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      Fantasia Barrino-Taylor on ‘The Color Purple’ and a Painful Role

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      Throughout the six months of production on the new film adaptation of “The Color Purple,” Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, who plays the protagonist Celie Johnson, often called on God for strength.“There were times that I just felt like I’m not going to make it. I cannot do it. I would cry going to set. I would cry leaving set,” she admitted sadly. “I would talk to God, and I would tell him, ‘You’ve got to make this make sense. Make it make sense. There’s got to be something out of this.’ It was so hard.”The film, based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, details the transformative journey of a rural Georgia woman in the early 20th century. First adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie in 1985 by Steven Spielberg, then reinterpreted for Broadway in 2005, it has once again been retrofitted as a musical, complete with dance. The role of Celie, however, remains consistent — one of inveterate trauma, stretched over decades of abuse by first her stepfather, then her husband, until she manufactures the strength to stand on her own. Onstage, when Barrino-Taylor took over the part in the original Broadway run, and then on film, that meant enduring endless verbal attacks, physical abuse and lovelessness, which was difficult to manage on a daily basis. Barrino-Taylor would often leave the set deflated and bruised from doing her own stunts.Before production began, she had “started traumatic therapy, where you tap into the younger person, the younger Fantasia, and you try to heal things that you either suppress or are literally forgotten,” she said in a video interview. A wife, mother of four, grandmother and owner of two dogs, Barrino-Taylor, now 39, was committed to being her best self to those around her. “I wanted to take this healing journey. So, I had to stop therapy, and I had to allow Celie to be my life coach. Girl, that wasn’t easy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Leo Reich Likes Nothing Better Than a Movie Where Nothing Happens

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      “Any movie by Alexander Payne, Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig, anything European,” said the comedian, who has a special on Max. “Anything where a woman with ennui wanders around a medieval town.”Like a lot of comedians, Leo Reich works out the kinks in his stand-up routines by pacing the floor and talking to himself.During the pandemic, that process reached a fever pitch.“I think that’s where a lot of the angst in the show was from,” he said about “Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!,” his Gen Z lampoon now streaming on Max, “the fact that I was at home in the childhood bedroom where I’d always lived with all of my old posters on the wall, just furious about the state of affairs that I was finding myself in.”Under that strain, what began as a confessional, rather traditional set eventually morphed, he recalled in a video call from London, into a kind of self-parody “of the worst excesses of my own personality.” During the new set, Reich, 25, flop-sweats across the stage in short shorts and black eye makeup.“It’s so funny having done a show that tries to send up on some level that whole idea of the fetishization of young talent,” he said, before elaborating on snobbery, eating animals and the freedom of humiliation, “and then essentially become what I was trying to lovingly criticize.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Two Pints of Beer and a CigaretteIt can be hot sun, Coronas and a Camel Blue. It can be dead of winter, subzero temperatures, two pints of Guinness and a Marlboro Red. What I will say is that after you’ve had two pints of beer and a cigarette, that is actually scientifically peak physical performance that a human being can get to. You will never feel as good as that in any other context.2Bird Watching and Pondering the Natural WorldThere was a period when I was 9 to 15 where I was a really obsessive bird watcher. Not to get religious about this, but sometimes in our lives we have to sit back and be in awe of the majesty of nature. It also makes you think, “God, I really know nothing about the universe because this little guy is dressed in bright, bright blue, and there is no possible explanation for that that I could possibly make sense of.”3Bad Sketch ComedyI passionately believe that perfection is the enemy of joy. To watch someone onstage do something that is on some level quite humiliating, but have the absolute best time doing it, you get a feeling of freedom and human connection that is unparalleled.4Movies Where Nothing HappensAny movie by Alexander Payne, Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig, anything European. Anything where a woman with ennui wanders around a medieval town and runs her hand along a curtain. Something where someone wonders, “Is this all there is to life?” That’s perfect to me.5OffalIf you’re going to kill and eat an animal, you should do it in the style of a Renaissance king and make sure that you eat the whole thing. The perfect intersection of that for me is eating a liver, a kidney, some intestines — something where you truly cannot hide away from the fact that what you are doing out of your own free will as a human being is biting into something that was once alive.6Snobbery and Reverse SnobberySome things I’m a snob about: superhero films, interior