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      in Movies

      ‘Casablanca’ and the Romance of the Refugee

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      A showcase of memorabilia at the Neue Galerie spotlights the Central European exiles who crafted Hollywood’s great wartime love story.Round up the unusual suspects. “Casablanca” has turned 80, and the most esteemed of all Hollywood classics enters its octogenarian years with a new ultra-high-definition DVD release. There’s also, right now in New York, an engaging new display of “Casablanca” artifacts, though you won’t find it at MoMA or the Museum of the Moving Image. Of all the joints in all the towns in all the world, the relics of this paragon of the Hollywood studio system have ended up in … a museum of German and Austrian modern art.That would be the Neue Galerie, conceived by the cosmetics baron Ronald S. Lauder and the art dealer Serge Sabarsky (1912-1996), which opened in 2001 in a former Vanderbilt mansion on a prime corner of Fifth Avenue. It’s celebrating its first 20 years with a showcase of its surviving founder’s own collection: not only jewels of modern Mitteleuropa, but ancient sculpture, medieval broadswords and reliquaries, and gleaming oddities from Renaissance cabinets of curiosities. Least expected are more than five dozen posters, lobby cards, props and press materials from the collector’s favorite movie, which he reports seeing “at least 25 to 30 times” — and whose memorabilia he has been buying up with foxhound-grade avidity.Medieval armor from Lauder’s personal collection is also on view.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“The Ronald S. Lauder Collection” had its grand opening on the evening of November’s midterm elections — whose result, by the way, Lauder may have decisively influenced, having spent millions on lawsuits and campaign advertising for Republicans in New York, where the G.O.P. flipped four congressional seats. (Among his animating causes are crime, taxes, and a proposed wind farm off the Hamptons shoreline.) “I’m no ogre,” Lauder assured The Times this month in an interview at Café Sabarsky, the charmingly ersatz Viennese cafe on the Neue Galerie’s ground floor, and, certainly, the 500-odd objects here do not have an outward suggestion of barbarism. If anything, its rooms of princely baubles are rather oversaturated, as if Lauder didn’t know where to stop; drawings by Egon Schiele are hung sky-high, essentially invisible, and stuffed vitrines induced in me the novel feeling of ivory fatigue.The unexpected highlight is the “Casablanca” gallery, the show’s smallest and densest, which in its way fits right into an institution devoted to Central European genius and American inheritances. Its walls are covered with soft-focus images of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, and posters both printed and painted. (“They Have a Date With Fate in … CASABLANCA,” reads one hand-lettered display from 1942, the title sparkling gold.) Lobby cards — those black-and-white stills you’d once see by the popcorn stand — take us back to the louche purgatory of Rick’s Café Américain, where the dashing Resistance hero Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) is gathering intelligence, and the charmingly corrupt Captain Renault (Claude Rains) is sizing up the loveliest exiles.Posters and lobby cards cover the walls with images of the film’s stars, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesDetail of a brass lamp, fringed with imitation jewels, used in the movie.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesA hand-lettered display from 1942 announces the film’s title in sparkling gold.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesYou’ll also find memorabilia from the film’s postwar releases in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia and, by 1952, Germany. Bergman appears in solo splendor on the German poster, beaming above a set piece of fez-topped musicians. There’s a brass lamp from Rick’s, fringed with imitation gemstones, and two rattan chairs where Europe’s desperate and displaced drank their cognacs and plotted their escapes. Looping in the background is “As Time Goes By,” performed by Dooley Wilson, a veteran of the Negro Theater Unit of the Federal Theater Project, in the role of the nightclub crooner Sam. Lauder apparently also owns the 1940 Buick Phaeton in which Rains drives our heroes to the Casablanca airport in the film’s final act. Lauder wanted to station the car outside the Neue Galerie for the run of the show, but no dice. Even with a net worth of $4.5 billion, nobody beats alternate-side parking regulations.“Casablanca” premiered in New York on Nov. 26, 1942; Warner Bros. pushed up its release date to capitalize on the excitement around that month’s Allied invasion of North Africa. It opened nationally in January 1943, and its tale of refugees and people smugglers was not only topical; it was nearly autofiction. A stunning number of its performers were Jewish refugees or anti-Nazi exiles — among them Conrad Veidt, previously a star of the Berlin studio system, who played Major Strasser; S.Z. Sakall, a Hungarian Jewish actor, as the club’s affable headwaiter; and Peter Lorre in the small but crucial role of Ugarte, who sells exit visas to the rich and desperate. The French actress Madeleine Lebeau, in the small role of Rick’s jilted mistress, cries real tears during the film’s stirring performance of “La Marseillaise”; she too was a refugee, fleeing via Lisbon to Mexico, and then to Hollywood. She escaped with her husband, Marcel Dalio (born Israel Mosche Blauschild), who plays the croupier at Rick’s, and who left France after antisemitic critics denounced his appearance in “The Rules of the Game.”The production’s transit papers for Victor Laszlo, “signed” by Charles de Gaulle, which Rick finally hands over in “Casablanca.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhen it plays in the revival houses on Valentine’s Day, when it surfaces as the late movie after “Nightline,” “Casablanca” still endures as a wartime love affair, with Bogie and Bergman letting each other go in the airport fog. But for me “Casablanca” has always been a movie of visas and exit stamps, embassies and expediters, bribed officials and underground operators. It paints the modern world as the province of emigrants and evacuees, and subordinates the most enthralling of all Hollywood romances to the welfare of the persecuted. Which is why I was so astonished to discover, in Lauder’s collection, an extraordinary relic: the original (prop) letter of transit that sets the plot in motion, made out to Victor Laszlo and “signed” by General de Gaulle. The prop passports are here too, with Bergman’s and Henreid’s photographs stamped with the seal of the Casablanca colonial administration.I couldn’t believe I was seeing them, and seeing them here, in a museum of German and Austrian art. It was as if these fictional travel documents concentrated all the exiles and displacements that built midcentury American culture, of Mies van der Rohe and Marlene Dietrich, of “Doctor Faustus” and “Broadway Boogie-Woogie.” They burn, especially, with the shame of knowing that a contemporary “Casablanca” cast member could probably not procure one. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has forced an estimated five million to flee, the world has been shaken by the largest refugee crisis since everybody came to Rick’s. The United Nations now puts the number of displaced at 100 million — one in every 78 people on Earth — from Afghanistan and Venezuela, from Central America and Myanmar, and above all from Syria, whose civil war will soon enter its 12th year.The prop passport for Ilsa Lund, Ingrid Bergman’s character.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesNevertheless, under President Donald J. Trump, the United States cut its quotas for refugee admissions to the lowest level ever. The numbers have barely budged under his successor. Though President Biden increased the cap of the refugee admissions program, his government has come nowhere close to fulfilling it; just 25,400 refugees were admitted in the last fiscal year, leaving 80 percent of the places unfilled.The fundamental things apply. In “Casablanca” the Hollywood system reached the acme of its artistic and civic potential, and on that Orientalist soundstage, as the displaced of Europe oscillated in and out of character, these foreigners offered America a new self-portrait. It taught us that love and displacement went hand in hand, that ideals were thicker than blood. “I bet they’re asleep in New York,” Bogie mopes into his tumbler of whisky at the end of the first reel. “I bet they’re asleep all over America.” But the passionate clarity of “Casablanca” was not something we only dreamed.The Ronald S. Lauder CollectionThrough Feb. 13, Neue Galerie New York, 1048 Fifth Avenue, 212-628-6200; neuegalerie.org. More

