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    How a British Gardening Show Got People Through the Pandemic

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraCredit…Francesca Jones for The New York TimesHow a British Gardening Show Got People Through the PandemicCredit…Francesca Jones for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETThe television show “Gardeners’ World” is an institution in England, where it has aired for coming up on 54 seasons, having premiered way back in 1968. It broadcasts on Friday nights, welcomed by viewers as a gentle usher into the weekend.Monty Don, a British garden writer and author of some 21 books on the subject, has been the host since 2003. If Mr. Don’s sturdy appearance and deep, reassuring voice don’t comfort audiences, there’s the constant presence of his dogs napping at his feet.Last year, over the course of the 33-episode season, which follows the growing season from March through late October, something remarkable happened: “Gardeners’ World” went from being comfort TV to indispensable viewing.With restaurants, bars and theaters shut down and socializing at home (or anywhere else) risky, gardening was one of the few leisure activities the pandemic didn’t take away. Both the U.K. and the United States experienced a gardening boom last year, with sales of seeds way up and nurseries overrun on weekends. Judging by the 30 percent sales increase of Scotts Miracle-Gro, this spring promises another bumper crop.“Gardeners’ World,” which is available in the United States through streaming services like BritBox and on YouTube, rode the enthusiasm. Last year weekly viewership was the highest in five years and the BBC, which airs the show (produced by BBC Studios) deemed it essential public service broadcasting, said the executive producer, Gary Broadhurst. (The new season debuts March 19.)Crocuses on the cricket pitch at Longmeadow.Credit…Francesca Jones for The New York Times“It’s because of what gardening can do for people,” Mr. Broadhurst said. “The channel thought, and rightly so, that people would need the program. Because we were bombarded with news about coronavirus, and this was an opportunity for just an hour to have a release.”Nadifa Mohamed, a Somali-British novelist, wrote last April in the New Statesman that Monty Don and “his placid Labradors” offered viewers “29 minutes of televisual sedation,” adding that “the seasons turn in a neat and predictable way, each offering new shades of beauty and little lessons in how to survive.”To tune in each week and see the daffodils and bluebells coming up, to watch Mr. Don’s raised vegetable beds grow lush and abundant by high summer, was true counterprogramming: Life endures. The birdsong that begins each episode was an antidote to the trauma of the nightly news. In short, “Gardeners’ World” became an oasis of normalcy, a balm for frayed nerves — and not only for British viewers.Alex Yeske, an art director and graphic designer, turned to “Gardeners’ World” early in the pandemic when she felt cooped up in her New York apartment and fried from staring at screens. “So many of us have been reaching our limits,” Ms. Yeske said. “I spend way too much time on my computer, my phone. Getting to see all this greenery was relaxing.”As her anxiety mounted last spring, Alisha Ramos, who writes the newsletter Girls Night In, went looking for something to quell it. She tried meditation apps, but they lacked a storytelling component. Then she found “Gardeners’ World.” Ms. Ramos was living in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, Md., without any green space, and she had never gardened before, but she was instantly drawn in. “Every night before bed I would cue up an episode,” she said. “It’s very gentle in how the episodes are constructed. Even the sounds; the birds chirping, the rain. Those natural elements were really calming.”Mr. Don hosts “Gardeners’ World” from his own home and two-acre garden, Longmeadow, in the West Midlands of England. In last season’s Episode 1, there was no mention of Covid-19. By Episode 3, the United Kingdom was under enforced lockdown and Mr. Don was filming without a crew and getting camera tips from his director via Zoom.While his co-hosts visit London flower shows and the immaculate landscaped gardens of grand country estates, Mr. Don has his boots in the muck at Longmeadow, patching a fence or digging up the horned tulips he has over-planted in his jewel garden. At program’s end, Monty gives viewers jobs for the weekend. In his stretched wool sweaters and old blue work coat, he’s an unlikely style icon — a solid sort.Ms. Ramos mentioned a quote attributed to Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher: “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” Mr. Don, she said, espouses something of that eternal wisdom on “Gardeners’ World.”“He said something along the lines of, ‘The beauty of gardening and nature is it’s always here,’” Ms. Ramos said. “It’s a reminder that life goes on. It’s so great to be able to retreat into our gardens at a time like this.”Irises, hyacinths and muscari in pots.Credit…Francesca Jones for The New York TimesTeasel seed heads.Credit…Francesca Jones for The New York TimesPreparing for Spring“The snowdrops are coming, the aconites, the crocuses, the irises. You’re starting to see buds and shoots on the trees and shrubs,” Mr. Don said last month. He spoke via video chat, from Longmeadow, where the very wet winter was nearly over and he and the gardeners who assist him have been mulching the borders and digging up some box hedging hit by blight.Mr. Don, who is 65, was eagerly anticipating spring’s arrival — and with it his return to “Gardeners’ World.” “Particularly after this winter,” he said. “It’s been a long, hard winter here. People are pretty depressed and fed up. So they want to breathe again, and get outside, and have this sense of hope.”On his documentary specials, like “Monty Don’s Italian Gardens” and “Monty Don’s American Gardens,” and in interviews, Mr. Don imbues gardening with a drama and passion uniquely his. A water feature built for the garden of the Roman Emperor Hadrian is “extraordinary”; the lengthening spring days bring him “immense” excitement. He bites into adjectives like ripe plums.