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      Book Review: ‘Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style,’ by Paul Rudnick

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      Following a neurotic writer and a wealthy aesthete over four bumpy decades, “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” is a gay rom-com that tugs at the heart.FARRELL COVINGTON AND THE LIMITS OF STYLE, by Paul RudnickNate Reminger, a New Jersey-born, gay, Jewish and unabashedly horny virgin, shows up at Yale University in 1973 and instantly sets his sights on the one man he’ll be gazing at for the next four decades.As a budding writer with a knack for shrewd description, Nate spends the length of Paul Rudnick’s life-filled rom-com trying to find ways to describe that man, Farrell Covington: He is a “blinding sun god,” a “blank check,” an “unhinged cipher” and more. In so doing, Nate also reaches for a new way of seeing himself and what he believes to be possible for two men in love.To Nate’s surprise, Farrell returns his gaze with an even stronger intensity. It supersedes the look of a crush — it’s an appraisal, a reverie.And of the pair, Farrell is the one with an eye for beauty. A devastatingly handsome, unimaginably wealthy aesthete, Farrell considers style his armor — “a form of protest, against gross inhumanity or inclement weather.” As the scion of an ultraconservative family, he is not so much the black sheep as the gilded one. He speaks in a mid-Atlantic accent that sounds “as if a person had been raised by a bottle of good whiskey and a crystal chandelier.” He is, as the kids would later say, everything.He and Nate quickly become everything to each other, and though Farrell has the kind of charmed life that allows him to avoid such inconveniences as Yale’s housing rules — he has a townhouse, with an original Hockney and a butler — it will not shield him from bigoted parents hellbent on keeping their son on the straight and narrow. Nate and Farrell are separated against their will, sending Nate spiraling downward and beginning a pattern of estrangement and reunion that recurs throughout the novel.The irony of Farrell’s charmed life is that it serves as the complicating factor in the couple’s relationship, as they move from college to New York to Hollywood and beyond, all while navigating the AIDS epidemic, crises of faith and a family that rivals the Ewings of “Dallas” for wealthy wickedness.While the endeavor is quite epic in scope, it’s made deliciously bite-size by Rudnick’s densely funny writing style and the gimlet eye he has given Nate, a clear avatar for the author in this semiautobiographical tome. “I had vague theatrical ambitions,” he tells us, “as an actor or playwright or simply someone who’d call other people ‘darling.’”Though Rudnick delivers the multiple-laughs-per-paragraph pace that fans of his sendups in The New Yorker might expect, the aim of “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” is closer to heart-tugging than to rib-jabbing. This does create tonal whiplash in spots, as when an emotional hospital sequence is capped by the sudden arrival of a sari-wearing acolyte from Mother Teresa’s order. Rudnick’s worldview is so effortlessly, gleefully campy that even when he plays it straight — please allow the world’s largest quotation marks here — it can feel like a setup to a punchline.This tendency also directs one’s gaze to the smallest of quibbles. Farrell is a glittering bauble of a man, an architecture-loving manic-pixie dreamboat, a walking interrobang, but he’ll never be more captivating than his creator and, by extension, his creator’s stand-in. We’re in Nate’s point of view, and we spend long stretches separated from Farrell altogether. And even without Farrell’s privilege, Nate’s path from college to Broadway to a successful screenwriting career is relatively frictionless, which gives some sections the desultory feeling of a light memoir rather than a novel.Another way of considering it, however, frames the central question around neither Nate’s nor Farrell’s individual obstacles but rather their shared destiny. If we encounter the true subject in those first pages — that mutual gaze — then this novel is more about their ways of seeing each other and the world’s way of seeing their possibility.Consider what Rudnick offers almost without comment: the comparatively rare opportunity to spend decades watching two men navigate love. Like so much of the author’s work in other media — the play “Jeffrey,” the film “In and Out” — “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” seems less interested in serving as a gay museum piece than as a filigreed statement.Turn your gaze, it beckons, and you’ll see we were more than simply here; we made this place beautiful.R. Eric Thomas’s latest book of essays, “Congratulations, the Best Is Over!,” will be published in August.FARRELL COVINGTON AND THE LIMITS OF STYLE | By Paul Rudnick | 368 pp. | Atria Books | $28.99 More

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      ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Is Now a Play in London’s West End

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      Much has changed for L.G.B.T.Q. people since Annie Proulx’s short story was published in 1997. But a new theatrical version is a reminder that homophobia is far from over.In 2016, when the theater director Jonathan Butterell was considering a proposal to adapt Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story “Brokeback Mountain” for the stage, he wondered how to translate the prose’s vast landscape and insular emotions into a play.Last month, in a central London rehearsal studio, Butterell and Ashley Robinson, who wrote the play, tried to answer that question. To help the cast connect with Proulx’s story of a cowboy and a ranch hand falling in love against the wide-stretching landscapes of 1960s Wyoming, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls during rehearsals.