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      in Music

      Queer History Was Made in ’90s Clubs. These Fliers Captured It.

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      “Getting In,” a new book from David Kennerley, collects the edgy advertisements for parties at clubs like the Palladium and records a culture forged from defiance.In the new book “Getting In,” the journalist David Kennerley takes an electric visual stroll through New York’s 1990s gay club scene. Not with photos, exactly, but through fliers — more than 200 of them — featuring polychromatic drag queens and come-hither hunks who enticed him to dance to Frankie Knuckles and Junior Vasquez remixes at popular nightclubs like Twilo and the Palladium, and parties like Jackie 60 and Lick It!“People threw the fliers on the ground,” Kennerley, 63, said in a recent interview at a Midtown cafe. “I thought, why would you throw this out? It’s going to be a memento.”Kennerley assembled the book from his collection of over 1,200 fliers that he acquired from several sources — promoters outside clubs, now-closed gay shops and bars, club mailing lists — all before social media. A self-described “bit of a hoarder,” Kennerley considers the book an act of queer music history preservation.“We weren’t all snapping pictures at clubs back then, so we don’t have much of a visual record,” he said. “These provide some sort of visual evidence of what went on.”Kennerley and other ’90s club veterans recently shared memories of some of the fliers, and the era. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.via David KennerleyDivas Fight AIDS, Palladium (1992)LADY BUNNY, D.J. and CLUB KID Back in the ’80s and ’90s, we felt we needed to come together as a community to fight AIDS. The fear of AIDS made us party with greater abandon. For an entire generation of gay men, especially those connected to the club world, we weren’t saving money. We assumed the odds were against us. Loleatta Holloway and Lonnie Gordon — that’s quite a lineup in terms of what songs packed dance floors.MICHAEL MUSTO, NIGHTLIFE CHRONICLER We learned the power of graphic art from ACT UP and Queer Nation. They knew how to use slogans and imagery to get a point across. Promoters used that know-how to sell their parties.DAVID KENNERLEY It feels like she’s a superhero in a way. That’s what people needed to be then because of the stigma and persecution.via David KennerleyPurgatory, Sound Factory Bar (1992)KENNERLEY At first glance it would be muscle boys in short shorts. It is, but someone Photoshopped on the heads of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Notice it was about getting out to vote. This one has credits of Jon McEwan and Jason McCarthy, the photographer and the promoter. They did one of George Bush spanking Dan Quayle, too.MARK ALLEN, GO-GO BOY and MODEL This was taken during a session where I was photographed with Richard, this kid from Venezuela, whose body was Al Gore. Mine was Bill Clinton. And Jon goes, I want to photograph you in cutoff shorts, the kind that were popular on Fire Island then. It sounded like something Spy would do in the ’80s. They took three shots and we went on to the next thing.You saw T-shirts of this image on cards. It was a good example about how something could go viral before the internet. I didn’t mind being anonymous. I thought it was art.SUSAN MORABITO, D.J. I don’t remember that particular party but I remember the flier.via David KennerleyThe Saint at Large, Tunnel (1992)MORABITO Back then, fliers inspired conversation and controversy sometimes. When the Saint at Large party used to send them in the mail, you couldn’t wait to get it. You’d get on the phone with your friends and talk about it.KENNERLEY Marky Mark had a song called “Good Vibrations” that went to No. 1. He was the Calvin Klein model for a while, and he would pull down his trousers and show off his tighty whities.The promise of the poster is, he’s going to show off his muscular physique. I paid a lot of money to go that night but I was very disappointed. He got onstage and he strutted around in a dark hoodie. Before you knew it, the song was over. I was like, wait, what about dropping the pants? I guess you could say it was misleading advertising.via David KennerleyCopacabana (1992)CHIP DUCKETT, PUBLICIST and PRODUCER Susanne [Bartsch, the club promoter and hostess] has a deep love of all things party. Inside Copa it was this perfect mix. There’s a baroness over here, a real one. Here’s a hooker and here’s a fashion model and it’s really gay but it’s also not gay. I don’t think Studio 54 did it in the same way. She’s still hosting parties every week.In those days I printed 50,000 fliers a month. Some guys in Queens who ran a club opened a printing company called Nightlife Printing. They did fliers for everybody. When I think of the amount of paper that got delivered to my office …Pork, The Lure (1994)KENNERLEY The Lure was leather and Levi’s oriented and they had a dress code. The party on Wednesday was geared toward the younger crowd, to get them involved in the scene. They also had B.D.S.M. shows on occasion. It got racy.MUSTO The way people forged a sense of communal identity was by going out. It was vital to have niche parties, where you had an exact type of gay, like twinks or bears. Now everybody has sex via Grindr, so that if you walk into a gay bar there is zero sexual urgency in the air.via David Kennerley‘Big’ Opening Night Party, Roxy (1996)ALLEN This was me, taken by the photographer Hans Fahrmeyer. I made some money on that one. It was on greetings cards and posters. I remember being in a cab and somebody had plastered on scaffolding 50 or 100 of the posters. I saw it for a few seconds. I thought, this is the closest I’ll ever get to my picture being in Times Square. I went back a week later and it was gone. That captured the fleetingness of the whole scene.LADY BUNNY This was a time when record companies would send D.J.s records to see what was a hit with our crowd. Gays has such good taste in dance music with zero promotion and a cover that didn’t even have the artist’s picture on it!ALLEN I thought it would lead to something incredible. It didn’t. But now it makes me think of my youth and the passage of time and how important the memories are. More

