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      Alicia Keys Steps Into a New Spotlight

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      “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical inspired by the singer-songwriter’s teenage years in New York, is set to open Off Broadway.One night this summer, Alicia Keys fell asleep listening to show tunes.She was on vacation following a five-week concert tour, but her mind was still at work: For 12 years, she has been developing “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical based on her adolescence in a then-gritty New York neighborhood, and at the top of her to-do list was writing a new song for the actress playing the main character’s mother.So she took a nap with her headphones on, listening to a playlist of theatrical mom songs (think “Rose’s Turn” from “Gypsy” and “Little Girls” from “Annie”). When she woke up, she could feel the rhythm. She could hear the chords. She could see the title.She ducked into a closet and began to sing into her phone. She hopped online, doing a little research to strengthen her lyrics. And then, when she returned to New York, she began to write, in the wee hours after the meetings and the calls and the rehearsals, noodling at an upright piano in her Chelsea recording studio.“This is occupying a lot of space in my mind,” Keys said about the musical, considered but candid as she was driven to a downtown rehearsal hall, tuning out the traffic and focusing on getting where she wants to go.Maleah Joi Moon is making her professional stage debut as the show’s protagonist, the 17-year-old Ali.Elias Williams for The New York TimesThat day, where she wanted to go was the Public Theater, the celebrated but pandemic-weakened nonprofit where “Hell’s Kitchen” is to begin an Off Broadway run on Oct. 24. Even though Keys is not in it, demand is high: Each time more tickets go on sale, they are snatched up.“I am thinking a lot about ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ and obviously the goal for it to be tremendously beloved and really something that comes into the world in a way that is just like a storm, an incredible storm,” Keys said. “And the goal, obviously, is to transfer to Broadway. So that’s heavy on my mind.”With 15 Grammys, five No. 1 albums and about 5 billion song streams, Keys is an unusual figure in the music world — a classically trained pianist turned R&B singer-songwriter who signed a recording contract as a teenager and remains, at 42, determined, driven and resolutely in control of her creative and commercial life.Her musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is unusual too, in ways that seem promising. Unlike many biographical jukebox shows chronicling childhood to celebrity, this one is both focused and fictionalized, depicting a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali.“This is not Tina Turner, this is not the Temptations, this is not MJ, this is not Carole King — although all of those are phenomenal,” Keys said, referring to shows about pop stars. “It’s really so much more about relationships and identity and trying to find who you are, which I think is a continuous theme in all of our lives: Who are we? Who do we want to be? Who are we becoming?”In “Hell’s Kitchen,” Ali, like Keys, is the daughter of a white mother and a Black father and is growing up in Manhattan Plaza, a subsidized housing development just outside Times Square where 70 percent of the units are for performing artists. The supporting characters — a hyper-protective single mother, a life-changing piano teacher, an older boyfriend and an unreliable father — are based on figures in Keys’s own upbringing.At its heart, “Hell’s Kitchen” is a mother-daughter love story, featuring the stage veteran Shoshana Bean, left, during a rehearsal with Moon.Elias Williams for The New York Times“We’ve highly fictionalized the specifics,” said Kristoffer Diaz, a playwright and librettist who has been working with Keys on the show for more than a decade. Along the way, Keys and Diaz have been joined by the Broadway veteran Michael Greif, who directed “Dear Evan Hansen,” and by the choreographer Camille A. Brown, an in-demand dance-maker.In some ways, the show’s narrative structure resembles that of Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film, “The Fabelmans”: It is a coming-of-age story about a gifted teenager with a fractured family; it ends with the protagonist’s trajectory unclear, but audiences can fill in the blanks based on what they already know about the author’s accomplishments.Keys resisted suggestions that the musical give audiences a road map to Ali’s future — a future in which she might, like Keys, become a big star. “Sometimes they would push: ‘And how about we…?’ And I was like, ‘No.’ ‘No,’” she said. “You just need to know that she is going to find something. Everything else is irrelevant.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is, in the eyes of its creative team, a mother-daughter love story. And, in an era when many musicals market themselves as love letters either to Broadway or to New York, this one falls squarely into the latter camp: Keys’s identity, as a person and as a songwriter, was shaped by the city in the 1990s, and that informs the show’s sounds (like bucket drumming) and movement (with echoes of social dances like the Running Man).The score, played by a band that will include a pianist visible to the audience even when actors pretend to be tickling the ivories, features Keys’s best-known hits: “Fallin’,” “No One,” “Girl on Fire,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” and, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z that has become an inescapable New York City anthem. Keys said she has written four new songs for the show, but that even existing songs have a new sound because they have been rearranged.“I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love,” Keys said, reflecting on her initial aspirations for “Hell’s Kitchen.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“The songs that you think you know,” she said, “you never heard like this.”Making a musical might seem like a swerve for Keys, but the truth is the overlap between the recording industry and musical theater is substantial. There is an ever-growing inventory of jukebox musicals biographical (“MJ,” about Michael Jackson) and fictional (“& Juliet”), as well as shows with original scores written by pop stars (“Here Lies Love”).Keys is a lifelong theatergoer who has dabbled in acting — she played Dorothy in a preschool production of “The Wizard of Oz” and had a cameo on “The Cosby Show” at 4 — but her passion was always music. She studied piano from age 7, was performing in a girl group and wrote her first song at around 11, and signed that recording contract at 15. Childhood moved fast — she skipped two grades and moved out at 16.“She knew a lot before she should have,” said her mother, Terria Joseph. (Mother and daughter both use stage names.)When Keys was a child, Joseph was a struggling actor — that’s how she qualified to live at Manhattan Plaza — who took survival jobs, particularly as a paralegal, while trying to find work as a performer. (Keys’s father, a flight attendant, did not live with them and was mostly not around; though Keys was close to her paternal grandparents, she was often estranged from her father. Now, she says, they are good.)Keys would tag along to auditions and rehearsals when her mother couldn’t afford a babysitter; when there was enough money, they would stand in line at the TKTS booth and buy discount theater tickets. Her mother recalls an early trip to “Cats,” and Keys remembers “Miss Saigon,” but the show that stands out most is “Rent,” in part because it’s about AIDS, which hit Manhattan Plaza, with its high population of gay artists, quite hard. “Rent,” like “Hell’s Kitchen,” was directed by Greif.She was valedictorian of her graduating class at the city’s Professional Performing Arts School, and attended Columbia University for a month before dropping out to pursue music. In 2001, with the release of “Fallin’,” and boosted by an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” her career took off.Keys has continued to see theater when she can, and in 2011 she co-produced a Broadway play, “Stick Fly,” about an affluent Black family wrestling with race and class. According to her mother, who is always trying to take her to more theater, Keys has long been thinking about developing her own show. “It was on her bucket list for some time,” Joseph said.