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      Review: In ‘The Harder They Come,’ Innocence Lost to a Reggae Beat

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      A stage adaptation of the 1972 movie about a Jamaican singer turned outlaw hero sounds great but falls hard at the Public Theater.It looks like such a bright, sunshiny day as the lights rise on “The Harder They Come,” the reggae musical that opened on Wednesday at the Public Theater. The patchwork vibrancy of Kingston, Jamaica, where the story takes place, is efficiently and joyfully sketched in a tin-sided, palm-fronded, louvered and latticed streetscape, lit in happy yellows and purples and bursting with people wearing island florals. And when we meet our hero, the “country boy” Ivan, who has come to the city to seek his fortune as a singer, he is bubbly and hopeful, with a bubbly and hopeful opening number to match: “You Can Get It If You Really Want.”But can you?Alas, over the next two hours or so, the answer will prove to be no, not just for Ivan but also for the audience. Like the chaotic 1972 movie it’s based on, which helped introduce reggae to audiences beyond Jamaica through the songs and charisma of Jimmy Cliff, the musical, adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks, is yanked apart by irreconcilable aims. The uplift of the infectiously danceable tunes keeps obscuring what turns out to be a deeply unsunny story.Not that the movie, directed and co-written by Perry Henzell, was very clear to begin with. Though considered a landmark by many, and certainly a point of national pride for Jamaica, it cannot count narrative logic as one of its strong suits. Its fascination is more like that of a fable, tracing the quick, jagged course of Ivan’s descent. Barely off the bus to visit his mother, he’s robbed of his meager belongings; soon thereafter he’s robbed of his soul, forced to sell his first song for just $20.Conflicts with the church (he falls for Elsa, a preacher’s ward), the police (he’s punished with lashings for defending himself) and even the ganja trade (what do you know, it’s corrupt!) gradually turn his disillusion into derangement. By the time this Candide becomes a semi-psychotic outlaw idol, like the characters in spaghetti westerns, it’s hard to keep track of the chain of injustice or even just the genre.If it’s easy to see why Parks might have wanted to work with this rich material — the movie’s soundtrack is deservedly a classic — it’s also clear that it needed rethinking for the stage. Yet her adaptation is full of choices that, however sensible they seem at first, ultimately make the problems worse.To give the story larger and more legible implications, she pushes the loosely drawn characters of the movie toward greater extremes of badness and goodness. The preacher is not just a hypocrite but a full-blown Judge Turpin, all but slavering over Elsa. The payola-scheming music executive and the police officer who controls the drug cartel are not just grifters but sharky megalomaniacs.Jones as Ivan and Meecah as Elsa, lovers in the movie whose courtship in the musical takes a more conventional turn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, Ivan (Natey Jones) is radically softened, as if the muddled moral middle ground were a dangerous place to locate a musical. His braggadocio is sanded down to mere optimism, his crimes minimized and justified to emphasize his essential innocence. This takes a bizarrely conventional turn in his courtship of Elsa, whom he doesn’t merely shack up with but marries.Evidently the idea is to downplay the characters’ complexity and culpability in favor of an overtly political interpretation of the story that the movie, in its laid-back way, was mostly content to suggest without comment. Parks’s script, and the staging by Tony Taccone and Sergio Trujillo, heavily underline the larger forces — colonialism, capitalism, racism — that help explain or even require Ivan’s bad choices.Though that’s perfectly valid in theory, the heavy-handedness is quite a surprise coming from Parks, whose greatest plays float at the midpoint between archetype and individual. “Father Comes Home From the Wars” superimposes Homer’s “Odyssey” on the tale of a Black man who buys his freedom by fighting for the Confederacy. “Topdog/Underdog,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and was recently revived on Broadway, pulls off a similar balancing act in telling the story of hustling Black brothers named Lincoln and Booth.That balance has been thrown off in “The Harder They Come.” One reason is that the original was a movie with songs, and the songs were all diegetic: They arose from situations in which characters were actually singing, in a church or nightclub or recording studio. But because Parks was writing a musical, the songs had to do and be much more. The movie’s short tunestack — really just four or five main numbers — would have to be expanded.Still, it was another reasonable idea that backfired to expand it quite this much: There are 33 numbers listed in the program. About a dozen