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      The Breakout Stars of 2020

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Breakout Stars of 2020Here are the 12 stars and trends that managed to thrive and shine in an impossible year.Clockwise from bottom left: Sarah Cooper, Maria Bakalova, the hand of the artist Salman Toor, Jonathan Majors and Radha Blank.Credit…Clockwise from bottom left: Lacey Terrell/Netflix; Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times; Peter Fisher for The New York Times; Adria Malcolm for The New York Times; Douglas Segars for The New York Times Dec. 23, 2020Updated 7:44 a.m. ETWhile plenty of us felt trapped this year, wandering through the same spaces and talking to the same people, it was the artists and entertainers who kicked open windows to new sights, sounds and experiences. Yes, the pandemic dealt a significant hit to the culture world, but nothing could derail its creativity. So, despite the limitations, stars in a variety of disciplines managed to thrive and shine, and by doing so, made a difficult year more tolerable for most everyone. Here are 12 artists and trends who gave us a fresh perspective in 2020.Radha Blank wrote, directed and starred in the autobiographical satire “The 40-Year-Old Version.”Credit…Douglas Segars for The New York TimesFilmRadha BlankRadha Blank was the hero many of us needed in 2020, when the concept of time got an overdue interrogation. In her autobiographical satire “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” which was on Netflix, she portrays a playwright who — refusing to believe that her dreams have an expiration date — pivots to rap as a grown woman. Like her character, Blank, who grew up Brooklyn, is a 40-something playwright who knows what it’s like to fight to elevate her voice.And elevate it she did. She wrote, directed and starred in the film, her first feature, a New York Times Critic’s Pick that A.O. Scott called “a catalog of burdens and also a heroic act of unburdening.”In “I May Destroy You,” Michaela Cole explores sexual assault, truth, revenge and trauma; she also created the HBO series.Credit…Natalie Seery/HBOTelevisionMichaela CoelMichaela Coel may have created the most important TV show of 2020: “I May Destroy You.” The series, which premiered on HBO in June, is inspired by Coel’s own experience with sexual assault, and in it, she deftly plucks apart ideas around truth, revenge, anxiety, trauma and fear.Coel, a 33-year-old British-Ghanaian writer and actor, plays a writer who is drugged and raped in a bathroom stall. The assault leaves her traumatized and grappling with hazy, fragmented memories. “Coel brings a superb discipline to the portrayal of distress,” wrote Mike Hale, a TV critic at The Times.In a critic’s notebook, Salamishah Tillet, a professor and contributing critic at large for The Times, noted that the show could be considered “part of a larger cultural trend in which Black women’s experiences with sexual assault are appearing with greater frequency and treated with more sensitivity.” (She pointed to the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” and TV shows like “Queen Sugar,” “The Chi” and “Lovecraft Country” as examples.)“By offering multifaceted endings,” Tillet went on, “Coel gives victims of sexual assault, particularly Black women who have survived rape, some of the most radical and cathartic moments of television I have ever witnessed.”ComedySarah CooperSarah Cooper, 43-year-old comedian, made her mark in 2020 by pantomiming the words of President Trump in viral videos that have been viewed tens of millions of times across social media. Jim Poniewozik called her first Trump lip-sync, “How to Medical,” a “49-second tour de force” and said Cooper was helping to develop “a kind of live-action political cartooning.”“Cooper’s Trumpian drag is partly a caricature of performative masculinity,” Poniewozik wrote.The success of her videos helped land Cooper a Netflix special, “Everything’s Fine,” directed by Natasha Lyonne. “This special shows that she can do much more than lip-sync,” Jason Zinoman, a comedy columnist at The Times, said of the production. “She has a promising future as an actor in television or movies.” She currently has a show in the works for CBS.Maria Bakalova, the Bulgarian actress who plays Borat’s teenage daughter in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.” Credit…Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesFilmMaria BakalovaIt’s no easy feat to stand out next to the unabashed actor-prankster Sacha Baron Cohen, but Maria Bakalova, a 24-year-old from Bulgaria, was riveting as the teenage daughter of his Borat character in his most recent mockumentary film. As the culture reporter Dave Itzkoff put it in The Times: “Sacha Baron Cohen may be the star of ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,’ but it is Maria Bakalova who has emerged its hero.”Her performance also grabbed headlines for an edited scene involving President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is seen putting his hands down his pants in a hotel room, where Bakalova, impersonating a TV journalist, is interviewing him. He later denied any wrongdoing.About the opportunity to star in a major American film, Bakalova said: “I will be really grateful to Sacha for giving this platform to an Eastern European, to play a strong and complicated character who’s not just one thing.”Adrienne Warren was nominated for a Tony for her starring role in “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical.” Credit…Molly Matalon for The New York TimesTheaterAdrienne WarrenAdrienne Warren’s starring role in “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical” earned her a Tony nomination in October for best actress in a musical. But it was her vocal and steadfast stand on racial injustice, including in the arts world, that brought Warren, 33, more deeply into one of the most urgent conversations of 2020. In an impassioned, impromptu speech this summer — during the Times event Offstage: Opening Night on the subject of being Black on Broadway — she questioned whether she even wanted to continue performing as part of an institution that didn’t stand up for people like her.“The last thing on my mind right now is me going back to Broadway,” Warren said. But in an interview with The Times after her nomination, she said, “I know this is what I’m supposed to do, but the question is whether I want to do it at the address I’ve been doing it.”As for what a dream role might look like for her in the future: “I want to make sure that I’m telling stories that represent me as a Black woman and also push the needle forward in ways that resonate with people, both in this nation and abroad,” she said.Jonathan Majors made a mark in both HBO’s “Lovecraft Country” and the Spike Lee drama “Da 5 Bloods.”Credit…Adria Malcolm for The New York TimesTelevisionJonathan MajorsJonathan Majors isn’t afraid of pain, and that may just be his secret to success. “I’m willing to hurt more,” he told Alexis Soloski in The Times over the summer. “It doesn’t bother me.”The 31-year-old star had a big year doing just that to great effect onscreen, as a Korean War veteran in the supernatural HBO thriller “Lovecraft Country,” set in 1950s Jim Crow America, and the son of a Vietnam War veteran in “Da 5 Bloods,” Spike Lee’s drama for Netflix that was named a Critic’s Pick in The Times by A.O. Scott.“Emotions in the men in my family run deep,” Majors told Soloski — who described him as “an actor of precision and intensity.” When asked if acting gave him a place to put those big emotions, he said: “With acting, it was almost like I was in a corridor, and it just appeared to me and said, ‘Go that way, son.’ I didn’t get in trouble once I started acting. I had a place to put the energy, to put my focus.”The artist Christine Sun Kim performing in American Sign Language at the Super Bowl in Miami in February.Credit…A J Mast for The New York TimesArtChristine Sun KimIn February, just minutes ahead of the Super Bowl in Miami, the artist Christine Sun Kim stood at the 40-yard line performing in American Sign Language as Yolanda Adams sang “America the Beautiful” and Demi Lovato sang the national anthem.“As a child of immigrants, a grandchild of refugees, a Deaf woman of color, an artist and a mother, I was proud to perform,” she wrote in an Op-Ed for The Times afterward. But because only a fraction of her performance was aired, she called the experience “a huge disappointment — a missed opportunity in the struggle for media inclusiveness on a large scale.”“Being deaf in America has always been political,” she wrote.Kim, 40, who was born in California and is now based in Berlin, has spent years channeling this perspective into her art. At the Whitney Biennial in New York last year, she exhibited hand-drawn charcoal drawings from her “Degrees of Deaf Rage in the Art World,” and in 2013, the Museum of Modern Art selected her for its exhibition “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” dedicated to sound art.“I want people to start thinking about what deafness means,” she told Vogue this year, “and maybe that will reduce the stigma and society will be more inclusive of people with disabilities.”MusicVerzuzYou could call it a battle, a face-off, a showdown. But Verzuz is also something else entirely: a pandemic pivot, cutting right to the very core of quarantine entertainment by combining livestreaming and nostalgia while filling a hole left by canceled live shows and shuttered clubs.Since April, Verzuz, the creation of Swizz Beatz and Timbaland, has streamed over 20 battles. Each one has brought together two hip-hop or R&B heavyweights: Gladys Knight vs. Patti LaBelle, Erykah Badu vs. Jill Scott, Gucci Mane vs. Jeezy, Babyface vs. Teddy Riley, Snoop Dogg vs. DMX, Ludacris vs. Nelly, to name a few. Millions of people have tuned in.Initially, Verzuz was streamed on Instagram Live. In July, Verzuz and Apple Music announced they’d struck a partnership which allowed the videos to be viewed live and on-demand on that platform, too.Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The Times, called the events staples of this era and “less battles in the conventional sense than choreographed chest-puffing combined with bows of respect.” To that point, there is no winner winner. As Swizz Beatz told ABC News: “The people won, the culture won, the music won.”The artist Salman Toor has his first solo museum show, “How Will I Know,” up at the Whitney Museum of American Art.Credit…Peter Fisher for The New York TimesArtSalman ToorThe painter Salman Toor was about to have his first solo museum show, “How Will I Know,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art early this year when the shutdown thwarted the whole thing. He took it pretty well. “My first reaction was, thank God,” he told The Times in June. “I’m not a social animal.” But disappointment inevitably crept in as he realized the exhibition might never happen.Thankfully for him and fans of figurative and queer art, the show eventually did go up at the Whitney, where it will appear through April. And that’s only the start for Toor. Over the summer, he joined the gallery Luhring Augustine, which will open an exhibition of his work in the next few years.Toor, 37 — who was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, and moved to the United States in 2002 — primarily depicts gay men of South Asian descent. In The Times, the writer Ted Loos described Toor’s contemporary settings: “iPhones appear here and there, the glow emanating from them emphasized with bright lines.” Toor said that he aspired to represent “what this new free space is like,” referring to living an openly queer life. In Pakistan, gay sex is illegal. “People are curious to know what it means to have the freedom of so much choice, and what is the nature of that freedom and what is the cost of that.”TheaterElizabeth StanleyUp against Adrienne Warren for that Tony is Elizabeth Stanley, who was nominated for her gutting performance as Mary Jane — “a brittle tiger mom suppressing secret trauma,” as Jesse Green, a theater critic for The Times, put it — in “Jagged Little Pill,” based on Alanis Morissette’s smash album from 1995. When Broadway shut down, Stanley, 42, did not take too long before shifting her energy toward digital performances.In April, she told Deadline that she’d already been wondering about what else she could do during the pandemic: “How can I twist to this and find something new and exciting out of this time?”What came of that question epitomized what much of theater looked like in 2020: creating new digital spaces for live performance.In April, she delivered a jaw-dropping rendition of “The Miller’s Son” from “A Little Night Music,” for the acclaimed event “Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration.” In June, she sang her wrenching rendition of “You Learn,” from “Jagged Little Pill,” for an Opening Night Times event on the future of Broadway. On Dec. 13, Stanley and her “Jagged Little Pill” co-stars reunited for “Jagged Live In NYC: A Broadway Reunion Concert.”Kali Uchis performing in Atlanta in 2018. She recently released the album “Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios).”Credit…Paul R. Giunta/Invision, via Associated PressMusicKali UchisIn 2018, Kali Uchis released a debut album titled “Isolation.” Clearly she was ahead of her time. In November, the Colombian-American artist — with a moody, seductive, dance-inducing style — dropped her second studio album, this time predominantly in Spanish, “Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios).” (Its lead single, “Aquí Yo Mando,” features the up-and-coming rapper Rico Nasty.) The album “goes genre-hopping and era-hopping, from romantically retro orchestral bolero to brittle reggaeton,” Jon Pareles, the chief pop music critic of The Times, wrote this month.Having grown up between Colombia and the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area, Uchis, 26, had many inspirations and influences, she told Interview magazine. “The last thing I ever want to do is be a predictable artist. I love that my fans never know what to expect when I drop a song.”DanceThe Year of the SoloIt wasn’t just that the coronavirus put an end to live performance in March. The need for social isolation uprooted every part of what gets a dance onto a stage: Suddenly, there were no more classes, no more rehearsals. How to fill that void? The solo.This solitary form has provided an outlet for frustration, for sadness and even for euphoria as dance artists continue to find meaning through movement. It’s true that some attempts have been sentimental and aimless, but much good has emerged from it, too. Instagram, from the start, illuminated these explorations in a steady stream of posts; choreographers worked with dancers remotely to create films in which the body could be fearless and free. “State of Darkness,” Molissa Fenley’s 1988 solo revived for seven dancers, was a glittering, harrowing reminder of the achievement that comes from strength, both internal and external.One of its interpreters, the dancer Sara Mearns, said that she saw herself as “someone that has gone through really, really hard times, but then in the end has come out stronger and on top.” Yes, dance and dancers are suffering right now. But the solo has given it — and them — a powerful voice. — Gia Kourlas, dance critic for The New York TimesAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Catie Lazarus, Comedian With a Lot of Questions, Dies at 44

