Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 125 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    With Her Final Album, Rebecca Luker Bids a Fond Farewell

    The much-loved Broadway soprano, who died in December, had one more miracle up her sleeve.The last solo number on “All the Girls,” the new duo album from the sopranos Rebecca Luker and Sally Wilfert, is a piece of specialty material for Luker called “Not Funny.”It’s funny.In the song, by Michael Heitzman and Ilene Reid, Luker twits her image as a “spoonful of saccharine” but also punctures it. The gist is that lower-voiced belters get all the laugh lines, possibly because it’s so “hard to land a joke up here” — in the soprano stratosphere. Playing Laurey in “Oklahoma!,” Luker complains, “I’ll sing my ass off, but Ado Annie steals the show.” Then she disproves it by ripping a thrilling high C.Luker was 58 when she last performed the number live, during a concert with Wilfert at Merkin Hall in Manhattan. That was in September 2019, 15 months before she died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig’s disease.As yet undiagnosed that night, she had some trouble climbing onto the de rigueur stool, but she sounded as beautiful as ever, clearly enjoying the chance to sing songs about sisterhood with someone who was in fact as close as a sister. They met, Wilfert recalls, at a reading in 2005; when Wilfert said “I’m going to the bathroom,” Luker said, “I’m going too” and they sat “in adjacent johns,” yakking.Luker enjoyed the chance to sing songs about sisterhood with Sally Wilfert, who was as close as a sister. David AndrakoDespite Luker’s unshakable ingénue rep — built on Broadway roles including Lily in “The Secret Garden” (1991), Magnolia in “Show Boat” (1994), Maria in “The Sound of Music” (1998) and Marian in “The Music Man” (2000) — she was by the time of the Merkin Hall concert a sophisticated Broadway veteran and a complex actor, even taking over the crushing role of Helen in “Fun Home” in 2016. Though her voice remained infallibly lustrous, with classical size and control yet zero operatic fussiness, it was her intelligence in deploying it that kept her in demand well past the industry sell-by date for most stars of that repertoire.Nor did her intelligence let up as “All the Girls” was put together. Her husband, the Broadway performer Danny Burstein, says her notes for the producers were “meticulous” despite her suffering. Tommy Krasker, the head of PS Classics, her longtime label, says she listened to mixes with the “clarity of mind and healthy self-criticism” she’d always displayed in their 20 years of working together. When she thought a joke in “Not Funny” wasn’t landing as well as it might, she asked that the piano part, performed by her music director, Joseph Thalken, be rerecorded. The joke now lands like a gymnast after a handspring.What’s remarkable about this is not only that Luker’s health was quickly deteriorating, but that such a fond, full-smile, no-dud album got produced at all, let alone in the middle of a pandemic. How it happened is the kind of story that Luker, whose death came just two days before the digital release of “All the Girls” on Christmas — and in whose honor an A.L.S. fund-raising concert entitled “Becca” will be streamed on Tuesday — would have loved for its unlikeliness and bittersweet ending.Recording dates had been set for March 2020. The lockdown delayed that plan, but by the time PS Classics could safely book a studio again, in August, Luker could no longer sing. Her final performances, in “An Evening With Sheldon Harnick … and Friends” at the York Theater in March and in a three-song concert streamed from home in June, had been achieved with mounting difficulty as she gripped the arms on her wheelchair to make the notes emerge. By autumn she could not make them at all.Though it might have been sensible to abandon the album at that point, Krasker and the producer Bart Migal decided to try an experiment, attempting what Krasker calls “the first studio album made without ever stepping in the studio.” Thalken, the music director, was able to weave new orchestrations around surprisingly good recordings of the Merkin Hall rehearsal and concert; musicians recorded the new parts in their homes; the producers mixed the result; and by some miracle what emerged sounded pristine.Though Luker and Wilfert have distinctive voices, they can sound nearly identical when singing together. Genevieve Rafter KeddyBut not just pristine: rich and compelling. Though Luker and Wilfert have distinctive voices when singing separately, they can sound nearly identical when singing together. (They have the same voice teacher.) Listening to playbacks, even they could not always figure out who was who. In duets like “You Are My Best Friend” (the charming opener) and “Isn’t It Better?” (a Kander and Ebb torch song here turned into an anthem of sisterly support) something sublime happens as the two voices, blending so closely, seem to multiply even as they merge.That effect is at its height in the album’s finale, an unexpected pairing of the Patty Griffin song “Be Careful” with “Dear Theodosia,” a number sung by Aaron Burr to his infant daughter in “Hamilton.” As performed by Luker and Wilfert, “Theodosia” feels like a promise from today’s women to their spiritual daughters to leave them a safer world. “Be Careful,” whose lyric provides “All the Girls” with its title, is wrenchingly ambivalent, celebrating women’s strength but also their fragility — and ending, in this arrangement, on a daringly unresolved harmony.Which feels only right. Strong as the album is — five poetry settings by Thalken are especially lovely — it inevitably comes wrapped in a shroud of loss. I don’t mean just the loss of Luker herself. Her kind of voice (and Wilfert’s) is gradually being squeezed out of musical theater, as classically trained sopranos give way to the kind described so saucily in “Not Funny,” which Kelli O’Hara will sing at Tuesday’s concert. Most new works are written for belters.The greater loss is of course personal. Many of us, mourning a loved one, are grateful for any scrap of their voice that might be preserved in a phone message or video. That’s not Burstein’s situation. He has lots of Luker’s albums to listen to. The problem is that though they are comforting they are also devastating — especially, on “All the Girls,” that final medley, with its aching Griffin lyric: “Be careful how you bend me/Be careful how you send me/Be careful how you end me.”In any case, the albums are what Luker gave us, not him. More than her public voice, what Burstein misses most after 20 years of marriage is her private voice: the one he heard in car rides spent harmonizing together to ’70s hits on the radio.“Now it’s just me and the radio,” he says.By comparison, the rest of us are lucky. Listening to “All the Girls,” in some ways Luker’s funniest and wisest album, we get to keep her singing next to us forever.Rebecca Luker and Sally Wilfert“All the Girls”(PS Classics)Becca: A Night of Stories and Song in Memory of Rebecca LukerMay 4 at 7:30 p.m.momenthouse.com/targetals More