“Gardeners’ World,” by contrast, is more subdued, and without any of the hyperbole or busyness common to modern media. When Mr. Don is working in his garden, we never hear background music. Weather isn’t edited into — or out of — the show. If it rains, the host gets wet. Features on gardens and gardeners are given room to breathe; lingering close-ups of a flower or trees rustling in the breeze play between the segments.A Utah family, fans of Monty Don, Britain’s national gardener, replace their lawn with a bed of wildflowers.CreditCredit…BBC Studios“The basic rule is it has to take you away from whatever stresses and strains there are in your world,” Mr. Don said. “But at the same time, it has to be honest. Nothing is manufactured. We never layer birdsong on that wasn’t there.”While Covid-19 upended the show’s production last season, Mr. Don and his colleagues decided for the most part not to talk about the pandemic, apart from glancing mentions of “challenging times.” Freaking people out was the job of the news. “Gardeners’ World” reinforced the therapeutic power of gardening.When the show addressed Covid-19 head on, it did so movingly. Unable to travel widely to film, the producers asked viewers to share videos of what they were up to in their gardens during quarantine. A Utah family dug up their yard and planted a wildflower meadow; a young girl in Wales grew her own pumpkins and left them for strangers. The clips connected viewers at a time of social isolation and showcased gardeners’ creativity and resilience.It’s been a long, wet and cold winter at Longmeadow. Spring is eagerly awaited.Credit…Francesca Jones for The New York TimesDaffodils grown as cut flowers.Credit…Francesca Jones for The New York TimesOne of the more poignant segments paid a visit to Kate Garraway, a well-known TV presenter. Ms. Garraway’s husband, Derek, got Covid-19 last March, became critically ill and was in the hospital for months, and remains seriously ill today. Sitting in her London backyard, Ms. Garraway explained how she and her children planted a garden in hopes that he would return to see it bloom.“You don’t plant something unless you believe it’s going to come up,” Ms. Garraway said. “So by planting something and believing Derek will see it when it comes up, that gives us a sense of future.”When the camera cut back to Longmeadow, Mr. Don spoke in the comforting voice of a minister at bedside, saying, “Gardens can’t make our problems go away, they can’t solve them, but they can help us to deal with them.”Reflecting on the Kate Garraway segment now, Mr. Don said, “I’m old enough to know that if you have grief, if you have suffering, if you have loss, the garden is a solace.”From Jeweler to the Stars to Expert GardenerMr. Don’s parents cultivated a five-acre plot at the family’s home in south England, and growing up, he and his siblings were given gardening jobs to do. As a boy, he disliked weeding the strawberries or chopping wood, but, at 17, while sowing some seeds in spring, Mr. Don experienced what he called a “Dionysian moment.”“Suddenly I was awed by a kind of ecstasy of total happiness. Of complete sense of not wanting anything else,” he recalled. “And bearing in mind this was 1971. The most glamorous thing in the world was sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, not gardening.”Monty Don and his wife, Sarah, in their London jewelry studio, in 1983. Credit…Dafydd JonesMr. Don kept his hobby to himself. Luckily, his wife, Sarah, whom he met at Cambridge University, enjoyed gardening too. In 1981, the couple started a jewelry company, Monty Don. Their loud costume pieces became fashionable during the go-go ‘80s, worn by Princess Diana, Michael Jackson and others. Mr. Don led a glamorous life in London, draped in his own jewelry and knocking around with Boy George. He and his wife also gardened behind their townhome; when Elle magazine ran a feature, he was outed as a green thumb.In the early ’90s, the economy tanked, and with it, the couple’s jewelry business. Drowning in debt, with three young children to support, Mr. Don and his wife sold everything they owned to pay off creditors. He fell into a deep depression. Years later, Mr. Don still bears the scars of that financial failure, friends of his told the Prospect last year. Despite becoming Britain’s national gardener, he is a workaholic, never one to rest easy on his success.Mr. Don and his family left London and moved to Herefordshire, the most rural county in England, because his wife’s mother lived there and property was cheap. The historic house and land they bought was scrubby and untamed. Mr. Don threw himself into creating Longmeadow, in a sense his workplace and sanctuary both. It is no formal, restrained garden but crammed with plants, features and ideas, a canvas for his imagination and enthusiasm.Monty Don and one of his ever-present dogs, Nellie.Credit…Francesca Jones for The New York Times“I found the mixture of creativity and just sheer physical work completely satisfying,” Mr. Don said. “I remember making cuff links for David Bowie. It was as though the previous life was, not the wrong turn because it was fun, but it was a side event. And that what I was doing was getting back to my roots. I was doing what I was meant to be doing.”He began to write columns on gardening for newspapers, appear on TV and publish books, many of them centered on life at Longmeadow. As a passionate but amateur gardener, Mr. Don connected with those who shared his interest but were intimidated by what can be a fixation on expertise.On “Gardeners’ World,” Mr. Don emphasizes function, utility and sustainability. You don’t need to buy $200 pruning shears or memorize pH levels, he shows us. It’s about celebrating the harmony, well-being and richness of life to be found in gardens.To Everything There Is a SeasonLast August, Ms. Yeske and her husband left New York and moved to West Los Angeles, where they bought a house with a large yard. She plans to grow a garden of vegetables and flowers for the first time in her life.“This spring I’m starting things from seed and planning to have a couple of raised beds,” she said. “All of which I probably wouldn’t have done if I didn’t watch ‘Gardeners’ World.”Ms. Ramos also left her apartment behind during the pandemic. She and her husband moved to a suburb of Bethesda, and bought a house whose previous owner, a chef, had gardened in the backyard and even built a drip-irrigation system. Having outdoor space to garden was suddenly high on her list of priorities, Ms. Ramos said. Watching the casual, sometimes fumbling way that Mr. Don gardens had given her the confidence to try.“Gardeners’ World” usually begins each season with half-hour episodes, before expanding to one-hour broadcasts later on. But because of last year’s success, the network ordered one-hour broadcasts from the start. Audience anticipation is high. The pandemic is still with us, lockdowns have not yet lifted — and the garden beckons.“You plant a seed and the next spring it will grow. And next summer it will flower. And maybe next autumn it will bear fruit,” Mr. Don said. “That continuation of life is very powerful.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Reminisces About One Year of ‘Living Contagiously’