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCatie Lazarus, Comedian With a Lot of Questions, Dies at 44On her live show “Employee of the Month,” she got laughs by interrogating writers, artists, politicians, intellectuals and her fellow comics.The comedian Catie Lazarus in 2015. She began interviewing prominent people about their careers, she said, “because I couldn’t quite figure out how to break in.”Credit…Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesDec. 20, 2020, 2:10 p.m. ETCatie Lazarus, a writer and comedian who probed the minds of celebrities and created her own late-night comedy universe on her longstanding self-produced live New York talk show, “Employee of the Month,” died on Dec. 13 in her apartment in Brooklyn. She was 44. Her father, Simon Lazarus III, said the cause was breast cancer.In 2011, as the nation recovered from the Great Recession, Ms. Lazarus was just another struggling comic trying to make it in New York. She had dropped out of a doctoral program in clinical psychology at Wesleyan University to move to the city, but as she tried establishing herself on the stand-up circuit, she discovered that stable jobs were hard to find. In light of these circumstances, she started hosting “Employee of the Month,” an interview-based talk show about work and labor at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.Ms. Lazarus asked notable writers, artists, politicians, intellectuals and comedians how they had achieved their enviable careers. She eventually interrogated subjects like Rachel Maddow, Dick Cavett, Greta Gerwig and David Simon. She inquired about disappointment, too — for example, she asked the journalist Kurt Andersen how he felt about getting pushed out of New York magazine.“I started hosting this show because I couldn’t quite figure out how to break in,” Ms. Lazarus told The New York Times in 2015. “I wanted to hear from people who, for the most part, love what they do and have carved out a niche for themselves. It wasn’t just about how they broke in, but what they continue to find worth struggling for, worth the heartache and the rejection and the economic toil and other types of losses that go along with it.”Her disarmingly intrusive interview style developed a following, and in 2014 Ms. Lazarus started hosting the show monthly at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. A live band accompanied her onstage, and nights crackled with the spontaneous energy of late-night television.Ms. Lazarus with her house band at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in 2017.Credit…Abel Fermin/ShutterstockMs. Lazarus approached her inquiries from a more philosophical level as well, seemingly trying to answer a bigger question: Why exactly do people do what they do for a living during their relatively brief time on earth? She often steered guests into illuminating revelations and spectacle.Wallace Shawn reminisced about how he had considered becoming a taxi driver. Billy Crudup whispered something to her when she asked him how much he was paid for voicing Mastercard ads (she looked shocked). Gloria Steinem tap-danced onstage. And Ms. Lazarus asked Josh Russ Tupper, a co-owner of Russ & Daughters, to participate in a blind taste test of lox from his competitors Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass.“They said you can tell the difference in the lox,” she challenged him. “Do you feel there’s a difference in how your lox tastes?” (Mr. Tupper largely succeeded in identifying his shop’s salmon.)Lin-Manuel Miranda, who appeared on the show, was also a frequent guest in her audience. “Catie was the ultimate New York comedy connector,” he said in a phone interview. “Once you did the show, you were in the alumni group.” He added: “It’s unbelievable the level of connections that came through there. People before they blew up. After they blew up.”“It was,” Mr. Miranda said, “sort of a crime she didn’t have her own TV show.”Catherine Simone Avnet Lazarus was born on April, 26, 1976, in Washington. Her father was a public policy lawyer who had been associate director of the White House domestic policy staff in the Carter administration. Her mother, Rosalind (Avnet) Lazarus, was a federal government lawyer. A great-great-great-grandfather was Simon Lazarus, founder of the Lazarus & Company department store chain, which later became Macy’s Inc.A nursery report card from the Beauvoir School appeared to portend Ms. Lazarus’s future. “Katie is a great talker and will volunteer to sit in the ‘hot seat’ and speak on any topic whether she knows anything about her subject or not,” it read. “The class expects this now and, in fact, the resulting arguments are more lively due to Katie’s proddings.” (Ms. Lazarus delighted in this document as an adult and quoted from it frequently).She attended the Maret School and Wesleyan University, where she received a B.A. and an M.A. in psychology. She eventually pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology at Wesleyan but dropped out after a semester to try comedy in New York. (Ms. Lazarus said that an encouraging chance encounter with Tina Fey, in which they discussed improv, helped galvanize her decision.)Ms. Lazarus first took the stage at Stand Up NY on the Upper West Side, and she relished the nervous rush of trying to get people to laugh. She began performing on the comedy circuit at clubs like Carolines on Broadway and the Laugh Factory. And she took improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, where she started hosting her show. Early guests included Rachel Dratch, Reggie Watts and the Times journalist David Carr.“I was keenly aware that people went on to achieve these great things,” Ms. Lazarus told The Times. “I just didn’t know the steps that were involved to get there. That is why I started my show, because there is somewhat of a science to success.”In 2015, Ms. Lazarus had a career break herself when Jon Stewart gave her his first interview after leaving “The Daily Show.” She pressed Mr. Stewart about his next projects and who he thought might replace him on the show. While discussing his career, she projected an image of him wearing underwear in a spoof of a Calvin Klein ad from his MTV talk-show days.Around 2017, Ms. Lazarus ended her run at Joe’s Pub and brought her show to other venues, including the Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan and the Bell House in Brooklyn. Slate started airing a podcast of the show in 2018. Ms. Lazarus also took the show on the road, hosting it at Largo in Los Angeles and at the Sundance Film Festival.“All these people over the years, they wanted to be interviewed by her,” her father said. “And she shot for the moon. She really thought she could get anybody. She thought she could get Barack Obama. She didn’t get him, but she wasn’t shy about trying.”In addition to her father, Ms. Lazarus is survived by two brothers, Ned and Benjamin; her mother; and her stepmother, Bonnie Walter.In 2019, Ms. Lazarus took a break from her talk show. She had learned she had breast cancer in 2014 and underwent chemotherapy for years. She also wanted to finish a book of personal essays she was working on. As the pandemic took hold of life in New York, Ms. Lazarus spent her time at her apartment in Prospect Heights, writing in the company of her cocker spaniel, Lady.Ms. Lazarus at Joe’s Pub in 2016. “It was sort of a crime she didn’t have her own TV show,” Lin-Manuel Miranda said.Credit…Abel Fermin/ShutterstockMs. Lazarus always hoped her show might get picked up by a network or streaming service, and she was vocal about the gender disparity among late-night television hosts.“Showbiz has notoriously rewarded those who fail upwards,” she told Out magazine in 2018. “If and when Hollywood is ready for a talk-show host with chops, chutzpah, humor, no cavities and a genuine moral compass, will you tell them where to find me?”In her Times interview, Ms. Lazarus was asked what her own dream job was. She answered definitively.“What I do right now,” she said. “Hosting a talk show. I found mine, but it wasn’t intentional.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      2020: A Theater of the Absurd for Europe’s Playhouses