  • 163 Shares199 Views

    in Television

    Conan O’Brien Says No More Trump Jokes for Final Two Months on TBS

    O’Brien said the last episodes of “Conan” will feature special guests and clips of his favorite moments on the show before he moves to HBO Max.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. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Fourth Time’s the CharmIn his Monday night monologue, Conan O’Brien announced that after 11 years, he will be “winding down” his TBS late night show, with a final episode airing June 24.“Some of you are wondering why am I doing this? Why end things here at TBS?” O’Brien said. “And I’ll tell you: because a very old Buddhist monk once told me that to pick something up, you must first put something down.”O’Brien said he is leaving to launch a “fourth iteration” of his program with HBO Max later this year, and that his final two months on TBS will be dedicated to clips of his favorite moments and will feature special guests.“I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished here,” O’Brien said. “And so what I’d like is I’d like these last couple of weeks to be a fond look back at all the absurd madness that my team and I have concocted. Best of all, I just want to point out, there will be shockingly few, if any, references to Donald Trump because that’s always been my favorite kind of comedy.”The Punchiest Punchlines (Things Are Looking Up Edition)“According to a new ABC News poll, Americans are more hopeful about the future than they have been in 15 years, since 2006. Of course, the poll was conducted before we found out Elon Musk is hosting ‘Saturday Night Live,’ so we’ll see if it holds up.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Of course, we’re feeling good. We have vaccines in our arms, stimulus checks in our pockets and hot sauce in our Goldfish.” — JIMMY FALLON“According to polls, the last time we were close to being this optimistic was 2006. I’m not surprised. That was when Tom Hanks brought back the mullet.” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s right, 64 percent are feeling optimistic, while the other 36 percent had a rough weekend at the Kentucky Derby.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingRoy Wood Jr. shared the history of Black royalty on Monday’s “The Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightDr. Anthony Fauci will offer some coronavirus updates on Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutLou Diamond Phillips as Ritchie Valens in the 1987 biopic.Columbia PicturesThe 1987 box office hit “La Bamba” was a watershed moment for films about Latinos, yet Hollywood failed to capitalize on its audience appeal. More