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      in Music

      One More Project for David Geffen: Building His Legacy

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      In Los Angeles, you can wander through Judy Baca murals at the cavernous Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, view “Beetlejuice” at the sphere-like David Geffen Theater at the Academy Museum, watch “The Inheritance” at the Geffen Playhouse, and follow the progress of the new David Geffen Galleries, a striking work of architecture that will span Wilshire Boulevard, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.New York now has not one but two David Geffen Halls: an academic building at Columbia Business School and the remake of the Lincoln Center home of the New York Philharmonic, which reopened this month after a $550 million renovation that he jump-started with a $100 million gift.At 79, Geffen, the entertainment magnate, has planted himself into the pantheon of leading American philanthropists. He has handed out $1.2 billion over the past 25 years to museums, theaters, concert halls, universities and medical centers, according to the Geffen Foundation, and pledged to “give every nickel away” of a fortune estimated to be $7.7 billion. As a result, Geffen has become avidly sought by culture and education leaders looking to finance a wave of new construction that is enlivening cities as the nation emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.“When you need a gift of this scale, there aren’t many people who are doing what David is doing, which is investing big-time in the cultural infrastructure of major cities — New York, Los Angeles,” said Michael Govan, the head of LACMA, who spent a year convincing Geffen to give $150 million toward the galleries there that will bear his name.Geffen’s gifts are often contingent upon naming rights. When Avery Fisher Hall was renamed for him in 2015, 61 signs and maps around Lincoln Center were changed. Brian Harkin for The New York TimesGeffen is hardly some modern-day version of Andrew Carnegie, who made his fortune from steel and financed one of the great waves of philanthropy in the nation’s history. He is an openly gay entertainment mogul whose life, romances, yacht, mansions, art acquisitions, business deals, celebrity adventures and political engagement with, in particular, the Clintons and Barack Obama make him as engrossing a character as anyone in Hollywood.It’s hard to imagine, for instance, Carnegie dating Cher or Marlo Thomas when he was young, which Geffen did; comforting Yoko Ono at the hospital the night that John Lennon was assassinated, which Geffen did; watching Joni Mitchell in his apartment when she wrote “Woodstock,” which Geffen did; or working with Janis Joplin, the Doors and Peter, Paul and Mary, which Geffen did.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.Who Is David Geffen?: The entertainment magnate, who jump-started the renovation, has become avidly sought by culture and education leaders looking to finance a wave of new construction.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Expert Assessment: Right after the reopening our critic wrote that the renovation had a mightily improved sound. In the weeks that followed his feelings became more complicated.His skill at spotting up-and-coming musical talent (Jackson Browne; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Guns N’ Roses), producing hit movies (“Risky Business” and “Beetlejuice”) and backing Broadway shows (“Dreamgirls” and “Cats”), and his work building record labels and movie studios has made him one of the wealthiest people in America. He has homes in New York, Los Angeles and East Hampton for when he is not entertaining boldfaced friends (think Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey) on his yacht, the Rising Sun. He once startled a dinner of journalists in Washington by disclosing that he had not flown on a commercial airplane since the late 1970s; that night he took a private jet back to Beverly Hills.Geffen is hardly shy about his philanthropy, as can be seen by the growing list of institutions bearing his name, including the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, which his gift made tuition-free. (“I don’t agree that the best giving is anonymous,” Geffen once told Fortune. “We should be examples to our friends and communities. I should be an example to young, gay kids.”) But he is, in his own way, low key about it — he declined an invitation to speak at the gala celebrating the opening of Geffen Hall this past week, and seemed reluctant to stand when he was acknowledged from the stage.The lobby of the revamped hall.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesAnd he is not like other wealthy donors, who can range from hands-on to micromanaging when it comes to projects bearing their names. “They want to check the carpet designs,” said Deborah Borda, the head of the New York Philharmonic. By contrast, the gala was the first time Geffen saw the redone hall bearing his name; he never joined the hard-hat construction tours that Lincoln Center gave to dignitaries over these past two years.“David said, ‘I want to leave this in your hands: I don’t need any input on the selection of the architect and driving the design,’” said Katherine G. Farley, the chair of the board of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, recounting her conversation with Geffen when she asked him for money to rebuild what was then called Avery Fisher Hall. “He kept repeating, ‘Make sure you do something great.’”Geffen, who declined a request for an interview, looks for transformative cultural projects that are struggling for credibility and financing, according to friends and associates. His contributions cover just a portion of the total cost — $100 million toward the $550 million Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center; $150 million toward the $750 million Geffen Galleries at LACMA — and are designed to goad other donors, while establishing Geffen as the primary patron.“He’s making big bets,” said Marie-Josée Kravis, the chairwoman of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to which he donated $100 million toward a three-floor David Geffen Wing in 2016. “They’re transformative. It’s not incremental.”His gifts are usually contingent on naming rights. Lincoln Center agreed to a $15 million payment to the Fisher family to relinquish its naming rights so the center could promise Geffen that his name would remain on the hall in perpetuity. Although some argued that the naming rights should have commanded a higher price, Farley said, “Without his gift, there is no question that would not have happened.”By contrast, when David H. Koch, the oil-and-gas billionaire, gave $100 million in 2008 to renovate what had been called the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, it came with the provision that the theater could be renamed for a new donor after 50 years.Arianna Huffington, the founder of The Huffington Post and a longtime friend of Geffen’s, said that “the arts have basically dominated his life,” and that they are what motivated his philanthropy.“I personally have very little patience for people who question why anybody gives — as long as they give,” she said.Geffen took a hands-off approach to the renovation, and never stopped by for a hard-hat tour when it was a construction site.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesGeffen has become more reclusive in recent years, first visiting the Geffen Theater at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles this month — a year after its red-carpet opening. He temporarily shut down his Instagram account at the start of the pandemic after he came under fire for posting a photo of his yacht floating in safe seclusion. “Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus,” he wrote. “I’m hoping everybody is staying safe.”Geffen is a college dropout who grew up in Brooklyn, where he attended New Utrecht High School. After creating Asylum Records — where he signed Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan — in 1971, he sold it two years later to Warner Communications for $7 million. He founded Geffen Records in 1980; he would sell that a decade later to MCA for $550 million in stock, which increased in value significantly when Matsushita then bought MCA. He co-founded, with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks SKG in 1994, and left the company in 2008.Geffen can be combative in his business dealings, and he lamented the “shameful” lack of support by New York donors in 2017 when Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic went back to the drawing board with plans to rebuild the hall, in part because it was growing too costly. Just after the move to rethink the New York project was announced, LACMA announced Geffen’s $150 million gift — timing that appeared to send a message, though officials said the gift had long been in the works.Associates said that Geffen’s background in business and culture, and particularly music, drives his philanthropic choices.“He comes from the music business,” said David Bohnett, another philanthropist based in New York and Los Angeles. “You grow up around music, you grow up around entertainment, it just seems logical that you are going to put your name on theaters and music halls and museums.”Some say it helps explain his hands-off approach to the projects he supports. “He’s made a career out of respecting artists and understanding what artists need,” said Henry Timms, the president of Lincoln Center. “And I think that’s the same context for this — he’s not assuming he can do this job better than the architects.”Geffen is intimately involved in deciding what projects to support. “He is a very engaged philanthropist and is involved in every funding decision made at the foundation,” said Dallas Dishman, the executive director of the Geffen Foundation, to which Geffen is the sole contributor.As he approaches his 80th birthday, and with over $7 billion left, Geffen is contemplating his mortality and his legacy, his friends say. Yet on Wednesday night in New York, when he finally rose from his chair at the gala marking the opening of the latest building bearing his name, he seemed taken aback by the intensity of the applause. He just smiled slightly and sat down, without saying a word.“He doesn’t reveal himself very much,” said Kravis, of the Museum of Modern Art. “He just gives. I respect his search for privacy and I’ve never pushed him on it.” More

