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    ‘American Idiot,’ Reborn in L.A. With American Sign Language

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    Inside the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles on a recent Wednesday, the air was saturated with stage fog and preshow jitters. The first performance of a revival of Green Day’s “American Idiot” was just hours away, and the choreographer Jennifer Weber had some final instructions for the cast members, who were wearing their costumes — combat boots, eyeliner, enough artfully ripped jeans to fill a Hot Topic — while they ran through dance movements onstage. Weber, microphone in hand, sang the song “Homecoming” as she demonstrated choreography:“What the hell’s your name?/What’s your pleasure, what is your pain?”An American Sign Language interpreter, Maria Cardoza, stood alongside the actors, signing Weber’s directions. At one point, Colin Analco, the show’s ASL choreographer, was slipped a small flashlight to illuminate Cardoza’s signing motions under the din of the fog and ambient lights. Weber kept singing, then started counting the beats:“‘Blew his brains out’ … one! … two! … three! …”Around the theater, about a dozen other conversations, some in spoken English and some in sign language, were happening among the cast and crew. Their show is the latest interpretation of a set of songs that have had many lives: After all, “American Idiot” is many things. It’s an album that monopolized alternative radio in 2004, but also a present-day staple of nostalgic streaming playlists. It’s a time capsule of Iraq War-era political disillusionment, and a distillation of timeless teenage angst. A musical adaptation of the album debuted in 2009, and made its way to Broadway in 2010. Now, this revival of that show is proving, with gusto, that “American Idiot” can be yet another thing: a near-scientific study of the innumerable ways to give somebody the finger.Landen Gonzales (signer, on the right) and Brady Fritz (singer, on the left) perform an excerpt from “Jesus of Suburbia.”Chad Unger for The New York TimesOr at least how many different ways the human body can be used to convey the emotions behind a raised middle finger. The production, which opened Oct. 9 and is running through Nov. 16, is a collaboration between the nonprofit Center Theater Group and Deaf West Theater, a Tony Award-winning company that stages plays and musicals that blend American Sign Language with spoken English.The cast includes both Deaf and hearing performers. Certain lead characters are played by two people at once — one Deaf actor who primarily communicates using sign language, and one hearing actor who sings and talks in spoken English. It’s a well-established method for producing work for audiences of Deaf and hearing people. Deaf West has specialized in it for decades. But as one might expect, “American Idiot,” a fast-paced, loud pop-punk musical filled with wordplay (“alien nation,” for instance) and four-letter words, presented the artists with some novel challenges.An idiosyncratic musicalBuilt around rock songs that were not written for the stage — among them “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “Wake Me Up When September Ends” and the title track — the “American Idiot” musical is almost entirely sung through, with little dialogue. Its book was written by Green Day’s frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, and the Broadway director Michael Mayer. Its story, about three teenage misfits named Johnny, Will and Tunny whose lives diverge, is primarily conveyed through the staging.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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      Singing, and Signing, Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ in Los Angeles

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      The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Deaf West Theater are working on an innovative production conceived for both hearing and deaf operagoers.LOS ANGELES — DJ Kurs has been the artistic director of the Deaf West Theater, a theater company created here by deaf actors, for the past 10 years. But he had never seen the Los Angeles Philharmonic or been to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, its renowned home, even though he grew up in Southern California.He will be there this week, though, leading seven actors from Deaf West in an innovative production of “Fidelio,” Beethoven’s opera about the rescue of a political prisoner, in a collaboration with a cast of singers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The actors — along with a chorus from Venezuela whose members are deaf or hard of hearing and will also be signing — will be center stage on opening night Thursday, expressively enacting the lone opera of a composer who had progressive hearing loss while writing masterpiece after masterpiece. In this “Fidelio,” the singers will stay in the background.