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      Review: ‘Thoughts of a Colored Man’ Preaches to the Choir

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      Keenan Scott II’s play, incorporating slam poetry, prose and songs, aspires to be a lyrical reckoning with Black life in America.Seven Black men step onto the stage in the opening of Keenan Scott II’s “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” Over the course of the play, each will reveal a personality and history, but not a name, though later they will introduce themselves as Love, Happiness, Wisdom, Lust, Passion, Depression and Anger. Wearing different combinations of black, gray and red, they stand staring at a hulking billboard that reads “COLORED” in declarative black caps.One of them then asks the question that begins the play: “Who is the Colored Man?”It’s a question that Scott’s Broadway debut, which opened on Wednesday night at the John Golden Theater, doesn’t quite know how to answer. Incorporating slam poetry, prose and songs performed by its cast of seven, “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which first premiered in 2019 at Syracuse Stage in a co-production with Baltimore Center Stage, aspires to be a lyrical reckoning with Black life in America but only delivers a gussied-up string of straw-man lessons.Set in present-day Brooklyn, amid the many symbols of gentrification (Citi Bike stations, Whole Foods and a Paris Baguette), “Thoughts” employs vignettes to check in with various characters, who are often grouped together. Though the show, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, only runs for about 100 minutes, it takes us to a bus stop, a basketball court, a barbershop, a hospital and other locations, in a series of 18 snappy scenes.The characters, ranging in age from late teens to mid-60s, have specific themes to illustrate: the elder Wisdom (Esau Pritchett) speaks about respect, history and ancestry; Anger (Tristan Mack Wilds) vents about the trappings of consumerism and the objectification of Black athletes; and Happiness (Bryan Terrell Clark) challenges notions about Black struggle and class.But the question remains: “Who is the Colored Man?”The framing of these characters as concepts seems to imply a larger metaphor about Blackness that never comes to fruition. Perhaps we’re meant to deduce that these men taken together make up an entire Black man, with all of his dimensions. Yet Scott’s script teeters between presenting fully drawn characters and firm personifications, ultimately failing at either.From left, Luke James (seated), Esau Pritchett, Da’Vinchi, Dyllón Burnside, Tristan Mack Wilds and Forrest McClendon in Keenan Scott II’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Thoughts” may be inspired by Ntozake Shange’s renowned choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” in which seven unnamed women alternate among songs, dances, monologues and choral poems. It has a narrative continuity that Shange’s doesn’t, though to what end is unclear. So Passion (Luke James) talks Lust (Da’Vinchi) down after a barbershop argument, and Happiness has an awkward confrontation with Depression (Forrest McClendon) in a grocery store. The minute insights are clear, about class and masculinity. More broadly, though, what does “Thoughts” ultimately contribute to this long conversation about Blackness in America?The play sits at the intersection of different avenues of Black life, from the bright retail worker who had to forgo a full scholarship to M.I.T. to the gay gentrifier who was raised in the upper middle class. Despite being set in the present, the play feels removed from time; Scott doesn’t touch the Black Lives Matter protests or the institutional systems that hold Black men back. There are barely any mentions of how whiteness shapes the Black experience in America.And Black women are almost entirely forgotten (except as victims, in one grossly sensationalized monologue by Lust, or objects of desire). The characters’ poems, which are awkwardly incorporated into scenes of regular dialogue about how to pick up women or which Jordans are the best, allow the men to describe and emote but not to advance any message. It all remains at surface level.How does one design a stage for a show that wants to claim representations of Blackness without knowing what to say about it? Robert Brill’s stage design, low black scaffolding and that “COLORED” billboard, recalls Glenn Ligon’s 1990 “Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background),” which was in turn inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s famous quote. It doesn’t help with the show’s overdone approach. Even Ryan O’Gara’s lighting, which at one point dresses the whole theater in a stunning constellation of speckled lights, cannot elevate the language.Dyllón Burnside has the toughest job. As Love, his spoken-word poetry is almost nonsensical. At one point, he says: “She was like the perfect use of assonance in just the right amount of lines. Her pupils looked lost, and I wanted to be the teacher that teaches them to love what they see.”Broadnax’s direction exacerbates these performances of the poems, which abruptly occur as other characters are frozen. They move with the stilted stage cadence of a slam poem, with awkward breaks, including some after verbs and prepositions, just to hammer home the wordplay and rhyme.Burnside as Love in the play, which has lighting design by Ryan O’Gara.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNot everyone in the cast jives with this rhythm; Pritchett’s full-toned bass stumbles through the tempo. Though James’s Passion gets shortchanged with the character’s back story, he at least gets his own music; he shows off his stellar voice, even if for only a few bars scattered throughout the production.Clark is funny as Happiness, tossing side glances, raised eyebrows and witty asides to the audience, providing some much-needed representation of a queer Black character, despite dipping from the well of gay clichés. Da’Vinchi, likewise, has his comic moments as a believably blunt and horny young man. When addressing Black toxic masculinity, primarily through Da’Vinchi’s Lust, the play is mostly inoffensive, if unremarkable.I wish I could tell you that one character isn’t killed by the end. And yet, this is another way that “Thoughts” so obviously tries to convey the reality that so many of us already know to be true. In fact, some of us have lived it. We don’t need a random act of violence onstage to tell us that every day Black men are endangered in our society. We need nuanced characters, action and complex poetry and prose to tell our stories.Thoughts of a Colored ManThrough March 20 at the John Golden Theater, Manhattan; thoughtsofacoloredman.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Sonia Sanchez Wins the Gish Prize

