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      A Cabaret Star and an Opera Star Walk Onto a Stage …

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      The punchline is “Only an Octave Apart,” featuring the unlikely collaborators Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo at St. Ann’s Warehouse.“This show has been 10 years in the making,” the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo said recently.He was talking about “Only an Octave Apart,” an undefinable event — A staged concert? A revue, maybe? — which he created with Justin Vivian Bond and which runs at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn from Tuesday through Oct. 3.On paper, the two seem to be unlikely collaborators. Bond, 58, is a throaty-toned pioneer of the alternative cabaret scene, both as a solo artist and as half of the duo Kiki and Herb. Costanzo, 39, is a classical star whose luminous voice takes him to opera houses and concert halls around the world. (In the spring, he’ll return to his body-waxed role as the titular character of Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Metropolitan Opera.)But Costanzo’s voracious taste for collaboration has encompassed artists as disparate as the painter George Condo, the ballet dancer David Hallberg and the fashion designer Raf Simons. And Bond recently appeared in an opera, Olga Neuwirth’s “Orlando,” in Vienna in 2019.Costanzo is a countertenor who is returning to the title role in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBond is an alt-cabaret artist who rose to fame as half of the duo Kiki and Herb.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSo it’s not entirely implausible that they’ve ended up together at St. Ann’s, where their set list ricochets giddily from Gluck to Jobim to the Bangles, and the artistic team includes the director Zack Winokur (“The Black Clown”), the fashion designer Jonathan Anderson and the composer Nico Muhly on arrangements.Bond and Costanzo’s partnership is more organic than most “when worlds collide” projects, which often feel as if an enterprising impresario had pulled random names out of a hat and precipitately pushed the unlucky artists onstage.“We were seeing each other because we were friends, not because we were intending to collaborate,” Bond said, sitting with Costanzo after a recent rehearsal.Back in 2011, Costanzo was in the audience at Joe’s Pub for one of Bond’s cabaret outings. When Bond mentioned from the stage that the guest artist for an upcoming performance had just dropped out and there wasn’t a replacement, Costanzo leaned over to a friend and whispered, “Me!”The friend, the photographer and director Matthew Placek, also knew Bond and made the introductions. Costanzo nabbed the guest spot and prepared a Handel aria, but he was also keen to join voices on “Summertime.”“You said no,” Costanzo recalled to Bond in the interview. “Then right before the show started, I was practicing it and you were like, ‘All right, all right, we will do it as a duet.’”The inspiration for “Only an Octave Apart,” and the title number, came from a television special Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills recorded at the Met in 1976. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe combo was a success. “We sounded so good together,” Bond said. “Of course, that song’s problematic and we can’t sing it anymore, but it gave us an opportunity to see our chemistry onstage, which was really fun.”So much so that they are back for more, though the initial impetus was rather pedestrian: Costanzo wasn’t sure what to do next for his record company. “I just didn’t want to make ‘Scarlatti Cantatas’ or something,” he said. “I mean, they’re beautiful, but it’s been done.”Teaming up with Bond provided a creative solution. (And this won’t be their last partnership of the season. They will come together at the New York Philharmonic in January as part of the “Authentic Selves” festival that Costanzo is organizing.)The inspiration for “Only an Octave Apart,” and the title number, came from a pop-culture footnote: a television special that Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills recorded at the Met in 1976. A similar encounter of disparate influences and high and low culture (or at least what audiences associate with high and low), flavored with vaudevillian touches, will now be played out at St. Ann’s.At first, even the longtime Bond collaborator Thomas Bartlett — who is the show’s music director and producer of the album version of “Octave,” which comes out in January — was skeptical.“When the idea was pitched to me, it sounded a bit like a fun joke,” he said in a video call. “It didn’t occur to me that Anthony’s voice would make Viv’s voice feel rich and kind and wise in this way, and that Viv would make Anthony sound even more ethereal.”Bond, Costanzo and Bartlett came up with a wide range of material. Some of the songs are duets, like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s “Don’t Give Up.” Some are solos in conversation with each other, such as when an aria from Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” segues into the early-20th-century ditty “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.” Some are classics from the cabaret repertoire, like “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” And some are the kind of free associations in which Kiki and Herb used to specialize, like a surprisingly effective medley of “Dido’s Lament” — also by Purcell — and Dido’s “White Flag.”“We’re holding our own space, but we’re doing it together,” Bond said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesDespite the mingling of their musical universes, the performers stay true to their respective styles. “We’re not crossing over,” Bond said firmly. “We’re holding our own space, but we’re doing it together.” They do not scat-sing Purcell, for example, and Costanzo does not imitate the disco singer Sylvester’s famous falsetto when the pair covers his track “Stars.”“I was like, how do I take an application of this voice and technique that feels honest and that sings the song?” Costanzo said. “I listen to opera singers try to sing pop and it’s so lame, because inevitably they wind up trying to sing some classical arrangement to a pop song.”During a recent rehearsal, Bond often left space for future improvisation. “I’m going to come out, they’re going to see me, I’m going to milk it for a moment,” Bond said at one point, describing an entrance. Costanzo, on the other hand, is used to the precision of classical music, where every note and step is carefully planned.“Sometimes my frustration with opera is that all spontaneity dies in pursuit of perfection,” he said. “I want to uphold and cherish the tradition, but in order to make it feel alive, it needs some kind of being in the moment and spontaneity.”“But it’s challenging because I am always looking for structure and Viv is always like, ‘Don’t box me in because it’s not going to be as good,’” Costanzo said.Still, Bond pointed out that there is a safety net. “I obviously don’t want Anthony to feel uncomfortable, or that he’s going to be in any way undermined or not feel that he’s going to be seen at his best, so we’ve been establishing points where things definitely have to happen,” Bond said.Working out the sound of a crow’s caw, the pair seemed ready for their spotlight — at the most stylish comedy hour ever. “I’ve never laughed so hard in the rehearsal process,” Winokur, the director, said.But if there are many jokes in the show, the performers are in on them.“Being a countertenor, whenever I open my mouth, even at the Met, people go, ‘Why is he singing like that?’” Costanzo said. “I go work with kids and they laugh the minute you start singing. Which I love, I welcome it, but I’m like a novelty in that way, which I enjoy exploiting.”“As a classical musician,” he added, “you can be gay or queer or whatever, and then you go do your show. You are not expressing yourself as much in that theatricality or your identity. You are embodying a character. This project feels like, for whatever reason, this real theatrical expression of who I am.”Bond suggested, “It’s expressing your artistry through a place of truth, as opposed to trying to make something that is artificial seem true.”Costanzo laughed and said: “See? Viv is so good!” More