“Opera itself as an art form, it has not been accessible to our world,” Kurs, 44, said the other day through a sign-language interpreter. Deaf West, he said, had been approached in the past about collaborating on operas but had always declined.But after nearly two years of not performing because of the pandemic — and after watching an energetic tape of Leonard Bernstein conducting “Fidelio” — Kurs decided to accept this offer to work with the Philharmonic and its music director, Gustavo Dudamel.Indi Robinson and Gregor Lopes, deaf actors, rehearse a scene from Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe extraordinary nature of the endeavor was clear as singers and actors gathered last week for rehearsals at a United Methodist church in Toluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley, some 10 miles from Disney Hall. Each day was a mix of languages, movement and simultaneous translations — between voiced German, Spanish and English and signed American Sign Language and Venezuelan Sign Language.For the production, 135 singers, actors, choir members (singing and signing), and orchestra players, along with Dudamel, who will conduct the production, will fill a stage that usually just accommodates an orchestra.“We are creating the dance of the double-cast,” said Alberto Arvelo, the director of the production, in which each character is portrayed by both a singer and an actor. “We have been conceiving ‘Fidelio’ for both audiences — we want to create to create an opera for a deaf audience as well. From the first bar of the opera.”For the actors, who are accustomed to performing in musicals including “Spring Awakening,” which has been part of Deaf West’s repertory, adapting to a more operatic style has been something of an adjustment.“It’s a challenging and terrifying experience,” said Russell Harvard, the actor playing Rocco, the jailer, after rehearsing a scene where he took Leonore to the dungeon to see her husband (husbands: a singer and an actor) sleeping on the floor. “I have never done anything like this before.”Josh Castille, a deaf performance artist acting the role of Florestan, left, worked with the director, Alberto Arvelo, center, and Ian Koziara, the tenor singing the role of Florestan.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe actors have to translate German (the language of Beethoven’s opera, and one that few of them know, so lip-reading is not an option for most) into American Sign Language. And they have to get used to the florid, multiple repetitions of a single word or line in the score, all of which are second nature for opera singers used to coloratura runs, and find ways to convey, with signs, the big moments when a singer sends a single note soaring through the hall.“Oh gosh — it is stressing me out,” said Amelia Hensley, the actor portraying Leonore, who disguises herself as a man named Fidelio to get a job in the jail where her husband, a political prisoner, is being held, in the hopes of saving him.“I have to hold my sign for an incredibly long time because the note is held that long,” she said. “It’s difficult for me to understand because I don’t hear. And I want to make sure that the deaf audience will understand me and understand why I’m holding this out, because it’s not natural to the language to hold a sign that long.”This production of “Fidelio” is opening less than a month after “CODA” won the Academy Award for best picture, and Troy Kotsur, who used to be member of Deaf West, won the Oscar for best supporting actor, the first deaf man to be so honored by the academy. Deaf West is developing a musical version of “CODA.” (Dudamel and his wife, Maria Valverde, said in an interview they had seen the movie three times.)This production is steeped in classical music history, since Beethoven experienced hearing loss in the last decades of his life. (“Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others,” the composer and musician wrote in 1802 in an anguished letter addressed to his brothers that came to be known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.)María Inmaculada Velásquez Echeverria, the artistic director of White Hands Choir.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThat history intrigued Dudamel as he was arranging a 250th anniversary celebration of Beethoven’s birth just before the pandemic. “It was how to make the opera be part of these two worlds — the two worlds of Beethoven,” he said.And it is what drew Deaf West to this project; its members considered what Beethoven faced writing and conducting while dealing with a steady decline in his hearing.“Maybe he did it through feeling the vibrations of the music?” Kurs said. “I don’t know Beethoven’s exact process, but there’s a similarity to how I experience music. I’ve never heard music in my entire life, but I think that I understand it.”There is much debate among biographers and musicologists about Beethoven’s level of hearing at various points in his career. He wrote and revised “Fidelio” over the course of nearly a decade, from its first performance in 1805 to the substantially revised version of 1814. By 1813, he had several ear trumpets made. By 1818, he began carrying pads of paper for people to write down what they were saying to him. While he was able to continue composing as his hearing deteriorated, it became increasingly difficult for him to perform and conduct.