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      Broadway’s Beloved Basement Club, Feinstein’s/54 Below, Turns 10

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      The venue beneath what was once Studio 54 will pick up a Tony Award for excellence in the theater as it marks its anniversary with a pair of concerts.On June 5, 2012, shortly after noon, a bevy of cabaret and theater artists and insiders gathered in a space beneath what had been the storied West 54th Street nightclub Studio 54. The occasion was a dress rehearsal for a show that evening that would open a new venue called, reasonably enough, 54 Below. Patti LuPone was the featured act, with other Broadway and nightlife luminaries, including Ben Vereen and Justin Vivian Bond, slated to appear soon afterward.Joe Iconis, a young composer, lyricist and performer who was part of that initial lineup, recalled the event as “a coming out for the room itself.” The bar was separated from the stage and dining tables by a curtain, which was later opened, “so there was this dramatic reveal of the room, to the people who would soon be playing it.”It was a fittingly theatrical debut for a spot that, 10 years later, still bills itself as “Broadway’s living room.” (The venue is now known as Feinstein’s/54 Below, acknowledging a creative partnership with the veteran performer and American songbook champion Michael Feinstein that began in 2015.) On June 12, it will receive an honor at the Tony Awards for excellence in the theater.“To me, Feinstein’s is not only about the American songbook; in some ways it’s become a sensibility, a lifestyle brand,” Michael Feinstein said.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesAt the time of 54 Below’s start, the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room, one of New York’s most established cabaret venues, had just announced its closure; Feinstein’s own namesake at the Regency Hotel shut down not long after. Don’t Tell Mama and the West Bank Cafe’s Laurie Beechman Theater still offered show tunes and standards, as did the jazz club Birdland. But as Richard Frankel, one of the four Broadway producers who started and still own 54 Below, remembered, “There was nothing geared towards the huge resource of the Broadway talent pool, and the continual renewal of new music that Broadway provided.”Today, 54 Below occupies a rare perch as a free-standing club offering just that. But it faces more competition. In 2017, the Green Room 42 arrived, which, like 54 Below, features name acts, rising stars and cult favorites alongside theme shows and special events. The following year, Birdland unveiled Birdland Theater, a space that has accommodated longer runs by Broadway performers and emerging jazz artists as well as freewheeling variety shows. Other venues have continued to pop up downtown, like the East Village spots Pangea and Club Cumming, where artists generally less associated with Broadway can wax theatrical in their own fashion.But Don’t Tell Mama’s longtime booking manager, the cabaret doyen Sidney Myer, conceded that 54 Below still “draws the best and the brightest” and called its team “creative and proactive.”The 2022 Tony AwardsThis year’s awards, the first to recognize shows that opened after a long Broadway shutdown during the pandemic, will be given out on June 12.Lifetime Achievement: Angela Lansbury, an acclaimed and beloved star of stage, film and television, will be honored with a special award during this year’s ceremony.Hugh Jackman: The actor may potentially win his third Tony Award for his role in “The Music Man.” He shared some thoughts on his life between film and theater.A New Star: Myles Frost is drawing ovations nightly on Broadway with his performance in “MJ,” a musical about Michael Jackson’s creative process.Frankel and fellow owners Steven Baruch, Marc Routh and Tom Viertel — who have produced “The Producers,” “Hairspray” and the 2018 revival of “Angels in America” — recruited the Broadway mainstays John Lee Beatty, Ken Billington and Peter Hylenski to design the restaurant and its lighting and sound. Beatty even requested a story for inspiration; Viertel spun one about Jewish hustlers who, as Frankel relayed it, sold stolen car parts during World War I, “then started bootlegging when Prohibition came, and invited showgirls and opened a speakeasy. John said, ‘Fine—I’m good.’”On June 12, the venue will receive an honor at the Tony Awards for excellence in the theater.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesFor a pair of anniversary concerts on Sunday and Thursday, the club will spotlight young and emerging performers, composers and playwrights — among them the “Dear Evan Hansen” and “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” alumnus Andrew Barth Feldman, 20, who grew up “binging YouTube videos of people at 54 Below” before starting to visit the club in his early teens. (Minors are welcome but aren’t permitted at the bar without parental supervision.)When the coronavirus pandemic shut down live performances in March 2020, there was no guarantee the venue would make it to this milestone. Two rounds of government loans “really saved us from the abyss,” Frankel said, though he estimated that business was still down between 20 and 25 percent from 2019.54 Below inherited its first director of programming, Phil Geoffrey Bond, from the Beechman. When Jennifer Ashley Tepper joined the venue as creative and programming director a little less than nine years ago, she took a cue from Bond’s popular “Sondheim Unplugged” series. One of her first projects was “New Musicals at 54,” which has delivered concert versions of shows such as Iconis and Joe Tracz’s “Be More Chill” and Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize winner “A Strange Loop,” now up for 11 Tony Awards, both showcased before they were produced in New York. An eclectic assortment of additional series have come to include “New Writers at 54!” and “54 Sings …,” which mostly celebrates pop music. “A lot of these shows are done on the fly,” noted the composer Stephen Flaherty, whose musicals “My Favorite Year” and “Seussical” have been showcased at the club, which also features cast reunions and concerts of classic and underappreciated works. “You’ll have people dropping out and others replacing them, so you never know what you’re going to get, which is part of the excitement.”Slotting such vehicles and novelty acts alongside headliners like Chita Rivera, Ariana DeBose and Charles Busch into at least two shows per night, seven nights a week, can pose a challenge, Tepper says: “A big part of my job is making sure that the crowd is different at different performances.” 54 Below has drawn what the jazz singer Nicole Henry, one of several artists brought on board by Feinstein, calls “an informed, intelligent audience. They often know more about the music than I do.”Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      After Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle Attacks, Comedy Venues Increase Security

