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    Neil Marcus, Whose Art Illuminated Disability, Dies at 67

    A playwright and actor, he saw his life as performance art. He was best known for his play “Storm Reading.”At each performance of his play “Storm Reading,” the writer and actor Neil Marcus offered his audience a reminder: “Disability is not a brave struggle or courage in the face of adversity. Disability is an art. It’s an ingenious way to live.”Mr. Marcus, who had dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions and affects speech, starred in the play, which comically illuminated how he passed through the world in a typical week, through vignettes of him conversing with grocery shoppers, doctors and passers-by.In 1988, when the show had its premiere at the Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara, Calif., people more often than not looked away from those with disabilities. “We’ve always been taught as kids we don’t point, don’t laugh, just basically ignore them,” Rod Lathim, the director of “Storm Reading,” said in an interview.In contrast, “Storm Reading” encouraged audiences to laugh with Mr. Marcus about his experiences.“Neil invited and welcomed, and in some cases demanded that people look,” Mr. Lathim said. “And so he brought them into his reality, which was not a reality of disability; it was a reality of his definition of life.”The success and longevity of the play, which toured throughout the country until 1996, turned Mr. Marcus into a pioneer of the disability culture movement. He called his work a reclamation of personhood in a world determined to deny people with disabilities their autonomy.Mr. Marcus died on Nov. 17 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 67.His sister Kendra Marcus said the cause was dystonia.In 1987, Mr. Marcus and his brother Roger contacted Mr. Lathim, the director of Access Theater, a Santa Barbara company that regularly mounted plays featuring disabled artists. Neil Marcus sent over samples of his writing and asked Mr. Lathim if the theater would be interested in adapting them.Their conversation led to the genesis of “Storm Reading.” Mr. Marcus, his brother and Mr. Lathim worked together to draft the play, whose cast of three originally also included Roger as “The Voice,” who portrayed Neil’s thoughts during his interactions (the role was later played by Matthew Ingersoll), as well as a sign language interpreter.The show was physically taxing for Mr. Marcus. But it also invigorated him.“There’s no drug, there’s no treatment, that is, in my opinion, as powerful as the interaction between a live audience and an artist on the stage,” Mr. Lathim said. “And watching Neil transform from that was astounding.”Scenes from “Storm Reading” were filmed for NBC as part of a 1989 television special about disability, “From the Heart,” hosted by the actor Michael Douglas. The cast reunited in 2018 for a performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.Neil Marcus was born on Jan. 3, 1954, in Scarsdale, N.Y., the youngest of five children of Wil Marcus, who worked in public relations, and Lydia (Perera) Marcus, an actor. When Neil was 6, the family moved to Ojai, Calif.Neil was 8 when he learned he had dystonia, and he attempted suicide at 14 after a taxing series of surgeries, he said in a 2006 oral history interview for the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.But counseling gave him confidence. He attended Ojai Valley School, where he was often spotted zooming around in a golf cart. After graduating from high school as valedictorian in 1971, he traveled to Laos; when he returned, he hitchhiked around the West Coast and eventually took classes at Fairhaven College, part of Western Washington University, and elsewhere. He moved to Berkeley in 1980 and became active in the disability activist community there.He explored art through various partnerships. With professional dancers, he participated in “contact improvisation” performances, which eschewed formal choreography and instead followed the seemingly frenetic movements of Mr. Marcus’s dystonia.He also wrote widely. He worked with the University of Michigan professor and activist Petra Kuppers on the Olimpias Performance Research Project, an artist collective that spotlights performers with disabilities in performances and documentaries. Their conversations on disability as art were published in a 2009 essay, “Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance.” The two also wrote a book, “Cripple Poetics: A Love Story” (2008), which features poetry and photography highlighting the physicality and sensuality of disability.The Neil Marcus Papers, including his essays, poems and correspondence, are held at the Bancroft Library.In addition to his sister Kendra, Mr. Marcus is survived by another sister, Wendy Marcus, and his brothers, Roger and Russell.In 2014 the Smithsonian National Museum of American History commissioned Mr. Marcus to write a poem dedicating its online exhibition “EveryBody: An Artifact History of Disability in America.”His poem began: “If there was a country called disabled, I would be from there./I live disabled culture, eat disabled food, make disabled love,/cry disabled tears, climb disabled mountains and tell disabled stories.” More

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    Sharon Gless Admires Eddie Redmayne and L.A.’s Union Station

    The “Cagney & Lacey” star discusses her unflinching new memoir and why Jean Smart’s performance in “Hacks” gives her hope.In 2013, with her time on cable TV’s “Burn Notice” coming to an end, Sharon Gless was summoned to CBS. “Welcome home, Sharon,” said Nina Tassler, then the president of entertainment, extending her hand.“I was so touched because I had done ‘Cagney & Lacey’ there, and it was my home for many years,” Gless recalled in a recent video interview. “But I didn’t even know if they’d remember.”She waited for the offer of a series. Instead, Tassler told Gless that she thought she had in book in her.“I dream a lot,” said Gless, “but this was not something I dreamed of.”It took seven years, but Gless has come clean and then some in “Apparently There Were Complaints,” a hilarious yet often affecting account of her metamorphosis: from the granddaughter of a film industry lawyer into the Emmy-winning actress behind one of TV’s most iconic characters, the New York City cop Christine Cagney. The book’s title captures its unflinching spirit: It’s how Gless explained to a friend her decision to go to rehab, not long after Cagney struggled with her own alcoholism on the show.Gless hated the process of writing the memoir, she admitted, but she loves being an author now that it’s done. And while she’s not sure if she has another book in her, she does believe that she has one more series.In the glow of a light-festooned palm in her home on Fisher Island, Fla. — “My husband’s birthday is at Christmas so he hates Christmas trees because it upstages him,” she laughed, referring to the “Cagney & Lacey” executive producer Barney Rosenzweig — Gless took what she called “sentimental travels through my life.”Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Ed Ruscha’s “Pumping Sand” With my “Cagney & Lacey” money, I was able to purchase a home in Malibu, and I bought it from a very famous producer, Doug Cramer. Doug was an art collector, and he left behind a piece of art for me as a gift. It was an Ed Ruscha graphic, and he said, “It must stay in this beach house,” and I said, “Well, thank you.”I’m sure it’s bad taste to discuss money, but there was an Ed Ruscha show in New York last year and the Ed Ruscha Society asked if I would loan my graphic to them, and I said, “Of course. Do you insure it?” And they said, “Yes, the value of it is around $400,000.”2. Union Station in Los Angeles I’m born and raised in Los Angeles. Union Station is a spectacular building, and as a child I used to go there to pick up my grandmother and other people who traveled across the United States. You’d see people always dressed so beautifully to travel in those days. I still enjoy going today and sitting on those highly, highly polished wooden benches, and just watching. It’s a tender spot.3. Broadway Classics at the Hollywood Bowl My grandfather had a box at the Hollywood Bowl, and he never used it. So he’d give the tickets to us, and my dad would take me to watch the Los Angeles symphony orchestra in that gorgeous setting at sunset. My two favorite nights were a Rodgers and Hammerstein night and a Lerner and Loewe night. I was enraptured.I constantly listened on my 33 1/3 records to every musical I could get my hands on. I knew every word. I always win bets with [my “Cagney & Lacey” co-star] Tyne Daly, who has a Tony, on lyrics. She’s never won once.4. “Gypsy” I saw Tyne do “Gypsy” four times — three in New York and once in Los Angeles. And in my humble opinion, I think she was the greatest Rose. We always think of musicals as being light but that performance was so desperate because Rose was desperate.5. Audra McDonald All the big Broadway greats were invited to sing at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Hillary was about to be [nominated] and everybody showed up. Tyne and I were invited. Certainly Tyne qualifies as a Broadway singer, and I was invited to go along because I was Cagney. That’s when I met Audra. She has a world-class voice and a world-class soul. I’ve gotten know her since that evening, and I think she’s the best we have.6. Eddie Redmayne I was introduced to him as Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything.” He won the Oscar for it. And then the next year he did “The Danish Girl,” and he should have won the Oscar again because he was absolutely brilliant. You never catch him acting. It’s such a thrill to watch talent like that.7. “Hacks” “Hacks” is a comedy, but Jean Smart could break my heart. And she’s an older actress, and she gives me such hope that that kind of career is still possible. There should be older women starring in shows on television. Older actresses have so much more to say.8. “Red Dragon” by Thomas Harris I love books that really frighten me. “Red Dragon” is where Hannibal Lecter was first introduced — it wasn’t “Silence of the Lambs” — and the description of him, I was petrified and I loved every moment of it. There was a quietness to him. A satisfaction. And he was quick! He could be the most calm — I don’t know if tender is the right word because he was so evil. He could move faster than any other human being, and end a life in a second.9. Johnny Mathis Johnny Mathis formed my life. As a teenager, I used to dream about falling in love and I believed it would all happen because of these beautiful songs he’d sing. The first one that I ever heard of his was “Maria,” which had emerged from “West Side Story.” The way he does it is like a choir singing. He makes the sound of her name sound so gorgeous. I have every album he’s ever made. He’s just magnificent.10. “Auntie Mame” When I was 14, my parents were divorcing and I was home from boarding school. My mother didn’t know what to do with me so she took me to Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to see “Auntie Mame” every day. I’d sit there in the first-row balcony with my feet up on the brass railing and eat buttered popcorn, and I memorized every line. Rosalind Russell just did something to me. I was smart enough to know I could never play Mame. But she was everything I wanted to be. More

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    ‘Ain’t Too Proud’ will close on Broadway as Covid takes its toll.

    “Ain’t Too Proud,” a jukebox musical about the Temptations that opened on Broadway in early 2019, will close on Jan. 16, the show’s producers said on Tuesday.The musical is the fourth Broadway show to announce a closing in the last eight days, as the spike in coronavirus cases from the Omicron variant has deepened the financial woes of an already pandemic-damaged theater industry.Last week, the musicals “Jagged Little Pill” and “Waitress,” as well as the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man” announced that they had closed without so much as a farewell performance — all were already on hiatus because of coronavirus cases among cast or crew.The Broadway production of “Ain’t Too Proud,” about the powerhouse Motown group, has not run since Dec. 15, citing coronavirus cases. It is planning to resume on Tuesday, Dec. 28, and hoping to run for three more weeks before closing for good.The musical also has a touring production that had to postpone shows at the Kennedy Center in Washington because of coronavirus cases; it is scheduled to have its delayed start on Tuesday night, as well. More

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    On Broadway, Newly Vital Understudies Step Into the Spotlight

    As Omicron spreads, shows are relying on replacement actors more than ever. And productions without enough of them have had to cancel performances.One evening in November, just a few hours before showtime, stage management told LaQuet Sharnell Pringle to prepare. A practiced swing, Pringle covers the female parts in the ensemble of the new Broadway musical “Mrs. Doubtfire.” She also understudies the role of Wanda, the social worker usually played by Charity Angél Dawson.The musical was still in previews. Pringle had never really rehearsed as Wanda. But she had studied the script, mastered the choreography and watched dozens of performances. So when Dawson called out (for a reason unrelated to Covid-19), Pringle went on.“It’s the job,” she later explained. “It’s the gig — to be able to be thrown on in a moment’s notice and to be able to deliver.”Swings and understudies are the undersung heroes of Broadway theater. (Off Broadway and regional theater productions may or may not hire them, depending on a production’s budget and priorities.) If a curtain rises when one or more actors has suffered illness or injury, that’s because a swing or an understudy has stepped in, sometimes with just a few minutes to get into costume, sometimes in a costume that isn’t even theirs. At a time of pandemic uncertainty, their contributions have become even more essential.For those unfamiliar with the terminology: Understudies can fill in for one or more of a play or musical’s principal characters. They may regularly appear onstage in a smaller role or they may spend most nights backstage, performing only if needed. Swings have no regular role in a show. Instead they cover up to a dozen ensemble parts in a musical, each with its separate vocal and dance track. Swings may also cover a principal character or two. (Some shows also use alternates, who take over principal roles for a number of performances on a predetermined basis.)In the past week, about half of the shows on Broadway canceled some number of performances. Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the trade association the Broadway League, seemed to blame certain understudies for these cancellations in an interview published Monday in The Hollywood Reporter. “My educated guess is the newer shows maybe have understudies that aren’t as efficient in delivering the role as the lead is,” she said.St. Martin quickly apologized, but not before fans and stars had leapt — or maybe, grand jetéed — to the defense of swings and understudies. “*My* educated guess is that when employers consistently reject our efforts to negotiate for more swings, understudies and sub stage managers, because the industry model has grown dependent on people working sick/injured, it’s short sighted and unsafe,” Kate Shindle, the president of Actors’ Equity, wrote on Twitter.In an interview a few hours later she expanded on those comments. “I hope that Broadway producers will be as proactive as possible in making sure that there is adequate coverage,” Shindle said. “Covid has changed how that looks.” Shows that don’t have enough coverage are forced to cancel.Hiring practices aren’t the only conventions worth re-examining. Historically, swings and understudies have not typically received dedicated rehearsal time until after a show’s opening night. Thursday night, after the fourth preview of “The Music Man,” Hugh Jackman saluted the understudy Kathy Voytko for going on for an absent Sutton Foster, despite having first rehearsed the part of Marian Paroo earlier that day.Without their own rehearsal schedule, swings and understudies have had to learn scenes, songs and choreography by observation and osmosis. (And in reverse, as they were often relegated to watching from the house.) If they had to go on in previews, like Voytko did, their castmates knew to “shove with love,” nudging them toward their correct positions.But the pandemic has encouraged a reckoning with the “show must go on” culture. Graham Bowen, a longtime swing for “The Book of Mormon,” described the mood backstage as, “Hey, if you’re just not feeling great, don’t come to work. It’s OK. We got this.” He referred to nights when only the Playbill-listed cast performs as “unicorns now.” (In mid-December, Bowen tested positive for Covid-19 and had to quarantine, so other swings, many of whom he has trained, are performing in his place.)In response, a few shows are rehearsing understudies earlier, sometimes right alongside the main cast or with the principal director rather than an assistant. “I told them from the jump, ‘We have to all trust each other because there’s all this intimate work. You can’t just come in halfway through,’” said Robert O’Hara, the director of “Slave Play,” which includes several sex scenes. And there is also a drive to allow some understudies to deliver distinct performances, rather than simply copying the work of listed performers.Rehearsal makes some aspects of the job easier. But it doesn’t alleviate the anxiety of not knowing whether you will go on. Or the weirdness of earning a Broadway salary when you may not set foot on a Broadway stage for weeks at a time. Or the feeling that you may be disappointing ticket holders if they see your name printed on a Playbill slip.Despite her longtime career as a swing for “The Phantom of the Opera,” Janet Saia said she once returned a ticket when she arrived at “The Producers” and found that Nathan Lane was out. “That show is all about him!” she said.Yet understudies and swings are always hired because they can do the role — or the many roles — with the virtuosity that Broadway demands.“We’re the last resort,” said Reynaldo Piniella, an understudy on “Trouble in Mind.” “But I do know, watching my understudies rehearse, these people are incredible artists.”On Wednesday night, about 10 minutes before curtain, Piniella got his own call. Though he had already booked a last-minute job on a different Broadway show, “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” he hurried to the “Trouble in Mind” theater, stepped into a costume he had never worn and made his entrance. “I bumped into pretty much every piece of furniture on that stage,” he said. “But I was prepared to tell the story.”In late November and early December, a few weeks before the current string of cancellations, I interviewed a number of swings and understudies about the rewards, stresses and peculiarities of the job and how Covid-19 has altered waiting in the wings. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Galen J. Williams of “Slave Play” started rehearsals much earlier than usual for an understudy, partly because the play contains quite a bit of intimate work.George Etheredge for The New York TimesGalen J. WilliamsUnderstudy, “Slave Play”What makes you take an understudy job?I’m an Aries, we thrive on spontaneity. It keeps the job exciting, never really knowing when you have to turn the light switch on. Every time you go on, it feels like it could be the last time. So let me really give it my all, go full in and have a good time.Andrea SyglowskiUnderstudy, “Pass Over”What was your rehearsal process like?From the first week, we rehearsed with the main cast, warmed up with them. We were never under any obligation to do exactly what the main cast was doing. We were actually encouraged to create our own characters.The show ended its run before you went on. How did that feel?It was really upsetting. It became increasingly possible that I was going to go on at the end of the run. So the anxiety and the tension increased. I was so excited to be a part of the first Broadway play back. I wanted to be able to show my work. I’m sure every understudy feels that way.“My fantasy is that the actor I’m understudying books some big Marvel movie,” said Reynaldo Piniella, an understudy on “Trouble in Mind.” George Etheredge for The New York TimesReynaldo PiniellaUnderstudy, “Trouble in Mind”How do you feel about understudying?I equate it to being the sixth man on a basketball team. You’re not a starter, but you understand that you play a very vital role. When your number is called, you want to make sure you’re on your game. My fantasy is that the actor I’m understudying books some big Marvel movie. This show is my Broadway debut, and I would love to get on that stage at least one time, feel what that’s like.LaQuet Sharnell PringleSwing, “Mrs. Doubtfire”How do you keep all of those roles in your body and head?I physically need to do choreography every single day, I physically need to say words out loud every day so that it’s a part of my muscles. I will do cross training to make sure I have the stamina to do all of the dance choreography. I increase my voice work so that I am strong enough to sing the songs no matter what. I generally read the script two to three times a week.If you’re not on, do you ever relax backstage?It makes me feel weird if I’m just chilling out. As I’m watching the show, I try to say the lines in real time. I’m trying to go over steps that I want to perfect and really understand. I wait until I get home and I’m in my Epsom salts bath to relax.Graham BowenSwing and co-dance captain, “The Book of Mormon”How does it feel to receive that last-minute call?I have experienced the stage manager coming into a