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      ‘Stereophonic’ Finds Drama in a ’70s Rock Recording Booth

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      The playwright David Adjmi explores the in-studio creation process in a play with new songs by the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler.A decade ago, the playwright David Adjmi was listening to music on a flight to Boston when Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” came on. The tune was familiar — he used to overhear his brother play it in his room — but he really listened to it that day, and became mesmerized by Robert Plant’s scorching vocals.“I was like, ‘God, this must have been so crazy in the studio because it’s so electric and so Dionysian and all over the map, emotionally, and raw,’” Adjmi said. “I saw the studio, I saw the whole thing in my head. Then I started thinking about the theatrical opportunities for setting a play in a studio, and how to play with sound.”That seed of an idea turned into “Stereophonic,” which is now in previews at Playwrights Horizons and is his first New York production since “Marie Antoinette” in 2013.The play’s action takes place in a recording studio, and the actors play their own instruments and sing.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesAs Adjmi (“Elective Affinities,” “3C”) envisioned on that plane, the action unfolds in a recording studio, where a rock band’s protracted work on an album straddles a year from 1976-77. “It really is like the process and the play are blurring because these people are in a studio forever,” Adjmi, 50, said. “And we’ve been doing this — we almost talk about it like it’s a cult, because we just kept doing this over and over for years.” (In a 2020 interview, he mentioned talks for a Broadway run; they did not pan out.)Adjmi was taking a lunch break between rehearsals at the theater, sitting with the director Daniel Aukin (“Fool for Love”) and the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler, who wrote several songs for the play’s fictional quintet. The idea was enough for them to sign on, and Butler, who now leads Will Butler + Sister Squares, had to wait years for the script to be completed before he could begin the songs. “The music is all reverse-engineered,” he said. “It was like, ‘Here’s a space that people are arguing about — how do you fill it so that the details of what they’re arguing about is accurate?’ It’s a very puzzle-piece way to compose the music.”Since the band is meant to be entering stardom (its previous album is hitting a belated stride in the play), its material has to sound as if it could top the Billboard charts, which put extra pressure on Butler, 41. “What a stupid idea to have them play the song,” he said, as his collaborators cracked up. “You’re not supposed to have them play the song, you idiot!”At this point it should be emphasized that “Stereophonic” is a play with music rather than a musical, making it somewhat of an oddity in an American theatrical landscape that has not much milked the rock scene’s dramatic potential. Adjmi said he thinks that’s “because we are the originator of the Broadway musical and there’s a very kind of calcified idea of what musicals are and how music should feel in the theater.” He added, “And I have an allergy to a lot of it. Not all of it, but a lot of it, because I can’t relate.”Sarah Pidgeon and Tom Pecinka as one of the band’s couples, partners and rivals in love and songwriting.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThe musicals he did praise are backstage classics — “A Chorus Line,” “Dreamgirls,” “42nd Street” — and, perhaps not coincidentally, “Stereophonic” is a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creation. Its unnamed band includes two couples. The steady, no-nonsense keyboard player and singer, Holly (Juliana Canfield, who played Kendall Roy’s assistant Jess on “Succession”), and the substance-abusing bassist, Reg (Will Brill), both British expats, are separated at the start of the show. The singer Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) and the guitarist-producer, Peter (Tom Pecinka), both Americans, are partners and rivals in love and songwriting. As for the British drummer, Simon (Chris Stack), he makes the most of his wife’s absence.All of this and a mid-70s California setting might evoke the rather popular band famous for “Rhiannon” and “Go Your Own Way,” but “Stereophonic” is not a play à clef about Fleetwood Mac. “There’s something about the mythos behind various bands that is in the culture,” Aukin said. “It’s almost using snippets from various bands’ histories and the histories of making some of these famous albums and using it as a sort of distant echo. We talked about many bands but we never talked about one.”In a phone interview, Canfield, 31, recalled that when she asked Adjmi for reference material, he recommended Keith Richards’s memoir, “Life,” and “Original Cast Album: Company,” the D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the fraught, stressful recording that preserved Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 musical for posterity.That film closely tracked the “Company” actors as they painstakingly performed take after take or made tiny pronunciation changes, while members of the producing team and Sondheim himself watched, gave notes and rolled their eyes. “Stereophonic” also plunges us into the middle of the action as David Zinn’s set features the mixing table in the foreground and the recording booth in the back. A pair of engineers (Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler, no relation to Will) take in both the personal clashes and the mix of inspiration and drudgery involved in art-making — all of which, of course, constantly feed off one another.In real life, arguments about adjusting levels or when to use a click track might make even a Steely Dan fan’s eyes glaze over. But the show does not sweep the grind of creation under the rug, especially as Peter evolves into an obsessive taskmaster. “God is in the details, but the details are boring in themselves,” Adjmi said. “So I took that as a challenge, like, ‘OK, let me see if I can turn this into something dramatically exciting.’ So much of it, the banality of the process, is part of what’s so beautiful about it, the granularity of it.”Adjmi said he sought to “reveal myself vis-à-vis these characters by creating real dimension and real nuance, and give actors really juicy roles.” The play opens on Oct. 29.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesFor the technical elements, Adjmi and Aukin consulted experts like their show’s sound designer, Ryan Rumery, and the longtime Steve Reich collaborator John Kilgore. Butler himself proved to be a ready source about interpersonal relationships among musicians. “My last band was with my brother and his wife and my new band is with my wife and her sister,” he said. “I’ve only ever been in bands with married people so I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This feels real.’”That naturalism is different stylistic territory for Adjmi, whose previous plays tended to be arch in a manner he described as “expressionist.” The new show has more of a fly-on-the-wall quality. “That was an experiment for me: Can I reveal myself vis-à-vis these characters by creating real dimension and real nuance, and give actors really juicy roles,” Adjmi said. “ I wanted to do something that would be more fun for them.”Perhaps, but his writing remains dense, with challenging, precisely timed overlaps in the dialogue. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the play is about music and about the cooperation of a group of people making it together, because the play itself, excluding the music, feels very scored,” Canfield said.As if that weren’t enough, the cast members who are in the band also have to play their own instruments and sing as well as convey the excesses that the 1970s were famous for. “I have a couple of scenes where I go from being really emotionally devastated and quite inebriated to walking into the music room and playing something very precise on the bass,” said Brill, whose credits include Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” and Jack Serio’s “Uncle Vanya” in a loft. “To keep the emotional and interpersonal dynamics running, and keep the verisimilitude of a drunk person, while executing something technically perfectly is a real challenge. It’s a delightful challenge, too,” he continued.“I’ve only ever been in bands with married people so I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This feels real,’” Butler said.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesFor the production to work, the actors must feel like a believably tight unit. “We’re trying to make a band here — it’s not like, ‘Open your score to Page 6,’” Butler said. “We’re trying to figure out people’s strengths and weaknesses, because that’s what a band is. When they start playing music together, there is some connection.”Fortunately, the actors said, they all clicked. “When all of us get in the room together, the sounds of the voices blend incredibly well and there’s a real sense of camaraderie amongst us,” said Brill, 37, who played guitar in another fictional band a decade ago, in the David Chase film “Not Fade Away.” Canfield recalls that one day the show’s music director, Justin Craig, overheard her, Pecinka and Pidgeon bickering about their harmonies, and joked that they were now a real band because they were arguing about the music.As realistic as that episode must have felt, it pales when compared to the toughest credibility test the would-be rockers have had so far. Last month, Butler asked the “Stereophonic” band to open for him at his record-release gig in Brooklyn. Canfield, dreading what she called “an ego death” fiasco, balked, and Brill had to joke-taunt her into it.“He said ‘Yeah, Juliana, it’s going to be such a good story in 20 years, when we tell people that we almost opened for Will Butler’s band but we didn’t because we were scared that we would be bad,’” she said. “And I was like, OK, screw you, I guess we’re doing it.” Now that’s rock ’n’ roll. More