“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” the Public Theater’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said of Keys (above, at a rehearsal). “There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“Stick Fly,” Keys said, “ignited this desire in me, across all mediums in regards to storytelling, to be able to start to hear, feel and see stories that I know exist, but in so many ways the world doesn’t see.” And when she started cooking up “Hell’s Kitchen,” she had audacious goals.“Because I have all the experience with seeing theater since a kid, I just was really ready to reinvent theater, too,” she said. “I just felt like there was so much to bring, so many worlds to collide and cross. I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love.”Hang on! There are people who can’t stand musical theater? Apparently, yes, and one of them is Keys’s husband, Swizz Beatz, a renowned hip-hop producer.“He’s not a fan,” Keys said, laughing. “Do not bring him to the show where in the middle of the sentence they break out into the song. He falls asleep. He cringes. He can’t take it.”So one goal, Keys said, is simply to create a show her husband will like. (The two make up a power couple, with multiple homes and a significant contemporary art collection; they have two children together, and are also helping to raise his three children from previous relationships.)And what about reinventing theater? When I ask her about that word, she qualifies it — mindful of how it might sound and wary after two decades talking to journalists. Keys said she thinks about her project differently now, because she believes that over the last decade, Broadway has made strides.“I don’t want you to now quote me and say I’m reinventing Broadway,” she said. “I want to be clear that there’s so many pieces that exist now that really do challenge, I think, what we were seeing. There of course needs to be more diversity on Broadway. Is there more already? Hell yeah. And we still need more.”I write about the business of Broadway, so one thing that has struck me, as I’ve been working on this profile, is Keys’s ownership — economic as well as artistic — of “Hell’s Kitchen.” Rather than finding Broadway producers to finance and shepherd the show, thus far she is doing so herself, retaining the rights to its commercial future.“I want to own my story,” she told me. “And I deserve to.”She consults, and is heard, on every strategic and creative choice: writing, casting, staging, marketing.Keys has been shuttling between her recording studio in Chelsea and the rehearsal space, while fine-tuning the show’s sound.Elias Williams for The New York Times“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public. “She’s been as involved as any artist I’ve ever worked with — she gets involved on a level of granularity that’s just astonishing. It’s not just music, but every sentence, every relationship, every actor. There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Maleah Joi Moon, who at 21 is making a professional stage debut playing Ali, was taken aback to realize that Keys, whose music was a staple in Moon’s childhood home, would actually be involved on a day-to-day basis.“When I saw the project, I was like, no way was she really attached to this,” Moon said. “And to find out, once I got into the rehearsal room, that she was going to be so heavily involved — it was insane.”Keys radiated warmth as well as intensity during a rehearsal, a novel (“The Vanishing Half”) at her elbow while she bounced in her chair to the beat and tapped out ideas on her phone. “She’s very specific with her notes,” said Shoshana Bean, the actress playing Ali’s mother.She teaches songs to the ensemble. (“You’ve never been to a more charged, lively and thrilling music rehearsal than when she’s running them,” Greif said.) She instructs the stars on vocal technique. (“She has expressed herself about what parts of my voice she wants me to use,” said Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Ali’s father.)She even attended auditions for understudies, and she told me she was relocating a piano in her studio to try to replicate the sonic environment of the theater, thinking she would record the songs in the show and give demos to the band “so they get the feel, they get the swing, they get the idea, they get the energy.”“I’m very, very anal,” she said, “and I know how I want everything to sound.”Control has been a central theme of Keys’s career. While still a teenager, she successfully extricated herself from the contract she had signed with Columbia Records, chafing at efforts to mold her image and sound.“It’s important for me to properly express how I feel at the moment and not have it filtered through other people,” she told Oprah at age 20. Now she preaches self-determination. “If you don’t know what you want for yourself, then you’ll never, never get there,” she told me. “You’ll always be deterred.”Several times, as we talked, she circled back to her concerns about the way the music industry treats artists, and she said one of her long-term goals is “redesigning the industry.”“I feel like as a young artist, we get very taken advantage of, and it’s unfortunate we find ourselves in these circumstances that do not benefit us to the level that it should,” she said. “And I’m lucky. I am in control of all of my music and all of the things that I’ve created. But let me tell you, that’s not the normal story. And I had to fight for it.”Maintaining creative and financial control has become “a mission,” she said, and with “Hell’s Kitchen,” she believes the lessons she has learned are paying off.“For the first time in my life,” she said. “I’m doing something exactly right.”That startled me, given her success. “Really?” I asked.The score is a mix of new songs and Keys’s best-known hits, including, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z.Elias Williams for The New York Times“I really do,” she said. She explained that with previous projects, “I didn’t start out right, but kind of ended up right.” But this time, she said, “I didn’t want to go out and get too diluted and get too many partners. We have all the right partners, all the right minds. It’s the right mixture of experience and also newness that I think is important to continue to create a new world.”One night in mid-July, I took the subway to Barclays Center to watch Keys do what she is best known for: perform. For 90 minutes she entertained a rapturous crowd of 11,894 — strikingly more diverse, and younger, than most theater audiences. Her sparkling Yamaha piano was in the center of the arena, on a rotating stage, with runways extending out so she could work the crowd.Just before the concert, as she often does, she presided over what she calls a Soulcare Session, promoting her skin care line (“I call them offerings, not products — products is too transactional”), talking up empowerment (“The theme today is reminding ourselves to own our own power”), and posing for pictures with superfans who had paid a steep premium for up-close access (“You can talk to me about anything you want,” she said). Her staff sprayed the patrons with a “reviving aura mist” and invited them to select keys (get it?) with words of affirmation; attendees sat on embroidered pillows, black beanbags and purple cushions and asked Keys about her wardrobe, her writing process, her childhood. Some spoke about how her songs had helped them endure disease or emotional hardship.Keys has long had an entrepreneurial streak — she started a babysitters club when she was 11 — and it is ever-expanding. “I’m really interested in business at this point,” she told me when I asked about what’s next.She’s all-in on “Hell’s Kitchen,” of course. She intends to further build up Key SoulCare. And she’ll make more music.“I feel like I’m in a place where I can express myself clearly,” she said. “I am clear about what I want, what I don’t want. Who I want to do it with, who I don’t want to. I’m unafraid to be very vocal and verbal about that, and I feel like I’m in a place where I can do anything, anything. And I haven’t even begun yet.” More

