Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 113 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    5 ‘Miscast’ Numbers That Will Play With Your Preconceptions

    MCC Theater’s 2020 “Miscast” gala is its first to happen online, but in a way it’s an easy pivot. For years, the theater has posted performances from the star-studded live event on YouTube, where they have attracted quite a following.Here, in alphabetical order, is a highly subjective list of “Miscast” favorites to check out.“Anything Goes” (from “Anything Goes”)[embedded content]If you loved Jonathan Groff as the foppish King George in “Hamilton,” you will find him irresistibly adorable in this deliriously silly, tap-happy 2012 homage to Sutton Foster, which has Groff playing Reno Sweeney, surrounded by a flock of dancers.“A Boy Like That” (from “West Side Story”)In the musical, the song belongs to Anita and Maria, so having men sing it sounds like a recipe for camp. But Lin-Manuel Miranda and Raúl Esparza’s 2014 duet isn’t a sendup — and that’s the source of its loveliness.“I Am What I Am” (from “La Cage Aux Folles”)Jennifer Holliday as Albin, the slighted half of a gay male couple divided about living openly? It’s probably not in the casting cards. But this song is Albin’s assertion of dignity, and that’s a universal human notion. At the 2017 gala, Holliday makes it her own exquisitely powerful affirmation, quite movingly.“If I Were a Rich Man” (from “Fiddler on the Roof”)Katrina Lenk, who was in previews as Bobbie in the gender-flipped “Company” when Broadway shut down, takes on another male role here, fiddling her way through Tevye’s most famous song. The 2018 number was her idea, and it is almost guaranteed to make you want to see her do the show.“The Impossible Dream” (from “Man of La Mancha”)The only part of this 2016 video that you should disregard is in the introduction, when Keala Settle says she would never be able to do the show justice. Hoping to see her play Don Quixote in a full production might be tilting at windmills — but her singing his anthem is an unequivocal victory. More

  • 88 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    Love Theater? Jesse Green Recommends Streaming Options

    As the editor of the Culture department at The New York Times, Gilbert Cruz relies on critics, reporters and editors in every field of the arts for their expertise. Now we’re bringing his questions — and our writers’ answers — to you. Currently on his mind: how to enjoy streaming theater, which he posed to Jesse Green, the co-chief theater critic.Gilbert asks: Jesse, before the pandemic, I’d go to the theater several times a month in New York City and one of the things that I most appreciated about the experience was the forced focus — no phones, no distractions, pure absorption. Since the lockdown began, I’ve tried several times at home to watch Zoom productions, or even filmed productions like stuff from the National Theater, and I find myself largely unable to sit down and commit. What is my problem?Jesse answers: It’s not just your problem. One of the things we’ve all lost is the blurring of public and private, of self and community, that theater traditionally plays on. Everything is private now because we’re all stuck in our homes. If you’re by yourself in a comfy chair with the phone nearby and the lights blaring, that blur is impossible. To mitigate the problem, I turn the lights down, shut off notifications and sit on the weird sofa no one ever sits on. It helps to watch with someone else. Or maybe you just need some zippier fare?Gilbert: I tried to start with zippier fare, so many months ago. I recall trying to watch James Corden in“One Man, Two Guvnors,” which by all accounts is a madcap time! And my mind just kept drifting and drifting … Didn’t make it more than 20-30 minutes. Have you seen that there is there a certain type of theater production that works best online?Jesse: Yes, and “One Man, Two Guvnors” is not it. That production was never intended to be experienced remotely. The online theater I’ve found most successful is designed for the medium, and sometimes even for the specific platform. In both Richard Nelson’s hourlong, contemplative five-hander “What Do We Need to Talk About?” and Noelle Viñas’s heartbreaking 10-minute monologue “Zoom Intervention,” families communicate via Zoom — and we watch them as if on Zoom ourselves. The form and the content are working together, not at odds.Gilbert: Yeah, I suppose you sort of need to be in the theater to feel the collective giddiness that the audience of “Two Guvnors” seemed to be experiencing. It makes sense that Zoom-based theater would feel natural; you’re steering into the curve there, using a format of communication that many of us have had to become quickly comfortable with. But what other genres or forms should I be looking for, then? I want to be successful here!ImageWhen an actor seems to be speaking directly to you, even if you know it’s an illusion, you feel a version of the intimacy live theater thrives on.Jesse: One-person works in general — like the ones that appear every week as part of the ongoing “Viral Monologues” series, are a good bet. When an actor seems to be speaking directly to you, even if you know it’s an illusion, you feel a version of the intimacy live theater thrives on. (It’s an illusion in the theater too!) Physical comedy is another genre that seems to work well, at least when conceived for the computer’s rectangle instead of the stage’s. (Bill Irwin and Christopher Fitzgerald in “In-Zoom” are delightful.) The avant-garde and surreal, never having depended much on traditional presentation, are thriving. But I have a sense that’s not what you’re looking for.Gilbert: I feel terrible saying this, but I think what I might be looking for (in part at least) is short-form theater? If the debate over the blurring lines between film and TV involve, at least in part, length versus compactness, what is the type of in-and-out “theater” I can experience online that I probably would be less inclined to do in person because I would be expecting “a night out”? One of the things that most moved me early in quarantine was watching Andrew Scott do “Sea Wall.” And that’s, what, an hour?Jesse: Just 30 minutes! I get your point, though: Theater, done right, asks a lot of you, which is one reason we typically leave the distractions of home to experience it. So let’s go bite-size. The monologues I keep pushing make a great all-you-can-eat buffet. If you prefer the feeling of multiperson plays, comedy is a good bet, like Jordan E. Cooper’s 14-minute “Mama Got a Cough.” And though full-length musicals are at this point pretty hopeless online, individual songs suit the medium well. If you didn’t watch “Take Me to the World,” the Sondheim 90th birthday celebration, you should sample it. Or this rendition of “Being Alive,” from the Antonyo Awards. Or this Zoomtastic “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from “Hairspray.” Five minutes of joy before you check the wash. More

