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      Warhol-mania: Why the Famed Pop Artist Is Everywhere Again

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      Andy Warhol is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works.Andy Warhol left behind a lot of self portraits.There was the black-and-white shot from a photo booth strip, from 1963, in which he wore dark black shades and a cool expression. In 1981, he took a Polaroid of himself in drag, with a platinum blond bob and bold red lips. Five years later, he screen-printed his face, with bright red acrylic paint, onto a black background. These and other images of the Pop Art master rank among his best-known works.But one of his most telling self portraits wasn’t a portrait at all, in a conventional sense. Between 1976 and 1987, the artist regularly dictated his thoughts, fears, feelings and opinions — about art, himself and his world — over the phone to his friend and collaborator Pat Hackett. In 1989, two years after his death, Hackett published “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” a transcribed, edited and condensed version of their phone calls.And now, more than three decades later, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” has come to Netflix as a bittersweet documentary series directed by Andrew Rossi. In a video interview, the director pointed out that Warhol had intended for the book to be published after he died.“It does seem like there’s some message which maybe he himself didn’t even understand,” Rossi said. “There’s an open invitation to interpret it as there is with any of his artwork — because I do view the diaries as another self portrait in his oeuvre.”Warhol’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death, in 1987. His fascination with branding and celebrity, as well as the famous dictum often attributed to him — “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — are if anything even more relevant in the age of social media and reality TV.“There’s a reason why ‘Warholian’ remains a description,” Rossi said. “He’s one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric.”But if Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is — onscreen, onstage, in museums and in the streets. Earlier this month, Ryan Raftery returned to Joe’s Pub with the biting celebrity bio-musical “The Trial of Andy Warhol.” Anthony McCarten’s new play in London, “The Collaboration” — which centers on the relationship between Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat — is already being adapted for the big screen. The Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol: Revelation” investigates his Catholic upbringing. And starting Friday, Bated Breath Theater Company will bring the theatrical walking tour production “Chasing Andy Warhol” to the streets of the East Village.“The Andy Warhol Diaries” delves into Warhol’s relationship with Jon Gould, a Paramount executive.Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixTogether, the works create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human beneath the white wig. Even as he created an indelible, internationally famous identity, this child of Carpatho Rusyn immigrants, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, grappled with his faith (Byzantine Catholic) and his sexual orientation (gay, but never quite as out as many of his contemporaries) — areas that both “The Andy Warhol Diaries” and “Andy Warhol: Revelation” explore in particular.A significant portion of the Netflix series examines Warhol’s romantic relationships. It delves into Warhol’s struggles to show his love for his first long-term partner, an interior designer named Jed Johnson. Later comes the preppy Paramount executive Jon Gould, whom Warhol showered with affection but who eventually died of AIDS.The Enduring Legacy of Andy WarholThe artist’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death in 1987.Warhol-mania: If Andy Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is: onscreen, in museums and in the streets.A Play: In “The Collaboration,” Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.A Book: “Warhol” by Blake Gopnik, the first true biography of the artist, reveals a narrative that gets more complex the more closely you look.A Musical: “Andy,” Gus Van Sant’s Warhol-inspired stage debut, may be the movie director’s oddest tribute to date.An Exhibition: “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum shows how Catholicism seeped into the Pop master’s work.Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, was interviewed in the documentary series. Rossi found her through her work on the 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again,” for which she wrote an essay titled “Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith and AIDS.”“There are these moments when he’s doubting himself, when he is questioning what it is to be successful, what it is to be getting older, what it is to be in love,” she said. “That’s one of the strengths of what the series reveals, is that there’s a human that’s behind this mythical story.”Beck pointed to pieces of Warhol’s “Last Supper” series, some of which are currently on view in “Andy Warhol: Revelation.” She referenced one painting in particular, “The Last Supper (Be a Somebody With a Body),” which fuses an image of Jesus Christ with that of a bodybuilder, a symbol of health and masculinity. Beck said the work reflects Warhol’s reactions to the AIDS epidemic.“When you have these two things juxtaposed, you have this real expression of ideas around mourning and suffering, but also forgiveness,” she said.“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” at the Brooklyn Museum, pays special attention to the artist’s faith.Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /
      Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photograph by Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” which opened in November and runs until June 19, is broken into seven sections that move visitors from the artist’s immigrant upbringing and the roots of his religion through the different phases of his life and career, with a particular focus on the tension between his faith and his queer identity.“This is beyond soup cans and Marilyn,” said José Carlos Diaz, the chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, referring to a few of Warhol’s Pop Art hits. Diaz first put on “Revelation” at the Warhol museum before bringing it to Brooklyn.Carmen Hermo, an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum, organized the New York presentation of “Revelation.” Both she and Diaz are the children of immigrants, like Warhol, and she speculated that this part of the artist’s background helped to account for his famed work ethic and his fierce drive to create the best version of himself.Diaz said, “For me, he lives the American dream,” adding that more nuanced, relatable perspectives on the artist were finally “surpassing this mythological Warhol with the big glasses, big wig.”Warhol is “one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric,” said Andrew Rossi, the director of “The Andy Warhol Diaries.”Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixAcross the East River, Mara Lieberman, the executive artistic director of Bated Breath Theater Company, is using her fair share of glasses and wigs. Beginning Friday, Lieberman will direct “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a theatrical tour through the East Village in which multiple actors play the artist simultaneously, alluding to his love for repeated images and various personas.One scene depicts something that happened on a trip Warhol took to Hawaii with the production designer Charles Lisanby, with whom he was in love at the time. A couple of days after arriving at the hotel, Lisanby brought another man back to the room, and Warhol exploded, hurt — an event that has been described in biographies of the artist.Warhol has said that he later realized the power of saying “so what” in response to painful life events, an insight he detailed in his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” It is, Lieberman said, “his greatest coping strategy.”This attitude was a key ingredient — along with his ideas about identity, technology, celebrity and more — in Warhol’s “highly stylized, constructed, brilliantly strategized brand,” Lieberman said.“Andy liked to take life and put a frame around it and say, ‘Look, that’s art,’” she said. “We go out in the streets of New York, and we put a frame around things and say, ‘Look, that’s art.’” More

