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The comedian’s first book, “She Memes Well,” balances jokes, autobiography and serious thoughts about the state of the country.When she began drafting her first collection of essays, Quinta Brunson wasn’t sure she had anything meaningful to say. More
LOS ANGELES — Amanda Kloots is not surprised that she’s famous.You don’t move to New York from Ohio at 18, go to countless thanks-but-no-thanks auditions, dust yourself off again and again, or practice tap dance nightly on your small apartment bathroom floor in case a spot in the ensemble for “42nd Street” or the Rockettes opens because you think you are best suited to a life of quiet anonymity. More
The century-old Drama Book Shop in Manhattan struggled for years. Then “Hamilton” happened.A sculptural representation of a bookworm — 140 feet of scripts and songbooks, twisted along a steel skeleton — corkscrews across the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan. It starts with ancient Greek texts and, 2,400 volumes later, spills into a pile that includes “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.”This 3,500-pound tribute to theatrical history is the centerpiece of the century-old bookstore’s new location, opening Thursday on West 39th Street.The shop — like so many bookstores around the country — had brushes with death, caused not only by e-commerce but also by fire and flood, before encountering a rent hike it could not withstand, in 2018. The beloved institution, where students, artists, scholars and fans could browse memoirs and bone up for auditions, was in danger of closing.Then came an unexpected rescue. Four men enriched by “Hamilton,” including the musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda; its director, Thomas Kail; its lead producer, Jeffrey Seller; and the theater owner, James L. Nederlander, bought the store from its longtime owners. Kail has a particularly close relationship with the shop — 20 years ago, just out of college, he formed a small theater company in its basement. After he teamed up with Miranda, the two worked on “In the Heights” there.“I was not born in a trunk; I was born in the basement of the Drama Book Shop,” Kail said. “All of my early creative conversations and relationships were forged in that shop, and the thought of it not existing was painful. I couldn’t imagine New York City without it, and I didn’t want to imagine New York City without it.”The store’s decorations include replicas of armchairs used in the musical “Hamilton.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times More
Created by the artist Sophia Al-Maria, the new series resituates Nin’s erotic short story collection in 1955 Morocco, a year before the country threw off its colonialist yoke.The French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” can resonate differently in an on-screen Moroccan setting. Most famous, perhaps, is the “Casablanca” version, in which the clientele of Rick’s Café sing it loud and proud to drown out the voices of the occupying Germans. More
Activists are trying to preserve the prison he was sent to after his conviction for “indecency,” saying his life is an important part of Britain’s history.READING, England —-The metal stairway creaks and groans underfoot on the way to cell C. 3.3, a bare oblong room of painted brick behind a large and forbidding prison door.It was here that Oscar Wilde was incarcerated for around 18 months in the late 19th century because of his homosexuality, and this was the inspiration for his grimly realistic portrayal of life behind bars, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”“You feel goose bumps going in there,” said Matt Rodda, a lawmaker representing part of this town, around 40 miles west of London, who compared the prison — closed on health and safety grounds in 2013 — to a time capsule.But few have seen the prison, which is rarely opened to the public, and moves to turn it into a public space have reached an impasse.Last month a 2.6 million pound bid — the equivalent of $3.7 million — from the municipality, Reading Council, to buy and convert the prison into a museum and arts center was rejected as too low by the government, which owns the property.Several movie stars, including the Reading-born actress Kate Winslet, support plans to open the site as — seemingly — does the street artist Banksy, one of whose murals is said to appear on one of the prison walls.“It’s got tremendous potential,” said Karen Rowland, a councilor in Reading with special responsibility for cultural issues, who is originally from New York and thinks the location is of importance not only as an artistic and cultural asset.Matt Rodda MP, the Labour Party member of parliament for Reading East (R), and Heritage consultant Karen Rowland (L), at the site of the Victorian jail and the ancient Reading Abbey.Mary Turner for The New York Times“Doubling that with LGBTQ+ interest, and having come from living right next to Stonewall in New York City, I know the value and the importance of a national heritage site for that community,” she said, referring to the Greenwich Village bar in New York credited as the starting place of the gay rights movement.The town of Reading proved to be an important place in the life of Oscar Wilde, a celebrated literary figure until 1895, when he was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel in London and subsequently convicted of “gross indecency.” When he was transferred from a prison in London to Reading Gaol, it was supposed to be an improvement in his conditions. But prison rules still forbade most social interaction, the food was appalling and the sanitation worse.For an aesthete and sybarite like Wilde, incarceration was a crushing change of fortune depicted vividly in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which he wrote after his release. It recounts the fate of an inmate who was hanged in the prison grounds.