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      Review: ‘A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet’ Is Missing a Few Notes

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      In this new musical, a singer’s future hangs on one song, but entrusting it to an inexperienced songwriting team is not, perhaps, the shrewdest choice.Once upon a time, Regina Comet was a pop star who filled arenas. Now that her career desperately needs a reboot, she and her team have a brilliant idea: They will come out with a perfume — sorry, a fragrance, called Relevance — and peg her comeback to it. Because of course listeners will just follow that scent all the way to Regina’s big concert.Adding a thick frosting of improbability to this far-fetched cake, Regina hires a pair of young songwriters so unhip that they idolize Barry Manilow — in 2021 — to pen the song her future depends on, the jingle for the fragrance.The focus of the story is not, as you might expect, Regina Comet, but rather the untried tunesmiths who simply, coyly, are called Man 2 and Other Man, and are portrayed by the show’s creators, Ben Fankhauser and Alex Wyse. Starring roles notwithstanding, Bryonha Marie Parham plays the title character in “A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet” with tireless zest and good humor.“Jingle” is mostly set in the office of the writers, where the walls are lined with so many notes, papers and photos that you might think they are TV detectives tracking a criminal. (Wilson Chin did the scenic design, which appears to have been labor-intensive.) But the object of their obsessive hunt is even more elusive than the Zodiac Killer: They desperately want to write “One Hit Song.” This would be a realistic goal only in a universe in which the Billboard cast-album chart decisively influenced mainstream pop culture.Man 2 and Other Man invite Regina (who always wears a shapeless ’80s-style tracksuit) to brainstorm. She’s open to a samba, or maybe some bossa nova, but the resulting song, “Say Hello,” sounds like a show-tune-ized single from Backstreet Boys or ’NSync. It is the most enjoyable number of the evening, yet it also reflects the production’s uncertain tone: Are we meant to laugh with the ingenuity of the Men or at their ineptness?The most frustrating element of the show is that despite a last-minute sort-of plot twist, Regina mostly serves as an unwitting wedge between the rookies. Their relationship gets so tense that in one particularly brutal dispute they chuck their notebooks to the floor in disgust.The production, directed by Marshall Pailet, moves at a steady clip, and Fankhauser and Wyse throw so much at the wall that once in a while, a joke acquires a bizarre kind of sheen through sheer surrealism.“I read she has an honorary degree in astrophysics,” Man 2 says of Regina. “That makes sense,” Other Man replies, “because her voice is so … good.”In the role of Other Man, Wyse, looking like an overgrown summer camper in his neat shirt and shorts — another costume decision that’s hard to parse — excels at this kind of exchange. Add his character’s penchant for borscht belt humor (“Take my Grandma, for instance,” one line starts, “no really, take her —”) and you’re halfway to an actual comic role.“A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet,” an Off Broadway production, is the first new in-person musical to open since Covid-19 shut down theaters last year, and it feels like the first pancake to come out of the pan: It’s a little undercooked, a little misshapen, but we’ll eat it anyway because hey, it’s still a pancake.A Commercial Jingle for Regina CometThrough Nov. 14 at DR2 Theater, Manhattan; 800-447-7400, reginacomet.com. Running time: 80 minutes. More

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      Micki Grant, Groundbreaking Broadway Composer, Dies at 92