“The vastness has been there from the very beginning,” Butterell said in a recent interview. When it came to evoking the story’s emotional landscape, the director had stuck one sepia-toned photograph, of a lone cowboy in a snow-covered Wyoming, behind a pillar. The image “speaks to the bit of us that feels alone in the world,” Butterell said. “Maybe he’s at peace with this, maybe it’s the source of his agony.”Butterell’s “Brokeback Mountain” opened in previews May 10 at @sohoplace in London’s West End. It’s the first time the story has been adapted for theater — an opera by Charles Wuorinen premiered in Madrid in 2014 — and each version now follows in the footsteps of Proulx’s text and the film that popularized it: Ang Lee’s 2005 Academy Award-winning adaptation, which is often cited as one of the best L.G.B.T.Q. films of all time.Faist, left, and Hedges at @sohoplace. During rehearsals, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesButterell said he was aware of his audience having expectations based on the film. “They’re inevitable,” he said, “but I don’t mind that.”This theatrical version also has some Hollywood clout. Its lead characters, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, are played by the BAFTA-nominated actor Mike Faist and the Oscar-nominated actor Lucas Hedges.In late 2016, Robinson first wrote a treatment for what he called a “memory play” based on the short story, after speaking with the composer Dan Gillespie Sells and Butterell. Robinson’s script stated that the Wyoming setting should not be conveyed “in a purely literal sense,” and his story is set in 2013, with an older version of del Mar reflecting on the years he spent with Twist between 1963 and 1983.Proulx approved of Robinson’s vision. She has “high hopes for the play,” she said in a recent email interview. “When I read Ashley’s script several years ago, I thought he had done a fine job.”In Proulx’s story, del Mar and Twist’s interior worlds are conveyed by an omniscient narrator. In the stage adaptation, music does much of that work.“These two men can’t sing,” Gillespie Sells said, because “they don’t have an emotional dialogue.” Instead, a character called The Balladeer — played by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader — sings with an onstage country and western band. “She takes us through time,” Butterell said. “Sometimes it’s from night to day. Sometimes it’s 10 years.”“Brokeback Mountain” will be the first time its two lead actors have appeared onstage in five years. Faist, who plays Twist, originated the role of Connor Murphy in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway, and has had more recent success in film, including Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of “West Side Story.”Hedges “hadn’t acted in a while” when he was sent the script, he said, having been focusing on writing instead. The “Brokeback” offer and playing del Mar changed that. “There wasn’t an angle I didn’t love about this,” he said.“As terrifying and frustrating as it is, I really am having the time of my life,” Faist, left, said of the production.Shona LouiseAs the project entered its final week of rehearsals, both actors were grappling with the process in different ways. Hedges said he was experiencing “tragic and triumphant ups and downs” about his own work. “I have a day where I think I’ve figured it all out, and then a day when it all disappears,” he said. The “collective experience” of theater was daunting compared to working in film, he said, adding that onstage, “I can’t use tricks to make it through.”Faist concurred: “It’s a challenge, and it’s terrifying,” mainly because of the expectations of having to match the source material and 2005 film, he said. “But as terrifying and frustrating as it is, I really am having the time of my life,” he added.Butterell said that Faist and Hedges were “as men, as actors, very different creatures.” Faist, he said, had “a sense of life and vivacity,” while Hedges “has this deeply complex interior landscape that’s very much of Ennis.”Neither Hedges, Faist nor Butterell had revisited Lee’s film since they were approached for the project. “The truth of the matter is, no matter what, he’s not Heath Ledger and I’m not Jake Gyllenhaal,” Faist said of the film’s two lead stars, who both earned Oscar nominations for their performances. He and Hedges, Faist added, would both bring their “own weird things” to the roles.The production has forced Faist to confront his “traumas,” he said. “We can take those traumas, turn them around,” he added, and, he hopes, make the audience “think deeply about their own lives.”Following the success of the “Brokeback Mountain” film, Proulx said fans of her text sent her fan fiction that rewrote the ending of her short story, claiming the original was too sad. She told the The Paris Review that those fans had “misunderstood” the story and stated that it was, most importantly, about “homophobia.”Jonathan Butterell, the play’s director, said his two lead actors had different strengths: Faist, left, has “a sense of life and vivacity,” while Lucas, right, “has this deeply complex interior landscape that’s very much of Ennis.”Suzie Howell for The New York TimesThis is the first adaptation of “Brokeback” to be released since the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in all 50 U.S. states. Robinson — who lives in Brooklyn but was raised in the tiny town of Lockhart, S.C. — said he wrote it to remind audiences that gay trauma still exists.“These stories aren’t necessarily being told anymore because of a trend to put onstage what we want the world to be,” he said, referring to the theater community. “That’s a wonderful thing to do, but we shouldn’t cancel out all of the opportunities to talk about what’s going on underneath it.”Butterell added that the fight against homophobia was “not over” in Britain either, citing a recent spike in the number of attacks on L.G.B.T.Q. people.“This is a tragedy,” Butterell said of the play. “Of course love exists — I don’t want it to be solemn — but the tragedy of this piece is that fear wins.” More

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      ‘Queens of the Qing Dynasty’ Review: Secret Soul Mates