“Each narrow cell in which we dwellIs a foul and dark latrine,And the fetid breath of living DeathChokes up each grated screen,And all, but Lust, is turned to dustIn Humanity’s machine”Gyles Brandreth, a writer, broadcaster, actor and former lawmaker who is honorary president of the Oscar Wilde Society, said the prison symbolized Wilde’s place in global literary, cultural and social history and needed to be saved.“There are not many literary figures whose life as well as their work plays a part in the national story, and indeed in the international story,” he said. “We are fascinated by his rise and by his fall and, because of the extraordinary change in attitudes to homosexuality over the century, he also has a place in social history. What we get in Reading Gaol is that transition from triumph to tragedy.”The Oscar Wilde gate outside the perimeter wall of the Victorian jail in Reading, England.Mary Turner for The New York TimesWilde’s situation in jail eventually improved when a new prison governor granted him access to more books and to writing paper. With that he was able to complete “De Profundis,” a lengthy letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, that included some more optimistic messages.“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me,” he wrote, citing his plank bed, loathsome food, hard labor, the “dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame.”He added, “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualizing of the soul.”In that spirit, those seeking to convert the jail believe that Reading, too, can turn the suffering of its former prisoners to something beneficial to the public. Local campaigners include Toby Davies, artistic director of the RABBLE Theatre, which in 2016 performed a play about the trial of Oscar Wilde in the chapel of the prison.“It was extraordinary, it will live with me for ever,” he said. “It’s a cliché, but it really does get in your blood, it is so dark and miserable — it feels like The Shawshank Redemption when you are in there. But as a result, there is something massively positive that comes out of that, that you think this is an opportunity for good.”Toby Davies, the artistic director of the RABBLE Theatre, which performed a play about Wilde’s trial at the prison in 2016.Mary Turner for The New York TimesReading Council’s bid for the site also aims to show off other aspects of the history of a town that was the burial place of King Henry I in 1136 but is arguably better known to most Britons for its big rail station.Tony Page, the deputy leader of Reading Council, said its plan would focus on arts and culture, accentuate the history of the jail — where Irish Republican prisoners were also held in the early 20th century — but also draw visitors to a neighboring site where King Henry I is buried.The precise location of the tomb has not been identified; it might be under a parking lot, as happened with Richard III in Leicester. Reading Abbey was largely destroyed in the 16th century and parts of it have been built over, though many ruins remain.Mr. Page, of Reading Council, said the Ministry of Justice, which owns Reading Prison, appeared to want around double the council’s bid for the site. That, he said, was unrealistic because it was based on prepandemic valuations and incorrect assumptions, made in an unsuccessful private sector bid, that planning laws would permit significant housing to be constructed on the site.Reading Council’s current proposal includes a much smaller amount of home-building and a boutique hotel, to help finance the conversion of the prison into a museum and arts center.Given that the site is costing the government around £250,000 a year to mothball, Mr. Page is frustrated that the ministry plans to put the site back on sale rather than enter into talks with him.Tony Page, the deputy leader of Reading Council, at Reading Civic Center.Mary Turner for The New York TimesIn a statement, the ministry said that “following discussions with the Council, the prison will be put back on the property market. Any sale will seek the best value for taxpayers and be reinvested into the justice system, while ensuring planning requirements for the historic site are met.”Campaigners have not given up yet, however. Mr. Rodda, the local lawmaker, wants a meeting with the government and said he hoped that other finance, perhaps from crowd funding, could top up the council’s bid.Like some others he is unenthusiastic about the council’s plans to build a boutique hotel on the site of a prison where many suffered and some died. Mr. Davies, the theater director, feels the same, though he thinks that it might be a price worth paying to transform a symbol of brutal penal servitude into one of culture and opportunity.That, he added, would be “an extraordinarily positive message from a town that has been associated with a train station, and shopping, and not much more.” More
Ruth Padel tells the great composer’s life story, more profoundly than most biographies, in “Beethoven Variations.”Though much is known about Beethoven, whole swaths of his life remain elusive. His deafness, for one thing. He started experiencing hearing loss before he was 30. But how extensive was the initial problem? How quickly did it worsen? It’s not clear.His most revealing words on the subject come in a letter he wrote (though never sent) to his brothers in 1802, while seeking isolation and resting his ears in Heiligenstadt, on the outskirts of Vienna. In the Heiligenstadt Testament, as it became known, his fear comes through poignantly. But what did it feel like to go deaf? What sensations did he experience? What did music sound like to him?The British poet Ruth Padel tries to fathom this mystery, and other long-mythologized strands of the composer’s life story, in “Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life,” recently published in the United States. Padel’s imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read.Padel’s imagery and imagination took our critic deeper into Beethoven than many biographies he had read.