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      ‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’ Review: A Shop Where Everybody Knows Your Mane

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      Jocelyn Bioh’s Broadway playwriting debut, set in a Harlem hair braiding shop, is a hot and hilarious workplace sitcom.Nothing says comedy to me like hot pink, and pink doesn’t get much hotter than the pink of the house curtain that greets you at the beginning of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” by Jocelyn Bioh. In the pale and staid Samuel J. Friedman Theater, a fuchsia drop depicting dozens of elaborately woven hairstyles — micro braids, cornrows, “kinky twists” and more — tells you, along with the bouncy Afro-pop music, to prepare for laughter.That will come in abundance, but don’t in the meantime ignore Jaja’s storefront: gray and grimy and contradicting the pink. With its roll-up grille fully locked down, it’s telling you something too.What that is, Bioh does not reveal until quite late — almost too late for the good of this otherwise riotously funny workplace comedy set in prepandemic, mid-Trump Harlem. A kind of “Cheers” or “Steel Magnolias” for today, “Jaja’s” is so successful at selling the upbeat pluck and sharp-tongued sisterhood of its West African immigrants that the hasty dramatization of their collateral sacrifice feels a bit like a spinach dessert.No matter: The first 80 minutes of the 90-minute play, which opened on Tuesday in a Manhattan Theater Club production, are a buffet of delights. Even David Zinn’s set for the beauty shop’s interior, once the grate is unlocked and lifted, receives entrance applause. From that moment on, the director, Whitney White, keeps the stage activated and the stories simmering at a happy bubble.David Zinn’s beauty shop set receives applause as do the wigs designed by Nikiya Mathis.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesUnlike the Ghanaian private school students in Bioh’s “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” and the star-struck Nigerians in her “Nollywood Dreams,” the stylists at Jaja’s are independent contractors. I don’t just mean financially, though they negotiate their prices privately and pay Jaja a cut. They also operate independently as dramatic figures, their plots popping up for a while, momentarily intersecting with the others’, then piping down to make room for the next.That’s fine when the plots and intersections are so enjoyable. Five women work at the salon in the hot summer of 2019, not counting Jaja’s 18-year-old daughter, Marie (Dominique Thorne), who runs the shop’s day-to-day operations. It’s she who lifts the grate and seems to shoulder the heaviest burdens. Her hopes for college, and a career as a writer, hang by a thread of false papers.Romance and dominance are the main concerns of the others. As her name suggests, Bea (Zenzi Williams) is the queen, at least when Jaja is not around, and stirs up drama from an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement. “When I get my shop, there won’t be any eating of smelly foods like this,” she snarks at her friend Aminata, innocently enjoying fish stew.Today Bea is especially infuriated because she believes that Ndidi (Maechi Aharanwa), a younger, faster braider, is stealing her clients. Meanwhile — and the adverb is apt because the subplots often echo the West African soap operas the women watch on the salon’s television — Aminata (Nana Mensah) is fuming over her scoundrelly husband, who wheedles her out of her hard-earned money and spends it on other women. Sweeter and quieter and more self-contained, Miriam (Brittany Adebumola) gradually reveals another side as she tells a client what she gladly escaped, and yet regrets leaving, in Sierra Leone.The problem of men is a common theme: Even Jaja (Somi Kakoma), who eventually makes a spectacular appearance, is caught up in what may or may not be a green-card marriage scam with a local white landlord. But except for Aminata’s husband, the men we actually meet — all played by Michael Oloyede in nicely distinguished cameos — are kind and cheerful, hawking socks, jewelry, DVDs and affection.Kind and cheerful is not the case with all the clients. (There are seven, played by three actors.) One is so rude just entering the shop that the braiders, usually hungry for business, pretend to be booked. Another client demands to look exactly like Beyoncé for her birthday; another is a loud talker. One mostly eats while Bea refreshes her elaborate do, a Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob. And Jennifer (Rachel Christopher) sits patiently in Miriam’s chair throughout, receiving long micro braids that take 12 hours and fingers of steel.It’s her birthday: Kalyne Coleman as a customer who asks for Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” braids at the salon.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNever really forging these bits into a single narrative, Bioh makes comic music of them, sometimes with the set-it-up-now, pay-it-off-later approach and sometimes with a scrapper’s punch-feint-return. Without White’s orchestration of the rhythm — and the perfect timing of the cast, most of them making Broadway debuts — I can’t imagine this working. Nor would it be as enjoyable without Dede Ayite’s sociologically meticulous costumes or the brilliance of the title characters. And by “title characters” I of course mean the hairstyles, rendered in before, during and after incarnations by Nikiya Mathis’s wigs, which seem to be holding a conversation of their own.If the entire play had been nothing but byplay — the women in one another’s hair both figuratively and literally — I would not complain. Translating a popular genre to a new milieu and stocking it with characters unfamiliar to most American theatergoers, as Bioh did in “School Girls” as well, is refreshing enough when crafted so smartly.But instead she has seen fit, again as in “School Girls,” to deepen and darken the story while providing a bang of activity at the end. Though abrupt and insufficiently resolved, it doesn’t come from nowhere. By the last of the play’s six scenes, all the women, but especially Jaja and her daughter, have something to fear from a president who has recently referred to some African countries with a disparaging vulgarism and complained that Nigerians allowed to enter the United States would never go back.“OK, so you want me to go? Fine, I will go,” Jaja exclaims witheringly, in what seems like a direct response. “But when do you want me to leave? Before or after I raise your children? Or clean your house? Or cook your food? Or braid your hair so you look nice-nice before you go on your beach vacation? ‘Oh please miss. Can you give me the Bo Derek hair please?’”“Jaja’s” is full of such treasurable moments, when the drama feels tightly woven with the comedy. And if the weave frays a bit at the end, what doesn’t? Like the Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, it’s still a great look.Jaja’s African Hair BraidingThrough Nov. 5 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Only Murders In the Building’ Season 3 Finale: The Show, and Deaths, Go On

