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      Teyana Taylor Has a Story to Tell

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      As an R&B singer, producer, dancer, music video director, choreographer and fashion designer, Teyana Taylor is no stranger to the spotlight. She’s known for her sultry singing, sexy dance moves and edgy turns on the red carpet — at this year’s Vanity Fair Oscar party, it was a sheer dark suit with a metallic gold bra. At New York Fashion Week in February, it was an avant-garde suit by Thom Browne. To it all, she brings a touch of the theatrical.But in the film “A Thousand and One,” Taylor gives an entirely different performance. Here, she plays Inez, a woman orphaned at a young age who is struggling to rebuild her life after a stint at Rikers Island. With an aim to be a better provider, she kidnaps her six-year-old son, Terry, out of New York City’s negligent foster care system.Over the course of the film, which covers a decade in gentrifying Harlem from the 1990s to the early 2000s, Taylor, who is a Harlem native, strips Inez to her core: A single Black mother trying to create a quality life for Terry while carrying the weight of the city on her shoulders. It’s the first feature film written and directed by A.V. Rockwell, and it won the grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Taylor received acclaim for her unadorned performance, with The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis calling her “terrific” in a notebook from the festival.With Aaron Kingsley Adetola in “A Thousand and One,” which won the grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival.Focus Features“This is the story of a street woman, and I think you needed to feel her rawness,” said Rockwell in a video interview. “One of the things that I told Teyana in terms of preparing for the role was, ‘I hope you’re ready to forgo your glam.’”Life transitions gave Taylor, 32, a head start down that road. During filming, she was six months postpartum after giving birth to her second daughter. “You don’t feel beautiful, you don’t feel confident,” she said of that time, in a video interview. She also attended the funerals of three different friends, all in Harlem, including one she grew up with as a child. “Having to see your friends lying in caskets. Going to wakes on my lunch break. I had a lot to cry about,” she said.But in “A Thousand and One,” the character Inez hardly cries, despite her hardships. Even at her most vulnerable, when it seems the men for whom she has sacrificed have abandoned her, she cracks a smile. “She’s able to have this strength even through her tears,” Taylor said. “It made me respect A.V. on a whole other level.”When Taylor watched the final cut, she remembered filming scenes of emotive crying. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh no, this is my Viola moment! Why are you not using the snot? I’m going in right now, I killed this scene.’ And A.V.’s like, ‘No, that’s just not who Inez is.’ She’s always in survival mode to people.”Taylor understood what it’s like to be in survival mode. She drew parallels to her professional life, saying she suffered abandonment by people she trusted to protect her. With her mother, Nikki Taylor, as her manager, she entered the music business at age 15. She has choreographed music videos for Beyoncé and appeared in other videos by Jay-Z and Kanye West. Her single, “Gonna Love Me,” has been streamed more than 167 million times on Spotify, and her three studio albums all reached the Billboard 200 chart.Then in late 2020, she announced in an Instagram post that she was retiring from music. She was signed with G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam at the time and had released “The Album” earlier that year. In her post, she mentioned “feeling super under appreciated” and “constantly getting the shorter end of the stick.” She also hinted at the time “that when one door closes another will open,” and the first opportunity that came along afterward was the role of Inez.“I didn’t have that Inez role locked in before I retired, so it was a real-life faith walk,” Taylor said.“It’s realizing that the things that I’ve been through and the amount of time that it took was not a punishment,” Taylor said. “It was preparation.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesNow, she’s forging ahead as an actor, director and producer. She has roles in two other upcoming films, “The Book of Clarence” and “The Smack,” and said she has plans to direct her first feature, a project from the production company she co-founded, the Aunties.Later this year, she’ll also release her own Air Jordan sneaker called, fittingly, “A Rose From Harlem.” It features a rose-colored, thorn-trimmed swoosh on the right sneaker, and a black swoosh with jagged stitching on the left. Taylor sees both herself and Inez as roses from Harlem. “This sneaker is a love letter to all the roses who grow out the concrete, from their own hoods, really making it out and putting on for their city, putting on for their neighborhood and really just making the hood proud,” she said.According to her, the wait was long for her own Air Jordan, and for the collaboration to launch the same year as the release of “A Thousand and One” seemed predestined. Taylor felt at peace with the past, and with any feelings of frustration and resignation in her career.“I always say, grace over grudges. Because what’s for me is already written,” she said. “So if it was meant for me to be abandoned or maybe mistreated, that gave me the strength to be able to tap into this character, Inez. It’s realizing that the things that I’ve been through and the amount of time that it took was not a punishment. It was preparation.”In the film, Inez tells Terry she’ll go to war for him. She defers her dream to be a hairstylist, instead keeping a steady job as a cleaner to pay the rent. It mirrored some of the experiences Taylor’s own mother contended with.“It was rough, but I had to do what I had to do,” Teyana’s mother, Nikki, said in a phone interview. She worked two corporate jobs and went to college while raising a young child mostly on her own, sometimes with the help of family members. “The way I looked at it, I’m going to always go above and beyond to take care of my kid. I always made sure she never needed for anything or wanted for anything.”Playing a single mother in the film, Taylor tapped into her experience being raised by a single mother.Erik Carter for The New York TimesTaylor herself now has two daughters with her husband, Iman Shumpert, the basketball player who is also a winner of “Dancing With the Stars.” The children are Iman Tayla, nicknamed Junie, age 7, and Rue Rose, age 2 (“going on 22,” Taylor said). During the film shoot, Junie was the same age as Aaron Kingsley Adetola, the actor who plays the young version of Terry, and in real life, the two children became best friends. Junie wanted to be on set and part of it all. “They let her call ‘Action!’ a few times. She’s following in my footsteps. She’s literally a mini me,” Taylor said.There’s no obvious trace of Taylor’s music and dance skills in her performance as Inez, but her background in these disciplines influenced her approach. For one, she was very in touch with her body, an important part of any performance, according to Rockwell, the director. “She has such a unique timber to her voice,” Rockwell said, so they played around with how Inez talks and moves as she matures in the film. “Teyana was able to dig into these parts of herself. To see her find those steps was exciting for me, and really inspiring to see this performer come to life in a way that I don’t think anybody was expecting.”The way a musician records a verse or song 50 times to get it right, Taylor gave her performance the same level of specificity. “Detail is a skill, and I’m a very detailed person,” Taylor said. For her, the stakes were high. She didn’t want to continue making work in which she was just dancing or looking glamorous. She had entered a new phase and wanted to be taken seriously. “I had a story to tell,” she said. “In a lot of ways, Inez’s story was my story.” More