design, restaurants, grammar, weirdly. Things I’m not a snob about: coffee, wine, reality TV, pop music. You’ve got to choose a couple of things where you’re like, “Listen up, I know more than you about this.” And some other things where you’re like, “Don’t over-intellectualize it. I’m just here to have fun.”7PiningYou don’t need any material reason or justification for it. You can pine after literally anyone, and your brain and heart will create the most gorgeous back story out of absolutely nothing that will sustain you, in my experience, years at a time.8Dancing to ’80s PopI mean, if you are dancing in a club that’s got lasers in it and, I don’t know, some Pet Shop Boys, come on. It rewires your brain forever.9Novels Where Nothing HappensThe person wandering around the city is probably from the ’20s or ’30s, and they’re doing something like planning a party or collecting a package. The whole novel is a metaphor for civilizational decline. I’m talking “Mrs. Dalloway” — almost any novel by Virginia Woolf will work for this. I’m talking Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education.” Something that if someone saw you reading it, they’d go, “Oh, the guy’s an intellectual.” Little do they know you don’t understand a thing that’s going on.10Saying Something StupidI think that one of the nicest things in the world is to embarrass yourself in a social setting and just accept that it’s happened. More

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      The Artists We Lost in 2023, in Their Words

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      The many creative people who died this year built their wisdom over lives generously long or much too short, through times of peace and periods of conflict. Their ideas, perspectives and humanity helped shape our own: in language spoken, written or left unsaid; in notes hit, lines delivered, boundaries pushed. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their voices.“I never considered giving up on my dreams. You could say I had an invincible optimism.”— Tina Turner, musician, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)“Hang on to your fantasies, whatever they are and however dimly you may hear them, because that’s what you’re worth.”— David Del Tredici, composer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Ever since I can remember, I have danced for the sheer joy of moving.”— Rena Gluck, dancer and choreographer, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“The stage is not magic for me. It never was. I always felt the audience was waiting to see that first drop of blood.”— Lynn Seymour, dancer, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Paul Reubens.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Most questions that are asked of me about Pee-wee Herman I don’t have a clue on. I’ve always been very careful not to dissect it too much for myself.”— Paul Reubens, actor, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“If you know your voice really well, if you’ve become friends with your vocal apparatus, you know which roles you can sing and which you shouldn’t even touch.”— Grace Bumbry, opera singer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Actors should approach an audition (and indeed, their careers) with the firm belief that they have something to offer that is unique. Treasure who you are and what you bring to the audition.”— Joanna Merlin, actress, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Glenda Jackson.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“If I have my health and strength, I’m going to be the most appalling old lady. I’m going to boss everyone about, make people stand up for me when I come into a room, and generally capitalize on all the hypocrisy that society shows towards the old.”— Glenda Jackson, actress and politician, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t see myself as a pioneer. I see myself as a working guy and that’s all, and that is enough.”— William Friedkin, filmmaker, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“Some people, every day you get up and chop wood, and some people write songs.”— Robbie Robertson, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I wasn’t brought up in Hollywood. I was brought up in a kibbutz.”— Topol, actor, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Jimmy Buffett.Michael Putland/Getty Images“I don’t play at my audience. I play for my audience.”— Jimmy Buffett, musician, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)“I’m still not a natural in front of people. I’m shy. I’m a hermit. But I’m learning a little more.”— Andre Braugher, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)“Some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.”— Louise Glück, poet, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I paint because I believe it’s the best way that I can pass my time as a human being. I paint for myself. I paint for my wife. And I paint for anybody that’s willing to look at it.”— Brice Marden, artist, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“Writing is about generosity, passing on to other people what you’ve had the misfortune of having to find out for yourself.”— Fay Weldon, author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Ryuichi Sakamoto.Ian Dickson/Redferns, via Getty Images“I went to see one of those pianos drowned in tsunami water near Fukushima, and recorded it. Of course, it was totally out of tune, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought, ‘Nature tuned it.’”— Ryuichi Sakamoto, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“I hate everything that is natural, and I love the artificial.”