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      Abba Voyage Review: No Ordinary Abba Night at the Club

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      With a concert spectacle mixing wizardry and technical skill, the band makes a case for its continued relevance.LONDON — I kept turning to my friend, wanting to tell him how young and fresh the two women that put the As in Abba seemed on the giant screens ahead of us. Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad were not actually in the room with us, but that’s the kind of stupor Abba Voyage dazzles you into.Though the Swedish pop band has not played London since 1979, holographic “Abbatars” of the band, modeled in their likeness from that year, are currently filling up a custom-built arena for a 90-minute concert of their greatest hits. A combination of motion-captured performance, animated sequences and a live 10-person band make up the spectacle, which makes a floor-thumping case for the music’s continued relevance.Projected on a screen that envelops one side of the spaceshiplike auditorium, the Abbatars play mostly as if it were a real concert. They “enter” from below the stage, make banter with the audience, ask for patience as they switch costumes, and return for an encore.It would feel corny if it weren’t so triumphantly fun, and the Friday night crowd was certainly along for the ride. Largely a mix of couples in their mid 60s and younger, disco-leaning gay men, the attendees sang through every number with the intensity of a therapeutic ritual. Abba Voyage is an exercise in symbol worship that separates itself from an ordinary Abba night at the club through state-of-the-art production values.“To be or not to be — that is no longer the question,” the band member Benny Andersson declares in a prerecorded solo address, and questions about live performance, truth, eternity and transience are frothed up into the sheer giddiness of (almost) being in the same room as one of the biggest acts in pop music history.It’s hard to pin down the reasons that such a strange, 21st century endeavor is a crowd-pleasing success, but Abba’s music has its own strange alchemy. Take “Mamma Mia” (performed here in rhinestone-emblazoned pink velour jumpsuits): Why is the hook an Italian catchphrase? Or “Fernando” (sung against a dramatic lunar eclipse): What could these four Swedes possibly have to say about the Mexican revolution? And yet, something about the earnestness of those songs, reflected in the audience’s full-chested belting, has made them inescapable pop standards.Those two songs are performed straightforwardly, the Abbatars life-size and center stage, with surrounding screens projecting close-ups for those seated in the orchestra level, behind a massive dance floor. Most of the numbers are done this way, recreating a concert experience; the audience was overjoyed to dance along and applaud each step of the way. Choreography, based on the band member’s real movements, but captured from younger body doubles, hit its peak during “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!,” with the digital Lyngstad doing high-kicks and twirls that I’m not sure the real one was capable of in her heyday.Abba Voyage is playing at a specially constructed “Abba Arena” in East London through December.Johan PerssonA couple of songs, however, played more like immersive music videos, with the full size of the screens used to tell more thorough visual stories. The band famously sang and performed through its own breakup, and “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” a 1977 anthem mirroring the dissolution of romantic and professional relations in the group, is here performed as an Ingmar Bergman-esque study in missed connections. Its members’ fractured faces sing across a hall of mirrors before ultimately embracing in reconciliation.Less successful than those episodes were two fully-animated numbers, set to “Eagle” and “Voulez Vous,” following a young traveler’s journey through forests and pyramids, and culminating in their discovery of giant sculptures of the band member’s heads.Those songs recreate the interstitial bits of a “real” concert, as do speeches from each Abbatar about their success and artistry. The best of these interludes saw the band present the footage from their Eurovision Song Contest-winning performance of “Waterloo,” the song that catapulted them to fame in 1974.Abba’s music is deceptively complex. What sounds like a simple little song reveals itself to be an intricately layered web of harmonies, melodies, real and digital instruments and angelic English vocals, ever-so-slightly outside the band’s Scandinavian comfort zone.It’s a mix of wizardry and technical skill that, decades later, after movies and musicals and greatest hits compilations, is still at the pinnacle of pop maximalism. To hear the closing piano riffs on “Chiquitita” in a crowded arena is an exalting experience, and despite its eyebrow-raising premise, Abba Voyage miraculously takes flight. More

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      Andy Fletcher, a Founder of Depeche Mode, Dies at 60