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      in Music

      A Sibling Rivalry Divides Harry Bertoia’s Legacy

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      Celia Bertoia’s father — the famous sculptor and not-so-famous musician Harry Bertoia — had been dead 30 years when she asked a psychic how to handle his legacy.The youngest of three children, she had long seemed to be her father’s favorite: a confidante who, as a child, would cut his hair outdoors on their forest-fronting property among the idyllic valleys of Eastern Pennsylvania. But after his death in 1978, she dodged the family business of welding together mountains of metal into behemoth public-art installations and “sounding sculptures” that made music. She became a real-estate agent in Colorado, then the owner of a Montana service that provided timing for road races.When she entered her 50s, Celia decided it was time to help manage the thousands of pieces her father had left. Her mother, Brigitta Valentiner Bertoia, had died in 2007. The next year, Celia consulted the psychic, who, knowing none of the back story, described “beautiful papers with abstract designs” — which Celia took as a reference to her father’s monotypes — and his lung cancer.Harry Bertoia is buried near the barn that houses his sounding sculptures, and under his biggest gong.Aaron Richter for The New York Times“She said: ‘The world is ready for these now. You should get these out,’” Celia, now 68, recalled in a phone conversation from the Utah office park that houses the Harry Bertoia Foundation, the nonprofit she started in 2013. “She gave me the direction.”Following the psychic’s guidance reignited the childhood rivalry between Celia and her older brother, Val, who had spent much of the previous three decades restoring, appraising and emulating his father’s sculptures in the workshop Harry established in 1952. Accusations of theft, forgery, avarice and betrayal erupted, prompting a bitter three-year lawsuit that led, in 2016, to the division of Bertoia’s most fabled work: a centuries-old stone barn stuffed with nearly 100 of his so-called Sonambients, intricate but austere sculptures he welded from rods of beryllium copper and played like a virtuoso.Many families struggle with issues of inheritance. But during the last decade, the Bertoias have learned how complicated those issues can be when that inheritance is unique.“When I first heard the sculptures, I went, ‘Wow, what is that?’ Their suppleness is so inviting,” said the composer Mark Grey, who captured their sounds with a mobile studio in 2002 to build simulacrums for the Kronos Quartet. “His sculptures leapfrog electronic music technology to create a different window into what we think sound is.”In late 2021, Sotheby’s auctioned 20 of Bertoia’s Sonambients (a rough portmanteau of sound and ambient) for nearly $6 million, prices that were in some cases ten times their estimates. Then Jack White’s Third Man Records reissued the 11 rare LPs Bertoia had recorded in the barn — recursive chimes that linger like church bells, powerful drones that roar like doom metal, tapped gongs that sing like seraphic choirs. The first pressing sold out in days. Last year, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas hosted the first domestic Bertoia retrospective in nearly half a century. There, musicians including Nels Cline and Craig Taborn played the Sonambients in a series of concerts.Those events were all partnerships with the foundation, part of Celia’s efforts to send her father’s work out into the world. Val, though, hopes to bring the world to the work. As children, they fought, and as adults, they have competing visions of their father’s legacy.“Celia and Val have the utmost respect for Harry,” Lesta Bertoia, the oldest sibling, who excused herself from the lawsuit, said in an interview. “But they have never had good communication. Now they can make up one another’s motives.”Val Bertoia with Melissa Strawser, his partner, at the Bertoia barn. Aaron Richter for The New York TimesTHE MORNING AFTER the Sotheby’s auction, 100 miles southwest of Manhattan at the family home in rural Pennsylvania, Val Bertoia bounded around what he called the “Sonambient Barn” with a devilish grin. He swatted and swiped row after row of musical sculptures ­— half of them made by his father, half by his own hand. The place shook with tectonic power, long southerly windows buzzing like beehives. His longtime partner, the artist Melissa Strawser, beamed.The Bertoia family arrived in tiny Bally, Pa., at the dawn of the 1950s. Harry was an accomplished jewelry and furniture designer who had worked with Charles and Ray Eames. He’d taken a job at the modern design bastion Knoll, where he developed the celebrated Diamond chair. Then the sound of a bending wire captured his attention and fired his imagination.An archival photograph of Harry Bertoia with his sculptures, and at left, a mallet used to activate them.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesBertoia’s grave in Pennsylvania.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesDuring his final 20 years, Bertoia developed an army of minimalist sculptures with long rods that waved like fields of grain, producing tidal washes of luminous overtones or pointillist symphonies. He added a second floor to the hay barn, where his desk remains; the rest of the barn functioned as a giant resonant chamber, filled with a rotating cast of 100 sculptures.“Being in the presence of those sounds brought me into a different world,” Celia said. “He would move around the room like a cat. He knew those sculptures better than he knew his family.”Val began working for his father at his sprawling, cluttered shop in the center of Bally in 1971. Their relationship was sometimes strained, but Val said he internalized his father’s methods. “Harry was my idol, my hero, my superman,” he said.After his father’s death, Val tended to the business. He continued making sounding sculptures, incorporating whimsy, a quality he felt his father had shunned, and numbering every piece sequentially. (After 45 years, he is nearing 2,700.) Harry Bertoia acolytes accused Val of being a charlatan who plagiarized, charged for tours and inflated appraisals.“I realized I could not replace Harry Bertoia,” Val, now 73, said. “I had my own personality and discoveries.”Harry Bertoia’s sounding sculptures are also housed at the foundation that bears his name in St. George, Utah.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesThis loose arrangement seemed to work until Celia launched her foundation. She’d been away from the sculptures for so long that she asked to shadow Val for two weeks, to get reacquainted with their dynamics and his own work. He agreed, then demanded $10,000; he admitted this was to scare her off. When Celia mentioned a few sculptures she’d requested years earlier, Val said they were gone. He’d split the proceeds only with Lesta, the sister who lived nearby. Celia hired a lawyer, battling Val over what belonged where until they settled in 2016.Celia and Lesta received 73 of the remaining 92 Sonambients. Val kept the barn, their childhood home, the workshop, and the other 19 sounding sculptures. Val described the day he spent crating his father’s sculptures as “emotionally swirling, like a hurricane.” For Celia, it was “a knife in the belly.” Lesta watched from the sidelines, telling them they were again behaving like children.A DECADE AGO, Bertoia’s musical legacy found an unexpected champion. John Brien is the owner of Important Records, a Massachusetts-based label that had documented the experimental recesses of international musical scenes for a dozen years, like harsh noise from Japan and New Zealand and graceful drones from England and Australia. He knew of Bertoia’s chairs and even kept a photo of the designer above his desk. He was embarrassed when he stumbled on a link to Bertoia’s music in 2012; how had he missed it?“There was nothing I could compare it to,” Brien said. “I wanted to know as much as I could.”Brien pitched the idea of a box set to the Bertoias, who consented despite the lawsuit. He began visiting the barn, where Harry’s Sony microphones still hung, to collect photos, slides and sketches. Released in 2016, the 11-disc “Sonambient” was the first compilation of Harry’s albums.Brien has since emerged as one of Bertoia’s most steadfast advocates, restoring and converting nearly 200 hours of unheard tape of music made on the sculptures. He has unearthed novel techniques within those recordings, including a primitive form of overdubbing. Brien said he can now identify several sculptures by sound alone.Amid the turmoil, Brien strove to be inclusive. He solicited essays from all three children. The art historian Beverly Twitchell, who organized Bertoia’s first two exhibitions while he was alive and wrote a definitive biography, contributed archival photos and guided Brien beyond the drama. And when the much-larger Third Man suggested partnering on a vinyl edition, defraying the massive cost of pressing such a large set, he agreed.“I wanted to reach a new audience unfamiliar with this music,” said Brien. “This was the way.”Celia Bertoia, the artist’s younger daughter, at the foundation.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesBrien’s work suggests an ideal path forward for the Bertoia family — partnerships, not divisions. But Celia and Val still seem hesitant to share resources, even while mounting exhaustive projects to document their father’s work.“Celia’s goal is to gain money, where I have the goal of gaining people,” Val said. (According to financial records, Celia has not drawn a salary as the foundation’s executive director for several years.) “We have two different directions — the foundation and the ‘Soundation.’ The Soundation is about how people can feel healed.”For five years, and with the help of Sotheby’s, the foundation worked to sell 60 of Celia and Lesta’s 73 Sonambients to a museum willing to build a new barn. Practicalities quashed the plan. Celia is now focused on a catalogue raisonné, a complete accounting of Harry’s work. That’s difficult to accomplish for an artist who never signed his creations, and harder still when a feud makes some of the pieces untouchable.“The catalog will survive far beyond any of the siblings,” she said. “It will ensure Harry’s work will live on.”Bertoia’s works at the foundation in Utah, which operates separately from Val Bertoia’s collection in Pennsylvania.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesVal has filled the half-empty barn with sounding sculptures of his own, opposite his father’s remaining Sonambients. Moving among them, he raved about the possibilities of what he called “the metaverse” — an augmented-reality program that will allow anyone to visit the barn virtually and play. Brien had once floated the idea, but Val and Strawser pursued it when the pandemic shuttered in-person tours.Grey, the composer, has started developing the program. It is not a question of technology, he insisted, but funding. “To see the barn in all its glory — the microphones hanging off rafters, cobwebs all over them — was remarkable, but time moves on,” Grey said. “We have the opportunity to keep this art alive.”When Twitchell, the Bertoia biographer, learned the barn’s contents would be scattered, she was sad. But practical considerations offset her disappointment. The aging barn has no security system or fire sprinklers, little parking or insurance. Even if the instruments are no longer in the same place, she said, they will at least survive.“Harry would like the idea of multiple approaches to his work,” Twitchell said. “No one would say ‘this is the only way to think about this stuff.’” More