dressing room and saying, “Hey, we need you for the next scene.” And that scene would be in a matter of minutes. It’s kind of one of the best parts of it. You have this adrenaline rush. It’s definitely nerve-racking. But you can ride that and really have a wonderful experience.Janet Saia outside the Majestic Theater, where she’s an understudy in “The Phantom of the Opera.” “You make mistakes, but then you say to yourself, ‘I’m covering eight roles, give me a break,’” she said.George Etheredge for The New York TimesJanet SaiaSwing, “The Phantom of the Opera”What makes a great swing?As a swing, you have to have the fantastic five. First, you have to be fast, you have to learn things fast, you have to adjust to change fast. Second, you have to be fabulous at what you do. The next one is focused, really, really focused. And flexible. And then the last one is fastidious, you’ve got to pay attention to all the details and make sure they’re all in there.With so many roles to cover, have you ever mixed them up?There’s a number in “Phantom,” “Don Juan.” It has all the people I cover in the ensemble around a table with props. One time I went out there and I had the jug and everything. Two seconds before the curtain goes up, somebody came in and said, “That’s my jug.” Then I realized, I’m not this part. Instantly, I had to switch my brain and go into the correct part. You make mistakes, but then you say to yourself, “I’m covering eight roles, give me a break.”Cameron Adams is an ensemble member and understudy in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which recently resumed performances after a 10-day hiatus prompted by coronavirus cases.George Etheredge for The New York TimesCameron AdamsEnsemble member and understudy, “Mrs. Doubtfire”Have you ever felt that you were disappointing an audience?I covered Kelli O’Hara in “Nice Work if You Can Get It.” Her name is above the title, people are excited to come and see Kelli O’Hara. I understand, because I want to see Kelli! I don’t think I’ve ever come off feeling, like, “Oh, my God, they hated me.” But I sometimes think, “Why do I do this to myself?” Because I get so nervous every time. That doesn’t go away.Sid Solomon of “The Play That Goes Wrong” said he has “an even greater personal sense of pride of showing up to the theater every night.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesSid SolomonUnderstudy, “The Play That Goes Wrong”Has Covid-19 made you feel differently about the job?I have an even greater personal sense of pride of showing up to the theater every night, knowing just how important having understudies is, so that nobody is ever put in a position where if they’re sick, if they’re injured, if they have a family issue, they ever have to think, I’m choosing between my well-being and whether or not a show happens that evening. I’m glad to be part of a production that’s really sort of living those values right now. More

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    What Three Broadway Shows Tell Us About Racial Progress

    The female protagonists in “Trouble in Mind,” “Caroline, or Change” and “Clyde’s” show the richness that comes from having a multitude of Black voices onstage.Now that Broadway has returned and made it through the fall, and as it deals with a raft of cancellations because of the resurgent pandemic, I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of progress. Promoted, in large part, by the racial reckoning of 2020, the theater industry has responded to criticisms about its systemic racism by featuring an impressive number of plays by Black writers or with Black leads.In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a handful of these shows: “Trouble in Mind,” “Caroline, or Change” and “Clyde’s.” Individually, their plots and period settings offer great insight into how far we’ve really come. But taken together, they reveal a full range of aesthetic and racial possibilities that exist for their African American characters once the white gaze is diminished or fully removed.My feelings largely align with the points Alice Childress makes in her 1955 play, “Trouble in Mind,” a comedy-drama about a veteran Black actress named Wiletta Mayer who, while preparing to stage an anti-lynching play called “Chaos in Belleville” for Broadway, begins to challenge the racial paternalism through which its white playwright and director insist on depicting Black Southern life. More specifically, the plot follows Wiletta’s mounting frustrations about her role as a mother who does not protect her Black son from a white mob after he tries to vote. It’s an act that seems inconceivable to Wiletta.“Trouble in Mind,” which was originally produced in Greenwich Village, did not make it to Broadway in 1957 after its white producers insisted that Childress provide a more conciliatory ending for her Black and white characters, and she refused. Now, Charles Randolph-Wright, a Black director, is overseeing the Roundabout Theater Company’s Broadway production of the show at the American Airlines Theater.In the play, Wiletta (portrayed brilliantly by LaChanze) initially accepts her character’s subservience and exaggerated Southern drawl, and the problematic messaging about civil rights in “Chaos in Belleville,” as the price she must pay in order to have one of the few parts offered to Black actors at the time. Set backstage, as Wiletta and her fellow cast members begin rehearsing with the director, Al Manners (Michael Zegen), we follow Wiletta’s progression from a woman trying to school a younger Black actor on how to ingratiate himself to white people, like Manners, who can make or break his career to a woman threatening to leave the production if her role continues to traffic in such offensive and absurd racial stereotypes.As she evolves, the audience is exposed to multiple gazes: the intimate conversations that Black performers have with one another beyond the purview of white people; the figurative masks that Black actors wear in front of their white peers and theater power brokers as a matter of professional survival; and the white gaze that Al and the other white characters don throughout the rehearsals in which they slip back and forth between declarations of how liberal they are and their racist insults.These three perspectives collide when Wiletta fully exposes Al’s racism, a climax that not only puts her career at risk but jeopardizes the future of the play. However, in Childress’s deft hands, this potential loss is not a tragedy, but rather a reversal of fortunes for Wiletta: Once Al is no longer able to determine her fate, she is able to give the performance of a lifetime — and live out her dignity in its fullness onstage.Sharon D Clarke, far left, with Nasia Thomas, Harper Miles and Nya in the musical “Caroline, or Change” at Studio 54.