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      With three others, he created the band in 1980 and rode its synthesizer-driven music to worldwide fame.Andy Fletcher, who played synthesizers in Depeche Mode, the electronics-heavy British band that developed a huge fan following and sold millions of records in the 1980s and ’90s, has died. He was 60.The band announced his death on Thursday on Twitter. The announcement did not specify where he died or give a cause. An unidentified source close to the band told The Associated Press that he died on Thursday at his home in Britain.Mr. Fletcher formed Depeche Mode in 1980 in Basildon, east of London, with his fellow synthesizer players Vince Clarke and Martin Gore and the vocalist Dave Gahan. Mr. Clarke left after the group’s first album, “Speak & Spell,” was released in 1981, Alan Wilder filled the spot, and Mr. Gore took over from Mr. Clarke as the group’s main songwriter. The band started to veer away from pop and toward the darker, more serious music that it rode to worldwide fame over the next two decades.Critics at first often didn’t fully appreciate the appeal of the synthesizer-dominated act.“Consisting of four young men, three synthesizers and a tape recorder playing prerecorded rhythm tracks, Depeche Mode makes gloomy merry-go-round music with a danceable beat,” Stephen Holden wrote in an unenthusiastic review in The New York Times of a 1982 performance at the Ritz in New York.Fans, though, latched on, and by the end of the 1990s the group had landed dozens of singles on the British charts — “People Are People” (1984) and “Personal Jesus” (1989) were among the more successful, also charting in the United States — and it was filling big arenas.Onstage, Mr. Fletcher was the least flashy member of the group. And he was self-deprecating about his role.“Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around,” he said in “Depeche Mode: 101,” a 1989 documentary.But Michael Pagnotta, a SiriusXM Volume host who for much of the 1990s was the band’s publicist, said that offstage, Mr. Fletcher was the glue that held the band together, eager to promote it, keeping track of business and financial matters and often serving as the first point of contact when a tour brought it to a new city.“Andy Fletcher was the heart of Depeche Mode,” Mr. Pagnotta said in a statement. “A true believer in the band and their music. His keen musical and business instincts helped Depeche become one of the most popular and influential bands of their generation and helped carry them all the way to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Not bad for a boy from Basildon.”Depeche Mode, with David Gahan on vocals and Mr. Fletcher on keyboards, at Madison Square Garden in New York in 2005. The least flashy member of the group, Mr. Fletcher once said on his three bandmates, “Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around.”Judith Levitt for The New York TimesThat Hall of Fame induction came in 2020, the band having first been nominated in 2017 — a nomination that Mr. Fletcher never expected, since an electronic band didn’t fit the guitar-and-drums model that traditionally defined rock ’n’ roll.“To be honest, we were surprised,” he said of the initial nomination in a 2017 interview with The Associated Press. “We never aimed to be in it. We think, ‘An electronic band in the rock ‘n’ roll hall?’”Andrew Fletcher was born on July 8, 1961, in Nottingham, England, and, like the band’s other founders, grew up in a working-class family in Basildon. He and Mr. Clarke met when both were in the Boys’ Brigade, a Christian youth organization. They formed a band, Composition of Sound, in 1980 and soon invited another acquaintance, Mr. Gore, to join because, as Mr. Gore put it later, he was “one of the few people in Basildon who had a synthesizer.”Later that year Mr. Gahan joined as featured vocalist, bringing a sense of style and a new name, Depeche Mode. Daniel Miller of Mute Records signed the group, and its popularity began to grow, not only in England but also in East and West Germany and other countries.“Violator,” one of the band’s most successful albums, came out in 1989, and, riding its popularity, Depeche Mode played Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan the next year.“The band’s music, made by synthesizers, is loud washes of sound driven by a dance beat,” Peter Watrous wrote in The Times. “Jet engines roar. Cliffs collapse, dams break. An occasional guitar peeps out from behind the wreckage. All is magnified, and the dance beat, occasionally influenced by house music and hip-hop, continues.“At Radio City, the audience stood during the whole show and constantly had to be kept from dancing in the aisles.”In 2017 the group released its 14th studio album, “Spirit.”Mr. Fletcher’s survivors include his wife, Gráinne Mullan, and their children, Megan and Joe. More

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      The Colorful Mozart of Gen Z