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      When a young woman hospitalized after a suicide attempt forms a bond with an international student, they create a different kind of relationship.The wonderfully bizarre Canadian drama “Queens of the Qing Dynasty” understands queerness the way that bell hooks did: as a “self that is at odds with everything around it.” Directed by Ashley McKenzie like a dream — or a bout of dissociation — the film is a love story, absent sex or romance, about a teenage psychiatric patient in Nova Scotia, Star (Sarah Walker), and a Shanghainese exchange student volunteering at the hospital, An (Ziyin Zheng). The pair make an odd couple, and yet their bond is intuitive, electric.The story kicks off in the aftermath of Star’s suicide attempt, the film’s tone at once bleakly clinical and deadpan absurd. Star, a neurodivergent foster kid with a sardonic sense of humor, clearly doesn’t register the gravity of her actions. Eyes glazed, she seems out of touch with her own body, and she’s not one for rules, like when she’s kicked out of an apartment for opening it to partiers. Eventually, she is institutionalized.Walker, captivatingly raw, makes Star both charming and frustrating in her aloofness. The cinematographer Scott Moore shoots in close-ups that blur at the edges, while the eerie sound design by Andreas Mendritzki gives the frosty Cape Breton location the feel of life on Mars, approximating Star’s dazed point of view.An, a poised international student with bladelike long nails, dreams of transitioning, and — through a kind of buddy system — connects with Star, regaling her with stories of ancient Chinese courtesans, scheming, glamorous dames who never have to work. The two communicate by text: An sends singing videos with their face prettified by a filter; Star, a stream-of-consciousness barrage of messages and voice mail messages that usually go unacknowledged. She doesn’t seem to mind and An isn’t driven away by them, either. They part and reunite and part again.Estranged from their communities, the two embody a different kind of relationship, and McKenzie doesn’t rely on the usual uplifting messaging and strained empowerment arc to humanize An and Star. In one beautifully uncanny scene, the duo stop by a virtual reality gaming studio and, equipped with headsets, plug into the fantasy, playing as flying sorcerers as they shoot the breeze. Their friendship remains mysterious, yet the film, as if by witchcraft, makes their connection feel palpable and true.Queens of the Qing DynastyNot rated. In English, Mandarin and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hour 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Robert Patrick, Early, and Prolific, Playwright of Gay Life, Dies at 85

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      He got his start at Caffe Cino, the birthplace of Off Off Broadway. His first of many, many plays, performed there in 1964, is a milestone of gay theater.Robert Patrick, a wildly prolific playwright who rendered gay (and straight) life with caustic wit, an open heart and fizzy camp, and whose 1964 play, “The Haunted Host,” became a touchstone of early gay theater, died on April 23 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.The cause was atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, said Jason Jenn, a friend.Mr. Patrick’s story is intertwined with that of Caffe Cino, the West Village coffee shop that was the accidental birthplace of Off Off Broadway theater. One day in 1961, a 24-year-old Mr. Patrick followed a cute boy with long hair into the place, where the playwrights John Guare, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson and, soon, Mr. Patrick, all got their starts; the cute boy was John P. Dodd, who went on to be a well-known lighting designer and die of AIDS in 1991.The cafe, run by a former dancer named Joe Cino, was scrappy, original and unpretentious, decorated with tinsel and silver stars that hung from the ceiling. Actors performed among the tables and chairs until they built a small stage. No one was paid, except the cops, because Mr. Cino was not just running an unlicensed cabaret but also a gay hangout, which was illegal in the early 1960s. Its young playwrights, particularly Mr. Patrick, churned out plays, playlets and monologues akin to TikToks, Don Shewey, the author and theater critic, said in a phone interview. As Mr. Patrick told Broadway World in 2004: “We wrote for each other, and it turned out there was an audience that, without knowing it, had been dying for personal, political, philosophical theater. And a few years after the Cino began doing original plays, there were over 300 Off Off Broadway theaters.”Actors performing at Caffe Cino in 1961. Mr. Patrick’s story is intertwined with that of that West Village coffee shop, the accidental birthplace of Off Off Broadway theater.Ben Martin/Getty ImagesMr. Patrick worked at the cafe as a doorman, a dishwasher and a waiter before writing his first play, “The Haunted Host.” It features Jay, a gay playwright who is haunted by the ghost of his lover, who died by suicide. Frank, a hustler who happens to be straight, wants help with a play and needs a place to spend the night.The dialogue is tart and snappy, as Jay rebuffs the young man and his work, razzes him about his sexuality — “Tell me, Frank, how long have you been heterosexual? Started as a kid, huh? Tsk-tsk” — and finally throws him out in the morning and in so doing exorcises the ghost.Early in the play, when Frank asks Jay how his lover died, Jay answers curtly, “Alone.”“Oh. Suicide?” Frank asks, to which Jay replies, “No, thanks, I just had one.”The play was not exactly a runaway hit in 1964, but it found new life in 1976, when it was revived in Boston with a very young Harvey Fierstein in the lead role. Mr. Fierstein reprised it again in 1991, at La MaMa in the East Village.“All these years later,” Howard Kissel wrote in his review for The Daily News, “‘Host’ has taken on a certain poignancy. It predates the gay rights movement and AIDS. It radiates an innocence no longer attainable.”Its significance was recognized in hindsight as an early example of a work with a gay person as the hero, and with themes that were universal: love, grief, self-respect.