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      After ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ Jesse Williams Takes the Stage

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      The former “Grey’s Anatomy” star is making his Broadway debut in “Take Me Out.” For that, he said, “I needed to go into a very unknown place.”Jesse Williams will be the first tell you — certainly, he was the first to tell me — that he has no formal theater training and little practice. There’s an Edward Albee play in the hazy past and a one-act opposite Zosia Mamet. That’s pretty much it.When I met him, on a recent weekday afternoon at Spring Place, a ritzy club and co-working space in TriBeCa, he joked that he was probably the least experienced theater actor I had ever interviewed.But on April 4, the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out” will open at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater with Williams, a familiar TV presence from his decade-plus run on “Grey’s Anatomy.” Which means that he is learning on the job: what “upstage” means, whether to hold for a laugh, how to use his whole body in a scene and not just the torso on up, as is the norm on television.“I’m not even wearing pants in half of those scenes,” he said of his time on “Grey’s.” (I think he was kidding?)In “Take Me Out,” which is set in the mid-1990s, Williams, 40, plays Darren Lemming, a superstar baseball player who comes out as gay. It’s a play about race, class, sexuality, sport and living a life in the public eye. Williams’s Darren stands — in batter’s crouch — at the intersection of these competing themes. “I’m here to just learn and get my butt kicked,” he said, using a stronger word than “butt.”Patrick J. Adams, left, and Williams in the play, which is in previews and scheduled to open on April 4.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWilliams grew up in Chicago, the eldest child of a white mother, a potter, and a Black father, a factory worker who later became a teacher. When Williams hit junior high school, his parents, now divorced, moved the family to a majority white neighborhood in suburban Massachusetts, where he experienced casual, and less casual, racism. Baseball, which he played on school teams and with his father, remained a constant.He graduated from prep school — he had moved on to soccer and lacrosse by then — and enrolled at Temple University, double majoring in African American studies and film and media arts. School, like most things, came easy to him. He would often write his papers the night before, high on marijuana, just to see if he could get away with it. Still, he excelled.Scouted as a model, he shot some commercials during college. But he never took that too seriously. The artists in his family were visual artists, not performers. And acting didn’t seem as creative, as generative, as stimulating. In 2006, having worked as a teacher, a paralegal and a political organizer and an activist with several grassroots organizations, he decided to apply to law school. Or maybe film school. But first he reached out to his old commercial agent, a move he chalked up to a “quarter-life crisis.”Four days later, in an example of the effortlessness that has defined his professional life, he booked an episode of “Law & Order.” He appeared in a few movies and shows, including a brief arc on the teen comedy “Greek” as a character aptly nicknamed the Hotness Monster. Then, in 2009, he was hired onto the medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy,” where he spent 12 years as Jackson Avery, the dynamic, gym-ripped plastic surgeon.Here is the comment that Shonda Rhimes, who created “Grey’s,” gave about a key scene: “We felt that having a shirtless Jackson Avery would be a benefit to society.”What he lacked in formal training, he made up for in his eagerness to master the craft. “He was always watching everybody’s artistry and learning from it,” said Krista Vernoff, a “Grey’s” showrunner.His colleague Sarah Drew, who played his longtime love interest, echoed that. “There’s nobody that worked as hard as he did,” she said. “Nobody.”Ellen Pompeo, another co-star, who said that she lived to mess with him, added: “He’s handsome. Girls always like that.”Fair enough. Williams, whom I watched first in rehearsal and then a few days later across that Spring Place table, is good-looking in a way that seems almost uncanny, with a grin that could melt permafrost. In person, he projects confidence — cockiness, almost — shot through with self-scrutiny and the occasional flash of humility. Colleagues described his keen intellect, instantly legible in the quickness and charm of his conversation.“Can an actor cross the footlights? I thought, I bet he can,” the director Scott Ellis said of offering Williams the lead role in “Take Me Out” after seeing him on “Grey’s Anatomy.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times“Yes, he really does look like that,” Vernoff told me. “And yes, he is really smart. And really, really talented.”Which explains why, a few years ago, the director Scott Ellis offered him the role of Darren. Ellis had wanted to revive “Take Me Out,” which received the Tony Award for best play in 2003. But first he had to find a biracial leading man (Darren’s race is a crucial element of the play) of overwhelming charisma who could also pass as a Hall-of-Fame-level player. Having seen Williams on “Grey’s,” Ellis suspected that he could command a Broadway stage.“It’s always that question,” Ellis said, speaking on a rehearsal break. “Can an actor cross the footlights? I thought, I bet he can.”Williams turned Ellis down. His schedule on “Grey’s” — as an actor and occasional director — didn’t allow a Broadway run. The play itself, with its rhythmic, cerebral dialogue and its nude scene, scared him. But the offer nagged at him. And as his work on “Grey’s” began to feel, in his words, “increasingly safe, protected, insulated,” that fear became part of the appeal.