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      Jacob Collier, the singer, songwriter and composer, who fancies crayon colors, clashing patterns and tie-dyed Crocs, doesn’t fit easily into any box. He’s OK with that.Jacob Collier was about to cross Fifth Avenue when a stranger stopped him to take a picture of his outfit. A Grammy-winning musician with millions of followers across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, Mr. Collier is used to requests for pictures, but it was a nice change of pace to be asked because someone liked what he was wearing — a color-blocked jacket, acid-green patterned pants and tie-dyed Crocs — rather than because they recognized him from the internet.“I was always curious how someone would perceive me from a fashion perspective because I’ve never really perceived myself that way,” he said later from his perch on a rock in Central Park, where he spent a sunny afternoon between shows on his “Djesse” world tour. “I’ve never overly contrived it. I’ve gone for things I like that are comfortable and expressive, and that’s about it.”Following his artistic instincts has served the 27-year-old Brit well, turning him into an internet-age success story. As a teenager, his videos of multi-instrumental covers of classic songs went viral on YouTube, earning him professional representation. Since then, Mr. Collier has won five Grammys and been nominated for four more. He is commonly described as a genius by fellow musicians, and the list of his admirers is long: Coldplay and Lizzo are fans; Hans Zimmer called Mr. Collier his “hero”; and SZA said she “stalked” him on Instagram until she convinced him to collaborate with her.That Mr. Collier attracts admirers from across so many genres is a testament to the uncategorizable nature of his music, which contains elements from jazz, folk, R&B and classical. His songs often comprise hundreds of tracks layered over one another, in which he plays and sings every sound. He recently attempted to translate this enjoyment of complexity into the visual realm by using the music software Logic to color-code the hundreds of tracks that went into his arrangement of “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire).” He printed the resulting pattern on a pair of pants in collaboration with the brand Skidz.“I find myself gravitating toward things that are highly patterned, because I’m quite highly pattern-minded,” he said. “Musically, I enjoy that exploration, and visually I think it follows suit.”Mr. Collier in Central Park in May.Isak Tiner for The New York TimesThrough it all, Mr. Collier’s look has remained remarkably homegrown. That’s not to say it’s tame: His wardrobe is wild and high-energy, full of crayon colors, power-clashing patterns and the occasional alligator onesie, paralleling the eclecticism of his whimsical and energetic soundscapes. But whereas many of his peers present a version of themselves to the world that has been polished by a team of professional image-makers, Mr. Collier has, for the better part of 10 years in the public eye, done his own thing. Until a few months ago, he’d never worked with a stylist. His biggest red carpet moment — when he wore a hot pink Stella McCartney suit to the 2021 Grammys (and promptly spilled ketchup on it, he divulged) — was a result of the brand reaching out to him directly.“You can tell when someone’s covering themselves up, and you can tell when someone is pulling things out from deeper within using clothes and colors,” Mr. Collier said. “That’s what I try to aim for.”Mr. Collier performing at Brooklyn Steel in May.Isak Tiner for The New York TimesAt his first of three “Djesse” shows in New York, that meant bounding joyously across the stage in lime-green corduroy pants from an upstart brand called Fried Rice and a shirt made of upcycled bandannas from Rcnstrct Studio. He went shoeless in mismatched socks, as is his custom when performing, partly because he uses his toes to play a bespoke instrument and partly because he likes feeling “grounded and in my body.” When he does wear shoes, they’re usually Crocs, because they remind him of the house where he has lived his whole life and recorded most of his music. (“Everyone in my family wears them,” he said.)Almost all of his signature wardrobe items are like that: If you ask him what he’s wearing, he’ll tell you about a relationship with someone he loves.The pair of patterned harem pants he wore to every show of his first tour, which started in 2015 and lasted for two years, came about when he tried on a pair of his sister’s. (Having grown up in a house full of women, he said, “I don’t think of clothes as having a gender.”)The T-shirt that he wore almost every night of that first tour also points to a major pillar of the Collier style philosophy in that it was handmade by a fan.“Fans like to give me things, and it has really sustained my fashion diet over the years,” he said. When he rifles through the suitcase that serves as his tour wardrobe, fan-made pieces abound: There’s a tie-dyed hoodie, a knit hat and a patchwork kimono embroidered with a “JC” logo. As an artist known for collaborating with his listeners — Mr. Collier regularly conducts live concert audiences as though they’re choirs and digitally duets submissions from followers on YouTube and TikTok — wearing pieces made by his fans allows him to feel as if he’s speaking “the same language,” musically and sartorially.Mr. Collier at Room 57 Gallery in New York.Isak Tiner for The New York TimesBut just as his musical trajectory started with him making songs alone in his room and has expanded to feature collaborations with world-class artists, he has recently decided it’s time to enlist others to help him with his look. Mr. Collier is working on a currently-under-wraps collaboration with an international brand that will be introduced later this year. And for the “Djesse” tour, he worked with the stylist Marta del Rio, who also creates looks for Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish and Tinashe, on his performance wardrobe.“He’s so advanced in his musical maturity, but he’s just starting to experiment with fashion,” Ms. del Rio said. “He communicates joyfulness and enjoyment, and we wanted to maintain that essence with the clothes.”At the beginning of their working relationship, Mr. Collier had a conversation with Ms. del Rio about sustainability in fashion, which he described as “a world full of possibilities to explore” that he is in some ways “just waking up to.” A onetime member of his school’s environmental club, Mr. Collier has started introducing climate awareness into his music-making process. He recently installed solar panels to power his music room, and he’s donating roughly 10 percent of net profits from merchandise sales on his current tour to Earth Percent, a nonprofit that raises funds for climate action.Mr. Collier’s most responsible dressing habit, though, is one that sets him apart from many of his social media-raised peers. While many young creatives associate self-expression with never being seen online wearing the same thing twice, he frequently wears his clothes again and again. A beloved striped Missoni knit, for example, appears in multiple music videos, at press events and in home videos.“I just really like it and wear it all the time,” he said, nodding at a group of street musicians whose eyes lit up in recognition as he walked by. “It’s a simple thing, but a lot of my friends and people in the industry will do something new for every show and event.”Though some of Mr. Collier’s fans have expressed a desire to imitate his look — there are Instagram accounts and Reddit threads devoted to documenting his style and parsing where to shop for pieces like his — he’s happy that his first concert in New York was attended by a crowd whose garb mostly didn’t mirror his own. More than anything, he said, he wants to inspire people to be their truest selves.“Certain people will wear a hat that looks like mine or something, but I get much more excited about people being really expressive as to who they are,” he said. “I love seeing people be themselves. I don’t want people to be like me. I want people to be like them. It’s that permission-giving that means the most.” More

