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      12 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2022

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      ‘Better Call Saul’ returns, Cecily Strong stars in a one-woman show, and Faith Ringgold gets an overdue retrospective.As a new year begins in uncertain times (again), our critics highlight the TV, movies, music, art, theater, dance and comedy that promise a welcome distraction.Margaret LyonsThe End of ‘Better Call Saul’Bob Odenkirk stars as Jimmy McGill in AMC’s “Better Call Saul,” which returns for its final season this spring.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Associated PressI’ll be sad forever when “Better Call Saul” is over, so part of me is actually dreading the sixth and final season. I never want to say goodbye to Jimmy or Kim — but man, am I dying to see them again. By the time “Saul” returns on AMC this spring, it will have been off the air for two full years. (Bob Odenkirk, its star, recovered from a heart attack that occurred on set this year.) If there was ever a show that knew how to think about endgames, it’s this one, among the most carefully woven dramas of our time. Of course, thanks to “Breaking Bad,” we know exactly where some of these characters are headed but not how they get there or how they feel about it or whom they’ll hurt along the way. Hurry back! But also, go slow.Salamishah TilletA ‘Downton Abbey’ Sequel Travels to FranceThe sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era” is partly set in the South of France; from left, Harry Hadden-Paton, Laura Carmichael, Tuppence Middleton and Allen Leech.Ben Blackall/Focus FeaturesOK, so yes, it was weird that my friends Sherri-Ann and Amber and I were the only Black people in the theater when we saw the movie “Downton Abbey” in 2019. At the time, we agreed that despite the absence of people of color in the theater and onscreen, we still found delight in the grandeur — the clothing, the castle, the cast of characters, especially the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Violet Crawley, marvelously played by Dame Maggie Smith. Now that we’ve set our calendars to March 18, 2022, for the sequel, “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” I’m looking forward to seeing how the franchise tries to reinvent itself on the cusp of a new era, the 1930s, and how it fares in the current racial moment. (A Black female face pops up in a trailer.) Partly set in the South of France after the Dowager Countess learns she has inherited a villa there, the movie sends the upstairs Crawley clan and their downstairs employees off on another adventure, with another wedding. While Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton,” has a new show, “The Gilded Age,” premiering on HBO in January — which seems to be a bit more thoughtful in its take on race, class and identity — here’s hoping that this sequel to “Downton” takes a bow in grand Grantham style.Jesse GreenCecily Strong in a One-Woman ShowCecily Strong, left, and the director Leigh Silverman; Strong is starring in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” at the Shed.Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesJane Wagner’s 1985 play “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” was custom-made for the chameleonic gifts of her life partner (and, later, wife), Lily Tomlin. Who else could have inhabited its 12 highly distinct characters — among them a runaway punk, a bored one-percenter and a trio of disillusioned feminists — with such sardonic sympathy? When Tomlin won a 1986 Tony Award for her work, it seemed to seal the idea that the performer and the play were forever one. But in the kind of casting that makes you smack your head with delight, Cecily Strong takes up Tomlin’s mantle in a revival directed by Leigh Silverman at the Shed, expected to open on Jan. 11. Strong — whose “Saturday Night Live” characters include Jeanine Pirro, the Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party and, most recently, Goober the Clown Who Had an Abortion When She Was 23 — seems like another custom fit, nearly four decades later.Jon ParelesAfrofuturism at Carnegie HallSun Ra Arkestra will perform its galactic jazz as part of the Afrofuturism festival that starts in February.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesStepping outside its own history as a bastion of Western classical music, Carnegie Hall will be the hub of a citywide, multidisciplinary festival of Afrofuturism: the visionary, tech-savvy ways that African-diaspora culture has imagined alternate paths forward. Carnegie’s series is expected to start Feb. 12 with the quick-cutting, sometimes head-spinning electronic musician Flying Lotus. (One challenge might be the main hall’s acoustics.) Shows at Zankel Hall include the galactic jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra with the cellist and singer Kelsey Lu and the spoken-word insurgent Moor Mother (Feb. 17); the flutist Nicole Mitchell leading her Black Earth Ensemble; and the clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid with her Autophysiopsychic Millennium (Feb. 24); the African-rooted hip-hop duo Chimurenga Renaissance and the Malian songwriter Fatoumata Diawara (March 4); and the D.J., composer and techno pioneer Carl Craig leading his Synthesizer Ensemble (March 19). There’s far more: five dozen other cultural organizations will have festival events.Anthony TommasiniThe Metropolitan Opera Rethinks VerdiThe set model for a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” which is expected to open at the Metropolitan Opera in February.Metropolitan OperaVerdi’s “Don Carlos” may not be a flawless opera. But it’s a profound work; I think of it as Verdi’s “Hamlet.” Written for the Paris Opera, it nodded to the French grand style and included epic scenes and massed choruses. But at its 1867 premiere, it was deemed overly long and ineffective. Verdi revised the opera several times, making cuts, translating the French libretto into Italian, leaving a confused legacy of revisions. The Metropolitan Opera is giving audiences a chance to hear the work as originally conceived in its five-act French version, which many consider the best. