Quarantine (Life and Culture)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Mariachis Play On, Their Music Unsilenced by the Virus or the Deaths

      by

      Even as the birthday parties and weddings grew scarce during the pandemic, the musicians were increasingly hired to play at funerals, including those of band members.Listen to This ArticleFacing the stone archway of St. Joseph’s Salesian Youth Retreat Center outside Los Angeles, the dark wooden coffin holding the body of Juan Jiménez was wheeled next to a band of masked mariachis. The group readied themselves to play, simultaneously lifting bows to violins, hands to a golden harp and fingers to pluck at guitarróns, their bass guitars.When the priest’s prayer ended, Jesus Guzmán led the band, Mariachi Los Camperos, through almost an hour of music: songs that express grief and goodbyes, like “Las Golondrinas” (“The Swallows”).The calendars of mariachi bands nationwide used to be full of dates for weddings, quinceañeras and serenades where the vigorous music of Mexican culture helped enliven some of life’s most joyous moments. With the onset of the pandemic, those opportunities disappeared, leaving behind only the funerals, the mounting number of funerals, that have kept some mariachis from financial ruin.Mariachi Los Camperos playing a concert before the pandemic. In February, they performed at the funeral of their nationally acclaimed guitarron player, Juan Jiménez (back row, second from right) who died in the pandemic.Jesus GuzmanAt this funeral, in February, the playing was particularly passionate and the musicians, sombreros off, bowed their heads as the body passed. Jiménez was one of their own, a revered guitarrón player who had succumbed at 58 to the coronavirus.“His friends were all there with him, playing for him, thanking him, continuing his legacy,” said Guzmán, a friend of Jiménez since childhood and the music director of the mariachi band they both called their own.To witness the number of sad events that have kept some mariachi bands financially alive is to confront the virus’s harrowing toll on the people who once sang to their music. Latino and Black residents caught in this winter’s fierce coronavirus surge through Los Angeles County died at two or three times the rate of the white population there.Members of Mariachi Los Galleros de San Antonio say the pandemic caused the cancellation of dozens of events that they had been scheduled to perform. Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThe story is similar in other locations with large Latino populations, and studies show Latinos are more vulnerable to becoming ill and dying from the virus. Their communities and households tend to be more crowded and to rely on mass transit, their access to health care is limited and their jobs are likely to involve contact with the public.So as the caskets go into the ground, many mariachi bands in California, Texas, Illinois and elsewhere have turned to playing songs of pain and sorrow to ease the passing. Even for the bands used to playing at funerals before the pandemic, the sweep of death has been overwhelming. Many have lost family and friends, band members and music teachers.For decades, family-run mariachi bands and self-employed musicians in Los Angeles have descended on Mariachi Plaza east of Downtown to vie for new bookings. This is where Christian Chavez, the secretary for the Organization of Independent Mariachis of California, has handed out boxes of food to struggling musicians since the pandemic first upended business.Tuning up in the parking lot.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesRehearsing in the final minutes before an event.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesMariachi Los Galleros de San Antonio rehearsing at a member’s home before an event.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesMiguel Guzman, a member of Mariachi Los Galleros de San Antonio, said he almost died when the coronavirus landed him in the hospital for a month in November.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesLike many musicians he met on the plaza, Chavez was not immune to the pandemic’s financial hardships. The band his grandfather first founded in Mexico, Mariachi Tierra Mexicana, struggled. The pandemic wiped out his savings in seven months. The coronavirus forced Chavez and other mariachis to make grueling decisions just to make ends meet. That led many to continue working at events where people were nonchalant about masks and social distancing.But, for many, funerals and burials became the mainstay, easing the financial pain but exacting another kind of harm, even for those used to playing such ceremonies intermittently between other events. The weeping. The people grasping for coffins as they were lowered. Chavez said that, at times, these moments were so devastating he had to turn away and just focus on his trumpet.Of the 400 active members of the California mariachi organization, about 80 died of the virus, possibly having picked it up performing at events like parties and at restaurants, Chavez said. That tally includes his godfather, Dagoberto Martinez, who played the vihuela in his family band for 15 years.