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      ‘Holidays,’ a Madonna Musical, Pays Tribute to the Star

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      “Holidays,” the first musical to include the pop icon’s songs, arrives just days before her “Celebration” tour starts. But matching the star’s talents is a challenge.Two lovers belting “Open Your Heart.” A misunderstood woman exhorting a roaring audience to “Express Yourself.” A gay wedding extravaganza set to “Like A Prayer.”No, this isn’t a preview of the stage antics in Madonna’s highly anticipated “Celebration” tour, which starts Saturday in London, at the O2 Arena. In Paris, the French stage director Nathan Guichet has started the party early with “Holidays,” a plucky new musical inspired by the global pop icon.It’s a wonder no Madonna jukebox musical has made it to the stage until now. Her back catalog brims with highly theatrical songs, and if “Holidays” is any indication, it doesn’t take a big-budget, bells-and-whistles production to get admirers of the pop icon to buy tickets.This two-hour show, which is set to run at the Alhambra theater through Jan. 28, features just four performers and one (very pink) set.Guichet has woven 15 Madonna songs into a fictional script performed in French. It is centered on four childhood friends, with somewhat contrived results: A number of twists and turns clearly exist to shoehorn songs into the show. (A character somehow lands in San Pedro, the island mentioned in “La Isla Bonita,” solely to cue Madonna’s 1986 track.) Yet by the end of a recent performance, Parisians were on their feet, fully hung up on Madonna nostalgia.Madonna performing during her Blond Ambition tour, in Rotterdam in 1990. “Holidays” tries to capture the star’s many talents.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesThe French capital is an unlikely setting for the first Madonna musical. Still, the newfound popularity of American-style musicals in France means there is a hunger for new titles, while producing costs are lower than on Broadway. “Holidays” came together in a year or so with a budget hovering around $1 million, according to its lead producer, Stéphane Pontacq. (For comparison, Broadway’s “Jagged Little Pill,” a jukebox musical inspired by the music of Alanis Morissette, was capitalized for up to $14 million in 2019.)Guichet, who has directed and produced original productions including a ”reimagining of “The Snow Queen,” said in an email that he was inspired by an interview Madonna gave to The Daily Star newspaper in 2012. “I’d sanction my songs to be made into a musical,” she said at the time. “But I wouldn’t do it myself, I don’t think that would interest me.”“Holidays” premiered just as global curiosity surrounds Madonna, who turned 65 in August. In June, she postponed “Celebration,” her 12th world tour, because of what her manager called a “serious bacterial infection.” The U.S. leg of the tour has now been rescheduled to start in December, following a series of concerts in Europe.There is little doubt that “Celebration” will be a lavish affair: Delivering a show to remember is what Madonna does, and has been doing consistently for four decades. Part of the challenge, when staging a tribute like “Holidays,” is trying to match her many talents.It is clear from the singing numbers in “Holidays,” all set to recorded music, that Madonna’s history of gutsy performances has challenge the performers to go above and beyond. The four women who carry the show all have moments of brilliance, and work hard to make the often dubious script shine.In it, a young heiress who is about to get married, Louise, gathers three friends she hasn’t seen in well over a decade. Their passion for Madonna united the quartet as teenagers, and every year, on Aug. 16, Madonna’s birthday, they would come to mark that special “holiday.”They reconvene as adults in Louise’s childhood home in a French village, which features a full-on Madonna altar: an eccentric pink bedroom suite designed for the girls by Louise’s doting father, covered in portraits of their idol.It takes a while for the four characters to gel. Louise, played by Juliette Behar, starts off as a manic pixie blonde, a “Material Girl” proxy with an over-excited delivery. Of her three friends, one, Valentina (Fanny Delaigue), has become a mysterious, provocative star in the United States, not unlike Madonna herself; another, Nikki, is a travel blogger with a history of family abuse. The fourth, Suzanne, is the proverbial underdog, who stayed in their local town and is stuck in underpaid jobs.The production weaves together Madonna songs into a fictional story centered on four childhood friends.NeibaPhotoThroughout, the main thing the four women have in common is Madonna. What “Holidays” gets right is what the star represents for many women: A sense of freedom and empowerment, the belief that they could break free of existing norms. It quickly becomes clear that Louise and her future husband don’t see eye to eye, and her friends encourage her to think beyond what is expected of her. Similarly, in a nod to Madonna’s longstanding L.G.B.T.Q. activism, a gay romance links two of the four friends, and blossoms movingly with the song “Secret.”“Holidays” isn’t a Madonna-backed venture. Promotional material for the production names her as infrequently as possible and the playbill’s plot summary only refers to the “famous pop star” who inspired the main characters. Luckily for the producers, it doesn’t take much to telegraph the mystery star’s identity. The poster art for “Holidays” closely mirrors one of Madonna’s best-known portraits, with her head tilted back and eyes closed on the cover of her 1986 album “True Blue.”Still, as fan tributes go, “Holidays” is a welcome reminder that Madonna’s catalog has rare staying power — and offers space for others to make their mark onstage. As Suzanne, Ana Ka brings serious vocal chops to the table, and lends heart to a character that could easily feel miserabilist.And the charismatic Nevedya, a budding musical star in France who recently headlined a production inspired by Josephine Baker, takes the role of Nikki and runs with it. A consummate dancer and singer, she brought striking arm flourishes and even a death drop to a “Vogue” number that otherwise felt a little timid, and in her hands, “Papa Don’t Preach” became a powerful plea to a father attempting to clip her wings.Madonna herself will be in Paris with “Celebration” in November. Until then, “Holidays” is an entertainingly upbeat stand-in. More

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      Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond? Yes, There’s a Connection.

