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      in Theater

      In Justin Peck’s ‘Illinoise,’ Dance On and Feel It

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      Justin Peck was around 17 when he first heard the Sufjan Stevens album “Illinois,” an epic paean to the state, nearly two dozen tracks brimming with orchestral indie rock, dense, lyrical wistfulness and sometimes obscure local history. This listening experience came long before Peck wanted to make dances, before he was even a professional dancer.But “Illinois” urged him to move. “It was an instantaneous, illuminating thing that I felt like it was so danceable,” said Peck, now the resident choreographer and artistic adviser at New York City Ballet. “And it is so rare to find someone who can conjure that, especially someone who’s alive right now.”Ever since, Peck, 36, has found artistic inspiration in Stevens — “the voice in music that has led me down paths further than I’ve ever gone before,” he said.The two collaborated regularly, including on “Year of the Rabbit,” the ballet that launched Peck as a choreographer, in 2012. Not long after they began working together, Peck, hoping to experiment with storytelling forms, and influenced by dance-pop productions like Twyla Tharp’s “Movin’ Out,” asked if he could make a theatrical piece set to “Illinois.” Stevens took nearly five years to agree.Justin Peck, left, and Jackie Sibblies Drury, who said the show “feels like the most broadly appealing thing that I have actually ever worked on.”Sasha Arutyunova for The New York TimesAlmost five years later, the result is “Illinoise,” a project that is every bit as ambitious and genre-defying as its soundtrack: a narrative dance musical that combines a coming-of-age story, a snapshot of queer identity and a meditation on death, love, community, history, politics and zombies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Reviving ‘The Wiz’ Through ‘the Blackest of Black Lenses’

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      Schele Williams first saw “The Wiz” when a tour of the original Broadway production came through Dayton, Ohio. She was 7 years old, and recalled it being the most “beautiful reflection of Blackness that I had never seen.”Years later, she was cast as Dorothy in a high school production of “The Wiz,” and the thrill of that experience led Williams to pursue a career in musical theater. She even used the show’s soaring finale, “Home,” as one of her audition songs.Now, after working on Broadway as an actor (“Aida”) and an associate director (“Motown”), she is directing the first Broadway revival of “The Wiz” in almost 40 years. It’s a chance, Williams said, to celebrate what “The Wiz” has meant to her and to pass the story along to her daughters.Since becoming a Broadway hit in 1975, “The Wiz,” a gospel, soul and R&B take on Dorothy’s adventures in Oz, largely composed by Charlie Smalls, with a book by William F. Brown, has been a vibrant cornerstone of Black culture. The show blends Afrofuturism with classic Americana to enact a sort of creative reparation, reframing an allegory about perseverance and self-determination to feature Black characters who, in the ’70s, had rarely appeared in popular children’s stories.The 1978 Motown film adaptation, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, was a critical and box-office flop. But the movie has been a trippy favorite of family living rooms for multiple generations, and the musical has remained a staple on local stages around the country.“The weight of that is not lost on me,” said Williams.The new production of “The Wiz,” beginning previews on March 29 at the Marquis Theater, arrives in New York after a 13-city national tour that began in September. The creative team said its goal is to celebrate both the property’s legacy and the richness of Black American history and culture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Jennifer Lopez and ‘This Is Me … Now’: Is She for Real?

