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      ‘Together’ Bears Witness to Britain’s Lockdowns

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      The new film, starring Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy, is a tensely funny relationship drama, as well as a chronicle of the first year of the pandemic.LONDON — In “Together,” Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy play a couple in meltdown. And then the pandemic begins.Ten minutes into the film, which debuts in theaters in the United States on Aug. 27, the unnamed female protagonist (Horgan) tells her partner (McAvoy) that he is the worst human alive.“You’ve got the same level of charm as diarrhea in a pint glass,” she says.“Lockdown’s going to be hard then,” he responds.The drama, written by Dennis Kelly and directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”), begins on 24 March 2020, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Britain’s first coronavirus lockdown. It unfolds, claustrophobically, over the course of a year in the couple’s home, which they share with their young son.As well as taking a wide view of the virus’s deadly impact — captions mark the rising death toll in Britain, from 422 in the first scene to 126,284 in the last — “Together” also zooms in on the disintegration and tentative rebuilding of a relationship. It’s sad, but also scabrously funny — “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” with added hand sanitizer. There’s shouting and crying, reminiscing and makeup sex, panic buying, jostling for vaccines and shocking, visceral grief.Stephen Daldry, top left, directed the film, which was shot over 10 days in London.Peter Mountain/Bleecker StreetHorgan said in a phone interview that the film was, on one level, an exercise in bearing witness, in particular to the “hidden trauma” of those families who lost loved ones in nursing homes. More than 39,000 nursing home residents in England died with the virus between April 2020 and March 2021, according to a study by the Care Quality Commission, a government agency. For many of those people, because of visiting restrictions and staff shortages, it was a lonely death.In “Together,” the mother of Horgan’s character moves into a nursing home at the start of the pandemic. “She’ll be safe there, right?” the daughter says. In the following scene, her mother is on a ventilator.Horgan said she felt “an enormous responsibility” in telling the story of what happened in Britain’s nursing homes. “We were incredibly shocked by it as a country, but the specific experience that families were having — of not being able to say goodbye, of watching loved ones die on FaceTime — people felt like they weren’t seen,” she said. “We wanted people to feel the pain of it.”The drama was filmed in London over 10 days in April this year, and was broadcast here by the BBC in June, in the same week that the government delayed the lifting of restrictions because of a surge in the Delta variant of the virus. As it premieres in the United States, just over half of Americans are fully vaccinated, but the long-term effects of the pandemic — physical, psychological and financial — are still being felt.“I’ve never written anything as immediate as this,” Kelly said in a phone interview. The script required little research, beyond observing day-to-day events, he added: “It’s the one event we’ve all been through.”Perhaps that’s why a number of recent films have tackled the strains of life in a pandemic. “Locked Down,” starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, throws an improbable heist into its story of a bored, bickering couple. “Lock Down Love” and “The End of Us” play out as more straightforward romantic comedies, in which being forced apart or together makes couples reassess. If “Together” stands apart, it is because fury and horror at what is happening in the wider world run in parallel to the central love story.Writing the movie was a cathartic experience, Kelly said. “There are a lot of people out there who are really angry. They lost people, and they know they died alone,” he said. “We still haven’t got anywhere near processing what we’ve been through.”Before Kelly approached Horgan about starring in “Together,” she had little interest in making a lockdown film: She had already turned down scripts based on the pandemic, she said. In the shows she was working on, including the BBC comedy “Motherland” and the second series of Aisling Bea’s “This Way Up,” the current circumstances were more or less glossed over, she added. Then she read “Together.”“I could see it was really important,” Horgan said of the script. “Of course, it’s rooted in Covid. But it transcends that, as a voyeuristic, in-depth X-ray of a relationship.” For that reason, Horgan doesn’t think people will feel fatigued by the events of last year and a half while watching it. “If it was just related to the pandemic, you couldn’t watch an hour-and-a-half of it,” she said.It helped that Horgan and Kelly are old friends. Horgan grew up on a turkey farm in Ireland, but has lived in London since the early 1990s, when she and Kelly met performing in a youth theater production. Years later, they bumped into each other in a pub. Horgan was in her late 20s and working at a job center; Kelly mentioned he’d written a play, called “Brendan’s Visit.” The next day, Horgan called and convinced him to put it on.“She was unbelievably driven,” said Kelly, who went on to win the Tony Award for Best Book with “Matilda the Musical” in 2013. “If it weren’t for Sharon, there’s no way I’d have been a writer.”From left: Tanya Franks, Rebekah Staton and Sharon Horgan in “Pulling.”HuluThe pair started writing together and created “Pulling,” a cult comedy about three 20-something female housemates, which debuted on the BBC in 2006. Watching it now, Horgan’s character, Donna, seems like a godmother to Fleabag from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s 2016 TV hit, as well as the many chaotic, honest portrayals of womanhood that have followed, but at the time there was no one like her on television.If “Pulling” was based on Horgan’s 20s, “Catastrophe,” the dramedy she co-wrote and starred in with Rob Delaney about a couple who get pregnant after a one-week stand, was based on her 30s: She and her now ex-husband Jeremy Rainbird had been together for six months when she found out she was expecting a daughter.Now, she is working on the third part of her loose trilogy based, as she described it, on the “life cycle of a woman.” It will encompass turning 50, divorce and watching her children grow up, she said.Horgan spent lockdown in London, with her two teenage daughters, who were “like caged animals,” she said. “So as a separated family we had to negotiate that, and make that work,” Horgan said. “It was intense.”The boundaries between her life and work have always been porous, Horgan said. “I don’t think I give too much of myself to my work; my work gives an awful lot to me, if I’m honest,” she said. “I’ve never really given away something incredibly personal that I haven’t felt better for having got it off my chest,” she added.When it came to rehearsing “Together,” in April, Horgan’s own experiences came pouring out.“Everyone was sharing stories, not just about Covid, or lockdown, but about relationships,” she said. “The emotion of it felt within arm’s reach.” More