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      in Music

      Mahogany L. Browne’s Love Letter to Hip-Hop

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      It was a clear black night, a clear white moon. Warren G, “Regulate” (1994)Originally appearing on the soundtrack of the Tupac Shakur film “Above the Rim,” this song is built around a sample of Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near).” I’m looking like a star when you see me make a wish. […] More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Five Demands’ Review: Occupying a College for Racial Justice

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      In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, a documentary recalls the occupation of City College 50 years ago.Among the wave of student protests that occurred across American university campuses in the late 1960s, the student occupation of The City College of New York in April 1969 was a highly local yet pivotal act of civil disobedience. The more than 200 Black and Puerto Rican students who occupied the buildings on South Campus for two weeks did so in protest of the school’s admissions policy and the lack of diversity in its student body. At a time when 40 percent of New York City’s high school graduates were Black or Latino, the film reports, only 9 percent of City College attendees were part of those communities. “The Five Demands,” a new documentary from Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, returns to the campus 50 years later alongside former students, now in their late 60s and 70s, who participated in the protests.In interviews, City College alumni who were recruited through the college’s SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) recall being underprepared in their education and made to feel like tokens who didn’t belong there by their white peers. And indeed, the “five demands” central to the occupation largely revolved not only around making efforts to admit more students of color, but also to provide them with adequate support once they were enrolled — a commitment that many elite colleges and universities still struggle with to this day.In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision that rejected affirmative action, the film feels eerily timely. Schiller and Weiss’s direction is utilitarian, cutting together talking-head interviews with montages of the occupation set to era-appropriate protest songs. But to its credit, the lack of flashiness puts the students’ struggles for racial justice front and center, and ultimately serves to highlight a less-remembered aspect of the countercultural student movement.The Five DemandsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Theater

