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    ‘Why Am I So Single?’ Review: After ‘Six,’ a Scrappy, Sappy Dating Musical

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    The duo behind the Broadway hit follow it up with a meta reflection on finding love online that is relatable and fun but lacking narrative drive.In London’s West End, two lonely singles are feeling sorry for themselves. Nancy (Leesa Tulley) and her gay, nonbinary best friend, Oliver (Jo Foster), conduct a two-hour inquest into their romantic failures while quaffing cheap bubbly on a peach-colored couch. At the same time, they bat around an idea for a musical based on these travails, which — you guessed it — turns out to be the musical we’re watching.“Why Am I So Single?” is written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the duo behind “Six,” the breakout hit feminist musical about Henry VIII’s wives. Running at the Garrick Theater through Feb. 13, 2025, this unabashedly crowd-pleasing — though ultimately somewhat vacuous — show goes all in on relatability and schmaltz, carrying a peppy message about friendship and self-care.The songs unpack the modern dating experience in a mélange of familiar rock and pop styles. “C U Never” is a catchy tap number about the importance of not getting too hung up on people who ghost you. During “Meet Market,” several members of the supporting cast are wheeled around in pink shopping carts to symbolize the transactional nature of online dating. “Disco Ball” is about being the life of the party while feeling lonely inside, and “Men R Trash” is self-explanatory.In “I Got Off the Plane’” Nancy and Oliver lament their love-hate relationship with the sitcom “Friends,” which they blame for popularizing an unrealistic and heteronormative view of romance — whereupon members of the supporting cast take to the stage in Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer wigs and urge the pair to get over themselves.The show, directed by Moss, has the chaotic, playful energy of a student revue, with lots of amusingly forced rhymes, tenuous puns and self-aware jokes about the metafictional conceit (“Twist my arm and call me expositional”; “before we rebuild the fourth wall …”). There is a heavy reliance on bathos that borders on the formulaic: Whenever characters pour their hearts out in song, another will immediately say something dismissive. After Nancy sings a tender ballad about her dead father — the only genuinely moving song in the show — Oliver quips, “So what you’re saying is, it was the daddy issues after all?”Leesa Tulley, center, as Nancy.Matt CrockettWe 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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      ‘Six’ Creators Announce Their Second Act

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      Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow spent years working out how to follow their hit musical about Henry VIII’s wives. “Why Am I So Single?” is their answer.In January 2019, Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, the creators of the musical “Six,” were on a writer’s retreat in Connecticut, wondering how to follow up their celebrated first show.That month, “Six” — in which Henry VIII’s wives tell their stories via pop songs — was starting a major West End run, and a Broadway transfer was on the horizon. The show had already been a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and a growing number of American fans were streaming the show’s soundtrack. More and more, people wanted to know what the pair would do next.During the Connecticut retreat, they struggled to come up with new ideas, Marlow recalled in a recent interview, and instead gossiped about their love lives. Then, they had a breakthrough: “Maybe this is what we should write about,” Marlow said.On Wednesday, Marlow, 29, and Moss, 30, announced that their second musical, “Why Am I So Single?,” will open at the Garrick Theater in London on Aug. 27.The show, which has a 12-person cast, follows two friends struggling to write a musical and asking each other why they’re chronically single. That idea may sound similar to the creators’ time in Connecticut, but Moss, laughing nervously, said it was “definitely not a complete autobiography.”Marlow said that the musical, which includes songs inspired by Dua Lipa hits and numbers from “Singin’ in the Rain,” was “about friendship and love and loneliness and everything that goes with it.”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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      Lucy Moss Unwinds With Songwriting and TikTok Cleaning Tutorials

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      The Tony Award-nominated co-director of “Six” shares the corners of the internet she haunts to help her stay productive.At 26, Lucy Moss became the youngest woman ever to direct a Broadway musical: the global hit, “Six,” which she had co-written at 23 with Toby Marlow, and co-directed with Jamie Armitage. The show, structured as a pop concert battle in which the wives of Henry VIII compete to see who suffered the most, began at the Edinburgh fringe festival in 2017 and now has six productions running worldwide.At 28, Moss is now up for best direction and best original score at the Tony Awards, and just directed a reimagined revival of “Legally Blonde” at London’s Regent’s Park Open Air Theater, running through July and starring a largely queer, mostly Black and brown cast.“At first I was quite a snob about movie adaptations, thinking they’re usually not good, even though that’s not true,” she said on a recent Zoom call from her apartment in London. “It also wasn’t very queer, so I didn’t know if it was my vibe. Then I saw the original’s MTV recording and thought it was the best thing I’d seen in my life.”The London native discussed the diverse bits of culture — pop, online, and IRL — that propel her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. A Weeping Willow in Regent’s Park When you walk in from the Baker Street Underground station, there’s a bridge and then this lone tree on the bank of the little lake. I’m usually on the tube stressing about something, trying to send 20 emails or whatever, so to then go into the park is just so beautiful, particularly when I was going in for auditions and meetings in the winter. I love weeping willows, I feel a very kindred spirit in them. They’re just falling over, like, “Ugh, everything is so difficult.” I can just look at it and go, “Yeah, same.”2. “Circle Jerk” by Fake Friends — Onstage I paid for, like, three tickets for the digital version of it in 2020 and kept watching it afterward — maybe 40 times? I immediately became their biggest fan from across the internet, and then we did “Ratatouille the Musical” together and became friends. I love how dense it is, textually. It’s such a rich rewatch, and just so funny and nuanced and stupid.I know it quite well at this point — the performances and choices and all that — and I imagine there’ll be new TikTok references [in the new production]. I just can’t believe I get to see it in the flesh. I’ve never been more excited to see a live show.3. Basketball Shorts They’re a great length; you can wear them high-waisted and still not