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      in Music

      A Music Career Is a Risky Bet. In ‘Mija,’ the Stakes Are Even Higher.

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      A new documentary follows Doris Anahi Muñoz, the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, as she balances the needs of her family with artistic dreams.As a middle schooler with big dreams living in San Bernardino, Calif., Doris Anahi Muñoz made her bedroom walls a canvas. She painted her hands on the back of her door, with the words, “These are the hands of Doris Anahi Muñoz, and they’re going to touch the hearts of millions.”As the main subject of the Disney original documentary “Mija,” Muñoz, an artist manager-turned-musician, aims for her story to do just that: connect with children of immigrant families who are yearning to pursue a career in the entertainment industry, yet who may feel alone or guilty about their desires when their households face urgent daily struggles.The film’s director, Isabel Castro, follows Muñoz as she works to catapult the careers of Latin musicians including Cuco and Jacks Haupt while helping her undocumented Mexican family navigate the green-card system.“A lot of us, we carry the weight of our families, and I needed a film like this growing up,” Muñoz said in a recent video interview from Boyle Heights, Calif., where wooden bookshelves outlined with cascading foliage and porcelain vases filled the room. “So, I’m just glad that being in this seat as a protagonist allows other people to see themselves.”Muñoz, the only of her parents’ three children who was born in the United States, grew up playing saxophone and violin in a family of Evangelicals who hoped she would use her talents to become a worship leader. During the summer after her sophomore year of college, Ed Sheeran, with a nod, invited her onstage to sing along to his hit single “Lego House” at a radio event, reigniting her passion for music.She wrote songs and performed live for a while, but she realized that she was uncomfortable in the spotlight and would rather work behind the scenes. Her first major project on her own was managing Cuco, a bedroom-pop artist who broke out by staying true to his Mexican American heritage and making music for Latino kids who felt unseen.Muñoz and the musician Jacks Haupt in a scene from “Mija.”DisneyThe film traces Muñoz’s early work with Cuco as she orchestrates his sold-out concerts and helps him land a seven-figure record deal, a success that helped fund her parents’ application to become permanent residents of the U.S.When the pandemic hits and (spoiler alert!) Muñoz must cope with the pressure of splitting with Cuco, she rediscovers her purpose in Jacks Haupt, an indie singer-songwriter from Dallas who, like many young artists, has struggled to find a wider audience.Haupt, 22, grew up listening to Joe Bataan’s “Mujer Mía” and other Latin soul classics in her Chicano household, and also took inspiration from Amy Winehouse, Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin. Haupt’s bilingual music has since pivoted to a more electronic, trip-hop sound, and she often sings about heartbreak and mental health.Haupt calls music her diary, and it has been a support system for her over the years. But at the beginning of her musical career, she said she lacked the support of her family. “Working in the arts as a photographer, videographer, immigrant, POC parents are more like, ‘This isn’t making money,’” Haupt said in a video interview from Dallas.Building a career in the arts can take money and time — resources that are in short supply for immigrant families facing challenges like navigating the path to citizenship and finding financial footing. The film documents Muñoz’s tight-knit bond with her family: expressing gratitude during a Thanksgiving meal, taking trips to visit her brother, who was deported to Tijuana, Mexico, and the ongoing battle for her parents’ green cards.“For those who feel alone in their process, I want this film to hold them,” Muñoz said. “I had big dreams about my family reuniting and coming together and hopefully telling their story one day as a kid.”Haupt called music her diary.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe “Mija” director Castro’s credits include the documentary shorts “USA v Scott,” about an American geographer facing prison time for aiding migrants in Arizona, and “Darlin,” a New York Times op-doc about a Honduran mother’s fight to reunite with her son after they were divided by the U.S. border detention policy. Castro said she was drawn to Muñoz and Haupt’s stories as an indie music lover who recognized a lack of representation for Latin artists in that world.“I just became really interested in the ways that Doris, Cuco and the entire community were really trying to figure out a place for themselves in this exact musical space that I had grown up listening to,” Castro said.The film shifts from Haupt’s dreamy onstage performances and Los Angeles recording sessions to a heated phone conversation with her mother about what is traditionally considered profitable work. Castro said the conversation was reminiscent of ones she had held with her own mother, in moments when she felt guilty for not living up to expectations.“My ambition and my career is rooted in a sense of responsibility for the sacrifices that my parents made for me,” she said.“I hope people, especially Latinx viewers and viewers of color, will come away from the film feeling a sense of hope,” Castro added, “feeling a sense of security that pursuing creative careers is a worthwhile ambition, and that it can pay off with hard work and tenacity.”In the time since “Mija” was filmed, Muñoz has closed her management company and has begun releasing her own music under her artist name, Doris Anahí. Last week, she performed at the film’s premiere in Central Park, as did Haupt. (The film opened in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Aug. 5, and will come to Disney+ on Sept. 16.)“Our parents come from a generation of survival,” Muñoz said, “and we are a lucky generation that gets to think about thriving rather than surviving.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Fair Play’ Review: Casting a Floodlight on Invisible Labor