      Jack Goldstein, a Savior of Broadway Theaters, Dies at 74

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      He helped secure landmark status for more than two dozen theaters in the 1980s, then initiated the design competition that led to a new TKTS booth.Jack Goldstein, a preservationist who in the 1980s reacted to the razing of several venerable Broadway theaters under a Times Square redevelopment plan by helping to organize a successful campaign to give landmark status to more than two dozen other theaters, died on June 16 in Cold Spring, N.Y., in Putnam County. He was 74.The cause was a heart attack, said Tom Miller, his executor.Over 30 years, Mr. Goldstein established himself as an effective behind-the-scenes player on Broadway.He was the executive director of the nonprofit Save the Theaters, which was formed to prevent the future destruction of playhouses. He was an executive at Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union, and with the Theater Development Fund, where he initiated the design competition that led to the creation of a new TKTS discount ticket booth in Duffy Square, topped with a dramatic cascade of 27 ruby-red structural glass steps that rises above West 47th Street.“Jack had a great artistic eye and a deep commitment to good government,” Gretchen Dykstra, the former president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, said in a phone interview.Mr. Goldstein arrived in Manhattan in the spring of 1982, during a difficult financial period for Broadway andaround the time of the wrenching demolition of the Helen Hayes and Morosco Theaters — the most distinctive of the five theaters between West 45th and 46th Streets on Broadway that were leveled to make way for the towering New York Marriott Marquis Hotel.The sites of the Hayes and Morosco Theaters had become the center of protests by actors, playwrights and others until the wrecking balls began swinging that March.The actor Jason Robards speaking at a rally in 1982 in an unsuccessful effort to preserve the Morosco Theater. Others on the platform included the actor Christopher Reeve, second from left. Mr. Goldstein joined the Broadway preservation effort that year. Marilyn K. Yee/The New York TimesMr. Goldstein told a conference at the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan in 2014, “The destruction in the center of Broadway of beloved, important and, from the actors’ point of view, irreplaceable instruments of their art form and communication, was an affront.”Mr. Goldstein, who had a background in historic preservation, was initially a volunteer with the Committee to Save the Theaters, which had been formed by Actors’ Equity. He soon shifted to join and then run its spinoff organization, Save the Theaters.“Since it was clear that the city no longer recognized the value of the Broadway theaters,” he told Metropolis, an architecture and design magazine, in 2004, “No. 1 on the agenda was to bring to bear whatever legal disincentives to demolition were available and apply them to the historic theaters.”For six years, Mr. Goldstein and other preservationists focused on getting protection for theaters from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.Part of the process was examining theaters’ interiors and exteriors to determine which might be designated landmarks. He brought actors to the commission’s hearings to impart their knowledge of the theaters. And he collaborated on a report with an architect, Hugh Hardy, that stressed the full geometry of the theaters — their shape, layout and acoustical properties — rather than just their decorative detail, as standards for landmark designation.Speaking to the Skyscraper conference, Mr. Goldstein cited, for example, the “spatial relationships and building techniques behind the walls” that allowed actors to speak without a microphone, or in a whisper, and be heard by 600 to 1,400 theatergoers.Workmen cutting away steel from the roof of the Helen Hayes Theater in 1982.