have them be super short. I feel like myself in them. I went to a vintage shop and bought a bunch, so now I have a pair for every day of the week. Now I’m dabbling in wearing them lower, but high-waisting my underwear line, with a crop top. Although, last night, I had to give my phone to a friend because it kept pulling them down.4. Her Cousin Max My mom’s sister’s son is my best friend, and the baby of the family. I love that he has a phone now so I can send him sort of memes of geese and stuff. He texts like a grandma, with correct capitalization and punctuation. I texted him to remind him of the time he fell into the pond at my mom’s house and he replied, “Oh gosh! That brings back memories.” It’s like a novel.5. Cleaning TikTok (“CleanTok”) I watch these when I’m going to bed, when I should be reading a book or something. It’s so soothing and relaxing to see videos of people cleaning their bathrooms — especially the ones from Japan, because they have gadgets that click in and out of place. I watch and fall asleep, though, I’ve absolutely not learned anything from them. Actually, I realized how clean you can actually get things to be.6. The “Contrapoints” YouTube Channel She is just the queen of nuance. Her videos are such a weird, amazing combo of academia made really accessible, and comedy and dress-up. They’re only about an hour but still so thorough, and she’s so empathetic. Sure, she’ll mock people but she’s ultimately discussing the roots of what’s going on in society. She doesn’t place herself higher than anybody else.7. @ZeeWhatIDid I guess she’s kind of like an influencer? She’s a British teenage TikToker who is so charismatic and sweet. She does cosplay and makeup tutorials and Marvel stuff, which I’m not even into, but I’m just happy that TikTok exists for her. She’ll be doing highlighter on her face and talking about blinding your enemies; she’s so gorgeous and funny. I love that she’s living her best life online.8. Writing Songs It’s a good way to unwind without feeling like I’m wasting my life. I don’t have plans to do anything with them, and I often put in little personal in-jokes. I just like the actual process of writing something just for myself, particularly as someone who is usually writing with other people, and always to a specific end. If I was writing with Toby, they’d be like, “Oh no, that rhyme should be at the end of the line,” or something to actually improve it, but I don’t have to do that alone.9. The Bush Theater in London Lynette Linton was made its artistic director a few years ago, and I admire her so much. She runs this building in such an incredible way; the way that everybody in the building interacts with her and each other, it’s such good vibes. And the actual space is amazing: The library is gorgeous, there’s a nice little cafe, and the shows they put on are always championing and nurturing young, different voices that other theaters wouldn’t necessarily do. And it’s in west London, which is where I grew up. So it’s kind of the only cool thing in west London, basically.10. A 2014 Video of Russell Brand Giving Away a CroissantI used to watch his show, “The Trews,” where he would discuss the news, and it got a bit more serious. And then, in the middle of that, there’s this video of him trying to give away a luxury croissant on the motorway. I watch it so often and quote it all the time, which obviously nobody even knows. It makes me so happy, I just love the way he says “croissant” and sings about this segment being his “trafficky bit.” I’ve been obsessed with this video since then and I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. More

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      Catherine Was Great. But Was She a Girl Boss?

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      In seeking to turn historical women into yassified contemporary heroines, pop culture creators are narrowing what female success can look like.Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, enjoyed embroidery and fasting. Little in the historical record suggests that she was any fun at a party.“Unfortunately, Catherine of Aragon just, like, loved church and was always praying and was kind of a bummer,” Dana Schwartz, a writer who hosts the podcast “Noble Blood,” told me recently.Yet there Catherine is, in the Broadway musical “Six,” vibrating her vocal cords like a Tudor-era Beyoncé, in a thigh-scraping miniskirt and studded boots — a girl boss, early modern style. “Six,” a giddy pop confection about the six wives of Henry VIII, joins recent works like “Dickinson,” the AppleTV+ comedy just concluding its final season, and “The Great,” the Hulu dramedy that recently released its second, in revamping notable women of past centuries as the cool girls of today. It’s history. With contouring.For decades now, popular culture and media have made a concerted effort — mostly laudable, occasionally cloying — to reclaim forgotten or maligned women. Think of the “Rebel Girls” books, the biopics that glut the Oscar race, even the Overlooked obituary series in The New York Times.Some of these works explore women’s lives mindful of particular historical contexts, acknowledging their achievements within the often oppressive systems of their times. Others, like “Dickinson” and to a lesser extent “The Great,” take a deliberately freewheeling approach to history, inventing counterfactual privileges and possibilities for their heroines. Still others, like “Six,” feed history through the YassifyBot, Facetuning women’s lives so that they seem fiercer, sexier, more aspirational — selfie-ready, way before cameras were invented.This girlbossification nearly always puts women in competition with each other, rather than emphasizing shared struggle. It diminishes oppression and bias, suggesting that any woman can get ahead if she just puts on her big girl panties and rises-and-grinds hard enough, retconning the necessary fictions of our own cultural moment into the past.In a moment when popular culture confuses fame and excellence, works like these also imply an inability to appreciate female merit absent of sex and glamour. The desire to zhuzh up women of history — Hey, it’s so super that you changed the world, but couldn’t you have done it in a bustier?— says a lot more about our own time than times past. When we reframe herstory as an Instagram story, what do we lose?I should probably tell you that questions like these make me feel like a scold. I hate that. You know who’s really no fun at parties? Scolds. Besides, I love “Dickinson.” I admire “The Great.” The songs in “Six” are absolute bops. None of these works aspire to historical accuracy. “The Great,” in particular, has the cheeky tagline of “an occasionally true story.” And even if they did, we probably shouldn’t be getting our history from prestige comedies and musicals.Hailee Steinfeld, left, as Emily Dickinson and Wiz Khalifa as Death in “Dickinson.”Michael Parmelee/Apple TV+Also, real life, even the real lives of great women, is mostly boring. Would you watch three seasons of a show in which Emily Dickinson sits alone at her desk, scratching out verse with a pencil? But there are telling emphases in these shows and equally telling excisions. This new breed of heroine is ambitious and sex positive, with impeccably modern politics. Rather than understanding these women as products of their time, we make them creatures of ours.Schwartz told me that she understands the impulse to sex up historical women. It lavishes attention on them, correcting the dismissiveness of earlier historians.