“It never really affected his ability to compose or orchestrate because he was wildly creative throughout his life,” said Theodore J. Albrecht, a retired professor of musicology at Kent State University, who has written extensively about Beethoven.Jan Swafford, a Beethoven biographer, said the composer began reporting hearing loss as early as 1798. “He would not have lost pitch as much as color,” he said of its onset.In the original plan, before the pandemic, this production was to be presented in Europe, with Dudamel conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra along with the White Hands Choir, a group of deaf and hard of hearing performers associated with El Sistema, the music education program in Venezuela where Dudamel trained. After the tour through Europe was canceled, Dudamel revived the idea here in Los Angeles, this time working with his own orchestra and Deaf West, the renowned Los Angeles-based theater.Dudamel is familiar with the complexities of leading an orchestra, singers and a choir; he is also the music director for the Paris Opera. But this week, he will also be leading the deaf and hard-of-hearing actors from Deaf West and choir members from Venezuela.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel, left, worked with members of the opera’s cast and chorus at a recent rehearsal.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDudamel told Kurs he had to some extent been prepared for this because of his work at the podium, especially as someone who conducts orchestras all over the world, with players who speak many different languages. (Some orchestra players disdain overly verbal conductors in any language, preferring to work through the music.)“In a way, a conductor needs to have sign language conducting the orchestra,” Dudamel told Kurs during a break in a rehearsal. “You cannot say anything. You can only show them.”Valverde, an actress and filmmaker, is producing a documentary about the White Hands Choir, whose members wear distinctive white gloves, and was there filming the choir as her husband led it in rehearsal.The aspirations of this performance will be signaled from first notes of the overture.The Venezuelan choir will use choreography and facial expressions to convey the power of the overture which opens the opera: The other day, it was wide smiles and hands raised to the air in a representation of fireflies. “Fidelio’s overture is especially optimistic,” Arvelo, the director said. “In such a dark story, the overture starts with this moment in major tones. We were like: How can we transmit this with images?”During the spoken stretches of the opera, the audience will hear nothing: the actors will communicate the dialogue in sign language, which will be translated on supertitles cast above the stage.The production will last for three nights.“I think it’s going to be a mixed audience,” said Chad Smith, the head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “There will be a lot of the L.A. Phil audience who are coming to hear Gustavo and the LA Phil perform one of the great works from the canon.”Smith added that the hope was to also have people who are deaf or hard of hearing, who are in the space for “perhaps the first time.”The experience has proved to be as powerful for the opera singers as for the actors. Ryan Speedo Green, the bass-baritone who appeared as Uncle Paul in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera last year, and is the singing counterpart to Russell Harvard’s Rocco, said this was the most inclusive opera he had ever witnessed.“People want to see themselves onstage,” he said. “For once in my life, I’m going to be someone’s voice and they’re going to be my action. He is my body and my action and my intent and my physical interpretation. And I am his voice to the audience, to the hearing audience. We are one entity — Rocco. He is attached to me, as much as I am attached to him.” More

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      ‘CODA’ Is Being Developed Into a Stage Musical by Deaf West

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      The theater plans to work with the Oscar-nominated film’s producers to adapt the story of a teenager torn between helping her deaf family and singing.The Oscar-nominated film “CODA,” in which a hearing child of deaf parents pursues a passion for singing, is being developed into a stage musical by Deaf West Theater, a highly regarded Los Angeles-based nonprofit with a strong track record in musical theater.The project, which does not yet have a creative team or a production calendar, is a joint venture between the theater and two of the companies that produced the movie, Vendôme Pictures and Pathé Films.“CODA,” written and directed by Sian Heder, is nominated for three Academy Awards, including best picture. The film is about a high school student torn between helping her family, which runs a fishing boat, and pursuing a newfound interest in singing; she is the only hearing member of her family. (CODA is an acronym for child of deaf adult.)“‘CODA’ is unique among the entire canon of feature films in that it features us in our natural setting: among the world at large and among our own, often at home or in private settings,” DJ Kurs, the artistic director of Deaf West, wrote in an email interview. “As a Deaf person, I knew from the start that ‘CODA’ would make a perfect musical: It addresses our relationship with music and how we move through the world of sound like immigrants in a foreign country, learning new, seemingly arbitrary rules on the fly.”Deaf West, founded in 1991, is the nation’s most prominent theater focusing on what it calls “Deaf-centered storytelling,” and its productions are generally performed in both American Sign Language and spoken English by casts that include deaf and hearing artists.The theater has previously staged five musicals, including two revivals that transferred to Broadway, “Big River” in 2003 and “Spring Awakening” in 2015. Both were nominated for Tony Awards. “CODA” would be the second musical originated by the company; the first was “Sleeping Beauty Wakes” in 2007.“Professional musical theater was largely inaccessible to our community for the most part until our production of ‘Big River’ was staged in bigger houses in L.A. and N.Y.,” Kurs wrote. “Now we have musical theater aficionados within our community, and that’s a beautiful thing. I would wager that the art form of signed musical theater is still in its infancy.”10 Movies to Watch This Oscar SeasonCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