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      Bennie Pete, Bandleader Who Kept the Beat After Katrina, Dies at 45

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      A tuba player and the leader of the Hot 8, one of New Orleans’s high-profile brass bands, he brought music to his fellow citizens in the difficult days after the storm.Bennie Pete, a New Orleans tuba player who co-founded and led the Hot 8, one of the city’s high-profile brass bands, and dedicated himself to preserving the musical traditions of the Big Easy after Hurricane Katrina, died on Sept. 6 at a hospital there. He was 45.His wife, Lameka Segura-Pete, said the cause was complications of sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease, and Covid-19.The soul of New Orleans is rooted in music. Second-line parades march for hours down its streets, with brass bands followed by dancers holding feathered parasols and sipping drinks. New Orleans honors its dead with jazz funerals that strut through town, celebrating life through a musical sacrament with the city.Born and raised in the Upper Ninth Ward, Mr. Pete embraced this heritage. He started playing the tuba at 10 and joined a marching band in middle school. At 18, he helped bring together two brass bands, the Looney Tunes and the High Steppers, into the Hot 8.The Hot 8 began playing for tips on Bourbon Street and in Jackson Square, in the heart of the French Quarter. They performed outside a housing project in the Central City neighborhood, where people sat down with bags of crawfish and bottles of Abita beer to listen. Mr. Pete once found himself leading a jazz funeral for a dog.“He was a popular dog for one of the popular musicians,” he told Esquire magazine in 2014, “and they threw a big second-line parade through the streets for him. They’d make a reason to party.”By 2000, the Hot 8 had established itself as part of a vanguard of young brass bands that were upholding the jazz and funk traditions of New Orleans yet playing with a contemporary sound. The Hot 8’s repertoire included songs by the Specials and Marvin Gaye, and the band incorporated rap and hip-hop into its style. The musicians led second lines on Sundays for social aid and pleasure clubs; crowds formed at night to watch them play in bars in the Treme neighborhood.After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the preservation of New Orleans’s musical heritage became a matter of serious concern. Countless musicians were displaced and evacuated, and longstanding jazz and blues clubs were left in ruin. Mr. Pete and a few bandmates ended up in Atlanta.Two months later, the Hot 8 regrouped to lead the first jazz funeral in New Orleans after the storm. The band played with donated instruments, and members of the procession wore salvaged pieces of finery. The parade, which honored a celebrated chef, Austin Leslie, started at Pampy’s Creole Kitchen in the Seventh Ward before ambling to the former site of Chez Helene, where a sign greeted the marchers: “We won’t bow down. Save our soul.”“Bennie wanted to play for these people to give them that New Orleans love that was missing,” his wife said of his activities after Katrina. “He and the band got busy spreading the culture around.”Maria ZbaskaAs despair weighed on the city, the Hot 8 began performing at evacuation shelters and emergency medical centers. They drove around in a van, stopping to jam for crowds until little second lines formed, before heading to another part of town. It wasn’t long before they became local heroes.“Bennie wanted to play for these people to give them that New Orleans love that was missing,” his wife said. “He and the band got busy spreading the culture around.”When Spike Lee learned of the Hot 8, he decided to feature them in his 2006 documentary about New Orleans, “When the Levees Broke,” which brought them national attention. They were signed to a British record label; they toured with Lauryn Hill and performed with Mos Def. They appeared on the HBO show “Treme” and recorded with the gospel group the Blind Boys of Alabama.But even as music returned to New Orleans after the storm, the Hot 8 endured more misfortune. Their snare drummer, Dinerral Shavers, was shot dead in his car in December 2006. It was only the latest in a series of tragedies for the band.In 1996, the trumpet player Jacob Johnson was shot in the head at his home. In 2004, the trombonist Joseph Williams was killed in an encounter with the police. And just after Katrina, the trumpeter Terrell Batiste lost his legs in a road accident.Mr. Shavers’s murder especially rattled Mr. Pete.“I wanted to move,” he told OffBeat magazine. “I was tired of New Orleans. I felt like I would be the one next.”Ultimately, Mr. Pete resolved to stay, and the Hot 8 recorded an album to honor their fallen bandmates.The Hot 8 Brass Band in 2017. From left: Christopher Cotton, Tyrus Chapman, Anthony Brooks, Harry Cook, Mr. Pete, Larry Brown, Alvarez Huntley and Andrew Calhoun.Melissa FargoReleased in 2012, “The Life & Times Of …” was nominated for a Grammy Award as best regional roots music album. The group released “Tombstone,” a sister album also based on the theme of remembrance, the next year. The Hot 8 was also featured on a 2015 compilation album, “New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City,” on the Smithsonian’s Folkways label.“Everything kind of worked,” Mr. Pete told Esquire. “Yeah, we are the Hot 8 who went through these things, but we’re still here, and this is who we are after the storm.”Bennie Gerald Pete Jr. was born on July 10, 1976. His father was a maintenance worker in the Garden District. His mother, Terry (Thomas) Pete, was a homemaker.As a boy, Bennie attended a Baptist church in the Seventh Ward where his maternal grandfather was pastor, and he danced in the aisles as he sang gospel music. He graduated from Alcée Fortier High School in 1994.In addition to his wife, Mr. Pete is survived by three sons, Brannon, Brennon and Bennie III; two stepdaughters, La’Shae Joseph and Laila Trask; and two sisters, Yvete and Terneisha Pete.Over the last decade, the Hot 8 began touring regularly in Europe; in New Orleans, the band performed on the vaunted stages of Tipitina’s and the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival.Mr. Pete suffered a seizure in 2014 and was diagnosed with sarcoidosis. In 2018, he underwent surgery for prostate cancer. During the lockdown, his health deteriorated and he lost 100 pounds. When the Hot 8 recently resumed their Sunday residency at the Howlin’ Wolf, Mr. Pete didn’t join them onstage.In the days after his death, brass bands in New Orleans mourned him with music. They led second lines through Treme, Central City and the Garden District. The soulful notes of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” a hymn played to send off the dead, echoed into the night. More

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      Ralph Irizarry, Innovative Latin Percussionist, Dies at 67