“But that then has the collective effect of making these women less interesting and less honest in who they were within their periods,” she said.At least, “Dickinson,” created by Alena Smith, plays with this dishonesty purposefully and boldly, taking the wildness and desire that suffused Emily Dickinson’s poetry, if not her life, and externalizing it through scenes in which Hailee Steinfeld’s Emily twerks at house parties and takes carriage rides with Wiz Khalifa’s Death.The real Dickinson was introverted and, despite her on-trend eyebrows, not a particular beauty. “In terms of being a cool girl, I don’t really know if she was,” Monica Pelaez, a Dickinson scholar who has advised the show, told me. “She chose to seclude herself.”The historical Dickinson doesn’t seem to have dressed as a man or protested as an ecowarrior or taken multiple lovers or heaved her bosom in a daring red dress. But her poetry and letters conjure vivid emotional states, so “Dickinson” colors Emily’s life with this dynamism, colliding reality and fantasy.“What the show does is bring that sensibility from her poetry and dramatize it,” Pelaez said.The Emily who emerges is confident, career-minded, fascinating to men and women, a corrective to previous works (even recent ones like Terence Davies’s 2016 movie “A Quiet Passion”) that ignored the queerness her letters and poems suggest. But while “Dickinson” seems acutely aware of the sociopolitics of 19th-century New England, the show often argues for Emily’s exceptionalism by differentiating her — and to a lesser extent her sister, Lavinia (Anna Baryshnikov), and sister-in-law, Sue (Ella Hunt) — from the other women of Amherst.Rather than looking for solidarity among the women of her progressive community, Emily emphasizes this difference. “I’m just not made for traditional feminine handicrafts,” she complains during a sewing circle scene, the implication being that women who are made for them don’t deserve a prestige TV series.Elle Fanning as Catherine in the second season of the Hulu series “The Great.”Gareth Gatrell/HuluIn this way Emily resembles Catherine, of “The Great,” which slid its 10-episode second season onto Hulu a few weeks ago. Created by Tony McNamara (who also co-wrote the lightly counterfactual battling-British-royals comedy “The Favourite”), the series stars a luminous Elle Fanning as a German princess who arrives at the Russian court as a teenager and promptly claims the tsardom for herself. Liberated from chronology and fact, the comedy-drama twiddles the timeline of Catherine’s career and marriage. (Let’s just say that the real Peter struggled to consummate their relationship and the Peter of “The Great,” played by Nicholas Hoult, does not.)Bright, colorful and cruel, like a dish of poisoned candies, the show occasionally portrays Catherine as naïve. But she learns fast and her emergent politics and commitment to hustle are beautifully modern. She wants to end Russia’s wars, free its serfs, teach women to read, inoculate her subjects. (This is more or less true of the historical Catherine.) And in her ball gowns? An absolute smokeshow.The legacy of the real Catherine, who came to the throne not as a dewy teenager, but as a more seasoned 33-year-old, was of course more complicated. “She actually increased serfdom,” said Hilde Hoogenboom, a professor of Russian who has translated Catherine’s memoirs.Hoogenboom describes “The Great” as the “Disneyfication” of the real Catherine. To make her a fairy tale princess, the series also insists on differentiating Catherine from the other women at court, representing her as a savvy It Girl, more beautiful and more powerful than her peers.“Bitch,” one noblewoman sneers.“Empress bitch,” Catherine corrects her.The real Catherine was different. (And as someone who routinely elevated her lovers and male allies, not so big on sisterhood.) But she was one of several 18th-century female heads of states, including the Empress Elisabeth, her immediate predecessor, a fact that “The Great” conveniently elides. Instead it presents Elisabeth (Belinda Bromilow) as a dithery nymphomaniac, raising Catherine up by pushing Elisabeth and her underwear down.“Six,” created by Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, puts its women in competition even more explicitly, structuring the show as an “American Idol”-style vocal contest. A blingy take on trauma porn, it demands that each woman sing not about her character or integrity, but about the wrongs she suffered at Henry’s meaty hands. Here are the rules, as detailed in the opening number:The Queen who was dealt the worst handThe Queen with the most hardships to withstandThe Queen for whom it didn’t really go as plannedShall be the one to lead the band.From left: Andrea Macasaet, Adrianna Hicks and Anna Uzele in the musical “Six.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBefore ending in a mostly empty gesture of solidarity, “Six” simplifies and updates many of these women, turning Anne Boleyn, an astute political player, into a foxy good-time-girl, framing Katherine Howard, a blatant victim of abuse, as a barely legal tease. (“Lock up your husbands, lock up your sons/ K-Howard is here and the fun’s begun.”) The costume design, in a nod to pop norms, sexualizes each women, coupling their worth with their hotness.In her song, Katherine Parr, Henry’s widow, reminds listeners of her accomplishments:I wrote books, and psalms, and meditations,Fought for female educationSo all my women could independently study scriptureI even got a woman to paint my pictureWhy can’t I tell that story?Well, why can’t she? Instead, the songs from “Six” center the women’s relationships to Henry, emphasizing his attraction to them (or rejection of them) over any of the wives’ accomplishments. “The things that these women were doing should be of historical interest, regardless of whether or not they were all married to this [expletive] dude,” Jessica Keene, a history professor who studies the Tudor period, said.This substitution of sexuality for excellence can extend even into more enlightened shows. That sewing circle episode of “Dickinson” includes a dynamic cameo from Sojourner Truth, played by the writer and talk show host Ziwe. Because “Dickinson” remains exquisitely self-aware, it jokes about Ziwe’s youthful appearance (“I’m roughly 66, but I look good as hell”) and Truth’s 19th-century sex bomb vibe (“Oh, they’re going to know I’m a woman in this dress”).But the real Sojourner Truth, who came to public life in middle age, didn’t lead with sex. Corinne T. Field, who has written on Truth, described her as a figure who critiqued girlish beauty and sexuality. “Her whole public career is built as someone who had already aged beyond youth and was occupying a position of power and charisma that did not rely on girlish beauty,” Field said.I asked Field what we miss when “Dickinson” depicts a woman like Truth this way. “An investment in intergenerational networks of mutual care,” Field said without pausing. “We need to think about how you sustain female empowerment over the course of a whole life.”If creators, even creators with explicitly feminist aims like Smith and Moss, believe that audiences won’t pay attention to female protagonists absent of youth and beauty, they will likely frame empowerment narrowly. And maybe that’s necessary on some level. The recent and more accurate versions — like “A Quiet Passion,” 2019’s “Catherine the Great” and this year’s “Anne Boleyn” — tend to be less fun.