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    ‘Rare Objects’ Review: A Woman Under the Influence

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    Actors are given a long and generous leash in this sometimes compelling, sometimes tepid drama about mental illness from Katie Holmes.For long stretches of its two-hour running time, “Rare Objects,” a story of recovery and addiction based on Kathleen Tessaro’s novel of the same name, is a heavy, somewhat slow-moving drama that seems perhaps better suited to the stage.Julia Mayorga stars as Benita, a young woman recently discharged from a mental institution, who is slowly and carefully putting her life back together, one day and one paycheck at a time. She talks at length about her life with her loving but critical mother (Saundra Santiago); gets a low-paying but honest job at an esteemed antique dealer, where she receives compassionate treatment from the owners, Peter (Alan Cumming) and Ben (Derek Luke); and makes fast friends with Diana (Katie Holmes), an incredibly wealthy heiress whom she met at the hospital.“Rare Objects” proceeds sluggishly, and a bit ponderously, as characters take on a staid air and say things that mean little but sound deep, like, “Some people need to be seen before they can hear.” Holmes is a generous but indiscriminate director of actors: She has the tendency, not uncommon among actors turned directors, of extending a cast of inconsistent talent a degree of latitude better reserved for the heaviest hitters. (She doesn’t have this problem with her own performance, which is both compelling and well-situated in the context of the film.)At times, the style of the movie gets in the way of the simple effects of the drama — a couple of pointlessly showy long takes add nothing and are a distraction — while a few baffling creative decisions threaten to spoil the good elsewhere. Cumming has a particularly moving scene in which he grieves the anniversary of the death of a lover over a boozy dinner — a scene very nearly ruined by the inexplicable choice to surround him with multiple empty martini glasses, something no restaurant on earth would do.Rare ObjectsRated R for strong language and mature themes. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      “The Traitors” Host Alan Cumming Wore His Own Clothes on the Show

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      On “The Traitors,” a reality game show framed as a whodunit, host Alan Cumming’s wardrobe has some viewers on the edge of their seats.“The Traitors,” a new reality game show, hinges on startling revelations. In episodes of the series, which is framed as a whodunit, cast members are regularly “murdered” (kicked off). Others are “banished” (also kicked off). But some of the most astonishing reveals have nothing to do with the plot — and everything to do with what outfit the show’s host, the actor Alan Cumming, will appear in next.There are pink plaid suits. Herringbone tweed capes. Sleek little kilts. “Perhaps, rather alarmingly,” Mr. Cumming said, “the vast majority of the clothes were mine.”Some fans of “The Traitors,” which premiered this month on Peacock, said Mr. Cumming’s knack for turning natty looks became a favorite part of tuning in. “I really appreciated that he was dressing in so many colors,” said Catherine Maddox, 39, a lab manager in Boston.The series, which is based on a show from the Netherlands, arrived in the United States after a British adaptation (not hosted by Mr. Cumming) became a surprise hit last year. Contestants on the American version are a mix of celebrities made famous by past reality shows — including Arie Luyendyk (“The Bachelor”), Cirie Fields (“Survivor”), and Kate Chastain (“Below Deck”) — and people who have yet to earn their 15 minutes of fame.Mr. Cumming, whose demeanor is at once macabre and flirtatious, presides over them as they compete for a cash prize on the grounds of Ardross Castle, an estate in the Scottish Highlands once owned by an heir to the Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce empire.Many of the clothes Mr. Cumming wears on the show came from his own closet.Photographs by Euan Cherry/PeacockSam Spector, who styled Mr. Cumming for “The Traitors,” wanted to achieve an aesthetic that he described as Sherlock Holmes, with a touch of “villain from a James Bond movie.”Euan Cherry/PeacockThe set was meant to evoke “Clue,” the murder-mystery board game turned movie, said Mathieu Weekes, the production designer of “The Traitors.” To freshen up the 19th-century castle, his team decorated it with ruby red dining room chairs, a crimson love seat, an emerald couch and other vibrant furniture. “Our first reference for color was the film ‘Knives Out,’” Mr. Weekes said. “We wanted to make it feel quite quirky.”Rarely do reality show sets “have this vintage maximalism,” said Rachel Trombetta, an architectural researcher who works in film and TV. Mr. Weekes, the production designer, said that the set of “The Traitors” was “quite different to create” than those of previous reality shows he has worked on (among them: “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!”) “We wanted to break from the norm and try to give it sort of its own identity,” he said.Setting the show at such a spectacular location meant its host needed a wardrobe that would “relate to the craziness of this beautiful castle,” said Sam Spector, who styled Mr. Cumming for “The Traitors.” Thankfully, Mr. Cumming, who is Scottish, had a closet full of suits, kilts and plus fours that could serve as a foundation for the aesthetic he and Mr. Spector wanted to achieve. “We talked about trying to make this sort of dandy,” Mr. Cumming said, “this eccentric Scottish laird.” Or, as Mr. Spector put it: Sherlock Holmes, with a touch of “villain from a James Bond movie.”Robin Emry, a 31-year-old researcher in London who has seen both the British and American versions of “The Traitors,” described Mr. Cumming’s wardrobe as “Vivienne Westwood meets Vincent Price.”To make Mr. Cumming’s clothes pop even more, Mr. Spector accessorized the host in fly plaids, a type of Scottish scarf worn over one shoulder, hats, capes, sashes and opulent brooches, which tied many of his outfits together (literally and figuratively). Some of his accessories, like a pair of blue opera-length gloves, were made especially for the show.“The gloves are just hilarious,” Mr. Cumming said. He wears them with what he called “a little policeman’s cape” and a porkpie hat — an eccentric get-up that even he said pushed the limits of an already theatrical wardrobe.“It’s the most mental look,” Mr. Cumming said, “but I love it.” More

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      ‘The Traitors’ Was a UK Hit. Will the US Version Catch On?