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      The poet, educator and activist will receive a cash award of about $250,000. The prize is for an artist who “has pushed the boundaries of an art form” and “contributed to social change.”The poet and activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement, has been awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the prize trust said on Thursday.The honor, which carries a cash award of about $250,000, is awarded to an artist who “has pushed the boundaries of an art form, contributed to social change and paved the way for the next generation.”Sanchez, the author of more than 20 books, is known for melding musical formats like the blues with traditional poetic forms like the haiku and tanka, using American Black speech patterns and experimenting with punctuation and spelling.Her work champions Black culture, civil rights, feminism and peace.“When we come out of the pandemic, it’s so important that we don’t insist that we go back to the way things were,” Sanchez said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “We’ve got to strive for beauty, which is something I’ve tried to do in my work.”This year, the five-member selection committee, led by Zeyba Rahman, the senior program officer of the Building Bridges program of the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, chose Sanchez unanimously out of 50 finalists from various artistic disciplines.Rahman said in a statement that the award recognizes Sanchez’s “extraordinary literary gift and her lifelong commitment to speaking up for social justice.” On Nov. 11, Sanchez will reprise her role in Christian McBride’s “The Movement Revisited,” in which she will recite the words of Rosa Parks, at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. More

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      A Pianist Finds Inspiration to Write Again

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      Evgeny Kissin, who has made a career of performing, was surprised to find himself drawn once more to composing.For the pianist Evgeny Kissin, it was a love story that provided the inspiration to write his own music again. After being reunited with a childhood friend — now his wife — he woke up in the middle of the night and jotted down a “Meditation” that would become the first of his Four Piano Pieces Op. 1.Mr. Kissin is best known as a soloist who began his career as a child prodigy. By age 12 he had performed both Chopin concertos in his native Russia and by 19 he had made headlines with the Berlin Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic.He remains one of today’s most highly regarded pianists for the intensity and sensitivity of his interpretations. He also began writing music as a child, as soon as he had learned notation, but stopped at about age 14, not resuming until just shy of a decade ago.As he approaches his 50th birthday in October, Mr. Kissin maintains an insatiable intellectual curiosity. His solo recital Saturday at the Salzburg Festival features works by Chopin, Gershwin, Alban Berg and Tichon N. Chrennikow (as a child, Mr. Kissin performed works, including ones he had written himself, for this Russian composer).The fall brings a busy concert schedule, in cities as varied as Jerusalem, Seoul and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. At the same time, he is steadily growing his catalog, most recently with “Thanatopsis,” a setting of the William Cullen Bryant poem, for female voice and piano.“The very fact that I started composing again came to me as a surprise,” he admitted in a video call earlier this month from his home in Prague, citing a “hidden potential” that was awakened by his romance with that childhood friend, Karina Arzumanova, whom he married in 2017.In his 2017 autobiography “Memoirs and Reflections,” Mr. Kissin wrote that music “stopped sounding in my head” as his concert career gained momentum. Since 2012, ideas have been flowing back, and he continues in a noncompetitive manner: “Let us see what comes of it,” he wrote, “and how audiences will respond to my music.”Mr. Kissin’s music displays a range of extreme emotions.Milan Bures for The New York TimesThe works that have been published so far reveal the sharp intellect and natural artistry that also characterize his performances. The last of the Four Piano Pieces, the Toccata, revolves around a jazzy, Gershwin-like motif, at first distorted by harsh dissonance, while running across the keyboard with virtuosic arpeggiated textures.His one-movement cello sonata, meanwhile, is lyrical and introspective, with a theme that sounds as if it is based on a 12-tone system but in fact is derived from only eight notes.Mr. Kissin has received the support of Arvo Part, one of the most widely performed contemporary composers, and leading musicians. His String Quartet was recorded by the Kopelman Quartet in 2016, and the cello piece has been championed by the international soloists Steven Isserlis, David Geringas and Renaud Capuçon.In a phone interview from London, Mr. Isserlis noted the range of styles that Mr. Kissin has managed to express in only a handful of works. “He’s such an intense person, and musician,” he said. “He has a very serious view of the world, although he’s not without humor.”Mr. Isserlis placed the “extreme emotions” of Mr. Kissin’s music in a line of pianist-composers ranging from Schuman to Rachmaninoff but also noted a specifically Russian-Jewish tradition. “There’s a darkness,” he said. “But there’s also a love of beauty. It has its roots in the past, like all good music.”Mr. Kissin, who in 2013 became an Israeli citizen, qualified any strict categorization by saying that he identifies with “a small minority of the Russian population, namely, the liberal Russian intelligentsia — a significant part of which consists of Jews like me.”For many years he has recited Yiddish poetry onstage and is himself a poet and writer, with work published in the Yiddish edition of The Forward and in a 2019 book, “A Yiddisher Sheygets.”Mr. Kissin at his home in Prague.Milan Bures for The New York TimesThe pianist is passionate about raising awareness toward the historic and aesthetic value of Yiddish, a Germanic language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews since the ninth century.Yiddish, Mr. Kissin writes in his memoir, belongs “to the highest achievements of world culture.” He notes its “rich and expressive” quality and an “inner strength” that “is capable of conveying the subtlest thoughts and feelings.”He and the writer and editor Boris Sandler joined forces for the Yiddish-language musical “The Bird Alef From the Old Gramophone,” which was performed two years ago in Birobidzhan, the center of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Eastern Russia. Although Jews account for less than 2 percent of the region’s population, Yiddish is still the official language.The musical’s creators hope to have it staged in Moscow next summer to mark the 70th anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets, when 13 Jewish intellectuals — including Yiddish poets — were executed by firing squads under orders from Stalin.Mr. Kissin is also working on a vocal cycle for baritone and piano based on the work of the Russian poet Alexander Blok. Ideas for the work emerged as early as 1986, he said, but he began writing down the music only in recent years.Mr. Kissin again emphasized that “it’s a matter of inspiration. And of course also of time. I only compose sporadically because it requires blocks of concentration,” he said, “which my main occupation as concert pianist allows very seldom.”Asked what repertoire he would like to explore in coming years, he rattled off a list of solo and chamber work with encyclopedic precision: the solo works of Bach and Shostakovich, which he has never played in public; Brahms’s Third Violin Sonata, one of his “favorite pieces of music ever written,” which he has played only once; Haydn, Mozart, Ravel, Scriabin.But he will also return to Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, which he has not played since 1996, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2023. Also that year, he plans to take on the Piano Concerto of Rimsky-Korsakov.Despite his renewed activities as a composer, Mr. Kissin remains humble: “I would never dare to compose myself knowing that I would never be able to write something approaching the level of the great music already written.“Playing music,” he continued, “is how I can express myself best.” More

