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    Alanis Morissette Is Not Aloof

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    Celebrating the 25th anniversary of her second album, the singer and songwriter spoke about being destabilized by sudden fame — and how she got her center back.If Alanis Morissette’s albums were children, “Jagged Little Pill” would be the spoiled one — universally beloved, lavishly celebrated, extravagantly fed. She has a soft spot for her second born, “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie,” which was reissued with new material last month for its 25th anniversary. (She plays from the album on her current tour, which has dates through September.)Morissette was only 25 when “Supposed” came out, in 1999, but “Jagged” had made her a battle-hardened veteran of the It Girl industrial complex. She had hoped success would bring communion with other stars of popular and alternative music; instead, she found herself isolated and creatively drained.“I felt like I was at odds with the credo of the ’90s,” she said. “I thought there would be more intimacy and vulnerability and kumbaya, but it was all about aloofness and ennui and I am not aloof.”Inspiration came from the unconditional love of her friends back home in Toronto, and a monthlong trip to India, the grounding influence of which can be heard on the album’s breakout single, “Thank You.” “My songs can be an invitation to three emotions American culture generally doesn’t allow: fear, anger and sadness,” she said. “I get excited to embody those things onstage, and to have people watch me and feel it in themselves.”In an interview from New York, Morissette discussed the parts of her life that give her strength and perspective. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Living Libations Essential OilsNadine Artemis had an essential oil spot called Osmosis in downtown Toronto. When I was a teenager, I walked in and I thought, “Wow, this woman is a master. She’s my guru.” So I basically — kind of jokingly, but semiformally — have been under her wing for decades.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Drake Looks for Love, Repeatedly, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by beabadoobee, Perfume Genius, the Beths and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Drake, ‘Falling Back’Less than 10 months after “Certified Lover Boy,” Drake has returned to monopolize summer. His surprise-released seventh album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” is a balmy mood piece —somewhere between a D.J. mix and one very long song — and after a series of weighty, overstuffed albums, it’s refreshing to hear him return to a lighter register, à la the 2017 mixtape “More Life.” (As I type this, “Passionfruit” is trending on Twitter.) Drake showcases his softer side on highlights like the club-ready, house-influenced “Massive,” and the pensive, tuneful “Overdrive,” one of several tracks partly produced by the South African D.J. Black Coffee. And though “Honestly, Nevermind” finds Drake singing more often than not, those who prefer his rapping will appreciate the relentless flow of “Sticky” and the cheeky closing track “Jimmy Cooks,” which features a sharp verse from 21 Savage.But it’s the kinetic “Falling Back,” the album’s first proper track and single, that best sets the scene: A throbbing electronic beat (produced by the D.J.s Rampa, &Me, Alex Lustig and Beau Nox) allows Drake the space for some Auto-Tuned crooning about — what else — a once-promising relationship turned sour. “How do you say to my face, ‘Time heals?’” he sings in a reedy, vulnerable falsetto, “Then go and leave me again, unreal.” The track’s video, though, is more of a lark, playfully sending up Drake’s heartbreaker reputation and imagining a time when he finally settles down and gets married — to 23 different women. Quips his mother, Sandi Graham, “I think he’s really taking these ones seriously!” LINDSAY ZOLADZRhys Langston featuring Fatboi Sharif, ‘Progressive House, Conservative Ligature’The polysyllables fly fast, then go on to accelerate wildly in “Progressive House, Conservative Ligature” by the Los Angeles rapper Rhys Langston, from a coming album called “Grapefruit Radio.” The producer Opal-Kenobi supplies loops of blurry, undulating piano chords and synthesizer swoops, shifting pitch every so often. Langston syncopates his verbal abstractions in double time and then triple time, delivering conundrums like: “Creative manners to skip and erase from moment to moment/abstract, realist, most problematic version of futurism.” It’s both virtuosic and defiantly nonchalant. JON PARELESbeabadoobee, ‘10:36’“I didn’t think you’d fall in love — you’re just a warm body to hold,” Bea Kristi sings on “10:36,” a tale of an emotionally lopsided relationship that will appear on her upcoming second album, “Beatopia.” Her feelings may be indifferent, but the song itself is exuberant — a bright, hooky blast of lo-fi pop propelled by punchy percussion and a bouncy chorus. ZOLADZThe Beths, ‘Silence Is