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      in Theater

      Michael R. Jackson and Jacolby Satterwhite on Making Art in a Shifting Culture

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      Two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation. This time: the playwright behind “A Strange Loop” and the visual artist.Although the playwright Michael R. Jackson, 41, and the visual artist Jacolby Satterwhite, 36, work in different genres, they have some things in common. Both are queer Black New York-based artists who address trauma, secrets and stigmas. And both have spent most of their careers feeling overlooked and misunderstood. “As the Black gay man in the room,” said Satterwhite, “I was seen as some sort of weird exception and dismissed.”Yet since the summer of 2020 and its global protests against racial discrimination and violence, both men have been enthusiastically embraced by the public. “A Strange Loop,” Jackson’s meta-musical about a queer Black man trying to write a musical, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making its author the first Black writer to win the award for a musical. The production moved to the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway two years later and was nominated for 11 Tony Awards, including that for Best Musical (which it won). Next spring, Jackson’s new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” set in the world of a fictional soap opera town called Allwhite, will open off Broadway. The playwright was born and raised in Detroit and spent nearly 20 years on “A Strange Loop,” taking a variety of jobs to support himself, including as an usher at “The Lion King” on Broadway.Satterwhite, whose work has been shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, hopscotches across mediums — photography, performance, painting, 3-D animation, writing — to create art that raises questions about self-mythology and expression, consumerism, labor, visual utopia and African rituals. His practice defies easy categorization. This year, the South Carolina native has been building multimedia installations around the world, including at the Format music and art festival in the Ozarks, the Front International triennial in Cleveland, the Munch Triennale in Oslo and the Okayama Art Summit in Japan.The two artists met in August for a conversation at Satterwhite’s studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to discuss their experiences in a shifting cultural landscape.Jaquel Spivey in Michael R. Jackson’s musical “A Strange Loop” at the Lyceum Theater in New York City.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJACOLBY SATTERWHITE: On the night “A Strange Loop” premiered, I had a lot of projects going on and wasn’t able to make it but, three times a week, someone would approach me about it. I went in a little skeptical and thought, “I’m probably going to see something that is asymmetrical to my experience.” But what was so great about it was that it encapsulated all the things that make me who I am as an artist and how I feel as a creative producer in an art world that has shifted seismically between 2003 and now.I was in the room before we all got a seat at the table, and I experienced all kinds of resistance among white peers, as well as my own Black colleagues who have a heteronormative stance.MICHAEL R. JACKSON: I think part of the reason a lot of people connect with the show is because this piece contains almost 20 years of thought. I started working on it when I was about 23 and, even though I rewrote it, it still captures whole periods of time of Black gay thinking, feeling and living and reflecting. There’s a lot that one can grab on to.J.S.: I went to see the show with my boyfriend, who is not in the art world or a creative industry. There are times when I struggle to communicate why I am the way I am, and I’ve said things that were a bit niche and esoteric to him with regard to my experience. And there were moments during the show when he looked at me, because the scenes illustrated exactly what I said to him.M.R.J.: In a weird way, the show demonstrates my inherent outsider status that makes me incompatible with being in a relationship. That could be wrong — I could be overdramatizing — but that’s one of the loops in my life.J.S.: Before I started dating this person, I had this “I am meant to be alone” militancy. And honestly, I do feel like I have more agency when I’m alone, because I have an obsessive practice that requires me to be extremely selfish to execute. I don’t have assistants. I’m a computer animator, a painter and an experimental filmmaker, and it requires a certain kind of loneliness.M.R.J.: Yeah. One important lesson I learned about myself during the pandemic was that my instinct is far more “I” than “we.” I’ve always thought of myself as a collectivist, and it’s not that I’m not sympathetic to groups but, if I track my own actions and choices, it was always me: whether it’s me against my family, me against other Black folks, me against white folks. Whatever group it was, I always had to find a way to soldier through the group within my own “I.” J.S.: I actually share a similar sentiment. As a person who grew up with childhood cancer — twice — had chemo and was isolated from a schizophrenic mother who was in a mental hospital, I’ve always felt everything about my identity was broken. So in order to survive, I found solace in my artistic ambitions.Exploring niche illegibility and abstraction as a Black artist is radical and unpopular, and it was one thing that people scoffed at for my whole career. But the boldness to commit to something that’s illegible and unpopular is rewarding, and it actually has more impact on the collective “we.” M.R.J.: My next musical, “White Girl in Danger,” is very much about the “we.” Now there’s a relationship between the “I” and the “we,” but the world is going, “Representation! Representation! Representation!” I’m like, “What is that?” That doesn’t feel true. I mean, you’re putting up what you want to see, and that’s fine. But then you want to try to sell that back to me, and I’m not giving you my money for that. That’s what I find troubling about [the focus on] representation, which is dissonant with what a lot of our culture has been saying for a couple of years.J.S.: Well, capitalism got in the way, and now you have banks saying, “We have money for trans visibility and we create safe spaces at our A.T.M.s,” or whatever.  