are by Cliff, from the movie or elsewhere; several are by other songwriters of the period; and three quite good ones are by Parks herself. (In her non-playwriting life, Parks fronts a “Modern Soul, Black-Country, Psychedelic-Afro-Righteous” band.) They’re deftly arranged for eight musicians by Kenny Seymour.But to accommodate so many, most are reduced to mere atmospheric snippets, curtailing their effectiveness. Even when they are pushed toward more prominence, they tend to evaporate on contact, as they’re forced, like the songs in jukebox musicals, into uses for which they weren’t designed. The rhythmic groove that makes reggae so intoxicating prevents the kind of development that edges a character forward, just as the repeated chorus structure, usually with repeated lyrics to match, stalls when deployed as drama.J. Bernard Calloway rattles the rafters with “Let’s Come in the House,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least the songs are sung well: Jones is as beamish as his music sounds; you can see and hear how his Ivan might be the star the show says he is. Meecah, as Elsa, and Jeannette Bayardelle, as Ivan’s mother — both roles greatly expanded to counteract the episodic nature of the underlying material — take full advantage of their brief vocal moments to shine. As the preacher, J. Bernard Calloway rattles the rafters with “Let’s Come in the House,” a terrific gospel shout. The rest of the ensemble backs them up appealingly, and dances Edgar Godineaux’s choreography even more so.Still, the promise of the show, like the promise of its opening imagery — sets by Clint Ramos and Diggle, lighting by Japhy Weideman, costumes by Emilio Sosa — goes largely unfulfilled. Neither its satire of criminal celebrity nor its tragedy of sullied innocence nor even the sonic pleasure of its catchy score escapes the distorting gravity of its oversized intentions. Instead, “The Harder They Come” falls right into the trap of the rest of that title lyric: “the harder they fall.”The Harder They ComeThrough April 2 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Bobby Caldwell, Silky-Voiced R&B Crooner, Dies at 71

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      His much-covered 1978 hit “What You Won’t Do for Love” launched him on a prolific career that spanned decades and genres.Bobby Caldwell, a singer-songwriter whose sultry R&B hit “What You Won’t Do for Love” propelled his debut album to double-platinum status in 1978 and was later covered by chart-toppers like Boyz II Men and Michael Bolton, died on Tuesday at his home in Great Meadows, N.J. He was 71.The cause was long-term complications of a toxic reaction to the antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones, his wife, Mary Caldwell, wrote on Twitter.Over his four-decade career, Mr. Caldwell swerved freely among genres, exploring R&B, reggae, soft rock and smooth jazz, as well as standards from the Great American Songbook. He recorded more than a dozen albums under his own name.While his skills as an old-school crooner — not to mention his trademark fedora — were convincing enough to land him a gig as Frank Sinatra in a Las Vegas revue called “The Rat Pack Is Back!” in the 1990s, he was best known as a silky-voiced master of so-called blue-eyed soul.“I was in an elevator once and a guy said, ‘Thanks a lot, Bobby, I just lost a bet,’” he recalled in a 2019 interview with Richmond magazine. “Apparently he bet a lot of money that I was Black, and he was wrong.”He was also a highly regarded songwriter. His songs were recorded by Chicago, Boz Scaggs, Neil Diamond and Al Jarreau, among others. “The Next Time I Fall,” which he wrote with Paul Gordon, became a hit for Peter Cetera and Amy Grant, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1986. In 2020, Billboard included the song on a list of the 25 greatest love songs.Success, however, did not come overnight.Robert Hunter Caldwell was born on Aug. 15, 1951, in Manhattan and spent much of his youth in Miami. His parents, Bob and Carolyn Caldwell, were entertainers who hosted two early television variety shows, “42nd Street Review” in New York and “Suppertime” in Pittsburgh, before moving the family to Miami.“I was a show business baby,” he said in a recent video interview. By age 17, he was writing and performing his own material. He soon moved to Las Vegas, where he performed with a group called Katmandu that cut an album in 1971. In the early 1970s, he got a turn in the spotlight as a rhythm guitarist for Little Richard.He spent the next several years trying to make a name for himself, playing in bars and recording demos. He finally found a taste of stardom in his own right with the success of “What You Won’t Do for Love.” That success continued in the early 1980s with albums like “Cat in the Hat” (1980) and “Carry On” (1982).While his star faded later in the ’80s, he continued to record and perform for decades. In 2015, he notched a comeback with his album “Cool Uncle,” which he made with the renowned R&B producer Jack Splash. The album crossed generational lines, featuring the guest artists Deniece Williams, CeeLo Green and Jessie Ware, and it climbed the Billboard contemporary jazz chart. Rolling Stone called the album “2015’s smartest retro-soul revival.”Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Caldwell also got an unlikely career boost with the rise of hip-hop: The rappers Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G. and Common all sampled his songs.Such a crossover might have struck some as unlikely, but not Mr. Caldwell. “This business is constantly in a state of flux,” he said in a 2005 interview with NPR. He added that R&B radio “is not what it was” in his early days, but that rappers were branching into what he called “adult urban, which is more of the R&B that you and I cut our teeth on.”“As it constantly changes,” he said, “you kind of have to keep reinventing yourself.” More

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      Review: A Pianist’s Inheritance Inspires Little Masterpieces

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      Adam Tendler’s program of works that he commissioned from 16 composers after the death of his father is emotionally involving and musically rewarding.When the pianist Adam Tendler received an inheritance — really, a manila envelope stuffed with cash — it did not take him long to think of a smart way to put it to use.Weeks after his father’s death, and being handed that money, Tendler began to commission new piano solos around the theme of inheritance. As he recalled in an essay for The New York Times, he realized that by doing this, he could both process his grief as well as fashion a program that could live on in his creative practice.It’s a touching and sagacious concept — though hardly one guaranteed to be an artistic success. The classical world has seen a number of similar, small-scale commissioning initiatives since the beginning of the pandemic; even when they draw some of the brightest names in the field, as Tendler has done, the result has often seemed frustratingly diffuse.But Tendler’s project, “Inheritances,” registered as emotionally involving — a musically rewarding and tightly plotted 80-minute set when he performed the collection on Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, New York. It was presented in collaboration with Liquid Music, the group that helped the pianist develop the show over multiple years.Nearly every one of the 16 composers on the bill responded to Tendler’s prompt with an A-game effort. Missy Mazzoli’s “Forgiveness Machine” opens with nervy, high-register oscillations that give way to grave bass interjections, before making space for a more relaxed treatment of melody in its middle section. But the score isn’t a simplistic journey toward acceptance: Some of the initial mechanistic churning returns at the close.Other composers reveled in similar ambiguity: music that suggested some arc of understanding, while also observing the persistent notes of friction in a relationship. In its opening bars, Scott Wollschleger’s “Outsider Song” includes sustained-tone airs of mourning, stark prepared-piano pitches and bursts of extended technique. So far, so typical, you might think, at least when it comes to post-John Cage experimentalism.But before long, Wollschleger’s piece works a gorgeous changeup by allowing its more striated tones to flower into full motivic passages, beautiful on their own terms even as the overall harmonic world remains somber. Call it a small masterpiece — a term you might also apply to Timo Andres’s “An Open Book,” which moves between contrapuntal strictures and more free-associative lines with casual discipline.It was a joy to hear so much good music from so many contemporary artists — and in such quick succession; “Inheritances” moves fast, and without an intermission. Just as I was fully appreciating the dancing qualities of Angélica Negrón’s aesthetic in “You Were My Age,” the rug was pulled, giving way to the melodic gifts of John Glover’s “In the City of Shy Hunters.” When Christopher Cerrone’s hypnotic and meditative “Area of Refuge” ended abruptly, without the kind of closing, inventive flourishes I’ve come to treasure in his music, I glanced at the program notes and learned that it was written shortly after his own father’s unexpected death.If any piece appeared less distinct than what had come before, that was largely on account of the strong standard set by this cohort. Throughout, you could hear some artists plying familiar ground with assurance. That was the case with Pamela Z’s “Thank You So Much,” which relied on her practice of looping, editing and phasing samples of someone’s recorded voice — here, Tendler’s — to create motifs.Some composers took risks, as Marcos Balter did when punctuating the more abstruse edges of his piece, “False Memories,” with select, dreamy sequences of jazz-chord harmony. His program note said that this idiom was not usual for him, but that’s no reason for him to stop pursuing the line of thought in future pieces; the result on Saturday was transporting.It would have been enough for Tendler to perform these discrete compositional