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      ‘MJ’ Review: Michael Jackson Musical Won’t Look in the Mirror

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      A new jukebox musical tells the story of Michael Jackson. Except for the big story.“There are a lot of strange stories making the rounds,” says a documentary filmmaker interviewing Michael Jackson.Understate much?Michael Jackson was such a magnet for strange stories that they nearly obliterated his gift. Yet in defensively brushing off the ones that don’t matter while pointedly ignoring the one that does, the new musical “MJ,” which opened on Tuesday at the Neil Simon Theater, may be the strangest Michael Jackson story yet.Not all strangeness is bad, of course, and within the confines of the biographical jukebox genre, “MJ,” with a book by Lynn Nottage, is actually pretty good — for a while. Directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, whose ballet background has found a natural outlet in dance musicals like “An American in Paris,” the show starts with confidence and verve in a natural setting: the rehearsal room. There, Jackson, along with his dancers, backup singers and band, is in the final stages of preparation for his 1992 Dangerous tour, a four-continent, 15-month marathon.That framing means that our first look at the musical’s version of Jackson is as a man at work, without the distraction of Bubbles the chimp, the Elephant Man bones, the hyperbaric chamber, the fading skin color, the disappearing nose — or the accusations of pedophilia that would begin to emerge a year later, at first in tabloids and then in lawsuits and eventually in police investigations.As such, we get the joy of discovery, both of Jackson before the fall and of Myles Frost, a real find in the role. Singing “Beat It” as he enters, Frost offers not just a willowy simulacrum of the star in perfect copies (by the designer Paul Tazewell) of his classic regalia — black jacket, gold brocade, tilted fedora, white socks scrunched to the ankles — but an eerie mimicry of his mannerisms. The breathy voice; the head-down, eyes-up gaze; the interjectory squeals and yelps: Frost has them down cold.Perhaps too cold. Absent any deeper revelation of the singer’s character, Frost’s performance of the songs — which include MTV-era chartbusters like “Bad,” “Billie Jean,” “Man in the Mirror” and “Thriller” as well as less-familiar numbers — soon begins to seem animatronic, as if he were created by Disney imagineers. It doesn’t help that there are so many of them; 37 titles are listed in the program, some barely one-verse samples.But Wheeldon’s choreography — performed by Frost along with a superb if amazingly jacked ensemble — remains compelling longer, offering a three-dimensional version of what most of us have seen only from distant arena seats or in dark videos on depthless screens. (The show’s “Michael Jackson movement” is credited to two additional choreographers, Rich + Tone Talauega.) The stage patterns are far more varied and expressive than in similar musicals, scoring points without words as they deliver the thrills and, following the biomusical road map, pave the way between present and past.Christian Wilson as the preteen Michael and Ayana George as his mother, Katherine, in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTake the sequence in which the Jackson 5 makes a smash appearance singing “ABC” at an Apollo Theater amateur night in 1969. Seamlessly Wheeldon swirls the giddy brothers from the stage to a scene of celebration in their hotel room, at least until their perfectionist father (Quentin Earl Darrington) demands, with the warmth of a cult leader, that despite their exhaustion they rehearse into the night. When the preteen Michael (Christian Wilson at the performance I saw) stands up to him and gets slapped so hard he falls to the floor, his mother (Ayana George) comforts him by singing “I’ll Be There” as he goes to bed.What Katherine Jackson’s responsibility might have been, besides providing a lullaby, is not considered; she is still alive. In any case, after all this, Wheeldon returns us to the 1992 rehearsal room with a trenchant gesture: The dancers pull the linens away to reveal the bed as a bunch of tour trunks.Jackson’s was undoubtedly a hard childhood. Though Nottage uses clichés from the jukebox playbook to dramatize that story — including an interviewer to prompt the reminiscences (Whitney Bashor) and three actors to divvy up the role at different ages (Tavon Olds-Sample is delightful as the teenage Michael) — she does so crisply and in a format that makes it seem almost natural. Having members of the 1992 entourage take all the supporting roles in the flashback scenes is both efficient and convincing.But the tale is mostly humorless, a problem not alleviated by Jackson’s occasional impish antics (he shoots a water pistol at his business manager) or the constant underlining of the emotional argument. (“You sang that song like you’ve been living with heartbreak all of your life,” Berry Gordy tells the preteen Michael after he performs “I Want You Back.”) As the joys of the early scenes begin to fade, “MJ” settles for baldly providing, in the relatively small space allotted to words, an avalanche of astonishing and sorrowful facts.Which is why the absence of the biggest one is so jarring.In agreeing to write what is essentially an authorized biography — the show has been produced “by special arrangement with the Michael Jackson estate” — Nottage apparently made a compromise: She would note his minor oddities while avoiding the most troubling accusations against him. Even so, there are pat explanations for every peccadillo, from the plastic surgeries (“This is Hollywood,” Jackson says. “Who hasn’t gotten a new nose?”) to the hyperbaric chamber (“I started that rumor. I thought it would be funny”). His father’s viciousness is likewise given a gloss coat of justification: “My hand ain’t nearly as heavy as the world’s gonna be on your Black ass if you step outta line,” he says.Frost, center, amid the zombies, in “Thriller.” Nearly 40 songs are listed in the program, including his biggest hits.