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      ‘The Wanderer’ Review: A Dion Musical Hits All the Familiar Notes

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      A new production about the 1960s doo-wop idol follows the usual rise-and-fall formula. Still, the songs are wonderful, as is the angel-voiced ensemble.Sometimes, all a show needs is a harmonizing ensemble perched out of windows and fire escapes in a well-appointed street scene to win you over. That’s mostly what gets “The Wanderer,” a new jukebox bio-musical about the rise of the singer-songwriter Dion DiMucci, across the finish line. Despite its falling into the genre’s tiresome tropes, this long-gestating production, which opened at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey on Sunday night, succeeds on sheer sonic strength.Another story of a singin’ Italian American who could, “The Wanderer” features a divinely voiced Mike Wartella as Dion, best known by his first name. Bio-musicals have a formula that’s certainly “tried” but less convincingly “true.” There are Dion’s humble beginnings, with his initial backing trio, the Belmonts, named after the Bronx neighborhood where they grew up. There are flashes of glory — winning over, and eventually marrying, the new girl on the block (a sweet Christy Altomare). There are setbacks, of course, like Dion’s plunge into a heroin habit, maintained by a shady friend (Joey McIntyre of, yes, New Kids on the Block). And there are moments of writerly ridiculousness, like when a thunderous downbeat follows his tour-mate Buddy Holly’s suggestion that they charter a plane.Aside from the typically inoffensive rise-and-fall-and-rise narrative, Charles Messina’s book hands Dion a lot of vaguely righteous tantrums about being sick of the doo-wop that made him without ever exploring why it is he’d rather be performing acoustic, singer-songwriter sounds. The song selection, while appropriate enough for the show’s nostalgia, is composed almost exclusively of the same rock ’n’ roll classics Dion claims no longer represent him artistically.But, wow, do they sound good thanks to Wartella’s crooning vocals. The Belmonts, played by Stephen Cerf, Billy Finn and Jess LeProtto, work up an impressive amount of charm. But their a cappella charisma is virtually discarded after the first requisite recording booth scene, when the orchestrations go into full swing. John Shivers’s crisp sound design and Sonny Paladino’s terrific music direction present a paradox: the more complex the arrangements, the further they get from the story’s shaky insistence that all Dion wants is a guitar to crank out a simple tune. Even when his neighbor, amiably played by Kingsley Leggs, sets up a soulful number as an antidote to the ’60s hit parade, Paladino doesn’t allow one note to go unscored.At least two scenes try to lend the book’s forced arguments weight by having the music stop, onlookers staring in awe. For a tight-knit Bronx community, these neighbors sure get startled by every little development. Credit must be given to Jasmine Rogers as a neighbor’s daughter, whose appealing stage presence surpasses what little her character gets to do, and Joli Tribuzio, for imbuing Dion’s mother with an interiority the book does not.Beowulf Boritt’s scenic design, consisting mainly of Bronx streets, transcends its straightforwardness through old-fashioned craft. Revolving set pieces reveal jungle gym-like fire escapes and terraces, and an eye-popping scene set during the Feast of Saint Anthony gives Boritt and the lighting designer Jake DeGroot a chance to flex their candy-colored vision. Along with Sarah Laux’s costumes, the sets outshine Sarah O’Gleby’s busy choreography and Kenneth Ferrone’s unoriginal direction.“The Wanderer” doesn’t reinvent the wheel, nor does it present a back story that was begging to be told; Dion’s highs and lows weren’t unique. Had it come out during the wave of Boomer traps like “Jersey Boys” and “Million Dollar Quartet,” it might have been buried under sickly nostalgia, its weaknesses amplified through market oversaturation. But, call me a sucker for some good doo-wop, I was continuously charmed by this throwback-y musical and its angel-voiced ensemble.The WandererThrough April 24 at the Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N.J.; papermill.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      Can a Brazilian Pop Star Crack the U.S. Market? Anitta Says Yes.

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      In the past decade, the singer has earned fame and the respect of some of Brazil’s most lauded musical elders. Now she’s taking aim at new audiences but hoping to hold on to her roots.“Meiga e Abusada,” the 2013 song that first catapulted the Brazilian singer Anitta to fame, begins with a Lady Gaga sample and a cool assertion. “I get everything I want,” she sings in Portuguese. “But it was so easy to control you.”In the song’s music video, partly filmed in Las Vegas, Anitta frolics around the desert in a cropped plaid shirt, drinks champagne and hits casinos in a limo. It’s a declaration of her prowess made all the more brazen by its timing: Only a couple of months before its release, it had felt like nothing would ever happen for her.“I’m a pessimistic person,” Anitta said in a recent interview, speaking in Portuguese. That’s partly because the odds were never strictly in her favor. “Growing up, my father would say, ‘We’re poor, you can’t study the arts,’” she said. “He thought I’d need a plan B.”She didn’t. Since putting out her first album at age 20, Anitta has gone on to become one of Brazil’s biggest pop stars. In the past decade, she has released four studio albums, performed at the 2016 Olympic opening ceremony and racked up numerous Latin Grammy nominations. Anitta got her start singing in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, and success eventually followed her to the rest of South America, where a string of Spanish-language hits featuring stars like J Balvin and Maluma cemented her status as one of the region’s top performers.The United States market feels like the final frontier. This month, Anitta will perform at both weekends of the Coachella festival. On April 12, her new trilingual album “Versions of Me” — her first since signing with Warner Records in 2021, and her first international LP — arrives. A solo female pop artist from Brazil has never become a star in North America, but Anitta’s team and label are intent on making it happen — and it shows. Featuring tracks produced by established hitmakers including Ryan Tedder, Stargate, and Andrés Torres and Mauricio Rengifo (who produced “Despacito”), the album’s sleek hooks, taut melodies and glossy production signal a clear attempt at breaking her in America.Speaking via video chat from her house in Miami in late February, Anitta was barefaced on the couch, dressed in an orange Versace T-shirt. She looked tired, but her posture was flawless. “I got back yesterday from Rio and I was exhausted. I’d been working Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday without a break,” she said, petting her sleepy Italian greyhound, Plínio. (He had great posture, too.)Born Larissa Machado in Rio de Janeiro’s working-class Honório Gurgel neighborhood, Anitta, 29, first rose to fame after she posted a video of herself singing into a can of deodorant. Her stage name, a homage to a character she’d long admired from an old Brazilian TV show, “Presença de Anita,” came later. In the series, she explained, Anita would say that she wanted to wake up a different person every day: “She could be romantic, sensual, intelligent and crazy all at once.” Anitta likes playing with that idea too.