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      A colleague said Mr. Irizarry, who played timbales with Ray Barretto and Rubén Blades and led his own bands, expanded the instrument’s possibilities “to the nth degree.”Ralph Irizarry, a master of the timbales who played in groups led by the conga player Ray Barretto and the singer Rubén Blades before forming his own well-regarded bands, died on Sept. 5 in a hospital in Brooklyn. He was 67.His daughter, Marisa Irizarry, said the cause was multiple organ failure caused by a bacterial infection in his lungs that led to septic shock.Mr. Irizarry’s virtuosic timbale playing placed him in the tradition of masters like Tito Puente, said Bobby Sanabria, a percussionist and educator who occasionally performed with Mr. Irizarry.“Ralph took the instrument and expanded on its possibilities to the nth degree,” augmenting it with cowbells and other percussion instruments, Mr. Sanabria said in a phone interview. But he refused to use a bass drum or add to his band a drummer who played a standard trap set.“If you closed your eyes, you’d say, ‘Who the hell is playing the drums?’” Mr. Sanabria said. “Then you see this freaking guy with his two hands, his timbales, a snare drum and cymbals.”In a tribute on his website, Mr. Blades described a critical element of Mr. Irizarry’s playing.“Irizarry’s percussive lesson is clear,” he wrote. “Not everything is pyrotechnics — we must not always fill the silences.” Mr. Irizarry’s timbales “conversed,” he added, “sometimes in whispers, with a sense of syncopation, of time and rhythm always flowing, never repeated.”Throughout his career — and especially after he formed the septet Ralph Irizarry & Timbalaye in the late 1990s — Mr. Irizarry was clearheaded about the music he wanted to play.“I knew that the Latin jazz I wanted to do was going to be about Latin rhythms organized under the structure of jazz,” he said in an interview in 2015 with the Latin Jazz Network, a website dedicated to advancing the music.Reviewing a performance by Timbalaye at Scullers Jazz Club in Boston, Bob Blumenthal of The Boston Globe wrote that Mr. Irizarry and the conga player Robert Quintero “attacked the music with incredible speed and power, often starting at a fierce dynamic level and building from there.” He added, “At the same time, their precision in negotiating the breaks and shifts that spice the band’s arrangements was beyond reproach.”Ralph Irizarry was born on July 18, 1954, in East Harlem to parents from Puerto Rico. His father, Francisco, owned convenience stores, and his mother, Gloria (Sanabria) Irizarry, was a homemaker. The family moved to the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn when Ralph was 2.When Ralph was 8, he recalled, his father received a set of timbales to settle a $25 debt with a drug dealer.Mr. Irizarry once said, “I knew that the Latin jazz I wanted to do was going to be about Latin rhythms organized under the structure of jazz.” Alan Nahigian“They had real skins, probably calf skins,” Mr. Irizarry told the Latin Jazz Network. He and his two brothers made sticks out of clothes hangers and destroyed the skins in one day. But several years later, after his family had moved to South Ozone Park in Queens, a neighbor who had congas and who assumed that Ralph knew how to play them asked him to jam.He retrieved the wrecked timbales, put plastic skins on them and played with the neighbor.“I remember I hit the timbale one time and it was like love at first sight,” he said. “I felt something I have never felt before. All my skin felt it. I shook.“Two days later,” he added, recalling a trip to Manhattan, “I went to Manny’s music store on 48th Street and bought brand-new timbales, sticks, everything.”When he was 17 and gaining confidence as a timbalero, he moved with his family to Puerto Rico, where he hoped to get musical work. He did get some, but he also felt prejudice against him as a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent.Mr. Irizarry returned to New York in 1974 and after a few years was hired by Mr. Barretto, the dynamic conga player and popular bandleader. In 1983, Mr. Irizarry became a founding member of Mr. Blades’s band, Seis del Solar, which recorded albums, toured and played at Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall.“With four percussionists, two keyboardists and a bassist,” Jon Pareles wrote in a New York Times review of the band’s 1985 performance at Carnegie Hall, “Seis del Solar can sound like a stripped-down salsa group, a jazz-rock band, or both.”When Mr. Blades decided to go solo in the mid-1990s, he encouraged the band to continue to perform as an instrumental group and retain its name. They did that for a brief time, recording two albums until Mr. Irizarry decided to form his own group, Timbalaye.In 2004, Mr. Irizarry formed a second ensemble, Son Cafe, an eight-piece salsa dance band.He recorded with both bands. He also reunited with Seis del Solar for a tour that culminated with “Todos Vuelven Live,” which won the Latin Grammy for best salsa album in 2011.Mr. Irizarry stayed busy with both his bands for several years after that. But in 2015 he received a diagnosis of inclusion body myositis, a rare degenerative condition that causes muscle weakness. It forced him to stop performing in 2018.“He pushed to the very end,” his daughter said in a phone text. “It was a very big blow for him, but he never showed that much sorrow — he just knew at some point his hands and legs would keep getting weaker and weaker.”In addition to Ms. Irizarry, he is survived by his wife, Elizabeth (Jackson) Irizarry; his sons, Ralph Jr., and Marlon; his sister, Dolores Irizarry; his brothers, William and John; and five grandchildren.Mr. Irizarry was single-minded about the timbales from the start. As a teenager he would practice in the basement of his family’s house, playing along with the latest records he had bought. One day, he recalled, he was practicing and didn’t hear his father walk in.“For some reason I turned around, and my father was at the bottom of the steps of the basement, and he had a tear coming out of his eye,” he told Truth Revolution Records in a video interview in 2015, when the label released a Timbalaye album. “He had never heard me play.” More

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      A Celebrated Virtuoso on an Instrument She Wasn’t Meant to Play