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has led superb Met performances of the Italian adaptation, will be in this pit for this new production by David McVicar. The starry cast, headed by the tenor Matthew Polenzani in the title role, includes Sonya Yoncheva, Elina Garanca, Etienne Dupuis, Eric Owens and John Relyea. When performances begin on Feb. 28, be prepared for a five-hour show with two intermissions; I can’t wait.Mike HaleTrue-Crime, Starring Renée ZellwegerRenée Zellweger is starring in the true-crime mini-series “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThis winter brings more than the usual number of big stars taking time out for the small screen, like Uma Thurman (“Suspicion”), Christopher Walken (“Severance”) and Samuel L. Jackson (“The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray”). The one that piques my interest the most is Renée Zellweger, taking on only her second lead television role in “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC. Zellweger can be hit or miss, but her hits — “The Whole Wide World,” “Chicago,” “Judy” — keep her in the very top rank of American actresses. Here she plays Pam Hupp, who is implicated in multiple deaths and is currently serving a life sentence for one of them, in a true-crime mini-series whose showrunner, Jenny Klein, was a producer on solid TV offerings like “The Witcher” and “Jessica Jones.”Jason FaragoAt 91, Faith Ringgold Gets a RetrospectiveA retrospective of the work of Faith Ringgold opens at the New Museum in February and will include “Dancing at the Louvre: The French Collection Part I, #1,” from 1991. Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY and DACS, London, via ACA GalleriesWhen the Museum of Modern Art opened its expanded home in 2019, its most important Picasso suddenly found itself with a new companion: a tumultuous, panoramic painting of American violence that Faith Ringgold painted in 1967. Ringgold, born 91 years ago in Harlem, has never been an obscure figure: Her art was displayed in the Clinton White House as well as most of New York’s museums; her children’s books have won prizes and reached best-seller lists. But she has had to wait too long for a career-spanning retrospective in her hometown. The one at the New Museum, which opens Feb. 17, will reveal how Ringgold intertwined the political and the personal: first in her rigorously composed “American People” paintings, which channeled the civil rights movement into gridded, repeating, syncopated forms; and then in pieced-fabric “story quilts” depicting Michael Jackson or Aunt Jemima, and geometric abstractions inspired by Tibetan silks and embroideries. The show comes with a major chance for rediscovery: the first outing in over two decades of her “French Collection,” a 12-quilt cycle that recasts the history of Paris in the 1920s through the eyes of a fictional African-American artist and model.Maya PhillipsA Viking Prince Seeks RevengeAlexander Skarsgård in a scene from “The Northman,” a story about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father, directed by Robert Eggers.Focus FeaturesRobert Eggers has directed only two feature films, and yet he’s already known as a maker of beautifully strange, critically acclaimed movies. “The Witch,” from 2016, was followed three years later by the grim and perplexing “The Lighthouse.” Both established Eggers as a stylistic descendant of the Brothers Grimm, a crafter of macabre fables that descend into torrents of madness. Which is why I’m excited to see his third feature film, “The Northman,” expected to premiere on April 22, about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father. Steeped in Icelandic mythology, the story is based on the tale of Amleth, the inspiration for Prince Hamlet, my favorite sad boy of English literature. Eggers wrote the screenplay with the Icelandic poet Sjón, so we can surely expect an epic with epic writing to match. There’s also a stellar cast, including Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe — and Björk as a witch. I’d watch for that alone.Gia KourlasTransformation, Via Tap and Modern DanceA still from Ayodele Casel’s “Chasing Magic”; from left, Anthony Morigerato, John Manzari, Casel and Naomi Funaki.Kurt CsolakThere are times, however rare, when a virtual dance can be just as stirring as a live one. Ayodele Casel’s joyful and galvanizing “Chasing Magic,” presented by the Joyce Theater in April, was just that. Now the tap dancer and choreographer unveils a new version of the work, directed by Torya Beard, for the stage — an actual one — starting Tuesday, barring any Covid cancellations. And the following month, “Four Quartets,” an ambitious evening-length work by the modern choreographer Pam Tanowitz, lands at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Feb. 10-12). Based on T.S. Eliot’s poems, the production features live narration by the actress Kathleen Chalfant, music by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and a set by Brice Marden; in it, Tanowitz continues her exploration of the relationship between emotion and form. It’s true that one is tap; the other, modern dance. What do they have in common? Both have much to say and to show about the transporting, transformative power of dance.Isabelia HerreraThe Rapper Saba Explores TraumaSaba, a rapper from Chicago, will release a new album, “Few Good Things,” on Feb. 4.Mat Hayward/Getty ImagesDiaristic and quietly intense, Saba, a rapper from Chicago, is the kind of artist who navigates grief with a cool solace. In 2018, his record “Care for Me” considered this theme in the aftermath of the murder of his cousin and collaborator, who was stabbed to death a year earlier. Out on Feb. 4, his next album, “Few Good Things,” confronts equally gutting life challenges: the anxiety of generational poverty and the depths of survivor’s guilt. It reprises Saba’s slithering and poetic flows, which breathe out a profound sense of narrative. The beats are still buttery, jazzy and meticulously arranged. But this time around, there is more wisdom — a recognition that living through trauma means finding gratitude and affirmation in the moments you can.Jason ZinomanComedian Taylor Tomlinson on TourThe comedian Taylor Tomlinson in her Netflix special “Quarter-Life Crisis,” from 2020; a new one is in the works.Allyson Riggs/Netflix“Quarter-Life Special,” the debut stand-up special from Taylor Tomlinson, introduced a young artist with real potential. Tomlinson tautly evoked a clear persona (cheerful but not the life of the party; more like, as she put it, “the faint pulse of the pot luck”) and told jokes marked by a diverse arsenal of act outs and manners of misdirection. She covered standard territory (dating, sex, parents, kids) with enough insight and dark shadings to get your attention. Most excitingly, every once in a while, she let her thought process spin out into deliriously unexpected directions, like the story that led her to imagine a test for sadness conducted by the police. “Instead of a breathalyzer,” she explained, “they have you sigh into a harmonica.” This Netflix special made a splash, but it would have probably been a bigger one if it didn’t come out in March 2020. One pandemic later, she has another hour ready, and another Netflix special on the way. She’s now performing it on tour, which is expected to stop in New York in January at Town Hall and then the Beacon Theater. More