Golden’Elizabeth Stokes is desperate for some peace and quiet on “Silence Is Golden,” the latest track from the New Zealand rockers the Beths and the first single from their forthcoming third album, “Expert in a Dying Field.” Antic percussion and squalling guitars mimic the anxiety induced by an avalanche of urban distractions, like sirens, jet planes and “6 a.m. construction”: Sighs Stokes, “It’s building and building and building until I can’t function at all.” She finally gets what she’s after in the final moments of the song, when the instruments suddenly cut out and she’s left to repeat the chorus contentedly a cappella. ZOLADZJulia Jacklin, ‘I Was Neon’The Australian songwriter Julia Jacklin doesn’t get very specific about the relationship she’s apparently left behind in “I Was Neon.” All she offers are hints like, “I was steady, I was soft to the touch/Cut wide open, did I let in too much?” Midway through the song, she arrives at the more important question: “Am I gonna lose myself again?” She repeats it more than a dozen times over an unswerving drumbeat and a language of rock obsession that dates back to the Velvet Underground — two drone-strummed electric guitar chords — with more guitars and voices arriving to wrangle over whether she’ll stay trapped in past habits. PARELESPerfume Genius, ‘Photograph’Mike Hadreas’s sixth and most abstract album as Perfume Genius, “Ugly Season,” is a work that entwines sound and movement, as he began composing it as an accompaniment to the choreographer Kate Wallich’s 2019 piece “The Sun Still Burns Here.” The beautifully spooky “Photograph” has the feel of a ghostly waltz: Drifting synthesizer riffs and groaning ambience provide the backdrop for Hadreas’s darkly romantic croon — “no fantasy, you were meant for me,” he sings — that adds yet another layer to the song’s lush, beguiling atmosphere. ZOLADZFKA twigs, ‘Killer’Even if FKA twigs weren’t suing Shia LaBeouf for sexual battery, “Killer” would be chilling. “I don’t want to die for love,” she sings in her highest, most fragile register. The track is starkly transparent — keyboard chords, electronic blips and drums, sustained bass lines, multitracked vocals, dub echoes — with a terse pop structure of short phrases and repeated intervals; she sings about attraction, intuition, self-doubt, denial and gaslighting. It’s an elegant crystallization of pain. PARELESRöyksopp featuring Jamie Irrepressible, ‘Sorry’The Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp periodically sets aside dance beats for ballads. That’s what it does on “Sorry,” an abject apology that arrives as a preview of its next album, “Profound Mysteries II.” It begins with melancholy piano chords reminiscent of Erik Satie, then opens up a bassy abyss as Jamie Irrepressible — the British singer Jamie McDermott — thoroughly indicts himself for abandoning a lover: “I hate myself for running scared,” he croons. “No heroics, I know, will bring you back.” For the last half of the song, all he can do is repeat, “I’m sorry.” PARELESAlanis Morissette, ‘Heart — Power of a Soft Heart’Alanis Morissette arrived in the 1990s as a voice of righteous wrath and determined self-rescue. Her pandemic project has been “The Storm Before the Calm,” an album of wordless meditation tracks striving for serenity. It’s a collaboration with Dave Harrington, who has worked with Nicolas Jaar in the psychedelic rock project Darkside. “Heart — Power of a Soft Heart” has uplift built into its foundation — three slow, ascending piano notes that are repeated throughout the track and enfolded in other tones: chimes, cymbals, hovering guitar notes and Morissette singing “ah,” sustaining a magnificent hush. PARELESVadim Neselovskyi, ‘Waltz of Odesa Conservatory’Vadim Neselovskyi’s third-stream pianism shares the qualities of a sculpture carved in ice: finely wrought detail, sharply traced; glinting elegance; coolness to the touch; refractions of light. His right and left hands converse with each other in eager, enchanted dialogue. Since moving to the United States two decades ago, Neselovskyi has collaborated with leading elders in jazz, like Gary Burton and John Zorn, but on his new album, “Odesa: A Musical Walk Through a Legendary City,” he sits alone at the piano. The record is a tribute to the Ukrainian seaport where he was raised, and although he composed the suite in 2020 based on personal inspirations — remembering his childhood there, as his father, a Ukrainian Jew, fought cancer — the album inevitably takes on a different cast now that this Russian-speaking, cosmopolitan city is in the throes of war. Before he joined the New York jazz world, Neselovskyi was a classical prodigy; “Waltz of Odesa Conservatory” calls back to the 1990s, by way of some Baroque piano turns, when he was the youngest student ever admitted to the school. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

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      ‘Jagged Little Pill’ to Close on Broadway, Citing Omicron