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      Nicole Scherzinger was exhausted. It was a week since Jamie Lloyd’s new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” had begun performances, and Scherzinger was playing the lead role of Norma Desmond — the forgotten star of the silent screen whose attempt at a comeback doesn’t end well.In Lloyd’s stripped-down, psychologically focused production at the Savoy Theater, Norma’s unraveling psyche is the heart of a story that is less about the loss of stardom than the emotional fallout of being passed over while in possession of all your gifts. At the end of the show the previous night, Scherzinger stood alone onstage, covered in blood and dazed, appearing to hardly register the audience’s wild applause.“It’s grueling,” she said last week while curled up on a chair in the depths of the Savoy. “But for many years I have been saying I am using a fraction of my potential, and now I feel I have really tapped into that.”The glamorous Scherzinger, 45, might initially seem like an odd fit for the role of Norma, immortalized by Gloria Swanson in the 1950 Billy Wilder film on which the musical is based. Scherzinger rose to fame as the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, a girl group formed in the early 2000s. And though she played Grizabella in a revival of Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” in the West End in 2014, her post-Dolls career has encompassed two solo albums and long stretches as a judge on “The X Factor” and “The Masked Singer.”When asked to star in “Sunset Boulevard,” Scherzinger said, “I wasn’t sure if the idea was flattering or insulting.” But she soon “fell madly in love” after reading the lines and listening to the music. Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesScherzinger herself was taken aback when Lloyd, the acclaimed experimental director added, asked to meet and suggested the part some 18 months ago. “There are many roles I wanted to play in musical theater, but this is not one of them!” she said over the course of an hourlong interview. “I wasn’t sure if the idea was flattering or insulting. But Jamie said to me, don’t watch the movie; read the lines, listen to the music. And I fell madly in love with it.”In a telephone conversation, Lloyd said he first thought about directing a revival of “Sunset Boulevard” during the pandemic, and “immediately thought Nicole should be in it.”Norma Desmond, had come to be seen as a role for an older actress. But he wanted a woman “who is in her prime, really brilliant, but has been discarded, just as we talk even now about women over 40 not having the opportunities they should have,” he said. “I felt there was a connection for Nicole, who had extraordinary international fame, but then didn’t have the opportunity to live up to her potential.”Talking about her career, Scherzinger said that although she had been a shy and awkward child, she had “always had a hunger and a drive.” Born in Honolulu to a Filipino father and a Hawaiian Ukrainian mother, she was raised in a religious and sheltered environment in Louisville, Ky., by her mother and a German American stepfather, whose last name she took.Although her parents were blue-collar workers with little money to attend concerts or the theater, she grew up singing and loving music (her mother’s family had a musical group called Sons and Daughters of Hawaii). She attended a performing arts high school, acted professionally in Louisville, and studied theater (“Stanislavski and Shakespeare and all that”) and voice in college.After leaving college early to join an acoustic rock band, Scherzinger auditioned for “Popstars,” a reality series that offered the winning contestants a place in a musical group and a recording contract. Her winning group, Eden’s Crush, was modestly successful, and “it got me out of Louisville,” she said about her move to Los Angeles.Clockwise from top left, Scherzinger with the Pussycat Dolls in 2007, as Grizabella in “Cats” in 2014, rehearsing for “Sunset Boulevard” this year, and judging “The X Factor” with Sharon Osbourne and Simon Cowell in 2017.MJ Kim/Getty Images; David M. Benett/Getty Images; Summers/Thames/Syco, via Shutterstock; Marc BrennerIn 2003, she auditioned for the Pussycat Dolls, a former burlesque act reimagined as a sexy singing and dancing girl group. Scherzinger became the lead singer and a household name, with the Dolls selling millions of records on the back of hits like “Don’t Cha” and “Buttons.”She was famous, but for a woman who “grew up singing in church,” she struggled with the group’s skimpy clothing and sexualized image, and spent over a decade obsessively exercising and battling bulimia. “I wish I could go back and enjoy it, realize this isn’t going to be forever,” she said. “Maybe that’s what Norma feels: It was her youth, she worked so hard, and she can’t get that back.”The Pussycat Dolls disbanded in 2010, and Scherzinger pursued a solo career with modest success. It was during this time that she performed “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” (from Lloyd Webber’s “Evita”) as part of a TV special celebrating Lloyd Webber, who, along with the director Trevor Nunn, asked her to join the cast of the 2014 revival of “Cats” on the West End. Scherzinger described the experience as transformative (every night “I got to shed my old self and be reborn again”), even though she didn’t stay with the production when the show moved to Broadway. She decided to join “The X Factor” instead, and Lloyd Webber was open about his annoyance.In a telephone interview, the composer said that he had been disappointed because he believed in her talent and “would have loved to have seen her show Broadway what she could do.” But they remained friends, he added, and was delighted when Lloyd suggested Scherzinger play Norma. “I believe she is one of the most gifted singer-actresses I have seen perform my work,” he said. “It’s a tough role, but Nicole is fearless musically and dramatically. I am a total fan.”“I knew exactly this feeling of abandonment, the constant thread of loneliness, the insatiable need for affirmation,” Scherzinger said. “I finally have the courage not to worry.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesScherzinger said that “The X Factor” had given her the time and financial stability to pursue her own music, which she did while also taking on other projects, like voicing the character of Sina in “Moana,” and starring in a television version of “Dirty Dancing.” But she always believed, she said, that she would return to musical theater, particularly after performing in the television special “Annie Live!” in 2021.Now that she’s back onstage, how does it feel? She said that preparing to play Norma had been cathartic: “I felt I knew exactly this feeling of abandonment, the constant thread of loneliness, the insatiable need for affirmation, validation. Now, there is this epic, iconic score to throw all this into and create art from places of torment.”Lloyd said that Scherzinger was “constantly searching, questioning, finding details, deepening her understanding of the inner world of the character.” Her work ethic (asking questions, taking notes and sometimes working through breaks), he added, has been an inspiration to the entire cast. “You would never know, through this entire process, that she didn’t have an acting background.”Asked about future plans, Scherzinger said her dream was to write her own musical, loosely based on her life.“After all these years, I finally have the courage not to worry about what others think, to know I have something to say,” she said. “As Jamie always says, ‘You are brave, be braver.’” More

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      Harry Smith, a Culture-Altering Shaman, at the Whitney

