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      Rita Gardner, an Original ‘Fantasticks’ Star, Is Dead at 87

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      In 1960 she originated the lone female role in an Off Broadway show that became part of theater history thanks to a record-setting run.Rita Gardner, who in a long cabaret and theater career earned an enduring place in stage history in 1960, when she originated the role of Luisa in the musical “The Fantasticks,” the longest-running musical in theatrical history, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 87.Claire-Frances Sullivan, her personal assistant and caretaker, said the cause was leukemia.Ms. Gardner was in her mid-20s and not particularly well known when she responded to an audition notice for “The Fantasticks,” a romantic fable with a book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt. She had called Lore Noto, the show’s producer, before attending the audition, and he told her that though the creative team already had another actress in mind for the part, she should audition anyway.“I didn’t know Tom or Harvey or anybody,” she said in an interview for the book “The Amazing Story of ‘The Fantasticks’” (1991), by Donald C. Farber and Robert Viagas. “I came in, essentially, off the street. They didn’t know me either.”She sang the song she had once used to win an “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” contest, “Over the Rainbow.” Mr. Schmidt heard a quality he liked.“With a lot of singers you can tell when they go from head to chest voice; it’s two different voices,” he said in an interview for the same book. “With Rita it was all one voice. Rita was like a pop singer, yet she could do these obbligato things, and it didn’t seem strange.”She got the part of Luisa (also sometimes called simply “the Girl”), the only female role in the piece. The show, whose signature number, “Try to Remember,” became a standard, opened in May 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. Tickets were $3.75.In The Daily News, Charles McHarry pronounced the show “recommended without reservation.” But in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson, while having kind words for the actors, thought the story lost steam. “Although it is ungrateful to say so,” he wrote, “two acts are one too many.”In a 2000 interview with The Associated Press, Ms. Gardner recalled that keeping the show open was touch and go until that August, when the production took time off amid the New York City summer and played in East Hampton, N.Y., for a week.“All the posh people saw it and told their friends,” she said. “Audiences started to grow.”Ms. Gardner with the other members of the original cast of “The Fantasticks,” including, top row center, Jerry Orbach.PhotofestThe show ran for 42 years, closing in 2002 after more than 17,000 performances, and then reopened in 2006 and ran until 2017. Ms. Gardner stayed only until the end of 1960. (Jerry Orbach, who was also in the original cast, left at about the same time.) But she was with the show long enough to record the original cast album.In a 2001 interview with The Bradenton Herald of Florida, Ms. Gardner recalled that, about 10 years earlier, she had attended a production of “The Fantasticks” for the first time as an audience member.“I didn’t know I had been in something so good,” she said.She was in Bradenton performing a revue she had assembled called “Try to Remember: A Look at Off Broadway,” in which she sang songs from “The Fantasticks” and other shows and told stories. A few months earlier she had staged the show at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, the same theater where she had originated the “Fantasticks” role 40 years earlier. There, her performance started at 10 p.m. — because “The Fantasticks” was still running in the theater’s main evening slot.Rita Schier was born on Oct. 23, 1934, in Brooklyn to Nathan and Tillie (Hack) Schier. She studied opera and dance and sang in a close-harmony group called the Honeybees; in the late 1950s she appeared in a revue called “Nightcap,” which featured songs by the then unknown Jerry Herman. In 1957 she married the playwright Herb Gardner, who would become known for “A Thousand Clowns.” Their marriage ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Peter Cereghetti. At her death she was married to Robert Sevra, who is her only immediate survivor.Ms. Gardner left “The Fantasticks” to appear in a movie called “One Plus One” (1961), and she had small parts in other movies over the years. She also appeared on television, including in several episodes of “Law & Order,” the show that helped make Mr. Orbach an instantly recognizable star. She appeared on Broadway in “A Family Affair” (1962) as well as in the 1963 revival of “Pal Joey,” among other shows.She performed frequently on the cabaret circuit, where she employed not only her fine singing voice but also her droll sense of humor. In her show “Try to Remember,” she talked about life beyond Broadway’s bright lights.“Off Broadway is not just a location, it’s a definition,” she said. “The Actors Equity definition is a theater that has less than 300 seats, but my definition growing up Off Broadway was a little different. It was a theater that had less than 300 seats, most of them broken.” More

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      Pharoah Sanders, Whose Saxophone Was a Force of Nature, Dies at 81