M.R.J.: You saying that has me thinking about [the 1990 documentary about New York City drag culture] “Paris Is Burning.” What’s actually been most interesting to me, but doesn’t get talked about, is that the group of people in that documentary — and so many more who weren’t in it — were imitating an imitation of an imitation in the Reagan era. All these people in the 1980s were reorienting because of the actual politics of the time, and the things that led to this era of excess and austerity. When I look at these queens, they want to be fictional characters. That has always been a beautiful dissonance.I went to the National Museum of African American History & Culture [in Washington, D.C.,] for the first time recently and found it fascinating. We start in the 1400s with the slave trade and then there’re all these moments in history where people are fighting bitterly to be free. Then in the 1960s and ’70s, it got real hot with the Black Panthers and all these radical groups starting to collaborate, and the government is like, “We have to break that up.” The Panthers are gone and suddenly we’re in the ’80s and it’s Oprah, Bill Cosby, superstars everywhere.An installation view of Jacolby Satterwhite’s “at dawn” (2022) at JSC Berlin. Shown here is Satterwhite’s “Birds in Paradise” (2019), a two-channel HD color video and 3-D animation with sound.Photo: Alwin Lay. © Jacolby Satterwhite, courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New YorkIt seems like the powers that be realized that, to keep the world order, they had to deliver these fantasies to people to confuse them and get them off the scent. And honestly, looking at today, a lot of that stuff’s only continued, and now people have taken those fantasies and pumped them into this idea of radicalism. Within that there’s stuff that’s real, and then there’s stuff that’s not real. But you can’t tell it apart unless you look at it with hard eyes.J.S.: My whole existence is that era. My mom named me after a character from [a spinoff of the 1980s soap opera] “Dynasty.” She was obsessed with Republicans and the Middle East, so my middle name is Tyran [a reference to Tehran]. This was down to her schizophrenia. She made 10,000 schematic diagrams of common objects in the house that she was trying to submit to the Home Shopping Network to get invented. She became so obsessed with imitating and copying the infection of capitalism — it ended up shaping me as a human being, and my artistic pursuit. And it’s interesting to see how my peers don’t even know what they’re imitating now.M.R.J.: For me, that raises the question of who my people are. I started this conversation by saying that I’ve been having complex feelings, and that’s part of it. I thought I knew who my people were, but now I find myself feeling a bit alone.I keep watching the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978) because the idea of pod people resonates with me — this idea of people who’re doing the same thing and trying to get you to be like them. There’s something in me saying, “I can’t trust anyone, because they might pull me into some pod people stuff — I’ve been a pod person before. And it sounds like paranoia, but I also see how people are inconsistent because I see how I can be inconsistent. When I look at other people not recognizing how they can be inconsistent, I worry how we can progress in this self-deluded world that’s constantly having ideas delivered to you from culture, politics, whatever, that’re purposely trying to keep you uninformed and confused.J.S.: I’ve always welcomed erasure and am constantly trying to shift skins. I had a traveling museum survey that started at Carnegie Mellon [in 2021] and, when I went to that survey, I almost cried. I saw a whole room of works from seven years ago that were completely out of context for the person I am today. But they were a part of me. I’m going to spend another seven years making something that represents the stage I’m in now, and those works will have a conversation with each other. What I’ve learned to do is be messy: There’s no such thing as mistakes, because everything can be recontextualized.M.R.J.: The tricky part of it is when other people try to hold you to what you said as evidence in the court of public opinion, [assessing] whether or not you’re a hypocrite.Social media culture has become so horribly linked to what art and entertainment are being made, how they’re viewed and how they’re produced. So much of my voice as a writer was developed on social media and specifically Facebook. That box that said, “What’s on your mind?” I took that as a personal challenge; I have a catalog of every thought I’ve ever had. Sometimes I’ll cringe because I don’t know who that person was, but it was part of my development.J.S.: I mean, the world’s in pain, especially after the pandemic, where lots of jobs were lost and isolation caused a lot of mental illness. We’re in the revenge generation. [But] that doesn’t leave room for artists to grow. We’re eradicating problematic people as if the person who’s throwing the stone isn’t problematic. But everyone is.This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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      in Movies