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“He was well spoken and enormously energetic,” Kent Barwick, a former chairman of the landmarks commission, said in an interview. “He was doing what needed to be done at the time. Was he always right in his judgment? No. Was he always fair? No. Was he dramatic? Of course — he was coming out of Actors’ Equity.”In 1987, the commission designated 28 theaters as landmarks — some for their exteriors, some for their interiors, some for both. (The sale of the Mark Hellinger Theater to a church in 1991 brought the group to 27.) The city’s Board of Estimate, a powerful governing body at the time, approved the designations in March 1988.Theater owners objected to the landmarking “as a confiscation of the value of the building because it limited its use to live theater,” Rocco Landesman, a former president of Jujamcyn Theaters, said by phone. He said of the buildings: “You couldn’t tear them down, and it was difficult to build above them if you didn’t have the rights. Value was taken without compensation.”The owners sued to overturn the landmarking of 22 of the theaters, but in 1992 the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case after the State Supreme Court and the Appellate Division had upheld the designations.Mr. Goldstein in 1997. Looking back with satisfaction in 2014, he said he thought he had made an impact on Broadway. “I feel, ‘job done,’” he said.TDFJack Lewis Goldstein was born on March 5, 1949, in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Joseph, was an Army officer and a physician whose work took him and his family to Maryland, Germany and other postings. His mother, Thelma (Ginsberg) Goldstein, was a homemaker, potter and political activist. The couple eventually divorced.Jack’s maternal grandmother took him to his first Broadway show, Lionel Bart’s musical “Oliver!,” which opened at the Imperial Theater in 1963.“‘Oliver!’ was the first time I experienced that suspension of disbelief,” Mr. Goldstein told Crain’s New York Business in 1998. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Goldstein graduated from George Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1972. He worked in Manhattan at the National Design Center, which exhibited home furnishings, before moving to Washington, where he was an assistant to the director of programs at the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a small federal agency that would play a role in persuading him to go to Broadway.While he was in Washington, the Interior Department, responding to a petition from preservationists, determined that the Morosco was eligible to be included on the National Register of Historic Places, and that if the developer of the Marriott Marquis wanted to tear it down, the company would need a waiver from the advisory council. Mr. Goldstein contended in an affidavit that Lyn Nofziger, an aide to President Ronald Reagan, had told the council to grant the waiver or lose its government funding — an assertion Mr. Nofziger denied.Frustrated, Mr. Goldstein soon left Washington to join the Broadway preservationists, whose efforts to save the Morosco were by then doomed to fail.After leaving Save the Theaters in 1988, Mr. Goldstein was a special assistant for government affairs to Ron Silver, the actor and president of Actors’ Equity, and the project director of the Broadway Initiatives Working Group, which was formed to evaluate Broadway’s future. He was the executive director of the nonprofit Theater Development Fund, which makes theater more affordable and accessible, from 1998 to 2001.When he announced the competition to design a new TKTS booth in 1999, Mr. Goldstein recognized how beloved and important the slapdash, pipe-and-canvas structure had become to theatergoers over 26 years. But, as he told The New York Times, “time and weather have taken their toll.”The new TKTS booth was not completed until 2008, a year before Mr. Goldstein returned to Actors’ Equity as its national director of governance policy and support.In 2012, he became an antiques dealer in Cold Spring. He previously owned a seasonal antiques store in Rehoboth, Del.He is survived by a brother, Leonard.Mr. Goldstein acknowledged that he had made an impact on Broadway.“I think I’ve made a contribution when I walk through Times Square and see theaters filled — many would have been swept away,” he told The Highlands Current of Cold Spring in 2014. “I feel, ‘job done.’” More