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      in Music

      Scott Johnson, Playfully Inventive Composer, Is Dead at 70

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      In works like “John Somebody,” he mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.Scott Johnson, a composer and guitarist who forged an original style involving the rhythmic cadences of speech and the gestures and timbres of popular music, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 70.Mr. Johnson’s sister Susan Lee Johnson said the cause was complications of aspiration pneumonia. Mr. Johnson had also been diagnosed with lung cancer in May 2021.Mr. Johnson immersed himself in music and art from an early age and played in rock bands in high school. His artistic breakthrough came with “John Somebody,” a playfully inventive work for solo electric guitar with taped accompaniment, which he assembled from 1980 to 1982, and which, as performed regularly and recorded in 1986, won him considerable acclaim.To create that work, Mr. Johnson transcribed into approximate musical notation portions of a friend’s telephone conversation he had recorded in 1977 (“You know who’s in New York? You remember that guy, John somebody? He was a … he was sort of a…”), along with other snatches of speech and laughter.Mr. Johnson added dense layers of guitar, saxophone and percussion, and a virtuosic solo part for live guitarist, with pitches, melodic motifs and rhythms derived from the recorded vocalism. The result mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.“To these ears, the music mirrors the subterranean rumble, the welter of voices and other overlaid sounds of the city, with the cries of superamplified guitars hovering like angels above the fray,” Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote about “John Somebody” in 1986. “It’s a compelling marriage of rock elements and classical formalism that doesn’t shortchange either.”Mr. Johnson refined and extended the process he developed for “John Somebody” in several subsequent works. He also created purely instrumental works and, for a time, led an ensemble comprising three saxophonists, two electric guitarists, an electric bass guitarist and two drummers.The technical demands of Mr. Johnson’s music could make collaboration a daunting prospect. But he formed close bonds with younger artists and groups like the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound and the guitarist and composer Mark Dancigers, who came of age at a time when fluency in rock and pop idioms became more prevalent among concert-music composers and performers.“He was a player who embraced complexity,” Mr. Dancigers said in a phone interview. “The writing is challenging from a number of perspectives: There are leaps, there are rapid virtuosic passages, there are chord voicings that change very rapidly.”Mr. Dancingers suggested that Mr. Johnson’s compositions paved the way for younger composers similarly inclined toward hybridity. “The first time I heard him present his music,” he said, “I thought, this guy’s a little ahead of his time.”Mr. Johnson developed a passion for electric guitar in high school, and his music mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.Patricia NolanScott Richard Johnson was born in Madison, Wis., on May 12, 1952. His father, Robert Warren Johnson, worked in marketing, merchandising and sales positions for a battery company. His mother, Janet Mary (Stecker) Johnson, was a homemaker. They both belonged to a church choir and attended concerts by the local symphony orchestra.Intellectually inquisitive and artistically inclined, Mr. Johnson played clarinet before switching to electric guitar in high school. An early infatuation with folk groups like the Kingston Trio ceded to a passion for Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.“His bands practiced in the family basement,” his sister Susan wrote in an email, “and the practice sessions shook the house.”Hearing Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring” sparked Mr. Johnson’s interest in modern classical composition. By college, he wrote in a biography on his website, “I was studying music theory during the week and playing in bars on the weekends.”Daunted by the serialist compositional style that held sway in academia, Mr. Johnson turned to visual art. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a bachelor’s degree in art in 1974 and then drove a cab in Madison for a year to finance his move to New York City in 1975.By that time he had temporarily set music aside. But he quickly established himself among a rising generation of versatile, inquisitive Downtown creators, including the composers Rhys Chatham, Peter Gordon and Arthur Russell, the choreographer Karole Armitage and the interdisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson, with all of whom he collaborated.On arrival, Mr. Johnson supported himself by demolishing and renovating lofts with a friend from Madison, Scott Billingsley, later known as the filmmaker Scott B. He also joined Mr. Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra.“It sometimes took Scott days to be able to use his fingers for guitar, after sanding floors all day” Mr. Gordon said by email. Like many other downtown composers, including Mr. Gordon, Mr. Johnson also worked as a tape editor for the sound artist and performer Charlie Morrow.Tape played a key role in Mr. Johnson’s oeuvre. For the earliest work he acknowledges on his website, “Home and Variations” (1979), he manipulated the voices of members of a dance company to accompany a dance.In the liner notes he wrote for a 2004 reissue of “John Somebody” on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Mr. Johnson said that germinal material for the piece dated as far back as 1977. At that time, he had to cut up strips of magnetic tape and then tape them back together. One particular passage in the work, he recounted, required a tape loop 25 feet long.Addressing the work’s development in a 2018 interview for the web publication NewMusicBox, Mr. Johnson cited several inspirations: early tape works in which Steve Reich looped and layered recorded speech, the call-and-response convention fundamental to the blues, and compositions in which Olivier Messiaen transcribed and notated bird song. In turn, “John Somebody” announced a signature style that anticipated Mr. Reich’s landmark 1988 piece “Different Trains,” and had a strong influence on other composers.Despite the seeming novelty of his approach, Mr. Johnson asserted his alliance to a historic lineage of rigorous formal composition. In his view, bringing elements of rock into the concert-music world extended a tradition of composers borrowing from vernacular styles, like folk songs. “John Somebody,” he wrote, resulted “when the partially developed elements laid out on my table met the animating idea of the Baroque dance suite, episodic but unified.”Mr. Johnson performed the work regularly. A 1986 recording made for the upstart record company Icon benefited from a partnership with Nonesuch, a more established label whose cachet was growing, and the commercial clout of that label’s corporate parent, Warner Bros.Mr. Johnson’s score for the 1988 Paul Schrader film “Patty Hearst” was released on Nonesuch. So were portions of “How It Happens” (1991-93), an evening-length composition for the Kronos Quartet with the recorded voice of the political commentator I.F. Stone, scattered across three different albums.Mr. Johnson, increasingly used his speech-manipulation technique to address social and philosophical concerns. In “Americans” (2003), he sampled the speech of immigrants recorded in Queens to examine cultural isolation and assimilation. For “Mind Out of Matter” (2009-15), a 75-minute work for Alarm Will Sound, he employed the voice of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has examined the history of religion.The Alarm Will Sound conductor Alan Pierson grew familiar with Mr. Johnson’s exactitude while preparing “Mind Out of Matter.” The percussion parts included some nearly impossible passages, and at one point players suggested altering a few notes.“Even as a conductor and a listener, I’m thinking you’re probably not even going to hear those notes,” Mr. Pierson said by phone. “But having to rethink that was so intense for Scott. Watching the amount of attention that he would put into reconsidering just a couple of notes, in a passage where there was so much going on, was really something to see.”In addition to his sister Susan, Mr. Johnson is survived by another sister, Lynne Ann Johnson. His wife, Marlisa Monroe, a classical-music publicist, apparently died on Friday: A Police Department spokesperson confirmed on Saturday that a 70-year-old woman was found unconscious and unresponsive, and later pronounced dead, at the Manhattan address where Mr. Johnson and Ms. Monroe lived. No cause of death has yet been determined; an investigation is ongoing.In his last months, Mr. Johnson completed a final composition: a wholly acoustic work for string quartet and mezzo-soprano. The piece, titled “Map,” features an elegiac text by Mr. Johnson, which reads in part:Every route is a branching fatewell worn path or departureshared inherited highwaysengineered exitsor unmarked dirt swervesaccidents, errors, discoveries. More

