Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 113 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    Warhol-mania: Why the Famed Pop Artist Is Everywhere Again

    Andy Warhol is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works.Andy Warhol left behind a lot of self portraits.There was the black-and-white shot from a photo booth strip, from 1963, in which he wore dark black shades and a cool expression. In 1981, he took a Polaroid of himself in drag, with a platinum blond bob and bold red lips. Five years later, he screen-printed his face, with bright red acrylic paint, onto a black background. These and other images of the Pop Art master rank among his best-known works.But one of his most telling self portraits wasn’t a portrait at all, in a conventional sense. Between 1976 and 1987, the artist regularly dictated his thoughts, fears, feelings and opinions — about art, himself and his world — over the phone to his friend and collaborator Pat Hackett. In 1989, two years after his death, Hackett published “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” a transcribed, edited and condensed version of their phone calls.And now, more than three decades later, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” has come to Netflix as a bittersweet documentary series directed by Andrew Rossi. In a video interview, the director pointed out that Warhol had intended for the book to be published after he died.“It does seem like there’s some message which maybe he himself didn’t even understand,” Rossi said. “There’s an open invitation to interpret it as there is with any of his artwork — because I do view the diaries as another self portrait in his oeuvre.”Warhol’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death, in 1987. His fascination with branding and celebrity, as well as the famous dictum often attributed to him — “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — are if anything even more relevant in the age of social media and reality TV.“There’s a reason why ‘Warholian’ remains a description,” Rossi said. “He’s one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric.”But if Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is — onscreen, onstage, in museums and in the streets. Earlier this month, Ryan Raftery returned to Joe’s Pub with the biting celebrity bio-musical “The Trial of Andy Warhol.” Anthony McCarten’s new play in London, “The Collaboration” — which centers on the relationship between Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat — is already being adapted for the big screen. The Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol: Revelation” investigates his Catholic upbringing. And starting Friday, Bated Breath Theater Company will bring the theatrical walking tour production “Chasing Andy Warhol” to the streets of the East Village.“The Andy Warhol Diaries” delves into Warhol’s relationship with Jon Gould, a Paramount executive.Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixTogether, the works create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human beneath the white wig. Even as he created an indelible, internationally famous identity, this child of Carpatho Rusyn immigrants, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, grappled with his faith (Byzantine Catholic) and his sexual orientation (gay, but never quite as out as many of his contemporaries) — areas that both “The Andy Warhol Diaries” and “Andy Warhol: Revelation” explore in particular.A significant portion of the Netflix series examines Warhol’s romantic relationships. It delves into Warhol’s struggles to show his love for his first long-term partner, an interior designer named Jed Johnson. Later comes the preppy Paramount executive Jon Gould, whom Warhol showered with affection but who eventually died of AIDS.The Enduring Legacy of Andy WarholThe artist’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death in 1987.Warhol-mania: If Andy Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is: onscreen, in museums and in the streets.A Play: In “The Collaboration,” Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.A Book: “Warhol” by Blake Gopnik, the first true biography of the artist, reveals a narrative that gets more complex the more closely you look.A Musical: “Andy,” Gus Van Sant’s Warhol-inspired stage debut, may be the movie director’s oddest tribute to date.An Exhibition: “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum shows how Catholicism seeped into the Pop master’s work.Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, was interviewed in the documentary series. Rossi found her through her work on the 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again,” for which she wrote an essay titled “Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith and AIDS.”“There are these moments when he’s doubting himself, when he is questioning what it is to be successful, what it is to be getting older, what it is to be in love,” she said. “That’s one of the strengths of what the series reveals, is that there’s a human that’s behind this mythical story.”Beck pointed to pieces of Warhol’s “Last Supper” series, some of which are currently on view in “Andy Warhol: Revelation.” She referenced one painting in particular, “The Last Supper (Be a Somebody With a Body),” which fuses an image of Jesus Christ with that of a bodybuilder, a symbol of health and masculinity. Beck said the work reflects Warhol’s reactions to the AIDS epidemic.“When you have these two things juxtaposed, you have this real expression of ideas around mourning and suffering, but also forgiveness,” she said.“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” at the Brooklyn Museum, pays special attention to the artist’s faith.Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /
    Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photograph by Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” which opened in November and runs until June 19, is broken into seven sections that move visitors from the artist’s immigrant upbringing and the roots of his religion through the different phases of his life and career, with a particular focus on the tension between his faith and his queer identity.“This is beyond soup cans and Marilyn,” said José Carlos Diaz, the chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, referring to a few of Warhol’s Pop Art hits. Diaz first put on “Revelation” at the Warhol museum before bringing it to Brooklyn.Carmen Hermo, an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum, organized the New York presentation of “Revelation.” Both she and Diaz are the children of immigrants, like Warhol, and she speculated that this part of the artist’s background helped to account for his famed work ethic and his fierce drive to create the best version of himself.Diaz said, “For me, he lives the American dream,” adding that more nuanced, relatable perspectives on the artist were finally “surpassing this mythological Warhol with the big glasses, big wig.”Warhol is “one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric,” said Andrew Rossi, the director of “The Andy Warhol Diaries.”Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixAcross the East River, Mara Lieberman, the executive artistic director of Bated Breath Theater Company, is using her fair share of glasses and wigs. Beginning Friday, Lieberman will direct “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a theatrical tour through the East Village in which multiple actors play the artist simultaneously, alluding to his love for repeated images and various personas.One scene depicts something that happened on a trip Warhol took to Hawaii with the production designer Charles Lisanby, with whom he was in love at the time. A couple of days after arriving at the hotel, Lisanby brought another man back to the room, and Warhol exploded, hurt — an event that has been described in biographies of the artist.Warhol has said that he later realized the power of saying “so what” in response to painful life events, an insight he detailed in his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” It is, Lieberman said, “his greatest coping strategy.”This attitude was a key ingredient — along with his ideas about identity, technology, celebrity and more — in Warhol’s “highly stylized, constructed, brilliantly strategized brand,” Lieberman said.“Andy liked to take life and put a frame around it and say, ‘Look, that’s art,’” she said. “We go out in the streets of New York, and we put a frame around things and say, ‘Look, that’s art.’” More