— Vera Molnar, artist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“A roof could be a roof, but it also could be a little garden.”— Rafael Viñoly, architect, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“True architecture is life.”— Balkrishna Doshi, architect, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)Sinead O’Connor.Duane Braley/Star Tribune, via Getty Images“Words are dreadfully powerful, and words uttered are 10 times more powerful. The spoken word is the science on which the entire universe is built.”— Sinead O’Connor, musician, born 1966 (Read the obituary.)“Before I can put anything in the world, I have to wait at least a couple of years and edit them. Nothing is going out that hasn’t been edited a dozen times.”— Robert Irwin, artist, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“An editor is a reader who edits.”— Robert Gottlieb, editor and author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Matthew Perry.Reisig & Taylor/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“Sometimes I think I went through the addiction, alcoholism and fame all to be doing what I’m doing right now, which is helping people.”— Matthew Perry, actor, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)“It was the period of apartheid. You know, it was very hard, very difficult and very painful — and many a time I felt, ‘Shall I continue with this life or shall I go on?’ But I continued. I wanted to dance.”— Johaar Mosaval, dancer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“God would like us to be joyful / Even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.” (“Fiddler on the Roof”)— Sheldon Harnick, lyricist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“I remember back in the day, saying it’s so cool that the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie are still played. That’s what we wanted hip-hop to be.”— David Jolicoeur, musician, born 1968 (Read the obituary.)“Civilization cannot last or advance without culture.”— Ahmad Jamal, musician, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Harry Belafonte. Phil Burchman/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die.”— Harry Belafonte, singer and actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“Some people say to artists that they should change. Change what? It’s like saying, ‘Why don’t you walk differently or talk differently?’ I can’t change my voice. That’s the way I am.”— Fernando Botero, artist, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”— André Watts, pianist, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)Renata Scotto.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Singing isn’t my whole life.”— Renata Scotto, opera singer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“It’s through working on characters in plays that I’ve learned about myself, about how people operate.”— Frances Sternhagen, actress, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)David Crosby.Mick Gold/Redferns, via Getty Images“I don’t know if I’ve found my way, but I do know I feel happy.”— David Crosby, musician, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)“I’m very abstract. Once it becomes narrative, it’s all over. Let the audience decide what it’s about.”— Rudy Perez, choreographer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t have a driven desire actually to be in the act of writing. But my response to any form of excitement about reading is to want to write.”— A.S. Byatt, author, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t think I ever wrote music to react to other music — I really had a very strong need to express myself.”— Kaija Saariaho, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)Richard Roundtree.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“Narrow-mindedness is alien to me.”— Richard Roundtree, actor, born 1942, though some sources say 1937 (Read the obituary.)“The reason I’ve been able to dance for so long is absolute willpower.”— Gus Solomons Jr., dancer and choreographer, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“My practice is a resistance to the glamorous art object.”— Phyllida Barlow, artist, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.”— Milan Kundera, author, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Mary Quant.Hulton Archive/Getty Images“The most extreme fashion should be very, very cheap. First, because only the young are daring enough to wear it; second, because the young look better in it; and third, because if it’s extreme enough, it shouldn’t last.”— Mary Quant, fashion designer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)“I spontaneously enter the unknown.”— Vivan Sundaram, artist, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“The goal is to wander, wander through the unknown in search of the unknown, all the while leaving your mark.”— Richard Hunt, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Angus Cloud.Pat Martin for The New York Times“Style is how you hold yourself.”— Angus Cloud, actor, born 1998 (Read the obituary.)“I have an aura.”— Barry Humphries, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“Intensity is not something I try to do. It’s just kind of the way that I am.”— Lance Reddick, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)Alan Arkin.Jerry Mosey/Associated Press“There was a time when I had so little sense of myself that getting out of my skin and being anybody else was a sigh of relief. But I kind of like myself now, a lot of the times.”