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      The hallowed tradition of kora playing in Sona Jobarteh’s family passed down the male line. One of her teachers dismissed it as “an ethnic thing.” But it has brought her international acclaim.MANCHESTER, England — The ethereal sound of the kora, a centuries-old West African instrument, reverberated as Sona Jobarteh, a virtuoso from one of Gambia’s most celebrated musical families, plucked its strings with her forefingers and thumbs.Under purple stage lights at the Manchester International Festival in July — her first performance since the pandemic began — Ms. Jobarteh added her velvet voice to the crisp sound of the kora, a 21-string instrument that combines the qualities of a lute and a harp. She sings in Mandinka, a language spoken by one of Gambia’s many ethnic groups, and the words descended like rainfall on the audience in northern England.Like her father and relatives stretching back generations, Ms. Jobarteh is a griot — a musician or poet whose tradition is preserved through the family bloodline. And in West Africa the griot fills a far broader role: not just as a kora master, but also as a historian, genealogist, mediator, teacher and guardian of cultural history.“The griot is someone who is a pillar of society, who people go to for guidance, for advice, for wisdom,” said Ms. Jobarteh, who is 37.Until Ms. Jobarteh, kora masters had one other notable characteristic: They were always male. By tradition, the playing of the kora is passed from father to son, but for many years Ms. Jobarteh was her father’s only child. “Whatever I do, it’s always in the awkward box,” she said, laughing.She initially shunned the label of first female kora master, preferring to be appreciated for her abilities rather than her gender. “I hated it with a passion,” she said. “I felt like no one would listen to what I was playing, that all they would do is observe what I am.”But she has come to embrace that status, in part because her achievements have inspired young female students. “It’s much bigger than just being about me,” she said. “It’s about instilling that seed of inspiration in girls.”The kora was also what brought her parents together.The kora, a 21-string instrument, combines the qualities of a lute and a harp.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesIn 1982, a year before Ms. Jobarteh was born, her mother, Galina Chester, who is English and who had never left Britain, flew to Senegal. She was traveling with Ms. Jobarteh’s half brother, Tunde Jegede, a British-Nigerian who is now a multi-instrumentalist and composer, to connect him with his African heritage.Toting a piece of paper scrawled with the name of a kora master, Ms. Chester drove across the desert to Gambia, where there was no airport at the time, to the house of Amadu Bansang Jobarteh, whose influence was so broad that he served as an adviser to Gambia’s first president.There, she met the kora master’s son and primary student, Sanjally — who would go on to become Ms. Jobarteh’s father. “That’s how she met my father, and how my story began,” Ms. Jobarteh said.Ms. Jobarteh’s childhood straddled two worlds: Britain, where she was born, and Kembujeh, her grandfather’s village in Gambia, where, enveloped by the warmth of her extended family, she found her “cultural grounding.”Griot women are typically taught to sing, but her grandmother Kumunaa encouraged her to sit with her grandfather and listen to the kora.A few years ago, Ms. Jobarteh’s mother shared letters with her daughter in which Kumunaa had predicted that the girl would become a griot and pleaded that her lineage be nurtured.“I just wish she was alive for me to ask her what was in her mind,” Ms. Jobarteh said. “She knew I was a girl. She knew it was not acceptable.”Ms. Jobarteh’s first kora teacher was Mr. Jegede, her half brother, whom she began playing the instrument with at age 3. (Although Mr. Jegede is a virtuoso in his own right, he is not a griot, coming from outside the Jobarteh bloodline.)She later became determined to carve out a path in classical music. At 14, she took composition lessons at the Purcell School for Young Musicians, outside London. Yet her initial instrument remained in her periphery: The school library displayed a kora that Tunde had donated as a student there. Drawn to it, she tuned and played it, and the school eventually gave it to her.A year later, she enrolled in the Royal College of Music, where she learned the cello, harpsichord and piano. But her personal musical legacy wasn’t welcome. One instructor dismissed the kora as an “ethnic thing,” she said, and another said of the instrument, “If you want to succeed, this is not a part of it.”Three years into her education there, Ms. Jobarteh deliberately failed her annual assessment in piano and cello. “I was shaking,” she said. “It felt so wrong, but I just knew, ‘I can’t do this to myself anymore.’”The college declined to comment for this article.Ms. Jobarteh instead asked her father to officially teach her to play the kora, and went on to train with him for several years. He told her, “I have a duty to give you what is mine,” she recalled.Ms. Jobarteh’s 14-year-old son, Sidiki Jobarteh-Codjoe, playing onstage with his mother in Manchester.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesSome families say the instrument dates to the establishment of the griot tradition in the 13th-century Mandinka empire. The first written account of the kora, by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, appeared in 1797, according to Lucy Durán, a professor of music at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Its popular origin story, Ms. Jobarteh said, is that it was stolen from a jinn, a supernatural being mentioned in Islam.The Mandinkas and griots attracted widespread interest after the writer Alex Haley traced his ancestry to a Gambian village in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Roots.” But their ancient melodies had made their way across the Atlantic centuries earlier, aboard ships carrying enslaved Africans, and morphed into the early American blues.The kora, with its improvised, oral tradition, can take decades to master. “You learn with your ears, not with your hands,” Ms. Jobarteh said.For years, she was reluctant to perform in Gambia, where a professional female kora virtuoso had never been seen onstage. But her stage debut with her family, in 2011, was met with adulation.The release of her debut album that year was also a leap of faith, as Ms. Jobarteh sang in Mandinka rather than in English, which could garner more commercial success. “I thought, ‘This is it. I’ve just put my life down the plug hole,’” she recalled.The album propelled Ms. Jobarteh’s music around the world, from the United States to New Zealand. And that brought her something far more meaningful than royalties.Ms. Jobarteh performing in Manchester.Adama Jalloh for The New York Times“It makes Africans feel something, to see that someone is being respected to sing in their own language, dress in their own clothes, play their own music,” she said. “That is a message not just for Gambians — it’s for the whole African continent.”Although preserving her heritage is Ms. Jobarteh’s passion, she says her real purpose is educational reform in Gambia — a broader mission that aligns with her role of griot.In 2015, she opened The Gambia Academy in Kartong, a coastal town, in part to prevent a brain-drain of young people seeking better prospects abroad. “I don’t want the next generation to have to do that,” she said, “where you have to have the privilege of having European connections or titles to be able to succeed in your own society.”With a curriculum that centers on West African traditions, the school now has 32 students, including her 14-year-old son, Sidiki, and 9-year-old daughter, Saadio. That has helped her pass down her family tradition, too, and onstage in Manchester Sidiki played the xylophone-like balafon and Saadio percussion.They are learning the griot repertoire — not from their father, but from their mother, a guardian of seven centuries of tradition. More

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      5 Pros in the Concert Trenches on Getting (Carefully) Back to Work