  • 100 Shares119 Views

    in Television

    Jimmy Kimmel: Ted Cruz ‘Outslimed Himself’ This Week

    Kimmel happily reported that the children’s book Cruz singled out to make a point about race at the Senate hearings for President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee this week became a No. 1 best seller.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘The Opposite of Oprah’s Book Club’In his Thursday night monologue, Jimmy Kimmel said Ted Cruz “even outslimed himself” at Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearings this week.“On Tuesday, you know, he singled out this children’s book called ‘Anti-Racist Baby’ for promoting critical race theory, which it actually doesn’t. He said the book teaches that babies are born racist, which it also doesn’t. And, as a result of Ted’s tirade, that book is now number one on Amazon — it’s the number one seller. It’s like the opposite of Oprah’s Book Club or something.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And not only is the book selling well, since Cruz’s little grandstand, Amazon is also seeing a spike in sales of psoriasis medication, wart remover, nose hair trimmers, male Spanx, slug repellent and mullet combs.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“If you’re wondering what Ted Cruz was really focused on during the hearings, somebody got a shot of him on his phone searching for his own name on Twitter. How embarrassing. And can you imagine being Ted Cruz and still wanting to know what people were saying about you online?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Emergency Photo Op Edition)“The president is in Brussels right now for an emergency summit with our NATO allies. Together, the leaders of the G7 nations put out a forceful statement warning Russia not to use chemical or nuclear weapons on Ukraine, and also posed for a series of awkward photographs, starting with a group shot.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yeah, it was an emergency summit, but don’t worry: NATO leaders still had time for a family photo.” — JIMMY FALLON“I don’t know, this seems unnecessary for an emergency meeting.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Looks like the sales team at a Honda dealership, doesn’t it? I’m expecting them to all say together, ‘We’re ready to serve you.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, it’s a very diverse group. There are suits of every color.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, that’s either a NATO summit or a conference for ‘men who don’t know what to do with their arms’ photo.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Uncharted” co-stars Mark Wahlberg and Tom Holland popped by the bodega on Thursday’s “Desus & Mero.”Also, Check This OutFrom left: Ally Bonino, Phillipa Soo, Taub, Hannah Cruz and Nadia Dandashi in the musical “Suffs” at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShaina Taub’s musical “Suffs” explores women’s crusade for the vote through a movement often divided along generational, class and racial lines. More

  • 125 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Help’ Review: Blindfolds (and Kid Gloves) Off. Let’s Analyze Whiteness.