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      in Music

      Robert Sherman, WQXR Host of Classical and Folk Music Shows, Dies at 90

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      For more than five decades, he brought together emerging classical and folk performers as well as established stars for interviews and live performances.Robert Sherman interviewing the flutist Marina Piccinini at the studios of WQXR-FM in 1991. He had been on the radio in New York since 1969.Steve J. ShermanRobert Sherman, a charming, easygoing radio personality who hosted three long-running shows over more than a half-century on the New York classical music station WQXR-FM, died on Tuesday at his home in Ossining, N.Y., in Westchester County. He was 90.His son Steve said the cause was a stroke, the fourth Mr. Sherman had had since 2021.Mr. Sherman had been working behind the scenes at WQXR for more than a decade before he began hosting “Woody’s Children,” a weekly folk music program, in 1969. A year later, he began “The Listening Room,” a daily program on which both established and emerging musicians were interviewed and played live music for 23 years. His guests included Jessye Norman, Itzhak Perlman, Robert Merrill and Leopold Stokowski.And in 1978, he started “Young Artists Showcase,” a weekly show that offered a prestigious platform for up-and-coming musicians to perform. That program is still on the air.“Bob, in many ways, embodied everything WQXR tried to be,” Ed Yim, the station’s chief content officer, said in a phone interview. “He was a guiding spirit. He supported young artists and approached classical music as being for everyone. He’s someone we all turned to when we wanted to know the history of something, or why we did things a certain way.”Mr. Sherman, whose mother was the concert pianist and teacher Nadia Reisenberg, wanted to conduct interviews that took flight as friendly conversations, rather than limiting his guests to answering prepared questions.In 1974, for example, he was speaking off the air to the contralto Marian Anderson during a news break on “The Listening Room” when, he later recalled, she said it had been many years since she heard one of the recordings he had just played. Back on the air, he asked her if she listened much to her own music.“When there’s listening time for our records, very often we make the choice to take the other things,” she said. But, she added after discussing some of her musical preferences, “music, in any case, gives one a great sense of quiet, and that is the kind I like rather than that which is discordant.”Mr. Sherman interviewing Leonard Bernstein in 1984. He wanted the interviews he conducted to take flight as friendly conversations.Steve J. ShermanThe pianist Emanuel Ax was on “The Listening Room” several times in his 20s, before he became famous. He recalled how welcoming Mr. Sherman had been.“For someone so young, it was a big deal,” he said by phone, adding that he took easily to being on the radio. “The thing he let me do, which I flipped for, is he used to let me read some of the ads on the show. Each time I’d come on, he let me say, ‘And now, Emanuel Ax is going to read the following ad.’”Mr. Ax was among the performers at a concert celebrating Mr. Sherman’s 90th birthday last year, which Mr. Sherman himself hosted, as were the violinists Chee-Yun Kim, Joshua Bell and Ani Kavafian and the Emerson String Quartet. Ms. Kim, who also spoke, discussed her first appearance on “Young Artists Showcase,” when she was a teenager.“I never spoke on a radio station ever, not even in Korea,” she said. “And I said to you, ‘I am so nervous, but it’s a live show — what if I make a mistake?’ And you told me, do you remember what you told me, you said: ‘Just talk to the microphone as you’re talking to me and people happen to listen in. That’s it. It’s just us two.’ And I was like, OK.”Robert Sherman was born on July 23, 1932, in Manhattan. His parents were immigrants: His father, Isaac, who ran an import-export business and other companies, was from Ukraine. His mother, Ms. Reisenberg, was Lithuanian.She taught Robert to play piano — with limited success.