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      Pharoah Sanders, a saxophonist and composer celebrated for music that was at once spiritual and visceral, purposeful and ecstatic, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 81.His death was announced in a statement by Luaka Bop, the company for which he had made his most recent album, “Promises.” The statement did not specify the cause.The sound Mr. Sanders drew from his tenor saxophone was a force of nature: burly, throbbing and encompassing, steeped in deep blues and drawing on extended techniques to create shrieking harmonics and imposing multiphonics. He could sound fierce or anguished; he could also sound kindly and welcoming. He first gained wide recognition as a member of John Coltrane’s groups from 1965 to 1967. He then went on to a fertile, prolific career, with dozens of albums and decades of performances.Mr. Sanders in a recording studio in 1968. He made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” in 1964, shortly before he began working with John Coltrane.Gilles Petard/RedfernsMr. Sanders played free jazz, jazz standards, upbeat Caribbean-tinged tunes and African- and Indian-rooted incantations such as “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” which opened his 1969 album, “Karma,” a pinnacle of devotional free jazz. He recorded widely as both a leader and a collaborator, working with Alice Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Randy Weston, Joey DeFrancesco and many others.Looking back on Mr. Sanders’s career in a 1978 review, Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote, “His control of multiphonics on the tenor set standards that younger saxophonists are still trying to live up to, and his sound — huge, booming, but capable of great delicacy and restraint — was instantly recognizable.”Mr. Sanders told The New Yorker in 2020: “I’m always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music.”Pharoah Sanders was born Farrell Sanders in Little Rock, Ark, on Oct. 13, 1940. His mother was a cook in a school cafeteria; his father worked for the city. He first played music in church, starting on drums and moving on to clarinet and then saxophone. (Although tenor saxophone was his main instrument, he also performed and recorded frequently on soprano.) He played blues, jazz and R&B at clubs around Little Rock; during the era of segregation, he recalled in 2016, he sometimes had to perform behind a curtain.In 1959 he moved to Oakland, Calif., where he performed at local clubs. His fellow saxophonist John Handy suggested he move to New York City, where the free-jazz movement was taking shape, and in 1962, he did.At times in his early New York years he was homeless and lived by selling his blood. But he also found gigs in Greenwich Village, and he worked with some of the leading exponents of free jazz, including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Sun Ra.It was Sun Ra who persuaded him to change his first name to Pharoah, and for a short time Mr. Sanders was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra.Mr. Sanders made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” for ESP-Disk in 1964. John Coltrane invited him to sit in with his group, and in 1965 Mr. Sanders became a member, exploring elemental, tumultuous free jazz on seminal albums like “Ascension,” “Om” and “Meditations.”After Coltrane’s death in 1967, Mr. Sanders went on to record with his widow, the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, on albums including “Ptah, the El Daoud” and “Journey in Satchidananda,” both released in 1970.Mr. Sanders had already begun recording as a leader on the Impulse! label, which had also been Coltrane’s home. The titles of his albums — “Tauhid” in 1967, “Karma” in 1969 — made clear his interest in Islamic and Buddhist thought.His music was expansive and open-ended, concentrating on immersive group interaction rather than solos, and incorporating African percussion and flutes. In the liner notes to “Karma,” the poet, playwright and activist Amiri Baraka wrote, “Pharoah has become one long song.” The 32-minute “The Creator Has a Master Plan” moves between pastoral ease — with a rolling two-chord vamp and a reassuring message sung by Leon Thomas — and squalling, frenetic outbursts, but portions of it found FM radio airplay beyond jazz stations.During the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Sanders’s music moved from album-length excursions like the kinetic 1971 “Black Unity” toward shorter compositions, reconnections with jazz standards and new renditions of Coltrane compositions. (He shared a Grammy Award for his work with the pianist McCoy Tyner on the 1987 album “Blues for Coltrane.”) His recordings grew less turbulent and more contemplative. On the 1977 album “Love Will Find a Way,” he tried pop-jazz and R&B, sharing ballads with the singer Phyllis Hyman. He returned to more mainstream jazz with his albums for Theresa Records in the 1980s.But his explorations were not over. In live performances, he might still bear down on one song for an entire set and make his instrument blare and cry out. During the 1990s and early 2000s he made albums with the innovative producer Bill Laswell. He reunited with the blistering electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock — who had been a Sanders sideman — on the 1991 album “Ask the Ages,” and he collaborated with the Moroccan Gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania on “The Trance of Seven Colors” in 1994.Mr. Sanders at the 1996 North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands.Frans Schellekens/RedfernsInformation on Mr. Sanders’s survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sanders had difficult relationships with record labels, and he spent nearly two decades without recording as a leader. Yet he continued to perform, and his occasional recorded appearances — including his wraithlike presence on “Promises,” his 2021 collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician known as Floating Points — were widely applauded.Reviewing “Promises” for The Times, Giovanni Russonello noted that Mr. Sanders’s “glistening and peaceful sound” was “deployed mindfully throughout the album,” adding, “He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected — not only to state his own case, but to funnel the soundscape around him into a precise, single-note line.”Mr. Sanders and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician and composer known as Floating Points, during the recording of the album “Promises” in Los Angeles in 2019.Eric Welles-NyströmIn 2016 Mr. Sanders was named a Jazz Master, the highest honor for a jazz musician in the United States, by the National Endowment for the Arts.In a video made in recognition of his award, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington said, “It’s like taking fried chicken and gravy to space and having a picnic on the moon, listening to Pharoah.” The saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin said, “It’s like he’s playing pure light at you. It’s way beyond the language. It’s way beyond the emotion.” More

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      Belle, Sebastian and Me

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      Following the world’s twee-est band down the Pacific Coast after a divorce and the death of a parent.May 31, 2022, Seattle, Paramount TheaterMy favorite band is on the road and I’m putting on a mask and going with them. I’ve been a little beaten up by the world the last couple years — maybe the same amount as anyone, but that’s plenty. I need to get out. Like the saddest, oldest groupie in the world, I’m following the Scottish indie band Belle and Sebastian down the west coast of America.I’m starting out in Seattle, where I live. My grown children come along and this feels just right, for the band’s presence in my life maps directly onto my motherhood. I discovered them when my first child was a baby. The voice of the lead singer, Stuart Murdoch, accompanied me over the next two decades, ringing out as I drove the school run in my VW van (little kids), then my Prius (medium-size kids), then a sensible Mazda (teenagers).Or should I say “lisping out.” If you know anything about Belle and Sebastian, you know they are twee and also, sometimes, the singer lisps. That’s what’ll be on their grave: TWEE LISPERS. As a person who grew up suckling at the bitter teat of punk rock, I didn’t see myself ending up here. But Belle and Sebastian has been the great musical love of my adulthood, and as the years slip by, it’s my belief that I am lucky to love anything at all. I don’t exactly understand why I love them, but I do.I’ve seen them so many times that I know exactly where to stand: at the rail, stage right, because that’s the direction Stuart faces when he plays piano.At the Paramount, the kids and I line up, stage right, and the band files out. There are so many of them: seven in the band, plus the few local musicians they add at each stop. They sound fantastic, but there are off-kilter notes: Sarah Martin, the violinist, is out with Covid. And they don’t do their traditional rave-up dance party to “The Boy With the Arab Strap,” when the audience jumps onstage with them. They’re all here, my secret friends, my superheroes, but I feel slightly cut off from the experience. My eyes dart around the crowded theater, looking for maskless folks who might be exposing me and my kids to the virus.I’m focused on my own fear, my own story. I am here, but not quite here.June 1, 2022, Portland, Roseland TheaterBarreling down I-5 the next morning, I have some time to reflect, not necessarily a welcome state of affairs. Reflection is a young woman’s game — it tends to go better when you don’t have quite so much to reflect about. And I have plenty: In the last two years, my very long marriage has ended (amicably, but still), I’ve sold the family home, I’ve nursed my beloved father to his death in the midst of a Covid-riddled hospital. These are the things I think about, or try not to think about, as I drive the familiar freeway.In Portland, I’m meeting up with my boyfriend — such a strange word for me, a person who was married for 20-plus years. He’s a music writer who has occasionally mocked me about my B & S love. He’s game to go to some shows, but I’m a little worried he might not get it, whatever it is. That indefinable thing that makes me love this band.Roseland is hot and crammed with all kinds of people — young queer couples, middle-aged former punks, families with little kids. My boyfriend angles us to a spot stage left, and I’m too embarrassed by my trainspotter-ish tendencies to insist that we move to the other side. I fall into conversation with a bunch of fellow enthusiasts, the kind of middle-aged white men who show their band love by accruing details about set lists and venues.Sarah is back! The venue is tiny. Stuart is right there. I start to feel the miracle of seeing a band you love — they have flown out of your car speaker or your earbuds and are now made flesh before your eyes. Stuart sits on the edge of the stage and slings one leg over the other. He looks like a very relaxed, debonair lamb. He extemporizes verses to “Piazza, New York Catcher.” A bald man leans his bulk on me. Two wild-haired young people in front of us twine their arms around each other’s necks. We all hold our breath and can’t believe our luck.When we walk out into the hot night, my boyfriend pulls his mask down and says, “I loved that” with great force.June 3, 2022, Oakland, Fox TheaterThe drive to Oakland passes in a dream of sunshine and grubby rest areas and Starbucks. This is the road trip that has been eluding me since the pandemic started. It turns out I only need a single day of being, as Gram Parsons sang, out with the truckers and the kickers, and I am starting to feel more human. My boyfriend, with the fervor of the newly converted and the completist tendencies unique to music writers, Spotifies his way through the Belle and Sebastian catalog as we drive.At the Fox, in downtown Oakland, I take my spot at the rail. The band fills the stage and the evening unfurls its magic. There’s a mysterious exchange between band and audience at their best shows; their very multitudinousness makes you feel somehow like you’re part of their project. All these other people are in the band, why not you? I forget my fears, I forget to be annoyed by the other audience members, or afraid of them. I lose myself in the sea of fans.When we walk outside, people line the sidewalks, dancing and singing. I had forgotten what it was like to be “out among ‘em,” as my granny used to say. It feels like the world has erupted with joy.The next day we go to the de Young to see a show of Alice Neel paintings. Neel burst into creative flower in midlife. In the 1970s her work became vibrant, celebratory, wicked, funny, communal. Her paintings are crowded with unexpected people wearing violet scarves and robin egg blue eye makeup. I walk around and around the galleries, taking in the spectacle of unending difference. “People Come First,” the show is called.And then I see it, the why of my love: Belle and Sebastian people my world. Their songs are filled with louche, ungovernable characters: the lazy painter Jane, who gets a dose of thrush from licking railings; Judy, who fantasizes about horses; Sukie, who likes to hang out in the graveyard; Hillary and Anthony, who kill themselves because they are bored and misunderstood; Chelsea and Lisa, who find solace in each other’s arms.My own world, over the last few years, has grown smaller and harder. Between divorce and death and quarantine, my soul has shrunk like a wool sweater in a washing machine. Even as I’ve walked alone through my difficulties, trying to solve every problem through sheer force of my solitary will, Belle and Sebastian have kept me company — with the characters they’ve invented, and with the performance of collaboration that defines the band. “We’re four boys in our corduroys,” one of their oldest tunes goes, “we’re not terrific, but we’re competent.” Their bleak cheerfulness has made them my boon companions, even when I was trying my hardest to do everything myself, when I was beginning to see other people as the enemy. They remind me that people come first.We have tickets to shows in Southern California but we’ll abandon the tour and stop here in San Francisco for a while. We’ve gotten what we came for. And we’re awfully old to be driving that far.Episode is a weekly column exploring a moment in a writer’s life. Claire Dederer is the author of “Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning” and “Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses.” More