“I knew that as I designed my exit, the next thing I did had to be terrifying. I needed to get out of my comfort zone, I needed to go into a very unknown place,” he said. “Take Me Out” provided it.REHEARSALS BEGAN in February 2020 and halted, as all Broadway did, that March. Williams spent the intervening months at home in Los Angeles, teaching the rudiments of baseball to his two children — he shares custody with his former wife, Aryn Drake-Lee — and intensifying his activism, particularly his support of the Black Lives Matter movement.Williams sits on the board of the Advancement Project, an advocacy group devoted to civil rights. “He is deeply committed to racial justice,” said Judith Browne Dianis, its executive director. “He’s not one of the celebs or influencers that does things for his brand purposes. It’s deep in his soul.”Williams does little for brand purposes. And he doesn’t seem to know how to phone it in. “I swing through the ball,” he said, describing his approach to each new project. He didn’t seem to register the sports metaphor.Williams spent 12 years playing the plastic surgeon Jackson Avery on the medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy.” Williams, above center, with some of his co-stars, from left: Robert Baker, Kevin McKidd, Sandra Oh and Sara Ramirez.Randy Holmes/ABCWhen rehearsals began again, almost two years later, he swung through, supplementing run-throughs with voice lessons; personal training; breath work, where he learned about the diaphragm; physical therapy, to heal several torn ligaments in his foot. (Mini golf has its dangers.)“I’m taking the preparation really seriously, because every single syllable is totally brand-new,” he said.Because he lacks training — “I’m not really an actor,” he reminded me, “I didn’t go to acting school” — he fills his characters out with lived experience. In some ways, his experiences paralleled Darren’s.For example, they share a similar focus and drive. “I win,” he said, using more sports metaphors. “I hustle hard. I jump way bigger than I am. And I figure it out.”And he relates to the frictionless way that Darren has moved through his life. The play describes Darren as “something special: A Black man who you could imagine had never suffered.” And that isn’t true of Williams personally, but it’s true enough professionally.“I’ve related to a self-awareness of ease in my life, a self-awareness that the way I look or perform, based on the standards in our society, grants me access,” he said. “I can relate to how it can lull you to sleep, ease.”He has asked himself why Darren chooses to come out as gay. Is it an act of self-determination or a kind of self-sabotage, a way to complicate that ease?Of course, those same questions also apply to a TV actor choosing to lead a Broadway play. “There’s a lot of spillage,” Williams said. “A lot of overlap.” Which means that the role is also a way for Williams to explore some of his own contradictions, like what it means to be a deep thinker admired for his body, to be a Black celebrity in majority white spaces, to live both a public life and a private one.Williams on embracing the play’s locker room nude scenes: “I’m here to do things I’ve never done before. It’ll be fine.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesHe is trying to embrace those contradictions fully and candidly, which also means embracing the play’s locker room nude scenes. He was somewhat resistant at first, asking Ellis about alternatives — a towel bar, maybe? But he has since committed to it, although when he spoke, he admitted that he had yet to try it.“I’m here to do things I’ve never done before,” he said. “I have got one life, as far as I know. It’ll be fine.”But of course his life is not exactly Darren’s, particularly when it comes to sexuality. Darren is gay. And Williams, as a number of tabloids will happily tell you, is straight. While Broadway has largely decided against racial impersonation, when it comes to matters of sexuality, gender and disability conversations around which actors should play which roles remain ongoing.Ellis, who is openly gay, said that an actor’s sexuality pertains less than other factors. “Do they have empathy?” he said rhetorically. “Do I feel that they can understand what this character is going through? That’s all that matters.”That isn’t exactly all that matters to Williams, who has taken these questions to heart. “If there’s anybody in the gay community that thinks that role should be played by a gay person, they have an argument,” he said. “They absolutely have an argument.”And still, he wanted his at-bat. “I really wanted the challenge of trying to do my best at the role,” he said.For Jesse Tyler Ferguson (“Modern Family”), the openly gay actor who plays opposite Williams, that’s enough. “He’s asking very thoughtful questions in the process and doing the work that truly great actors do,” Ferguson said. “I’ve completely fallen in love with his version of Darren.”I watched a scene of that Darren — the shower scene, rehearsed clothed — on a recent weekday morning. Williams looked like a ballplayer, rubbing pain cream into his ankle, swinging a bat like he’d been born with it. He looked like a stage actor, too, communicating danger and an almost feline grace as Darren approached another character.Patrick J. Adams (“Suits”), a longtime stage actor, described how quickly Williams had adapted to the rhythms of theater. “He’s just taking it in kind of instantly, almost frustratingly, to be perfectly honest,” Adams said. “Like, How is this so easy for you?”Williams makes it look easy. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t working hard.“The last thing I want is to be the shiny rich TV guy that thinks he can just show up and do something, because that’s just absolutely not how I feel,” he said. “I’m just here to learn.” More