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn this, “MJ” is trying to have it both ways. It wants to blame everything sad and weird about Jackson on others (especially the press, who are equated with the zombies in “Thriller”) but credit him alone for his every good deed and success. Acknowledgment of the choreographers and songwriters he collaborated with is mostly saved for the program.This defensiveness, constantly asserting his genius as if it were in question, eventually becomes dulling, like any act of bad faith. And so as the show, anticipating its star’s trajectory, disintegrates in the second half, the pleasure that compensated for its inherent ickiness can no longer do the job. “MJ” becomes a grind of obfuscation, a case of willfully not looking at the man in the mirror.Would it have been possible to make this musical otherwise? Could you successfully market as a family-friendly Broadway extravaganza a show whose main character, though never convicted of a crime, settles two sexual abuse cases out of court and dies before two others are dismissed because the statute of limitations has run out?Unlikely — and perhaps you could argue that Broadway is not in any case the place to interrogate such questions. Musicals based on real people have always elided their worst traits. Even that fascist enabler Eva Perón was sugarcoated and sanctified. Of course, her estate did not have a “special arrangement” with the producers of “Evita.”Ultimately, the problem with “MJ” is not its ethical stance but the way that stance distorts its value as entertainment. Even the combined power of Jackson’s material and Wheeldon’s reanimation of it cannot make up for the emptiness at its center; we cannot understand or accept the main character if he’s deliberately kept from us.A line from “Man in the Mirror” applies here as well: “If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make a change.” What “MJ” needed was either a lot more time to pass before daring to mount it — or a different, deeper, more considered main character.MJAt the Neil Simon Theater, Manhattan; mjthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      On ‘The 7th Hand,’ Immanuel Wilkins Sees Jazz as an Escape Pod

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      The alto saxophonist’s second album is blues-based, gospel-infused, intellectually considered music that secures his quartet’s commanding status on the scene.The alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and his quartet make bristling, physical music, both leaning into and pulling against the swing rhythm that has historically been the backbone of jazz. There’s a certain sensuality to classic swing, an element of taking your time that doesn’t seem at home amid the hamster-wheel feeling of life today. Wilkins has wisely left that part behind in favor of a layered, exploding-grid approach to rhythm.Still, there’s no confusing that this is blues-based, gospel-infused, intellectually considered music, from concept down to craft. All of which qualifies it neatly as part of the jazz tradition (pardon the four-letter word).But it’s much harder to locate his major saxophone influences than to position him in a broad lineage — which is a sign of how widely Wilkins, 24, has listened. Soon after Blue Note Records released his debut album, “Omega,” in 2020, I found myself nagged by that question: Whose alto playing casts the biggest shadow over Wilkins? Comparisons to legends like Jackie McLean or contemporaries like Logan Richardson didn’t feel right. It was J.D. Allen, a saxophonist one generation ahead of Wilkins, who solved the riddle, in a chat that summer: When he listened to Wilkins, he said, James Spaulding came to mind. It made sense on a few levels.One of jazz history’s crucial supporting cast members, Spaulding was a frequent presence on classic Blue Note albums in the early ’60s. But he also spent time playing rougher, more atonal stuff with Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Billy Bang and others. Skating alongside the tempered scale, Spaulding, now 84, might blow squirrelly, zigzagging lines at a thousand notes a minute, or pause to tug at a single note from multiple sides. These are shoes that Wilkins walks in.But he has made himself known as a composer, too, to a degree Spaulding never did, and in just a few years, his quartet — with Micah Thomas on piano, Daryl Johns on bass and Kweku Sumbry on drums — has become a band that members of the young generation can measure their own ideas up against.“The 7th Hand,” Wilkins’s newly released second album, confirms the quartet’s commanding status on the scene. Another collection of all originals, it is just as unrelenting as “Omega.” On tunes like “Don’t Break” and “Shadow,” Wilkins and Thomas play the melody in loosely locked unison, shifting in and out of keys, tilting and rocking the harmonic floor beneath them. Moving like this, Wilkins can switch emotional registers, even genres, with the flick of a wrist: A simple blues lick transposes into what sounds like a heart-tugging soul line, then scrambles up into something that’s undeniably jazz.“Don’t Break” includes a cameo from the Farafina Kan percussion ensemble (with which Sumbry often performs), weaving its West African hand percussion into the flow of the quartet and proving that Wilkins’s progressive take on rhythm still connects easily with its roots. The album’s other guest artist, the flutist Elena Pinderhughes, makes a strong impression on back-to-back tracks, “Witness” and “Lighthouse,” with a hard-blown and soaring sound that will be immediately recognizable to listeners who’ve heard her in Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah’s recent groups. Throughout the album, Thomas’s dazzling presence across the entire keyboard gives the quartet much of its depth; he’s on his way to becoming a prominent bandleader in his own right.Wilkins has said that with “The 7th Hand,” he was looking for nothing less than spiritual transmission — to make himself and the quartet into a “vessel” for the divine, in the way of a Mahalia Jackson, or a John or Alice Coltrane. Biblically, the number seven represents completion and the limits of human endeavor: On the seventh day, we rest. The album’s seventh and final track is a 26-minute free improvisation titled “Lift,” which Wilkins saw as an opportunity to set aside his own map and let spirit take over. The quartet unspools its finely woven, vigilant group sound into something wide open, achieving a kind of escape. Thomas and Sumbry sometimes sound like the free-jazz pioneers Cecil Taylor and Sunny Murray going at it; elsewhere, Wilkins