      Film Academy’s Museum Connects With Visitors in First Year

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      The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures attracted about 20 percent more people than it expected since opening in September 2021. Now it needs to keep the momentum going.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has been something that almost no one in Hollywood expected: an instant hit.After an almost comical series of setbacks, the Academy Museum opened in Los Angeles in September 2021 and has since attracted more than 700,000 visitors, about 20 percent more than its pandemic-adjusted goal, according to Bill Kramer, chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (For months, gallery capacity was limited.) Half of the museum’s visitors have been under 40, he added, citing attendee surveys, and half have self-identified as being from underrepresented ethnic and racial communities. Adult tickets cost $25.“There was perhaps a slight concern, and I’m choosing my words carefully, that young people, people under the age of 40, might not be interested in film history or a cinema museum because they are streaming movies in different ways now,” Kramer said. “It has not been true, not even remotely. One of the many success stories of the museum is that it’s helping to cultivate a new generation of cinephiles.”The bad news? The academy now has to keep the momentum going, and with a potential recession on the horizon.“I’ve been thinking a lot about how to encourage repeat visitors — building a sense of community so that, not only do people see new things when they come back again, but they also feel that they’re participating with us in creating this experience,” said Jacqueline Stewart, the Academy Museum’s president. “Our museum depends in a lot of ways on breaking down some of the barriers I think that people might have felt when they hear the term academy. There’s an assumption that it’s an elitist institution.”The museum has sold 24,000 memberships, which cost between $100 and $1,000 annually. Additional revenue has come from hosting more than 100 private events; renting out the glass-domed terrace atop the museum’s spherical theater building runs $50,000 on top of a corporate membership, which starts at $10,000. Fanny’s, the museum’s well-reviewed restaurant, has served more than 150,000 people, according to the academy. Dishes range from $16 to $90.The museum’s gift shop has generated more than $6 million in sales, an amount that Kramer called “beyond our wildest expectations.” An Oscar made out of Legos, which sells for $500, and the $50 catalog for the museum’s Hayao Miyazaki exhibition have been among the top sellers.Add in philanthropic contributions and additional revenue — an opening gala generated $11 million — and the Academy Museum is comfortably covering annual operating costs while delivering returns that will ultimately be used to pay down hundreds of millions of dollars in construction debt, Kramer said.At the very least, the museum’s rosy first-year financial picture makes it something of a rarity among nonprofit cultural institutions, many of which are still reeling from the pandemic.By the time the seven-story museum opened last year, it was four years behind schedule. Its cost had ballooned by 90 percent, to about $480 million. Setbacks included the discovery of mastodon fossils by excavation crews, sparring architects, internecine warfare over the curatorial focus and, of course, the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, academy leaders became known for one blunder after another regarding their most high-profile undertaking, the annual Oscars ceremony.While the museum’s first-year financial picture is rosy, it will soon face fresh competition for visitors.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“Many began to wonder if the Academy Museum, rising as box office fell, was some bizarre hoax that would never actually be finished,” Mary McNamara, a Los Angeles Times columnist and critic, wrote last year.Soon after opening, the museum was hit with accusations of antisemitism. While taking great care to honor the contributions of women and artists of color to the cinematic arts — achievements long overlooked in an industry historically dominated by white men — curators had excluded the mostly Jewish immigrants, white men all, who founded Hollywood. To rectify the matter, curators announced a new permanent exhibition, “Hollywoodland,” about the founding of the American film industry, specifically the lives and contributions of the Jewish studio founders; it will open next fall.Other upcoming exhibitions include “Director’s Inspiration: Agnès Varda,” and “The Art of Moviemaking: ‘The Godfather.’” “Casablanca,” “Boyz N the Hood” and “The Birds” will be showcased in smaller galleries.But visitors were plentiful from the start. The museum’s retrospective of Miyazaki, the Japanese animation titan behind films like “Spirited Away” (2001), was a major draw, Stewart said. The museum also offers extensive public programs — 137 in year one, including onstage discussions with filmmakers like Spike Lee and actors like Denzel Washington. The institution also operates a separately ticketed cinematheque; more than 500 films were shown in its first year.“I met a guy a couple of weeks ago who said it was his 83rd visit to the museum and was committed to reading every label,” Stewart said.If nothing else, Angelenos now have somewhere to take Hollywood-fascinated visitors that does not involve the dreaded Hollywood & Highland shopping mall or the sticky, stinky Walk of Fame.What the future holds is anyone’s guess. Tourism officials hope that 2023 will mark a full recovery for Los Angeles, which would benefit the museum; the number of visitors to the area, particularly from overseas, is still far behind prepandemic levels. But a recession could just as easily stymie growth.The Academy Museum will also face increased competition in the years ahead. The adjacent Los Angeles County Museum of Art is in the middle of a colossal expansion. And construction has begun near downtown Los Angeles on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will house items collected by George Lucas, including 20th-century American illustrations, comic books, costumes, storyboards, stage sets and other archival material from “Star Wars” and other movies.For the academy, the continued financial health of its museum is of crucial importance. The construction debt is secured by the academy’s gross revenues, the vast majority of which come from the annual Oscars telecast. But awards revenue — after rising for decades — declined 10.8 percent in the academy’s 2021 fiscal year, reflecting plummeting Oscars viewership. Kramer, facing the likelihood that broadcast rights for the ceremony will continue to decline in value, perhaps dramatically, is scrambling to diversify the organization’s revenue streams.“It’s what any healthy nonprofit needs to do and should do,” Kramer said, “and the museum is helping us greatly with that.” More

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      The Academy Museum Names Jacqueline Stewart as New Leader

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      The film historian and preservationist specializes in Black cinema and silent movies. She had been serving as the institution’s chief artistic and programming officer.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Wednesday named Jacqueline Stewart, a film scholar who worked to make the long-delayed project a reality, as its new director and president.The museum’s former leader, Bill Kramer, was appointed chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that oversees the Oscars, last month. As the museum’s chief artistic and programming officer, Stewart worked closely with Kramer to bring the institution over the finish line amid pandemic challenges, and bring it up to date with social movements, like #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo, that exposed inequities in the film industry.Stewart, a film historian and preservationist with a specialty in Black cinema and silent films, is a professor in the cinema and media studies department at the University of Chicago. In 2019, she became the first Black host on the cable channel Turner Classic Movies when she stepped in to introduce the programming series Silent Sunday Nights. She is chair of the National Film Preservation Board, which advises the Librarian of Congress on the National Film Registry, and founded an organization on Chicago’s South Side that preserves and screens footage of everyday life there.At the museum, which opened in Los Angeles last year, Stewart has helped steer exhibitions, screenings and workshops; she has also hosted a new podcast under the museum’s banner that delved into key social and cultural moments in Oscars history.In a news release announcing the appointment, Stewart said she looked forward to working with the museum board and staff and with the academy itself:“Our ambition in opening the Academy Museum was to give Los Angeles and the world an unprecedented institution for understanding and appreciating the history and culture of cinema, in all its artistic glory and all its power to influence and reflect society,” she said in the release. “I feel deeply honored to have been chosen for this new role.” More