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      The Alanis Morissette musical becomes the first big show felled by the resurgent coronavirus pandemic.“Jagged Little Pill,” a rock musical fueled by the songs of Alanis Morissette and wrestling with a variety of contemporary social issues, will close on Broadway, becoming the first big show felled by the resurgent coronavirus pandemic.The musical stopped performing on Saturday, citing “a limited number of positive Covid test results.” And on Monday night, the producers said they would not reopen.The causes are multiple: the show, which opened in late 2019, was nominated for 15 Tony Awards but did not win the big one, best musical, and never fully found its footing before shutting down with the rest of the industry because of the coronavirus pandemic. It restarted in October, but then faced the renewed uncertainty caused by the Omicron variant.“The drastic turn of events this week with the rapid spread of the Omicron variant has, once again, changed everything,” the producers said in a statement. “We are dismayed by what appears to be another substantial public health crisis, and, due to the detection of multiple positive Covid-19 cases within the company, need to prioritize the health and safety of the cast, crew, and entire team working on ‘Jagged Little Pill.’”They added, “In light of the extreme uncertainty ahead of us this winter, and forced to choose between continuing performances and protecting our company, we’ve made the difficult decision to close our doors.” More

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      Let’s Look Back on 2021, When We Couldn’t Stop Looking Back

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      There’s now a thriving cottage industry for content that re-examines the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. Is that a good thing?Time is an abstract and collectively imaginary concept, and often our brains must latch onto contemporary metaphors to fathom its churn. So I will say, with all due respect to our (gulp?) probable future president Matthew McConaughey, this was the year I no longer felt that time was a flat circle.I found it to be moving more like a social media feed, dominated by freshly excavated and somewhat randomly retweeted remembrances of the recent past. A bit of cultural flotsam from the last 25 years would suddenly drift back up to the top of our collective consciousness and spread wildly, demanding renewed attention in the context of the present.Sometimes this was harmless fun — a welcome distraction from the fact that, this being Year 2 of a global pandemic, the actual present was depressing and exhausting to think about for too long. So everybody started watching “Seinfeld” and “The Sopranos” again. Taylor Swift released note-for-note replications of two old albums, allowing everybody a brief opportunity to get mad at an ex-boyfriend she had stopped dating a solid decade ago. “Bennifer,” the most gloriously of-their-time celebrity couple of the early aughts, were back together, baby! It was almost enough to make you want to live-tweet a contemporary rewatch of “Gigli” and declare it an unfairly maligned and subversive take on sexual fluidity, or something. (I said “almost.”) In 2021, the turn-of-the-millennium past was back in a big way, even if the eyes and ears through which we were taking it all in had grown older and — just maybe — wiser.Documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears” helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series.Brenda Chase/Online USA, Inc.,via Getty ImagesA word I sometimes noticed bandied about this year when talking about pop culture was “presentism.” Like so many other terms whose meaning has been distorted and hollowed out by contemporary, social-media-driven use — “problematic,” “intersectionality,” “critical race theory” — it began its life as jargon confined mostly to college classrooms and undergraduate term papers. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “presentism” is a philosophical term describing “the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.” To translate that into pop-culture speak, it is the modern tendency to look at an old video of David Letterman grilling Lindsay Lohan on late-night TV and feeling compelled to tweet, “Yas queen, drag his ass!”But this year some of these reassessments went refreshingly deeper, and they were long past due. What’s the opposite of partying like it’s 1999? Recycling the empties, dumping out the ashtrays and soberly assessing the damage to property or — worse — people? Whatever it was, there was suddenly, and very belatedly, a lot of it going on in 2021.All year, headlines and trending topics were monopolized by old, familiar names suddenly being scrutinized under new lights, using language and means of critical thinking that had gone mainstream in the wake of both the #MeToo reckoning and last summer’s protests for racial justice. The lines separating heroes and villains, victims and monsters, were being redrawn in real time. Flashbacks to salacious media coverage of the late ’90s and early 2000s were reminding people how horribly both Britney Spears and Janet Jackson had been treated in the court of popular opinion, and how Justin Timberlake’s white male privilege had allowed him to skate through both of these controversies unscathed. (The New York Times released documentaries about both Spears and Jackson.) In a New York courtroom, the victims of R. Kelly were telling the same stories they’d been telling for years and finally being heard, if damnably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted in plain sight, while far too many of us turned away..