  • 100 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    The Play Is Coming From Inside the House

    Three new virtual productions, set in haunted homes and an interactive hotel, give you the excitement of exploring spaces that are off limits.Exploring a home that isn’t your own carries a voyeuristic thrill, a feeling that you’re intruding on a private space. This excitement holds even if you have paid for your admission, even if no one has lived there for decades. A rare upside of the pandemic — at least until people discovered decent virtual backgrounds — was the opportunity to peer into (and immediately judge) colleagues’ rooms.Back when interior spaces weren’t so perilous, I was a fiend for a historic home tour. Summer palaces, period rooms at the Met, living history installations with basket-weaving how-tos — yes, absolutely, all of them. Last summer, during the pandemic’s darker days, I spent some happy hours “visiting” Newport’s cottages online.Recently, digital theater has gotten in on this domestic act, offering virtual tours of spaces imagined and actual, in works such as Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s “A House Tour of the Infamous Porter Family Mansion With Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry … At Home!”; Jared Mezzocchi’s “Someone Else’s House”; and Blast Theory’s “A Cluster of 17 Cases.” They may not provide the frisson of walking through actual spaces — and surreptitiously fingering the occasional embroidered tablecloth — but the latter two offer the shivery pleasure of entering a space where you clearly don’t belong.“A House Tour,” directed by Jason Eagan, began in 2016 in San Francisco as an in-person event, which took an audience from room to creatively rendered room. It has been re-envisioned as an audio-only drama, accompanied by a deluxe mailer. (Mailers are another pandemic upside; sometimes they include wine.) This one contains two figurines that you are invited to decorate with feathers and pipe cleaners — I dragooned my children for this part — and a number of cunning packages.Danny Scheie in the original 2016 production of “A House Tour of the Infamous Porter Family Mansion With Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry.”Julie SchuchardThe Broadway actress Lilli Cooper provides the introduction, a flawless parody of a museum audio guide. Her voice informs us that the Porter Family Mansion has doors, windows, rooms and “some of the finest world collections of many different things.” (The house is wholly imaginary.) Danny Scheie’s Weston takes over. Scheie was also the star of the in-person version, and his Weston has a strange and malevolent energy. He delights in sharing the most scandalous details of the lives and sweaty loves of Hubert and Clarissa Porter, the fictional one-percenters who built the mansion.The monologue leans heavily on innuendo and smutty puns. This salaciousness extends to the participatory elements, as when Weston tells us to fold up a card and put it in our “undies.” Let’s just say that even an obedient audience member — I had, as directed, mashed the figurines together in a simulation of sex — has her limits. (The children, thankfully, had already gone to bed.)More frustrating than the lewdness is how incompletely the creators have reimagined this experience for at-home consumption. The house never really comes into mind’s eye view and the items in the box, almost entirely irrelevant, don’t help. Also, the audio runs nearly two hours, which is an awfully long time to sit at your computer, headphones in, staring at concupiscent dolls. And the humor is beyond juvenile. I had hoped that “A House Tour” would create a kind of memory palace, a mansion of the mind, but it just loiters, endlessly, in the gutters.“Someone Else’s House,” produced by Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, is an altogether shorter, tauter and shrewder work. Developed for an online audience and running just under an hour, it’s a chiseled piece of at-home horror, ostensibly based on a colonial-era New Hampshire house that Mezzocchi’s parents and siblings once inhabited. “This isn’t just a ghost story,” Mezzocchi says. “It’s real. It happened to my family.”“Someone Else’s House” also has an accompanying box. This one contains items relating to the house’s history, like a family tree and antique sketches and photographs. It also includes a candle, scented for some reason like decomposing vanilla.Mezzocchi, in flannel shirt, wool beanie and quarantine beard, makes an appealing narrator. The story he tells, from a location that becomes clear as the tale proceeds, is an extremely creepy one. (The short version: Maybe don’t buy a house with a former slaughtering cellar in the basement?) The design is meticulous, the archival photos unsettling, the “are they or aren’t they?” Zoom glitches unnerving. And if you have ever suspected that your furniture is out to get you, this is the digital work for you.Mezzocchi, who also wrote “Someone Else’s House,” makes an appealing narrator of this taut and shrewd work. via Geffen PlayhouseWhat’s strange, though, is how Mezzocchi doesn’t fully trust the theatrical form. If you have seen his previous work, like “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy,” you know that he’s an absolute wizard at making online theater feel live. “Someone Else’s House” ends in a frightening digital coup-de-theatre, but none of the multimedia effects are more uncanny than the low-tech vision of Mezzocchi sitting in front of his laptop, spinning a tale in a slowly darkening room.And yet, the scariest online house tour may be the brief one offered by the experimental English theater Blast Theory, which has produced a virtual version of its 2018 work, “A Cluster of 17 Cases.” Created when Blast Theory were artists in residence at the World Health Organization, the piece explores the transmission of the SARS virus to 17 people on the 9th floor of Hong Kong’s Metropole Hotel. The company has built a scale model of the hotel, in lightweight aluminum. An interactive site allows you to take the elevator up and explore it.“Some people will leave unscathed, and some people will die. It’s time to choose your room,” a narrator says, coolly. There are only three rooms to discover, plus trips back down to the lobby to learn how many other people the rooms’ occupants infected once they left the hotel and flew home. (As Covid-19 has taught us, aerosolized particles are no joke.) The nerve-shredding experience lasts perhaps 15 minutes. Like “At Home” and “Someone Else’s House,” it’s ultimately a cautionary tale. For more than a year most of us have been told to stay indoors, but as these shows argue, inside isn’t so safe either.A House Tour of The Infamous Porter Family Mansion with Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry … At Homeporterfamilymansion.com.Someone Else’s HouseThrough July 3; geffenplayhouse.org.A Cluster of 17 Casesblasttheory.co.uk. More