“People have always wanted to define women: Is she the marrying type? Is she the type that likes to go out?” she added. “But I can be both things, right?”Anitta made a name for herself performing at parties around Rio’s favelas. Funk carioca, or baile funk, a vibrant rhythm that emerged in Rio de Janeiro’s predominantly Black working-class neighborhoods in the 1980s, is the soundtrack of choice at these gatherings, where sound systems often blast the genre’s signature tamborzão beat. “I started bothering everyone and asking if I could sing at their events, the proibidas,” Anitta said.Proibida is Portuguese for prohibited. In the early 2000s, the police — who deemed these bailes (dance parties) breeding grounds for gang violence — began violently sweeping events in Rio’s favelas under the guise of public safety. While the genre now plays in some of the country’s wealthiest neighborhoods and in clubs popular with arty crowds in London and Berlin, its creators, especially those who haven’t yet risen to fame, are still marginalized.Anitta onstage in Miami earlier this year. Since putting out her first album at age 20, Anitta has gone on to become one of Brazil’s biggest pop stars.John Parra/Getty ImageAt the height of the moral panic around baile funk, even stars like Anitta didn’t walk away unscathed. When she performed at the Olympic opening ceremony in 2016 alongside the national icons Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, critics lashed out against her inclusion in the event, dismissing her as a “favelada.”“Prejudice hurts,” Anitta said. “But what artists like Caetano, Marisa Monte, Djavan and Bethânia have always told me is that they were the Anitta of their time,” she said, referring to Maria Bethânia and other Brazilian stars who are mostly over 70 (Monte, the youngest of the group, is in her 50s). “Everyone told them they were bums and now they’re icons.”Veloso, one of the country’s most revered singer-songwriters who has collaborated with the singer in the past, praised her in an email. “Anitta is so competent, sincere, direct and likable,” he wrote. “She has captured the zeitgeist in such an impressive way.”In the mid-2000s, M.I.A. and Diplo began to export funk carioca out of Brazil through songs like “Baile Funk One” and a documentary, “Favela on Blast,” but the genre never made it to the pop charts. Anitta still believes it has the potential to go global, though. And while her new album experiments with a range of styles — the Gaga-inspired electro-pop of “Boys Don’t Cry,” the rollicking reggaeton of “Gata” — “Versions of Me” never completely severs ties with her roots.Still, she knows success often takes time. “The main things are patience and persistence,” she said. “We have to do it step by step.”Ryan Tedder, the frontman for the band One Republic who has written hits for Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, agreed to executive produce Anitta’s project halfway through their first studio session. “She’s easily the hardest working person I’ve ever worked with,” he said by phone. “She does not have an off switch.”Tom Corson, co-chairman and chief operating officer at Warner Records, agreed: “Anitta has what it takes to be a global superstar.” The plan? “Obviously we want hit records,” Corson said. “And we’d like to see her as a unique force within the U.S. and global market, toggling back and forth between languages.” The obvious comparison is Shakira.While “Versions of Me” is above all, an international project, Tedder and Anitta were both adamant that Brazilian rhythms had to be a part of it. “I didn’t want to disenfranchise her Brazilian fan base from what she’s already built,” he said.For “Faking Love” — a baile funk-inspired track featuring the American rapper Saweetie — Anitta and Tedder flew the Brazilian producers Tropkillaz to Los Angeles for a session. “The rhythmic movement of an actual funk beat doesn’t use what’s called quantization,” Tedder said, referring to software that makes beats line up perfectly. “You have to program it in with natural human swing.” It took him several tries before he could get it right; Anitta sat and listened until she knew they’d found the one.Anitta is aware that when it comes to her work, she is a perfectionist first. For years, she has worked with a speech therapist to minimize her accent, and even as she was putting the finishing touches on her album, she was rerecording parts of tracks. Would it matter if she sang in English with a strong accent? It shouldn’t, but it does, she said. “I realized that if I spoke slower in meetings or with an accent, people would respect me less,” she said, recalling how she felt when she started doing business in America.Things are different in her personal life, but it’s hard to completely relinquish control when she has lived the bulk of it under a microscope. Anitta, who is bisexual, kept key aspects of her identity — including her sexuality — hidden from the Brazilian press for years. “It was complicated because it was all very taboo at the time,” she said. “Lots of singers weren’t out, and I don’t judge them because I know people really came after me.”It was only after a bodyguard had to chase down someone who took a picture of her kissing a woman at a party that she realized she wanted to stop hiding. “My mom has known that I kiss girls since I was 13, why should I care what other people think?” she said in a second interview, throwing both of her hands up in exasperation as she slouched down on a hotel room couch in Los Angeles.Politically, aspects of Anitta’s life have long been scrutinized too. The singer was criticized in 2018 when she didn’t outright condemn Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro during the early stages of his campaign. But she maintains there’s a reason for that. “I was having my religious initiation,” she said. In Candomblé, which mixes Yoruba, Fon and Bantu beliefs, initiations typically require people to remain secluded for around 21 days: “I had no way of contacting the outside world.”When it became clear Anitta would have to say something, she called a friend, the lawyer, journalist and political commentator Gabriela Prioli, and asked for help. “I didn’t understand anything. I didn’t know what a congressman does or what a councilman does,” she said. “I’m not ashamed to say it because most Brazilians don’t.”In the end, Anitta found the conversation so helpful she decided to start broadcasting political education classes with Prioli on her Instagram, which she hopes to resume ahead of this year’s elections. While she won’t endorse a candidate, Anitta now firmly opposes Bolsonaro. In late March, when lawyers representing the president’s party petitioned Brazil’s supreme electoral court to stop artists from making “political demonstrations” in their sets, Anitta encouraged other performers to defy them. “To my friends who want to speak out: I’ll pay your fine,” she said in an Instagram story.Bolsonaro and Anitta occasionally even butt heads on social media, where the singer boasts 61 million followers on Instagram alone. “He knows his conservative supporters don’t like me, so he uses my name to draw attention to himself,” she said.Her follower count will likely only grow in the coming months. Popularized by the “paso de Anitta” — Spanish for Anitta’s dance move — her TikTok hit “Envolver” is the first song by a Brazilian artist to enter the Top 10 on Spotify’s global chart. In late March, it hit No. 1 there.Anitta’s upcoming Coachella performance on the festival’s main stage marks another first for a Brazilian artist.“I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “It makes me anxious.” But she is thinking about it.Anitta said rehearsals for the show are happening in Rio, where she’s training with one Brazilian and one American choreographer. (“I wanted to combine both cultures.”) And after that? “I’ve only planned my life until Coachella,” she said half-jokingly.“I’m not going to overthink things,” she said. That’s how music becomes formulaic. “I know what I want to do: if things work out, great,” she added. “If they don’t, that’s also great.” She wasn’t always this way. “But I’ve accomplished so much more than I ever thought I would. If I fell asleep now and woke up at 40, I’d still feel like I’d done what I set out to do.” More

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      The Politics of Rihanna’s Pregnancy Style