languages persuasively and call it a night. But there was also a sense of true dramatic stakes. The piece “hushing,” by inti figgis-vizueta, played out over archival video of Tendler as a child; the intense chordal pounding of the piece had the feel of eerie, silent-film piano accompaniment. And I teared up when Tendler spoke directly about his father over Darian Donovan Thomas’s gently reflective work “we don’t need to tend this garden. they’re wildflowers.”Tendler’s concert, by the end, amounted not only to a display of contemporary compositional force, but also a true show. The 92nd Street Y date was a one-night affair, but I hope that additional audiences can experience the live version of “Inheritances” — and that Tendler chooses to close the book on it with a recorded album.Adam TendlerPerformed on Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, New York, Manhattan. More

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      Next Jazz at Lincoln Center Season Will Celebrate Wayne Shorter

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      As part of the performing arts center’s 2023-24 concert season, the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis will honor Shorter, the innovative saxophonist who died this month.Jazz at Lincoln Center announced a 2023-24 concert season on Tuesday that includes tribute concerts to the influential saxophonist Wayne Shorter and performances from both jazz world fixtures like Bobby Rush and Terence Blanchard and up-and-coming artists like the singer Samara Joy, who won a Grammy for best new artist this year.Wynton Marsalis, the composer and trumpeter who is the organization’s managing and artistic director, will be among the artists celebrating Shorter, who died this month, on March 8 and 9 of next year.Rush, the singer, guitarist and harmonica player who is considered one of the last remaining blues masters of his generation, will play early next year, the center announced. Next March, Blanchard, the film and opera composer best known for scoring Spike Lee films, is scheduled to perform a career retrospective with his band, the E-Collective, and the Turtle Island Quartet.And Joy, who won her first Grammy this year at 23, will headline her first show at the organization’s Rose Theater in October.Marsalis, who is the face of Jazz at Lincoln Center, is slated to play several other concerts this year and next. He and the rest of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will open the season on Sept. 21 with a “reimagining” of his small group compositions as big band orchestrations in a concert called “Beyond Black Codes,” a reference to his 1985 album “Black Codes (From the Underground).” In January, Marsalis will pay tribute to Max Roach, the drummer and a founder of modern jazz, in concerts that mark 100 years from Roach’s birth in 1924.Another pair of concerts in February will celebrate three other jazz architects: Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and Charles Mingus, with music direction by Vincent Gardner, the trombonist and composer. The other part of the concert includes the premiere of a new suite, called “Usonian Structures,” by the composer and saxophonist Andy Farber.Ellington will also be the focus of concerts in the spring, led by Marsalis, to celebrate what would have been his 125th birthday. There will also be performances paying tribute to the civil rights activist and singer Bayard Rustin, which will be presented by the drummer Bryan Carter, as well as concerts celebrating the singers Mahalia Jackson and Sarah Vaughan.Other performances include an annual Valentine’s Day concert from Dianne Reeves; concerts by the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel; a set of shows by Catherine Russell, celebrating the genre of Hot Club jazz that emerged in 1930s Paris; and a two-night event by the ensemble Artemis. The saxophonist Sherman Irby will premiere a new commission, called “Musings of Cosmic Stuff.” More

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      Hilary Hahn Practices in Public, Wherever and However She Is

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      BOSTON — Backstage at Symphony Hall here on a recent afternoon, Hilary Hahn opened her violin case and took out her instrument.She flipped it up to her chin, then paced around; she was warming up to play Bach for a group of Boston Symphony Orchestra staffers, as a run-through before she set out on a tour that continues in Los Angeles and Chicago this week. For the moment, she was trying to break in a new set of strings, as any violinist might.She paused. She set her pink-cased iPhone down to face her, having scouted the dressing room for an angle, then turned on its camera and pressed record. She played her Vuillaume violin toward the lens, but not exactly for it. She let it watch while she tuned and tuned again; while she repeated tricky little passages; while she sighed, composing herself. She stopped it when she was done.Hahn edited the video down to a bit more than a minute of unflashy content then posted it, with all the brisk efficiency of a social media intern, to Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. There were no retakes, no notes to her publicist. Season 6, Day 61, of #100daysofpractice was in the can.