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      A solo show takes on the legacy of the painter, folk musicologist, filmmaker, obsessive collector and underground legend. It also hints at what has been lost.“Far-out” is an accurate, but inadequate, descriptor for the high-flying (and often plain high) cultural magus named Harry Smith (1923-91). And the label “polymath,” too, while true, falls short for this innovative painter-filmmaker-collagist-musicologist-designer-scholar-curator-collector/hoarder, whose very first and very strange (it could not be otherwise) institutional solo is at the Whitney Museum of American Art.When speaking of Smith, it’s hard to know where to begin, or end. To the degree that he is familiar at all in the art world (never mind in the real world) it’s as an experimental filmmaker. His chief reputation, however, lies in a different field, music, notably as the compiler of the six-disc 1952 LP -collection called the “Anthology of American Folk Music,” an ethnological document that had a subtle but palpable role in moving the nation’s sociopolitical needle in a revolutionary direction during the civil rights and Vietnam era.Booklet for “Anthology of American Folk Music” (Folkways Records, 1952). Smith divided the work into three sets of two LPs, “Ballads,” “Social Music” and “Songs,” and accompanied each with an illustrated booklet of notes.Smithsonian Folkways, Washington, D.C.How to present such a figure, whose work is so grounded in sound and visual motion, in a traditional museum setting naturally presents a problem, which the Whitney has handily solved by bringing in an object-based artist, the sculptor Carol Bove, as installation designer.Bove has created a big, film-friendly, black-box-style container for the show. And she has placed down at its center a zigzagging walled corridor for the display of little-known objects — paintings, drawings, prints, photographs — that Smith produced almost nonstop throughout his life and that he sometimes claimed to regard more highly than his films.That life began in the Pacific Northwest. Smith was born in Portland, Ore., and grew up in Washington State. He was lucky in his family. They didn’t have money: His father worked in the fish-canning industry; his mother was a teacher. But they encouraged his early interest in reading and art and folk music. And as practicing Theosophists, they made him comfortable with esoteric spiritualities and instilled in him their own pantheistic love of the natural world.Because his mother taught school on the local Lummi Indian reservation, Smith became fascinated with Indigenous culture. By age 15, he was already a committed ethnologist, participating in Lummi dances and religious rituals, absorbing Native music, photographing objects, sacred and secular — a handful of foggy slide photographs of masks, drums and weavings are the show’s earliest entries — while taking copious field notes on everything.Harry Smith, left, recording a Lummi ceremony around 1942. He documented songs, ceremonies and artistic traditions of the Lummi people through photography, painting, sound recording, and took copious notes of everything.Getty Research Institute, Los AngelesAnd a unitary concept of “Everything” was already the axis around which his worldview turned. He was intensely focused — a classic geek — but the focus was panoramic and panoptic, taking in many seemingly unalike things — dance, color, language — at once, all of which he perceived as interrelated. He would speak of illuminating such connection as the primary value of his work, the one he cared most about.In 1945, he moved to San Francisco with the intention of studying anthropology at the University of California in Berkeley. But classroom learning wasn’t his thing. (He attended some lectures but never registered.) He spent most of his time doing what amounted to field research in the city’s burgeoning Beat poetry cafes and in jazz clubs where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker regularly played.He lived in a minute apartment in the Fillmore neighborhood, then predominantly African American, and indulged what would be two insatiable lifelong appetites: one, for mood-altering substances (alcohol and a rainbow of perception-changing drugs), and the other for the bulk collecting of objects — books, music recordings, artworks (for him a spacious, nonhierarchical category), antique tools, tarot cards, textiles, toys, used bandages found at tattoo shops, and a Himalaya of newspaper and magazine clippings.Installation view of “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.Ron AmstutzIn San Francisco he was doing a lot of painting: smoothly geometric Kandinsky-ish, mandalalike compositions, as well as looser, brushier work in which the individual strokes were synced to the notes and chords in jazz recordings. And he used this gestural mode to create his first animated abstractions, painted directly on film stock, which was then edited and projected.The earliest surviving example of this “action painting,” “Film No. 1: A Strange Dream” (circa 1946-48), is in the show — it’s an eyepopper — as are a few more abstractions from the San Francisco years. They’re tip-of-the-iceberg evidence of the riches Smith was producing at the time. But they also hint at what’s been lost.Chronically indigent and often high, Smith was careless with his art and collections. When he couldn’t pay rent he’d be out on the street, his possessions with him, up for grabs. He’d sometimes destroy things in a rage. So, materially speaking, there’s now relatively little output to see. Three beautiful “jazz paintings” in the show exist only as lightbox transparencies made from slides of originals lost who knows when. As a result, a show of big ideas — organized by Dan Byers of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard; Rani Singh, director of the Harry Smith Archives; and Elisabeth Sussman, Kelly Long and McClain Groff of the Whitney — feels small.Still from Smith’s “Film No. 1: A Strange Dream,” circa 1946–48, the earliest surviving example of his “action painting” from the San Francisco years. via Anthology Film Archives, New YorkSmith’s “Algo Bueno [Jazz Painting], circa 1948–49,” a lightbox projection from a 35-millimeter slide of lost original painting. The individual strokes were synced to the notes and chords in jazz recordings.Estate of Jordan BelsonSmith was blessed with protective friends — the poet Allen Ginsberg and the filmmaker Jonas Mekas were two — and sporadically with supportive patrons, including, briefly, Hilla Rebay, the first director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (the forerunner of the Guggenheim Museum).On a visit to San Francisco in 1948 she saw Smith’s extraordinary animated abstractions and offered him a stipend to do more. With the money he moved to New York City, settling first on the Lower East Side, and later and longer, in the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street. Here he worked on some of his most ambitious projects.In 1952, the Manhattan-based Folkway Records released his “Anthology of American Folk Music,” the long-time-coming end product of Smith’s childhood passion for preserving materials from sources he perceived as marginalized. And although the LP set had a low-key landing — it was niche marketed, primarily to libraries — it gained a passionate and eclectic audience that included Bob Dylan, Philip Glass and the Grateful Dead.(The full “Anthology” set, which Smith regarded as an art object in itself — he even signed it as if it were a painting — can be sampled in a section of the show set aside as a listening station, as can the fabulously erudite and poetic commentary that Smith wrote for all 84 cuts.)Harry Smith, “Untitled,” circa 1950–51, casein and paint on board,Harry Smith Archives, Los AngelesIn New York, he also created his most complex and inventive films, none of them, strictly speaking, abstract. “Film No. 11: Mirror Animations,” made around 1957, adheres to the “jazz painting” model of aligning music and visuals. The music in this case is Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso,” but the images now include Buddhist figures and Kabbalistic emblems.For “Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic Feature,” also in the show, Smith supplied his own score of everyday noises: dogs barking, babies crying, wind blowing, glass breaking. He also proposed a story line — a woman with a toothache goes to a dentist, gets injected with some kind of drug and ascends to heaven — which is enacted by figures clipped from Victorian-era print sources.The ingenious animation feels delightfully witty at first, but over the span of its hour length, makes for creepy watching. There’s wild, violent stuff going on. If this is heaven, we want to stay clear. Smith has a reputation for being an occultist, but he was never a religionist. Like Joseph Cornell, he was an uninnocent mystic. However spacey his art, the world is very much in it.Still from “Film No. 11: Mirror Animations,” circa 1957. Using cutup animation and collage technique, he synchronized the work to Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso.”via Anthology Film Archives, New YorkStill from “Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic Feature,” circa 1957–62. It depicts a woman with a toothache who goes to a dentist, gets injected with some kind of drug and ascends to heaven, a story line enacted by figures clipped from Victorian-era print sources.via Anthology Film Archives, New YorkIt’s certainly there in the magnum opus “Film No. 18: Mahagonny,” (1970-80). The score is a full two-hours-plus recording of the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht opera “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” And the visuals, projected on four square contiguous screens, are a collage of color films Smith shot in Manhattan in the 1970s: on its streets, in the Chelsea Hotel and in Central Park.A mathematically calculated visual puzzle, it’s also a record of a time and place, filtered through Smith’s favored themes: outsider-insider culture, embodied in figures from the city’s avant-garde (Ginsberg and Patti Smith make appearances); material accumulation (tabletop arrangements of food, liquor bottles and drugs); and some promise of transcendence, in this case through Nature (childhood: he keeps going back there).In the 1970s, New York was in trouble, and so was Smith. Years of alcohol and drug intake were catching up. “A stoned, drunken, hunched-over demonically creative gnome” is how his New York psychiatrist described him. Penniless and in failing health, he was crashing with friends who passed him on to other friends. At one point he ended up in a Bowery flophouse. (This phase of his life — indeed his entire life — is empathetically chronicled in John Szwed’s indispensable new biography, “Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith.”)Andy Warhol, “Screen Test: Harry Smith,” 1964, a four-minute 16-millimeter film transferred to digital video, black and white, silent.The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PABut he never stopped working, which meant collecting: He carried a tape recorder, always turned on. And there were late upbeat moments. In 1988 he was invited to teach at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colo., a Buddhist-inspired college, where he was treasured and cosseted.In 1991, he was awarded a special Grammy for the “Anthology” and flew to New York, five kittens in tow, to accept it. He wore a rented tuxedo. No one would have guessed that by this point he was surviving entirely on instant mashed potatoes, NyQuil and cigarettes and would soon be lost in hallucinations of who he would meet in the afterlife. He died, at the Chelsea Hotel, that year, “unique, devious, saintly,” as Ginsberg eulogized, and far-out right to the end.Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry SmithThrough Jan. 28, 2024, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212-570-3600, whitney.org. More