  • 88 Shares129 Views

    MTV Video Music Awards: 6 Memorable Moments

    As late as this month, the 2020 MTV Video Music Awards were still scheduled to be staged in person at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, though little to no audience was expected because of the ongoing pandemic. Instead, the network announced on Aug. 7 that outdoor performances would be “more feasible and safer than an indoor event,” scrapping the central location but forging ahead with a makeshift show.The result, which aired Sunday night, combined disparate, green screen-heavy segments, piped-in crowd noise and soundstage performances, most of which were reportedly pretaped — many in Los Angeles, despite the New York theme — joining the BET Awards, held remotely in June, in the strange project of making a virtual collage appear like a communal celebration.The issues of the day, from Covid-19 and police brutality to the upcoming election and the death of the actor Chadwick Boseman, were alluded to repeatedly, but did not dominate the messaging as performances from BTS, the Weeknd, DaBaby, Doja Cat and Lady Gaga attempted as much pop maximalism as they could muster. Below are some of the night’s most notable moments.Lady Gaga Goes Big[embedded content]For much of their existence, the MTV Video Music Awards have seemed to operate by an unspoken rule: Give the awards to the most famous people who show up. (A locked-suitcase, PricewaterhouseCoopers-audited affair this is not.) That has become all the more obvious in recent years, as ratings decline, the show slips further from relevance, and the majority of music’s A-listers make other, less ambitious Sunday-night plans. Those household names who do deign to grace the V.M.A.s with their presence, though, tend to be handsomely rewarded with ample Moon Person awards and uncut centerpiece performance time. Think Beyoncé’s 15-minute “Lemonade” extravaganza in 2016, or Taylor Swift’s rainbow-brite “Lover” medley last year.Or, now, Lady Gaga’s complete and total takeover of the show in 2020. Because while others Zoomed in acceptance speeches from home (was Swift in … a model-home’s walk-in closet?), the artist born Stefani Germanotta showed up. As she accepted four televised awards — she picked up five total, the most of any artist Sunday night — she may not have been in the same place as the host Keke Palmer or any of the “Blade Runner” replicants cheering in the “audience,” but at least she was on a stage, treating the whole uncanny-valley’d charade as though it were a semi-meaningful awards show. It, like so much of what Gaga does, was strangely, even beautifully, sincere.Gaga’s four acceptance speeches were all disarmingly earnest and involved dramatic costume changes (each look with its own couture face mask). Accepting the V.M.A. for artist of the year in a white feathery cape and sequined mask, she told a lengthy story about being wined and dined by label executives early in her career, ending with a quotable punchline: “I didn’t come here for the California roll.” It felt like a throwback to the great “there can be 100 people in a room” awards campaign of 2019. Whether it’s an Oscar, a Golden Globe, or a new V.M.A.s category seemingly tailor-made for the fact that you actually attended this year’s ceremony (last night’s “Tricon Award”), the woman certainly knows how to accept an accolade.Where Gaga truly showed up, though, was in her ambitious nine-minute performance, a medley of songs from her latest album, “Chromatica.” She opened with the segue from an instrumental track into the robotic pop of “911” — a self-aware nod to the year’s most joyous meme — and then a face-masked-and-pigtailed Ariana Grande joined her for their thumping house duet “Rain on Me.” The performance had a bittersweet undercurrent, given that the Power-Rangers-on-MDMA sets and electro-ninja outfits conjured what Gaga’s postponed Chromatica Ball tour might have looked like, in a world where live indoor concerts still safely existed. (It’s now scheduled to begin in August 2021.) But for an energetic, bonkers and wholly cathartic nine minutes, Lady Gaga was so committed to a good old-fashioned awards-show performance that you almost forgot that it was anything less than business as usual. LINDSAY ZOLADZMiley Cyrus Throws It Back, in IsolationIf any pop star could be said to have home-court advantage at a late-period MTV Video Music Awards ceremony, it’s Miley Cyrus, who has consistently provided the show with moments that felt relatively vibrant and unscripted, from twerking in the vicinity of Robin Thicke in 2013 to bringing Wayne Coyne and feuding with Nicki Minaj while also hosting two years later. (In between, she pulled a Marlon Brando, sending up a young