“I make a point of not picking up the part of the practice that is impressive,” Hahn, 43, said in an interview afterward. “I pick out the part that’s the actual work, where I know I was in the zone, and I wasn’t thinking about anything else.”Hahn, the artist-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony, has long thought about her role in broader terms than many superstar soloists. She has commissioned works including garlanded concertos and brief encores; taped Suzuki exercises for young students to aspire to; and given recitals for babies (all right, their parents). And this prodigy turned pre-eminence is an experienced poster, too: For years, she tweeted in the voice of her violin case.Even so, #100daysofpractice has become an unexpected phenomenon. Social media statistics are notoriously unreliable, but the hashtag counts 800,000 posts on Instagram alone, and has brought amateurs and professionals alike into a community of musicians who, for their own reasons and in their own ways, post part of their daily routine. Drawing back the veil on how musicians work when they are not onstage, Hahn is trying to relieve at least some of the negativity that can surround a crucial — yet traditionally private and largely untaught — element of a musical life.Hahn’s practice videos tend to be recorded where they can be — whether on the road, in a hotel room or at home.Sophie Park for The New York Times“I make a point of not picking up the part of the practice that is impressive,” Hahn said.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHahn came up with the idea in 2017, when she first noticed #The100DayProject, an initiative that asked creative, primarily visual artists to make something, day after day. She chose an activity that she thought she should have been undertaking with a similar commitment to regularity, but was not.“I desperately wanted to get reposted, get attention,” Hahn, laughing, recalled of a time when her social-media presence was not as formidable as it is now. “I didn’t get reposted at all, I was like: ‘I’m here! I’m doing something innovative! I’m boring my fans! Notice me!’”On one level, Hahn’s posts since are a diary of a virtuoso’s life. There’s Hahn at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, at Wigmore Hall in London, at David Geffen Hall in New York, where she recently became the first artist to play a solo recital in the refurbished main theater. There’s Hahn on a private jet, in a hotel, and in another, and another. There’s Hahn in her Cambridge, Mass., home, with her Grammys on a side table or her guinea pigs behind her. There’s Hahn the working mother, playing with one of her two children as her impromptu accompanist, or stealing a quiet moment after midnight, exhausted.Part of Hahn’s message, she said, is that being deliberate about practice, whatever else might be going on in life, allows marginal gains to compound. That opportunity for accountability and self-discipline has attracted other soloists to join in. The pianist Dan Tepfer said that he adopted the hashtag this year to recommit to daily practice, after a grueling, monthslong tour.“I like to say that if your practicing isn’t a practice, you’re not practicing,” Tepfer said. “It truly is a practice, it’s a daily activity, and the power of practicing comes with that kind of continuity.”Hahn practicing on the stage of Symphony Hall in Boston.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHahn initially saw the project along similar lines, and to an extent still does. But as she read the replies to her posts, and spoke with fans after concerts, she saw that the posts were being interpreted as a statement about the need for musicians to accept imperfections and embrace their vulnerabilities — or as a challenge to “the toxic mentality around practice,” as she put it.“We’re just so often in classical music, really trained to beat ourselves up until we get it right, on our own,” Hahn said. “I compare it to walking into a room by yourself, and you’re looking in a mirror, and you’re having to pick out everything that’s wrong with you, and then fix it, with no ability to fix it. You’re supposed to walk out better. And it’s just such an impossible thing. You actually just walk out with all these ideas in your head of what’s wrong with you.”“I realized that we need to have a lot more self-compassion as musicians,” she added. “You can’t become someone you’re not in practice, and you can’t make the music become something that it’s not ready to be. It’s just difficult, though, to reconcile that with expectations, sometimes.”Hahn’s most powerful videos are not those in which she tosses off some Bach with all her familiar assurance, but those in which she does least with her instrument. “Practice” turns out to mean all kinds of things, from listening back to past concerts to doing near-silent left-hand studies while the laundry whirs along. But it can also mean mindfully taking a day off, or acknowledging feeling burned out, and responding appropriately.