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      Bridgette Wimberly, Playwright and Librettist, Dies at 68

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      She had success with a play about abortion in 2001, and in 2015 wrote the libretto for the opera “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”Bridgette A. Wimberly, a playwright whose first staged work, a drama about abortion, was an Off Broadway hit in 2001 with Ruby Dee in the lead role, and who later made a mark in opera, writing the libretto for the widely produced “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird,” died on Dec. 1 at a care center in the Bronx. She was 68.Her family said the cause was complications of strokes.Ms. Wimberly took up playwriting relatively late. In an interview with The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2003, when one of her plays was being staged by the Cleveland Play House, she confessed that had someone told her a decade earlier that she would be a playwright, “I would have said that someday I’d be going to Mars, too.”Yet her first produced play, “Saint Lucy’s Eyes,” staged at the Women’s Project Theater in Manhattan in April 2001, was so well received — The New York Times called her “one of the country’s most powerful chroniclers of the Black underclass” — that after its initial run ended it was brought back for an eight-week summer run at the Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village.The play was developed through the Cherry Lane Alternative mentorship project, in which Ms. Wimberly worked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein.Ms. Dee, then 76, played a character known only as Grandma who, as the story opens in a scene set in Memphis in 1968, is preparing to perform an illegal abortion on a teenager. The action later shifts to 1980, with Ms. Wimberly’s script exploring the consequences of that abortion and another one that Grandma is preparing to perform.“The play is smart enough to realize that there are many truths,” Anita Gates wrote in a review in The New York Times, “some of them contradictory.” In Newsday, Gordon Cox wrote, “‘Saint Lucy’s Eyes’ doesn’t boast much narrative momentum, but Wimberly shows an admirable talent for the unhurried development of her characters and for dialogue that consistently rings true.”Several more of Ms. Wimberly’s plays were produced over the next dozen years, and then, in 2014, she was offered the chance to take her writing in a different direction.Daniel Schnyder, a Swiss-born saxophonist and composer, had been commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Gotham Chamber Opera to write an opera, and had landed on the pioneering jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker as a subject. He knew Ms. Wimberly through her brother, Michael, a percussionist with whom he had performed, and asked her to write the libretto of what would become “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”First, though, Ms. Wimberly had to overcome some personal reservations. An uncle had been a jazz saxophonist and had been somewhat obsessed with Parker. He had also begun using heroin, the drug that contributed to Parker’s death in 1955 at 34. Her uncle, 14 years younger than Parker, died at 35.“My grandmother hated Charlie Parker because she thought he got my uncle hooked on heroin,” Ms. Wimberly told The Times in 2015. “All my life, he was just a bad name.”Lawrence Brownlee, right, as Charlie Parker and Will Liverman as Dizzy Gillespie in Opera Philadelphia’s 2015 production of “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”Dominic M. MercierBut she took the assignment and developed a certain respect for Parker. “Yardbird” was commissioned as a showcase for the tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who portrayed Parker when the opera had its premiere in Philadelphia in 2015. The work imagined the period immediately after Parker’s death in 1955, with the jazz great pondering, among other things, his wives and other people from his past as well as the large orchestral work that he was never able to write.“In the end, he didn’t write an orchestra piece, and we weren’t going to have him write a false one,” Ms. Wimberly told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2015. “But I feel that what he passed on was that he inspired so many people to create, he opened up the doors, he set the birds free, the people free, the music free, like with what he did with the blues. What he did for jazz itself was allow others to do what he was not able to do in his lifetime.”Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the Philadelphia premiere for The Times, called the work “a 90-minute, swift-paced chamber opera with a pulsing, jazz-infused score.” The next year the opera had its New York premiere at the Apollo Theater, where Parker himself had played. It has since been staged by Seattle Opera, Arizona Opera and other companies, and will be performed in January by the New Orleans Opera.Mr. Schnyder, in a phone interview, said that, because it had a white, male, European composer, the piece needed a librettist who could bring an African American and a female sensibility.“It was a perfect match because she looked at the story of Charlie Parker from a really different perspective, focusing on his relationships with different women in his life,” he said. “That proved to be much more interesting than just focusing on the music.”Bridgette Angela Wimberly was born on Jan. 7, 1954, in Cleveland to John and Conchita (Smith) Wimberly. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University in 1978 and later did graduate studies at Columbia.Ms. Wimberly, third from right, and other former members of the Cherry Lane Theater’s mentorship project at a 2014 event celebrating the project’s 16th anniversary.Walter McBride/Getty ImagesShe was trained as a medical researcher and worked for a time at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center; later several of her plays, including “Saint Lucy’s Eyes” and “Forest City,” about Cleveland’s first integrated hospital, would touch on medical issues.She was interested in poetry and began sharing some of hers in a reading group that met in a Harlem theater where the conditions were not always ideal.“When it was cold, we froze,” she told The Times in 2001. “When it rained, we had to use our umbrellas inside. When it was hot, we burned up.”The poetry led her to dabble in theater. In 1997 she participated in a directing workshop at Lincoln Center. She wrote a scene for one exercise; others in the class, she recalled, told her, “You should finish this”; and the eventual result was “Saint Lucy’s Eyes.”Ms. Wimberly is survived by her mother; her brother; and a sister, Bernadette Scruggs.Seth Gordon, who teaches at the Helmerich School of Drama at the University of Oklahoma, directed the premiere of “Forest City” for the Cleveland Play House in 2003.“Bridgette gave voice to the stories of people who struggled quietly and with dignity, and to chapters of African American history that deserve attention,” he said by email. “She wrote with a striking poetic flair, and with a sense of grace that also defined her very generous spirit.” More

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      Interview: Childminding with The Manny

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      Sam McArdle is The Manny

      Sam McArdle is an Irish actor whose one man black comedy The Manny plays at the King’s Head Theatre in January 2023. We caught up with him to have a chat about developing and funding the show, as well as his own experiences working as a male nanny.

      Well, the title of the play probably gives a bit of a hint, but first tell us about the premise of The Manny.