— Alan Arkin, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“I have always thought of myself as a kind of vessel through which the work might flow.”— Valda Setterfield, dancer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”— Cormac McCarthy, author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)Elliott Erwitt.Steven Siewert/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“In general, I don’t think too much. I certainly don’t use those funny words museum people and art critics like.”— Elliott Erwitt, photographer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its humorless own arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.” (“The Information”)— Martin Amis, author, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)Magda Saleh.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“I did not do it on my own.”— Magda Saleh, ballerina, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“The word ‘jazz,’ to me, only means, ‘I dare you.’”— Wayne Shorter, musician, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“What is a jazz singer? Somebody who improvises? But I don’t: I prefer simplicity.”— Astrud Gilberto, singer, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)“It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”— Anne Perry, author, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“When I think about my daughter and the day that I move on — there is a piece of me that will remain with her.”— Ron Cephas Jones, actor, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)“Let us encourage one another with visions of a shared future. And let us bring all the grit and openheartedness and creative spirit we can muster to gather together and build that future.”— Norman Lear, television writer and producer, born 1922 (Read the obituary.)Tony Bennett.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Life teaches you how to live it if you live long enough.”— Tony Bennett, musician, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via Getty Images. More

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      The World Has Finally Caught Up to Colman Domingo

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      Colman Domingo was at the Equinox on 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue when his agent called. A rush of hope overtook him: After a week spent auditioning for eight film and television roles, finally he was about to get something.This was in 2014, which Domingo experienced as a year of incredible highs and dangerously low lows. He had just come off a successful, soul-enriching transfer of the stage musical “The Scottsboro Boys” in London, but upon returning to New York, he felt quickly cut down to size. Despite his Tony nomination for the Kander and Ebb musical, Domingo was stuck auditioning for “under-fives,” screen roles that had little more to offer than a line or two. Still, he felt backed into a corner, praying that one of them would hit.The most promising was a callback for HBO’s Prohibition-era drama “Boardwalk Empire”: To audition for a maître d’ at a Black-owned nightclub, Domingo had donned a tuxedo to sing and tap dance for the producers. You can imagine how he felt, then, when his agent began that call at the gym by saying that everyone on “Boardwalk Empire” had loved his audition. This is the one that’s going to change it up for me, Domingo thought. This is the one that’s going to finally be my big break.There was just one problem, his agent said. After the callback, a historical researcher on the show reminded producers that the maître d’s in those nightclubs were typically light-skinned, and Domingo was not. “Boardwalk Empire” had passed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      What to Know About ‘Maestro’: A Guide to Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein Biopic

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      Now on Netflix, the movie tracks the life of the American conductor and composer and his wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre, played by Carey Mulligan.Pop quiz: Who wrote the score for Bradley Cooper’s new Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro”?Trick question: Bernstein. But you might not realize it, or learn of some of his more lasting accomplishments (“West Side Story” erasure!), even after watching the entire film, which focuses on the personal life of the prodigiously talented musician.Which is to say, the film — which Cooper directed and starred in, and which is now streaming on Netflix — does not hand-hold. It assumes some basic familiarity with one of America’s most storied conductors and composers. Here’s a guide to help you get up to speed.His careerWhat is Bernstein best known for?One of the rare virtuosos to compose for musical theater, write classical music and conduct august bodies like the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein is probably best remembered as the composer of the 1957 musical “West Side Story.”The Manhattan-set tale of urban gang warfare in New York City, based on “Romeo & Juliet,” includes standards like “Tonight,” “I Feel Pretty” and the aching, wistful “Maria.” The classic show, a collaboration with Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, and Stephen Sondheim, who penned the lyrics, won two Tony Awards in its original incarnation.In his day, Bernstein was known first and foremost as an animated, passionate conductor. After his spectacular fill-in debut at the Philharmonic at age 25 in 1943 — on just a few hours’ notice, because the scheduled guest conductor fell ill — Bernstein would be affiliated with the orchestra for four decades and conduct symphonies around the world.He also wrote classical music, including three symphonies, “Jeremiah,” “The Age of Anxiety” and “Kaddish,” and made the classical realm accessible to ordinary Americans through his Young People’s Concerts. Those televised lectures, which ran on CBS for 14 years, covered a broad range of subjects including humor in music, and the composers Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky.What is Tanglewood?Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its training academy in the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts, is where Bernstein studied with Serge Koussevitzky, then the director of the ensemble. The two met in 1940, when Koussevitzky selected a 22-year-old Bernstein as one of three inaugural conducting fellows for the Berkshire Music Center, now known as the Tanglewood Music Center.Bernstein went on to teach and perform there nearly every summer for 50 years, becoming the head of orchestral conducting at Tanglewood after Koussevitzky died in 1951. In 1990, Bernstein led the final performance of his life there — a gripping account of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.How much of the film’s score is Bernstein’s music?That cue you hear when Bernstein finds out he’ll be making his conducting debut at the New York Philharmonic? That’s from “On the Waterfront,” the 1954 Marlon Brando drama for which Bernstein wrote the music. That spiky, horn-filled composition that signals tension when Bernstein and a male lover arrive at the family’s Connecticut home? That’s the prologue from “West Side Story.”In fact, most of the music you hear was written by Bernstein. (Also see if you can spot classical excerpts from his ballets “Facsimile” and “Fancy Free,” his opera “A Quiet Place,” and parts of his second and third symphonies.)His personal lifeWas Bernstein gay or bisexual?Though he was married to his wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), for 26 years, he had numerous relationships — with both men and women — before and during their marriage, and after her death in 1978.The film focuses on two of them — his dalliance with the clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), whose bottom Bernstein slaps at the beginning of the film, and the musician Tom Cothran (Gideon Glick), whom he steals kisses with at a party and brings to his Connecticut home.What was society’s attitude toward gay people at the time?Anti-gay prejudice was rampant in America in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Lavender Scare — a fear that homosexual people had infiltrated the federal government and were a threat to national security — led to the dismissal of gay and lesbian employees, and those assumed to be, en masse. Gay, lesbian and transgender people — particularly public figures — faced intense pressure to conceal their identities, and Bernstein worried that the public revelation of his sexual orientation would hurt his conducting prospects.Did Montealegre know Bernstein was gay or bisexual when she married him?Yes, according to a letter she wrote to him the year after they were married, which the couple’s children discovered after her death. “You are a homosexual and may never change,” she wrote, adding later, “I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr.” She went on to tell him, “Let’s try and see what happens if you are free to do as you like, but without guilt and confession.”Was Bernstein open about his affairs with men?At first, he was discreet, heeding Montealegre’s request to not embarrass her publicly. But, as “Maestro” shows, he became “sloppy” later or, rather, decided that he no longer wanted to hide what he viewed as a fundamental part of himself amid society’s changing attitudes.In 1976, he briefly left Montealegre to live openly with his boyfriend, Cothran, though he returned to her a year later when she learned she had lung cancer and cared for her until she died at age 56.What did Bernstein say about his sexuality?Nothing, at least, publicly. But privately, he suffered through years of therapy, apparently in the hope that he could be “cured” of his attraction to men. That desire lasted a lifetime: “I have been engaged in an imaginary life with Felicia,” he wrote in a letter to his sister, Shirley, from Israel in 1950, “having her by my side on the beach as a shockingly beautiful Yemenite boy passes.”Did Bernstein love his wife?Bernstein was “a gay man who got married,” his “West Side Story” collaborator Arthur Laurents once said in response to the assumption that Bernstein, who had three children with Montealegre, was bisexual. “He wasn’t conflicted about his sexual orientation at all. He was just gay.”But what is clear, from their children’s memories and from Bernstein’s own letters, is that he and Montealegre had an abiding affection for one another, and that their relationship was built on tenderness and mutual respect.“Bernstein absolutely loved her — there was no question about that,” Paul R. Laird, the author of “Leonard Bernstein,” a 2018 biography, recently told Time magazine. “It was as sincere a marriage as you’re going to get between a male homosexual and a woman at a time when a lot of male homosexuals married women.”Bernstein’s oldest daughter, Jamie, has spoken about her parents’ friendship. “They were really great friends, and probably that counts for the most in the long run, that they could still make each other laugh,” she said in a 1997 PBS interview.How did Bernstein die?He had received an emphysema diagnosis in his mid-20s — he would struggle with addiction to cigarettes and alcohol for most of his life — and died on Oct. 14, 1990, at 72, of a heart attack caused by lung failure.He was often depressed in his later years, intimidated that he would be best remembered as a conductor, resigned to the fact that he could never live up to the success of “West Side Story,” and guilty about his wife’s death from cancer, which he held himself responsible for. More