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      Sam Fender, a Songwriter Caught Between Stardom and His Hometown

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      The musician is fast becoming one of Britain’s biggest rock acts with tracks about working class life in North Shields. Can he let himself leave the town?NORTH SHIELDS, England — Sam Fender, a singer-songwriter often labeled Britain’s answer to Bruce Springsteen, realized his life had changed for good on Halloween.This year he bought “eight massive boxes” of chocolate for any children who might knock on his door in North Shields, a working class town that sits on the banks of the River Tyne in northeast England.Fender expected the stash to last all night, but it went almost instantly.“Everyone in the neighborhood was, like, ‘That’s Sam Fender’s house, let’s go knock!’” the musician recalled in a recent interview at his studio a short walk from the town center, in a nondescript building surrounded by car mechanics’ workshops. The trick or treaters’ parents were more keen on getting selfies with the star than candy, whether they knew his music or not. “That scared us a bit,” he said. “It was just nuts.”Over the past year, Fender, 27, has become one of Britain’s biggest music stars, but said he still doesn’t want to be “that guy” who is too famous to answer his door on Halloween — a position that touches on a tension running through his newfound success: how to be a star while remaining part of the local community that defines his songwriting.His second album of anthemic pop-rock, “Seventeen Going Under,” released in October, quickly hit the top of the British charts, just like his debut did, and since then he’s sold out arenas, announced a 45,000-capacity outdoor show in London and charmed the British public by appearing hung over on morning TV.For a few weeks this fall, the album’s title track sparked a TikTok trend because of lyrics — “I was far too scared to hit him, but I would hit him in a heartbeat now” — that speak to suffering at the hands of bullies and domestic abusers.All that success had been built on the back of North Shields, a depressed town of some 30,000 people in a region where 34 percent of children live in poverty, but is also home, Fender said, to some of “the funniest, most loving, caring people you’ve ever met.”Fender sets most of his songs in the town, often referencing local pubs or fistfights on the nearby chilly beaches, and sings about his and his friends’ experiences, including troubled childhoods, male suicides and widespread political alienation.Owain Davies, Fender’s manager who was also born locally, said Fender’s songs were “emotive and powerful,” but their subject matter allows them to “speak for a lot of people up here — a lot of us.”Now Fender is in a sort of limbo, unable to have a normal life in North Shields or Newcastle, the nearest city, as he tries to navigate fame, even as he desperately wants to. “I’m bouncing between two complete opposites and I’m in a stage now where I don’t feel I belong in either of them,” Fender said, breaking eye contact only for bites of a chicken burger with copious mayonnaise he’d ordered from his local pub.The thought of leaving home was difficult for an artist in the northeast in a way it wouldn’t necessarily be for someone from London, he explained: “We’re tribal. Anything from Newcastle that does good belongs to Newcastle.”At a time when many British music stars attended performing arts schools and arrive primed for success, Fender’s route to fame is more illustrative of the barriers class can still present. Class has long animated music here, as a topic for songs and a badge of honor: The Clash made supporting workers’ rights part of its mission and the Sex Pistols sneered at the Queen; the Britpop battles of the 1990s pitted the middle-class Blur against the working-class Oasis, as the arty Pulp sang about posh outsiders slumming it with common people.Fender on the streets of North Shields near where he grew up. Mary Turner for The New York TimesAfter initially growing up on a middle class street in North Shields, things became difficult, Fender said, after his parents divorced when he was 8. As a teenager, he lived with his mother, a nurse who had to stop work because she suffered from fibromyalgia, a condition that causes pain and fatigue.“We were always having to beg, borrow and steal off anyone who could help her,” Fender said.At 18, Fender was working in a local pub to support them both when Davies, the manager, came in. At his boss’s encouragement, Fender played the Beatles song “Get Back” followed by one of his own tracks.Davies, recalling that moment in a telephone interview, said he’d drunk several pints of beer by that point but was still “totally struck by this incredible voice.” He immediately got on the phone to book Fender some proper shows.“It feels like a Disney story when you tell it,” Fender said, adding, “Davies saved my life.”What followed was far from a fairy tale of overnight success, though. For the next few years, Fender kept playing gigs and writing songs, “trying to figure out who I was,” he said.Then, age 20, he became seriously ill (he won’t discuss the condition’s specifics) and sat in the hospital thinking, “If I’m going to die young, I want to make sure I’ve wrote something worth listening to.” Soon, he was writing songs about his life in North Shields.Fender sitting on the bank of the River Tyne. “We’re tribal,” he said. “Anything from Newcastle that does good belongs to Newcastle.”Mary Turner for The New York TimesThis local focus has won him fans far from Britain. Steven Van Zandt, a veteran member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band who regularly plays Fender’s music on his radio show in the United States, said in a telephone interview that Fender “could have taken the easy route” thanks to his voice and looks. Instead, Fender chose to sing “these intensely personal songs of working class life that had no guarantee of success,” Van Zandt said, calling that decision “courageous.”Fender seemed overjoyed some of his heroes, who include Springsteen, loved his music, but in an hourlong interview, he returned to talking about his hometown again and again. At one point, he mentioned a campaign he led last year to stop the local council from charging people money for calling its emergency help lines for the homeless. After Fender took to social media to complain about the problem, the council promised to make the lines free.“I sometimes feel like, ‘Am I really doing anything that good?’” Fender said. That was a rare moment when he felt he was, he said.Fender insisted he would never leave North Shields behind and became visibly anxious when talking about the possibility. But Halloween night and other similar experiences had shown him it might be time to try living somewhere else for at least a few months. Somewhere that doesn’t feel like a “goldfish bowl,” he said, maybe New York, maybe London, somewhere that is “the opposite of where I’m from.” The only thing for certain was his songs wouldn’t change.“You can take a lad of Shields,” he said, “but you can’t take Shields out of the lad.” More

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      Our Favorite Arts Photos of 2021

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      After 15 months of darkness, live music returned. In New York, Foo Fighters reopened Madison Square Garden.Photograph by Tim Barber for The New York TimesOur Favorite Arts Photos of 2021These are the pictures that defined an unpredictable year across the worlds of art, music, dance and performance.Laura O’Neill More

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      Watching My Mother Watch Music