and the drummer collide with the combustive power of John Coltrane and Elvin Jones.Wilkins’s idea to use this album as a means of transcendence — of exiting the body and disappearing into sound — isn’t just about worship. In interviews, he has cited contemporary theorists like Arthur Jafa with providing crucial inspiration, and he’s spoken about seeking an aesthetics of abstention: from being watched, from being sorted into commercial bins. It’s in line with a larger current in Black radical thought today, shepherded by figures like Jafa and Fred Moten. In “Glitch Feminism,” published in 2020, the writer and curator Legacy Russell proposes rethinking our entire relationship to the human body — a site of so much labeling and othering. “The glitch,” she says, is a place where we might reject capture and embrace “refusal.”It’s possible to hear “The 7th Hand” in a similar way. In her liner notes, the poet Harmony Holiday calls this album “the sound of turning away from ourselves to get back to ourselves, of how abandon can be organized into liberation with the right set of adventures and a beat to unpack them by.”Immanuel Wilkins“The 7th Hand”(Blue Note) More

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      Remembering Greg Tate, Critic and Catalyst

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherGreg Tate, the pioneering critic, died last December at 64. His 1992 anthology “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America” is a startling document of the innovations taking place in the Black music, film and art of the time, and also a guidebook for a sui generis style of writing that was deeply lyrical on its own terms.Tate’s criticism was political, empathetic and skeptical all at once. It valued exuberant expressiveness along with a mischievous twist, and sought out the most provocative creators and rewarded them with close attention and, when warranted, loving scrutiny.On this week’s Popcast, conversations with two of Tate’s contemporaries about the fertile Black writing and arts scene in New York in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the overlap between creators and critics, and the impression Tate left on his peers and on those who came after.Guests:Michael A. Gonzales, who writes about music and true crime and is the co-author of “Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture”Joan Morgan, program director at the Center for Black Visual Culture, N.Y.U. Institute of African American Affairs, and the author of “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down”Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      J Dilla Was a Revered Rap Producer. A New Book Deepens His Legacy.

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      The Detroit musician wasn’t known to give many interviews, and his influence has grown exponentially since his 2006 death. “Dilla Time” by Dan Charnas explores what drove him.Even during his lifetime, there was something unexplainable about J Dilla, the Detroit-born hip-hop producer and M.C. He was an open secret, an under-acknowledged force shifting and shaping modern music. Followers spoke of him reverentially and with enough hyperbole that he could feel inaccessible to listeners who didn’t quite get it. In the 16 years since his death, the aura around him has only grown.The writer Dan Charnas conducted nearly 200 interviews to write “Dilla Time,” a 400-page biography out on Tuesday that thoroughly examines the hip-hop producer’s unique approach. But Charnas, the author of the 2010 book “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop,” could barely recall anything that J Dilla, born James Dewitt Yancey, said during the one occasion they spent together, in the summer of 1999.He remembered Dilla crouched over his MPC3000 sampling drum machine in the basement studio of his family’s home in the Conant Gardens neighborhood of Detroit. He remembered going out for Mongolian barbecue with the rapper Chino XL, Dilla and Common, who was in town to work with Dilla on what would become his album “Like Water for Chocolate.” But that’s about it.“I was talking rather than listening,” Charnas said in a recent video interview, “and so the big shift for me is that I’ve had to do really, really careful listening over the past four years to try to get this story.”Dilla, who came to attention via his work with the Pharcyde, A Tribe Called Quest and his own group Slum Village, died in February 2006 from complications of a rare blood disease three days after he turned 32. He was beloved by his contemporaries and a small following of fans for his off-kilter beats — and he was not known to talk to journalists often. (Charnas could find only 16 interviews.)Common remembered seeing Pharrell Williams bow down to Dilla when they met and recalled how Kanye West excitedly showed everyone in the studio the album that Dilla had given him to pull drum samples from.“I didn’t grow up listening to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. I didn’t even grow up listening to Fela Kuti or Jimi Hendrix,” Common said in a phone interview. “I’m bringing up their music because these artists and their work are everlasting. And J Dilla is one of those individuals.”Dilla’s career was rooted in seemingly contradictory ideas. He became known for matching somber, yet comforting tones with rugged, crackling drums. He often worked alongside artists who were positioned as the sanctimonious counterbalance to the increasingly materialistic and hypersexualized world of late ’90s hip-hop, but he himself was unapologetically enthralled with jewelry, expensive cars and strip clubs. As technological advances made music production easier, and as a result, more uniform, Dilla used those tools to find possibility in imperfections.Charnas wrote “Dilla Time” to help make J Dilla’s contributions to music known.Listenership and the breadth of Dilla’s influence have grown exponentially since his death. There are now annual Dilla Day events around the world, and his music has been celebrated by institutions like Lincoln Center and the Detroit Institute of Arts. His MPC3000 is displayed behind a glass case at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Charnas teaches a course about Dilla, which is how the book originated, as an associate professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University.Over the years, there has been almost a deification of Dilla; Charnas’s book takes great efforts to humanize him. Though he is sympathetic to his subject’s struggles — particularly his misfortunes as an artist in the major label system and his deteriorating health — Charnas does not shy away from describing his imperfections.Dilla had a temper and could become jealous, those closest to him said to Charnas. When he was frustrated, his quietness would break as he lashed out at them. But the same people who told Charnas these unflattering stories continued to care about Dilla unconditionally.