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      With “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” she became the first woman to write the book, music and lyrics of a Broadway musical.Micki Grant, who in the early 1970s became the first woman to write the book, music and lyrics of a Broadway musical, “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” a soulful, spirited exploration of Black life, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 92.Her death, at Mount Sinai Morningside hospital, was announced by Joan Allen, a family spokeswoman.Ms. Grant, an actress, composer, playwright and musician, had developed “Don’t Bother Me” for two years with the director Vinnette Carroll, taking it to small theaters in New York, Philadelphia and Washington before opening on Broadway in April 1972.She would also be known for her work on another Broadway musical, “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” and for her seven years on the NBC soap opera “Another World.”Set in New York City, “Don’t Bother Me” explored topics like ghetto life, Black power, feminism and student protests with an all-Black cast performing songs — all by Ms. Grant — that drew from rock, jazz, funk, blues calypso and other musical genres.Ms. Grant recalled in 2018 that she and Ms. Carroll had wanted audiences of the musical to recognize the similarities among races, not the differences.“And I think that’s expressed when you find out in the end that the audience is willing to reach out and take someone’s hand,” she said in an interview with The New York Amsterdam News. “Some people in the audience never held the hand of a person of a different race before, and all of the sudden, they’re holding another person’s hand.”The musical got rave reviews, including one from Clive Barnes of The New York Times, who wrote: “It is the unexpected that is the most delightful. Last night at the Playhouse Theater a new musical came clapping, stomping and stamping in. It is fresh, fun and Black.”The show received Tony nominations for best musical, best original score, best book (also by Ms. Grant) and best direction. It won a Grammy for best musical theater album, making Ms. Grant the first female composer to win in that category.“Don’t Bother Me” was revived in 2016 as a concert performance by the York Theater Company in Manhattan and two years later by the Encores! Off-Center series at New York City Center, directed by Savion Glover.Amber Barbee Pickens, foreground, in the Encores! production of “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope” at New York City Center in 2018. One critic said of the original Broadway production: “A new musical came clapping, stomping and stamping in. It is fresh, fun and Black.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJames Morgan, York’s producing artistic director, said in a phone interview that Ms. Grant had “wanted a say in everything and would say, ‘No, that’s not how that goes.’ I’d tell her, ‘We want this to be your version of the show.’”He had been hoping to stage a full Off Broadway production of “Don’t Worry,” he said, but couldn’t raise the money. “I so wanted it for her, because there’s still a big audience for it,” he said.Ms. Grant was born Minnie Louise Perkins on June 30, 1929, in Chicago to Oscar and Gussie (Cobbins) Perkins. Her father was a barber and a self-taught pianist, her mother, a saleswoman for Stanley Home Products.Minnie was smitten by theater and music at a young age. At 8 she played the Spirit of Spring, touching flowers to bring them to life, in a community center production. She began taking piano and double-bass lessons at about the same age.And, she recalled in an interview with The Times in 1972: “I was busy writing poetry and walking around the house reciting it. My family always listened and said what nice poetry it was.”Ms. Grant began writing music at 14 or 15 and acting in community theater at 18. She studied at the Chicago School of Music and later attended the University of Illinois, Chicago.But one semester shy of graduating, she left to perform in Los Angeles, where, in 1961, she appeared in a musical revue, “Fly Blackbird,” a social satire about the evils of segregation. She moved with the show to its Off Broadway production in 1962.By then, she had changed her name to Micki.Ms. Grant made her Broadway debut a year later in a supporting role in “Tambourines to Glory,” a short-lived “gospel singing play” — written by the poet Langston Hughes with music by Jobe Huntley — about two female street preachers in Harlem. It also starred Robert Guillaume and Louis Gossett Jr. A year later she appeared in a revival of Marc Blitzstein’s musical play “The Cradle Will Rock,” set in 1937 during the Great Depression.She turned to television in 1965, beginning a seven-year run on “Another World” playing a secretary-turned-lawyer, Peggy Nolan. She is believed to have been the first Black contract player in soaps. She later had roles in the soap operas “Guiding Light,” “Edge of Night” and “All My Children.”Ms. Grant in the NBC soap opera “Another World” in 1968. She had a seven-year run on the show playing a secretary-turned-lawyer.Fred Hermansky/NBCCasey Childs, the founder of the Primary Stages Company in New York, recalled directing her in one soap opera episode. “She was an absolutely lovely actress, who understood the need on a soap to move quickly and make fast choices,” he said in an interview.During her long run on “Another World,” Ms. Grant was building a theatrical legacy with Ms. Carroll, who in 1967 founded the Urban Arts Corps to provide a showcase for Black and Puerto Rican performers.They put together the first production of “Don’t Bother Me” in 1970 at the company’s theater on West 20th Street in Manhattan. Ms. Grant also wrote the music and lyrics for a song and dance version of the Irwin Shaw novel “Bury the Dead” and for a children’s show called “Croesus and the Witch.”Working with Ms. Carroll, she said, was a “magical” experience.“It all came together so perfectly,” Ms. Grant told American Theater magazine in an interview this year. “It was a fortunate meeting between us: I needed somewhere to present my work, and she needed the new work to present because of who she was — having original works brought out her creativity, rather than trying to repeat something that was already done.”The two women also collaborated on “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” an acclaimed gospel-infused musical that opened on Broadway in 1976 and ran for 429 performances. Ms. Carroll wrote the book, and music and lyrics were by Alex Bradford, with additional songs by Ms. Grant.Two years later, Ms. Grant was one of the five songwriters behind the musical “Working,” which was based on the writer Studs Terkel’s book of interviews with everyday people about their jobs. The group was nominated for a Tony for best original score.In one of Ms. Grant’s songs in “Working,” a woman laments: “If I could’ve done what I could’ve done/I could’ve done big things./With some luck to do what I wanted to do/I would’ve done big things./Swam a few rivers/Climbed a few hills/Paid all my bills.”She returned to Broadway one last time, with a musical, “It’s So Nice to Be Civilized” (1980), which closed after eight performances.Her other credits include the English-language lyrics to songs in “Jacques Brel Blues,” which debuted in East Hampton, N.Y., in 1988, and “Don’t Underestimate a Nut,” a musical based on the life of George Washington Carver, the agricultural scientist who promoted the cultivation of peanuts. It was commissioned by a children’s theater in Omaha, Neb., in 1994.In the late 1990s, Ms. Grant spent two years with Lizan Mitchell on a tour of the United States and South Africa as they played the centenarian Delany sisters in “Having Our Say,” Emily Mann’s Tony Award-winning play.Ms. Grant had no immediate survivors. Her marriages to Milton Grant and Ray McCutcheon ended in divorce.When Encores! revived “Don’t Bother Me,” Ms. Grant, reflecting on its creation, said that her and Ms. Carroll’s goal had not been to produce an incendiary musical about the difficulties faced by Black people in America.“There was a lot of angry theater out there at the time, especially in the Black community — Bullins, Jones,” she said, referring to the playwrights Ed Bullins and LeRoi Jones, who became known as Amiri Baraka. “I wanted to come at it with a soft fist. I wanted to open eyes but not turn eyes away.” More

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      ‘How Do I Become Happy?’ Advice From a Professional Fool