    Claudia Rankine’s heady new play dares white audiences to deny the realities of their social advantages.In July 2019, The New York Times Magazine published an essay by the poet and author Claudia Rankine titled, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.” A first-person investigation of white dominance and its broad range of social consequences, Rankine’s essay prompted more than 2,000 online comments, including many defensive replies from white readers.The essay, and the responses it generated, form the basis of her heady and pointed new play, “Help,” which opened on Thursday night at the Shed (which commissioned the play). Part polemic, part documentary theater, “Help” does not so much dramatize Rankine’s argument as dissect it, coolly daring white audiences to deny the live presentation of empirical evidence.The Narrator, played by April Matthis, speaks into a microphone, introducing herself as “a representative of my category,” or what she says is the 8 percent of the United States population who identify as Black women. A glass wall separates Matthis from what looks like an airport waiting area, where nine white men and two white women are arranged in business attire (costumes are by Dede Ayite). We’re in what the Narrator calls a liminal space that people move through on their way from here to there, one full of imaginative possibilities.It was in first-class cabins and airport lounges where Rankine originally conducted her social experiment, trying to loosen the blindfold she often found white men wore to the realities of their social advantages. A few of those incidents are recreated here, including the men’s predictable knee-jerk reactions (“I’ve worked hard for everything I have,” “I don’t see color”), and Rankine’s incisive dressings-down, often left partially unspoken in the moment.From left: Charlotte Bydwell, O’Keefe and Nick Wyman in the play at the Shed.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut much of the play’s primary dialogue is between the narrator’s critical oration and the indignant responses Rankine received to her essay, which ensemble members recite directly to the audience. (In a 2020 interview, Rankine said that 90 percent of what’s said by white men in the play comes from these letters.)Rankine assumes the perspective of all Black women as a bold rhetorical gesture, to indict the presumed neutrality of whiteness and call out its ramifications. (“I, the Black woman, am just meant to get on with the program of accommodating white people,” Matthis tells the audience.) In doing so, the playwright also resists including herself as a character onstage, despite casting herself as its Narrator. The result is an exercise in performance more academic than it is dramatic.To illustrate and historicize her points, Rankine also includes actual remarks from public figures, from Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s possible to read the play exclusively as a rebuttal to incendiary rants from the former president, adding to the sense that “Help” relitigates the past more than it confronts the present.Matthis, an invaluable asset to recent Off Broadway productions exploring Black lives and histories, including “Fairview” and “Toni Stone,” is an unwavering orator, both determined and persuasive as Rankine’s stand-in. But she has little emotion to play beyond simmering frustration. Even in conversation with her husband, who is white, the Narrator speaks almost entirely in ideas, forgoing an opportunity to complicate her argument with the illogic of desire. How does it feel to challenge white men in the public square when you have one living at home? And how might the playwright’s proximity to whiteness color the reception to her case?Matthis, right, with, from left: Nick Wyman, Scholl, Barbagallo and O’Keefe.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesDirected by Taibi Magar, the production has a clinical slickness that holds its subject — the fictions people create to distance themselves from one another — at a chilled remove. (The air travel aesthetic and metaphor eventually overstay their welcome.) Sitting in high-backed blue airplane seats, the white actors wheel themselves across the cold-gray floor and into various formations, frozen in tableau or starkly lit in jerky gesticulation (set design is by Mimi Lien and lighting by John Torres). Occasionally, they perform frenetic choreography by Shamel Pitts, curious fits of movement that make a play for expressiveness but feel disconnected from the rest of the production.“Help” was in early previews when theaters closed in March 2020, and a version of the play streamed online. Rankine has since revised the text to include references to the pandemic and the killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade and others precipitating the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s possible that white audience members who see Rankine’s play may be provoked by its tenets, on an intellectual, if not an emotional level. (More than one program note expressly states that “Help” is intended for white audiences.)But a treatise on the tyranny of white privilege and ignorance would have felt more prescient before the summer of 2020, when anti-racist books topped best seller lists — and white people at least promised to read them — as the United States witnessed one of the most widespread protest movements in its history.For audiences of any color without delusions about the fundamentals of racism and its pervasive, deadly constructs, Rankine’s lecture, however essential, may seem a redundant lesson. If theater has the potential to embody hard truths, “Help” spells them out in familiar black-and-white rather than lifting them off the page.HelpThrough April 10 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    Shaina Taub’s ‘Suffs’ Tells the Suffragist Tale in Song