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      Tuesday’s finale of “Only Murders in the Building” wrapped a season that was a love letter to Broadway musicals, not least because it was a little silly.This notebook contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “Only Murders in the Building.”Everyone loves a Broadway hit. It’s possible that we enjoy a Broadway catastrophe — “Carrie,” “Diana, the Musical,” “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” — a little more. Few productions have been as cataclysmic as Oliver Putnam’s “Death Rattle Dazzle,” a misbegotten gothic about murderous infants, re-conceived as a glittery musical. Think “Ruthless” but skewed younger and set at a Nova Scotian lighthouse.This musical was the centerpiece of Season 3 of the Hulu comedy “Only Murders in the Building,” which brought the amateur detectives played by Selena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short out of their luxury apartment complex and into a sumptuous Broadway theater. (The theater is actually the opulent United Palace in Washington Heights, subbing for a space more than 100 blocks south.) “Death Rattle Dazzle” bore only the vaguest sequined resemblance to a real Broadway show, while demonstrating deep love of the form. Think of the season as a love letter to Broadway, written in lipstick and blood.On the original opening night, the leading man, Paul Rudd’s Ben Glenroy, was killed. Twice. Once with rat poison and again down an elevator shaft. Theater has its own violence. A good show “kills,” it “slays,” it “knocks them dead.” But this was s a bit much.Amid rehearsals for the original play’s transformation into a musical, several members of the cast and crew were accused of his murder. In the meantime, there were in-jokes about superstitions, spike tape, stage fright, Schmackary’s Cookies and the cavalier use of accents. The accent jokes were made at the expense of Meryl Streep. Matthew Broderick also showed up for some method skewering.During the season finale, which arrived on Tuesday (spoilers follow, so many), the murderers were finally revealed. The uberproducer Donna DeMeo (Linda Emond) had poisoned Ben to protect her son Cliff’s investment in the show. Then her son (Wesley Taylor), defending his mother and his ego, pushed a revived Ben down an elevator shaft.Was the motive love? Or money? Or artistic integrity? Yes? I think? Motive is never big with the “Only Murders Gang.” (Personally, I plumped for the documentarian Tobert (Jesse Williams), mainly because it’s hard to trust a man named Tobert.)This season didn’t often mirror what actually happens on Broadway, even as it assembled a crack team of Broadway composers — Justin Paul, Benj Pasek, Marc Shaiman, Michael R. Jackson and Sara Bareilles — to supply the songs. “Death Rattle Dazzle” was, even by Broadway’s variable standards, too inane, too sparkly. Perhaps the most delirious fiction, beyond the dancing crab people, was the notion that a single negative review, delivered here by the critic Maxine (Noma Dumezweni, deadpan and delectable), could be the precipitating event for a murder.The series’s madcap commitment was one of the most realistic aspects of “Death Rattle Dazzle,” which included singing shellfish and three babies suspected of murder.Patrick Harbron/HuluThankfully (and I write this as someone who covered Broadway for decades), critics don’t have quite that much power, but then again Martin’s Charles-Haden Savage described Maxine’s assessment as “a pan, a massacre.” And also: “The harshest review in the history of theater. A complete bloodletting.” After attending the musical’s opening night, Maxine has warmer feelings: “This dusty old chestnut has been Botoxed, bedazzled and brought back to life.” A complete about-face? Yes, that’s fiction, too.But what did feel real, just a smidgen, was the madcap commitment to the bit that putting on a musical requires. Most musicals, even those that eschew babies and shellfish, are at least a little silly. Unless you’re attending a theater camp, humans don’t spontaneously break into song, and there isn’t often a full orchestra backing them or a chorus that just happens to sing along in harmony while executing the occasional pas de bourrée. It’s ridiculous to think that a few lights, some spangled costumes and a set that’s mostly plywood will transport an audience to some far-off world.And yet, that’s what happens. Which is why we have and have had long-running musicals about, say, cats or trainee witches or the wildlife of the African savannah. Those crab people should feel right at home.A couple of weeks ago, I took the train up to the United Palace for an “Only Murders” pop-up event. Guests wandered the lush surroundings, sifting evidence with specialized flashlights. “Only Murders” is a TV show about a podcast, which this season was about a Broadway show. This event was also a strange hybrid of forms — gallery exhibit, immersive happening, escape room, a live-action watch party, Botoxed and bedazzled. Also you could get your makeup done, which seemed fun. And they gave you a puzzle on the way out.The best part, for me anyway, was a quiet moment in which I was able to sit in the orchestra and look up at the stage. In that plush seat, I could imagine all of the wonderful, outrageous, demented shows that had played there before and dream about what might come next. More

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      Echo Brown, Young Adult Author and Performer, Dies at 39