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      in Music

      The Uniform Cool of Charlie Watts

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      “Style is the answer to everything,” Charles Bukowski, of all people, once said in a lecture that’s still afloat in the ether of YouTube. Swigging Schlitz from a bottle, the pockmarked laureate of the underground discoursed on one of the few traits that, as is well known, one may possess though never acquire.Bullfighters have style and so do boxers, Bukowski said. He had seen more men with style inside of prison than outside its walls, he also somewhat questionably asserted. “To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it,” he then added — and that much, at least, seems indisputable.Nobody ever accused the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who died Aug. 24 at 80, of dullness. Yet so granitic and unshowy was he relative to his preening bandmates — in their face paint, frippery and feathers — that it was easy to be distracted from the ineffable Watts cool that anchored the Stones sound and that drew on a lineage far older than rock.Well before joining what is generally called the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll group, Mr. Watts, a trained graphic artist who learned to play after giving up banjo and turning the body of one into a drum, was a seasoned sessions player. He considered himself at heart a jazzman; his heroes were musicians like Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Lester Young and phenomenal pop crooners like the unfairly forgotten Billy Eckstine.While the rest of the Rolling Stones dressed the part of rock stars, Mr. Watts found his style groove on Savile Row. Here, with Ron Wood, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, he celebrates the opening of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” in 1983.Carlos Rene Perez/Associated PressMr. Watts in London, 1989.John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesIn a double-breasted suit, in 1992.Eamonn McCabe/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesHe studied famously natty dressers like Fred Astaire, men who found a style and seldom deviated from it throughout their lives. A famous story about the Stones describes them starving in order to make enough money to recruit a drummer then in no great rush to join the band. “Literally!” Keith Richards wrote in “Life,” his excellent 2010 memoir. “We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts.”Mr. Watts was expensive then and, as it happened, chose for himself an image that seldom looked otherwise. “To be honest,” he once told GQ. “I have a very old-fashioned and traditional mode of dress.”When his bandmates Mick Jagger and Mr. Richards began peacocking in Carnaby Road velvets, secondhand glad rags from Portobello Road, Moroccan djellabas, boas, sequined jumpsuits and dresses plucked from the wardrobes of their wives or girlfriends, Mr. Watts continued to dress as soberly as an attorney. And when, in the late 1970s, Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards began adding suiting to their wardrobe, their selections tended to feature nipped waists, four-lane lapels, checkerboard patterns or Oxford bag trousers from the brilliant and flamboyant upstart Tommy Nutter.“I always felt totally out of place with the Rolling Stones,” Mr. Watts told GQ, at least in style terms. Photographs appeared of the band with everyone else wearing sneakers and Mr. Watts in a pair of lace-ups from the 19th-century Mayfair shoemaker George Cleverley. “I hate trainers,” he said, meaning athletic shoes. “Even if they’re fashionable.”Perhaps in some ways Mr. Watts was just ahead of the other Stones and the rest of us in purely style terms — more evolved in his understanding of convention and how stealthily to subvert it, a bit like a jazz musician improvising on core melodies. There may even have been something punk in his determination early on to forgo the likes of Mr. Nutter and instead patronize some of the more venerable Savile Row tailors, places still so discreet in the 1970s that they often had no signs on their doors. It was his brilliance to mold what those tailors did to his own assured tastes.Take, for instance, the 1971 Peter Webb images — lost for 40 years before rediscovery in the past decade — depicting the young Mr. Watts and Mr. Richards from “Sticky Fingers” at the very height of their fame. Mr. Richards is fabulously attired in zippered black leather, graphically patterned velvet trousers in black-and-white, a contrast-patterned shirt, a custom leather bandoleer belt and buccaneer shag. Mr. Watts, by contrast, is wearing a three-piece suit with a six-button vest in what appears to be stolid burgomaster’s loden.Or take the double-breasted dove gray morning coat the mature Mr. Watts is seen wearing in another shot of himself and his wife, Shirley, at Ascot. (The couple bred Arabian horses.) Beautifully cut for his compact frame (he was 5-foot-8), it is worn with a pale pink waistcoat and tie, a shirt whose rounded collars are pinned beneath the knot, a style he first glimpsed and copied from the cover of Dexter Gordon’s imperious jazz classic “Our Man in Paris.”Already by 1967, the Stones (with Brian Jones in rear) were venturing into Portobello Road glad rags, vintage scarves and their girlfriends’ dresses. A lilac tie with a velvet jacket was about as Mod as Mr. Watts would ever get.Tony Gale/AlamyIt takes gumption, and a good relationship with one’s tailor, to pair a morning suit with a waistcoat in powder pink, as Mr. Watts, seen here with his wife, Shirley Watts, did at Ascot Racecourse in 2010.Indigo/Getty ImagesEach of those suits was bespoke, the latter stitched by H. Huntsman & Sons, a Savile Row institution that has been dressing British swells since 1849. Theirs was one of just two tailoring companies Mr. Watts worked with throughout his life.“Mr. Watts was one of the most stylish gentlemen I’ve had the pleasure of working with,” said Dario Carnera, the head cutter at Huntsman, in an email. “He imbued his own sartorial flair in every commission.” He ordered from the establishment for more than 50 years, the craftsman added. (In the Huntsman catalog there still exists a fabric — the Springfield stripe — of Mr. Watts’s design.)By his own rough estimate, Mr. Watts owned several hundred suits, at least as many pairs of shoes, an all-but-uncountable quantity of custom shirts and ties — so many clothes, in fact, that, inverting a hoary sexist cliché about fashion, it was his wife who complained that her husband spent too much time in front of the mirror.Mr. Watts seldom wore any of his sartorial finery onstage, however, preferring the practicality and anonymity of short-sleeved dress shirts or T-shirts for concerts or tours. It was in civilian life that he cultivated, and eventually perfected, a sartorial image as elegant, serene and impeccable as his drumming. More

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      in Television

      Michaela Coel Puts Herself Together in ‘Misfits’