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      in Movies

      Cannes 2022: ‘Elvis’ Iss Remixed by Baz Luhrmann

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      The super-splashy biopic presents the story of the King as told by a (fake) colonel, a narratively curious choice.CANNES, France — Close to the start of “Elvis,” Baz Luhrmann’s hyperventilated, fitfully entertaining and thoroughly deranged highlight reel of the life and times of Elvis Presley, I wondered what I was watching. I kept wondering as Luhrmann split the screen, chopped it to bits, slowed the motion, splashed the color and turned Elvis not just into a king, but also a savior, a martyr and a transformational American civil-rights figure who — through his innocence, decency, music and gyrating hips — helped heal a nation.In conventional terms, “Elvis,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, can be classed as a biographical portrait, a cradle-to-grave (more or less) story of a little boy from Tupelo, Miss., who became a pop-culture sensation and sad cautionary tale — played as an adult by the appealing, hard-working Austin Butler — despite the evil man, a.k.a. Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who groomed him. But Luhrmann — whose films include “Moulin Rouge” and “The Great Gatsby” and, um, “Australia” — doesn’t do simple or ordinary. A visual maximalist, he likes to go big and then bigger, and he likes to go super-splashy. Most filmmakers just want to get the shot; the great ones strive for perfection. Luhrmann wants to bedazzle it.The movie’s narrative axis and, strangely, its most vividly realized character is Colonel Parker, whom Hanks embodies with an enormous, obviously false belly, flamboyant jowls, a nose that juts like the prow of a ship and a baffling accent. I would have loved to have listened in on Luhrmann and Hank’s conversations about their ideas for the character; if nothing else, it might have explained what in the world they were after here. I honestly haven’t a clue, although the image of Sydney Greenstreet looming menacingly in “The Maltese Falcon” repeatedly came to mind, with a dash of “Hogan’s Heroes.”Written by Luhrmann and several others, the movie traces Elvis’s trajectory through Parker, a curious choice given that the colonel is the villain of the piece. They meet when Elvis is a young unknown and still under the protective wing of his mother and father. As soon as the colonel sees Elvis perform — or rather, witnesses the euphoric reactions of the shrieking female audiences — he realizes that this kid is a gold mine. The colonel swoops in, seduces Elvis and puts him under his exploitative sway. The rest is history, one that Luhrmann tracks from obscurity to Graceland and finally Las Vegas.Even non-Elvis-ologists should recognize the outlines of this story, as it shifts from the beautiful boy to the sensational talent and the fallen idol. That said, those who don’t know much about the ugliness of Elvis’s life may be surprised by some of the ideas Luhrmann advances, particularly when it comes to the civil rights movement. A white musician who performed and helped popularize Black music for white America, Elvis was unquestionably a critically important crossover figure. What’s discomforting is the outsized role that Luhrmann gives Elvis in America’s excruciating racial history.In the gospel of Elvis that Luhrmann preaches here, the titular performer isn’t only an admirer or interpreter (much less exploiter) of Black music. He is instead a prophetic figure of change who — because of the time he spends in the Black church, Black juke joints and Black music clubs — will be able to bridge the divide between the races or at least make white people shake, rattle and roll. As a child, Elvis feels the spirit in the pulpit and beyond; later, he becomes an instrument for change by copying Black ecstasy and pumping his slim hips at white audiences, sending them into sexualized frenzy.As Elvis ascends and the colonel schemes, Luhrmann keeps the many parts whirring, pushing the story into overdrive. The 1950s give way to the ’60s and ’70s amid songs, pricey toys, assassinations, personal tragedies and the usual rest, though I don’t remember hearing the words Vietnam War. Family members enter and exit, tears are spilled, pills popped. There are significant gaps (no Ann-Margret or Richard M. Nixon), and, outside a nice scene in which the Las Vegas Elvis arranges a large ensemble of musicians, there’s also little about how Elvis actually made music. He listens to Black music and, almost by osmosis and sheer niceness, becomes the King of Rock ’n’ RollWhile Butler pouts, smolders and sweats, he has been tasked with what seems an impossible role. Elvis’s ravishing beauty, which remained intact even as his body turned to bloat, is one hurdle, and so too was his charisma and talent. Butler’s performance gains in power as Elvis ages, particularly when he hits Las Vegas. One insurmountable problem, though, is that Luhrmann never allows a single scene or song to play out without somehow fussing with it — cutting into it, tarting it up, turning the camera this way and that, pushing in and out — a frustrating, at times maddening habit that means he’s forever drawing attention to him him him and away from Butler, even when his willing young star is doing his very hardest to burn down the house. More

