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      Curtains Down, Bottoms Up: When the Show Ends, the Night’s Just Getting Started

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      “Dead Letter No. 9,” “Cocktail Magique” and “Hypnotique” are offering theatergoers a taste of nightlife.A funny thing happened at Dead Letter No. 9, a new performance space in Brooklyn. It was just after 10 p.m. on a Saturday in late October. The evening’s show had finished, but the audience wouldn’t leave — crowding instead into the adjoining bar for cocktails, mocktails and flatbreads.Though New York City has its cabaret spaces and piano bars, theater and nightlife mostly occupy separate addresses. Blame temperament or real estate or the lingering effects of cabaret laws (finally repealed in 2017), which required a license to allow patrons to dance, but in general those who long for a drink and a show at the same time have had to settle for overpriced chardonnay in sippy cups. Ah, the glamour.New shows and new venues are blurring those lines. Though I am a lady with a hilariously low tolerance for alcohol who likes to be in bed just as the cable TV shows are getting good, I attended three of these performances over the last few weeks, trading a good night’s sleep for this superabundant approach (drinks, snacks, dance, card tricks, elaborate lingerie) to evening entertainment.Audience members sit facing the stage at “Cocktail Magique.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesStrong cocktails complement the dance routines at the show.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Jonathan Majors’s Accuser Is Arrested but Won’t Face Prosecution

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      Grace Jabbari, who accused the actor of assaulting her in a car, was herself arrested on a countercomplaint.A woman who has accused the actor Jonathan Majors of assaulting her in a car in Manhattan in March was arrested late Wednesday on a countercomplaint he filed against her, claiming to be the true victim in the altercation, the police said.The woman, Grace Jabbari, was charged with misdemeanor counts of assault and criminal mischief and released with a desk appearance ticket that requires her to appear in court at a later date, the police said.The arrest occurred even though the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing this month that it had told lawyers for Ms. Jabbari and Mr. Majors in September that the office “would decline to prosecute” her “if she were arrested.” The filing did not explain what was behind the decision not to prosecute.A lawyer for Ms. Jabbari did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Majors has pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor assault and harassment charges arising from the March episode. Ms. Jabbari’s surrender came the same day a Manhattan judge set a Nov. 29 trial date after rejecting the actor’s bid to dismiss the charges.Mr. Majors, a 34-year-old Yale graduate, was a rising Hollywood star when the altercation with Ms. Jabbari, his former girlfriend, occurred. Performances in vehicles like the HBO series “Lovecraft Country,” the film “Creed III” and the gritty drama “Magazine Dreams” had marked him as a potential Oscar contender, and his character Kang, from “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” was emerging as a linchpin of Disney’s Marvel franchise.The fallout from his arrest was swift. The U.S. Army pulled two recruiting commercials featuring him, with a spokeswoman explaining that “prudence dictates that we pause our ads until the investigation into these allegations is complete.”His movie career is effectively on hold. In part because of the continuing actors’ strike, Disney does not need to make a decision about his future involvement in the Marvel films until next year. “Magazine Dreams,” which stars Mr. Majors as a troubled bodybuilder and which generated buzz at the Sundance Film Festival, remains on Disney’s theatrical calendar for December, with the company’s art-house division, Searchlight Pictures, as the distributor.In light of Mr. Majors’s legal problems, theater owners expect Disney to push the film into next year, with an announcement coming as soon as this week. A Searchlight spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.In their filing this month, prosecutors said the episode at issue, on March 25, began when Mr. Majors and Ms. Jabbari, 30, were using a car service to go from Brooklyn to their Manhattan home.During the ride, the filing says, Ms. Jabbari saw a message on Mr. Majors’s phone that said, “Wish I was kissing you right now.” She grabbed the phone to see who had sent the message, the filing says.Mr. Majors, the filing says, began to grab the right side of Ms. Jabbari’s body and to pry her middle finger off the phone. He then grabbed her arm and hand, twisted her forearm and struck her right ear, cutting it, the filing says. Grabbing his phone, he left the car, the filing says.When Ms. Jabbari tried to get out, according to the filing, Mr. Majors picked her up and threw her back inside. In addition to the cut on her ear, the filing says, Ms. Jabbari sustained a broken finger, bruises on her body and a bump on her head.In April, after Mr. Majors had been charged, his lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, wrote to a judge that Ms. Jabbari’s version of events was a “complete lie” and that Ms. Jabbari had been the aggressor, hitting and scratching Mr. Majors.Ms. Jabbari, Ms. Chaudhry wrote, had then gone out clubbing, had passed out in a closet at home and had woken up to find the injuries to her finger and ear. Two months later, Mr. Majors filed the countercomplaint against Ms. Jabbari accusing her of assault, The police subsequently developed sufficient evidence to support the charges on which she was arrested. He faces up to a year in jail if convicted.Among the other notable details in the prosecutors’ filing was the mention of a “police report prepared by the London Metropolitan Police” as a piece of potential evidence in the case, as well as the prosecutors’ efforts to obtain “medical records from London related to an incident that occurred in September 2022.” The filing does not indicate who was involved in the incident.The filing also questions the veracity of a witness statement provided by the defense. In the purportedly firsthand statement, the filing says, the witness said that he saw Ms. Jabbari slap and “tussle with” Mr. Majors and that Mr. Majors had “gently” placed Ms. Jabbari in the car.When prosecutors presented the statement to the witness, the filing says, he said that he had not written or approved it, that he had not previously known it existed and that the statements attributed to him were false.Ms. Chaudhry did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.Brooks Barnes More