“If girlbossification is the price to elevate female historical figures to the mainstream consciousness, so be it,” Schwartz said.That consciousness could then encourage viewers to seek out what Schwartz called “actual historically accurate sources.” And in these sources they might find that sometimes women changed the world in flats or with split ends or in common cause with other women or when they weren’t especially sexy or young. A few of them must have had a really solid grasp of traditional feminine handicrafts. Where is the absolute bop for that? More

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      The Breakout Stars of 2021

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      In a year that offered glimmers of hope across the world of arts, these performers and creators rose to the occasion.Olivia Rodrigo, members of the cast of “Reservation Dogs” and a scene from “Sanctuary City.”Clockwise from left: Mat Hayward/Getty Images; jeremy Dennis for The New York Times; Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe cultural world began to sputter back to life this year, and in turn, so did many of us — slipping out of our sweats and into movie theaters, clubs and Broadway shows. Even for those who were less confident rubbing (or bumping) elbows in public, artists brought us plenty of joy in the safety of our home. It may not have been the beforetimes, but in 2021, these artists and creators from across the arts gave us a fresh outlook.Pop MusicOlivia RodrigoFor those of us over 30, Olivia Rodrigo seemed to come out of nowhere with her colossal debut single, “Drivers License,” a heartbreak ballad that dropped in January and stayed at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks. But for a younger audience, Rodrigo, 18, was familiar from her time as a Disney child star. Despite that pedigree, she didn’t drag along a squeaky clean image.Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic at The New York Times, called “Sour,” her debut album from May, “nuanced and often exceptional,” deploying “sweet pop and tart punk equally well.” He called Rodrigo, a California-raised Filipino American, “an optimal pop star for the era of personalities, subpersonalities and metapersonalities.”As Rodrigo told GQ magazine in June, “Something that I learned very early on is the importance of separating person versus persona. When people who don’t know me are criticizing me, they’re criticizing my persona, not my person.”Olivia Rodrigo’s colossal debut single, “Drivers License,” stayed at the top of the charts.Mat Hayward/Getty Images for IheartmediaTelevisionLee Jung-jaeBlood-drenched, brutally violent entertainment is rarely synonymous with nuanced, complex performances. But in Netflix’s “Squid Game,” a dystopian thriller from South Korea that became a global streaming sensation, Lee Jung-jae, 49, pulled off just that. As the protagonist Seong Gi-hun, a gambling addict who is deeply in debt, he gives a wrenching and surprisingly subtle performance as he battles his way through unspeakable horrors.But Lee, a model-turned-actor who has starred in several hit Korean films like last year’s gangster drama “Deliver Us From Evil,” doesn’t play Gi-hun as a hero or a villain, a bumbling fool or a savvy con man. “Gi-hun’s emotions are very complicated,” Lee told The Times in October.“Squid Game,” he went on, “is not really a show about survival games. It’s about people.”TheaterThe Authors of ‘Six’In October, “Six” became the first musical to have its opening night on Broadway since the pandemic shutdown in March 2020, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. An exuberant and cheeky pop musical about the wives of Henry VIII, it brought much-needed fun and noise to the stage — thanks to Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, who wrote the book, music and lyrics. (Moss also directed the show with Jamie Armitage.)The hit show is “a rollicking, reverberant blast from the past” that “turns Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives into spunky modern-day pop stars,” as Jesse Green, the theater critic at The Times, and Maya Phillips, a critic-at-large, put it. Think Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj, whom the leading divas were in some ways modeled after.Marlow came up with the idea for “Six” while daydreaming during a poetry class at Cambridge University, where he and Moss, now both 27, became fast friends. “This,” Moss told The Times in 2019, “is obviously the craziest thing that’s ever happened to us.”MoviesAunjanue EllisIn 1995, The Times called Aunjanue Ellis an up-and-comer for her role in the Shakespeare Festival production of “The Tempest” in Central Park. Ellis “projects nearly as much force offstage as she does in character as Ariel,” the article read. That fire hasn’t wavered in the years since, whether on film —“Ray,” “The Help,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” — or on TV in “When They See Us” and “Lovecraft Country,” both of which earned her Emmy nominations.Now, in the movie “King Richard,” Ellis delivers a megawatt performance as Oracene, the mother of Venus and Serena Williams (opposite Will Smith as Richard) — turning a supporting role into a talker and generating Oscar buzz.In an interview this fall, Ellis, now 52, talked about what makes her say yes to a role: “Can I do it and not be embarrassed and stand by the fact that I’ve done it?” she says she asks herself. “Is it fun to play and am I doing a service to Black women?”.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;}Classical MusicEun Sun Kim“An artist is never satisfied,” said Eun Sun Kim after the San Francisco Opera’s production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” on Oct. 14 — despite an extended ovation and shouts of “Bravo!” from the audience.After all, Kim — the first female music director of a major opera company in the United States and the first Asian to take on such a role, a monumental appointment that became official in August — has a lot on her plate. Not only is she grappling with the company’s financial fallout from the pandemic, she inherited the opera’s previous problems, like declining attendance.“It’s a hard job, it’s a big job, whether you’re a woman or a man,” she told The Times in October. “I want to be seen just as a conductor.”Kim, 41, whose conducting debut in the states was in 2017 with the Houston Grand Opera production of “La Traviata,” is aiming to broaden the art form’s appeal in the digital age. The company hopes her appointment will do the same; there were advertisements featuring her image with the words “A new era begins” around the city.