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI thought a lot about Wiletta’s limited theatrical options — a mammy, a maid, an emotionally repressed Southern mother — while watching Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s musical, “Caroline, or Change,” which first appeared on Broadway in 2004, and now is also being produced by the Roundabout Theater on Broadway, at Studio 54. Set in Louisiana in 1963, eight years after “Trouble in Mind” made its debut and when the civil rights movement was reaching full bloom, the musical does not focus on the major events affecting the nation at the time — the assassination of Medgar Evers, the March on Washington, or the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.Instead, “Caroline, or Change” is a semi-autobiographical exploration of how the country’s racial dynamics affected an 8-year-old boy named Noah Gellman, his middle-class Jewish American Southern family, their 39-year-old Black housekeeper Caroline Thibodeaux (played by the breathtaking Sharon D Clarke), and her three children.When we first meet Caroline, she is doing laundry in the Gellman’s basement. Physically alone, her world seems to come alive when the radio (Nasia Thomas, Nya and Harper Miles), the washing machine (Arica Jackson), and the dryer (Kevin S. McAllister) become characters onstage and provide Caroline with a sense of camaraderie and comfort that she does not share with her white employers.Public spaces are even more segregated so she finds community in the moon (N’Kenge) and the bus (McAllister again), who speak to her as well. The richness of Caroline’s life, however, is always illusory: The gaze through which we understand her story is never hers, but rather that of Noah’s as he reminisces on his childhood and his family’s (especially his stepmother Rose’s) fraught relationship with her during this turbulent time in American history.To his credit, Kushner’s script never pretends that Noah’s lens is Caroline’s. One of the musical’s most revealing scenes takes Noah’s myopic vision head-on. After Rose (Caissie Levy) tries to teach Noah a lesson by asking Caroline to take home any “change” that she finds in his pockets before she washes them, Noah imagines Caroline’s children at home, happy to spend their entire evening thinking about him and how they will spend the money. This satirical turn challenges Noah’s nostalgia, putting his racial narcissism front and center. It is also a perfect counterpoint to the professed liberalism of Al Manner’s from “Trouble in Mind” and the unacknowledged white male privilege that he wields over his cast and stage crew.And yet, “Caroline, or Change” still feels incomplete. Not because Noah and Caroline are unable to resolve their conflict or because the unrest driving the civil rights movement is nodded to through the toppling of a Confederate statue, but because for the entirety of the show Caroline remains Noah’s fantasy, and thus unknowable to us. She is not a fully realized character.Such distance, of course, is realistic. Memory is fallible and given their differences, I expected Noah to have very little access to Caroline’s inner life or imagination. But I longed to see her unmediated through his sentimentality, and truly on her own terms. Though Caroline is the protagonist of this musical (and Clarke really does own this stage), Caroline is not fully empowered, her agency limited in the story because it was not really hers in the first place.Kara Young, left, and Uzo Aduba as the title character in Lynn Nottage’s play “Clyde’s” at the Hayes Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis is not to say that I need to have an all-access pass to a Black woman’s interiority in order to appreciate the depth of her humanity. In fact, I found the title character in Lynn Nottage’s comedy “Clyde’s,” played by the ever-perfect Uzo Aduba at the Helen Hayes Theater, to be refreshingly inaccessible.The owner of a truck stop diner in Reading, Pa., Clyde also oversees the kitchen that she only staffs with formerly incarcerated men and women. Not only does she impose her exacting demands on her employees — a direct contrast to the Zen-like style of her head cook, Montrellous (the wonderful Ron Cephas Jones) — but she is the only person whose back story we never learn and who, besides her endless stream of costume changes, has no clear character arc.In other words, she is intentionally flat, a feature that Aduba’s nuanced performance leans into with wit and grit, making Clyde a rarity for a Black woman actress: an antihero. She does not have agency, she has full-fledged power. Her omnipresence is most likely a stand-in for state violence or Satan, or both. Unlike Wiletta, who needs to break free of roles that confine her, or Caroline, who, we assume, feels suffocated by the oppressive conditions of the South, Clyde is the one who traps her employees in a permanent space of unfreedom and social purgatory.“One of the things about where we are today is now we have a multitude of Black voices on the stage,” Nottage said to me during a recent interview at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “I feel the freedom to put someone onstage who isn’t perfect, who isn’t heroic, who isn’t necessarily showing the best of us, but showing an aspect of us.” In other words, Clyde’s villainy is also an aesthetic liberation for Nottage, a character that is neither born out of nor now embattled with the white gaze.Ultimately, such provocative personalities are signs of progress for us all, both on and off stage. We can only hope that such roles continue to exist — not as a one-off or in a vacuum — but as a sister among many. This is the Broadway that Wiletta Mayer really fought for as she longed to celebrate the complexity, diversity and messiness of Black life. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ and New Year’s Eve

    David Tennant stars in a new Jules Verne adaptation on PBS. And Miley Cyrus, Pete Davidson and more appear in New Year’s Eve specials.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Dec. 27-Jan. 2. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO (2019) 6 p.m. on Showtime. A drama that uses surreal imagery to comment on real issues of displacement, gentrification and income inequality, “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” centers on a young man, Jimmie (Jimmie Fails, playing a version of himself), who fights to reclaim his childhood home in a San Francisco transformed by wealth and those who wield it. “In moments,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times, “it feels as if Jimmie and his faithful artistic friend, Montgomery (Jonathan Majors, a mournful heartbreaker), are dreaming the movie into existence, pouring its surrealistic jolts and hallucinatory beauty out of their heads and straight into yours.”THE YEAR: 2021 9 p.m. on ABC. This annual year-end recap from ABC might strike some viewers as too daunting — this edition focuses on 2021, after all — but those in a reflective mood might appreciate the opportunity to look back at some of the biggest world events from the past year. Robin Roberts hosts.TuesdayBob Einstein in “The Super Bob Einstein Movie.”HBOTHE SUPER BOB EINSTEIN MOVIE (2021) 9 p.m. on HBO. Revisit the career of the comic actor and writer Bob Einstein, who died in 2019 at 76, in this feature-length documentary. After writing on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in the late 1960s, Einstein stepped in front of the camera as the character Super Dave, a parody of stuntmen like Evel Knievel. More recently, Einstein appeared alongside Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” David pays tribute to Einstein in the documentary, alongside a roster of other interviewees including Steve Martin, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Rob Reiner, J.B. Smoove and Sarah Silverman. In a succinct description of Einstein’s