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      Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars. Dave Chappelle was tackled at the Hollywood Bowl. Now some venues are increasing security to protect comedians.It was a joke about a mother, cocaine and Walmart that set the man off.He had been sitting with a woman at the Laugh Factory in Chicago this winter, shouting enthusiastically in response to a joke about drugs when, after being needled about his relationship with the woman, he said that she was his mother.So when Joe Kilgallon, the next comedian, took the microphone, a joke popped into his head.“That’s healthy — cocaine with your mom on a Monday,” Mr. Kilgallon recalled quipping. “Getting some real Walmart vibes here.”The man leaped from his chair, cursed and made a beeline for the stage, club officials and Mr. Kilgallon recalled. A security guard grabbed the man before he could climb onstage and hustled him out of the club through an emergency exit.It wound up nothing more than a minor confrontation, the kind that comedians have had to deal with for years, given that making fun of people and mixing it up with hecklers is basically part of the job description. But a couple of recent high-profile physical attacks on comedians — Will Smith slapping Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars in March and a man tackling Dave Chappelle as he performed at the Hollywood Bowl last week — has left some comics wondering if the stage is becoming less safe, and has led some clubs and venues to take steps to beef up their security at comedy shows.Laugh Factory officials say that as a result of the recent unrest, they have added cameras and metal detectors and increased the number of security guards at some of their locations. They have made a few additions — “This is not a U.F.C. match!” “We do not care about your political affiliation!”— to the standard monologue about two-drink minimums people hear as they walk in the door. The Uptown Comedy Corner in Atlanta last weekend hired an off-duty police officer to bolster its security, moved one of its guards closer to the stage and began using metal detecting wands to check patrons and their bags at the door. And the Hollywood Bowl said it had implemented its own “additional security measures” after the attack on Mr. Chappelle.Garrett Baney was searched this week as he entered The Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“When a comedian gets onstage, what is their only goal?” asked Judy Gold, the comedian and author of “Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble.” “To make you laugh. That’s it.”“When you take the comedian’s intent out of the formula and you decide ‘I am going to take this joke the way I perceive it, instead of the way the comedian intended it,’ ” she said, “and then say ‘I didn’t like that joke, I want that person canceled or silenced or beat up,’ I mean, it’s just devastatingly sad.”In interviews, comedy club owners and comedians themselves expressed varying degrees of concern over the recent events. While some spoke of a worrisome uptick in audience outbursts that predates the Oscars, others cautioned against conflating what happened to Mr. Rock and Mr. Chappelle and drawing overly broad conclusions.Trevor Noah addressed the situation with comedy last week, when he warily walked out onto the stage of his Comedy Central program, “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” under the watchful eye of a man in a black windbreaker that said “Security” who appeared to murmur into a Secret Service-style earpiece as Mr. Noah opened the show.Noam Dworman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar in New York, said he viewed the Smith-Rock confrontation as a highly specific “one-off” in which Mr. Smith seemed to be trying to embarrass Mr. Rock more than physically hurt him. Seeing an audience member tackling Mr. Chappelle was concerning, he said, but might be part of a broader trend.“It just seems like violence is creeping up on us,” Mr. Dworman said, citing recent riots and protests that have turned violent. “We have a lot of people equating words with violence. And the logical extension of equating words with violence is to say that it’s reasonable to answer words with violence.”Some comedians brushed off concern about their personal safety, noting that they are not, for the most part, big names like Mr. Rock and Mr. Chappelle. Several made clear they did not plan to soften their material. But some worried that societal forces, including the bitter debates of the Trump years and the difficulties many faced during the pandemic, may have left people increasingly on edge — and less willing to take a joke.After Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars and was allowed to stay at the ceremony, some comedians feared it might embolden copy cat attacks. Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesJamie Masada, the owner of the Laugh Factory, said he had been counseling his comedians to take into account that some audience members have spent much of the last two years inside their apartments during a grueling pandemic. Mr. Kilgallon said he believed that after so much time alone, “people don’t know how to act in public” — whether it be in comedy clubs, bars or sporting events.Comedy clubs have long employed bouncers and security guards to deal with the occasional patron who has been overserved, or who is heckling a tad too much. And long before Mr. Smith strode onto the Academy Awards stage to slap Mr. Rock as retribution for a joke about his wife, there have been scattered instances of people confronting comedians during their sets, or in some cases, physically assaulting them.In the aftermath of the Oscars slap, some comics warned of the potential for copy cats. Mr. Smith was not only not removed from the Dolby Theater after hitting Mr. Rock but was given a standing ovation soon afterward when he was awarded the Oscar for best actor. (He was later banned from the Oscars for 10 years.)“These people gave him a standing ovation and no punishment,” Ms. Gold said of Mr. Smith. “We all said there will be copycat assaults. And there was.”The attack on Mr. Chappelle was murkier. A man carrying a weapon tackled Mr. Chappelle onstage at the Hollywood Bowl, where he was appearing as part of “Netflix Is a Joke: The Festival.” The Los Angeles city attorney charged Isaiah Lee, 23, with four misdemeanors in connection with the attack, including battery and possession of a weapon with intent to assault; Mr. Lee has pleaded not guilty.The Los Angeles police have not released any information about Mr. Lee’s motive for the attack on Mr. Chappelle, whose comedy has provoked controversy in the past. Mr. Chappelle discussed the encounter at another comedy show in Los Angeles later that week, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Mr. Chappelle told the audience that he had spoken to Mr. Lee after the incident, and said that Mr. Lee had said he did it to draw attention to the plight of his grandmother, who had been forced out of her neighborhood by gentrification, the trade publication reported.The Laugh Factory recently installed a new security camera.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“More than the incident itself, it’s the reaction people are having and saying — saying this is an ongoing or repeat thing,” said Angelo Sykes, a co-owner of Uptown Comedy Corner, which stiffened its security after the attack on Mr. Chappelle. “When you hear those things it makes you say, ‘OK, we can’t take those chances. We’ve got to be on the safe side.’”In telephone interviews last week, several comedians in Los Angeles said the attacks had been a topic of conversation between comics after shows. Ms. Gold described some of her fellow comedians as “weary and tired” and said others were “freaking out.”Comedy, she noted, is often a work in progress. “We don’t know where the line is until we bring up our material,” she said. “The audience informs us.”Tehran Von Ghasri, a Los Angeles-based comedian, was among those who said an increasing share of “hypersensitive” audience members seemed to be coming to shows and either inviting confrontation, “looking to be offended” — or both.Mr. Kilgallon said social media was also to blame. He has noticed that audience members are now quick to pull out their phones if a controversial topic is being discussed or a tense moment arises. But he said that the fundamentals of comedy remained the same.“Over the last five years, people come up to me after a show and say, ‘It’s got to be tough these days doing comedy — everyone’s so sensitive,’” Mr. Kilgallon said. “And I say, ‘No, it’s not.’ I perform in the bluest parts of the country and some of the reddest parts of the country. If you’re funny — no matter what the joke is, people laugh.” More