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      This documentary, a lucid look at household tasks based on Eve Rodsky’s best seller, pairs actionable guidance with testimony from real families.The advice included within Eve Rodsky’s book “Fair Play,” a guide to sharing domestic labor and achieving harmony in the home, won’t blow your mind. A woman’s time is as valuable as a man’s? Who knew! But there is a fortifying effect to arranging these axioms in sequence.The documentary “Fair Play,” directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom (“The Great American Lie”) and based on Rodsky’s book, reproduces its lucidity by positioning interviews with real families alongside Rodsky’s directives. While its stylings, including perky music and cutesy graphics, can sometimes verge on trite, its insights and guidance are encouraging, actionable and necessary.As our talking-head guide, Rodsky is amiable cinematic company. She describes growing up as the latchkey kid of a single mother, and how the strains she faced in her youth informed her values as a wife and mom. An admirable frankness guides her testimony: Rodsky recounts instances of feeling angry at her husband, and describes the specific ways that she coached him in the art of taking ownership over household tasks.The film’s arguments hit harder in the wake of the pandemic’s lockdowns, which the documentary suggests found moms bearing the brunt of the stress. But most vital is the film’s look at where the United States falls short in its support of parents, particularly its limited access to subsidized child care. The burden of invisible labor can be mitigated on a case-by-case basis, but at the end of the day, it is the system that needs to change.Fair PlayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      in Theater

      On the London Stage, Families in Disarray

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      Two new plays, “The Southbury Child” and “Mad House,” explore domestic discord with contrasting degrees of success.LONDON — Families are having a hard time on the London stage of late, and in one instance, at least, balloons are partly to blame. That’s the unusual starting point of “The Southbury Child,” a lively if uneven new play from Stephen Beresford that has arrived at the Bridge Theater (through Aug. 27) after its premiere south of London last month at the Chichester Festival Theater.A young girl, Taylor Southbury, has died of a fast-spreading illness, and the local vicar, David Highland (Alex Jennings, in a galvanic star turn), is preparing for her funeral. The girl’s bereft mother, Tina (Sarah Twomey), has requested that her daughter’s memory be honored with helium balloons affixed throughout the church, bearing images of the Disney princesses the child so loved.David, though, rebuffs this idea. “This is not just a question of taste — of mere aesthetics,” he tells his wife, Mary (Phoebe Nicholls), as the townspeople in his Dartmouth constituency gather in support of Tina’s wishes. What matters most when it comes to grieving Taylor, the vicar says around the capacious kitchen table that dominates Mark Thompson’s set, is “an experience worthy of God” that looks at death head-on. That means rejecting embellishments like balloons — branded by Disney no less — that aren’t focused on spiritual priorities like salvation.David, we soon discover, is far from flawless and may not be ideally positioned to adjudicate behavior and protocol in others. A philanderer with a fondness for drink, he threatens to rupture his family no less fully than he upends a congregation whose mounting disapproval — “justice for Taylor” becomes their mantra — can be heard during the scene changes. (The exemplary sound design is by George Dennis.)The play wastes no time spelling out the inconsistencies in David’s sentiments: “You’re not exactly the poster boy for unshakable principles,” counters Craig (a likable Jack Greenlees), the gay Scottish curate new in town who, rather too conveniently, has fought his own battle with booze.Josh Finan in “The Southbury Child.”Manuel HarlanAdding to the increasingly vexed crosscurrents are the dead girl’s sweary uncle, Lee (Josh Finan), whose actions in the second act send a genuine shiver through the house, and the Highlands’ grown daughters, Susannah (Jo Herbert) and Naomi (a vivid Racheal Ofori), the first as prim and indrawn a personality as her younger, adopted sibling is a free spirit with a fondness for weed.Beresford wrote one of the defining plays of lockdown in his terrific solo piece, “Three Kings,” as a showcase for Andrew Scott, and here you sense the playwright’s delight at being able to populate a stage anew.Ambitious in its thematic reach, “The Southbury Child” suggests itself as a bustling state-of-the-nation play, which wastes no time referring to societal divisions, unemployment and the reality of Brexit. It also has plenty to say about the climate of cancel culture that threatens to engulf David via mob rule. Nicholas Hytner’s characteristically adroit production is on firmest footing when the play is at its most serious, and when Jennings’s bespectacled David puts his flippancy to one side to make way for genuine anguish.Hytner and Jennings have worked together on and off now for several decades, and their latest collaboration owes an incalculable amount to Jennings’s ability to do wry one minute and to tap the wellsprings of emotion the next.Elsewhere, you slightly tire of the script’s more glib moments: Waitrose, the upmarket British grocery store, is co-opted for a punchline, and there’s a light bulb joke that I could swear I’ve heard before.It seems odd, too, that a disgraced David cedes center stage near the end to the stricken Lee, whom the able Finan plays with a gathering despair that ends the proceedings on an intriguingly open-ended note. For all the breeziness of a play that likes its gags, “The Southbury Child” comes steeped in a degree of pain that even the best sermon might find hard to assuage.As for the calamity-prone clan in Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” now in its world premiere at the Ambassadors Theater, through Sept. 4, what can I say beyond noting that I didn’t believe a single word of the fractiousness on view?From left, David Harbour, Bill Pullman and Akiya Henry in Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel at the Ambassadors Theater.Marc BrennerThe synthetic feeling of Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s production is especially surprising following reports that Rebeck, the American author of such accomplished Broadway plays as “Seminar” and “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” wrote the play very much with its leading man, the TV star and stage actor David Harbour, in mind — specifically drawing upon mental health issues that Harbour has confronted in the past.It would help if the situation — a dying father (Bill Pullman) facing down his three children, Harbour’s emotionally wayward Michael chief among them — didn’t seem to owe such an obvious debt to plays like “August: Osage County,” albeit with the genders reversed, not to mention earlier studies in familial discord like Arthur Miller’s “The Price.” Pullman’s irascible Daniel roars his way to the grave via a series of standoffs that depend on hoary narrative devices like a revelatory letter and baldfaced pronouncements on the groan-worthy order of “None of us had a childhood.”That particular remark is spoken by the widower’s toxic daughter, Pam (Sinéad Matthews), who is the last of the children to gather at the chaotic family home for a rancorous reckoning that finds room, too, for a hospice nurse played by the wonderful Akiya Henry, an Olivier Award nominee this year for her performance in the Almeida Theater’s “Macbeth.”Henry’s character, patronizingly conceived in saintly terms, gets a breakdown moment that is better acted than the writing deserves, and her dismissal of “this ridiculous country” (meaning the United States) seems calculated to strike a chord with British audiences. It’s always good to see Pullman onstage, and Harbour’s conviction in a part that is presumably close to the knuckle exists beyond any doubt.But I’m still pondering the crucial narrative role of a pencil sharpener, which all too readily happens to be found outside a back door, ready for use. Playgoers, take note: You never know when a writing implement might become a matter of life and death.The Southbury Child. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Aug. 27.Mad House. Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Ambassadors Theater, through Sept. 4. More