magic, Silverman says, “The straight man is usually what the funny man bounces off of — but he’s both.”WednesdayMURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1974) 8 p.m. on TCM. The director Sidney Lumet assembled a train full of famous actors for this classic take on the Agatha Christie story of the same name, about a billionaire’s on-rails murder. Albert Finney stars as the fictional detective Hercule Poirot, alongside Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave and Anthony Perkins. Working from a screenplay adapted by Paul Dehn, Lumet fills the story with stylistic nods to classic big-budget Hollywood movies — this is a movie that felt old school even in the mid-70s. The result, Bosley Crowther wrote in his 1974 review for The Times, is a “terrifically entertaining super-valentine” to classic whodunits.ThursdaySPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (2018) 4:30 p.m. on FX. Spider-Man once again proved his moneymaking superpowers this month with “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which brought in the third-highest opening weekend box-office receipts in Hollywood history after a period of moviegoing malaise. But the animated rethink “Into the Spider-Verse” is probably still the recent Spidey movie to beat in terms of critical reception. It imagines its hero as a Brooklyn middle schooler named Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) who takes on the bad guys with the help of a group of heroes from different dimensions. In his review for The Times, A.O. Scott called the movie “fresh and exhilarating.”FridayMiley Cyrus and Pete Davidson will host an NBC New Year’s Eve special on Friday.Vijat Mohindra/NBCNEW YEAR’S EVE SHOWS various times on several networks. While the Omicron variant has thrown many people’s New Year’s Eve plans into doubt, there’s no shortage of events on offer in the televised realm. Highlights include MILEY’S NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY HOSTED BY MILEY CYRUS AND PETE DAVIDSON, airing at 10:30 p.m. on NBC, with a slate of performers including Brandi Carlile, Billie Joe Armstrong and Saweetie; NEW YEAR’S EVE LIVE: NASHVILLE’S BIG BASH at 8 p.m. on CBS with Jason Aldean, Miranda Lambert, Darius Rucker and many more; and DICK CLARK’S PRIMETIME NEW YEAR’S ROCKIN’ EVE WITH RYAN SEACREST 2022 at 10 p.m. on ABC, with Billy Porter, Journey, Daddy Yankee, Avril Lavigne and Travis Barker, Big Boi with Sleepy Brown, and others.SaturdayGREAT PERFORMANCES FROM VIENNA: THE NEW YEAR’S CELEBRATION 2022 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The Vienna Philharmonic has long been prized for its warm, traditional “Vienna sound.” So expect to feel a disorienting sense of timelessness as it performs a New Year’s program anchored by Strauss waltzes in this celebratory concert. “It’s their obstinacy that has kept them so different, sound-wise, from the other orchestras of the world,” the conductor Zubin Mehta told The Times in 2014. “The oboes, the clarinets, the horns, the trumpets, the timpani are still the same type of instruments that their forefathers used.”Denzel Washington in “The Magnificent Seven.”Sam Emerson/MGM and Columbia PicturesTHE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (2016) 9:30 p.m. on Paramount Network. In less time than it takes him to wax poetic about the moral cost of killing in the just-released “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (“is this a dagger which I see before me?”), Denzel Washington cuts down a saloon full of bad guys in this western from Antoine Fuqua. A remake of the 1960 film of the same name — itself an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” — the movie casts Washington as a bounty hunter hired to free a town from the grip of a greedy villain (Peter Sarsgaard). He enlists the help of some other gunslingers, played by the likes of Ethan Hawke and Chris Pratt. It’s “a remake of a remake that’s as fresh as recycled recycling suggests,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. But, she added, Washington “has that ineluctable what’s-it for selling the goods no matter what their sell-by date. And he has nice help in his amusing backup team.”SundayMASTERPIECE: AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). David Tennant plays the peppy fictional adventurer Phileas Fogg in this new, family-friendly adaptation of the Jules Verne novel. Joining the quest to circumnavigate the globe are Fogg’s valet, Passepartout (Ibrahim Koma), and a young journalist (Leonie Benesch). More

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    ‘Insecure’ Finale Recap: Choosing Confidence

    By the end, Issa and her friends had learned how to embrace the unexpected.Season 5, Episode 10: ‘Everything Gonna Be, Okay?!’Dreams can come true, even if they don’t look as tidy as we envisioned them. The things that haunt you might be the things you need to explore. In the final episode of the final season of “Insecure,” we see this happen in the lives of the characters we have come to love.We start this episode where we left off in the last. Issa is on her way home with Nathan, after he almost fought Lawrence at Tiffany’s going away party. When he drops Issa off, he breaks up with her.“I was wrong — this ain’t good for me,” he tells Issa, his eyes teary. “I gotta take a step back.”He chooses his sanity over the toxicity of Issa’s messiness. It’s important to note that Nathan is looking after himself: He realizes that he is constantly triggered by Issa and he needs to check in with himself. Issa’s open-ended relationship with Lawrence seems to spill all over the place and he does not want to be a part of that. Issa seems to take the breakup in stride and goes home. She doesn’t fight it.The next day Molly wakes her with food and love. She wants to make sure her friend is OK, but she does not know that Nathan has already broken up with her. In the bathroom, Issa gets dragged by her reflection: “You’re down bad. I don’t know where you go from here. You were tripping about all these decisions and choices, just to end up here.”“I just want to fast forward to the part of my life where everything is OK,” Issa tells her reflection.That is exactly what happens next, sort of. We fast forward to Molly’s birthday. Her mother, siblings, Taurean and Taurean’s parents are at her place to celebrate her. It is the last time Molly will celebrate a birthday with her mother, but she does not know it yet. Tiffany is in town from Denver, and Kelli has a tall hunk by her side named Desmond. The girls all seemed to have moved on in life, but not Issa. She is contemplating leaving Los Angeles. Molly encourages Issa to consider her personal growth.Molly seems to have found her tribe, her community, but so has Issa. We fast forward again to Issa’s birthday, thrown at Crenshawn headquarters, which lets us know that she chose to collaborate with him instead of going to MBW. In lieu of gifts, her assistant asked people to donate to The Blocc, and her friends donated $5,000. It is clear that Issa’s community supports her. At the party, Nathan shows up, and it is the first time they are seeing each other since his fight with Lawrence. He explains his behavior and donates some money to her in person. They iron out their wrinkles. It is nice to see them accept that they are not a good fit and walk away from each other in peace and with love.This frees Issa up. Another montage of aerial shots of Los Angeles moves us forward in time again, and the girls are finally in Denver visiting Tiffany for her birthday. Tiffany hates Denver but she is also working on figuring it out. At Tiffany’s, Lawrence is haunting Issa again.