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      What’s it like mixing sound, building sets and taking care of artists’ health as the music industry hits pause and play?As live music revs back up, we spoke to five professionals around the industry about their experiences with fans, safety protocols, volume levels and tour plans. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Marguerite Nowacki, security supervisor at the Metro in ChicagoFirst and foremost, every patron needs two forms of ID: their government ID, and their proof of vaccination. Our venue does not allow any kind of negative test for entry. A lot of patrons have come up to thank us for actually checking every single person’s vaccination card.That was the main reason we wanted to be fully vaccinated: We want people to feel our venue is a safe environment, and it will always be no matter what. Everybody’s been polite, understanding and accepting, with everything that’s going on. We’re seeing a lot of young crowds, and international crowds, and even the older generation is coming back out to listen to live music, and just be in the moment.One of the new protocols is to look for anxiety or stress, and ask if a patron needs help. Being in your house, cooped up, and then finally being let out — a lot of people experience stress around high intensity music or light. We tell our team to look for irritation, shakiness, sweatiness. We give them a bottle of water and a towel, if they want, to calm them down. Sometimes they just want to go home.Alex Reardon, president of Silent House ProductionsEverybody still wants the best show, the biggest show, the flashiest show, the coolest show — whatever aligns with their thinking. Everyone has been sitting still for so long that we are now so busy, we’re almost turning down work. And as a result of that, we have to understand that all of the arenas and theaters everywhere are going to be booked solid. So there will be a time when we have to work out, “Well, if the routing means that you can’t get from here to here in time, and you can’t actually build the stage, then the stage has to become smaller.” We would then address that logistical constraint in our design while working with the promoters and agents.The silver lining is that most management teams understand the constraints of availability, so they are talking to us earlier on than they might have in normal times. I think there’s something in the DNA of everyone that works in live touring, which is that we come up with solutions very, very quickly, which comes from the concept of “The doors will open at 7 p.m., and people will be in the venue.” But until we know where the problems are, we can’t really do much about it.The logistics, we popped back into very easily — we have muscle memory, and it just reconnects. But I think what I’m seeing across the entire live entertainment industry is an enthusiasm and a joy that we’ve been really reconnected with. I was recently at Lollapalooza, talking to Tyler, the Creator and his manager, and I told them that it was an interesting experience to walk from the stage out to the front of the house, surrounded by the audience, and smell the beer and sweat. I used the analogy that it’s like bumping into an old friend you hadn’t seen for a long time. And I think Tyler just called me a hopeless romantic and wandered off giggling.Elisa Binger, monitor engineer at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C.At first, it felt a little weird to have a bunch of people back in the room again. The first few shows, I was actually surprised that almost nobody in the audience was wearing a masks. I’ve just gotten so used to seeing people with masks over the last year and a half, that it almost sort of felt like culture shock.We were actually pretty concerned that people would be on their worst behavior. But for the most part, everyone is very well behaved. Everybody’s excited to talk to the bartenders, and talk to us, because they’ve missed talking to people other than their friends and family for so long. There have been a lot of regulars coming back — I knew their faces before, and was sort of familiar with them, but everybody’s gotten closer, because nobody wants to take that social interaction for granted.One of the nice things that actually makes my job a little bit easier on the technical side is that bands haven’t played in a really, really loud environment for a long time. They’re playing quieter than they once did, which brings the whole noise floor down onstage. Most of us are coming back with a fresh perspective after spending many months not working at all. When bands would load in, it used to feel like sort of a hassle — but now, whenever we have a band loaded, I’m excited for the running around, and lifting heavy things, and crazy things like that. It reminds me that we’re back at it.Don Muzquiz, production manager for Alanis MorissettePart of my job is to avoid surprises. It’s not about the noise, or the news, or the propaganda or whatever you want to believe or want to support. It’s about if anybody gets sick or not.Everything’s affected, because as we go into a city you’re having to involve a lot of local workers at the venues. Some artists that have been touring regularly have slimmed down their production. Every tour is going to have their own restrictions or their own requests, but we are requesting that all locals staff be vaccinated, and that everybody wear masks throughout the day, vaccinated or not. It’s just taking every precaution — you’re trying to protect as much as you can, because you’ve got a lot of people traveling together in confined spaces, on your buses.I think the biggest thing for everybody is that the access to backstage is going to be almost zero, in terms of anybody that’s not working. Any sort of visitation from anybody that’s not on the working personnel or touring staff, it’s probably just not going to happen. There’s no fluff, no extra people, not one guy that’s just out there to carry towels around.I can’t speak for everybody, but I think the overall feeling is that the artists are excited to get back to what they love. If there’s any nervousness, it’s really about just being able to make it through the tour without there being an issue. In total, with opening acts, we’re about 85 people traveling together, and we’re having to interact with local workers daily in different cities every day. The goal is to not get anybody sick, because then it’s just a domino effect.Erica Krusen, managing director of mental health and addiction services at MusiCaresMental health issues existed way before the pandemic, and continue to endure beyond it. We are seeing more requests come in daily, and we’re here to support them. A lot of the festivals and venues and bands are pivoting to require all of their crew and band members to be vaccinated. What we’re hearing is the anxiety increasing: Are they going to get it? How safe is it backstage? Are the venues adhering to protocols?All of our directors, including myself, are licensed therapists, social workers and chemical dependency counselors. We can assess and get music industry professionals the resources that they may need — that can be directing them to a local therapist, finding therapists that do Zoom or FaceTime or Skype, making sure that they know where the local hospital is.What we saw in the music community is how everyone began to confront mental health and talk about it and address it. For a long time, the music industry was behind in that, and now we’re seeing a lot of really good changes. Managers and agents are coming to us to say, “What can we do to help?” The more we talk about it, the more we destigmatize it, and the more that people will not be afraid, and not be shamed into thinking that they can’t get or find help. More

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      Jane Powell, Hollywood’s Girl Next Door, Is Dead at 92