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}So many of these conversations were so long overdue, kicked down the road because of how difficult it is for masses of people to face hard truths. But documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears,” “Allen V. Farrow” and “Surviving R. Kelly” (from 2019) helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series, using a familiar narrative vocabulary to sharpen viewers’ understanding of familiar events they thought they knew all about. As uncomfortable as most of these documentaries were to watch, their mass consumption helped shift public opinion, set the terms of cultural conversation, and in some cases maybe even expedited justice.Victims of R. Kelly were finally heard this year, if regrettably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted for years in plain sight.Tannen Maury/EPA, via ShutterstockBut not every reconsideration felt as vital as the next. By now it feels like there is also a thriving and somewhat formulaic cottage industry for content that reconsiders the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. In September, Rolling Stone released an updated version of its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list, a fascinating and (given the racial and gender biases of its previous iterations) even noble endeavor whose critical perspectives will nonetheless, in time, look as dated and of-their-moment as those of the one it replaced. A month later, the online music magazine Pitchfork caused a brief furor when it “rescored” 19 of its old reviews, seemingly to reflect changing public opinions. (I worked there from 2011 to 2014, and one of the rescored reviews was mine.)Operating from a similar point of view, HBO has released several music documentaries in partnership with the entertainment and sports website The Ringer that invite the viewer to relive massively popular ’90s cultural phenomena (the rise of Alanis Morissette; Woodstock ’99) through the seemingly more enlightened perspective of 2021. (I worked at The Ringer from 2016-19.) Directed by the filmmaker Garret Price, “Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage” first came to HBO Max in July. The documentary makes the case — through repeated and rather heavy-handed montages of Columbine, the Clintons and music videos featuring angry young men in cargo shorts — that 1999 was a very particular time in pop culture, seemingly alien to anyone who didn’t live through it. The economy was prosperous and so bands were apolitical, raging against nothing in particular, or so we were told.“The intention was to do something contemporary,” the Woodstock promoter Michael Lang says at the end of the film, summing up the hubris of the original festival’s turn-of-the-millennium update. Woodstock ’99’s catastrophic failures — countless sexual assaults; several preventable deaths; massive, horrifying crowds of white people gleefully rapping the N-word — are presented in the documentary with a comforting assurance that this was the kind of thing that only could have happened in the wacky, angsty late ’90s. Never again! Right?It is surreal to watch this documentary in the aftermath of November’s Astroworld Festival tragedy, which led to 10 deaths. The parallels to Woodstock ’99 (or, since time is still kind of a flat circle, the 1969 Altamont Free Concert) are haunting, with security forces that were inadequate to control such large crowds. The past, it seemed, wasn’t even past.At one point in “Woodstock 99,” the music critic Steven Hyden reflects back on the aura surrounding the original 1969 festival, and how much of it was constructed by the idyllic documentary “Woodstock.” “The problem is that instead of learning from mistakes that were made, we instead created this romanticized mythology in the form of the documentary,” Hyden said. “People watched the film, and they chose to believe that’s the way it really was.”Todd Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality. Apple TV+I wonder if something like the opposite is happening now: The allure of presentism is causing people to romanticize contemporary perspectives at the expense of an excessively vilified past. It’s uncomfortable to dwell in gray areas, to admit imperfections, to acknowledge blind spots — better to have a 100-minute documentary or four-part podcast to allow us to tidily “reconsider” something that we got wrong the first time around, so we never have to think too hard about it again.But to believe the linear, one-dimensional