on a series of shifting roles — a reluctant producer encouraging the writer to tone down the eroticism of his work, a proctologist assuring him he did nothing to deserve hemorrhoids, an experienced lover instructing him to use “an ocean’s worth” of lube.One scene moves into the next with the ease and illogic of a subconscious on shuffle mode, with lighting by greer x, and occasional gusts of haze, marking the subtle shifts. Presented by i am a slow tide, and directed by the artistic director Gus Heagerty, the production has an elegant polish that suggests a more assured purpose than “The Gold Room” conveys over its hourlong running time. “I don’t know if it’s a work,” Stanton’s writer admits of the record he’s been keeping of his dreams, adding that they might not mean anything. The expression of insecurity seems to belong as much to Perkins as to his onstage surrogate.There is a therapy-couch feel to the play’s unprocessed reflections, and a lack of perspective that results from such sustained navel gazing. Perkins writes in the script that the two men may be cast with actors of any race, so long as they are both the same, suggesting a kind of mirroring. That note seems blind to the context of privilege, though, at a time when its acknowledgment has become essential to many conversations about difference. When talk turns to feeling unsafe, and to the monsters that always seem to be lying in wait outside the door, it’s tough not to consider that other facets of identity tend to offer some protection.The Gold RoomThrough Nov. 5 at Here, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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    ‘He Must Have Superpowers’: Asi Wind and His Sublime Card Tricks

    With a new one-man show, deploying a single deck of cards, the performer’s 20-year run as magic’s best-kept secret may be nearing its end.“Every now and then, this fails,” said Asi Wind, pausing for a suspense-maximizing moment during his new one-man magic show, “Asi Wind’s Inner Circle.” “This could fail. If it does, remember all the fun we had before.”There is little chance anyone took this whimsical disclaimer seriously. By the time it was offered, Wind, a 43-year-old Israeli-born New Yorker with the effervescent wit of a good dinner party host and the cunning of a master jewel thief, had already pulled off so many seemingly impossible feats that only a sucker would have bet against him. If he’d told us that we were all about to start floating around the room, half of the audience would have reached for a Dramamine and braced for lift off.Detailing what happens during this giddily mystifying 70-minute production — which opened last month and runs at the Gym at Judson, next to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, until Jan. 1 — would spoil more than a few surprises and much of the fun. Suffice to say, the entire show revolves around a single deck of playing cards, and the cards behave in ways that defy reason and, occasionally, the laws of physics.But Wind’s niftiest trick, honed over more than 20 years and thousands of private events, is his ability to eliminate any sense that he and his audience are locked in a contest. He does it with a combination of charm and humility that peers say is just one reason he ranks among the great magicians of our time.“When he was in his late 20s, I was describing him as one of the finest close-up performers in the country, and I think he’s been at the top of the magic world ever since,” said Jamy Ian Swiss, author of six magic books and co-producer of the long-running show Monday Night Magic at the Players Theater in Greenwich Village. “Very often a performer has a big personality onstage or he’s got great technical chops or he’s just inventive. And you can get by on any one of these qualities. Asi has all three. He’s the complete package.”For “Asi Wind’s Inner Circle,” audience members are asked to write their first and last names on blank playing cards, which are then spread on a round table where Wind conjures his mischief.Joan MarcusMany magicians imply that they are performing miracles and dare onlookers to divine their methods. Wind turns that approach on its head. He tells spectators that he can’t do magic and then makes any other explanation seem inconceivable.And he does it with ease and self-deprecating humor — “C’mon,” he said at one point, faux-pleading for a big reaction, “in Israel that’s a miracle!” — that will disarm even the most ardent Card Trick Columbos, those spectators too busy trying to bust the performer to enjoy the performance.Though a star among insiders, Wind has remained a relative unknown to the public. He had an Off Broadway show in 2013 called “Concert of the Mind,” and there was his wickedly bamboozling appearance on the competition television show “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” in 2019, which has been viewed on YouTube nearly 14 million times. That video and a few other clips are about the only glimpses available of the man at work. He’s maintained a surprisingly low profile, earning his living at corporate shows and consulting with David Blaine, a producer of “Inner Circle” who calls Wind “my favorite magician.”“Fame is not his goal,” Blaine said in a phone interview. “What interests him most is answering the question, ‘How can I make magic a great experience for my audience?’ That’s what he’s chasing.”Wind’s status as magic’s best-kept secret may end with “Inner Circle,” which is built around a simple, ingenious premise. Before the action begins, ushers ask audience members to write their first and last names on blank-face playing cards that all have identical backs. The cards are then spread on a round table where Wind will sit and conjure his mischief.So every trick is performed with a deck missing any of the standard suits, faces or numbers, and that changes every night. A card might start off as “Zach Alexander” then transform, in Zach’s hands, into “Rachel Silver.” Rachel may then open a sealed envelope she’s been guarding, only to find “Zach Alexander” inside.“A playing card has information on it, but to most people, the six of hearts, for example, means nothing,” Wind said one recent afternoon. “But if a spectator puts his name on that card, suddenly it is significant. It’s not a card. It’s a person.”Wind was sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park, a place that has a cameo in the show — a spectator is dispatched here to ask a stranger for a random number — and a key role in his origin story. In 2001, he flew to the United States, intending a quick visit with his brother, but fell hard for New York City and tore up his return ticket. With no job prospects, let alone a work visa, he took a regular deck of cards to this park and performed for tips for anyone who could be convinced to stand still for a few minutes.“It was hard, and I failed,” he recalled, with a smile. “But it taught me a valuable lesson — that magic is about connecting to people. It’s about them.”Wind was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, a go-to outfit that he augments for performances with a dark sports jacket, a look that says TED Talk more than “I do magic.” During a two-hour interview, he was animated, funny and candid about his struggles, which include a somewhat debilitating streak of perfectionism that he described as a curse.“It’s never being satisfied, never being super happy with something,” he said. “It really takes a toll on me, emotionally.”Wind in Washington Square Park, where he used to perform for tips.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesHe pronounced himself “60 to 70 percent” pleased with the show during this talk in late September, and said he’d never stop refining it. For years, he’s kept vampiric hours in his Upper East Side apartment, spending all night practicing sleights and polishing routines. “Inner Circle” includes effects that Wind has been fine-tuning for decades. There’s no hint of methods in the show, let alone the daredevilish risks he takes through the evening, because he’s spent thousands of hours rendering his techniques invisible.When he’s in the mood for more visible handiwork, he paints watercolors. Many are portraits of his magic heroes, several of which are projected onto the round table at the end of “Inner Circle” during a monologue about those who have influenced him.“Harry Houdini,” he said, introducing the first image. “He understood that it’s not enough to fool people with magic. You have to make them care.”Wind began his life as Asi Betesh in Holon, a city near Tel Aviv. An uncle showed him the first tricks he ever saw, and the owner of a magic shop later scrambled his brains with a card trick that he can still describe in detail.He left Israel after developing a comedy-magic act inspired by Steve Martin and lived with his brother in Brooklyn while working the lowest rungs on the entertainment ladder — twisting balloon animals for tips at a Toys “R” Us in the Bronx or performing at kids’ parties dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants, in a costume that once gave him scabies.“Oh my God, was that hard to get rid of,” he said. “I had to take so many showers and take every sheet, every fabric in my apartment to the laundromat.”He started landing gigs at parties and, eventually, a spot at Monday Night Magic, which first let him perform during intermissions and seven years later, in 2008, as a headliner. As his reputation grew, Penn and Teller tried to coax him on to “Fool Us” and succeeded only after agreeing to let Wind perform without having to dupe the hosts.“For all his talk about not wanting to compete,” said Penn, a bit grumpily, “he did a trick backstage that had one purpose — to fool me. So shut up, Asi.”Today, and for the run of “Inner Circle,” Wind has a theater of his own, a bespoke and painstakingly fabricated 106-seater that is based on a venue for magicians in Munich. Judging from audience reactions, the design yields an intimacy that makes the effects astonishing from every vantage point.“I was sitting there thinking that all the people he was calling on were shills — and then he called my name,” Wendy Rogers, a public-school teacher from Brooklyn, said after the show. “He must have superpowers or something because what he does isn’t possible on earth. And yet he does it.” More

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    Tiago Rodrigues’s Theater of Compassion

    Three stage works in Paris by the incoming director of the Avignon Festival continue his preoccupation with empathy and human complexity.PARIS — There is something about the Portuguese writer and director Tiago Rodrigues that inspires affection. It is an odd thing to feel about an artist in his position: As the incoming director of the Avignon Festival, one of the biggest events on the European performance calendar, he is suddenly a very powerful man in French theater — and with that comes a new level of critical scrutiny.Yet time and again over the past month, as three of Rodrigues’s productions were presented in quick succession in Paris, the heartfelt, considerate way in which he approached characters melted my heart. First, there were the stories of humanitarian workers teetering between miracle and catastrophe in “Insofar as the Impossible.” “Lovers’ Choir,” a chamber work in which two voices speaking in unison somehow become a potent metaphor for mutual devotion, followed.And then came “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists,” a work that simply shouldn’t work the way it does. Just try to picture a successful play about a family whose quirky little tradition is to hunt down and kill fascists — until the youngest daughter struggles with becoming a, you know, murderer.If the premise of “Catarina” sounds histrionic, the result is anything but. As a rule, Rodrigues isn’t a showy director: He is a humanist at heart, preoccupied with empathy and the ways in which today’s world undermines it. His actors tend to address the audience frontally yet modestly, as if asking us to bear witness to each character’s doubts and flaws.