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      in Music

      Cannes 2022: ‘Elvis’ Is Remixed by Baz Luhrmann

      by

      The super-splashy biopic presents the story of the King as told by a (fake) colonel, a narratively curious choice.CANNES, France — Close to the start of “Elvis,” Baz Luhrmann’s hyperventilated, fitfully entertaining and thoroughly deranged highlight reel of the life and times of Elvis Presley, I wondered what I was watching. I kept wondering as Luhrmann split the screen, chopped it to bits, slowed the motion, splashed the color and turned Elvis not just into a king, but also a savior, a martyr and a transformational American civil-rights figure who — through his innocence, decency, music and gyrating hips — helped heal a nation.In conventional terms, “Elvis,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, can be classed as a biographical portrait, a cradle-to-grave (more or less) story of a little boy from Tupelo, Miss., who became a pop-culture sensation and sad cautionary tale — played as an adult by the appealing, hard-working Austin Butler — despite the evil man, a.k.a. Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who groomed him. But Luhrmann — whose films include “Moulin Rouge” and “The Great Gatsby” and, um, “Australia” — doesn’t do simple or ordinary. A visual maximalist, he likes to go big and then bigger, and he likes to go super-splashy. Most filmmakers just want to get the shot; the great ones strive for perfection. Luhrmann wants to bedazzle it.The movie’s narrative axis and, strangely, its most vividly realized character is Colonel Parker, whom Hanks embodies with an enormous, obviously false belly, flamboyant jowls, a nose that juts like the prow of a ship and a baffling accent. I would have loved to have listened in on Luhrmann and Hank’s conversations about their ideas for the character; if nothing else, it might have explained what in the world they were after here. I honestly haven’t a clue, although the image of Sydney Greenstreet looming menacingly in “The Maltese Falcon” repeatedly came to mind, with a dash of “Hogan’s Heroes.”Written by Luhrmann and several others, the movie traces Elvis’s trajectory through Parker, a curious choice given that the colonel is the villain of the piece. They meet when Elvis is a young unknown and still under the protective wing of his mother and father. As soon as the colonel sees Elvis perform — or rather, witnesses the euphoric reactions of the shrieking female audiences — he realizes that this kid is a gold mine. The colonel swoops in, seduces Elvis and puts him under his exploitative sway. The rest is history, one that Luhrmann tracks from obscurity to Graceland and finally Las Vegas.Even non-Elvis-ologists should recognize the outlines of this story, as it shifts from the beautiful boy to the sensational talent and the fallen idol. That said, those who don’t know much about the ugliness of Elvis’s life may be surprised by some of the ideas Luhrmann advances, particularly when it comes to the civil rights movement. A white musician who performed and helped popularize Black music for white America, Elvis was unquestionably a critically important crossover figure. What’s discomforting is the outsized role that Luhrmann gives Elvis in America’s excruciating racial history.In the gospel of Elvis that Luhrmann preaches here, the titular performer isn’t only an admirer or interpreter (much less exploiter) of Black music. He is instead a prophetic figure of change who — because of the time he spends in the Black church, Black juke joints and Black music clubs — will be able to bridge the divide between the races or at least make white people shake, rattle and roll. As a child, Elvis feels the spirit in the pulpit and beyond; later, he becomes an instrument for change by copying Black ecstasy and pumping his slim hips at white audiences, sending them into sexualized frenzy.As Elvis ascends and the colonel schemes, Luhrmann keeps the many parts whirring, pushing the story into overdrive. The 1950s give way to the ’60s and ’70s amid songs, pricey toys, assassinations, personal tragedies and the usual rest, though I don’t remember hearing the words Vietnam War. Family members enter and exit, tears are spilled, pills popped. There are significant gaps (no Ann-Margret or Richard M. Nixon), and, outside a nice scene in which the Las Vegas Elvis arranges a large ensemble of musicians, there’s also little about how Elvis actually made music. He listens to Black music and, almost by osmosis and sheer niceness, becomes the King of Rock ’n’ RollWhile Butler pouts, smolders and sweats, he has been tasked with what seems an impossible role. Elvis’s ravishing beauty, which remained intact even as his body turned to bloat, is one hurdle, and so too was his charisma and talent. Butler’s performance gains in power as Elvis ages, particularly when he hits Las Vegas. One insurmountable problem, though, is that Luhrmann never allows a single scene or song to play out without somehow fussing with it — cutting into it, tarting it up, turning the camera this way and that, pushing in and out — a frustrating, at times maddening habit that means he’s forever drawing attention to him him him and away from Butler, even when his willing young star is doing his very hardest to burn down the house. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Mother Courage’ Review: Selling Her Wares Amid the Havoc of War