“I know some people say that’s not practice,” Hahn said on the video for Day 34 of last year’s series. “Can you count that as practice? But it is about the practice of long-term practicing, that mentality that it is — it’s a lifestyle. There’s a consistency to it, and being a consistent practicer doesn’t always mean practicing by data.”Hahn’s videos, she said, challenge “the toxic mentality around practice.”Sophie Park for The New York TimesMany of Hahn’s admirers have taken that lesson about mindfulness to heart. Another violinist, Elena Urioste, tried the project two years ago, and “promptly failed on my third day,” she wrote on Instagram. She responded with her own hashtag, #ErraticDaysofPractice.The rising violinist and hashtag devotee Nancy Zhou said that Hahn “positively reinforces the whole practice culture and what it should be,” and that she was “completely confident” that the star has had an influence.“It makes them start thinking,” Zhou said of colleagues she had talked with, “about, well, how can they more deeply and more forgivingly look at the way they practice?”Hahn said that series has been useful to her own routine, though it took her time “to be at one with the public and the private aspects of it.” And there have been periods when filming — or writing analytically about it — has interfered with practice itself. The series eventually dispelled a “cycle of commentary” that fixated on how she played “perfectly,” she said, denying that that was her intention.But even if Hahn sees her posts as modeling just one possible approach — practice isn’t perfect — and certainly not as lessons in how to practice or play the violin, she has come to accept what she calls their “greater purpose.” She has no plans to stop them just yet.“As a student, I never saw someone practice,” Hahn said. “I would sort of illegally listen to the wall, or even if I would poke my head into the window to see who was there, then you would duck down. You know, you tried to listen a little bit.”“We had no idea how people achieved what they achieved,” she continued, “and the fact that people have embraced the project, started doing it themselves, they’re getting comfortable posting stuff that isn’t polished — it feels like maybe the idea was mine, but the game changer is the pickup of this community.” More

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      Gary Glitter Is Back in Prison After Violating Probation Terms

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      The singer was released from prison last month after serving half of a 16-year sentence for sexually abusing three young girls decades ago.LONDON — The former glam rock singer Gary Glitter, who was released from prison last month, was sent back to prison on Monday for breaching the terms of his probation, Britain’s Ministry of Justice said.“Protecting the public is our number one priority,” a Ministry of Justice statement said on Tuesday. “That’s why we set tough license conditions and so when offenders breach them, we don’t hesitate to return them to custody.” The statement did not specify what the singer, whose real name is Paul Gadd, did to violate the terms of his release.Mr. Gadd was released from prison in early February after serving half of a 16-year sentence for sexually abusing three young girls decades ago, and had been set to serve the remainder of his sentence under probation, a common arrangement in Britain.Following his release, Mr. Gadd, 78, had been fitted with a GPS tag and faced other restrictions.In 2012, Mr. Gadd was arrested as part of an inquiry set up to investigate accusations of sexual abuse against Jimmy Savile, a longtime BBC host. That arrest led to Mr. Gadd’s conviction in 2015 on one count of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault and one count of sexual intercourse with a girl under the age of 13.At his trial, prosecutors detailed how he had abused his access to young fans as his fame grew globally in the 1970s, when he had a string of hits, including “Rock and Roll Part 2.” His music has also been featured in films, including “Joker,” one of the top grossing films in 2019. More

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      Book Review: ‘Y/N,’ by Esther Yi