“Catarina” and “Lovers’ Choir” were programmed as a double bill of sorts at the Bouffes du Nord. The 45-minute “Lovers’ Choir,” in an early evening slot, is an unassuming sequel to the first play Rodrigues wrote, in Lisbon, 15 years ago. In it, a couple experience a life-or-death emergency: A woman suddenly can’t breathe, so her partner drives her to the hospital, against the clock.Rodrigues has revived and expanded the story in this new version, created last year for French actors. At the start, Alma Palacios and David Geselson stand side by side, looking ahead at the auditorium yet united in fear, as they begin their race to find medical help. They speak in sync throughout. When she says, “I can’t breathe,” he says, “She can’t breathe” at the same time; on a nearly bare stage, they bring the scene to life solely through their intertwined words, a chorus of two.It makes for a delicately urgent narrative, in which breathing together comes to represent both love and life. When Palacios and Geselson are purposely out of sync, here and there, you know danger lurks.Alma Palacios and David Geselson in “Lovers’ Choir” at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord.Filipe FerreiraThe second half throws this new version of “Lovers’ Choir” out of balance, however. Once the emergency is dealt with, the story suddenly accelerates. The characters zoom through the ensuing decades, listing milestones in their lives without giving us much time to latch onto them.“Insofar as the Impossible” and “Catarina” show how much Rodrigues’s work has gained in ambition over the years. His rise to prominence in France in the 2010s came via intimate, confessional works, like 2013’s “By Heart,” in which he shared the life of his grandmother and asked audience members to memorize a poem, and 2017’s “Sopro,” which starred the longtime prompter of the theater Rodrigues directed in Lisbon until recently, the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II.There are real stories at the heart of “Insofar as the Impossible,” too. The script of this production, at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, wove together excerpts from 30 or so interviews that Rodrigues and his team conducted with humanitarian workers from the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.It fits into a style of documentary theater that has become popular in recent years. While French directors like Didier Ruiz have brought interviewees to the stage, however, Rodrigues has entrusted their words to four actors, who speak in a mix of French, English and Portuguese, in keeping with Rodrigues’s love of multilingualism. (He announced recently that under his direction, there would be a special focus on a different language every year at the Avignon Festival, starting with English in 2023.)Throughout, the geographical areas that humanitarian workers travel to — to provide relief from war, disasters or other emergencies — are referred to as “the Impossible,” and the comfortable Western homes they leave behind are “the Possible.” It means the audience can’t connect the anecdotes with what they may know of the region or the conflict; instead, we are invited to consider how violence, inhumanity — and dignity, too — manifest regardless of culture.Wisely, given the gut-punching nature of many scenes, Rodrigues treads lightly as director. The sets stop at a large white cloth that is slowly pulled above the stage. Many of the situations described are too harrowing to summarize neatly; suffice to say that, while humanitarian workers generally choose their line of work out of a desire to do good, “doing good” turns out to be a lot more complicated than it seems.Making a virtuous contribution is also what drives the family at the heart of “Catarina,” a work of fiction Rodrigues created with a Portuguese cast. To this family, however, that means capturing a fascist each year, following a tradition passed down by a female relative who, in the 1950s, avenged the death of her friend Catarina under Portugal’s military dictatorship. Per her wish, all her descendants are called Catarina, regardless of gender, and in Rodrigues’s engaging production, wear long dresses and aprons.Romeu Costa, left, and Rui M. Silva in “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord.Filipe FerreiraEach death and garden burial is celebrated with songs and a banquet. Yet the youngest Catarina, who was raised to kill and is about to shoot her first victim, starts experiencing doubts about her right to take a life.In a recurring joke, the characters keep quoting the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and like Brecht, Rodrigues nudges the audience to adopt a critical perspective. Rodrigues’s father was an antifascist activist, and “Catarina” is preoccupied with weighty political questions: When fascist forces are on the rise in a