“I had a certain talent for it and lacked the discipline to do anything,” Mr. Sherman said in an interview in 2019 for the Avery Fisher Artist Program oral history project. “Mother always told me, ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t tell anybody you study with me, because you’re not typical of my class.’”He joked that he chose to attend the academically rigorous Stuyvesant High School, where he figured he would be the best pianist, rather than a performing arts school, where he assumed he would be the worst.After graduating from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1952, he earned a master’s degree in music from Teachers College, Columbia University. He then entered the Army, where he played piano in a band that toured in U.S.O. shows.He joined WQXR — which until 2009 was owned by The New York Times — in the mid-1950s as a clerk and typist. He gradually moved up to director of recorded music and then music director; by 1969, he was program director. He also wrote scripts for a show called “Folk Music of the World,” but he wanted to create a different type of program that was more connected to the contemporary surge in folk music’s popularity.His proposal was approved, but the station interviewed other potential hosts, including Pete Seeger, before choosing Mr. Sherman. The show was called “Woody’s Children,” after a reference by Mr. Seeger, on the first episode, to the singer-songwriters who followed Woody Guthrie. WQXR canceled the program in 1999, saying it no longer fit the station’s format. But it was picked up by the Fordham University station WFUV, where it ran until earlier this year.Mr. Sherman’s guests on “Woody’s Children” over the years included Judy Collins, Odetta, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.“After nearly 55 years on the radio dial,” Rich McLaughlin, WFUV’s program director, said in a statement after Mr. Sherman’s death, “‘Woody’ is as much Sherman as he is Guthrie.”Mr. Sherman hosted the 1,800th installment of “Young Artists Showcase” in 2012.Steve J. ShermanMr. Sherman hosted “The Listening Room” until WQXR canceled it in 1993. “Young Artists Showcase,” which he hosted for 45 years, has continued with guest hosts.Mr. Sherman also wrote music criticism for The New York Times; hosted “Vibrations,” a short-lived music show on the New York public television station WNET, in 1972; and collaborated with Victor Borge, the comic piano virtuoso, on two books, “My Favorite Intermissions: Lives of the Musical Greats and Other Facts You Never Knew You Were Missing” (1971) and a sequel, “My Favorite Comedies in Music” (1980).With his brother, Alexander (who died in 2013), Mr. Sherman compiled a book about their mother, “Nadia Reisenberg: A Musician’s Scrapbook” (1986), which used interviews, letters, photographs and newspaper clippings to tell her story.“I really didn’t want to do the typical artist’s biography, which is that she played here, she played there, and everybody loved her,” Mr. Sherman told The Standard-Star of New Rochelle, N.Y. “I wanted to make it more personal and at the same time more documentary.”In addition to his son Steve, a performing arts photographer, Mr. Sherman is survived by his partner, Jill Bloom; another son, Peter; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Ruth Gershuni ended in divorce; his marriage to Veronica Bravo ended with her death in 2012.At Mr. Sherman’s 90th-birthday concert, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma remembered being invited to the WQXR studio at the Times building for an interview when he was 15. He was so anxious, he said, that he steeled himself by drinking several gin and tonics in a nearby bar. (He had an ID from the Juilliard School that said he was 23.)“I bumped into you the next day,” he recalled to Mr. Sherman, “and you said, ‘Yo-Yo, I just want you to know I spent all last night splicing’ — this was in the days of tape — ‘this interview from completely unintelligible sentences, and I turned it into something that made even a tiny bit of sense.’” More