    Shaina Taub’s highly anticipated musical explores women’s crusade for the vote through a movement often divided along generational, class and racial lines.On a recent afternoon, Shaina Taub was standing in a rehearsal room at the Public Theater with a group of 18 women in corsets and long skirts, paired with T-shirts and sports bras, planning a grand parade.Taub was suited up — halfway at least — as Alice Paul, a founder of the National Woman’s Party, and a main character of “Suffs,” her new musical about the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.“How will we do it when it’s never been done?” Taub sang as the performers bustled up and down the risers. “How will we find a way where there isn’t one?”The song, “Find a Way,” was about the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Procession, the first large-scale political demonstration ever held in Washington. But Taub might have been singing about “Suffs” itself, and its winding, eight-year road to the stage after multiple pandemic delays, three set redesigns and script revisions prompted by the tumultuous politics of the country — and American theater — since the racial justice protests of 2020.“It’s amazing how much the experience of making the show mirrors what they were doing,” Taub said during a break. She slipped off her period-correct high-heeled Oxfords and put on cloth slippers. Would the corsets be staying for the real show?“It’s a hot topic,” Taub said. “But — yes.”From left: Ally Bonino, Phillipa Soo, Taub, Hannah Cruz and Nadia Dandashi in the musical at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn an age of riot grrrl playlists and “The Future Is Female” tattoos, it can be hard to see past the petticoats and big hats and recognize the “ladies” of the suffrage movement as the hard-nosed political strategists they were — and to fully appreciate the radical nature of their demands. “Suffs,” in previews now and scheduled to open April 6 at the Public, aims to release the movement from its starchy image, drawing on the sounds of Tin Pan Alley, early jazz, pop-gospel and what Taub calls “the sounds of the future the suffs were trying to create.”The highly anticipated production — whose extended run, through May 1, is already sold out — may wear its idealism on its sleeve. But it also digs into the complexities of a movement that was often sharply divided along generational, class and racial lines. That last was an aspect of the show, Taub said, that she worked to deepen after the murder of George Floyd.“I’m not trying to glorify or vilify,” Taub said. “I’m trying to humanize, and dramatize.”“SUFFS” BEGAN sprouting in 2014 when the producer Rachel Sussman (“What the Constitution Means to Me”) gave Taub a copy of “Jailed for Freedom,” Doris Stevens’s account of the militant suffragists who, in addition to organizing the parade, assembled the first picket of the White House, which led to dozens being arrested, beaten and force-fed in prison.She tore through it in a single night. “I couldn’t believe how dramatic it was,” she recalled.As an activist-minded theater kid growing up in Vermont, Taub, 33, had been fascinated by the history of the civil rights movement, ACT-UP and other social change movements. Why, she wondered after reading Stevens’s book, had she been taught virtually nothing about this one?“There’s just been this hidden treasure trove in my own backyard this whole time,” she said. “I emailed Rachel at 3 a.m. and said, ‘We have to do it!’”Making a musical just about women battling men didn’t seem very dramatic. “I thought the audience might be a bit ahead of it,” she said. But she saw potential in the internal conflicts.“How do various characters who do want the same things go about it differently?” she said. “That could help me focus on the women most of all.”Today, Taub, whose album “Songs of the Great Hill” will be released April 1, is an in-demand musical theater talent whose (many) other projects include a collaboration with Elton John on songs for a musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” set to open in Chicago this summer.But back in 2014, she was a singer-songwriter with regular gigs at Joe’s Pub and other venues. At the recommendation of Sussman (who also teamed up with the producer Jill Furman, of “Hamilton”) the director Leigh Silverman went to see her and instantly became, in Silverman’s words, “a crazed Shaina Taub superfan.”“I was just dazzled,” said Silverman, who at the time was directing her first musical, the Broadway production of “Violet.” “I just thought, how can I get attached to Shaina Taub forever?”Over the next two years, Taub worked on the musical between projects, including “Old Hats,” with the clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner, and her original musical adaptation of “Twelfth Night,” for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park. In late 2017, Taub played the first 20 minutes of music for Silverman.“It was thrilling,” Silverman said, before taking a long pause. “Those first 20 minutes did a thing I think the show does incredibly well, which is, it tells a story and gives you an emotional arc of character.”Jenn Colella (“Come From Away”), who plays Carrie Chapman Catt, the leader of the old-guard National American Woman Suffrage Association (who was often at odds with the more radical Paul), participated in the first workshop. She recalled an immediate “crackling of energy.”“We found ourselves sitting straight up, standing when we didn’t need to — crying,” she said. “From go, this was a moving piece.”From left, Jenn Colella, Taub and Susan Oliveras during a rehearsal.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTaub, who did historical research at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library and read what more than one collaborator described as seemingly every book on the subject, has laced the piece with quotes and detailed references. (She even found a juicy love story in a footnote. “Every musical needs a love story!” Taub said.) But “Suffs,” Silverman emphasized, is not an “eat-your-spinach history musical.”“We’ve done a lot of work around deepening all the characters, the friendships, the betrayals,” she said. “In a way, the movement is the protagonist.”ALICE PAUL WAS a notoriously opaque figure, with a monomaniacal focus and, as the historian Susan Ware (one of many scholars Taub consulted with) has written, no personal life. “She never married, never had a partner, we don’t know about her sexuality,” Taub said.What helped unlock the character, Taub said, was Paul’s “deep, fraught, crazy-making friendships” with other suffragists, which Taub said were not so different from hers with her collaborators.