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      The Remarkable, Resilient Loren Connors

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      Three decades ago, the New York guitarist was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. His output still hasn’t slowed.If Loren Connors was going to get to his gig, the guitarist knew he would need to crawl. It was late January 2007, two months after he had smashed into a Brooklyn sidewalk and broken his hip while carrying an armload of art, resulting in major surgery and an 11-day hospital stay.But he had agreed to rally for a concert organized by his record label two miles from his apartment, improvising with a trio he’d never met. After all, this was his life now: Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease 16 years earlier, he expected the falls and concomitant broken bones to escalate.After a lift from a friend, there was just one unexpected hurdle on that winter night — 16 steep stairs leading to the venue, tucked inside a silo alongside the Gowanus Canal. “Loren got on his hands and knees and started crawling up,” Eric Weddle, the founder of Family Vineyard, said by phone. Weddle started his label in part to issue Connors’s music, and now he stood at the top of the stairs, dumbstruck. “His laundry list of injuries is crazy, but none of this has stopped him. It is resilience.”Connors, 72, can barely cross a room now. The pills he takes a dozen times each day often steal his speech until he can only stutter; even on good days, the syllables blur together. His legs kick at night, and he is mostly confined to the cramped Brooklyn Heights apartment he has shared with his partner, the singer and lawyer Suzanne Langille, since 1990.“Parkinson’s is a curse,” he said on his landline early one recent morning, when his speech is typically best. “It doesn’t kill you, but it just makes your life terrible. I’m hanging in there.”He is hanging in there, to some extent, because he can still play guitar and paint, both of which he does most days. In the three decades since his diagnosis, he has released about 100 records — gentle suites of forlorn melodies, relentless spans of plangent notes, and, most recently, sprawling drifts of ghostly tones.This is one of the most productive periods of his career, too, as a confederation of labels rushes to reissue his rarest albums, which often fetch hundreds of dollars online, and to distribute new recordings. During the last year, Connors has shared live collaborations with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and the Australian experimental impresario Oren Ambarchi, plus a book of impressionistic flower sketches. “Airs,” a quiet 1999 collection of gorgeous and brief pieces, will be reissued Friday, with another art book and at least a half-dozen other records due in the next year.“It’s a passion and a compulsion — he has to create all the time,” Langille said by phone. “And he’s still doing it with all this weight on his back. It comes down to his determination, courage.”Connors grew up in New Haven, Conn., born to the opera singer Mary Mazzacane and the inventor Joe Mazzacane. The family of five wobbled at poverty’s edge — “shanty Irish,” Connors quipped. He developed a reputation as a rapscallion, less interested in school than drawing, the guitar and rowdy misadventures into New York.A work from Connors’s book “Wildweeds.”Loren ConnorsIn 1975, after an unhappy — if artistically inspiring — year at the University of Cincinnati, he became a janitor at Yale. For a decade, he lived rent-free in a warehouse crammed with 20 artists, the smell of paint and shellac commingling with fumes from plastic melted by a businessman making toys. (With no family history of Parkinson’s, Connors believes his exposure to these toxins ultimately led to his disease.)Connors had fallen hard for acoustic blues and electric guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, still a favorite. (“All my avant-garde friends don’t like Clapton, because he’s a pop star,” he said. “He’s more than that.”) He ran an art gallery and hosted shows by visiting musicians. In the late ’70s, he began self-releasing a series of splenetic improvisations that suggested the blues broken into bits following a violent car crash. “The reception was absolutely terrible,” Connors said by video call soon after sunrise on a September morning, Langille laughing to his right. “Everyone thought I was a real weirdo — pretty discouraging.”Actually, not everyone: Connors often cleaned the office of the Southern culture scholar William Ferris, who learned that his janitor had taken the job in part to access Yale’s voluminous library. Connors began sending him those early recordings, and Ferris offered his academic imprimatur via liner notes. “It crossed so many boundaries, redefined the blues in a very modernist way,” Ferris said in an interview. “He taught me where the roots music I loved was moving and wrote a new chapter in American music.”He found another convert in Langille, a recent Yale Law grad mesmerized the moment she saw him sit at a piano to improvise with a saxophonist in 1984. He loved the intensity of her eyes; she loved, as she put it, that “the whole composition was in him from the first note, just flooding out.” Two years later, they had their only child, Jamie. Four years after that, Connors quit his paper route, his final job apart from art. The trio moved into their 600-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn Heights in 1990 so Langille could work as a public lawyer, arguing against incinerators and advocating for wetlands.Connors in Brooklyn with his wife, the singer and lawyer Suzanne Langille.Daniel Weiss for The New York TimesFor Connors, the move fulfilled a lifelong goal he’d never been able to afford. New York became his wellspring. After Langille headed to work, Connors and Jamie would make daily pilgrimages over the Brooklyn Bridge to explore Hell’s Kitchen or Five Points. They’d spend hours at the library, researching Connors’s Irish heritage, the city’s homeless paperboys or the work of artists like Mark Rothko.“I would come home from school, and there would be paint all over the ceiling and walls from these big canvases in this tiny apartment,” Jamie said. “Or he would be recording albums in our living room, and I’d just sit there, really quietly, watching.”Connors began to meet younger experimental musicians who, much to his surprise, knew his work. His network ballooned. When Connors had been in New York for less than a decade, for instance, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth organized a monthlong series of concerts to celebrate his 50th birthday. Four nights per week, Connors played with someone new. (His favorite? Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power.)This cadre admired his obsession with seemingly small ideas — like starting so many compositions in A minor — and recognized Connors’s fabled compulsion to make anything, always.“On 9/11, picking up a guitar was the last thing on my mind, but Loren recorded,” said Alan Licht, Connors’s most consistent collaborator for 30 years. “The city’s on fire, but he’s making music in response, like, that day. That’s how deeply ingrained it is.”It may seem cruel that Connors was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1991, just a year after arriving in New York, the place he’d always wanted to be. Langille and Connors both demurred at the notion. Instead, she saw how motivated he became, hoping to work as much as he could before losing control of his hands. (He hasn’t yet.) He even learned to schedule his pills so they didn’t interfere with his music. “He dived in and became incredibly productive,” she said. “Once he got into that rhythm, he never stopped.”That cycle — playing and painting every day — has created a kind of artistic map of his disease’s progression. He is improvising with the changing state of his body. Connors once bent strings wildly, as if the entire guitar quaked beneath his blues. But now, with his small-bodied Fender, he produces wide washes of subtle sound. They shift gradually, like leaves losing color in autumn. He doesn’t mind the change, even if he didn’t choose it.“People these days are always making plans — I never did that,” Connors said, chuckling softly. “When you’re a kid, you play like a kid. When you grow up, you leave kid stuff, like licks, behind.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Nothing Compares’ Review: Sinead O’Connor’s Rise and Fall