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBest of Late NightJimmy Kimmel Reminisces About One Year of ‘Living Contagiously’“If somebody said ‘N95’ to you one year ago, you’d think they were a bingo caller,” Kimmel joked on America’s “coronaversary.”“The traditional gift for a one-year anniversary is paper, so I figured toilet paper makes the most sense,” Kimmel said while throwing some to a socially distanced audience of employees.Credit…ABCMarch 12, 2021, 1:45 a.m. ETWelcome 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.One Year Later, Gifts for EveryoneJimmy Kimmel celebrated America’s “coronaversary” on Thursday night, referring to it as “one year of living contagiously.”“The traditional gift for a one-year anniversary is paper, so I figured toilet paper makes the most sense,” he said, while tossing the most in-demand item from last March to a sparse, socially distanced audience made up of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” employees.“I think we all remember where we were when we heard the news, because we’re all still there.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Well, it’s been exactly one year since we’ve had an audience, and I’ve got to say, I really miss the laughs, the energy, and of course, keeping the lost wallets.” — SETH MEYERS“Yeah, it was a year ago today that we had our last show with a full audience. Six days later, I did the show from home, and six days after that, both my kids had agents.” — JIMMY FALLON“I remember that day like it was yesterday. Everything was shutting down, people were scared, grocery stores were ransacked, so I got up on a chair in the office and gave an inspirational speech where I said to my staff, ‘Gang, I know you’re terrified, but this is our moment. People are counting on us. So let’s get out there and put on the best [expletive] show of our lives!’ And then I looked down and the room was empty except for a tumbleweed that rolled past, stole a bottle of Purell off my desk and then left.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (The Way We Were Edition)“And today marks one year since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. Prior to that, it was actually categorized as a legume.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“If somebody said ‘N95’ to you one year ago, you’d think they were a bingo caller.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Remember when we were carefully disassembling our Instacart deliveries like a munitions expert in ‘The Hurt Locker’? Watch out, the Chipotle could explode!” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Of course, it’s also the one-year anniversary of the first time I Lysol-ed a banana. But not the last.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s also been one year since we all trapped ourselves inside our homes with stockpiles of gin and red wine, watching ‘Tiger King’ and ‘Love Is Blind’ while clinging to our last shreds of toilet paper like a plank floating in the water after a shipwreck.” — SETH MEYERS“I think we all remember where we were when we heard the news, because we’re all still there.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yeah, the past year was just like flying United Airlines. The engine fell off, but somehow we still made it.” — JIMMY FALLON“If you had told me a year ago that nearly 100 million Americans would be vaccinated for Covid by March 2021, I would have said, ‘What are you talking about? They said this will be over in two weeks. All we’ve got to do is flatten the curve, that’s it. When the warm weather comes, it will just disappear.’” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingThe writer and chef Eddie Huang talked with Desus and Mero about his new movie, “Boogie,” and his feelings about recent racially driven attacks on Asian-Americans.Also, Check This OutCredit…Nathaniel Russell, Alex Kalman, Sinna NasseriSeventy-five musicians, authors, directors, comedians, painters and playwrights answer seven questions about creativity and productivity (or lack thereof) in the pandemic.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Battered but Unbowed: How Beckett Speaks to a New Era