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      The book, adapted from a speech by the creator and star of “I May Destroy You,” codifies her efforts to achieve transparency in her work and in her life.The city of Edinburgh was the epicenter of a powerful energy pulse on Aug. 22, 2018 — not the kind that precise scientific equipment can detect, but one whose ripples would be felt by sensitive human instruments in the weeks and months that followed.That evening, Michaela Coel, a rising British TV star, was invited to address her colleagues at the prestigious Edinburgh International Television Festival. Speaking to a few thousand industry peers in a lecture hall and countless more viewers watching her online, she shared stories from her ascent, a narrative that was by turns wryly comic and devastating.Coel talked about growing up a member of one of only four Black families in a public housing complex in East London. She described her time at drama school, where a teacher called her a racial slur during an acting exercise. She discussed her surprise, after achieving some professional success, at being sent a gift bag that contained “dry shampoo, tanning lotion and a foundation even Kim Kardashian was too dark for.” She recounted how she had gone out for a drink one night and later realized she had been drugged and sexually assaulted.She spoke of resilience gained from a life spent “having to climb ladders with no stable ground beneath you,” and she classified herself as a misfit, defined in part as someone who “doesn’t climb in pursuit of safety or profit, she climbs to tell stories.”Three years later, Coel — now 33 and the celebrated creator and star of the HBO comedy-drama “I May Destroy You” — regards this speech as a satisfying moment of personal unburdening.As she said in a video interview a few weeks ago, “We go in and out of working with people and we never quite know who they are, and no one ever quite knows who you are. There’s something quite liberating about just letting everybody know.”A misfit, Coel said during her 2018 speech, “doesn’t climb in pursuit of safety or profit, she climbs to tell stories.”Ken Jack/Corbis via Getty ImagesWith its explicit calls for greater transparency, Coel’s address (known formally as the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture) resonated across the entertainment industry and provided a narrative and thematic foundation for “I May Destroy You.” Next month, the speech will be published by Henry Holt & Co. as a book titled “Misfits: A Personal Manifesto.”To an audience that is still discovering Coel, her life and her work, “Misfits” may seem like an artifact preserving the moment that its author became the fullest version of herself.But to Coel, it represents a particularly validating episode in a career where she has always felt empowered to speak her mind.“I’ve always been annoying people about these things,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t know where I got the cheek to be like this. But from the beginning, there’s always been a story where Michaela was pushing and saying, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”To this day, Coel is relentlessly candid about the choices that go into her work, even when it comes to the decision to call “Misfits” a “manifesto,” which she said was foisted upon her by her publishers.As she explained, “I was like, ‘But it’s so small, it’s not really a book.’ They were like, ‘A book is a binding of papers.’ OK, fine, can we call it an essay book? ‘Mmm, no.’”Coel’s book “Misfits” is out on Sept. 7.She was more circumspect about discussing where on the planet she was while we had our video conversation. Despite a report in Variety that Coel had joined the cast of the Marvel superhero sequel “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” she said, “I’m in America. I don’t know why I’m here. I have a feeling that I’m not supposed to say.” (A spokesman for Marvel declined to comment.)The actor Paapa Essiedu, a co-star on “I May Destroy You” and a longtime friend of Coel’s, said that since their time together as students at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he had known Coel to be a courageous, forthright person.“Her voice was always very clear,” Essiedu said. “She always felt like she was unperturbed by what was expected of her, and she was able to think and speak independently.”Even so, Essiedu said, “Remember that she is just a normal person,” who talks trash with her friends “and can be funny and can be really annoying. Her day-to-day life is not her espousing how to make the world a better place.”In the speech, Coel described frustrations she had endured on her breakthrough comedy series, “Chewing Gum,” which ran on the E4 channel in Britain and on Netflix in America. She spoke about crying into an unpurchased pair of tights at a drugstore following a phone call where she it was suggested that she would have to hire co-writers to help her on the series.She also talked about turning down an offer to make “I May Destroy You” with Netflix when the streaming service declined to let her keep any ownership rights for the series. (In the lecture, she told this story with an allegorical flair, imagining it as a negotiation with a fictional stepmother she called “No-Face Netanya.”)“I don’t know where I got the cheek to be like this,” Coel said. “But from the beginning, there’s always been a story where Michaela was pushing and saying, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”Wulf Bradley for The New York TimesAmy Gravitt, an executive vice president at HBO who oversees its original comedy programming, said that she was moved by Coel’s lecture when she watched it online.