“Every time I go to work, I pray that I’m one of the lucky ones to return home,” Chavez, who is working events and playing at dozens of funerals, said in a video interview. He and his family got dangerously sick with the virus in October, too.All performing arts workers have struggled during the pandemic as unemployment had an undue influence on that sector. What is unique about the mariachi band members, many of them said in interviews, is how much their music became part of the ritual of passing for a population particularly affected by the pandemic.As more people get vaccinated, Mariachi Los Galleros de San Antonio is seeing a slight uptick in events while still playing at many funerals.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesIn Pilsen, a neighborhood of Chicago with a sizable Latino community, Enrique and Karen Leon’s circle of mariachis has waned in the past year, in part because of deaths attributed to the coronavirus.“Every mariachi represents a musical instrument, an instrument you hear in a group,” Karen Leon, the manager of the band Mariachi Mexico Vivo, said, describing what the loss of musicians means to the close community of mariachis. “Lots of people think, well, there are plenty of mariachis in Chicago, but it’s really difficult to replace someone when they have their talent. You can’t just replace someone’s life for another.”In the past four months, Enrique Leon and six members of the band played at 15 funerals, half of those for coronavirus-related deaths. Though the funerals are essential, and help pay the bills, they do not match the emotional boost of performing at an event where one can see the music lift people’s spirit like a buoy.“I want to play my guitar, compose songs, be in public singing,” Enrique Leon said. “That ambience fills me up. I’m working, and making money, but it’s not the same. It’s not the same without seeing smiles and laughter, the emotion from the crowd when they see the mariachi.”Members of Mariachi Mexico Vivo playing at a 50th birthday party in March.Samantha Cabrera Friend for The New York TimesThe party was a return to normalcy for a band whose performances at happy occasions had been disrupted by the pandemic.Samantha Cabrera Friend for The New York TimesThe guest of honor, Josefina Gonzales, center, who herself survived the virus, was surprised, and moved, by the appearance of the band.Samantha Cabrera Friend for The New York TimesMembers of Mariachi Mexico Vivo, smiling here at the birthday party, have played at 15 funerals in recent months.Samantha Cabrera Friend for The New York TimesIn Texas, back in November, Miguel Guzman of Mariachi Los Galleros de San Antonio had to put his violin and music aside when he tested positive for the coronavirus. Just days before, he was masked and inside the home of a friend who was a reliable instrument dealer, buying a violin for a student. The friend later died of the virus.Guzman fell very ill, too, and spent a month in the hospital. The virus winded him. He needed a constant stream of oxygen to breathe with his damaged lungs; he dropped 40 pounds and lost all his muscle; he needed physical therapy just to walk again.At home, his fingers were numb when he repeatedly tried picking up his violin, but it was the promise of playing in the band with his sons again and writing a composition for his wife that kept him motivated to recover.This past month, Guzman finally returned to the band and played at another round of funerals and burials. His first day back was at the funeral of a friend’s father-in-law. The week after, it was a funeral for one of his longtime clients, a tire-shop owner who had died of coronavirus-related complications.Close to the coffin at that funeral, he stood with the band playing “Te Vas Ángel Mío” or “You’re Leaving, Angel of Mine.” He could hear the crying, yes, but he also could hear his violin, carrying life forward for those who grieved, and for him.“Music is the medicine, because when I’m playing, I forget about not being able to breathe,” Guzman said. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Bonzie Longs for a Post-Pandemic ‘Reincarnation’

      by

      On her third album, the Chicago-based songwriter offers melody, mystery and prized imperfections.Nina Ferraro, the songwriter who records as Bonzie, had been working since 2018 on her third album, “Reincarnation.” It would be the continuation of a fully independent career that has consistently yielded richly melodic and mysterious songs. Then Covid-19 hit, and, like everyone else, she had to change her plans. She moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, where she had lived before; she learned how to be her own recording engineer; she immersed herself in studying Japanese. The centerpiece of her album-in-progress became a song she wrote during quarantine: “Alone,” an understated, haunted, not quite acoustic ballad that she released in 2020.As she continued writing and recording, the songs for the album — released on March 16 — converged into a narrative arc from separation to reconnection, pondering mortality and tenacity. “Either you want to die or you don’t want to die/Both are so lethal/Me, I’m stuck in the middle of the glorious combat,” she sings, gently and matter-of-factly, in “Lethal.” It’s a song she wrote before the pandemic.