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      A one-woman show that used her date with a white hipster to talk about life, race, love and sex, led an editor to sign her to write two novels.Echo Brown, a late blooming storyteller who mined her life to create a one-woman show about Black female identity and two autobiographical young adult novels in which she used magical realism to help convey her reality, died on Sept. 16 in Cleveland. She was 39.Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her friend Cathy Mao, who said the cause had not yet been determined. But Ms. Brown was diagnosed with lupus in about 2015, leading eventually to kidney failure, Ms. Mao said by phone. A live kidney donor had been cleared for a transplant, which was expected to take place early next year.Ms. Brown, who grew up in poverty in Cleveland and graduated from Dartmouth College, had no professional stage experience when her serio-comic show, “Black Virgins Are Not for Hipsters,” made its debut in 2015. It told her autobiographical story, through multiple voices, about dating a white hipster, including wondering what his reaction to her dark skin would be, and the sex, love, depression and childhood trauma she experienced.“It’s very revealing, and I felt very vulnerable doing it,” she told The Oakland Tribune in 2015, adding, “It’s as if you get onstage and share your deepest, darkest secrets. Putting my sexuality out there in front of people can make me feel very exposed.”The show was successfully staged in theaters in the Bay Area; she also performed it in Chicago, Cleveland, Dublin and Berlin.Robert Hurwitt, the theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, called Ms. Brown “an instantly attractive and engaging performer” who “has us eating out of her hand well before she gets everyone up and dancing to illustrate (with a little help from Beyoncé) why Black women shouldn’t dance with white men until at least after marriage.”And the writer Alice Walker said on her blog in 2016, “What I can say is that not since early Whoopi Goldberg and early and late Anna Deavere Smith have I been so moved by a performer’s narrative.”When “Black Virgins” was mentioned in a profile of Ms. Brown in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2017, Jessica Anderson, an editor at Christy Ottaviano Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, took notice.“I reached out blindly to see if she would turn her attention to writing for a young adult audience,” Ms. Anderson said in a phone interview. “She wasn’t familiar with young adult or children’s literature. I sent her some books, and she had an immediate sense of what her storytelling should be.”The result was “Black Girl Unlimited” (2020), a novel that Ms. Brown tells through the lens of her young self as a wizard who deals with a fire in her family’s cramped apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration, sexual assault and her mother’s overdose.Ms. Brown’s first novel presents her young self as a wizard and carries readers through events like a fire in her family’s apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration and her sexual assault. Macmillan“Brown’s greatest gift is evoking intimacy,” Karen Valby wrote in her review in The New York Times, “and as she delicately but firmly snatches the reader’s attention, we are allowed to see this girl of multitudes and her neighborhood of contradictions in full and specific detail.”Ms. Brown’s second book was “The Chosen One: A First-Generation Ivy League Odyssey” (2022), a coming-of-age story that uses supernatural elements like twisting portals on walls to depict her disorienting and stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Ms. Brown’s second novel focuses on her stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Christy Ottaviano BooksPublishers Weekly praised Ms. Brown for the way she ruminated on her “independence, fear of failure and mental health” with “vigor alongside themes of healing, forgiveness and the human need to be and feel loved.”Echo Unique Ladadrian Brown was born on April 10, 1984, in Cleveland. She was reared by her mother, April Brown, and her stepfather, Edward Trueitt, whom she regarded as her father. Her father, Edward Littlejohn, was not in her life. During high school she lived for a while with one of her teachers.Ms. Brown thought that Dartmouth, with its prestige and stately campus, would represent a “promised land” to her and be “the birth of my becoming,” she said in a TEDx talk in 2017.But early on she heard voices from a speeding truck shout the N-word at her.“They weren’t students, they probably weren’t affiliated with Dartmouth in any way, but it was enough to shatter me,” she said. The incident taught her a lesson: “There are no promised lands in this world for marginalized people, those of us who fall outside the category of normal.”She graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in political science — she was the first college graduate in her family — and was hired as an investigator with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent oversight agency of the New York City Police Department. She left after two years, believing that “we didn’t have the power to do the work that was necessary,” she told the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.She worked as a legal secretary and briefly attended the Columbia Journalism School. She became depressed, started to study yoga and meditation, and moved to Oakland in 2011. While there, she was hired as a program manager at Challenge Day, a group that holds workshops at schools aimed at building bonds among teenagers.Her job included telling students about her life, which helped her find her voice.“I found that I could drop people into emotion and pull them out with humor,” she said in the Dartmouth magazine article. “That’s where I learned I was a good storyteller and wondered, ‘Where can I go to tell more stories?’”She began taking classes in solo performing with David Ford at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco. At first, she wrote comic scenes, then created more serious ones.“It was clear that she was someone who was ready for this, and she had a very easy time getting the words off the pages as a performer,” Mr. Ford said. “There was something miraculous about her.”In addition to her mother and stepfather, Ms. Brown is survived by her brother Edward. Her brother Demetrius died in 2020.Ms. Brown’s latest project was a collaboration with the actor, producer and director Tyler Perry on a novel, “A Jazzman’s Blues.” It is based on a 2022 Netflix film of the same name that Mr. Perry directed from a script that he wrote in 1995, about an ill-fated romance between teenagers (the young man becomes a jazz musician) in rural Georgia that takes place largely in the late 1930s and ’40s. It is to be published early next year.Ms. Anderson said the project came about because, as Ms. Brown got sicker, “it was too energy-consuming for her to work on her own material. So she was looking for a more creative partnership. and this came about through her agent.” More

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      in Theater

      In ‘Big Trip,’ an Exiled Russian Director Asks: What Makes Us Human?