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      Irondale Ensemble’s adaptation of Brecht’s antiwar epic captures some of its spirit but lacks any real philosophical or political heft.There’s no virtue in war. But there is profit — for those ruthless enough to get it.So preaches Bertolt Brecht in his play “Mother Courage and Her Children,” a new adaptation of which is now running as part of Irondale Ensemble’s Brecht in Exile series. This production, directed and adapted by Jim Niesen, using John Willett’s classic translation, captures some of the spirit of Brecht’s cynical war fable but none of the philosophical or political heft.Mother Courage (an appropriately brusque Vicky Gilmore, in a knit hat, leather jacket and combat boots), traveling with her three children, is selling goods from a cart during the Thirty Years’ War. There’s Eilif (Nolan Kennedy), her pugnacious elder son who’s recruited as a soldier; Swiss Cheese (Terry Greiss), her honest but dimwitted younger son who becomes an army paymaster; and Kattrin (Jacqueline Joncas), her mute daughter. While peddling her wares over the course of several years, this mother and her family meet soldiers, a cook, a chaplain, a prostitute and a spy, and ultimately her children become direct or indirect casualties of the war she aimed to get rich on.“Mother Courage” is being produced and staged by Irondale at its space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a former Sunday school auditorium with chipped walls and giant plaques announcing the Beatitudes, which would have worked for this no-frills play if it weren’t undermined by what precedes it. Before the show, which has been marketed as an immersive experience, audience members can have a drink in the makeshift lobby set up with picnic tables; beer and soft pretzels, courtesy of DSK Brooklyn, are served from a cart in the corner. It’s meant to recall a biergarten, but is more a gimmick than an actual part of the show.In other words, it looks and feels like any other hipster hangout in Brooklyn.In his staging, Niesen retains Brecht’s title cards, the expository bits of narrative announcing what will transpire in each of the 12 scenes in this tedious two-and-a-half-hour epic.There are songs, too, as in Brecht’s original text — exegetic tunes that the characters break into — set to new music by Sam Day Harmet, who performs here with Erica Mancini and Stephen LaRosa. The score — incorporating banjo, guitar, drums, accordion and a synthesizer — begins with a war march before shooting into different genres, from bluegrass to ’80s synth pop and garage rock.The music’s too chic and eccentric for the production and the actors, who perform on, in and around an unsightly two-level scaffolding structure draped with blankets and curtains (scenic design is by Ken Rothchild).As for the actors: How can they be critiqued when Brecht wrote an unsentimental play with characters who aren’t meant to be empathized with, who don’t appeal to our hearts but our minds? Of the show’s central brood, the women are most memorable — Gilmore’s despicable Mother Courage and Joncas’s skittish Kattrin, who communicates through a series of fearsome croaks. The rest of the cast — all of whom play several characters — appear most comfortable when they tap into the production’s absurd sense of humor, such as Stephen Cross’s indulgent performance as a clucking, mischievous capon and Michael-David Gordon’s huffing and griping as a weary prostitute named Yvette. Many of the performances feel lethargic, and the cast awkwardly hiccups through the dialogue of even the smallest bits of improvised comedy.Niesen’s direction flattens an already challenging work of theater that, despite its influence, didn’t quite catch on in the United States, where agitprop and other kinds of homiletic plays are less popular. This “Mother Courage” feels like pedagogy encased in a bubble, isolated from, say, an overseas war — not to mention the political warmongering and consumptive capitalism in our own country.This production then reads as an indelicate transcription, because Brecht may be stone cold, but that doesn’t mean his work lacks spark. The spark of revolution, that is — though Brecht pioneered the Lehrstück, or “learning play,” his aim wasn’t just to educate but to incite audiences to make change in their society. He wanted his plays to “knock them into shape,” Brecht wrote. Unfortunately, this “Mother Courage” fails to pack a punch.Mother Courage and Her ChildrenThrough June 5 at Irondale, Brooklyn; irondale.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      in Music