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      ‘Real Women Have Curves’ and ‘Heart Sellers’: Snapshots of Immigrant Lives

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      A musical adaptation of “Curves” and a play about two Asian women becoming friends both look at immigrants’ experiences, with mixed results.Body positivity was not at all the cultural vibe in 1990, when Josefina López’s play “Real Women Have Curves” was new. There was a rebelliousness to its climactic strip-down scene, in which a group of Latinas sewing dresses in a roasting-hot Los Angeles factory peel off layers of their clothing and shed a bit of shame, reveling in their lived-in bodies.In the 2002 film adaptation starring America Ferrera, the scene is similarly feel-good — a refutation of everything the women know to hate about the way they look, because the world around them reinforces their self-loathing every day.In the new musical adaptation currently making its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., under the direction of Sergio Trujillo, the scene becomes a skivvies-clad, song-and-dance display of female empowerment. A dressmaker’s dummy, tiled with mirrors, is lowered like a disco ball, and the show’s title figures in the lyrics. It’s an upbeat crowd-pleaser of a number.Yet in a musical that pushes body image to the periphery, bursting into defiant song about it feels oddly out of place. With a book by Lisa Loomer, music and lyrics by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez, and additional material by Nell Benjamin, this ungainly iteration of “Real Women Have Curves” is primarily interested in the tensions and vulnerabilities of immigrant life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      How Richard Nelson’s ‘Our Life in Art’ Was Translated, Twice

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      Richard Nelson seemed to have found the perfect home for his play “Our Life in Art.”He had written a show about the Moscow Art Theater’s 1923 tour of the United States with its director, Konstantin Stanislavski, and was planning to have a Russian translation presented by the company’s modern leader at a performance space that Stanislavski had built on the grounds of his family’s factory.What’s more, the Brooklyn Academy of Music was interested in bringing the production to New York, where Nelson is best known as the author of the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” a collection of a dozen intimate plays that document and dissect slices of American life and history through nothing more than dinner conversation.A major step toward the play’s premiere in Moscow came on Feb. 23, 2022, when the director, Sergei Zhenovach, read through it with his company. Everyone seemed enthusiastic about the project, but Nelson awoke the next day to a message that read, “Something awful has happened.”Russia had invaded Ukraine.“That was it,” Nelson recalled during a recent video interview. “The war cut all ties to Russian theater, so it was over.”“Our Life in Art,” Nelson’s play about a close-knit theater troupe of the past, is being performed by a close-knit French theater troupe of the present.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesThe war, and a fresh crackdown on dissent in Russia, made “Our Life in Art” all the more necessary. Its plot, which unfurls between Moscow Art Theater performances in Chicago, examines and questions how art is navigated within world events and politics. “The play has evolved into being about itself,” Nelson said. “What’s happened while trying to get the play on has now affected how it is seen. So many people I know in Russian theater and art — it’s just a very difficult time, and all of these issues are in the air.”In the air, and finally onstage. In the end, Nelson’s play about a close-knit troupe of the past was taken up by a close-knit troupe of the present: “Our Life in Art” found a new home at the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris, where it is running through March 2, translated into French by that company’s director, Ariane Mnouchkine.The production has put Nelson on the other end of work he has previously done translating Russian theater classics into English with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the power couple behind many Russian literature translations in print today. So, Nelson knows that the process is more than mapping one language onto another; as with the plays by his hero and aesthetic ancestor, Anton Chekhov, it also requires the preservation of a specific, crucial sensibility.In the works of both Chekhov and Nelson, the extraordinary emerges only from the ordinary. Revelations come not in speeches, but in passing comments. And, above all, in the spirit of verisimilitude, people have true conversations. Nelson’s characters speak to one another, not to the audience. He likes to tell actors that the performance “is the relationship you have with everyone else.”That’s a level of lived-in mastery rarely seen even in naturalistic theater. Not for nothing does Nelson tend to work with the same actors as a de facto company; Jay O. Sanders and Maryann Plunkett appeared in all the Rhinebeck plays, but as members of three different families. And Sanders starred in Nelson, Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”The translators got to know Nelson when he had mailed them a letter introducing himself and expressing interest in a collaboration. They later met in New York, during the release of their version of “War and Peace” about 15 years ago, and the three of them decided to embark on translating Russian theater, starting with Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country.”