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      in Music

      Martha Wainwright Tells a Few Stories She Might Regret

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      With a new memoir, the singer-songwriter from a famous musical family says she is happy to be “letting go of this story of being No. 4 on the totem pole.”When Martha Wainwright was 14 years old, she moved to New York from her home in Montreal to live with her father, the singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Her mother, the Canadian folk star Kate McGarrigle, was busy with a new album and a concert tour, and so it was decided that Loudon would watch over Martha for a year. The New York experiment turned out to be something of a failure, though, according to Ms. Wainwright; she did poorly in school and stayed out late, as if in competition with a father who was sometimes out even later. But the year definitely had its upsides: “I became more like my father, as if the DNA in me that came from him started to wake up,” she writes in a new memoir, “Stories I Might Regret Telling You.”A few years later, she went with him on a tour of Britain, serving as his warm-up act and joining him onstage for father-daughter duets. One night she heard him introducing “I’d Rather Be Lonely,” a song she had figured was about an old girlfriend. So she was surprised when he told the audience it was about the year he had spent living with his teenage daughter. As Ms. Wainwright listened to him sing the key lines — “You’re still living here with me / I’d rather be lonely” — she began to cry.“A part of me wanted to jump to my death from my tiny seat,” she writes in the memoir. “Or, better yet, take off into the night, leaving him standing there waiting for me. But the show must go on, so I dried my tears and went down the stairs and on to the stage.”The new book, cigarette and all.HachetteConfessional art always comes at a cost, for its creators and subjects alike, as people in the Wainwright-McGarrigle family know all too well. Loudon, who rose to sudden success with the novelty hit “Dead Skunk,” has included songs about his family on a majority of his more than 25 albums, many of them devastatingly personal. Ms. McGarrigle, who made 10 albums as part of a duo with her sister Anna before her death in 2010, also wrote a number of autobiographical songs that touched on her marriage to Loudon, which ended in divorce, and their children.When Martha and her older brother, the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, came of age, they joined what was by then an established family tradition. The first song Ms. Wainwright wrote was about the birth of a new half sibling, a wry welcome to her singular family; and a song on her brother’s 1998 debut album delved into his relationship with his mother.As children, Martha and Rufus sang for paying audiences at folk festivals. Later, when he had a deal with the DreamWorks record label and started touring the world, she was often his backup singer, an arrangement that eventually came to an end. “He needed to cut the fat and I needed to get out of his shadow,” she writes.Rufus and Martha Wainwright sing their father’s hit “Dead Skunk” at a show in London, circa 1984.Martha Wainwright Collection In New York, Ms. Wainwright performed in dive bars while putting herself through a series of crushes on unavailable men. She was by turns ambitious and self-destructive. On nights when she knew a label scout or producer was in the crowd, she would go onstage drunk or high. “I created an impossible situation for myself,” she writes. “I was afraid to fail but I kept setting myself up to fail.”As her brother’s fame grew, she struggled with her status as the least famous member of her nuclear family. And while her parents provided inspiration, she says in the book that they could have been more helpful. “I don’t know if you’re wondering where my dad was during those New York years,” she writes, “but at the time, I was wondering, too.”For a while Rufus was running around as part of a “sons of” club, a group that included Sean Lennon, Chris Stills and Harper Simon. “They were all getting signed and written about and had publicists and photo shoots and beautiful girlfriends,” Ms. Wainwright says in the memoir. “Were their songs better than mine?” The chip on her shoulder led her to write a grand statement song, its title a vulgar epithet. Contrary to what she has told journalists in the past, the song isn’t about her father — or, rather, it isn’t exclusively about him.In addition to the attention-grabbing title, the song had perhaps the closest thing to a pop hook to be found in her oeuvre up till then. Whereas the typical Martha Wainwright melody meanders as it showcases her acrobatic whisper-to-scream vocal range, this one was different: a folky strum-and-shout with straightforward lines like “Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish I was born a man.”The Guardian called the song a “masterpiece” when it appeared in 2005 as the centerpiece of “Martha Wainwright,” her first album. Critics admired her debut but couldn’t resist comparing her with the rest of her family. A Pitchfork reviewer praised her voice and her songs, only to add the caveat that her ability to write about personal matters with such