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      Mickey Gilley, Country Star Whose Club Inspired ‘Urban Cowboy,’ Dies at 86

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      Mr. Gilley, who had more than 30 chart-topping records, owned a Texas nightclub that was behind a country music revival.Mickey Gilley, the hit singer and piano player whose Texas nightclub was the inspiration for the movie “Urban Cowboy” and the glittering country music revival that accompanied it, died on Saturday at a hospital in Branson, Mo. He was 86.His publicist, Zach Farnum, announced the death but did not cite a cause.A honey-toned singer with a warm, unhurried delivery, Mr. Gilley had 17 No. 1 country singles from 1974 to 1983, including “I Overlooked an Orchid” and “Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time.”He placed 34 records in the country Top Ten during his two decades on the charts. But he was ultimately best known as the proprietor, with Sherwood Cryer, of Gilley’s, the honky-tonk in Pasadena, Texas, that became one of the most storied nightspots in country music.Established in 1971 as a local bar catering to 9-to-5ers in and around Pasadena, an oil refinery town near Houston, Gilley’s was large, encompassing 48,000 square feet, with a parquet dance floor that could accommodate up to 5,000 people. Among the hall’s main attractions was its mechanical bull, a repurposed piece of rodeo-training equipment on which the club’s more intrepid patrons vied to see who could ride the longest before being thrown off.Just as striking was the synchronized line dancing of its boot-scooting regulars, attired, as was the fashion, in crisply pressed Wranglers, big, gleaming belt buckles and immaculately cared-for Stetson hats.Extending rodeo iconography beyond the provinces of the American West, Gilley’s shaped dance scenes in cities and suburbs across the nation, especially after an article about the club, “The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America’s Search for True Grit,” appeared in Esquire magazine in 1978.Two years later, Paramount Pictures released the feature film “Urban Cowboy,” starring John Travolta and Debra Winger. Much of the film was shot at Gilley’s.“Country Night Fever” was how Mr. Gilley characterized the movie in interviews, alluding to “Saturday Night Fever,” the disco-themed 1977 movie that also starred Mr. Travolta. Nevertheless — even as “Urban Cowboy” helped country music become more popular than disco — Mr. Gilley was quick to add that “Urban Cowboy” cast his establishment in a glossier light than its warehouselike ambience, mud-wrestling contests and reputation as a hotbed for brawling might have warranted.“There wasn’t anything nice about that club,” he said in a 2019 interview with The Santa Fe New Mexican. “I mean, Gilley’s was a joint. But it worked because of what it represented — country music and the cowboy image.”Mr. Gilley, left, performing with his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis at Gilley’s, his nightclub in Pasadena, Texas, in the mid-1970s.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesGilley’s and the scene that coalesced around it also brought country music newfound crossover success with adult contemporary radio. The soundtrack to “Urban Cowboy,” replete with contributions from rock and pop acts like Boz Scaggs, Bonnie Raitt and the Eagles, was certified platinum three times over for sales of three million copies. It spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the country album chart and climbed as high as No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Pop Albums.This crossover impulse was second nature to Mr. Gilley, who had successfully navigated the country charts in the ’70s with honky-tonk remakes of R&B staples like Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and Big Joe Turner’s “Chains of Love.” Both were No. 1 country singles for Mr. Gilley, as was his version, from the “Urban Cowboy” soundtrack, of the soul singer Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.”“Orange Blossom Special/Hoedown,” a recording from the soundtrack credited to Mr. Gilley’s Urban Cowboy Band, won a Grammy for best country instrumental performance in 1981.Well into his 30s before he had his first hit, and over 40 when his nightclub achieved widespread acclaim, Mr. Gilley was something of a late bloomer. This was certainly the case compared with his flamboyant cousin Jerry Lee Lewis, whose meteoric early success had reached its zenith — and flamed out, after his marriage to his adolescent cousin — by the time he turned 22.Another of Mr. Gilley’s piano-playing cousins, the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, achieved fame (and notoriety, for widely publicized scandals involving prostitutes) more readily than Mr. Gilley did as well.Mickey Leroy Gilley was born on March 9, 1936, in Natchez, Miss., to Irene (Lewis) and Arthur Gilley. Raised in nearby Ferriday, La., he grew up singing gospel harmonies with his cousins Mr. Swaggart and Mr. Lewis, and sneaking into local juke joints with them to hear blues and honky-tonk music.Mr. Gilley’s mother bought him a piano when he was 10, shortly before he came under the boogie-woogie-inspired tutelage of his cousin Jerry. Mr. Gilley would not begin playing professionally, though, until he was in his 20s, several years after he had moved to Houston to work in the construction industry.He released his first single, “Ooh Wee Baby,” in 1957, only to wait 55 years for it to find an audience: It ran in a television commercial for Yoplait yogurt in 2012. His first recording to reach the charts, “Is It Wrong (For Loving You)” (1959), featured the future star Kenny Rogers on bass guitar.Settling in Pasadena in the early ’60s, Mr. Gilley began performing regularly at the Nesadel Club, a rough-and-tumble honky-tonk owned by his future business partner, Mr. Cryer. His recording career, however, did not gain traction until 1974, when Hugh Hefner’s Playboy label rereleased his version of “Room Full of Roses,” which had been a No. 2 pop hit in 1949 for the singer Sammy Kaye. Mr. Gilley’s iteration became a No. 1 country single.Mr. Gilley subsequently enjoyed a decade at or near the top of the country charts. At the height of the Urban Cowboy boom, he had six