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      Review: ‘Third Bird’ Doesn’t Quite Land

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      The fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi is a terrific host, but this production at the Guggenheim Museum is awfully shaggy for an avian story, our critic writes.Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” is a children’s classic, an ideal introduction to the instruments of the orchestra. The production of the score that Works & Process has presented annually at the Guggenheim Museum since 2007, narrated by the fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, has itself become a local classic.Now Mizrahi, who has been the designer and director since 2013, has created a companion piece, “Third Bird,” with the composer Nico Muhly and the choreographer John Heginbotham. Why? The premiere at the museum on Friday provided no reason other than to have a little fun. “Third Bird” is charming and slight.As in the Prokofiev original, each character in “Third Bird” is connected with an orchestral instrument or two, here played live by members of Ensemble Signal arrayed around the stage. For the bluebird, there’s flute and piccolo. For the duck, there’s oboe and English horn. The ostrich — the “third bird” — gets the heavier, unusual bass clarinet, and so on, through the cat, the grandfather, the ornithologist and the zookeeper.Mizrahi explains all this at the start. He’s a terrific host, kid-friendly without condescension, an expert teller of bedtime stories, voices and all. His enthusiastic appreciation for how the instruments evoke character establishes exactly the right tone. And by adding instrument-animal pairings that Prokofiev did not, he and Muhly extend Prokofiev’s idea. A bass clarinet is like an ostrich. The orchestra contains more wonders.Mizrahi’s new libretto is less wonderful. It’s a kind of sequel to “Peter and the Wolf,” set in a Central Park elegantly evoked by a skyline silhouette backdrop and the branches of a tree. The duck (Marjorie Folkman), having emerged whole from the stomach of Prokofiev’s wolf, returns to tell its adventure in pantomime. Chased by the Gwen Verdon-like cat (Lindsey Jones), it learns to fly. The ostrich, a new character (played by Brian Lawson), does not.Christine Flores, left, and Marjorie Folkman. The bluebird (Flores) is a ballerina, smug about her skills while Folkman pantomimes her story.David Andrako for Works & Process at the GuggenheimThere are witty touches. Mizrahi, the narrator but also the designer, takes a moment to stop and fix the duck’s wolf-ruffled attire. The bluebird (Christine Flores, light and precise) is a ballerina, smug about her skills. Heginbotham plays the moon by simply sitting in white, high in the skyline backdrop. Muhly evokes the zookeeper (Macy Sullivan) with bouncy harpsichord and whirly tube, and Heginbotham’s choreography responds with some standard vaudevillian humor.But “Third Bird” is awfully shaggy for an avian story. Eventually, a suggestion of a moral emerges, advocating acceptance of different shapes and abilities. (The flightless ostrich is the only character without a human head.) As in “Peter and the Wolf,” danger and even mortality flash briefly and an improbable resolution consoles, though here the resolution is a hoary joke (about New York snowbirds).That’s typical. At one point, Mizrahi announces that the ostrich is about to do “a very special dance.” It isn’t very special. It’s just nice, as is everything else in the production, including the costumes — lots of casual wear ornamented with wings or duck feet. Like many sequels, “Third Bird” offers the pleasures of returning characters and performers, squeezing out something diluted from the original idea. It reflects a weaker light, but then again, so does the moon.“Third Bird” was performed on Friday at the Guggenheim Museum. More

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      Artists Are Putting Their Stamp on Lincoln Center

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      In a partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund, works by Nina Chanel Abney and Jacolby Satterwhite will help reintroduce Geffen Hall this fall.When David Geffen Hall reopens on the Lincoln Center campus this fall, two new artworks — by Nina Chanel Abney and by Jacolby Satterwhite — will be splayed across the 65th Street facade and a 50-foot media wall in the renovated lobby.These highly visible pieces, commissioned by the performing arts center in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund, are positioned to help reintroduce the longtime home of the New York Philharmonic to the city and will inaugurate a rotating program of visual artists invited to put their stamp on Lincoln Center.“One of the overriding goals of the new David Geffen Hall has been to find ways to connect more meaningfully with outside — not just to open up but to reach out,” said Henry Timms, president and chief executive of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. “We’ve been very intentional about thinking about different voices, different audiences, more people seeing themselves at Lincoln Center. The Studio Museum was the perfect partner for that.”For the museum, which has been organizing temporary installations of public art since 2016 in Harlem while its 125th Street building is under construction, this collaboration was “a great opportunity to extend our engagement in site-specific commissioned artwork,” said Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum’s director and chief curator. It also allows the museum to complement the work at Lincoln Center “to broaden and deepen and expand their program and the ways in which they engage audiences.” Golden pulled in the Public Art Fund for the organization’s resources and expertise in implementing large-scale public projects.Together, the institutions developed the curatorial vision and identified the two prominent locations for the art — a 10,000-square-foot expanse on the north facade of the building and a new multiuse media wall running across the lobby. This space has been reconceived as a kind of living room, open to the public all day with beverages. Nonticketholders will be able to view the art on the media wall that will also broadcast the Philharmonic down to the lobby when it is playing upstairs. Abney, 39, known for her bold, large-scale paintings, and Satterwhite, 36, a multidisciplinary artist who combines digital media and painting, were selected from more than half a dozen artists of color invited to make site-specific proposals.A rendering of a multiuse media wall that will be at David Geffen Hall. Satterwhite’s commission will appear there, and concerts will be streamed, as well.via DBOX“That facade for so long was thought of as the blank back side of the building and is kind of hiding in plain sight,” said Nicholas Baume, artistic and executive director of the Public Art Fund. “It’s right there at that intersection of all these major streets and can express this concept that Lincoln Center wants to open itself up to the city and address some of that symbolic citadel-like podium elevation of the original ensemble of buildings.”In a dynamic constellation of colorful stylized figures, symbols and patterns to be printed on vinyl and applied across a grid of 35 windows on that north facade, Abney will pay homage to San Juan Hill, a largely Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood that was demolished to make way for the 14-acre federally aided Lincoln Center project, which broke ground in 1959.“I was interested to delve into the history and the amazing people who inhabited that neighborhood,” said Abney, who is working with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to study San Juan Hill, considered the birthplace of the Charleston and bebop, and home to musicians including the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. “It’s acknowledgment and celebrating what was there.”In tandem, Lincoln Center has commissioned the composer Etienne Charles to explore the neighborhood’s legacy in a piece, “San Juan Hill,” to be performed by the Philharmonic in the new hall for free on Oct. 8.“This is part of a necessary engagement with our history,” Timms said. “This isn’t a one-off.”In a poetic, digitally animated landscape that will unfold across the 50-foot media wall in the lobby, Satterwhite plans to tell a story about the past, present and future of the New York Philharmonic. “The history of Lincoln Center is very male and white — that’s what it’s perceived as,” Satterwhite said. He is working with archivists there to mine footage of conductors and performers of different races and genders working more at the margins of the Philharmonic, to be woven fluidly into a kind of pastoral concert with 100 student musicians and dancers from Alvin Ailey, LaGuardia High School and others that Satterwhite is filming.“I want to reanimate the timeline that may traditionally be told, without any kind of hierarchy,” Satterwhite said. The pandemic, he feels, has offered an opportunity for “culture and society to reconfigure and reflect on itself. I want this piece to be very much about moving forward.” More