      Robert Ainsley Is Named Glimmerglass Festival Director

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      Robert Ainsley, a champion of new American opera, takes the reins from Francesca Zambello. He said the festival would continue to showcase work that tells “everyone’s story.”The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., announced on Wednesday that it has named Robert Ainsley as it next artistic and general director, giving the festival a new leader as it moves toward its 50th season, in 2025.Ainsley most recently served as the director of the Cafritz Young Artists program at the Washington National Opera and of the American Opera Initiative where, over a span of six years, he commissioned, developed and premiered more than 30 new operas and other works. He has also held leadership positions at the Portland Opera, Minnesota Opera and Opera Theater of Saint Louis and has worked at other summer music festivals.He succeeds Francesca Zambello, who led Glimmerglass, a summer festival of opera and theater, for more than a decade. In an interview, Ainsley said he was committed to building on Zambello’s efforts to “make this an art form for everyone — telling everyone’s story and trying to ensure everyone has agency in how those stories are told.”“She’s really built something that is inclusive and representative of the diversity of America today,” Ainsley said. “And that’s something I really want to carry on and make a central part of our mission.”Robert Ainsley, the new artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival.Arielle DonesonHe also said he was dedicated to ensuring that the festival has a balance of everything from 17th-century opera to musical theater to the kinds of new works and formats he has championed in previous jobs.Glimmerglass has offered new productions and other stagings of opera and musical theater in Cooperstown every summer since 1975.“The intense experience of drawing so many people together from all over the country and all over the world is what makes a festival very special,” Ainsley said. “But what Glimmerglass has is the best bits of all of the summer programs.”In a news release, Zambello called Ainsley “a wonderful artist” who will bring “excellent vision and leadership” to a time of transition for the company. Robert Nelson, the chair of the Glimmerglass Festival board of trustees, said Ainsley “is perfectly poised to lead the Glimmerglass Festival into its next era.”Ainsley said he was eager to get to Cooperstown to become part of the community there.“When an institution gets me, they get all of me,” he said. “Bringing people together of all backgrounds and creating something wonderful is what has made Glimmerglass special, and that’s definitely what I want to do with it.” More

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      The ‘Philosopher King’ of Percussion Starts His Next Chapter