consecutive No. 1 hits.As the movement that Gilley’s had spawned gave way to the back-to-basics neo-traditionalism of mid-80s country music, Mr. Gilley increasingly turned his attention to his nightclub, where protracted conflict with Mr. Cryer, who died in 2009, had previously caused the men to dissolve their partnership. Mr. Gilley closed the honky-tonk in 1989, a year before a fire destroyed much of the building.He opened the first of two theaters in Branson, Mo., in 1990, and later established night spots in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. No longer a presence on the country charts, he also marketed his own brand of beer and made cameos on prime-time television shows like “The Fall Guy” and “Fantasy Island.”Mr. Gilley suffered a fall while helping friends move a sofa in 2009, an accident that left him temporarily paralyzed. He was unable to play the piano again, but he otherwise recovered and resumed singing in public well into his 80s.Mr. Gilley is survived by his wife, Cindy Loeb Gilley; a daughter, Kathy Gilley; three sons, Michael, Gregory and Keith Ray Gilley; four grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. He was married to Vivian McDonald from 1962 until her death in 2019. His first marriage, to Geraldine Garrett, ended in divorce.The mechanical bull was certainly a major draw at Gilley’s, but Mr. Gilley always made it clear that it was not his idea. Mr. Cryer had the it installed, unbeknownst to Mr. Gilley, who at the time was on the road performing.“He went and made a deal with these people with this mechanical contraption who’d used it as a rodeo-training device,” Mr. Gilley said in his interview with The New Mexican, recalling the circumstances that led to the arrival of the mechanical bull at his venue. “It was never meant to be in a nightclub.”Vimal Patel contributed reporting. More

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      Making Up for Lost Time as Ibiza’s Clubs Reopen

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      IBIZA, Spain — As the sun was setting over Ibiza last Saturday, the party at Ushuaïa was just hitting its stride. Nearly 8,000 people had gathered at the outdoor mega-club for the beginning of the island’s first clubbing season in three years, and the crowd — including many women in tasseled bikinis and tanned, musclebound men — seemed intent on making up for lost time.While Artbat, a Ukrainian D.J. duo, played a high-octane blend of house and techno, the dancers heaved around the club’s large pool, cheered on by guests from the overlooking hotel balconies. In the V.I.P. section, a parade of staff carrying sparklers announced that a high-paying guest had just purchased another pricey bottle of champagne.Sipping a drink at the bar, Mina Mallet, a heavily tattooed 25-year-old finance worker from Zurich, said that the reopening of Ibiza’s clubs marked the end of a difficult and tedious period in Europe. “It means a new beginning: for enjoying life, enjoying our freedom and getting wasted,” she said. “I actually think people are going harder than before.”After more than two years of uncertainty for nightclubs, governments across Europe have gradually dropped many of their pandemic restrictions over the last few months, allowing clubs to reopen with a sense of relative stability for the first time in two years.On the dance floor at Amnesia, one of Ibiza’s mega-clubs. Roughly 30,000 people traveled to Ibiza this past weekend to go to the clubs, according to a local nightlife association.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesIn many countries, including Spain, Germany and Britain, governments now allow clubs to welcome visitors without any vaccine checks, masks or distancing requirements. And although the pandemic is not yet over, and a new variant could appear anytime to spoil the fun, Europe’s clubbers seem ready to relive the days when nobody had ever heard of Covid-19.The return of the clubs has come as a relief to many workers in the nightlife sector, which has been especially hard-hit. Before the pandemic, 45 percent of the gross domestic product in the Balearic Islands, which include Ibiza, came from tourism, for which clubbing is a major draw. In the first half of last year, tourist spending in Ibiza and the nearby island of Formentera was less than one-third of prepandemic levels, according to the Statistical Institute of the Balearic Islands.Ocio de Ibiza, a local nightlife association, estimates that 30,000 people traveled to Ibiza this past weekend to go to the clubs, a number on par with a prepandemic opening weekend. Sanjay Nandi, the chief executive of the group that runs the large Pacha nightclub, said in an interview before the opening that advance ticket sales had surpassed those of previous years. Of the island’s major clubs, only one, Privilege, does not yet have plans to reopen this summer.“I know we are very lucky,” Nandi said, explaining that, like other clubs, Pacha had received help from Spain’s government in the form of a furlough program for staff. The company also received a loan of 18 million euros, about $19 million, from the government’s Recapitalization Fund for pandemic-hit businesses, and it was able to get some revenue through its constellation of restaurants and other venues. Nandi said that the size of Ibiza’s major clubs — whose capacities range from around 3,000 to 7,800 — and their associated political clout allowed them to weather the pandemic better than smaller venues. “Being bigger helps,” he said.Nearly 8,000 people gathered at the outdoor mega-club Ushuaïa on Saturday.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesA professional dancer getting ready for the opening party at Pacha, another Ibiza club.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesOther clubs in Europe have been less fortunate. According to France24, the French broadcaster, 200 clubbing venues in the country had permanently closed because of the pandemic as of last fall. A survey released in October by the Night Time Industries Association, a British lobbying group, found that 22 percent of the city’s clubs had shuttered since the pandemic’s start.Amy Lamé, London’s “night czar,” a city hall official charged with liaising between nightlife businesses and city authorities, said in an interview that the city was still doing its own assessment of the damage done. Although the British government gave relief grants to venues, she said, the country’s unpredictable public health measures, “which sometimes changed from one day to the next,” had posed a particular challenge.Lamé added that the city had also provided targeted aid to what she described as the most “vulnerable” venues, including L.G.B.T.Q. clubs. Those grants meant that all of London’s L.G.B.T.Q. clubs survived the pandemic, she said. “If we lose those kinds of venues, we lose part of the essence of London,” said Lamé.Perhaps the most ambitious measures to protect the clubbing sector were taken in Berlin, another European clubbing capital where nightlife is recognized as a key driver of the city economy. According to a 2018 study by the Berlin Club Commission, tourists visiting the German capital for its club scene contributed approximately $1.7 billion to the city’s economy.Partygoers at Ushuaïa. Before the pandemic, 45 percent of the gross domestic product in the Balearic Islands, which include Ibiza, came from tourism, for which clubbing is a major draw. Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesAs well as offering financial aid for small and large businesses during the pandemic, German officials classified clubs as cultural venues, allowing them to access a 2-billion-euro fund meant for institutions such as museums and theaters. In Berlin, extra emergency funding was also made available for shuttered clubs. Kyle Van Horn, the managing director of Trauma Bar und Kino, a Berlin club and arts venue, said the pandemic was a turning point in the way officials have treated clubs. “I think there was a change from the side of the government; they are finally seeing us as relevant contributors to society,” he said.In an interview, Lutz Leichsenring, a Club Commission spokesman, said that thanks to the support, no Berlin clubs had closed as a direct result of pandemic restrictions. “The aid money was done in a very well-targeted way,” he said by phone. He explained that the pandemic had vindicated yearslong efforts by Berlin’s clubbing industry to mobilize as a political force. “We were very well networked as a sector,” he said.And perhaps inevitably, the social changes of the past two years are also making themselves felt on the dance floor. Steven Braines, a co-founder of He.She.They, a London-based record label and event company organizing L.G.B.T.Q.-inclusive parties at Ibiza’s Amnesia mega-club this season, said club organizers were now more focused on expanding gender and racial diversity among the acts they booked, which he said was partly a result of the heightened international visibility of movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter during the pandemic.Braines added that he sensed that men “maybe aren’t as predatorial anymore on the dance floor.” Club culture would now be reshaped, he said, by a cohort of 18- to 20-year-olds who were now visiting clubs for the first time, and who had less experience with drugs and alcohol. “This will be a new breed,” he said.The dance floor at Amnesia on Friday night.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesUshuaïa on Saturday.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesOn Friday night, some of these newcomers were gathering outside Amnesia, on a highway outside Ibiza’s largest town. “I had just turned 18 when the pandemic happened, and everyone told me that I had lost the best years of going out,” said Sebastian Ochoa, 20, who works in social media in Madrid. “When I go out at home, there’s a limit, but here there’s the party, the after-party, the after-after-party. I’m here to make up for lost time.”A few feet away, Richard Stone, 58, said he had been coming to the club for 30 years, often four times a season, so he felt he couldn’t miss the reopening. “This is a milestone,” he said.A few minutes away by car, at Pacha, near Ibiza’s main yacht marina, a more glamorous party was taking place. A line of several hundred snaked around the exterior of the hulking white club, which includes a rooftop terrace, garden, restaurant and gift shop, where visitors could buy a scooter helmet bearing the club’s logo ($221) or a Pacha-branded game of Monopoly.The upstairs area of the V.I.P. section, where guests paid up to 25,000 euros for a table, was filled with groups of men in white dinner jackets and women in sparkly minidresses dancing to a set by Solomun, a German-Bosnian D.J. At one of the tables, Arthur Coutis, a 20-year-old visitor from Paris, said he had the feeling that the pandemic had led clubbers to shift their priorities.“Before it was much more about money and drinking — now it’s much more about freedom, and enjoying the music,” he said, looking out over the crowd. As the music reached a new climax, a nearby group raised a bottle of champagne, and screamed with joy.Opening weekend celebrations at Pacha.The club received about $19 million from the Spanish government’s Recapitalization Fund for pandemic-hit businesses.Samuel Aranda for The New York Times More

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      New York’s Dancehall Parties Are ‘A Different Type of Turn Up’

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      This story is part of an occasional series exploring nightlife in New York.CJ Milan was racing around a yacht just after midnight on Sunday, handing out hundreds of foam glow sticks.“When the boat starts moving, we play soca music,” she said with a mischievous smile as she paused for a moment to watch the dance floor. “It gets everybody turned up.”Ms. Milan was running Yacht Fete, a 1,000-person reggae, dancehall, soca and afrobeats party that takes place monthly on the Hudson River.The yacht is just one of the venues that she uses to host her recurring Reggae Fest dance parties, which she started organizing in New York in 2015.The dance floor at Yacht Fete, a monthly party held on a yacht on the Hudson River.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesDancehall, a party-friendly byproduct of reggae music with faster tempos and the cadence of hip-hop, came out of Jamaica in the late 1970s.And New York’s dancehall parties, which are often thrown by and for the city’s large Caribbean communities, bring people together on flamboyant dance floors where they can whine, dagger, line dance and drop into full splits.Ms. Milan, who estimates that she has drawn more than 170,000 people to Reggae Fest events in New York over the last seven years, has since expanded the parties to Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Los Angeles.But even as she broadens her reach, she’s still figuring out how to keep picky New York crowds happy.“New York is a different type of turn up,” she said. “We just have so much more to cover music-wise because our city is so diverse.”Partygoers held up foam glowsticks as the yacht left Pier 40 in Lower Manhattan.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesShe said that at each of her parties, she tries to have a team of D.J.s ready to play whatever type of music the crowd is responding to most vividly that night.Marvin Smith, who’s known at Reggae Fest as D.J. Legend, said that he plays anything from reggaeton to dancehall to keep people moving.“When I see the hairdos sweated out, when I see people who are looking around like, ‘Where are my keys? Who has my phone?’” Mr. Smith said. “When we see that, we know it’s mission accomplished.”And Ms. Milan said they try to throw something in the mix for every kind of listener.“Dancehall has different levels — some of it is hardcore,” she said, which often appeals to a younger generation. “But then you get the older generation who want to hear Mr. Vegas or Sean Paul.”She added: “Then you got other ones that say, ‘I want that sexy stuff’ — they want to hear what the women have to say,” referring to artists like Spice.Sean Paul performed at Elsewhere, a venue in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, late last month.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesYet there are certain shows that bring out dancehall fans of all kinds. As Sean Paul performed at Elsewhere in Bushwick on April 25, the crowd reflected his fan base, spanning an international and intergenerational mix.Paul, 49, a mellow and singular figure who’s responsible for bringing dancehall to American radio stations in the early 2000s, said that his earliest memories of Jamaican dancehall parties are from when he was 14.He would sneak out with friends to a street party called Frontline, where they would often spot dancehall legends like Tiger and Shabba Ranks and dance under the open night sky.