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      When the right to control your own body and the right to dress how you like intersect.Ever since she announced her pregnancy in late January via Instagram and an artfully staged paparazzi shot of her and her partner ASAP Rocky strolling beneath the Riverside Drive viaduct, Rihanna’s maternity style has been marked more by what she has not worn than what she has.She has not worn tent dresses. She has not worn maternity jeans. In fact, she has barely worn much clothing at all.Instead she has bared her naked belly at seemingly every turn: in green draped fringe and ombré pants at a Fenty beauty event; in a bra, sheer blue top unbuttoned over her bump and low-slung gray jeans at the Super Bowl; in dragon-bedecked black pants, a vinyl bandeau and a crystal headdress at a Gucci show; in a sheer baby-doll dress over a lacy bra and panties at Dior; and, most recently, in a sheer organza Valentino turtleneck over a sequin skirt and bandeau at Jay-Z’s Oscar after-party.In the annals of public pregnancy, there has never been a display quite like it.Not surprisingly, the general reaction among celebrity watch sites has been a breathless swoon. “Rihanna Keeps Wearing the Hottest Maternity Looks Ever,” HighSnobiety crowed. “Rihanna Is Single-handedly Giving ‘Maternity Style’ a Rebrand,” Glamour U.K. sang.Rihanna at a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles in February.Mike Coppola/Getty ImagesAt a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles in March.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Fenty Beauty by RihannaThey’re right, of course. But, really, the style choices are just the beginning. In dressing to confront the world with the physical reality of her pregnancy so consistently, Rihanna has gone way past just making a fashion statement. She’s making a “totally transgressive and highly political statement,” said Liza Tsaliki, a professor of media studies and popular culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece.It’s just all couched in the familiar trope of the “the celebrity bump watch.” Sneaky, right?The result is a dizzying swirl of contemporary phenomena, including: (1) celebrity culture, in which we increasingly take our consumer and behavioral cues from boldface names; (2) what Ms. Tsaliki calls “the aestheticization of the body and the monitoring of women’s waistlines”; and (3) modern politics.All of which take this particular pregnancy dress story far beyond mere “get the look” role modeling. (They also explain why this particular “get-the-look” role modeling has been so disproportionately exciting for so many.)After all, said Renée Ann Cramer, the deputy provost of Drake University and author of “Pregnant With the Stars: Watching and Wanting the Celebrity Baby Bump,” this is a time when “many people on the far right and even the mainstream right are promoting policies that challenge the continuing autonomy of women-identifying people over their bodies, lives and decision-making capacity.”At the Dior show at Paris Fashion Week in March.Jeremy Moeller/Getty ImagesBy dressing to showcase her pregnant belly, and in a way that has nothing to do with traditional maternity wear, Rihanna is modeling an entirely opposite reality. “She’s saying, ‘I’m a person still, and I’m my person.’” Ms. Cramer said. That she can be “autonomous, powerful and herself, even while carrying a life.” She’s connecting the right to dress how you like with all sorts of other, more constitutional rights.It’s a pretty radical move.The pregnant body, after all, has been celebrated, policed, hidden away and considered problematic for centuries.In ancient times, pregnancy was venerated and exhibited, seen as a physical embodiment of women’s connection to mother earth, but by the Middle Ages and medieval Christendom, Ms. Tsaliki said, it had been transformed into a shameful state, one connected not so much to the sacred as the profane.It had become a symbol of our base desires and a sign of female instability and lack of control and thus something best kept behind closed doors and (literally) under wraps. At least until the child emerged and the woman was transformed into a paragon of pure maternal selflessness.It was an evolution revealed in “Portraying Pregnancy,” a 2020 exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London that demonstrated how, since the 16th century, “the response to the unsettling physical reminder of mortality and sexuality engendered by pregnant bodies changed.” Or so wrote Helen Charman in a review of the show in the international art magazine Apollo.ASAP Rocky and Rihanna at the Gucci show during Milan Fashion Week in February.Victor Boyko/Getty Images For GucciAfter the Rams Super Bowl victory in February.Ab/BackgridIt revealed, she said, how paintings and other art forms moved from showing pregnant bodies “as affirmations of paternalistic structures of inheritance and power” to trying to pretend they didn’t actually exist (or the condition of being pregnant didn’t) to putting pregnancy front and center as an increasingly idealized state.That began in 1952, when Lucille Ball became pregnant during the filming of “I Love Lucy” and famously forced her producers to write her impossible-to-ignore condition into the script, and onto everyone’s screens (though they still couldn’t use the actual word “pregnant”), as dramatized in the recent film “Being the Ricardos.”That in turn gave way to the tent dress compromise. (Remember Princess Diana’s ruffled smocks and sailor dresses during her pregnancies in the early and mid-1980s?) At least until Demi Moore shocked the world by posing naked and heavily pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, inaugurating the age of the pregnancy art portrait.And that period extended through such belly-baring covers as Cindy Crawford, naked and pregnant on W; Britney Spears, naked and pregnant for Harper’s Bazaar in 2006; and Serena Williams, naked and pregnant on Vanity Fair in 2017. That phase reached its apogee with Beyoncé’s 2017 photo shoot/announcement that she was pregnant with twins, a heavily art-directed series of pictures that seemed to encompass such references as Botticelli’s Venus and a renaissance Madonna.As the pregnant body became valorized for its life-giving potential, it increasingly became “a place of safe transgression,” Ms. Cramer said. And that meant that “it’s one of the few times women-identifying people can safely disrupt some norms.”At Jay-Z’s Oscar after-party in Hollywood.Ngre/BackgridProgressive though they may seem, however, as Ms. Charman wrote in Apollo of such images, they nevertheless “conform to the glossy conventions.”Not so Rihanna. She has made confronting her pregnancy part of her every day. Or maybe more pertinently, our every day. “I was expecting the announcement,” Ms. Cramer said — perhaps even a few other, carefully calculated appearances. “But there has been no return to covering up.”Though it’s possible that this is a totally unconscious choice — maybe her skin is so sensitive that it’s uncomfortable to have anything on her belly — Rihanna herself has a history of consciously using her own physicality and profile to force reconsideration of old prejudices and social conventions about female agency and beauty. Most obviously in her Savage X Fenty lingerie brand, currently valued at around $3 billion.Indeed, her current approach may have been foreshadowed by her choice to have Slick Woods, at nine months pregnant, model in her first Savage X Fenty show in 2018 wearing only pasties and lacy lingerie. Famously, Ms. Woods went into labor on the runway, later posting “I’m here to say I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT WHENEVER I WANT AND SO CAN YOU.” (There were some additional words in there to emphasize her point, but they cannot be printed in this newspaper.)Change the date and those lines could easily be the motto of Rihanna’s maternity wear. She did characterize her own pregnancy style as “rebellious.”Now the question, said Ms. Cramer, is whether “an overt celebration of embodied power through pregnancy can make a difference.” Can the “performance of a powerful pregnancy by a wealthy woman at the top of her game filter down” to change how all pregnancies are perceived?If so, Rihanna will have done a lot more than influence how pregnant women dress. She’ll have influenced how we think about the rights of women. Pregnant or not. More