“You know what I always wondered, what would you have said to Lawrence if Nathan hadn’t interrupted?” Molly asked Issa.“It’s too late, anyway!” Issa responds.“Girl it’s not too late if that’s what you really want,” Molly tells her.It is the voice in Issa’s head that tells her she can’t do the things she wants to do, that holds her back. She knows how she feels about Lawrence, yet she ignores it to be safe, to fit in, to not be out of pocket. Molly reminds her she can just do her thing.“Sometimes it’s not that hard,” Molly says.Between Molly’s mother passing away and Issa learning that Kelli is pregnant, after telling everyone that she doesn’t want to have children, something shifted in Issa. That voice became smaller. The urgency of the first few episodes seems to have tripled for Issa, who is watching her peers grow, personally and professionally.That is how Issa ended up with Lawrence by the end of “Insecure.” She let go of the ideas that she had of herself and the expectations she thought her friends had for her. It was all in Issa’s head. That is where her reflection comes in: She was always talking to the mirror because her thinking was internal. In the real world, there were no expectations.What I didn’t expect in the final episode was a wedding. Even though Molly married Taurean — and I am so happy for her — the wedding seemed like more of a celebration between Issa and Molly, the true soul-mates on the show. We see Molly walk out of a church with Taurean and hit the dance floor, but it isn’t until Issa is helping her out of her dress that we see a ceremony of sorts. Issa is unwraps the corset of Molly’s dress, tells her that she is happy for her and we get to see their relationship become even more layered.“There goes my girl,” Issa tells Lawrence at the wedding while staring at Molly.In this episode, at Issa’s birthday party, before she tries to kick it to a very handsome man, Kelli yells out:“She woke up today and chose confidence!”May we all learn from Kelli, Issa, Tiffany and Molly, who each came to realize, through many tough trials and errors, that opening yourself up to the unexpected is a form of strength. Resisting such matters, whether it is a boyfriend that had a child during a breakup, a move to a place outside of what you know, changing your mind about wanting children or finally letting your guard down, does not lead to a full life — we must remain open as people to move forward. May we all leave our insecurities behind and choose confidence. More

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    Catherine Was Great. But Was She a Girl Boss?

    In seeking to turn historical women into yassified contemporary heroines, pop culture creators are narrowing what female success can look like.Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, enjoyed embroidery and fasting. Little in the historical record suggests that she was any fun at a party.“Unfortunately, Catherine of Aragon just, like, loved church and was always praying and was kind of a bummer,” Dana Schwartz, a writer who hosts the podcast “Noble Blood,” told me recently.Yet there Catherine is, in the Broadway musical “Six,” vibrating her vocal cords like a Tudor-era Beyoncé, in a thigh-scraping miniskirt and studded boots — a girl boss, early modern style. “Six,” a giddy pop confection about the six wives of Henry VIII, joins recent works like “Dickinson,” the AppleTV+ comedy just concluding its final season, and “The Great,” the Hulu dramedy that recently released its second, in revamping notable women of past centuries as the cool girls of today. It’s history. With contouring.For decades now, popular culture and media have made a concerted effort — mostly laudable, occasionally cloying — to reclaim forgotten or maligned women. Think of the “Rebel Girls” books, the biopics that glut the Oscar race, even the Overlooked obituary series in The New York Times.Some of these works explore women’s lives mindful of particular historical contexts, acknowledging their achievements within the often oppressive systems of their times. Others, like “Dickinson” and to a lesser extent “The Great,” take a deliberately freewheeling approach to history, inventing counterfactual privileges and possibilities for their heroines. Still others, like “Six,” feed history through the YassifyBot, Facetuning women’s lives so that they seem fiercer, sexier, more aspirational — selfie-ready, way before cameras were invented.This girlbossification nearly always puts women in competition with each other, rather than emphasizing shared struggle. It diminishes oppression and bias, suggesting that any woman can get ahead if she just puts on her big girl panties and rises-and-grinds hard enough, retconning the necessary fictions of our own cultural moment into the past.In a moment when popular culture confuses fame and excellence, works like these also imply an inability to appreciate female merit absent of sex and glamour. The desire to zhuzh up women of history — Hey, it’s so super that you changed the world, but couldn’t you have done it in a bustier?— says a lot more about our own time than times past. When we reframe herstory as an Instagram story, what do we lose?I should probably tell you that questions like these make me feel like a scold. I hate that. You know who’s really no fun at parties? Scolds. Besides, I love “Dickinson.” I admire “The Great.” The songs in “Six” are absolute bops. None of these works aspire to historical accuracy. “The Great,” in particular, has the cheeky tagline of “an occasionally true story.” And even if they did, we probably shouldn’t be getting our history from prestige comedies and musicals.Hailee Steinfeld, left, as Emily Dickinson and Wiz Khalifa as Death in “Dickinson.”Michael Parmelee/Apple TV+Also, real life, even the real lives of great women, is mostly boring. Would you watch three seasons of a show in which Emily Dickinson sits alone at her desk, scratching out verse with a pencil? But there are telling emphases in these shows and equally telling excisions. This new breed of heroine is ambitious and sex positive, with impeccably modern politics. Rather than understanding these women as products of their time, we make them creatures of ours.Schwartz told me that she understands the impulse to sex up historical women. It lavishes attention on them, correcting the dismissiveness of earlier historians.“But that then has the collective effect of making these women less interesting and less honest in who they were within their periods,” she said.At least, “Dickinson,” created by Alena Smith, plays with this dishonesty purposefully and boldly, taking the wildness and desire that suffused Emily Dickinson’s poetry, if not her life, and externalizing it through scenes in which Hailee Steinfeld’s Emily twerks at house parties and takes carriage rides with Wiz Khalifa’s Death.The real Dickinson was introverted and, despite her on-trend eyebrows, not a particular beauty. “In terms of being a cool girl, I don’t really know if she was,” Monica Pelaez, a Dickinson scholar who has advised the show, told me. “She chose to seclude herself.”The historical Dickinson doesn’t seem to have dressed as a man or protested as an ecowarrior or taken multiple lovers or heaved her bosom in a daring red dress. But her poetry and letters conjure vivid emotional states, so “Dickinson” colors Emily’s life with this dynamism, colliding reality and fantasy.