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      A cross between “Survivor” and the party game Mafia, the competitive reality show arrives on Peacock after a British version became a word-of-mouth hit.For television fans, a favorite reality show can spawn viewing parties, themed WhatsApp groups and memorable moments quoted without context.But James Symonds, 25, a British graphic designer, recently became so obsessed with the BBC reality game show “The Traitors,” that he hosted a party at which he and his friends re-enacted its first season.“Never has a TV show ever had me like this,” Symonds said in a video interview. After watching episodes broadcast live with his partner, he said they “had so much sort of adrenaline we couldn’t sleep.”“The Traitors,” which premiered in Britain in November and has an American version arriving Thursday on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service, is an adaptation of the Dutch television game show “De Verraders.” The British version was unusual in that it was not the typical type of show broadcast on the BBC, but it was one of the most talked-about shows of 2022 in Britain.A blend of “Survivor” and the party game Mafia, “The Traitors” is set in and around a castle in Scotland. Contestants work together through a series of grueling challenges to win money that is added to a final prize fund. Participants are divided into “Traitors,” whose identities remain secret and who choose a player each day to “murder,” and “Faithfuls,” who try to uncover the Traitors’ identities throughout the show.The whole group also votes for those who it thinks are Traitors, eliminating the person or people from the show. The result is a thoroughly unpredictable competition series.The British and American versions of the show were filmed at the same Scottish castle.Mark Mainz/BBCIn a scene from the British show, the contestants gathered to discuss who they thought were the Traitors.Mark Mainz/BBCFor Symonds’s party, he secretly assigned Traitors and Faithfuls, repeated monologues from the show’s host, Claudia Winkleman, and warned guests, “‘You can no longer take each other at face value,’” he said.Like in the show itself, the party became immersive. “My friend had brought his relatively new girlfriend along,” Symonds said. Soon, her boyfriend had been “murdered,” and “everyone just turns on her,” the host said, accusing her of targeting her boyfriend.This tendency for viewers to take the show’s gameplay almost as seriously as the contestants helped “The Traitors” become a word-of-mouth hit in Britain.“It’s a format that creates an enormous amount of drama,” said Stephen Lambert, whose production company, Studio Lambert, made the American and British versions of “The Traitors,” “and it is ultimately about the way in which people make judgments about each other.” In Britain, the show was broadcast during prime time, three times a week on the BBC, but it found a bigger audience during its run on the BBC’s streaming service, iPlayer (an average of 3.7 million viewers watched the first episode within the first seven days of its broadcast, with more than 1.5 million viewers watching the episode in the subsequent weeks, according to figures from the BBC).All 10 episodes of the American version of the show, which were filmed at the same Scottish location before the British show was shot, will arrive on Thursday on Peacock.Contestants on the American version of “The Traitors,” from left, Shelbe Rodriguez, Rachel Reilly, Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick and Ryan Lochte.Euan Cherry/PeacockThe U.S. show’s format is similar, but with a couple of adjustments: The Scottish actor Alan Cumming hosts, and half of the show’s 20 contestants are reality TV stars from shows including “The Bachelor,” “Big Brother” and “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”The oldest contestant on the British version was in her 70s, and for many fans, it was refreshing to see a diversity of ages and backgrounds in a reality show.“We’ve all sort of been exhausted by the format of ‘Love Island’ and dating competitions where people are bronzed up and dressed to the nines,” Hamza Jahanzeb, a fan who ran a Twitter Space dedicated to “The Traitors,” said in a video interview. At 29, Jahanzeb is one of the show’s many viewers ages 16 to 34, and he said he felt the cast “was a reflection of our reality.”Mike Cotton, who is the executive producer of the British and American versions of the show, said in a video interview that this was intentional: “We always knew that we wanted to have a cast — have an eclectic cast — that represented a broad age range of people, much like you would get in a traditional murder mystery.”When it came to making the American version, producers at NBC decided to include reality TV regulars “to see if preconceived notions of known personalities would affect the game,” a representative from NBC said over email. Lambert noted that in the United States, a new show faced “even more competition than there is in Britain,” and that having recognizable faces among the first season’s contestants could be “helpful, in terms of getting attention and drawing an audience.”This mix of contestants also meant that “there was an added frisson,” Cumming said. The reality TV stars “were accused of being able to be more manipulative because they’ve done things like this before — in ‘Big Brother,’ in those shows where you have to kind of form alliances,” he said.“It’s kind of hilarious that the American version of the show is much camper than the British one,” Cumming said. Euan Cherry/PeacockWhile on the British show, it was “fascinating,” Cotton said, to see “how some people will become very convinced, 100 percent certain, someone is a traitor based on almost no evidence whatsoever,” in the U.S. version, a question that emerged for all contestants, including celebrities, was, “Can you sort of get rid of your preconceived notions about someone?”In both shows, if only Faithfuls remain at the end of the competition, the overall prize fund is split evenly between them. If a Traitor makes it to the end undiscovered, however, he or she takes all of the money.At a time when viewers often accuse reality shows of being overly produced and storyboarded, the producers on both versions of “The Traitors” had a deliberately hands-off approach to try to keep the gameplay feeling authentic and immersive.“We didn’t have the kind of reality show producers pulling people in for chats, chatting with people whilst they were taking a break or anything like that,” Cotton said.This lack of intrusion also added to the pressure cooker environment. On the British show, contestants “started talking about people as if they had actually died,” Cotton said. “And we just had to remind them that they hadn’t died, but were removed from the game.” The production team said that the show had a robust contestant welfare system, and an on-site psychologist.Cumming, who is touring his cabaret show in Australia, had never hosted a reality show before. He discussed with producers playing the host as a “James Bond villain,” he said, wearing tartan and a beret.It ended up being a “heightened sort of weird, dandy, Scottish, layered version of me,” he said. “It’s kind of hilarious that the American version of the show is much camper than the British one.”“But I guess that’s me,” he added. “That’s my fault.” More

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      Alan Cumming Uses Dance to Get at the Truth of Robert Burns