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      ‘Suffs’ Review: Young, Scrappy and Hungry for the Right to Vote

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      Shaina Taub’s new musical at the Public Theater tells the story of the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment.I don’t remember my grade school history books dedicating more than a few sentences to the women’s suffrage movement. The nearly 100-year history of women fighting for the right to vote is often trimmed down to two main talking points — Susan B. Anthony and the 19th Amendment — and some dismissed the suffragists as self-serious rabble-rousers.In an effort to counter those notions of these revolutionary women and their fight, the new musical “Suffs” begins with the satirical vaudeville-inspired “Watch Out for the Suffragette!,” sung by the ensemble, made up of female and nonbinary actors. (The show was scheduled to open Wednesday at the Public Theater, but canceled because of positive coronavirus tests.) They’re dressed in drag — even mustaches — caricaturing their male detractors. We’re in for a tedious history lesson, these hypothetical skeptics predict in song; a dreaded feminist is “planning to scold you for three hours straight.”My first thought: Dear God, I hope not.“Suffs” has a hefty two-hour-and-45-minute running time, after all, and though the musical isn’t guilty of scolding, it is guilty of stifling an impressive — though exhausting — breadth of U.S. history through its contemporary lens.Shaina Taub, the Public Theater’s playwright in residence and creator of the musical, stars as Alice Paul, the headstrong young suffragist who assembles a group of women who lead protests, suffer abuse and incarceration, and march on Washington for their right to access the ballot box.Taub gives a steely performance as Paul, though her standby (Holly Gould) has stepped into the role, as Taub tested positive for the coronavirus just before the production’s scheduled opening.Hannah Cruz, center, in the satirical vaudeville-inspired number “Watch Out for the Suffragette!” in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPaul is joined in the metaphorical barracks by Lucy Burns (played by an understated Ally Bonino), her friend and fellow suffragist who helped Paul form the National Woman’s Party. There’s also Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi, teeming with earnestness), an eager young student and writer from Ohio, and Ruza Wenclawska (a droll Hannah Cruz), the tough-as-nails Polish American factory worker and union organizer. Inez Milholland (Phillipa Soo), a labor lawyer and chic socialite, is their public face; as Inez, Soo, the beloved “Hamilton” alum, brings sugar, sass and style to the group, marching with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other.In the seven years that are covered in the musical — 1913 to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally ratified — Paul butts heads with her sisters in the fight. She has a yearslong dispute with Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), who, as the head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, thinks Paul’s moves are too radical. And there’s the journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James), who unsuccessfully tries to bring race into the movement, challenging Paul’s myopic vision for change.But her actual opponent is the president, Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean), who noodles around the stage, step-kicking down stairs with a top hat and a cane while gaily singing misogynistic lyrics like “Men make the money/Ladies make the bread/Men make the rules/Ladies make the bed.” McLean’s jaunty performance introduces some of the few moments of levity in the musical; otherwise a general stiffness pervades the production.Nikki M. James, center, as Ida B. Wells and Cassondra James, right, as Mary Church Terrell in a subplot highlighting the tensions between two suffragists with differing ideas about how to elevate race in the movement.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMaybe that’s because the whole production feels so attuned to the gender politics and protests of today, so aware of possible critiques that it takes on its subject with an overabundance of caution. So a mere 20 minutes into the show, “Suffs” makes it clear it’s not framing Paul as the perfect warrior-saint of the movement. When Paul is dismissive of Wells she responds with the song “Wait My Turn” (“Do you not realize you’re not free until I’m free./Or do you refuse to see?”), establishing her role as the racial conscience of the musical, popping up every once in a while as a reminder of the pitfalls of white feminism. And all these women and stories of their activism are uncomfortably stuffed into a show too scared to miss anything that it becomes bloated with information.In many ways “Suffs” lands like a clunky heir of the Public’s other big historical musical, “Hamilton,” borrowing some of its approaches to structure while trying to avoid the criticisms about its politics around women and slavery. But that’s the risk that comes with recasting history with today’s sensibilities in mind. Even this feminist tale occasionally serves retorts to those funky founding fathers who met in “the room where it happens”; our suffragists sing about how no women got to witness the signing of the 19th Amendment themselves because “a man signed the paper behind a closed door in a room somewhere.”But the musical doesn’t need to try so hard to defend itself or prove its relevance, say, by showing the threats and taunts of men interjected into songs like “The March.” Neither does it need to fall back on preciousness, like when a Tennessee state senator’s mother, an “old farmer’s widow,” sings a banjo-heavy song pleading with her son to vote for suffrage with a promise of his favorite meatloaf in return. Or the pat pairing of some couples in the end, and the heavy-handed finale, “Never Over,” about the continuous march toward progress.The direction, by Leigh Silverman, feels as methodical as the text; the pacing is speedy, and the songs are dense with exposition like those of “Hamilton.” But “Suffs” turns out to be all work and mostly no play, and when it comes to the music itself nothing really pops. There are a few dry touches of vaudeville, and pop and some sugary songs like “If We Were Married,” a number that feels like a contemporary stab at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s 1937 rendition of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” It’s a parody of such cutesy courtship numbers yet it delivers just that.Taub, left, as Alice Paul and Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt, who thinks Paul’s moves are too radical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe music is most interesting when it sheds the exposition and allows the characters space to express their hopes, frustrations and desires. Colella slays her performance in one such song, the prickly “This Girl.” Colella clips her words and sharpens her gestures, hitting her notes with the punch of a boxer in the ring. The harmonies, too, like those in the ensemble number “How Long,” which shifts from a tone of despair to one of resilience, also provide the music with much-needed dimension.The choreographer Raja Feather Kelly’s typically transgressive style (exhibited in shows like “A Strange Loop” and “Fairview”) feels defanged, ball-and-chained to its very literal interpretation of the material; there’s much marching and posing, syncopated stepping. Mimi Lien brings a similar austerity to her set design — the stately steps and columns of Congress, perhaps, or some institutional building — but the simplicity here works, allowing “Suffs” to focus on its diverse cast of history-makers. In the costume design, Toni-Leslie James strikes a satisfying balance between formal high-waisted skirts and black lace-up boots, and the splashy wide-brimmed hats have enough ribbons and feathers to make a Southern churchgoer swoon.“Suffs” ends with a passing of the torch from one generation of change-makers to the next, revisiting the latest clash of new politics versus old politics: What was once revolutionary becomes out of date. For all the work this show does to illuminate the successes — and failures — of the women’s rights movement, and the constantly evolving nature of our politics, it focuses so much energy on seeming as timely as possible. But, as the suffs learn, movements transform; our government leaders change, as do the demands of the people on the picket line. It’s a lesson the musical should take to heart: You can’t live in the past, present and future of our nation’s politics all at once — at least not without losing your way.SuffsThrough May 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      An Afrofuturism Festival Brings an Energy Shift to Carnegie Hall

