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    Roaring Twenties Enthusiasts Gather in New York

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    Hundreds of time travelers in 1920s-era outfits took ferries to Governors Island earlier this month to attend the two-day Jazz Age Lawn Party, one of New York City’s most curious summer traditions.They wore flapper dresses with feather boas, pinstripe suits with black-and-white wingtips and lots of boater hats, cloche hats and bow ties. Gathered on picnic blankets in a grassy field, they passed the day sipping gin and tonics before dancing to hot jazz performed by the Dreamland Orchestra.A man wearing pink pants and suspenders drank beer from a Mason jar while his young son, also in suspenders, sat on his shoulders. Lines gathered outside a stand that sold newsboy caps and another that offered on-site tintype portraits. A pie contest included the category, “Hobo’s Choice,” which rewarded the confection most likely to be “stolen off a back porch.”The orchestra was conducted by the pencil-mustached bandleader Michael Arenella, who started the event in 2005. “We were pretty much the first event out here,” he said. “It was maybe 50 people then. People are drawn to the Roaring Twenties because there’s a youthfulness to the era. After the war, people were looking to have a good time, after their brush with mortality.”In the edited interviews below, re-enactors on the second day named their Jazz Age fashion heroes and pondered whether they would actually time travel back to the era.Cyrene ReneeModel and playwrightDesiree Rios for The New York TimesIf you could time travel back, would you? I’d go back. I’d be a showgirl at the Cotton Club and be the best dancer there. As much as I love the era, I don’t think life was better, though. There was segregation. Yet despite what we were going through as people of color, we created beautiful dance, music and art.Do you have a Jazz Age fashion hero? Josephine Baker, all day, every day. She was righteous and liberated in her beauty.Inez RobinsonEducatorDesiree Rios for The New York TimesWould you go back? I can’t romanticize that period, as a person of color, but I’m very drawn to the era’s fashion. As a Harlem native, I have an affinity for the Harlem Renaissance. African Americans were using fashion to carry themselves proudly every single day.Jazz Age fashion hero? Coco Chanel. Her designs introduced gender fluidity. She pioneered the idea you could go both ways.Skip DiatzRetired librarianDesiree Rios for The New York TimesWould you time travel back? People think of the 1920s as one big party, but it was just good for a few people of certain persuasions. It was also a time of intolerance and prejudice. I’d probably go back just for a weekend. However, this is only one time period I’m involved with as a re-enactor. I did a World War II event the other weekend, and I was at a Revolutionary War event recently in Mount Vernon.Your old-timey fashion hero? Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He was married to Joan Crawford and was the best dressed man in Hollywood.Michael ArenellaBandleaderDesiree Rios for The New York TimesWould you go back? I’d like to go back, because I relate to the simplicity of that time. Don’t get me wrong, it was a harder life, and lots obviously wasn’t good, but things were simpler then, and I feel we’ve gotten further from that.Jazz Age fashion hero? Gary Cooper. He was just starting out, and he had that elegant swagger. You don’t see elegant swagger in a man these days.LaVerne CameronRetired paralegalDesiree Rios for The New York TimesWould you time travel back? Yes, because I think people were happier then, though I’d want to arrive before the Great Depression. Women’s liberation was starting and so much of that fashion remains stylish today, from sequins to headbands.Old-timey fashion hero? Carole Lombard. She married Clark Gable and died in a plane crash. She started the blond hair trend.Jesse Rosen and Taylor DunstonScientist and Beauty sales executiveDesiree Rios for The New York TimesWould you go back?J. R.: I think there are aspects of me that wouldn’t fare so well then, but to experience those parties, I don’t know …. If I could come back, sure, but I’d stay here if it was a one-way ticket.Jazz Age fashion hero?T. D.: I can’t immediately think of one but I feel Tom Ford pulled heavily from this era. His suits are masculine yet use feminine color palettes. He loves a luxurious full lapel with strong shouldering, like the gangsters wore. You could argue the power suit was born in the 1920s and that Ford borrowed from it.Michael AsanteFlight attendantDesiree Rios for The New York TimesWould you go back? I’d be naïve to say any era was better, but in terms of fashion, I’d like it if everyone still dressed like this. The mobsters in particular, with their red ties and cigars, were really bringing it.Jazz Age fashion hero? I feel Karl Lagerfeld was channeling the Jazz Age. The gloves. The white collar. His white cat, Choupette, in a carrier basket.Charles AnnunziatoEvents coordinatorDesiree Rios for The New York TimesWould you go back? Probably not. The prohibition era was a time of hardship. Now we can get liquor whenever we want.Jazz Age fashion hero? Bonnie and Clyde. Because they did whatever the hell they wanted.Caroline Shaffer and Marissa KoorsGraphic designer and Book editorDesiree Rios for The New York TimesWould you go back?C.S.: Absolutely not. I like having the internet and rights as a woman.M.K.: Only with a return trip. I have rights in this era and so do my friends and allies. We also have medicine. I could have gotten the Spanish flu.Jazz Age fashion hero?C.S.: Jean Harlow. She played unremorseful characters, like women who got involved with married men, yet she played them in a surprisingly likable way.M.K.: Elsa Schiaparelli. She took from surrealism and said, ‘What if we put lobsters on our dresses?’ Wearing Schiaparelli was to wear art.Alvin and Marla NichterRetired electrical engineer and Retired fashion image consultantDesiree Rios for The New York TimesWould you go back?M.N.: I think I would have fit right in. It was a ladylike time. A time of gentleman. Girls were girls. Men were men. Wait, could I get in trouble for saying that? What I mean to say is it was a stylish feminine era, which I like.Jazz Age fashion hero?A.N.: My glamorous great-aunt. She was a fashion buyer for the top New York department stores back then. She’d go to Paris to bring back the latest fashions for New Yorkers. I’ve seen pictures of her. She was the bee’s knees. More

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      How ‘Some Like It Hot’ Tunes In to the Jazz Age

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      From the set design to the wig styles, the Broadway musical creates a richly detailed vision of the 1920s and ’30s. Its creators share their inspirations.During the 1920s and well into the next decade, there was an explosion of creativity in artistic expression and popular entertainment.The Chrysler Building stood proud and tall on 42nd Street, with a headdress worthy of a Ziegfeld girl. Bootleggers ensured liquor was flowing in the speakeasies. A fiery new music called jazz hit the airwaves, courtesy of Duke Ellington and his band in Harlem’s Cotton Club. Hemlines were higher, hair was shorter, and new moves were showing up on the dance floor and on the cinema screen.It was the Jazz Age, a period whose energy and excitement was in determined defiance of Prohibition and the Great Depression.The era comes to splendid life in “Some Like It Hot,” a new musical adaptation of the Billy Wilder film, now playing at the Shubert Theater. A lyric in the opening number sets the tone for the show while capturing the mood of 1933: “Let’s keep dancing till the crack of dawn … Tomorrow we may all be gone!”“It’s a world where our lead characters have to keep things hidden and underground,” the show’s director and choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, said of the setting. “A place where you could be a little bit naughty.”In a series of interviews, members of the creative team detailed how they drew on the Jazz Age for several aspects of the show: the music and lyrics, the book, the choreography, the scenic and costume design, and the looks.A Big, Brassy SoundChristian Borle, foreground left, and J. Harrison Ghee portray jazz musicians and lifelong friends who go on the run to escape from gangsters.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSet in Chicago during Prohibition, “Some Like It Hot” follows Joe (Christian Borle) and Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), a sax player and a bass player who go on the run after witnessing a mob hit. They disguise themselves as women — now going by Josephine and Daphne — and join up with an all-female band, Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators, traveling with the group aboard a cross-country train.Appropriate for a story crowded with musicians, the show makes full, boisterous use of an onstage band whose 17 players cover many more instruments. The songs, by Marc Shaiman (music and lyrics) and Scott Wittman (lyrics), take their cues from the sounds of Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan, Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford, with their bold melodies, ecstatic performances and dare-you-not-to-dance rhythms.The sound of Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators also nods to the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a racially integrated, all-female jazz band that rose to prominence in the 1940s.The decision was made early on to recreate the “hot, joyous, sexy” sound of the big band era. Shaiman and Witman were ready for it. “We have been researching for this show our entire lives!” Shaiman said. “Those acts have always been top of the list for us.”For the character Sweet Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams), the Syncopators’ bandleader, Shaiman and Wittman found a model in the sassy blues of the singer and songwriter Victoria Spivey. They explored a moodier palette for the character of Sugar (Adrianna Hicks), the Syncopators’ star performer, originally played by Marilyn Monroe in the film. “As soon as the idea of Sugar being Black came up, thoughts of the legendary women of color who toured with bands came to mind,” Wittman said. Sugar’s sultry ode to the sax, “A Darker Shade of Blue,” was written with the vocal stylings of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald in mind.Dance, With a KickThe show’s director and choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, began