“He was private, and there’s still things I don’t talk about,” said Frank Nitt, Dilla’s close friend since middle school whose music he later produced as part of the group Frank-n-Dank. “But on the flip side, being who he was and how he’s being perceived by the people at this point, there’s a lot of misconceptions.”One of the foundational Dilla myths is how he arrived at his signature sound, in which the rhythm can feel off, different or just wrong. Some have said it was a failure to quantize his compositions, a feature in digital recording that eliminates human error and puts the timing of drum beats in their “correct” place.Charnas explains that Dilla’s process was more complex and that he took multiple steps to purposefully accentuate the sonic effects of error. The result was a fresh rhythmic feel that Charnas labels the titular “Dilla time” — differentiating it from straight time and swing time, the two rhythmic patterns that defined Western music. Dilla’s explanation for his innovation? He would just say that’s how he nodded his head.Charnas traces Dilla’s influence beyond hip-hop and soul, as it extended to pop, electronic music and jazz. His imprint can be found in songs by artists like Michael Jackson, Flying Lotus, the 1975 and Robert Glasper. (“Dilla Time” reveals that Dilla blew off potentially working with ’N Sync, twice.) Sometimes Dilla’s impact has been circuitous. He inspired young Los Angeles jazz musicians like Terrace Martin and Thundercat. Then Kendrick Lamar had those artists work on and expand the palette of his landmark 2015 album, “To Pimp a Butterfly.”Charnas also clarifies the story around “Donuts,” an instrumental album that Stones Throw Records released right before Dilla’s death that has become a key entry point for new generations of fans. It’s been said that Dilla recorded “Donuts” in the hospital, embedding messages for loved ones in his compositions as the end approached. In reality, “Donuts” was born from one of the many beat tapes he had made. It was largely edited and extended by Jeff Jank, who worked at Stones Throw, and completed months before Dilla died.Though he settled on J Dilla around 2001, he was alternately credited under names including Jay Dee, Jaydee, J.D. and Jon Doe. For much of the mid-90s into the turn of the century, he was part of two production collectives, the Ummah and the Soulquarians, alongside more famous members.In the book, Charnas relates how during the making of D’Angelo’s 2000 opus “Voodoo,” D’Angelo and Questlove called Dilla and Prince their “two North stars.” Dilla was around for many of the recording sessions at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, but none of the songs he initiated were completed. In the end, when he received his copy of the record, he was disappointed to realize that his name was nowhere in the liner notes.“The main theme for James in this story is credit, being seen,” Charnas said, “and he’s struggling to be seen.” Even on Common’s “The Light,” the biggest hit Dilla ever produced, he’s listed as “The Soulquarian’s Jay Dee for the Ummah,” leaving him, as Charnas said, “smothered in brotherhood.”Charnas’s main reasons for writing the book are not only to make Dilla’s contributions to music known but to also explain that the devotion from fans is justified. “Ultimately it’s really about me saying to everybody who loves Dilla: ‘You were not wrong. Your affection was not misplaced,’” he said. “He is special, more special than many of you all even know.” More

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      Review: International Orchestras Are Finally Back at Carnegie

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      The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London was the first foreign ensemble to play at the hall since February 2020.What sets a cultural capital apart is not just the quality of its music-making, but also the quantity and variety. No American symphonic ensemble, for example, is better than the Cleveland Orchestra, but it stands largely alone at home. Few big groups travel to Cleveland the way they do to New York.Or did. The city’s performing arts landscape has blossomed again following long pandemic closures, but virus surges, visa issues, quarantine requirements and financial concerns have meant that orchestral tours — usually the meat of Carnegie Hall’s season — are still slumbering, almost two years later.But tours, too, are slowly reawakening. The marquee offering comes later this month, when the mighty Vienna Philharmonic comes to Carnegie for a three-night stand. A landmark arrived on Monday evening, however, when the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London became the first international orchestra to appear at the hall since the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique on Feb. 24, 2020.The Royal Philharmonic, with a solidly spirited concert under its new music director, Vasily Petrenko, also celebrated its own milestones: its 75th season, and its first appearance at Carnegie in 25 years. (If you want to talk about a real cultural capital, the group, founded by the conductor Thomas Beecham in 1946, is one of at least five major orchestras based in London.)Kian Soltani was the soloist in Elgar’s Cello Concerto.Richard TermineThe program was standard-issue: the Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes,” Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Holst’s mammoth suite “The Planets” — British composers, all. There is, in an era of thoroughly internationalized ensembles, something quaint and a little silly about the notion of touring with your country’s repertory.Particularly when the works are, like these, chestnuts done all the time. I endorse British ensembles advocating British music, but “The Planets” is hardly in need of advocacy, and the Royal Philharmonic, for