“That’s just the nature of this unstable rock that we’re on,” Bonzie said on a Skype video call from her home in Chicago. “We feel some of these things very strongly right now, but they have always been there. It’s impossible not to be affected by the world situation, but a lot of things are constant for me.”Bonzie, 25, was wearing a hoodie with a design by one of her favorite songwriters, Daniel Johnston. It showed the “Silver Sufferer” (a skull-faced parody of the Marvel superhero Silver Surfer) singing the opening line of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends.” An electric bass and an electric guitar leaned against the walls; her Yorkie, Kiraki (“Sunday” in Armenian), spent time in her lap.Behind her was a large picture frame holding a small yellow rectangle: a sketch on a Post-it note made by the prolific Chicago producer Steve Albini, one of Bonzie’s early supporters. It showed a bell curve of creativity — a burst of inspiration and work followed by quickly diminishing returns.Bonzie said she was inspired by the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi: “You preserve these natural imperfections that are actually beautiful details.”Alexa Viscius for The New York Times“I just thought it was funny,” she said. “There are two people in you at all times. One is this endless spirit soul, that’s just creative and will go forever. And then the other one is trying to gently guide that person, to remind you that you’re physical material. The curve represents time spent creatively, and then the X represents where you stop.”On the new album, Bonzie’s music merges the singer-songwriter staples of guitar, piano and finely turned melodies with synthesizers and programmed beats. For most of the album, Bonzie worked with a co-producer, DJ Camper, who has extensive credits in hip-hop and R&B. One song, the trap-tinged “Up to U,” was co-produced by Yeti Beats, better known for working with Doja Cat. The album’s title song, “Reincarnation,” envisions a post-pandemic renaissance: “We will change, I swear we’re gonna change,” its chorus insists.Bonzie was 12 when she began singing her own songs weekly at a coffeehouse in her hometown, Racine, Wis. She didn’t want to use her own name, and eventually chose Bonzie as an abstract word that also looked good graphically in capital letters. Using a stage name “just felt better to be able to say everything I wanted to say,” she said, “and not be worried when I was singing about all of these dark, deep secrets that I wouldn’t tell anybody.”She moved with her family to Chicago, where, as a high schooler, she performed at well-known clubs like Schubas Tavern and Beat Kitchen. She self-released a debut EP as Nina Ferraro when she was 15, followed by her full-length debut album as Bonzie, “Rift Into the Secret of Things” — a phrase from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” — in 2013. She had already begun to mingle folky coffeehouse basics with electronic experimentation, and she found fans among the city’s indie musicians.“I was impressed by her drive and her seriousness at a very early age,” Albini said by phone from his Chicago studio, Electrical Audio. “She was more serious about her decisions and about her aesthetic than a lot of people her age. It was clear that she had listened and thought very deeply about what she was doing. And the thing that made her stand out immediately was just a singular drive — not to get famous, not just to become known, but to express herself in a way that meant something to her.”Bonzie’s music grew more elaborate on her second album, “Zone on Nine,” released in 2017. It roved from straightforward acoustic strumming to the delicate sonic apparitions and intricate backup vocals of freak-folk to the crunch of hard-rock guitars; her lyrics could be startlingly direct or poetic and elusive. Now, with “Reincarnation,” she has stripped back her music. “I wanted it to be more personal,” she said.Her interest in Japanese culture — which began with high-school exposure to Pokémon and anime — led her to the aesthetic of wabi-sabi, the idea that “artifacts that come from your medium, that you didn’t intend, are what you highlight and you keep,” she said. “You preserve these natural imperfections that are actually beautiful details. It’s accepting the nature of your imperfect humanness. When producing this record, I thought about that a lot. Like, that’s not perfect with my voice, and that’s not like the most shiny, brilliant, beautiful take, but loving that imperfection that we all have.”She was also seeking what she had heard in gospel music. “Some of the best voices in the world are gospel singers,” she said. “And I like the way that it feels like there’s nothing that’s unneeded in gospel production.”Once the pandemic is over, “I think it’s inevitably going to birth a new type of life,” Bonzie said. “I think that there could be a lot of positive things that come on the other side.”Alexa Viscius for The New York TimesShe came across the productions of DJ Camper — who has worked with Brandy, Drake, Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton and H.E.R. — while living in Los Angeles. By coincidence, she found his Twitter account on his birthday, which was also her older brother’s birthday. She contacted him. “We kind of felt like we’d known each other for a really long time,” she said. “He’s a musician’s musician. We related on that level where we would be producing and we didn’t even talk at all. We would find something and we’d just, like, look at each other for a second. And then that would mean like, yeah.”