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      GLASGOW — Rain pours down, thunder growls, lightning flickers. Fragments of melancholy melody emerge from the tumult, and a lone, silhouetted figure appears onstage, moving his upper body in sinuous circles, entwining his arms and gesturing with slow deliberation. Then he walks forward, opens his arms and smiles impishly. “Here am I,” he announces.Here he is: The Scottish poet Robert Burns, embodied by the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in the one-man dance-theater show “Burn,” coming to the Joyce Theater on Sept. 20.Conceived by Cumming and the choreographer Steven Hoggett, “Burn,” which had its premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival in August, is an unlikely hybrid: A movement-focused show performed by a famous actor with no dance training, about a man whose medium was words.Why dance? Why Burns?Cumming answered those questions at some length a few days after that Glasgow performance, in a video interview from Aberdeen, where — between performances of “Burn” — he was filming the second season of a Scottish travel series with the actress Miriam Margolyes. To boil it down: He loves a challenge, he loves dance even more, and he had been thinking about taking on another physically demanding role since reprising the role of the M.C. in “Cabaret” eight years ago. (He won a Tony Award for the performance in 1998.)Vicki Manderson, left, did the choreography with Hoggett (back to camera). Here, they are rehearsing with Cumming iin Glasgow.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“When that ended in 2015, I was 50,” he said. “I felt sad to think I’m never going to be as fit as this again, this is it. Then I slowly began to think, No, I have one more thing left in me.” He added, “I put it into the universe.”The universe responded. In 2018, he went backstage at the Joyce Theater after watching “The Tenant,” choreographed by Arthur Pita, the partner of his old friend and flatmate Matthew Bourne. While chatting with Pita, Cumming was introduced to Linda Shelton, the executive director of the Joyce. “She asked me if I had any dancey ideas,” Cumming said. “I do!,” he answered.He had been thinking about Burns at that time, he said, prompted in part by writing an autobiography and revealing dark aspects of his own past. “It made me think how we don’t have a holistic picture of our icons,” he said. “Burns is everywhere in Scotland — on statues, milk bottles, chocolate boxes — he is a sort of Scottish DNA wallpaper. But we don’t really know who he is. Somehow, at that moment, the two things, Burns and dance, merged in my mind.”He told the Joyce team that he wanted to do a dance-theater piece about the poet with the choreographer Steven Hoggett. But he neglected to mention he hadn’t yet asked Hoggett.“It’s true,” Hoggett said in a video interview from New York, where he is working on a coming production of “Sweeney Todd.” The two men — friends since 2007, when they collaborated on the National Theater of Scotland’s “The Bacchae” — were having dinner one night when Cumming asked him what he thought about the idea. “I said it sounded fantastic and he should do it,” Hoggett recounted. “He said, ‘Good, because you are doing it, too.’”Cumming wanted to work with Hoggett, he said, because the choreographer comes from an experimental background (he founded the physical theater group Frantic Assembly) and has extensive experience working with actors. “He brings that energy and aesthetic to the more commercial work,” Cumming said, “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Cumming, right, said that Hoggett, left, brings “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanCumming and Hoggett began a residency at the National Theater of Scotland, which produced the show with the Edinburgh International Festival and the Joyce. Although their first idea, Hoggett said, was to look at Scottish male identity, they changed focus entirely after Kirsteen McCue, a professor of Scottish literature and a director of the Center for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, talked to them about the poet. McCue suggested they read his letters and the research of her colleague, Moira Hansen, who posits that Burns might have suffered from bipolar disorder.“They guided us to his mental health, to his relationship with his patron Frances Dunlop, to things that aren’t so sexy, but fascinating,” Cumming said. “When you read the letters — and there are two thick volumes — you realize he is much more fragile, more florid, sometimes obsequious to rich people, a bit stalker-y to women, often depressed.”The men began to work on movement that could evoke Burns’s states of mind, and in the process started to “find out what Alan’s body did and didn’t do,” Hoggett said. “He wasn’t going to learn a rond de jambe,” he added, referring to a step in the basic ballet vocabulary.Instead they did exercises around some of the content of the letters: farming, writing, joy, love, lust, depression. “What happens to the body when you’re using farming implements? What does his joy feel like, where does it spring from?” Hoggett said. “What does it feel like, in the body, to be inspired?”Every day, they would do an hourlong warm-up, then try out various exercises. Together with Vicki Manderson, who choreographed the piece with Hoggett, they would create material and construct movement phrases.“He would try anything,” Hoggett said of Cumming. “I encouraged him to really feel whether something felt right and fit on his body.”Hoggett said of Cumming: “He would try anything.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanIt was hard both physically and mentally. “The sheer pain of it,” Cumming said, grimacing. “It was intense.” It was also scary, he added, to go into rehearsal and not have a structure. “Steven is used to just making things up in the room,” he said. “But actors like to have a script!”Asked whether it had been difficult to memorize movement sequences, and eventually an hour of choreography, Cumming clutched his head in his hands. “I kept thinking, I memorized the whole of ‘Macbeth,’ I can do this!” he said. “But of course, getting the muscle memory of movement into your body is entirely different.”He learned that to tell a story with your body, “you have to think in a different way, let the story touch you in a more nonlinear, visceral way,” he said. “It was an incredibly emotional thing to do. I felt very vulnerable, which is what I want to be.”And, gradually, he became more sure of himself. “The exercises, zoning into the themes we were focusing on in the show,” he said, “gave me more confidence about my body and storytelling. It was a shock to me that some of the movement started coming from me.”He also realized, he said, that he was playing both Burns and the Alan Cumming that people know. “I am asking people to look at me in a different way, and also to look at the character I play in a different way,” he said. “The form really helped tell the story.”Cumming and Hoggett knew early on, Cumming said, that they wanted to use the genre-defying music of the Scottish composer Anna Meredith, whom they both admired. “We press-ganged her a bit,” Hoggett said. “Then she came to a few workshops, saw how forensic we were being with her music, and sent us a lot of stuff that hadn’t been released before.”Meredith, whose memory of those workshops involves “mainly doing a lot of Scottish country dancing with an expert who had come to work with the men,” said that she “loved the ambition of the show,” and the way it revealed unusual aspects of Burns. The score, she said, is made up of both existing tracks and older, sometimes experimental, work that “I hadn’t found a home for.”Cumming working with Manderson.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“It’s a mix of acoustic and electronic,” she said, “some tracks untouched, others needed edits or extensions to fit the exact length of Alan’s words and rhythms.”Working with Meredith to shape the score also helped in creating a structure for the show, when the men reconvened at Cumming’s home in Scotland last summer. “By then, we had pared down the topics we felt were important to telling the story of who Burns was,” Cumming said. He ticked off key points: Burns’s upbringing on a farm; starting to write; his relationship with Jean Armour (who would be the mother of nine of his 12 children); his affairs with Mary Campbell and others; his poverty, depression, and his love for Scotland and its stories and themes.“To label ‘Burn’ as dance might be stretching a point,” Mark Fisher wrote in The Guardian, adding that Cumming has nonetheless “dared to put himself in an unfamiliar place.”As several reviewers pointed out, there is not a great deal of Burns’s famous poetry in the show. Instead Cumming and Hoggett focus on the autobiographical content of Burns’s letters, evoking the highs and lows of his emotional life through their words, digital projections (Andrzej Goulding), dramatic lighting (Tim Lutkin) and occasional stage magic, as quills scroll independently across a manuscript and a dress rises from the floor to incarnate a character.“When Alan is 90 years old, he can recite Burns poetry in a rocking chair, under a spotlight,” Hoggett said. “And he can do that beautifully. But we wanted to go further and do a show about the man and the way movement can reveal a reality that words often hide.” More

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      At Edinburgh’s Festivals, Big Names and Live Issues