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      Stanley Allan Sherman, one of the niche artisans of New York theater, makes leather masks for the stage. And the occasional pro wrestler.Everyone has a Sept. 11 story. The pages of Stanley Allan Sherman’s, a one-man show called “September,” sat propped on a music stand in his apartment the other day, amid a room full of leather masks. Something about the text was vexing him. “I’ve got to find a way to make it funny,” he said.Mr. Sherman, 70, is an Orthodox Jew, a professional clown and sometime playwright and director. But mainly, he is one of the small army of niche artisans who make New York’s theater world the anything-is-possible place it is. In a city that has everything, he is one of the few makers of custom leather masks of the sort used in commedia dell’arte, a form of theater that uses stock characters denoted by their masks. He also makes them for the occasional pro wrestler or rapper. It’s a living.He started writing the Sept. 11 monologue several years ago, with interest from Theater for the New City in the East Village. Then the pandemic happened, leaving the show orphaned — a meditation on resilience during one calamity, sidelined by another.For Mr. Sherman, it was just one more occasion for improv.Like many artists of his generation, he arrived in New York without a plan, and found a sweet spot in a post-’60s art world that was just taking shape. It was roughly 1973, after he’d spent a year on a kibbutz in Israel and a couple more in Paris, and his intention was to stay a couple of nights on his brother’s couch, in a fifth-floor walk-up on the edge of the Manhattan neighborhood now known as Chelsea.Mr. Sherman in the first mask he made, a trial-and-error process.via Stanley Allan ShermanBy then he had studied mime and the use of masks in the fabled Parisian school of Jacques Lecoq. Mr. Sherman’s brother was trying to peddle a documentary about the Cockettes, a San Francisco drag troupe; he was also broke. “Abbie Hoffman took a bath in that tub when he was on the run from the F.B.I.,” Mr. Sherman said, beginning a tour of the apartment, where he has lived ever since. Instead of leaving town as planned, Mr. Sherman grabbed a set of antique toilet plungers and headed downtown to Wall Street, to pass the hat as a sidewalk juggler and mime. It was a great way to learn about human psychology, he said. It also made him the apartment’s sole breadwinner.“I picked Wall Street and Nassau for a reason,” he said. “I felt, that’s the center of power, they need the humanity the most. This one fellow stopped me and said: ‘I watch you. I have all the money I want in the world. But I’m not happy. I see you perform, and you’re happy. How do I become happy?’”Mr. Sherman during his time as a mime and juggler.Jim R Moore/VaudevisualsSoon his brother took a real job on Wall Street and moved out of the apartment, leaving it to Stanley. The rent, stabilized, was about $350.Mr. Sherman graduated from the sidewalk gig to performing in the small, adventurous theaters that were beginning to open downtown. “If you stay too long in the street you get mean,” he said. “I was getting mean.” One day, the director of the Perry Street Theater, knowing of his training in commedia dell’arte, asked him to make a mask for the stock character Arlecchino, also called Harlequin.“The only person I knew who made masks was in Italy, and he had died,” Mr. Sherman said. He called puppeteers he knew for advice about how to mold leather. Finally, through trial and error, he made a mask that looked nothing like Arlecchino, he said.The director was satisfied. Mr. Sherman had found a niche and a community, the unsung artisans who make or fix things that no one else wants to think about.A mask Mr. Sherman created as part of a 9/11 series.Stanley Allan Sherman“The community of people who do this in New York is very DIY, out of the mainstream, and you get deep collaborations,” said Seth Kane, who designs prostheses for stage and medical use and has worked with Mr. Sherman on masks for dancers, under the name Dr. Adventure.“The performer says, ‘I studied ballet for 20 years — I don’t know how to make this fire-breathing unicycle I’m about to ride.’” That’s where the artisans come in.For Mr. Sherman, it has been an odd sort of career. His best-known performing role was as a guest on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” where he appeared more than 40 times in the 1990s, usually in bits calling for a Hasidic Jew, with or without juggling.But his best-known mask appeared on the professional wrestler Mick Foley, in his character of Mankind, a wounded psychopath.“They basically wanted Arlecchino but didn’t know it,” Mr. Sherman said. “I knew it.”Mr. Sherman, left, with the professional wrestler Mick Foley.via Stanley Allan ShermanIt can take Mr. Sherman a few days or as long as a year to make a mask, using the apartment’s back room as a workshop. When he works, he said, he tries to become the character. “When you’re sculpting, you’re moving as the character, you’re joking around as the character, so you’re putting all the energy into it, and that’s transferred to the mold,” he said.The finished product, he said, should reveal the actor, rather than concealing him or her.He is now hoping to revive “September,” his one-man show, maybe take it on the road. On that September morning 20 years ago, Mr. Sherman was on his way home after morning prayers at the Chelsea Synagogue when he saw a plane flying low overhead. The horror that ensued is by now achingly familiar. But what stood out for Mr. Sherman was not just the devastation but also the spontaneous camaraderie that drove him and neighbors, who gathered supplies for the emergency medical workers.“One of the best things we did is we gave people a way to help, to participate,” Mr. Sherman said, dropping his voice to near a whisper. “Someone came with eight supermodels. There was an old couple with a giant pot of chicken soup that fed people for hours. All these beautiful things happened. Then seeing the line of refrigerator trucks on the West Side Highway was just disturbing. People in their 20s have no memory of this. They hear about Sept. 11, but they don’t know how the energy in the city was so amazing. It was a magical time.”Performing during the NYC Clown Theater Festival in 1985.Jim R Moore/VaudevisualsStill, he wondered whether the monologue was missing the element of humor that has connected his work from the Wall Street sidewalks to the present, a pathway for communicating inconvenient truths.“This is what fools do: They expose truths,” he said. It was an imperative that has guided him for half a century, and a filter through which to see the city he has made his own. “The reason late night comedy talk shows are so popular and so many people get their news from them, is because they’re speaking truth,” he said.“If it’s a lie, it’s not funny. Lies aren’t funny. Truth is funny.” More