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      On Europe’s Dance Floors, Music Too Fast for Feet

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      Since Europe’s clubs reopened after pandemic lockdowns, young partygoers have been drawn to a hard, driving style of techno. It’s changing the way people dance.It was Friday night, and the clubgoers at the Sputnikhalle nightclub in Münster, Germany, were primed to go hard. Decked out in black clothes and sunglasses, despite the dim light, the young crowd chanted the name of Héctor Oaks, a Spanish D.J., as he began playing his signature muscular, fast techno. Standing on top of the club’s risers, the crowd barely tried to keep up with the beat. Instead of moving their legs, many just oscillated their hips.Neele Hoyer, 21, a college student attending the event, explained that most other German techno fans of her age had developed affinity for such breathless music. “It’s gone totally mainstream,” she said. Dancing to such a fast beat could sometimes be strenuous, she added, but “this is what’s normal to us.”In recent years, Oaks, 32, has become a prominent figure in a broader trend in electronic music. While conventional techno is often played at around 120 to 130 beats per minute, Oaks and other D.J.s often play at 145 or above. The resulting hard-charging, breakneck sound has become the defining sound of Europe’s dance floors since the lockdown phase of the pandemic.Dancing to such a fast beat could sometimes be challenging, said Neele Hoyer, a college student. However, she added, “This is what’s normal to us.”Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesAlthough fast electronic music is not new, its broader dominance is. A data analysis by the German public broadcaster RBB this summer found that the top electronic music tracks of 2022 had much faster tempos than similar songs in 2016. Specialist dance music publications like Mixmag and Beatportal have noted the trend, and many of the buzzy D.J.s of the moment, like Ukraine’s Daria Kolosova and the Polish D.J. VTSS, are known for cranking up the speed.“I see it everywhere,” said Casper Tielrooij, the founder of Dekmantel, a label and annual electronic music festival in Amsterdam. “It’s not only techno, but jungle and trance and drum and bass.” He argued that although the zeitgeist had started to change before Covid, the faster, harder genre of techno had “exploded during the pandemic” and tastes were partly being shaped by young people who had spent their late teens or early twenties in lockdown.Luigi Di Venere, a techno and house D.J. who often plays at Berghain, the Berlin techno club, said that “there’s this idea that they need to speed things up to make up for it, and in case it happens again.” He added that the less “organic” and more “robotic” fast music suited a generation of clubgoers more connected to online culture.While conventional techno is often played at around 120 to 130 beats per minute, many D.J.s in Europe are playing at 145 or above.Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesHe argued that the brisk sound is partly sustained by a kind of feedback loop: As some D.J.s play faster, their co-headliners imitate their style to keep up the energy in the club. “You can’t just be a grandma and go, ‘Tra-la-la, 120 B.P.M.,’” he said, adding that he believed the trend still hasn’t reached its peak.In an interview, Oaks said that he began developing his sound in 2013, by melding traditional techno sets with other genres, including trance. Music played at a higher speed, he said, causes dancers’ hips, rather than their feet, to resonate, fostering a movement more akin to hovering than dancing. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” he added.He recalled that the music he played was an outlier on the European club scene a decade ago. But he partly grew a following at Herrensauna, a Berlin-based queer party known for its harder sound. The Herrensauna D.J.s’ 2018 appearance on the influential Boiler Room platform, which hosts livestreamed sets, was a “turning point” for his kind of music, he said. “After that, you could see everything switched.”Héctor Oaks said an appearance on the streaming platform Boiler Room was a “turning point” for his kind of music.Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesThe style’s success was likely fueled by other developments, including the proliferation of online D.J. streams, like Hör, during the pandemic’s lockdowns. According to Di Venere, because these streams were often shorter than normal club sets, D.J.s were pushed to squeeze in as much energy as possible, and the high-octane results became a staple at Europe’s illegal pandemic-era raves.Since coronavirus-prevention measures were relaxed last year, the sound has now transitioned to the continent’s clubs, including in smaller cities like Münster, which has a population of around 300,000. Oaks is now regularly booked at venues in Ibiza, for instance, which were previously known for their softer, warmer sound.Tahliah Simumba, 25, a Scottish musician who D.J.s as TAAHLIAH, grew her following during the pandemic with pop-inflected sets that often culminated at 170 B.P.M. In a recent phone interview, she said that TikTok, the video app, has been crucial in shaping post-pandemic club culture. The app, which focuses on snappy clips, has a large user base of techno fans, and its short videos favor fast-paced music.She added that, as a younger D.J. raised in an online environment, her sound was largely developed in isolation from the dance floor. “I try not to be held back by hierarchical idea of what D.J.ing is,” she said. “I want to be having as much fun as possible, and what is D.J.ing, after all, other than playing music you like?”Instead of moving their legs, many dancers at the Sputnikhalle just oscillated their hips.Valentin Goppel for The New York Times More