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      While marquee productions have featured star turns from Ian McKellen and Alan Cumming, smaller shows deal with contemporary life.EDINBURGH — Some big names have been leaving their mark this month in Edinburgh, where both the International Festival and the bustling theatrical grab bag that is the Fringe are in full swing after a slimmed-down pandemic lineup last year. Ian McKellen and Alan Cumming have proved box-office catnip, both of them in dance-intensive enterprises that take already long-established careers in new directions.There is excellence, of course, among the less well-known talent here, too. But there’s no denying the marquee appeal of McKellen, now 83 and pretty much alone among his generation of British actors in still being onstage. (Too many of his onetime colleagues have either retired or died.) Last year, he gave us a limber, age-defiant Hamlet, for an extended run. And this month, he is revisiting that hallowed text, in a 65-minute fusion of dance and theater that is unremarkable but easy on the eye.The performance, devised by McKellen and the Danish choreographer Peter Schaufuss, finds the veteran Shakespearean delivering excerpts from the text in his familiar, deep-voiced rumble; all the other performers are dancers, many from the company of the Edinburgh Festival Ballet, which Schaufuss runs. The approach includes Ophelia (an expressive Katie Rose) swooping to the stage floor in grief, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hopping briefly into view and the charismatic dancer Johan Christensen whirling in torment as the young Hamlet: He and McKellen offer dual aspects of a split psyche. Luke Schaufuss, the choreographer’s son, completes a central triangle of sorts as a model-handsome Horatio in a decorative outing that is watchable, to be sure, but doesn’t run very deep.Alan Cumming performing an extract from the poetry of Robert Burns in “Burn,” created by Cumming and Steven Hoggett. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty ImagesAlan Cumming, the Tony-winning Scottish actor, gets the stage all to himself in “Burn,” an official Festival entry in conjunction with the National Theater of Scotland that will travel next month to the Joyce Theater in New York. It’s a portrait in words and movement of the 18th-century poet Robert Burns, Scotland’s national bard, whom Cumming and his co-creator, Steven Hoggett, have conceived as a lank-haired, black-clad goth. (The show finished Aug. 10 in Edinburgh and will tour Scotland before its New York run.)And what if Burns was 37 when he died — 20 years younger than Cumming is now? The protean actor brings to this assignment a lithe, sinuous physicality that belies his years, while a digital clock counts down the passage of time in Burns’s too-brief life. The show couples enticing visuals (Tim Lutkin’s lighting is suitably stormy) with a canter through Burns’s verse. We’re left at the end with a sweet recitation from in front of the stage curtain of “Auld Lang Syne,” the traditional New Year’s Eve melody, for which this Scotsman wrote the words.Contemporary themes are being dealt with in Edinburgh, too, even as this year’s celebrity names chose to look toward the past. “Silkworm,” at the Assembly Roxy, tells of a lesbian couple from Nigeria who arrive in Glasgow seeking permanent asylum in Britain. Ewa Dina, left, and Antonia Layiwola in Vlad Butucea’s “Silkworm.” Tommy Ga-Ken WanWritten by Vlad Butucea, a Romanian-born, Glasgow-based dramatist, the play is set 17 floors up in a low-income housing project where, we are told, “You can hear the wallpaper peeling.”Abidemi (a radiant Ewa Dina) is the more expansive of the pair; her partner, Omolade (the intense Antonia Layiwola) is fearful that the authorities won’t recognize the gravity of the women’s plight. That the previous occupants of this same apartment leaped to their deaths amplifies the air of unease: Once their fates are decided, the lovers’ bond gets tested in a slow-burning drama that could be teased out further for greater impact.Calvin (the live-wire Michael Dylan), the gay man at the endearingly manic center of James Ley’s “Wilf,” is in the process of ending a relationship when we first encounter him center stage, chattering away and wearing a Celine Dion T-shirt. His story, he tells us at the start, involves love, loss and the comfort he takes in the car of the title, a used Volkswagen Polo that he has come to cherish as if it were a person. The play is at the Traverse Theater — always a reliable Fringe destination — and directed by Gareth Nicholls, the house’s artistic director.Irene Allan and Michael Dylan in James Ley’s “Wilf,” directed by Gareth Nicholls.Mihaela BodlovicIts good nature proves entirely infectious as Calvin learns to motor his way, literally and metaphorically, through the pain of separation, en route to a possible new start with any of the various men he encounters along the way. Neil John Gibson gives vivid life to a broad array of romantic prospects, and a third performer, Irene Allan, is a hoot as a polyamorous onetime therapist. The play’s sexual candor was something of a surprise at 11 a.m. — performance times vary throughout the run — but “Wilf” is highly engaging whatever the time of day, and very touching, too.The sexual peccadilloes in “Boris the Third,” at the Pleasance Courtyard, belong to Britain’s prime minister. The writer-director Adam Meggido’s overextended comedy puts center stage a teenage Boris Johnson in a production of “Richard III” at Eton, one of Britain’s most elite boarding schools. The troubled show took place — or maybe not, given that Johnson’s father remembers that the actual Shakespeare play was “Richard II” — with a leading man who, in this account anyway, was more intent on bedding two sisters at once than on learning his lines.Meggido’s play tries to connect the conniving if doomed charmer Johnson may once have acted onstage to the modern-day leader who has been repeatedly called out for deceit. While it is worth seeing principally for Harry Kershaw’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role, it still feels like a shaky first draft.From left, Naima Swaleh, Fionn Ó Loingsigh, Anna Healy and Fiona Bell in Sonya Kelly’s “The Last Return,” directed by Sara Joyce.Ste Murray I had a much better time at Sonya Kelly’s wonderful “The Last Return,” the best of the seven shows I attended last weekend. Also at the Traverse, this production by the Druid Theater of Galway, directed by Sara Joyce, gathers a disparate array of characters, all clamoring for entry at any price to the sold-out final performance of a fictitious play.The ebb and flow of the queue is of scant interest to the ticket seller (Anna Healy), who repeats ‌as if ‌by rote that there are no seats left, and the prospective playgoers become increasingly fractious. A disaffected 60-something academic (Bosco Hogan) has tried 36 times to make it through the show but hasn’t managed, because he is incontinent; this performance is his last chance. Among those also jockeying for admission are a battle-scarred American soldier (Fionn Ó Loingsigh) who just wants to rest his feet after the trauma of war and, most memorably, a querulous Scotswoman (Fiona Bell) who offers homemade snacks to the other characters as she angles for a spot at the front.The lineup of hopefuls also includes a mostly silent Somali woman (Naima Swaleh) who has crossed continents, we discover, to get to the theater and whose final gesture ends the play on an unexpectedly touching note. Chaos, “The Last Return” suggests, lies in wait everywhere, but so, too, do humanity and compassion, if we are lucky enough to experience them — and this play.Edinburgh International FestivalThrough Aug. 29 at various venues in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk.Edinburgh Festival FringeThrough Aug. 29 at various venues in Edinburgh; edfringe.com. More