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      Drama Book Shop, Backed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, to Open in June

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      The quirky bookstore, which sells scripts and other theater-related work, was acquired by a team of “Hamilton” alumni after years of struggle.The Drama Book Shop, a quirky 104-year-old Manhattan specialty store that has long been a haven for aspiring artists as well as a purveyor of scripts, will reopen next month with a new location, a new look, and a new team of starry owners.Those new owners — the “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as the show’s director, Thomas Kail, lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, and the theater owner James L. Nederlander — said Wednesday that the store will have its long-delayed reopening on June 10.The opening, at 266 West 39th Street, is a sign of the team’s confidence in Times Square, which has been largely theater-free since March 12, 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic forced Broadway to close. Broadway shows are not planning to resume performances until September, but the new store owners say they are ready for business.The “Hamilton” team bought the Drama Book Shop, most recently located on West 40th Street, in early 2019 after years in which the store had struggled to survive the challenges of Manhattan real estate, e-commerce, and even a damaging flood. Kail had a particular passion for the bookstore, where he had run a small theater company in his early years as a professional; Miranda joined him there to work on “In the Heights,” a musical Kail directed. “In the Heights” has now been adapted into a film which is being released on June 11, the day after the bookstore opens.The new owners had initially hoped to reopen the store in late 2019, and then in early 2020, but the project was delayed, first by the vicissitudes of construction, and then by the pandemic. The new shop has been designed by David Korins, the “Hamilton” scenic designer, and includes a cafe.The store is encouraging visitors to make reservations online; capacity will be limited. More

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      Come to the Cabaret, Old Chum. Or at Least Stream It.