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      Russell Sherman, Poetic Interpreter at the Piano, Is Dead at 93

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      He was known as a passionate, idiosyncratic performer in concerts and on recordings and admired as a longtime teacher at the New England Conservatory of Music.Russell Sherman, a pianist admired for his poetic and idiosyncratic interpretations of Schoenberg, Beethoven, Debussy, Liszt and others, died on Sept. 30 at his home in Lexington, Mass. A longtime music educator as well, he was 93.His death was confirmed by his wife, the pianist Wha Kyung Byun.Mr. Sherman, who gave his last recital at 88, made his name performing virtuoso works such as Franz Liszt’s daunting “Transcendental Études.” Referring to the composer’s reputation as a showman, Mr. Sherman told The New York Times in 1989 that he was engaged in a “lifelong battle to reconstitute Liszt as a serious composer.”He recorded the Études on cassette in 1974 and in 1990 for Albany Records. “The poetic idea is central,” he wrote in the liner notes for the second recording, “and the virtuoso elements become so many layers to orchestrate the poetic content.”Mr. Sherman was in many ways an anti-virtuoso; he devoted much of his time to other interests, like poetry, philosophy and photography. In the late 1950s, instead of becoming a touring concert pianist, he left New York to teach piano at Pomona College in California and the University of Arizona in Tucson.In 1967, he began a long tenure at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, hired by its president at the time, the composer Gunther Schuller. Mr. Schuller, who founded GM Recordings in 1981, produced a Beethoven album by Mr. Sherman, who became the first American pianist to record the complete Beethoven sonatas and piano concertos.On a GM Recording album, “Russell Sherman: Premieres and Commissions,” Mr. Sherman performed works composed for him in the 1990s by Mr. Schuller, Robert Helps, George Perle and Ralph Shapey. His recordings also include works by Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Chopin Mazurkas, the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas and Bach’s English Suites.Mr. Sherman began giving public concerts again in the 1970s. He performed with the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra as well as major European orchestras.His concerts drew devoted fans who admired his dramatic interpretations. In 2016, the critic Jeremy Eichler of The Boston Globe wrote that in works by Schoenberg, Beethoven, Debussy and Liszt, Mr. Sherman’s playing, “while still demonstrating a formidable athletic prowess, also conveyed his abiding gifts of fantasy and insight.”Mr. Sherman in 2005 at the Essex House in Manhattan. He had grown up at the hotel, where his neighbors included Rudolf Bing, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera; and the opera singers Lauritz Melchior and Lily Pons. He continued to stay there when in he was in town for a concert.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesHis idiosyncrasies were often noted. Reviewing a performance of Liszt’s Sonata in B minor and two Beethoven sonatas at Carnegie Hall in 1984, the Times critic Will Crutchfield wrote: “It is possible to feel that he distorts, infuses too much into little,” but added that it was “better instead to salute in Mr. Sherman’s concert an antidote to the many that are played week after week in which listeners are lucky if their interest is genuinely caught once or twice in the whole evening.”Some two decades later, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Times that Mr. Sherman’s “interpretive style, it should be said, is an acquired taste,” but that his “performances are usually illuminating alternatives to the standard view.”Mr. Sherman resented these accusations of eccentricity. “I think of myself as a compassionate conservative” who responded “radically to the score and nothing but the score,” he told The Times in 2000. He suggested that listeners who disliked his interpretations lacked imagination.Russell Sherman was born on March 25, 1930, in Manhattan and lived at the elegant Essex House hotel on Central Park South with his parents and three older brothers. Their neighbors included Rudolf Bing, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera; the opera singers Lauritz Melchior and Lily Pons; and the pianist Clifford Curzon.Mr. Sherman’s father, Moses Sherman, was a manufacturer of women’s raincoats, and his mother, Irene (Schwartz) Sherman, was a homemaker. Russell inherited his father’s love of fashion.He started piano lessons at age 6. At 11, he joined the studio of the Polish-born pianist and composer Eduard Steuermann, who had studied with Schoenberg and Ferruccio Busoni and who encouraged his students to take interpretive risks. This inspired Mr. Sherman’s own ethos that performers should strive for what he called “personal wildness and conviction” in their interpretations.Mr. Sherman when he was a youth at the Essex House. He made his concert debut at 15. Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesHe made his concert debut at 15, at Town Hall in Manhattan, and began undergraduate studies at Columbia University the same year. He graduated with a degree in the humanities in 1949 and later studied composition with the German composer Erich Itor Kahn.Mr. Sherman married Wha Kyung Byun, a Korean-born former student of his, in 1974; she began teaching at the New England conservatory in 1979. They sometimes celebrated their anniversaries by performing together.In a phone interview, she recalled soirees at their house, where students would read different roles in Shakespeare plays. Mr. Sherman, a passionate baseball fan, was also an avid photographer with an interest in light, shadows and trees. He often read science books, determined to master concepts he initially found challenging.While teaching at the New England Conservatory, he was also a visiting professor at Harvard University and at Juilliard in New York. He and his wife sometimes taught the same students, such as the pianist Minsoo Sohn, who joined the faculty in 2023. Other former students include the pianists HaeSun Paik, Christopher Taylor and Christopher O’Riley.In 1996, Mr. Sherman published “Piano Pieces,” a compilation of essays about teaching and performing. “Notes may be missed but not casually flubbed,” he wrote. “Phrases may be askew but not aimlessly drifting. Sonorities may be brazen but not barren. The player has to say something, with verve and style.”In addition to his wife, survivors include his sons Edward and Mark, from his marriage to the pianist Natasha Koval, which ended in divorce, and several grandchildren.“I think that musical performances should be free,” Mr. Sherman once said, and “should invite danger, should tell a story, should court the ‘madness of art,’ should in every way reveal the characteristics and visions of the composers.”Reviewing Mr. Sherman’s performance of Prokofiev and Beethoven at age 17, the reviewer noted that “how individual a pianist he is remains to be seen,” but that the “searching way” he interpreted music boded well.Mr. Sherman never abandoned that spirit of inquiry. According to his wife, when he was interviewed by the Nexus Institute in Amsterdam and asked what he wanted written on his tombstone, he replied: “A quest.” More

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      Review: Rachel Bloom Shines in ‘Death, Let Me Do My Show’

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      The writer-performer wanted to avoid the pandemic, but couldn’t. Her new solo show dives into birth, death and cosmic confusion.Rachel Bloom came to perform her latest live show in New York, and she really wanted to do it as if it were 2019. That was the year when her musical-comedy series, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” ended its four-season run on the CW, and Bloom was getting ready to hit the road. But in 2020, some things happened.Now that she’s finally able to face a live audience again, the writer-performer wanted to treat the coronavirus pandemic as a parenthesis: She was keen, as she put it at the Lucille Lortel Theater a few days ago, to “go back to my old material unsullied by trauma.”Some things, however, can’t be brushed aside easily, even with the help of gleefully blunt songs, or a few jokes.Fate, life, inspiration, rumination, grief, time, a dark power greater than even the gods of comedy: Whatever you want to call it, something derailed Bloom’s plan, and “Death, Let Me Do My Show” deals with what she was trying to avoid talking about onstage. (Spoiler alert: the “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” cast member David Hull plays one of the aforementioned forces.)Which is that in the spring of 2020, she found herself in a conjunction of events so chaotic, so intense and so scary that had they been part of a Hollywood movie, critics would have accused the screenwriter of being a tad too melodramatic and over-reliant on far-fetched coincidences.In the early days of the pandemic, Bloom gave birth to a daughter. The baby had fluid in her lungs and was placed in intensive care. At the same time and on the opposite coast, Bloom’s close collaborator on the series, the musician Adam Schlesinger, was also in the hospital, with Covid-19.Bloom’s child lived; her friend died.Those harrowing days form the conclusion of Bloom’s memoir, published in November 2020, “I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are,” and are the crux of her almost-one-woman show. Bloom bounces from incomprehension to fear to regret to anger to cosmic confusion (she starts questioning her atheism) and back again. All the while, she expertly deploys a jokey, graphic candor that telegraphs honesty and forthrightness — that, after all, is what we expect from a woman who brightly talks about bodily fluids and whose perky song about trees that smell like semen feels like a deep cut from a bizarro “Mary Poppins” cast album. (The music director Jerome Kurtenbach leads a three-piece backing band.)Directed by Seth Barrish, a regular Mike Birbiglia collaborator, “Death, Let Me Do My Show” lands closer to Birbiglia’s classic self-examination than to the recent solos by Kate Berlant and Liz Kingsman, which toyed with the genre’s form and conventions, and reflected on the very nature of narcissism.Bloom is an old-fashioned vaudevillian — because this is the 21st century, she got her start not at a borscht belt resort but by uploading videos on YouTube. (Do look up her 2012 duet with Shaina Taub, “We Don’t Need a Man“; Taub and Kurtenbach are two of Bloom’s several co-songwriters in the new show.) Bloom is also a bona fide theater kid who is fluent in both displaying va-va-voom extroversion and mining her anxieties and struggles for art. The new show toes, often dexterously, the line between confidence and vulnerability, earnest emotion and winking self-dramatization — a number sending up “Dear Evan Hansen” captures the way that hit musical relies on rooting for an unreliable, somewhat unsympathetic lead character.The songs are the highlights here. Bloom is especially good at puncturing emotion with surreal detail, as when she sings the tender “Lullaby for a Newborn,” then reminds us she had been cradling her bottle of water swathed in a towel. More than blunt language — a tool that loses its sharpness with use — this absurdist vein effectively draws laughs, but it also underscores the show’s real subject: the often cruel arbitrariness of life.Death, Let Me Do My ShowThrough Sept. 30 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; rachelbloomshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      A Stage Musical About Belfast’s Punk Oasis