“He’s a man of very great integrity,” Volokhonsky said of Nelson, “and he has a gift for friendship.”The three quickly grew close, and built up their working relationship to translating all the major plays of Chekhov. “We would submit the text to him,” Pevear said, “and he would go through it and say, ‘My actors wouldn’t say that, what if we did it this way?’ That’s why we only wanted to do this work with a playwright. It’s not just about narrative.”So, when Nelson wrote “Our Life in Art” — a nod to Stanislavski’s book “My Life in Art” — in fall 2020, he recruited Volokhonsky to translate it. Originally, it had been planned for Lev Dodin, the artistic director of the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg, but he and Nelson had different visions for the play, about whether it should be understated or eruptive, and their collaboration ended on friendly terms. Next, the show was taken up by Sergei Zhenovach before he left the Moscow Art Theater, and by that point, Volokhonsky said, her work on the show was done; anything further would be refined in rehearsals. But those never came.“To have this luxury and this luck, where every day, for months and months, I am just able to focus on making theater without any other pressures or anything else going on, is a piece of profound fortune,” Nelson said of working with the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesAs the play lay dormant, Mnouchkine, who had seen Nelson’s work in New York, approached him about creating something for Théâtre du Soleil. He told her that he happened to have a show about an acting company, and sent it to her. She read “Our Life in Art” overnight and decided to mount it, with him directing, as he often does with productions of his plays in the United States.Mnouchkine translated the text quickly, she said, “while he was already rehearsing” with her actors, over a luxuriously long 10 weeks last spring. “I had to go quite fast, but I needed to have this very high-standard, delicate easiness, which seems easy to say but is not easy. And I wanted to have the same rhythm as Richard.”The translation was not without its complications. Nelson doesn’t speak French, and not everyone in the Théâtre du Soleil company speaks English. A translator was an essential intermediary. He would tell the actors what was happening in a scene, and if they responded, “That’s not quite what’s here in the text,” they would together work toward a more accurate turn of phrase. They talked through complicated idioms, untranslated figures of speech and, most difficult, the difference between pronouns, a nonissue in English: When should characters who are close but still colleagues address each another as the informal “tu” or the formal “vous”?It helps that, after more rehearsals this fall, Nelson had 14 weeks with the actors, and spent that time living in the company’s home, La Cartoucherie, in the bucolic Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris, seeing them behave as a true company. “There are no stage managers, there are no real designers,” he said. “The actors do everything: They clean toilets, they move furniture around. This is their home, and they own this.”The result may not have been an unequivocal success — in The New York Times, the critic Laura Cappelle found the play’s realistic conversations casual to the point of rendering historical context inaccessible — but Mnouchkine said she and her actors were “very pleased” to work with Nelson. For his part, he felt as if the most difficult translation, of his nothing-forced aesthetic, was achieved.“I’m really happy with where the play has landed,” Nelson said. “At a time when the American theater is in crisis, to have this luxury and this luck, where every day, for months and months, I am just able to focus on making theater without any other pressures or anything else going on, is a piece of profound fortune.” More

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      Ralph Fiennes and David Tennant: Two Very Different ‘Macbeths’

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      Ralph Fiennes and David Tennant take Shakespeare’s psychodrama along divergent paths in two simultaneously running shows.There is more than one way to tell a story. In England, two equally impressive new productions of “Macbeth” prove this, both featuring major stars in the title role and adopting strikingly different approaches to Shakespeare’s classic tale of hubris and betrayal.The first, starring Ralph Fiennes (“The Menu,” “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”), runs at the Depot, a cavernous converted warehouse on an industrial estate in Liverpool. Despite its grittily authentic set design and costumes, it is for the most part a conventional, realist treatment. The second, at the Donmar Warehouse, in London, and starring David Tennant (“Doctor Who,” “Des”), is a rather more high-concept affair, heavy on ambience and atmospherics.The leading men are, likewise, a study in contrasts: Fiennes’s Macbeth is a hulking, lugubrious presence, whereas Tennant’s is a gaunt, energetic bundle of angst.The