with the dance styles of the 1920s and ’30s and adapted them into performances that could still feel fresh to modern viewers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDancing had gotten wilder and looser after World War I. Naughtier, too — a sensibility that Nicholaw sought to capture throughout, but especially in the flirtatious Charleston dancing in the number “Let’s Be Bad.”But it was the Lindy Hop, another popular dance craze of the time, that Nicholaw was most excited to bring to Broadway. “I jumped into that vocabulary right away,” he said.Originating in 1920s Harlem, and named in honor of the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 trans-Atlantic flight, the dance features brisk swing outs and lightning footwork. Set to the opening number, “What Are You Thirsty For?,” it’s the perfect dance to welcome the audience into the world of the show. “There’s a veracity and excitement to it,” Nicholaw said, while admitting that some liberties were taken. “Authenticity isn’t always theatrical. I wanted to create dances that had some humor and felt fresh now as well as capturing the authentic style of the period.”“Some Like It Hot” also embraced plenty of tap dancing, which had its heyday on American movie screens in the 1930s, with the films of Bill Robinson (better known as Bojangles) and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.Early on, Joe and Jerry’s tap routine expresses the simpatico nature of their lifelong partnership. And in an Act 2 fantasy sequence, the show uses tap to reveal the budding romance between Joe and Sugar. Here, Nicholaw looked to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for inspiration. (The pair first danced together onscreen in 1933, in “Flying Down to Rio.”) Nicholaw strove for something like Astaire and Rogers’ introductory dance in “Swing Time” (1936), whose kinetic movements convey the thrill of discovering a new dance partner — while providing the firecracker percussion of fancy footwork. “While romantic, it has a more playful feel to it.”Lyrics and LingoLyrical wordplay and Prohibition-era slang give a sense of authenticity without overwhelming the audience with detail.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen it came to conjuring the era through the lyrics, the urbane, “playfully bawdy” couplets of Cole Porter were a touchstone for Shaiman and Wittman. In the words to songs like “Let’s Misbehave,” Porter “found a million and one ways to refer to sex without ever using a single actually naughty word,” Shaiman said.In similar fashion, Shaiman and Wittman find endless fun with the title of the show, producing lines like: “Some like it rough, some like it tame/ Bring me a moth who loves the flame,” and “Now on some sultry summer day, some consummate with consommé.”“Some Like It Hot” is also peppered with scat singing, the improvised, syllabic gymnastics (“zee bap zeh bootlee atta feet bam-bam!”) that at times serve as the characters’ secret code. The vocal improvisations of scat singing greats like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway provided inspiration, though here, of course, the effect is precisely scripted.In writing the book, Matthew López and Amber Ruffin wanted to evoke the period without letting things get too cartoonish. Speakeasy slang, like “Cheese it!” and “Move those getaway sticks!” found their way into the dialogue. “I think at first I went full ‘Bugsy Malone,’” Ruffin said. “I love where the show landed. It’s just enough lingo of the era that you’re not distracted by it and you also don’t miss it.”López and Ruffin’s book channels the wit and attitude of such pre-Production Code Hollywood films as “Merrily We Go To Hell,” “The Public Enemy” and “The Gay Divorcee.” Sweet Sue gets some zingers, redolent of a time when women no longer felt as constrained by the pressure to be polite. “I just heard from the doctor,” she says, “and I tested negative for patience.” “Sue always felt to me like a character out of a Jazz Age movie,” López explained, “except in a way she never would have been depicted at the time.”Sets From the Machine AgeSweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators meet Josephine and Daphne aboard a cross-country train.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhile Duke Ellington was jazzing up the airwaves, a new kind of architecture and design sensibility was jazzing things up visually. Art Deco, with its striking geometry and gleaming surfaces, flourished in the 1920s and 1930s — the height of the Machine Age, as the show’s scenic designer, Scott Pask, points out — and was epitomized by the Chrysler Building in New York. For Pask, the decorative metalwork of that building was a jumping-off point for myriad onstage details, including stair rails and light fixtures. The receding parabolic arches in the Chrysler’s crown even inform a wallpaper pattern.The color of the sets throughout is rooted in the metallic palette of the Machine Age: steel, silver, chrome, graphite. Even before the show starts, the audience sees, instead of the traditional scarlet Broadway show curtain, a series of narrow, folded silver vertical planes, framed within a metal proscenium.In one dazzling scene, a train, designed by Pask, rolls into Chicago’s Union Station and traverses the entire width of the stage. It was modeled on the aerodynamic feel of locomotives in the ’30s. “It’s a design element that brings me a lot of joy,” Pask said.For the curtains, tables, chairs and other onstage furnishings at the Hotel del Coronado, Pask took inspiration from the work of the furniture designer Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, which conveyed luxury through strong shapes and ornamental restraint when it was shown at the International Exhibition of Decorative and Modern Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925.Hairdos With PizazzAngie Schworer as Minnie.