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesIn one of the first poems, “On Not Needing Other People,” Padel describes the 13-year-old Beethoven visiting the Breunings, a rich, cultured family that befriended him. Most books on the composer present this episode as an opportunity for the young Beethoven to enjoy some familial companionship — one of the sons became a lifelong friend — and develop career skills by teaching piano to some of the children.But Padel dwells on how different, how apart, Beethoven must have felt, even while savoring the family’s attention. The mother told her children to let their young visitor alone when he slipped into, as Padel puts it, “the solitude she calls raptus” and displayed his “surly way of shouldering people off,” his “fits of reverie, lost/in a re-tuning of the spheres.” As Padel perceives it, Beethoven early on drifted into states that prefigured how deafness would increasingly isolate him:This boy has no idea that before he’s thirtysome inflamed wet muddle of labyrinth and cochlea,thin as a cicada wing, will clog his earswith a whistling buzz, then glue them into silence.In “Moonlight Sonata,” Padel, in an imaginative leap, describes that famous piano work as music of loss — not just of love, but of hearing: “Bass clef/High treble only once/and in despair.” For Beethoven, she continues, this is the new “shocked calm of Is it true.” Is this “what it sounds like, going deaf?”In a poem about Beethoven’s five-month stay in Heiligenstadt, Padel recounts her own visit there — with views of the Danube canal and vineyards in bud — as she follows his steps into a cobbled yard: “God invents curious/torture for his favourites. He’s thirty-one./Fate has swung a wrecking ball.” Beethoven has walked into a place “of zero sum,” she writes, where “he must cast himself as victim or as hero.”Though he “cannot hear the driving rain,” he is sketching a funeral march — a symphony — taking him down a new path. In “Eroica” Padel arrestingly describes that path:You are havoc on the brink, a jackhammershattering the night and soaring past world-sorrow.Against everything that can happento you or anyone, you pitch experimentand the next new key, ever more remote.Most traditional biographers are reticent about guessing how Beethoven’s deafness affected his composing. Padel, though, suggests — daringly but compellingly — that Beethoven’s isolating deafness contributed to his greatness. “What we forget,” she writes, “makes us who we are” — perhaps for Beethoven that eventually included the actual sound of music. Describing what she felt as she examined the manuscript of the late Op. 131 String Quartet, Padel asks, “Does being deaf break the chains?”“Could he,” she writes, “have written this otherwise?”Padel knows her history. But a poet is free to inhabit her subject and elaborate on the record. And she describes Beethoven’s music vibrantly, as in her acute phrases on the sublime slow movement of the Op. 132 String Quartet: “Cloud iridescence”; “Wave-shadow like mourning ribbon”; “Quiet as a wreath of sleep/for anyone in sorrow.”A writer and teacher, Padel has also explored ancient Greek culture, the contemporary issues of refugees and homelessness, and science. (Darwin was her great-great-grandfather, and her book “Darwin: A Life in Poems” was published in 2009.) The Beethoven poems are informed by her lifelong immersion in music, starting from her youth, when her father, a psychoanalyst and cellist, conscripted her into a family ensemble; she played the viola.This Beethoven book is not her first poetic biography. “Darwin: A Life in Poems,” about her great-great-grandfather, was published in 2009.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesThe book originated through her work over the past decade with the Endellion String Quartet, to whom it is dedicated. Padel first worked with the Endellion on performances of pieces by Haydn and Schubert, in which she wrote poems and read them between the movements. Asked to collaborate on a Beethoven program that included the Op. 131 Quartet, she wrote seven poems to be interspersed between that visionary work’s seven movements. As the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, in 2020, approached, she went further and wrote what is, in effect, a poetic biography.Naturally, some of the poems will speak more immediately to those with knowledge of the events and characters of Beethoven’s life. So Padel helpfully includes “Life-Notes: A Coda,” some 30 pages of short biographical bits linked to the four sections of poems (49 in all). Even these entries have poetic elegance. Explaining that Beethoven’s alcoholic, abusive father put his young son to work playing viola, she explains why the instrument appealed to her, and may have suited Beethoven: “It does not have the brilliance of the violin or power of the cello, but when playing it you hear everything going on around you, all the relationships and harmonies, from inside. It is a writer’s instrument, inward and between.”Padel’s viola. Beethoven also played that instrument, which Padel describes as “a writer’s instrument, inward and between.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesVisiting the house in Bonn, Germany, in which Beethoven was born, Padel imagines “your mother/carrying the shopping,” “your father staggering home drunk/up these stairs” to “wake you in the middle of the night.” In “Meeting Mozart,” she describes the 16-year-old Beethoven after a three-week winter journey to Vienna, “burning” to be taught by the master.Many biographers struggle to deal with this meeting between two of the titans of music history. Padel puts herself in the mind of the young Beethoven, to whom Mozart “looks like a fat little bird./Bug eyes, fidgety,/tapping his toes.” Beethoven’s performance of a Mozart sonata fails to impress its composer, who suddenly urges Beethoven to improvise.