“Opera is not boring or old,” she said in October. “It’s the same human beings, the same stories, whether it was 200 years ago or nowadays.”Eun Sun Kim, the first female music director of a major opera company in the United States, at the San Francisco Opera in October.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesArtJennifer PackerLast year, Jennifer Packer, 37, a painter who depicts contemporary Black life through atmospheric portraits and still lifes, told The Times that she’s driven by thoughts of “emotional and moral buoyancy in the face of various kinds of impoverishment and de facto captivity.”Now, that perspective is on display in her biggest solo exhibition, “The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing,” on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show includes about 30 of her works from the past decade, including the painting “A Lesson in Longing,” which was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial — as well as works that speak to Black lives lost to police brutality. Her largest painting, “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!),” referring to Breonna Taylor, was created during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.In reviewing Packer’s Whitney exhibition for The Times, Aruna D’Souza wrote that no other artist right now is doing as much as Packer “to make those who have been rendered invisible — on museum walls, in public culture, in political discourse — visible.”MoviesCooper HoffmanIn “Licorice Pizza,” the new comedy-drama-romance from Paul Thomas Anderson, Cooper Hoffman plays an unlikely teenage hero. Cooper, 18, is the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson’s muse before the actor’s death in 2014. Before this movie, Hoffman had never really acted, except with Anderson in something akin to home movies, he said during a press event in November. “It was on a very lower scale, with an iPhone and his kid,” Hoffman joked, referring to Anderson’s child. “I would always play the bad guy, and his kid would beat me up, and it was good fun.”In her review of the film, Manohla Dargis, co-chief movie critic at The Times, said that Anderson’s love for Cooper’s character, Gary, is special — “as lavish as that of an indulgent parent.” His affection for Gary, she continued, “is of a piece of the soft nostalgic glow he pumps into ‘Licorice Pizza.’”Cooper plays opposite Alana Haim, who also had no acting experience before “Licorice Pizza.” The pair had met briefly through Anderson several years ago, she told The Times, never thinking their paths would cross again. As soon as they read together, though, Haim recalled, “It was like, oh, we’re a team. We can take on the world together.”Cooper Hoffman, foreground, stars in “Licorice Pizza,” which was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.Melinda Sue Gordon/MGMDanceLaTasha BarnesLaTasha Barnes — a leader in the dance forms of house, hip-hop and the Lindy Hop — bridged worlds this year. Barnes is “a connector, or a rather a re-connector,” Brian Seibert wrote in the Times. In particular, she works to reconnect Black audiences and Black dancers (like herself) to their jazz heritage. To watch her dance, Seibert said, “is to watch historical distance collapse.”Barnes, 41, has been admired in dance for years, but it was her showing in “The Jazz Continuum” (the show she presented at Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum in May and later at Jacob’s Pillow) and her appearance in “Sw!ng Out” (the contemporary swing-dance show that debuted at the Joyce Theater in October) that caught the attention of many. In November, she won a Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer.Discouraged by dance teachers at a young age because of her body type, Barnes pivoted to gymnastics and track and field; at 18, she enlisted in the Army. She later weathered athletic injuries, as well as a broken hip, back and wrist after being hit by a car. Despite it all, her zeal for dance continued.“I was always looking at myself as the perpetual outsider,” she told The Times, “without realizing that it was actually the reverse.”The dancer LaTasha Barnes works to reconnect Black audiences and Black dancers to their jazz heritage.Cherylynn Tsushima, via The BessiesTelevisionThe Cast of Reservation Dogs“Reservation Dogs,” a dark comedy about four teenagers living on a Native reservation in Oklahoma, is a game-changer. That’s how one of its stars, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, described it, and he wouldn’t be alone. The series, from FX on Hulu, is the first on TV with an entirely Indigenous writer’s room and roster of directors. That backbone allows the undeniable synergy among its core cast members — Woon-A-Tai, Devery Jacobs, Lane Factor and Paulina Alexis — to flourish.On previous sets, Jacobs said she was “literally the only Native person for miles.” The industry “should feel embarrassed that 2021 is a year for firsts for Indigenous representation,” she went on.For Alexis, her acting dreams once felt so impossible, she felt embarrassed to tell anyone about them, she told The Times. “There was no representation on TV. I didn’t think I would make it.” Now she has a role in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” and will star in a second season of “Reservation Dogs,” which was renewed in September.The stars of “Reservation Dogs,” a groundbreaking show from FX on Hulu: from left, Paulina Alexis, Lane Factor, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Devery Jacobs.Jeremy Dennis for The New York TimesPop MusicMickey GuytonAfter Mickey Guyton was nominated for three Grammys in November, she told The New York Times, “I was right.” She was referring to her instinct for the direction of “Remember Her Name,” her debut full-length release. “This whole album came from me and what I thought I should release,” she said, “and that’s something I’ve never done.”In January, alongside major players like Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton, she will have three chances to win: for best country album, best country song and best country solo performance (for the title track). Last Grammys, she became the first Black woman to be nominated for a solo country performance award for the track “Black Like Me.”Guyton, 38, is also an outspoken activist in Nashville, with song titles like “Different” and “Love My Hair.”“What’s being played on country radio has been played on country radio for the last 10 years — I can’t do that,” she told Jon Caramanica of The Times in September. “I can’t do it spiritually. I can’t write songs that don’t mean something.”The country singer Mickey Guyton, performing in New York in December, is also an outspoken activist in Nashville.