“It was that stew of ‘We love each other, we’re hanging out but you’re driving me crazy, we have to do this thing, I don’t want to mess around, I want to work,’” she said, doubling the tempo on her normal mile-a-minute speech.Initially, Taub, whose acting credits also include the Off Broadway productions of “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” imagined she might play Doris, whom she described as “the writer-downer, like Mark in ‘Rent.’” But she eventually connected with what she called Paul’s “fear of failure” — and also, as anyone who has watched the 5-foot-3 Taub in action for five minutes might notice, with her intense focus and make-it-happen energy.Taub said she even briefly entertained having the suffragist and labor lawyer Inez Milholland (played by Phillipa Soo, from “Hamilton”), who led the 1913 parade, appear onstage on a real horse. “For a minute, I was like, ‘How much would it cost to shut down Lafayette Street for four hours?’” she said.By late 2019, the plan was to open at the Public in September 2020, shortly after the centennial of the 19th Amendment — and a few months before the presidential election. Then the pandemic hit. “It took a minute for it to really drop that it wouldn’t be happening,” Taub said.Then, in June 2020, came the George Floyd protests, and intense discussions about structural racism in the theater world, including at the Public, which in May 2021 announced a broad “anti-racism and cultural transformation plan.”From the beginning, the show had addressed the uglier sides of a movement that reflected — and sometimes actively bolstered — the racism of American society. It was a time when Jim Crow had solidified and Woodrow Wilson (played in “Suffs” by Grace McLean) had presided over the segregation of the federal work force.One of the first songs Taub wrote was “Wait My Turn,” sung by the suffragist and journalist Ida B. Wells (played by Nikki M. James) in response to Paul’s decree that Black women would march in a separate section at the back of the 1913 parade, to appease Southern white marchers. (Wells refused, and marched with her state delegation.)But amid the 2020 protests, Taub and Silverman realized they needed to revisit not just the show itself, but also their approach to making it. “I realized I had more to do, and deeper to go,” Taub said.They brought in two additional collaborators to the core creative team, assembling an expanded dramaturgical brain trust, nicknamed the Coven, which started meeting weekly. It included Taub and Silverman, along with the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly (who is also credited as a creative consultant) and, as dramaturg, Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar at Arizona State University.Thompson, who became a scholar-in-residence at the Public in 2020, was initially puzzled by the invitation. (“The first thing she said to me was ‘I hate musicals,’” Silverman recalled.) In a video interview, Thompson said the idea of a musical about the suffrage movement initially sounded “like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.”“I just thought ‘Oh my god, that’s the worst idea ever,” she said, imagining “the earnestness, the whiteness, the tweeness.”Cast members rehearsing “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” a vaudeville-style romp in which they portray jeering men.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Obviously, that was all my bad preconceived ideas,” she said. “There’s a really rich story here — not just about women battling men, but a really interesting intergenerational battle” that’s “almost Shakespearean in its complexity.”Thompson, who has written extensively on race and performance, also spearheaded a rethinking of the approach to casting. Most of the prominent characters — Paul, Catt, Wells, the Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell — are played by actors of the same race. But the other, mostly white characters, including male historical figures, were cast very deliberately with women and nonbinary actors of a range of races and ethnicities — not just for the sake of a diverse company, but to challenge assumptions about who gets to be (to use a favorite Thompson word) “virtuosic.”“We wanted to give women, and particularly women of color, the same kind of mutability usually granted to white men,” she said.A downtown choreographer and director, Kelly (“Fairview,” “A Strange Loop”), whose work has often examined issues of appropriation, said that when Silverman approached him last summer, he was initially hesitant. “I was like, ‘I’m not a woman,’” he said. “Was that going to be a thing for some people?”One of the challenges, he said, was creating a movement language that would help the audience figure out how to read the bodies onstage. The opening three songs, he said, set up some of the registers.The vaudeville-style romp of “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” sung by ensemble members costumed as jeering men (and inspired by real anti-suffrage songs of the period), is followed by the stylized proper-lady tableau of “Suffrage School” and then the naturalism of “Alice and Carrie,” which establishes the dynamic between Catt and the upstart Paul.As for the diverse casting, Kelly said, “something that was important to me was, how does the musical hold space for all these characters, and allow the perspective to shift, without feeling like it’s checking boxes?”Actors also helped push beyond the boxes. James, a Tony winner for “The Book of Mormon” who has been close with Taub since they both appeared in “Twelfth Night,” had been singing Wells’s number “Wait My Turn” for years at workshops and benefits. But after the summer of 2020, she said, “I started feeling pretty conflicted, and I think Shaina did, too.”In Taub’s initial script, Wells (who actually intersected very little with Paul or the National Woman’s Party after 1913) sang the song, then largely disappeared. “I really encouraged Shaina to find ways to give Ida more of a voice,” James said.Taub added a second-act song for Wells, in which she reflects on the personal costs of her battles. She also reworked a scene between Wells and the genteel Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, in which they debate the merits of the inside game (“dignified agitation,” as Terrell, played by Cassondra James, puts it) versus confrontation.It’s a mirror of the conflict between Paul and Catt, with its interplay of sharp disagreement and mutual respect. “Two people can have the same goal, but totally different ideas about how to get there,” James said.“Suffs” is opening in the same theater where “Hamilton” — and America’s runaway romance with the roguish “ten dollar founding father” — was born. Are audiences open to seeing Taub’s feminist founding mothers as similarly three-dimensional heroes, shaded by their flaws rather than simply damned by them?“Suffs” may be about women. But their long fight for the vote, Taub said, can stand in for any of the great social movements in American history, all of which were also messy, fractious, imperfect — and unfinished.She cited a line from the last song: “Don’t forget our failure. Don’t forget our fight.”“You can hold both truths in your hand,” she said. More