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      in Movies

      'Great Freedom': Film Traces Long Shadow of Anti-Gay Law in Germany

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      A new film traces the many decades it took to abolish Paragraph 175, a measure criminalizing sex between men that was strengthened by the Nazis.BERLIN — A turning point arrives for Viktor and Hans, the central characters in the new film “Great Freedom,” when Viktor sees the concentration camp tattoo on Hans’s arm.It’s 1945, and Viktor has already forcibly thrown Hans out of the cell they share in a German prison after learning that Hans was jailed for having sex with men. But when Viktor, an ice block of a man with a murder conviction, discovers the tattooed number, he offers to give Hans a new design to cover up the past.“They put you from a concentration camp into the slammer? Seriously?” Victor (Georg Friedrich) stammers in disbelief, more to himself than to Hans (Franz Rogowski).The fictional character of Hans, liberated from a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II only to be sent directly to prison, is based on a chilling and often overlooked chapter in German postwar history.Hans is repeatedly arrested under Paragraph 175, a law criminalizing sex between men that the Nazis expanded just a couple of years into their regime, and which was kept on the books for decades after.The law was used, sometimes with elaborate sting operations, to convict up to 50,000 gay men in West Germany between 1945 and 1994 — roughly as many as were arrested during the decade in which the Nazis used it.“For gay men, the Nazi era did not end in 1945,” said Peter Rehberg, the archivist of Schwules Museum, a gay cultural institution in Berlin.When Sebastian Meise, the director of “Great Freedom,” read about the men who went from the concentration camps to prison because of their sexuality, it “really changed my understanding of history,” he said in a telephone interview from Vienna. The discovery set him off on an eight-year project that resulted in “Great Freedom,” which was Austria’s submission to the international feature category at this year’s Oscars.Modern Germany has been praised for its efforts to keep the dreadful memory of the Holocaust present for the generations born after what Hannah Arendt called the “break in civilization.” The Nazi era is a mandatory part of school history curriculums, for example, and many schoolchildren and police cadets are obliged to visit former concentration camps. But for many decades, postwar Germany’s treatment of gay men was also neither liberal nor progressive.In 1935, the Nazis strengthened Germany’s law criminalizing homosexuality, which was originally introduced in the 1870s. This allowed the regime to criminalize not just gay sex, but almost any behavior that could be seen to run afoul of heterosexual norms, including looking at another man. While East Germany had a slightly less restrictive version on its books, West Germany kept the strict Nazi legislation until 1969, when it was first reformed.Peter Bermbach at his home in Paris. He left West Germany in 1960 after being imprisoned under Paragraph 175. Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesFor West Germans like Peter Bermbach, Paragraph 175 cast a long shadow over the postwar decades.In his senior year of high school in West Germany in the late 1940s, he was overheard turning down a date with another boy. School officials did not just suspend him, they also reported him to the police.“It was the typical German sense of order and justice of the time,” said Bermbach, now 90, in a telephone interview.The second time, he didn’t get off as easily. At 29, with a Ph.D. and a job in a publishing house, he was caught putting his arm around a 17-year-old at a public pool. Bermbach spent four weeks in jail and was fined 5,000 marks — a hefty sum at the time.After he paid off the fine, he became one of the thousands of gay and bisexual men who fled Paragraph 175. He moved to Paris in 1960 in search of more freedoms.Meise and his writing partner Thomas Reider collected many stories from Bermbach’s generation of gay men during the six years they spent researching and writing the script for “Great Freedom,” visiting the archives at the Schwules Museum and the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation, which collects interviews with men affected by the law.Still, Paragraph 175 did not stop gay culture from evolving in Western Germany; the German title of the film, “Grosse Freiheit,” is a nod to a venerable gay bar in Berlin where the penultimate scene takes place. But it did push many aspects of gay life underground, according to Klaus Schumann, 84. He remembered Berlin police pulling up in large vans in front of bars known to be gay hot spots in the late ’40s and ’50s. No one was criminally charged, he said, but everyone, including staff, were taken to the local police station to to be identified.“It was basically a way to keep control over people,” Schuman said.Hans (Franz Rogowski) first arrives at the prison in 1945 after being held in a Nazi concentration camp.MUBI“Great Freedom” traces Hans’s many stints behind bars, where he was labeled a “175,” jumping between 1945 and 1969. To help mark that time shift, Rogowski lost more than 25 pounds during filming, to make himself appear younger (the later scenes were filmed first). Shooting in an abandoned prison close to Magdeburg in the former East Germany, Meise captures the slow course of incarcerated time, as well as social change.