“Reincarnation” begins with “Caves,” which has psychedelia-tinged electric guitars and lyrics that could be about obsessive love or addiction. “I’ve been waiting my whole life/To feel this good for just one night,” Bonzie sings.She said, “You have to start off in a place of letting go of stuff, and then you can explore other things.”In “Slated,” she sings about a lonely oblivion, intoning, “I hope that you will find me,” as electronic tones ripple around her; in “Eternity,” she fingerpicks quietly and repeats, “I wish that you could stay, but these things fade,” as harp, orchestral strings and electronics materialize and vanish around her lustrous voice. But she ends the album with a hymnlike affirmation: “Come to Me.” Floating on synthesizers and organ chords, she sings, “Hold you up/No fear/We are free.”She said, “I feel like so much has changed so fast, and we’re still adapting to the pandemic. We’re still in a shock period. Once we get out of it, I think it’s inevitably going to birth a new type of life. I think that there could be a lot of positive things that come on the other side of this era of humanity.”Like Bonzie’s other songs, “Come to Me” isn’t simply topical, conceptual or autobiographical. “A lot of things go into the pot,” she said. “And then there’s some alchemy, and then the song comes out.” More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in April

      by

      Bach two ways, the composer Tania León and a Philip Glass adaptation of Kafka are among the highlights.With a widespread return to indoor, in-person performances still a ways off, here are 10 highlights from the flood of online music content coming in April. (Times listed are Eastern.)‘St. John Passion’April 2 at 9 a.m.; dg-premium.com; available through April 4.This concert sells itself: John Eliot Gardiner, one of the finest Bach interpreters in the world, leading his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in the “St. John Passion” — on Good Friday, no less. Not always as popular, and always more controversial, than its sibling “St. Matthew Passion,” the “St. John” is nonetheless a work that Gardiner feels passionately about. As he wrote in his book “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,” it is “as bold and complex an amalgam of storytelling and meditation, religion and politics, music and theology, as there has ever been.” JOSHUA BARONEAttacca QuartetApril 6 at 7 p.m.; millertheatre.com; available indefinitely.The Attacca players seem incapable of putting on a dull concert; one of the final live performances I heard before last year’s lockdown featured them in joyous mastery of Caroline Shaw’s string quartets. That was at the Miller Theater, which is hosting this livestream of selections from John Adams’s “John’s Book of Alleged Dances”; Gabriella Smith’s rhapsodic jam session “Carrot Revolution”; and “Benkei’s Standing Death,” a 2020 work by Paul Wiancko, whose “Lift” teems with understanding of and affection for the string-quartet tradition. JOSHUA BARONE‘Pelléas et Mélisande’April 9 at 1 p.m.; operavision.eu; available through Oct. 9.We usually associate the phrase “period instruments” with the Baroque era. But changes in musical technology have been continuous and profound through the ages, such that there can be revelatory performances of “period Beethoven” or “period Wagner” — or period Debussy! François-Xavier Roth and his ensemble, Les Siècles, have long tailored their interpretations — and the instruments they use — to different works they play. They have recorded Debussy as he might have sounded at the turn of the 20th century, and now take on his epochal 1902 “Pelléas” for Opéra de Lille, directed (and with starkly elegant sets designed) by Daniel Jeanneteau. ZACHARY WOOLFETania León’s glittering “Ácana,” from 2008, is among the works that The Orchestra Now will play in a streamed concert on April 10.Miranda Barnes for The New York TimesThe Orchestra NowApril 10 at 8 p.m.; theorchestranow.org; available on demand from April 15 through May 30.This impressive ensemble of graduate students at Bard College presents a characteristically adventurous program, conducted by Leon Botstein. It opens with Tania León’s glittering “Ácana,” from 2008, followed by Bernstein’s “Serenade”: a rumination on Plato’s “Symposium” that takes the form of an intense, episodic violin concerto, with Zongheng Zhang as soloist. The brilliant pianist Blair McMillen appears in Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, a terrific but seldom performed piece. The program ends with Mendelssohn’s spirited “Scottish” Symphony. ANTHONY TOMMASINIBenjamin ApplApril 12 at 8 a.m.; wigmore-hall.org.uk; available through May 12.When this German baritone sang Schubert’s “Die Schöne Müllerin” cycle at the Park Avenue Armory two years ago, Joshua Barone wrote in The New York Times that he “had the exacting attention to text of an actor, the charisma of a seasoned storyteller and an agile voice.” If you, like me, missed that performance, another opportunity beckons with this livestream from Wigmore Hall in London. Appl will have, in the pianist James Baillieu, the same partner as at the Armory, so we’ll see if he can cast the same spell over the screen. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘In the Penal Colony’April 15 at 12:01 a.m.; philipglasscenterpresents.org; available indefinitely.In the past, I’ve found the recording of this Philip Glass “pocket opera,” adapted from Kafka’s short story, to be a bit of a slog. But a staging can make all the difference, particularly when dealing (as here) with a talky libretto. This 2018 production by Opera Parallèle — presented as part of this year’s digital edition of Glass’s Days and Nights Festival — has turned me around on the work. Thanks to a strong pair of lead performances and a simple yet effective black-box set, Kafka’s bureaucratized dystopia shines through with a fresh lacquer of bleak humor. SETH COLTER WALLSSan Francisco SymphonyApril 15 at 1 p.m.; sfsymphonyplus.org; available indefinitely.The pandemic waylaid this orchestra’s splashy plans to welcome Esa-Pekka Salonen as its new music director. But with its own streaming service now up and running, San Francisco is giving Salonen a chance — however curtailed — to start defining his tenure. For this SoundBox program, he is focusing on ideas of musical patterning. While the program includes some well-worn Minimalist favorites by Steve Reich and Terry Riley, the most intriguing item is a premiere from Salonen himself: “Saltat sobrius,” a fantasy on Pérotin’s medieval “Sederunt Principes.” SETH COLTER WALLSJeremy Denk’s Bach concert, presented by Cal Performances, will be available starting April 15.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesJeremy DenkApril 15 at 10 p.m.; calperformances.org; available through July 14.The first book of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” was to have dominated this pianist’s 2020 performance schedule. That, of course, was not to be, but last spring, he nevertheless produced a series of streams related to the capacious work. He returns to it in its totality for this concert, presented by Cal Performances. ZACHARY WOOLFEHallé OrchestraApril 29 at 7 a.m.; thehalle.vhx.tv; available through July 29.All three of the Hallé’s streams this month will be worth watching, including the premiere of Huw Watkins’s Symphony No. 2, available from April 15. But this last program of the season is the most ambitious: an account of Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” filmed on location across the orchestra’s hometown, Manchester, England. Composed amid the influenza pandemic of 1918, the Stravinsky asks for small forces: just seven instrumentalists backing three actors and a dancer. Mark Elder conducts, and Annabel Arden and Femi Elufowoju Jr. direct. DAVID ALLENChamber Music Society of Lincoln CenterApril 29 at 7:30 p.m.; chambermusicsociety.org; available through May 6.This program is billed as “Monumental Trios,” and that’s no exaggeration. Beethoven’s Trio in E-flat (Op. 70, No. 2) is a majestic, searching and, at times, alluringly quizzical work. The superb pianist Juho Pohjonen joins the violinist Paul Huang and the cellist Jakob Koranyi in a performance taped in 2015. Brahms’s Trio No. 1 in B, composed in 1854 and revised in 1889, offers music by this composer in his brash early days — then modulated some 35 years later, once he was a probing, mature master. The performance by the pianist Orion Weiss, the violinist Ani Kavafian and cellist Carter Brey is from 2017. ANTHONY TOMMASINI More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Building a Better Girl in ‘Honestly Sincere’

      by

      Liza Birkenmeier’s new play about a shape-shifting teenager makes a fitting contribution to Theater in Quarantine’s revamp of the avant-garde.The gay liberation movement has defined the closet as a smothering, imprisoning space. But it can also be, during moments of transition and danger, a sheltering and even a freeing one.Or so we’ve learned this past year from Theater in Quarantine, the shoestring East Village company that since April 2020 has been producing marvelous live work from the 4-foot-by-8-foot box in which Joshua William Gelb used to store his winter coats. In dozens of plays, performance pieces and dance theater amalgams, Gelb and his collaborators have been repurposing spatial and safety restrictions to build a valuable new outpost of the avant-garde.As it happens, refuge and transformation are the animating ideas behind the company’s latest offering: “Honestly Sincere,” a charming, edgy new play by Liza Birkenmeier that not only streams from a closet but is also set in one. There among her pink and gray tops, 13-year-old Greta Hemberger makes a series of calls on her mother’s cellphone that in their intimacy and awkwardness seem to encompass the whole of early teenage girlhood in one breathless caress.Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, Greta even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineIt’s only natural that Greta retreats to her closet; on the cusp of so many kinds of self-discovery, she is also something of a self-embarrassment. She has not, for instance, gotten the role she sought in her school’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie” — the role of Albert, that is, the male lead. But in her private Sweet Apple, she can appear to herself (and to us) as if she had: Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, she even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”And when she calls a friend known only as F (Remi Elberg), she can rehearse real-life personalities too. F won’t mock her for saying pretentious, possibly meaningless things like “I am no longer a bodied animal I am only an effect.” She’ll merely continue the conversation as if nothing more than a burp had interrupted it.This is all very strange and adorable, but Birkenmeier, whose terrific full-length play “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” displayed a similar crafty delicacy, isn’t about to waste time even in a 30-minute sketch. Nor is Greta; she soon gets to the point with F, which is to obtain the phone number of Ethan Blum, a boy she hopes to invite to a dance even though he has a quasi-girlfriend and is probably gay.If her conversation with the adenoidal Ethan (Alexander Bello) weren’t so sweet and hilarious, you would probably be annoyed on his behalf when you realize that Greta is really calling to talk to his older sister Sabel (Hailey Lynn Elberg) on the flimsiest of excuses. She now tries on yet a new personality, a sophisticate prone to gibberish like “diligence is deeply tragic and maybe even unjust,” while still thrilling to the possibility of having a 17-year-old help with her makeup if not with her math.This is all so beautifully acted under the direction of Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin that I forgot that the characters, except for Greta, are disembodied voices on the other end of her phone. And even Greta, in a way, is disembodied, piped as she is through Gelb’s rather fearless 36-year-old cisgender maleness.Whether Greta is cisgender or gay or something else is unclear — probably to her, as well; she’s 13. But in “Honestly Sincere” (the title is taken from another “Bye Bye Birdie” song), Birkenmeier is less interested in pinning down identity than in tracing the lovely way a girl in the comfort of her chosen safe space (and with the help of her chosen technology and friends) sets out to discover it.Which brings us back to Theater in Quarantine and its own chosen space, technology and friends. I’ve not usually been a fan of the avant-garde, which too often strikes me as intellectualized and chilly, fogged in a machismo musk. But these closet productions, fully odd though they may be, are nearly always warmer, more penetrating and more speculative in exploring gender than the works of the old-school male gurus.It matters that so many of them — including Heather Christian’s “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face” and Madeleine George’s lovely “Mute Swan” — are written by women. Their characters, even when embodied by a man, seem safe enough in the cozy closet to represent and thus honor more than just themselves.Honestly SincereOn the Theater in Quarantine YouTube page More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      With Fewer Ads on Streaming, Brands Make More Movies

      by

      As streaming video has gained in importance during the pandemic, advertisers have put more focus on Hollywood-level branded content as a way to reach viewers.When the N.B.A. shut down its season last year because of the pandemic, one of the first phone calls Chris Paul made was to the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer. Mr. Paul, then a point guard with the Oklahoma Thunder, knew he wanted to chronicle what was going on, and he wanted Mr. Grazer’s help.“The idea was, basically, film everything that had taken place in that game that night and what was going to come of it,” Mr. Paul said. “We had no clue what would happen next.”The result was “The Day Sports Stood Still,” a documentary about the shutdown, the N.B.A.’s pandemic bubble and the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on the league. (Mr. Paul appears in the film and is an executive producer.) It is a portrait of the ways the pandemic convulsed the sports world, but also an example of how Covid-19 has upended the entertainment industry.The film, which debuts Wednesday on HBO and HBO Max, comes from Mr. Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment and a newer entrant to Hollywood: Waffle Iron Entertainment, Nike’s production entity.With more people home and glued to their streaming services, many of which don’t allow advertising, companies are finding they need to be creative about the ways they get in front of audiences no longer seeing 30-second commercials. More are turning to traditional Hollywood production companies like Imagine to partner on feature films like “The Day Sports Stood Still,” which is infused with Nike’s ethos but carries none of the traditional branding audiences are used to seeing.