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJ. Harrison Ghee as Jerry, as Daphne.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Jazz Age was “really the time when women started cutting their hair short,” Josh Marquette, the show’s hair and wig designer, explained. “In fact, if you had long hair, you were either old or considered old-fashioned. The styles of the day were so elaborate and gorgeous, with finger wave and pin-curled hairstyles. Women went to great lengths to create these styles. But the hair still had to ‘dance’ and not fall apart when out at a jazz club.”Marquette studied footage of Lindy Hoppers, searching for the secret to hairstyles that could withstand a session on the dance floor. “They almost always ended a number with hair intact,” he said, “but most hats and hair ornaments were gone!”Marquette’s lookbook included the likes of Greta Garbo and Bette Davis. Daphne’s wig at the end of the show is directly and admiringly borrowed from Josephine Baker’s sleek “Eton crop” hairstyle, with curls pasted on the forehead and cheeks. “It’s just too good of a hair style to not include,” Marquette said.As for Sugar’s hair, though it was not modeled on anyone specifically, it has both the sculpted quality of Baker’s crop and a hint of Clara Bow’s curls and, he said, “with maybe one ounce of Betty Boop!” More

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      ‘Babylon’ and the Case of the Missing Bob Haircut

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      Margot Robbie’s 1920s silent-screen star wears her locks long and frizzy — and that’s by design, as the director Damien Chazelle and hairstylist explain.At the start of the epic “Babylon,” Margot Robbie’s character, a rising silent-film star named Nellie LaRoy, quite literally crashes into a Hollywood bigwig’s party — her car hits a statue — and then proceeds to take over the dance floor, her voluminous hair whipping back and forth as she headbangs to a jazz score. In a sea of the kind of bobbed hairstyles usually associated with the 1920s, Nellie’s long frizzy mane stands out as Robbie wields it almost like another appendage.The hairstylist Jaime Leigh McIntosh was terrified. “I will be honest, it was freaking me out,” she said in a recent interview via video. “I was just like, I’m going to be stoned in the village square. My fellow hair stylists are going to be like, ‘That’s not period correct.’”But McIntosh and the film’s writer-director, Damien Chazelle, also made sure that as anomalous and modern as Nellie’s hair might seem for the 1920s, there was historical precedent for it. What results is a look that evokes both Clara Bow and Janis Joplin with a bit of the Bible’s Samson thrown in. “I wanted it to be like someone just took her from the woods,” Chazelle said.The wild Nellie symbolizes the ethos of the sprawling movie, which takes the classic narrative of a starry-eyed ingénue and adds a layer of excess and scatological humor. Chazelle was intent on creating a portrait of the 1920s that didn’t look like the one audiences knew from, say, “Great Gatsby” adaptations. “He was just like, ‘There’s got to be another ’20s out there,’” McIntosh recalled. “‘We just keep kind of regurgitating the same looks and the same fashion, and there must have been other things happening.’”In the months before shooting began, she and Chazelle sent reference photos back and forth. He gave her a list of films and documentaries to watch, but the production team was also on a hunt for images of people not filtered through a movie lens. She and the makeup artist Heba Thorisdottir leafed through the book “Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots” for examples of what unvarnished people of the era might look like. Chazelle in particular was drawn to images from portrait studios. “Like Man Ray portraits, but less famous than that,” he said.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.“There’s only so much of what you would call documentary photography, candid camera stuff, but there’s a lot of really out-there, wild, transgressive studio photography that wound up inspiring a lot of the costumes, too, where people would put on crazy, crazy stuff that even the pre-Code movies of the time would never allow you to put on,” Chazelle said, referring to the Hays Code, which imposed morality restrictions on film starting in the 1930s. It was not just the hairstyles that caught his eye, he added, but also the “risqué-ness that was accepted in the wardrobe both of men and women at the time.”Anything that bucked conventional wisdom about the time sparked inspiration. McIntosh cited footage she found of women at a long hair competition and an image of Miss Philadelphia 1924, her hair a mess of