narrative that Woodstock ’99 or misogynistic media coverage of Britney Spears can only be visible in hindsight is to gloss over the fact that plenty of people felt uncomfortable with these phenomena while they were happening. To dutifully perform belated horror at how tabloids wrote about Spears in the early 2000s, how macho rock culture was in the late ’90s, how blithely racist white people who listen to hip-hop used to be, is in some ways to believe a comforting fiction that all of these problems have been solved once and for all.The past was imperfect, yes, but so is the present. Inevitably, the future will be too. The lesson to be taken from all these reconsiderations is not necessarily how much wiser we are now, but how difficult it is to see the biases of the present moment. If anything, these looks back should be reminders to stay vigilant against presentism, conventional wisdom and the numbing orthodoxy of groupthink. They invite us to wonder about the blind spots of our current cultural moment, and to watch out for the sorts of behaviors and assumptions that will, in 20 years’ time, look nearsighted enough to appear in a kitschy montage about the way things were.The best movie I saw this year broke this cycle, essentially by presenting another, more harmonious way the past and present coexist. Todd Haynes’s remarkable and immersive documentary “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality — a little bit like Andy Warhol did in his own slow, strange art films.I was not alive in 1967, the year the Velvet Underground released its debut album, but for a heady and hypnotic two hours, I could have sworn I was. Split-screen images suggested the validity of multiple truths. The music’s blaring brilliance rained down self-evidently rather than having to be overexplained by talking heads. Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico and Moe Tucker all seemed, at various moments, to be both geniuses and jerks. Neither glorified nor condemned, 1967 came flickering alive and seemed about as wonderful and awful a time to be alive as 1999 or 2021. Or, it stands to reason, 2022. More

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      ‘Jagged’ Review: The Painful Road to Era-Defining Success

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      This documentary from Alison Klayman catalogs the odds that Alanis Morissette overcame to make her 1995 hit album “Jagged Little Pill.”Alanis Morissette’s megaselling, epoch-defining 1995 album “Jagged Little Pill” sounds like an obvious centerpiece for a film. Until, that is, you consider the comparatively low number of documentaries about women in rock and pop, especially focusing on the creation of a record. Just look at how few female musicians are represented in the long-running documentary series “Classic Albums.”Kudos, then, to the director Alison Klayman for getting “Jagged” done in the first place.It kicks off with Morissette’s start as a teen sensation in the 1980s and tracks her transformation into a generation’s electrifying bard. Klayman (“The Brink”) is at her best illustrating Morissette’s candid, thoughtful reminiscences with period footage, and documenting the wild year that followed the release of “Jagged Little Pill,” when the newly minted star toured nonstop, backed by male bandmates who now semi-sheepishly confess to preying on the girls and young women flocking to the concerts. (Morissette has recently distanced herself from “Jagged,” accusing it of having a “salacious agenda” and offering a “reductive take.”)The film, which is fairly conventional aesthetically and narratively, follows the testosterone-laden “Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage” in HBO’s Music Box series. Taken together, they paint an unsettling portrait of the structural and behavioral sexism pervasive in the music world — a former radio program director interviewed in “Jagged” remarks, for example, that “it was regarded as a no-no to play female artists back to back.”This makes the vision of Morissette reclaiming her life and art in great, powerful yelps while pacing arena stages in baggy T-shirts all the more thrilling: We know the cost.JaggedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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      in Theater

      'Jagged Little Pill' Producers Respond to Controversies