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      in Theater

      In ‘Up Here,’ the Song Stuck in Your Head Might Be Your Mean Ex-Crush

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      Developed by a team of Broadway and Hollywood all-stars, the new Hulu series sets a chorus of inner critics to song.The rats were not on the call sheet. They turned up anyway.For the members of the brain trust behind the new Hulu musical series “Up Here,” this balmy September night last year was to be a precious occasion: After more than two years of cross-country video calls, the writer and executive producer Danielle Sanchez-Witzel had flown in from Los Angeles during the last full week of production, finally giving her a chance to hang out on set with her collaborators — a gang of Broadway powerhouses that included the highly decorated songwriting couple behind “Frozen,” Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez.“She was one of our best friends in the pandemic,” Anderson-Lopez said at the time, at an outdoor shoot in the Manhattan neighborhood of Hudson Heights. “We spent six to eight hours together a day during 2021. And we just hugged in person for the first time 10 minutes ago.”And then Sanchez-Witzel got a dose of New York City realness. As they gathered around the monitors, with the cameras rolling just a few yards away, a few enterprising rodents decided to join the fun. Snacks were stashed. Sanchez-Witzel nervously pulled up her feet. Someone joked about creating a viral video to promote the show.It was just the latest twist in the bigger challenge faced by the illustrious team behind “Up Here,” which dropped all eight episodes of its first season on Friday: how to merge that most classically New York of art forms, the stage musical, with a much younger Hollywood one — the bingeable half-hour streaming sitcom.Stage musicals have been adapted into movies for decades; live television adaptations have made a comeback in recent years, too. But turning one into serialized television is new. This alone would make “Up Here,” developed from an original musical by the Lopezes, stand out.The developers of “Up Here” on a location shoot in Manhattan, from left: Danielle Sanchez-Witzel, Robert Lopez, Steven Levenson, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Thomas Kail.Sarah Shatz/HuluThe Lopezes created “Up Here” as a stage musical that debuted in San Diego in 2015, but soon shelved it. They made significant changes for the TV adaptation. Sarah Shatz/HuluAdd to that the Tony-winning creative powers of the writer Steven Levenson (“Dear Evan Hansen”) and the director Thomas Kail (“Hamilton”), and the series also comes courtesy of Broadway’s equivalent to a Marvel superteam.“I think they wanted to make sure someone hadn’t won a Tony in this group,” Sanchez-Witzel said. (She, Levenson and the Lopezes are all credited as developers.) She joked that over the years she had spent “thousands of dollars on StubHub” to watch her new collaborators’ shows.Given the surrealistic premise of “Up Here,” it was perhaps always well suited for the screen — think “Herman’s Head” with music, or “Inside Out” with nagging parents, mean ex-crushes and former friends instead of lovable little gremlins. Set at the turn of the millennium, it centers on Lindsay and Miguel (played in the series by Mae Whitman and Carlos Valdes), a young couple who meet outside a bar bathroom where Lindsay’s roommate is having sex with a stranger.If a show about the lurid dating lives of 20-something New Yorkers feels a little familiar, the twist is that the characters’ thoughts, as personified by people from their lives, constantly speak up — or, rather, sing up — to interfere.“I got there, and with the accompanist and the music, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like a theater audition,’” said Valdes about trying out for his role. He had ample show-tune experience.Patrick Harbron/HuluThe original musical premiered in San Diego in 2015, then was shelved while the Lopezes worked on other things. It didn’t stay on the shelf for long. Early in 2020, Kail, who since directing “Hamilton” had begun to develop a solid reputation in television (he was an executive producer and director of the acclaimed FX series “Fosse/Verdon”), was looking for a new project he could sink his teeth into. He knew the Lopezes from the theater world — in addition to their songs for the “Frozen” movies and “Coco,” Lopez had co-written “Avenue Q” and “The Book of Mormon” — and he asked if they had anything lying around.They were keen to take another crack at “Up Here.” Kail saw potential. He soon pulled in Levenson, his fellow developer of “Fosse/Verdon.” All agreed that “Up Here” would work best as a comedy series. There was just one problem.“We quickly decided none of us had any experience in half-hour television,” Levenson said. So Kail contacted Sanchez-Witzel, whose credits included “The Carmichael Show” and “New Girl.” She signed on but continued to work from Los Angeles. (Kail, the Lopezes and Levenson are also executive producers.)The team’s central task was figuring out how to translate the stage version to episodic television. The idea, as Levenson explained it, was to create a musical that spanned eight episodes but where each was also its own mini-musical. And the tunes had to be more than an accessory.“The show needed to function like a musical, where the songs actually were necessary to the storytelling, so that if you removed them, the show wouldn’t work,” Levenson said.The learning curve was steep for both sides.“Danielle told us about certain structures of a 30-minute comedy,” Anderson-Lopez said. “And we talked a lot about how when we’re looking for songs in theater or animated musicals, we’re always looking for a moment when a character is having a feeling so big, they can’t speak anymore. It was really fun figuring out those spaces in a half-hour comedy.”Eventually, the set list from the San Diego production was almost entirely put aside. The male lead’s name was also changed from Dan to Miguel.Valdes as Miguel in a scene from the series. The male lead was called Dan in the stage version. Sarah Shatz/Hulu“I felt strongly that this time around he should be not white,” said Lopez, the youngest person ever to win an EGOT — an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — and also the only person to have won each award more than once. He and Sanchez-Witzel share “a similar experience being nonwhite and feeling disconnected from both the white mainstream and from our immigrant histories,” he added. (Lopez is of Philippine descent; Sanchez-Witzel is Mexican American.) “We thought that’d be interesting to put into this character.”To find their lead actors, the New York-based creators followed a procedure they were all familiar with. This was an advantage for Valdes.“I got there, and with the accompanist and the music, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like a theater audition,’” said Valdes, who is best known for playing Cisco/Vibe on the CW’s “The Flash” but has extensive show-tune experience, including appearing in the Broadway hit “Once” a decade ago.“It had been a long time since I’d been in that kind of musical theater space, but it felt so familiar,” he said, “like a homecoming.”Landing the part was more fraught for Whitman, whose extensive television résumé (“Parenthood,” “Arrested Development”) had not prepared her for an old-school tryout. “I had to fly to New York and stand in front of a table full of people next to a piano player and have to sing,” Whitman said in a joint video call with Valdes. “It was terrifying. I can sing, but I’d never done anything like that.”As for the actors handling Lindsay and Miguel’s inner voices, they tend to straddle both worlds. Portraying Lindsay’s parents are the writer, humorist and actor John Hodgman and the Broadway and “Brockmire” veteran Katie Finneran. Team Miguel includes Scott Porter, an original cast member of the Off Broadway hit musical “Altar Boyz” who went on to star in “Friday Night Lights.” That evening in Hudson Heights, he was rocking a goatee and suspenders that made him look like a cocky late-90s corporate bro, which is exactly what he plays.Lindsay leaves her partner (George Hampe, far right) for New York City in the pilot. The voices in her head (played by, center left, Sophia Hammons; Katie Finneran; and John Hodgman) follow her.Craig Blankenhorn/HuluFrom his experience in theater and on “Fosse/Verdon,” Kail had learned that things went smoother if you had everyone in the same building; aside from the portions shot on location, the entire production was concentrated at a compound in Long Island City, Queens, from the writing to the choreography to the costume making.“The thing with theater is, there is a moment when you move into the theater and everybody’s under the same tent,” he said. “We wanted to try to do that here and bring everybody in.”Except, of course, for Sanchez-Witzel, who until the final full week had to make do from Los Angeles. It was great that technology had allowed her to observe the set from 3,000 miles away, she said, but she couldn’t deny the thrill of finally watching it all in person: the strips of ratty off-white carpet evoking dirty Manhattan snow, the whispers between takes, the in-person chemistry between Whitman and Valdes.Then there was the massive boulder in the middle of a block in Hudson Heights, where Lindsay and Miguel share an important kiss.“To see the rock in person — it’s probably hard for you to imagine how exciting it is,” Sanchez-Witzel said, laughing. “But to me, it’s extremely exciting!” More

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      ‘Shucked’: A Broadway Musical That Doubles Down on the Corn