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      This new documentary shows many faces of Sinead O’Connor and highlights her genuinely incomparable voice.The ascent of singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor’s star was arguably matched by its implosion, which began when, with the longtime abuses of the Catholic Church in Ireland and around the world in mind, she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live,” exclaiming, “Fight the real enemy.”The Irish artist’s sense of rebellion stems from many sources, the first of which is her Irishness. A couple of other factors are the Bobs — Dylan and Marley, both major influences on her thinking and her music. This documentary, directed by Kathryn Ferguson, doesn’t have any contemporary talking-head interviews; instead, it relies on O’Connor’s own speaking voice, both today — it is husky and slightly weary, sounding older than her 55 years — and on archival footage, in which she is quiet, shy, and remarkably tolerant of interviewers harping on her shaved head.The movie chronicles a fraught childhood and a rapid musical development. “How could I possibly know what I want when I was only 21,” she asks in her song “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” After her worldwide breakthrough, she knew she didn’t want the United States national anthem played before her stateside shows, and that she wanted to shed light on sexual abuse in the Catholic church.The reaction to these activist moves was vehement and often incredibly stupid and sexist, as nearly countless short clips of insults delivered by radio callers and celebrities (including Madonna and Joe Pesci) demonstrate. While her stardom was derailed, her music career continued, and the movie ends with a recent performance clip. (She announced this year that she was withdrawing from the music industry, however.)At no point during the movie proper is it mentioned that O’Connor’s biggest hit, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” was composed by Prince, which is peculiar. At the movie’s end, a title card notes that Prince’s estate denied the filmmakers permission to use the song in the movie. This jarring instance of what looks like narrative grudge-holding notwithstanding, “Nothing Compares” is a worthwhile appreciation of the artist.Nothing ComparesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Theater

      They Translated ‘Hamilton’ Into German. Was It Easy? Nein.