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      “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” a movie built on her latest album, is a showcase for the exhausting, never-ending, hazardous work of being Jennifer Lopez.Nobody who winds up at a “what’s the strangest moment in this new J. Lo thingy” contest should worry. There are no wrong answers.The parts in which Fat Joe plays Dr. Melfi to Jennifer Lopez’s Tony Soprano bewilder as intensely as the too-many scenes in which Jane Fonda, Trevor Noah, Keke Palmer, Post Malone, Kim Petras and Neil deGrasse Tyson (to pick merely six of a dozen names) bickeringly represent the astrological signs. None of these people appears to have been on the set at the same time. The only performers persuasively sharing the screen are Jenifer Lewis and Jenifer Lewis, and that’s only because she’s doing Gemini.A number about a quickie wedding is called “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but the groom has already hand-delivered Lopez’s invitation. It’s “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but first with a stop at what could be Westeros or Themyscira or “The Cell.” Least forgettable is the sight of our star, in a tank top and up to her neck in elbow warmers, riding a headache ball to squelch a power-plant disaster.Lopez has titled these 53 minutes (and an additional 10-minute-plus credits sequence) “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story.” She’s released it, on Amazon, alongside an album of new songs, a few of which provide grist for the visual component. The album is a so-so buffet of sounds that get called contemporary or urban: music that could have been produced at any point in the last 25 years, which isn’t the same as calling it timeless. Lopez has been never on any sort of cutting edge. She’s often where music just was; and that can leave her stranded the way she is here.For “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” she gives “just was” both frenetic cinematic accompaniment and her physical all. In addition cowriting, Lopez goes out on a limb and takes the role of what can rightly be called “Me,” a husband-hunter jailed in such metaphorical music-video scenarios as “glass house” and “love factory.” In that second one, she and two dozen coveralled co-workers bang out some electrocuted, hydraulic choreography while the operation’s giant, once-malfunctioning heart sputters back to life and spews radioactive positivity. These are the only vaguely satisfying numbers. If the wishy-washy, parable-making and haywire everything else won’t cohere into true beauty or credible horror, then camp it is. Ladies and gentlemen: Jennifer Lopez and her Oppenheimer Dancers!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Market Hotel, A Brooklyn D.I.Y. Club, Changes With the Times

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      Just before midnight on Saturday, hard techno began pulsating from the Market Hotel, a D.I.Y. music venue located beside the elevated tracks of a Myrtle Avenue subway station in Bushwick, Brooklyn. A crowd of 20-somethings, many of them wearing sunglasses, ripped jeans and fanny packs, lined up in the cold before they threw themselves onto the dance floor.The party, “Market Hotel Sweet Sixteen,” was meant to commemorate the venue’s legacy as a D.I.Y. rock club. But as the beats continued toward dawn, the celebration was more about the current moment in a vastly changed underground scene.Over a decade ago, the Market Hotel nurtured a middle-class bohemia, providing a stage to punk and indie bands like Real Estate, Vivian Girls, Titus Andronicus and the So So Glos. Defiantly underground in its early years, it operated without a liquor license and offered housing to musicians who slept in its cubbies. Its address was passed along by word of mouth. If you knew, you knew.They were at the Market Hotel’s Sweet Sixteen.Allen Ying for The New York TimesFounded by the So So Glos and Todd Patrick, the music promoter known as Todd P, the Market Hotel became a hotbed of millennial Brooklyn nightlife back when a Pitchfork writer could lift a noise rock band from obscurity with a favorable review. At the recent Sweet Sixteen party, it was clear that the place had moved beyond the moment when flannel shirts were in vogue and craft beers were sipped from Mason jars.“I don’t really know much about the indie rock scene that used to be here but I’m grateful for this space as it is now,” said Ashley Van Eyk, 26. “It’s become a liberating queer space I feel I can express myself in.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Live Performance in New York: Here’s What to See This Spring