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      Shane McAnally’s boffo songwriting career got off to a slow start, but by 2013 he and his frequent writing partner Brandy Clark were finally having success. The Band Perry’s “Better Dig Two” and Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart,” both co-written by McAnally and Clark, reached No. 1 and No. 2 on the Billboard country chart.The songs were hits, sure, but they were also unique, especially in the vivid imagery of their lyrics, which found new ways to describe jealousy and heartache. People in Nashville took notice, including the singer Jake Owen, who offered his opinion of “Better Dig Two” and “Mama’s Broken Heart.”“He said to me, ‘Those sound like songs from musicals,’” McAnally recalled recently, sitting in a second-floor room of the Nederlander Theater in Manhattan. He viewed the comment as a backhanded compliment, and remembered thinking, “I wouldn’t even know how to write songs for a musical.”Fast forward 10 years, and McAnally and Clark are days away from the April 4 opening of their new Broadway musical at the Nederlander. The show, “Shucked,” is about a plucky small-town woman who leaves home in search of someone who can figure out why all the corn in the county keeps dying. She meets a big-city con man who’s pretending to be a podiatrist — “Corn doctor,” the sign outside his office says — who then concocts a plan to swindle the desperate farmers.The musicians Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, center row, with the director Jack O’Brien, top row, and the book writer Robert Horn. “They have the same sense of humor that I do,” Horn said of McAnally and Clark.Adam Powell for The New York TimesMcAnally and Clark, who composed the show’s music and wrote the lyrics, are two of Nashville’s most successful musicians. He’s co-written or produced 39 songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, and she has 11 Grammy nominations. The New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica called them “two of the most in-demand and disruptive songwriters” in Nashville and “convention-tweakers in a town in thrall to its conventions.”They began writing songs about a decade ago for a different iteration of the musical, which the book writer Robert Horn had been working on since 2011. Horn, who won a Tony Award in 2019 for writing the stage adaptation of “Tootsie,” unabashedly filled “Shucked” with corn puns — the leading lady is named Maizy, she hails from Cob County, and that’s just the start of it. The show is both about corn, and corny in an audacious way.‘A show about outliers’Maybe every Broadway show takes a Mr. Magoo path to opening night, but the back story to “Shucked” features more flat tires and head-on collisions than most.It began with a brand extension. Executives at the Opry Entertainment Group, which owns the rights to “Hee Haw,” thought that the TV show’s mix of music and cornpone comedy might adapt well to the stage. The person first tasked with creating the adaptation was Horn, who’d written and produced lots of television shows, as well as the book (with Dan Elish) for the Broadway musical “13.”After making progress with the story, Horn traveled to Nashville in 2013 to meet the city’s top songwriters, including McAnally and Clark. He’d prepared a lengthy outline, but they didn’t even read it. “We want to do this,” he recalled them saying.Clark, who moved to Nashville in 1997, was just starting a sterling career as a highly acclaimed solo artist. Growing up in Washington State, she was in a community production of “The Music Man,” another show about a slick con man trying to bilk small towners. (“We have some Harold Hill going on,” she acknowledged with a laugh.)“Writing a musical was always on my bucket list,” she explained. “But I thought you had to have a music pedigree to be a Broadway composer.”And McAnally had recently become a musical theater convert after seeing his first Broadway show, “The Book of Mormon.” “It blew my mind,” he said. “I said to my husband, ‘I want to do that. But I don’t know what it is or how you do it.’”When Horn met McAnally and Clark, “it was love at first sight,” Horn said in a phone interview. “They have the same sense of humor that I do. The fact that they were proud, gay, out country artists was appealing to me, because I knew I wanted this to be a show about outliers.”Mary Johnston Rutherford, the show’s wardrobe supervisor, working on Alex Newell’s costume during a fitting. Newell’s song “Independently Owned” has been getting standing ovations during preview performances.Adam Powell for The New York TimesHorn, who gets credit (or blame) for the randy puns and dad jokes in “Shucked,” comes to his comedy honestly. His mother was Ed Sullivan’s secretary, and his grandfather, a Bell Telephone engineer who in his off hours was a vaudeville dancer, introduced him to borscht belt comedy.When Horn was a baby, his father skipped town. His mother struggled with depression, and at the age of 9, he was sent to an orphanage, where he found that making jokes sometimes kept him from being beaten up.The first version of the show was called “Moonshine: That Hee Haw Musical,” and in 2015, it ventured to Dallas. A local critic called it “cartoonish,” and Variety predicted the musical-comedy would succeed only “far from the Great White Way.” “Moonshine” was foundering, “so we had to let it go,” Horn said.Rebuilding a showWhile making “Moonshine,” Horn had grown so close to the two songwriters that after his sister died, Clark called him and said, “I’m your sister now.” None of them were ready to give up on the idea of the show, so Horn got the band back together.The Opry Entertainment Group had bowed out, so they threw away the title and all but three songs. And there was a new addition to the team: the director Jack O’Brien, who fell in love with country music in the 1980s thanks to his then boyfriend. Catching the show on the rebound, O’Brien, the only person to win Tonys for directing “Henry IV” and “Hairspray,” knew “Shucked” needed some weight. “It’s so campy it would float away,” he said.He urged the songwriters to throw out their opening number, which they loved. He proposed a new song that celebrates corn, one in which the word corn sounded “like a foghorn,” Clark recalled, and the songwriters were delighted when they realized the giddy, tone-setting result was better.When it came time to see what audiences thought, the show’s producers booked the National Theater in Washington, D.C., with a plan to open there in late 2020. But then the pandemic arrived. “It was an ill wind, in the classic sense, that brought us some good,” O’Brien said.While the creative team continued to hone the show, some of the actors, with Broadway mostly shut down, had nothing to do.“This show is what pulled me through the pandemic,” said the Broadway veteran Andrew Durand, who plays Beau, the dim and stubborn male lead, and coincidentally, spent the first 10 years of his life in Cobb County, Ga. “This is what I had to look forward to, any time I got down.”For the second attempt at an out-of-town run, the producers picked the Pioneer Theater Company in Salt Lake City, Utah, though Horn feared red-state residents would flinch at his jokes. One local reviewer said the show delivered laughs “at a staggering clip,” though another critic warned that the jokes were “a little smutty.” The Salt Lake City audiences “had some difficulty with it,” O’Brien admitted. “They pursed their lips, but I’ve never heard an audience laugh longer.”Behind the scenes at the Nederlander Theater.Adam Powell for The New York TimesThe show, in previews now, is scheduled to open April 4.Adam Powell for The New York Times“Shucked” would not be as good, he added, if not for the delay. “We have sat, as colleagues and friends, with nothing to do for three years while we turned these tender leaves over and over in our hands, thinking, ‘Maybe we can do better than that.’ We found values that it’s worthwhile to put out there.”‘Key to Humanity’The good songs and jokes in “Shucked” are so plentiful that secondary characters all have a spotlight or two. During rehearsals last month, no one got more laughs than Storyteller 2 (Grey Henson, a Tony nominee for “Mean Girls”) and Beau’s brother Peanut (Kevin Cahoon, the cast’s lone holdover from “Moonshine”), whose punch lines are nearly Dada-esque.And the showstopping number “Independently Owned” isn’t sung by one of the two lead characters, but by Maizy’s cousin Lulu (Alex Newell of “Once on This Island” and TV’s “Glee”), who shows off a remarkable range while nailing multiple tricky modulations in the song. “Alex got a standing ovation last night,” McAnally said the day after the first preview performance.It’s no spoiler to say that in Cob County, the women are smarter than the men. (“True to life, really,” Durand quipped.) Maizy (played by Caroline Innerbichler, who is making her Broadway debut) is gullible but determined and openhearted, while the worldlier Lulu is skeptical about the big-city grifter Gordy (John Behlmann of “Tootsie”) whose arrival unsettles the equilibrium in Cob County.The story line in “Shucked” is partly a corollary to the real-life relationship between Horn’s Yankee family and his husband’s Southern kinfolk. Since they learned to love one another, he says, maybe others can too.In February, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia proposed a “national divorce” between red and blue states, O’Brien told the cast: “There has never been a more important moment for this show.”During a later interview, he got specific about the musical’s worthwhile values. “Laughter is God’s miracle,” he said. “You sit in the dark with people you don’t know, and don’t want to know, and you all voluntarily expel the air out of your lungs at the exact same time. If that isn’t the key to humanity, I don’t know what is.“We don’t have a lot to laugh about right now. Sometimes I cannot look at the news anymore. It breaks my heart. So if there is surcease from sorrow, and my name is attached to it, thank God.”Broadway musicals rise or fall mostly on the strength of jokes, songs, performances and stagecraft. Apart from one good joke at the expense of Christopher Columbus, the show’s politics are not overt.“People may see it as a funny little fable, but I hope it’s more than that,” Horn said. “I’m watching laws go into effect for the gay and trans community, my brethren, and watching anti-Semitism grow in this country.”A big part of the show’s message is tolerance and love on both sides of a divide, though it’s not a #bothsides play. He hopes audiences recognize that the show has “a message of unity,” he said. “Unless you can open your heart to people who are different than you, you will never grow.”Behind the rat-a-tat pace of the jokes, “Shucked” is the work of outliers who worry that the victories for tolerance they’ve seen in their lifetimes are being reversed.The trick to songwriting in Nashville, Clark said once, was “to find your group of misfit toys.” Even through their success, she and McAnally felt as if they were censoring themselves by removing jokes and political themes to blend in on country radio.In New York, the two best friends joined an enclave where misfit toys are the rule, not the exception.“Our songwriter friends say, ‘You’re going to be Broadway rich!’ Well, I’m already Broadway rich,” McAnally said with a laugh. The payoff wasn’t the pay, but the freedom to write songs without restrictions. “Why would we go back to Nashville?” he asked. More

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      Heinali Is Reconstructing Kyiv, One Synth Wave at a Time