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      Solo Shows in Theater This Fall: Patrick Page, Isabelle Adjani and More

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      For theatergoers who love uncrowded stages, the coming months bring a range of works, from musical comedies to Shakespearean dramas.Solo shows have been around as long as there has been theater — longer, actually, if we count storytelling by a campfire. There is an elemental intimacy about the format and, let’s face it, an economic appeal at a time of belt-tightening.Despite their seemingly restrictive approach, one-person productions come in many shapes and forms: tales told by a single narrator and ones in which the performer embodies many characters, for example; dramatic yarns; and comic efforts that can flirt with stand-up. The last hybrid seems to be enjoying a kind of golden age, illustrated by the successes of Mike Birbiglia (“The Old Man and the Pool”) and Alex Edelman, whose recent Broadway hit, “Just for Us,” will be at the Curran Theater in San Francisco, Oct. 26-28.The coming months are a boon for theatergoers who love uncrowded stages, starting with the fall iteration of the cornucopia known as the United Solo Theater Festival (through Nov. 19 at Theater Row). Here is a selection of notable shows.Interrogating biographySometimes, it takes one icon to take measure of to another. The French actress Isabelle Adjani (“The Story of Adèle H.,” “Camille Claudel”) engages with Marilyn Monroe, myth and woman, in “Marilyn’s Vertigo.” The show, presented in French with supertitles as part of the Crossing the Line Festival, is framed as a dialogue with the Hollywood star, and was written by Adjani and Olivier Steiner. Oct. 12-13; FIAF Florence Gould Hall, Manhattan.John Rubinstein in Richard Hellesen’s “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” adapted from Eisenhower’s memoirs, speeches and letters.Maria BaranovaIn a different register, John Rubinstein returns for an encore of Richard Hellesen’s “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” a dive into the life of the military leader-turned-president that has proved quite popular. Through Oct. 27; Theater at St. Clement’s, Manhattan.One’s a crowdThe formidable Patrick Page is a versatile actor, but let’s face it: He is best known for portraying antagonists, including the Green Goblin in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” and Hades in “Hadestown.” Maybe it’s his basso profundo voice? In “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” directed by Simon Godwin, Page — whose command of his craft our critic described as “stupefying, effortless” — scrutinizes those classic characters. This might be the only time we ever see his take on Lady Macbeth. Through Jan. 7; DR2 Theater, Manhattan.Following his acclaimed solos “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” (2015) and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (2018), the Irish writer and actor Mikel Murfi is bringing to New York the trilogy’s conclusion, “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey.” Murfi portrays a range of characters from County Sligo, and performs all three pieces in repertory. Audiences can see any of the shows, or all of them. Oct. 24-Nov. 18; Irish Arts Center, Manhattan.Lameece Issaq has written for ensembles in works like “Food and Fadwa,” but her new piece, “A Good Day to Me, Not to You,” is a solo. In the show, presented by the Waterwell company and directed by Lee Sunday Evans (“Oratorio for Living Things”), Issaq plays a 40-something former dental lab technician reconsidering her life as she moves into a rooming house run by nuns on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nov. 8-Dec. 9; Connelly Theater, Manhattan.Stand-up or theater?The comedian Caitlin Cook returns to SoHo Playhouse with her show “The Writing on the Stall.”Mindy TuckerGabe Mollica and Caitlin Cook are usually called comedians, but their work blurs the line with theater. Both performers are returning to the stage with encore runs of pieces that have been building a buzz. In “Solo: A Show About Friendship,” Mollica explores his realization that he has buddies but no close friends, and tries to dig into the reasons for that. Our ideas and hangups about masculinity may well play a part. Oct. 10-28, Connelly Theater Upstairs, Manhattan.Cook’s “The Writing on the Stall” is inspired by the gold mine of comic material found on the walls of bar bathrooms. She has turned graffiti spotted over the years into a show integrating songs (a nice micro-trend among comedians; see also Catherine Cohen), bits of anthropology and autobiographical sharing. Oct. 16-17, SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan.Birth of a performerEdgar Oliver, a longtime fixture of the downtown New York theater scene, revisits his days at the Pyramid Club in his new work, “Rip Tide.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFour years ago, Ben Brantley described Edgar Oliver’s body of work as a “singular series of elegiac performance pieces,” which essentially amount to an oral history narrated by one person. Oliver’s new piece, “Rip Tide,” revisits his days performing at the Pyramid Club, the East Village boîte where renegade drag, rock, spoken word and performance art thrived in the 1980s and ’90s. Through Oct. 28; Axis Theater, Manhattan.In her review for The New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes pointed out how Melissa Etheridge turns Circle in the Square into an intimate music club for her concert-cum-memoir show, “My Window,” now on Broadway. Some of the rocker’s most fun anecdotes cover her early years playing lesbian spaces from her native Kansas to California. Through Nov. 19, Circle in the Square, Manhattan.Table for how many?Geoff Sobelle most recently performed his dinner party as theater spectacle at the Edinburgh Festival.Iain MastertonTechnically speaking, Geoff Sobelle’s “Food,” which is part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, involves a lot of people. Sobelle (“The Object Lesson”) is the host of a dinner party at which audience members sit at a very large table for what is described as “a meditation on how and why we eat.” Since “Food” was created with the magician Steve Cuiffo (“A Simulacrum”), it is no spoiler to mention it involves entertaining trickery. Nov. 2-18, Brooklyn Academy of Music.Repertory of onesPlaywrights Horizons is making smart use of its space by presenting three solos in repertory. Drawing from years as a tutor, Milo Cramer wrote and performs in “School Pictures,” a play with music that looks at our education system via a range of New York students. The comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu, who opened for Catherine Cohen at Joe’s Pub this summer, brings more of his surreal musings in “Amusements.” And Alexandra Tatarsky’s “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” which involves clowning and nudity, looks to be the wild card of this bunch — emphasis on wild. Nov. 2-Dec. 3, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan. More

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      Alicia Keys Steps Into a New Spotlight