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      Beethoven Is More Intimate Than Ever in New Poems

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      Ruth Padel tells the great composer’s life story, more profoundly than most biographies, in “Beethoven Variations.”Though much is known about Beethoven, whole swaths of his life remain elusive. His deafness, for one thing. He started experiencing hearing loss before he was 30. But how extensive was the initial problem? How quickly did it worsen? It’s not clear.His most revealing words on the subject come in a letter he wrote (though never sent) to his brothers in 1802, while seeking isolation and resting his ears in Heiligenstadt, on the outskirts of Vienna. In the Heiligenstadt Testament, as it became known, his fear comes through poignantly. But what did it feel like to go deaf? What sensations did he experience? What did music sound like to him?The British poet Ruth Padel tries to fathom this mystery, and other long-mythologized strands of the composer’s life story, in “Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life,” recently published in the United States. Padel’s imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read.Padel’s imagery and imagination took our critic deeper into Beethoven than many biographies he had read.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesIn one of the first poems, “On Not Needing Other People,” Padel describes the 13-year-old Beethoven visiting the Breunings, a rich, cultured family that befriended him. Most books on the composer present this episode as an opportunity for the young Beethoven to enjoy some familial companionship — one of the sons became a lifelong friend — and develop career skills by teaching piano to some of the children.But Padel dwells on how different, how apart, Beethoven must have felt, even while savoring the family’s attention. The mother told her children to let their young visitor alone when he slipped into, as Padel puts it, “the solitude she calls raptus” and displayed his “surly way of shouldering people off,” his “fits of reverie, lost/in a re-tuning of the spheres.” As Padel perceives it, Beethoven early on drifted into states that prefigured how deafness would increasingly isolate him:This boy has no idea that before he’s thirtysome inflamed wet muddle of labyrinth and cochlea,thin as a cicada wing, will clog his earswith a whistling buzz, then glue them into silence.In “Moonlight Sonata,” Padel, in an imaginative leap, describes that famous piano work as music of loss — not just of love, but of hearing: “Bass clef/High treble only once/and in despair.” For Beethoven, she continues, this is the new “shocked calm of Is it true.” Is this “what it sounds like, going deaf?”In a poem about Beethoven’s five-month stay in Heiligenstadt, Padel recounts her own visit there — with views of the Danube canal and vineyards in bud — as she follows his steps into a cobbled yard: “God invents curious/torture for his favourites. He’s thirty-one./Fate has swung a wrecking ball.” Beethoven has walked into a place “of zero sum,” she writes, where “he must cast himself as victim or as hero.”Though he “cannot hear the driving rain,” he is sketching a funeral march — a symphony — taking him down a new path. In “Eroica” Padel arrestingly describes that path:You are havoc on the brink, a jackhammershattering the night and soaring past world-sorrow.Against everything that can happento you or anyone, you pitch experimentand the next new key, ever more remote.Most traditional biographers are reticent about guessing how Beethoven’s deafness affected his composing. Padel, though, suggests — daringly but compellingly — that Beethoven’s isolating deafness contributed to his greatness. “What we forget,” she writes, “makes us who we are” — perhaps for Beethoven that eventually included the actual sound of music. Describing what she felt as she examined the manuscript of the late Op. 131 String Quartet, Padel asks, “Does being deaf break the chains?”