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      “Kyiv Eternal,” by the composer and sound artist Heinali (real name Oleh Shpudeiko), submerges listeners in the sounds of the prewar Ukrainian capital.It’s disorienting: Again and again these past few weeks, I’ve been walking through New York and thinking I’m somewhere else. I’ll be strolling through Central Park, but the sounds I hear come from a park nine time zones away. In line at my local Whole Foods I’ll hear the cash registers of an Eastern European grocery store. Last week I was riding the subway to Harlem and the announcer called out the wrong line. “Next stop, Maidan Nezalezhnosti …”In my headphones, I’ve had an album on loop: “Kyiv Eternal,” a ravishing audioscape of the Ukrainian capital by the composer and electronic musician Heinali. Amid ambient washes of sound, Heinali, whose real name is Oleh Shpudeiko, integrates field recordings from across Kyiv: the horns of minibuses that ferry workers in from the suburbs, or the crowds in Landscape Alley, the open-air sculpture park overlooking the Dnipro River. Staticky street sounds from Shuliavka, a neighborhood that endured artillery strikes in the war’s first hours, commingle with quavering loops of electronic vibrations.The sounds are something of a time capsule. Shpudeiko captured them before Russia invaded; some of the recordings are more than a decade old. Intertwining those archival noises with electronic keyboards and instrumental lines, he has fabricated a citywide portrait of beautiful irresolution. “Kyiv Eternal” is no war diary. It’s an inward-looking musical conjuration of a city that’s partially vanished — to refugee outflows, to military curfews — and a city that is still, defiantly, standing.“I bought my first pocket Zoom sound recorder in 2011, I think, and the moment I bought it I started recording basically everything around me,” Shpudeiko told me when we caught up on a video call. With Alexey Shmurak, another sound artist, he attempted an “acoustic ecology of Kyiv”: collecting tones and noises that typified the capital’s audible life. They captured the unique phrasings of drivers of the capital’s private minibuses — which once constituted a hefty fraction of Kyiv transport, but began to fade in the era of Uber — hawking their destinations.“They would develop, with time, a very specific phrasing,” Shpudeiko said. “A melodic contour would suddenly appear. Like birds trying to capture the attention of a mate.” He incorporated those calls into the track “Rare Birds,” where soft electronic tremolos shimmer over drivers’ megaphones, as they announce their routes to Odesa or Vinnytsia.You hear more literal chirping on “Botanichnyi Sad” (“Botanical Garden”), whose stuttering synths intermingle with field recordings of birdsong from the A.V. Fomin Botanical Garden, which has stood in the center of the capital for nearly two centuries. Or there’s the exquisite track “Silpo,” named for a Ukrainian grocery store chain, whose jingling beat derives from the cash registers: a corporate carillon of high, sharp chimes, each ringing out over the composer’s muffled, crackling percussion line.“Kyiv Eternal” was released on Feb. 24, the one-year anniversary of the invasion. It inhabits a different sonic space from Heinali’s medieval-inspired synthesizer compositions, which he’s performed this year in a Paris mansion, a Vienna nightclub and a Ukrainian bomb shelter. (Ukrainian men require government permission to go abroad; Shpudeiko had approval for a residency in Cologne, Germany, where he recorded the new album.) Each track of “Kyiv Eternal” is largely stationary, without strong melodic variations. Some recall the ambient 1990s synth baths of Aphex Twin, others the recent synth-and-found-object compositions of Ryuichi Sakamoto. The effect is foggy, wistful, plangent, unresolved.Yet to a Kyivan listener, every track is studded with “ear-marks,” as Shpudeiko calls the aural signposts that orient you through the city as landmarks do for your eyes. The album is an ode to the capital, but not a mash note. “Kyiv isn’t the perfect city,” he said. “It’s full of ugliness and beauty as well. It’s a very interesting city, but it’s hard to love. But after leaving Ukraine, I felt it was a part of my identity, and I owe a lot to this city.”Since the war began, Heinali has performed in a Paris mansion, a Vienna nightclub and a Ukrainian bomb shelter. Oleksii KarpovychShpudeiko is a city boy, born in Kyiv in 1985. As a teenager he witnessed the 2004 Orange Revolution, which drew nonviolent protesters to the streets to protest a rigged election. Ten years later he took part in the Maidan Revolution, the massive democratic uprising that ousted a Kremlin-backed president. Maidan didn’t just recast Ukraine’s political trajectory; it brought a cultural revolution too, especially in the capital.Before Maidan, Shpudeiko recalled, Kyiv had few promoters specializing in electronic, experimental music. “After 2014,” he said, “it was like an explosion.”Clubs sprang up in Podil, a low-lying bohemian neighborhood by the Dnipro River. There were digital radio stations like 20 Feet Radio, and electronic music labels rivaled only by Berlin’s. Kyiv became one of Europe’s prime party capitals — but the same venues that hosted club nights like Cxema also presented contemporary classical concerts, dance performances and art installations. “The audiences that would usually visit a rave would go to contemporary poetry readings,” Shpudeiko remembered.That post-Maidan class of DJs and sound artists — composers of art music and of club music, none too worried about the distinction — would become the first generation from post-independence Ukraine to win broad European esteem. But even as the city developed its reputation for cutting-edge nightlife, Shpudeiko started looking back: to medieval and early Renaissance music, whose strict, almost mathematical cadences reverberated with his own modular synthesizers.He fell particularly hard for Léonin and Pérotin, two of the first named composers, who in Paris in the late 12th and early 13th centuries pushed Western sacred music into polyphony. On his magnificent 2020 album “Madrigals,” Shpudeiko used custom synthesizer software to generate rich, independent yet intertwining melodies in the style of the Notre Dame school. Over that electronic polyphony, accompanists on period instruments, including the theorbo (a long-necked lute), improvised sometimes plangent, sometimes dissonant improvisations.He was at work on a second album of “generative polyphony” when the war came to Kyiv. (That album remains on hold, though a new composition, “Aves rubrae,” premiered on the website of the Museum of Modern Art last month.)“The thing is, I didn’t believe there would be a full-scale invasion,” he said. “All of my friends didn’t believe it either. But my girlfriend, she actually believed there would be war. I remember, on that night, we drank wine and we watched the last season of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm.’ Four hours later we were woken up by explosions in Kyiv. And even at first, I thought that maybe it was some kind of mistake.”The couple’s first act was to evacuate their mothers. They were on the road for 50 hours straight, with Shpudeiko’s synthesizer between his legs. They tried and failed to cross the Polish border, unable to make it through the miles-long lines. Eventually they made it to the Hungarian border, where his relatives crossed safely. Shpudeiko took refuge in Lviv, in the relative safety of western Ukraine, where he and other displaced musicians played live-streamed concerts to raise money for the army and humanitarian aid.Last April — as Ukrainian forces retook the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, and discovered unspeakable atrocities exacted on civilians — Shpudeiko was in a bomb shelter, his synthesizer hooked up to Ethernet cables the length of a football field, playing his unfinished medieval album. Out of the basement, the beeps and honks of the synth danced around one another, just as the voices did in Paris some 900 years ago. The walls of the shelter, like those of the Gothic cathedral before it, reverberated with polyphonic music from a world beyond pain: not sacred, not quite, but certainly exalted.“What we did back then, it wasn’t just activism,” he says of those bomb-shelter concerts. “It was also about therapy. It was a way of preserving our artistic identity. When the full-scale invasion started, I think no one knew who they were anymore. I think everyone needed to perform some work to either reconstruct or preserve or change their identity.”Now the Ukrainian capital has another soundscape: the wailing bursts of the air raid siren that wakes you at night, the whir of the low-altitude cruise missile, the chain saw buzz of the slow-flying drone. The war haunts “Kyiv Eternal” nevertheless. The album opens with sounds of the Kyiv tramway, and, amid reverberant synths, we hear a loudspeaker calls out the stops: Zoolohichna Street, Lukianivska Square …. It’s line 14, and a gander at a Ukrainian transport app (for the trams still run on time in Kyiv) confirms that this streetcar is headed north, to Podil, where it will terminate at a grand square.On the album’s cover is a statue in that square, of Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, a Cossack military commander now adopted as the patron saint of the Ukrainian army. In peacetime, pedestrians would look up to see Konashevych on horseback, saber raised to the sky. On the cover of “Kyiv Eternal” he appears as he does today: sandbagged up his neck, a black tarp shrouding his head.The general is, for Shpudeiko, an unexpected cover model. “I’m not a nationalist, and all my music was always personal or abstract; it didn’t have any obvious national identity,” he told me. “I wanted to have something that would capture this feeling of wanting to embrace the living city. And these monuments: They are embraced by these sandbags, protecting them from harm.”Heinali (Oleh Shpudeiko)“Kyiv Eternal”(Injazero) More

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      Following a Folk Tale Through the Himalayas