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      HAMBURG, Germany — “Hamilton” is a mouthful, even in English. Forty-seven songs; more than 20,000 words; fast-paced lyrics, abundant wordplay, complex rhyming patterns, plus allusions not only to hip-hop and musical theater but also to arcane aspects of early American history.So imagine the challenge, then, of adapting the story of America’s first treasury secretary for a German-speaking audience — preserving the rhythm, the sound, and the sensibility of the original musical while translating its dense libretto into a language characterized by multisyllabic compound nouns and sentences that often end with verbs, and all in a society that has minimal familiarity with the show’s subject matter.For the last four years — a timeline prolonged, like so many others, by the coronavirus pandemic — a team of translators has been working with the “Hamilton” creators to develop a German version, the first production of the juggernaut musical in a language other than English. The German-speaking cast — most of them actors of color, reflecting the show’s defining decision to retell America’s revolutionary origins with the voices of today’s diverse society — is now in the final days of rehearsal; previews begin Sept. 24 and the opening is scheduled to take place Oct. 6.The production is an important test for “Hamilton,” which already has six English-language productions running in North America, Britain and Australia, and is hoping to follow Germany with a Spanish version in Madrid and Mexico City. But whether a translated “Hamilton” will succeed remains to be seen.Hamburg has emerged, somewhat improbably, as a commercial theater destination — the third biggest city for musical theater in the world, after New York and London — with a sizable market of German-speaking tourists. The market began with “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” and Disney shows are a big draw: “The Lion King” and “Frozen” are now playing side-by-side on the south bank of the Elbe River, accessible by a five-minute ferry ride.But less familiar shows have had a harder time here — “Kinky Boots” closed after a year. Sure, there are hard-core German “Hamilton” fans (some of them upset that the show is being performed in a different language from that of the cast album they love), but there are also plenty of Germans who have never even heard of Alexander Hamilton.Charles Simmons (George Washington)Florian Thoss for The New York TimesChasity Crisp (Angelica Schuyler)Florian Thoss for The New York Times“history has its eyes on you”Original: “History has its eyes on you.”German: “Die Geschichte wird dabei Zeuge sein.”Back-translation: “History will be witness.”“It’s not like ‘Frozen,’ which everybody knows,” said Simone Linhof, the artistic producer of Stage Entertainment, an Amsterdam-based production company that operates four theaters in Hamburg and has the license to present “Hamilton” in German. Stage Entertainment is putting “Hamilton” in its smallest Hamburg venue, a 1,400 seat house in the lively St. Pauli district. “‘Hamilton’ is more challenging,” Linhof said.The German cast has already adopted its own take on the show: Whereas in New York, the musical is celebrated for its dramatization of America’s founding, almost every actor interviewed here described it as a universal human story about the rise and fall of a gifted but flawed man.“People should stop focusing on that it is American history, and focus more on the relationship between the characters,” said Mae Ann Jorolan, the Swiss actress playing Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds. “‘Hamilton’ is all about having the drive to achieve something.”International productions have become an important contributor to the immense profitability of a handful of shows birthed on Broadway or in the West End, and they are often staged in the vernacular to make them more accessible. “The Phantom of the Opera,” for example, has been performed in 17 languages.For “Hamilton,” Stage Entertainment executives invited translators to apply for the job by sending in sample songs, and then, not satisfied with any of the submissions, asked two of the applicants who had never met one another to collaborate. One of them, Kevin Schroeder, was a veteran musical theater translator whose proposal was clear but cautious; the other was Sera Finale, a rapper-turned-songwriter whose proposal was imaginative but imprecise.“Kevin was like the kindergarten teacher, and I was that child who wanted to run in every direction and be punky,” said Finale, who hadn’t been to the theater since seeing “Peter Pan” as a child and had to look up “Hamilton” on Wikipedia. “If you have an open mic in Kreuzberg,” he said, referring to a hip Berlin neighborhood, “and you’re standing there with a blunt, normally you don’t go to a musical later in the night.”Both of them were wary of working together. “I thought, ‘What does he know?’” Schroeder said. “And he thought, ‘I’ll show this musical theater guy.’”But they gave it a go. They wrote three songs together, and then flew to New York to pitch them to Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics for “Hamilton.” Miranda can curse and coo in German (his wife is half Austrian), but that’s about it; he surprised the would-be translators by showing up for their meeting with his wife’s Austrian cousin.“Lin is a smart guy,” Finale said, joking that the presence of the cousin ensured “that I don’t rap cooking recipes or the telephone book.”Miranda had been on the other side once — he translated some of the lyrics of “West Side Story” into Spanish for a 2009 Broadway revival — and he remembered observing how that show’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, listened for the sounds of the Spanish words. Miranda applied that experience to the German “Hamilton.”“I’m going to feel the internal rhyme, or lack of internal rhyme, of which there is a lot in this show, and so it’s important to me whenever that can be maintained without losing comprehensibility,” Miranda said. “That’s part of what makes hip-hop so much fun, are the internal assonances of it, and they did an incredible job of maintaining that.”Mae Ann Jorolan (Peggy Schuyler/Maria Reynolds)Florian Thoss for The New York TimesIvy Quainoo (Eliza Hamilton)Florian Thoss for The New York Times“helpless”Original: “I have never been the type to try and grab the spotlight.”German: “Ich gehör’ zu den’n, die auf der Party gern am Rand steh’n.”Back-translation: “I belong to those who like to stand on the sidelines at parties.”Once Finale and Schroeder got the job, the process was painstaking, reflecting not only the complexity of the original language but also the fact that the show is almost entirely sung-through, meaning there is very little of the spoken dialogue that is generally easier to translate, because it is unconstrained by melody. They tried divvying up the songs and writing separately, but didn’t like the results, so instead they spent a half year sitting across from one another at the kitchen table in Finale’s Berlin apartment, debating ideas until both were satisfied. They would send Miranda and his team proposed German lyrics as well as a literal translation back into English, allowing Miranda to understand how their proposal differed from his original.Kurt Crowley, an original member of “Hamilton” music team — he was an associate conductor and then the Broadway music director — became the point person for the project. He developed a multicolored spreadsheet tracking the feedback process; not only that, but he set about learning German, first from apps, and then with a tutor.“A lot of the coaching and music direction I do has to do with the language,” he said. “I couldn’t think of any other way to do my job besides knowing exactly what they were saying.”In some ways, the wordiness of “Hamilton” proved advantageous. “At least we had all these syllables,” Schroeder said. “It gave us room to play around.”Hamilton’s hip-hop elements also had benefits, Schroeder said. “If you come from a musical theater background, you’re used to being very correct and precise, but that’s not how rap works,” he said. “You have to find the flow, and you can play around with the beat.”There were so many variables to consider. Finale ticked off a list: words, syllables, meter, sound, flow and position. They needed to preserve the essential meaning of each element of the show, but also elide some of the more arcane details, and they needed to echo the musicality of the language.Figures of speech and wordplay rarely survive translation, but Miranda encouraged the translators to come up with their own metaphors. One example that Finale is proud of concerns Hamilton’s fixation on mortality. In English, he says “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.” In German, he will say words meaning, “Every day death is writing between the lines of my diary.”There were easy pleasures: The youngest Schuyler sister’s signature line, “And Peggy,” translated