“It was so much before its time,” Mr. Fierstein said in a phone interview. “Here you have a play where the strange person, the bizarre person, the person who was the antagonist, was the heterosexual. The normal person, the one with real emotion and real love, was the gay character. We forget our history, and now we have people who want to erase our history. This is why Robert’s work is so important.”Harvey Fierstein, right, and Jason Workman in La MaMa’s 1991 revival of “The Haunted Host,” Mr. Patrick’s 1964 play that became a touchstone of gay theater. La MaMa archivesMr. Cino died by suicide in 1967, and Caffe Cino limped along for a year afterward. Mr. Patrick kept writing, and writing. Over the decades he wrote hundreds of plays as well as countless songs, poems and short stories, a memoir and at least one novel.“They just poured out of him,” Mr. Fierstein said.One work, many years in the making, was “Kennedy’s Children,” an affecting drama set in a bar on the Bowery one Valentine’s Day in the early 1970s. Five characters, including a disillusioned actor who was a proxy for Mr. Patrick, declaim their isolation and anomie in monologues that ruminate on the legacy of the ’60s — its failed promise and heartbreak.Mr. Patrick began working on the play in 1968. It was first produced in 1973 at Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan, but, as Mr. Patrick said, nobody came and nobody reviewed it. It then made its way to a tiny theater in London and had runs in similar small theaters around the world before returning to London and opening to great acclaim in the West End, followed by a Broadway production in 1975, for which the actress Shirley Knight won a Tony.“The wit is as hard as nails and as sharp,” Clive Barnes of The New York Times wrote in his review. “Mr. Patrick hears well and writes so colloquially, so idiomatically, that you could actually be eavesdropping on the drunken but revealing, paranoid but illuminating meanderings of the barstool set of bad cafe society.”Later work included “T-Shirts” (1980), which Mr. Shewey, in his review for The Soho News, described as a comic romp about the gay generation gap as well as “a schematic attack on the values of the gay male world, charging that money, youth and beauty have become as interchangeable as, well, T-shirts.”“Blue Is for Boys” (1987) is a nutty farce about an apartment converted into a dorm for gay male college students. “Camera Obscura,” a playlet about a boy and a girl who struggle to communicate, was first performed at Caffe Cino in 1966 and became a staple of high school drama festivals and regional theaters.For a while, Mr. Patrick was known, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as the world’s most produced playwright, with his work performed at small theaters in Minneapolis, Toronto, Vienna, Brazil and New Zealand, often all at the same time. In 1978, The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported, “Certain works, such as ‘Kennedy’s Children’ and ‘Camera Obscura,’ are quite probably being done somewhere every day of the year.”For a while, Mr. Patrick was known, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as the world’s most produced playwright. Becket LoganRobert Patrick O’Connor was born on Sept. 27, 1937, in Kilgore, in eastern Texas. His parents, Robert and Jo Adelle (Goodson) O’Conner, were itinerant workers who moved constantly throughout the Southwest. The family lived in tents, Mr. Patrick said, until he was 6. He recalled attending 12 schools in one year.He spent two years in college before joining the Air Force because he had fallen in love with a “flyboy,” he said. He was kicked out during basic training, however, when a love poem he had written to the airman was found in the man’s wallet. As Mr. Patrick told it, it was discovered during an Air Force sting operation in the restroom of a local hotel that gay servicemen were using as a rendezvous spot. Mr. Patrick’s love poem was for naught anyway; the man had already ditched him, he wrote, for a captain with a Cadillac.Mr. Patrick never stopped writing plays, but in later years he paid the rent by working as a ghost writer and as an usher for the Ford Theater in Los Angeles, where he moved in the 1990s; he also wrote reviews of pornographic movies. For the last decade or so, he performed a cabaret act at Planet Queer, a riotous variety show held weekly at a bar in Los Angeles.He is survived by his sister, Angela Patrice Musick.In 2014, Henrik Eger of The Seattle Gay News asked Mr. Patrick if there was anything he hadn’t yet done but wished he had.“True love,” he said. “And I would like to have the money to build or buy a theater in L.A. with enough ground space that I could call it Robert Patrick’s Free Parking Theater, because in L.A. the theater would fill up for every performance no matter what show was on, just because of the magic words ‘Free Parking.’ Then I could do whatever plays I liked.” More

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      Putting the Brutality of a Prize Fight on the Met Opera Stage

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      Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” about the fighter Emile Griffith, is the rare opera to engage with sports. A boxing consultant helped keep it gritty.Emile Griffith fought Benny Paret on March 24, 1962, in a highly anticipated welterweight championship bout at Madison Square Garden.In the 12th round, Griffith knocked Paret into the ropes and pounded him with more than a dozen unanswered blows. As The New York Times put it the next day, “The only reason Paret still was on his feet was that Griffith’s pile-driving fists were keeping him there, pinned against the post.”Paret never regained consciousness and died 10 days later. The fight and its terrible aftermath were high drama. One might even call the story operatic.There has been little overlap between the high drama of sports and the high drama of opera, beyond the bullfighting in “Carmen” or perhaps that odd singing competition in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” But in telling Griffith’s story, Terence Blanchard and Michael Cristofer’s 2013 opera “Champion,” which opened earlier this month at the Metropolitan Opera and streams live in movie theaters on Saturday, brings together the brutality of boxing with the soaring passions of opera.It helps that “Champion” is not just a tale of boxing, but also of Griffith’s life as a closeted gay man, an immigrant with a tough childhood and complicated relationship with his mother, and later an old age troubled by dementia and regret.But boxing is the catalyst for the story. The 1962 bout was the third between Griffith and Paret, who had split their first two fights. (Those earlier contests are omitted from the opera, keeping the focus on the fateful third.)Ryan Speedo Green, center, as Griffith after winning the fight against Paret (Eric Greene) in “Champion.