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      “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical inspired by the singer-songwriter’s teenage years in New York, is set to open Off Broadway.One night this summer, Alicia Keys fell asleep listening to show tunes.She was on vacation following a five-week concert tour, but her mind was still at work: For 12 years, she has been developing “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical based on her adolescence in a then-gritty New York neighborhood, and at the top of her to-do list was writing a new song for the actress playing the main character’s mother.So she took a nap with her headphones on, listening to a playlist of theatrical mom songs (think “Rose’s Turn” from “Gypsy” and “Little Girls” from “Annie”). When she woke up, she could feel the rhythm. She could hear the chords. She could see the title.She ducked into a closet and began to sing into her phone. She hopped online, doing a little research to strengthen her lyrics. And then, when she returned to New York, she began to write, in the wee hours after the meetings and the calls and the rehearsals, noodling at an upright piano in her Chelsea recording studio.“This is occupying a lot of space in my mind,” Keys said about the musical, considered but candid as she was driven to a downtown rehearsal hall, tuning out the traffic and focusing on getting where she wants to go.Maleah Joi Moon is making her professional stage debut as the show’s protagonist, the 17-year-old Ali.Elias Williams for The New York TimesThat day, where she wanted to go was the Public Theater, the celebrated but pandemic-weakened nonprofit where “Hell’s Kitchen” is to begin an Off Broadway run on Oct. 24. Even though Keys is not in it, demand is high: Each time more tickets go on sale, they are snatched up.“I am thinking a lot about ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ and obviously the goal for it to be tremendously beloved and really something that comes into the world in a way that is just like a storm, an incredible storm,” Keys said. “And the goal, obviously, is to transfer to Broadway. So that’s heavy on my mind.”With 15 Grammys, five No. 1 albums and about 5 billion song streams, Keys is an unusual figure in the music world — a classically trained pianist turned R&B singer-songwriter who signed a recording contract as a teenager and remains, at 42, determined, driven and resolutely in control of her creative and commercial life.Her musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is unusual too, in ways that seem promising. Unlike many biographical jukebox shows chronicling childhood to celebrity, this one is both focused and fictionalized, depicting a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali.“This is not Tina Turner, this is not the Temptations, this is not MJ, this is not Carole King — although all of those are phenomenal,” Keys said, referring to shows about pop stars. “It’s really so much more about relationships and identity and trying to find who you are, which I think is a continuous theme in all of our lives: Who are we? Who do we want to be? Who are we becoming?”In “Hell’s Kitchen,” Ali, like Keys, is the daughter of a white mother and a Black father and is growing up in Manhattan Plaza, a subsidized housing development just outside Times Square where 70 percent of the units are for performing artists. The supporting characters — a hyper-protective single mother, a life-changing piano teacher, an older boyfriend and an unreliable father — are based on figures in Keys’s own upbringing.At its heart, “Hell’s Kitchen” is a mother-daughter love story, featuring the stage veteran Shoshana Bean, left, during a rehearsal with Moon.Elias Williams for The New York Times“We’ve highly fictionalized the specifics,” said Kristoffer Diaz, a playwright and librettist who has been working with Keys on the show for more than a decade. Along the way, Keys and Diaz have been joined by the Broadway veteran Michael Greif, who directed “Dear Evan Hansen,” and by the choreographer Camille A. Brown, an in-demand dance-maker.In some ways, the show’s narrative structure resembles that of Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film, “The Fabelmans”: It is a coming-of-age story about a gifted teenager with a fractured family; it ends with the protagonist’s trajectory unclear, but audiences can fill in the blanks based on what they already know about the author’s accomplishments.Keys resisted suggestions that the musical give audiences a road map to Ali’s future — a future in which she might, like Keys, become a big star. “Sometimes they would push: ‘And how about we…?’ And I was like, ‘No.’ ‘No,’” she said. “You just need to know that she is going to find something. Everything else is irrelevant.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is, in the eyes of its creative team, a mother-daughter love story. And, in an era when many musicals market themselves as love letters either to Broadway or to New York, this one falls squarely into the latter camp: Keys’s identity, as a person and as a songwriter, was shaped by the city in the 1990s, and that informs the show’s sounds (like bucket drumming) and movement (with echoes of social dances like the Running Man).The score, played by a band that will include a pianist visible to the audience even when actors pretend to be tickling the ivories, features Keys’s best-known hits: “Fallin’,” “No One,” “Girl on Fire,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” and, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z that has become an inescapable New York City anthem. Keys said she has written four new songs for the show, but that even existing songs have a new sound because they have been rearranged.“I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love,” Keys said, reflecting on her initial aspirations for “Hell’s Kitchen.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“The songs that you think you know,” she said, “you never heard like this.”Making a musical might seem like a swerve for Keys, but the truth is the overlap between the recording industry and musical theater is substantial. There is an ever-growing inventory of jukebox musicals biographical (“MJ,” about Michael Jackson) and fictional (“& Juliet”), as well as shows with original scores written by pop stars (“Here Lies Love”).Keys is a lifelong theatergoer who has dabbled in acting — she played Dorothy in a preschool production of “The Wizard of Oz” and had a cameo on “The Cosby Show” at 4 — but her passion was always music. She studied piano from age 7, was performing in a girl group and wrote her first song at around 11, and signed that recording contract at 15. Childhood moved fast — she skipped two grades and moved out at 16.“She knew a lot before she should have,” said her mother, Terria Joseph. (Mother and daughter both use stage names.)When Keys was a child, Joseph was a struggling actor — that’s how she qualified to live at Manhattan Plaza — who took survival jobs, particularly as a paralegal, while trying to find work as a performer. (Keys’s father, a flight attendant, did not live with them and was mostly not around; though Keys was close to her paternal grandparents, she was often estranged from her father. Now, she says, they are good.)Keys would tag along to auditions and rehearsals when her mother couldn’t afford a babysitter; when there was enough money, they would stand in line at the TKTS booth and buy discount theater tickets. Her mother recalls an early trip to “Cats,” and Keys remembers “Miss Saigon,” but the show that stands out most is “Rent,” in part because it’s about AIDS, which hit Manhattan Plaza, with its high population of gay artists, quite hard. “Rent,” like “Hell’s Kitchen,” was directed by Greif.She was valedictorian of her graduating class at the city’s Professional Performing Arts School, and attended Columbia University for a month before dropping out to pursue music. In 2001, with the release of “Fallin’,” and boosted by an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” her career took off.Keys has continued to see theater when she can, and in 2011 she co-produced a Broadway play, “Stick Fly,” about an affluent Black family wrestling with race and class. According to her mother, who is always trying to take her to more theater, Keys has long been thinking about developing her own show. “It was on her bucket list for some time,” Joseph said.“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” the Public Theater’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said of Keys (above, at a rehearsal). “There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“Stick Fly,” Keys said, “ignited this desire in me, across all mediums in regards to storytelling, to be able to start to hear, feel and see stories that I know exist, but in so many ways the world doesn’t see.” And when she started cooking up “Hell’s Kitchen,” she had audacious goals.“Because I have all the experience with seeing theater since a kid, I just was really ready to reinvent theater, too,” she said. “I just felt like there was so much to bring, so many worlds to collide and cross. I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love.”Hang on! There are people who can’t stand musical theater? Apparently, yes, and one of them is Keys’s husband, Swizz Beatz, a renowned hip-hop producer.“He’s not a fan,” Keys said, laughing. “Do not bring him to the show where in the middle of the sentence they break out into the song. He falls asleep. He cringes. He can’t take it.”So one goal, Keys said, is simply to create a show her husband will like. (The two make up a power couple, with multiple homes and a significant contemporary art collection; they have two children together, and are also helping to raise his three children from previous relationships.)And what about reinventing theater? When I ask her about that word, she qualifies it — mindful of how it might sound and wary after two decades talking to journalists. Keys said she thinks about her project differently now, because she believes that over the last decade, Broadway has made strides.“I don’t want you to now quote me and say I’m reinventing Broadway,” she said. “I want to be clear that there’s so many pieces that exist now that really do challenge, I think, what we were seeing. There of course needs to be more diversity on Broadway. Is there more already? Hell yeah. And we still need more.”I write about the business of Broadway, so one thing that has struck me, as I’ve been working on this profile, is Keys’s ownership — economic as well as artistic — of “Hell’s Kitchen.” Rather than finding Broadway producers to finance and shepherd the show, thus far she is doing so herself, retaining the rights to its commercial future.“I want to own my story,” she told me. “And I deserve to.”She consults, and is heard, on every strategic and creative choice: writing, casting, staging, marketing.Keys has been shuttling between her recording studio in Chelsea and the rehearsal space, while fine-tuning the show’s sound.Elias Williams for The New York Times“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public. “She’s been as involved as any artist I’ve ever worked with — she gets involved on a level of granularity that’s just astonishing. It’s not just music, but every sentence, every relationship, every actor. There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Maleah Joi Moon, who at 21 is making a professional stage debut playing Ali, was taken aback to realize that Keys, whose music was a staple in Moon’s childhood home, would actually be involved on a day-to-day basis.“When I saw the project, I was like, no way was she really attached to this,” Moon said. “And to find out, once I got into the rehearsal room, that she was going to be so heavily involved — it was insane.”Keys radiated warmth as well as intensity during a rehearsal, a novel (“The Vanishing Half”) at her elbow while she bounced in her chair to the beat and tapped out ideas on her phone. “She’s very specific with her notes,” said Shoshana Bean, the actress playing Ali’s mother.She teaches songs to the ensemble. (“You’ve never been to a more charged, lively and thrilling music rehearsal than when she’s running them,” Greif said.) She instructs the stars on vocal technique. (“She has expressed herself about what parts of my voice she wants me to use,” said Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Ali’s father.)She even attended auditions for understudies, and she told me she was relocating a piano in her studio to try to replicate the sonic environment of the theater, thinking she would record the songs in the show and give demos to the band “so they get the feel, they get the swing, they get the idea, they get the energy.”“I’m very, very anal,” she said, “and I know how I want everything to sound.”Control has been a central theme of Keys’s career. While still a teenager, she successfully extricated herself from the contract she had signed with Columbia Records, chafing at efforts to mold her image and sound.“It’s important for me to properly express how I feel at the moment and not have it filtered through other people,” she told Oprah at age 20. Now she preaches self-determination. “If you don’t know what you want for yourself, then you’ll never, never get there,” she told me. “You’ll always be deterred.”Several times, as we talked, she circled back to her concerns about the way the music industry treats artists, and she said one of her long-term goals is “redesigning the industry.”“I feel like as a young artist, we get very taken advantage of, and it’s unfortunate we find ourselves in these circumstances that do not benefit us to the level that it should,” she said. “And I’m lucky. I am in control of all of my music and all of the things that I’ve created. But let me tell you, that’s not the normal story. And I had to fight for it.”Maintaining creative and financial control has become “a mission,” she said, and with “Hell’s Kitchen,” she believes the lessons she has learned are paying off.“For the first time in my life,” she said. “I’m doing something exactly right.”That startled me, given her success. “Really?” I asked.The score is a mix of new songs and Keys’s best-known hits, including, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z.Elias Williams for The New York Times“I really do,” she said. She explained that with previous projects, “I didn’t start out right, but kind of ended up right.” But this time, she said, “I didn’t want to go out and get too diluted and get too many partners. We have all the right partners, all the right minds. It’s the right mixture of experience and also newness that I think is important to continue to create a new world.”One night in mid-July, I took the subway to Barclays Center to watch Keys do what she is best known for: perform. For 90 minutes she entertained a rapturous crowd of 11,894 — strikingly more diverse, and younger, than most theater audiences. Her sparkling Yamaha piano was in the center of the arena, on a rotating stage, with runways extending out so she could work the crowd.Just before the concert, as she often does, she presided over what she calls a Soulcare Session, promoting her skin care line (“I call them offerings, not products — products is too transactional”), talking up empowerment (“The theme today is reminding ourselves to own our own power”), and posing for pictures with superfans who had paid a steep premium for up-close access (“You can talk to me about anything you want,” she said). Her staff sprayed the patrons with a “reviving aura mist” and invited them to select keys (get it?) with words of affirmation; attendees sat on embroidered pillows, black beanbags and purple cushions and asked Keys about her wardrobe, her writing process, her childhood. Some spoke about how her songs had helped them endure disease or emotional hardship.Keys has long had an entrepreneurial streak — she started a babysitters club when she was 11 — and it is ever-expanding. “I’m really interested in business at this point,” she told me when I asked about what’s next.She’s all-in on “Hell’s Kitchen,” of course. She intends to further build up Key SoulCare. And she’ll make more music.“I feel like I’m in a place where I can express myself clearly,” she said. “I am clear about what I want, what I don’t want. Who I want to do it with, who I don’t want to. I’m unafraid to be very vocal and verbal about that, and I feel like I’m in a place where I can do anything, anything. And I haven’t even begun yet.” More