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      The inaugural event explored a movement about denial and transcendence in the most institutional music hall in New York City.The first time Sun Ra and his Arkestra played Carnegie Hall, in April 1968, they were shrouded in darkness for most of the show. The critic John S. Wilson, reviewing for The New York Times, was flummoxed. Wilson considered himself a Sun Ra fan, but he couldn’t fathom why, on the country’s most prestigious stage, the cosmic keyboardist, bandleader and philosopher was keeping his ensemble’s wondrous “array of odd instruments” and “colorful costumes” out of view.The messages in Ra’s music, and his riddle-like public statements, could’ve helped Wilson understand. “​​On this planet, it seems, it has been very difficult for me to do and be of the possible things,” Ra said in an interview for DownBeat magazine in 1970. “As I look at the world today and its events and the harvest of possible things, I like the idea of the impossible more and more.” Perhaps the most appealing impossibility, for Ra, was to escape — to disappear.The Arkestra returned to Carnegie Hall in February, almost three decades after Ra’s death, to help kick-start the hall’s first-ever Afrofuturism festival, a series of concerts on its major stages, with satellite events held in smaller venues across New York, around the country and online. Those programs included screenings of sci-fi films made by Black directors, comics lectures and panels on social theory.All tied back to Afrofuturism, an artistic movement that mixes realistic racial pessimism with audacious fantasy, and that holds an increasingly prominent place in culture today. Afrofuturism picks up on a more than century-old mode in Black American art: fusing the tools of sci-fi and surrealism with the histories and belief systems of African societies, particularly in Egypt, Ethiopia and Nigeria, in search of new models.The trumpeter Theo Croker made his debut performance at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in March alongside the keyboardist Mike King, the bassist Eric Wheeler and the drummer Shekwoaga Ode.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times“You can call Afrofuturism the high culture of the African diaspora right now,” Reynaldo Anderson, a Temple University scholar and a co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement, said in an interview. He was on the five-person committee of scholars and artists that curated the festival, and he sounded well aware of the inherent contradictions of trying to bring a movement about denial and transcendence into the most institutional music hall in New York City.“The Carnegie function is going to be remembered as bringing all those threads together at a mainstream institution,” he said. “I think we made the argument successfully.”That’s partly because the artists they chose knew how to treat reclamation as a viable alternative to escape. Camae Ayewa, a speculative poet and electronic musician who performs as Moor Mother, sat in with the Arkestra toward the end of its set. “I was never here,” she recited, invoking Ra, over the large ensemble’s turbid, thumping swing. “From 1619 to Wakanda, I don’t exist/Whose map is this? Whose timeline?”Then she issued a warning, seemingly to herself: “Don’t be truth in front of the vultures/Don’t be truth in Carnegie Hall.”The festival’s performances were stacked with moments like this: disruptions of the space, caught between gratitude and suspicion. All the performers seemed sincerely thrilled to be there, and nearly all of them went out of their way to say how welcomed they’d been by the staff and the curators. Most also expressed a kind of surprise.Fatoumata Diawara, the incendiary Malian vocalist, guitarist and songwriter, headlined a bill in Zankel Hall that also featured Chimurenga Renaissance, a transnational band mixing hip-hop, lounge music, Zimbabwean protest songs and Afrobeats. Diawara and her five-piece band administered energy to the room as an undiluted concentrate, playing distorted, tension-ratcheting desert blues and dance music from the West African coast.Her songs are mostly in Bambara, which she sings over tightly riveted rhythms drawn from the Wassoulou region of Mali or the highlife tradition of Ghana. She, too, insisted on the right to remain partly unknown. “Many people told me, ‘Why don’t you sing in English?’” she mused between songs. “I don’t need to sing in English to connect with you guys!” A roar rose up to agree, but the point was already proved.Fatoumata Diawara performed with a band featuring Sam Dickey on bass and Victor Campbell on drums.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesDiawara did one song in English: “Sinnerman,” the old spiritual and Nina Simone staple. By the time the quintet reached a canter, many in the crowd had stood up to dance, and those still in their seats seemed to have loosened up completely. It rearranged the energy in the room, made it unrulier. Not long after, in an encore, she pulled up about 10 audience members to dance with her, and the disarray spread to the stage.There was nothing blatantly futuristic about Diawara’s performance, and she was one of a few artists on the bill who have not made a point of nominally affiliating themselves with Afrofuturism. But it felt unbounded, in a way that made you think about how tightly energy like this is often asked to be kept in when it’s not onstage.By contrast, the flutist Nicole Mitchell often does compose for her Black Earth Ensemble with the science-fiction writings of Octavia Butler in mind. Mitchell and her band gave one of the most consistently breathtaking performances of the festival. Mixing Mitchell’s streaked, blustery flute and echoing effects with the inchoate, chewed-up speech sounds of Mankwe Ndosi; the earthy, shifting beats of the drummer Avreeayl Ra; and the contributions of a small crowd of acoustic instrumentalists, this was music with drive and narrative of its own, but it seemed to make every move in anticipation of something far grander to come. That grand thing never quite arrived, which also felt right.The Detroit techno luminary Carl Craig led a group that included four fellow synthesizer artists and a concert pianist, all playing together, and just about everything they did was grandiose. He leaned into fan favorites from the 1990s, and delivered a key insight during his stage banter: Most of the beats he made as a young person, he said, were crafted with the idea that they might one day become the soundtrack to a “Blade Runner” movie.The Carl Craig Synthesizer Ensemble performed grandiose versions of fan favorites from his early days.