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was a time when big boxing matches were big news. Pre-fight hype was everywhere, with all aspects of the fighters’ preparations scrutinized. The Times marveled at Griffith’s “$130 a day suite with two television sets and a closet the size of a Y.M.C.A. room” in Monticello, N.Y., as well as the “turtleneck sweaters, seal coats and Ottoman club chairs” that surrounded the ring as he sparred.The terrible aftermath of the fight brought even more intense coverage. News of Paret’s serious condition made the front page of The Times, days after the fight, with the headline “Paret, Hurt in Ring, Given Little Chance.”At the time, the biggest controversy was the referee’s delay in stopping the contest. “Many in the crowd of 7,500 were begging” the referee to intervene, The Times reported. The referee, Ruby Goldstein, was later exonerated by the State Athletic Commission.But there was more to the story. Though Griffith said he was “sorry it happened,” he added, “You know, he called me bad names during the weigh-in” and during the fight, “He did it again, and I was burning mad.”“Bad names” was how Griffith, The Times and other newspapers described Paret’s taunts. The true nature of those words was not widely known at the time. But in the mid-2000s Griffith revealed the full story. Paret had called Griffith “maricón,” a Spanish slur for a gay man. Griffith was secretly bisexual.The opera’s second act deals with the fallout from the fatal punches, and Griffith’s later life, including a brutal beating he received outside a gay bar. Griffith died in 2013 at 75.The Met worked hard to get the details and the atmosphere of a prize fight right: the ring announcer (who acts here as a Greek chorus of sorts), the sound of the bell, the trophies and championship belts, a “ring girl” signaling the changing of the rounds and the macho posturing of the weigh-in. (The conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin emerges in the pit for the second act in a boxer’s hooded robe.)Helping to make it look accurate was Michael Bentt, a former professional world champion who served as the opera’s boxing consultant. “I’m not an expert on opera,” he said. “But I’m an expert on rhythm. And boxing is rhythm.”Bentt told the production team that there should be no stool in the ring before the first round, only between later rounds. And he thought that the boxing mitts, used by a trainer to block a fighter’s punches, looked too clean. “I said: ‘Make them look gritty. Rub them on the concrete to get them nasty looking.’ There’s nothing clean about the world of boxing.”The Met’s fight director, Chris Dumont, is used to working out sword fights. But for “Champion,” he had to choreograph fisticuffs and make them look convincing without anyone getting hurt.Champion. Griffith after winning the middleweight title in 1966.Larry Morris/The New York Times“For the body shots, they might make some contact with each other,” he said. “But you don’t want someone to get hit in the face. Even if it’s light, it won’t feel too good.”There are several ways to depict boxing: One is to simulate it as closely as possible, as some boxing movies do, by showing powerful punching and splattering blood. A more apt choice for the stage is stylization.“Since they have to sing, actually boxing through those scenes would wind them,” Dumont said of Ryan Speedo Green, who portrays the younger Griffith, and Eric Greene, who plays Paret. Most of the time, when a blow lands, the singers freeze, as if in a snapshot. Some parts are performed in slow motion.The show reaches its sporting peak with the re-creation of the 1962 fight, which ends the first act. The tension and anticipation operagoers may feel as the ring appears onstage is not all that different from the mood among fight fans or sportswriters in the moments before a big bout. All sports have some atmosphere of pregame expectation. But when the sport involves two combatants trying to hurt each other with repeated blows to the head, there is an added frisson of fear, or even dread.In “Champion,” Griffith goes down in the sixth round, and the shouts of a boisterous onstage crowd add to the tension. Then comes the fatal moment.Although the boxers’ blows onstage do not land, that does little to temper the grim moment when a flurry of unanswered shots floor Paret. “I watched the actual fight and tried to keep it as real as possible,” Dumont said. “The 17 blows are fairly close to what it was, in real time. We are not actually landing blows, but moving fast enough so the audience is tricked. It moves back to slow motion as he is falling to the mat.”And in the orchestra pit, the snare drummer looks up at the stage. Each time a blow falls, he raps a synced snare shot.A night at the opera can bring murder or war or bloodshed. But the historically and sportingly accurate depiction of a prize fight that ended with a man’s death has an unsettling quality all its own. As Goldstein, the referee, testified: “It’s the type of sport it is. Death is a tragedy that occasionally will happen.” Or, as Bentt said of “Champion,” “We can’t tiptoe around that it’s violence.” More

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      ‘Little Richard: I Am Everything’ Review: The Nitty-Gritty Beyond ‘Tutti Frutti’