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      Of all the streets to open a record store, one nicknamed Bomb Alley might not have been optimal. Then again this was Belfast in 1977, when the nationalistic, sectarian violence known as the Troubles made retail perilous pretty much everywhere.The situation did not deter Terri Hooley, who welcomed warring Protestants and Catholics to the shop he had optimistically called Good Vibrations.“It was like a little oasis in a sea of madness,” Hooley, 74, said in a recent video conversation from Belfast.The story of a lone man bridging warring communities is the kind of feel-good tale you can easily imagine as a movie, and lo and behold, it became one: “Good Vibrations” (2012), starring Richard Dormer (“Game of Thrones,” “Fortitude”) as Hooley. Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson then adapted their own screenplay into a stage musical for Belfast’s Lyric Theater, whose most recent production of the show is running at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan until July 16.The show, in which members of the cast take turns playing in the onstage band, follows the odyssey of Hooley (played by Glen Wallace) as he started the shop then a label that released early singles by the Undertones and the Outcasts. It also portrays the toll his obsession took on his marriage to the poet Ruth Carr (Jayne Wisener).“It actually helps you understand what Northern Ireland is now, what Northern Ireland had been,” the musical’s director, Des Kennedy, said. “It’s a real snapshot of that conflict without being about the conflict.”Hooley discovered the power of music at a young age. “My history starts in 1965 in the Maritime Hotel with Van Morrison and Them,” he said, mentioning one of the biggest stars to ever come out of Northern Ireland. “The ’60s were very colorful for me. Then the Troubles came, and the 1970s were black and white, and horrific.”Glen Wallace, center, as Terri Hooley in the musical “Good Vibrations” at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHis solution was to create a place that would welcome all. “Terri is a true radical,” Patterson said via video from Belfast. “He really believes in the power of transformation, about betterment, about enjoyment, about living to your full potential.”Hooley, a fan of Hank Williams and the Shangri-Las, was at first confounded by punk, but he quickly embraced the scene, which was blowing up in Belfast just as it was in London or New York.The movement, however, had a different resonance in Northern Ireland.“So much of the emphasis then was on what you couldn’t do,” Carberry said of Belfast in a joint chat with Patterson. “You can’t go to that school, you can’t live on that street, you can’t support that football team, you can’t have that friend, you can’t go out with that person — it was all about narrowing options.“Punk music,” he continued, “was about opening up options: Expand your record collection, expand your group of friends and ultimately expand how you look at the world.”Eventually, Hooley decided to expand beyond the store. Remembering great Northern Irish bands in the 1960s who had never made it to the studio, he didn’t want the new generation to be similarly erased.So he started the Good Vibrations label to help preserve the legacy of bands like the Outcasts, Rudi, Protex and most notably the Undertones, who were based 70 miles away in Derry. A couple of the best scenes in “Good Vibrations” actually revolve around the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks,” which was so clearly an instant classic that the taste-making BBC DJ John Peel played it twice in a row during a 1978 broadcast.A scene from the film “Good Vibrations,” with Richard Dormer, right, as Terri Hooley.Cinematic Collection /Alamy Stock PhotoLike many of the Northern Irish punk songs, “Teenage Kicks” celebrated the headiness of being young, rather than spewing out bile: Those kids didn’t have to sing about aggression — they were living it.“Across the years, people were trying to avoid talking about politics in Northern Ireland,” said the show’s music director, Katie Richardson, who is 34. “Young people were like, ‘We’re sick of this, we want to talk about love, we want to talk about the positive things.’ For me and my generation of musicians, it was the same: Nobody wanted to talk about the Troubles.”Not that love was doing all that great in Hooley’s own home: His passion for music came at a cost to his relationship with Ruth. “The night that Terri’s first daughter was born, he wasn’t at the hospital; he was at a Siouxsie Sioux gig in Belfast, hanging out backstage,” Kennedy said. The show does find a bit more room for Ruth as a poet, and for the couple’s friends Dave and Marilyn Hyndman (Darren Franklin and Cat Barter).As Northern Ireland recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles, Carberry noted that the commemorations largely focused on the leaders at the negotiation table, to the detriment of the groups and individuals who had tried so hard to make a difference on a smaller scale.“In a way, ‘Good Vibrations’ is a celebration of those people,” Carberry said. “This is a story about ordinary people who tried to live a different way, and tried to help others live a different way.” More

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      Can the Tribeca Festival Make Audio Appealing?