all its liveliness, didn’t sound in it much different than, say, the New York Philharmonic would have. The number of orchestras with actual sonic or interpretive idiosyncrasies in music of their compatriots is by now almost or actually zero.But with Petrenko a tall, animated presence on the podium — bouncing up and down, shimmying, and hypnotically curling the long fingers of his left hand, witchlike — it was a pleasant evening. From the Britten on, the orchestra’s winds and brasses were particularly mellow and secure, sounding dewy in Holst’s “Venus” and adding to the bronzed ominousness of “Saturn” and the sensual hush of “Neptune,” which also featured the offstage voices of Musica Sacra, under Kent Tritle.The cellist Kian Soltani, the soloist in the Elgar, played with buttery understatement and intimacy, and considerable wit in the Lento. It speaks to his collegiality that his encore included five of the orchestra’s cellists in his arrangement of an excerpt from Shostakovich’s film score for “The Gadfly.” At the end of the concert, the full ensemble’s encore also abandoned Britain for Russia, with a cheerful rendition of the “Dance of the Tumblers” from Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Snow Maiden.”Royal Philharmonic OrchestraPerformed on Monday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      A Conductor in Demand, and in Control

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      MUNICH — Let’s get this out of the way: Don’t expect Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla to be the music director of a major American orchestra any time soon.“At the moment, I will be much more content to be a simple freelancer,” Gražinytė-Tyla, 35, said in a recent interview at the Bavarian State Opera here, where she was preparing a new production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.”It’s an unusual statement coming from a young conductor in demand, especially one whose current appointment — as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Britain — concludes this spring. Even more unusual since Gražinytė-Tyla, along with the likes of Susanna Mälkki, is often mentioned as a leading contender to fill vacancies on the horizon at top American orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic.But as administrators search for a conductor of her stature, as well as for someone to tip the scale of gender balance in the United States — where there won’t be any female music directors among the country’s 25 largest orchestras until Nathalie Stutzmann starts with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra next season — Gražinytė-Tyla is a defiant rarity: an anti-careerist who has resisted industry pressure in favor of artistic and personal fulfillment.Her star might be on the rise, but she is keeping it on a short leash. Gražinytė-Tyla designed her calendar this season so that it was dominated by “The Cunning Little Vixen” — both in concert, as in Birmingham, and staged, as in Munich. She has retained a remarkable amount of control over her schedule, ensuring time for family: her partner and two sons in Salzburg, Austria, with a third child on the way. (The Birmingham orchestra recently announced that, because of the pregnancy, she would no longer conduct her planned final concerts in June.)“She’s very in tune with herself,” said Barrie Kosky, who directed the new “Vixen,” which runs through Feb. 15. “She’s very sure her decisions are the right decisions for her. She couldn’t care less about all the tra-la-la.”Born to a family of professional musicians in Lithuania, and finding early success with the baton, Gražinytė-Tyla (pronounced grah-zhin-EE-tay teel-AH) was teed up for the typical life of a conductor: jet-setting hustle and steppingstone appointments — leading, perhaps, to a prestige podium.But she also long had a streak of independence. She began to study music formally at 11 against the wishes of her parents, who wanted to spare her the difficulties of an artistic life. Although experienced as a singer, she wasn’t a trained instrumentalist, so she joined the only school program that was available: conducting. She was a natural and, at 16, took first prize at a Lithuanian competition.Gražinyte-Tyla rehearsing at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. “She’s very in tune with herself,” said the stage director Barrie Kosky.Roderick Aichinger for The New York Times“I remember thinking, Oh no, what am I going to do now?” Gražinytė-Tyla said. “There was this pressure, and I knew it would be so hard to maintain that level. It was a huge challenge, but also a mix of joy and responsibility.”The pressure didn’t end there. Completing her studies, adding Tyla (the Lithuanian word for silence) to her professional name, and winning the Salzburg Young Conductors Award, she was then given a fellowship with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she would go on to serve as an assistant, then associate, conductor. She first appeared with the C.B.S.O. in summer 2015, and by the following January had been appointed its music director.The speed of all that, Gražinytė-Tyla said, “puts you into shape and can give you a good kick to do something fast.” But, she added, it also made her value an introspective pause. “I think it is incredibly important to stay very aware of what is happening inside, because a person shouldn’t be a machine, and shouldn’t be a little part of this big mechanism that says, ‘You go this way and this way.’”“People are different,” she continued. “But I think I need time where I am not studying or conducting or traveling or rehearsing to just be a whole human being.”A breakthrough came during a conversation with the violinist Gidon Kremer. She recalled him telling her that her career would always feel like it had two different doors. Behind one would be record labels, managers, festivals and a variety of conflicting demands; behind the other, “all your dreams are there, and your imagination, and the things you can go for and explore.”She has opened both doors. Insistently private, she speaks strategically, at times even euphemistically, about her home life. Her partner hasn’t been publicly identified beyond having a job with the Mozarteum Orchestra in Salzburg; in the interview, she referred to family time as “human relations.”Yet she did take the job in Birmingham, which has a high profile and a reputation as a star-maker, with such recent music directors as Simon Rattle and Andris Nelsons. A recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon followed her appointment. In both cases, she was a first: as a woman on the Birmingham podium and as a female conductor with that storied label. Those milestones were noted publicly, Gražinytė-Tyla said, but only in passing.