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      “Jagged Little Pill” barrels into tonight’s Tony Awards with 15 nominations, more than any other show — but also with its producers confronting two controversies that have prompted scrutiny and an apology.The show, a musical featuring Alanis Morissette songs and a script that explores a host of social issues, is one of three contenders for best musical, and is a leading contender in the best featured actress and best book categories. It plans to resume performances on Broadway next month.But in the run-up to the Tonys the show’s producers have found themselves responding to criticism over how depictions of a character’s gender identity evolved as the show developed, and over the accusation by a former member of the cast who said they were asked to delay a surgical procedure. (The Tony voting period ended in March, before that accusation became public.)On Saturday, the show’s lead producers, Vivek J. Tiwary, Arvind Ethan David and Eva Price, said that they had hired an employment lawyer to look into an accusation from the former cast member, Nora Schell, who uses the pronouns they and them, and who said the production had asked them to delay a procedure to remove vaginal cysts. The union representing stage performers, Actors’ Equity, also said it would investigate; Schell said a union vice president was among those who mishandled the medical concerns.The statement from the producers came a little more than a week after the musical had issued an apology for its response to concerns about the gender identity of one of the show’s main characters, Jo, who is played by Lauren Patten, a nominee for best featured actress in a musical.During the show’s pre-Broadway run, some people saw Jo as a rare example of nonbinary representation in a major musical; when the show then transferred to Broadway, some of those fans were disappointed with how the role had evolved.“In Jo, we set out to portray a character on a gender expansive journey without a known outcome,” the lead producers said. “Throughout the creative process, as the character evolved and changed, between Boston and Broadway, we made mistakes in how we handled this evolution. In a process designed to clarify and streamline, many of the lines that signaled Jo as gender nonconforming, and with them, something vital and integral, got removed from Jo’s character journey.”The producers said they had “hired a new dramaturgical team (which includes nonbinary, transgender and BIPOC representation), to revisit and deepen the script.”Schell, who was a member of the ensemble when the musical opened in late 2019, voiced their concerns about backstage treatment on Twitter.“During previews for the Broadway run of JAGGED LITTLE PILL I was intimidated, coerced and forced by multiple higher ups to put off CRITICAL AND NECESSARY surgery to remove growths from my vagina that were making me anemic,” Schell wrote.The producers responded with their own statement, declaring themselves “deeply troubled” by the claims and pledging to “take this matter very seriously.”“Broadway shows are by their very nature collaborative human efforts, so there is nothing more important to us than our people,” they said. “We are committed to continuing to nurture a work environment where everyone feels valued and respected.”On Saturday, one of the show’s Tony-nominated stars, Celia Rose Gooding, said on Twitter that she was concerned by the allegations. Responding to Schell’s tweet, she wrote, “this is unacceptable. nobody should have to put off necessary medical treatment for a show, ever.”And, in a more general tweet bidding farewell to the show, which she is leaving for a role in “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” she wrote that she “cannot ignore the harm Jagged has done to the trans and nonbinary community.” More

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      in Television

      For a Tony Nominee, an Apartment With a Sense of Drama

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      Kathryn Gallagher’s Upper West Side home ‘was never supposed to be a one-bedroom apartment.’ But that’s why she likes it.When Kathryn Gallagher was 11, the career demands of her father, the actor Peter Gallagher, forced the family to leave the Upper West Side of Manhattan for Los Angeles. A decade or so later, the demands of her own burgeoning career — specifically, a role in the 2015 Broadway revival of “Spring Awakening” — meant a move back to Manhattan. And she knew precisely where she wanted to land.“I was like, ‘If I’m going to live in New York, it has to be the Upper West Side, which is home, and which is where the best bagels are to be found,’” said Ms. Gallagher, now 28, a current Tony nominee for her performance in the musical “Jagged Little Pill” and a Season 2 cast member of the Amazon series “Modern Love,” based on the New York Times column. “This is my neighborhood.”Initially, she rented a studio apartment on the fourth floor of a walk-up building near Central Park West, the fulfillment of every “young-woman-in-the-big-city” dream she ever had. There were tall windows, exposed brick, crown molding and just the right degree of scruffiness. But what with the three or four (or more) daily walks required by her dog, Willie Nelson, the trips up and down the stairs became burdensome.Kathryn Gallagher, 28, who is nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the musical “Jagged Little Pill,” lives in a one-bedroom rental in a townhouse near Riverside Park.James GallagherKathryn Gallagher, 28Occupation: Actor and songwriterDesign for living: “It’s very helpful for have a mother who’s an interior decorator. I inherited my mom’s sense of style, but added 50 points for zany wackiness.”Ms. Gallagher is an avid student of life. Her conversation is studded with phrases like “lessons hard learned,” “a journey of learning” and “learning curve.” So it will come as no surprise that when she went hunting for a new apartment two and a half years ago, she had absorbed enough wisdom to hold out for something that was close to ground level but with the raffish charm of the walk-up.She found such a place — a one-bedroom with high ceilings and period detail on the parlor floor of a townhouse near Riverside Park — at the end of a long, rainy day of searching with her mother, Paula Harwood, an interior designer.