candor “would be more remarkable if it weren’t a genetic trait.”Her next album, “I Know You’re Married but I’ve Got Feelings Too,” was partly produced by Brad Albetta, a bass player who, by the time of its 2008 release, was also her husband. Their relationship had always been tumultuous, but she had pushed for marriage anyway, partly because she wanted to “grow up” before losing her mother, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.Martha Wainwright with her mother, Kate McGarrigle, in London, 2009.Martha Wainwright Collection Her memoir goes deep into her mother’s illness and death, which coincided with the premature birth of Ms. Wainwright’s first child. In less capable hands, such material could come across as maudlin, but Ms. Wainwright has a light touch and an eye for telling detail. She describes wanting to put her mother’s cancer-ridden body in the same kind of incubator that was keeping her son alive, as well as the moment when she and Ms. McGarrigle compared their damaged bodies — her own fresh C-section incision, the chevron scar from chemo that covered her mother’s torso.Ms. Wainwright’s marriage limped along after her mother’s death. She clung to Mr. Albetta as a source of stability (not to mention bass playing). “I really like the makeup sex / It’s the only kind I ever get,” she sang from the stage while on tour for the album “Come Home to Mama,” with her husband close behind onstage.An early draft of “Stories I Might Regret Telling You” that contained more details about those years was used as an exhibit in their divorce proceedings in 2018. That version — “the whole enchilada,” as Ms. Wainwright described it in an interview — was pared down considerably before publication.Rather than zeroing in on the father of her children (a second son was born in 2014), Ms. Wainwright, 46, concludes the memoir by focusing on her creative and personal renaissance of recent years. She describes the aftermath of a show she gave in Los Angeles, when she emerged rumpled from the house of “someone everyone in the world wants to sleep with” full of joie de vivre and “glad to know that rock ’n’ roll was still alive and I was still a part of it.”The extended musical family in New York, 2012, from left to right: Martha Wainwright, the singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, Rufus Wainwright, Loudon Wainwright III, and the singer-songwriter Lucy Wainwright Roche.David Corio for The New York TimesOn a recent Zoom call, she looked and sounded exactly as she does onstage: beautifully unvarnished, full of open-mouthed laughter. In the past few weeks she has been preparing to go on tour with a show that combines readings from the memoir and performances of songs on her fourth album, “Love Will Be Reborn.” She said a documentary filmmaker has been following her around, adding that she sometimes wished she had a larger-than-life persona to hide behind, like Tom Waits’s or Laurie Anderson’s.Lately, she added, she has been in the mood to do some serious spring cleaning in her building in Montreal, which she inherited from her mother. “There’s a back room that’s filled with the Kate McGarrigle and Anna McGarrigle archive and crap,” she said, gesturing toward a door behind her desk. “I feel like I’m almost about to light the whole thing on fire. I’m not going to do it literally, but I’m like, ‘OK, let’s call a museum and have them take it away.’ And I think that I’m kind of excited about it. And maybe I’m excited about letting go of this story of being No. 4 on the totem pole.”She said that when she thinks about her earlier albums, filled with so many songs referring to her marriage, she wonders whether she had created the situation in order to mine it for material. Now she’s in a relationship that inspires lyrics like “I got naked right away when I saw you / And my love was like the rain when I saw you.”If her contentment threatens her creative output, she’s fine with that. “I’ll keep the love and forgo the material, if need be,” she said.But later in our conversation, she revised that assessment, after mentioning her plan to pick up her guitar later in the day and try to write some new songs: “I haven’t in a while, so I’ll see if I’m too happy and I made a terrible mistake.”Ms. Wainwright said she has been wondering if she’s too happy to write songs.Alexi Hobbs for The New York TimesEven her relationship with her father seems in a good place. “Stories I Might Regret Telling You” begins with the story of her own birth, or, rather, the story of how she almost wasn’t born. Her father, she writes, tried to persuade her mother to have an abortion when she was pregnant with her, which is something he confessed to Ms. Wainwright when she was a teenager. “It hurt my feelings,” she writes with an understatement that makes the story sort of hilarious. “I had always felt a little out of place in the world, and knowing that I’d only just barely made the cut didn’t help matters any.”Three days before our interview, her father called her to say he loved the book.“I mean, his voice was a little tight when he said it,” Ms. Wainwright said. “He told me he didn’t see things exactly the same way, and I asked him if he could accept my version, and he said that he could accept it. And so that was a really nice moment for us.” More