“That was the one thing I didn’t like about clubs here at first,” he said. “You can’t see the stars. You can’t feel the moon, there’s no island breeze blowing on your face while you’re listening to some real, authentic rumbling bass lines.”But when he started coming to New York in the late 1990s, he discovered a more “grimy” dancehall scene with audiences for every niche.One of his favorite spots in the early 2000s was a two-story warehouse in Brooklyn where the parquet floors moved “at least a foot” as people danced.Dancing by the bar to Sean Paul. “It’s the only city that I knew at the time where I was able to hit four clubs in one night,” he said of his early trips to New York.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times“It’s the only city that I knew at the time where I was able to hit four clubs in one night,” he said before rattling off a list of the places he would visit.“Two clubs in Jersey — one is a Jamaican club, and then one is a Guyanese club,” he said. “And then one in Brooklyn, which is a straight hardcore hip-hop type vibe, and the same thing back up in Manhattan.”But many of the clubs that Paul remembered are now long gone. And while smaller spaces that play Caribbean music are still sprinkled around the city, there are only a handful of parties and shows that consistently bring out thousands of people.Cathy Rodriguez, 25, who was at Ms. Milan’s yacht party last weekend, said that she’s been coming to Reggae Fest parties for years.Often traveling up from the Washington area, where she now lives, Ms. Rodriguez said that she’ll sometimes plan her trips around the parties.Tempest Williams, Aniquiana Kurtz, Christina Mejia, Cathy Rodriguez and Maria Traore posed for a photo on the top deck at Yacht Fete.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times“I will legit just go out of town for Reggae Fest,” she said. “Like, don’t get me wrong, I will go see my family, of course. But I will be like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to New York and we’re going to Reggae Fest.’”Ms. Rodriguez said that one of the main pulls of the event was the chance to hear her favorite music.“Dancehall will always be my first baby,” she said. “Growing up in New York City, particularly in the Bronx, dancehall has always been a huge part of my life. Like my mom listens to dancehall on Sunday morning when she’s cleaning.”And even beyond her favorite songs, what keeps Ms. Rodriguez showing up again and again is the lively dance floor.“In the Caribbean community, we say ‘stush’ a lot, and stush basically means like, standing still,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a regular nightclub in New York City, but people are like standing still, smoking hookah — you know, they’re not really enjoying themselves to the music.”“CJ’s vision when it comes to Reggae Fest is like, ‘I want people to come, I want people to turn up, but I want people to dance,’” she continued. “That’s why I keep going to her events, because it’s guaranteed I’m going to dance my ass off the whole night.” More

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      Régine, Whose Discotheque Gave Nightlife a New Dawn, Dies at 92

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      Credited with opening the first disco, she built an empire of glittering playgrounds for the Beautiful People in Paris, New York and beyond.She was born Rachelle Zylberberg in Belgium as the Great Depression struck: a Jewish child abandoned in infancy by her unwed mother and left alone at 12 when her father, a drunken Polish refugee, was arrested by the Nazis in France. She hid in a convent, where she was beaten. After the war, she sold bras in the streets of Paris and vowed to become rich and famous someday.In 1957, calling herself Régine, she borrowed money and opened a basement nightclub in a Paris backstreet. She could not afford live music, so the patrons danced to a jukebox. Business was bad, and the young proprietor, in a decision that would have social historians wagging for decades, concluded that the problem was the jukebox.“When the music stopped, you could hear snogging in the corners,” she told the BBC, using British slang for kissing and necking. “It killed the atmosphere. Instead, I installed two turntables so there was no gap in the music. I was barmaid, doorman, bathroom attendant, hostess, and I also put on the records. It was the first-ever discotheque, and I was the first-ever club disc jockey.”And so began Chez Régine, widely regarded as the world’s first discotheque. In the 1970s, its owner built a $500 million empire of 23 clubs in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, including Régine’s in Manhattan, the most famous nightspot of its era, catering to the stretch-limousine crowd of arts and entertainment stars, society celebs, princes, playboys and Beautiful People.Régine, whose chain of clubs peaked in the 1980s and faded in the ’90s, a victim of an open drug culture and radical changes in the club scene, died on Sunday. She was 92.Her death was announced on Instagram by her friend the French actor and comedian Pierre Palmade, who did not specify the cause or say where she died.A plump, effervescent empresaria with flaming red hair, Régine was known to everyone who was anyone as “the Queen of the Night.” With enormous fanfare, she opened her New York club in 1976 on the ground floor of Delmonico’s Hotel, at 59th Street and Park Avenue. She moved into the hotel’s penthouse suite. The city had just survived a fiscal crisis, but to her chic clientele that hardly mattered.Régine made exclusivity an art form. She attracted privileged classes by selling 2,000 club memberships for $600 each, and by requiring tuxedos and evening gowns to get in. She installed a flashing “disco full” sign outside to discourage the hoi polloi and a slide-back peephole at the door to inspect supplicants for admission to the pounding music and gold-plated glamour of her Valhalla.Brooke Shields, Régine and the French designer Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 in New York.PL Gould/Images/Getty ImagesShe embraced celebrities: Salvador Dalí, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Joan Collins, Andy Warhol, Milos Forman, Mick Jagger, Anthony Quinn, Brooke Shields. Nobodies were admitted for stiff cover charges after the New York State Liquor Authority threatened to sue her for “social discrimination.” She managed publicity masterfully. She once wore a live boa constrictor, a gift from Federico Fellini.On a given night, you might see Franςoise Sagan, Brigitte Bardot, Diane von Furstenberg, Ben Vereen, Hubert de Givenchy and Stevie Wonder in a crowd with Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardner and Robert Mitchum, with Jack Nicholson and John Gotti conspiring at a table. Régine was strict about enforcing her dress code. Her friend Mick Jagger was once refused entry for showing up in sneakers.Régine danced all night with Gene Kelly, then disappeared with him for 15 days. “Yes, we had private relations,” she told Elle in 2011.She recalled John Wayne’s awed face at their first meeting: “Are you the Régine?”And Robin Leach, chronicler of the rich and famous, told her that his reporting from Paris was a snap: “You’d just go to Régine’s every night and wait for the princesses to file in.”Régine juiced up evenings with “happenings.” One in Paris was a “Jean Harlow night.” Patrons in platinum wigs arrived in white limousines, stepped onto a white-carpeted sidewalk, and strolled up in white tuxedos and clingy white gowns with white feather boas.Saluting Bastille Day in New York, the patriots included Gov. Hugh L. Carey, Ethel Kennedy, Margaux Hemingway, Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner (at the time, the chairman of the United States Bicentennial Commission), and Senator George S. McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate.“If anyone had second thoughts about celebrating an event that theoretically ended the privileged class, in a room some 40 times as crowded as the Bastille dungeon on that fateful day, no one made them audible,” The New York Times reported. “To be fair, it was somewhat difficult to make anything other than isolated words audible.”By the late ’70s, Régine’s expansion was peaking. Besides flagships in Paris and New York, she had clubs in Monte Carlo, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Saint Tropez, London, Düsseldorf, Los Angeles, Miami, Cairo, Kuala Lumpur and many other cities. All were in prime locales. Her marketing analyses included lists of each city’s elite, to be cultivated as club-goers and financiers.Régine at the debut of her nightclub in Miami in the early 1980s.PL Gould/IMAGES/Getty ImagesAsked about financing her clubs, she insisted that all she invested was her name, never her money. Some of her clubs, she explained, were franchises owned by local entrepreneurs who paid up to $500,000 and gave her cuts of the action to use her name. She also owned restaurants, cafes and a magazine; sold lines of clothing and perfumes; and sponsored dance classes and ocean cruises.She was an entertainer on the side, with small roles in films, including “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (1976), a Sherlock Holmes tale with Nicol Williamson and Laurence Olivier, and was a moderately popular singer in Paris and New York. She had a hit with a French version of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” in 1978, and she made her singing debut at Carnegie Hall in 1970.“Although Régine has a strong, dark voice, she made little effort to use it as a flexible instrument,” Robert Sherman wrote in a review for The Times. “Régine’s pert appearance and vivacious stage manner cover a multitude of inflexibilities, and the sheer exuberance of her performance was, in itself, more than sufficient enticement.”The popularity of Régine’s in New York and around the world gradually faded in the 1980s, overtaken by trendier clubs like Studio 54, the Manhattan disco founded in 1977 by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. It, too, drew the celebrities but also a sex-and-drugs clientele and crowds of hangers-on surging for a glimpse of decadent chic.“By the end of the decade, the party began to wind down,” New York magazine reported in a retrospective on Régine’s in 1999. “A new generation of club-goers deemed her club staid and stuffy, and even Régine’s most faithful devotees found it hard to resist the sexy lure of Studio 54.”“You didn’t feel like you could start doing cocaine on the tables at Regine’s,” Bob Colacello, the author and social critic, told New York. “She wasn’t giving out quaaludes to movie stars. She didn’t have bartenders with their shirts off. She didn’t have what people wanted when the times changed.”Régine’s clubs drew celebrity clients likes Salvador Dalí, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Joan Collins, Andy Warhol, Milos Forman, Mick Jagger, Anthony Quinn and Brooke Shields. The woman behind Régine’s mystique was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, on Dec. 26, 1929, to emigrants from Poland, Joseph Zylberberg and Tauba Rodstein. In an unhappy, unstable childhood, she never knew her mother, who abandoned the family and went to Argentina, but recalled her father as a charming gambler and drinker who ran a small eatery in Paris. Rachelle, as she called herself in an interview with The Boston Globe, had a brother, Maurice, and a half sister, Evelyne.As a child, she waited on tables in her father’s restaurant near Montmartre. After the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, her father was arrested and sent to a prison camp. She hid for two years in a Catholic convent, where she said she was beaten by other girls because she was Jewish. Her father escaped, and by one account she was taken hostage briefly by the Gestapo.After the war, she dreamed of a glamorous life and occasionally glimpsed what it might be like. “When I saw Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan, the focus of all eyes at the best table in a chic Deauville restaurant, I vowed one day to sit where they were,” she told The New York Post in 1973.When she was 16, she married Leon Rothcage. They had a son, Lionel Rotcage, and were divorced after a few years. In 1969, she married Roger Choukroun, who helped manage her properties. They were divorced in 2004. Her son died in 2006.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.By the end of the 1990s, Régine’s international empire had dwindled to a handful of clubs in France, a place in Istanbul and a restaurant-lounge in New York called Rage.In recent years, she lived in Paris, managed her affairs, supported charities, gave occasional parties and saw old friends. In 2015, she published a book of photographs and reminiscences, “Mes Nuits, Mes Rencontres” (My Nights, My Encounters”). Pictures showed her with Charles Aznavour, Oscar de la Renta, Diana Vreeland, Michael Jackson and many others.“My son is the only thing I miss,” she told Women’s Wear Daily. “I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. That doesn’t interest me. I want them to laugh with me and to be happy.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Nebula, a Big New Club, Wants Manhattan to Dance Again

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      Yang Gao, a newcomer to the nightlife business, took a gamble when he spent $12 million in the middle of a pandemic to carve out a 10,000-square-foot space in the heart of Midtown.Two years ago, Yang Gao and Richie Romero were watching over a very noisy and very expensive construction project: Digging down, down, down, beneath the floor of an old building on West 41st Street, just off Times Square.Mr. Gao, an entrepreneur, and Mr. Romero, a nightlife impresario, were carving out Nebula, a giant dance club. By blasting into the bedrock, the ceilings could be that much higher — 27 feet above the dance floor.Known in the tabloids as a “club king,” Mr. Romero had definite ideas about what Nebula should and should not be. The main thing was, it had to be the kind of place where people would actually dance, rather than lounge the night away in banquettes.That’s how it used to be when he started going into Manhattan from Queens as a teenager, eager to show off his moves at Tunnel, Palladium and Club USA. Everybody went out on the floor back then. You mingled. You sweated. You got into it. By age 18, Mr. Romero was working as a promoter of parties at Limelight. He was armed with a beeper and a list of more than 2,000 names and numbers. If your name was the list, Richie waved you in.Yang Gao, left, and Richie Romero in one of the V.I.P. rooms in the basement of the club.