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      in Television

      Does ‘And Just Like That …’ Signal the End of Stealth Wealth?

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      So does the pop culture and fashion wheel turn.And just like that, stealth wealth, the aesthetic made viral by “Succession,” with its toxic billionaires in their Loro Piana baseball caps and Tom Ford hoodies locked in a C-suite cage match to the death, has been swept off screen.In its place: logomania, branding that can be seen from whole city blocks away and accessories that jangle and gleam with the blinding light of bragging rights.The outfits, that is to say, of Carrie and Co. in Season 2 of “And Just Like That …,” the “Sex and the City” reboot come recently to Max — the streamer that, as it happens, also gave us the Roys in their greige cashmere. Both shows are set in New York City, the home of strivers and entrepreneurs, of “Washington Square” and Wharton, of constantly evolving social castes highly, and literally, invested in their own identifiable camouflage.If watching “Succession” was in part like engaging in a detective game to suss out what character was wearing what brand, so insider were the fashion politics, watching “And Just Like That …” is like attending brandapalooza: the double Cs and Fs and Gs practically whacking you on the head with their presence. (Warning: Spoilers are coming.) All the over-the-top fashionista-ing is back. The room-size closets!It’s the yin to the “Succession” yang: a veritable celebration of the comforting aspirational dreams of self-realization (or self-escapism) embedded in stuff that may actually be the most striking part of an increasingly stale series. Certainly, the clothes, which often serve as their own plot points, are more memorable than any dialogue.Well … except maybe for that instantly classic line in Episode 1, uttered by Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) on her way to the Met Gala in reference to her gown and feather hat: “It’s not crazy — it’s Valentino.” But that’s the exception that proves the rule.Lisa Todd Wexley stopping traffic on her way to the Met Gala in Valentino.Craig Blakenhorn/MaxThere is Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), with her multiple Manolos and Fendis, self-medicating with shopping, returning home one day with six Bergdorf Goodman bags. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) toting her Burberry doggy poop bag (also possessed of a Burberry apron and Burberry ear muffs) and bemoaning the fact that her teenage daughter hocked her Chanel dress to fund her musical aspirations.Lisa Todd Wexley dropping her kids off for camp in a bright green Louis Vuitton jacket and scarf. And Seema (Sarita Choudhury), the character that passes for a restrained dresser thanks to her penchant for neutrals (and the occasional animal print), loudly lamenting the theft of her caramel-colored Hermès Birkin — one of her totems of self, ripped directly from her hands.Lisa Todd Wexley dropping her children off for camp in Louis Vuitton.Jason Howard/Bauer-Griffin/GC ImagesSeema with her caramel-colored Hermès Birkin.Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin, via GC ImagesThere is Loewe and Pierre Cardin; Altuzarra and Dries Van Noten. There is also an effort to repurpose clothes, like Carrie’s wedding dress, in order to promote the virtues of rewearing, but it’s pretty much lost in all the rest of the muchness. There is a dedicated Instagram account on which the costume designers Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago share their finds, with 277,000 followers. @Successionfashion, by contrast, has 184,000.All of which means what, exactly? Is the era of quiet luxury, so recently embraced by TikTok, already at an end? Have our attention spans, so famously abbreviated, moved on? Has the physics of fashion exerted its force and produced an equal and opposite reaction to an earlier action?As if. In many ways, the fashion in “And Just Like That …” seems to protest too much. In part that’s because it seems like a regurgitation of the fun that came before, which was itself a reaction to the minimalism of the early 1990s, which itself was born in that decade’s recession.The fact is, no matter how much lip service has been paid to quiet luxury or stealth wealth or whatever you want to call it, and how it is 2023’s “hottest new fashion trend,” it was never a recent invention. It has been around since way back when it was referred to as “shabby chic” or “connoisseurship” or “old money,” all synonyms for the kind of product that didn’t look overtly expensive but was a sign of aesthetic genealogy — the difference between new money and inherited money that fashion co-opted and regurgitated to its own ends. Just as more obviously coded consumption has been around since Louis Vuitton plunked his initials on some leather back in 1896 or since Jay Gatsby started tossing his shirts.Note the Fendi bag on the back of Carrie’s chair.HBO MaxFind the Burberry-branded doggy poop bag tucked on Charlotte’s arm.HBO MaxWe’ve been declaring the “end of logos” and, alternately, the “rise of stealth wealth” for decades now. There are cycles when one is more ubiquitous than the other (usually having to do with economic downturns when flaunting disposable income is not a great look), but they exist in tandem. They help define each other.Consider that during the current economic uncertainty, exactly the kind of environment that tends to fast-forward the appeal of low-key high-cost items, the most successful global brands have remained the most highly identifiable: Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermès. Or that in his recent debut for Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams introduced a bag called Millionaire that costs — yup — $1 million. (It’s a yellow croc Speedy with gold and diamond hardware.)What is more interesting is, as Carrie and the gang continue on their merry wardrobed way, how clichéd both styles now seem, how performative. Once they have trickled up to television, it’s impossible not to recognize the costume. Or the fact that whichever look you buy into, they are simply different ways of expressing wealth, in all its decorative strata. And wealth itself never goes out of fashion. More