homeless man to claim her 2014 video of the year award for “Wrecking Ball.”) So take away the crowd, give every performer their own green screen and throw in a divorce for good measure, and Cyrus was left looking, well, isolated, and without an outlet for her generally benevolent chaos.In a shaggy ’80s mullet and an oversized Madonna-esque cross necklace, Cyrus performed most of her new grown-up, Pat Benatar-y single, “Midnight Sky,” with only a microphone stand as a prop, eventually climbing a staircase to a disco ball that she could pretend was that old wrecking ball. Cyrus has done pointedly subdued at the V.M.A.s before, but this wasn’t that — she seemed to be simply gesturing toward the past because the present, let alone the future, wasn’t worth dwelling on. JOE COSCARELLIThe Weeknd’s Ominous AmbienceThe Weeknd had a distinctly audible and sometimes visible helicopter over his shoulder when he cold-opened the show performing “Blinding Lights” at the Edge, the pointed, cantilevered balcony jutting out from a high-rise amid the architectural shouting match of Hudson Yards. With camerawork mimicking the disorienting pace and perspectives of the video directed by Anton Tammi — the winning video of the year — and wearing the same kind of red jacket and bruised, bloody makeup, Abel Tesfaye (a.k.a the Weeknd) amped up the song’s desperate sense of isolation, pushing his croon toward a shout. The song was an appropriate on-ramp to a show infused with the anxiety of the pandemic that teetered between presence and simulation. In case the helicopter wasn’t noisy enough, fireworks — were they real? — exploded through the finale. The song is pure synth-pop, harking back to a-ha’s “Take On Me”; it also won the R&B award. JON PARELESAdvertising Drives Into the Front RowOne of the most hopeful symbols of the music industry during Covid-19 has been the drive-in concert — a socially distant adaptation meant to prop up the devastated concert business, albeit one that many insiders dismiss as an unsustainable gimmick. It took the 2020 V.M.A.s, though, to make the drive-in branded content.Toyota’s sponsorship was inescapable during the show, and two segments, by the Colombian singer Maluma and the multinational Latin boy band CNCO, were staged as performances in front of a sea of sleek, subtly lit automobiles — perhaps all Toyotas, although in the darkness it was hard to tell. (The location was announced as being Brooklyn.)Along with the masks on Maluma’s yellow-clad dancers, the four-wheeled audience seemed at first a recognition of how life has changed in the pandemic. But it also blurred the line between performance and sponsor. As it went on, the scene came to look less like a drive-in show than simply a promo for a tricked-out Toyota dealership. When it came time for CNCO’s performance, they took to the vehicles like actors in a commercial, mugging behind the wheels as the cameras slowly panned over vehicles so new they lacked license plates. BEN SISARIOBTS’s K-Pop PrecisionThe seven-member K-pop superstars BTS make boy-band predecessors like the Backstreet Boys or ’N Sync look downright uncoordinated, and they do it with smiling nonchalance. They were performing “Dynamite,” their first single on their own with all of its lyrics in English; it’s a relentlessly upbeat slice of neo-disco that celebrates the joy of success, ready to “light it up like dynamite.” (As if it weren’t perky enough, it leaps up a key before the end.) There was no pretense that they were performing in New York City. Their dance routine was green-screened onto Big Apple backdrops, and at first they looked like video game avatars. But it was soon clear that they had shared an actual soundstage and re-choreographed the song with just enough references to moves fans have already learned from the video-clip version, still making all that effort look easy. PARELESA Spotlight on Black Lives MatterThe Grammys tend to be the least politically and socially engaged of the big four awards shows, but as the host Keke Palmer made clear in her opening monologue, Black Lives Matter was on artists’ minds at the V.M.A.s this year. DaBaby danced atop a police car during a medley of his recent hits. The video for good award went to H.E.R. for “I Can’t Breathe,” a protest song the singer and guitarist released in June with a video that includes the names of victims of police violence. The Black Eyed Peas concluded their performance with the words “Wakanda forever — Black Lives Matter.” And the Weeknd used both of his acceptance speeches at the podium to send a message: “It’s really hard for me to celebrate right now and enjoy this moment, so I’m just going to say, justice for Jacob Blake, and justice for Breonna Taylor.” CARYN GANZ More