“There was so much that she said in that speech that resonated as a woman working in this industry,” said Gravitt, who first met with Coel in 2017 following the success of “Chewing Gum.”“When she talked about her desire to see another person’s point of view represented onscreen, that resonated deeply with me as a programmer,” Gravitt said.Far from feeling reluctant to work with someone so outspoken, Gravitt said, “I feel like I only want to work with people who feel comfortable speaking their mind.”Coel ultimately ended up making “I May Destroy You” for HBO and the BBC. When I asked her if Netflix must cry itself to sleep every night for losing out on the show, she answered, “Well, melatonin works a charm.”A press representative for Netflix said in a statement said, “Michaela is an incredibly talented artist who we were thrilled to work with on ‘Black Mirror’ and ‘Black Earth Rising’ among others, and who we hope to work with again in the future.”Coel said she never hesitated to tell her lecture audience about having been sexually assaulted. “I never had that thing where I kept it to myself and was afraid to say it because of what people thought,” she said. “And because I never had that incubation period for shame and guilt to make a home inside of me, it never did.”Talking about the assault now was like “looking at a scar,” she said.“I look at the scar, and it’s like, whoa, that happened,” Coel said. “But now I’m alive to look at this scar, which means that I’ve come around the bend.”At the time she gave the lecture, Coel was already writing what would become “I May Destroy You,” in which her character, a young writer named Arabella, is served a spiked drink and sexually assaulted.“I May Destroy You” is up for nine Emmys, including outstanding lead actress.HBO, via Associated PressTo this day, Coel said, she encounters people who are fans of the show but do not realize it is based on her experience. Other viewers approach her, over social media and in person, to tell her about their own traumas. “I’ve cried with strangers on the street,” she said.“I May Destroy You” became a pandemic-era staple when it ran last spring and summer, and it has inspired its fans in other ways.In February, the series received no nominations for Golden Globes, prompting an outcry from its audience. Deborah Copaken, an author and memoirist (“Ladyparts”) who was a writer on the first season of the gauzy Netflix comedy “Emily in Paris,” wrote in an essay for The Guardian that the snub “is not only wrong, it’s what is wrong with everything.”In an interview, Copaken praised Coel for putting “people on the screen you’ve never seen on TV except as extras or others,” in a series that encompassed topics such as sexual consent and the assimilation of immigrants.“It doesn’t do the thing of making people who aren’t white and Western into paragons of virtue,” Copaken said. “These are interesting people with messy lives. At every turn, it challenges viewers’ assumptions.”Coel herself said she was too enchanted with the broader reaction to her series to worry about the Golden Globes controversy. “I was on this cloud of gratitude,” she said, “and I could hear there was something happening. I was like, guys, I don’t know how to come down from the cloud and deal with this.” Last month, “I May Destroy You” was nominated for nine Emmy Awards, including limited or anthology series. Coel and Essiedu both received nominations as actors, and Coel was also nominated as a director and as a writer on the series.Now Coel faces the happy challenge of figuring out a follow-up to “I May Destroy You,” and she is emphatic that the series has concluded.“To me, it’s very clearly finished, isn’t it?” she said. “Imagine if there was a Season 2? I just think guys, come on, it’s done. Unless somebody has this amazing idea for Season 2 that doesn’t destroy Season 1, for me it is closed and finished.”Coel said she faced no external pressures to deliver her next project. “HBO and BBC were very kind,” she said. “They said, ‘Hey, Michaela, you’ve done a great thing for us. You can just chill out, take as long as you need.’ But I’m not like that.”She quickly pointed her camera at a whiteboard on which she had started to map out a new story arc, but she turned the camera back at herself before any words were legible. She would say no more about the new series except that the BBC had committed to making it.Viewers of “I May Destroy You” sometimes approach Coel, over social media and in person, to tell her about their own traumas. “I’ve cried with strangers on the street,” she said.Wulf Bradley for The New York Times(Gravitt, the HBO executive, said that her network was “in the early stages of talking to Michaela and the BBC and various artists who are all a part of the team of ‘I May Destroy You,’ and excited at the prospect of having this new project to work on together.”)Essiedu said that Coel had not been changed much by reaching a new echelon of fame, and that she remained an artist who was motivated more by the work more than by the celebrity.“She deserves the credits and the plaudits,” he said. “She’s not going to shy away from that, which is something that us Brits are very good at doing. She’s maybe a bit more like you Americans in that approach.”But having twice experienced the satisfaction of feeling that her viewers truly and fully received what she was saying — with her MacTaggart lecture, and with “I May Destroy You” — Coel said she could hardly ask for much more.“As a writer, sometimes I’m fraught, I’m frazzled,” she said. “I’m trying to be clear, piece by piece, and the audience valued me and listened to me.”With a mixture of relief and delight, she exclaimed, “The way that people listen to me in this life! All I’ve learned is to be heard.” More