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      New concerts from Sutton Foster, Jeremy Jordan and Marilyn Maye offer examples of what the most intimate art form can and can’t do.Cabaret is a magpie medium, plucking pieces from the world’s songbook and repurposing them to tell more-or-less personal stories.Whether the result is sublime or mortifying (or, more typically, in between) depends on how cleverly singers shape their material to fit the contours of the tales they’re telling. Vocal beauty is a secondary matter — as any number of old-school performers, like the swinging Sylvia Syms and the barking Elaine Stritch, proved by keeping the form alive even when they had almost no voice left.But the pandemic has nearly done the old bird in; the intimacy of most cabaret performance spaces, and the likelihood that a singer may spit in your chicken Kiev, have made live shows impossible. If there have nevertheless been some astounding virtual concerts in the tradition, including one Audra McDonald gave for a New York City Center gala, that doesn’t make the real thing any less valuable.Until live cabaret’s day, or rather its evening, returns, high-profile offerings from Sutton Foster, Jeremy Jordan and Marilyn Maye are here to entertain and instruct us. These three performers sing very well indeed, in very different styles and with very different material. But it’s their completely divergent uses of the form that make them stand out as examples of what cabaret can and can’t do best.One thing it can’t do at all is refuse to tell a story, even if that’s what a singer intends. Foster’s concert “Bring Me to Light,” also for City Center, tries hard anyway, deliberately defocusing its star and keeping psychology on a very short leash. The effect is so extreme that Foster seems more like the host of the occasion than the occasion itself, pushing her spotlight onto guests including Kelli O’Hara, Raúl Esparza and Joaquina Kalukango, who steals the show with “The Life of the Party,” from Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party.” Foster even gives a solo — “Here I Am,” from Disney’s “Camp Rock” — to Wren Rivera, a student of hers at Ball State University.In other words, despite having starred in seven Broadway shows and winning two Tony Awards, the first for “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2002, Foster is a sharer, not a self-aggrandizer. Instead of filling gaps between songs with the de rigueur résumé-by-chitchat, she chipperly interviews her pals. And though the title of the show is taken from the finale of “Violet,” the Jeanine Tesori-Brian Crawley musical Foster led at City Center in 2013 and on Broadway in 2014, the tunestack of “Bring Me to Light” tends to avoid material strongly associated with its star. Mostly, it offers songs she is unlikely to be assigned onstage (“How to Handle a Woman”) or that come from other genres entirely. She and O’Hara make a lovely duet of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now.”This is all professionally rendered — as is the show itself. (The director is Leigh Silverman; the music director, Michael Rafter.) It looks fantastic in the plush if empty City Center auditorium. But at no point does it offer us the Sutton Foster who is so commanding when she plays a role that she can disappear into it before emerging transformed. Actually, at one point it does, when she bounces through the backstage hallways in jeans and then, in a nice jump cut, pops onto the stage in a sparkly gown. The song is the ambivalently titled “Hey, Look Me Over.”From Sutton Foster’s “Bring Me to Light,” at New York City Center.If Foster’s show tells the story of a star who avoids too much drama, “Jeremy Jordan: Carry On” heads in the opposite direction. It is bursting with drama, more than its little canoe of gorgeously sung songs can carry without tipping.The premise is both affecting and overwrought: that when he became a father in 2019, Jordan realized he had to unburden himself of unresolved conflicts from his own childhood before he could properly parent. Hence the pun in the show’s title, which is not just a command to keep going but also an actual piece of luggage filled with keepsakes that represent youthful traumas he must unpack.These are not the kind of traumas that are too piddling to earn a hearing; Jordan tells a brutal tale, involving abuse, drugs and a catastrophic car accident. The problem is that there aren’t many songs available to reflect and shape those traumas, so he must jury-rig existing ones (or, as in two cases, write new ones) to make a case for singing at all. Even so, as in a jukebox musical, they rarely fit, especially the ones associated with his own career, like “Broadway, Here I Come!” from “Smash,” and “Santa Fe” from “Newsies.”From Jeremy Jordan’s “Carry On,” at Feinstein’s/54 Below.Pop songs, including Billy Joel’s “Lullaby,” work better, but overall, the show is too heavy for a cabaret act and too skimpy and unvaried for a musical. (Aside from two medleys, there are only eight numbers.) Attempts to switch up the texture with asides, rueful jokes and painfully scripted banter with his pianist and music director, Benjamin Rauhala, only heighten the feeling that the material is as yet too raw for such a refined format.Perhaps “Carry On,” filmed without an audience at Feinstein’s/54 Below, would have been better off if Jordan hadn’t written, directed and performed it all himself. But learning to calibrate the emotional temperature of a room — and of one’s material — is a skill that comes only with experience. Jordan is 36; Foster, 46; together, they do not add up to Marilyn Maye’s 93 — an age that helps explain the distillation of her gifts and also her preference for classic material. “Broadway, the Maye Way,” another installment in the Feinstein’s/54 Below series that presented Jordan’s concert, consists mostly of show tunes, heavy on Jerry Herman, from musicals she’s been in, although never on Broadway itself.Maye, who started singing professionally in the 1940s, has run the gamut of outlets: radio, television, film, nightclubs, regional revivals, summer stock, concert halls and now cabaret. That is by no means a downward trajectory, but if anyone has the life experience to sing songs like “I’m Still Here,” from “Follies,” she does, with her “three cheers and dammit” verve. That would be enough in this repertoire, but Maye also brings to bear her wonderfully natural phrasing, her generous but not overstated swing and her big wallop of a voice in fantastic shape.From Marilyn Maye’s “Broadway, the Maye Way,” at Feinstein’s/54 Below.It’s hard to say whether she’s so good at singing optimistic Broadway barnburners like “I’m Still Here,” “Step to the Rear” and “Golden Rainbow” because they were written for voices like hers (she recorded the original hit version of “Cabaret” in 1966, and sings it again here) or because she has chosen them carefully to reflect what appears to be her actual personality.Probably, it’s both. The moto perpetuo arrangements by her musical director, Tedd Firth, certainly highlight her bubbliness and drive, but when she sings “Fifty Percent” from “Ballroom,” a number about a widow in love with a married man, the alteration in its effect is clearly coming from her. It’s no longer a torch song but a glass-half-full anthem.What Maye has mastered is the proportioning of restraint and release that allows the safe exchange of emotion between singer and audience. In a small room — and online, every room is small — that’s key. It’s how cabaret even under lockdown can remain an affecting art and not just a jukebox musical with sequins.Sutton Foster: Bring Me to LightThrough May 31; nycitycenter.orgJeremy Jordan: Carry OnThrough June 17; 54below.comMarilyn Maye: Broadway, the Maye WayThrough June 19; 54below.com More

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      Film Forum Is Reopening With a Classic: Fellini’s ‘La Strada’