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    John Korty, Director of ‘Miss Jane Pittman,’ Is Dead at 85

    He was best known for a series of ambitious television movies that examined racism, disability and other social issues.John Korty, a director best known for ambitious made-for-television projects, including the 1974 film “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” which won nine Emmy Awards, died on March 9 at his home in Port Reyes Station, Calif. He was 85.His brother, Doug Korty, said the cause was vascular dementia.“Miss Jane Pittman,” a CBS presentation based on the Ernest J. Gaines novel in which a Black woman recounts more than a century’s worth of memories, featured an acclaimed performance by Cicely Tyson as the title character. John J. O’Connor, reviewing the film in The New York Times, called it “a splendid night for television.”“John Korty’s direction is cool and restrained,” he added, “never underlining and always avoiding what could easily be mawkish.”The Emmys the film won included one for Mr. Korty for best directing of a single program, comedy or drama.Mr. Korty on the set of the 1974 television movie  “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” which went on to win nine Emmy Awards, including one for Mr. Korty.via Korty Family Cicely Tyson as the title character, a woman who recounts more than a century’s worth of memories, in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”Bettmann via GettyMr. Korty also won both an Oscar and an Emmy for “Who Are the Debolts? And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?,” a documentary about a couple whose many children included hard-to-place adopted ones with disabilities or other challenges. American television networks weren’t interested in the documentary when Mr. Korty first offered it; it was initially released as a film in Japan, then shown at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1977, where it received a standing ovation.That brought it an Oscar for best documentary feature, but Mr. Korty still wanted to get it in front of TV audiences. With some persuasion from Henry Winkler, whose role as Fonzie on “Happy Days” had made him one of the network’s biggest stars, ABC finally broadcast a cut-down version in late 1978; that version won the Emmy for outstanding individual achievement for an informational program.Although Mr. Korty also directed lighter fare and the occasional Hollywood feature, including “Oliver’s Story,” the 1978 follow-up to the hit 1970 movie “Love Story,” he gravitated toward television movies that touched on social issues.In addition to “Miss Jane Pittman,” which covered a century’s worth of the Black experience, he directed “Go Ask Alice” (1973), about teenage drug addiction; “Farewell to Manzanar” (1976), about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; “Second Sight: A Love Story” (1984), about a blind woman; “Resting Place” (1986), about a family’s attempt to have a Black officer who was killed in Vietnam buried in his hometown’s all-white cemetery; and “Eye on the Sparrow” (1987), about a blind couple trying to adopt.“I wouldn’t give up television movies,” Mr. Korty told The Times in 1986. “There is nothing like the response you get. Fifty million people saw ‘Jane Pittman’ in one night. That’s very different from even the biggest hit movie.”Mr. Korty on the set of “Farewell to Manzanar,” his 1976 TV movie about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.via Korty FamilyIn the best of his television work, Mr. Korty sought to illuminate subjects and perspectives not often addressed in the mainstream. In an essay he wrote for The San Francisco Examiner in 1978, he said that was his hope for the “Debolts” film, in which he showed the children’s disabilities in unflinching detail, rare for TV at the time.“It seems that most physically handicapped people have their greatest struggles not with their crutches, but with their identities — being accepted as individuals rather than as a distasteful class of outcasts,” he wrote. “We hope that by the end of our film the audience will forget who is on crutches and who isn’t.”John Van Cleave Korty was born on June 22, 1936, in Lafayette, Ind. His father, Richard, was an engineer, and his mother, Mary (Van Cleave) Korty, was a nurse.“I started drawing when I was 5 years old,” Mr. Korty said at a 2013 panel discussion of his work, “and for many, many years I thought I was going to be what you’d call a commercial artist.”But in 11th grade a teacher showed the class some of the innovative animated films of Norman McLaren, and Mr. Korty found a new interest. He soon made his first animated film, but, as he told The Abilene Reporter-News of Texas in 1986, he couldn’t afford new film stock. Instead he somehow obtained a reel of a Mickey Mouse cartoon and dumped bleach on it in his parents’ bathtub to erase the images, then hand-painted images on its 2,600 frames. The trick worked, he said, but it took him a week to scrub the bathtub clean.He earned a bachelor’s degree at Antioch College, where he continued to experiment with animation. In about 1963 he settled in the Bay Area, where he set up his own studio. One of his earliest professional efforts, “Breaking the Habit,” a documentary about smoking produced in cooperation with the American Cancer Society, was nominated for the short-subject documentary Oscar in 1965.Mr. Korty directed the independent features “The Crazy-Quilt” (1966), “Funnyman” (1967) and “riverrun” (1968) before he made his first television movies, drawing some critical acclaim and the attention of other young filmmakers who were interested in working outside the Hollywood system. Among them were Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, who came to visit his setup in 1968.“They showed up in two station wagons, and when Francis walked in, his mouth dropped open,” Mr. Korty told The Marin Independent Journal in 2011. “He said, ‘My God, you’ve done exactly what we want to do: get out of Hollywood and set up a studio. If you can do it, we can do it.’”A year later Mr. Coppola and Mr. Lucas would found their American Zoetrope studio in San Francisco. Mr. Korty had an office there for several years and went on to work with Mr. Lucas. He and Charles Swenson directed “Twice Upon a Time,” an animated feature made with Mr. Lucas’s Lucasfilm company in 1983, and the next year Mr. Korty directed “Caravan of Courage,” a Lucasfilm TV movie based on the Ewok creatures from the “Star Wars” movie “Return of the Jedi.”“I wouldn’t give up television movies,” Mr. Korty said in 1986. “There is nothing like the response you get. Fifty million people saw ‘Jane Pittman’ in one night. That’s very different from even the biggest hit movie.”via Korty FamilyThough the success of “Miss Jane Pittman” brought Mr. Korty offers to direct Hollywood films, he rarely accepted. “Oliver’s Story,” which he directed in 1978, was an exception. It was a bigger-budget movie than he normally attempted, with big stars — Ryan O’Neal, Candice Bergen — and Mr. Korty wasn’t entirely comfortable.“It’s the first movie I’ve ever made that I’ve felt not a part of,” he told The Sacramento Bee in December 1978 as the early reviews, many of them unflattering, were coming in. “I know I put things in this movie that I liked and the audience wouldn’t — and vice versa.”Mr. Korty’s marriages to Carol Tweedie in 1959 and Beulah Chang in 1965 ended in divorce. In 1989 he married Jane Silvia, who survives him, along with his brother; a sister, Nancy Korty; two sons from his second marriage, Jonathan and David; a son from his third marriage, Gabriel; and three grandchildren. More