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      in Music

      Jimothy’s Flex Looks a Little Different

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      The British rapper doesn’t dress or sound like his peers — but that’s just how he likes it.LONDON — Like in every other aspect of his life, Jimothy dresses intuitively.On a recent afternoon at Camden Market in North London, the 22-year-old rapper wore a crisp button-down under a Ralph Lauren puffer jacket, boot-cut jeans and a white messenger bag.“I got my mum to tailor them,” he said, gesturing at the jeans.Browsing the stalls, he considered a rack of fake Gucci belts. “I’m buying fakes now,” he said. “Going broke to look rich is very embarrassing.”When Jimothy (real name Timothy Gonzalez) burst onto the London music scene in 2017 with his viral track “Getting Busy,” his nonconformist dress sense was only part of the reason people kept asking him if “Jimothy” was a comedy bit.“Getting Busy” is an unlikely ode to scheduling set over lo-fi beats, with Jimothy — then performing with the last name “Lacoste” as a nod to his preppy dress sense — rapping in his now-signature deadpan, singsong style. In the accompanying video, he dances atop a bus shelter, before hitching a ride on the outside of a London train.“Everyone needs to know,” he said, swinging his legs over the edge of a Camden canal, “is it a joke, is it a joke?” The question used to bother Jimothy when he was younger and “mad egotistic,” he said. Today, although he emphasizes “it’s me, truly,” the rapper accepts some people just won’t get his thing.“Have you ever heard anything like his music, specifically lyrically, ever?” said Poundland Bandit, the anonymous London-based meme-maker who is a fan. “It’s the purest form of someone genuinely being themselves and having the most fun possible with whatever they create, with no boundaries or fear of criticism.”There is also a vulnerability to Jimothy’s music that evokes the confessional style of other British artists like Mike Skinner (now a collaborator) and the playfulness of Dean Blunt. He either rejects the tropes of rap entirely or subverts them playfully. While other rappers brag about sex, drugs and expensive cars, Jimothy raps about his ambition to one day earn enough money to shop at upmarket supermarkets and listening to his mother’s advice.Jimothy shops with friends. His jeans were tailored by his mother. Suzie Howell for The New York TimesJimothy has come to embrace being unconventional. He grew up in public housing in the affluent London area of Primrose Hill, not far from Camden Market, and was raised by his Spanish mother, whom he still lives with. His father, who is of Caribbean heritage but was born in Britain, was not around much.Street-savvy and smart, Jimothy enjoyed unusual freedom as a child. “When I was 12,” he said, “I felt like a big man.” He would explore London on foot, walking to other boroughs up to four miles away. He would also meet and befriend older children online. “I’d message them on Facebook and say, ‘Yo, I like what you do, let’s chill,’” he said.This precociousness is evident to this day. Browsing the market stalls, Jimothy bartered good-naturedly with the sellers, purchasing a burgundy sweater vest and a counterfeit TikTok sweater. He was charming and thoughtful company, if a little inclined toward sermonizing, whether on the importance of cultivating “severe happiness,” eating healthily or not overthinking things.Jimothy has dyslexia and dyscalculia, which affects his ability to understand numbers — he wears a digital watch because he struggles to read a clock face — and went to a middle school for children with special educational needs.There, he was exempt from the pressure to conform to the social vagaries of his peers, he said, but he was also understimulated and overlooked by teachers.Instead, he taught himself what he needed to know via YouTube. He learned to dance by watching videos of body-poppers and hip-hop, which led to his jerky-fluid dance style. “That was my school,” he said. “Oh, my gosh. I learned more on YouTube than anything. Cooking, how to make friends, how to be confident, how to talk to girls, how to kiss. Everything.”Jimothy’s lifelong fluency in digital culture manifests itself as a hypersensitivity toward his image and a hatred of visual cliché. When he waves a wad of cash in the video for “Make Money,” he does so because he knows that “with the way I’m dressed,” in a black turtleneck and gold rimmed glasses, “it looks interesting,” he said. But if he’s wearing baggy jeans and a chain, “I’m not flexing no cash, because I don’t look different,” he said.“I literally just wear what I like,” Jimothy said of his dress sense.Suzie Howell for The New York Times“It’s called anti-drip. When you’re doing anti-fashion, anti-clothes,” he said of his new counterfeit TikTok sweater. Suzie Howell for The New York TimesAfter leaving school at 16, Jimothy considered becoming a massage therapist. He posted his first two tracks, “T.I.M.M.Y.” and “Getting Busy,” online in 2016 and 2017. He’d only wanted to make music to “play at house parties,” he said. His sister encouraged him to take it seriously.Following the success of “Getting Busy,” in 2018 Jimothy signed to Black Butter Records, the Sony imprint, although he subsequently parted ways with the label. His fans range in age from millennials to Gen Z teens, but they all share one thing: “They relate to me,” Jimothy said. “I think they relate to me more than they like my music.”As his profile has grown, his videos have become more high-concept and slick. Last year, he released his well-reviewed debut album “The Safeway” and he has a tour of midsize British venues planned for the coming months. He’s modeled for Acne Studios and Ralph Lauren, and his bedroom in his mother’s flat is full of gifted swag from fashion labels.Jimothy recently branched into house music and now will use other musician’s beats, something he formerly refused to do. But he maintains that he has kept his bedroom pop ethos, uploading videos to an anonymous YouTube channel, while holding on to control over all parts of his music production.He refuses to write with external songwriters, apart from his friend Joss Ryan, a writer and producer who first worked with Jimothy on his debut album. “His approach to making music is unique,” Ryan said, “because he was, and still is, very self-sufficient.”“I am myself,” Jimothy said. “I try my best, anyway. It’s hard not to be yourself.”Suzie Howell for The New York TimesJimothy defends his uncompromising approach. “If I get in the studio with some random songwriter that some label has put me on, it’s not going to work,” he said, “because they don’t know my life.”His latest challenge in resisting the pressure to conform, he said, is his fans, and their opinions on his music.“You’re going to listen to them and think, maybe they’re right,” he said. Sitting by the canal, tourists thronged the footpath behind, and he strained to be heard over the melee. “But as soon as you get into that mind-set,” he said, suddenly animated, the music you’re making changes, and “you’re no longer making it for yourself.”Jimothy paused. “Obviously, they are your customers,” he said, of his fans. “Customer is always right. But is this a business I’m doing? Because I don’t think it is.”After all, “business and feelings and emotions don’t work,” he said. “I’m not doing formula music. I’m doing feeling music.” More

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      in Theater

      Review: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Delayed ‘Cinderella’ Is Worth the Wait