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      Our pop music critic remembers going to concerts with his mom, who died last year.Getting gifts for my mother was never easy — she was particular, as am I, and not always in overlapping ways. But when I saw that Tina Turner was going to be performing around her birthday in 2008, I bought tickets as soon as they were available.Growing up, there was a lightly worn hardback of “I, Tina” above the refrigerator. My mom spoke about “Tiiina” like an old friend, someone she used to get in trouble with. If you were alive and watching television in the mid-1980s, the image of Turner ecstatically stomping across the screen, hair pointing to the moon, was indelible. Here was a woman in charge of her destiny.Because I got them quickly, our seats were in the center of the second or third row. There’s a thing that happens at a concert, especially in an arena, when you are seated right up front. The speakers are generally booming sound to the middle and back of the room, but up close, you can actually hear what’s happening onstage, and also what’s going on right around you. Which is why for most of that night’s show, I couldn’t really hear the roar of the crowd, but I could hear my mom yelling encouragement, loudly, at Turner.It was a pointillist way to experience a show — an almost literal call and response. My mom was in no way chill. Turner vamped, my mom hooted. Turner sang of brittle love, my mom pumped her fist in assent. I can’t quite tell you how the concert was, because for those two hours, I felt like I was eavesdropping on private communiqués.More than anyone, my mother — who died late last year — gave me music. She gave me the idea that there was freedom, or identity, to be found within. My mother was raised in an ungenerous home, and from her youngest years was looking for any safe space available to her. That often meant music, which would become a constant in my young life: WBLS or Z100 in the car, Whitney Houston or Andreas Vollenweider or the Bee Gees in the house.At the time of the Turner concert, I’d been writing about music for more than a decade, and had been reviewing shows regularly for The Times for a few months. Those nights out were alternately riveting and glum, and always experienced at a little remove. I had become a professional observer.Which, in fairness, I always had been, dating back to the first proper concert I attended: Ryuichi Sakamoto at the Beacon Theater. This was in 1988, not long before my parents separated. My mother had me very young, and for the majority of my childhood until that point, had mostly been a stay-at home parent. But she had recently begun working, and finding success, in Manhattan. Our lives were changing, subtly for the moment.I don’t remember much about that night apart from the need to dress up — it was a long way from Sheepshead Bay in outer Brooklyn to the Upper West Side. The Beacon Theater crowd was disciplined. It was the most reserved I ever witnessed my mother at a concert.But the chic cosmopolitanism of the performance reflected a future she was envisioning and willing herself toward. She was also manifesting a range of imagination for me far vaster than the one she’d been afforded as a child. After the show, my mom, grandmother, great-grandmother and I all waited by the stage door exit to grab a glimpse of Sakamoto as he left — for months, years even, my mom insisted he reached through the crowd, looked me in my eyes and shook my hand.She had a way with narrative — she was the main character long before main-character energy was a thing. And she wanted that for me even if I was always a little naturally reticent. A studied and practiced mama’s boy, I learned to navigate the world by bending myself around her shape, a fearless mother’s careful son.Tina Turner, as photographed on the writer’s BlackBerry in 2008.Jon CaramanicaRyuichi Sakamoto onstage at the Beacon Theater in 1988.Bell Biv DeVoe on the 1991 Club MTV Tour.Raymond Boyd/Getty ImagesAretha Franklin, captured on the writer’s old iPhone in 2017.Jon CaramanicaEveryone was playing their part when, a couple of years after the Sakamoto show, I cajoled her into taking me to see the Club MTV Tour at the Jones Beach amphitheater. The lineup, frankly, was jacked: Bell Biv DeVoe, C+C Music Factory, Gerardo. The highest of NRG.I was still learning how to navigate those spaces, trying to figure out just how loudly I could declare my enthusiasms in public. So even though I knew every word of every song of every performer, I mostly sat still.My mom, though, was just as exuberant then as at the Turner show. Like any sullen teenager, I was embarrassed — but I also was learning firsthand it was safe to be yourself, even while Bell Biv DeVoe was calisthenically attacking the stage during “Do Me!”She was giving me a blueprint to feel free, though even now, I experience exuberance at concerts far more intensely on the inside than the outside. Maybe that’s part of my origin story as a critic — watching the show, and watching my mother watch the show, and watching others watch my mother watch the show. It’s all part of the experience.BY THE TIME of the Turner show, my mom had been living with lung cancer for about three years. She’d been diagnosed, miraculously, on a scan following a car accident. The years that followed were harrowing and unpredictable.Nothing will strip your varnish quite like watching someone you love wither. It made me tentative, as if any wrong move on my part might put her in peril. When, in 2017, she told me she wanted to see Aretha Franklin perform, all I could think about were the liabilities — What if the show ran late? What if my mom started to feel weak during the performance? What if Franklin seemed … ill? Would it be too much to bear?Over the years, as a critic, I’ve had to watch many late-career concerts from onetime titans — it can be grim. That was part of my hesitation, too, that the effort that I knew my mother would put into going to the show would somehow not be repaid. I wanted to protect her, and myself too.As anyone who’s seen Franklin perform knows, though, I truly needn’t have worried. She was a little frail, but vigorous and stubborn, perhaps powered by the determination of someone who was not in flawless health. (Franklin died the following year; this ended up being one of her last shows.)There were so many stretches of time during my mother’s illness when I felt I had nothing to give, that nothing I did would be useful. Faced with the scale and nimbleness of a wily cancer, you can’t help but feel insufficient.This, however, I’d gotten right. As at all the other shows, I watched my mother watch the stage. All night long, she radiated hope. Franklin was in declining health, but my mother saw none of that. Or maybe she saw it, but just not how I saw it. For her, Franklin was indomitable. A beacon of resilience.The days just after the show were difficult — for me. I felt awful that I couldn’t give her that sensation every day. My mother, on the other hand, talked about it for weeks. About how Franklin was bossing the band around. About how she brought her purse out onstage and someone ran after her with it when the show was done. About her fur coat. In every telling, Franklin was very much alive, and so was she. More

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      Jeanine Tesori’s Gift: Conjuring the Storytelling Potency of Music