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      in Movies

      How ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Helps to Heal Generational Trauma

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      For me, it was a scene about two rocks. For the actress Stephanie Hsu, it was taking her mom to the Los Angeles premiere.When I was 13, I asked to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.I was racked with debilitating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (O.C.D.), forced to write each individual letter against a straightedge, hellbent on perfection. It was messing with my seventh grade mojo.The perfectionism, in turn, shredded my sleep schedule. I spent countless hours, belly on the floor, struggling with my math homework, pressing mechanical pencil to ruler. Parabolas? Forget about it. O.C.D. combined with sleep deprivation and overmedication led to an angsty, early teenage flavor of nihilism — arguably the worst kind.When my mom came to visit, we sat in her car in the hospital parking lot and I told her about it. Head swirling with brain fog, I tried to explain that nothing mattered and how that was pressing me toward a mental brink. She got it.She told me, for the first time, that when she was 25, close to the age I am now, life was too much for her, too, and she tried to leave it. She saw me, understood me and sat there with me — a golden moment between generations.That incandescent memory surfaced a couple of weeks ago, when my roommate and I went to see “Everything Everywhere All At Once” — a sci-fi action adventure about the emotional implications of the multiverse — at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Manhattan’s Financial District.Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert narrate a sequence from their film starring Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan.Allyson Riggs/A24Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) is a Chinese American immigrant who just wants to host a Chinese New Year party at her family’s failing laundromat, but a suave alter ego of her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), arrives to warn her that the multiverse is in danger. So Evelyn learns to “verse jump” — hop between parallel universes to access skills from other versions of herself — then realizes that the dark force threatening the multiverse is inextricably linked to her estranged daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu).Evelyn follows a nihilist alter ego of her daughter through infinite universes, trying to figure out why she’s hurting. Then she’s transported to a cliff. Two rocks — one tan and one dark gray — sit side by side, overlooking a ravine and mountains in the distance. It’s silent for a while. Then captions appear — white for Joy, black for Evelyn. This, apparently, is one of the many universes where the conditions weren’t right for life to form.“It’s nice,” reads Evelyn’s text.“Yeah,” reads Joy’s text. “You can just sit here, and everything feels really … far away.”“Joy,” Evelyn’s rock says, “I’m sorry about ruining everything —”“Shhhh,” Joy’s rock says. “You don’t have to worry about that here. Just be a rock.”Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown. Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy. The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves. Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blanding action and drama. Anatomy of a Scene: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the film’s directors, discuss an action sequence built around … a fanny pack.“I just feel so stupid — ” Evelyn says.“God!” Joy says. “Please. We’re all stupid! Small, stupid humans. It’s like our whole deal.”Later, Joy asks Evelyn to let her go. Evelyn nods slowly and whispers, “OK.” In our universe, Evelyn lets go of Joy’s waist. In the rock universe, the tan rock slides off the edge of a cliff, rolling down it. But then, in one world, Evelyn turns back to face Joy.Maybe there is, Evelyn says, “something that explains why you still went looking for me through all of this mess. And why no matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always want to be here with you.” The dark gray rock scoots to the edge of the cliff and tips off over it, rolling after her daughter.The scene shattered me, then glued the pieces back together. And it reminded me of the importance of understanding intergenerational trauma — when the effects of trauma are passed down between generations — and addressing it.“Everything Everywhere All At Once,” wrote its directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, on Twitter, “was a dream about reconciling all of the contradictions, making sense of the largest questions, and imbuing meaning onto the dumbest, most profane parts of humanity. We wanted to stretch ourselves in every direction to bridge the generational gap that often crumbles into generational trauma.”When the 31-year-old breakout star Stephanie Hsu took her mom to the L.A. premiere, her mom cried. Then her mom, who is from Taiwan, pointed to the screen and said, “That’s me.” For Hsu, it was an aha moment: Her mom related to Evelyn’s character, who faces her own trauma in her relationship with her father, Joy’s grandfather, or Gong Gong (James Hong).“Life is so messy, and life is more than a two-and-a-half-hour movie,” Hsu said in a video interview from New York. “Life is a long time, if you’re lucky. We don’t get a script that helps us succinctly metabolize our sadness.”When she first saw the screenplay, Hsu couldn’t believe what she was reading: The mother-daughter relationship was that poignant and relatable. She knew in her bones how complicated and precious that relationship was. And the transference of energy from the screen to the audience, she said, is very real.“When you break open like that, you can’t help but look into yourself and say, ‘OK, that pained me, and I need to look at that,’” Hsu said. “‘Something in me is wanting to heal, and something in me is wanting to take that leap of faith.’”Hsu thinks that’s what art is for: to hold space for trauma and offer catharsis. There’s a generation of women, she thinks, whose idea of strength hinges upon toxic masculinity, bravado and impenetrable toughness.“Our generation and the younger generation is now exploring different types of strength and what it means to be strong when you’re compassionate,” she said. “And how, actually, empathy and radical empathy and radical kindness are also a tool.”Peggy Loo, a licensed psychologist and the director of the Manhattan Therapy Collective, saw the movie on the Upper West Side. She believes that the film can serve as an exercise in imagination for those who have experienced trauma.Trauma can shrink the imagination, she said, if your main reference points for life’s possibilities emerged out of traumatic experiences. To heal, we need to be able to see farther than what we’ve known and been exposed to.“There’s this, ‘We know who we are, we know who we want to be,’” Loo said by phone. “And then the gap between the two. How do we get there?”To Loo, part of the strength of the movie lies in its sci-fi genre, which requires the viewer to suspend reality simply to keep up with the plot. It’s the perfect counterpoint, she said, and a great way to flex the imagination.Rather than neatly tying up loose ends, as movies typically do, “Everything Everywhere” mimics realistically what change can look like, by letting its protagonist make mistake after mistake. Wil Lee, 31, is a software engineer based out of San Francisco. “Not to be reductive,” he tweeted, “but Everything Everywhere All At Once is the generational trauma slam dunk film this season.”The way it fluidly weaves three different languages — Cantonese, Mandarin and English — he continued, is a spot on reflection of how many immigrant households actually communicate.“It shows the linguistic barrier as a core component of this intergenerational misunderstanding,” Lee said in a phone interview, adding, “The divide is so huge that you struggle to even find the right words to explain yourself to your family.”Hsu as Joy with Tallie Medel, who plays her girlfriend, Becky, in the film.Allyson Riggs/A24In one early scene, when Gong Gong arrives at the laundromat, Joy tries to introduce her girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel), to him for the first time. Joy fumbles with her Mandarin, and Evelyn jumps in in Cantonese, introducing Becky to Gong Gong as Joy’s “good friend.” Joy’s face falls.When Shirley Chan, a 30-year-old freelance illustrator based in Brooklyn, watched the movie in Kips Bay, it felt like the universe deliberately sent it her way, she wrote in a Letterboxd review, to let her know her own efforts were seen and to give her the courage to live as her most authentic self.A week before she saw the film, Chan came out to her immigrant mother in Cantonese and spoke honestly for the first time about how her upbringing affected her. Some of the Cantonese dialogue, Chan wrote, was uncannily almost word for word what she said to her mom.“But in my actual life, where this verse jumping doesn’t happen,” Chan said in a phone call, “I can see the moments in which she is trying, like asking me if a friend that I’m talking about is my girlfriend or telling me that she’s happy for my career.”The sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, who specializes in pop culture, sees the universality in the specificities of “Everything Everywhere.” Everybody can relate to a dysfunctional family, regrets, transformation, laundry and taxes.Evelyn is “like our parents, but seen through our lens,” Yuen said by phone. “If our parents could evolve, that’s who Evelyn would be.”I asked my own mom to see the movie, and she did, in Chicago’s West Loop — her first time in a movie theater in two years. She texted me a screenshot of an explainer (I needed an explainer, too) with one line circled in black:“When Evelyn reveals she always wants to be with Joy, no matter where they are, it is the start of a healing process for both characters.” More

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      in Movies

      I Watched ‘Encanto’ With My Dad. It Brought Him Back Home.