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      Fun Things to Do in N.Y.C. This May 2022

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      Looking for something to do in New York? Go see the Asian Comedy Fest at Stand Up NY and Caveat or the British singer Nilüfer Yanya at Webster Hall. Take the kids to Our First Art Fair, as part of NADA New York. Or you can still catch “Hangmen” on Broadway and the Jacques-Louis David blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Comedy | Music | Kids | Film | Dance | Theater | ArtComedyJes Tom, above at Union Hall in Brooklyn in February, will be among the performers in this weekend’s Asian Comedy Fest.JT AndersonAsian Comedy FestFriday at 6, 8 and 10 p.m. at Stand Up NY, 236 West 78th Street, Manhattan; standupny.com. Saturday at 6, 8 and 10 p.m. at Caveat, 21A Clinton Street, Manhattan; caveat.nycFor the third straight year, Ed Pokropski, a writer and producer at NBCUniversal, and the producer and comedian Kate Moran have assembled dozens of performers for this festival, and like last year, they’re right on time to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The six shows will feature Julia Shiplett, Michael Cruz Kayne, Usama Siddiquee, Karen Chee with the puppeteer Kathleen Kim, the podcasters from “Feeling Asian,” and Yuhua Hamasaki from “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Friday’s 8 p.m. lineup includes perhaps the festival’s buzziest performer: Jes Tom, a nonbinary trans comedian who co-stars in the new Hulu rom-com “Crush.” (Tom will also headline their own show on May 14 at the Bell House.) Tickets start at $25 per show ($65 for an all-night pass) and are available at asiancomedyfest.com. SEAN L. McCARTHYMusicDarius Jones, above at the Winter Jazzfest in 2018, has programmed this year’s MATA Festival, which concludes at National Sawdust this weekend.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesClassical MusicMATA FestivalFriday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at National Sawdust, 80 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn; live.nationalsawdust.org.This year’s iteration of the annual contemporary music blowout known as the MATA Festival has been programmed by the composer and alto saxophonist Darius Jones. For the festival’s final two nights, Jones has put together a set of works by younger artists on Friday and one of his own on Saturday. Friday’s concert will feature notable artists like Travis Laplante, who is scheduled to play his solo tenor saxophone opus “The Obvious Place.” And Saturday’s performance will offer the world premiere of Jones’s piece “Colored School No. 3,” which references a Brooklyn building once used as a segregated school for Black children into the early 20th century. Tickets for each night are $25. SETH COLTER WALLSNilüfer Yanya will headline at Webster Hall on Saturday.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesPop & RockNilüfer YanyaSaturday at 7:30 p.m. at Webster Hall, 25 East 11th Street, Manhattan; websterhall.com.Though as a teenager she was tapped to be in a girl group assembled by Louis Tomlinson of One Direction, Nilüfer Yanya chose a self-determined path over the prospect of pop stardom. The British singer’s debut album, from 2019, contained notes of jazz and indie pop but leaned predominantly into alt-rock, showcasing the guitar chops she had honed since picking up the instrument at age 12. Yanya’s sophomore effort, released in March, follows suit but pares her sound down to essential components: wafty melodies, crisp beats, circuitous guitar work reminiscent of Radiohead. Ironically titled “Painless,” the album is spiked with thorns, its lyrics tackling the complicated, damaging side effects of desire. On Saturday, Yanya heads a bill that also features two other singer-guitarists: Ada Lea and Tasha. Tickets start at $25 and are available at axs.com. OLIVIA HORNKidsOur First Art Fair at Pier 36, sponsored by the New Art Dealers Alliance and the Children’s Museum of the Arts, will feature works by children 12 and under. Above, a display from an after-school class at the museum in 2019.Children’s Museum of the ArtsOur First Art FairThursday from 4 to 8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at NADA New York, Pier 36, 299 South Street, Manhattan; newartdealers.org.Learn More About the Metropolitan Museum of Art$125 Million Donation: The largest capital gift in the Met’s history will help reinvigorate a long-delayed rebuild of the Modern wing.Recent Exhibits: Our critics reviewed exhibits featuring the drawings of the French Revolution’s chief propagandist and new work by the sculptor Charles Ray.Behind the Scenes: A documentary goes inside the Met to chronicle one of the most challenging years of its history.A Guide to the Met: From the must-see galleries to the lesser-known treasures, here’s how to make the most of your visit.While the New Art Dealers Alliance has always catered to the business’s youngest members, it would be hard to find exhibitors younger than some appearing at this year’s NADA New York exposition. They’re the entrepreneurs 12 and under participating in Our First Art Fair, presented by the alliance and the Children’s Museum of the Arts. Here, youngsters display and price their creations, receiving all proceeds. Little artists who missed the April submission deadline can still contribute by completing a required form and delivering it, along their work, to the fair. On Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m., museum educators will also attend, providing art supplies and helping with last-minute entries. What doesn’t sell goes to the museum’s permanent collection — no small distinction. NADA passes start at $40; they’re free for children. LAUREL GRAEBERFilmThuy An Luu and Frédéric Andrei in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Diva,” which is screening at Film Forum starting on Friday.Rialto Pictures‘Diva’Ongoing at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org.You’ve seen Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out”? “Diva” is the other major film of 1981 (released in the United States in 1982) that involves a protagonist with a hot-potato audio recording, or technically two: Jules (Frédéric Andrei), a postman and opera fan, secretly records a star vocalist, Cynthia Hawkins (the real-life soprano Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez), who makes a point of only singing live, at a performance in Paris. Soon after, he unwittingly comes into possession of another tape that could expose an international drug-and-sex-trafficking operation.But the crazy convolutions of the plot are hardly the point. “Diva,” directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, who died in January, is perhaps the film most identified with a trend in France that became known as the cinéma du look, movies for which visual style and attitude left the prevailing impressions. In a print showing at Film Forum, the shades of blue are dazzling, and an elaborate chase through the Paris Metro is pretty exciting, too. BEN KENIGSBERGDanceValerie Levine of Ice Theater of New York performing “Arctic Memory” by Jody Sperling on