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      The Tribeca Festival and audio artists each have something the other wants. Can they make it work?When Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their first original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival, they set their expectations near the curb.The couple, co-founders of the podcast studio Wolf at the Door, believed in the project. Making the nine-episode series — a surrealist caper about two impaired friends whose psychiatrist goes missing — had been a nearly yearlong labor of love, but early signals from the market had been humbling. An agent the couple hired to find distribution for the show had come back empty-handed, and emails to 200 journalists generated just one reply — a rejection.At the Tribeca Festival, which dropped the word “film” from its name that year and expanded its focus on video games, virtual reality, music and audio, “The Imperfection” received a warmer reception. It was among the inaugural slate of 12 officially selected podcasts to premiere at the festival.Being chosen by Tribeca meant “The Imperfection” was featured with the other festival selections on the Apple Podcasts and Audible home pages, helping it reach the top 20 of Apple Podcasts’ fiction chart. The show was later nominated for best podcast of the year and best fiction writing at The Ambie awards, the industry’s answer to the Oscars. And the Kemps got new representation with the Creative Artists Agency; last year, they sold the television rights to the show, and they will co-write the pilot script.“It was a huge boon to us helping our first show get found,” Winnie Kemp said. “There are so many shows out there; the hardest thing to figure out is, ‘How do I cut through the noise?’”Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival.n/aThough it has never equaled the most prestigious galas of the film world, the Tribeca Festival, which began last Wednesday and will feature audio selections this week, has emerged as a uniquely appealing showcase for podcast creators. The demand for credible curatorial organizations is high in podcast land, where an explosion of titles — over two million have been created since the start of 2020, according to the database Listen Notes — has made it hard to break out even as overall listenership has increased.While other festivals exist specifically for audio storytelling, and some documentary festivals include podcast selections, Tribeca’s history — it was founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff — and association with Hollywood talent have made it an instant player in the audio community.“This is the next frontier of interesting, creative, independent storytelling — so much so that discoverability has been a challenge for audiences,” said Cara Cusumano, the director and vice president of programming at the Tribeca Festival. “That’s our forte; there was a place for us to play a role in this ecosystem and deliver an experience that you won’t find anywhere else.”This year, 16 podcasts are competing for various awards in fiction and nonfiction categories. The selections include Alissa Escarce, Nellie Gilles and Joe Richman’s “The Unmarked Graveyard,” a documentary series about the anonymous dead of New York’s Hart Island cemetery; Georgie Aldaco’s “These Were Humans,” a sketch comedy series that imagines the artifacts of an extinct human race; and Glynnis MacNicol, Emily Marinoff and Jo Piazza’s “Wilder,” a nonfiction series about the life and legacy of the “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder.The festival will also host live tapings and premieres of several podcasts that are not in competition, including “Pod Save America,” Crooked Media’s popular political talk show; “Just Jack & Will,” the actors Sean Hayes and Eric McCormack’s new “Will & Grace” rewatch podcast and “You Feeling This?” an Los Angeles-centric fiction anthology from James Kim.Davy Gardner, the curator of audio storytelling at Tribeca, said the festival aims to demonstrate that podcasts deserve a comparable level of “cultural recognition” to films.“Tribeca is giving these creators the full red-carpet treatment,” he said. “This is its own art form and we want to help elevate it and push it forward.”Film festivals have long been the envy of audio artists. In the early 1990s, Sundance helped create a vogue for independent and art-house films that blossomed into a booming market. Filmmakers who entered the festival with few resources and no name recognition could exit it with the backing of a major studio and a burgeoning career.No similar infrastructure exists for independent podcasters. As major funders like Spotify and Amazon have consolidated around easy-to-monetize true-crime documentaries and celebrity interview shows — a trend that has intensified amid industrywide economic woes and a series of layoffs — many artists have struggled to find support for less obviously commercial work.“If you don’t have a promotional budget or aren’t attached to a big network it’s really hard to find an audience,” said Bianca Giaever, whose memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021. (She is also a former producer of the Times’ podcast “The Daily”). “It’s a vicious cycle, because then less of that work gets made.” Bianca Giaever’s memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021.n/aOf course, even award-winning films at the biggest festivals don’t always become hits. And podcast creators at Tribeca have to compete for audiences and prospective business partners accustomed to filling their schedules with movie premieres.Johanna Zorn, who co-founded the long-running Third Coast International Audio Festival and presented audio work at multiple documentary film festivals in the 2010s, said the payoff sometimes fell short of the promise.“We went to some fabulous film festivals and we were happy to be there,” she said. “But did they help us get real press coverage? Get us into a room with people who could lead us to the next thing? Give us something that we could really build on? Not so much.”To cast the podcast selections in an optimal light, Gardner and his colleagues have had to learn how to exhibit an art form not customarily experienced in a communal setting. They have planned around a dozen events at theaters and other venues around Manhattan that will pair excerpts from featured work with live discussions or supplementary video.One thing they won’t include? Quiet rooms with only an audio track and an empty stage.“I’ve tried it,” Gardner said wearily. “It’s incredibly awkward.” More