  • 100 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    Director of a Storied Paris Theater Is Fired

    LONDON — Ruth Mackenzie broke boundaries as the artistic director of the Théâtre du Châtelet, one of Paris’ most famous stages.In 2017, she became the first woman to run the theater, which opened in 1862. Shortly after she took office, the Châtelet closed for a two-and-a-half-year, $35 million renovation, and Mackenzie used that time to reinvent the institution. When it reopened last fall, the revamped programming made headlines and appealed to new audiences, including from Paris’s poor suburbs. Last October, for example, it staged “Les Justes,” a rap musical based on a work by Albert Camus. The production’s director, Abd al Malik, was the first Black artist to direct a play at the theater.Now, Mackenzie has been fired.The theater’s board dismissed her with immediate effect on Thursday, she said in a telephone interview. A letter from the board said that she had bullied employees, Mackenzie said, an accusation that she denied.“There’s a level of betrayal,” she said of her feelings about the decision. “It’s a high price to pay for moving here, writing a 10-year vision and starting it with some beautiful work with artists and audiences that hadn’t had a chance to go to this theater before.”She said she would seek legal advice to challenge the decision.In a short news release, the theater said Mackenzie had left with immediate effect, and a spokesman declined to answer any questions about her departure.Mackenzie’s time at the Châtelet was not without problems. In 2019, before its official reopening, the theater hosted “DAU,” a much-hyped but poorly executed immersive theater work. Visitors complained of waiting in line for hours to see a half-finished spectacle.The grumbling continued once the official programming began. Many critics said that the theater’s opening show, “Parade,” a reworking of a famous ballet that premiered at the Châtelet in 1917, was shallow; others complained that it used amateur performers who weren’t paid. The thumping music in “Room With a View,” a dance piece developed with the French electronic music producer Rone, led to noise complaints from a nearby hotel.Ariane Bavelier, the deputy culture editor at Le Figaro, a conservative French newspaper, criticized several productions from Mackenzie’s tenure in a text message exchange. “Parade,” she said, was “more showbiz than the sophisticated refinement expected in that house,” while she described “DAU” as “a fiasco.” It was “poorly organized, slow, pretentious and without much to see,” she said. Other works in the season, she said, were unoriginal or had already been shown elsewhere.But, Bavelier said, Mackenzie “wasn’t fired because of her programming.”Mackenzie said that two employees from the theater’s marketing department had complained about her while the theater was closed during the coronavirus lockdown, which had led to an official inquiry. “I had Covid and then pneumonia, so it was quite tough being interrogated by Zoom,” Mackenzie said.Mackenzie said that the inquiry’s final report had cleared her of the bullying accusations. “It says some rude things about me,” she said. “It says I don’t speak French very well, and it says some people in the theater found it culturally hard to adjust to my vision. But it could not prove bullying. Nonetheless, they have fired me, citing bullying.”She conceded that some of her programming decisions had not been popular with the theater’s traditional audience. “It was exactly the readers of Le Figaro who found the adjustments from the old Châtelet to the new Châtelet difficult,” she said.Mackenzie said she was “heartbroken” by being fired, but hoped that the theater would continue on the path she had set for it.“My vision is a citizens theater, it’s an activists theater,” she said. “We want the theater to show to the world Paris’s values. I hope that continues.” More