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      in Music

      What’s on Your Fall Playlist?

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      Tell us which songs deliver sonic coziness for you.What makes a fall song? Sometimes it’s as obvious as Neil Young’s “Harvest.”Rune Hellestad/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,I’m on vacation this week, so I won’t be sending out any new playlists. But many of you have been emailing to ask how you can listen to previous Amplifier playlists, and I’m happy to announce that we finally have them archived and updated here.So take this opportunity to catch up on any of the more than 50 installments of The Amplifier you may have missed. (No, I can’t believe I’ve already written that many either.) If you’re an overachiever who’s already listened to every single playlist? Honestly, I’m impressed. Reward yourself by revisiting some of your favorites!When I’m back, I’ll be sending out a very special autumn playlist, and I’d love to include some of your picks.What makes a fall song, you ask? Sometimes it’s so obvious, it’s in the title: Yo La Tengo’s “Autumn Sweater,” Neil Young’s “Harvest” or pretty much any rendition of “Autumn in New York.” But sometimes it’s more about a certain mood, or a general sonic atmosphere of coziness.So, what’s a song that feels like fall to you? Share your answers here. We may use your response in an upcoming newsletter.I’ll be back next Tuesday. As ever, thanks for reading and listening.Vacation, all I ever wanted,Lindsay More