      The Manny is loosely based on when I was working as a male nanny for rich single mums in West London in my 20s. I always feel the need (and rightly so!) to stress that the character is quite different to me. He’s quite a morally grey figure, who uses this flexible, well paid job to his advantage by living a ‘Peter Pan-esque’ life of casual dating, probably because he’s a little lost in his place in life. Although he comes across as quite confident, he also represents the anxiety that can come from society’s pressure to have achieved all of your ‘objectives’ by a certain age, and so he is settling for this life where he doesn’t feel anything. He meets an actress called Molly, who also seems lost, but in a different way. She came out of the top drama school in London with all of the agents coming for her, but after a few years she seems to have been cast aside by the industry, and it looks like she won’t achieve her dreams. She is also settling, in a different way, by being in a relationship with a ‘safe bet’. He works in tech, makes a good salary, but he doesn’t really ‘see’ her. Not in the way The Manny does. She’s drawn to his appetite for life and brazenness, and he’s never met someone before who is following their passion, no matter how much it hurts them. Finally, we have Michael. He’s a seven-year-old, pain in the arse, right-wing child with slightly Machiavellian tendencies, who is the product of a cold, loveless marriage. He’s settling for turning into every example of an entitled smarmy public school boy that we see today. But he himself is drawn to The Manny, as he has no role model in his life. So this brash, crude male nanny’s realistic outlook on life may act as an unlikely role model to the boy. In summary, it’s about how all three of these characters need each other and are changed by each other throughout the show.

      You have drawn on your own experience working as a manny in London; can we expect a Hollywood-style ‘any resemblance’ disclaimer?

      Everyone signed NDA’s so I’m safe! No I’m kidding… The character is very different to me. I wanted to explore those themes of societal pressure, loneliness in your 30s, and unrequited dreams, but I wanted to do that through the lens of The Manny. I also wanted to write about a character who goes on a journey throughout the show and is changed. So I wanted him to start in a certain place of thinking, and because of what happens throughout the show and the characters that he encounters, he ends up in a very different place to how we see him at the start.

      I worked with a variety of families; some were lovely to work with and I still keep in touch with! Others were different, but all the characters are based on real life people, apart from Molly. I did meet a child with slightly psychotic tendencies that Michael is based on!

      It’s been a long process to bring The Manny to the stage, from writing it in lockdown to hugely successful scratch nights in London. How have you found your script and performance developed?

      I started writing this show in early 2020, but as I had quit acting at that time it was still only in rough form. When COVID hit, I actually stopped writing it all together for a couple of months. It wasn’t until that summer when a Michael Jordan documentary called The Last Dance came out. It blew my mind how focused he was, and it made sense. I had been quite driven in my 20s (not that I’m comparing myself to MJ!) but I had lost that spark, through being ground down by the industry. There were a number of things that helped me get me back on track, and that documentary was one of them. I became much more disciplined with my routine, sleep and diet, and it all helped to constantly refine and refine the script. I would gather feedback from people whose opinions I trusted, and then in the summer of 2021 the director Melanie Fullbrook came on board. We’ve been close friends since we were in drama school, and she knows me better than anyone, so when I had the final script, she was able to shape and create my performance. This version of the show is very similar to the one we did last year. It’s taken a bit of time for us to find the right venue to bring the production to the next level, so it’s a great pleasure to be working with the King’s Head Theatre. They’ve been fantastic, especially Valentina Londono who’s been fantastic with marketing and selling the show.

      There was some crowdfunding to help produce this run. Tell us a little about that and the challenges involved in putting on a show like this?

      It’s been a huge learning curve producing this show myself, and raising funds is the most important thing – making sure everyone gets paid, and that we cover ourselves. We ran an IndieGoGo campaign in November, and that’s been instrumental in securing our funding. I also wrote to various trusts and boards, as well as doing the ACE application (50 pages of agony), and were rejected on them. I think crowdfunding is the best option for fringe shows. But still, we are doing this on quite a tight budget. There’s a huge financial risk with putting on any theatre, as we know, but we do need more help from the government. COVID, Brexit, various Tory governments are crippling the arts, and it’s difficult to get going in today’s climate. I don’t mean to be despondent, but I think Arts Council funding being cut for the major theatres, as we have seen, has a huge knock-on effect.

      How did you get involved with The King’s Head to bring this play to their stage?

      I wrote to Mark Ravenhill last year, who was very complimentary about the play, which was really lovely to hear, as I was a huge fan of Shopping and F*cking. From there, we met with Sofi Berenger, lead producer at the venue, and they offered us a great slot to kick off 2023!

      What are your ambitions for The Manny, and do you have any other projects coming up to tell us about?

      The Manny has a two-season TV show arc, which I would love to develop. I’ve got the TV pilot written, which we are currently pitching to networks, and some are coming to see the show. This is the first thing I’ve ever written, and I’m loving knowing nothing about it, but being on a journey of learning (as wanky as that sounds). So I want to get better at writing these characters for TV where I can properly flesh out their backstories and character arcs. My favourite character is probably Molly (at this point in time), and there’s a lot under the surface that we only catch a glimpse of in the 60 min show.

      Finally, are there any lessons or skills you learnt while dealing with other people’s children that you have been able to apply in the theatre? Do you find it easier to wrangle directors and producers or, dare we suggest, actors?

      I think the key to working well with anyone, from kids to adult creatives, is listening. Everybody comes to a discussion/meeting/argument with a list of pain points and objectives they want to get across. Most people just want to be heard and listened to. If you can put yourselves in their shoes, you’re normally able to meet in the middle and both of you come out of the meeting or argument feeling heard and willing to work together.

      But also, much like it’s sometimes easier to let a bratty child win the Mario Kart game, sometimes it’s easier to pick your battles and save your energy. I try and stay away from energy vampires, and if it’s not worth the fight, just smile and be polite. That was an unintentional rhyme! Ha!

      Our huge thanks to Sam for taking time out from preparing the show to chat with us. You can find him on Twitter and on Instagram.

      The Manny plays at The King’s Head Theatre from January 10-14. Further information and booking details can be found here. More

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      A Cop Called Coco, an Actor Named Mani, a Quebecer Exploring Quebec