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      Cynthia Weil, Who Put Words to That ‘Lovin’ Feeling,’ Dies at 82

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      With her husband and songwriting partner, Barry Mann, she wrote lyrics for timeless hits by the Righteous Brothers, the Animals and Dolly Parton.Cynthia Weil, who with her writing partner and husband, Barry Mann, formed one of the most potent songwriting teams of the 1960s and beyond, churning out enduring hits like the Drifters’ “On Broadway” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,” signature tunes of the baby boomer era, died on Thursday at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 82.Her death was confirmed on Friday by her daughter Jenn Mann, who did not specify a cause.“​​We lost the beautiful, brilliant lyricist Cynthia Weil Mann,” the chart-topping singer and songwriter Carole King wrote in a statement posted on social media.Recounting the friendship and rivalry that she and her former husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, shared with Ms. Weil and Mr. Mann (a friendship memorialized in Broadway’s “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” from 2014), Ms. King added, “The four of us were close, caring friends despite our fierce competition to write the next hit for an artist with a No. 1 song.”Ms. Weil and Mr. Mann, who were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, notched their first hit — “Bless You,” recorded by Tony Orlando — in 1961, two years after the music supposedly died with the Iowa air crash that claimed the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson, known as the Big Bopper.In fact, the pop and rock explosion of the 1960s was just beginning, thanks in no small part to key contributions from songwriters like themselves, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond and Ms. King, who were part of the star-studded songwriting community centered on the Brill Building, the storied hit factory on Broadway and 49th Street in Manhattan.Ms. Weil and her husband toiled two blocks away, in fact, at 1650 Broadway. It was a humble setting in which to create musical masterpieces.“There were, like, three or four writing rooms there, and each room had an upright and an ashtray, because everybody smoked like crazy back then,” Mr. Mann said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Even though it was sparse, we worked and worked, and,” he added with considerable understatement, “some good things came out of there.”Ms. Weill with her husband and songwriting partner, Barry Mann, during the induction ceremony. Chad Batka for The New York TimesThose good things included two soaring, almost sepulchral No. 1 singles for the Righteous Brothers: “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,” from 1964, which in 1999 the music licensing agency BMI ranked as the most played song on radio and television of the 20th century, and “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration,” from 1966.Another potential hit written for the Righteous Brothers, “We Gotta Get Out of this Place” (1965), ended up in the hands of Eric Burdon’s band, the Animals, who added some grit to it that helped it become an anthem for battle-weary soldiers in the Vietnam War. (“In this dirty old part of the city,” Ms. Weil’s lyrics began, “Where the sun refused to shine, people tell me there ain’t no use in tryin’).Whatever the style or genre, Ms. Weil supplied a trademark touch of poetry and wit. In her statement, Ms. King said her favorite Weil lyric is in the song “Just a Little Lovin’ (Early in the Mornin’),” recorded by Dusty Springfield in 1968: “Just a little lovin’ early in the mornin’ beats a cup of coffee for startin’ off the day.”While many of their songs became emblems of the 1960s, Ms. Weil’s lyrical success continued well after the mud of Woodstock had dried.In 1977, Dolly Parton hit No. 1 on the Billboard country chart and No. 3 on the pop chart with the Weill-Mann song “Here You Come Again.” (The song brought Ms. Parton a Grammy Award for best female country vocal performance.) In 1980, the Pointer Sisters hit No. 3 on the pop charts with “He’s So Shy,” which Ms. Weil wrote with Tony Snow.“There’s no reason a person shouldn’t write better 20 years after they start,” she said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1986. “Writers know more and have more life experience to draw on.”Which is not to say that she found it easy to stay on top in the music business. “You kind of have to sit through the trends,” she continued. “Live through bubble gum and disco and everything else we’ve lived through. You’ve got to be a creative survivor.”Ms. Weil was born on Oct. 18, 1940, in New York City, the younger of two children of Morris Weil, who owned a furniture company, and Dorothy (Mendez) Weil.Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and later on the Upper East Side, she trained as an actress and dancer and dreamed of a life in theater, a subject she later majored in at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.