readily to “Und Peggy.” But for the eldest Schuyler sister, lyrics got more complicated: In “Satisfied,” a rapid-fire song set at Hamilton’s wedding, “I feel like there’s a thousand extra words they added to it,” said Chasity Crisp, the actress playing Angelica. “I’m still trying to learn how to breathe in the number. It’s incredibly fast. But there’s no other way you can do it — otherwise you wouldn’t be telling the story right.”The Schuyler Sisters: Chasity Crisp (Angelica), Mae Ann Jorolan (Peggy) and Ivy Quainoo (Eliza).Florian Thoss for The New York Times“the schuyler sisters”Original: “I’m looking for a mind at work.”German: “Ich will ‘nen Mann, bei dem was läuft.”Back-translation: “I want a man who has got something going on.”A few English phrases — well-known to fans, repeated often, and easy to understand — remain, including a reference to New York as “the greatest city in the world,” as do some English titles and American name pronunciations.But most of the quotes from American musicals and rap songs are gone; in their place are references to the German hip-hop scene, including a description of Hamilton and his friends as “die fantasticschen Vier,” which means “the fantastic four” but is also the name of a band from Stuttgart, plus a moment when Burr says to Angelica, “You are a babe — I’d like to drink your bath water,” which is a line in a classic German rap song.There were, of course, disagreements along the way — over tone (an initial translation described the West Indies, where Hamilton grew up, as “filthy,” which Miranda rejected as going too far), and content: The translators, for rhyming reasons, wanted Eliza, angry over her husband’s infidelity, to tell him, in German, “All this shall burn” rather than “I hope you burn.” Miranda sacrificed the rhyme to preserve her personalized fury.An unexpected factor was the way that the translation affected choreography. Much of the show’s movement echoes words in the score; as those words changed, there was a risk that the movement would not make sense. For example: Initially the translators proposed to replace “The room where it happens” with a German phrase meaning “behind closed doors,” which they thought was a clearer image for the German audience. But the choreography of that song suggests a room-like space, so the choreographer, Andy Blankenbuehler, balked, and the original concept stayed. The song is now called “In diesem Zimmer,” meaning “in this room.”But Blankenbuehler also saw — well, heard — one attribute of German that was a bonus: its percussive sound. “The thing I love is the consonants are so guttural and aggressive,” he said. “Right away it sounds awesome — it sounds like the movement.”The principal cast members are all fluent in German, and many of them were skeptical that the translation could be done effectively. “At the beginning I was afraid that they won’t get the essence of what ‘Hamilton’ is — that they wouldn’t get these little nuances, the play on words and the intelligence of it all,” Crisp said.Fans were worried too, and weighed in on social media. “People are skeptical when something really cool is being put into German,” said Ivy Quainoo, the actress playing Eliza. “Hamilton has all these New York rap references, and this East Coast swagger — how is this going to translate?”The German cast is the most international ever assembled for a “Hamilton” production, hailing from 13 countries, reflecting the degree to which Hamburg has become a magnet for European musical theater performers, and also the wide search the producers needed to conduct to find German-speaking musical theater performers of color.Miranda said assembling a diverse cast was his biggest concern about staging the show in Hamburg. “The image of Germany in the world was not of a very heterogenous society,” he said. “That was my only hesitation, born of my own ignorance.”Benet Monteiro (Alexander Hamilton)Florian Thoss for The New York TimesGino Emnes (Aaron Burr)Florian Thoss for The New York Times“my shot”Original: “I am not throwing away my shot.”German: “Mann, ich hab’ nur diesen einen Schuss.”Back-translation: “Man, I’ve only got this one shot.”Many of the actors are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, giving particular poignancy to the show’s reliable applause line, “Immigrants: We get the job done.” Quainoo, playing Eliza, is a Berliner whose parents are from Ghana; Jorolan’s parents moved to Switzerland from the Philippines. Hamilton is played by Benet Monteiro, a Brazilian who moved to Hamburg 12 years ago to join the cast of “The Lion King”; Burr is played by Gino Emnes, who was born in the Netherlands to a mother from Aruba and a father from Suriname.Monteiro and Emnes have had long careers in musical theater in Germany, but some of the members of the cast are newer to the genre. The roles of Hercules Mulligan and James Madison are played by a German rapper named Redchild, whose father is from Benin. “I had a very negative view of musical theater,” he said. “To me it was a quite limited genre, and I didn’t have high hopes.” But he heard about “Hamilton” from a friend, watched it on Disney+, and decided to audition.Very few of the performers had actually seen an in-person production of “Hamilton.” “I was in New York, and I wanted to, but it was too expensive,” Crisp said.Crisp represents another demographic slice of the cast: a child of an American serviceman. She was born in Mississippi but her father was stationed in Berlin when she was just a year old, and she has spent her whole life in Germany. Charles Simmons, the singer playing Washington, is originally from Kansas City, Mo., but his father, a soldier, was twice stationed in Germany, and Simmons has made the country his home. “It’s fun to tell the story of my birthplace to my place of residence,” he said.Many cast members said they experienced racism growing up in Europe. “People only saw me as the Asian girl,” Jorolan said. And Redchild said he would often be asked if he was adopted. “People do not think you can be German,” he said.Those experiences have informed the way they think about “Hamilton.” “I’m playing a white slave owner, and it feels weird because I know that parts of my family have been slaves,” Redchild said. And Emnes noted, “I think in the States and London, the discussion about seeing diversity onstage is much older, and developed. In Europe, it’s a very young discussion.”But all said just being in the rehearsal room was striking. “It’s very exciting that we have the cast that we have, even though Germany is a very white country,” Simmons said. “The whole notion of people of color playing white people is pretty revolutionary.”The path to Hamburg for American and British musicals is well-worn; it began in 1986, with a production of “Cats.” Stage Entertainment opened “The Lion King” here in 2001; Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that also operates two Broadway houses, is the most recent player, with a German-language production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” (which is not a musical, but sells like one).The commercial theater scene stands out in Germany, where much stage work is done by government-funded institutions that often present avant-garde plays. But Michael Otremba, the chief executive of Hamburg’s tourism agency, said musical theater serves an important audience. “This is not the mass of German people who have read Goethe and Schiller,” he said. “There is also this market for light entertainment. And ‘Hamilton’ helps this genre to prove they are more than Andrew Lloyd Webber and Disney.”Hamburg is overshadowed by Berlin and Munich as a tourist destination, but visitorship here has been growing: In 2001 the city had 4.8 million overnight visitors, and by 2019 it was up to 15.4 million, Otremba said. And culture is an important part of the attraction. The city frequently notes its place in Beatles history (the band performed in clubs here); it has just opened a striking new concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie, that has been embraced by locals and tourists; and then there are the big shows here from the United States and Britain.“The musicals are a pillar for the development of tourism,” Otremba said. “All the marketing for these productions is enormous, and every time they promote their shows, they mention Hamburg.”Once the American team moves on, day-to-day oversight of “Hamilton” will fall to Denise Obedekah, a German performer whose father is from Liberia. Obedekah was a dancer in multiple German shows — most recently, “Tina” — but was ready for a change.“The musical theater audience in Germany is a little conservative,” Obedekah said. “For a very long time, when musical theater was produced in Germany, it was done in a very safe way,” she added. “Producers need to be more brave, and educate our audience to new material. I know this is a risk, because we don’t know if the audience is going to react in the way that they did in the States or in England. But it’s definitely necessary. ” More