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      MONTREAL — Just five years ago, Mani Soleymanlou, a Quebec actor of Iranian origin, was playing characters named Ahmed, Hakim and Karim on French-language television shows produced in the province. Today, his roles include Patrick, a banker, in one successful TV series, and a corrupt police officer with the very Québécois name Robert “Coco” Bédard, in another.Coco appears in “C’est comme ça que je t’aime,” or “Happily Married,” a dark, rollicking comedy set in the 1970s in a suburb of the provincial capital, Quebec City — a time and place where the chances would have been slim of running into someone like Mr. Soleymanlou: an immigrant who was born in Iran, and grew up in Paris, Toronto and Ottawa, before landing in Quebec.“I think,” Mr. Soleymanlou said in French, with an accent picked up in Paris, “Québécois culture has long been very homogeneous.”But that is changing — thanks in part to people like him.That Mr. Soleymanlou, 40, went from playing typecast outsiders to an insider named Coco Bédard in a few short years is also indicative of larger shifts in Quebec society.Though it still remains rooted in the French language, in ethnicity and in a shared history, Québécois identity is in flux right now — and what it means to be Québécois is what Mr. Soleymanlou has spent the past decade deconstructing in his other career as a playwright.With his family, Mr. Soleymanlou was among the Iranian exiles who streamed to France in the years after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980.At a recent performance at the Théâtre Jean-Duceppe in Montreal, the packed audience gave Mr. Soleymanlou a standing ovation for his trilogy, “Un, Deux, Trois.” For four and a half hours, he dissects his own search for identity after arriving in Quebec, which made him feel like more of an outsider than anywhere else, and he explores the meaning of identity itself and the place of French speakers in Canada, an otherwise overwhelmingly Anglophone country.Collectively, the three plays raise difficult questions that go to the heart of Québécois identity.Can an immigrant from Iran, or anywhere else, ever be considered Québécois? If the French language is a pillar of Québécois identity, what is the place of the French spoken by newcomers from the Maghreb or West Africa, accents heard more and more throughout the province? Is French Québécois identity fated to disappear because of demographics and geography? Or can it — should it? — reinvent itself by becoming part of the global Francophone world?If the success of Mr. Soleymanlou’s trilogy and the arc of his acting career suggest that Québécois identity is expanding, the recent provincial elections also show that the evolution hasn’t been smooth and isn’t a given. The provincial premier, François Legault, and his allies won in a landslide, partly by promoting a cultural nationalism that portrayed immigrants as a threat to Quebec society.Quebec nationalists, especially during the heady days of the independence movement in the 1970s and 1980s, upheld immigrants’ mastery of French as the key to acceptance and integration in Quebec society.But Quebec nationalists have moved the goal posts in recent years, emphasizing instead that immigrants must adhere to an amorphous notion of Quebec values. Politicians like Mr. Legault and his allies, while stressing the importance of French, have also described immigration as undermining Quebec’s identity.“They’re using identity to score political points, especially among older voters, because that’s where fear works,” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “And that’s the problem. They’re not talking to the new Quebec.”Mr. Soleymanlou’s trilogy, “Un, Deux, Trois,” explores identity in Quebec and the place of French speakers in Canada, an otherwise overwhelmingly Anglophone country. Mr. Soleymanlou spoke recently during an interview at a café in Hochelaga, a Montreal neighborhood where he lives with his partner, Sophie Cadieux, a Québécoise actress, and their son. Appointed to the prestigious position of director of the French theater at Canada’s National Arts Centre in Ottawa last year, Mr. Soleymanlou was in the middle of a tour of eight Canadian cities with his trilogy.“In his work, he was able to use humor and laughter and this technique almost like standup comedy to talk about his experiences,” said Yana Meerzon, a professor of theater at the University of Ottawa, contrasting his plays with the straightforward tragedies of some other migrant stories.She added that his work acknowledged the differences between adult immigrants and child immigrants. “They don’t speak from that culture, necessarily, they speak from their own culture, which is mixed.” Mr. Soleymanlou’s successful dual career as actor and playwright points to the opening up of French Québécois popular culture, which has long existed apart from the rest of Canada. Despite the province’s demographics being changed by successive waves of immigration over many decades, the stage and the screen had until recently been dominated by stories told by French Québécois for an audience of French Québécois. “We were very late,” Mr. Soleymanlou said, “but now we’re accelerating to catch up.”Born in Tehran a couple of years after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Mr. Soleymanlou and his family joined a stream of Iranian exiles to France. In Paris, he attended public schools and learned French, before the family packed up again, this time for Toronto, when he was 9.In Toronto, he went to schools with immigrants like himself and eventually “forgot about himself” — immersed in the ever-widening circle of multiculturalism that is the ethos of Canada outside Quebec.He arrived two decades ago in Quebec to study at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal. By then, newcomers from Francophone Africa, many of them Muslim, were reshaping the city’s landscape, the way previous immigrants from Europe and Asia already had for decades. Still, the arts were the domain of the French Québécois.That was made clear to him on his first day at the school where he and three others accounted for the only non-French Québécois students. Four was the most there had ever been in a school with more than 100 students.“Since my arrival in Quebec, I’ve never felt more like a guy from elsewhere, like a stranger, an exile, lost, an immigrant,” Mr. Soleymanlou said in his play “Un.” The school director at the time made a joke of struggling to pronounce his name, Mr. Soleymanlou recalled. Then, using two common French Québécois family names, she said, “They’ll stop criticizing us for having only Tremblays and Girards at the National Theatre School.”“I didn’t understand at all why we were being separated into two categories of students,” he said.That first day set off a search for identity — his own and that of the French Québécois — that, almost by accident, eventually launched his career.In 2009, he was invited to perform at the Théâtre de Quat’Sous in Montreal, which then showcased immigrant artists every Monday evening. Drawing on his life, he wrote and performed a monologue that would become “Un,” the first part of his trilogy.“Since my arrival in Quebec, I’ve never felt more like a guy from elsewhere, like a stranger, an exile, lost, an immigrant,” he said in the play. “Never have I had to explain so often where I came from, to justify my accent, to describe my path, to pronounce over and over again my family name.”His anguished search for identity in “Un” resonated in a province where the dominant French Québécois had long fought to preserve their own sense of self, surrounded as they are by an English majority.“Quebec is a society that’s had to protect and defend itself, always positioning itself in opposition to the other,” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “That’s something I didn’t understand in the beginning — that the Québécois want to know how you define yourself because they have to define themselves to protect themselves.”Mr. Soleymanlou continued his search for identity in “Deux,” in a dialogue with a bilingual Jewish Montrealer, and then in “Three,” which featured three dozen French speakers who were not French Québécois.Before 2017, Mr. Soleymanlou had never been offered a role with a French name. “There’s been a radical change in the past decade, a phenomenal paradigm shift in the arts in Quebec,” he said. As his theater career took off, the scripts sent his way changed. In 2017, while performing his trilogy in Paris, he got a call from Radio-Canada, the public broadcaster, offering him the role of “Philippe” in a new series. He had never been offered a role with a French name before.“Philippe on Radio-Canada? My God, yes,” Mr. Soleymanlou recalled answering.But when he got the script, he found that his role had been changed to a Greek named “Yaniss.” The producers said sorry, but he remained Yaniss.He had to wait two more years for his first meaty role as an ethnic French Québécois — that of the corrupt, though lovable, cop in “Happily Married,” a series about two couples in a very French Québécois suburb, Sainte-Foy, who turn to organized crime while their kids are away at summer camp.“The role of a police officer, in the 1970s, in Sainte-Foy, in Quebec, played by someone of Iranian origin?” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “Ten years ago, that would have been impossible.” More

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      Machine Dazzle: How Many Ways Can You Say Fabulous?