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty ImagesTheaterSharlene CruzIn September, amid theater’s reopening, “Sanctuary City,” a play from the Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok, resumed Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Like much of Majok’s work, it takes on the “plight of undocumented immigrants, with a glowering side-eye cast on the rest of us,” as Jesse Green of The Times put it in his rave of the play.Sharlene Cruz brings to life the smart, impulsive G — performing opposite Jasai Chase-Owens as B, both playing undocumented teenagers. Cruz, who is in her 20s, renders her character smartly, impulsively and with a lot of subtext. “Impulsiveness can just seem stagy — youth, a caricature,” Green told this reporter, but Cruz gets the rhythm right and is disciplined enough to put that quality in service of the character’s goals.As those goals change — G ages a few years in the play — Cruz convincingly shows how that impulsiveness hardened into hotheadedness, and youth into something that’s not quite maturity.Sharlene Cruz, left, and Jasai Chase-Owens play undocumented teenagers in “Sanctuary City” at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesArtPrecious OkoyomonPrecious Okoyomon, 28, a multidisciplinary artist and poet who has only been exhibiting for a few years, creates massive site-specific installations using organic materials. “I make worlds,” Okoyomon, who won the Artist Award at Frieze New York this year, told The New York Times Style Magazine. “Everything, every portal I make, is its own ecosystem.”Okoyomon, who lived in Lagos, Nigeria, as a child before moving to Texas and then Ohio, added: “I attach myself to materials such as earth, rocks, water and fire because these are things I can’t control on my own.”As part of the Frieze win, Okoyomon conceived and presented a performance-based installation at the Shed titled “This God Is A Slow Recovery,” which focused on communication or the lack thereof. “It’s about destroying our language, building it up, crashing the words into each other,” Okoyomon said. “How do we create the language to get to the new world?”This month, Okoyomon won a Chanel Next Prize, a new award from the French fashion brand established to nurture emerging talent, nominated by a group of cultural figures and selected by the jurors Tilda Swinton, David Adjaye and Cao Fei.DanceKayla FarrishIn September, the dancer and choreographer Kayla Farrish — teaming up with the jazz, soul, and experimental musician Melanie Charles — transported Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn to a vivid scene of grace and power.The performance — as part of the platform four/four presents, which commissions collaborations among artists — was “sweeping and robust work braiding music and spoken word with choreography” that encompassed the best of technical dance and athletic drills, said Gia Kourlas, the dance critic at The Times.The result turned its five dancers — Farrish, 30, was joined by Mikaila Ware, Kerime Konur, Gabrielle Loren and Anya Clarke-Verdery — into a vibrant union of musicality, tenderness and power,” Kourlas wrote. More

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      Review: In ‘Six,’ All the Tudor Ladies Got Talent

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      The exuberant queenhood-is-powerful pageant about the wives of Henry VIII was shut down on opening night by the pandemic. Now it’s back, and it totally rules.Are you an Elsa or an Anna? An Elphaba or a Glinda? Or, for those with more classic tastes, a Vera or a Mame?Musicals typically offer just two prototypes of dynamic womanhood: a twinsie set of dark and light. To hit a real Broadway sister lode you have to time travel further back than “Frozen,” “Wicked” or even “Mame”: half a millennium back, as it happens. In “Six,” the queenhood-is-powerful pageant about the wives of Henry VIII that took a bow — finally! — at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Sunday evening, Tudor London is the place to be if you’re looking for a sextet of truly empowered, empowering megastars.Of course, you do have to get past the little hitch of “divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.” But so what if the show’s view of the wives is counterfactual? Their power may have been limited during their lives by men, misogyny and the executioner, and diminished afterward by the dust of time, but hey, it’s still a tale you can dance to.That’s the animating paradox behind the entertainment juggernaut that froze in its tracks when Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered theaters closed in response to the coronavirus outbreak just hours shy of the show’s opening on March 12, 2020. In the ensuing 18 months, a fitter catchphrase for the musical-in-waiting seemed to be “divorced, beheaded, quarantined.”But now it is here, all but exploding with the pent-up energy of its temporary dethroning. And though after seeing a tryout in Chicago I wrote that “Six” was “destined to occupy a top spot in the confetti canon,” two questions nagged at me as I awaited its arrival on Broadway: How can a show formatted as a Tudors Got Talent belt-off among six sassy divas also be a thoughtful experiment in reverse victimology? And how can history be teased, ignored and glorified all at once?Yet somehow “Six,” by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, isn’t a philosophically incoherent jumble; it’s a rollicking, reverberant blast from the past. I don’t just mean that it’s loud, though it is; you may clutch your ears even before the audience, primed by streaming audio and TikTok, starts singing along to the nine inexhaustibly catchy songs.I also mean that though gleefully anachronistic, mixing 16th-century marital politics with 21st-century selfies and shade, it suggests a surprising, disturbing and ultimately hopeful commonality. Which shouldn’t work, but does.True, it sometimes works too well; the brand discipline here is almost punishing. What began as a doodle devised during a poetry class at Cambridge University is now as tightly scripted as a space launch. When the wives emerge in turn to tell their stories after a group introduction — “Remember us from PBS?” — we discover that they are literally color-coded. As if designed by a marketing expert in a spreadsheet frenzy, each is also equipped with a recognizable look, a signature song genre and a pop star “queenspiration.”It only makes sense that Henry’s first and longest-wed wife, Catherine of Aragon (Adrianna Hicks), would be a golden Beyoncé. Her anti-divorce anthem “No Way” could be retitled “Keep a Ring on It”: “My loyalty is to the Vatican/So if you try to dump me, you won’t try that again.”Adrianna Hicks, center, who portrays Catherine of Aragon, with Andrea Macasaet, as Anne Boleyn and Anna Uzele as Catherine Parr.