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story2020: A Theater of the Absurd for Europe’s PlayhousesThe Times’s theater critics in London, Paris and Berlin reflect on a year of closures, reopenings, restrictions and curfews, in which the show somehow went on.At the National Theater in London in September. The city’s theaters were closed and reopened twice in 2020, then closed a third time.Credit…Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesDec. 17, 2020Updated 12:39 p.m. ETBritainMatt Wolf, London Theater CriticTheater of the absurd has nothing on the bizarre scenario endured by Britain’s playhouses during 2020. March 16 was the first of several doomsdays on which the coronavirus pandemic forced them to close their doors, bringing to a halt a theatrical economy worth billions of pounds.Then came months of nothing, followed by the gradual emergence of outdoor shows, then indoor performances, when financially practical: no big musicals or Shakespeares, just bite-size plays, performed in auditoriums newly configured to meet government guidelines.Several pioneering venues — the Bridge Theater, in London, pre-eminently — opened again at the end of the summer, but not for long. They, too, were shuttered again by a second lockdown, in early November — albeit a shorter one, which lifted on Dec. 2.This was replaced by a tiered system of geographical restrictions, which meant that theaters in parts of the country were open, while others had to stay shut. In London, this critic’s diary was briefly filled with press night appointments that recalled the halcyon days of old. But now, as of Dec. 16, the city has entered the grim “Tier 3,” and that surge in activity has proved to be short-lived — at least for in-person performances, rather than events streamed via the internet.Theaters have responded to these whiplash changes with a nimbleness that wasn’t in evidence this time last year. (Equally improbable back then was the notion of socially distanced seating, with legroom worthy of an airline’s first class.) Shows have learned to be readily adaptable for online distribution: That was the path taken by “Death of England: Delroy,” the production chosen to reopen the National Theater, in November. Its opening night turned out to be the closing one, too, when the second national lockdown was announced, but it went out on YouTube later that month. That brought Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s fiery solo play to audiences worldwide, and confirmed the prevailing awareness that smaller was better in these corona times.Playgoers at the Donmar Warehouse for “Blindness,” a reimagining of José Saramago’s 1995 novel as a sound installation heard through headphones.Credit…Helen MaybanksThroughout the pandemic, you had to marvel at the ability of theater people to follow the work, wherever it might lead. Juliet Stevenson, for instance, should by rights have spent much of this year leading the West End transfer of Robert Icke’s production of “The Doctor.” Instead, the stage veteran turned up first as a voice — experienced not live, but via headphones — in the astonishing Simon Stephens aural experience “Blindness,” and then as a droll Lillian Hellman in an online version of a gossipy American play called “Little Wars.” Caryl Churchill, a stalwart presence at the mighty Royal Court, was among the talents assembled for “The Lockdown Plays,” a series of podcasts in which the 82-year-old writer’s ongoing interest in the quietly apocalyptic came to the fore once again.While the last year has shown the folly of forecasts, 2021 would seem to portend better theatrical times ahead. Hopefully, Britain’s head start on the rest of the world with a vaccine suggests a return to cheek-by-jowl seating and full houses sometime next year.Without such confidence, Andrew Lloyd Webber wouldn’t be looking at a start of performances in late April for his new musical “Cinderella,” a major commercial venture set to open in the West End, even as Broadway will remain shuttered until May, at least. David Tennant, Megan Mullally and Adrian Lester are among the star names announced for some London openings during the first half of 2021. Their luster, with luck, will entice possibly wary playgoers to purchase tickets for live performance once again.Sure, we’ve learned to embrace Zoom and YouTube to savor virtual productions, which are preferable to none at all. But London feels ready to return to full theatrical form as soon as conditions allow — and if not? Well, this strange new normal should give Britain’s playwrights something to write about, for a long while to come.FranceLaura Cappelle, Paris Theater CriticOn paper, French theater has been relatively lucky in this pandemic year. Buoyed by high levels of public funding for the arts and rounds of government support, most venues resumed performances between the country’s first lockdown, from March to May, and the second, which started in late October. No major company or theater has been forced to close its doors permanently (yet). That’s more than many Western countries can say.Yet 2020 often felt like “Groundhog Day” — a never-ending grind of closures, reopenings, restrictions and curfews which, based on conversations with artists and administrators, has left many bone tired. Perceived slights to the culture sector, so integral to France’s identity, have bred resentment. While the country’s new culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot, appointed last July, scored points with the sector in the summer and early fall, the planned reopening of theaters and cinemas in December has now been postponed until January at the earliest, and the grumbling has returned.When theaters could welcome audiences, their hit rate seemed higher than in past seasons: Perhaps scarcity heightened the thill. In early October, the Comédie-Française troupe teamed up with the film director Christophe Honoré for “The Guermantes Way,” a Proust adaptation that struck the perfect balance between immersion and irreverence. At the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, Margaux Eskenazi and Alice Carré tackled the legacy of the Algerian decolonization war with great finesse in “And the Heart Is Still Steaming.”Comedy, meanwhile, often felt like a public service. From a warm reinvention of an 18th-century original (Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam’s “À l’Abordage!”) to the absurd humor of the excellent Chiens de Navarre collective, comedians played their part in keeping us sane.As happened everywhere else, streams of recorded productions mushroomed during the two lockdowns, but these felt like a consolation prize, rather than an area of genuine innovation. French theater is very attached to its extensive network of brick-and-mortar venues, and the priority was to get back to the stage.The cast of “Cabaret Under the Baclonies” performing for residents of the Ehpad Bois de Menuse nursing home in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, on May 26.Credit…Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesOne notable exception was Marion Siéfert’s “Jeanne Dark,” billed as the first French play to be offered live and via Instagram simultaneously. Helena de Laurens, the superb lead, played a teenager who confides in her followers, in a long Instagram Live session, about her Catholic parents and joyless school life.At La Commune in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers, where it was created in October, the audience witnessed de Laurens filming herself, while Instagram users saw the show in real time on Jeanne’s fictional account. “Jeanne Dark,” which is set to tour in 2021, wryly captures the gap between the two-dimensional feed and reality.This year has been a reminder that our definitions of theater are sometimes too narrow: Performances outside the big urban institutions are part of France’s culture, too. The first show to be staged after the spring lockdown, Léna Bréban’s “Cabaret Under the Balconies,” took place at a nursing home 200 miles from Paris, and I can’t think of a more fulfilling experience this year than sitting with the elderly residents to watch