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      It was movie night at the Museum of Arts & Design in Manhattan, and the costume designer Machine Dazzle was ready for his entrance.The selection was the 1980 roller-disco fantasy “Xanadu,” and he had draped his 6-foot-5 frame in a shiny take on Olivia Newton-John’s purple Grecian goddess look, accessorized with pastel-rainbow pumps, sequined legwarmers and a Venetian-style ONJ mask on a stick.The movie, of course, was a mess — but the kind of wildly colorful, overstuffed, yes-to-everything mess that could have roller-skated right into his own work.“How many different ideas can find their way into a costume?” Dazzle asked the audience, plenty of whom came in their own homemade light-up headdresses, sparkly jackets and legwarmers. “A lot. If you don’t believe me, go upstairs.”“Upstairs” meant the museum’s fourth and fifth floors, where “Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle,” on view through Feb. 19, is currently offering perhaps the city’s most glittery, tinselly, witty display of bling this holiday season.The show, Dazzle’s first solo exhibition, brings together more than 80 costumes and other artifacts, from self-worn creations from his beginnings in the 90s downtown experimental drag scene to his outrageously extravagant costumes for Taylor Mac’s epic “24-Decade History of Popular Music,” which was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize.Costumes from “Treasure,” Machine Dazzle’s 2019 indie-rock cabaret piece about his relationship with his mother, who died soon after he moved to New York.Jenna Bascom/Museum of Arts and DesignIt’s a summing up, but also a bit of a pivot for Dazzle, who turns 50 on Dec. 30. Lately, he said, he’s been broadening his possibilities, “slowly moving uptown” — and not just because there’s currently a 30-foot photograph of him in rainbow-spangled drag on the museum’s facade, looking up Central Park West (or as he put it, “shooting lasers” at the nearby Trump International Hotel & Tower).This month, he designed and performed in “Bassline Fabulous,” a fanciful staging of Bach’s Goldberg Variations with the Grammy-winning Catalyst Quartet in a Versailles-themed gallery at the Metropolitan Museum (where his character, among many other things, constructed an elaborate topiary garden from ingenious props pulled from under the covers of a giant bed, and at one point did battle with a giant bottle of Elmer’s glue). Next up: costumes for Rameau’s “Io” with the Washington-based Opera Lafayette in the spring.“I love there’s this shift into classical,” Dazzle said. “It makes me want to dive into it more.”Before the commission, he said, he’d never heard the Goldberg Variations, but then he listened to them every day for months. “Music inspires me more than anything visual,” he said. “When I hear music, I see shapes.”Chatting in his studio on the top floor of the museum known as MAD, the evening before the “Bassline Fabulous” dress rehearsal, Dazzle — dressed in paint-splattered jumpsuit and sneakers, his Medusa-like head of dark curls tucked into a knit hat — came off as both knowing exactly what he was doing but also a bit hard-pressed to describe his indeterminate position in the intergalactic space between the art, theater and drag worlds.“It’s taken me years to describe what I am, what I’ve been my whole life,” he said. “I’m an emotionally driven, instinct-based conceptual artist in the role of costume designer” — he paused ever so slightly — “most of the time.”Three looks from “Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle”: left, a Jackie Kennedy-inspired costume from Taylor Mac’s “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”; center, a costume from Godfrey Reggio’s film “Once Within a Time”; and right, another costume from Mac’s show.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesIf the exhibition floors are a dazzling parade of exquisitely detailed looks, the studio is unabashed chaos, crammed with bits and pieces of costumes from previous projects. On a dressmaker’s dummy, there was his not quite finished Louis XIV-ish costume for “Bassline Fabulous,” including a bondage-tinged cage of ruched elastic over a lace caftan that had been pulled through the holes.“You get these weird blob shapes, which are kind of oozing,” he said. “You don’t want to lose the body, but there can also be sculpture.”Nearby was a neck corset, a pair of size 15 period shoes awaiting their blue-sky-and-clouds trompe l’oeil paint job, and a pile of cloth flowers in “weird Barbie flesh tones” set to be incorporated into a headdress. And, on the table, his sewing machine: a basic $250 Singer from Michael’s, the arts and crafts emporium.“I use a sewing machine the way I use a hammer,” Dazzle said. “I’m not a fine tailor. What I do with a sewing machine is attach two things together. It’s sort of like civilized glue.”“Civilized glue” — or maybe Krazy Glue? — might be an alternate title for the exhibition, which showcases the way his work bonds not just wildly disparate elements but trash and glamour, metaphor and materiality, emotion and intellect.“I love wearing ideas,” Dazzle said. “You can make something that’s really beautiful but gets boring after five minutes onstage. I like giving the audience some work to do. I want them to ask, ‘Why the hell is he wearing an apple pie on his head?’”Taylor Mac in Machine Dazzle’s 1776-inspired opening costume from “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, 2016.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMachine Dazzle with the Catalyst Quartet at a dress rehearsal for “Bassline Fabulous,” a staging of Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in December.Stephanie Berger/The Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe show was assembled by Elissa Auther, the museum’s chief curator. She’d seen photographs of Dazzle’s costumes for “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a 24-hour-long queer retelling of American history from 1776 to the present through songs of the time. “I thought I’d be lucky if I could find 10 costumes available,” she said.Instead, she was surprised by the profusion of material that came out of Dazzle’s studio, his apartment and friends’ basements. The title “queer maximalism” was her idea — and one meant to challenge aesthetic hierarchies.“In the art world, these kinds of maximalist styles are viewed as stylistic embarrassment, lacking in rigor or meaning,” Auther said. “But Machine really, really brilliantly demonstrates it as an embodied aesthetic category. These surface effects are really political effects of resilience and survival.”Dazzle, whose name is Matthew Flower, was born in 1972, and spent his early childhood in Houston, where his father worked as an engineer in the energy sector. He was always into crafting, and movies like “Grease” and “Xanadu.” On his 10th birthday, he was enchanted by a trip to “The Nutcracker,” which involved not just elaborate costumes but children like himself onstage.“I thought, ‘This is what I want to do! Look, there it is!’” he said. “But then I got depressed, since I was so far away from that. I didn’t come from a cultured place. I had to find it for myself.”A display of headdresses, costumes, photographs and ephemera, from “Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle” at the Museum of Arts and Design. Jenna Bascom/Museum of Arts and DesignWhen he was 11, the family moved even farther from Xanadu, to Idaho Falls, Idaho. In 1994, after art school at the University of Colorado, he bought the proverbial one-way ticket to New York City. (In his suitcase was a bag full of milk tops that said “HOMO,” for “homogenized,” collected from a favorite cafe in Boulder, which he later fashioned into a kind of chain-mail breastplate included in the show.)He worked a series of day jobs, including a 15-year stint as a costume jewelry designer. (In his studio, he pointed out one of the first pieces he made in the early 2000s, for a friend: a choker made of a piece of windshield retrieved from a burned-out car on the Brooklyn waterfront.) At night, he was a regular at venues like Exit Art, a performance-oriented gallery, and small downtown queer clubs like the Cock, the Slide and the Pyramid Club.He began making costumes for the Dazzle Dancers, a Solid Gold-style dance troupe formed in 1996 (represented in the show by writhing mannequins in barely-there costumes and a video for their raunchy cover of the theme from “The Love Boat,” which introduces them as “a naked sensation” that had “come to heal a broken nation”). A friend called him a “dancing machine,” and it stuck.Machine Dazzle’s costumes for the Dazzle Dancers, a downtown performance art troupe founded in New York City in 1996. A fellow member called Dazzle (who was born Matthew Flower) a “dancing machine,” and the name stuck.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHe also began making costumes for downtown performers like Julie Atlas Muz, Justin Vivian Bond and Mac, who in 2004 invited the Dazzle Dancers to participate in “Live Patriot Acts: Patriots Gone Wild!,” a “political vaudeville” that parodied the Republican National Convention.“I had my own rougher aesthetic, and Machine had a similar take on things,” Mac recalled. “It was about making a trash bag beautiful, and not so much about making something that was already beautiful beautiful.”“His costumes are always metaphors for something,” Mac continued. “With everyone else, if you say the costume is a cat, it’s a cat. But he would make a costume of what cats make you feel like.”They are also, Mac ventured, “a storage of pain.” “It’s a flooding of all the emotions and things a little queer kid wasn’t allowed to express, growing up in the time we did,” Mac said.Dazzle made what became nearly 100 costumes for “The Lily’s Revenge,” Mac’s six-hour, 40-performer play staged in 2009 at HERE Arts Center in Manhattan. It’s represented at the museum by a single flower headdress. But MAD’s entire fifth floor is dedicated to Dazzle’s dozens of costumes for “A 24-Decade of Popular Music,” including the companion costumes he made for himself. (For those who missed it, there’s a sizzle reel in the gallery, and an HBO documentary in the works.)Dazzle’s Civil War-era costume for Mac, right, from “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” featuring a hoop skirt made of hot dogs and barbed wire, inventions of the period. At right, Dazzle’s companion costume for himself, “Gay-braham Lincoln.” Jenna Bascom/Museum of Arts and DesignDazzle summed up what he calls his “recipe” for Mac’s show: a silhouette informed by what people wore at the time, but layered with references to inventions, technological and social change, and collective emotions. Take his costume for 1856-1866: a shredded military jacket on top of a skeletal hoop skirt made from barbed wire and strings of … sausage?“It was the Civil War, so there’s loneliness, dead people, sadness, winning, losing,” Dazzle said. “But also barbed wire, which was invented at the time. And hot dogs! I read in a couple places that the American hot dog was invented in this time, by German immigrants.”Representing the 1960s, there’s a Jackie Kennedy pink suit painted with Roy Lichtenstein dots, backed with giant “wings” of Pop-Art hands pointing like guns. For the AIDs era, there’s a robe made of cassette tapes, topped by a many-headed mushroom-cloud-like death mask.It was in 2016, during the performances leading up to the one-time-only, 24-hour marathon show at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, that Dazzle got the courage to quit his day job.“I’m Capricorn, Virgo rising — very responsible, practical, realistic,” he said. “I was really scared, but I decided to take the leap and follow my heart.”Dazzle in his studio at the Museum of Arts & Design. “I love wearing ideas,” he said. “You can make something that’s really beautiful but gets boring after five minutes onstage.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe show highlights some work with new collaborators, including his costumes for “Once Within a Time,” a 50-minute wordless art film by Godfrey Reggio (“Koyaanisqatsi”), which had its premiere last October at the Santa Fe International Film Festival. (One oversize mannequin wears the mud-cloth shaman number worn by Mike Tyson, who plays a character called the Mentor.)There’s also a moving suite of costumes for “Treasure,” his 2019 indie-rock cabaret piece about his relationship with his mother, who died soon after he moved to New York. (An album version was released in October.)And Dazzle is also working with Mac on a new, large-scale piece, “The Bark of Millions,” a suite of 54 original songs inspired by queer figures throughout history, written by Mac and the composer Matt Ray. At a recent preview concert at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Dazzle — who also sings in the ensemble — wore a jumpsuit and “a large poncho.” But this time, both he and Mac decided to trade their usual extravagant footwear for some maximal minimalism.“Being barefoot onstage is very punk,” Dazzle said. “It’s raw and it’s real and it’s kind of witchy.”Queer Maximalism x Machine DazzleThrough Feb. 19, Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, Manhattan, (212) 299-7777; madmuseum.org. More