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      ‘My Old School’ Review: An Impostor Makes the Honor Roll

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      A documentary uses animation and professional actors to tell the story of a once-notorious hoax.“What is a person?” It’s a profound and complicated philosophical question, posed by a man named Stefen during an interview in “My Old School.” Like most of the other people who appear on camera in this brisk, slippery documentary, Stefen has a particular person in mind, a student at Bearsden Academy in the early ’90s known to his classmates as Brandon Lee.Stefen, who is one of the few Black pupils at Bearsden, a school in an affluent section of Glasgow, remembers Brandon fondly as a friend who invited him to parties and protected him from racist bullying. Other Bearsden alums have more ambivalent memories, but they all describe a curly-haired young man who impressed his teachers, charmed his peers and wanted more than anything else to become a doctor.They also agree that their classmate, who showed up as a fifth-year student (roughly the equivalent of a high school junior) after the start of the academic year, could seem a little odd. He looked older than 16 — “he had old skin,” one of them recalls — and alluded to a mysterious and tragic family history. He also had a car and a fondness for ’80s pop music, neither of which was typical among Glaswegian teenagers in 1993.As it turned out, Brandon wasn’t a teenager at all. When Stefen and the others first met him, he was 32 years old, and the name he used was borrowed from a recently deceased celebrity. This isn’t a spoiler, even though “My Old School,” directed by Jono McLeod — a television journalist who was one of Brandon’s classmates — arranges the case into a teasingly suspenseful narrative. The hoax was widely reported in Scotland and beyond, and the news reports and talk-show interviews that McLeod folds into the story may jog dim recollections of a faded media frenzy. There have been so many other grifters and impostors to keep track of in the intervening years.“Brandon,” whose real identity comes out midway through the movie, is given the chance to explain himself, though it can’t quite be said that he reveals himself. The gray-haired, middle-aged man in a drab windbreaker who faces the camera is the actor Alan Cumming, who faultlessly lip-syncs a first-person tale, told in the “real” Brandon’s voice, that is by turns sad, strange and self-serving.The movie, in the end, doesn’t quite know what to make of it all, perhaps because of the director’s barely mentioned personal stake. In flashbacks, Brandon and his classmates are represented in brightly colored, simply drawn animation that evokes the MTV cartoons of the era. Some of their adolescent voices belong to actors and pop singers, emphasizing the gap between them and their grown-up, live-action selves.There’s a disjunction between the jaunty, can-you-believe-this tone of “My Old School” (which ends with a peppy cover of the Steely Dan song of the same name) and the darker implications of its story. The people who knew Brandon look back mostly with incredulity and amusement at his imposture and extend him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his motives. The film takes his words at face value — even though it doesn’t show his face — and takes for granted that his deceit was benign, motivated by his ambition to study medicine and overcome adversity.At the same time, surely there is something creepy about a grown man socializing with children half his age, not only in the halls of Bearsden but also at parties where he served them alcohol, and on a vacation he took with a few of them to Spain. The movie glances toward this moral gray area but mostly looks elsewhere, practicing a troubling kind of access journalism and falling back on a dubious epistemological relativism. Its fascination with Brandon becomes a kind of credulity, a willingness to accept uncritically the mystifications of a proven liar.My Old SchoolNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Reconsidering the Spice Girls: How Manufactured Girl Power Became Real