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“Manhattan was the king of the world back then,” Mr. Romero, 46, said. “The stages were bigger than the DJs. Every DJ wanted to play them.”He was sitting in Nebula’s balcony during off hours. The place was empty and quiet. He recalled an early success he had, taking on the challenge of Monday nights at the China Club and just packing the place.“I was 19 years old,” he said. “I was so excited. I thought I was a big shot.”Manhattan may still be the epicenter of finance and media, but the club scene has moved elsewhere — Miami, Berlin, Las Vegas, even Scottsdale, Ariz. These days, New York is “the little stepsister,” Mr. Romero lamented. And although Marquee is going strong on Tenth Avenue, New York’s nightlife energy has moved on to Brooklyn.With Nebula, Mr. Romero and Mr. Gao are hoping to return Manhattan to its glory nights. Mr. Gao said he plowed some $12 million into the project, a huge gamble to take in the middle of a pandemic, when nightlife was on lockdown.“Dealing with the uncertainty of it all scared the hell out of me,” Mr. Romero said.At 10,000 square feet spread over three levels, Nebula was the largest new nightclub in the city when it opened last September. The main dance floor is 5,000 square feet. A D&B sound system pumps out the beats. Six LED projection screens descend from the ceiling to enclose guests in trance-like visuals.The multimedia aspect has appealed to the tech crowd. “Every NFT company wants to come here and do something,” Mr. Romero said.Nebula has also become a go-to place for newly minted 13-year-olds: “Funny,” he added. “We’re like the king of the bar mitzvahs now.”The private events, which take place on weeknights, are a lucrative sideline to the main attraction: weekend dance parties with top DJs from around the world, including Jamie Jones, Artbat and Eric Prydz, all of whom are scheduled to perform at Nebula this month.A clubber at Nebula.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesAs New York’s clubs have become more lounge-like in recent years, with a focus on bottle service for high rollers who lay out $10,000 to $20,000 for a private table, Nebula is decidedly old school.“I want to capture the people that are artistic, that are able to go into the club and appreciate the music,” said Mr. Gao, Nebula’s owner.Mr. Gao, 42, is new to the nightlife industry. A classically trained oboist who once played in the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, he said he has a hand in several businesses, including a wine store in Astoria and East River party boats. About five years ago he started looking for club space in Manhattan, insisting the ceiling height be at least 21 feet. After signing the lease in late 2018, he sought out Mr. Romero.Nebula’s location has a long history in clubland. It was formerly Saci, Show and Arena. Most recently, it housed Circle, a Korean American spot that defined going out for a generation of the Asian and Asian American communities in New York until it closed in 2018. Mr. Romero promoted parties at all of those venues, except Circle. In recent years, he drifted out of nightlife and got into quick-service restaurants, opening a pizza chain, Zazzy’s, only to be lured back by Mr. Gao.“I believe in good bones. And this room always had good bones,” said Mr. Romero, who speaks at 200 beats per minute. “Sat down. Saw the vision. Came in here. We started putting it all together and made Nebula Nebula.”Business boomed in the brief window between opening and Omicron, Mr. Romero said. Since then, supply chain problems have led to shortages of Don Julio 1942, the club’s most popular tequila. The banquettes meant for the edges of the main dance floor didn’t arrive until last week.For those who remain wary of big crowds, Mr. Gao designed private rooms at the basement level, each with its own sound system, lights and bathroom. Despite reports of coming Covid-19 waves, he said he is optimistic.“I know that people want to come out,” Mr. Gao said. “People long for human interactions. That’s when I decided that this sector isn’t going away.”Saturday night at Nebula.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesAt 12:30 a.m. on a recent Tuesday, Nebula’s main dance floor was nearly full. As images flashed on the LED screens, several hundred clubgoers were dancing to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” The event was Tuesday Baby Tuesday, a night set aside for people who work at nightclubs.“It’s an industry night,” Jonas Young-Borra, 37, a musician and former male model who described himself as the “left-hand, right-hand” to Mr. Romero, said over the music. “You get people from other clubs who can’t go out on the weekends, plus the 21 and up crowd.”Mr. Romero, who stood watching the action on the dance floor, said that, in terms of the crowd, this was a bit slow for a Tuesday. He promised a bigger turnout the following week, when 50 Cent would be making an appearance. But after two years of social isolation, it was incredible all the same to see hundreds of bodies so close together, without masks or discernible phobias. Hostesses brought Champagne bottles topped with sparklers to the V.I.P. section.New York has changed since Mr. Romero’s Limelight youth, but he was determined that some things would not.“It’s important,” he said, “that we keep Manhattan thriving.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘La Mami’ Review: Tough Love

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      This documentary about the den mother of dancers at a Mexico City cabaret is vérité at its best.At the Cabaret Barba Azul, women get paid to dance and drink with the male patrons, a custom that dates back to the 1930s. In the beautifully-rendered documentary “La Mami,” the director and cinematographer Laura Herrero Garvín (“The Swirl”) immerses us in the behind-the-scenes world of these dancers through the lens of their den mother: Doña Olga. Like them, Doña Olga also used to spend her nights dancing for pesos, but after 45 years working various jobs at the cabaret to support her five children, she has settled into her post in the club’s dressing room-bathroom combo. There she regulates the distribution of toilet paper with an iron fist, and doles out a charming mix of motherly nurturing and fierce rebukes. Like this bit of poetry: “Men are only good for two things: for nothing, and for money.”Garvín’s adept camerawork allows the story to unfold so seamlessly in its vérité style, that the film emanates the magic of a scripted drama without revealing any noticeable interference. And it creates a palpable depth of intimacy too: from Doña Olga waving incense and whispering prayers throughout the club before the doors open, to the nervous new girl Priscilla putting on makeup in the mirror.The triumph of “La Mami” is that in depicting how Doña Olga and the Barba Azul dancers navigate a job where male pleasure dominates, the film does not look down on them, but instead revels in their humanity. And in so doing, this remarkable portrayal of female friendship offers a poignant, elemental take on the lives of working-class women in urban Mexico today.La MamiNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More