pared-down song and dance numbers after months of isolation.And if events that look a lot like performances are going to take precedence over theaters when coronavirus restrictions are eased, then they should probably be reviewed, too. The whiz-bang productions on offer at the Puy du Fou, a historical theme park, reopened early to much controversy, in June; in late November, the drama of the Catholic Mass returned to France’s churches, though playhouse doors remain shut.A critic’s job doesn’t have to stop when the curtain comes down. All the world’s a stage, after all.Germany and AustriaA.J. Goldmann, Berlin Theater CriticThis was the year when going to the theater became a matter of life and death: Who was willing to risk catching a deadly virus just to enjoy some Shakespeare?In the German-speaking world, as everywhere, theater was among the first causalities of the pandemic. One by one, premieres were canceled, then the festivals, too. It’s still unclear what the fate of all of those productions will be. But luckily, the future of the performing arts themselves doesn’t hang in the balance, as it seems to in other parts of the world.The deep conviction in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that art is valuable to society means that government-sponsored theater, opera and music has had a fighting chance of survival.Over the past nine months, I’ve marveled at the resilience. I’ve been heartened and impressed by the directors, managers and performers who worked creatively with restrictions to keep the show going under challenging circumstances.Quality varied greatly, as it always does, but what mattered most was that companies kept going — even when it meant preforming for a handful of audience members, or just for the cameras. Many playhouses began to cleverly redefine the theatrical experience itself, from developing online formats to performing in unusual locations and configurations. At the same time, streamed theater came of age, although it often sapped the experience of its live wire excitement and vitality.The pandemic forced me to be far less of a roving critic than usual. For the most part, I sheltered in place, in Munich. But summer and early fall, with their relative permissiveness, seem now like some long-ago idyll. Lockdown lifted, and I was free to travel — with P.P.E. and disinfectant, of course.Spectators reflected in mirrors watching Anne-Marie Lux, right, performing a scene in a cloakroom at the Stuttgart State Theaters as part of “We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On.”Credit…Bernhard WeisIn early June, the Stuttgart State Theaters, in the south of Germany, triumphantly drew back their curtains with a theatrical walkabout that was as momentous as it was meticulously executed. It was, without a doubt, the production of the year. Then came the defiant centenary edition of the Salzburg Festival, in Austria. It deserves a 21-gun salute for realizing its reduced but still formidable installment, which boasted two world premieres in its dramatic program, including one from a Nobel laureate. Subsequent stations for me included Leipzig, Berlin and Hamburg — and then lockdown hit again.Critics are not in the predication business (except, maybe, when it comes to awards), so I’m not going to speculate about what 2021 might bring. In many places, the pandemic has proved a stress test for the arts and culture. Yet the coronavirus has not exposed fault lines and structural problems for the arts in the German-speaking world the way it has in the United States. When the public health crisis is over, there won’t be much need for the theaters, opera houses and orchestras here to “build back better.” That, in itself, is reason for optimism.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ Review: All the Blues That’s Fit to Sing

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s pick‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ Review: All the Blues That’s Fit to SingViola Davis and Chadwick Boseman star in a potent adaptation of August Wilson’s play.Viola Davis stars in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” August Wilson’s 1984 play about a recording session in Chicago in the 1920s.Credit…David Lee/NetflixDec. 17, 2020Updated 11:26 a.m. ETMa Rainey’s Black BottomNYT Critic’s PickDirected by George C. WolfeDrama, MusicR1h 34mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“White folks don’t understand about the blues,” says the pioneering singer Ma Rainey, as imagined by August Wilson and incarnated by Viola Davis. “They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that that’s life’s way of talking.”Albert Murray, the great 20th-century philosopher of the blues, put the matter more abstractly. The art of the music’s practitioners, he wrote, involves “confronting, acknowledging and contending with the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence by playing with the possibilities that are also there.”“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Wilson’s 1984 play about a recording session in Chicago in the 1920s, both dramatizes and expresses that duality. Absurdities and frustrations abound, and the lethal, soul-crushing shadow of American racism falls across the musicians and their instruments. The specific and manifold evils of Southern Jim Crow repression and Northern economic exploitation are unavoidable. The members of Ma’s band swap stories of lynching, assault and humiliation, and Ma fights with the white owner of the record label (Jonny Coyne). By the end of the play — a swift hour and a half in George C. Wolfe’s screen adaptation — one man is dead and another has seen all his prospects evaporate.[embedded content]But the sense of play and possibility, the joy and discipline of art, are also, emphatically, there. There in Ma’s big voice and smoldering, slow-rolling charisma. There in the tight swing of the players behind her — Cutler (Colman Domingo) on trombone; Toledo (Glynn Turman) on piano; Slow Drag (Michael Potts) on bass; and an ambitious upstart named Levee (Chadwick Boseman) on cornet. There in the voices and personalities of the actors: Turman’s gravelly wit; Domingo’s avuncular baritone; Boseman’s quicksilver; Davis’s brass. And there above all in the singular music of Wilson’s language, a vehicle for the delivery of vernacular poetry as durable and adaptable as the blues itself.This version of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” on Netflix, is part of an ongoing project to bring all of Wilson’s plays — a cycle representing aspects of Black life in the 20th century — to the screen. That makes it, in some ways, definitive by default, part of an archive of preserved performances that will introduce future generations to the playwright’s essential work.From left, Glynn Turman, Chadwick Boseman and Michael Potts are the players behind Viola Davis’s Ma Rainey.Credit…David Lee/NetflixIt’s also definitive because it will be hard, from now on, to imagine a Ma Rainey other than Davis, or a Levee to compare with Boseman. The rest of the cast is first-rate too, but those two carry the play’s meatiest, most complicated theme, and enact its central antagonism. Each character is an ambitious, inventive artist, and their inability to harmonize creates an undertone of tragedy that grows more insistent as the day wears on.Ma, who rolls into the studio late, flanked by her nephew, Sylvester (Dusan Brown), and her young girlfriend, Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige), can seem almost like a caricature of the “difficult” artist. She insists that Sylvester, who stutters, record the spoken introduction to her signature song. She demands three bottles of Coca-Cola (“ice-cold”) before she will sing another note, and continually upbraids her nervous white manager (Jeremy Shamos). But this behavior isn’t the result of ego or whim. It’s the best way she has found of protecting the value of her gift, which once it becomes a commodity — a record — will enrich somebody else. The hard bargain she drives is the best deal she can get.She also represents the old school — an established star who works in a Southern style that Levee thinks is behind the times. Part of the history embedded in the play is the story of the Great Migration of Black Southerners to the industrial cities of the North, and Levee suspects that his fleet, light-fingered approach to the blues will appeal to the tastes of the migrants, and also cross over to white record buyers. He epitomizes a different kind of artistic temperament as well — cocky, impulsive, tilting toward self-destruction. He argues with the other musicians, refusing to listen when they try to talk sense to him. He seduces Dussie Mae, a risky career move to say the least. He’s a young man in a hurry, eager to cash checks before they’ve been written.Of course it’s hard to watch Levee — to marvel at Boseman’s lean and hungry dynamism — without feeling renewed shock and grief at Boseman’s death earlier this year. And though “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” has been around for a long while and will endure in the archive, the algorithm and the collective memory, there is something especially poignant about encountering it now.Not because it’s timely in an obvious or literal way — the argument of Wilson’s oeuvre is that time to reckon with racism is always now, because Black lives have always mattered — but because of some unexpected emotional resonances. Wilson’s text is a study in perseverance, but it’s haunted by loss, and to encounter it at the end of 2020 is to feel the weight of accumulated absences.Some are permanent and tragic, like losing Boseman at just 43. Others are, we hope, temporary. This is a rendering of a work written for the stage that begins with a concert — a sweaty, sensual spectacle of the blues in action. It’s also a movie that you’ll most likely encounter in your living room or on your laptop, further confounding an inevitable identity conundrum. Should we call this theater, cinema or television — or a sometimes graceful, sometimes clumsy hybrid of all three?Maybe the question doesn’t matter, or maybe it will matter more once we regain our critical bearings and the theaters and nightclubs fill up again. But at the moment, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is a powerful and pungent reminder of the necessity of art, of its sometimes terrible costs and of the preciousness of the people, living and dead, with whom we share it. “Blues help you get out of bed in the morning,” Ma says. “You get up knowing you ain’t alone.”Ma Rainey’s Black BottomRated R. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Viola Davis and Company on ‘Ma Rainey’ and Chadwick Boseman’s Last Bow

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsBoseman and Davis head the cast of the new drama. It’s the story of “a woman who was known for her autonomy, who did not barter for her worth, and the men who were around her,” Davis said.Credit…Photo illustration by Jennifer Ledbury/The New York Times; Photos by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images Europe; David Lee/NetflixSkip to contentSkip to site indexViola Davis and Company on ‘Ma Rainey’ and Chadwick Boseman’s Last BowMembers of the creative team discuss what it took to adapt the August Wilson play for Netflix and trying not to be “outdone” by the late actor.Boseman and Davis head the cast of the new drama. It’s the story of “a woman who was known for her autonomy, who did not barter for her worth, and the men who were around her,” Davis said.Credit…Photo illustration by Jennifer Ledbury/The New York Times; Photos by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images Europe; David Lee/NetflixSupported byContinue reading the main storyDec. 17, 2020Updated 10:57 a.m. ETA nation riven by racial violence, an industry with a history of exploiting Black culture, white executives eager to portray themselves as allies, and Black artists at the center of it all, contending with a system that would toast them with one arm and pick their pockets with the other.The story of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” August Wilson’s acclaimed 1982 play about Black pride, white power and the blues in 1927 Chicago, is as incendiary today as the day it was written. A new feature film adaptation, due on Netflix Dec. 18, revives Wilson’s historical narrative in a contemporary moment when so much and so little has changed.The second entry in his 10-play American Century Cycle, chronicling the Black experience in each decade of the 20th century, “Rainey” won three Tonys for its original run on Broadway. The film adaptation is already an awards contender for next year, thanks to a searing lead performance from Viola Davis and a powerful showing by Chadwick Boseman, in his final film role before his death from cancer in August.To play Ma Rainey, Viola Davis said she looked to “my Aunt Joyce and other Black women that I know to fill in the blanks.”Credit…David Lee/NetflixDavis plays Ma, an indomitable performer based on the real-life “Mother of the Blues,” whose unprecedented superstardom has taken her from tent shows in Barnesville, Ga., to a recording session in Chicago. The white men overseeing the session, visions of dollar signs dancing in their heads, fear and respect Ma like everyone else in her gravity-bending orbit, including her girlfriend Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige) and quartet of seasoned backing musicians: Levee (Boseman), Cutler (Colman Domingo), Toledo (Glynn Turman) and Slow Drag (Michael Potts). But when Levee’s own career ambitions put him at odds with the group, its fragile infrastructure threatens to implode.The Tony winner George C. Wolfe (“Angels in America”) directed the film from a script adapted by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. In a recent round-table conversation, conducted via video chat, Wolfe, Davis, Domingo, Turman and Potts discussed working with Boseman, Rainey’s potent legacy and asserting your worth in a world built on your devaluation. These are edited (and spoiler-free) excerpts from our conversation.The movie is dedicated to Chadwick Boseman, who delivers an unforgettable performance as Levee. What are some of your memories of working with him? What did he bring to the performance that you saw as his collaborators that we might not know about as viewers?GEORGE C. WOLFE I remember one time, when the band was just sitting around during rehearsal, he started to launch into one of his final monologues. It had all been very casual. And then, at a certain point, it wasn’t casual — it was a fully invested moment that was full of energy and intensity and truth. I just remember thinking, “Oh, we’re going there?” And he went there. We were all sort of half the characters and half who we were, and then, in that moment, the half that was the character took over. And it was kind of glorious.From left, Glynn Turman, Chadwick Boseman, Michael Potts and Colman Domingo.Credit…David Lee/NetflixGLYNN TURMAN I loved the way he always had his cornet nearby. He was always doing something with it, becoming familiar with it, discovering how a musician and his instrument become one. Anytime he picked it up, it was in the right position. Anytime he set it down, it was in the right position. Anytime he put it to his mouth, it was in the right position. He became a musician. It was wonderful to watch that. We all kind of took that cue not to be outdone, as actors do. [Laughter]COLMAN DOMINGO That’s the truth.WOLFE Who, this group? I’m confused. [Laughter]I wonder, when you look at his performance now or when you watch the film, does it play differently at all for any of you in light of his passing? Has its meaning changed for you in any way?DOMINGO Absolutely. I watched it the other night and I heard Chad’s language in a different way. You see his strength and his humor. It brought tears to my eyes very early on, knowing