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      In a high hamlet, a two-hour trek up a verdant slope beneath ice-clad Himalayan peaks, an argument erupted over a folk tale. Two brothers, Pralad Singh Dariyal, 60, and Hira Singh Dariyal, 77, heatedly debated which nearby village in the Johar Valley was once the home of the story’s heroine. Eventually agreeing on a few possible locations, Hira said that the story, which is sung as a ballad and which he remembered from childhood, was virtually unknown today among the area’s young people. “They’re the YouTube generation,” he explained with a shrug.“No one even knows how to sing it anymore,” Pralad added.The voice of Pralad’s wife, Sundari Devi, rang out from the kitchen into the courtyard, where I sat with the brothers and a couple of other people in front of clothing drying on a line and pieces of a butchered sheep drying on a neighbor’s stone-shingled roof. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she shouted. “Some people do remember how to sing it. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s not important.”In the Kumaon region of the Indian state of Uttarakhand, where sky-scraping summits soar over a maze of sublime hills in a corner of the country that abuts Nepal and Tibet, the story known as “Rajula Malushahi” has been passed down orally for hundreds of years. A sprawling epic of adventure and true love that unfurls across a broad swath of the landscape, it’s long been recognized as Kumaon’s pre-eminent folk tale. Short versions were sung by parents to their children, while renditions lasting up to 10 hours were performed by hurkiyas, or traditional bards, who chanted and drummed alongside a handful of backup vocalists for local audiences, often as a way to pass cold winter nights, before televisions — and now smartphones — became ubiquitous.When I first learned about “Rajula Malushahi” on a previous visit to Kumaon, I was immediately intrigued. After reading as much of the literature about it as I could find, I decided on a recent trip to use it as a guide to traveling through the area, letting it take me places I might not otherwise think to go.While creating an itinerary, I realized that there was no definitive route to follow, since there is no definitive narrative. Before it was first written down in the 1930s, numerous versions were sung. Though they tend to share the same overarching plotline, there are many variations among them, including where certain episodes are said to have occurred. It seemed fitting that planning a trip around a centuries-old folk tale was more an act of creative interpretation than a strict adherence to a single text.A traditional Kumaoni house, built of stone.Morning mists rise from fields in the Gomati Basin.I headed first for the Johar Valley, which is where the story (according to most versions) begins. There, a girl named Rajula, who was so beautiful that the sun paled before her, was born into the Shauka tribe — one of the subgroups of shepherds generally known as Bhotias. Her father, Sunapati Shauk, was the richest trader in the region, shuttling goods over the Himalayas between India and Tibet on the backs of sheep and goats, the best animals for navigating the treacherous terrain. Historically, this once-lucrative route thrived for about a thousand years before collapsing in 1962 with the outbreak of a war between India and China and the closure of the border.In the story, Rajula grows into a clever and confident young woman. She meets Malushahi, the young monarch of the Katyuri Kingdom, which ruled Kumaon from around the seventh to the 11th centuries, and they fall in love. They are quickly separated, however, as her hand has already been promised by Sunapati to the son of a Tibetan king, an important trading partner. Rajula, rebelling, escapes from this undesirable arrangement, then travels through Kumaon to find Malushahi again, overcoming numerous obstacles with her courage and quick wits. After many dramatic twists, including deceptions, murder and sorcery, the lovers are finally reunited — either happily or in death, depending on the version.After initially arriving in Delhi at the end of last September, I traveled for a few days — first by rail, and then by road — to the Johar Valley’s main town, Munsiyari. My friend, the writer Shikha Tripathi, who is herself Kumaoni, happened to be there working on a story about climate change. Together, by S.U.V. and on foot, we traveled for most of a morning to the village of Paton, where we talked in the courtyard with the Dariyal brothers, as Shikha translated.Our conversation concluded when a village-wide feast began. A woman who had married a man with family in Paton was making her first visit — 13 years after their wedding. Everyone came out to welcome her, including people who now lived elsewhere and had returned for the celebration. Vats of rice, mutton and dal had been prepared, and we ate on flat rooftops with views of the valley walls slanting sharply into the clouds.When the feast wrapped up, Shikha and I went back to Pralad’s place to get our bags and shift to the house where we’d been offered accommodations for the night. I stepped into the kitchen to bid Sundari goodbye and found three other women sitting on the floor with her. Before I could say “thank you,” two of them began to sing, filling the low-ceilinged space with the resonant tones of the first verses of “Rajula Malushahi.”Nanda Devi Dariyal, in red, and Duri Devi Sailal, in blue, sing Rajula Malushahi in the kitchen of Sundari Devi Dariyal, who sits behind them.They sang for about five minutes, which was more than long enough to transform the dimly lit room into a musical time machine, transporting us beyond the temporal world into the wonder of the moment. It was Sundari’s gift to us — and was her way of conclusively proving the point she had made to her husband.The next day, Shikha and I hiked, drove and hiked (uphill again) to a village where Hira had told us that some of Rajula’s community had scattered after being cursed at the end of her story. Upon reaching Jimia, we learned that a celebration of the Hindu festival Dussehra was about to begin.Led by drummers and men carrying saplings adorned with flags and tufts of yak hair, a joyous procession descended from the homes at the core of the village to a small temple at its edge. Two sheep were sacrificed to the local goddess, Bharari Devi, a form of Durga, a major Hindu deity. The drumming surged with fevered intensity and the jagar — a ceremony in which the goddess enters into the body, or bodies, of one or more of those in attendance — began around a smoldering bonfire.A possessed woman staggered around like a zombie. A man named Gajendra Singh Quiriyal — the village’s grand pradhan, or leader — fell to the ground and convulsed on the fire’s edge, caking himself with ashes and embers. The goddess then settled into Rudra Singh Quiriyal, Gajendra’s brother. Blankly staring at something no one else could see, he flung rice over himself and into the crowd. Villagers shouted questions one atop the other, like a scrum of reporters at a chaotic news conference, seeking help with their problems. Most persistent was a middle-aged man desperate for his wife to have their first child. Bharari Devi promised to grant his wish.Led by Tulsi Devi Nuriram, at center, women sing and dance during Dussehra celebrations in Jimia.Ukha Devi Quiriyal, wearing traditional Shauka clothing, dances during Dussehra celebrations in Jimia.When the jagar was over, the pradhan, who’d brushed himself off, asked me to snap a picture of him with his wife and daughters and insisted that Shikha and I stay with them that night. Rice and meat from the sacrificed sheep was served to all. On a grassy terrace just above the temple, women danced in a circle while singing songs to welcome back to the village their sisters and daughters who had moved away after marrying men from other places. Some of the dancers wore traditional Shauka dress — including embroidered headscarves, black blouses, and black skirts.When we spoke to the women as they sat together following an hour or so of dancing, the elders among them said that they had all heard the tale of “Rajula Malushahi,” but only one remembered how to sing it. Encouraged by the others, Tulsi Devi Nuriram performed a few verses, surprising me with a completely different melody and rhythm than I’d heard the previous day.Everyone I would meet who knew the story line of “Rajula Malushahi” — the youngest of whom appeared to be in their 60s — spoke of it as though it was based on actual events, while well aware that it is a folk tale. It occupies a liminal space in the collective imagination, somewhere between fiction and fact, fantasy and reality — which was not unlike how I internalized my experience of that day.The following night, which Shikha and I spent at a homestay in the village of Darkot, a center of Shauka weaving, we met with a folk theater performer who was well-versed in much of the scholarship about the tale. After launching into a long, impassioned analysis of which elements of particular versions were most likely to be true, Lakshman Singh Pangtey concluded by saying, “There is no guarantee about anything I’ve said. After all, it’s a 500-year-old story.”Women at Bageshwar’s Bagnath Temple gather to observe Karwa Chauth, praying for long lives for their husbands.The Hindu ritual of arti is performed near the confluence of the Saryu and Gomati Rivers, in Bageshwar. A funeral pyre burns in the background.Shikha stayed in Munsiyari, and I continued on alone. I first went to Bageshwar, where Rajula once stopped to pray. The god Bagnath, a form of Shiva, was so overcome by her beauty that he attempted to extort her affections with threats and promises — a deal she angrily refused. When I visited the same site at the confluence of the Sarayu and Gomati rivers, where a 15th-century Chand-era temple stands, women had gathered to observe Karwa Chauth, praying for long life for their husbands. In the bustling, friendly town, scenes of life and death, commerce and worship, played out on the streets and riverbanks on a scale large enough to fascinate yet small enough to be absorbed without overwhelming.In the hills and villages of the Gomati Valley, women harvested winter fodder for their livestock, men turned fields with plows pulled by oxen, and everyone I met was happy to see a stranger and chitchat in Hindi. I was charmed by the town of Dwarahat, where Katyuri-era carved-stone temple complexes are tucked among brightly colored houses and gardens, near where Rajula was captured, beaten and left for dead in the forest. And I visited the riverside temple of Agniyari Devi in Chaukhutia, where Malushahi first laid eyes on Rajula, and she laughed at him for mistaking her for the goddess herself.Along the way, I happened to meet a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew one of the last great hurkiyas of Kumaon. Before long, Nain Nath Rawal invited me to his home, in Sirola village, to hear him sing. I went with my friend, Shriyani Datta, who was staying near Almora, some two hours away.In the town of Dwarahat, Katyuri-era carved-stone temple complexes are tucked among brightly colored houses and gardens.Plowing a field along a tributary of the Gomati River.Rawal’s two-story stone house was set along a ridge atop cascading terraced fields with eye-popping views of the high peaks. He invited us into a room on the upper floor, with shelves of awards for his contributions to Kumaoni culture, and pictures of gods and goddesses encircled by flower garlands hanging on bright yellow walls. An 81-year-old farmer, he was taught to sing by his mother, who gave him lessons when he was young.When, among many questions translated by Shriyani, I asked why audiences root for Rajula when they wouldn’t approve of a young woman from their own community overtly disobeying her father, breaking a marriage contract and running away to find her beloved, he acknowledged that “today, her family would probably send the police after her.” But, he explained, Rajula and Malushahi were destined to be together, which meant that Rajula was doing the right thing. “If that happened now,” he added, “you couldn’t prove that fate was involved.” The story’s theme, he said, is “turning divine intention into reality through love.”Rawal sang while playing an hourglass-shaped drum, called a hurka, for over 20 minutes, accompanied by Baji Nath Rawal, who tapped on a stainless steel plate, while two vocalists, Mohan Nath Rawal and Chandan Nath Rawal, sang backup. Though he had made more than 120 recordings during his career, this was the first time he had recorded “Rajula Malushahi.”Nain Nath Rawal, left, sings the entirety of “Rajula Malushahi” while playing the hurka. Accompanying him, left to right, are Baji Nath Rawal, Mohan Nath Rawal and Chandan Nath Rawal.Rawal remarked that he used to perform the ballad around Kumaon at all-night festivals, but that they were rare events these days. “My generation is trying to keep our local culture alive, as much as we can,” he said, “but times have changed.”For now, at least for those who recall it, the story is still woven into the landscape, which conjures memories of a young woman who, ages ago, defied convention to follow her heart.“I hope this song survives,” Rawal said, as we headed downstairs.Michael Benanav is a writer and photographer whose most recent book, Himalaya Bound: One Family’s Quest to Save Their Animals and an Ancient Way of Life, was published in 2018.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. 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      Songs to Add to Your Wedding Playlist