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      Steven Schick, a renowned figure in contemporary music, had nearly burned out as a performer. But a new recording project shows he’s hardly finished.SAN DIEGO — Since its first performance, in 1976, Iannis Xenakis’s “Psappha” has been at the core of the solo percussion repertory.Not that it really had competition: When it premiered, a repertory for solo percussion barely existed. But “Psappha” shook the nascent field with its tension between flexible instrumentation and rigorous beat, between stark rhythms and kaleidoscopic colors. The 14-minute piece, in which the player presides over a sprawling array, came across as a strikingly modern abstraction of an ancient ritual, teetering between sober and ecstatic.Steven Schick managed the precarious balance between those two qualities as he recorded the pounding final minute on a recent afternoon in a studio at the University of California campus here, where he has taught since 1991.“Not even my 20-year-old self could have done that,” said a smiling Schick, 68, over the control room speakers when he was done. “That was pretty good.”Renowned for the ease and lucidity with which he handles the piece’s polyphonic intensity, Schick had already recorded it for a Xenakis collection released in 2006. But this new take will become part of “Weather Systems,” a multialbum project setting down his latest thoughts on a body of work he has commanded for nearly half a century. The opening installment, “A Hard Rain,” which compiles some of the foundational pieces he learned when he was starting out as a musician, was released on Friday.The series might seem, at first glance, like a nostalgic farewell to these works. After all, as his sweat and heavy breathing when he finished the recording session made clear, percussion is, more than most instrumental music-making, a young person’s game.But after a foray into conducting — his tenure leading the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, which began as something of a lark and lasted 15 years, is ending in June — Schick is focusing anew on solo performance.“My percussion playing was saved by starting to conduct,” he said in an interview on the patio of his home in La Jolla. “The repertory is not that large. ‘Psappha’ I’ve played a thousand times. So I was really on the verge of burning out.”It was a renewal cemented during the pandemic.“I didn’t miss conducting,” he said. “And I actually didn’t really even miss teaching in person. I certainly didn’t miss playing concerts. But it was like an itch to practice. It felt like being 19 or 20: not learning these pieces because I had a concert, just doing it because I wanted to.”“Weather Systems,” then, is part textbook, part scrapbook, part lockdown diary, part communion with his younger self, part accumulation of new works. Looking to his past and sketching his future, it is intended as the magnum opus of a figure the composer Michael Gordon has called “the philosopher king of percussion music.”Schick was born in Iowa, growing up first on his family’s farm, then in a small town nearby. (“A Hard Rain” alludes to the precipitation that obsesses every farmer, as well as to the deluge of the pandemic.)“The elementary school band teacher sent home an instrument list for the parents to decide what their kids would play,” he said. “And at the top were the ones I wanted: violin, and French horn sounded kind of exotic. But down at the very bottom was drums, with an asterisk that the parents didn’t have to buy the drums, just the sticks. And my mother was frugal; I was the eldest of five.”Schick, practicing a piece by Sarah Hennies that includes a bowed vibraphone and a flour sifter, is “the god of a certain kind of percussion playing,” Hennies said.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesSo a drummer he became, playing in marching band and some rock ’n’ roll groups. What classical music he knew was from his mother, a talented amateur pianist. She took him to see the New York Philharmonic on tour — Seiji Ozawa conducting Debussy’s “La Mer.”“And I thought, Whoa,” Schick recalled. “I just knew that wasn’t the marching band.”Planning to become a medical doctor (his father’s aspiration before farming), Schick soon transferred to the University of Iowa, where an influx of money from the Rockefeller Foundation had established an unlikely hotbed of contemporary music. When he was asked by the pianist James Avery, a faculty member, to work with him on Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” — a long, raucous electroacoustic classic created in the late 1950s — Schick was thrust into the heart of experimental music.“It was the moment there was no turning back,” he said.With a talent and work ethic that allowed him to memorize huge amounts of complex music, Schick swiftly stood out for his magnetic, theatrical performances, notable as much for the movement, almost choreographic in its fluid elegance, as for the sound.“You have to imagine the 1980s,” said Gordon, one of the trio of composers who founded the collective Bang on a Can. “People came onstage to play contemporary music with the music pasted on huge pieces of cardboard. It was: ‘I’m doing very serious work; this is very hard; this music is very complicated.’ And Steve, from the beginning, what really shocked everyone is that he decided he’s not playing anything unless he plays it by memory. And once he was freed from having to have the music, he’s an incredibly dynamic performer.”Bang on a Can brought him on as a founding member of its All-Stars chamber ensemble, a new challenge for a solo specialist. Establishing himself in San Diego, where he turned his class of graduate students into the touring ensemble Red Fish Blue Fish, he continued to be the rare artist equally interested in the complex tangles of Brian Ferneyhough and Charles Wuorinen; the open-ended spareness of Morton Feldman and John Cage; and the Post-Minimalist rock inflections of Gordon and his cohort.All these styles come together in “The Percussionist’s Art,” his 2006 book that is a kind of memoir in music: poetic and thoughtful, but without stinting on detailed measure-by-measure advice for his fellow performers.“He wrote about these pieces in the same way I would hear pianists talk about the classic pieces in their repertoire,” said Ian Rosenbaum, a member of the quartet Sandbox Percussion. “He wasn’t talking about them in terms of sticks and the technical things; he was talking about them in terms of feelings and emotions. It was a dimension of interpretation that I had never really considered before.”Schick on the beach near his home in La Jolla, Calif. “It turns out I’m a better player than I was,” he said.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesSchick developed a reputation as a player whose technique could handle any obstacle. “Any reasonable composer would think: This is Steve Schick; he can play anything; I’m just going to write a virtuoso showpiece, and every impossible thing I can think of,” said John Luther Adams, a close friend and collaborator, who wrote the suite “The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies” for Schick in 2002.“I did exactly the opposite,” Adams went on. “I gave him this piece which requires a kind of Butoh virtuosity, this nearly frozen slow-motion virtuosity.”Schick, of course, took it in stride and made it his own, as he does with almost every musical dare. Lacking enough hands for an old Bang on a Can piece, he figured out that he could attach sleigh bells to his ankles and dance the part.He has filmed performances without audience in the Arctic tundra and in misty Canadian mountains, and, four years ago, led the San Diego Symphony in a stirring interpretation of Adams’s “Inuksuit” at the U.S.-Mexico border, with musicians on both sides. He will play in Tyshawn Sorey’s epic, glacial “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” this fall at the Park Avenue Armory, having participated in the premiere at the Rothko Chapel in Houston in February.“Weather Systems” is being released on the Islandia Music Records label, founded by the cellist Maya Beiser, another close friend and a fellow founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. “I knew I wanted to do a big project with Steve,” she said. “It worked out perfectly that he was in this moment in his career when he wanted to refocus on his solo work.”A collaboration with the audio engineer Andrew Munsey, “A Hard Rain” is a meditative two hours of music, with the dark resonance of a cave — and, in Kurt Schwitters’s “Ursonate,” a flood of Dada babble. Next up will be an installment of radio-play-type pieces for speaking percussionist by George Lewis, Vivian Fung, Pamela Z and Roger Reynolds.And, further in the future, an album including “Psappha.” Schick’s new recording recreates the situation of his practice studio on campus during the pandemic, when limited space meant that hanging gongs surrounded his setup for the Xenakis. The result is a barely audible but palpable shimmer around the beats that bleeds into the pauses — a subtle heightening of the ritualistic nature of the piece, and an indelible record of Schick’s life over the past couple of years.“Steve is really the god of a certain kind of percussion playing,” said Sarah Hennies, a player and composer who studied with him in San Diego. “The music of ‘Psappha’ is ecstatic and transporting and powerful. But the way Steve plays it, it doesn’t feel like he’s showing off, which is what a lot of people want to do.”And Schick has grown only more economical in his gestures, the distribution of his energy.“All these percussion solos from that period of time were written for young, acrobatic people,” he said of the “Hard Rain” collection. “So the question is, what does an aging body, but a more experienced body, have to offer? And it turns out I’m a better player than I was. I don’t waste any time.” More