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      In Esther Yi’s weird and wondrous ‘Y/N,’ a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.Y/N, by Esther Yi“We’re more popular than Jesus,” John Lennon infamously said of the Beatles. As houses of worship shut down in droves while pop music fandom grows ever more extreme, it seems unfair anew that he got such a drubbing.“We no longer go to church once a week; we attend a stadium concert once a year,” declares Masterson, one of several minor characters given excellent Dickensian names in Esther Yi’s wondrous and strange first novel, “Y/N.” It’s a short book — just over 200 pages — but with big themes, like the precarity of love, and how the modern self is forged less in community than mass consumption.Though he’s oblivious to its implications, Masterson has just discovered evidence that his sort-of girlfriend, an anonymous narrator, has become obsessed with the youngest member of a Korean boy band. The star is called, with an inevitable echo of the Unification Church founder, Moon. His oldest bandmate is Sun, of course, with Jupiter, Mercuryand Venus rounding out the quintet. “There are so many lowercase gods in this secular, cynical era,”Masterson pontificates, waxing on about how philosophy has been supplanted by data, religion has become “a vending machine for manifestation and fulfillment,” and so on. Many of us have dated a Masterson.“Y/N” refers not to yes/no, as Moon will assume, but to the practice in fan fiction of leaving a space for Your/Name, so that readers can Mad Lib themselves into the narrative. But this abbreviation, too, has extra resonance. “He seemed to be asking ‘why’ of my existence,” the narrator thinks when Moon reads aloud the first letter in the elaborate fanfic she’s written for him. “‘Why’ I was what I was.”When another supporting character, who manufactures shoe soles and goes by O (shades of the erotic classic published under the pen name Pauline Réage), asks the narrator what letter she’d like to be, she chooses N, reasoning that “the two prongs of M perfectly captured Moon’s bipedal stability” — he’s an exceptional dancer, with a background in ballet — and she is comparatively “doddering.”Esther Yi, the author of “Y/N.”Sharon ChoiSwirling around in this alphabet soup of identity is the idea that a parasocial relationship might be as fulfilling as, or anyway no less delusional than, traditional monogamy. Reading the narrator’s obsessive Moon ruminations, I remembered more than once the weird intensity of Jerry Maguire’s line “you complete me.” During a livestream, she imagines another fan, a vegan, actually wishing to be “masticated by Moon.”What we learn about this unnamed narrator — let’s call her U.N. — is delightful in its specificity. A Korean American living in Berlin, she works as a copywriter for a canned-artichoke-heart business. “I don’t want my life to change,” she tells the flatmate she met online, who’s proselytizing for the band, “I want my life to stay in one place and be one thing as intensely as possible.” But though leery of fandom, she falls hard and fast after one concert. Not for nothing is fame now near-synonymous with “virality”; to be struck by its power is indeed a kind of sickness.Troubled by the news that Moon is retiring, U.N. consults on Zoom with a therapist in Los Angeles named Dr. Fishwife. “The best way to fall out of love,” he advises her, “is to realize there exists no love out of which to fall.” (“Y/N” is packed like a can of artichoke hearts with such useful epigrams.) Undaunted, she books a one-way ticket to Seoul, where she has an uncle, to track down and confront the object of her obsession, staying in an apartment building whose first floor contains, and this rings all too true, “a coffee shop where one could sit, and a coffee shop where one could not sit.”There’s also a pilgrimage to the Polygon Plaza, HQ of the entertainment company that masterminded the boy band, where a Music Professor, the president, does a bit of waxing herself about how “people were running around in circles and indulging their small adorable freedoms, like wearing this or that outfit or sleeping with this or that person. They confused their navigation through the stunning variety of meaningless choices as an expression of their individuality.” It’s a stinging indictment of what it’s become fashionable to call “late capitalism,” as if anyone had an idea of its endpoint.The main pleasure of “Y/N” is not so much its somewhat skeletal plot, which floats in and out of surreality like an adult “Phantom Tollbooth,” as its corkscrew turns of language (also Tollboothian). I loved how Yi animates objects and reduces humans to collections of cells. The celestial group refers to its fans as “livers” — maybe because it sounds like “lovers,” but more because “we kept them alive,” the narrator notes, “like critical organs.”Shelves of books snake through a dark library “in a disorderly line, not unlike intestines.” Electronic door locks emit “smug beeps.” Cosmetic sheet masks, a 30-day skin regimen packaged with images of the boy band, stay on way longer than they should. “In a month, my dead skin cells will fall away, and I’ll be left with the juicier cells underneath,” U.N. states flatly. “Then I’ll be closer to who I really am.”(This is how Sephora makes billions.)In real life, K-pop fans are a sprawling entity, bigger and more online than Gaga’s Monsters or Beyoncé’s Hive: “armies” that have increasingly made incursions into politics and faced government censure. In its clever compactness, “Y/N” resists the junkiness of the internet where they reside, the fanfics and the livestreams and endless comments.All that writing, that global “content,” is now so ubiquitous, so endless, so cheap — ChatGPT, bonjour — it comes to seem like a toxic cloud, against which a well-formed novel like this counteracts, a blast of cleansing heat.Y/N | By Esther Yi | 224 pp. | Astra House | $26 More