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      In shows like “Caroline, or Change” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” the composer excels at translating her astute insights about characters into music.Jeanine Tesori can take apart music and put it back together as well as any composer who’s put note to paper. She can write a recitative worthy of Janacek, or a pop tune that could have charted on 1970s AM radio. She can conjure a gospel number, a tap soft-shoe, or a folk-rock confessional like a seasoned pro.And as the co-creator of “Caroline, or Change” (now in a widely acclaimed revival on Broadway) and the Tony-winning “Fun Home,” she has helped to expand the boundaries of the American musical in a way that recalls such forebears as Stephen Sondheim and Elizabeth Swados.But you don’t come away from a Tesori musical — not the soulful “Violet,” the jazzy “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” the snarky “Shrek the Musical,” the meta-cultural “Soft Power,” nor the offbeat “Kimberly Akimbo,” now in a well-reviewed premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company — marveling at her formal innovation.For all her formidable tools and training, Tesori understands that “craft is the conduit for a really fresh and profound encounter with human experience,” her “Fun Home” co-writer Lisa Kron said. “It’s not an end in itself.”Said David Lindsay-Abaire, with whom she adapted “Shrek” for Broadway, and who adapted his play “Kimberly Akimbo” with her: “She thinks like a playwright. She understands story and narrative and character, and the architecture of a scene.”It’s not just structure she’s attuned to, said Tony Kushner, with whom she wrote “Caroline, or Change,” but subtext as well.“She either comprehends or intuits, not what necessarily is the most obvious choice for dramatic action or dramatic events, but what’s under the surface, where the real meaning of a piece lies,” Kushner said. “I’ve never met anybody more wide open to that, or more emotionally intelligent about human beings than she is.” While that’s surely a fine quality in any person, here’s the key: “She has this absolutely uncanny ability to translate that into music.”From left: Nya, Sharon D Clarke, Harper Miles and Nasia Thomas in the Roundabout Theater’s revival of “Caroline, or Change” at Studio 54.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis is the mystery of Jeanine Tesori — of any composer for the theater, really. Where does the music come from, and how does it work its magic? A nonverbal language with the power to move us, sometimes literally, music can be wed to words and characters in ways that feel definitive, clarifying. As Lindsay-Abaire put it: “I don’t know if pure is the right word, but something less diluted. You hear the characters’ emotions and know what’s going on inside those heads and hearts,” dramatic content that in nonmusical plays “you rely on the actors to communicate.”George Brant, with whom Tesori is adapting his play about a female drone pilot, “Grounded,” for the Metropolitan Opera, said that Tesori is “able to get at the guts of the piece and transform it into something that still feels like itself, but more.”The question of music’s storytelling potency is sharpened in Tesori’s case because, unlike Sondheim or many of her generational peers (Jason Robert Brown, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel), she doesn’t write lyrics. Instead, she has worked with playwrights to shape not only her show’s scripts but bracingly original songs as well, in idioms and character voices as wide-ranging as the musical genres she references.Looking at her list of collaborators, Lin-Manuel Miranda said: “It’s as if she’s made it a mission to bring every serious dramatist to swim in the musical theater pool. But the other side of that is she’s bending their skills to our art form, and innovating our art form with every at bat.“It’s how you know she’s the best,” he added “because she works with the best and makes them sing.”It’s not as if she has a cookie-cutter style, though. As Lindsay-Abaire said, “The fact that the lyrics are all so different — that Tony’s are Tony’s, Lisa’s are Lisa’s, mine are mine, is a testament to Jeanine embracing her collaborators and our voices. It’s not like: This is how Jeanine teaches all these playwrights to write lyrics.”For her part, Tesori — who recently turned 60 but retains a youthful bonhomie, with “Fun Home” wallpaper patterns tattooed on her forearm — has a firm grip on what her strengths are.“I’m not a lyricist at all, but I’ll say what my gift is: recognizing lyrics in the sea of words,” Tesori explained during a recent interview in her office at City Center, where she serves as a creative adviser. She immerses herself in her collaborators’ verbiage in various ways. She asks for what she calls “noodles,” which Kron described as “bits of lyric that didn’t make it into the lyric I built for her.” Tesori also has them read their lyrics aloud to her, sometimes “two or three times,” as Kron recalled, to glean intention from inflection.Then, Tesori said, her mind goes to work on fragments of material, in a process she compared to the sequence in “The Queen’s Gambit” when the lead character envisions complicated chess moves on the ceiling. “Things start clicking into place,” Tesori said, “and I think: Oh, there! There!”“Meryl Streep disappears into her characters. You sort of know that she’s there, but also you don’t. I like doing that too,” Tesori said. “I feel like my job is to get out of the way of how they sing.