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      The animated Disney movie is set in Colombia, where my father is from — a place he rarely talks about. Would he fall for the film?The first time I saw the teaser trailer for Disney’s “Encanto” — an animated musical set in Colombia — two feelings flooded me. First came a surge of excitement for what it could be. Then, almost instantly, a shift to the defensive. “They’d better not mess this up,” I thought.After “Narcos” hit Netflix in August 2015, glossing drug lords, the Medellín cartel and cocaine with a sheen of glamour, couples dressed for Halloween as Pablo Escobar and his wife, María Henao. Escobar’s mug shot and mustache were plastered onto canvas tote bags. Introducing myself as Colombian American became tinged with perceived intrigue — before “Narcos,” my peers may not have immediately associated Colombia with drug violence. Now, the country was a curiosity.But “Encanto” was a chance for a new generation to view Colombia in a fresh light.In October, I watched an early screening of “Encanto” for an article I was working on. Not long into the film — as towering wax palm trees filled the screen — my eyes glazed with tears. The filmmakers hadn’t messed it up. Directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard, it turns out, had a close relationship with the Colombian filmmakers Juan Rendon and Natalie Osma, with whom they traveled on a research trip to Colombia. A group of Latino Disney Animation employees called Familia shared their experiences and perspectives to help shape the film. Charise Castro Smith, who wrote the screenplay with Bush and is a co-director, is Cuban American.The movie captivated me, as someone who had grown up with my heritage held an arm’s length away from me. I knew where my father’s family came from — I had visited Colombia — but I always itched to know more. But what about my dad, who left home behind to build a new one?“Encanto” means “enchantment” or “spell” in Spanish, and the movie lives up to its name: Years ago, Alma Madrigal fled her home while escaping armed conflict. She saved her three infant children, Julieta, Pepa and Bruno, but lost her husband, Pedro. Devastated, Alma clung to the candle she was using to light her way, which became enchanted. Its magic imbues each member of the Madrigal family with a fantastical gift when they come of age — except for Julieta’s youngest daughter, Mirabel.Julieta can heal physical ailments with the food she cooks (often arepas de queso or buñuelos). Pepa’s moods influence the weather, and Bruno sees visions of the future. Isabela, one of Julieta’s two older daughters, makes flowers bloom; Luisa, her sister, has superhuman strength. Pepa’s three children each have a power, like talking to animals. And our protagonist, Mirabel? Well, she never got a gift.For me, as the only cousin in my family born outside of Colombia — and the only one not raised speaking Spanish — that resonated.My father, Francisco Zornosa, is from Cali; he emigrated to the United States when he was around my age, at 25. He was born a year after a five-decade-long armed conflict began in Colombia and grew up amid warfare between leftist guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitaries and government forces. It’s an aspect of his childhood we’ve never really talked about.Laura Zornosa, left, and her father, Francisco, at the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas in Cartagena.Laura ZornosaI had just started college in 2016 when the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was signed. Growing up, I was fascinated by the mysterious land where my dad was from, where my grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousins lived. But with my fair skin, red hair and mangled Spanish, I would stand out like a sore American thumb. It was deemed too dangerous for me to visit.Once the peace agreement was signed, though, my incessant wheedling began. Finally, my father caved: We embarked on a tour of his homeland. We stayed with my grandmother in Cali, nestled comfortably between the mountains. We drank in the sun in Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast. And we hiked through Cocora Valley in the Zona Cafetera, where the wax palm trees stretched impossibly tall, through the mist toward the sky.Walking out of the screening, I knew I had to show “Encanto” to my dad. “Look!” I wanted to tell him. “I recognize these trees! That animal! This pastry!” I wanted to hold up a shiny piece of him — of both of us — to be proud of.On Thanksgiving weekend, I dragged him to a theater. Maybe 20 minutes in, his glasses came off and the tissues came out. I had only ever seen him cry once, when his father died.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      in Theater