what I know now. And knowing we were all very well able-bodied people and we were doing this tremendous work, showing up and wrestling with August’s language. This man had another massive struggle on top of that. I don’t know how he did it. I sat with myself for a good 15 minutes after watching it and I had a little cry, especially when I saw the dedication. It truly struck me that he’s not with us. I knew he wasn’t, but to see that written, it kind of decimated me.VIOLA DAVIS There was a transcendence about Chad’s performance, but there needed to be. This is a man who’s raging at God, who’s lost even his faith. So [Boseman has] got to sort of go to the edge of hope and death and life in order to make that character work. Of course, you look back on it and see that that’s where he was.I always say, a carpenter or anyone else that does work, they need certain tools in order to create. Our tool is us. We’ve got to use us. There’s no way to just sort of bind whatever you’re going through and leave it in your hotel. You’ve got to bring that with you, and you need permission to do that. And he went there, he really did.Boseman “became a musician,” Turman recalled. “It was wonderful to watch that. We all kind of took that cue not to be outdone, as actors do.”Credit…David Lee/NetflixGeorge and Viola, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is the only play in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle that is inspired by a real-life public figure. What do you think it is about her story that is ripe for drama?WOLFE I think one of the reasons that August was drawn to her is [that] she lived outside the rules. And when somebody lives outside the rules, it becomes very clear what the rules are. I love that she’s going to fight the fight, not thinking about the consequences. She’s going to fight the fight because she must. She reminds me of … my grandmother was like this. If you were a Black woman, if you waited around for somebody to acknowledge your power, it was never going to happen. So you had to claim your power. She has that quality that everybody has to evolve if you are an artist, period, and if you are an artist of color, magnified: This is the truth and this is my talent, and this is what I’m willing to do and this is what I’m not willing to do. I think she lived her life so purely that way. And if you set that in 1927, you’ve got drama, because the world isn’t acknowledging any of that.DAVIS One of the things I love about August is he gives us something that we have not had in a lot of narratives, especially in movies: autonomy. We’re always sort of shown in a filter of a white gaze. It’s like how Toni Morrison talks about “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. She’s like, “Invisible to whom?” August defines us in private. If you ask any one of us who are on this Zoom call if we know anyone like Ma Rainey, who could beat your ass on Thursday and be in church on Sunday, who is unapologetic about their value, we grew up with people like that. And certainly, I think that it’s a great start for a narrative, to have a woman who was known for her autonomy, who did not barter for her worth, and the men who were around her.George C. Wolfe said that for Ma Rainey and other Black women, “if you waited around for somebody to acknowledge your power, it was never going to happen.”Credit…David Lee/NetflixViola, talk to me about stepping into the character of Ma Rainey. There is literally stepping into the costume, but there’s also the way she carries herself and the way she interacts with the world around her. Where did you find inspiration, and what did it feel like to become her on set?DAVIS You just have to look at the given circumstances. They said she had makeup that was like grease paint that was melting off her face. In the tent [during her performances], she always looked like she was covered in sweat. She was always wet-looking. She had a mouth full of gold teeth. She was described as not attractive. But because she was such a nurturer, some people were attracted to her.Like everything, I always say that if someone did a story about my life and they went to my husband and daughter, maybe talked to my mom, you’d still only get about 40 percent of me. The other part, you have to rely on your observations in life. You have to in order to get at what is driving that person. What are they living for? That’s when I had to get into my Aunt Joyce and other Black women that I know to fill in the blanks. Who was she in private? Who was she when she was with her women? Even if you didn’t necessarily see it, I had to use that as fuel.Glynn, Colman and Michael, so much of the electricity of the film comes from the interactions between the boys in the band. There’s a kind of jocularity and a camaraderie among you, but there’s also a current of tension and rivalry. Tell me about how you worked together to create that dynamic.TURMAN It starts from a place of really being able to enjoy each other’s company. I think we had a dinner one evening after rehearsal where we all went out after just meeting one another. Our friendship built on that foundation. Just like in real life, the pains and the discomfort come from how well you know one another, because the people who you know are the only people that can really get to you. So we all took great pain in trying to get to know one another within the time frame we had. That way, we were comfortable cussing each other out and giving each other [expletive]. And that took place onscreen and offscreen. [Laughter]MICHAEL POTTS It never stopped. You’re on set with a bunch of men who ain’t got no sense. They ain’t got no damn sense at all. [Laughter]Potts, above, Domingo, below left, and Turman. Along with Boseman, the actors playing the musicians set out to know one another, first over dinner, to get at how relationships in a band work.Credit…David Lee/NetflixCredit…David Lee/NetflixCredit…David Lee/NetflixDOMINGO I remember Chad came in one day. It was early in the rehearsal. He would come in with his hat cocked to the side and the trumpet with him. He comes in a room quietly, very gracefully. And I don’t know if it’s the Cutler in me as well, but I’m like, “Oh, so you just think you ain’t going to speak to nobody when you come in? You walk indoors and don’t talk to nobody?” [Laughter] He said, “Ah, no, no!” We were jocular in that way. But, from then on, he made sure every morning he came and said hello to his brothers and showed respect. Because the feeling was: We can’t be in our own heads. We’ve got to come in and just give over to each other. And that’s what we did.One of the major questions presented by the film is how you come to terms with your place in the world — as an artist and entertainer, but also as a Black person at the bottom of a rigid racial hierarchy. I’m curious if there were elements of the characters’ stories that resonated with any of you in your own artistic and professional journeys.DOMINGO I think that’s why this play is so resonant, especially for Black artists. You’re always trying to make sure your voice is heard, just speaking up and speaking the truth and saying, “No, my place in the world should be elevated because of what I give. I’m just asking for what I deserve, that’s it.” I think [the characters] are asking for that. I know, truly, that I’m asking for it. We’re all asking for it every day. We wake up fighting for it, go to sleep thinking about fighting for it. And we’re fighting for the next generation more than anything, trying to move the dial.DAVIS I find it exhausting. I do. I find it very necessary but exhausting. You’re fighting for your place. You’re fighting to be seen. You’re fighting to be heard. It’s always a fight. And it’s a fight for the simplest things that are given to other people without an exchange.My big thing is when I have to fight for my ability. I can’t stand that. That part of me is the part that went to 10 years of acting school, that did all of that theater, Off Broadway, Broadway, did TV, or whatever. And then you go into a room in Hollywood and you see that has a short shelf life when it’s attached to somebody Black. That’s what pisses me off. I don’t like when people question my ability. But I feel like that’s what all of August’s plays are about — fighting for one’s place in the world. And here’s the other thing: You don’t have to be a king or a queen. You don’t have to be someone up high. He has infused importance into our lives, even if we didn’t make it into a history book.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Ann Reinking: Playful, Refined and With Legs for Days