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      Overlooked No More: Sylvia Rexach, Puerto Rican Singer and Composer

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      She was especially known for reinventing boleros — songs of stringent, abiding love — amid Puerto Rico’s sexist and militaristic society in the mid-20th century.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A woman positioned close to a microphone announces a title into the silence, as if preparing to read a poem: “En Mis Sueños” (“In My Dreams”). A guitarist plays a precise and dramatic introduction to a bolero.At modest volume, the woman, Sylvia Rexach, begins to sing, with a smoky voice and non-virtuosic authority. She describes a fantasy loop in which an ex-lover briefly visits her in her dreams, leaving behind a “wake of love” (“estela de amor”). The dream will return again when she wants it to, which she will. She may not want more than the fantasy. (She may even want less: to be free of repetitive desire.) There is no sense of possession nor, really, of loss. There will be no reciprocity in this relationship, and she seems not only to accept the situation but to be an adept within it, a powerful expert.This description could pertain to more or less every track on “Sylvia Rexach Canta a Sylvia Rexach,” a luminous, séance-like record made in a San Juan studio in July 1958 by the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter, then 36, and her friend the guitarist Tutti Umpierre. The tempos remain similar, as do the images and themes: moons, night and oblivion; celestial flashes; troublesome desire; waves and what they leave behind.The album, after it was released in the mid-1960s by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña — a government-funded operation and the island’s equivalent to the Smithsonian Institution — was barely distributed outside Puerto Rico and has only recently appeared on streaming services. It is the only commercially issued recording of Rexach performing her own songs, and it was not even intended as such: It was a reference document for posterity attesting to how her songs should sound, made at the behest of the studio’s owner. It includes “Olas y Arenas” (“Waves and Sands”), “Alma Adentro” (“Inner Soul”) and “Y Entonces” (“And So”), which over the years have been taken up by other performers in many styles.Rexach (pronounced reck-SAHTCH) was a gifted composer of boleros — songs of stringent, abiding love in slow 2/4 time. The bolero began in Cuba at the end of the 19th century and gained popularity across Latin America in the late 1920s. But by the ’40s and ’50s it could reflect a more modern sensibility, one in tune with the wild subconscious. It could just about accommodate someone like Rexach, an artist to the core, “una bohemia” — not a casual description but a committed identity.“It meant that she liked the nightlife, and sang with her friends in groups, and saw the sun come up,” her daughter, the actor and singer Sharon Riley, said in an interview.There had been important female bolero composers before Rexach, most famously María Grever of Mexico. But Puerto Rico’s sexist and militaristic society in the mid-20th century created particularly difficult circumstances that forced women artists like Rexach and the poet Julia de Burgos to invent their own tradition.The eminent musicologist Cristóbal Díaz Ayala described Rexach as virtually unclassifiable within the Latin American music of her time. Her lyrics projected a frank sexuality and a near-indifference to shame. They could look like passionate resignation, or calm defiance. “I am the sand that the wave never touches,” she laments in “Olas y Arenas.”She could destabilize and diffuse what the scholar Elaine Enid Vázquez González has called “the boleristic ‘I’”: In her songs, the narrator’s desire doesn’t entirely travel outward toward its object, as had been common in bolero lyrics. It travels inward, more toward her own memory and the senses. The listener follows it there.Rexach was 36 when she recorded an album with the guitarist Tutti Umpierre. The songs on that record have been performed by many other musicians, including Linda Ronstadt and Tito Rodríguez.Archivo General de Puerto RicoSylvia Regina Rexach González was born on Jan. 22, 1922, one of seven children of Julio Rexach, who was of Catalan descent and ran Farmacia Rexach, a drugstore next door to the family’s home, and María Teresa González, a society woman and organizer of annual carnival activities. Her well-to-do family lived in Santurce, the district east of San Juan’s Old City known for its density of musicians and artists.At Central High School in Santurce, Sylvia proved an indifferent student but one who was indispensable to the school’s performing-arts programs. One afternoon in the mid-1930s, while on a school outing, she played her song “Di Corazon” (“Tell Me, Heart”) on a piano at the Escambrón Beach Club. The bandleader Rafael Muñoz, who was on a break from rehearsing for an evening performance, heard it and asked her who wrote it. Her father signed a contract on her behalf with the publishing company Peer International, and Muñoz recorded the song before Rexach finished her junior year.In 1943 she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps for three months, working as a desk clerk. Around this time, while publicizing a brand of rum outside a grocery store, she met Bill Riley, an Army cook from Connecticut. They fell in love, quickly married, had three children and were legally joined for 13 years, mostly unhappily, with a long separation toward the end. According to Sharon Riley, her father was often violent with her mother, especially when both had been drinking.In the 1940s and ’50s, Rexach worked in clubs as the leader of the vocal group el Combo Las Damiselas (later known as el Combo de Sylvia Rexach) and with musical-theater revues, both on the island and occasionally in New York City. She helped form a publishing organization through which she advocated for composers’ rights; wrote scripts for radio and television comedy shows, as well as advertising jingles for aspirin and detergent; and wrote a cultural criticism column for El Diario de Puerto Rico, praising the unsung and the local while reacting against exploitative business practices.She also raised her children as a single mother, and she wrote songs. About 50 have been published, though a friend, the singer José Luis Torregrosa, believed that many more “were left on the tabletops of the cafes where we were drinking.” Several were recognized during her life through versions by well-known singers — particularly Lucho Gatica’s “Y Entonces,” released in 1959 — but many more came later, as performed by Tito Rodríguez, La Lupe, Cheo Feliciano and others. The song “Alma Adentro” alone has passed through many sensibilities: Linda Ronstadt covered it on her Grammy Award-winning 1992 album, “Frenesí,” as did the New York-based jazz saxophonist Miguel Zenón in 2011. on a record named after the song. Miramar, the bolero revivalist band with roots in Puerto Rico, researched her life before creating their own subtle version, included on their album “Dedication to Sylvia Rexach,” released in 2016, which drew some attention to the composer in the United States. And the Spanish singer Angela Cervantes and the Cuban jazz pianist Pepe Rivero recently released their own version, spreading her work to audiences that barely knew her music.Aspects of Rexach’s life have created around her an aura of tragedy. But those who knew her spoke of a different set of qualities, including hilarity, bravery and loyalty.Archivo General de Puerto RicoRexach died on Oct. 20, 1961, of stomach cancer. She was 39.Her position in history remains unfixed — somewhere between institution and cult, often rediscovered and sometimes not discovered at all. A Telemundo mini-series about Rexach’s life, broadcast in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s and starring Sharon Riley, told her story in dramatic tones. There have been two theaters named for her in San Juan; the current one, inside the Centro de Bellas Artes, Puerto Rico’s major arts center, is built roughly on the site of her family’s old house. A well-researched Spanish-language biography, “Sylvia Rexach: Pasión Adentro,” by Virianai Rodríguez Santaliz, was published in Puerto Rico in 2008, but it has not been translated into other languages and has gone out of print.Rexach was a woman of integrity who continues to resist easy definition and enshrinement. She was melancholic, and aspects of her life have created around her an aura of tragedy: her troubled marriage and divorce; her long illness; her son Billy’s opiate addiction and prison time in New York City; her early death at the Women’s Hospital of Santurce.Yet those who knew her well, as detailed in Santaliz’s biography, have stressed a different set of qualities: hilarity, bravery, generosity, loyalty, perfectionism. Marta Romero, one of her bandmates in el Combo Sylvia Rexach, once called her “a volcano of mercy in constant eruption.” The great songwriter Tite Curet Alonso also compared her to nature, calling her “a true cultural bruma.” The word “bruma,” which she used in “Olas y Arenas,” means mist, and implies that she has become part of the atmosphere. More