“And at last he’s caught,” Padel writes. It’s a thrilling moment in her telling.Then the news comes that his adored mother is gravely ill and Beethoven is “snatched away”:She waits till you returnto drown in the coughed-up dregsof her own lungs.There are poems about Beethoven’s hapless infatuations for unattainable women from the upper ranks of Viennese society; about his sexual activities (“Brothels? Probably. Everyone did.”); and, especially, about his long, contorted legal battle to gain custody of his young nephew Karl from his widowed sister-in-law. His obsession with being a substitute father causes a long dry spell in his composing:You’re not working. You’re a mountain kingwaylaid in your own black corridors.The final poem, “Musica Humana,” begins with a description of a postmortem examination of Beethoven’s inner ears, the auditory canal “covered in glutinous scales/shining throughout the autopsy.” Other biographies report on this, but not with such gruesomely poetic imagery. And “how he died,” Padel marvels, “lifting his fist/as if it held a bird he would release into the storm.”I thought back to an early poem about Beethoven’s bullying father:your response to challenge ever after will be attack.You will need no one. Only the relationshipof sound and key. You improvise. More
This child’s-eye view of a family’s flight from Nazi Germany keeps the perils of the adult world at a determined remove.Painting a curiously cozy portrait of refugee life, Caroline Link’s “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit” views displacement and the approaching Holocaust primarily through the experiences of a child, Anna Kemper (a captivating Riva Krymalowski). The result is a movie that’s almost as cuddly as the toy in its title.We meet 9-year-old Anna in Berlin in 1933, just before the Nazis come to power. Forced to flee to protect her father, Arthur (Oliver Masucci), a noted theater critic and prominent denouncer of Hitler, the family — including Anna’s older brother, Max (Marinus Hohmann), and their mother, Dorothea (Carla Juri) — relocates to the Swiss countryside. While the children grapple with a new language and unfamiliar customs, Arthur struggles to find work in a country he learns is experiencing an influx of Jewish intellectuals and is fearful of compromising its neutrality.A move to a meager Paris apartment only accelerates their diminishing circumstances. Yet, considering the horrors unfolding in Germany, the family’s problems feel staggeringly trivial. News that the Nazis have looted their home and burned their books, and that Arthur now has a price on his head, seems to arrive from another planet as the film focuses on Anna’s developing artistic talent. It’s difficult to sympathize with a family whose most pressing problems are a snippy French landlady (Anne Bennent) and the ability to afford private schooling for only one child. Indeed, Dorothea’s disdain for public schools (“They don’t even teach Latin there”) expresses a privilege that feels shockingly out of place.This soft-pedal, sentimental approach is clearly owed to Judith Kerr’s 1971 children’s novel, which Link and Anna Brüggemann have adapted without cracking much of a window onto the adult world. The family experiences some mild anti-Semitism, but the film carries no genuine sense of looming threat or the perils of their predicament. Much like Link’s 2003 feature, “Nowhere in Africa” — in which a wealthy Jewish family relocates to Kenya — the pace is lingering, the tone warm, the palette glossy and the mood determinedly optimistic. And as Anna moves from scribbling pictures of disasters to casting gloomy thoughts aside, the film strains to inject even a modicum of drama.“Good will always win,” Anna’s beloved godfather, Uncle Julius (a perfect Justus von Dohnányi), promises her before she leaves Berlin. That’s as accurate a summary of the movie’s message as any.When Hitler Stole Pink RabbitNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More
The quirky bookstore, which sells scripts and other theater-related work, was acquired by a team of “Hamilton” alumni after years of struggle.The Drama Book Shop, a quirky 104-year-old Manhattan specialty store that has long been a haven for aspiring artists as well as a purveyor of scripts, will reopen next month with a new location, a new look, and a new team of starry owners.Those new owners — the “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as the show’s director, Thomas Kail, lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, and the theater owner James L. Nederlander — said Wednesday that the store will have its long-delayed reopening on June 10.The opening, at 266 West 39th Street, is a sign of the team’s confidence in Times Square, which has been largely theater-free since March 12, 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic forced Broadway to close. Broadway shows are not planning to resume performances until September, but the new store owners say they are ready for business.The “Hamilton” team bought the Drama Book Shop, most recently located on West 40th Street, in early 2019 after years in which the store had struggled to survive the challenges of Manhattan real estate, e-commerce, and even a damaging flood. Kail had a particular passion for the bookstore, where he had run a small theater company in his early years as a professional; Miranda joined him there to work on “In the Heights,” a musical Kail directed. “In the Heights” has now been adapted into a film which is being released on June 11, the day after the bookstore opens.The new owners had initially hoped to reopen the store in late 2019, and then in early 2020, but the project was delayed, first by the vicissitudes of construction, and then by the pandemic. The new shop has been designed by David Korins, the “Hamilton” scenic designer, and includes a cafe.The store is encouraging visitors to make reservations online; capacity will be limited. More