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAn AppraisalAnn Reinking: Playful, Refined and With Legs for DaysDiscipline and abandon gave the dancer an ingrained elegance, an internal organization of the body that you sense even when it’s not pronounced.Ms. Reinking, photographed in 1977.Credit…Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesPublished More

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      Ann Reinking Dies at 71; Dancer, Actor, Choreographer and Fosse Muse

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAnn Reinking Dies at 71; Dancer, Actor, Choreographer and Fosse MuseFrom the ensembles of “Cabaret” and “Pippin,” she stepped into the role of Roxie Hart in “Chicago,” and the rest is Tony-winning history.Ann Reinking as a character based on herself in Bob Fosse’s autobiographical 1979 movie. “All That Jazz.” “I think I came off as a good person,” she said, “and as someone who meant something to him.”Credit…Everett CollectionPublished More

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      Interview: Georgie Bailey ties us in knots with Tethered

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      Tethered, Or The Adventures of the Adequately Excited People, seems to be another play that is going to play havoc with our word count (see also How to live a jellicle life: life lessons from the 2019 hit movie musical ‘cats). But long name aside, we’re always more than pleased to chat to anyone crazy enough to be planning a show right now. And for that reason, we thoroughly enjoyed catching up with Georgie Bailey, Artistic Director of Chewboy Productions, to find out more about the play and whether our GSCE French is at all relevant to anything.
      First things first then Georgie, tell us what to expect with Tethered.
      Tethered is going to be a madcap, bizarre, run-around hour of surreal theatre. You can expect printers with prophecies to deliver, a lot of strange words inspired by our current language and (most importantly), balloons and party hats for all. As if two characters being tied together wasn’t enough, there’s also this idea of the audience choosing the order of their story, which is both terrifying and exciting for us as actors. Expect a big adventure and treat everything as more than meets the eye. There’s a lot of content covered in an hour, and the piece gets very child-like and silly in a very comedic way at points, but then suddenly diverges into more serious, poignant and poetic points. Oh, and you can definitely expect to see a lot of fun being had with this huge old rope we’ve got. A whole lot of physical comedy is coming your way at the Lion and Unicorn folks…
      How will the audience get to decide the order then? And does the running order of the two halves effect the outcome?
      We’ve actually had a lot of fun with devising how best to let the audience decide which half they see first. Initially, we were going to use a coin flip, then realised COVID was a thing and that it might not be the best option to go with a sweaty coin getting exchanged between sweaty palms. So, we went through a few different variations of what could happen and are still experimenting with it now. It might change every night, but at the moment we’ve got a big game of splat taking place, where both characters represent Half A and Half B (sums up the play, really). The audience decide a category and the two actors are pitted against one another; determining the victor through playing.
      We also tried a thing called a moo-off, a show of hands, a mind-reading exercise and a short, sharp game of twister. Anything could happen… And yes! The order determines how you view the play and how things pan out for the characters. It’s quite a cyclical play in that everything has a place and makes sense between Parts A and B, but your opinion and perspective of the characters and this bizarre situation alters quite dramatically depending on the order you experience.
      Do we detect a hint of lockdown madness in the theme of excitement at the pair possibly being untethered and released? Was this a show inspired by lockdown, or just created during it?
      Your detection is on point! We wanted to create something that physically embodied both lockdown and social distancing, but it’s taken to a much more abstract, absurd and surreal place. There is no mention of lockdown, COVID or our real world – it’s all a lot more distant and strange. Our plans were thrown up in the air a bit; our original show was due to be produced as part of the Lion and Unicorn Theatre’s Associate Artist scheme has had to be postponed until late 2021, so we wanted to keep creative and busy during lockdowns 1&2, so decided to create this. Mainly for us to have fun, but also for the audience to have a bit of fun too.
      Your characters are Sans and Moins, which as obviously spotted straight away (honest we did) means Without and Less in French, is that at all relevant or are we reading too much into things?
      Very beady eyes from you all – yes, it is very relevant, both in character and situation. But we don’t want to give too much away at all! It’s a well-hidden little thing, so you’ll have to whack those beady eyes out again when you see the play.
      The show was initially pencilled in for a December run, but you’ve decided to push it back now due to lockdown 2 (and since the time of interview, lockdown 3), was that a difficult decision to make?
      It was a super difficult decision to make. We’d had the show pencilled in for a good couple of months as well as had the script developed, rehearsal space booked etc. etc. But with lockdown 2, we realised rehearsal would be almost impossible with us being spread across the country. In a way though, we’re grateful for the additional time to work on the show further, have some more fun with it and get it up to scratch to reach its full potential for February.
      Finally, and because we really couldn’t let it pass by without comment, you’ve recently published “Poems While You Poo”; would you recommend that as a Christmas present for our dad’s maybe? And is there any poems in the collection about the toilet roll shortage crisis from the first lockdown?
      We might be biased, but we’d definitely recommend it as a Christmas presents, not just for Dad’s but for the whole family! The collection is illustrated beautifully by my partner-in-crime Hal Darling (co-founder of ChewBoy) and takes you through the seven stages of doing your business, with a variety of poems ranging from comedic, wholesome, educational and emotional – it’s all there for your toilet breaks. And it’s available in hardback and paperback – so there’s a version for every book lover or toilet fiend you know. And we’d love to say there is some poems about the toilet roll shortage of lockdown gone by, but we’d been developing the book for such a long time before lockdown that we missed that boat! Maybe in our sequel that’ll make an appearance…
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      As always, our thanks to Georgie for taking the time during the latest lockdown to chat to us about the show. It is now scheduled to play at Lion & Unicorn Theatre between 9 and 14 February 2021. Further information, tickets and of course, that book, can be found on their website below. More