“This is something that our generation has to be incredibly grateful for,” she said, referring to the struggles of female conductors. “There have been a lot of painful memories for our colleagues in the past, and I have had some small experiences myself, but nothing in the amount that someone in Susanna Mälkki’s generation had to go through.” (Mälkki is 52.)Gražinytė-Tyla was warmly received by the players in Birmingham, said Oliver Janes, a clarinetist with the ensemble. “She has this rehearsal technique where you forget you’ve ever played a piece before,” he added. “And once you’ve completely forgotten how it goes, you feel like you’re starting again.”She also, he said, gave the orchestra — and its public — a jolt. At their first BBC Proms appearance under her direction, they encored with Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty,” and the moment it ended she shouted to the audience inside the vast Royal Albert Hall in London, “See you in Birmingham!”She has released several Deutsche Grammophon recordings with the orchestra, including as part of a benchmark pairing of symphonies by the often overlooked Mieczyslaw Weinberg — a reflection, she said, of her tendency to take a project-based approach to conducting. Just as there will be more Weinberg to come, she is in the midst of a “Vixen” immersion.“I am totally aware that this is a complete luxury,” she said. “Some people see the profession of a conductor as: You have to be incredibly fast and know all the repertoire. These are fantastic qualities. On the other hand, for myself I only can say I believe less and less I could be such a type of conductor.”Over time and multiple performances, she added, “Vixen” has revealed its “incredible jewels and connections” to her. Janes, the clarinetist, said that in Birmingham, she knew every corner of the text, to the point where, “if all the singers went ill, she could do the whole concert and sing every part.”When Kosky started planning the Munich production with Gražinytė-Tyla, he said, she wanted their first conversation to be about text, “which delighted me from the top of my head to my toes.”“I said to her, ‘That’s all the work,’” he added. “The work itself is how the text is propelled by the music. She breathes the text, and she breathes with the music. Without that in Janacek, you’re dead.”“At the moment, I will be much more content to be a simple freelancer.”Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesText was central even at her recent rehearsals with the Bavarian State Opera’s orchestra. Standing at the podium, her small frame belying a deep voice that commands as easily as it lets out booming laughter, she alternated between straightforward notes and explaining scenes in detail — especially in relation to Kosky’s staging. She later did the same when the cast joined for the sitzprobe, the first meeting of the singers and instrumentalists.The tenor Jonas Hacker, singing the role of the Schoolmaster, said that Gražinytė-Tyla’s directions tend to be “very color-motivated” and that she “breaks things down into tiny segments,” which, he added, comes from the score itself: “Janacek tends to be so fragmented, she’ll just take a few bars and figure out really what is the text saying and what its mood is, and really taking the time.”Throughout, Kosky said, he has remained convinced that she is “a theater person, which to me is so fundamental.”“There aren’t many opera conductors in the world,” he added. “You can be a great symphony conductor and be a lousy opera conductor. And there is an absolute shortage of genuinely talented opera conductors. It’s a bit of a worry; get your truffle pig out at the moment. But Mirga is one of them.”Gražinytė-Tyla hasn’t announced future performances beyond a brief revival of “Vixen” during the Munich Opera Festival this summer. But for now, she is confident that whatever follows will not be a long-term post with any orchestra.“The luxury to focus on the ‘Vixen’ — I think it will remain a very important point for me to deal with certain repertoire in the rhythm I feel is the right one, right now, for me,” she said, adding with a hearty laugh: “I’m not sure the big orchestras will be interested in having me if I say I’ll do only ‘Vixen’ for the whole season.” More

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      Jennifer Lopez on 'Marry Me,' Fame and Ben Affleck

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      LOS ANGELES — Of course the fireplace is lit at Jennifer Lopez’s house. It’s a rainy day just a week before Christmas, and her Spanish-style Bel-Air estate is decorated as you would expect: pine garland strewn around the mantle, orange roses on the coffee table, a professionally trimmed Christmas tree in the living room.It’s like a page from a Restoration Hardware catalog, right down to the star herself, dressed in the couture version of the work-from-home uniform: chunky beige sweater, cream sweatpants, blinged-out Timberlands. Her hair is pulled back in a bun and a touch of makeup highlights her impossibly dewy skin. The giant diamond studs affixed to her ears are the one true giveaway of her status as one of the most famous women on the planet.Which makes you wonder, does anything happen by accident in Jennifer Lopez’s life? It’s a question to be pondered especially after her newish boyfriend, Ben Affleck, pops in for a kiss and a whispered conversation near a giant gingerbread house that’s iced with the words “Affleck Lopez Family.”After all, this is a woman who has successfully navigated the treacherous waters of celebrity for close to three decades, endured round after round of public romances and breakups, refashioned herself from dancer to singer to actress to producer. At 52, a time when female stars usually find themselves in an ageist and sexist Hollywood purgatory, she seems to be more relevant than ever.To play a superstar at a vulnerable moment, Lopez said, “I had to remind myself in this movie that this was actually a safe place to let those feelings out.