  • 75 Shares159 Views

    in Theater

    For Female Directors, a Generational Shift

    In Germany, a country with few theater leaders who aren’t men, professional success has often meant becoming one of the guys. Now, a new group of women are developing their own way. dFRANKFURT — Of the 24 new productions expected on Schauspiel Frankfurt’s three stages this season, two-thirds will be directed by women. This is an astonishing statistic in Germany, where gender inequality is still pronounced across the vast theater landscape. Despite advances in recent decades, women run only a small fraction of the 142 publicly owned playhouses, and, according to the latest available statistics, in 2016 only 20 percent of theater directors were female.Two current productions at Schauspiel Frankfurt, the municipal theater company, show how the theatrical ground here has shifted over a generation to allow more confident explorations of female self-expression. Both plays lie far outside the standard repertoire, which is consistent with a general trend in German theater to break out of the narrow canon of acknowledged masterpieces. But only one seems to provide a uniquely female perspective on the work in question.Claudia Bauer, born in 1966, is one of German theater’s most acclaimed and prolific directors. A fixture on stages throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland for the past quarter-century, she enjoys a certain seniority among Germany’s female theatermakers. But both formally and thematically, her productions often feel very similar to those of her male colleagues. Like them, she has spent much of her career sifting through the (mostly male) theatrical canon: Some of her most acclaimed recent productions have been based on plays by Brecht, Molière and Tennessee Williams.At Schauspiel Frankfurt, Bauer has turned her attention to Luis Buñuel’s 1972 film, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise,” adapted for the stage in a surprisingly faithful version by the writing team PeterLicht and SE Struck.In a memorable sequence from Buñuel’s surreal Oscar-winning movie, a band of affluent Parisians, trying in vain to eat a meal together, inexplicably find themselves dining onstage at a theater. That scene takes on a heightened degree of absurdity when it is recreated in Bauer’s antic production. The audience, of course, has been there all along. Getting the actors onstage to acknowledge the spectators’ presence could come off as an all too obvious gag, but here it’s a subversive joke that suggests a sort of mutual recognition between the out-of-touch elites portrayed onstage and the affluent theatergoers of Frankfurt, Germany’s financial center.It is one of the inspired moments when Bauer finds clever ways to translate Buñuel’s mischievous provocations to the stage. Her production eschews the film’s ironic detachment and pretense of normalcy in favor of something far more energetic and flamboyant. With a gypsy swing soundtrack and live video projections by Jan Isaak Voges that roam Andreas Auerbach’s set — an upscale residence inside a giant white container — the production feels halfway between a sitcom and a revue.Aided by a nimble eight-person cast that forms a tight unit, Bauer turns the digressive and episodic film into a gleefully absurd carnival where farce coexists with horror.Like Buñuel’s actors, Bauer’s maintain their composure in the face of increasingly perplexing circumstances. But they also preen and pose with evident relish, performing as much for one another as for the audience. “Discreet Charm” was a hit here when it opened this month, and some local critics wondered whether it might be a contender for next year’s edition of Theatertreffen, an annual celebration of the best German-language theater, to which Bauer has been invited four times. The festival recently instituted a quota to help promote the work of female directors: At least half of the 10 shows chosen must be female-led. However, the past few years have seen the dawning of a new generation of bold and self-confident female theatermakers, and I doubt that Theatertreffen’s quota, intended as a corrective, will be necessary much longer.“I and I,” written by Else Lasker-Schüler some 80 years ago and directed by Christina Tscharyiski, also at the Schauspiel Frankfurt.Robert SchittkoMany of the emerging female directors in Germany seem more committed to work that explicitly engages with feminist and post-feminist topics than directors of Bauer’s generation, who were pioneers in a male-dominated landscape where professional success often meant becoming one of the guys. Along with addressing issues of women’s representation, history and psychology, some of these younger directors — including artists from all over Europe, as well as the United States and Israel — are creating exciting stage aesthetics to address those themes.On Schauspiel Frankfurt’s smaller stage, the Kammerspiele, the Austrian-Bulgarian director Christina Tscharyiski, 33, has bravely taken a stab at one of the strangest, most obscure and most difficult-to-perform German plays of the 20th century: “I and I” (“Ichundich”) by Else Lasker-Schüler.That German-Jewish Expressionist poet and artist, who fled the Nazis in 1933, called her sprawling work, in six acts and an epilogue, a “hell play.” Composed in 1940 and 1941, “I and I” is an infernal romp that features characters from Goethe’s “Faust” and real-life personalities, including Lasker-Schüler herself and much of the Nazi high command. The unlikely group meets up in a version of hell somewhere in Jerusalem, which is where the author lived in unhappy exile until her death in 1945.The play was long ignored as an unperformable oddity: It made it to the stage for the first time only in 1979. In the barely four decades since, productions have been exceedingly rare. Tscharyiski’s take on “I and I,” stylishly designed by Verena Dengler and Dominique Wiesbauer, resembles a kind of Dadaesque haunted house where characters in Hasidic robes, medieval garb and Nazi uniforms wander a stage strewn with ash.Unfortunately, the production’s charms are largely visual, and the shortened performing version of the text fails to cohere in a compelling thematic, narrative or poetic way. Despite inspired performances by Friederike Ott as the poet, Lasker-Schüler’s alter ego, and Florian Mania and Tanja Merlin Graf as a pair of rival Mephistos, the demon who bargains for Faust’s soul, the production seems both overstuffed and underdeveloped, and much longer than its 75 minutes. Yet despite the production’s limitations, it feels momentous that this complex work is being reconsidered 80 years after it was written. And it’s heartening to know that a director as prodigiously talented as Tscharyiski can be enlisted to aid in our rediscovery of a key 20th-century artist whose theater works are too little known.Der diskrete Charme der Bourgeoisie. Directed by Claudia Bauer. Schauspiel Frankfurt, through May 1.Ichundich. Directed by Christina Tscharyiski. Schauspiel Frankfurt, through April 17. More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    Late Night Approves of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s High Ratings