“I would be very pleased if it was taken as a universal story,” Meise said of his film. “It’s so hard to disentangle the history and the current politics because it’s so virulent.” Meise noted that the issue is far from being a purely historical one, as there seem to be new pushes to reinforce heterosexual norms in places like some U.S. schools.For the men whose lives were affected by Paragraph 175, much has changed. After he settled in Paris, Bermbach built a career as a journalist and filmmaker. Last year he wrote an autobiography, and later this month the high school that kicked him out more than seven decades ago has invited him to visit and read from the book.“Honestly, I don’t really care,” Barmbach said of going back to the place that once expelled him. “As for being denounced for being homosexual, I’ve long forgotten about that.”After Paragraph 175 was reformed in 1969 and again in 1973, the last vestige of it was taken off the books in 1994. In 2017, a year after Meise started writing “Great Freedom,” the German parliament said anyone charged under the law would have their record expunged. It also agreed to offer a meager settlement to those who applied.Of the 50,000 men who might have eligible, only 317 had applied by last summer. More

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      in Television

      In Chinese Version of ‘Friends,’ Ross’s Lesbian Ex-Wife Goes Missing

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      The popular show has become the latest target of China’s censorship campaign. The awkward cuts have not been missed by fans of the show in the country.HONG KONG — The wildly popular sitcom “Friends” is back on China’s best-known streaming services, but with some big changes to the script.In the latest Chinese version, when Ross tells his parents he has split from his wife, he doesn’t explain the reason: She is a lesbian living with another woman, is now pregnant and plans to raise the baby with her partner. Instead, the scene simply cuts to his parents’ stunned faces, and the plotline ends there.There are other, more subtle changes to the show, too.Joey’s suggestion of a trip to a strip club is translated in Chinese subtitles as “going out to have fun.” When Paul the Wine Guy tells Monica, “I haven’t been able to, uh, perform sexually,” the subtitle says that he has been in “low spirits.” A lament by Rachel that she is more “turned on” by a gravy boat than her fiancé is translated as Rachel being more “happy to see” tableware.The changes have prompted biting commentary on social media from the show’s many Chinese superfans, who mocked the prudishness of censors and said the alterations reinforced gender stereotypes.“Friends” is the latest example of foreign entertainment being rewritten in China, as the country embraces more traditional gender roles under its leader, Xi Jinping. Officials have gone so far as to ban portrayals of effeminate men on television.Even before the regulations went into effect in September, Chinese censors had already been hard at work. In the Chinese version of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the Queen biopic, a crucial scene in which Freddie Mercury, the band’s lead singer, tells his fiancée that he is gay was removed.The Communist Party wields enormous power over the entertainment business, bending it to produce the narratives it wants to promote. In January, censors changed the end of the movie “Fight Club,” replacing a scene in which a series of buildings were destroyed with a message saying the effort had been thwarted by police, although the original version was soon restored after a massive outcry. That move came after a much anticipated “Friends” reunion episode last year was missing cameos from Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and BTS when it aired in China because those celebrities had at some point offended the country’s leaders.“Friends” is hugely popular in China, where at one point many major cities had look-alikes of Central Perk, the cafe that was a gathering point for the show’s characters. Viewers in China had been able watch the show in an uncensored format over the past decade, but fans of the show are now limited to an officially edited version that is streamed on multiple platforms.Superfans have been quick to point out omissions or changes in censored episodes and debated the reasons for the cuts.The hashtag #FriendsDeleted was viewed more than 54 million times on the Chinese social media site Weibo over the weekend, according to a CNN report. By Monday, it had been removed.“Mostly they don’t want the women in their own country to be awakened,” one person wrote on Chinese social media. “They don’t want them to know women can love women. Otherwise who will help the men to carry on the family line.”Another commentator pointed out that the writers of “Friends” helped to normalize the L.G.B.T.Q. community with the episode. “And this is something that ‘Friends’ managed to do in 1994,” they wrote, questioning why homosexuality was being censored in China decades later.Only the first season of “Friends” was made available through online streaming platforms in China earlier this month, and many viewers in the country were already joking about what other scenes would be removed as future episodes become available.One person wondered how the censors would handle the season in which Phoebe becomes a surrogate mother to her brother. Another quipped that they were willing to bet the equivalent of $15 that the episode in which Monica, Chandler and Rachel discuss seven parts of a woman’s body for pleasure would be deleted.“I bet 100 yuan,” the person wrote on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. “That ‘Seven Seven Seven’ is absolutely deleted.”Cao Li More