  • 113 Shares159 Views

    in Television

    Netflix Chronicles Byron Bay’s ‘Hot Instagrammers.’ Will Paradise Survive?

    Tensions between protecting and capitalizing on the image of the famous Australian beach town have exploded over a new reality show.BYRON BAY, Australia — The moral quandaries of life as an Instagram influencer in the famously idyllic town of Byron Bay are not lost on Ruby Tuesday Matthews.Ms. Matthews, 27, peddles more than vegan moisturizers, probiotic powders and conflict-free diamonds to her 228,000 followers. She is also selling an enviable lifestyle set against the backdrop of her Australian hometown’s crystalline coves and umbrellaed poolsides.It’s part of the image-making that has helped transform Byron Bay — for better or worse — from a sleepy beach town drawing surfers and hippies into a globally renowned destination for the affluent and digitally savvy.“I do kind of have moments where I’m like, ‘Am I exploiting this town that I live in?” Ms. Matthews said recently as she sat at The Farm, a sprawling agritourism enterprise that embodies the town’s wellness ethos. “But at the same time, it’s my job. It puts food on the table for my children.”The tensions between leveraging and protecting Byron Bay’s reputation, always simmering in this age of entrepreneurial social media, exploded last month when Netflix announced plans for a reality show, “Byron Baes,” that will follow “hot Instagrammers living their best lives.”Local residents said the show would be a tawdry misrepresentation of the town and demanded that Netflix cancel the project. One woman started a petition drive that has gathered more than 9,000 signatures and organized a “paddle out” — a surfer’s memorial usually reserved for commemorating deaths — in revolt.Byron Bay is the most expensive place to live in Australia, with a median house price of $1.8 million.Mullumbimby, a town near Byron Bay. The announcement of the new show from Netflix has raised questions about who is entitled to capitalize on the cult of Byron Bay.Several store owners, many of whom have substantial Instagram presences, have refused permits that would allow Netflix to record on their premises. A number of influencers who were approached by the show also said they had decided not to take part. More