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      After months of pandemic-mandated postponements, the British composer’s new show finally had its premiere. It’s fun.LONDON — “Cinderella” finally got there, albeit well past midnight. Five weeks after the show’s aborted July 14 premiere, and with numerous other dates offered and then dropped along the way, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical at last opened here Wednesday at the Gillian Lynne Theater.And, guess what? The long-awaited show from the 73-year-old industry veteran turns out to have been worth the wait. “Cinderella” is a big, colorful production, painted in deliberately broad brushstrokes by the director Laurence Connor, that turns a time-honored story (somewhat) on its head. The result may not be quite the theatrical equivalent of its heroine’s cut-glass slipper, but it nonetheless looks set for a sturdy West End run. Best of all: “Cinderella” is fun.Lloyd Webber has been unusually visible of late as a newly minted activist, making headlines here throughout the pandemic to score points against the British government and demand that theaters be allowed to open; this musical is on more familiar territory. Cinderella, a societal outcast, is a bit like the rejected Phantom in “The Phantom of the Opera,” and that show’s mask gets a visual reference toward the end of “Cinderella’s” first act, when the scraggly-haired, dowdy-looking “scullery wench” (Carrie Hope Fletcher) of the title is given a beauteous makeover. She finds herself in the care of a Godmother (Gloria Onitiri), who would seem to be a dab hand at plastic surgery, and within minutes Cinderella is covering her face as part of the treatment.Her inevitable prince, too, turns out not to be the Prince Charming of legend, who is reported missing at the show’s start, but his shy and gawky younger brother, Sebastian (the sweet-faced Ivano Turco, only a year out of drama school). Cinderella’s childhood friend and lover-in-waiting, Sebastian could as well be the young Joseph from “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” if that earlier musical’s cheerfully asexual hero had been allowed a libido. (“Joseph” and “Phantom” are both back up and running in the West End.)Ivano Turco (Prince Sebastian) and Rebecca Trehearn (the Queen).Tristram KentonThe score tilts heavily toward the power ballads that tumble from this composer’s pen; one or two could be trimmed to the benefit of an overlong production. The aggressive number “Bad Cinderella” early on establishes the gifted Fletcher’s clarion-voiced rebel as a troublemaker amid the manicured environs of the show’s “picturesque” French setting, where everyone is devoted to beauty and physical perfection. (That would explain the frequent emergence among the townsfolk of various muscled, bare-chested men, apparently on loan from a Chippendales revue.)Sebastian gets an earworm number of his own in the emotive “Only You, Lonely You,” which ends with the same sort of money note as “Love Changes Everything,” from Lloyd Webber’s “Aspects of Love.” Elsewhere, in a second-act waltz, we clock nods toward Rodgers and Hammerstein, who wrote their own “Cinderella,” and, separately, to Edward Elgar at his most ceremonially British; a showstopping duet, “I Know You,” for the Queen and the Stepmother, by contrast, has a more Gallic tinge.Those supporting roles are played to comic perfection by Rebecca Trehearn and Victoria Hamilton-Barritt: A florid Hamilton-Barritt, in particular, vamps across Gabriela Tylesova’s elegantly shifting sets like an Edward Gorey figure who has had too much to drink. Trehearn, for her part, raises haughtiness to a high art: “I can’t lose my head,” she announces. “Where would all my hats go?”Here, as elsewhere, you feel the enlivening touch of a collaborative team that includes Tony-winner David Zippel (“City of Angels”) whose lyrics rhyme “nondescript” with “ripped” while also accommodating the story’s swoony romanticism. The notably bawdy book is by Emerald Fennell, an Oscar-winner this year for her script for “Promising Young Woman,” who springs several narrative surprises along the way — an important one will be immediately clear to those who read the cast list. (And surely her appearance in “The Crown” as Camilla Parker Bowles equipped Fennell for a musical that features its own royal wedding.)Carrie Hope Fletcher as Cinderella with Victoria Hamilton-Barritt, second from right, as the Stepmother, and Laura Baldwin and Georgina Castle as the stepsisters.Tristram KentonIn keeping with other musicals like “Wicked,” to which “Cinderella” owes an evident debt, the emphasis here is on learning to love and trust your inner beauty, rather than seeking approval elsewhere. In context, it’s no accident that Cinderella tells Sebastian, in a moment of mock petulance, “I can’t help being a legend,” before coming to realize that she might actually deserve that exalted status.I doubt “Cinderella” itself will ever be a show of legend, but its fairy-tale rewrite feels like a happy corrective to grim times: Cinderella arrives at the ball, by which point the audience has had one, as well.CinderellaAt the Gillian Lynne Theater, in London; andrewlloydwebberscinderella.com. More

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      Andrew Lloyd Webber Delays ‘Cinderella’ Musical in West End

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      The composer and producer blamed Britain’s coronavirus restrictions for the delay.One day before Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much-anticipated “Cinderella” musical was slated to open in London’s West End, and two days after a cast member tested positive for the coronavirus, the prolific composer and producer announced on Monday that opening night would yet again be delayed.“I have been forced to take the heartbreaking decision not to open my Cinderella,” he said in a Twitter statement. “The impossible conditions created by the blunt instrument that is the Government’s isolation guidance mean that we cannot continue.”Lloyd Webber’s announcement initially did not specify whether the production was closing for good or just being postponed, though a spokeswoman for him later clarified that the show’s opening was delayed, not canceled, and that they hoped to open the show “soon, but it’s very difficult under the current conditions.”The composer’s statement was likely an attempt to try and force the British government to change its rules on quarantine for actors and crew. Last month, he made newspaper front pages with comments promising to open “Cinderella” at full capacity “come hell or high water” — even if he faced arrest for doing so. He quickly pulled back from the plan after learning his audience, cast and crew risked fines for breaching British coronavirus rules.With its story and book by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”), the $8.2 million musical had been set to star Carrie Hope Fletcher in the title role, and had been in previews at half capacity at the Gillian Lynne Theater for about a month.Lloyd Webber, 73, has been pressuring the government for more than a year to allow theaters to open at full capacity. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, he said protocols that required a show to cancel performances because one member of the cast came into contact with someone who tested positive could be the death knell for a musical like “Cinderella.”“The trouble is, we wouldn’t be able to carry on,” he said. “We can’t carry on hemorrhaging money each week, because at 50 percent we do. It’s almost unthinkable, but there comes a time when you just have to hand in the towel.”A surge of coronavirus cases in Britain, driven by the Delta variant, has also been shuttering London’s other West End theaters after members of productions like “Hairspray” at the London Coliseum and “Romeo and Juliet” at Shakespeare’s Globe tested positive earlier this month. And London’s Riverside Studios announced that “The Browning Version,” which had been set to open next month starring Kenneth Branagh, has been canceled.Despite a rise in cases that has driven England’s daily average to 39,950 — approximately double the level just two weeks ago — virtually all social distancing and mask requirements were removed on Monday, prompting widespread “Freedom Day” celebrations.But for those involved with “Cinderella,” the news was grim.“Cinderella was ready to go,” Lloyd Webber said in the statement. “My sadness for our cast and crew, our loyal audience and the industry I have been fighting for is impossible to put into words.” More

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      Covid Surge Shuts Down West End Shows