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHer facility with a wide range of musical styles can be traced to a diverse musical education. She started piano lessons at age 6 with a teacher, she said, who let her play any musical style. “He did not judge anything, and that was really the lesson,” she said. After a rebellious break from music during her teen years, and a brief flirtation with pre-med classes, she studied music at Barnard College and soon got work as a Broadway pit pianist and freelance music director.Most formative, though, was her partnership with Buryl Red, a Baptist choral arranger with whom she ran a music company for 25 years until his death in 2013. Assisting Red on countless recording sessions in Nashville and around the world, she absorbed a range of musical influences, in particular gospel, that have served her well in such scores as “Violet” and “Caroline, or Change.”This broad palette isn’t mere versatility for its own sake. Her colleagues talk about her rigor at winnowing their material, while her peers praise the results. The composer Stephen Schwartz hailed “her ability to always sound like Jeanine and yet to write very specifically for whatever character or milieu that she’s doing,” while Miranda said that she “serves character absolutely and rigorously.”Said LaChiusa: “I never hear the composer screaming, ‘Look at me!’ Instead, I hear, ‘Listen to these words,’ and ‘Feel this character’s joy, this character’s sorrow.’”Honing in on character may get closer to the heart of the matter. By comparison, Tesori recalled of a famous collaborator on the 2006 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Mother Courage,” for which she wrote music. “Meryl Streep disappears into her characters,” she said. “You sort of know that she’s there, but also you don’t. I like doing that too: I want them to be musicalized, not me. I feel like my job is to get out of the way of how they sing.”In the case of “Kimberly Akimbo,” Tesori gives the title character — a teenager with a disease that ages her prematurely — bittersweetly introspective songs, while the callow teenagers and needy adults around her sing in a range of prickly, searching pop and rock. And in the quasi-operatic “Caroline, or Change,” she breathes life not only into the Black and Jewish characters but also into several inanimate objects, from a beatific moon to an angry, mournful city bus.Tesori knows how to translate feeling into song so well that she was even brought in as a vocal producer on the new “West Side Story,” at the screenwriter Kushner’s recommendation. She coached performers on the Bernstein-Sondheim songs, which they recorded in a studio before a frame was shot, and she followed up on set to make sure they maintained consistency.“I love the treasure map of looking into a score as if you’re singing it into being,” she said of the film, though she could also have been describing the kind of information she encodes in her own work. “So you’re not singing ‘West Side Story,’ you’re actually expressing something a character needs in that moment. The tritone in ‘Maria’ is part of an expression, not a famous motif.”Searching for a pre-verbal language to express big feelings, especially unexpressed ones among family members, may be how her musical antennae were formed. Gesturing to the family struggles at the center of “Fun Home,” “Caroline” and now “Kimberly Akimbo,” Tesori said, “I love a household — the counterpoint of the attic, the living room, and the basement.” Growing up as one of four girls in a Sicilian American family on Long Island, she recalled, “There was beauty to it, and there was great chaos to it, and they were all happening at the same time, depending on which fader was up.”She remains tied to her Long Island roots, and photographs of her grandparents are prominently displayed in her office. Her grandmother’s ageless quality, she said, informed her work on the lead character of “Kimberly Akimbo,” while her immigrant grandfather’s thwarted career as a band composer and arranger — he had to pump gas to make ends meet — is part of what fuels the “urgency” she feels about making music.Though Tesori doesn’t typically originate projects, she is careful in choosing them. When David Henry Hwang pitched her the idea of “Soft Power” — a reverse “King and I,” in which a Chinese diplomat becomes an adviser to an American politician — she said she immediately knew: “This is so ambitious and worth failing at, worth spending the four or five years they all take, no matter what.”Victoria Clark, center, as the title character in “Kimberly Akimbo” at the Atlantic Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHwang said she dug with complete commitment into both the show’s irony and its sincerity, and above all she “forced me to take my character seriously, and face my own trauma.” (Hwang was stabbed on a Brooklyn street in 2015 in what was possibly an anti-Asian hate crime.) The show, originally produced in Los Angeles in 2016 and at the Public Theater in 2018, is still aiming for Broadway.With Tazewell Thompson, she wrote the opera “Blue,” about the police killing of a young Black man, which premiered at the Glimmerglass Festival in the summer of 2019. Planned for 2020 stagings scotched by Covid, the opera has new 2022 dates at companies in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Toledo, Ohio, with more commitments to follow. Thompson joined Tesori’s other collaborators in marveling at her ability to make music speak emotionally.“It comes completely from her being in touch with the world, having her ears and eyes always open, watching, peering, getting involved,” Thompson said.That kind of openness can be draining, she said, citing the Sondheim song “Finishing the Hat” for the way her mind will tend to wander to her work. “I feel like I’m always chasing music; I think about it almost all the time,” she said with a note of desperation.While she maintains strong relationships — not only with her colleagues but also with her 24-year-old daughter, Siena, whom she co-parented with her ex-husband, the musical director Michael Rafter — she admitted she struggles with work-life balance and thinks about retiring all the time.“I find it a really hard life,” she admitted. “The loneliness of writing is very difficult. When students say, ‘I want to write for the theater,’ there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Run!’ And there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Stay.’”Making music has been a craft Jeanine Tesori has learned, clearly, but hearing the world as music may just be how she is wired.“Someone came to ‘Kimberly,’ this incredible woman, and she said, ‘Oh, I thought it was WON-dah-ful, it’s bee-YOO-tee-ful,’” Tesori said. The compliment was nice, sure, but “all I could hear was timbre of her voice. I started notating it in my head.” More