    A poll found strong support for the judge’s Supreme Court nomination, but “speechmaking and hissy-fitting” continued in the Senate, said Jimmy Kimmel.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Upon ApprovalWednesday was the final day of questions for the Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, or, as Jimmy Kimmel referred to it, “another day of grandstanding, speechmaking and hissy-fitting in the Senate.”A newly released poll, conducted before the hearings began, found that 58 percent of Americans supported Judge Jackson’s appointment to the court.“It is the most support a Jackson has had since ‘Thriller’ came out.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Right now, Biden’s like, ‘Hey, I nominated you — it’s only fair that we split that approval rating, come on.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, the only way it could have been higher is if she ended today with a water bottle flip.” — JIMMY FALLON“She said the fact that she was even nominated shows how far we’ve come as a country, and so some of the Republican senators on the committee have been hard at work to show how far we haven’t.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“This is how low the United States government has fallen. We’ve gone from ‘Let’s put a man on the moon within the decade’ to ‘Maybe someday we can get at least one Republican to vote for a qualified woman.’” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Uninvited Edition)“In other news, despite the current state of affairs, Vladimir Putin is still planning to attend the G20 summit with other world leaders in Bali this fall — which explains this year’s theme: ‘Awkward.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Seriously, what is he doing? It’s like getting kicked out of high school and then showing up for the reunion.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, it’ll backfire on Putin when he realizes it’s not a G20 summit; it’s an intervention.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth Watching“The Late Late Show” celebrated Reggie Watts’s 50th birthday by giving him a racecar bed.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightGwen Stefani will pop by Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutThe artists Mónica Arreola, left, and Andrew Roberts, selected for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2022 Biennial, titled “Quiet as It’s Kept,” at the graffitied border wall in Tijuana.Alejandro Cossio for The New York TimesThe curators of this year’s Whitney Biennial expanded their reach to include Mexican perspectives on the border. More

  • 163 Shares169 Views

    in Television

    Rachel Zegler, ‘West Side Story’ Star, Is Invited to the Oscars After All

    On Sunday she revealed on Instagram that she had not been invited to the ceremony, prompting an outcry. She has since been added as a presenter.It looks as if Rachel Zegler, who plays Maria in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” is going to the Oscars.She has been invited to be a presenter at the Oscars, and Disney is working to rearrange the production schedule on her current project, a live-action version of “Snow White,” to make it happen, according to two people briefed on the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid a conflict with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hosts the Oscars.How the arrangement came together provides a glimpse into how the Hollywood gears can sometimes grind.It started on Sunday, when Zegler, 20, posted a photo of herself in a blue gown on Instagram. A follower commented, “Can’t wait to see what you’ll be wearing on Oscar night.”Zegler replied that she had not received an invitation to the ceremony, during which “West Side Story” is up for seven awards. The ceremony will be broadcast this Sunday on ABC from Los Angeles. ABC is owned by Disney, which released the film last year.“I’m not invited,” she wrote, “so sweatpants and my boyfriend’s flannel.”She added that she would support the film from her couch. “I hope some last minute miracle occurs and I can celebrate our film in person,” she wrote, “but hey, that’s how it goes sometimes, I guess.”The challenge involves much more than invitations. Zegler is filming “Snow White” in London, and getting her to the Oscars and back will require Disney to rework schedules for hundreds of cast and crew members. The film, already on a tight schedule because of delays related to the coronavirus pandemic, is a $200 million production.A spokeswoman for the academy, which confirmed Zegler’s addition to the presenter lineup in a statement later on Wednesday, declined to comment. A representative for Zegler did not respond to a request for comment.Word that Zegler had not been invited to the ceremony drew a swift backlash from her followers and others on social media, including Russ Tamblyn, who played Riff, the leader of the Jets street gang, in the original “West Side Story” in 1961. They wondered why a lead actress in a film that had received a best picture nomination would not be invited to the ceremony.The film’s Oscar nominations include best picture, best director for Spielberg and best supporting actress for Ariana DeBose. Zegler, who is not nominated for an Oscar, won a Golden Globe for her role.Vimal Patel More