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesOpening the festival on Feb. 12, Flying Lotus, who may be Craig’s best-known heir, played a sold-out show at the nearly 3,000-seat Stern Auditorium, flanked by the harpist Brandee Younger and the violinist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Draped in a white robe, and huddled over what looked like an ice sculpture crowned with a laptop, he ran through new and old material, heaving from agitated beats to wide-open airscapes that the three musicians gradually curved and bent. Abstract projections crawled across the ceiling; the elegant molding overhead became electric goo.The term “Afrofuturism” was coined by the (white) cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993, the year Ra died, in a series of interviews he’d conducted with Black writers: Samuel R. Delany, a novelist; Tricia Rose, a hip-hop scholar; and Greg Tate, a music and cultural critic. Those interviews, for a special edition of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly, are revealing in a number of ways. In them, Dery framed the proposition of Afrofuturism as a conundrum. “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” he wondered.But Tate — an expert across the fields of jazz, film, comics, Black history and cultural studies — countered, pointing out: “You can be backward-looking and forward-thinking at the same time.” In fact, that very action sits at the center of Black cultural practice, especially in music. “I see science fiction as continuing a vein of philosophical inquiry and technological speculation that begins with the Egyptians and their incredibly detailed meditations on life after death,” Tate said.Shelley Nicole of Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber steps to center stage.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesTate’s sudden death in December at 64 sent a chill through the world of arts and letters. Writing since the early 1980s for The Village Voice and other publications, he had been the rare figure who could comfortably present the patois and perspective of everyday Black life to a mainstream (read: white) audience, without any act of translation or dilution. His presence at the festival would have been meaningful.His shadow loomed generously instead. And for the festival’s closing night on Sunday, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, the genre-stirring big band that Tate co-founded in the late 1990s, played two sets of thrashing, syncopated music: five vocalists, seven horn players, two drummers and two bassists, all in the flow. Bringing the show to a close, the guitarist Vernon Reid delivered a last homage to Tate. Reid and the band chanted Tate’s phone number back and forth, and he asked over and over: “Whose band is this?”“Tate’s!”Reid continued: “He wanted you to make a sound. If you made a sound from your heart, you were in the Burnt Sugar Band.”Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber’s set was in many ways a homage to Tate, its co-founder.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times More

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      With MOMEN, Frankfurt Officials Give Techno the Stamp of Approval

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      FRANKFURT — These days, this German city is known as a staid financial capital and home to the European Central Bank. But in the 1980s, it held another, more underground distinction, as a hub for Europe’s budding techno scene. Although the electronic music genre’s origins are largely in Detroit, Frankfurt’s clubs were among the first to bring the sound to Europeans.Among the most influential venues was Dorian Gray, a club with a famously decadent reputation. “It was a place for all the freaks of the night: drag queens, hard-core leather people, the cocaine crowd,” said Alex Azary, the director and a founder of Frankfurt’s new Museum of Modern Electronic Music. “When the subwoofer was turned up, your heartbeat would match the rhythm.”Now Azary has taken on the task of educating the mainstream public about electronic music’s legacy and culture — and Frankfurt city officials are backing him. The new museum, which is known as MOMEM and opened Wednesday, is a $1.3-million attempt to translate the experience of going to a club into an institutional environment. MOMEM will host rotating and permanent exhibitions incorporating videos, music and interactive elements, alongside live events.The museum is also the most high-profile example of German policymakers’ increasing efforts to embrace clubbing as an economic and cultural force, and as part of the country’s heritage.The director of the Museum of Modern Electronic Music, Alex Azary, in a D.J. booth set up as specified in Sven Väth’s tour rider.Felix Schmitt for The New York TimesLocal and federal leaders have recently taken a variety of measures to protect and promote clubbing. Last year, Germany’s Parliament changed zoning rules to reclassify clubs as equal to concert halls and better protect them from encroaching gentrification. The Free Democrats, a pro-business party that is a member of the governing coalition, has also backed an initiative to have techno music declared an item of “intangible heritage” by UNESCO. Politicians in several cities, including Berlin and Leipzig, have moved to protect clubs on a local level.But MOMEM appears to be the first time a German municipality has financed the construction of an institution of this kind. Housed in Frankfurt’s former Children’s Museum, MOMEM is the newest addition to the city’s famous Museumsufer, a string of high-profile cultural institutions near the River Main that include the Städel Museum and the house where Goethe was born. Aside from providing the location free of charge, the city has cofinanced the project with a starting loan of 500,000 euros, around $550,000, and allowed the museum to hold its opening party in the Paulskirche, one of the country’s most historically significant churches.The Eclectic Beats of Electronic MusicFrom house to techno, the entrancing balance of sound and technology keeps fans on the dancefloor. The Roots: Black artists played a critical role in the genesis of electronic music genres like Detroit techno. The Dweller festival celebrates their contributions.A New Museum: Frankfurt’s clubs were among the first to bring the sound of techno to Europe. A new venue celebrates that legacy. Unsung Heroines: Women in electronic music have largely been written out of the genre’s history. A documentary corrects the record. Remembering Avicii: The globe-trotting D.J., who died in 2018, revolutionized electronic dance music. An exhibition in Stockholm takes visitors into his world.Ina Hartwig, the city’s head of cultural affairs, said in an email that the city had supported MOMEM in the hope it would be a “cultural magnet” that would draw international visitors to Frankfurt.For its opening exhibition, MOMEM is dedicating its entire space to an exhibition about Sven Väth, one of Germany’s best-known D.J.s. Curated by Tobias Rehberger, an artist who won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2009, the exhibition includes records from Väth’s collection, virtual-reality recordings of his D.J. sets and dangling headphones on which visitors can listen to his original music. One area features a D.J. booth — set up as specified in Väth’s tour rider — at which visitors can play records of their choosing.“This is the beginning,” Azary said. “The first museum dedicated to modern art appeared in 1908, and now they’re in every small town. I think soon that will happen, but for this subject.”Although Frankfurt played a key role in the early days of Germany’s techno scene, its center of gravity shifted to Berlin in the 1990s, after German reunification. The German capital has since become known globally for its anything-goes clubbing culture. According to a study by the Club Commission, a group dedicate to promoting and protecting Berlin’s nightlife, the scene pumped approximately $1.66 billion into the city economy in 2018.MOMEM will host rotating and permanent exhibitions incorporating videos, music and interactive elements, alongside live events.Felix Schmitt for The New York TimesVäth donated thousands of vinyl records to MOMEM from his own collection. Visitors can play them at the museum.Felix Schmitt for The New York TimesThe artist Tobias Rehberger beside a piece he created for MOMEM’s opening exhibition.Felix Schmitt for The New York TimesMatthias Pasdzierny, a musicologist at the University of the Arts in Berlin who has written about electronic music in Germany, said in a phone interview that the German authorities’ support for clubbing and for projects like MOMEM stemmed largely from marketing considerations. “There is a global competition among cities for a certain class