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      How a Pro Skateboarder Became an Apostle of Ancient Tuning

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      Duane Pitre was poised to become a street skating legend. Now he embraces just intonation.When he retired for the first time, Duane Pitre was 23.It was the winter of 1997, when money was starting to pour into professional skateboarding. Pitre was poised to become one of the sport’s lucrative stars as it transitioned from counterculture to commercial empire. He was an early member of Alien Workshop, the upstart equipment company that helped shape skating’s aesthetic.The company’s founders fell for Pitre’s lithe form and easy charisma. He effortlessly executed the tricks of street skating, a nascent urban approach, full of slides down handrails and grinds across picnic tables. He starred in seminal skate videos. Boards were printed with his name.Just as profits were rising, however, Pitre bought a cheap bass, realized his true love was making music, and bid skating farewell.“I was getting paid to do this thing I did not want to do,” Pitre, now 47, said recently on a call from his home outside of Ann Arbor, Mich. “There was no option for me to skateboard to just make my living. That’s not what it was about; it was about self-expression.”Pitre skating in Dayton, Ohio, in 1990.Mike HillPitre ended up playing in heavy rock bands, gravitating toward the stranger side of the genre until he became ensconced in experimental music two decades ago. During the last dozen years, he has emerged as an apostle of just intonation, an ancient tuning system tied to Indian and Chinese traditions but often ignored by Western composers. A proud autodidact, Pitre has moved among long-form electronic drones, mercurial acoustic improvisations and glistening string meditations, all employing just intonation.Released this fall, his pensive new album, “Omniscient Voices,” puts the piano in conversation with computer programs and electronics over five pieces that suggest damaged photos of exquisite horizons. Pitre has used the same traits that made him a street-skating phenom — ageless rebelliousness, intractable focus, unwavering restlessness — to inspire younger musicians also exploring just intonation.“Duane is like a shepherd for my generation,” the organist and composer Kali Malone, 27, said in an interview. She once spent a formative spring playing along with the composer Caterina Barbieri to “Feel Free,” Pitre’s 2012 album. (Malone’s own pieces in just intonation have introduced yet another group of artists to the system.)“Just intonation isn’t a genre,” Malone said, “but a tool you can use to make many types of music.”It’s no surprise that music was Pitre’s destiny. His parents reveled in New Orleans rock clubs; they named him after Duane Allman and indoctrinated him into the Beatles and Black Sabbath. Pitre bought new wave singles for his tiny plastic record player.His father thought the preteen Duane had a long future — perhaps a professional one — in football. But the opening skate scene in “Back to the Future” excited him so much that he cut grass for a whole summer to buy his first cheap board. And just as Marty McFly was pursued by a band of bullies in that 1985 film, Pitre and his friends were often lambasted with homophobic slurs while skating around New Orleans, long before skating’s ubiquity.“We were outcasts — bad kids,” Pitre said. But once he “found a way to run away in the streets,” he added, “I was hooked. I never played another sport.”When he was 15, Pitre earned his first sponsorship. Two years later, Alien Workshop issued his first official board, paying him two dollars for every one sold — enough for him to buy a Super Nintendo. When he was 20, he moved to San Diego to live in a skater house that resembled a frat.Its residents made cult-classic videos and did photo shoots that became the gospel of skateboarding’s ballooning community. But Chris Carter, a founder of Alien Workshop, recalls how Pitre began skipping shoots to play bass or study his indie rock obsessions, My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr.“I thought he would have been one of those legends that skates at a high level for 20 years,” Carter said in an interview. “He could have made a lot of money. But he was very honest about not wanting to get paid for something he didn’t want to do.”After Carter offered six months of retirement pay, Pitre hit the road with a series of bands. He bought a guitar pedal that allowed him to layer loops into drones. He moved to New York, which served as a de facto conservatory. A new friend was shocked, for example, that despite his aspirations to create experimental music, he didn’t know who Meredith Monk was.“All these ideas and concepts — that is what college should be,” Pitre said.In 2004, a friend Pitre had met through skating back in San Diego invited him to the studio of East Village Radio, where a mellow section of La Monte Young’s landmark “The Well-Tuned Piano” was playing. Pitre was dumbstruck: He had been using circuits to alter his sound, while Young used only tuning. The DJ knew only the name of the style: just intonation.“It felt like confusion, in the best sense,” Pitre said. “I began asking people what just intonation was, and they said it was nature’s tuning system. I didn’t want the New Age explanation. I wanted the science.”Pitre goes through his copy of “The Just Intonation Primer,” with which he taught himself the tuning system.Jarod Lew for The New York TimesHe immersed himself in the question, just as he had done with skating two decades earlier. He visited Young’s Dream House sound and light environment. He pored over rudimentary websites, read scholarly essays and ordered a spiral-bound workbook called “The Just Intonation Primer.” He tackled its mathematical models like a college student grappling with calculus and internalized just intonation’s axioms.In its simplest terms, just intonation means that the ratios between notes are whole numbers, rather than the irrational ratios that divide the octave in the familiar framework of equal temperament. For Pitre, the resulting sound — which felt exotic and disobedient, like a surrealist’s rendering of the world — was the draw. Its esoteric status lured him, too, since after skating he had resolved not to tie his creativity to commerce. Just intonation would never sell.Amid this self-education, Pitre found that just intonation samplers bored him because they were more concerned with mechanics than music. Before he released his first album in the system, he organized the 2009 compilation “The Harmonic Series” as a rebuttal. Its eight tracks showed the disparate ways that artists like the Deep Listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros or the resonator guitarist R. Keenan Lawler might wield just intonation.“I was trying to say two things,” recalled Pitre, a married father of two who still speaks with the boyish nonchalance (and sports the long hair) of his skating adolescence. “Here’s this music I think is awesome. And I was speaking to a version of myself that was two years younger, saying, ‘You can do this yourself.’”That ethos has guided Pitre’s diverse output. While the mix of harp, dulcimer, strings and electronics on “Feel Free” suggested a Renaissance recital at a tech summit, “Bayou Electric” added a Southern touch to just intonation through tidal guitar harmonies and recordings of Louisiana’s Four Mile Bayou, where Pitre’s grandmother was raised. “Omniscient Voices” has the meditative warmth of Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s “Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror” or Philip Glass’ softest études — perhaps if they were heard on warped vinyl.Likewise, Pitre’s second installment of “The Harmonic Series,” released in July, begins with Malone’s hovering organ and ends with Barbieri’s disorienting electronics. They both play with time and texture, as if tickling the mind through the ear. The six pieces — and just intonation in general — “allow us to rehear sound,” said Tashi Wada, a compilation contributor who admired Pitre as a skater before hearing his music.Experiencing younger musicians using just intonation in novel ways, Pitre said, compels him to keep exploring — in a way skating never could.“In high school math, I hated having to write down your work, because I would find my own ways to solve problems. Just intonation involved the same part of my brain,” he said. “It’s almost universally accepted that 12-tone equal temperament is the only way to tune, but that’s wrong. It felt important for people to know.” More

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      Wallice, an Indie Pop Sensation from Los Angeles

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      Her 2020 song “Punching Bag” was anointed by an influential Spotify playlist.Name: WalliceAge: 23Hometown: Los AngelesCurrently Lives: In a three-bedroom bungalow house in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles with her longtime boyfriend, Callaghan Kevany, and a friend.Claim to Fame: Wallice (whose full name is Wallice Hana Watanabe) is a singer-songwriter best known for “Punching Bag,” a song about self-deception in toxic relationships; her follow-up hit, “23,” about the perils of living with her mother during the pandemic, has had three million streams on Spotify. Sample lyric: “I’m terrified of the future/ Scared that I’ll still be a loser.” “I credit the pandemic to be able to find an audience, because I think a lot of people had time to listen to music and find new artists,” Wallice said.Big Break: In 2020, shortly after Wallice released “Punching Bag,” Spotify decided to feature the song on its Lorem playlist — an influential list that showcases new artists and now has more than 900,000 followers. “A lot of my friends are indie artists that are coming up in the scene,” she said. “They kept reposting the song, and that’s how I got Spotify’s attention.” The song took off from there and has been streamed more than four million times.Latest Project: In October, Wallice signed with Dirty Hit, an independent record label in London that’s also home to the 1975, an English boy band. In November she released the single “Wisdom Tooth,” a bubbly pop tune that was written the night before she went to the dentist. “I was so nervous,” she said. “I had a recording session that day and was like, ‘There’s no way I can write about anything else.’”Carlos Jaramillo for The New York TimesNext Thing: In the new year, she’ll join the band Still Woozy on tour. “I’m really excited about going on tour, especially since my bandmates are my best friends,” she said. “My boyfriend is our guitar player, and my bass player I’ve known forever.”What’s in a Name?: Wallice went without a name at birth because her parents thought they were having a boy. A few days later, her father named her after Wallis Simpson, the American socialite who later became the wife of Prince Edward, after he abdicated the British throne to marry her. “I really like my name, and I love how it is unique,” Wallice said. More