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      Review: Verdi’s Falstaff Is Back at the Met, Enlarging His Kingdom

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      Michael Volle puts his noble voice to delightfully undignified use as the title character in Robert Carsen’s still fresh production of “Falstaff.”There’s a lot of fat-shaming in Verdi’s “Falstaff,” but the opera has never really been a candidate for revision or cancellation, probably because the victim of those insults refuses to see himself as one. Eloquent and self-aggrandizing, Falstaff proudly identifies with his stature.“This is my kingdom,” he proclaims, patting his belly, “I will enlarge it.”On Sunday, in the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Robert Carsen’s winning production, the baritone Michael Volle delivered the line in a room at the Garter Inn surrounded by butler’s carts spilling over with ravaged plates and wine-stained tablecloths. Falstaff’s kingdom — as within, so without. Such sly touches litter Carsen’s production set in the 1950s. A decade after its company premiere, it still looks fresh and earns the kind of enthusiastic laughter rarely heard in an opera house.Beyond the appealing visuals — the yellow-chartreuse kitchen cabinets and flattering cinched-waist dresses — Carsen has provided opportunities for profundity. His lighting design with Peter Van Praet, in particular, offers clues — the raw naturalism for Falstaff’s pessimistic aria “L’onore! Ladri!” or the dusky sunset for Falstaff’s humbled reflections at the top of Act III.Volle’s Falstaff leans into those subtleties. In his most recent Met assignments — as a futilely disempowered Wotan in the “Ring” cycle and a salt-of-the-earth Hans Sachs in “Die Meistersinger” — Volle has shown himself to be a Wagnerian of long, graceful focus. As Falstaff, he puts the noble grain of his voice to deliciously undignified use. This booming, endlessly interesting antihero comports himself as an entitled, well-bred gentleman who has tired of wearing dirty long johns and waiting for the universe to right his fortunes. His solution: some Tinder Swindler-style manipulations with two well-to-do married women.Expounding a personal philosophy of honor and its uselessness in “L’onore! Ladri!” Volle sang with professorial authority, his voice emerging as if from a deep well. His smug “Va, vecchio John” flowed with syrupy self-satisfaction. When he waxed poetic about his salad days as the page of the Duke of Norfolk, his voice turned light, proud and assured — grandiloquent, yes, but also creditable.The conductor Daniele Rustioni matched Volle’s conception, leading the orchestra in a rousing, confidently shaped performance. Verdi goes for deep sarcasm in his masterfully comic score — when the men make fools of themselves in bombastic monologues, the orchestration only intensifies — and there was nothing cutesy in Rustioni’s account of it. When the brasses trilled, they belly laughed. The bassoons galumphed; the strings ennobled passages of sincerity; and the horns had it both ways, sometimes jocular, sometimes expressive.The opera’s female characters, never taking themselves — or the threat posed by badly behaved men — too seriously, often sing in ensembles rather than solos. Even so, Ailyn Pérez provided warm, elegant leadership as Alice with a glowing lyric soprano. Her rise as one of the Met’s leading ladies has been a pleasure of this season. The contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, clearly having a ball onstage as Mistress Quickly, received exit applause for her uproarious scene with Falstaff, in which she flashed some leg and flaunted a lot of plumpy tone. The mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano was a mettlesome Meg, and as Nannetta, Hera Hyesang Park revealed a soprano as limpid as fresh water, even if a few top notes sounded hard and unsteady.As Ford, Christopher Maltman sang with a toughened baritone. Bogdan Volkov’s Fenton was sweetness itself.The relentless patter of Verdi’s vocal writing against a full, busy orchestra presents distinctive challenges. The women anchored the double vocal quartet of Act I when the men started to rush the tempo, but otherwise, ensemble singing was admirably tight. The final fugue had astonishing transparency — Lemieux’s pitched guffaws cut through effortlessly — and Carsen’s staging neatly introduced each new voice as it joined the increasingly dense musical texture on a crowded stage.Act III begins in a lonelier way — with Volle’s Falstaff crumpled in a small corner of a vast, empty space, where he is drying off and licking his wounds after being dumped unceremoniously in the Thames. A kindly waiter gives him a cup of warm wine, and he sings its praises with quietly arresting beauty. In that moment, the Wagnerian in Volle poked through, turning the humanity of Falstaff’s humbling into something sublime.FalstaffThrough April 1 at the Metropolitan Opera; www.metopera.org. More