Governors Island in February.Josef PinlacIce Theater of New YorkFriday and Saturday at 7 p.m.; Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Sky Rink, 61 Chelsea Piers, Manhattan; chelseapiers.com.After pivoting to pavement during the pandemic, Ice Theater of New York returns to its true milieu, which is also a fitting place to reflect on climate change. As part of its home season, the company will present the premiere of the choreographer Jody Sperling’s “Of Water and Ice,” which draws on her research in the Arctic and is set to music by D.J. Spooky. It will be joined on the program by 10 other works, many of them also new, with soundtracks ranging from Philip Glass to Rachmaninoff to Madonna. Don’t expect a string of Nathan Chen-like acrobatic feats, though; the company, founded in 1984, is rooted in the art of ice dancing, which combines the ethos of concert dance with the speed, momentum and strength of ice skating. Two of the form’s best-known practitioners, the British champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, will be honored at Monday’s gala performance. Tickets start at $25 and are available at icetheatre.org. BRIAN SCHAEFERTheaterDavid Threlfall, center, with, from left, Richard Hollis, Ryan Pope, John Horton and Alfie Allen in Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy “Hangmen” at the Golden Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCritic’s Pick‘Hangmen’Through June 18 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; hangmenbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.In Martin McDonagh’s Olivier Award winner, set in the 1960s, a menacing mod from London (Alfie Allen of “Game of Thrones”) walks into a grim northern English pub run by a former hangman (David Threlfall). Pitch-black comedy ensues. Directed by Matthew Dunster, this production was a prepandemic hit downtown. Read the review.‘Plaza Suite’Through June 26 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; plazasuitebroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker revel in physical comedy as they play two married couples and a pair of long-ago sweethearts in the first Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s trio of one-act farces, a smash at its premiere in 1968. John Benjamin Hickey directs. (Onstage at the Hudson Theater. Limited run ends July 1.) Read the review.Critic’s Pick‘American Buffalo’Through July 10 at Circle in the Square, Manhattan; americanbuffalonyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss team up for David Mamet’s verbally explosive tragicomedy, set in a Chicago junk shop where an inept pair of small-time criminals and their hapless young flunky plot the theft of a rare nickel. Neil Pepe directs. Read the review.Hugh Jackman as Harold Hill in the Broadway revival of “The Music Man” at the Winter Garden Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘The Music Man’At the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; musicmanonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.Hugh Jackman, a.k.a. Wolverine, returns to the stage as the charlatan Harold Hill opposite Sutton Foster as Marian the librarian in Jerry Zaks’s widely anticipated revival of Meredith Willson’s classic musical comedy. It’s a hot ticket, and one of Broadway’s more stratospherically priced shows. (Onstage at the Winter Garden Theater.)Read the review.Art & Museums“The Oath of the Tennis Court” (1791), a presentation drawing in “Jacques-Louis David: Radical Draftsman” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts a foundational event of the French Revolution.RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NYCritic’s PickJacques-Louis David: Radical DraftsmanThrough May 15 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.“Radical Draftsman,” a momentous and deadly serious exhibition, assembles more than 80 works on paper by this prime mover of French Neo-Classicism, from his youthful Roman studies to his uncompromising Jacobin years, into jail and then Napoleon’s cabinet, and through to his final exile in Brussels. It’s a scholarly feat, with loans from two dozen institutions, and never-before-seen discoveries from private collections. It will enthrall specialists who want to map how David built his robust canvases out of preparatory sketches and drapery studies. But for the public, this show has a more direct importance. This show forces us — and right on time — to think hard about the real power of pictures (and picture makers), and the price of political and cultural certainty. What is beautiful, and what is virtuous? And when virtue embraces terror, what is beauty really for? Read the review.Critic’s PickJonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always RunningThrough June 5 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.A Lithuanian refugee who landed in New York City in 1949, Jonas Mekas became a founder of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Film Culture magazine and Anthology Film Archives. He also made scores of collagelike “diary” films. “The Camera Was Always Running” is Mekas’s first U.S. museum survey, and its curator, Kelly Taxter, approached the daunting task by mounting a high-speed retrospective projected on a dozen free-standing screens.Most of the films in the exhibition are broken up into simultaneously projected pieces, so that the full program of 11 takes just three hours. Many are diary films — abstract kaleidoscopic records of Mekas, his brother Adolfas, also a filmmaker, and the SoHo bohemians and Lithuanian transplants of their circle. Since the point of all this, even more than documenting the variety of Mekas’s life in particular, is to capture the magical incongruity of life in general, Taxter’s inspired staging may even make the works more effective. Read the review.Painted fabric hangings behind the sculpture “The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro,” 1976. This entire installation originated as part of a performance piece.Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY, DACS, London and ACA Galleries; Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesCritic’s PickFaith Ringgold: American PeopleThrough June 5 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org.Ringgold’s first local retrospective in almost 40 years features the Harlem-born artist’s figures, craft techniques and storytelling in inventive combinations. And it makes clear that what consigned Ringgold to an outlier track half a century ago puts her front and center now. The show begins with a group of brooding, broadly stroked figure paintings from the 1960s called “American People Series.” All the pictures are about hierarchies of power; women are barely even present. Ringgold referred to this early, wary work as “super realist.”In the ’80s, an elaboration on the painted quilt form, called “story quilts,” brought Ringgold attention both inside and outside the art world. It is the vehicle for Ringgold’s most formally complex and buoyant painting project, “The French Connection.” Overall, it feels, in tone, like a far cry from the “American People” pictures, but there’s politics at work in the French paintings, too. Read the review. More