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      “The Notebook” and “Cabaret” land on Broadway. Olivia Rodrigo’s tour stops in Manhattan. Plus: Herbie Hancock, Heartbeat Opera and Trisha Brown Dance Company.BroadwayTHE NOTEBOOK Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 novel (adapted for the screen in 2004) is now a sweeping musical tale of romantic idealism and the decades-long love between Allie and Noah. The Chicago Tribune gave a glowing review to the 2022 Chicago Shakespeare Theater premiere, and several performers from the Chicago cast, including Maryann Plunkett as Older Allie, will reprise their roles. The show features a book by Bekah Brunstetter (“This Is Us”) and music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson, with Michael Greif and Schele Williams directing. Now playing at the Schoenfeld Theater, Manhattan.THE WHO’S TOMMY The show, with music and lyrics by Pete Townshend who wrote the book with Des McAnuff, was on Broadway 30 years ago, but this new take, which had its premiere at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, is very heavy on visual spectacle (and, egad, how theatrical effects have changed in three decades!). Tommy is a traumatized child who witnesses violence and loses his ability to see, hear and speak. He plays mean pinball, though, and in the strange spectacle becomes something of a messiah. The leads, including Ali Louis Bourzgui (Tommy), Alison Luff (Mrs. Walker) and Adam Jacobs (Captain Walker), are revisiting the roles they played at the Goodman. Choreography is by Lorin Latarro (“Waitress”), and McAnuff directs. Performances begin March 8 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan.Louis Bourzgui in “The Who’s Tommy.”Liz LaurenLEMPICKA The life of the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka was not a screamingly obvious topic for a Broadway musical, but an impressive team has collaborated on this show. The Polish-born Lempicka (1898-1980), who was married, twice, to men, but had female lovers as well, lived through two world wars, surrounded by cultural and political change in Russia, Paris and California. Rachel Chavkin directs a cast led by Eden Espinosa as Lempicka, who returns to the role that wowed critics in productions at the Williamstown Theater Festival and La Jolla Playhouse. The show features music by Matt Gould and lyrics by Carson Kreitzer; they collaborated on the book. Performances begin March 19 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan.SUFFS The hard-fought passage of the 19th amendment, which codified women’s right to vote in 1919, is the focus of this musical by Shaina Taub. In addition to the challenge of being book writer, lyricist and composer, Taub also stars as Alice Paul (1885-1977), a leader of the National Woman’s Party. She and a group of like-minded women, including Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James) and Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), battle the patriarchy and, at times, one another. Directed by Leigh Silverman. Performances begin March 26 at the Music Box Theater, Manhattan.HELL’S KITCHEN Alicia Keys makes her Broadway debut with this semi-autobiographical jukebox musical about a 17-year-old girl named Ali, raised in a small Manhattan apartment by her protective single mother alongside a community of artists. The show features music and lyrics by Keys, a mix of hits, including “Fallin’” and “Empire State of Mind,” and new songs. The show’s premiere last year at the Public Theater received decent, if not exceptional, reviews, but c’mon, this girl is on fire. The book is by Kristoffer Diaz and choreography by Camille A. Brown. Maleah Joi Moon, Shoshana Bean and Brandon Victor Dixon will reprise their roles. The busy Michael Greif (see also “The Notebook”) directs. Performances begin March 28 at the Shubert Theater, Manhattan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Sutton Stracke Travels to Spain With Merce Cunningham’s Ashes

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      The current season of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” meets Merce Cunningham in an incongruous mash-up of reality TV and modern dance.“Can you get my drink, and I’ll get Merce?“In certain circles — OK, mine — that name can belong to only one person: Merce Cunningham, the 20th-century choreographer who reshaped modern dance. Over the past few weeks, his name has come up in the strangest of places: “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”On recent episodes, Sutton Stracke traveled to Spain with her fellow Housewives. Along with racks of designer clothes, she brought Cunningham’s ashes packed in a Ziploc bag. Cunningham, it turns out, was one of the most important men in her pre-“Housewives” life, and she wanted to release the ashes “in a significant place and make this a really meaningful trip.”Dismay ensued. “Put me in a Birkin, fine,” Kyle Richards, another Housewife, said. “But a Ziploc? No.”And out of Erika Girardi’s tipsy mouth poured this gem at dinner: “Merce is in the purse.”Worlds are truly colliding. Cunningham, who died in 2009 at 90, is an indelible part of dance history but less familiar to the general public. As Stracke told her castmates, “He’s a real big deal.” How big? Stracke explained that he was a founder of modern dance.Girardi asked, “With Martha Graham and all them?”“Yes,” Stracke said.“Twyla?” Girardi said, referring to Twyla Tharp. Girardi, who performs pop music as Erika Jayne, has long worked with the choreographer Mikey Minden, and knows a thing or two.“Twyla studied under him,” Stracke said.“OK,” Girardi said with detectable pride, “There you go.”Erika Girardi revealed the location of Cunningham’s ashes (a purse) over a tipsy dinner.Bravo/NBCUniversalWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Hors Pistes’ Is an Arts Festival About Sports, for People Who Don’t Like Sports