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      Typecast from the outset, she was a star of movie musicals before she was out of her teens. But her big-screen career peaked when she was in her 20s.Jane Powell, whose pert good looks and lyrical soprano voice brought her Hollywood stardom before she was out of her teens — but whose movie career peaked when she was still in her 20s with a starring role in one of the last great MGM musicals, the 1954 extravaganza “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” — died on Thursday at her home in Wilton, Conn. She was 92. Susan Granger, her friend, confirmed the death.Ms. Powell, who was just over five feet tall and retained the guileless features of an innocent teenager well past adolescence, found herself typecast from the outset.Ms. Powell in Los Angeles, in 1944, the year her first film, “Song of the Open Road,” was released. “I should have been the happiest girl in the world,” she said of becoming a movie star in her teens. “Well, I wasn’t.”Associated PressShe was only 15 when her first film, “Song of the Open Road” (1944), was released. She played a disenchanted young film star who finds happiness when she runs away from home and joins a group of young people picking crops while adult farmworkers are at war. The film is noteworthy mostly because the name of the character she played, Jane Powell, became hers as well when the movie was released. She was born Suzanne Lorraine Burce. Ms. Powell had already been signed by MGM, but the studio lent her to United Artists for “Song of the Open Road.” Her first several MGM movies were mostly forgettable musicals, with slender story lines that were little more than frameworks for the songs.In “Holiday in Mexico” (1946), she played the daughter of the American ambassador to that country (Walter Pidgeon), while the piano virtuoso José Iturbi, the bandleader Xavier Cugat and Ms. Powell provided the music. In “Luxury Liner” (1948), she was a stowaway on a cruise ship captained by her father (George Brent), with Mr. Cugat and the opera singer Lauritz Melchior among the passengers.Her breakthrough was “Royal Wedding” (1951), the first movie in which she played an adult. This time Ms. Powell had an outstanding director, Stanley Donen; an outstanding score, by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner; and, most important, an outstanding co-star: Fred Astaire.Set just before the wedding of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, “Royal Wedding” centers on an American brother-sister song-and-dance act (Astaire and Ms. Powell) on tour in London. Cast at the last minute to replace Judy Garland, who had been fired (and who herself had replaced a pregnant June Allyson), Ms. Powell had almost no time to learn her dance routines. But she acquitted herself well, notably in a knockabout vaudeville-style number with Astaire, “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?”Her movie career appeared to be gaining steam. In fact, it was halfway over.After “Royal Wedding,” Ms. Powell, to her frustration, found herself once again cast as the girl next door in lightweight musicals like “Rich, Young and Pretty” (1951) and “Three Sailors and a Girl” (1953). It would be three years before she had another role of substance — but it was a memorable one.Set in a pioneer community in 19th-century Oregon, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” told the story of newlyweds (Ms. Powell and Howard Keel) whose first order of business as a married couple is to find wives for the groom’s six rowdy brothers. Directed by Mr. Donen, with a lively score by Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer and acrobatic choreography by Michael Kidd, it earned a place on many lists of the greatest film musicals of all time. It was, Ms. Powell later said, “my last really wonderful role in a film.”Suzanne Burce was born on April 1, 1929, in Portland, Ore. An only child, she was still a toddler when her parents — Paul Burce, who worked for a bread company, and Eileen (Baker) Burce — began grooming her as a potential successor to Shirley Temple.By the time she was 5 she was taking singing and dancing lessons and appearing on the radio. When she was 14 her parents took her to Hollywood, where her performance on a popular radio talent show led to an audition for Louis B. Mayer of MGM and, in short order, a seven-year contract.Looking back on that time in her 1988 autobiography, “The Girl Next Door and How She Grew,” Ms. Powell wrote: “I should have been the happiest girl in the world. Well, I wasn’t.” All she wanted to do, she said, was return home, go to high school and make friends. Her parents’ relentless efforts to make her a star had made for a lonely, artificial childhood. Despite her almost immediate success, she wrote, “Sometimes I just wanted to run away from it all.”Ms. Powell in performance at a nightclub in Las Vegas in 1957.David Smith/Associated PressWith musicals beginning to fall out of fashion, she had few film roles after “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” (“I didn’t quit movies,” she once said. “They quit me.”) Two middling musicals followed: “Hit the Deck” (1955), her last film for MGM, and “The Girl Most Likely” (1958), in which she was courted by Cliff Robertson and two other men.Her big-screen career came to an anticlimactic end in 1958 with the dramas “The Female Animal,” in which she played the alcoholic daughter of a fading movie star (Hedy Lamarr), and “Enchanted Island,” in which she was improbably cast as a Polynesian islander. (“It was a terrible movie,” she said. “The best thing about it was that it gave the family a great vacation in Acapulco.”)Ms. Powell found a new home on television. A 1961 pilot for a sitcom, “The Jane Powell Show,” was not picked up, but she appeared regularly on dramatic anthology series, variety shows and musical specials, as well as in a recurring role as Alan Thicke’s mother on the sitcom “Growing Pains” in the late 1980s and in a long-running ad campaign for denture products. Her last TV appearance was on an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” in 2002.She also performed in touring productions of musicals, including “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music” and “Carousel.” She made her Broadway debut in 1974, when she replaced her friend and frequent MGM co-star Debbie Reynolds as the title character in the hit revival of the 1919 musical “Irene.”Ms. Powell in 1984 with Dick Moore, who, like her, had been a child star, and whom she would marry four years later.G. Paul Burnett/Associated PressShe never returned to Broadway, although she played the queen in a 1995 New York City Opera production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” and occasionally appeared Off Broadway. She seemed headed back to Broadway in 2003, when she played the mother of the entrepreneurial Mizner brothers in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Bounce” in Chicago and Washington. But the show was poorly received and never made it to New York. (It was later reworked, retitled “Road Show” and staged at the Public Theater in New York in 2008, without Ms. Powell in the cast.)Ms. Powell’s first four marriages ended in divorce. In 1988 she married Dick Moore, whom she met when he was writing a book about child actors. Although, as Dickie Moore, he had once been a child actor himself, their paths had never crossed until he interviewed her for his book.Ms. Powell at her apartment in New York in 1996. She appeared frequently on television until 2002.Jack Manning/The New York TimesMr. Moore died in 2015, and Ms. Powell died in the home they had shared. She is survived by a son, Geary Anthony Steffen III; two daughters, Suzanne Steffen and Lindsay Cavalli; and two granddaughters.Looking back in 1988 on her youthful stardom and her place in the Hollywood studio system, Ms. Powell was philosophical.“I get angry when I hear other actors blame the studios for all their problems,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It really bothered me when Judy Garland used to say, ‘The studio made me do this, the studio made me do that.’“Nobody makes you do anything. You make your own choices.”Alyssa Lukpat More

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      Max Harwood Steps Up in 'Everybody's Talking About Jamie'