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      in Music

      Taylor Mac Explores the Philosophy of the Hang

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      What kind of a party do you throw when you’re about to die? It’s an especially morbid question these days. But in “The Hang,” a new opera from the performer Taylor Mac, the answer involves equal parts philosophy and décor.The show, written with the composer Matt Ray, is about the death of Socrates, who after being convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death by hemlock, spent his final hours talking about virtue with his friends. And a few songs into a recent run-through of the production at the HERE Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, Mac — in a purple tulle robe and appropriately Socratic pandemic beard — started dragging out giant beanbag chairs while a bar took shape in the corner of the stage.“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,” Mac sang, as the eight-piece band leaned into a groove, “I’m in it for the hang.”Mac with cast members of “The Hang,” which takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThat’s something of a credo for Mac, whose work, including the epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” celebrates community and connection through a radical queer lens. And “The Hang,” created with some of Mac’s longtime collaborators, puts those themes onstage again, in a phantasmagorical, hard-to-summarize mix.The show, which runs 105 minutes without an intermission, takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies,” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. There’s plenty of wailing, but also queer romps, ancient Greek in-jokes, a comic monologue in the style of Noël Coward and a meditative number sung in a lavatory.And yes, there’s talk of virtue — not in the sense of starchy purity (to say the least), but the Socratic sense of knowledge and ceaseless questioning, which for Mac is not just a matter of logical argument, or even words.From left, Trebien Pollard, El Beh and Queen Esther. Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle designed the costumes.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“One angle I wanted to go with in this show was to say there’s more,” Mac said in a video interview. “The Socratic questions can also be expressed physically, aesthetically and sonically.”“The Hang,” which began previews Thursday and runs through Feb. 20, may seem like a riposte to the pandemic, which shut down not just theater but also, for a time, most nonvirtual hanging out. (The opera, which is being produced by HERE, was originally set to have its premiere earlier this month as part of the Prototype Festival, which was canceled because of the Omicron surge.)The show was inspired by Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates. It was so relevant, Mac said, to the way conversations about virtue today “are being manipulated to end curiosity.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut Mac said the idea began germinating several years ago, as a “palate cleanser” after “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a sprawling meditation on American history through 246 songs, which Mac performed as a 24-hour marathon in 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.The initial impulse was to make a solo theater piece based on Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates, which Mac had recently read for the first time. “I wanted to do something simple,” Mac said. “And it was also so relevant to what’s been going on — the conversation about justice and virtue, and how those things were being manipulated to end curiosity.”The jazz vocalist Kat Edmonson was persuaded to join the production. It’s her first stage role.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut nothing with Mac, a self-described maximalist, stays simple, or small. In late 2019, “The Hang” had turned into an ensemble piece, and he sent a preliminary script to Ray, who had arranged the songs in “A 24-Decade History.”Ray, who has played jazz since he was a child, said his sonic entry point was a wailing saxophone, which became the sound of the poison, played in the show by a trio that sometimes roams the stage, as if spreading it. “I just started hearing this sound in my head,” he said. As Mac kept emailing him lyrics (in no particular order), Ray composed what became the show’s 26 songs, drawing on New Orleans jazz, swing, soul jazz, touches of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and other influences, though he hesitated to affix any firm labels. “I don’t like to write things that are an impression,” Ray said. “I just wrote the things I like to play.”Trebien Pollard applying makeup before a dress rehearsal.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMac describes the show as a kind of “fever-dream prayer,” an idea that’s literalized by the set, created by the costume designer Machine Dazzle, another longtime collaborator. He’s the one who suggested that the action was actually set inside Socrates’ body, complete with a fabric-draped proscenium as the rib cage.The vibe is wild and messy excess, though Dazzle said the pandemic had subtly affected his approach to costuming, and not just because the price of tulle had doubled.“People are different from the way they were two years ago,” he said. “You can tell they’ve been thinking. They’re in their head more.”Early in the 2020 pandemic lockdown, the core creative team started having virtual hangs twice a month, to talk about the show (and what they missed about seeing each other in person). The first workshop was held in October 2020, in a tent in a plaza in downtown Brooklyn.The show’s choreographer Chanon Judson.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe director Niegel Smith.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Machine Dazzle, the scenic and costume designer.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Matt Ray, the composer and music director.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Niegel Smith, the director, said the casting was about “curating friendship,” as well as artistry. The company of nine performers and eight musicians (who are choreographed into the show) are a mix of veterans of previous Mac projects and new collaborators, including the jazz vocalists Kat Edmonson and Queen Esther and the Broadway veteran Kenneth Ard (“Cats,” “Starlight Express,” “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”).Ard had already left theater when the pandemic hit, and was working as a corporate chef. He moved to San Francisco during the lockdown, but came back to New York to audition at the recommendation of Dazzle, a friend.“I was tired of the commercial theater thing, but I hadn’t experienced really artistic theater, as I feel this is,” he said in a video interview. “Matt Ray’s score just blew me away. I just thought, I have to sing these songs.”Wesley Garlington during rehearsals.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesEdmonson was recruited by Ray, with whom she has performed at Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center and elsewhere. It’s her first stage role and, in the song “Virtue,” a chance for some serious scatting, something she has only recently added to her own live shows. “It’s kind of a new thing for me,” she said. “It’s so much fun.”The physical demands of “The Hang” aren’t quite as extreme as those of Mac’s last play, “The Fre,” which put the actors — and the audience — in a giant ball pit. (The play, directed by Smith, was still in previews at the Flea when the pandemic hit.)Still, at the recent rehearsal for “The Hang,” the performer El Beh’s big skirt festooned with Medusa heads kept knocking over the urn where the cast members burn their mock-Socratic beards during “OK Boomer,” a riff on cultural ephemerality. And there was strategizing over the best way to flop onto a giant pouf during an extremely up-tempo philosophical dialogue called “The Ephemeral.”“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it,” Mac said of approaching the work.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Chanon Judson, the choreographer, described the movement, like so much of the show, as a collage. “I really like to scan the room and sponge in everyone’s idiosyncratic ways of being in the space,” she said.In Plato’s “Apology,” the downfall of Socrates is blamed on Aristophanes, who in his play “The Clouds” had ridiculed Socrates as a charlatan, helping to turn public opinion against him. “The Hang” certainly gets its digs at Aristophanes. But in Mac’s retelling, if Socrates has a foil, it’s Plato himself, who lurks around the action, taking it all down on an ancient Greek stenograph.Plato was famously critical of theatricality, condemning drama as a form of lying that manipulates the public, with sometimes dangerous consequences. It’s an idea “The Hang” turns inside out.“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it, and find a way to express a truth rather than a lie?” Mac said. “You can’t hide when you sing. You can try to, but you always end up telling some kind of truth about who you are.” More