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookBattered but Unbowed: How Beckett Speaks to a New EraAdaptations of “Happy Days” and “First Love,” works by the master of existential wheel-spinning, show us how to live in place.Tessa Albertson is a younger-than-usual Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” directed by Nico Krell.Credit…via The Wild ProjectPublished More

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    Protesters Occupy French Theaters, Demanding Reopening

    The pandemic is still raging, but arts workers in France want to know when cultural life can restart.PARIS — Dozens of protesters stood outside the La Colline theater here on Wednesday, waving signs. “Better ‘The Rite of Spring’ than a massacre until spring,” read one; “We want to dream again,” said another.The protesters were there to support others inside the building who have occupied the playhouse since Tuesday, demanding the reopening of theaters across France.Cultural institutions here have been closed since October, when rising coronavirus cases led the government to heavily restrict social life. France has lifted some restrictions since, including on some stores, but there is still a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew in cities, restaurants can only offer takeout, and museums, music venues and movie theaters remain closed.Protesters, most of them actors, theater workers and students, now occupy at least seven theaters across the country — including the Odéon Theater in Paris and the National Theater of Strasbourg — in the hope of forcing the government to restart cultural life.“We want to bring life back to these venues, not blockade them,” said Sébastien Kheroufi, a drama student and one of the occupiers at La Colline.Actors and students outside the National Theater of Strasbourg on Wednesday.Jean-Francois Badias/Associated PressAt the La Colline theater in Paris on Tuesday.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFrustration at the continued shutdown of cultural life in France has been building for weeks. Last Thursday, trade unions representing arts workers organized more than 30 protests around the country to demand a reopening date, as well as an extension to special unemployment benefits for actors and musicians.During one of those marches in Paris, around 50 people entered the shuttered Odéon, one of the city’s most prestigious theaters, which was also occupied in the student protests of 1968. The demonstrators have since refused to leave, although they have allowed rehearsals taking place there for Christophe Honoré’s new play “The Sky of Nantes,” initially scheduled for a March premiere but now postponed until next season, to continue.On Saturday, Roselyne Bachelot, France’s culture minister, made a surprise visit to the Odéon to meet with the demonstrators. “I understand the concerns,” she wrote on Twitter after the meeting. “My objective is to continue to protect artistic employment,” she added.But this week, her tone changed. “Occupying performance venues is not the answer,” Bachelot told lawmakers on Wednesday, calling the occupations “pointless” and “dangerous.”Yet a number of theater directors have welcomed the occupations, including La Colline’s director, Wajdi Mouawad, who said in an emailed statement: “La Colline supports, in dialogue and trust, the actions of the students.”France is still recording high, if stable, levels of coronavirus infection. On Wednesday, the French government announced that a further 30,000 people had tested positive for the virus in the last day, while there had been 264 deaths after a positive test.Joachim Salinger, an actor who is part of the occupation at the Odéon, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday night that there were around 45 protesters in the building, and that everyone was wearing masks and maintaining distance from one another.At La Colline, the occupiers all took coronavirus tests before they entered the building, Kheroufi, the student protester, said.“Occupying a theater is a lot of work,” said Mélisande Dorvault, 23, another protester at La Colline. “We try to listen to everyone, to take different opinions into account and vote on decisions,” she added.The demonstrators at La Colline appeared to have support from nearby business owners also hit hard by the pandemic. Achour Mandi, a barman at the nearby Café des Banques, said he felt a kinship with the protesters. “We’re in the same mess,” Mandi said, pointing to the restrictions on restaurants.Protesters occupying the Odéon Theater in Paris last week.Francois Mori/Associated PressWhen the government announced new coronavirus measures in the fall, it banned public performances but said theaters would reopen Dec. 15. That plan was scrapped when a target of bringing new case numbers under 5,000 a day was missed.“Since December, we’ve had absolutely no visibility about what is going to happen,” Salinger said.Other arts institutions, such as museums, have also called on the government for a reopening timetable. In February, the heads of dozens of the country’s major museums pleaded with the government to allow them to open their doors. “For an hour, for a day, for a week or a month, let us,” they wrote in an open letter published in Le Monde, the daily newspaper.Soon afterward, the mayor of the city of Perpignan, in the south of the country, ordered his city’s four museums to reopen in defiance of national rules, saying his city had “suffered enough, and its inhabitants need this patch of blue sky.” The government took the city to court and the museums shut again.The anger among workers in the arts sector is compounded by the French government’s recent decision to go ahead with an unpopular reform of unemployment benefits, set to take effect in July. The withdrawal of this change is one of the theater protesters’ demands.On Thursday, union representatives held a video call with Bachelot and Jean Castex, France’s prime minister, where they announced 20 million euros in new support for cultural workers and young graduates. But in a phone interview afterward, Salinger said the measures were insufficient. “We will stay,” he added.At La Colline on Wednesday, Kheroufi said he thought the protesters would be there for the long haul. “We’ll stay for as long as it takes,” he said. “If I leave, what do I do? Go home? Where can we go?” More