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      Two years ago, Max Harwood made a video in his bedroom.A second-year student at a musical theater school in London, he introduced himself and said where he was from. He talked about how, as a child, he would don a bouffant wig and perform Rizzo’s songs from “Grease,” making his grandmother laugh so hard that she nearly wet herself.That minute-long video was Harwood’s first audition for the movie “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” an adaptation of the sparkly West End musical about a teenager in the north of England with dreams of being a drag queen. Seeking new talent, the producers held an open call, which yielded thousands of tapes. Jonathan Butterell, the film’s director, watched nearly all of them, and Harwood’s stood out immediately.“He had this kind of magic about him,” Butterell recalled. “He is fabulous without being arrogant.” He called Harwood back six more times, for dance calls, for recording sessions, for chemistry reads, for drag challenges. The magic didn’t fade.So now Harwood — who had no professional credits, couldn’t get into a first-class drama school and had been told that he should aim for ensemble parts — is filling some very high-heeled shoes. His ice-blonde crop and princeling looks occupy nearly every frame of “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” which premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Friday.“I’ve had a process with this film where I’ve stepped into my queerness and my comfortability,” Harwood, 23, said on a recent evening while lolling on a sofa at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York. “This is who I am.”“I’ve had a process with this film where I’ve stepped into my queerness and my comfortability,” Harwood said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHarwood had arrived in the city the previous day, driving in from the Hamptons on a whistle-stop press tour for the film. The tour had taken him across America — which, mid-pandemic, mostly meant airports and hotels. He has louche, generous features, the outsize eyes of a startled deer and an unforced warmth. He wore a spotted T-shirt. And if his Converse sneakers lacked the pizazz of the glittery heels that Jamie covets, they did have platform soles. He carries himself like the dancer he trained to be, which makes him seem taller than 5 feet 10 inches.He grew up in Basingstoke, a town in south central England without a professional theater company. He knew he wanted to act, even if the drama schools that he applied to didn’t see it the same way. But his local theater society gave him a scholarship for a one-year course at the Guildford School of Acting. The teachers there weren’t entirely encouraging.“I was told that if I wanted to do musical theater, because of how I looked, I would be typically cast in the ensemble, and I needed to get my dancing up,” Harwood said. What exactly was wrong with his looks? “I’m not, like, the strapping leading man.”A scene from the film, an adaptation of the stage musical about an English teenager with dreams of being a drag performer.John Rogers/Amazon StudiosHe was directed to the Urdang Academy, a musical theater training program in London. Although he enjoyed the classes, he struggled there. He wanted to stand out, and the work of an ensemble member, who has to look and dance just like everybody else, never suited him. He wasn’t supposed to audition during the program, but he had seen “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” onstage, and had loved the sight of a story centered around a young gay man that didn’t depend on trauma.“He didn’t die at the end,” Harwood said. “He wasn’t comic relief. He didn’t come in for two scenes to be the gay best friend. And that was really nice.”So, when a friend told him about the open call for the movie, he put himself on tape. During the months of auditions that followed, he kept up with his schoolwork and his part-time job as a supervisor at a sneaker store. He never really thought that Butterell and the producers would cast him, but when he was called back for a day that involved a full drag makeup test, he let himself dream.Butterell had conceived the musical after watching the BBC documentary “Jamie: Drag Queen at 16,” which followed Jamie Campbell, an English teenager who wanted to wear a dress to prom. “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” opened in Sheffield, in the north of England, and quickly transferred to the West End in London. In The New York Times, the critic Ben Brantley called that production a “determinedly inspirational show.”In adapting the musical for the screen, Butterell and the other creators, the writer Tom MacRae and the composer Dan Gillespie Sells, didn’t want a strapping leading man to play Jamie. “Because what’s radical about Jamie is the fact that you’ve got an authentically effeminate male hero,” Gillespie Sells said in a phone interview. “That’s something you don’t see very often.”The creators saw it in Harwood. When Butterell told him that he had the part, Harwood screamed, swore and asked if he could call his mother.“Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” isn’t a coming out story; Jamie is out already. Instead it’s a tale of stepping confidently into your identity, in appropriately glamorous footwear. Jamie’s story isn’t really Harwood’s. Though Harwood liked playing dress-up, he never felt compelled to perform drag. But then again, maybe it’s everyone’s story: Doesn’t everyone want to be seen for who they really are?The dancing came easily to Harwood, and so did the songs, which are mostly pop- and R&B-inflected. Gillespie Sells praised his voice: “It was exactly that thing, that very pure, young male, perfect pop voice that was so good for Jamie because Jamie is pop personified. Everything about him is bright and hopeful.”Harwood didn’t always feel hopeful. Butterell, however, never doubted him. Neither did his colleagues, including Richard E. Grant, who gives a moving performance as Jamie’s drag mother. “He looks very young, sings and dances to the manner born, is emotionally open and giving, instantly likable, and of course, has talent by the bucket load,” Grant wrote of Harwood in an email.“I’m really happy to be a voice for my community,” Harwood said. “But there are so many more stories to be told.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut there were moments — such as a scene between Jamie and his best friend, Pritti (Lauren Patel) — when Harwood worried whether he could deliver the right performance. He felt frightened. He felt vulnerable. Butterell took him aside and told him to breathe. Maybe in these moments Jamie felt vulnerable, too, Butterell suggested.The day they shot Jamie’s drag performance was even more anxiety-inducing, but Jamie Campbell, the musical’s inspiration, happened to be on set that day. “And I said to Jamie, ‘I’m so scared, I’m so scared,’” Harwood recalled. “And he was like: ‘You’re in exactly the right place. And if you weren’t in that place, you would not be human.’”So Harwood’s anxiety became Jamie’s anxiety, which layers the musical’s sequins and chiffon with a febrile authenticity. If the film is about Jamie coming into his own, it’s also about Harwood doing the same. “Max went on a similar journey to what Jamie’s going through,” Butterell said. “Max went looking for who he was in this. Where Max and Jamie meet is in this duality of sheer joy and the fear that you have to step through to maintain that joy.”Starring in a movie musical as your first professional gig is one more joy. But even a decade ago, young queer actors might have fretted about being birthed into the industry in a role like Jamie, because it could lead to a typecast future. That doesn’t bother Harwood. He believes in Jamie’s story, which he describes as “a little beacon of light and hope and joy.”Sprawled on that couch in New York, he said that story, however universal, is only one story — and queer youth deserve more. “I’m really happy to be a voice for my community,” he said. “But there are so many more stories to be told.” More

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      Andrew Garfield Can’t Remember Who He Was Before ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’