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      In a scene from the 1997 film “Spice World,” the Spice Girls are rehearsing for the movie’s climactic performance at the Royal Albert Hall. Dressed in their signature looks, they sway their way through one of their hits, “Say You’ll Be There,” playfully poking each other and bopping along as they perform the R&B-infused track.“That was absolutely perfect,” the music director declares when they finish, “without being actually any good.” The Girls kind of agree, and kind of don’t care.It is a fleeting, self-deprecating punchline in the movie but one that encapsulates how the pop group has been perceived ever since it zig-a-zig-ah-ed its way onto the music scene in the mid-1990s. To a mostly young and female audience drawn to their messaging of self-empowerment, individuality and friendship, the Spice Girls were absolutely perfect. But to critics and commentators who wrote them off as “duds,” “manufactured” phonies and “shrill” bimbos, they were not actually any good.Twenty-five years after the release of the film, as some of the band’s most fervent fans have themselves grown up to be pop titans, the role of the Spice Girls in music history is still being rewritten.To be sure, criticism of the Spice Girls — most notably, that they were a superficial, manufactured, disposable pop confection — was not unique to them. Many pop acts, including the Beatles, the Monkees and Abba, initially encountered the same derision. But from the beginning of their ascent to superstardom, the fact that the five Girls — Victoria Adams (now Beckham), a.k.a. Posh Spice; Melanie Brown, a.k.a. Scary Spice; Emma Bunton, a.k.a. Baby Spice; Melanie Chisholm, a.k.a. Sporty Spice; and Geri Halliwell (now Horner), a.k.a. Ginger Spice — were outspoken young women seemed to bring an added layer of skepticism.Perhaps nothing illustrates the conundrum of the Spice Girls more starkly than the reception to “Spice World,” their madcap mockumentary, which earned more than $70 million worldwide but received memorably withering reviews. Desson Howe in The Washington Post said it was “about as awful and shamelessly pandering as a fanzine movie could dare to be.” In The Orlando Sentinel, the critic Jay Boyar described the movie as akin to “being kicked to death by a pack of wild Barbies.” Roger Ebert compared it very unfavorably to the film that inspired it, “A Hard Day’s Night,” writing, “The huge difference, of course, is that the Beatles were talented while, let’s face it, the Spice Girls could be duplicated by any five women under the age of 30 standing in line at Dunkin’ Donuts.”Horner, Brown, Beckham, Bunton and Chisholm arriving — aboard a double-decker bus — at a 1998 screening of their film “Spice World” in New York.Henny Ray Abrams/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat’s become clear in the decades since the film’s release is that these five particular women could not, in fact, be duplicated. While all-female groups — from the Supremes to Destiny’s Child — have long been a celebrated part of pop music, Posh, Scary, Baby, Sporty and Ginger offered a specific combination of self-expression and brazen ambition that inspired a generation of artists. Contemporary performers such as Sam Smith, Little Mix and Haim have all been effusive in their praise for the Spice Girls.“I remember hearing ‘Wannabe’ on the radio and immediately falling in love with it,” the singer Rita Ora, who performed the Girls’ hit “Wannabe” in a 2018 appearance on “Lip Sync Battle,” said in a recent email. “To see women uplifting women who were doing it just as good as the guys, if not better, was incredibly inspiring as a young girl.”“They probably inspired me to pick up a hairbrush when I was like five and sing into it,” the British pop star Charli XCX, who remixed “Wannabe” for her 2019 single “Spicy,” has said of the group.The Spice Girls inspired a generation of fans that, decades later, still identify as a Scary or a Baby. Tens of thousands of fans came to Wembley Stadium in London for the group’s 2019 reunion tour.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesThe 15-time Grammy Award-winning artist Adele is also an avowed Spice Girls superfan. When the group announced its 2019 reunion tour, she shared a photo on Instagram of herself as a young girl, the wall behind her plastered with Spice Girls posters and photos.On an episode of “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” as part of the segment “Carpool Karaoke,” Adele enthusiastically declared her love for the band. “It was genuine,” she insisted of her admiration, to an incredulous Corden. “It was a huge moment in my life when they came out — it was ‘girl power’ and these five ordinary girls who just did so well.”At their peak, the Spice Girls were a global sensation, and they remain, to this day, the most successful girl group of all time: Their first single, “Wannabe,” released in 1996, was a No. 1 hit in 37 countries, and their debut album, “Spice,” is still one of the best-selling albums by any female group. And even the Girls themselves are still coming to terms with just how much their brief stint at the apex of pop music affected a generation of fans and other artists.“At the time, in the ’90s, we were probably too busy, too young and too exhausted to fully realize what was happening,” Chisholm said in a recent interview with The New York Times. But, she added, “it’s really quite overwhelming, but brilliant, to process that we really did make a difference, in so many people’s lives. It was such a joyful thing to be able to do.”‘R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated’Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times; Photographs by Getty ImagesOf the many criticisms leveled at the Spice Girls, perhaps the most potent was that they were not “real” musicians. This critique has often been used to belittle pop groups. Even the Beatles weren’t spared: When the band first crossed over to the United States in 1964, they were described as “a press agent’s dream combo,” “appallingly unmusical” and “a gigantic put-on.”But this line of criticism carried particular weight in the 1990s in Britain, where male, guitar-forward Britpop bands such as Oasis and Blur, who preached a gospel of authenticity, dominated the music scene.So let’s get something out of the way: Yes, the Spice Girls were manufactured. In 1994, Bob and Chris Herbert, a father-and-son music-management team based in Surrey, England, came up with the idea of creating a female version of Take That, the successful British boy band. The Herberts’ notion of injecting more femininity into the prevailing “lad culture” of ’90s Britain was “the one unarguable stroke of genius in their vision,” the music critic David Sinclair wrote in his book “Wannabe: How the Spice Girls Reinvented Pop Fame.”The Herberts placed an ad in a newspaper: “R.U. 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated.” After weeks of auditions, they selected five girls — Brown, Chisholm, Beckham, Horner and Michelle Stephenson (who was replaced a few months later by Bunton) — and moved them into a house in the English town of Maidenhead, paying for their voice coaching, dance lessons, songwriting sessions, media training and demo recording sessions.However, as the Girls worked together, Sinclair explained, they concocted an ambitious vision for their band that clashed with the Herberts’ approach. The Herberts wanted them to stick to the usual lead-singer-with-backup model, while the Girls distributed lines equally among themselves so that no single leader emerged. The Herberts imagined five girls with a uniform look; the Girls wanted to remain distinct.“We didn’t dress similarly in everyday life, and when we tried to do that in a performance, it just didn’t work,” Chisholm said. “Quite early on, quite naturally, we wanted to be individuals, and the management weren’t really feeling that.”Like the Monkees before them — another manufactured band that seized control of its own destiny — the Girls decided they wanted out. So the five of them crammed into Horner’s Fiat Uno and drove off with their master recordings. That bold decision “was a measure of how determined they were,” Sinclair said. It was as though the Herberts had “invented Frankenstein’s monster,” he continued. “They were completely floored by what their creation then did to them.”The Spice Girls were assembled by a management team but took steps to seize control of their destiny.Tim Roney/Getty Images“It was all a bit of an adventure,” Chisholm said. “At that point, we didn’t really have much to lose, so we just went for it. And then the band became a very organic thing. We felt quite unstoppable.”The Girls were already generating enough buzz in the industry — thanks in part to a showcase they had done — that they were in a position to audition new managers. They decided on Simon Fuller, who at that time was managing the Scottish icon Annie Lennox. In March 1995, they met him at his office and started belting out “Wannabe.”“It was quite unusual,” Fuller recalled in a recent interview, “to have these five young girls come bounding in the office with confidence and say, ‘You have to manage us, and we’re not leaving until you agree.’ It was just very contagious, that energy.”From the Girls’ perspective, “it just clicked,” Chisholm said. “When we met him, it felt very much like he got it.”Instead of turning the Girls into clones of one another, as the Herberts had intended, Fuller told them to focus on who they genuinely were and just dial it up. “If you like pink and fluffy and your mum is your best friend, then be pink 24/7, have fluffy on you all the time. If you’re the rowdy northern girl who has no airs and graces, sexy and dominant and noisy, then be that,” Fuller explained. This idea, Fuller revealed in a 2014 BBC documentary, was inspired by Lennox, who, upon meeting the Girls, encouraged them to “ham up” their personalities.The approach fit the Spice Girls perfectly.The band’s “girl power” message, Chisholm said, also gave the group a focus: “At first, we wanted to make music and have fun and travel the world and do all those fun things. But the messaging gave us more motivation. We were expressing ourselves, as young women, in the mid-90s. It was giving fuel to this fire.”Their first single, “Wannabe,” was released in Britain on July 8, 1996, and by the end of that year it hit No. 1 in more than 20 countries. Their debut album, “Spice,” released in November 1996, also went to No. 1 and was shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Prize, awarded to the best British or Irish album of the year.“It was like, you know, the preparation, the waiting, the frustration,” Chisholm said. “And then ‘Wannabe’ is released and bam — just two years of mayhem.”‘Firing on all cylinders’“I don’t want to be emotional,” the South African president Nelson Mandela told reporters when he met the Spice Girls in 1997, “but it’s one of the greatest moments in my life.”Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile the primary fan base for the Spice Girls was young and female, others were not immune to their charms. In 1997, while in South Africa to perform at a charity concert, the band met Prince Charles and Nelson Mandela. Posing for photos outside the presidential residence in Pretoria, Mandela, the South African president, told reporters, “You know, these are my heroines.” (Horner quickly chimed in to affirm that the feeling was mutual.) The group’s extravagant self-expression, coupled with a straightforward message of empowerment, resonated with girls, who saw themselves reflected in the band members’ various personas, spawning a generation of fans who identified as a Sporty or Scary or Posh.“That’s kind of the beauty of the Spice Girls,” Ora said. “Each of them had their own voice and something different to offer.” (Those nicknames, by the way, were not coined by the group but imposed on them by a journalist at the British magazine Top of the Pops. The Girls, true to form, embraced the names.)The group’s theatrics and self-aware sense of kitsch also sparked an enthusiastic following among members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, which initially took the band by surprise, Chisholm said. “In our heads, it was like, right, we’ve got to do this for the girls! And then we very quickly realized that a huge part of this community was behind us as well,” she recalled. “I think it’s because people can feel lonely if they’re in an environment where they can’t fully be themselves, and the Spice Girls gave them something to belong to.” The band has since become a popular source of inspiration for drag acts and several of the Girls have appeared as guest judges on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”There was, however, one demographic that resisted them: the music media. “I think they were victims of their own success in the sense that, the more eyes are on you, the more critical people are going to be,” said Joe Stone, an editor at The Guardian who has written about the band.Traditional tastemakers often sniffed at the Girls’ music; one relatively charitable review characterized it as emblematic of “pop’s heart of lightness, a happy place filled not with music of good taste but with music that tastes good — at least to a substantial portion of the planet.” Others dismissed the Spice Girls themselves as Fuller’s pawns, earning him the nickname “Svengali Spice.” And much of the press, particularly the tabloids, picked apart not just the group’s work but their appearance and what they seemed to represent. “People were firing on all cylinders: They couldn’t sing, they couldn’t write music, they weren’t pretty enough, their feminism was hollow,” Stone said.When Beckham appeared on a British talk show eight weeks after she’d given birth, the host, Chris Evans, weighed her to see if she was back to her pre-baby weight. He subjected Horner to the same treatment when she appeared on his show; both women have since spoken about struggling with body image and eating disorders.“There is a real culture here in the U.K. that they really like to drag people down. We celebrate success to a point, and then it’s time to attack — kind of, ‘Don’t get above your station,’” Chisholm said. “But we always felt that the numbers don’t lie. We were breaking records.”Another frequent target of criticism was the group’s message of “girl power,” which was promoted not just in their music but also through their many marketing deals with brands like Pepsi and Chupa Chups lollipops. Activists raised concerns that the band was exploiting feminism for commercial ends. Many commentators were “very conscious of how feminism and pro-women sentiment was manipulated and weaponized, particularly by the media,” said Andi Zeisler, who co-founded the feminist pop culture magazine Bitch in 1996, the same year the Spice Girls made their debut.Against a backdrop of the punk riot grrrl movement and the women-centric Lilith Fair — both of which used music as a platform to advocate specifically feminist political and social changes — “the Spice Girls perhaps felt like a step back,” Zeisler said.But the notion that the Girls’ message was, by virtue of being broadcast commercially, inherently hollow now seems shortsighted. “I think it’s possible to say, on the one hand, the Spice Girls and girl power were this very contrived marketing technique. And that’s true,” Zeisler explained. “But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t very real for the Girls themselves, or for the audience. I grew up with feminism as an irredeemably dirty word. No one wanted to be associated with it. So just the optics of having a group of women talking about feminism in a different language, making it accessible — that’s really important.”‘That sounds like a hoot’The Girls at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, where they announced their movie, “Spice World.”Dave Hogan/Getty ImagesThe idea of a Spice Girls movie was first floated by Fuller and the band during their early publicity trips to the United States. The movie would be “a parody of ourselves,” Horner explained in a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival. “We are basically taking the mickey out of ourselves.”The Girls shot the movie in the summer of 1997 while also writing and recording their sophomore album, “Spiceworld.” Such was the allure of the band at the time that many renowned actors and musicians readily agreed to take part: The movie’s list of cameos reads like a who’s who of British pop culture, including Roger Moore, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Elton John and Elvis Costello (as well as Meat Loaf, an American).Richard E. Grant, who played the band’s manager in the movie, explained his decision to join the cast. “My then 7-year-old daughter, Olivia, was and remains a massive Spice Girls fan and begged me to take the role, so it was a slam dunk decision,” he said.Alan Cumming, whose character spends the film trying to make a behind-the-scenes documentary about the band, was similarly won over. “My agent called and, first of all, he asked me, did I know the Spice Girls? I was like, ‘Well, I am alive,’” he said. “I was really keen — I thought, that sounds like a hoot.”But when “Spice World” came out, it followed the same path as the Spice Girls’ music — commercial success on the one hand and critical derision on the other.“Half of the critics, especially the higher-brow ones, they’d already made up their minds before they watched the movie,” Naoko Mori, who played the group’s friend Nicola, said.For years, Chisholm said, she couldn’t bring herself to watch the film. But when her now 13-year-old daughter asked to watch it for her fifth birthday, they put it on and she was delighted. “I just adored it — I mean, it was hilarious,” she said. “We do take the piss out of ourselves and each other all the time.”The movie ended up being one of the band’s final acts as a fivesome. By the time it premiered on Dec. 15, 1997, the Girls and Fuller had already parted ways. A few months later, Horner also abruptly left the band.The rest of the Girls continued to perform as a foursome, including on a 1998 world tour, and released a third album, “Forever,” in 2000. They’ve appeared together in different configurations for various reunion performances, including two tours, over the last two decades. But the particular magic of their ascent had dissipated.The Spice Girls generation comes of ageThe reunited Spice Girls performed a rendition of “Spice Up Your Life” at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.Hannah Peters/Getty ImagesIn 2012, the organizers of the London Olympics crafted the opening and closing ceremonies to celebrate the best of British culture. There were odes to James Bond, the queen and Mary Poppins, but perhaps no act drew more cheers, and tears, from the crowds than the members of the Spice Girls — all five of them — reunited atop a fleet of tricked-out black cabs as the stadium sang along raucously to their greatest hits.Nearly three decades after their peak, critics have started to reconsider the ways in which the Spice Girls reshaped the pop-music landscape, in Britain and beyond.In 2019, Pitchfork revisited the band’s debut, “Spice,” for a series on significant albums the publication had overlooked. While the outlet still rated the record a 6.8 out of 10, it wrote that “the album was a meticulously crafted pop product, front-loaded with surefire radio hits,” concluding: “‘Spice’ remains an audacious achievement.”As for “Spice World,” the movie is now championed by some as a cult classic, with its campy, self-aware humor entertaining those viewers who can get their hands on a DVD. (The movie is not currently available for streaming.) “I think it’s really funny, and I’m really glad I did it,” Cumming said. “When people ask me for my favorite of all the movies I’ve made, I always answer ‘Spice World.’”Perhaps the most remarkable thing the Spice Girls achieved, however, was their empowerment of a generation of fans. These listeners first encountered them as children and responded positively to the band and what they represented — five women who remained true to what they wanted and how they were going to get it and had a lot of fun together along the way.In an industry teeming with stories of artists — particularly young female ones — being manipulated or taken advantage of, the Spice Girls can now be remembered as a rare example of an all-female band that took a strong hand in charting its own success. “A lot of times, it’s the management that holds all the cards, makes all the money, decides what happens, and the artist that goes away shortchanged if not totally screwed over,” Sinclair said. The Spice Girls, he noted, “actually kept a grip on everything, from Day 1.”Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times; Photographs by Getty ImagesChisholm and the band have embraced their status as role models, both for women and for the L.G.B.T.Q. community. “It’s so humbling to have the opportunity to give people strength to just be who they are. That should be everybody’s human right,” Chisholm said. “Maybe we’re misfits, maybe we’re oddballs — we’re all different. But we come together, and our unity is our strength.”When, in 2019, the Spice Girls (minus Beckham) reunited for a tour, Adele — the fangirl whose childhood wall was once plastered with Spice Girls posters — visited them on the day of their final performance, at Wembley Stadium.“We went into the bar to see our friends and family after the show,” Chisholm recalled. “Adele had gotten everybody ready, and they all started singing ‘Wannabe’ when we walked in. She was leading the chorus!”It was a powerful, full-circle moment for the band, she said.“There’s so much talent out there, and if the Spice Girls had any part in inspiring and empowering these brilliant artists, then that is only a good thing,” said Chisholm, who is now a solo artist, with a self-titled album out now and a memoir coming later this year.For Ora, the band’s girl-power message has always been “about standing up and advocating for the women around you, because, at the end of the day, we have to look out for each other,” she said. “Who better to teach us that lesson than the Spice Girls?” More