of well-educated young people,” he said. Highlighting a city’s club culture, he said, “is a way of saying, ‘We have interesting jobs, and you can have fun here.’”Such concerns have become salient in business-oriented Frankfurt, which had hoped to attract bank finance workers relocating from London after Brexit, but struggled. As one writer in Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper put it: “Not too many London-based bankers are willing to leave one of the world’s great metropolises, teeming with cultural riches, to move to sleepy little Frankfurt.”Pasdzierny explained that German leaders in recent decades have also come to view techno as a form of “soft power” to help improve the country’s reputation internationally. “It became a narrative freeing Germany from its Nazi past,” he said, adding that by emphasizing the country’s inclusive club culture, officials aimed to perpetuate the image of a kinder Germany.But he added that the coronavirus pandemic had shown the limits of German politicians’ willingness to offer concrete support to nightlife, as nightclubs were often the first venues to be closed when cases rose, even though they often enacted stringent safety measures. “I think politicians are only interested when it helps them economically, or their image,” he said. “There is still the view that clubs are dangerous and dirty.”MOMEM is the newest addition to Frankfurt’s Museumsufer, a string of high-profile cultural institutions near the River Main that include the Städel art museum and the house where Goethe was born. Felix Schmitt for The New York TimesOne of Azary’s goals is to dispel simplistic views of clubbing and to explore the ideas and values that electronic music transports. A 40-year veteran of the Frankfurt club scene, he said he had long believed that clubbing could be a utopian force that could encourage open-mindedness, love and egalitarianism. “It was a revolutionary feeling — we sincerely thought we could change the world,” he said. Yet given the current state of the world, “we need to admit that it hadn’t turned out exactly as we wanted,” he added.With Russia waging war in Ukraine, he said, he had even doubted if it was appropriate for the museum to throw an opening party. “But then we decided we need to turn what we are doing into a symbol,” he said. “Club culture is about mutual respect — and about being allowed to be who you are.” More

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      Kanye West Replaced by Swedish House Mafia and the Weeknd at Coachella

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      A little over a week before the music festival’s first weekend, West, now known as Ye, dropped out of his headlining slot.Nine days before the return of Coachella, the festival has confirmed reports that Kanye West has dropped out as one of the event’s three headliners, and has been replaced by Swedish House Mafia with the Weeknd.No explanation was officially given about the departure of West, who was booked as the top performer for the third night of the festival, which repeats its lineup over two successive weekends. (Harry Styles and Billie Eilish lead the first two nights.) But the change, noted only in a revised lineup flier posted to the festival’s social media accounts on Wednesday, followed West’s ban from performing at the Grammy Awards, after weeks of unpredictable and troubling behavior online.The news of West’s apparent withdrawal was first reported on Monday by TMZ, and was quickly followed up by reports in the music press that the festival was seeking a replacement. Swedish House Mafia had been announced months ago as being part of the festival, though the group’s position in the lineup was left unclear. In October, the group released a track, “Moth to a Flame,” featuring the Weeknd on vocals.The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which was one of the first major events to be canceled by the spread of the coronavirus in 2020 — and was then postponed multiple times as the pandemic continued — will be held April 15-17 and April 22-24 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif. It is being closely watched by the music industry as a symbolic moment for the full-scale return of the multibillion-dollar touring business. In February, the festival announced that attendees would not have to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination or a negative test to enter; masks are not required.West, who now goes by Ye, was nominated for five Grammys at Sunday’s ceremony, including album of the year for “Donda.” He won two nontelevised rap categories, bringing his career total to 24, but did not attend the show.The subject of a new Netflix documentary that coincided with the release of a new album-in-progress exclusively on a proprietary $200 speaker device, West had taken to posting extensively and combatively online about his divorce from Kim Kardashian, her dating life and their ongoing child custody battle.When Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show,” who was set to host the Grammys, said in a segment last month that West’s behavior was tipping into harassment and abuse, West responded in a post that referred to Noah with a racial slur. West was subsequently banned from Instagram for 24 hours and has not posted online since.Coachella’s 2020 event would have featured headlining performances by Rage Against the Machine, Travis Scott and Frank Ocean. A crowd surge at Scott’s own Astroworld festival last October left 10 people dead and many more injured, leading the rapper to withdraw from most public appearances. West indicated in an Instagram post in February that he planned to bring Scott, his onetime protégé and erstwhile brother-in-law, to the Coachella stage as a special guest during his set.Coachella is expected to welcome up to 125,000 attendees per day. More

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      Bobby Rydell, Teenage Idol With Enduring Appeal, Dies at 79

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      He had his first hit in 1959. Six decades later, teamed with his fellow singers Frankie Avalon and Fabian, he was still drawing crowds.Bobby Rydell, a Philadelphia-born singer who became a teenage idol in the late 1950s and, with his pleasant voice, stage presence and nice-guy demeanor, maintained a loyal following on tours even after both he and his original fans were well past retirement age, died on Tuesday in Abington, Pa. He was 79.The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Maria Novey, a spokeswoman.Mr. Rydell and two other affable performers who became stars in those years, Frankie Avalon and Fabian, grew up within about two blocks of one another in South Philadelphia. Long after their days on the pop chart were past them, they enjoyed great success on the oldies circuit. The three had toured extensively together since 1985, billed as the Golden Boys.Mr. Rydell did not just have staying power; he also made a comeback after years of alcohol abuse, which he chronicled in his autobiography, “Bobby Rydell: Teen Idol on the Rocks” (2016), written with the guitarist and producer Allan Slutsky. Near death, he had a kidney and liver transplant in July 2012. By that October he was back, singing on a cruise ship with Mr. Avalon. But five months later, he underwent cardiac bypass surgery. Some of his later appearances were charity promotions for organ donation.By 2014, his schedule was heavy again, including 11 concerts in Australia that February. He continued to perform for the rest of his life.Mr. Rydell performing with the City Rhythm Orchestra In Concert at Lincoln Center in New York City, in 2016.Bobby Bank/WireImage, via Getty ImagesMr. Rydell’s recording prime encompassed the era roughly between 1959, when Elvis Presley was in the Army and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and 1964, when Beatlemania hit America. It didn’t hurt that Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” was broadcast in those years from Philadelphia, the home of Mr. Rydell’s label, Cameo Records.Mr. Rydell’s repertoire included plaintive love ballads; slow, danceable tunes; occasional frenetic