“The best partnership you can have is a marriage where the themes between the company and the story are aligned,” Mr. Grazer said in an interview. “If you’ve got Chris Paul and Nike is part of the marketing, that is an added ingredient why someone will see it. They will feel Nike endorsed it and Nike does good things.”Chris Paul in “The Day Sports Stood Still,” which he helped produce.HBOData from the research firm WARC showed that the amount advertisers spent in broadcast television in 2020 declined 10 percent from the previous year while online video spending rose 12 percent. Much of that money has gone to streaming services like Hulu, YouTube and Peacock that accept advertising. But those that don’t allow commercials, like Netflix, still remain unavailable to traditional marketing.“Streaming is giving less and less opportunity for advertisers to connect with consumers in a meaningful way,” said Justin Wilkes, chief creative officer of Imagine Entertainment. “One of the last ways to do that is through long-form content. It’s all circular. This goes back to the earliest days of advertising and underwriting the great entertainment program.”Brands have linked themselves to movies and television for almost as long as the mediums have existed. Long before he became president, for instance, Ronald Reagan hosted the popular “General Electric Theater” television show from 1954 through 1962. In the past decade, branded filmmaking has only proliferated.Patagonia funded a feature-length documentary about dams, called “DamNation,” in 2014. Pepsi backed the 2018 movie “Uncle Drew,” which showcased the basketball star Kyrie Irving recreating his septuagenarian character from a popular series of Pepsi Max commercials. The film made $42 million and marked one of the first branded entertainment campaigns to be adapted into a major motion picture. “Gay Chorus Deep South,” a documentary produced by Airbnb, debuted on the festival circuit in 2019. And Apple’s acclaimed “Ted Lasso” began its life as an NBC Sports promotion for its acquisition of the broadcast rights to the English Premier League.Kyrie Irving in character as Uncle Drew, the spokesman for Pepsi Max who became the basis for a feature film.Davie Brown EntertainmentImagine Entertainment, the production company founded by Mr. Grazer and Ron Howard in 1985, formed Imagine Brands in 2018 to pair companies with filmmakers, hiring Mr. Wilkes and Marc Gilbar, the creator of the “Uncle Drew” Pepsi campaign and an executive producer on the film, to run the group. The division has produced both feature-length documentaries and narrative films with their partners, which have included Unilever, Walmart and Ford.Imagine is also working with the consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble. The company, which effectively created soap operas when it began to sponsor serial radio dramas in the 1930s to help promote its soap products, is cofinancing a feature-length film with Imagine called “Mars 2080.” It will be directed by Eliza McNitt and begin production later this year. The film, which is scheduled to be released theatrically by IMAX in 2022 before moving to a streaming service, focuses on a family resettling on Mars.It grew out of a breakfast in New York in 2019, where Mr. Wilkes, Mr. Howard and Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer, discussed technology in the pipeline. The Imagine team later toured Procter & Gamble’s research labs in Cincinnati, seeing examples of its “home of the future” products and meeting its scientists.Kimberly Doebereiner, the vice president of Procter & Gamble’s future of advertising division, said the company hoped to do more long-form storytelling, like “The Cost of Winning,” the four-part sports documentary its shaving brand Gillette produced. It debuted on HBO in November.“We want to be more interesting so consumers are leaning into our experiences and we’re creating content that they want to see as opposed to messages that are annoying to them,” she said. “Finding a way to have content that is in places where ads don’t exist is definitely one of the reasons why we’re leaning into this.”Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, the founders of Imagine Entertainment.Peyton Fulford for The New York TimesIt’s all part of a deliberate shift by brands to try to integrate themselves more fully into consumers’ lives, the way companies like Apple and Amazon have, said Dipanjan Chatterjee, an analyst with Forrester. And they want to do so without commercials, which, he said, have “zero credibility” with consumers.