“Could he,” she writes, “have written this otherwise?”Padel knows her history. But a poet is free to inhabit her subject and elaborate on the record. And she describes Beethoven’s music vibrantly, as in her acute phrases on the sublime slow movement of the Op. 132 String Quartet: “Cloud iridescence”; “Wave-shadow like mourning ribbon”; “Quiet as a wreath of sleep/for anyone in sorrow.”A writer and teacher, Padel has also explored ancient Greek culture, the contemporary issues of refugees and homelessness, and science. (Darwin was her great-great-grandfather, and her book “Darwin: A Life in Poems” was published in 2009.) The Beethoven poems are informed by her lifelong immersion in music, starting from her youth, when her father, a psychoanalyst and cellist, conscripted her into a family ensemble; she played the viola.This Beethoven book is not her first poetic biography. “Darwin: A Life in Poems,” about her great-great-grandfather, was published in 2009.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesThe book originated through her work over the past decade with the Endellion String Quartet, to whom it is dedicated. Padel first worked with the Endellion on performances of pieces by Haydn and Schubert, in which she wrote poems and read them between the movements. Asked to collaborate on a Beethoven program that included the Op. 131 Quartet, she wrote seven poems to be interspersed between that visionary work’s seven movements. As the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, in 2020, approached, she went further and wrote what is, in effect, a poetic biography.Naturally, some of the poems will speak more immediately to those with knowledge of the events and characters of Beethoven’s life. So Padel helpfully includes “Life-Notes: A Coda,” some 30 pages of short biographical bits linked to the four sections of poems (49 in all). Even these entries have poetic elegance. Explaining that Beethoven’s alcoholic, abusive father put his young son to work playing viola, she explains why the instrument appealed to her, and may have suited Beethoven: “It does not have the brilliance of the violin or power of the cello, but when playing it you hear everything going on around you, all the relationships and harmonies, from inside. It is a writer’s instrument, inward and between.”Padel’s viola. Beethoven also played that instrument, which Padel describes as “a writer’s instrument, inward and between.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesVisiting the house in Bonn, Germany, in which Beethoven was born, Padel imagines “your mother/carrying the shopping,” “your father staggering home drunk/up these stairs” to “wake you in the middle of the night.” In “Meeting Mozart,” she describes the 16-year-old Beethoven after a three-week winter journey to Vienna, “burning” to be taught by the master.Many biographers struggle to deal with this meeting between two of the titans of music history. Padel puts herself in the mind of the young Beethoven, to whom Mozart “looks like a fat little bird./Bug eyes, fidgety,/tapping his toes.” Beethoven’s performance of a Mozart sonata fails to impress its composer, who suddenly urges Beethoven to improvise.“And at last he’s caught,” Padel writes. It’s a thrilling moment in her telling.Then the news comes that his adored mother is gravely ill and Beethoven is “snatched away”:She waits till you returnto drown in the coughed-up dregsof her own lungs.There are poems about Beethoven’s hapless infatuations for unattainable women from the upper ranks of Viennese society; about his sexual activities (“Brothels? Probably. Everyone did.”); and, especially, about his long, contorted legal battle to gain custody of his young nephew Karl from his widowed sister-in-law. His obsession with being a substitute father causes a long dry spell in his composing:You’re not working. You’re a mountain kingwaylaid in your own black corridors.The final poem, “Musica Humana,” begins with a description of a postmortem examination of Beethoven’s inner ears, the auditory canal “covered in glutinous scales/shining throughout the autopsy.” Other biographies report on this, but not with such gruesomely poetic imagery. And “how he died,” Padel marvels, “lifting his fist/as if it held a bird he would release into the storm.”I thought back to an early poem about Beethoven’s bullying father:your response to challenge ever after will be attack.You will need no one. Only the relationshipof sound and key. You improvise. More

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      She’s Marianne Faithfull, Damn It. And She’s (Thankfully) Still Here.