rockers like “Wild One” and “Swingin’ School”; and ageless songs like Domenico Modugno’s 1958 hit “Volare,” which became Mr. Rydell’s signature song in his later touring years.Mr. Rydell was a pop phenomenon but hardly a cutting-edge rock star. Still, he sold a lot more records than some of those who were. Over the course of his recording career he placed 19 singles in the Billboard Top 40 and 34 in the Hot 100. His name alone could conjure up an entire era: The 1970s rock musical “Grease,” in both its Broadway and movie versions, was set in 1959 at the fictional Rydell High School.Mr. Rydell was born Robert Louis Ridarelli on April 26, 1942. His father, Adrio, was a machine shop foreman, and in 1995 the city of Philadelphia honored South 11th Street, where he grew up, as Bobby Rydell Boulevard. Mr. Rydell’s 1963 song “Wildwood Days” paid homage to Wildwood, the New Jersey beach town where his grandmother had a boardinghouse and he spent his early summers; like Philadelphia, Wildwood later held an honorary street-naming for Mr. Rydell.Unlike some of the other pretty faces of his era, Mr. Rydell was a real musician. His father, a fan of the big bands, would take him as a child to see Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw at the Earle Theater in Philadelphia. At age 6, he told his father he wanted to play the drums like Gene Krupa, and he was singing in local nightclubs a year or two later.The bandleader Paul Whiteman had an amateur talent show, “TV Teen Club,” on Philadelphia television in the early 1950s. Young Bobby entered the contest when he was 9; he soon became a regular on the show, remaining for three years. Bobby’s father shortened the boy’s name to Rydell for the show.After a brief period as the drummer for a local group, Rocco and the Saints, which included Frankie Avalon on trumpet, Mr. Rydell went solo as a singer. His first three songs on the Cameo label were flops, but he scored in 1959 with “Kissin’ Time,” which Dick Clark, whose show had succeeded Paul Whiteman’s, immediately liked. It reached No. 11 on the Billboard chart.Mr. Rydell’s romantic voice, cute face and regular-guy personality drew screaming girls, but he also had enough adult appeal to be booked at the Copacabana in New York at 19.Reviewing his Copacabana performance in 1961, Variety complimented him on his “sense of career.” “Right now, he’s a teenager’s teenager,” the Variety critic said. “His style is packed with rhythm and bounce and his ‘nice boy next door’ demeanor is quite winning. Even the adults realize this, and it works to his advantage.”By his 21st birthday, Mr. Rydell had made three trips to perform in Europe and three others to Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan. In a 2011 interview, he recalled the reaction in Australia: “They stormed the stage, thousands and thousands of kids. The Australian police had to make a wedge to get us out of Sydney Stadium. It was scary, but all in all it was absolutely tremendous.” (Mr. Rydell went on to tour in Australia more than 20 times.)He also recalled that in 1963, in England, the Beatles climbed onto his tour bus to meet him. He didn’t know them, but they knew him. In the 2000 book “The Beatles Anthology,” Paul McCartney was quoted as saying that he and John Lennon based “She Loves You” on a Bobby Rydell song. He didn’t name the song, but his 1960 hit “Swingin’ School” includes a “Yeah, yeah, yeah” refrain. (Some sources say the song was “Forget Him,” which is somewhat similar lyrically.)Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell in a scene from “Bye Bye Birdie” on the movie set in Hollywood in 1962.Associated PressColumbia Pictures signed him to a contract in 1961. But the only movie in which he made much of an impact was “Bye Bye Birdie,” released in 1963 and based on the hit Broadway musical of the same name, which poked fun at show business in general and rock ’n’ roll frenzy in particular. Mr. Rydell played Hugo Peabody, the meek high school steady of Kim McAfee, played by Ann-Margret, the small-town girl chosen to give the Elvis-like Conrad Birdie a kiss on national television. Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh were the film’s stars, but the parts of Hugo and Kim were considerably beefed up in the transition from stage to screen.In a radio interview in 2013 with Ted Yates of CKOC in Hamilton, Ontario, Mr. Rydell explained why he hadn’t stayed in Hollywood to make more movies: “I couldn’t. There was something about the lifestyle in California that I really wasn’t used to. I was basically a South Philadelphia kid, and I was an East Coast guy, and I really couldn’t stay out in California.” (Mr. Rydell also played a nightclub singer in the 1975 film “That Lady From Peking,” which was shot in Australia.)Underscoring his ties to his family and his city, and going against recommendations that he live on the West Coast, Mr. Rydell bought a house in 1963 in Penn Valley, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, and moved in with his parents and grandparents. He raised his children there, and moved in 2013 only because the house had grown too big for him and his wife. “I had the good fortune to spend my peak years as a recording artist during the golden age of the TV variety show,” Mr. Rydell wrote in his autobiography. “Throughout the early ’60s, I appeared on almost all of them.” Those included shows hosted by, among others, Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, Perry Como, Jack Benny, Milton Berle and, most notably, Red Skelton.After making two appearances on “The Red Skelton Hour” on which he just sang, he appeared in sketches intermittently from 1961 to 1969 as various characters, including Zeke Kadiddlehopper, cousin to Skelton’s country-bumpkin character Clem Kadiddlehopper.“Mr. Skelton fell in love with Bobby,” Mr. Rydell’s personal assistant, Linda F. Hoffman, said in 2013. “His son had passed away, and Bobby always felt he was looked upon by Mr. Skelton as a son. They were very close.”New York Times reviews of two rock ’n’ roll revival shows at Madison Square Garden suggested reasons for both his lesser place in the rock firmament and his future career longevity. In 1975, Ian Dove wrote: “Mr. Rydell is not your hard rocker — his era was in the late 1950s, when rock was being softened and made less frightening. With such songs as ‘Volare,’ he emerges more like a crooner than a rocker.” Reviewing a 1977 show, Robert Palmer wrote that Mr. Rydell “seemed uncomfortable with his rock ’n’ roll hits and would probably have become an Italian crooner had he not grown up in the rock ’n’ roll era.”After his television appearances dwindled, he continued to perform in nightclubs and nostalgia shows, and to tour Australia, until the promoter Dick Fox put the Golden Boys together in 1985, initially for a PBS special. Mr. Rydell, Mr. Avalon and Fabian would perform their own songs and then sing together; there would also be tributes to Frank Sinatra and to Mr. Rydell’s favorite singer, Bobby Darin.“When the three of us are onstage, we’re having fun,” Mr. Rydell said in a 2012 interview with the writer Pat Gallagher. “We’re not trying to fool anybody. Everybody has known us for the better part of 50 years. We just go out there and have fun and the audience can see that.”Mr. Rydell married his high-school sweetheart, Camille Quattrone, in 1968. She died in 2003. He is survived by his wife, Linda J. Hoffman (who is not related to Linda F. Hoffman); two children from his first marriage, Robert Ridarelli and Jennifer Dulin; and five grandchildren.In 2011, Mr. Rydell was characteristically modest. He praised Red Skelton and other show-business veterans for helping him along, recalled that in 1985 the touring trio didn’t think their act would last more than two years, and joked that the “G” sometimes fell off marquees where they performed, making their name “the Olden Boys.”He also said he felt odd that he was one of the first 10 people inducted into the Philadelphia Music Foundation’s Hall of Fame. “Leopold Stokowski, Dizzy Gillespie and Bobby Rydell,” he mused. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”Vimal Patel contributed reporting. More