“If the right story has the right ingredients and it becomes worthwhile for sharing, it doesn’t come across as an intrusive bit of advertising,” Mr. Chatterjee said. “It feels much more like a natural part of our lives.”Alessandro Uzielli, the head of Ford Motor Company’s global brand and entertainment division, first met with Imagine Brands in early 2018. He was looking for a way to augment Ford’s advertising campaign for its relaunched Bronco with a piece of entertainment that would reach a younger audience. The result was “John Bronco,” a 37-minute long mockumentary directed by Jake Szymanski (“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates”) and starring Walton Goggins (“Justified”) as the greatest fictional pitchman of all time.The short film earned a slot in the Tribeca Film Festival and is now streaming on Hulu. In addition to featuring guest spots from Tim Meadows, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bo Derek, it helped reintroduce the Bronco, a sport utility vehicle that the automaker pulled in the mid-1990s.“This helped us speak to an audience that we probably weren’t going to speak to on our own,” Mr. Uzielli said.“It was Imagine’s project, and we didn’t want to cloud their process, to try to make it feel like too much of a sales job,” he added.A still from “John Bronco,” a 37-minute mockumentary from Imagine that stars Walton Goggins and is augmenting a Ford marketing campaign.Imagine DocumentariesMr. Szymanski, who has directed both feature films and commercials, including ads for the Dodge Durango starring Will Ferrell’s “Anchorman” character Ron Burgundy, said Ford allowed him a great deal of creative freedom. “I think they could have tried to impose a much larger shadow on it than they did,” he said. Now, Imagine, Mr. Szymanski and Mr. Goggins are trying to turn John Bronco into the next Ted Lasso — an effort in the early stages of development.“It’s kind of a win-win,” Mr. Szymanski said of a possible television series based on Mr. Goggins’ character. “I don’t think Ford would have any creative control over it but to have a character named John Bronco in the world, that would be a good thing for them.” More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Next From Taylor Mac: A Post-Pandemic Pandemic Play — Set in 1918

      by

      “Joy and Pandemic” is slated to be performed this fall before an in-person audience at the Magic Theater in San Francisco.What kind of art the coronavirus pandemic will inspire remains an open question. But the playwright and performer Taylor Mac has spent much of the past year of theatrical shutdown creating a work about the last Big One.“Joy and Pandemic,” set during the influenza pandemic of 1918, will have its premiere in September at the Magic Theater in San Francisco. And if all goes according to plan, it will be with an in-person audience.“The pandemic has taught me to be skeptical of certainty,” Sonia Fernandez, the Magic’s interim artistic director, said in an email confirming the production. “That said, we are optimistic that we will be able to ensure a safe environment to produce the play with the artistic rigor it deserves.”Mac is best known for “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a marathon 24-hour performance piece that took in all of American history through song, refracted through a radical queer lens (and involving some exuberant audience participation). “Joy and Pandemic,” inspired in part by some of Mac’s research for that show, had actually been commissioned by the Magic, a 144-seat nonprofit theater with which he has a long association, before the current pandemic hit.“At first, I thought about dropping the flu aspect,” Mac said in a phone interview last week. “It seemed maybe too on the nose. But then I thought it will be nice to ritualize this experience by making a play that’s not necessarily about this flu, but is about this moment in time.”“Joy and Pandemic” is set in Philadelphia in September 1918, at the tail end of World War I, on the day of the huge Liberty Loan Parade that became an infamous super-spreader event, though it also bounces forward in time to 1951. It takes place in a children’s art school (inspired by one Mac’s mother ran), and it deals in part with Christian Science, in which Mac was raised.“It’s so much about what our beliefs are, what somebody else’s reality is, and how those two things match up,” Mac (who will not appear in the play) said.Mac’s work, even more than most live theater, is based on the opposite of social distancing. Mac’s last play, “The Fre,” which was in previews at the Flea in New York when the coronavirus hit, featured audience seating inside a giant ball pit, where the actors metaphorically mud-wrestled.During the past year of shutdown, Mac has been developing “Joy and Pandemic” with the director Loretta Greco, via Zoom. Mac (who at the start of the pandemic also created an artist-led mutual aid effort called The Trickle Up) missed the normal in-person process of “hanging out with everybody and talking about ideas and surprising each other,” and then inviting the audience in.“Being in a room together with other people, that’s the whole point,” Mac said. “I’m in it for the hang.”And “The Hang,” as it happens, is also the title of another upcoming Mac world premiere, scheduled for January 2022, at the Here Arts Center in New York City. Mac, who will perform in the show, would describe it only as “a musical theater piece,” but not a musical per se, created in collaboration with the composer and musical director Matt Ray, the costume designer Machine Dazzle, the director Niegel Smith and others from the “24-Decade” team. More