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      Many London theaters are canceling performances, and people in the industry fear that more productions will have to close when England ends distancing and mask-wearing requirements next week.LONDON — The cast and crew of “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner,” an experimental play at the Royal Court, were just two weeks into their run when they received some bad news: One member of the company had tested positive for the coronavirus, and everyone had to quarantine.On July 4, the theater canceled performances for a week.The next day, the producers of “Hairspray” at the London Coliseum announced that they were canceling nine days of shows, because a member of the production team had tested positive, and later that week the Globe called off a performance of “Romeo & Juliet,” because an actor in the show had, too.This Monday alone, “The Prince of Egypt” at the Dominion Theater; another “Romeo & Juliet,” at the Regent’s Park Theater; and “Bach and Sons,” at the Bridge were all canceled for at least five days because of confirmed or potential cases.The spate of abandoned shows comes at what was supposed to be a celebratory moment for British theater. Starting Monday, playhouses in England will be allowed to open at full capacity for the first time since the pandemic began, as the country ends restrictions on social life in an effort to restore normalcy while living with the virus. Audience members will no longer have to wear masks inside theaters, although many are encouraging patrons keep them on.Yet with coronavirus cases soaring in Britain because of the more contagious Delta variant, theaters fear more cancellations, given that many young actors and crew members are not yet fully vaccinated. “We are all ready for it to happen again,” Lucy Davies, the Royal Court’s executive producer, said in a telephone interview. “It’s going to be fragile all summer.”“The Prince of Egypt,” at the Dominion Theater, shut down on Monday along with two other London shows.Matt CrockettCalled-off shows will cause further financial stress on cash-strapped theaters, Davies said, especially because no commercial insurers in Britain offer cover for coronavirus-related cancellations. And producers say the British government’s coronavirus rules are part of the problem. When people test positive here, they are required to quarantine for 10 days, as must all of their “close contacts” — defined as anyone who has been within about six feet of an infected person for 15 minutes.In Britain, more than 42,000 new coronavirus cases were recorded on Wednesday, a number last seen in January when the country was in lockdown to prevent its health system from being overwhelmed. Sajid Javid, the health minister, said on Monday that daily numbers were likely to rise to over 100,000 a day during the summer, although hospitalizations and deaths are expected to be much lower than in previous waves of infection, because two-thrids of adults have been fully vaccinated.In the first week of July, more than 520,000 people in England were told to quarantine as close contacts, according to official figures. They have to isolate even if they test negative for the virus or have had two vaccination shots.Eleanor Lloyd, a producer who is the president of the Society of London Theater, said that most of the cancellations were because of close contacts who were told to isolate, rather than positive cases.The Regent’s Park Theater said in an emailed statement that several of its staff members had been told to stay at home and were still in quarantine, despite later testing negative. “We do need an alternative to automatic self-isolation for our acting company and crew, as the current situation is simply unsustainable,” the statement said.Starting Aug. 16, fully vaccinated close contacts will no longer need to quarantine. “It’ll be better from then,” Lloyd said. But that is still a month away, and the risks may continue longer. So she is considering employing more understudies for a forthcoming production of Agatha Christie’s “Witness for the Prosecution.” That would have a cost, too, she said.London theaters have adopted safety measures to try to limit the risk of outbreaks. In most, casts and crew are tested several times a week, and masks and distancing are typically required offstage. But “people are traveling to and from the theater, and that is a risk, however safe our environment is,” Davies said.Joel MacCormack and Isabel Adomakoh Young in the title roles of the Regent’s Park Theater production of “Romeo and Juliet.” The show’s producers also had to call off performances.Jane HobsonThe safest productions seem to be those created especially for these pandemic times, with social distancing among the players both onstage and behind the scenes. The Globe has used this approach for shows like its “Romeo & Juliet.”Even so, last Saturday, Will Edgerton, who is playing Tybalt, learned that he had the virus after performing a home test.The Globe canceled that afternoon’s show so that a new actor could rehearse the role, then went ahead with the evening performance. “We are unique, as Shakespeare’s plays can be presented with distancing,” Neil Constable, the theater’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview. “But when you’ve got a major musical like ‘The Prince of Egypt,’ which costs millions of pounds and has lots of people onstage, you don’t have that option.”He said the British government should underwrite theaters’ risks, a sentiment that echoes calls by other leaders from Britain’s theater industry for a state-run insurance program. Last year, the government introduced a similar initiative for TV and movie shoots, but it has not announced anything for other forms of cultural life, as European governments like those of Germany and Austria have done.“We understand the challenges live events have in securing indemnity cover and are exploring what further support may be required,” a spokeswoman for Britain’s culture ministry said in an email.Davies, the Royal Court executive, said a safety net was badly needed, especially for commercial theaters that don’t receive public subsidies.She had a recent experience of the benefits of insurance, she said. On Monday, the cast and crew of “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” were scheduled to return to the stage for their first performance since completing their quarantines — but then a severe storm flooded the theater’s basement and the show was canceled again.“It was devastating — it was their comeback,” Davies said, before adding that the theater’s insurers had covered some of its losses that night. “We’re insured for flooding,” she said, “just not Covid.” More

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      Andrew Lloyd Webber’s New Act: Activism