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      A series of events in preparation for the Paris Olympics explores a paradox, since arts and sports rarely mix in France.When it comes to the biggest sports show on earth, many Parisians have reached the stage of begrudging acceptance. The level of disruption — and metro price hikes — to get the city ready for this summer’s Olympic Games hasn’t exactly endeared the event to locals, especially those who favor culture over sports.“The Olympics are coming — whether we like it or not,” a curator from the Pompidou Center, Linus Gratte, said as he introduced a performance there this past weekend as part of the “Hors Pistes” festival. The audience chuckled.“Hors Pistes” (meaning “Off-Piste”), a festival the Pompidou Center says is devoted to “moving images,” came with an Olympic-ready theme this year: “The Rules of Sport.” It is part of the Cultural Olympiad, the program of arts events that is now a part of the Olympic experience in every host city.For the Paris Cultural Olympiad — spearheaded by Dominique Hervieu, an experienced performing arts curator — the city has opted to go big. Any cultural institution could apply for the “Olympiad” label, leading to a sprawling lineup of sports-related exhibitions and performances, which started back in 2022. This has led to a degree of confusion over what, exactly, the Olympiad stands for: Its official website currently lists no fewer than 984 upcoming events.And quite a few of them end up exploring a paradox, because art and sports rarely mix in France. As a rule, the country’s artistic output leans toward intellectualism rather than the virtuosity embodied by high-level athletes. The Pompidou Center, a flagship venue for contemporary art, telegraphs as much in its “Hors Pistes” publicity material, which says the festival’s goal is “to question and subvert the rules of sport, and to imagine new interpretations of them.”While the Pompidou is primarily an art museum, and “Hors Pistes” comes with a small exhibition, the festival features a significant number of performances, onstage in the center’s theater, or in its galleries. Some of these struggled to find coherent common ground with sports, however, like Anna Chirescu and Grégoire Schaller’s “Dirty Dancers,” an hourlong dance performance staged in the exhibition space, with sports-style bleachers for the audience.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Hinton Battle, Three-Time Tony Winner in Musicals, Dies at 67

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      He won awards for his roles in “Sophisticated Ladies,” “The Tap Dance Kid” and “Miss Saigon” — the most ever in the category of best featured actor in a musical.Hinton Battle, a dazzling dancer who won the first of his three Tony Awards in 1981 for his performance in the Duke Ellington musical revue “Sophisticated Ladies” after learning how to tap dance in the weeks leading up to opening night, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 67.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Leah Bass-Baylis, a family spokeswoman, who danced with him on Broadway. She did not provide a cause.“Some people are born with the spirit of the dance,” said Debbie Allen, the dancer, choreographer and actress, who had known Mr. Battle since he was 16. “Hinton Battle was that kind of person.” She added: “He was just technically superior to anyone who came close to him. He had rhythm and style. You were looking at a supernova.”Mr. Battle auditioned for “Sophisticated Ladies” several years after he originated the role of the Scarecrow in “The Wiz,” the all-Black adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz,” when he was 18. Trained as a ballet dancer, he didn’t know how to tap and felt the pressure of being in a show with virtuoso tappers like Gregory Hines and Gregg Burge.Mr. Battle playing the Scarecrow with Stephanie Mills as Dorothy in the Broadway musical “The Wiz” around 1975. Hulton archive/Getty ImagesAt his audition, Mr. Battle said that he fudged a soft-shoe routine.“I panicked,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “It used to be you didn’t need to know how to tap. Tap was out for so long, and there wasn’t much of it to see.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More