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      ‘Pariah’ at 10: When Black Lesbian Characters Had the Spotlight

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      The Dee Rees drama made waves but studios largely returned to business as usual. A new crop of filmmakers sees signs of hope.At the shimmering pink Catnip Lounge, a Brooklyn teenager, Alike, stands face to face with a dancer sliding head first down a pole. The pleasure manifesto “My Neck, My Back” from the rapper Khia booms from the speakers. Transfixed by the power of her desire, Alike discovers a physical place outside herself that can hold it. Finally.This is the bold opening of “Pariah,” the coming-of-age drama from the writer-director Dee Rees. Ten years ago it premiered to critical acclaim, first at the Sundance Film Festival, then in theaters with a limited release that December, a herculean effort for an independent film starring a then unknown Adepero Oduye as Alike (pronounced ah-LEE-kay) and made on a shoestring budget of less than $500,000.“Pariah” (available to stream on HBO Max) was the first movie about a Black queer woman to be released in theaters nationwide by a Hollywood studio. As Nelson George wrote in The Times in 2011, “No film made by a Black lesbian about being a Black lesbian has ever received the kind of attention showered on Ms. Rees’s film.” At the same time, George pointed out, “Pariah” was also part of a crop of films that pushed the boundaries of “what ‘Black film’ can be.” How Hollywood responded, then and now, has been telling.Rees tells Alike’s story with an uncompromising specificity that has etched its place in great American cinema. (This year the movie was added to the Criterion Collection.) This unflinching sensibility harks back to the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. By opening with the unfettered eroticism of the lesbian club and showing us scenes — like Alike’s awkwardly endearing dildo try-on — without explanation or apology, Rees followed in the footsteps of a group of filmmakers who refused to sanitize images of queer life to appease straight audiences. Think Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman” (1996), the first narrative feature film about an out Black lesbian protagonist made by an out Black lesbian. Cheryl Dunye directed herself and Guinevere Turner, left, in “The Watermelon Woman.”First Run Features“Pariah” began making waves in 2007 when Rees released the short that would become the basis for the 2011 feature. Kebo Drew of the San Francisco film training nonprofit Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project remembers the reaction in her community of friends and colleagues. “The Blackness was just saturated, coming from the roots,” Drew recalled.After hearing word-of-mouth about the short, a screening at Outfest in Los Angeles touched the filmmaker Angela Robinson. “I felt like it was kind of opening a door that I hoped would stay open,” said Robinson. “It was such a personal story and a singular vision.”The writer-director Numa Perrier credits Rees and “Pariah” as an inspiration for her 2019 film “Jezebel.” She remembered, “The softness of how vulnerable that coming-of-age story was, I hadn’t seen that before.”Yet this fresh perspective did not lead Hollywood to greenlight more films about Black lesbians. There have been supporting characters like the passionate teacher Ms. Rain (Paula Patton) in “Precious” (2009) and the serene boxing coach Buddhakan (Sheila Atim) in Halle Berry’s directorial debut this year, “Bruised.” But over the last 10 years, not a single feature focused on Black lesbians has made it through mainstream pipelines.At the same time L.G.B.T. characters overall have become far more visible on the big and small screens. Yet according to a University of Southern California report looking at the top 100 films of 2019 (the most recent year for which figures were available), nearly 80 percent of all such characters were male-identified and 77 percent were white. The report doesn’t provide statistics on queer women of color, as a group distinct from the category “female-identified.”“It’s almost like the stars have to align before we get another Black lesbian movie,” Drew said. “But that’s a structural issue. So there has to be a more systematic approach for encouraging stories.”So “Pariah” was singular not just in its self-assurance, but in whose story it told, too: Alike and her best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), two Black, gay and masculine-of-center best friends from working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn circa the early 2000s. Through the refuge of their friendship, they carve out space to be themselves.Sara Foster, left, Meagan Good, Devon Aoki and Jill Ritchie in “D.E.B.S.”Bruce Birmelin/Samuel Goldwyn FilmsAt a “Pariah” screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018, Rees told the audience, “There shouldn’t be two or three or 10. To me there should be like 200.” She added, “There’s room for so many more stories.” (Rees declined a request to be interviewed for this article.)When Black lesbian stories, and the filmmakers with the lived experience to tell them, are shut out of the larger film world, the result is systemic erasure that is by definition hard to measure.About 100 feature films have been directed by Black women since 1922, almost a third of whom are lesbians, the researcher and filmmaker Yvonne Welbon wrote in the 2018 anthology “Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making.”But the work of Black lesbian filmmakers has almost exclusively been made outside the Hollywood system and often not seen outside the film festival circuit, academia or grassroots distribution networks. Rees’s predecessors — filmmakers like Dunye, Michelle Parkerson (“A Litany for Survival”) and others — didn’t have assurances that a larger audience would even see their work; they simply made films that mattered to them, stories they wanted to see that didn’t yet exist in a film world that barely acknowledged their existence.That “Pariah” earned distribution, made back its budget and even received a glowing shout-out from Meryl Streep during her acceptance speech for “The Iron Lady” at the 2012 Golden Globes, was all monumental, even if the film didn’t garner much attention inside Hollywood.This is something the filmmaker Tina Mabry well understands, having tried, and failed, to get a theatrical release for her critically acclaimed debut feature, “Mississippi Damned,” a few years before “Pariah” came out. After seeing the short version of “Pariah,” Mabry asked Rees for an introduction to the film’s then up-and-coming cinematographer Bradford Young and hired him to shoot “Mississippi Damned.”Tessa Thompson in “Mississippi Damned.” The director, Tina Mabry, turned to the cinematographer Bradford Young after seeing his work on the “Pariah” short.Array ReleasingA coming-of-age tale starring Tessa Thompson and based on Mabry’s experience growing up in a Black working-class family in Tupelo, Miss., the movie won awards on the festival circuit, and aired on cable. Mabry said that she was told repeatedly that the movie was too similar to “Precious” and that “the market can’t handle two Black dramas.” For some distributors that focus on L.G.B.T. audiences, the movie was also perceived as not being gay enough despite a Black lesbian main character.“The distribution model failed us. The people did not,” Mabry said. She also gives a nod to Ava DuVernay, who eventually got the film released on Netflix in 2015 through the film distribution arm she founded, Array. That year Mabry also got her first television directing job (“Queen Sugar,” another DuVernay assist) and Mabry — much like Rees after “Pariah” was released — has worked steadily in Hollywood ever since.Indeed, there are signs of potential change. Mabry said she currently has feature film projects in development at four Hollywood studios, some of which center on Black queer women protagonists, although none of them are a done deal yet.Back when Robinson made her first feature, “D.E.B.S.,” a 2004 lesbian teen spy movie that has since become a cult classic, “there was still the attitude in town that if you played a lesbian, it could ruin your career,” she remembered.After Nina Jacobson, then a Disney studio executive, saw “D.E.B.S.” at the Sundance Film Festival, she hired Robinson to direct “Herbie Reloaded,” starring Lindsay Lohan. With ticket sales of $144 million, Robinson became the first Black woman director to draw at least $100 million at the box office. But despite her gratitude to Jacobson and the crew, the experience left her feeling isolated.“It was me and 200 white men,” Robinson said.That was when she pivoted to cable, accepting an offer from the showrunner Ilene Chaiken to direct episodes of the third season of “The L Word,” the groundbreaking show about the lives of high-powered lesbians in Los Angeles. Robinson hasn’t made another studio-backed film since. (Her 2017 feature “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women” was an indie.)But now, more than 15 years later, she has an all-female action movie in the works at Warner Bros., and her desire to cast women of color in the leads was met not with pushback, but enthusiasm, she said.“Warner Bros. called back and they were like, ‘Yes, we think you should make it more women of color and more queer,” Robinson said. “You have no idea how many years I have been waiting for somebody to say that.”And Robinson is more hopeful than ever. She has a lucrative television production deal with Warner Bros. and several other projects in the pipeline, including a DC Comics series, “Madame X,” and a film remake of “The Hunger.”“It’s always a tenuous time, but things have changed. I don’t feel like I have to Trojan-horse it anymore,” Robinson said, adding that it seems as if “I can just walk in the front door and say, ‘This is what I want to do.’ And I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to do it.” More

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      Steve Bronski, of Pioneering Gay Band Bronski Beat, Dies at 61