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      This documentary presents the self-proclaimed “architect of rock ’n’ roll” as a man of contradictions.Judging from “Little Richard: I Am Everything,” the best way to understand the self-proclaimed “architect of rock ’n’ roll” is through his contradictions.In this documentary, directed by Lisa Cortés, Little Richard, who died in 2020, is seen as a musician who could simultaneously lay the groundwork for an entire genre and not get his due. Without him, we probably wouldn’t have the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie or Prince — artists who were happy to cite his influence even as they stole his thunder and his style.In the 1950s, he broke with the slower sounds of Ray Charles and B.B. King in favor of fast songs with lyrics not so subtly about sex. Yet over the years he seemed to have a conflicted relationship with his own sexuality. (He is shown in an early 1980s interview with David Letterman claiming both that he believed he was one of the first gay people to come out and that he was no longer gay.) He went from flamboyant rocker to gospel singer and back again.“He was very, very good at liberating other people through his example,” the pop-music scholar Jason King says in the film. “He was not good at liberating himself.”Mick Jagger, who credits Little Richard with teaching him how to work the whole stage, and John Waters, who says his mustache is a tribute, are among the famous faces here who testify to how he liberated them. “I Am Everything” also skews gratifyingly wonky for a pop-music bio-doc. The sociologist Zandria Robinson describes the cultural atmosphere in the South — a space, she says, for the different, the Gothic and the nonnormative — at the time Richard was formed as an artist. King describes Little Richard’s piano playing as a left hand of boogie-woogie and a right hand of Ike Turner-influenced percussion.Little Richard himself, seen in a bounty of archival footage, gives good quotes — “everybody likes to go to orgies,” he says at one point. And even in decades-old video, his musical performances, like a rendition of “I Can’t Turn You Loose” at the 1989 induction of Otis Redding to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, are showstoppers.Cortés tries a few things to upend the humdrum rock-doc template. She has musicians re-create breakout moments in Little Richard’s career, such as a night in the 1940s when Sister Rosetta Tharpe had him take the stage in Macon, Ga., or a spontaneous rendition of “Tutti Frutti,” before its lyrics were sanitized, at the Dew Drop Inn in New Orleans. (A montage depicts the song’s popularity as a cosmic explosion, even as Little Richard is shown complaining bitterly in an interview that Elvis and Pat Boone “sold more of ‘Tutti Frutti’ than I did.”) At the end of the day, though, “I Am Everything” is content to be a thorough, energetic, largely chronological appraisal, more interested in saluting a musical legend who shook things up than in shaking up conventions itself.Little Richard: I Am EverythingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Stephen Hough Revisits His Youth, in Playful Fragments

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      In his new memoir, “Enough: Scenes From Childhood,” Stephen Hough recalls his artistic and sexual coming-of-age with a light touch.On the cover of the book “Enough: Scenes From Childhood,” out this week from Faber & Faber, a young Stephen Hough sits at the piano, wearing a velvet jacket stitched with sequins and fake pearls. He’s dressed as Liberace.“Obviously, there’s a gay subtext to that costume,” Hough said in a recent video interview. “Even then, I loved the outrageousness of it, even though I was quite shy.” There’s a hint of subversion, something Hough maintains today with a twinkle permanently in his eye.Hough, an English pianist and composer, has carried his lifelong love of creative writing into two previous books: “Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More,” and a novel, “The Final Retreat.” Where Hough described his novel as “Sibelian” in form, “Enough,” a collection of vignettes on childhood and Hough’s troubled adolescence, is, in his words, more Debussyan: “In the ‘Préludes,’ the way he writes the piece titles at the end of the preludes, not at the beginning, with dots — I love this idea of hinting at things, suggesting things.”Playful suggestion abounds in Hough’s memoir, from the cover onward. (The first part of the title is a play on his regularly mispronounced surname, the second on Robert Schumann’s “Kinderszenen.”) “I do like shocking people, and I think that’s part of what keeps me onstage,” he said.The critic Alexandra Coghlan said that there is a lightness of touch in both Hough’s playing and writing, “allowing him to explore some big topics on the page — his Catholic faith, his homosexuality, life as an artist — without becoming po-faced or preachy.” Among stories of “chucky” eggs (boiled hard, then mashed with seasoning) and his family’s tenuous Beatles connection, Hough recalls the time, at age 4, when he inserted his third finger up a neighborhood boy’s rectum. “Later, I would use it to trill long at the top of the keyboard in the Liszt First Concerto,” he writes, nonchalantly.Despite a scrapbook style, “Enough” retains a loose chronology, beginning with his family’s first piano, a “pretty bad one” with yellowed keys and a rosewood frame, bought for £5 in an antique shop near his home, in an area between Liverpool and Manchester; and ending after the Hough won the Naumburg International Piano Competition in 1983, at 21.In lieu of descriptions of pianos he’s loved — “It’s like meeting someone on holiday and having a romance: You know that you can’t see them again so best not to be too involved,” he said — Hough focuses on relationships with family and teachers, and an early musical life of hymns, nursery rhymes and “sweet, teeth-rotting tunes” from the world of light music.Hough performing with the New York Philharmonic in 2019. In his memoir, he describes an early musical life of hymns, nursery rhymes and “sweet, teeth-rotting tunes” from the world of light music.