  • 175 Shares129 Views

    ‘We Have to Hear Each Other Out’: Two TV Stars on Friendship and Race

    [embedded content]Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Because of the social and racial divisions across the country, it’s easy to wonder sometimes: Can people who are even the slightest bit different ever understand one another? Tichina Arnold and Beth Behrs do. The actresses, co-stars of “The Neighborhood” on CBS (currently on pause because of the pandemic), spoke with Dodai Stewart, deputy Metro editor, about their friendship in a recent Times Live at Home conversation. Here are excerpts that have been edited for clarity.It’s been months. What has your quarantining been like? Have you been baking? Do you have new skills? I heard something about a banjo, I’m not saying who.TICHINA ARNOLD Ask the white girl! Ask the white girl!BETH BEHRS I have been playing the banjo. I have always wanted to and never had the time to pick it up. I was, like, “I am going to garden and learn the banjo.” Because I felt stuck. And fun fact, Tichina, I’m reading a book right now called “The Banjo: America’s African Instrument,” and I’m learning about the roots and how it was the way to communicate, and its history is both heart wrenching and fascinating.ARNOLD And these are the makings of a really good interracial girlfriend relationship. Honestly. I told Beth, “As your Black friend, I will be doing you a disservice if I do not tell you the truth and if we don’t communicate with each other.” She was, like, “Well, I just need to do this.” I said, “Well, by golly, do it.” That’s what it takes.We have to communicate with each other. And that’s why I love Beth Behrs so much, because we are able to sit down, look each other in the eye and talk about the most intimate things and the things that irk us. So Beth, thank you, for being such a good friend. It means a lot.BEHRS I paid her a lot of money before this interview to say that. No, Tichina is a once-in-a-lifetime friend. She’s also like an older sister who has been through everything, sometimes worse than what a woman can go through in this business. But I just look to her as always telling the truth, but also always coming from a really grounded, spiritual place from the heart. We joke about it and we laugh about it, but there’s really truly something special between us.On the show you are neighbors who become friends, and it’s mostly a Black neighborhood, and here is this white family. Your husbands have their issues, but you as friends get over things very quickly. Did you find that came to you naturally in real life as you started working together?ARNOLD Yes. We operate on the same frequency. And Beth and I since the inception of the show, when we were together on the set from the time we met, it wasn’t about our color. It wasn’t about us even being women. It was about: “We’re about to bring this damn comedy. We are about to tear these walls up.”So we met on common ground. And when you meet on common ground, it creates the basis for a wonderful relationship, no matter what color it is. When you start on the same level and you are looking eye to eye with somebody and you are jumping off the cliff with your work, that is the basis of a wonderful relationship. So that’s where Beth and I started out. Out the gate, we were ready to rock.When you were first starting out, and saying, “I just want to perform, I just want to share this gift,” I’m sure there were so many obstacles. What are some of the ways that you overcame those obstacles?ARNOLD There is a double standard in Hollywood. In America. There is a double standard when it comes to my career and Beth’s career. Beth and I, we have had this conversation.BEHRS Yeah.ARNOLD Beth is afforded certain things that I am still afforded, but how it’s looked upon and how it’s treated and how it’s cultivated, it’s completely different. So our roads are different. And it has not been easy. And there have been a lot of changes made, but we’ve got a long way to go. We are not done.But I believe that Beth and I on “The Neighborhood,” we represent change. We represent something that’s not even new. It’s