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    Jason Mantzoukas Has Had Time to Really Geek Out on Music

    Behind the wide-eyed, high-decibel comedy of Jason Mantzoukas, there is a consummate, almost archetypal music geek. Before his roles on shows like “The League,” “The Good Place” and “Big Mouth,” Mantzoukas spent years playing drums, collecting hundreds of records and researching transcendental religious music in North Africa and the Middle East. His love of music is effusive and encyclopedic, and during the anxious, idling days of the pandemic, he found it suddenly reignited. But the kinds of music he was drawn to had shifted entirely.

    Was there a moment last year when you realized your listening habits were changing? When my normal life exists, it’s busy and chaotic. I listen to a lot of music that is slower, melancholy — stuff that juxtaposes against the larger chaos of my life. When life became incredibly simple, that music became too overwhelmingly sad for me to listen to. I can’t listen to Joni Mitchell right now. Even like an album that I loved, Phoebe Bridgers’s record — still so sad. So I slowly started realizing that I was choosing to listen to soul, funk and R.&B., because it just didn’t trigger those emotions. It allowed me to keep my head above water.

    Everything was so scary and stressful in March, in April and May, and I’m a very anxious person by nature. I’ve been in complete solo isolation for nearly a year now; I’ve not touched another person in a year. So my music tastes changed simply because I didn’t want to completely fall apart. I listened to a lot of Meters. I listened to a lot of the Numero Group’s “Eccentric Soul” compilations. My No.1 song I listened to the most — hold on, I made a playlist for this call. It’s the Del-Reys’ “Don’t You Know.” It’s such a beautifully simple song.

    I was obsessed with a lot of music that I literally have no reference for. I feel like I’m having another adolescence — being stuck in my room, just listening to music and watching movies. It’s like a second go at being a teenager, when the only way to access stuff was to try to find new music. Which is why I think I’m drawn to all these reissue labels, all these labels that are finding stuff that I just have not known about: Numero Group or Tompkins Square or Mississippi Records or Awesome Tapes From Africa.

    I know that you studied transcendental music. Was that something you came back to this year? Huge. I feel like holy music has been reintroduced into my life. I’ve gone back to Moroccan Gnawa music. Also a lot of great spiritual jazz stuff — the Alice Coltrane record from a couple of years ago. Did you watch “Ragas Live,” by any chance? You can sign up and watch the whole thing: 24 hours of uninterrupted, absolutely incredible music performances. They had Zakir Hussain, Terry Riley, all these names. They’re all playing from home, so they’re like, “Here’s Terry Riley from Japan!” They went to Venezuela and played this band I’ve never heard of, fronted by this woman named Betsayda Machado. Do you know who this is? I’m going to send you a song. The visual of them out in this beautiful, idyllic, lush green setting, with the river behind them and people going by and boats, and they’re singing and playing this — I was, like, mouth agape. I stood up, I got so excited.

    One of the true surprises of the year was that I listened to a lot of music that made me want to dance around. The Machado song makes me move. All I do is sit and read, sit and type, sit and watch — I don’t need music that just pushes me further into the chair. There’s something about forcing myself to expend energy, even if it’s just out on my porch for 10 minutes. There’s something about that release. That is such a part of my normal life, either through performing or being with friends.

    Or even just getting the experience of two people in a room, being like, “Here, listen to this.” I could literally do this for the next three hours!

    I would love for you to send me your playlist. The playlist is five hours long. I was like: You know what? I’m just going to dump a bunch of songs in there, because I could talk about any of them as part of this year. And then suddenly, it’s five hours.

    The flip side of all this dance-music stuff is that I also spent a tremendous amount of the year deep-diving into ambient and New Age music. This artist who goes by Green-House. And then there was also the Hiroshi Yoshimura reissue of the album “Green.” That Mary Lattimore record “Silver Ladders” — just very calming, a record that really helped me not to spiral out. Beverly Glenn-Copeland. In years past, I would lean more toward harder, experimental ambient stuff — Fennesz, Tim Hecker.

    I’m constantly searching for and trying to find ways to discover new music. One thing that has been hardest for me, in the last 10 years, is that so many of those avenues have been closed, because a lot of them were physical. For me, a lot of discovering music came from being able to walk into Other Music in New York. Amoeba Records in Los Angeles. Aquarius Records, out of San Francisco — they would put out a comprehensive list of new releases, with big, chunky write-ups.