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      Day 25: That Time an Orthodox Jew Celebrated Christmas

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      The first and only time that Alex Edelman’s family celebrated Christmas, their tree was topped not by a star, but a teddy bear wearing a yarmulke.Mr. Edelman, who was 7 or 8 at the time — he doesn’t remember the exact year — was also wearing a yarmulke. All of his male family members were. Mr. Edelman, 33, grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in Brookline, Mass., and he says his family’s one-night fling with Christmas, which he chronicled with withering precision in his recent Off Broadway comedy show “Just For Us,” was a thoroughly Jewish endeavor.The story has become an integral part of Mr. Edelman’s comedy routine: A non-Jewish friend of Mr. Edelman’s mother had a tragic year, and no one to celebrate Christmas with. So Mr. Edelman’s mother decided that, religion notwithstanding, she would do a mitzvah — the Jewish concept of a good deed — and invite her to celebrate with them. In order to make that happen, of course, she’d need stockings, cookies for Santa, and that ever-important tree.“So we had Christmas,” Mr. Edelman says in his act. “We did a pretty good job, for Jews. We went whole-hog, except no hog. Kosher Christmas.”By decking their halls, Mr. Edelman said, they were performing an essential Jewish act: welcoming the stranger into their home, with love and open hearts.On Christmas morning, Mr. Edelman and his younger brother opened presents with their parents and Kate, their non-Jewish friend, who had spent the night and gone to bed delighted by the celebration. The brothers then headed off to school, as the Jewish day school that they attended was not closed on Christmas Day. Later that evening, their father would get a phone call from the school principal, who was deeply concerned. The Edelman brothers, it seemed, had been telling other students that Santa Claus had visited their home. Why would the Edelmans allow Christmas into their life? Mr. Edelman’s father was quick to answer: Clearly, he told the school principal, you don’t understand the true meaning of Christmas.“It was a moment of great parenting. Not to give too much credit to my parents, but all credit to my parents,” Mr. Edelman said in an interview. “The only thing that is universally Jewish is intentionality. You cannot have Judaism without intention. And what’s so Jewish about this event is there was so much empathy, but also much intentionality, when my parents decided to do this.”These days, the story remains Mr. Edelman’s favorite comedic bit in his show, “because afterward people tell me their own stories of human kindness,” he said. “It highlights what I love about my Jewish values, with empathy as the true north. It’s a good demonstration of how Jewish values can be applicable, even when you’re celebrating Christmas.” More