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      Dmitry Krymov’s two shows at La MaMa thrillingly stress the porosity of the line between life and storytelling.The Russian theatermaker Dmitry Krymov’s “Big Trip,” two shows in repertory through mid-October at La MaMa, in Manhattan, is in love with the very essence of theater: how we tell stories, how we make art, how we live.The productions have no sets to speak of. The costumes and props look as if they have been sourced from thrift shops and Home Depot — one piece makes extensive use of cardboard. Yet we are far from the usual Off Off Broadway seen at incubators like the Brick. The framework here — Pushkin, Hemingway and O’Neill — is drawn from high art, or at least classics some might deem musty. Flares of whimsy, as when the actors don red clown noses, might feel rather European to locals more accustomed to irony. It is safe to say there is nothing else like this on New York stages right now.This is all very much of a piece for Krymov, but also new territory for him.Back in Moscow, this acclaimed writer, director and visual artist had access to fairly generous budgets, presented work at fancy institutions and taught his craft to avid students. He earned accolades and traveled the world, including to our shores to present “Opus No. 7” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn (2013), “The Square Root of Three Sisters” at Yale University (2016) and “The Cherry Orchard” at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. After that last production’s run ended in spring 2022, Krymov refused to return home because Russia had attacked Ukraine.Now living in New York, he runs Krymov Lab NYC, an iteration of his Moscow workshop, and collaborates with an English-speaking ensemble. “Big Trip,” their first official outing, consists of the distinct pieces “Pushkin ‘Eugene Onegin’ in Our Own Words,” a retooling of one of his Moscow productions; and “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad,” based on two of Hemingway’s short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Canary for One,” and scenes from Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”Krymov does not so much stage classic works as filter them through prisms like memory, notions of cultural heritage and identity, and the very process of theatermaking. (It’s mind-boggling that, according to Tatyana Khaikin, a lead producer of Krymov Lab NYC, none of the city’s established companies have invited him to do a show.)In “Onegin,” the stronger of the two works, Russian immigrants (Jeremy Radin, Jackson Scott, Elizabeth Stahlmann and Anya Zicer) guide the audience through a retelling of Pushkin’s 19th-century masterpiece about high-society youths facing the demands of love.Kwesiu Jones, left, and Tim Eliot in “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad,” in a segment that adapts Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”Steven PisanoThey begin by explaining the basics of theater then re-enact scenes from “Eugene Onegin” while essentially annotating the text (throughout both shows, Krymov repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to stress the porosity of the line between life and theater). The central character is a dandy afflicted with spleen, which “is like having American blues,” we are told. “But even worse — it’s having the Russian blues.” (Reflecting on such differences is a Krymov forte: His astonishing memory play “Everyone Is Here,” which is on the streaming platform Stage Russia, intersperses scenes from “Our Town” with the impact a touring American production had on him in the 1970s.)The issue of watching an exiled Russian director’s work while his country is waging war against Ukraine is actually raised in “Onegin,” which is interrupted by a harangue directed at the cast: “You can’t hide behind your beautiful Russian ‘culture’ anymore. Your culture means destruction and death, and all of your Pushkins, your Dostoevskys and Chekhovs cannot save you.” The show resumes, but the trouble among theatergoers feels real, and so are the questions that have been raised. Should Thomas Mann not have been able to publish in America after he fled Nazi Germany, for example?The outburst is also representative of the constant interrogation of the source material, all the while reaching deep into its core and extracting the marrow — what makes us human.The trickiest of the three segments in “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad” is O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” which will be cryptic for those unfamiliar with the play’s premise and characters. Yet the action is magnetic because of the director’s ability to create absorbing theater in an elemental way, often through deceivingly simple devices. The father and son Ephraim and Eben (Kwesiu Jones and Tim Eliot), using stilts, tower over Abbie (Shelby Flannery), the woman who has upended their lives. It’s a stark representation of power and its often illusory appearance that peaks in a stunning visualization (that I won’t spoil) of Abbie and Eben’s tortured relationship.In the same show’s “A Canary for One,” the unrolling of a painted sheet suggests passing scenery seen from a train. It’s easy to get lost in the action, despite the fourth-wall breaking. Introducing “Desire,” Radin wondered where the train was. A whistle blew. “It’s very far away, and behind you,” he told us. I knew the train could not possibly be there, and yet I turned around and looked. I’d bought it all. More

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      in Music

      ‘Melissa Etheridge: My Window’ Review: Musings on Life and Music

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      On Broadway, this rock concert spliced with memoir has gained a striking intimacy.In 1979, when Melissa Etheridge was an aspiring rock star getting ready to leave Leavenworth, Kan., for music school in Boston, she got a 12-string guitar. Her father made a macramé strap for it — a sturdy, intricate piece of knot work that was a portable souvenir of his love.“And this is it,” his Grammy Award-winning daughter said during her Broadway show, turning around to give everyone a view of the strap that held up her instrument.It was a charming moment, and in our high-definition, multi-screen world, refreshingly analog: just Etheridge, life-size and in three dimensions, sharing the room with us.Share it she does, superbly, in “Melissa Etheridge: My Window,” which opened Thursday at Circle in the Square Theater, just one block east of where an earlier version of the show ran Off Broadway last fall. On Broadway, this rock concert spliced with memoir has gained a striking intimacy, as if Etheridge had shrunk an arena to fit in the palm of her hand.A stage stretches across one end of the space, floor seats and a center aisle are where the theater’s thrust stage would usually be, and a tiny satellite stage sits behind them. Circle in the Square never struck me as a warm, embracing theater, but Etheridge makes it one, paying graceful, diligent attention to every section of the 726-seat audience, and occasionally coming down off the stage to sing and stroll.Written by Etheridge with her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge, and directed once again by Amy Tinkham, this musically gorgeous, narratively bumpy show starts with Etheridge’s hit “Like the Way I Do,” ends with “Come to My Window” and fits 15 husky-voiced songs in between, including a trippily comical “Twisted Off to Paradise,” an arrestingly beautiful “Talking to My Angel” and a winking ode to her current gig, “On Broadway.” (Sound design is by Shannon Slaton.)On a set by Bruce Rodgers whose spareness serves the complexity of Olivia Sebesky’s projections, this is a visually slick production, with abundant jewel tones in Abigail Rosen Holmes’s saturated rock-show lighting, and Etheridge looking glamorous in costumes by Andrea Lauer.The show is shorter, more polished and more assured than it was Off Broadway — though Etheridge still seems undefended when she doesn’t have a guitar strapped across her or a piano in front of her. She also doesn’t speak memorized lines but rather tells versions of stories mapped out in the script. It’s a valid approach that sometimes leaves her fumbling for words.Kate Owens plays the small, clowning role of the Roadie, a character whom the audience loves but who I wish would desist from upstaging Etheridge with antics.Etheridge herself is very funny, and she knows how to handle a crowd. Such as when she got to the point in her life story when she fell for a woman who was married to a movie star — “a for real, for real movie star,” she added, for emphasis.“Who?” a voice called out, not that the performance is meant to be interactive.“Look it up,” Etheridge said, shrugging it off.Unlike her recently published memoir “Talking to My Angels,” which opens with a recollection of “a heroic dose of cannabis” that changed her understanding of herself and the universe, “My Window” proceeds chronologically, starting with Etheridge’s birth. (Projections show baby Missy with fabulous hair.) So the talk of what Etheridge calls “plant medicine” comes later.This is a passion of hers, so it belongs in a show about her. But the performance devolves into speechifying every time it comes up, except when it morphs into an enactment of experiencing an altered state — which, despite some vividly kinetic projections, can be as tiresome to watch onstage as it would be off.Surprisingly, the most starkly powerful part of the show Off Broadway — Etheridge recounting the death of her son Beckett, at age 21, in 2020 — works less well on Broadway.I cannot fault Etheridge for her stiffness in that delicate section at the performance I saw, or for reaching for words — like her blunt assessment, “He was difficult” — to convey her memories. But this is where relying on the script’s gentler, more contextual language could assuage what must be a terrible vulnerability.Logistics also undercut that scene. While Etheridge speaks from the large stage and the auditorium is plunged in darkness, a guitar is placed on the satellite stage by a technician who crosses in front of many people. No distraction should break the connection between Etheridge and her audience in that moment.She is, throughout “My Window,” a marvel with that audience.Back when her fame was rising, she told us in Act II, she started playing arenas and stadiums.“Thousands and thousands of people,” she said, “and the funny thing is, the more people there were, the further away y’all got.”On Broadway, they’re near enough again for her to commune with. And so she does.Melissa Etheridge: My WindowThrough Nov. 19 at Circle in the Square Theater, Manhattan; melissaetheridge.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      Michael Gambon, Dumbledore in the ‘Harry Potter’ Films, Dies at 82