    One thing I’ve spent the last year doing — and again, I’m 48 years old — is trying to understand Bandcamp and use it as a portal to discover stuff. Digging deep and unearthing stuff that was like: “I don’t know what this is. But because I’ve been listening to this other thing, now that weird label has shown me this thing.” Now I’m listening to this Brazilian artist who I’ve never heard of who’s blowing my mind.

    This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. More

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    Before Lockdown, This Super Fan Went to 105 Shows in One Season

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHe Went to 105 Shows in One Season. Now He Watches TV.What has this year been like for the most voracious of culture vultures? A super fan in Chicago lets us into his life without the arts.Edward T. Minieka, a 77-year-old arts enthusiast, in the doorway of the Chicago apartment where he has spent much of his time during lockdown, unable to take in live events.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesMarch 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETEdward T. Minieka was 5 years old when his parents started taking him to see shows.The Miniekas lived in Bridgeport, on Chicago’s South Side, and hopped a streetcar to get downtown. They watched “King Midas and the Golden Touch” at the Goodman Children’s Theater, plus family programs at Symphony Center and the Civic Opera House. On good days, there might be a visit to the Woolworth’s lunch counter; on really good days, the Walnut Room at Marshall Field’s.Minieka is now 77 years old. He still lives in Chicago. And he still loves the arts.In the last prepandemic season, he bought tickets for 105 live performances — symphony, opera and lots of theater.Then, thanks to the lockdown, he got a TV.With his new (to him) TV, Minieka is watching British shows and the occasional movie. But he has no use for digital theater.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesThe performing arts depend on people like Minieka — culture vultures, often retired, who fill the seats at many a show. And that dependence is mutual. There are lots of people, many of them older, for whom the arts are a way to stay connected to the world — intellectually, emotionally and socially.This last year, when live performance before live audiences has been largely banned, has hit the most devoted especially hard.“What I miss most of all is the community,” Minieka said in one of a series of telephone interviews from the antiques-filled downtown apartment where he has been holed up for most of the year, but for the occasional walk, weather permitting, and a weekly early morning trip to the grocery.A former professor of management and statistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he is accustomed to solitude, having lived alone for a long time. “I tried living with boyfriends off and on,” he said, “but I’m better off having my own space.”He pauses to reflect. “It’s OK,” he added. “I have a nice apartment. I’ve got the TV set up. I just got a new phonograph — my old one died after 25 years — and I’ve been listening to some of the old opera recordings my father gave me just before he died.”Opera recordings, antique English furniture and old master paintings fill Minieka’s art-filled apartment. (Maria Callas is one of his favorite sopranos.)Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHe’s been quite intentional about maintaining social ties. He doesn’t like video chatting, but schedules one to three phone calls a night. He makes lists of what he wants to talk about, just to jog his memory.But it’s not the same. One day, taking the bus to a doctor’s appointment, he ran into a woman he knew from the art world, and it hit him, the absence of serendipity. “A phone call is arranged,” he said. “I don’t run into chums, and get some buzz from them — that someone who has just come home from New York, and tells you about what show they saw. That’s gone, and there’s no way to replace that.”The Same Seat at the SymphonyIn the before times, Minieka would put on a coat and tie every Thursday and take a bus to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, settling into the same seat in the back corner of the sixth floor where he’s sat for years. “I close my eyes and listen,” he says. “I just want to hear them.” During intermission, he and his gang would meet in the Symphony Center’s ballroom, saying hello and trading gossip.He’s been a regular attendee since his undergraduate days at Illinois Tech, when he’d buy $1 tickets; he still remembers seeing Fritz Reiner conduct. “They didn’t have an elevator then, but I didn’t mind walking up six floors,” he said, “and the sound in the top gallery is sublime.”More than anything, Minieka (sitting before a prized and rare 19th century piano) says he misses the community that comes with attending cultural events.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesMinieka began grad school at Stanford, and while there he’d visit the San Francisco Opera; he finished up at Yale, where he learned to love plays at the drama school, and where he organized a car pool to New York to see productions at the Metropolitan Opera.He’s not interested in Broadway in Chicago or the big nonprofits — too commercial. But he subscribed to the Court and TimeLine and Steep and Redtwist and A Red Orchid, key pieces of the city’s thriving small and storefront theater scene, as well as to the Lyric Opera.He’s a pensioner, and money is tight, so he bargain hunts — balcony seats, discounts, last-minute tickets. “It’s my own fault, buying antiques,” he shrugs. “There were smarter things to buy.”There are so many memories — just last season, there was the Pride Films and Plays production of the musical “A Man of No Importance,” which Minieka attended with 20 friends, and the series of short plays by women at the Broken Nose Theater’s summer Bechdel Fest.During the live performance shutdown, he has visited one museum. “I went once during the last year, to see the El Greco show,” he said, “but the problem was people were congregating around the captions. It was just too risky.”He’s also stopped, after 40 years, going in person to the solemn high Mass at the Church of the Ascension, known for its music. “Now they have reservations, but I don’t want to do it,” he said. “It’s not going to be the same.”Will Minieka return to live performance? “I’ve kind of gotten used to sitting at home, and not paying for tickets, or spending a couple of nickels to have things streamed,” he said.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesArt fills his life, literally. He lives in a vintage apartment filled with his collection of English furniture and old master paintings, plus, of course, shelves of opera on vinyl. “I like to pull out some of the old ones,” he said. “You come to a new level of understanding.”Before the pandemic, he enjoyed playing host. Every winter since 1978, he had convened a series of Wednesday night salons, inviting curators, collectors, artists and art lovers to gather at his apartment. “It’s amazing the conversations that happen around midnight,” he said.His final night out was March 9, 2020, when he went with friends to Petterino’s Monday Night Live, a cabaret showcase. “It was full throttle,” he said, “as if everyone knew the lockdown was coming.”A few days later, he dressed up and boarded the bus to watch the symphony perform “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Boléro.” He arrived, found out the performance had been canceled, and went back home. That was March 12.Late to Binge WatchingMinieka never had much use for television. For years he had a hand-me-down black-and-white he used to watch the Oscars and the elections, but when the tubes started leaking, he threw it out. At the start of the pandemic, a friend offered him her old TV — she was upgrading — and he decided it was time to hook up cable and figure out streaming.He’s bingeing “Downton Abbey,” “The Crown” and “Brideshead Revisited.” He watches the occasional movie. But he has no patience for digital theater. “I just don’t enjoy it,” he says. “I’ve been to the real thing.”Now he’s had both vaccine doses, and he’s planning to celebrate by seeing a Monet exhibit at the Art Institute. But will he go back to live performance? He’s not sure.“I’ve kind of gotten used to sitting at home, and not paying for tickets, or spending a couple of nickels to have things streamed,” he said. “And it used to be you had an 8 o’clock curtain, and if I wasn’t there they’d close the doors. Now I can start whenever I want, and I don’t have to wear a matching tux.”“I was running at full steam, going out every night,” Minieka said. “Suddenly it all stops, and I adjust.”Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHe describes this period as a “sabbatical,” and ponders what he would want to see next; at other times, he says he thinks of this as a second retirement, and that he might just move into a retirement community and stop going out. After all, he has a heart condition, he takes 16 pills a day, he uses a cane for balance, so maybe it’s time?“I was running at full steam, going out every night,” he said. “Suddenly it all stops, and I adjust. In a way, it puts a coda on that part of my life.”As for his annual salons? “March 4, 2020 was the last one,” Minieka said. “I’m too old to do it. It’s a lot of work. And it’s nice to end something when you don’t know it’s the closing night.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    The Night New York's Theaters, Museums and Concert Halls Shut Down