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      We asked our readers to weigh in on the songs they enjoy hearing the most. From classic to contemporary, here are recommendations from wedding guests and married couples.There is so much joy in a wedding, and music is a big part of it.Last month, we asked readers to submit their favorite wedding songs. As I read through hundreds of submissions, I could sense the emotion and joyful nostalgia from readers reminiscing on their own first dances or fun times on the dance floor.“September” by Earth, Wind and Fire was the most popular song, with 5.6 percent of submissions including it.Disco was perceived to be the best genre for cross-generational enjoyment, with songs that everybody knows, even people who were born well after the ’80s. Among them are “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge, “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees and “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang. (Although David Williams, from Boston, said that when the DJ plays “Celebration,” he “heads for the exit.”)For a first dance song, readers love “Can’t Help Falling In Love” by Elvis Presley and “At Last” by Etta James.And what is the most popular song (so far) at a 2023 wedding? “I Just Wanna Rock,” by Lil Uzi Vert. It’s inescapable, and with good reason.Here are 22 wedding songs recommended by readers from around the world — from New York to the Netherlands.Davido, ‘Fall’This is one of those special songs that immediately washes you over with a feeling of peace and merriment. “Fall” is a staple African wedding/party anthem that celebrates spoiling your lover, and recognizing the changes you need to make to meet them halfway.Jephtha Prempeh, the Bronx, N.Y.Ben E. King, ‘Stand By Me’Our first dance at our wedding reception. Every time I hear it I want to hold my wife close and dance.Guy Valentine, OttawaParliament, ‘Flash Light’You’ll see the 50-plus break out their best moves for this.Dana Duffy, Bloomington, Ind.Beyoncé, ‘Virgo’s Groove’“Virgo’s Groove” was the anthem of my summer of 2022. It’s the modern interpretation of a feel-good disco song that everyone can enjoy, whether they’re bopping in their seats or kicking it out on the dance floor.Rebecca Kim, Brooklyn, N.Y.Jesse Powell, ‘You’“You” is a beautiful love song about a man sharing how much he loves his bride-to-be. Powell is also a underrated R&B artist who did not receive enough flowers before he died last year.Keisha Clark, ChicagoBabyface, ‘Every Time I Close My Eyes’The lyrics capture the beauty of Black love, which is often trivialized but rarely articulated in a way that captures my understanding of it. I can’t envision “jumping the broom” without hearing, “And every time I close my eyes I thank the Lord that I’ve got you.”Katherine Tinsley, ChicagoToploader, ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’It’s really catchy and the lyrics are easy to follow.Sandra Tan, Brooklyn, N.Y.Rihanna, ‘We Found Love’This song was also in our wedding movie when we were wandering the old Utrecht streets, it was a nice contrast between the modern upbeat music and the classic buildings.Firdaus Mohamed Hoesein, Utrecht, the NetherlandsBritney Spears, ‘Toxic’It’s a throwback for us ’90s kids (throwbacks are always great for getting people on the dance floor), and the song is old enough that our parents still know it.Hannah Rivers, Lincoln, Neb.Etta James, ‘At Last’We were married in Ravello on the Amalfi Coast. A relatively small affair (50 people), but attendees from around the world. A year previous we heard a lounge singer in London and finally encouraged her to sing at our wedding. Stepping out of the shadows, she sang “At Last” by Etta James and had everyone in tears.Rodney Conlon, TorontoElvis Presley, ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’Our wedding song was “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” It is one that has truly stood across time, place, and culture. A song written in 1961 is constantly rerecorded in fresh new ways — the most popular version among my friends is not the Elvis original, but the Kina Grannis cover. What other song has such cachet across disparate demographics like white boomers and Asian American millennials like me and my wife? And if this does not sound impressive, consider — despite his well-deserved place on the Mount Rushmore of American rock ’n’ roll, how many other Elvis songs have the instant recognition among millennials today that “Can’t Help Falling in Love” has?Andrew Min, New YorkEarth, Wind and Fire, ‘September’It’s special because it came out when I was in high school. I’ve danced to it at so many weddings. Everyone knows it, no matter what age, and it gets everyone on the dance floorKathryn Watson, WashingtonBarry White, ‘My First, My Last, My Everything’For me and my boyfriend, if we decided to marry, this would be the perfect song to get the party started! We met as 17 and 18 year olds in the fall of 1971 our freshman year in college, fell in love as we knew it, then broke up when he left for a year in France at the end of summer before our junior year. A lifetime later in 2016 we reconnected on social media and fell head over heels in love with the adults we grew up to be.Constance Malone, Roswell, Ga.Wacka Flocka Flame, ‘No Hands’“Giiirl, drop it to the floor, I love the way yo’ booty go!”Evelina Kurayeva, Queens, N.Y.Elvis Crespo, ‘Suavemente’A staple for every Latino event, party, wedding — anything. And everyone will go crazy with their best merengue steps.Elizabeth Ortiz, Queens, N.Y.“Michael Jackson, ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’I’ve DJed over 600 weddings. Favorite fast song: “The Way You Make Me Feel,” Michael Jackson. Favorite slow song: “Easy” by The Commodores.Steve Rader, Milwaukee, Wis.Natalie Cole, ‘This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)’Walking down the aisle to “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” by Natalie Cole is one of my favorite memories of my wedding — my husband was crying up the front, I walked down arm in arm with both my parents, my brother and sister in law walked ahead as my bridal party and all of our friends and family were clapping and dancing and laughing in surprise at such a happy song to open the day! One of our friends still texts every time this song comes on the radio, remembering that happy moment, and it always makes me smile. I love the optimism and joy of the song for a wedding! And for me it has been an everlasting love.Bethany Sullivan, Sydney, AustraliaStevie Wonder, ‘My Eyes Don’t Cry’Here in metro Detroit, every wedding includes “the hustle” done to Stevie.Cheryl Voglesong, Troy, Mich.MGMT, ‘Electric Feel’I worked as a wedding DJ in 2010s, and the best approach for a crowded dance floor was to vary beats, genres and artists to keep people guessing on what I would play next. Halfway through the event, when people are a bit tired but still want to dance, I would play either Daft Punk or MGMT to have them take a little breather and yet enjoy these mellow beats.Anastasia Bannikova, PhoenixJagged Edge, ‘Let’s Get Married’It’s is clear and specific — celebrating the occasion and the idea of weddings.Reba Liverman, SeattleWhitney Houston, ‘I Want to Dance With Somebody’Oh — are your feet starting to hurt in those heels? If you sit down and this song comes on, you have no choice but to get right back up.Jessie Palatucci, WashingtonLuther Vandross, ‘Never Too Much’It’s a song that makes your heart fill, and then melt, with love.Jeremiah Feather, Brooklyn, N.Y. More