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHenry’s third and best-loved wife, Jane Seymour (Abby Mueller), wears black and white and sings “Heart of Stone,” a torch song that instantly recalls Adele’s “Hello.” Two wives later, Katherine Howard (Samantha Pauly) arrives as a pink, ponytailed Ariana Grande, with a chewy wad of bubble gum pop called “All You Wanna Do.”They and the other wives are supposedly competing not just as singers but also, oddly, as losers. “The queen that was dealt the worst hand,” we are told, “shall be the one to lead the band” — though that’s just a figure of speech; the blazing four-woman group that accompanies the show, in studded black pleather, is led by the musical director, Julia Schade.That’s no accident; the choreographer (Carrie-Anne Ingrouille), scenic designer (Emma Bailey) and costume designer (Gabriella Slade) are also women, and so is the co-author Moss, who with Jamie Armitage serves as director. That “Six” so strongly embodies feminism in its staffing while at the same time building its story on a contest of female degradation is an example of how it sometimes seems, on close inspection, to be at cross-purposes with itself.This would be a more serious problem if the authors were unaware of it. But even when they double down on the Mean Girl catfighting, they do it smartly enough that you trust they are heading somewhere. Thus you enjoy the snarky upspeak of wife No. 2, Anne Boleyn (Andrea Macasaet), insisting that the other women’s woes cannot possibly compare to her decapitation. Her Lily Allen-like number: “Don’t Lose Ur Head.”Likewise, the humblebragging of No. 4, Anne of Cleves, here called Anna (Brittney Mack), is too deliciously on point to cloy. “Get Down,” her funky rap about cushy post-divorce life — 17 years of luxury in exchange for six months of loveless marriage — sounds like Nicki Minaj could sing it tomorrow, tipping her crown to Kanye West: “Now I’m not saying I’m a gold digger, but check my prenup and go figure.”The show’s pop score touches on hip-hop, electronica and more. From left, Samantha Pauly, Andrea Macasaet, Brittney Mack, Anna Uzele, Adrianna Hicks and Abby Mueller.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe wit of the conception and the execution — the songs are a slick blend of pop grooves, tight lyrics and old-fashioned musical theater craft — goes a long way toward keeping the show from sagging. (The almost indecently short 80-minute run time also helps.) The texture is kept sparkly by salvos of puns (“live in consort”) and thematically dense by the threading of themes. Musical themes, too: Though the score samples hip-hop, electronica, house music and soul, one recurrent melody, introduced on harpsichord during the preshow, is “Greensleeves,” supposedly written by Henry as a love token to Anne Boleyn. Her color, obvs, is green.Still, I was grateful when the twist finally came, as it had to, with wife No. 6. In a performance rendered even lovelier by its contrast with the brashness of the previous five, Anna Uzele makes a touching creation of Catherine Parr, who probably did not in real life develop a theory of retroactive regnal sisterhood. But here she does, arguing to her predecessors that history, which has merged them into a monolith defined by the one thing they had in common, must be rewritten to see them as individuals instead.That “Six” puts just such a rewritten history onstage is a great thing for a pop musical to do. Let’s not quibble about its accuracy, or the way it drops its contest framework cold, just in time for the singalong finale. It’s not a treatise but a lark and a provocation — and a work of blatantly commercial theater. That means a fantastic physical production and unimprovable performances by a diverse cast whose singing is arena-ready but also characterful.It also means a certain amount of bullying; those women onstage insisting you have fun are, after all, queens. They may even be queenlier now than they were in 2020; at times I thought they seemed over-primed by the time off.But if the direction by Moss and Armitage comes just up to the edge of too much, then takes two more steps before turning around and winking, their choices are justified by the show’s insistence on finding an accessible, youthful way to talk about women, abuse and power. Call it #MeSix and be prepared: The confetti canon is aimed at you.SixThe Brooks Atkinson Theater, Manhattan; sixonbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Six’ Is Back in Rehearsals and Hoping to Get to Opening Night

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      The red velvet seats at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on West 47th Street were covered by tech tables of computers, cables and consoles operated by designers, directors and stage managers. An audience was not due until the first preview on Friday night.But the anticipation was nevertheless high for a dress rehearsal of “Six,” the British musical dreamed up by two college students that imagines the wives of Henry VIII as pop stars.In one of the more poignant examples of the pandemic’s toll on the theater, the musical’s opening night turned out to be its closing night instead: The show had been scheduled to open March 12, 2020, the day Broadway shut down.Now “Six” will find out if the loss of 18 months has cost the show any momentum; its original opening had been buoyed by advance sales, multiple productions, a hugely popular soundtrack and fans who had been following the show since its 2017 premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.So there were effusive whoops and cheers from the crew in attendance when the curtain came up on the show’s six queens, fully decked out in their sparkly costumes, glittering boots and — in some cases — crowns.“We’re finding ways of readjusting the show to who these performers are now — who these queens are at this moment in time, who their 2021 selves are, where these songs are coming from,” said Jamie Armitage, who directed the musical with Lucy Moss. “There’s a depth and fire to some of the performances which I haven’t seen before.”“I think it’s the time away, realizing what theater means and what it means to congregate,” Armitage continued, adding that the show’s theme was newly resonant: “The group is more powerful than the individual.”The production’s diverse, all female cast and band — and its message of sisterhood and self-empowerment — also resonates with the lessons of the lockdown period, specifically a heightened awareness about the importance of equal opportunities for women and people of color. The musical concludes by calling out “patriarchal structures.”The dress rehearsal went smoothly, running its 85-minute, intermission-free duration without any apparent technical hitch. And after the confetti had fallen on the curtain call, the two directors rehearsed the bows again. Then they introduced a new idea: The cast took selfies from the stage. “Six” will start previews on Friday, the same night David Byrne’s “American Utopia” begins a return engagement, as Broadway’s reopening gathers momentum. Another 28 shows are scheduled to begin performances before the end of the year.As the “Six” actors dispersed for a dinner break — before returning to the theater for notes — Moss, who co-wrote the show with Toby Marlow, said she was feeling cautiously optimistic.“Until it’s open and running I’m not going to be like, ‘We’re back,’ because who knows what’s going to happen?” she said. “It makes you very grateful for every moment in the room.” More

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      ‘Ratatouille,’ the Musical: How This TikTok Creation Came Together