Fiennes “Macbeth,” directed by Simon Godwin, runs through Dec. 20 at the Depot in Liverpool, before moving on to Edinburgh, London and Washington, D.C., in 2024. The makeshift playhouse features an immersive set: To get to their seats, theatergoers must file past a bleak, dusty landscape of rubble and burned-out cars, suggestive of a war zone. The stage set is an elegant geometric structure in forbidding gray, comprising a number of doors, balconies and stairways, representing the various Scottish castles in which much of the action unfolds. Thin, vertical streaks of blood gradually materialize on its walls as the story progresses.The plot will be familiar to many. Three clairvoyant witches tell Macbeth he will become King of Scotland. With further encouragement from Lady Macbeth (Indira Varma), he proceeds to murder the reigning monarch, Duncan (Keith Fleming), forcing his heirs into exile and taking the crown for himself. He has to carry out several more murders in order to cover his trail, and the guilt starts to consume him; Lady Macbeth urges him to man up, but her own conscience catches up with her in the form of somnambulistic terrors and, eventually, suicide.To get to their seats in Liverpool, theatergoers must file past a bleak, dusty landscape suggestive of war’s aftermath.Matt HumphreyIn this production, Macbeth and his male co-protagonists appear in 21st-century military fatigues; when we see them, intermittently, in civilian attire, it’s understatedly stylish contemporary get-up. (The costumes are by Frankie Bradshaw.) That stark juxtaposition drives home the brutal reality of strongman politics: The ruling class and the military elite are one. There are some deft visual effects — the disappearance of the three witches in puffs of smoke is particularly pleasing — and the acting is consistently strong. Ben Turner is a powerful Macduff, and Varma brings a subtle, darkly comic energy to Lady Macbeth during the famous scene in which Macbeth, confronted with the reproachful ghost of the murdered Banquo, has a meltdown in the middle of a dinner party.A markedly different aesthetic was on offer in the compact, intimate environs of the Donmar, where theatergoers were required to put on headphones upon entry. In this “Macbeth” — directed by Max Webster, featuring Cush Jumbo as Lady Macbeth and running through Feb. 10, 2024 — the actors wear discreet headsets and their speech is transmitted to the audience digitally.Another “Macbeth,” at the Donmar Warehouse, in London, through Feb. 10, 2024, features David Tennant in the title role, with set and costume design by Rosanna Vize.Marc BrennerI was predisposed to dismiss this as a gimmick, but was pleasantly surprised. The transmitted audio imbues the words with an added richness and immediacy — the deep aural texture of a radio play. The conceit comes into its own in the scenes featuring supernatural elements (the witches, Banquo’s ghost) and during Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness, when eerie vocal echoes are overlaid on the dialogue. At times, the sound alternates abruptly between the left and right earphones.The set and costume design, by Rosanna Vize, are strikingly abstract. With the exception of Lady Macbeth, who wears a white formfitting dress, the cast are clad in an austere uniform of gray or black tops — turtlenecks, vests or collarless jackets — with dark kilts and black Chelsea boots. The stage is a simple white rectangle, at the rear of which, in a boxed-off section behind a transparent screen, a small troupe of musicians provide the play’s soundtrack: a gorgeous blend of Gaelic song and religious chant, composed by Alasdair Macrae and featuring beautifully haunting vocals by the Scottish singer Kathleen MacInnes.Fiennes and Tennant are both outstanding talents, but very different in corporeal stature and bearing. Just a few months ago, Fiennes’s brother, Joseph, delivered a compelling turn as an England soccer coach in “Dear England,” at the National Theater, in London, and there were echoes of that performance here: a certain tentative, beard-stroking pensiveness and lumbering indecision. Ralph’s frame as Macbeth is bearlike, and his turmoil is a slow burn. (I was also reminded of the Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose ill-fated uprising against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and subsequent demise, had shades of Shakespearean tragedy.)Tennant, left, and Cush Jumbo, who plays Lady Macbeth.Marc BrennerIn contrast, Tennant, with his slim-line physique and withdrawn, vaguely haunted-looking face, has a more expressive emotional energy that lends itself to treacherous intrigue and anguished remorse alike. He is frantic, almost from the get-go. An unlikelier warrior, perhaps, but a more convincing worrier.The truth, of course, is that “Macbeth” doesn’t really require too much jazzing up, because its themes resonate easily enough without embellishment. One is always struck, in particular, by the prescience of the play’s pointed depiction of machismo, long before “toxic masculinity” became a buzz-phrase. Almost every misdeed is incited with an appeal to virility, whether it’s Lady Macbeth goading her husband into going through with their murderous plan (“You will be so much more the man!”), or Macbeth using similar rhetoric to persuade his hit men to kill Banquo.A light touch is key. What these two productions get right is that they conjure just enough novelty, in their visual and aural landscapes, to freshen things up, while still ensuring that the text remains center stage — in all its timeless glory. More