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesHer new movie, the sparkly romantic comedy “Marry Me,” long-delayed by the pandemic, opens in theaters and on Peacock on Valentine’s Day weekend. In it, Lopez plays a J.Lo-like superstar trying to negotiate a love life amid the trappings of uber-fame. (Sound familiar?) She will play another bride in “Shotgun Wedding,” due out this summer, before trading the gowns for a role as a deadly assassin in Netflix’s upcoming film “The Mother,” which she planned to finish shooting in the Canary Islands after the Christmas holiday.At some point the streaming service, which last year signed a multiyear deal with Lopez’s company, Nuyorican Productions, will also release a documentary that chronicles the year she turned 50 and all her disparate worlds coalesced: legitimate recognition for her acting in “Hustlers” (she earned her second Golden Globe nomination and a SAG Award nod), her 2019 international concert tour and the halftime show at the 2020 Super Bowl. The year, she said, “when everything I had worked for in movies, music and fashion just started happening.”“Marry Me,” which Lopez began working on years ago with Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, her former agent turned producing partner, is in some sense an explanation of what it’s like to exist under Lopez’s spotlight, something she calls “a very specific life.” It is also a high-wire act, a bet that she can revive a genre that’s been left for dead by both the studio system and the rom-com stars of the past.A scene from “Marry Me,” featuring Lopez and Owen Wilson as her love interest.Universal PicturesFor Goldsmith-Thomas, Lopez’s decision to go from “Hustlers,” which upped her cred as a serious actress, to “Marry Me,” which aligns more with her earlier success as a stalwart of the rom-com (“Maid in Manhattan,” “The Wedding Planner”), makes perfect sense. “We loved making ‘Hustlers,’ but that doesn’t mean that’s all we should do,” she said. “She had an opportunity to pull the curtain back and make a film about what it was like to live and to love in a glass bowl, to have your mistakes amplified and crucified across all platforms, and to ultimately find your way in spite of it. Add to that the ability to produce, and perform a soundtrack to that journey, and we’d be fools not to make it.”In “Marry Me” Lopez plays Kat Valdez, a global pop star who intends to marry her boyfriend, also a worldwide sensation (played by the Colombian singer-songwriter Maluma), in front of millions of fans in a televised stunt. Moments before the big “I do,” Valdez discovers he has been cheating on her, calls off the ceremony while onstage and opts to marry the poor schlub in the audience (Owen Wilson) holding a “Marry Me” sign. Think “The Bodyguard” meets “Notting Hill” complete with a soundtrack by Lopez.The movie is both a frothy pop fantasy and a glimpse into a life few are lucky enough to lead. Any obsessive Lopez fan will surely examine it closely for clues into Lopez’s own psyche, specifically how lonely it can be at the top, where the cocoon of entitlement can often feel like a cage. And they won’t be wrong.With “Marry Me,” Lopez returns to rom-coms, a genre that has been left for dead by studios.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesLopez recalled filming a scene in which her character returns home after the stunt ceremony has gone south, depleted and still in her gown. She turns on Jimmy Fallon, only to see him insult her during his late-night monologue, and she starts to cry. It’s a hint of vulnerability you don’t often see from Lopez and one that took some time for the actress to reach.“Once you’ve gotten burned a few times, you realize, ‘I have to be careful.’ If things are too deep and you put them out there, somebody might step on your heart,” she said, adding an expletive.The film’s director, Kat Coiro, admired Lopez’s quest for perfection. “There is a choreography even in her acting,” she said. Yet for the scene to work, Coiro asked Lopez to repeat it a number of times to break down that veneer. The result feels real, or as real as Lopez will allow herself to be.“I had to remind myself in this movie that this was actually a safe place to let those feelings out,” said Lopez, seated in front of that garlanded fireplace. “They’re making fun of me, that hurts. My instinct was to act like it didn’t.”Lopez has spent decades trying to find that balance between what the public wants from her and what she is willing to give to them. She still loves doing meet-and-greets with fans after concerts. Coiro, for one, was stunned with just how much time she was willing to give them.“She’s so ubiquitous that sometimes she doesn’t get the credit she deserves,” the director said. “I think there’s something of that in this film.” When Kat Valdez “talks about never winning any awards, I think that was a moment that was true to life,” Coiro continued. “She’s been around. She has fans like nobody else, and because of that high profile sometimes she’s not looked at in a certain way.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Review: In ‘Intimate Apparel,’ Letting the Seamstress Sing

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      Lynn Nottage’s play about a Black woman in 1905 becomes an opera, with music by Ricky Ian Gordon, that forefronts voices ignored by history.We begin with joyful ragtime, that musical theater fallback for telling Black stories of the early 20th century.But the sound is muffled, distorted. The party is elsewhere in the boardinghouse where our heroine, Esther, a shy, plain woman of 35, sits in her room sewing corsets and camisoles for socialites and streetwalkers. She is too serious and too ambitious to descend to the parlor and cakewalk with the revelers.So is “Intimate Apparel.” In musicalizing Lynn Nottage’s play of the same title, Ricky Ian Gordon, working with a text by Nottage herself, wants more for Esther than a quick dance and a slick tune. A woman so bent on betterment in an age that makes it almost impossible deserves the most serious and ambitious musical treatment available — and gets it in the knockout Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, that opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Monday.That the play was excellent to begin with was no guarantee of a viable libretto. But looking back on its 2004 Roundabout Theater Company premiere, starring Viola Davis as Esther, you can see that “Intimate Apparel” already had the necessary ingredients for a powerful opera: spine, scope and poetry.The spine remains neatly articulated. The first scene quickly establishes that Esther (Kearstin Piper Brown) has the discipline and drive to make a career of her handiwork; with the savings she sews into the lining of her crazy quilt she plans one day to open a beauty salon. The scene also establishes her pride, as she rejects the last-chance men who come to the parties given by her landlady, Mrs. Dickson.