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 12, 2020: The Night the City Sighed to SleepChocolate fountains, Debbie Harry and an artist’s swan song cut short. We gathered scenes from the New York City cultural landscape in the last moments before lockdown.The view from Sardi’s on March 12, 2020, as Broadway and much of New York locked down.Credit…Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesMichael Paulson, Julia Jacobs and March 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETMarch began with an ominous drumbeat. A packed cruise ship with a coronavirus outbreak was left floating for days off the coast of California. South by Southwest was canceled. The N.B.A. suspended its season. And then, on March 12, Broadway shut down, and with it every large gathering in New York City.By the time the grates came down, it was not much of a surprise. The city that never sleeps was grinding to a halt.But it was impossible to imagine what was to come. The staggering death toll. The vast job losses. The isolation. The endlessness.That evening, a group of Broadway bigwigs — theater owners and producers, mostly — gathered to drown their sorrows at Sardi’s, the industry hangout famous for its celebrity caricatures. They noshed, they drank, they commiserated, and they hugged. Several of them wound up infected with the virus, although there were so many meetings, and so few masks at that point, who knows how they got it.They posted signs on their theaters saying they expected to be back four weeks later.Now it’s been 52.Do you remember your final nights out? We gathered scenes from around the city as the curtains closed. MICHAEL PAULSONFondue Fountains, Buckets of Bouquets and Fresh DolceThe dressing rooms at the Brooks Atkinson Theater were filled with flowers. The ruby chocolate fondue fountain was booked for the after-party. Brittney Mack’s mother and her brother and her best girlfriends had all flown into town, not about to miss the moment when the 30-something Chicagoan made her long-awaited Broadway debut as a 16th-century English queen.But it was not to be. Ninety minutes before the scheduled opening of “Six,” an eagerly anticipated new musical about the wives of King Henry VIII, Broadway shut down.“I got to the theater early, and there were gifts from all over — buckets and buckets of plants, and cookies, and so much love, and I was like, ‘Hell, yes,’” Mack recalled. “And then the assistant stage manager came in and said the show is canceled, and I just said, ‘How dare you!’”Credit…Lucas McMahon“It was very, very overwhelming, and all of a sudden I felt incredibly alone. And then I was like, ‘But my dress! And the earrings!’ So many perspectives hit me, and I realized this happened to our entire industry, and I thought, ‘What the hell are we all going to do?’”What most of the “Six” family did was to gather. Mack went out for drinks with her friends at Harlem Public, near her apartment. Meanwhile, the show’s producer, Kevin McCollum, fresh off canceling an 800-person opening night party at Tao Downtown, hosted about 100 members of the show’s inner circle at the Glass House Tavern, a few doors down from the theater.“Looking back, it was ridiculous that we did that, but we didn’t know what we didn’t know, so we had a buffet of crudités, and a host of droplets, I’m sure,” he said. “We were in shock. There were people crying. We were giving it our best stiff upper lip, for the British, but we were emotionally devastated.”The notice posted on the doors of the Brooks Atkinson Theater, home to the Broadway production of “Six.”Credit…Lucas McMahonBundled playbills that would have been distributed to the sold-out audience.Credit…Lucas McMahonGeorge Stiles, an English composer, was among many British friends of the show who had flown over for the opening. Stiles was once in a band with the father of Toby Marlow, who wrote “Six” with Lucy Moss, and had become a mentor and then a co-producer.“Never before has something that I’ve been involved with felt so poised to go off with a crack,” Stiles said of “Six” — quite a statement given that he wrote songs for the stage musical adaptation of “Mary Poppins.” “I was anticipating the euphoria of the crowd, and the fun of the red carpet-y nonsense, and the everyone wanting to be the last one to sit down.”Instead, he and his husband and Marlow’s father licked their wounds at Marseille. What was on the menu? “The sheer awfulness of being this close to a wonderful Broadway run.” Stiles has since put his “suitably regal” gold and black Dolce & Gabbana outfit “into very careful mothballs,” anticipating that there will yet be an opening night to celebrate. “We are very gung-ho,” he said, “and hopeful, fingers crossed, that it wont be too many months away.” PAULSON“We Love You, New York! Don’t Touch Your Face!”Only about half of the people who bought tickets to the March 12 show at Mercury Lounge had turned up, but there were still throngs of people drinking, talking and grooving to the band. Debbie Harry of the band Blondie was there, and so was the music producer Hal Willner. He would die less than a month later from Covid-19.Onstage, Michael C. Hall, the star of “Dexter” and lead singer of the glam rock band Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, belted and wailed into the microphone.The staff members at Mercury Lounge knew they were watching their last live concert for a while; what “a while” meant, they had no idea. Bands had been canceling their appearances at an increasing rate, and on a call earlier that day, the owners had asked the staff members if they were still comfortable working, said Maggie Wrigley, a club manager. The line was silent for a moment, before one employee spoke up to say that no, it was no longer comfortable.Michael C. Hall, the star of “Dexter,” and his glam rock band, Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, were the last act to perform at Mercury Lounge prior to shutdown.Credit…Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressOthers piped up to agree: They felt exposed and vulnerable to the virus at work. Because the late show had already canceled, the owners decided that the club would shut down that night after the early show.At about 9:30 p.m. — painfully early for a Thursday night on the city’s club scene — the audience was asked to leave. “We love you, New York! Don’t touch your face!” Hall yelled at the end of his set.Alex Beaulieu, the club’s production manager, sanitized the microphones and packed the drum kit, amps and cables for longer term storage.“We locked the door and sat at the bar and had a drink,” Wrigley said of the club’s staff, “and we just kind of looked at each other, with no idea what was going to happen.”JULIA JACOBSA Swan Song, Cut ShortFor Sheena Wagstaff, chairman of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the spring of 2020 was destined to be bittersweet. The Met Breuer, the museum’s experimental satellite space, was going to close, three years ahead of schedule. But its final show was one she’d spent years preparing: “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,” a survey of the stern and skeptical German artist, filling two floors of the landmark building and including loans from 30 different collections.The exhibition, intended by the now 89-year-old artist to be his last major show, opened March 4. It had the makings of a blockbuster, and it ought to have introduced New York to four paintings called “Birkenau” (2014): streaked, abraded abstractions that obscure imagery of the titular death camp. On March 12, the show’s ninth day, Wagstaff realized it had to close.The Richter exhibition at the Met Breuer had all the makings of a blockbuster when it closed on its ninth day.Credit…Charlie Rubin for The New York TimesAt first the gravity of the crisis wasn’t fully clear. “I had every anticipation that it was going to reopen in May at the very latest,” Wagstaff said recently. But soon she realized that “Birkenau” — a culmination of Richter’s 60-year engagement with German history and the ethics of representation — would not find an audience. “Beyond a kind of personal huge disappointment, it was that the artist, so aware of his own mortality, was denied the possibility of actually making a mini-manifesto to the world. Alongside that was the curtailment of the Breuer. What we ended up with was this implosion.”Richter never saw the show. A few days before it came down, Wagstaff stood alone with “Birkenau”: paintings about the possibility of perceiving history that, now, no one could perceive at all. “It was a kind of haunting experience,” she said. “They became almost anthropomorphic. They’re sitting there on the walls, and there’s nothing, there’s no one to witness them. The paintings are witnessing something, and that witnessing cannot be conveyed any further.”By autumn, the Met had ceded occupancy of the Breuer to the Frick Collection. Most of Richter’s paintings had been crated up and shipped back to their lenders. Yet “Birkenau,” which belongs to the artist, stayed in New York. Wagstaff brought these most challenging works into the Met’s main building, introducing into the lavish Lehman Collection these four speechless acts of remembrance and horror. “It was a trace of the show. The viewing conditions weren’t perfect,” Wagstaff conceded. “We had really limited attendance; we still do. But people stayed in that room for a really long time. For those who came to see it, it was a revelation.” JASON FARAGOOne Final SetBy March 15, Broadway theaters and concert halls were empty, but in the dim light of the Comedy Cellar, audience members sat shoulder to shoulder sipping drinks and watching stand-up comedy. Masks were not required.The comedian Carmen Lynch was hesitant about showing up that night: Her boyfriend was heading out of the city to stay with his family in Connecticut, and she planned to join him — it seemed like it was time to hunker down. But, Lynch said, she knew that the days of doing multiple shows in a single night were ending, and she wanted to make as much money as possible before the inevitable shutdown. She exchanged texts with fellow comedians to feel out who was still performing.“I thought, ‘I’m not doing anything illegal. I’ll just do this one show and then leave,’” Lynch recalled.In the last stand-up shows at the Comedy Cellar before it closed on March 15, comedians joked about Corona beer and the newly clean state of the subway.Credit…Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesSo her boyfriend took her suitcase to Connecticut while she stayed to perform — one set at 7:45 p.m. another at 8:30. Before each comedian would walk onstage to tell jokes in front of the club’s famous exposed brick wall and stained glass, they would reach into a bucket to take a microphone that had been recently cleaned.Just before Lynch went on, the comedian Lynne Koplitz took the stage, removed the sanitized microphone from the stand and theatrically wiped it down with a white cloth another time, saying, “I’ve wanted to do this for years!”When Lynch finished her second set, she didn’t linger. She called an Uber and felt relieved when the driver accepted her request for an hour-and-a-half drive to Connecticut, not knowing how long she’d be gone (until summer) or what the city would be like when she returned (eerily empty, store windows boarded up).She drove away, and in retrospect, she remembers it like a scene in a disaster movie. “It’s like you’re in the car,” she said, “and you turn around and there’s an explosion behind you.” JACOBSAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Dench, Smith, McKellen, Jacobi: On a Vanishing Era of Theater Greats