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      in Theater

      Eleri Ward Captures the Longing at the Heart of Sondheim’s Work

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      On her new album, the singer fuses Stephen Sondheim’s emo register with a familiar coffeehouse folk sound.The so-called “I want” song is a convention — if not a rule — of musical theater scores. From “I’ll Know” in “Guys and Dolls” to “My Shot” in “Hamilton,” these thesis statements by leading characters typically come early in a show, hitching the plot’s momentum to their ambitions or dreams.Stephen Sondheim, arguably the greatest of musical theater songwriters, didn’t write many conventional “I want” songs — one great exception being the long “I wish” prologue to “Into the Woods” — but it was not for want of wanting. The characters he wrote for had huge, often doomed desires, whether it was the impossible no-strings intimacy Bobby seeks in “Company” or the apocalyptic retribution demanded by the demonic barber Sweeney Todd, and they expressed them in accordingly expansive musical terms.Among the qualities that Eleri Ward, a preternaturally gifted young singer whose guitar-based interpretations of Sondheim lit up last year’s brilliant album “A Perfect Little Death,” and whose follow-up collection, “Keep a Tender Distance,” is being released by Ghostlight Records on Friday, captures in her performances is the vast, unquenchable longing at the heart of the master’s work. This is not the nervy, brassy Sondheim of “Getting Married Today” or “Putting It Together,” but the wounded soul who wrote “Not a Day Goes By” and “Unworthy of Your Love,” two songs that appear on the new album.Ward plumbs this deep well in a way that feels so intuitively right, it’s remarkable no one has done it before: She has fused this emo Sondheim register with a familiar coffeehouse folk sound, adding delicate fingerpicking guitar accompaniment to support her limber, expressive soprano. In her hands, it’s not hard to imagine these songs as the creation of an especially gifted — if occasionally bloody-minded — indie singer-songwriter.Ward’s new album, “Keep a Tender Distance,” will be released on Friday.-A conservatory-trained singer and musician who grew up on musical theater, as well as pop, in Chicago, Ward, 28, stumbled on this folk-Sondheim sound when she picked up a friend’s guitar and, inspired in part by Sufjan Stevens in his mellower mode, recorded a version of “Every Day a Little Death” on Instagram in 2019. Kurt Deutsch, Ghostlight’s founder and president, later discovered her version of “Johanna (Reprise)” on TikTok, and said of that moment, “There was just a balm that came over me.” He reached out to her to see if she had more like it, and soon she did.“A Perfect Little Death” was mostly “made in her closet during the pandemic,” Deutsch said. It led to a series of live shows, first at Rockwood Music Hall in Manhattan, then at Joe’s Pub, where she sang a duet of “Loving You” with Donna Murphy, who first sang it as Fosca in Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1994 musical, “Passion.” In an interview, Murphy raved about Ward’s “unicorn of a voice,” adding that she especially admired that “there is nothing about Eleri that is struggling for a quality; it just all feels so fluid.”Josh Groban, who was in the audience at that first Rockwood gig and who later invited Ward to open for him on a recent concert tour, noted the “wonderful line” of her voice, which he said goes against the grain not only of the spikiness of a lot of pop music vocals, but also of what he called the “staccato in Sondheim.” (Groban will find out more about that when he stars in a “Sweeney Todd” revival on Broadway next spring.) Sondheim’s music “connects the brain to the heart,” he said, but what Ward does is “find ways to smooth the songs out and bring even more heart into the performance.”Though she reads music, Ward said she arrives at her guitar and vocal arrangements by ear, spinning the cast albums to learn the songs, then “never listening to them again.” Likewise, on “Keep a Tender Distance,” the string parts by Ellis Ludwig-Leone (“The king of moody strings,” as Ward put it) were derived from her demos rather than from the original orchestrations.The resulting interpretations are somehow both spare and lush, honoring the complexity of Sondheim’s compositions without, as the album’s producer, Allen Tate, put it, “trying to outthink” the original material. Tate, who with Ludwig-Leone is a member of the Brooklyn band San Fermin, added that “what Eleri does well is take what is really speaking to her about these songs, and then try to lay that bare, as opposed to dressing them up beyond what they already are.”“Every song explores some sort of distance from what you want or what you don’t have, and it all rolls forward,” Ward said of the 14 songs on her new album.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe 14 songs on “Keep a Tender Distance” don’t constitute a cast or concept album, exactly, but there is a kind of emotional logic to their order, from the questioning opener, “Merrily We Roll Along,” to the resolute closer, “Move On.”“The whole record is moving through space in all these different ways,” Ward told me. “Every song explores some sort of distance from what you want or what you don’t have, and it all rolls forward.”Among the album’s high points is a subtly reimagined “Another Hundred People” that suggests the original’s vertiginous pace, but is more heartbroken than breakneck, and a stark, haunting take on “Marry Me a Little,” the song from “Company” that gives the album its title and may be Sondheim’s quintessential push-me-pull-you expression of unfulfilled desire.While many singers tend to lean into the song’s delusional hope that an easy-to-handle relationship might be just around the corner (“I’m ready now!”), Ward’s voice, alternating between what Murphy called the “whistle tones” of falsetto and a Fosca-like lower register, conveys crushing need more than sunny optimism.Ward, who is currently understudying two tracks in the new musical “Only Gold” at MCC Theater, and who has recorded her own original pop music, may be feeling a bit like Bobby in “Company”: pulled in many directions by contradictory impulses. The new record, she said, is infused with the sense of, “I’m far away from the thing that I want.” Of course, that might be why it sounds so very Sondheim. More