“I was always fixated on Broadway,” she said in a 2016 video interview with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “I wanted to write for Broadway, I had always pictured myself doing something on Broadway.”She channeled those youthful longings into the lyrics for “On Broadway,” which she originally wrote from the point of view of a small-town girl dreaming of a future on the Great White Way — a dream that, the lyrics acknowledged, often comes with dashed hopes:They say the neon lights are bright on BroadwayThey say there’s always magic in the airBut when you’re walking down the streetAnd you ain’t had enough to eatThe glitter rubs right off and you’re nowhereMs. Weil eventually changed the song’s protagonist to a male for the Drifters’ version, which charted No. 9 as a single in 1962. Sixteen years later, George Benson lodged his own jazz-inflected version at No. 7.In addition to her husband and daughter, Dr. Mann, a psychologist, she is survived by two granddaughters.Despite her Broadway ambitions, Ms. Weil’s career took a different turn in 1960, when she met Mr. Mann, who had already co-written a couple of Top 40 hits, including one he recorded himself in 1961, the doo-wop sendup “Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp Bomp Bomp),” which he wrote with Mr. Goffin.It was Ms. Weil who first noticed the man with whom she would craft a career and life. As her daughter recalled by phone, her mother had asked Don Kirshner, the Brill Building power broker music publisher, to find her a writing partner, hoping it would be Mr. Mann. She “thought he was really hot,” Dr. Mann said.Instead, Mr. Kirshner set up a meeting with a different up-and-coming songwriter. On the day of that meeting, Ms. Weil “was sitting and waiting,” Mr. Mann recalled, “and in walks Carole King. She thought, ‘Oh, what a drag, I don’t want to have to write with that chick.’”He added, “It worked out fine for both of them.” More

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      How America’s Playwrights Saved the Tony Awards

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      The screenwriters’ strike threatened next month’s broadcast, a key marketing moment for the fragile theater industry. That’s when leading dramatists sprang into action.Martyna Majok, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, was revising her musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” after a long day in a developmental workshop when she heard the news: The union representing striking screenwriters was not going to grant a waiver for the Tony Awards, imperiling this year’s telecast.So at three in the morning, she set aside her script to join a group of playwrights frantically writing emails and making phone calls to leaders of the Writers Guild of America, urging the union not to make the pandemic-hobbled theater industry collateral damage in a Hollywood dispute. “I had to try,” she said.Surprising even themselves, the army of artists succeeded. The screenwriters’ union agreed to a compromise: it said it would not picket the ceremony as long as the show does not rely on a written script.“Theater is having a very hard time coming back from the devastating effects of the pandemic — shows are struggling and nonprofit theaters are struggling terribly,” said Tony Kushner, who is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest living playwrights, and is, like many of his peers, also a screenwriter. “Ethically and morally, this felt like a recognition of the particular vulnerability of the theater industry. It’s the right thing to do, and costs us nothing.”Kushner, who is best known for the Pulitzer-winning play “Angels in America,” is a fiery supporter of the strike who freely denounces the “unconscionable greed” of studio bosses and who showed up on a picket line as soon as it began. But he spent a weekend calling and writing union leaders in both New York and Los Angeles, urging them to find a way to let the Tony Awards happen, arguing that canceling them would have been far more damaging to theater artists than to CBS, which broadcasts the event.He was among a number of acclaimed dramatists — including David Henry Hwang and Jeremy O. Harris — who spent a weekend phoning and emailing union leaders. At least a half-dozen Pulitzer winners joined the cause, including Lynn Nottage (“Sweat” and “Ruined”), Quiara Alegría Hudes (“Water by the Spoonful”), David Lindsay-Abaire (“Rabbit Hole”), Donald Margulies (“Dinner with Friends”) and Majok (“Cost of Living”).“Cost of Living,” by Martyna Majok, is nominated for best new play. Majok joined other playwrights lobbying the writers’ union to allow the Tonys telecast to proceed. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMajok, who is a first-time Tony nominee herself this year for “Cost of Living,” said, “I approached them with respect and gratitude for all they have done for me,” she said, “but this decision was impacting so many of my colleagues and friends deeply, in an industry that is still financially struggling.”Writers are never the main attraction at the Tony Awards. The annual ceremony centers musical theater, hoping that razzle-dazzle song and dance numbers will inspire viewers to get up off their couches and come visit Broadway. The telecast often struggles with how to represent serious drama.But playwrights say they treasure the Tonys, because the ceremony introduces new audiences to theater. “In one way or another, it’s all connected,” Kushner said.And for once playwrights actually had power, because in recent years, as the number of scripted series on television and streaming services has exploded, many of them have also taken jobs working in film and television, which pays much better than the theater industry. Many of the playwrights concerned about the Tony Awards were also members of the Writers Guild — some quite successful, like Kushner, who wrote the scripts for Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” “Lincoln,” “West Side Story” and “The Fabelmans,” and Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote “The Waverly Gallery” for the stage and “Manchester by the Sea” for the screen.