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookDench, Smith, McKellen, Jacobi: On a Vanishing Era of Theater GreatsWith British venues closed and years advancing, there’s even less time to see some of the finest actors in their 80s onstage.From left: Maggie Smith attending the 65th Evening Standard Theater Awards at the London Coliseum in November 2019; Derek Jacobi and Judi Dench at the world premiere of “Murder on the Orient Express” in London in November 2017; and Ian McKellen at the Evening Standard awards in 2018.Credit…Ian West/Press Association, via AP Images; Rune Hellestad/Corbis, via Getty Images; Associated PressMarch 11, 2021, 3:53 a.m. ETLONDON — I’ll say this for the pandemic: It’s brought acting talent together — and into your living room — in ways that might not have seemed possible previously. That sense was probably shared by many on a Sunday night in November when Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench participated in a Zoom event titled “One Knight Only,” which was facilitated by another, younger member of Britain’s acting nobility, Kenneth Branagh.There, sharing a single screen, were four octogenarians — each a knight or a dame and a winner of Tony and Olivier Awards and heaven knows how many other accolades. Gathered for an online conversation in aid of charity, the quartet embodied a lifelong devotion to the theater that has found time for screen renown as well. The realization that the pandemic and advancing age have significantly reduced the already scarce opportunities to see these actors onstage again gave the occasion an underlying piquancy.How glorious, then, to clock their interplay, McKellen taking the reins as a raconteur, with a puckish Jacobi, nattily dressed, not far behind. Dench leaned into the screen as if Zoom were some inconvenience keeping her from sharing an actual space with friends, while Smith, notably more reticent, seemed to pull back from her screen. The conversation ranged from life during lockdown (McKellen has been painting) to their attitude toward critics and on to embarrassing onstage moments and roles they might like to play now. “Anything,” Dench said. “I would be pleased to be cast in anything.”All four belong to a tradition in British acting where theater was what you did and anything else was a happy add-on. Smith, alone among them, won the first of two Oscars (for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”) when still in her 30s, while the others took far longer to become known overseas the way they had long been at home. Whether in college and drama school or covering the expanse of Britain’s once-storied network of regional theaters, these players cut their teeth on theater and waited for the screen to recognize the gifts already well known to live audiences. (More than once I have taken a seat aboard a trans-Atlantic flight only to find a smiling McKellen on video, advising me on in-flight protocol.)Whether as Gandalf, the stammering Roman ruler Claudius or the tart-tongued Dowager Countess in “Downton Abbey,” McKellen, Jacobi and Smith, respectively, boast screen roles with which they will forever be associated, especially for those who haven’t seen them chart a course across the classics, and many a new play as well, onstage. (Smith’s Professor McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movies found her a following among preteens, too.) More people probably saw Dench’s inimitably brisk M during just one of the weekends her seven Bond films were in cinemas (she also made a cameo in an eighth) than saw her onstage during a theater career spanning 60 years and counting.Judi Dench, left, and Maggie Smith in the 1985 film “A Room With a View.”Credit…Cinecon, via Everett CollectionDench and Smith in David Hare’s play “The Breath of Life” in 2002.Credit…Geraint Lewis, via AlamyIan McKellen as Freddie and Derek Jacobi as Stuart in the British television series “Vicious” in 2018.Credit…via ShutterstockThe joy of hearing their reminiscences came with an appreciation of how often these actors’ lives and work have overlapped: Think of them as a continuing Venn diagram from the start. McKellen and Jacobi acted together as students at Cambridge, where McKellen has spoken of harboring a crush on his classmate. The pair reunited a half-century later as the waspish elderly couple in the British sitcom “Vicious.” Jacobi and Smith were integral to the early glory days of the National Theater under Laurence Olivier, and McKellen and Dench played the Macbeths for the Royal Shakespeare Company in a 1976 production that exists on disc and is still spoken of in reverential tones.Dench and Smith, longtime friends, have appeared several times together onscreen, in “Tea With Mussolini” and “A Room with a View” among other titles, and in 2002 made up the entire cast of the David Hare play “The Breath of Life.”Surely, there are plenty of younger actors who are no less committed to the stage, and as we saw at this year’s Golden Globe awards, there’s a direct path in Britain from theater training to screen acclaim. Jude Law is a star who loves the theater, as are Benedict Cumberbatch (TV’s “Sherlock”) and George Mackay (the fast-ascending leading man from “1917”).The difference has to do with career paths that no longer require, or even suggest, the lengthy apprenticeship in Britain’s flagship subsidized theaters — the RSC and the National — that gave these senior practitioners an established perch early on. An actor nowadays may do a play or two only to be siphoned away to TV and film. Some return a fair amount (Matt Smith, a former and popular Doctor Who, is one example), whereas others vanish from in-person view: When’s the last time you could see Colin Firth in a play? Not since 1999, when he starred in Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” at the Donmar Warehouse here.From left, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Eileen Atkins and Judi Dench in “Tea With the Dames,” a 2018 documentary directed by Roger Michell.Credit…Mark Johnson/IFC FilmsIan McKellen in his one-man show “Ian McKellen on Stage: With Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others … and You” in New York in 2019.Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy contrast, McKellen even now is visibly rejuvenated whenever he takes to the boards. In 2019, he toured a physically demanding one-man show the length and breadth of Britain (and for one night in New York) to mark his 80th birthday, and he has begun work on an age-inappropriate stage production of “Hamlet” that was put on hold by the coronavirus. Attending a Sunday matinee of the solo show, I was especially moved by his presence directly afterward in the lobby of the theater. Energy undimmed, he seemed ready to engage his public in chat well into the night.That same year found Smith onstage for the first time in 12 years not in the more-anticipated realms, perhaps, of Wilde or Coward but going it alone as Goebbels’s secretary, Brunhilde Pomsel, in “A German Life,” a bravura solo performance that by rights should travel to New York. (The plan now is to adapt the play into a film.) Dench has spoken candidly of her waning eyesight due to macular degeneration and her desire to nonetheless carry on acting. How exciting it would be to see her once again on a London stage, perhaps as the agelessly witty and worldly grandmother in “A Little Night Music,” a musical in which she once played that same character’s daughter, Desiree.Dench and Smith were part of a separate, scarcely less distinguished quartet when they joined Eileen Atkins and Joan Plowright in “Tea With the Dames” (called “Nothing Like a Dame” in Britain), a lovely documentary that was aired in the United States in 2018 and lets the camera roll as the four great ladies of the stage take stock, gossip and reflect. To see this generation of talent in any iteration is to applaud their longevity while pausing to note the inevitable passing of a collective kinship with the stage that will live on well after it’s no longer possible to enjoy their talents in person.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More