democracy, what are the best means of countering them? Is “doing harm in order to practice good,” the family’s motto, morally acceptable?Many of the conversations that result between relatives — a mother urging her daughter to violence; a sister angling to take her place — could easily turn into caricatures, yet Rodrigues refuses to give the audience an easy path out of these ethical dilemmas. He doesn’t shy away from showing us what he means by fascism, either. One lengthy scene is devoted to a far-right political speech full of such hatred toward minorities that Rodrigues seems to be testing our endurance.Yet even this part of “Catarina” feels like an invitation to grapple with what humanity is capable of, rather than a didactic demonstration. Complexity is always the answer in Rodrigues’s work — and it is one of the best ways to the audience’s heart.Dans la Mesure de l’Impossible. Directed by Tiago Rodrigues. Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe/Festival d’Automne. Further performances in 2022 and 2023 around France and in Madrid.Chœur des Amants. Directed by Tiago Rodrigues. Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, through Oct. 29.Catarina et la Beauté de Tuer des Fascistes. Directed by Tiago Rodrigues. Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord/Festival d’Automne, through Oct. 30. More

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    in Television

    ‘Modern Love’ Goes Global in New Television Series

    The latest iteration of the “Modern Love” franchise, “Modern Love Tokyo,” begins streaming on Oct. 21.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Daniel Jones, the senior editor of The New York Times’s Modern Love column, remembers when, a dozen years ago, it was just him selecting stories from a stack of nearly a thousand monthly submissions and editing each one for the essay series. “It was kind of lonely,” he said.This week, he has plenty of company. He is in Japan to attend the premiere of the television series “Modern Love Tokyo,” the latest installment in Amazon’s global “Modern Love” franchise. The seven-episode show will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Oct. 21. The episodes are set in Tokyo, feature the work of actors, of directors and of a creative team from Japan, and are based on essays published in the column that were reimagined to make them more familiar to Japanese audiences. (In a “Modern Love” first, one of the episodes will be animated.)“I love that the process includes all these other talented people who are interpreting stories and amplifying emotions, putting in music,” Mr. Jones said in an interview last week. “It’s just exploded the job into a whole new realm.”Since the original “Modern Love” show was released on Amazon in October 2019, three international spinoffs have debuted in three languages: “Modern Love Mumbai,” in Hindi; “Modern Love Hyderabad,” in Telugu; and the Tokyo series, in Japanese. A fourth series, “Modern Love Chennai,” in Tamil, is forthcoming, and a fifth, “Modern Love Amsterdam,” offered in Dutch, is set to be released in mid-December.Mr. Jones reflected on the television franchise’s expansion abroad, on the process of adapting American stories for each series and on the longevity of the Modern Love column. Read the edited interview below.When did the idea to create international versions of the show come about?The original series, set in New York City, came out in 2019, and pretty soon after that, we started talking about other cities around the world where we might be able to do versions of it. Of course, then the pandemic hit, which made everything harder and a little delayed. And so the international versions we began talking about several years ago are just now coming out.What is your role on the series?I’m a co-producer on all the international versions. I see the episodes as they’re being edited; I read the scripts. I try to maintain a sense of what Modern Love is and has been for more than 18 years now, meaning realistic love stories, not sweeping romances. No overt sex or Bollywood plots or anything that would push the boundaries and make it seem outside what the column does. But the people working on this at Amazon Studios know this and get it. In fact, that’s what they value most about these series and what makes the work distinctive in these markets. We’re all on the same page.Also, the Modern Love archive is enormous — it’s 900-some essays at this point. While the teams in different countries who are picking content completely reimagine the stories for their audiences, the shows’ creators often stick close to the plot, so I’m helpful to them if they want a certain kind of story; I know the archive better than anyone. But I’ve been so impressed with the local teams’ approach and research and passion for this project.Daniel Jones attending the “Modern Love Tokyo” premiere. Phoebe JonesHow does the process of adapting an American story for an audience in another country work?For one of the Mumbai episodes, the creative team in Mumbai took an essay about a woman in Brooklyn who had separated from her husband and who was feeling down in every way — she was in bad physical shape, emotionally wrung out. And she now needed to get herself to work by bicycle.She started riding across the Manhattan Bridge, but she didn’t have the stamina to go all the way up, so the story was about the empowerment — both physical and emotional — of building herself back up. It was a very New York story, but when they took it to Mumbai, they made her character a domestic servant in a wealthy family, highlighting the class divide there. There’s a bridge in Mumbai, called