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      He was part of a British trio whose songs often directly addressed gay themes and issues in a way few other pop music acts were doing.Steve Bronski, part of the 1980s British synth-pop trio Bronski Beat, whose members were openly gay at a time when that was uncommon and whose early songs unabashedly addressed homophobia and other gay issues, died after a fire on Dec. 7 at his apartment building in the Soho section of London, British news outlets reported. He was 61.The London Fire Brigade confirmed that it had responded to a fire on Berwick Street and taken an unidentified man to a hospital, where he later died. Josephine Samuel, a friend who had been helping to care for Mr. Bronski since he’d had a stroke several years ago, told The Guardian that Mr. Bronski was the fire victim.Mr. Bronski formed Bronski Beat in 1983 with Jimmy Somerville and Larry Steinbachek, and their first single, “Smalltown Boy,” was released the next year. It was a stark story of a young gay man’s escape from a provincial town where he had endured a homophobic attack; a haunting chorus repeats, “Run away, turn away.” The official video for the song, fleshing out the events the lyrics allude to, has been viewed more than 68 million times on YouTube.The song became a Top 5 hit in Britain and made the charts in other countries as well, including the United States. A follow-up, “Why?,” another chart success, was equally direct, the lyrics speaking to the ostracism and social disapproval experienced by gay people. “You in your false securities tear up my life, condemning me,” one lyric goes. “Name me an illness, call me a sin. Never feel guilty, never give in.”At the time, a number of mainstream performers — Elton John, the Village People, Boy George — telegraphed gayness, often with stereotypical flamboyance, but rarely addressed gay issues directly in song. Bronski Beat was different, eschewing coyness and gimmicks.“They buck stereotypes,” Jim Farber wrote in The Daily News in 1985, “presenting themselves as everyday Joes.”The group’s debut album, “The Age of Consent” (1984), was as forthright as the two singles. The album sleeve listed the “minimum age for lawful homosexual relationships between men” in European countries, an effort to underscore that the age in the United Kingdom at the time, 21, was higher than almost everywhere else. The sleeve also included a phone number for a gay legal advice line.Mr. Bronski said the trio didn’t start out as a political or social statement.“We were just writing songs that spoke about our lives at the time,” he told Gay Times in 2018. “We had no idea ‘Smalltown Boy’ would resonate with so many people.”But when they began doing live performances in 1983, he told The Associated Press in 1986, the audience reaction helped them realize that they had struck a chord.“We had all these people coming backstage saying, ‘I think it’s great you’ve been so honest about it,’” he said.That same audience reaction landed them a contract with London Records in early 1984. Mr. Bronski was on keyboards and synthesizers along with Mr. Steinbachek; Mr. Somerville’s distinctive falsetto vocals were the group’s signature.Warren Whaley, an electronic music composer based in Los Angeles and half of the synth-pop duo the Dollhouse, struck up a running correspondence with Mr. Bronski when he wrote to him after Mr. Steinbachek’s death in 2016.“I recall hearing their debut single, ‘Smalltown Boy,’ on the alternative music radio station in Los Angeles in 1984,” Mr. Whaley said by email. “The song starts with a heavy octave bass. Then a staccato hook. Then Jimmy Somerville’s lovely falsetto. I was hooked by 22 seconds in. This band was something special. Something new — but old. Their sound harkened to disco and R&B. But it sounded new, different.”Mr. Bronski in 1996. He continued to make music after the original Bronski Beat trio broke up. Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesThe original Bronski Beat lineup didn’t last long; Mr. Somerville left the group in 1985. But Mr. Bronski continued to make music, with Mr. Steinbachek for a time and with others over the years, most notably “Hit That Perfect Beat,” a hit in Britain and elsewhere in 1986 and a dancehall favorite ever since. Mr. Whaley said that though Bronski Beat’s best-known songs had gay-centric lyrics, “their appeal crossed the boundaries of sexual alignment.”“Everyone bopped their heads and danced to their music,” he said.Mr. Bronski was born Steven Forrest on Feb. 7, 1960, in Glasgow. He had made his way to London by the early 1980s, where he met Mr. Somerville and Mr. Steinbachek.“It was a lot easier living in London,” he told Classic Pop magazine in 2019, explaining why he and other gay men had gravitated to the city, “since there was a thriving gay scene compared to other parts of the country.”Information on his survivors was not available.In 2017, more than three decades after the release of “The Age of Consent,” the only album with the original Bronski Beat lineup, Mr. Bronski teamed with Stephen Granville and Ian Donaldson to release the album “The Age of Reason” under the Bronski Beat name, revisiting songs from the original record and adding new tracks.“I think a lot of the songs are as relevant today as they were all those years ago,” he told Gay Times. More

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      ‘The Novice’ Review: A Freshman Effort Worthy of Varsity

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      The obsessive ambitions of a college rower are masterfully orchestrated in a debut feature by the writer-director Lauren Hadaway.In “The Novice,” the impressive debut feature from the writer-director Lauren Hadaway, Alex (Isabelle Fuhrman) is a college freshman who finds purpose in the masochistic ecstasy of team rowing.Alex isn’t suited to the demands of her sport. She’s not as strong as her crew mates, and she’s not as team-oriented as they are either. But she becomes obsessed with rowing, driven to achieve her goal of making the school’s varsity squad, even if her incessant efforts alienate her peers and coaches. Not even Alex’s first queer romance with Dani (Dilone), a confident teaching assistant, can draw Alex out of her fixation. She begins her season as a novice, and threatens to end it as a zealot.Hadaway has crafted a film that thematically and visually resembles Damien Chazelle’s “Whiplash,” for which she served as a sound editor. But where Chazelle’s film followed a protagonist with world-class aspirations, the modest scale of Alex’s ambitions keeps “The Novice” more grounded as a character study, and helps the film steer clear of overblown statements about success. The protagonist merely wishes to be the worst rower on her team’s best boat.Without the pressure of narrative grandeur, Hadaway is free to go big in her filmmaking style. She uses maximalist techniques like slow motion, rapid editing and deep space staging to create dreamlike sequences of Alex’s isolation. Fuhrman’s performance matches the filmmaking for its intensity. The movie achieves a surreal allure — at times, it’s hard to pay attention to the dialogue because the images and the sound design are already communicating so much. If the story’s hero can only aspire to the middle of the pack, the beginner behind the camera shows no such limitations.The NoviceRated R for intense sequences of distress, language, brief nudity, and some sexual content. Running time: 1 hours 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More