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      The British musician has had several brushes with death in her 74 years. But Covid-19 and its long-haul symptoms didn’t derail her latest project: a spoken-word tribute to the Romantic poets.Several times in her 74 years of life, Marianne Faithfull has boomeranged from the brink of death.First there was the summer of 1969, when she overdosed on Tuinal sleeping pills in the Sydney hotel room she was sharing with her then-boyfriend, Mick Jagger; as she slipped under, she had a long conversation with his recently deceased bandmate, Brian Jones, who had drowned in a swimming pool about a week prior. At the end of their spirited talk, Jones beckoned her to hop off a cliff and join him in the beyond. Faithfull declined, and woke up from a six-day coma.That was before she became addicted to heroin in the early 1970s: “At that point I entered one of the outer levels of hell,” she writes in her 1994 autobiography “Faithfull.” It took more than a decade to finally get clean. Since then she’s survived breast cancer, hepatitis C and an infection resulting from a broken hip. But, as Faithfull told me on the phone from her London home one afternoon in February, her recent bout with Covid-19 and its lingering long-term aftereffects has been the hardest battle she’s fought in her entire life.“You don’t want to get this, darling,” she said. “Really.”She said it, of course, in That Voice, coated with ash but flickering with lively defiance underneath. As it’s matured — cracked and ripened like a well-journeyed face — Faithfull’s voice has come to possess a transfixing magic. It’s a voice that sounds like it has come back from somewhere, and found a way to collapse present and past. She can find the Weimar Berlin decadence in Dylan, or breathe William Blake’s macabre into a Metallica song.Right before she contracted the virus in March 2020, Faithfull was working on an album she’d dreamed of making for more than half a century: “She Walks in Beauty,” due April 30, a spoken-word tribute to the Romantic poets, who had first inflamed her imagination as a teenager. In the mid-1960s, the demands of Faithfull’s burgeoning pop career pulled her out of her beloved Mrs. Simpson’s English literature course, “but I went on reading the books,” Faithfull said. And through the ups and downs of her life, those poems stayed with her like well-worn talismans: “If you’ve ever read ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ ‘The Lady of Shalott’ — you’re not going to forget it, are you?”Faithfull had recorded recitations of seven Romantic poems, from Byron (“She Walks in Beauty”), Shelley (“Ozymandias”) and Keats (“Ode to a Nightingale”). After she was hospitalized with Covid-19 and fell into a coma, her manager sent the recordings to Faithfull’s friend and frequent collaborator Warren Ellis, to see if he would compose music to accompany them. Neither was sure Faithfull would live to hear the finished product.Ellis was told, “‘It’s not looking good,’” he recalled, on a video call from his Paris home. “‘This might be it.’”But — ever the Lady Lazarus — Faithfull pulled through. Only once she began to recover did her son, Nicholas, tell her what they’d written on the chart at the foot of her bed: “Palliative care only.”“They thought I was going to croak!” Faithfull said, likely for not the first time in her life.“But,” she added with a wizened chuckle, “I didn’t.”Faithfull said she wanted to attend Oxford and immerse herself in literature. But she was discovered by the music manager Andrew Loog Oldham instead.John Pratt/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMARIANNE’S FATHER, Glynn Faithfull — yes, that improbably perfect surname is real — was a British spy in World War II, and the son of a sexologist who invented something called “the Frigidity Machine.” Her mother, just as improbably, was the Austrian Baroness Eva von Sacher-Masoch — the great-niece of the man who wrote the sensationally scandalous novella “Venus in Furs” and from whose name we are blessed with the word masochism. Put all those things together and you get their only child, born a year after the end of the war.Her parents split when she was 6, and at 7, her mother sent her to boarding school at a Reading convent. (“Glynn begged her not to,” she writes in “Faithfull.” “I remember him saying, ‘This will give her a problem with sex for the rest of her life.’”) When she visited her father, who was living and teaching in a commune, she got a glimpse of the polar opposite end of the spectrum. At 18, she married the artist John Dunbar and gave birth to Nicholas shortly after.“I wanted to go to Oxford and read English literature, philosophy, and comparative religion. That was my plan,” she said. “Anyway, it didn’t happen. I went to a party and got discovered by bloody old Andrew Loog Oldham.”Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ first manager, hadn’t heard Faithfull sing a note; he just took a long look at her and decided this striking young blonde was destined to be a pop star. He had Mick Jagger and Keith Richards write a song for her, the melancholy ballad “As Tears Go By.” It was, in her words, “a commercial fantasy” that pushed “all the right buttons.”Which is to say she didn’t take this accidental pop career of hers that seriously, not at first. On her debut tour, she always seemed to have her nose buried in a book, “poring over my reading list for English literature as if I were going back to school.”But that wasn’t happening. In swinging, psychedelic London, Faithfull was a beautiful girl suddenly in the eye of a cultural hurricane. She met everybody. She left her husband and child behind, dabbling in everything the men did without apology. She and Richards dropped acid and went looking for the Holy Grail. She wrote in her autobiography that Bob Dylan tried to seduce her by playing her his latest album, “Bringing It All Back Home,” and explaining in detail what each track meant. (It didn’t work. “I just found him so … daunting,” she wrote. “As if some god had come down from Olympus and started to come onto me.”)Jagger had more luck, and for a few seemingly glamorous years they were a generational It Couple. But there were tensions from the start, and Faithfull wasn’t sure she was cut out for the wifely muse role that, even in such bohemian circles, she was expected to play. Then there was the Redlands drug bust.Tipped off by a sanctimonious British tabloid in February 1967, the police raided Richards’s Sussex home during a small party, and found a modest amount of drugs. Faithfull had just taken a bath when the cops arrived, and the only clothes she brought were dirty, so without thinking too much about it she flung a rug over herself.Jagger and Richards’s subsequent drug trial is now generally seen as a pivot in mainstream acceptance of certain countercultural behaviors. But Faithfull bore the brunt of the backlash. One headline blared in all caps: Naked Girl at Stones Party. “I was slandered as the wanton woman in the fur rug,” Faithfull wrote, “while Mick was the noble rock star on trial.” It certainly wouldn’t be the last rage-inducing double standard she’d endure. “If you’ve ever read ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ ‘The Lady of Shallot’ — you’re not going to forget it, are you?” Faithfull said.Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesA FEW YEARS ago, over a Christmas dinner, Faithfull gave Ellis’s teenage children a long, anecdote-filled talk about why they should stay away from drugs. She spoke about the infamy at Redlands as though it was something they would be familiar with.“My kids had no idea what she was talking about,” Ellis said. “But when I drove her home, my son just looked at me and goes, ‘[Expletive], she’s awesome.’”Ellis — who Faithfull affectionately described to me as “a sexy old thing” — conducted his interview from a low-lit, brick-walled room that looked like it may or may not be a dungeon. This is where he was holed up for long hours last spring, listening to the voice of his dear friend, who may or may not have been dying, read him Romantic poetry.He said he found the poems “so incredibly beautiful and uplifting, a total balm for all this turmoil and sadness that was going on in the world.” This was new: When he read them as a schoolboy in Melbourne, Ellis had found the Romantics mostly “impenetrable.” But listening to a masterful interpreter like Faithfull intone them, he said, “suddenly they felt ageless. They felt freed of the page. Because of this authority and absolute belief in them. She believes what she’s reading.”In composing the tracks, Ellis wanted to shy away from the expected “lutes and harpsichords” approach. Instead he studied some of the records he thought most successfully blended spoken-word and music, like Gil Scott-Heron’s “I’m New Here,” Sir John Betjeman’s “Late-Flowering Love” and Lou Reed and Metallica’s “Lulu.” Like Faithfull’s fiery readings, Ellis’s meditative compositions — featuring contributions from Nick Cave and Brian Eno — accentuate the poets’ enduring modernity. (The Romantics might not have yet lived to see rock ’n’ roll, but they certainly knew a thing or two about sex and drugs.)Before Ellis was finished, he got the news that Faithfull had woken up from her coma, left the hospital — and, in time, recorded four more poems. “She survived Covid, came out, and recorded ‘Lady of Shallot,’” Ellis said shaking his head, referring to the 12-minute Tennyson epic. “She’s just the best, Marianne.”The remarkable — and even fittingly spooky — thing about the record is that you cannot tell which poems Faithfull recorded before or after her brush with death. Perhaps only Faithfull herself can hear the difference. “I was quite fragile, but I didn’t start to do it until I was better,” she said. “And I liked it very much, because I sound more vulnerable — which is kind of nice, for the Romantics.”Faithfull has fashioned sticking around into a prolonged show of defiance — a radical act, for a woman. She did not come into her own musically until her mid-30s, with the release of her punky, scorched-earth 1979 masterpiece “Broken English.” In the subsequent decades, her artistry has only deepened, and she has gradually, grudgingly earned her respect (“I’m not just seen as a chick and a sexy piece anymore — though I should think not, I’m 74!”). Her anger about the industry and the media subsided a great deal in the time between her 1994 and 2007 memoirs. What happened?“Just time, you know. From everything I know about life in general — which is probably not much — is that you have to get over those things, or they eat you up,” she said. “And I’m not going to let that happen. So I let it go. I don’t hold resentment anymore about the press.” She laughed, genially. “But of course I don’t let them near me, really!”She has a lighter attitude, but Faithfull has not made it out of her latest battle without some lingering scars. She lost her dear friend and collaborator Hal Willner to the virus. And after initially feeling better, a few months ago she started feeling worse. She has since been experiencing the stubborn symptoms of long-haul Covid, which for her include fatigue, memory fog and lung problems.She has been working diligently on her breathing; a close friend comes by weekly with a guitar to lead her in singing practice — her own version of the opera therapy that has shown promising results in long Covid patients. She’s been spending quality time with her son and grandson, reading (Miles Davis’s autobiography, among other things), and counting the days until she can once again go to the movies, the opera, the ballet. When she first got out of the hospital — après Covid, as she likes to call it — it seemed like Faithfull may never sing again. Now, she is looking forward to writing new songs, and envisioning what a return to the stage might look like.“I’m focusing on getting better, really better — and I’m beginning to,” she said. “I’ll certainly never be able to work as hard as I was, and long tours are not going to be possible. But I do hope to do maybe five shows. Not very long — 40 minutes perhaps.” Still, she admitted, “It’s a long way away.”Ellis said, “If anyone can do it, it’s Marianne, because she just doesn’t give up. She constantly surprises you.”Sometimes she even surprises herself. Earlier in our conversation, Faithfull had let me know, in her admirably no-nonsense way, that she hadn’t called me up to chat for fun, but because she had an album to promote. But she ultimately admitted to finding it vivifying to talk about her life, her art, her past and future. “It’s good for me to remember who I really am, not just an old sick person,” she said.“Of course,” I replied. “You’re Marianne Faithfull, damn it!”She mulled it over for a long moment. “It’s true, I am.” Then, with an unexpected surge of strength, like a hammer’s blow, she added, “Damn it.” More