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesHough’s writing is deeply sensual, “because I had such a lack of it in my childhood,” he said. The post-World War II period that saw colorful developments in art and music — he turned to David Bowie and Marc Bolan in his teens — coincided, in Hough’s world at least, with “horrible food”: his grandmother’s “desiccated baking,” or overboiled sprouts that “looked like comatose slugs.” That peculiarly British trait of blandness, Hough said, “comes right through from the Victorian suspicion of pleasure.”“Only in our literature have we allowed ourselves to enjoy words in a sensual way,” he added. “You think of the great poets right through the era, that’s the only place where we have let go of the tight corsets and collars.”Before he had any idea of the concept, Hough knew that he was gay. Later, he learned what the word “homosexual” meant: “I thought, ‘How disgusting is that!’ And then two seconds later, I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute, that’s me!’”His adolescence was full with contradictions about sexuality, particularly as he converted to Catholicism. Later, his route to self-acceptance came through celibacy. A busy professional life after his Naumberg win helped distract him, though he was tormented by the constant possibility of guilt — mainly through unconscious thoughts, like sex dreams. “This was my scrupulous theological line on overdrive, really,” he said, ”but it was distressing, I have to say, many times in my life.”Hough’s parents — loving of him, but not especially of each other — contained similar conflicting multitudes. His father, a member of the now-defunct Liberal Party, was anti-Europe but not aligned with the political right’s position on the issue, was prudish and chivalrous around women yet also a serial adulterer. “He was just outside of every box that you could imagine,” Hough said, “in the most interesting way.”His mother was irrepressible. Despite saying that she was solely attracted to men before her death, “there were so many clues along the way,” Hough said. “Maybe she was part of a kind of sexual fluidity before it was known as that; maybe she enjoyed physical affection with women without feeling the need to say, ‘I’m a lesbian.’”At 10, Hough enrolled at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester. What followed was a dark period for him (he suffered a nervous breakdown) and the school (some of his teachers would later go to prison for child abuse), before he moved to the Royal Northern College of Music, where “something sparked into life.”Three life-changing moments came in a short period: the inaugural BBC Young Musician of the Year competition; his first Catholic Mass; and his discovery of Edward Elgar’s setting of the John Henry Newman poem “The Dream of Gerontius.”“It turned me around in every way: musically, religiously, personally,” Hough said of the Elgar. “You can taste it really: that era of late Victorian camp, high-church life.”Hough had been interested in composing, but was forced to stop studying it as he focused on piano while at the Royal Northern College of Music. (John Corigliano encouraged him to restart in the 1990s.) In contrast to his many piano teachers — including “Miss Felicity Riley,” an orange-lipped teacher from the next village, the avuncular Gordon Green and the fearsome Adele Marcus — Hough didn’t feel the need to return to composition lessons.“I think it’s a little bit like writing words,” he said. “I don’t think Henry James had creative writing lessons, but he read and he knew the grammar, and so he set off on a journey with it.” That method — of writing music by absorbing musical grammar — informs his compositions, which “are always felicitous, viz., most recently his delicately allusive first string quartet,” the music critic Michael Church wrote in an email, referring to “Les Six Recontres” (2021), which evokes flavors of the French neo-Classical set Les Six.“Enough” concludes in New York: Hough gained a scholarship to the Juilliard School, and fell in love with a city slowly coming to terms with what would become the AIDS crisis.“As the 1980s moved on, it was like a cloud in the sky on a sunny day,” Hough said. “Gradually it began to be darker and darker, and this extraordinary life of clubbing, fun and parties became very different in flavor.”But while the book ends with Hough’s life in turmoil, there’s one final suggestion: that better things are coming. 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      in Theater

      In ‘Public Obscenities,’ the Transgender Activist Tashnuva Anan Makes Her New York Debut

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      Tashnuva Anan Shishir, who became her country’s first transgender news anchor in 2021, is performing in “Public Obscenities” at Soho Rep.When Shayok Misha Chowdhury wrote the character of Shou for his new bilingual play, “Public Obscenities,” about a couple who interviews queer locals in Kolkata, India, he was “super worried” about casting the role. The performer would not only need to be of the appropriate gender but also a Bangla speaker with the right “linguistic fluency” to capture the character, who speaks “exuberantly and forthrightly and confidently,” he told me recently.Shou identifies as kothi, an Indian gender that encompasses a breadth of expressions, Chowdhury said. So he reached out to a friend for advice: Debanuj DasGupta, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is “very in the sort of Bangali queer and trans space.” After the professor mentioned Tashnuva Anan Shishir, Chowdhury searched her name online, and several questions came into his head: Is she even in New York? Would she be interested in auditioning?When he posted a casting call on Instagram, and Anan responded, a plan started to coalesce. She was in New York, performing in Queens, in “I Shakuntala,” a play by Golam Sarwar Harun and Gargi Mukherjee, a married couple who would also go on to star in “Public Obscenities.” Anan’s