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      The Artists We Lost in 2022, in Their Words

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      Music innovators who sang of coal country and “Great Balls of Fire.” An actress who made a signature role out of a devilish baker who meets a fiery end. The trailblazing heart of “In the Heat of the Night.”The creative people who died this year include many whose lives helped shape our own — through the art they made, and through the words they said. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their own voices.Sidney Poitier.Sam Falk/The New York Times“Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play.”— Sidney Poitier, actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“People in the past have done what we’re trying to do infinitely better. That’s why, for one’s own sanity, to keep one’s own sense of proportion, one must regularly go back to them.”— Peter Brook, director, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Ronnie Spector.Art Zelin/Getty Images“Every song is a little piece of my life.”— Ronnie Spector, singer, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Yuriko.Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“Dance is living. Dance is, for me, it’s survival.”— Yuriko, dancer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Kirstie Alley.Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“The question is, how do you create with what you have?”— Kirstie Alley, actress, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)Carmen Herrera.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Every painting has been a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win. But you know how many paintings I threw in the garbage?”— Carmen Herrera, artist, born 1915 (Read the obituary.)“I decided that in every scene, you’re naked. If you’re dressed in a parka, what’s the difference if you’re dressed in nothing at all, if you’re exploring yourself?”— William Hurt, actor, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Takeoff.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global Citizen“You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh. You gotta have character. A hard punchline can make you laugh, but you gotta know how to say it.”— Takeoff, rapper, born 1994 (Read the obituary.)“I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up.”— Bob Saget, comedian and actor, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)Olivia Newton-John.Las Vegas News Bureau/EPA, via Shutterstock“I do like to be alone at times, just to breathe.”— Olivia Newton-John, singer, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Movies are like clouds that sit over reality: If I do cinema well, I can uncover what is beneath, my friends, my allies, what I am, where I come from.”— Jean-Luc Godard, director, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Sam Gilliam.Anthony Barboza/Getty Images“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political.”— Sam Gilliam, artist, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“Everyone says that I was a role model. But I never thought of it when I was doing the music and when I was performing. I just wanted to make good music.”— Betty Davis, singer-songwriter, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Nichelle Nichols.Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images“The next Einstein might have a Black face — and she’s female.”— Nichelle Nichols, actress, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“If I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be with Albert Einstein at Panzanella.”— Judy Tenuta, comedian, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)“In time, writers learn that good fiction editors care as much about the story as the writer does, or almost, anyway. And you really often end up, the three of you — the writer, and the editor, and the story — working on this obdurate, beautiful thing, this brand-new creation.”— Roger Angell, writer and editor, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Jennifer Bartlett.Susan Wood/Getty Images“I spent 30 years trying to convince people and myself that I was smart, that I was a good painter, that I was this or that. It’s not going to happen. The only person that it should happen for is me. This is what I was meant to do.”— Jennifer Bartlett, artist, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Christine McVie.P. Floyd/Daily Express, via Hulton Archive and Getty Images“I didn’t aspire to be on the stage playing piano, let alone singing, because I never thought I had much of a voice. But my option was window-dresser or jump off the cliff and try this. So I jumped off the cliff.”— Christine McVie, musician and songwriter, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge. You go to the precipice and lean over it.”— Maria Ewing, opera singer, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Taylor Hawkins.John Atashian/Getty Images“There’s so much in what I do that is beyond hard work — there’s luck and timing and just being in the right place at the right time with the right hairdo.”— Taylor Hawkins, drummer, born 1972 (Read the obituary.)“I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face.”— Angela Lansbury, actress, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)“I always try to improve upon what I’ve done. If something’s not working, I’ll change it to make it better. I’m an artist and a performer above all, and I don’t limit myself.”— Elza Soares, singer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Leslie Jordan.Fred Prouser/Reuters“I’m always working, always. I got to keep the ship afloat.”— Leslie Jordan, actor, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“The reward of the work has always been the work itself.”— David McCullough, historian and author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“To me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, author, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)James Caan.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Passion is such an important thing to have in life because it ends so soon, and my passion was to grow up with my son.”— James Caan, actor, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)Tina Ramirez.Michael Falco for The New York Times“Words are unnecessary when movement and feeling and expression can say it all.”— Tina Ramirez, dancer and founder of Ballet Hispánico, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Claes Oldenburg.Tony Evans/Getty Images“I haven’t done anything on the subject of flies. It’s the sort of thing that could interest me. Anything could interest me, actually.”— Claes Oldenburg, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“A skull is a beautiful thing.”— Lee Bontecou, artist, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“I like to write strong characters who are no better or worse than anybody else on earth.”— Charles Fuller, playwright, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Ray Liotta.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis, via Getty Images“One review said I played a sleazy, heartless, cold person who you don’t really care about. Great! I love it; that’s what I played.”— Ray Liotta, actor, born around 1954 (Read the obituary.)Jerry Lee Lewis.Thomas S. England/Getty Images“There’s a difference between a phenomenon and a stylist. I’m a stylist, Elvis was the phenomenon, and don’t you forget it.”— Jerry Lee Lewis, musician, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“All of us have something built into our ears that comes from the place where we grow up and where we were as children.”— George Crumb, composer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Anne Heche. SGranitz/WireImage, via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”— Anne Heche, actress, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)Louie Anderson.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“That’s my goal every night: Hopefully at some point in my act, you have forgotten whatever trouble you had when you came in.”— Louie Anderson, comedian and actor, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)“Adult human beings live with the certainty of grief, which deepens us and opens us to other people, who have been there, too.”— Peter Straub, author, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Ned Rorem.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“I believe in the importance of the unimportant — in the quotidian pathos.”— Ned Rorem, composer, born 1923 (Read the obituary.)Gilbert Gottfried.Fred Hermansky/NBC, via Getty Images“I don’t always mean to offend. I only sometimes mean to offend.”— Gilbert Gottfried, comedian, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“Merce Cunningham is quoted somewhere as saying he wanted a company that danced the way he danced. I kept doing the same thing. And I began to wonder why I was insisting that they be as limited as I am.”— David Gordon, choreographer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Hilary Mantel.Ellie Smith for The New York Times“The universe is not limited by what I can imagine.”— Hilary Mantel, author, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“Getting the right people with a shared vision is three-quarters of the battle.”— Anne Parsons, arts administrator, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)Paula Rego.Rita Barros/Getty Images“My paintings are stories, but they are not narratives, in that they have no past and future.”— Paula Rego, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Javier Marías.Quim Llenas/Getty Images“When you are addressing your fellow citizens, you have to give some hope sometimes, even if you want to say that everything is terrible, that we are governed by a bunch of gangsters. In a novel, you can be much more pessimistic. You are more savage, you are wilder, you are freer, you think truer, you think better.”— Javier Marías, author, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)“Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm.”— Richard Taruskin, musicologist, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker. I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”— Pablo Milanés, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Peter Bogdanovich.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do.”— Peter Bogdanovich, director, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Loretta Lynn.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images“I think the highest point of my career was in the late ’70s. I had No. 1 songs, a best-selling book and a movie made about my life. But I think it was also the lowest point for me as well. Life gets away from you so fast when you move fast.”— Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Thich Nhat Hanh.Golding/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, monk and author, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images; Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. More