“Pride’ll leave you lonely,” Mrs. Dickson (Adrienne Danrich) warns.We next meet two of her clients, whose lives express in contrasting ways the limitations Esther hopes to escape. Mrs. Van Buren (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) has every luxury a white woman of privilege could want, including the pink silk crepe de chine corset that Esther brings to her boudoir for a fitting. But Mrs. Van Buren, trained only to be a wealthy man’s wife, has no options when her husband loses interest.Though poor and Black, Mayme (Krysty Swann) is likewise at men’s mercy for her few luxuries — which, amusingly, include the same corset as Mrs. Van Buren’s. (“What she got, you want,/What you got, she want,” Esther comments.) Instead of an absent husband Mayme has johns who are often vile or violent, yet she is closer to Mrs. Van Buren than either might like to think.Brown and Arnold Livingston Geis as Mr. Marks, a fabric salesman, in the opera at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEsther’s friendship with the women is more than professional but nevertheless circumscribed by class and race. (She has never entered Mrs. Van Buren’s house through the front door, and presumably never entered a brothel at all.) Her third professional friendship is even more delicate. Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis) sells fabric on Orchard Street, saving the most beautiful bolts for her. Though he is the only man ever to recognize and encourage her gift, he is literally untouchable: an Orthodox Jew.But he is not the only man to flirt with her. Esther is surprised — and then, almost against her will, gratified — to receive a letter from a Barbadian laborer working on the Panama Canal. It seems that George Armstrong (Justin Austin) is looking for a pen pal to counter, with beautiful words, the filth and harshness of his job. As Esther can neither read nor write, she depends on Mrs. Dickson to tell her what George is saying; and then on Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme to forge suitably Cyrano-like replies.I will say no more about the plot except that at the end of Act I Armstrong arrives in New York to marry Esther, who wears an exquisite dress made with fabric she bought from Mr. Marks. If she is not what might have been expected from their correspondence, neither, she gradually realizes, is he. In Act II we learn why.Many plays sewn so tightly unravel completely as they stretch toward their crisis. Not “Intimate Apparel”; with its eye on the big picture, it maintains both its integrity and its tension to the end. Never stinting on detail — or, apparently, period research — Nottage forces the audience to keep sight of the larger pressures pushing all her characters into situations they must eventually escape more explosively.I focus on the story because it is usually the problem with opera, as books are with musicals. Nottage has cut perhaps half of her play to make room for Gordon’s music, and in doing so has made the smart if painful choice to retain only what is most narrowly tailored to the plot and yet most allusive. What we call poetry in opera is not really the verse (though Nottage’s libretto is lightly rhymed where necessary) but the rich texture of everything doing double duty.Courtship by mail: Brown and Justin Austin as George Armstrong.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSo too with Gordon’s lush yet intricate score, which soars into the timeless atmosphere of operatic writing (though he calls his hybrid works “operacals”) while always regrounding us in the specifics of period and character. In numbers like “No One Does It for Us,” repeated choruses do more than ram home lovely melodies; they underline the similarities between Esther and Mayme, who sing it. And it is not for nothing that George’s letter arias from Panama are typically accompanied by a ghostly chorus of other men, as if to question their strange intimacy.None of these smart choices would matter if the performers could not make hay of them, but Sher has assembled and tuned an unusually fine cast of opera singers who can actually act. Brown is especially heartbreaking as Esther — and astonishingly tireless in a huge role. (Chabrelle Williams takes over for the Wednesday and Sunday matinees.) Her scenes with Geis as Mr. Marks are so gentle and rich in subtext you don’t want them to end. But all six leads are terrific, and the ensemble of eight other singers performs dozens of roles, each quickly and perfectly etched.Sher’s staging in the 299-seat Newhouse, on a simple turntable set by Michael Yeargan, is a marvel of constant movement that never feels busy, and the costumes by Catherine Zuber are exquisite even when plain. As always, it is a joy to hear an opera in an intimate space with acoustics so clear and natural — the sound is by Marc Salzberg — that the captions projected on the walls of the set are rarely needed. And though the voices are prioritized in Gordon’s orchestration for two pianos, the presence of the instruments, on platforms above the stage, is not incidental. As played on Friday evening by Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk, they seemed to have dramatic roles of their own, representing not only the need of women, especially Black women, for emotional independence, but also the world of 1905 that forbids it.In that sense “Intimate Apparel” — even more as an opera than as a play — is an act of rescue. When Esther tells Mrs. Van Buren, as they write the first letter to George, “My life ain’t really worthy of words,” she means that she isn’t special enough to be made permanent on paper. That isn’t true; as Nottage and now Gordon have shown, she is worthy of even more. She is worthy of music that is finally worthy of her.Intimate ApparelThrough March 6 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More