“What the show does is bring that sensibility from her poetry and dramatize it,” Pelaez said.The Emily who emerges is confident, career-minded, fascinating to men and women, a corrective to previous works (even recent ones like Terence Davies’s 2016 movie “A Quiet Passion”) that ignored the queerness her letters and poems suggest. But while “Dickinson” seems acutely aware of the sociopolitics of 19th-century New England, the show often argues for Emily’s exceptionalism by differentiating her — and to a lesser extent her sister, Lavinia (Anna Baryshnikov), and sister-in-law, Sue (Ella Hunt) — from the other women of Amherst.Rather than looking for solidarity among the women of her progressive community, Emily emphasizes this difference. “I’m just not made for traditional feminine handicrafts,” she complains during a sewing circle scene, the implication being that women who are made for them don’t deserve a prestige TV series.Elle Fanning as Catherine in the second season of the Hulu series “The Great.”Gareth Gatrell/HuluIn this way Emily resembles Catherine, of “The Great,” which slid its 10-episode second season onto Hulu a few weeks ago. Created by Tony McNamara (who also co-wrote the lightly counterfactual battling-British-royals comedy “The Favourite”), the series stars a luminous Elle Fanning as a German princess who arrives at the Russian court as a teenager and promptly claims the tsardom for herself. Liberated from chronology and fact, the comedy-drama twiddles the timeline of Catherine’s career and marriage. (Let’s just say that the real Peter struggled to consummate their relationship and the Peter of “The Great,” played by Nicholas Hoult, does not.)Bright, colorful and cruel, like a dish of poisoned candies, the show occasionally portrays Catherine as naïve. But she learns fast and her emergent politics and commitment to hustle are beautifully modern. She wants to end Russia’s wars, free its serfs, teach women to read, inoculate her subjects. (This is more or less true of the historical Catherine.) And in her ball gowns? An absolute smokeshow.The legacy of the real Catherine, who came to the throne not as a dewy teenager, but as a more seasoned 33-year-old, was of course more complicated. “She actually increased serfdom,” said Hilde Hoogenboom, a professor of Russian who has translated Catherine’s memoirs.Hoogenboom describes “The Great” as the “Disneyfication” of the real Catherine. To make her a fairy tale princess, the series also insists on differentiating Catherine from the other women at court, representing her as a savvy It Girl, more beautiful and more powerful than her peers.“Bitch,” one noblewoman sneers.“Empress bitch,” Catherine corrects her.The real Catherine was different. (And as someone who routinely elevated her lovers and male allies, not so big on sisterhood.) But she was one of several 18th-century female heads of states, including the Empress Elisabeth, her immediate predecessor, a fact that “The Great” conveniently elides. Instead it presents Elisabeth (Belinda Bromilow) as a dithery nymphomaniac, raising Catherine up by pushing Elisabeth and her underwear down.“Six,” created by Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, puts its women in competition even more explicitly, structuring the show as an “American Idol”-style vocal contest. A blingy take on trauma porn, it demands that each woman sing not about her character or integrity, but about the wrongs she suffered at Henry’s meaty hands. Here are the rules, as detailed in the opening number:The Queen who was dealt the worst handThe Queen with the most hardships to withstandThe Queen for whom it didn’t really go as plannedShall be the one to lead the band.From left: Andrea Macasaet, Adrianna Hicks and Anna Uzele in the musical “Six.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBefore ending in a mostly empty gesture of solidarity, “Six” simplifies and updates many of these women, turning Anne Boleyn, an astute political player, into a foxy good-time-girl, framing Katherine Howard, a blatant victim of abuse, as a barely legal tease. (“Lock up your husbands, lock up your sons/ K-Howard is here and the fun’s begun.”) The costume design, in a nod to pop norms, sexualizes each women, coupling their worth with their hotness.In her song, Katherine Parr, Henry’s widow, reminds listeners of her accomplishments:I wrote books, and psalms, and meditations,Fought for female educationSo all my women could independently study scriptureI even got a woman to paint my pictureWhy can’t I tell that story?Well, why can’t she? Instead, the songs from “Six” center the women’s relationships to Henry, emphasizing his attraction to them (or rejection of them) over any of the wives’ accomplishments. “The things that these women were doing should be of historical interest, regardless of whether or not they were all married to this [expletive] dude,” Jessica Keene, a history professor who studies the Tudor period, said.This substitution of sexuality for excellence can extend even into more enlightened shows. That sewing circle episode of “Dickinson” includes a dynamic cameo from Sojourner Truth, played by the writer and talk show host Ziwe. Because “Dickinson” remains exquisitely self-aware, it jokes about Ziwe’s youthful appearance (“I’m roughly 66, but I look good as hell”) and Truth’s 19th-century sex bomb vibe (“Oh, they’re going to know I’m a woman in this dress”).But the real Sojourner Truth, who came to public life in middle age, didn’t lead with sex. Corinne T. Field, who has written on Truth, described her as a figure who critiqued girlish beauty and sexuality. “Her whole public career is built as someone who had already aged beyond youth and was occupying a position of power and charisma that did not rely on girlish beauty,” Field said.I asked Field what we miss when “Dickinson” depicts a woman like Truth this way. “An investment in intergenerational networks of mutual care,” Field said without pausing. “We need to think about how you sustain female empowerment over the course of a whole life.”If creators, even creators with explicitly feminist aims like Smith and Moss, believe that audiences won’t pay attention to female protagonists absent of youth and beauty, they will likely frame empowerment narrowly. And maybe that’s necessary on some level. The recent and more accurate versions — like “A Quiet Passion,” 2019’s “Catherine the Great” and this year’s “Anne Boleyn” — tend to be less fun.“If girlbossification is the price to elevate female historical figures to the mainstream consciousness, so be it,” Schwartz said.That consciousness could then encourage viewers to seek out what Schwartz called “actual historically accurate sources.” And in these sources they might find that sometimes women changed the world in flats or with split ends or in common cause with other women or when they weren’t especially sexy or young. A few of them must have had a really solid grasp of traditional feminine handicrafts. Where is the absolute bop for that? More