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      The newly restored masterpiece, about an itinerant clown, is part of the Manhattan movie theater’s in-person lineup.“La Strada,” the 1954 movie that made Federico Fellini’s international reputation and won the first competitive Oscar for best foreign film, is exemplary pop modernism — an existential parable with affinities to “Waiting for Godot,” featuring an appealingly sad clown, haunted by a forlorn musical phrase and set in the timeless landscape of windswept beaches, tattered carnivals and deserted piazzas that Fellini made his own.It’s also a crowd pleaser, appropriately chosen as one of the movies that, newly restored, will reopen the Film Forum on Friday.Fellini is out to break your heart from the get-go, as the wide-eyed waif Gelsomina (the director’s wife, Giulietta Masina) is sold by her impoverished mother to the itinerant carnival strongman Zampano (Anthony Quinn) as his stooge, servant and concubine.Gelsomina’s childlike innocence is amplified by her master’s brutish behavior. While he is largely stuck with repeating a single, unimaginative stunt — ironically, it’s bursting a chain that encircles his chest — simple-minded Gelsomina delights in fantasy and spontaneous performance. In one scene, she entertains the guests and children at an outdoor wedding with an impromptu dance; in another she enchants the sisters in a convent that gives her shelter (and Zampano considers robbing).Masina’s performance is nearly silent; unmistakably Chaplinesque with her derby, oversized coat and makeshift cane, she also evokes Stan Laurel, Harpo Marx and, as a little woodenhead, Pinocchio too. Fellini is said to have received scores of offers to make further vehicles for the character, including one from Walt Disney. E.T. may be considered among her descendants.The New York Times hailed “La Strada” (The Road) as “a tribute to the Italian neo-realistic school of filmmaking,” even though, for all its desolate locations, it is far more allegorical than naturalistic. Indeed, Fellini’s metaphoric intentions are made apparent with the introduction of the itinerant tightrope walker called the Fool (Richard Basehart) who performs wearing a pair of cardboard angel wings.Despite his annoyingly dubbed giggle, the Fool fascinates Gelsomina. When all three characters are engaged by a threadbare circus, the Fool mocks Zampano and encourages Gelsomina to join his act. That she cannot do, bound to Zampano by a mystical force that can only be termed “love.” Instead, the Fool leaves her with the poignant Nino Rota melody that becomes her theme.Like that refrain, “La Strada” belongs to Masina. Still, before the movie ends it becomes apparent that Quinn (who took over Marlon Brando’s role in the Broadway production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” a precursor of roughneck masculinity) has given a career performance. Indeed, the last five minutes, a coda set five years after the two part ways, are his.“La Strada” is often sentimental and not always convincing but the ending packs a wallop. I was told the story, as a small child, by my mother who had just seen and perhaps been devastated by the movie. Although I did not fully understand it, the final scene — Zampano wading into the sea — has stayed with me all my life.La StradaApril 2-8 at Film Forum, Manhattan. 212-727-8110; filmforum.org. Also streaming on the Criterion Channel, Kanopy and other platforms. More

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      New York Theaters Are Dark, but These Windows Light Up With Art

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      The Irish Repertory Theater is streaming poetry readings, and Playwrights Horizons and St. Ann’s Warehouse are showcasing art dealing with race and injustice.Like many cultural organizations, the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan has streamed pandemic programming on its website.But a few days ago, the theater added a new sort of broadcast to its repertoire, setting up two 60-inch screens in windows that face the sidewalk, installing speakers high up on the building facade and airing a collection of films that show people reading poems in Ireland, London and New York.On a recent morning, Ciaran O’Reilly, the Rep’s producing director, stood by the theater on West 22nd Street, gazing at the screens as they displayed Joseph Aldous, an actor in Britain, reading “An Advancement of Learning,” a narrative poem by Seamus Heaney describing a brief standoff with a rat along a river bank.“These are not dark windows,” O’Reilly said. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”In the past year, theaters and other performing arts institutions in New York have turned to creative means to bring works to the public, sometimes also injecting a bit of life into otherwise shuttered facades. Those arrangements continue, even as the State of New York has announced that arts venues can reopen in April at one-third capacity and some outdoor performances, like Shakespeare in the Park, are scheduled to resume.The panes of glass, though, have provided a safe space. Late last year, for instance, the artists Christopher Williams, Holly Bass and Raja Feather Kelly performed at different times in the lobby or in a smaller vestibule-like part of the building in Chelsea occupied by New York Live Arts. All were visible through glass to those outside.Three more performances by Kelly of “Hysteria,” in which he assumes the role of a pink-hued extraterrestrial and explores what Live Arts’ website calls “pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity,” are scheduled for April 8-10.The Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s photographs of sculptures are on display at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother street-level performance took place behind glass last December in Downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Ballet staged nine 20-minute shows of select dances from its “Nutcracker.”The ballet turned its studio into what its artistic director, Lynn Parkerson, called a “jewel box” theater; chose dances that kept masked ballerinas socially distanced; and used barricades on the sidewalk to limit audiences.“It was a way to bring some people back to something they love that they enjoyed that they might be forgetting about,” Parkerson said in an interview. “It did feel like a real performance.”She said that live performances were planned for April and would include ballet members in “Pas de Deux,” set to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Gavotte et Six Doubles,” with live music by the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.Pop-up concerts have been arranged by the Kaufman Music Center on the Upper West Side, in a storefront — the address is not given but is described on the center’s website as “not hard to find” — north of Columbus Circle.Those performances, running through late April, are announced at the storefront the same day, to limit crowd sizes and encourage social distancing. Participants have included the violinist Gil Shaham, the mezzo-soprano Chrystal E. Williams, the Gabrielle Stravelli Trio and JACK Quartet.St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn is displaying Julian Alexander and Khadijat Oseni’s “Supremacy Project,” public art that addresses the nature of injustice in American society.The word “supremacy” is superimposed on a photograph of police officers in riot gear, and there are images by Michael T. Boyd of Sandra Bland, Elijah McClain and Emmett Till.And at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown, the Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day is placing photographs of sculptures of human figures in display cases, encouraging viewers to reckon with definitions of beauty and race. Those displays are part of rotating public art series organized by the artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein and the set and costume designer David Zinn.The aim, Finkelstein said in January when the series was announced, was to display work that “makes constructive use of dormant facades to create a transient street museum” and to “remind the city of its buoyancy and originality.”O’Reilly, at the Irish Rep, said the theater heard last year from Amy Holmes, the executive director of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, who thought the theater might provide a good venue to air some of the short films the organization had commissioned to make poetry part of an immersive experience.The series being shown at the theater, called “Poetic Reflections: Words Upon the Window Pane,” comprises 21 short pieces by the Irish filmmaker Matthew Thompson.“These are not dark windows,” said Ciaran O’Reilly of the Irish Repertory Theater. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThey show contemporary poets reading their own works as well as poets and actors reading works by others, including William Butler Yeats and J.M. Synge, and were produced in collaboration with Poetry Ireland in Dublin, Druid Theater in Galway, the 92nd Street Y in New York and Poet in the City in London.“I think there is something special about encountering the arts in an unexpected way in the city, especially an art form like poetry,” Holmes said.The readers in the films include people who were born in Ireland, immigrants to Ireland, people who live in Britain and a few from the United States, like Denice Frohman, who was born and raised in New York City.Frohman was on the theater’s screens on Tuesday night, reading lines like “the beaches are gated & no one knows the names of the dead” from her poem “Puertopia,” when Erin Madorsky and Dorian Baker stopped to listen.Baker said he saw the films playing in the window as symbolizing a “revitalization of poetic energy.”Madorsky had regularly attended theatrical performances before the pandemic but now missed that connection, she said, and was gratified to happen upon a dramatic reading while walking home.She added that the sound of the verses being read stood in contrast to what she called the city’s “standard” backdrop of blaring horns, sirens and rumbling garbage trucks.“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “There’s something so soothing about her voice, it just pulled me in.” More