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      After he made his mark in London in the 1970s, he went on to play a wide range of roles, including Edward VII, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill.Michael Gambon, the Irish-born actor who drew acclaim from both audiences and peers for his stage and screen work, and who won even wider renown as Albus Dumbledore, the firm but kindly headmaster of the Hogwarts wizarding school, in the “Harry Potter” films, died on Wednesday night. He was 82.Mr. Gambon’s family confirmed his death in a brief statement issued on Thursday through a public relations company. “Michael died peacefully in hospital with his wife, Anne, and son Fergus at his bedside, following a bout of pneumonia,” the statement said. It did not identify the hospital where he died.The breakthrough that led the actor Ralph Richardson to call him “the great Gambon” came with Mr. Gambon’s performance in Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” at London’s National Theater in 1980, although he had already enjoyed modest success, notably in plays by Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter.Peter Hall, then the National Theater’s artistic director, described Mr. Gambon (pronounced GAM-bonn) as “unsentimental, dangerous and immensely powerful.” He recalled in his autobiography that he had approached four leading directors to accept him in the title role, only for them to reject him as “not starry enough.”After John Dexter agreed to direct him in what Mr. Gambon was to describe as the most difficult part he had ever played, the mix of volcanic energy and tenderness, sensuality and intelligence he brought to the role — in which he aged from 40 to 75 — excited not only critics but also his fellow performers.Mr. Gambon in the title role of Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” at the National Theater in London in 1980. He called it the most difficult part he had ever played.Donald Cooper/AlamyAs Mr. Hall recalled, the dressing-room windows at the National, which look out onto a courtyard, “after the first night contained actors in various states of undress leaning out and applauding him — a unique tribute.”That brought Mr. Gambon a best-actor nomination at the Olivier Awards. He would win the award in 1987 for his performance as Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” at the National Theater. Again it was his blend of vulnerability and visceral force that impressed audiences; Miller declared that Mr. Gambon’s performance as the embattled longshoreman was the best he had seen. Mr. Ayckbourn, who directed the production, described Mr. Gambon as awe-inspiring.“One day he just stood in the rehearsal room and just burst into tears — no turning upstage, no hands in front of his face,” Mr. Ayckbourn said. “He just stood there and wept like a child. It was heartbreaking. And he did angry very well too. That could be scary.”Michael John Gambon was born in Dublin on Oct. 19, 1940. He became a dual British and Irish citizen after he and his seamstress mother, Mary, moved to London to join his father, Edward, an engineer helping to reconstruct the city after it had been badly bombed in 1945.By his own admission he was a dreamy student, often lost in fantasies of being other people, and he left school “pig ignorant, with no qualifications, nothing.” When the family moved from North London to Kent, he became an apprentice toolmaker at Vickers-Armstrongs, which was famous for having built Britain’s Spitfire fighter planes.The teenage Mr. Gambon had never seen a play — he said he didn’t even knew what a play was — but when he helped build sets for an amateur dramatic society in Erith, Kent, he was given a few small roles onstage. “I went vroom!,” he recalled. “I thought, Jesus, this is for me, I want to be an actor.” He joined the left-leaning Unity Theater in London, performing and taking lessons in improvisation at the Royal Court.This emboldened him to write to Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, the founders of the Gate Theater in Dublin, claiming to be a West End actor passing through the city en route to New York. An invitation ensued, as did a job as the Second Gentleman in “Othello,” followed by an offer to join Laurence Olivier’s new National Theater, which (Mr. Gambon said) was seeking burly six-footers like himself to play spear carriers.Several small or nonspeaking roles followed — Mr. Gambon remembered little but saying “Madam, your carriage awaits” to Maggie Smith in a Restoration comedy — until Olivier himself advised him to seek better parts in the provinces. That he did, closely modeling an Othello in Birmingham in 1968 on the Moor famously played at the National by Olivier, an actor Mr. Gambon said he always regarded with “absolute awe.”Mr. Gambon didn’t make his mark in London until 1974, when he played a slow-witted veterinary surgeon in Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy “The Norman Conquests.” One scene, in which he sat on a child’s chair so low that only half his face was visible, became celebrated for the hilarity it generated. Indeed, Mr. Gambon said, he actually witnessed a man “laugh so much he fell out of his seat and rolled down the gangway.”Mr. Gambon in 1987, the year he won an Olivier Award for his performance in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.”John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesMr. Gambon said he disliked looking in mirrors; so unpleasant did he find his face that he compared it to a crumpled plastic bag. His jowls and his heavy build meant that he never played Hamlet or any obviously heroic or conventionally good-looking characters, yet he won universal admiration for his versatility. He seemed able to grow or shrink at will. For a man compared to a lumberjack, he was astonishingly fleet and nimble. One critic saw him as a rhinoceros that could almost tap-dance.And he brought a paradoxical delicacy to many a role: King Lear and Antony, which he played in tandem for the Royal Shakespeare Company; leading roles in Pinter’s “Betrayal” and “Old Times”; Ben