always been here. Our relationship, there are a lot of Black women and white women out there that have the same relationship that Beth and I have. But guess what? It gets drowned out by the bull. Sorry to bring it down.I think it’s interesting that you are on a sitcom about racial issues, and we are having a kind of reckoning going on in all kinds of forms, in entertainment, in academia, a racial reckoning around the police, and it’s pervasive. And you have a show that discusses these issues. Have there been moments while you were filming that you felt really spoke to the atmosphere around you?BEHRS Yeah. I used to shy away from being uncomfortable. Like, “I don’t want to ruffle feathers.” Now, we have tackled some things on the show that Tichina and I talked about. Tichina and I had an episode where, the moral of the story was a police officer followed her through the store even though I was the one who was doing the stealing. I’m trying to educate myself and also learn how to be an ally and be uncomfortable and step the [expletive] up, because it’s something that I know has been my privilege to shy away from.As a country, I feel like we have to do better. We have to come together. We cannot be separate anymore. And I’m so grateful for my relationship with Tichina Arnold for helping me grow. And I think it’s our responsibility now to help others. And I don’t know what I just said. I feel like I went on an emotional tangent and Tichina, please help.ARNOLD No, you did not. Because you did exactly what I as a Black woman in America want to see in my counterparts. I want to see that you understand, and that even the things that you don’t understand, you try to understand. Because you can’t understand really until you walk in their shoes.But Beth is not going to walk in my shoes. I’m never going to walk in her shoes. So how can we understand each other? We have to hear each other out. Because even as Beth is learning a lot of stuff about Black culture and Black women, I do the same. I have to learn about how she feels and how she processes things.I’m loving this conversation. We have some questions from the audience. Chelsea asks, “Do you have any advice for how to ask privileged female co-workers to step up and advocate for others in professional spaces?”ARNOLD When they state “privilege,” what do they mean? Privilege all around or are they using the word privilege for white? I need to differentiate the two, because I will give you two separate answers.Let’s say that it is white.ARNOLD Very simple. You ask. You ask. I learned how to deal with my uncomfortability. When I’m uncomfortable, I learned how to express that I’m uncomfortable without losing my job, because you are going to ruffle feathers.That’s why I like talking to a lot of my young Black women, my young girls, people like my daughter. You’ve got to be able to understand when you are uncomfortable. Because when you are uncomfortable, depending on how you deal with being uncomfortable, that could either make you lose your job or make you gain friends. It depends on you. Everything runs back to you.Denise asks, “What’s the best advice you have ever received?”BEHRS Something that I have read in “Untamed,” the book, multiple times. Glennon Doyle says in her book: We can do hard things. And I think about that especially during this time in our country and with the pandemic and everything, and also as women — we can do hard things, and it’s OK to feel your feelings. You have to feel it to heal it. Her book would be the best advice for women and men that I have ever read.ARNOLD “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.” It’s my motto. Me being nice and me being cordial and me being able to understand and have dialogue with other people have gotten me jobs where somebody else was better than me because of how I handled myself and how I talked to the producers, how I talked to the director, how I engaged. That lives far longer than you just focusing on the job. The job is more than the job. The job is everything that surrounds the job.Go here to see the full interview, and find out here about upcoming Times Events. More