role was small, but she “stole the show,” Chowdhury said.After she auditioned for his play, it was practically unanimous, he said: “We have found the person.” While Shou doesn’t appear until 50 minutes into “Public Obscenities” — its run at Soho Rep (in a coproduction with the National Asian American Theater Company) has been extended through April 16 — the character has been among its most memorable.In “Public Obscenities,” Anan, center, plays a scene-stealing interview subject, our critic wrote in a review of Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s play.Julieta CervantesIn March 2021, Anan made history as the first transgender news anchor in Bangladesh. For three minutes, on International Women’s Day, she spoke on the air and was seen by millions of her compatriots. She went on to anchor occasionally for the network, Boishakhi TV, through November 2021.In December of that year, she came to New York, her first time in the United States. Her trip was primarily to receive care related to what she calls her transformation. And while here, professional opportunities have arisen: Last year she became the first transgender model from Bangladesh to walk in New York Fashion Week.Anan, 31, grew up in a conservative Muslim family and has had a grueling journey to this point. She has endured relentless harassment and survived suicide attempts; been shunned by family members, including her father; and lived penniless in a slum.“I really wanted to be an actress,” Anan, who performed in theater in South Asia and in a small Bangla film, “Kosai,” told me recently in a video interview. “People shouldn’t be considered by their gender. People should acknowledge their work. People should acknowledge their skill.” Being a news anchor in Bangladesh was eye-opening, she said, but it couldn’t quite open up the world for her like the United States could. “I was feeling that I have to swim. So I should swim in the ocean, not in a pond, not in a river. So if I can achieve, I can achieve. If not, then not.”Here are excerpts from our conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.“I had to pay a lot. I had to leave my family to prove my identity,” Anan said.Desmond Picotte for The New York TimesHow has life in New York been for you?It’s a lot of adaptation. I’m born and raised in a village, not a city. The city is highly competitive, but I like this competition. Being an activist, this is a great eye-opening for me to learning, to adapting to each other, to teaching how is the activism going on. When I was in Bangladesh, I was working in a national level. Now I’m in New York, and I’m working globally. I’m contributing internationally. So this is a good opportunity for me.You’ve shown remarkable perseverance. What gives you strength?For myself, that I believe: Do your own job. Just do hard work. There is no shortcut in life. Just believe in yourself. And just, first, inspire yourself. I have competition only with myself, because I’m trying to do a little bit better than yesterday.Why do you think Shou has been so memorable to audiences?Shou is intelligent, Shou is extra-talented, an extrovert, and Shou knows actually about this scenario: the situation of queer people, queer activism, especially in Kolkata, Bangladesh, Pakistan. So Shou is charming everyone. Shou is connected with everyone.Shou is very common character in South Asia because Shou is kind of a feminine guy, so Shou would like to wear femininity in her body or in their body. So this feminine guy represents South Asian queer community also.How do you see yourself in this character and how are you different?Tashnuva bold, Tashnuva sexy, Tashnuva brave, Tashnuva iconic — and the brand I created, I had to pay a lot. I had to leave my family to prove my identity. Shou is also powerful. Shou is also entertaining. Shou is also jolly. Shou is also friendly. Tashnuva is sometimes moody, because people can consider my self-esteem or people can consider my self-respect as an ego, but I had to maintain it. But Shou doesn’t have that; Shou is more friendly.When I get confirmation from my team, I was a little bit tense actually, because, see, I have long hair, and the show is going to put, like, a wig. Then I asked Misha, “Should I cut my hair? I can’t!”First time, when I watched myself with that wig, with proper costume, I was so low — believe me, I was so low. I didn’t feel well because still, then, I didn’t believe Shou. So I was trying to just discover what was going on. Now, I literally fall in love with that wig. Yeah, this is me, this is Shou.How has the reception been from South Asian audiences?Oh my God, they appreciate a lot. They were looking at their sorrows in front of them. They’re looking at their life in front of them, through Shou’s eyes. I got lots of messages from my friends — “Tashnuva, you’re doing really well because this is not doing acting, this is very natural.” I wanted to be a natural actor. I want to play a character that should be more natural, that should be believable. I really believe when I am doing something, people should believe.Last night, when I’m coming toward audience, a girl literally was crying, and she was from Bangladesh, and she born and raised here. She only heard me by social media, and this is the first time we get connected in person. And she was telling me, “Tashnuva, this is the story that we know but we couldn’t tell in front of people.”What’s next for you?I don’t like to say my dream because people are always critics. So I love to keep my dream inside. I am looking for opportunities to act more. So I think now, just now, after this project, I want to jump into another project. There I can play a more powerful character. There I can say another story. I don’t want to pursue any character that is very common.When I think about performance — light, camera, action — I love Broadway performance. Today and tomorrow, is my dream that I will perform in Broadway, or I will perform in a Hollywood film. When I start working, I just forget my every pain. I just forget everything. And this is the performance that inspired me a lot, that did a lot for me. More