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      In the movie musical, Garfield plays the creator of “Rent,” who died unexpectedly at 35. Making the film helped Garfield process a death in his own life.Jon (Andrew Garfield) is throwing a party, though there’s hardly a reason to celebrate. He’s riven with anxiety, his cramped apartment is overpacked with people, and he’s just spent money he doesn’t have, a down payment on success that will not come within his lifetime. But still, with a wide grin, Jon toasts his friends, leaps on his couch and sings, “This is the life!”Jon is Jonathan Larson, the composer and playwright who died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm at age 35 in 1996 just before his new musical, “Rent,” would become a global smash. The new film “Tick, Tick … Boom!” portrays Larson struggling to find success in his late 20s, as he frets about whether he should pack it in and choose a more conventional path than scripting musical theater.Larson originally created “Tick, Tick … Boom!” as a solo show, “Boho Days,” starring himself in 1990; after his death, it was reworked by the playwright David Auburn into a three-person production that the “Hamilton” creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, saw in 2001, when he was still a senior in college.“Here’s this posthumous musical from the guy who made me want to write musicals in the first place,” said Miranda, who’s now made his feature directorial debut with the film.Miranda saw Garfield in the 2018 Broadway production of “Angels in America” and thought he was “transcendent” in that show. “I just left thinking, ‘Oh, that guy can do anything,’” the director recalled. “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything. So I cast him in my head probably a year before I talked to him about it.”Miranda put Garfield through his paces, sending him to a vocal coach and ensuring that the actor would be able to play enough piano so the camera could pan from his fingers to his face throughout the film. But those are just the technical aspects of a performance that is impressively possessed: Garfield plays the passionate, frustrated Larson with enough zealous verve to power all the lights on Broadway.Garfield as Jonathan Larson in a scene from “Tick, Tick … Boom.”Macall Polay/NetflixIt’s all part of a very busy fall for the 38-year-old actor, who recently appeared in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” as the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and, it’s rumored, will suit up alongside Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” out in December. (Of that supersecret superhero team-up, Garfield can divulge nothing.) Still, it’s clear that “Tick, Tick … Boom!” meant much more to him than he initially expected.“It’s a strange thing when there’s someone like Jon that you didn’t have any relationship to before, and then suddenly now there’s this mysterious forever connection that I am never, ever going to let go,” Garfield told me on a recent video call from Calgary, Canada, where he’s shooting “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a limited series. “I just feel so lucky that Jon was revealed to me, because now I don’t remember who I was before I knew who Jon was.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.How did “Tick, Tick … Boom!” originally come to you?One of my best friends in New York is Gregg Miele, and he’s the great body worker and massage person of New York City — he works on all the dancers and actors and singers on Broadway and beyond. Lin was on his table one morning and asked, “Can Andrew Garfield sing?” And Gregg, being the friend that he is, just started lying, basically, and said, “Yes, he is the greatest singer I’ve ever heard.” Then he called me and said, “Hey, go and get some singing lessons because Lin’s going to ask you to do something.”Lin and I had lunch, and he told me briefly about “Tick, Tick” and Jon. I’m not a musical theater guy in my history — it’s not something that I’ve been introduced to until the last few years, really. So Lin left me with a copy of the music and lyrics, and he wrote at the front of it, “This won’t make sense now, but it will. Siempre, Lin.”Garfield hadn’t done much singing when he was cast in “Tick, Tick … Boom” opposite musical theater veterans. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesYou’ve performed in plays like “Angels in America” and “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway, but in this film, Lin surrounded you with a lot of musical-theater ringers, and even some of the smallest roles and cameos are filled by major players from that world. That had to have been a daunting space to step into.I remember a very specific moment where we were in music rehearsal. Alex Lacamoire was at the piano walking us through the songs — he’s Lin’s musical arranger and producer — and I was with [“Tick, Tick” co-stars] Robin de Jesus and Vanessa Hudgens and Josh Henry and Alex Shipp. You can imagine how I’m feeling! They’re all just pros, they know exactly what they’re doing, they’re making notes. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m going to die.”Then it comes time for me to get into the song and I’m just trying to get through it. I remember Alex Lacamoire going, “Woo, Andrew!” And then everyone behind him, like Josh and Vanessa and Alex and Robin, were like, “Yeah baby, that’s it baby! You got it, baby!” I go beet red and five minutes pass, and I’m just like, “Hey guys, sorry.” I start crying, and I say, “I don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy in my entire life, to be surrounded by the most supportive liars I have ever known.”Garfield working with his director, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who cast him after seeing the actor in “Angeles in America.” Miranda recalled, “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything.”Macall Polay/NetflixJonathan spends the movie anxious about this ticking that only he can hear. How did you interpret that?There was a line in the original one-man show “Boho Days”: “Sometimes, I feel like my heart is going to explode.” It was too on-the-nose for people after he passed away, and they had to cut it, but he spends the story trying to figure out what this ticking is: “Is it turning 30? Is it that I haven’t succeeded? Is it some unconscious idea of my girlfriend’s biological clock combined with the pressure of my career? Or is it all of my friends who are losing their lives at a very young age because of the AIDS epidemic?”It could even be a musical metronome. The way you play Jonathan, as this theatrical person who feels so deeply and urgently, it’s almost like he needs to break into song because normal life just doesn’t cut it.Everything is up at an 11. Even when he’s making love, it’s at 11! Somehow he knows that this is all going to end, that this is all so ephemeral, and I think he was acutely, painfully aware that he wasn’t going to get all of his song sung. And I think he was also agonizingly aware that he wasn’t going to get the reflection and recognition that he knew he was supposed to have while he was still breathing.On the last day of shooting, what I understood is that Jon had it figured out. He knew that this is a short ride and a sacred one, and he had a lot of keys and secrets to how to live with ourselves and with each other and how to make meaning out of being here. Once he accepted that, he could be fully a part of the world, and then he could write “Rent.” I don’t think there’s an accident in that. That very visceral knowing of loss and of death, that’s what gives everything so much meaning. And without that awareness, we will succumb to meaninglessness.So what kind of meaning did this story give to you?Every frame, every moment, every breath of this film is an attempted honoring of Jon. And, on a more personal level, it’s an honoring of my mom. She is someone who showed me where I was supposed to go in my life. She set me on a path. We lost her just before Covid, just before we started shooting, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. So, for me, I was able to continue her song on the ocean and the wave of Jonathan’s songs. It was an attempt to honor him in his unfinished song, and her in her unfinished song, and have them meet.I think that’s part of the reason I didn’t want this movie to end, because I got to put my grief into art, into this creative act. The privilege of my life has been being there for my mother, being the person that gave her permission when she was ready. We had a very amazing connection, and now an audience will know her spirit in an unconscious way through Jon, which I just find so magical and beautiful.“I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing,” Garfield said, adding, “Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm.”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesStill, that’s a lot to deal with while you were shooting this movie. It can’t have been easy.I was hesitant whether I was going to share that, but I feel like it’s a universal experience. In the best-case scenario, we lose our parents and not the other way around, so I feel very lucky that I got to be with her while she was passing, and I got to read her favorite poems to her and take care of her and my dad and my brother. I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing. It’s the person that gives you life no longer being here. Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm. For me, everything has changed: Where there was once a stream, there’s now a mountain; where there was once a volcano, there’s now a field. It’s a strange head trip.You put parts of yourself in other people, almost like they’re the stewards of who you are. And when you lose those people, suddenly you become their steward.As you say, it’s like my mother now lives in me in a way that maybe is even stronger than ever when she was incarnate. I feel her essence. For me, it only comes when one can accept the loss, and it’s so hard for us to do that in our culture because we’re not given the framework or the tools to. We’re told to be in delusion and denial of this universally binding thing that we’re all going to go through at some point, and it’s fascinating to me that this grand adventure of death is not honored.Actually, the only thing that gives any of this meaning is if we walk with death in the far corner of our left eye. That’s the only way that we are aware of being alive in this moment. I think that was the legacy that Jon leaves and the legacy that my mom leaves for me personally, is just to be here. Because you’re not going to be here for long.It reminds me of what was written on your script before all of this happened: “You don’t understand now, but you will.”“You don’t understand now, but you will.” I’m still reeling from the download of understanding what Jon’s life was about, what my mother’s life was about, what all of this is about. Oh God, how lucky to explore that in one’s work! More