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      LONDON — Andrew Lloyd Webber, 73, has for decades been a household name in Britain for his flamboyant, quasi-operatic musicals. Now, he’s becoming known for something more unexpected: activism.For over a year now, Lloyd Webber — who redefined musical theater with shows like “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Cats,” and served for years in the House of Lords — has been harassing Britain’s conservative government to get theaters open at full capacity, at times making scientifically questionable claims along the way.This June alone, he made newspaper front pages here after pledging to open his new “Cinderella” musical “come hell or high water” — even if he faced arrest for doing so. (He quickly pulled back from the plan after learning his audience, cast and crew risked fines, too.)He went on to reject an offer from Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain that would have let him do a trial opening of “Cinderella” without restrictions because it left other theaters in the lurch; take part in legal action against the government demanding it release results of research into whether coronavirus spread at cultural events; and to tell an interviewer he regretted caucusing with Britain’s Conservative Party when in the House of Lords because the party was now failing to support the arts and commercial theater.“The way he’s done it is like something out of his musicals — it’s loud, it’s over the top,” said Arifa Akbar, the chief theater critic for The Guardian newspaper.A scene from Lloyd Webber’s new musical “Cinderella,” which is now playing to reduced capacity audiences, despite his wishes.Tristram KentonJames Graham, a leading playwright (whose “Ink” played Broadway in 2019) said approvingly that Lloyd Webber had become “a big thorn in the government’s side.”Theater has been one of the industries hit hardest by the pandemic. In New York, most Broadway theaters do not plan to reopen until September. In England, theaters have been allowed to open with socially distanced and masked audiences for brief periods, with the West End most recently reopening on May 17.But Lloyd Webber has, impatiently at times, urged the government to provide clarity on when theaters can reopen at full capacity, complaining that they were forced to remain shut or enforce restrictions far longer than other businesses.Now the government seems to be giving him the clarity he sought: it plans to lift most remaining restrictions on July 19.“I never wanted, never intended to be the sort of spokesman for the arts and theater in Britain,” Lloyd Webber said in a recent interview at the Gillian Lynne Theater, where his musical “Cinderella” was in socially-distanced previews. “But there came this strange situation where nobody else seemed to be.”Outside the theater, several theatergoers praised Lloyd Webber’s new role. “I’ve never been his biggest fan — I’m more a Sondheim fanatic,” said Carole Star, 70. “But if I see him tonight, it’ll be difficult not to hug him.”“I could cry at what he’s done this year,” she added.Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice last September at a socially distanced London performance of their musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.”David Jensen/Getty ImagesBut others said they were glad he had pulled back from the threat to fully reopen before the government decided to allow it. “I admire his passion, but I hope he keeps things safe,” said Samantha Fogg, 25.Lloyd Webber, who participated in vaccine trials, said he had been driven by “a real sense of injustice” that theater has been treated differently than other parts of British life. He complained that in June, tens of thousands of soccer fans were allowed in stadiums — “everybody singing completely pissed,” he said — while theaters could only open at limited capacity and amateur choirs were not allowed to sing indoors. (Scientists have been clear that outdoor events are far safer than indoor ones.)The British government’s attitude to the arts was “dumbfounding,” he said.But health officials are not impressed with a theater composer’s opinions on the safety of fully reopening.In June, the British government released a report on a series of trial cultural and sporting events. The events, mainly held outside for people who could show that they had tested negative, only led to 28 potential coronavirus cases, it said, but the data had to be interpreted with “extreme caution.” And the study was conducted before the more infectious Delta variant began sweeping Britain.The report “basically says everything’s completely safe,” Lloyd Webber claimed. But Paul Hunter, a British academic specializing in epidemics, said in a telephone interview the report did “not in any way” say it was safe to reopen indoor theaters. (He said he approved of the government’s plan to reopen at full capacity on July 19.)When the pandemic first hit Britain, Lloyd Webber tried to show that theaters could reopen safely by adopting measures like those that were keeping his “Phantom of the Opera” running in Seoul. Those included requiring audience members to wear masks, doing temperature checks at the door and spraying theaters with disinfectant.Thanks to strict protocols, the composer’s “Phantom of the Opera” played to full audiences in Seoul.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesLast July, he spent over 100,000 pounds, about $140,000, to stage a trial at the Palladium theater in London to prove such measures worked.“I’ve got to say this is a rather sad sight,” Lloyd Webber said that day, as he looked out over a largely empty auditorium. “I think this amply proves why social distancing in theater really doesn’t work,” he added. “It’s a misery for the performers.”That event didn’t lead to any major reopening of theaters, and Lloyd Webber said his frustrations grew as Britain let airplanes fly at full capacity, and people return to pubs, restaurants and garden centers with abandon. Last September, he sarcastically told a group of politicians that he had considered turning the Palladium into a garden center so it could hold performances again.“I am absolutely confident that the air in the London Palladium — and indeed in all my theaters — is purer than the air outside,” he added, despite the growing scientific consensus that it was far safer to be outdoors than in.Lloyd Webber’s breaking point came last December, he said, when theaters were allowed to reopen for a handful of performances only to be forced shut again as cases rose, even though shops were allowed to stay open. “You saw scenes of people literally cheek by jowl, no distancing, nothing,” he said.“That’s the point I realized this government has no interest in theater,” he added. “Once I realize that, I didn’t see any reason to hold back.”He later clarified that the government had been right to shut down theaters at that point (there were over 25,000 coronavirus cases in Britain on the day the West End shut, and in a matter of weeks they peaked at over 60,000). Lloyd Webber said he didn’t feel he’d ever called for reopening too early. “I think everybody thought things would get back earlier,” he said.Lloyd Webber, who owns significant real estate in the West End, has been the most outspoken critic of the British government’s commitment to the arts during the pandemic.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesOther British theater figures, such as the producer Sonia Friedman, have also made headlines by urging the government do more for theaters, but none have garnered as much attention as Lloyd Webber, who along with being a composer, owns substantial real estate in the West End.Lloyd Webber, whose personal wealth has been estimated at £525 million, reported that it was costing his company £1 million a month just to keep his seven theaters closed, and said that he had to mortgage his London home to raise funds. But he insisted money was not behind his advocacy. “My main concern is to just get everybody back to work,” he said.“I don’t think money’s got anything to do with it,” Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey,” who wrote the book for Lloyd Webber’s “School of Rock,” said in a telephone interview, adding, “He’s a man on a mission and you can tell.”But Lloyd Webber has not escaped criticism in his own community. In April, it was reported that the orchestra for “The Phantom of the Opera” in London would be slashed in half when it reopens, with percussion, harp and oboe replaced by keyboards.“When I see him get on his soapbox, part of me wants to applaud him and part of me wants to take him to task,” Matt Dickinson, a percussionist who lost his job, said in a telephone interview.Asked about this, Lloyd Webber said he was not the show’s producer, and pointed out that during lockdown he had recorded a set of orchestral suites that employed 81 freelance musicians.Ivano Turco, left, and Rebecca Trehearn in “Cinderella,” which has been given a contemporary spin thanks to a book by Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”).Tristram KentonLloyd Webber remains an extraordinarily busy — or driven — man. As well as trying to produce and finish “Cinderella” — whose book, by Emerald Fennell, the director and screenwriter of “Promising Young Woman,” gives the fairy tale a contemporary twist — he has been involved in a £60 million refurbishment of the Theater Royal, Drury Lane.Even as he explored old churches in Hampshire the other day, he said, he could not escape his newfound role in politics, saying that people would tell him, “We cannot believe that the government could have treated the arts in the way it has.”But sometimes he clearly is happy to highlight it. When the government set the reopening date of July 19, Lloyd Webber wrote on Twitter that he would add a special “Freedom Day” performance and a gala with proceeds benefiting Britain’s health care system.“I am thrilled,” he wrote, “that at last it seems theaters can finally reopen!” More