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      Cecilia McDowall to Debut New Christmas Carol

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      Each year, the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, commissions an original song for its Christmas service, giving the composer an audience of around 100 million people.LONDON — Every Christmas Eve, the British composer Cecilia McDowall follows the same routine.At 3 p.m., as family members arrive at her London home, she goes into the kitchen, turns on the radio and starts making a Christmas pudding — a slow-cooked, booze-soaked British dessert — while listening to the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, perform its Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.That service of Bible readings and Christmas music is one of Britain’s best known festive traditions, broadcast live on radio stations worldwide, including on around 450 in the United States. A spokesman for the choir estimated that 100 million listeners would tune in.But this year, McDowall won’t be in the kitchen. Instead, she will be sitting in King’s College’s huge Gothic chapel, listening as the choir performs “There Is No Rose,” a carol she has written especially for the event.Cecilia McDowall, a British composer, wrote a carol for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.Oxford University Press“It really is something significant,” McDowall said of the commission. “It must be the most people who’ve ever heard my music in one go.”Since the early 1980s, when the Choir of King’s College began ordering up new works for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, notable composers of religious music like John Tavener and Arvo Pärt have written for it, as well as more surprising names like Harrison Birtwistle, a British composer of spiky modernist pieces.King’s is far from alone in trying to bring new carols, or at least new settings of old texts, into the Christmas repertoire. McDowall said she had written 10 carols since the 1980s, starting with a piece for a school choir. This year, in addition to the King’s commission, she wrote a setting of “In Dulci Jubilo” for the choir of Wells Cathedral in southwest England.John Rutter, a prolific British composer of Christmas music, said in a telephone interview that this year he had also written two new carols: a setting of a William Blake poem for a cancer charity’s carol concert, and another for the Choir of Merton College, Oxford.Carol writing for choirs was a vibrant art form, Rutter said, adding that “no form of music can afford to be a museum where you’re only listening to the songs by the dead.” New works run the gamut from “something you might sing down the pub” to “refined and elegant compositions,” like McDowall’s, he added. Andrew Gant, the author of a book on a history of Christmas carols, said that some, like “The Holly and the Ivy,” are folk songs from before written records, but that many have surprisingly recent origins, far removed from the festive season. The music for “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” for instance, dates to 1840, when the German composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote the tune to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the printing press. Mendelssohn insisted the tune should never be used for religious purposes, Gant said, but 15 years later, William Cummings, a British organist, took the melody and added words from a Methodist hymn.The Choir of King’s College has commissioned a new work for its Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols since the early 1980s.Geoff RobinsonMany carols “are a series of happy accidents” like that, Gant said, adding that it was only in Victorian times that British composers started writing carols specifically for Christmas services.McDowall said the King’s College choir’s music director, Daniel Hyde, had requested that her piece provide “a moment of stillness” in the service, and asked her to keep it simple, in case choir members got sick at the last minute and new singers had to be brought in.Last December, the choir had a coronavirus outbreak in the run-up to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, then decided to cancel its live broadcast entirely as Britain was plunged into another lockdown.Hyde’s requests for an uncomplicated carol actually helped McDowall focus, she said, and the music came soon after she had found the words she wanted to use — a 15th-century hymn that tells the story of Jesus’s birth. McDowall said she had sung a setting of “There Is No Rose” by Benjamin Britten as a child and also admired a version by John Joubert. She submitted the piece in September.McDowall said she didn’t think of her carol competing against much-loved Christmas songs like “Once in Royal David’s City,” which opens the King’s service each year. “If any composer would be intimidated by the fact there exist other carols along the same lines, it’d just get in the way,” she said.Bob Chilcott, a co-editor of “Carols for Choirs” — a well-known compendium of Christmas music, first published in 1961 by Oxford University Press and updated regularly since — said there had “been a huge energy for writing new carols” in Britain over the past 20 years. Chilcott is in the process of selecting 50 new pieces for the next volume of “Carols for Choirs,” scheduled to be published in 2023. It might include contributions from contemporary composers like Caroline Shaw, he said.Most composers take one of two approaches, he said. The first is meditative, “maybe to do with talking about the quietness of the night, and the baby asleep in the manager.” The second is euphoric. “It’s all about the shepherd’s rejoicing and ‘Glory to God in the highest,’” he said. Most composers also try “to write a good tune,” Chilcott added.John Rutter, a British composer, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London this month. He has written several popular carols.Andy Paradise/Royal Philharmonic OrchestraRutter, who wrote a new carol for the King’s service in 1987, said his success with carols like the “Shepherd’s Pipe Carol” and “What Sweeter Music” — both sung in churches throughout the English-speaking world — was down to their memorable melodies, which seemed like they had been around for hundreds of years. He was “50 percent composer, and 50 percent songwriter,” he said.Hyde said McDowall’s “There Is No Rose” was centered on “a beautiful cluster” of notes that “hover, like a freeze frame,” before unfurling into a tune. “The last thing you’ll hear is the original cluster we started with, echoing in the space,” he added. “I hope people will be moved by it.”But McDowall didn’t want to say any more than Hyde. The choir likes to keep the details under wraps, and doesn’t let any recordings of the piece emerge until after it has been broadcast — by which time McDowall should be heading home to a waiting Christmas pudding. More