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      Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Laura Grill Jaye Win 2022 Relentless Award

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      The award’s first prize to a musical went to the writing duo for “How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia.”Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Laura Grill Jaye have won the 2022 Relentless Musical Award for their new work, “How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia,” the American Playwriting Foundation announced on Thursday.It is the first Relentless Award to go to a musical. Chowdhury and Jaye, known as the writing duo Grill and Chowder, will receive a $65,000 prize and have the option to hold staged readings at prominent theaters across the country, including a series at Theater Row in New York.“How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia,” which centers on race and identity in a musical chock-full of ’90s touchstones like Tamagotchi cyberpets and Abercrombie & Fitch, tells the story of a young white girl whose suburban life is interrupted when she finds an unexpected scar on her shoulder in the form of a brown spot.“At this moment in time when there are so many different approaches to dealing with issues of race, what they’re up to is so complex,” said David Bar Katz, the foundation’s artistic and executive director. “They come at it through humor and discovery.”The Relentless Award was established in honor of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman after his death in 2014. This year, the award was limited to musical submissions to honor the songwriter Adam Schlesinger, who died in 2020 from complications of the coronavirus.Applicants had the challenge of embodying both artists.In previous years, when plays were evaluated for exemplifying Hoffman’s spirit, “it was more about if someone’s art seemed like they’d ripped their heart out and threw it down on the stage,” Katz said. Schlesinger, on the other hand, “loved creating well-constructed pop songs that were hummable that people would enjoy,” Katz said.“Having to reconcile those things is almost an impossible task,” he added.Going forward, there will be two awards: one for plays with a $45,000 prize and one for musicals with a $65,000 prize.More than 500 entries were read by a panel of judges, including the playwrights Thomas Bradshaw and Lynn Nottage, and the musicians James Iha and Stephin Merritt.The jury also awarded $3,000 prizes to three finalists: Joe Stevens and Keaton Wooden, for “Hills on Fire”; David Gomez and John-Michael Lyles, for “Shoot for the Moon”; and Oliver Houser, for “XY.” More

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      On Gay Street, Another Piece of NYC’s History Is Coming Down