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      in Music

      Poem: Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 8, RV 315 ‘L’estate’: I. Allegro mà non molto

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      The first five times I read this poem, I never imagined that the title referred to actual music. I thought, Nah, this is just avant-garde poetry; there isn’t a Concerto No. 2 in G Minor. I wasn’t imagining a funky violin in the background and francine harris doing her Vivaldi, dropping a riff on a sonnet to explicate how the violin turns trap and some empty street in Venice, Calif., or Venice, Fla., or Venice, Ill., or Venice, La., gets funky. This is theme music for the end of the pandemic, and poetry to explain it all. Selected by Reginald Dwyane BettsConcerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 8, RV 315 “L’estate”: I. Allegro mà non moltoBy francine j. harris[Antonio Vivaldi, I Solisti Aquilani, Daniele Orlando]Underneath generators, if you tune it out, it becomesits own vow of subaural buzz. Something is generating.Something lit and moving low to the ground. A hush in festival,night and how the bus rows the street over stoplights. Picking upspeed, it rounds nothing. No men out tonight. No crickets evenif winter is suffering a heat on all the snow melted and slickice quickly black has slipped off into greasy gutters and dried thoughat midnight, the orchestra loses it. Breaks out of its trap shell. its loungedoors. its shivering cymbals, and howls a lost dog into the steady dropnight where beneath the window the squash leaves are still fat andyellowing a sign of dormant or disaster why night baptizes everyutterance, quickly black and restless children are always out nowof earshot, the red priest of Venice is bowing so lightly you haveto listen at full volume and when the men bellow suddenly intohalf empty streets at night, it wakes everyone. everyone at once.Illustration by R.O. BlechmanReginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. He created the Million Book Project, an initiative to curate microlibraries and install them in prisons across the country. His latest collection of poetry, “Felon,” explores the post-incarceration experience. In 2019, he won a National Magazine Award in Essays and Criticism for his article in The Times Magazine about his journey from teenage carjacker to aspiring lawyer. francine j. harris is the author of the poetry collection “Here is the Sweet Hand,” (2020) from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Houston. More

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      in Television

      Craig muMs Grant, Actor and Slam Poet, Dies at 52

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      He was a star of the HBO series “Oz” under the name muMs, which he also used on the poetry circuit both before and after finding success on television.Craig muMs Grant’s biggest success as an actor was the role of Poet on the HBO prison drama “Oz,” but fans of that series were accustomed to seeing him credited simply as muMs. It was a name he adopted as a young man when he was exploring rap and slam poetry, influences that he said changed his life.“Before hip-hop,” as he put it in “A Sucker Emcee,” an autobiographical play he performed in 2014, “I couldn’t speak.”Mr. Grant compiled a respectable career as an actor. He appeared on “Oz” throughout its six-season run, which began in 1997, and turned up in spot roles on series including “Hack,” “Boston Legal” and “Law & Order” and its spinoffs, and in movies like Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” (2000). But before his “Oz” breakthrough he was a familiar presence on the slam poetry circuit in New York and beyond; he was in the 1998 documentary “SlamNation” as part of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s slam team.He returned to his poetry/rap roots often, even after “Oz” gave him a measure of fame — appearing onstage with the Labyrinth Theater Company in New York, where he was a member of the ensemble, and performing at colleges and small theaters all over the country.Mr. Grant, third from left, in an episode of the HBO series “Oz” in 1997. He played Poet, a drug addict who writes verses while incarcerated.HBO“I love words,” he told The Indianapolis Star in 2001. “Anybody ever wanted to buy me anything for Christmas or my birthday, they can buy me a dictionary. The bigger, the better.”Mr. Grant died on Wednesday in Wilmington, N.C., where he was filming the Starz series “Hightown,” in which he had a recurring role. He was 52.His manager, Sekka Scher, said the cause was complications of diabetes.Craig O’Neil Grant was born on Dec. 18, 1968, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a locksmith and carpenter at Montefiore Hospital, and his mother, Theresa (Maxwell) Grant, was a teacher.Mr. Grant graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx and was taking college courses in Virginia when, he said, he started exploring writing, seeking to infuse poetry with the energy of the rap music he enjoyed.“The problem with poetry is, a lot of the audience sometimes has a short attention span,” he told the Indianapolis paper years later. “So poetry has to have rhythm to capture people who can’t listen for so long. They’ll just close their eyes and ride the rhythm of your voice.”He took the name “muMs” when he was around 20. He was in a rap group, he told The Philadelphia Daily News in 2003, and still had a bit of a youthful lisp, so a friend suggested he call himself “Mumbles.”“I thought about that for a week and shortened it to muMs,” he said, and then he turned that into an acronym for “manipulator under Manipulation shhhhhhh!” That phrase, he told the Indianapolis paper, symbolized the notion that “as great as I want to become or as great as I think I am, I can always go to the edge of the ocean, stand there and realize I’m nothing in comparison to the universe.”Back in New York, he didn’t succeed as a rapper. But he began performing spoken-word poetry at places like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which is where someone involved in developing “Oz” saw him and recommended that Tom Fontana, the show’s creator, give him a look. Mr. Grant auditioned by performing one of his poems, and he was cast as Poet, a drug addict who writes verses while incarcerated.Mr. Grant, who lived in the Bronx, joined Labyrinth in 2006 and appeared in various roles in its productions. He also began writing plays, including “A Sucker Emcee,” in which he told his life story largely in rhymed couplets while a D.J. working turntables provided a soundtrack.Mr. Grant is survived by his partner, Jennie West, and a brother, Winston Maxwell.In 2003 Mr. Grant released a spoken-word album called “Strange Fruit,” taking the title from the song about lynchings famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.“Today, strange fruit means we’re the product of everything Black people have been through in this country — Middle Passage, Jim Crow, segregation,” he told The Baltimore Sun in 2004. “It’s a new way of looking at it. The metaphor of strange fruit means life and birth for me, where it used to mean lynching and death. Blacks have been doing that for years, taking the bad and flipping it, making the best of a bad situation.” More