“The moment I walked in, I was like, ‘When this was a single-family home, this was where they gathered after work to smoke a pipe and have a whiskey, and there were books lining the walls.’ I created a whole fantasy for the life that was lived in here before,” Ms. Gallagher said.“This is a one-bedroom apartment that was never supposed to be a one-bedroom apartment,” she added. “I think of it as a library and a lounge. I love it.”It’s true that there’s more vertical than horizontal space, and Ms. Gallagher, an eager cook, has “a criminally small” kitchen. But, really, what’s a dearth of counter space when measured against the vintage mirror over the fireplace, the fireplace itself, the Tiffany-style ceiling pendant, the French doors separating the living room from the bedroom, and the massive wood front door?“I’m obsessed with the door,” Ms. Gallagher said. “No one is messing with this door. This door has seen many things.”“I love having meteorites and beautiful stones all around the apartment,” she said. “And I like having things around, like my tarot cards, that make me happy and connect me to something.” James GallagherIn pulling the apartment together, Ms. Gallagher came to an important realization: Mom really does know best. It was Ms. Harwood, after all, who inveighed against the folly of trying, as she put it, to move in overnight. “She was like, ‘You won’t know what you need for six months. Don’t buy everything at the beginning,’” Ms. Gallagher said.Only recently, for example, did she have radiator covers made. “I was like, ‘Of course I need them.’ But it took me a long time to realize they were even an option,” she said, noting that she’s using the newly available flat surfaces to hold books. “I’m really excited about that.”The one thing she did insist on soon after signing the lease was a red velvet sofa. “And my mother was like, ‘Are you sure?’” Ms. Gallagher said. “‘Because if you get a red velvet couch, everything else has to be chill. You can’t get an orange chair and a purple rug.’”As if. The red velvet, tufted, Tuxedo-style sectional makes its strong statement, while a leaf-patterned rug in shades of sage, cream and blue provides appropriately quiet support. “It’s the kind of couch that, if this were the 1920s, someone with curls in a long silk robe would be sitting on it smoking a skinny cigarette and drinking a martini,” she said.In the interest of filling out the scene she has so earnestly conjured, an Art Deco bar cart with mirrored shelves is just a few feet away.In moments of uncertainty in life and in work, Ms. Gallagher’s first instinct is to nest. “I never imagined spending so much time in the apartment,” she said. “But since the pandemic, I’m finding I just love it more and more, and have found little ways to personalize it, by putting things that make me happy in every corner.”The list includes tarot cards, guitars and journals. Atop and around the fireplace are large quantities of crystals and candles, as well as vases that once contained congratulatory opening-night bouquets, then candy canes during Christmas season, and now dried flowers.Nick Cordero, an actor known primarily for his theater work, died last year of Covid-19. Friends, including Ms. Gallagher, poured the contents of a whiskey bottle into the Hudson River in tribute to him. The empty bottle now sits on the mantel of Ms. Gallagher’s fireplace. James GallagherOn the wall behind the sofa hangs a photo of Ms. Gallagher’s maternal grandmother, who was a member of the now-defunct ballet company at Radio City Music Hall; an original piece by Erté, a gift from that same grandmother; and a needlepoint likeness of the four principal female “Jagged Little Pill” cast members, stitched by Ms. Gallagher’s dresser, Dyanna Hallick.On a wall in the bedroom is a handwritten card from Alanis Morissette, whose music forms the basis of “Pill”: “Kathryn: thanks for your courage and willingness and grace and power and vulnerability. Love Alanis.”Peter Gallagher, who is “super handy,” according to his daughter, took on the role of picture-hanger and also installed a clothes rod in an armoire from the family’s old apartment, to turn it into a coat closet for Ms. Gallagher.“I had my dad on FaceTime when I was re-caulking the bathtub and when I was putting in an air-conditioner,” she said. “I think he was prouder of me for installing the A/C than he was of my Tony nomination.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More