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      Like other vulnerable landmarks across the city, the house at 14 Gay Street — which helped inspire the musical “Wonderful Town” — is being demolished.One Monday in late November, preservationists, politicians, neighbors and looky-loos gathered at dusk on Manhattan’s tiny Gay Street, a slim crescent in the heart of Greenwich Village, to protest the demolition of a nearly 200-year-old house there. The place in question, 14 Gay Street, is one of a clutch of six winsome but precarious early 19th-century buildings on Gay and Christopher Streets that were owned for decades by Celeste Martin, a singular character devoted to her properties and to the often eccentric cast of tenants she nurtured.Ms. Martin died in late 2018, at 94, with no will and no close relatives, so the city took over her holdings, selling 14 Gay Street and its siblings for about $9 million to a buyer who flipped them last April to Lionel Nazarian, a 37-year-old developer, for about $12 million. Since then, Mr. Nazarian has done foundation work that has destabilized 14 Gay Street and imperiled its neighbors, so the city has ordered its demolition, a slow, laborious process that began just before Thanksgiving.Chillingly, this scenario is one that is playing out all over the city, said Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation and the organizer of the November protest: As developers have been buying up vulnerable landmark properties, they are either allowing them to deteriorate or doing work that compromises public safety. In the last year, he said, more than a dozen such buildings have come down.Celeste Martin, who died in 2018 at 94, owned six historic properties on Gay and Christopher Streets, including 14 Gay Street. A singular character, she doted on her properties and her often eccentric tenants.Harry ZernikeMr. Berman blames the lack of oversight and coordination by city agencies. “As a result,” he said, “our neighborhoods are paying the price, our city’s history and heritage are paying the price, and the irreplaceable historic landmarks that distinguish New York from everywhere else are being lost.”The city, along with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said in a statement it had approved plans for the work on Gay Street and that Mr. Nazarian’s construction crew did not follow their instructions. Preservationists like Mr. Berman and local politicians like Deborah Glick have cried foul, declaring that the city and the commission should have been overseeing the work and described Mr. Nazarian as a bad actor. In 2017, he was accused of creating hazardous conditions and tenant harassment in a property he owns in the East Village. Mr. Berman wondered if his actions were deliberate, to insure he wouldn’t have to restore his new holdings, but be allowed to tear them down and start fresh. For his part, Mr. Nazarian said the construction workers made a terrible mistake, adding that he loves historic architecture and just wants to preserve the buildings.The doughty but fragile antique buildings that Ms. Martin left behind “are part of this incredible surviving collection of very early houses,” said Andrew S. Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. “Dozens were built in the 1820s, but not many are left — certainly not in groups on a small, intimate street. They are really precious.”The building at 14 Gay Street dates to 1827; its siblings, a year later. “They were originally built for the mercantile class,” Mr. Dolkart said. “They weren’t built for the wealthy. They aren’t pristine museum pieces: You can see they had lived, and been lived in, over time.”That’s significant, because the early 19th century was the last period “that modest people, shop owners and small business owners, could afford to live in a single-family home in a built-up section of Manhattan,” he continued. “You can still see a number of these houses peppering the Village.”By the end of the century, many had evolved into boardinghouses and multifamily dwellings. By then, Gay Street was an integrated block, with a large Black community and a melting pot of immigrants from Ireland, Denmark, France, Italy, Germany and Belgium.Demolition recently began at 14 Gay Street. The city has ordered that the work be done by hand and the material saved for use in a reconstruction overseen by the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAll six buildings are landmarked — Gay Street is in the Village’s historic district — but No. 14 is especially noteworthy as a literary artifact, the onetime home of Ruth McKenney, who memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment there in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein. (For years, a longtime tenant of the apartment, David Ryan, was awakened by tourists belting the refrain of the musical’s signature number, “Why, oh why, oh why-oh/Why did I ever leave Ohio?” and peering through the bars of his bedroom window. When the play was revived on Broadway in 2003, he suffered acutely.)Ms. Martin’s father, Edmond, who was French, bought the six buildings that now belong to Mr. Nazarian in the 1920s, along with several other properties in the Village, including a fanciful pink Moorish-looking townhouse on Waverly Place, where Ms. Martin grew up. While his father wanted him to join the family’s sail-making business, Edmond fancied himself a real estate mogul and an artist. With the help of his wife, Ramee, he turned the Gay and Christopher Street buildings into a complex of furnished studio apartments, decorated by Ramee and outfitted with slipcovers and curtains sewn by their nanny.In her short story “Mr. Spitzer and the Fungus,” Ms. McKenney renders Edmond as a pompous landlord with artistic pretensions — his character was called Mr. Appopolous in the musical — and her $45 a month basement flat, where she lived with her sister, Eileen, as a dimly lit dump sprouting with mold, including a particularly aggressive fungus that draped from the ceiling. “Every night we cut it down with Eileen’s manicure scissors,” she wrote, “and every morning it was long enough to braid. Eileen thought there was something shameful about the fungus, and she always carefully cut it down before we had a party.”The building in 2003, the year “Wonderful Town” was revived on Broadway.Harry ZernikeEdmond was said to have been miffed by his portrayal in Ms. McKenney’s work; he felt his artistic talents weren’t appropriately recognized. He was not a bad painter, said Matt McGhee, who for decades sold exquisite Christmas ornaments out of his fairyland boutique at 18 Christopher and lived in a one-bedroom next door.Notably, though, Edmond was a racist, cited by the city for refusing to rent to Black people. At one point, he hung a sign in his office at 16 Gay Street declaring this policy. In 1959, The Daily News reported, he filed a suit against the city, claiming that its anti-discrimination housing law interfered with his “aesthetic freedom.” Needless to say, he did not prevail.When he died in 1985, Ms. Martin inherited his properties, but not his bigotry. However, she was never the most assiduous steward of the houses.As Jeanne Kelly, the former director of fossil preparations at the American Museum of Natural History and a Gay Street neighbor for two decades, put it, they were held together with spit and a prayer, and the haphazard ministrations of a retinue of helpers that at one point included a super who was blind and a physics teacher with a number of aliases.But Ms. Martin was generous to her tenants, offering to waive rent if they were in extremis and delivering Christmas gifts of pink Champagne and sweets. (One year, Mr. McGhee said, the gifts included stuffed animals; he received a dog.)She doted on many of the tenants, but Mr. Ryan, who moved into the McKenney apartment in the early 1970s and decorated it with distinctive, decaying élan, English country style, was a favorite. When “Wonderful Town” was in revival on Broadway in December of 2003, they saw the musical together. A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Mr. Ryan died in a fire that consumed his apartment, and Ms. Martin never quite recovered.Instead of renovating the apartment, neighbors said, she left it to rot and to the rats. “It was the beginning of her decline,” Ms. Kelly said.David Ryan was the last tenant of the basement apartment that Ruth McKenney rendered as a dimly lit dump in her short stories.Harry ZernikeMr. Ryan decorated the apartment with distinctive, decaying élan…Harry Zernike….in an English country style that involved layers of Persian carpets, velvet- and chintz-upholstered furniture, classical statuary, candelabras and prints in gilded frames.Harry ZernikeSince 1976, Denise Marsa, a singer-songwriter, has lived in her tidy studio around the corner, in the building Ms. Martin once owned at 18 Christopher Street. (She can still remember the original rent: $174.24.). She tried to help Ms. Martin in her final years, urging her to make a will, but her landlord “lived in a fairy tale,” she said.Today, Ms. Marsa, 68, is the last residential tenant in the building, her cheerful apartment, with its kitchen tucked into a closet, an object lesson in small-space living and the promise of studio life as a launching pad. She, too, has rendered her home in song, as Comden and Green once did, in a number featured in “The Pass,” her one-woman show about making it in the big city, which she performed at United Solo, a theater festival in Manhattan, in the fall of 2021. (The storefronts below her are full; John Derian, the purveyor of his own brand of charming decay, took over the spot occupied by Mr. McGhee four years ago.)Back at the rally organized by Mr. Berman, the mood was festive, despite everything. The growl of a bulldozer interrupted the protesters. Its driver, a private contractor, said he was there to do work under the road in front of 14 Gay Street. When questioned, he said he did not know who had hired him, and beat a retreat. Across the street, Joan Goldberg, a broker with Brown Harris Stevens, was holding a quasi-open house at 13 Gay Street, a modest Greek Revival built around 1840 and owned by Margaret Kunstler, the widow of the civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who died in 1995 and was known for representing some controversial clients. (The house is on the market for $6.9 million.)“It was a wonderful street to live on,” Ms. Kunstler said. “We had big Halloweens. Sometimes we would shut down the street for birthday parties. The house was open; there were constant comings and goings.”Ruth McKenney memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment 14 Gay Street in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein.These days, from the top floor of Ms. Kunstler’s house, you can see into the dark cavity that is all that’s left of where Ruth and Eileen McKenney once lived: two gaping window frames braced by wooden beams.Representatives from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the city said that the city will be taking action against Mr. Nazarian for what they say was illegal work done there. Furthermore, the city is requiring that the demolition of 14 Gay Street be done by hand and its material saved for use in a reconstruction that the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission will oversee.“I never intended to just let them rot,” Mr. Nazarian said of the buildings.Asked to estimate what it might cost to restore them, he said, “More than I thought.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More