      ‘I Think We’re Cousins?’: ‘Ain’t Too Proud’ Performers Realize Link

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      A post in a family Facebook group led an actor and a musician in the Broadway musical to discover that they are distant cousins.Before the curtain comes down each night on “Ain’t Too Proud,” the Broadway jukebox musical that follows the rise of the R&B group the Temptations, the cast turns around in unison and lowers down to one knee as the lights go up to illuminate the show’s 17-piece band.After playing more than two hours of Motown classics, the guitarists, the drummers and the string section wave as the audience applauds.During the curtain call on Feb. 28, 2020, the day Matt Manuel made his Broadway debut in the flashy role of David Ruffin, he bowed alone, then with his fellow Temptations, all wearing gleaming white jackets and ties. When he turned and knelt down to give the musicians the spotlight, he thought to himself vaguely that the violist had cool hair.Two days later, he received a message from that violist, Andrew Griffin, who had been in the band since the show opened in 2019.“So…I think we’re cousins…?” Griffin wrote to Manuel in an Instagram message.Manuel responded with the requisite number of exclamation points for such a discovery: “Omg yes we are cousins!!!!!!!!”In fact, they’re second cousins once removed, according to the family tree recently drawn by Griffin’s mother. (She’s enthusiastic about genealogy.) Manuel’s great-grandmother is Griffin’s grandfather’s older sister, with 14 years separating the two siblings.Manuel made his Broadway debut as David Ruffin in the show just weeks before the shutdown.Julieta CervantesThe realization was a delight and a comfort to Manuel, 29, who, in January 2020, arrived in New York from Detroit after he had been cast as Ruffin, replacing Ephraim Sykes. It was a daunting move across the country: He left quickly with only two suitcases — the rest of his stuff remained in his parents’ garage — and it was his first time living independently, away from his family.He had always heard that Griffin’s side of the family eagerly supported their relatives however they could.“Wherever you’re at, they will take you up in a heartbeat,” said Manuel, whose professional acting debut was playing Marvin Gaye on tour in “Motown: The Musical.” “If you’ve got family, you’ve got everything that you need.”Griffin, 35, who grew up in Pittsburgh and moved to New York about six years ago to advance his music career, was shocked to learn that a new leading member in “Ain’t Too Proud” was a blood relative.“I knew nothing of him — absolutely nothing,” Griffin said. “I saw him onstage whenever they turn around and the musicians wave. That’s about it.”If it wasn’t for a video of the curtain call on Feb. 28, they might never have realized it. Manuel and his family had missed an earlier reunion, and the one scheduled for 2020 was canceled because of the pandemic.In February 2020, Manuel’s mother, Amiesha Williams, traveled to New York City to see his debut, and the day after, she posted a YouTube video of the curtain call on a family Facebook page used to plan reunions.“You know how proud moms are,” Manuel said, “they just brag.”The post garnered clapping emojis, encouraging remarks and then a comment from Griffin’s mother, Linda, pointing out that her son was in the center of the video playing the viola. She didn’t realize who Matt Manuel was and why Williams had posted the video of him in the first place.“How do you know him?” Linda Griffin wrote in the comments section.Williams replied the next day: “I’m sorry I fell asleep so I’m just seeing this. Matthew is my son.”As comments flew back and forth about the specifics of their genealogy, Manuel was onstage crooning into the microphone as Ruffin, the original lead voice of “My Girl.” Griffin was not far away, playing his viola beneath the stage. When Manuel returned to his dressing room, he saw a text from his mother: He had a cousin in the band and he should go meet him.“I’m like, ‘What does he look like?’” Manuel said. “And she’s just like, ‘His name is Drew and he plays the viola.’”Outside the stage door, Manuel signed autographs for a throng of giddy Broadway fans, glancing back every so often to look for the viola player. When Griffin walked out, the two introduced themselves tentatively. “I think we’re cousins,” Griffin said. Two fans holding a poster stared at them blankly, Manuel recalled.The pair did the natural thing to do when you discover a family member: schedule a lunch date. They made plans for the following week, but soon, the airborne virus that had been spreading across the world had producers worrying. Then, on March 12, less than two weeks after Manuel’s debut, the industry shut down.“Maybe we should postpone,” Griffin remembered saying.During the lockdown, Griffin fled to North Carolina to hunker down with his girlfriend and her family; Manuel went back to Detroit, thinking the pause in the production would be a good opportunity to drive back the rest of his stuff in a U-Haul.The shutdown stretched on and on, keeping performers like Griffin and Manuel out of a regular job and perpetually wondering when they would get a return date. Griffin spent time composing, something he didn’t always have time to do with a full performance schedule. Manuel grieved the loss of a relative, spent time with family and tried to reconnect with the part of himself that wasn’t a performer, always eager to entertain those around him.The cousins fell out of touch, their discovery outside of the stage door seeming like another era, where fans mingled freely with actors after exiting a tightly packed theater.But last month, the show took back its place at the Imperial Theater. The initial days were all work: Manuel, who lives in Harlem, tried to get his body accustomed to doing back flips, splits and microphone tricks for seven shows a week. Griffin, who lives in Williamsburg, had four days to sit back in front of his music stand with the rest of the band and get songs like “You’re My Everything” and “Get Ready” back into their muscle memory.“Going down the street for the first day of work, I started to well up a little bit,” Griffin said. “It was like nothing had really changed — there were still jokes and stuff written on our stands.”They hadn’t gotten a moment to spend time together until late last month, when a member of the show’s production staff had a birthday party and they were both invited.“Now let’s pick up where we left of,” Manuel said. “Actually go eat a meal and talk and, you know, gossip.” More