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      in Movies

      How ‘Sound of Metal’ Star Paul Raci Went From Day Jobs to Oscar Nominee

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      After decades of struggle, the 72-year-old actor finally found his breakthrough playing a deaf Vietnam vet with addiction issues — a role with parallels to his own life.It’s been a long time coming for Paul Raci, who just earned his first Oscar nomination at age 72.“To be an actor for all these years — 40 years of just knocking around — and then to have this kind of acclaim, it’s insane, man,” Raci said recently in the backyard of his Burbank home.For most of his career, Raci has had to make do with one- or two-line roles in TV shows like “Parks and Recreation” and “Baskets.” Then the “Sound of Metal” director Darius Marder plucked Raci from obscurity and handed him the part of a lifetime: Joe, the stoic but sensitive leader of a sober-living community for deaf people who takes in a troubled punk-metal drummer, Ruben (Riz Ahmed).It’s a role with real-life resonance for Raci, who grew up in Chicago as a CODA — a child of deaf adults — and, like Joe, dealt with addiction issues after serving in Vietnam. “I always say I went into Vietnam like John Wayne, and I came out Lenny Bruce,” Raci said.A lifetime spent as his parents’ hearing interpreter had instilled in Raci a love for performance, but when he moved to Los Angeles decades ago to pursue an acting career, roles were scarce. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve always known what I was capable of, but nothing was happening for me out here,” he said.Still, Raci kept plugging away, working by day as a sign-language interpreter in the Los Angeles County Superior Court system and, at night, continuing to hone his craft in stage productions at the Deaf West Theater. “I would always think to myself, ‘I must be so specific that there’s nothing around here for me,” said Raci, who is small and wiry with tattoos and rocker-length hair. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to wait for that specific role.’” And then it finally came.These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Raci as a sober-community leader in “Sound of Metal,” starring Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke.Amazon StudiosWhat was the morning of the Oscar nominations like for you?Well, I don’t have an alarm clock — I have a head clock, and for some reason it was unplugged that morning. I was supposed to get up at 5 a.m., and at 5:25 a.m., my wife and I got up: “Oh, we missed it!” We run in the living room, turn on the TV and just as it came up, they were on the second guy from the supporting-actor category. And then [presenter Priyanka Chopra Jonas] goes, “And Paul Rah-ci.” I said, “No, it’s Ray-ci … and I accept!”So now it’s 5:30 in the morning, my phone starts ringing. People are showing up with wine, they’re showing up with edibles — not the kind you’re thinking about, but fruit covered with chocolate, and cupcakes. My friend Hillary, she brings over a bottle of champagne — I said, “It’s six o’clock, Hillary!” My wife is crying, my daughter is crying. It stayed like that all day long, so it was quite exciting.And what was it like after the dust settled?Six days later, I looked at my wife and I said, “Did this really happen?” But if I had to wait this long for this moment, it’s worth it, man. A very good friend emailed me two days ago and said, “Paul, this is not just a supporting-actor nomination, this is a lifetime achievement award.” I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I got a lot of work left to do here. I think this thing has added 20 years to my life.For decades, you had been doing day-player work in movies and television. How did you make those kinds of roles feel worthwhile?To be honest, it’s more of a detriment than anything, because it just shows you what an abysmal failure you are in your own head. I mean, I wasn’t able to get a series-regular audition or to even get in the room because, “They need a name.” Thank God for Deaf West Theater — if it wasn’t for them, where the hell else was I going to exercise my acting chops? I had nothing. But you go from gig to gig and hope that something’s going to happen.So how did it finally happen? When you auditioned to play Joe in “Sound of Metal,” did you have an inkling that this time might be different?I put it on tape, sent it in and then forgot about it — because listen, this never happens for me. When I leave an audition with the sides [script pages] in my hand, I rip them up, throw it in the garbage. I’m not going to dwell on stuff that’s going to break my heart. But my wife, who’s my agent, called the casting directing office and said, “Have you seen Paul’s tape?”At that point, they said: “We’re inundated with tapes. We’ve got too many that we can’t even find Paul’s tape, and we’re probably going to go with a name.” Robert Duvall, Forest Whitaker, that’s what they were looking for, name-wise. My audition tape was fairly strong, and my wife said, “Please, look for it.” Ten minutes later, the phone rings. The casting office goes, “Darius wants to talk to Paul.” A week later, he drove down to meet me and we talked and talked.A friend told Raci to consider his nomination a lifetime achievement award: “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I got a lot of work left to do here.”Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesIt must be great to have a wife who fights for you in that regard.Listen, she’s been a small-time agent here for over 20 years, trying to compete with CAA and ICM. She has a boutique agency and she said, “I’m not going to close it until you’re a star, Paul.” She was always fighting to get me in a room, and it never happened. My mind-set was so stuck in rejection that even at the end of my conversation with Darius, I said, “Hold on a second, are you actually offering me the role?” He said, “Yes, I am.” But at first, I told them I wasn’t going to do the movie.Why not?Look, I got a house to pay for here. This is not the big movie I thought it was — it was a very small budget, and I could make more money staying here in L.A. and working in the court system than what they were offering me. I’m going to go all the way over there [around Boston] for something that’s going to put me in the hole? I can’t afford that — I don’t even have health insurance for my family. So I said to my wife, “Tell Darius I’m not interested.”Really? That takes guts.Well, it looked like a pretty good movie, but I’m a blue-collar guy like my dad and I’ve got to pay my bills. Then Darius calls me: “You can’t do this! You don’t understand what this means.” So they kind of bumped up my per diem. He was so flexible with me, and I knew his heart was in the right place — he was so respectful to my point of view, to my CODA experience, that I felt like I could trust him.After subsisting for so long on these minor roles, how did it feel to play out such long scenes opposite Riz Ahmed?Wonderful. Fulfilling. I’ve had many of those moments in a 99-seat theater, but to be able to have this captured on film is incredible to me. And to be a scene partner with somebody with Riz’s brilliance is a dream come true. In our very first scene, when he’s sitting across from me and I say, “So, how are you doing,” he’s in so much pain and he just sits there, taking a very long moment. And that was real! He just breaks my heart.I’m forever grateful to Riz Ahmed — I don’t know if I could have done it with another actor, because it was so intense. In our last scene together, I looked over in the periphery of my eye when they called “Cut,” and Darius Marder was standing there just weeping.“You go from gig to gig and hope that something’s going to happen,” Raci said.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesThough you’re a child of deaf adults, you’re also a hearing person. Is there a case to be made that Joe should have been played by someone who is deaf or hard of hearing?That’s an argument that some would make in the deaf community, yes. However, I would argue back, because I’m a CODA and you cannot take me out of this culture that I was brought up in. I would never take a deaf role from a deaf actor who is culturally deaf, but Joe is a guy who was late-deafened.I’m sensitive to it, and I vetted it before we went ahead. I asked Darius in the beginning, “I don’t feel comfortable having this guy be deaf. Can’t you make the guy a CODA?” He said, “That’s interesting. Let me get back to you.” He had three deaf advisers on the set, and all three told Darius, “No, it’s more compelling to have him be deafened,” to have that parallel line between Ruben and Joe, which you feel so strongly.The beautiful thing about it is I’m hooked into [“Sound of Metal” distributor] Amazon right now, and they’re coming to me and asking for content. I have other things I’ve written, I have other deaf writers I know of, and because of this connection, I think some doors are going to be kicked down, because people are interested in what I have to say right now.Have you figured out what your next project will be?Listen, I have “Team Paul” now. I’ve got a management team, I’ve got an entertainment lawyer, and Team Paul is now advising me that I have to be very careful with the next role I take. I’ve been offered — honest to God — about eight, nine, 10 things. And I’ve never been offered anything ever! I can’t wait to get started working again, but I’m going to have to be a little selective and there’s nothing wrong with that.Are any career goals now in sight?I love Bill Murray, he’s the same age as me. I don’t want to take any roles away from Bill, but I certainly would like to act with that guy. I used to fantasize and meditate on things like that, things I thought were too good to be true, because for many years my prayer has always been, “Nothing is too good to believe in. It can happen.” Even though there was a part of me didn’t even believe that, the prayer believed in me and lifted me up. You’ve got to just persevere, even when the believing isn’t in you. If it’s true for me, it’s true for everybody. More