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      A 'Blade Runner' Version of Manhattan

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraCredit…John Taggart for The New York TimesAm I in Manhattan? Or Another Sequel to ‘Blade Runner’?Flickering screens, whizzing helicopters and repurposed patches of pavement have transformed the scene.Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 11, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETIf you have been drinking too much while looking at pictures of real life (or at least Instagram life), if you spend more time talking to machines than living creatures, if you’ve been wondering if you’re alive, if you have an itch you can’t scratch, if you think you have a condition called accelerating decrepitude, if you live in a building of empty apartments, there may be a movie that speaks to you, and that movie came out almost 40 years ago. It’s called “Blade Runner.”Since its 1982 debut, “Blade Runner,” set in a phosphorescent, futuristic Los Angeles and directed by Ridley Scott, has tempted fans to see it as coming to life, well, everywhere. The film’s motifs — gorgeously derelict prewar high-rises, the aesthetic influence of Asia’s megacities, massive LED screens — have become visual shorthand for The Future: Down and Out (but Dark and Sexy) Version.Purists insist that it is a Los Angeles movie, but posts tagged #bladerunner linked to places as disparate as Istanbul, Tijuana, Milan, Nairobi and Detroit typically appear on Instagram every 10 minutes or so.Few of those places resemble the movie as much as still mostly locked-down Manhattan, where a starker, lonelier, more class-riven update of the film’s retro-noir mood has taken hold. The filmmakers behind “Blade Runner” originally found inspiration in New York, and that was before the city incarnated its post-apocalyptic setting in which “anyone with the wherewithal has presumably gone away,” as Janet Maslin wrote in 1982. “Only the dregs remain.”A jumbo flashing billboard that was once the CNN logo, near Columbus Circle in Manhattan late in February.Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesAdrian Benepe, the former New York City Parks Commissioner and current head of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, sees “creeping Blade Runner syndrome” everywhere, from the clogged skies over Manhattan to the subways, which he rides to work every day from his home on the Upper West Side.“They’re empty,” Mr. Benepe said. “I’ve been alone many times at rush hour. It’s eerie as hell.” He also finds the movie prescient in its depiction of a world saturated by intrusive, omnipresent advertising.“Places in New York that used to not have advertising now have ads,” he said. “You can’t get away from it. It’s in the subways, it’s on the streets, it’s on barges. You never stop being assailed.”Giant screens are nothing new, of course. But New York’s streetscape had been permeated as never before with twitchy, adhesively catchy LEDs, a trend that has only accelerated during the pandemic, with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announcing last summer the addition of 9,000 screens broadcasting “Covid-relevant safety information.”Herald Square, now with a neo-noir flair.Credit…John Taggart for The New York Times“There is advertising everywhere, and it’s a bit of sensory overload,” said Ben Kallos, a City Council member who represents Manhattan’s East Side. Mr. Kallos said LinkNYC, the network of 1,800 sidewalk kiosks around the city providing free Wi-Fi as well as block after block of eye-level digital content, “is pushing the boundary” when it comes to “the amount of advertising people are willing to take.”That said, for all its complexity and clutter, New York’s visual environment is carefully calibrated by zoning codes and the desire of advertisers not to trigger associations with images such as the “Blade Runner” signature motif of a geisha’s face beaming down from a hovering blimp, let alone the monolithic Big Brother figure in Apple’s infamous “1984” commercial (also directed by Mr. Scott).Slip-ups happen, however. Last summer, during protests over the killing of George Floyd, marchers who had gathered near Columbus Circle were shocked to see messages from a billboard overhead sternly telling them to go home and “Don’t be a criminal.”“They were telling people that this isn’t what George Floyd would want, things like that,” said Frederick Joseph, a marketing and communications specialist who is also the author of the recently published New York Times best seller “The Black Friend.”Mr. Joseph was marching beneath the 32-foot-high digital sign — the only such billboard facing Central Park — and was shocked to see the messages accompanied by the face of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, along with a misleading Twitter handle. (The Moinian Group, a real estate developer that owns the billboard, did not answer several calls.)“There was a countdown basically saying how much time before you were past curfew,” Mr. Joseph added. “And when it got to like 10 minutes before, people started running. It felt like something out of ‘The Hunger Games,’ or ‘Blade Runner.’”Not all of the resemblances to the movie are nightmarish. The retro-noir look “Blade Runner” is credited with has inspired copycats, including Anthony Bourdain, who before his death planned to open a “Blade Runner”-inspired “Asian night market” on the West Side of Manhattan, and Raf Simons, whose 2018 men’s wear show on a steamy, neon-lit night under the Williamsburg Bridge featured models in monklike cocoon coats carrying clear plastic umbrellas.Indeed, one of the subversive triumphs of “Blade Runner” is making techno-fascist dystopia seductive.