frizz around her face before falling into long ringlets. Chazelle looked to the silent film star Clara Bow — “Margot and I both loved just how bird’s nest-y Clara Bow’s hair could get,” he said — but also the less well known Lili Damita, who sometimes appeared with a big curly mop. “I just kept coming back to photos I would find of women of the time with long hair, with wild long hair,” Chazelle said. “I just couldn’t get over those photos because of how un-1920s they felt. They felt so counter to expectations.”As Chazelle and McIntosh found — and as Rachael Gibson, who bills herself as the Hair Historian — confirmed, it was a misconception to think that all women in the 1920s wore their hair short. “We just kind of think, ‘Oh everyone had this hair,’” Gibson said. “But that’s not the reality.”Still, the images Gibson has seen of Nellie struck her as incongruous. (At the time of the interview, she had not yet seen the movie.) “It’s not superlong and it’s kind of got this natural wave to it, and it’s really unlike anything else that we associate with that era,” she said.That too was the point. One of the words Chazelle kept using, McIntosh said, was “timeless.” As he identified Nellie’s historical counterparts, Chazelle also kept in mind “spirits” he wanted her to evoke. Those included the musicians Joplin and Courtney Love and the actresses Jean Harlow and Julie Christie. Chazelle felt Nellie needed to “always have a foot in a different era as though she sort of came from the future,” and used ’80s punk culture as a reference, too.To determine the specific length and style, McIntosh and Chazelle went through multiple rounds of tests, putting Robbie in various wigs to see not just how they looked but eventually how they moved as she walked and danced. “I never expected it to be as complicated as it wound up being,” Chazelle said. “We locked it down right in the nick of time.”Once they settled on her long locks, Robert Pickens built a wig that could both withstand Nellie’s thrashing and convey the “grittiness” of the era. Without air conditioning, Pickens said, “people are sweating. To communicate all that through hair we went with a really fine texture.”Going into filming, McIntosh was still nervous. It wasn’t until she saw Robbie shoot the opening dance number that she suddenly realized, “‘It all makes complete sense. This is genius.’ It took me a while. I was a little stubborn but I got there.”Later in the film, Nellie’s hair is cut into a more recognizably period finger-wave bob as she tries to rehabilitate her flailing career by fitting in with high society. It looks awkward. Her power has been sapped from her, almost like Samson’s when his hair was cut.“I was just like, ‘Oh, my God, what have we done to her?’” McIntosh said. “Which is so funny because normally you’d be like, ‘Oh, wow, look at this beautiful finger wave,’ but because it was on Nellie it was so wrong.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Terra Femme’ Review: How Women Have Seen the World

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      An assemblage of travelogues shot by women from the 1920s through the 1950s, this experimental essay film can be seen with either live or prerecorded narration.Blurring the line between experimental essay film and performance piece, Courtney Stephens’s “Terra Femme” can be seen in two versions. Most screenings will have regular voice-over, but at the Thursday screening and at one of the screenings on Sunday, Stephens will deliver the narration live, in the spirit of how some of the material in the movie was originally screened.“Terra Femme” compiles amateur travelogues shot largely by women from the 1920s through the 1950s. The footage filmed by Kate and Arthur Tode, a couple who circumnavigated the globe, for example, was shown at cinema clubs in the 1930s and 1940s, and as with Stephens’s presentation, the films would be narrated while they unspooled.Although the two versions are said to be similar, the live edition — the one I saw at a press screening — conceivably adds something extra, because “Terra Femme” is partly about Stephens’s own relationship to the material. At one point, she discusses trying to recreate certain shots from India and not quite framing them correctly.Stephens asks whether these travelogues might reveal that women, who at the time had few opportunities to direct movies professionally, see the world differently. She considers the lives of the camerawomen, like Annette Dixon, of Philadelphia, whose films were archived under her husband’s name; Adelaide Pearson, who captured what may have been the first color cinematic footage of Gandhi; and Armeta Hearst, who filmed in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Seattle in the 1950s. The first reel of Hearst’s footage was accidentally scanned backward, making it look as though subjects who were exiting their homes were instead being absorbed back into them, inescapably.“Terra Femme” addresses many more issues: changing domestic roles in the 20th century, self-consciousness in amateur filmmaking, women’s potential access to historic moments and even — obliquely — climate change. Stephens’s ideas and presentation make for a dense, continually absorbing hour.Terra FemmeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 2 minutes. In theaters. More