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Ratatouille,’ the Musical: How This TikTok Creation Came TogetherWe talked to the Broadway stars behind a virtual performance of the animated film. Inspiration started with quirky TikTok segments circulating this fall.A screenshot of “Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical,” from left: Joy Woods; Tituss Burgess as Remy the rat; and J.J. Niemann.Credit…“Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical”Dec. 31, 2020, 12:37 p.m. ETBeginning in October, thousands of TikTok creators who were bored at home and missing Broadway created elements of a show that didn’t exist yet: a musical based on Disney Pixar’s “Ratatouille,” an animated film about a rat with culinary aspirations.In 60-second increments, people contributed their own songs, dances, makeup looks, set designs, puppets and Playbill programs inspired by the 2007 movie. Without any leadership, the virtual show materialized organically from a crowdsourced jumble of content.It was a musical conceived like no other. Many creators thought it was a long-shot before it could coalesce in real life. But on Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern time, “Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical” will take shape as a virtual benefit performance, with Tituss Burgess starring as Remy the rat. About 80,000 tickets have already been sold for the pre-filmed show, put on by Seaview Productions to raise money for the Actors Fund. It will be available to stream for three days.The musical follows, more or less, the plot of the movie: Remy, who’s blessed with a refined palate, teaches the lowly kitchen worker Alfredo Linguini how to cook by hiding under his chef’s hat. Linguini rises to the top of his restaurant in Paris, only to be judged by the imperious critic Anton Ego.We spoke to its creators about the challenges of making a virtual show adapted from TikTok segments adapted from film. These conversations have been edited for clarity and condensed.Andrew Barth FeldmanThe actor, who was in “Dear Evan Hansen,” playing Alfredo Linguini.How did you get involved?My friend Nathan asked me to sing one of the songs on TikTok. People have been telling me that I looked like this character for years. I love the movie, and I always felt that this character resonated with me. I think we’re both generally anxious people with an undying optimism. He’s clumsy in a cartoony way, and he’s so unabashed in what he does. He has a passion for wanting to do right by everyone. The nervousness paired with the optimism feels very me.How long have you been rehearsing?This is the quickest turnaround for a Broadway show that I’ve ever seen in my life. That first conversation had to have been three weeks ago. This has all moved so, so quickly. It’s all one big romp of a time.What’s one challenge to presenting a show online?It’s funny because we’re doing this remotely. I’m not looking at any of these people. There was one point where it was the end of the day, and I was having trouble. I found this stuffed animal of Remy I have and put him off camera to film the scene — to feel the stakes of the story and remember it’s about a rat whose controlling a hat.André De Shields recording his part as the restaurant critic.Credit…Emily MarshallAndré De ShieldsThe actor, who was in “The Wiz,” playing Anton Ego.Any similarities between you and Anton?There was no time to do any research, so I had to trust the casting director who said, “This is for you. We want you to do this.” I haven’t seen the film, but in terms of playing Anton Ego, who is this snooty food critic, you learn he has turned his nose up at the ratatouille that’s served to him in the restaurant. You learn that’s how he grew up. That’s what his mother gave him as a child. When he tastes the ratatouille, he regresses to his childhood. You see he’s been wearing a mask all his life, and all he needed was a reminder of how happy he was as an ordinary kid.How is this show different from live ones performed onstage?We don’t improvise very much in the theater because there’s a script for us to run, and everyone’s expecting you to say what’s in the written thing. In terms of the distance between all of the collaborative people involved, if something didn’t come out exactly right, than we made use of that spontaneous inspiration. There’s no mistake in jazz. You say, “That’s what I intended to do, now the rest of you follow along.” That’s what “Ratatouille” is all about.Lucy MossThe director, who previously co-directed and co-wrote “Six: The Musical.”What was your vision for the show?The thing that’s really interesting about the original TikTok materials and submissions is that the aspiration for it was so broad. Despite being on a format on the cutting edge of tech and the most Gen-Z thing in the world, people were aspiring to be like a classic musical. The challenge of doing that in the least theatrical space ever — online — was trying to remain true to that aspiration. The aim is a Zoom reading or an online concert that drank 20 Red Bulls and spit on the screen.A screenshot of a ProTools session around 3 a.m. on Christmas Day, from top: the orchestrator Macy Schmidt; the music supervisor and arranger Daniel Mertzlufft; the sound mixer Angie Teo; and the music director Emily Marshall.Credit…Daniel MertzlufftDaniel MertzlufftThe music supervisor and arranger, who wrote some of the “Ratatouille” songs.Tell me about your role on the show.Basically my job was to take the nine songs we were pulling from TikTok and create some kind of story and a full cohesive score. That was the challenge because some of the songs we’re only a minute long, and we had to expand them. We had to write new songs to fill in some spots. We wrote part of a new opening number and an “I want song,” where the character sings what they want and hopefully they get it.What’s been your biggest challenge?I had my first meeting Dec. 4 with the folks at Seaview. They gave me a call and said, “Hey, we have this crazy idea. Disney has given us the allowance to do a benefit for the Actors Fund of ‘Ratatouille.’” They said, “Yeah, we’d like to do this on Jan. 1,” and I took a deep breath and said, “Yeah, that’s possible.”All of us were working 24/7 the first few weeks of December trying to finish all this. It was a return to normalcy for theater and the collaboration. Although the deadline was insane, of course I said yes. Who else can make insane deadlines like that happen besides theater people? I would do a song a day. This is months, if not years, of work that we did in two weeks. Even though it was a challenge, I loved being up until 3 a.m. Christmas morning mixing songs. We’ve all missed the feeling.“Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical” in a shoe-box set created by Christopher Routh.Credit…Christopher RouthChristopher RouthThe set designer, who works as a photographer.Tell me about your shoe-box set models.“Ratatouille” takes place in Paris, so how can I create a Paris backdrop for an actual stage? How can I create different drops for different scenes?The very first “Ratatouille” set model that I posted [on TikTok] and designed a set for, I got the idea from a picture from Pinterest. It was just a silhouette of Linguini with a chef’s hat, and it had a shadow of Remy. I took that, cut that out, lit it up using projections. Then I made sure that the hat was transparent so Remy could come from the back of it, and that’s when the whole set building started. It’s crazy to look at these TikToks again and see where I was and where I am now.This event really highlights a lot of the TikTok creators, and we’re very happy we got this recognition. We can take our content and do something good with it, not only raise money for the show but make sure that Broadway comes back stronger than ever.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More