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      in Theater

      Sheldon Harnick, Musical Theater’s Great Marriage Broker

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      In lyrics of rare humor, elegance and compassion, the man who put words to “Fiddler on the Roof” and “She Loves Me” explored the complex emotional architecture of love.The twilight golden years of the Golden Age of musical theater, which archaeologists date from about 1959 to 1981, produced three great lyricists. One, of course, was Stephen Sondheim, setting words to his own music with a neurotic complexity that defined that time and ours. Another was Fred Ebb, the longtime songwriting partner of John Kander, who if poppier in outlook was a genius at prosody, shooting off syllables (“one day it’s kicks, then it’s kicks in the shins”) that never failed to bruise.Sheldon Harnick, who died on Friday at 99, was the third, though only one of his musicals, “Fiddler on the Roof,” written with the composer Jerry Bock, was widely known outside the world of theater lovers. But within that world, his subtle craft and character insight were universally acknowledged. Sondheim called his lyrics “impeccable.”As models of humor, elegance and compassion, they could stand to be more widely studied and imitated. That they aren’t is partly the result of the strange bifurcation of Harnick’s career into Bock and post-Bock eras. Though Harnick kept writing well for four decades after the team broke up at the height of its powers in 1970, he never again met with the kind of success that greeted the earlier work. And Bock fell almost completely silent.What a loss! And yet what a success it had been. By the time of the split, Harnick had written the lyrics not just for the worldwide hit “Fiddler” (1964) but also for two smaller yet equally admired scores: “Fiorello!” (1959) and “She Loves Me” (1963). Another handful of his shows with Bock (“The Apple Tree,” “The Rothschilds,” “Tenderloin”) are just as pleasurable, if less profound.I use the word “profound” to describe those shows, and Harnick’s best lyrics, not because they offer earth-shattering insights but because they are perfect expressions of ordinary ones. A jaunty waltz like “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” from “Fiddler,” could not, after all, be more conventional in its framing: Two poor young sisters dream of being fixed up with perfect husbands.But notice how the agenda-like structuring of their wish list, along with the click-lock rhymes, captures in a few lines what “perfect” means to several people involved:For Papa, make him a scholarFor Mama, make him rich as a king.For me, well, I wouldn’t hollerIf he were as handsome as anything.By song’s end, though, alerted to the dangers of overreaching, the girls have turned the image inside out:Maybe I’ve learned:Playing with matchesA girl can get burned.What neither the sisters nor the audience yet know, but Harnick suggests, is how broadly the idea applies. While initiating the marriage plot so central to “Fiddler,” the lyric also introduces a warning about a world soon to go up in flames.Once heard, Harnick’s lyrics seem like the last word on their subjects. In part that’s because of their concision — he typically writes short lines and never too many — and in part because they build an almost impenetrably tight argument through structure and sound. The important words all land on the right beat; the grammar is never distorted to squeeze over a melody. With so little space, every syllable does at least double duty.Double duty is a nice way of looking as well at his main theme, marriage. (Harnick was briefly married to Elaine May; he wed Margery Gray, who survives him, in 1965.) Like most musicals, his and Bock’s keep circling the subject, but with a slyer view of the rage and redemption that go into it.That combo is brilliantly expressed in “Fiorello!” — the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical about Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City from 1934 through 1945. In “The Very Next Man,” the mayor’s long-suffering secretary, Marie, after years of frustrated love, vows to marry whoever shows up.Again, an ordinary setup, yet Harnick captures Marie’s compulsive preoccupation in a neat chain of repeated words, a few perfect rhymes (some of them hidden) and a heartbeat of recurring long o’s:I’m through with mopingMoping from all this pointless hopingHoping he’ll notice me and open his heartTime now to break away and make a new start.That stanza is actually a rewrite; apparently, in 1959, the original version (“And if he likes me/Who cares how frequently he strikes me?”) was considered acceptable and got a big laugh.There’s some justice in the rewrite being better crafted than the original; Harnick’s dramatic sweet spot was letting characters tie themselves in knots to convince themselves of ideas they know are not right. Also a Harnick sweet spot: forcefully untying the knots later. So even though Marie insists at the end of “The Very Next Man” that she’s finished with romance forever —New York papers, take note!Here’s a statement that you can quote:Waiting for ships that never come inA girl is likely to miss the boat.— she of course does marry La Guardia in the end.Harnick’s gift for expressing simply the complexity of emotional architecture finds perhaps its greatest expression in “She Loves Me,” a show essentially built on romantic delusion. In the song “I Don’t Know His Name,” Amalia concludes that her anonymous pen pal — even though he is, in fact, a co-worker she hates — must be an extremely kind and cultured man:When I undertook this correspondence,Little did I know I’d grow so fond;Little did I know our views would so correspond.But as that tight and high-minded stanza gives way to florid fantasizing —He writes his deepest thoughts to meOn Swift, Vermeer and Debussy.De Maupassant, Dumas, Dukas, Dufy, Dufay, Defoe.— we understand she is not yet ready to find love where it really exists. That will come later.In Sondheim’s lyrics, the double bind of attachment is often a source of agitation; in Ebb’s it is often a pummeling. But in Harnick’s word-world, attachment is a pleasant and relatively livable condition, once you get past the drama.Near the end of “Fiddler,” when in the song “Do You Love Me?” Tevye asks his wife that question, she replies, barely singing the words, “Do I what?” It’s a laugh line, defanging or absorbing what might otherwise seem sentimental. By the end of the gentle, forgiving and ruminative number, so typical of Harnick’s gentle, forgiving and ruminative art, you come willingly to the couple’s conclusion, sentimental or not:It doesn’t change a thingBut even soAfter twenty-five yearsIt’s nice to know. More