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      in Theater

      New York Theaters Are Dark, but These Windows Light Up With Art

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      The Irish Repertory Theater is streaming poetry readings, and Playwrights Horizons and St. Ann’s Warehouse are showcasing art dealing with race and injustice.Like many cultural organizations, the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan has streamed pandemic programming on its website.But a few days ago, the theater added a new sort of broadcast to its repertoire, setting up two 60-inch screens in windows that face the sidewalk, installing speakers high up on the building facade and airing a collection of films that show people reading poems in Ireland, London and New York.On a recent morning, Ciaran O’Reilly, the Rep’s producing director, stood by the theater on West 22nd Street, gazing at the screens as they displayed Joseph Aldous, an actor in Britain, reading “An Advancement of Learning,” a narrative poem by Seamus Heaney describing a brief standoff with a rat along a river bank.“These are not dark windows,” O’Reilly said. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”In the past year, theaters and other performing arts institutions in New York have turned to creative means to bring works to the public, sometimes also injecting a bit of life into otherwise shuttered facades. Those arrangements continue, even as the State of New York has announced that arts venues can reopen in April at one-third capacity and some outdoor performances, like Shakespeare in the Park, are scheduled to resume.The panes of glass, though, have provided a safe space. Late last year, for instance, the artists Christopher Williams, Holly Bass and Raja Feather Kelly performed at different times in the lobby or in a smaller vestibule-like part of the building in Chelsea occupied by New York Live Arts. All were visible through glass to those outside.Three more performances by Kelly of “Hysteria,” in which he assumes the role of a pink-hued extraterrestrial and explores what Live Arts’ website calls “pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity,” are scheduled for April 8-10.The Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s photographs of sculptures are on display at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother street-level performance took place behind glass last December in Downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Ballet staged nine 20-minute shows of select dances from its “Nutcracker.”The ballet turned its studio into what its artistic director, Lynn Parkerson, called a “jewel box” theater; chose dances that kept masked ballerinas socially distanced; and used barricades on the sidewalk to limit audiences.“It was a way to bring some people back to something they love that they enjoyed that they might be forgetting about,” Parkerson said in an interview. “It did feel like a real performance.”She said that live performances were planned for April and would include ballet members in “Pas de Deux,” set to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Gavotte et Six Doubles,” with live music by the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.Pop-up concerts have been arranged by the Kaufman Music Center on the Upper West Side, in a storefront — the address is not given but is described on the center’s website as “not hard to find” — north of Columbus Circle.Those performances, running through late April, are announced at the storefront the same day, to limit crowd sizes and encourage social distancing. Participants have included the violinist Gil Shaham, the mezzo-soprano Chrystal E. Williams, the Gabrielle Stravelli Trio and JACK Quartet.St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn is displaying Julian Alexander and Khadijat Oseni’s “Supremacy Project,” public art that addresses the nature of injustice in American society.The word “supremacy” is superimposed on a photograph of police officers in riot gear, and there are images by Michael T. Boyd of Sandra Bland, Elijah McClain and Emmett Till.And at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown, the Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day is placing photographs of sculptures of human figures in display cases, encouraging viewers to reckon with definitions of beauty and race. Those displays are part of rotating public art series organized by the artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein and the set and costume designer David Zinn.The aim, Finkelstein said in January when the series was announced, was to display work that “makes constructive use of dormant facades to create a transient street museum” and to “remind the city of its buoyancy and originality.”O’Reilly, at the Irish Rep, said the theater heard last year from Amy Holmes, the executive director of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, who thought the theater might provide a good venue to air some of the short films the organization had commissioned to make poetry part of an immersive experience.The series being shown at the theater, called “Poetic Reflections: Words Upon the Window Pane,” comprises 21 short pieces by the Irish filmmaker Matthew Thompson.“These are not dark windows,” said Ciaran O’Reilly of the Irish Repertory Theater. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThey show contemporary poets reading their own works as well as poets and actors reading works by others, including William Butler Yeats and J.M. Synge, and were produced in collaboration with Poetry Ireland in Dublin, Druid Theater in Galway, the 92nd Street Y in New York and Poet in the City in London.“I think there is something special about encountering the arts in an unexpected way in the city, especially an art form like poetry,” Holmes said.The readers in the films include people who were born in Ireland, immigrants to Ireland, people who live in Britain and a few from the United States, like Denice Frohman, who was born and raised in New York City.Frohman was on the theater’s screens on Tuesday night, reading lines like “the beaches are gated & no one knows the names of the dead” from her poem “Puertopia,” when Erin Madorsky and Dorian Baker stopped to listen.Baker said he saw the films playing in the window as symbolizing a “revitalization of poetic energy.”Madorsky had regularly attended theatrical performances before the pandemic but now missed that connection, she said, and was gratified to happen upon a dramatic reading while walking home.She added that the sound of the verses being read stood in contrast to what she called the city’s “standard” backdrop of blaring horns, sirens and rumbling garbage trucks.“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “There’s something so soothing about her voice, it just pulled me in.” More