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Black Feminist Video Game’ Review: Pixels and Polemics

    Live performances via Zoom mix with actual game footage in this well-intentioned but preachy play by the poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes.Audre Lorde isn’t going to save you. She’s too busy resting in the heavens of legendary artist-activists to be your personal Black feminist guru. That’s what a teen gamer named Jonas finds out in the Civilians’ well-intentioned but clumsy “Black Feminist Video Game.” Jonas (Christon Andell), our Player 1, is a biracial, autistic high school student with a single working mother (Constance Fields) who has tried to teach her son lessons from the great Black feminists, like bell hooks. However, Jonas learns how hard it is to internalize those lessons when a girl he’s dating, Nicole (Starr Kirkland), breaks it off. In an attempt to win her back, he, with the help of his gamer friend Sabine (Kyla Butts), seeks guidance from an old gift from his mother: the 2-D video game that gives the play its title.Written by the poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes and directed by Victoria Collado, “Black Feminist Video Game” incorporates live performances via Zoom, actual video game footage and some light audience interaction through YouTube chat. We watch Jonas as he conducts livestreamed video diaries — and Andell does interact with the audience minimally, responding to audience comments and asking for advice, though the improvised prattle slows the show’s pacing and feels inorganic.The script, too, labors through attempts to smoothly and naturally be its most intersectionally woke self, but diversity feels downgraded to a checklist. (Black? Mixed-race? Queer? Autistic? Check, check, check, check.) And when it comes to the play’s message, with Jonas slowly understanding when he’s mansplaining and failing to truly listen to and respect Black women, “Black Feminist Video Game” gets unbearably preachy — and the performances don’t do much to help.As part of the production, Jonas (Andell) and Sabine (Kyla Butts) play through an actual game created for the show.via The CiviliansAt least there’s the game itself, created by Ché Rose and Jocelyn Short of Cookout Games, which is a fun, pixelated blast from the past. Adorable avatar versions of Jonas and Sabine run through the levels: the Forest of Feminist Angst, the Coven of the Many-Faced Mirrors, the Realm of Colorism, and Peak Patriarchy, where waits the final boss. Just like the rules of the game — which is psychic, by the way — confound Jonas, so, too, was I confused by its logic, even as Lorde showed up to impart wise words to our wannabe Black feminist protagonist.Though a notoriously bad crash-and-burn gamer myself, I enjoy the idea of them — video games, but also games built into theatrical experiences, especially those related to race. The tension between politics and play is exciting — think “The Colored Museum,” “Underground Railroad Game” and “Black History Museum.” I even thought of Kekubian Assassin, a real mobile game based on an episode of Terence Nance’s HBO series “Random Acts of Flyness,” in which a Black woman plays a first-person-shooter-style game where she fights back against racist and sexist street harassment. “Black Feminist Video Game” aspires to this same degree of poignancy and ingenuity, but despite its cute gameplay, it can’t get past Level 1.Black Feminist Video GameLive performances through May 2; on-demand May 3-9; thecivilians.org. (The Oregon Shakespeare Festival will present performances of “Black Feminist Video Game” May 11-16, with on-demand access available May 17-23; osfashland.org.) More