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      Review: ‘Schmigadoon!’ Has a Song in Its Heart, and Everywhere Else

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      The Apple TV+ series both mocks and embraces the glories of classic musicals like “Brigadoon,” “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel.”Welcome to Schmigadoon, “where the men are men, and the cows are cows,” a magical musical land where Melissa and Josh (Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key) find themselves stranded during a trip meant to rehabilitate their romance. At first they think it’s like Colonial Williamsburg, or a warped Disney experience, but they quickly buy into their new reality: They’re trapped in this wholesome, old-timey parallel universe until they learn the lessons about true love it is meant to impart. More

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      'Schmigadoon!' Is an Ode to Broadway Musicals, and Pokes Fun At Them Too

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      One would think that everyone involved in the parody series “Schmigadoon!” was in love with the sometimes hokey, sometimes magical musical genre. Not quite.The director Barry Sonnenfeld has never been a theater guy.“I am not a fan of Broadway musicals,” he grumped affably over the phone. “I’m not a fan of filmed musicals. I don’t understand why people would stop talking and start singing.”So Sonnenfeld, who is best known for the “Men in Black” movies, was a curious choice to direct the new Apple TV+ comedy “Schmigadoon!,” a series whose very title screams musical theater spoof.The showrunner, Cinco Paul, a fan of Sonnenfeld’s work on the highly stylized and intermittently musical cult series “Pushing Daisies,” was unaware of the director’s aversion until they were shooting last fall, mid-pandemic, in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a blockbuster cast filled with Broadway stars.“Here we are on the set,” Paul recalled, “and he’s half jokingly saying, ‘Why are there so many songs?’”If you count reprises, they number nearly two dozen — composed by Paul, who created the show with Ken Daurio — spread over six half-hour episodes that air starting July 16.An affectionate, knowing sendup of classic American musicals, “Schmigadoon!” stars Cecily Strong of “Saturday Night Live” and Keegan-Michael Key, lately of Netflix’s “The Prom,” as a contemporary couple in a stagnating relationship. On a backpacking trip, they stumble into a frozen-in-time, trapped-in-a-musical town called Schmigadoon, which they can’t escape until they find true love.Paul, who grew up on his mother’s Broadway cast recordings and played piano for musicals as an undergraduate at Yale, said he came up with the kernel of “Schmigadoon!” almost 25 years ago. Not knowing what to do with the idea, he put it away until Andrew Singer at Lorne Michaels’s production company, Broadway Video, mentioned their interest in musicals a few years ago. A match was made.According to Strong, Michaels is — like her — “a musical dork.” And the show brought on stage-savvy writers, including Julie Klausner (“Difficult People”) and Strong’s fellow “S.N.L.” star Bowen Yang.In Schmigadoon, the locals include the sweet, melancholy Mayor Aloysius Menlove, played by the Tony Award winner Alan Cumming; the moral scourge, Mildred Layton, played by the Tony winner Kristin Chenoweth; and the handsome carny Danny Bailey, played by Aaron Tveit, who got news of his Tony nomination for “Moulin Rouge!” during the series shoot. Other boldface names from Broadway include Jane Krakowski, Ann Harada and Ariana DeBose.Recently, Paul, Sonnenfeld and members of the cast spoke separately by phone about “Schmigadoon!” and their affinity, or lack thereof, for musicals. These are edited excerpts from those interviews.“Musicals are charming, and they’re so entertaining, but they’re also sometimes dumb, and sometimes they’re problematic,” said the series co-creator Cinco Paul.Adam Amengual for The New York TimesCINCO PAUL I wanted real musical theater people. I wanted people who did eight shows a week and had those chops, because I wanted everybody to do their own singing, and I wanted to capture that singing live on set to the extent it was possible. The amount of talent we were able to get was phenomenal and was unfortunately because they weren’t able to work anywhere — because theaters were shut down. In many cases, the parts were written for these actors.BARRY SONNENFELD When I interviewed for the job, I said: “Look, here’s the thing. I want to shoot this entirely onstage and I want to shoot it in Vancouver because Vancouver has really great stages and really good crews, and it’s also cheaper.” What was surreal and wonderful was that Vancouver was the only film center that was open when we shot. L.A. was shut down. New York was shut down.CECILY STRONG We had to go shoot our “S.N.L.” intros right before I left for Vancouver. It’s like, you’re around New York and you’re seeing all these theaters shuttered. It’s a little devastating. More