the Flyway, that goes from a gritty area to the gleaming city center, and it was the same basic process of her building herself back up. It speaks to the universality of these conflicts — you can get a divorce in Mumbai, and you can get a divorce in Brooklyn. The emotions and struggle and all that can be so similar.All of the versions of the show are available to stream on Amazon Prime in the United States, right?Yes. Now, with the success of series like “Squid Game,” it’s become clear that subtitles are not a barrier. I hope people check out the versions set in the other cities, too.What’s been the most exciting part of working on the international versions?When these teams discover stories that I’d long forgotten about in the archive, and then reintroduce me to them in a new way. It’s great to have other people look at the archive with fresh eyes, find such gems and see how to reimagine them for the screen.What’s next for the “Modern Love” television franchise?Our fifth international series, “Modern Love Amsterdam,” premieres in mid-December. Beyond that, stay tuned, because we have ambitions for all over the world. More

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    in Theater

    Times Square May Get One of the Few Spectacles It Lacks: A Casino

    The battle to win a New York City casino license has heated up in Manhattan, with real estate and gambling giants offering competing proposals for Times Square and Hudson Yards.Times Square, New York City’s famed Crossroads of the World, could hardly be considered lacking. It has dozens of Broadway theaters, swarms of tourists, costumed characters and noisy traffic, all jostling for space with office workers who toil in the area.Now one of the city’s biggest commercial developers is pitching something that Times Square does not have: a glittering Caesars Palace casino at its core.The developer, SL Green Realty Corporation, and the gambling giant Caesars Entertainment are actively trying to enlist local restaurants, retailers and construction workers in joining a pro-casino coalition, as the companies aim to secure one of three new casino licenses in the New York City area approved by state legislators earlier this year.The proposal has enormous implications for Times Square, the symbolical and economic heart of the American theater industry, and a key part of the city’s office-driven economy. Although foot traffic in Times Square was almost back at 2019 levels during recent weekends, theatergoers and office workers have been slower to re-embrace a neighborhood where violent crime has risen.Overall attendance and box office grosses on Broadway are lagging well behind prepandemic levels, and there is considerable anxiety within the industry about how changes in commuting patterns, entertainment consumption and the global economy will affect its long-term health.A casino in Times Square faces substantial obstacles. There is already a competing bid for a casino in nearby Hudson Yards from another pair of real estate and gambling giants, Related Companies and Wynn Resorts.And with casino bids also taking shape in Queens and Brooklyn, there is no assurance that the New York State Gaming Commission will place a casino in Manhattan, let alone Times Square, one of the world’s more complex logistical and economic regions.Few things change in Times Square without notice or protest. When the city installed pedestrian plazas in the area more than a decade ago, the move was widely condemned and even lampooned by late-night talk show hosts, before being eventually embraced as an innovative foray in urban design. When the neighborhood’s army of costumed characters gained a reputation for aggressive solicitation, the city restricted them to designated “activity zones,” raising free speech concerns.Now critics worry that putting a casino at 1515 Broadway, the SL Green skyscraper near West 44th Street, would alter the character of a neighborhood that can ill afford to backslide toward its seedier past, and further overwhelm an already crowded area.In a copy of a letter soliciting support for the casino, which was obtained by The New York Times, the companies promised to use a portion of the casino’s gambling revenues to fund safety and sanitation improvements in Times Square, including by deploying surveillance drones.Yet the idea of a casino has already found an influential opponent: the Broadway League, a trade association representing theater owners and producers. On Tuesday, the league sent an email to its members saying it would not welcome a casino to the neighborhood.“The addition of a casino will overwhelm the already densely congested area and would jeopardize the entire neighborhood whose existence is dependent on the success of Broadway,” the league said in a statement. “Broadway is the key driver of tourism and risking its stability would be detrimental to the city.”The congestion in Times Square is both a closely watched sign of vibrancy and a potential irritant, particularly for commuters and theatergoers who sometimes cite the crowds and the cacophony as reasons to stay away.For New York, Times Square is an important financial engine — the city relies heavily on tourists to spend money at the neighborhood’s hotels, restaurants, stores and entertainment venues.There are ample indicators that Broadway is still struggling: Several productions, including “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is the longest-running Broadway show in history, and “A Strange Loop,” which won this year’s Tony Award for best musical, have announced plans to close.Last week, there were 27 shows running on Broadway, seen by 225,731 people and grossing $29 million; in the comparable week in October 2019, before the pandemic, there were 34 shows running that were seen by 286,802 people and grossed $35 million.Still, the Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union representing actors and stage managers, is among those supporting the casino bid, suggesting a contentious road ahead for a proposal that will face a lengthy approval process.