“It’s supposed to be terrible, but of course it’s mesmerizing,” said James Sanders, the author of “Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies.” Mr. Sanders said that “Blade Runner” originally spoke to a “terror that white middle-class culture was going to be overrun by foreigners.”A helmeted man in bike and other vehicles, whizzing down 32nd Street.Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesSome parts of Midtown are incontestably gloomy, such as along Lexington Avenue in the 40s, where mannequins seem to outnumber humans, space-helmeted bicyclists swerve around heaps of garbage, and like a jellyfish glowing undersea, any gleam of life only underscores the vacuum.”Just a half-mile south, though, in Manhattan’s Koreatown, the feel is warmer, if slightly edgy, as restaurants have transformed 32nd Street into a vogue-ish outdoor bazaar where you may not feel comfortable unless you’re wearing a neoprene cocoon coat with nozzles for the attachment of heating tubes. It’s not just the diners slurping seolleongtang inside plywood shacks, the cosmetic treatments on offer up glowing stairwells, or the puddles at the diners’ feet (which, although not runoff from acid rain as in “Blade Runner,” may be something worse from nearby Midtown).Scott Geres is the general manager of the Edison Hotel, a Jazz Age showpiece that opened in 1931, when Thomas Edison himself turned on the 26-story building’s lights. Pixelated models’ faces projected from Times Square flood many of its 810 rooms, including the Presidential Suite, where Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees right fielder, spent the 2018 season.Is that the Jolly Green Giant or something more sinister?Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesFor the last year, Mr. Geres has been one of the few people at the Edison.“For the first month I didn’t leave the building,” said Mr. Geres, 48, who walks up to 25,000 steps a day checking for pipe leaks and fire hazards. “There used to be 5,000 people in this building on a Saturday night. Now it’s just me and one other person on my team.”Mr. Geres said his job is to keep the Edison’s lights flickering behind the plywood shielding windows on the Rum Bar and street-side restaurants. The 700-room Paramount hotel, across West 47th Street, however, is “dark dark,” he said, like so many buildings in Midtown.“Dark dark” is of course the psychic state of much of New York these days, and of Rick Deckard’s mind. In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” the 1968 novel by Philip K. Dick on which “Blade Runner” is based, Mr. Deckard is tormented by empty apartments — “sometimes he heard them when he was supposed to be asleep.”Childless, communicating via “vidphone,” and drinking himself into oblivion (with Vangelis’s blissfully narcotic score playing in the background, who wouldn’t?), Mr. Deckard spends his time when not hunting fugitive robots — whose vivacity is a rebuke to his own shrunken soul — looking at pictures from before times, specifically, snapshots of possibly imaginary family members.It’s an on-the-nose image of loneliness and lassitude for those “living in the screen bunker,” as the pop psychologist Rob Henderson has called pandemic life. Meanwhile, outside the bunker, intimations of creeping disorder conjure the city of the 1970s, one of the main inspirations for “Blade Runner.”“Places in New York that used to not have advertising now have ads,” said Adrian Benepe, the former New York City Parks commissioner. “You can’t get away from it. It’s in the subways, it’s on the streets, it’s on barges. You never stop being assailed.”Credit…John Taggart for The New York Times“I was spending a lot of time in New York,” Mr. Scott has said of the movie’s filming. “The city back then seemed to be dismantling itself. It was marginally out of control.”At that time, Mr. Scott frequently found himself flying directly to Midtown via a helicopter service from Kennedy Airport that would land atop the former Pan-American (now MetLife) Building straddling Park Avenue. Not long afterward, following a grisly accident, the helicopter service was discontinued.Mr. Benepe sees helicopters as another way “Blade Runner”speaks to the moment.“In ‘Blade Runner’ you have this overhead traffic constantly circling overhead,” he said. “Well, now the ultrawealthy, not only are they no longer in mass transit with us, they’re not even on the roadways. They’re flying in from the Hamptons.”He pointed out that the helicopter charter service Blade recently announced a daily commuter run, set to begin this month, shuttling passengers to Manhattan from Westchester.“Blade Runner”’s class critique is not subtle. A sex worker hunted by Mr. Deckard tries to kill him with his tie. The movie’s arch-villain, the head of an evil biotech corporation, lives at the pinnacle of a Pharaonic temple, and apparently he’s the only character in the movie whose apartment gets sunlight.That home, towering above the city, is as spacious and warm as the other interiors are dismal and claustrophobic. Though, in one of the ways “Blade Runner” seems dated, compared with Pharaonic apartments in Manhattan nowadays, its proportions are not extravagant.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More