“Most playwrights are W.G.A. members, because they have to make a living and get health insurance,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs for the Dramatists Guild of America, which is a trade association of theater writers. “And yes, there was a great deal of lobbying of the W.G.A. by many of them to find a way to get the broadcast on.”The screenwriters’ union was torn over whether to assist the Tony Awards, with its eastern branch, filled with playwright members more sympathetic than the affiliated western branch, which is more Hollywood-oriented. It did not go unnoticed that many theatrical workers have been vocally supporting the writers’ strike, including Kate Shindle, the president of the Actors’ Equity Association, who has brought members of her union to the picket lines and who spoke with the heads of both branches of the screenwriters’ guild.“There was no master strategy involved — we were just standing up for the writers,” Shindle said. “But I’m happy with the way that it seems like a decision came about: writers talking to and debating with each other, which feels like the right thing.”The Tonys seem likely to be a rare exception. In the days following the greenlighting of the theatrical awards, this year’s Peabody Awards, which honor storytelling in electronic media, were canceled, and the Daytime Emmy Awards, which honor work on television, were postponed.Asked about the decision, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a vice president of the screenwriters’ guild’s eastern branch, offered an emailed statement that said, in part, “we recognize the devastating impact the absence of a Tonys would have on our New York theater community. Here in W.G.A. East, we have many, many members who are playwrights, and we are deeply intertwined with our sister unions whose members work in the theater.”Playwrights were not actually the first choice of Broadway boosters strategizing about how to save the Tonys — at first, industry leaders thought they might look to prominent politicians and famous actors to make their case. But they quickly realized that playwrights, because of their ties to the W.G.A., were better positioned to influence the discussion. Harris, who wrote “Slave Play,” and Gina Gionfriddo (“Rapture, Blister, Burn”) rallied writers to the cause, along with the agent Joe Machota, who is the head of theater for Creative Artists Agency.This year, they argued, would be an especially unfortunate time to downgrade the Tony Awards.Ariana DeBose, who hosted last year’s Tony Awards, is expected back this year, but it’s unclear what a ceremony without a script will look like.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway attendance and overall grosses remain well below prepandemic levels, and new musicals are struggling — four of the five nominated shows are losing money most weeks.Unlike the Oscars, which generally take place after the theatrical runs of nominated films, the Tonys take place early in the run of most nominated musicals, so they can translate into ticket sales. The Tonys matter for plays in a different way: nominations and wins have an enormous impact on how often those works are staged, read and taught.“People that don’t work in playwriting don’t always have a meaningful understanding of how important Broadway is to Off Broadway and to regional theaters — they’re really a beacon for the community at large, and even if you don’t care about the glitz and the glamour, if they start to lose money, it has impacts all over the country,” said Tanya Barfield, a playwright and television writer who is the co-director of the playwriting program at Juilliard.After she heard her union had denied a waiver for the Tony Awards, a “heartbroken” Barfield joined a picket line with a homemade “I ❤️ the Tony Awards” sticker on her WGA sign. And she wrote union leaders. “We wanted to make sure theaters did not become a casualty,” she said.Another concern: this year’s Tony Awards feature an unusually diverse group of nominees, reflecting the increasingly diverse array of shows staged on Broadway since 2020. Five of this year’s nominated new plays and play revivals are by Black writers; four of the five nominees for best actor in a play are Black; the best score category for the first time includes an Asian American woman; and the acting nominees include two gender nonconforming performers as well as a woman who is a double amputee.“We need to showcase what we’ve been seeing with the diverse talent and rich storytelling of the past few years,” Majok said.The Tonys will be different this year. The event will take place, as planned, at the United Palace in Upper Manhattan, with a live audience, live performances of musical numbers from nominated shows, and the presentation and acceptance of awards. But there will be no scripted material (a draft script had been submitted, but will not be used) and no scripted opening number (Lin-Manuel Miranda had been planning to write one). Ariana DeBose, the Oscar-winning actress who had been named its host for the second year in a row, is still expected to take part, but it is not clear what role she will play.One new element that is expected at this year’s ceremony? Shout-outs to the striking screenwriters. Hwang, a W.G.A. member who called and emailed union leaders asking them to rethink their position on the Tonys, said, “I anticipate that there will be a lot of speeches that express our appreciation and support for the guild on Tony night.” More