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      in Television

      For Sutton Foster, Crochet Is a Survival Tactic

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      Sutton Foster is finishing up a 15-week run at the Barbican as Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” a role for which she won a Tony a decade ago, and she is preparing to return to Broadway later this year to co-star with Hugh Jackman in “The Music Man.”But before we got into all that, she wanted to show off a washcloth.“They didn’t have any washcloths here in the flat,” Foster said during a video interview from London last month, “so I was like, ‘Well, I’ll make some!’” She plans to give them as Christmas presents.When she isn’t performing onstage or onscreen (recently as one of the stars of the television series “Younger”), there is a decent chance that Foster is crocheting, cross-stitching, baking, drawing or gardening, hobbies she explores in her new essay collection, “Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life,” which Grand Central will release on Tuesday.The chapters are craft-themed, but this book is not all about Mod Podge and Jo-Ann Fabrics. Foster, 46, writes about how keeping her hands busy has helped her cope with the stress and pressure of her career and the ups and downs of a life in which she didn’t always get what she needed from her family, loved ones or colleagues.“Hooked” is out on Oct. 12.“Anxiety runs in my family — in me,” she writes. “I am the daughter of an agoraphobic mother. I make a living as a performer. It’s complicated. And yet, if I’m feeling anxious or overwhelmed, I crochet, or collage, or cross-stitch. These hobbies have literally preserved my sanity through some of the darkest periods of my life.”There are light moments, like when we learn that Foster crocheted an octopus toilet-paper-roll cover as a wedding gift for her “Younger” co-star Hilary Duff. But these are balanced with heavier revelations, such as when Foster writes about the baskets she cross-stitched for her mother as a means of escaping toxic cast dynamics early in her career.She opens up about snowman-shaped holiday cookies she baked with the family of her first husband, Christian Borle, and the floral blanket she pieced together, one “granny square” at a time, when that marriage ended. She describes drawing interconnected circles with paint pens while undergoing fertility treatments, and the striped baby blanket she crocheted while waiting for her daughter’s birth mother to go into labor.Foster taught herself how to crochet when she was 19, and estimates that she has eight to 10 projects going at a time. She has a yarn dealer who shipped three boxes of Lion Brand supplies to London, then flew over to see “Anything Goes.” (You know what a big deal this is if you’ve ever been a novice in a certain kind of a yarn store, where customers tend to be sorted into varsity, junior varsity and invisible.) Sometimes Foster works from a book or consults YouTube for assistance, but she also creates her own designs.Foster said she has crafted many evenings of song, so she brought the same approach to writing her book: “You’re taking a reader on a journey, like taking an audience on a journey.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesGrowing up in Georgia and, later, Michigan, Foster got her start, like many thespians of her generation, in a community production of “Annie.” After performing in national tours of “Grease” and “Les Misérables,” she appeared in Broadway productions of both shows, as well as “Annie” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” In 2002, she won her first Tony for “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Like her perennially cheerful “Younger” character, Liza Miller, Foster was a bundle of can-do energy and enthusiasm, until our conversation turned to her mother. Then she spoke slowly, eyes closed, choosing each word painstakingly.Helen Foster’s health began to decline when Sutton and her brother, Hunter, were teenagers. She had a fraught relationship with Sutton and stopped speaking to Hunter for close to a decade; the siblings’ connection with their father suffered as a result. Since Helen Foster’s death in 2013, Sutton and Hunter have enjoyed a new chapter with the man known as Papa Bob, and “Hooked” includes his tips for growing the perfect tomato. (No. 9: “Pick the tomatoes when they’re near ripe but not quite ripe, so others can grow.”)“Crafting was the way I could tell my mother’s story that felt most authentic to me,” Foster said. “A way to weave, pun intended, all the facets of my life together in a way that felt true to me today.”In the book, she takes readers inside the squalid house in Florida where her mother spent her final years. “I flipped on the light and gasped,” she writes. “All of her windows had been blacked out with black garbage bags, secured to the walls with duct tape.” Her mother had been bedridden for months, refusing to seek medical treatment: “That explained the bedpan and pee pads on the floor next to her bed.”In “Younger,” Foster plays a 40-year-old empty-nester who lands an entry-level publishing job — and a whole new life — by pretending to be a millennial.Nicole Rivelli/CBS“It was mental illness that was never treated, never dealt with,” Hunter Foster said in a phone interview. After mentioning that he spends as much time as possible outside, he added, “I don’t allow myself to sleep past a certain time because my mom stayed in bed half the day.”His and his sister’s relationship with their mother is likely to surprise some readers, Sutton Foster said. “It’s a part of our story that people don’t know. It’s this underbelly: my mother’s illness and protecting her and being afraid of her. No one talked about it, and there’s this freedom now.”Behind her on the wall was a framed poster that said “Breathe.”Foster wrote “Hooked” with Liz Welch, who has collaborated on best sellers by Malala Yousafzai, Elaine Welteroth and Shaun King. “Sutton is a Broadway musical actress, my mother was a Broadway musical actress. Sutton’s an adoptive mother, I’m an adoptive mother. Honestly, I think we’d be friends anyway,” Welch said. “Crochet was the perfect metaphor for holding oneself together, taking all these different threads of her incredibly interesting, not-what-you’d-expect life.”Suzanne O’Neill, a vice president and executive editor at Grand Central, said: “One thing that’s very hard for people who are writing memoirs to do is to excavate their stories, and Sutton was game for it, even if there were moments that were hard. She wanted the book to be excellent. She dove into it. It was a piece of art for her, and she worked really hard to make it the book it is.”In “Hooked,” Foster recalls being 16, mesmerized as her idol, Patti LuPone, belted out “Being Alive” on TV. “There was something simultaneously terrifying and thrilling about her confidence,” she writes. Her mother, who had recently stopped driving and grocery-shopping, said, “You can do that.”Foster, center, won a Tony for her performance in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe later met LuPone, who also played Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” and LuPone inspired one of Foster’s favorite collages: a colorful confection of craft paper on plywood, spelling out BADASS.“She’s a beautiful creature,” LuPone said of Foster. “She exudes a very positive light. We’re drawn to tortured souls, just to find out why they’re tortured. And we’re also drawn to the light, and the light is much more nourishing. You see somebody onstage that makes you feel better. That’s Sutton.”Foster is set to open “The Music Man” in December, playing Marian Paroo opposite Jackman as Harold Hill. But before she embarks on more soul-soothing craft projects backstage at the Winter Garden Theater, she will have time to settle into the Orange County farmhouse she moved into last spring with her husband, Ted Griffin, a screenwriter, and their 4-year-old daughter, Emily.She plans to bring at least one piece of her past into this next phase of life: a cross-stitched scene depicting baskets of various shapes and sizes that she made for her mother. For years, the piece hung in the front hallway of her parents’ house and was a stabilizing presence during difficult visits.Foster recently collected the baskets from her father’s basement. “I have them now,” she said. “They’ll go in the new house.” More