“The proposal from the developer for a Times Square casino would be a game changer that boosts security and safety in the Times Square neighborhood with increased security staff, more sanitation equipment and new cameras,” Actors’ Equity said in a statement. “We applaud the developer’s commitment to make the neighborhood safer for arts workers and audience members alike.”The simmering tensions between local power brokers, months before the formal bidding process has even begun, foreshadow the fight ahead for developers hoping to cash in on what could become the most lucrative gambling market in the country, at a time when traditional office-using tenants have become more scarce.A state committee formed this month to review casino applications said the process would open by Jan. 6, and that no determinations on locations would be made “until sometime later in 2023 at the earliest.”In their letter seeking support for the casino, SL Green and Caesars said that gambling revenues could be used to more than double the number of “public safety officers” in Times Square and to deploy surveillance drones.The letter said a new casino would result in more than 50 new artificial intelligence camera systems “strategically placed throughout Times Square, each capable of monitoring 85,000+ people per day.” The safety plans were developed by former New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, according to SL Green.Mr. Bratton did not respond to a request for comment.“As New Yorkers, it’s incumbent on us to keep making sure Times Square is keeping up with the times, and doesn’t go back to what I’ll call the bad old days of the ’70s or the early ’90s,” said Marc Holliday, the chief executive of SL Green. “And we all remember what that was like, when it comes to crime, and, you know, open drug use.”The casino is expected to include a hotel, a wellness center and restaurants, right above the Broadway theater that is home to “The Lion King” musical and a stone’s throw from the site of the ball drop on New Year’s Eve.Earlier this year, the state authorized up to three casino licenses for the New York City region. Legislators have touted the union jobs, tourists and tax revenue that a casino would attract, citing the fact that the bidding for each license will start at $500 million.Two existing “racinos” — horse racetracks with video slot machines but no human dealers — are considered front-runners for two of the three licenses: Genting Group’s Resorts World New York City in Queens and MGM Resorts International’s Empire City Casino in Yonkers, N.Y.The competition for the third license features many of the country’s major casino companies. Steven Cohen, the owner of the New York Mets, has been talking with Hard Rock about a casino near the baseball team’s stadium in Queens. Las Vegas Sands has been finalizing plans for its preferred casino location in the area, and Bally’s Corporation has been scouting for a development partner.The Wynn-Related proposed casino would be on the undeveloped western portion of the Hudson Yards, which was supposed to be completed by 2025 and include residential units and parks. Related, the developer of Hudson Yards, said it plans to fulfill all of its prior housing and public space commitments for the area.In a private pitch deck obtained by The Times, Wynn and Related wrote that Hudson Yards, near the Javits Center, was the ideal location to target “diverse upscale” guests for a casino resort complex.“Because it attracts the upper tier of gaming consumers, Wynn is able to dedicate less than 10 percent of its resort space to gaming, yet still generate significant gaming revenue and tax benefits for municipalities,” reads a slide in the deck.The deck also features photos of an outdoor man-made waterfall — and of a couple enjoying cocktails while watching a cigarette-holding animatronic frog, apparently from Wynn’s “Lake of Dreams” show.In their pitch letter, SL Green and Caesars said the casino was a “once in a lifetime opportunity to once again solidify Times Square as the world’s greatest entertainment area.”Community support is an integral ingredient to winning state approval for a casino license.The Broadway League’s “influence and clout and understanding of what theatergoers want is crucial to the future of Times Square, and if they’re opposing this proposal, I don’t see how it proceeds,” said Brad Hoylman, the state senator representing the district that encompasses Times Square.But Andrew Rigie, president of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, which represents the city’s restaurants and bars, said the group would support a casino in Manhattan if it used local restaurant operators or provided vouchers to nearby eateries. A major question surrounding the economic impact of casinos is whether they incentivize guests to stay and eat inside the building, which could hurt surrounding businesses.Alan Rosen, the owner of Junior’s Cheesecake, a restaurant chain with locations in Times Square and at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, said he was unconcerned.“I can’t see it hurting my business,” he said. “Look at Las Vegas. What do people do? They eat. They go to shows. It’s a lot more than gambling these days.” More