Jonson’s Volpone at the National Theater; and the anguished restaurateur in David Hare’s “Skylight,” a performance he took from London to Broadway, where it earned him a Tony Award nomination for best actor in 1996.At the time he was best known in the United States for a television performance as the daydreaming invalid in Dennis Potter’s acclaimed 1986 mini-series, “The Singing Detective.” Though he always said that the theater was his great love and he pined for it when he was away, he often appeared on screens both large and small during a career in which he was virtually never out of work.Before being cast as Dumbledore, Mr. Gambon was best known in the United States for his performance as the daydreaming invalid in Dennis Potter’s acclaimed 1986 mini-series, “The Singing Detective.”BBCFrom 1999 to 2001, he won successive best-actor BAFTA awards, for “Wives and Daughters,” “Longitude” and “Perfect Strangers.” His portrayal of Lyndon B. Johnson in the 2002 mini-series “Path to War” won him an Emmy nomination, as did his Mr. Woodhouse in the 2009 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”His television roles varied from Inspector Maigret to Edward VII, Oscar Wilde to Winston Churchill. And in film he played characters as different as Albert Spica, the coarse and violent gangster in Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” and the benign Professor Dumbledore.Mr. Gambon took over the role of Dumbledore, a central character in the Harry Potter saga, when Richard Harris, who had originated it, died in 2002. Reviewing “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” in which he first appeared in the role, A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that the film, though noteworthy for its special effects, was also, like the two earlier films in the series, “anchored by top-of-the-line flesh-and-blood British acting,” and noted that “Michael Gambon, as the wise headmaster Albus Dumbledore, has gracefully stepped into Richard Harris’s conical hat and flowing robes.” Mr. Gambon continued to play Dumbledore through the final movie in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” released in 2011.For all the attention that role brought him, Mr. Gambon claimed not to see this or any other performance as a great accomplishment; he tended to answer interviewers who questioned him about acting by saying, “I just do it.” But in fact he prepared for his roles conscientiously. He would absorb a script, then use rehearsals to adapt and deepen his discoveries.“I’m very physical,” he once said. “I want to know how the person looks, what his hair is like, the way he walks, the way he stands and sits, how he sounds, his rhythms, how he dresses, his shoes. The way your feet feel on the stage is important.” And slowly, very slowly, Mr. Gambon would edge toward what he felt was the core of a person and, he said, rely on intuition to bring him to life onstage.Though he was no Method actor, Mr. Gambon did use memories when strong emotions were needed. He found it easy to cry onstage, he said, sometimes by thinking of the famous photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack. Acting, he said, was a compulsion, “a hard slog, heartache, misery — for moments of sheer joy.”Mr. Gambon in the 1989 film “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.”Steve Pyke/Getty ImagesIn person Mr. Gambon was elusive; he said that he didn’t exist aside from his acting and that he hated the idea of celebrity, even popularity. He adamantly refused to reveal anything about his private life to interviewers, though it’s on public record that he married Anne Miller when he was 22 and that together they had a son, Fergus. They both survive him. It is believed that they remained on good terms even after he had two other sons, Tom and William, with the set designer Philippa Hart.He was knighted in 1998.His engineering apprenticeship left him fascinated with the workings of mechanical things: clocks, old watches and especially antique guns, of which he possessed scores. He also took delight in fast cars; he once appeared on the television show “Top Gear” and drove so recklessly that a section of the track he’d taken on two wheels was renamed Gambon Corner.He became notorious for impish behavior on and off the stage. A qualified pilot, he promised to cure a fellow actor of his fear of flying by taking him up in a tiny plane, then mimed a heart attack as, his tongue lolling, he nose-dived toward outer London. Mr. Ayckbourn recalled a moment in “Othello” when Mr. Gambon shoved Iago’s head into a fountain. “Shampoo and set, shampoo and set,” roared the Moor — but such was the emotion already generated the audience reportedly didn’t notice.“I’m actually serious about my work,” Mr. Gambon once said. However, much of that work came to a premature end after he played a wily, drunken, needy Falstaff at the National Theater in 2005, followed by the alcoholic Hirst in Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” in 2008.Having admitted that he often felt terrified before making an entrance, he had panic attacks while rehearsing the role of W.H. Auden in Alan Bennett’s “The Habit of Art” in 2009 and was twice rushed to a hospital before withdrawing from the production. By then he was finding it difficult to remember lines. After playing the nonspeaking title character in Samuel Beckett’s “Eh Joe” in 2013, he announced that he would no longer perform onstage.He continued to appear on film and television, notably as the ailing title character in “Churchill’s Secret” in 2016. But his departure from theater meant that he ended his stage career with a deep sense of loss.“It’s a horrible thing to admit,” he said. “But I can’t do it. And it breaks my heart.”Alex Marshall More

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      in Movies

      Onstage, Michael Gambon’s Depth Transcended the Unspoken

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      The actor conveyed the gravitational force of mortality, tugging the men he played so commandingly toward a void beyond meaning, our critic writes.Even in silence, he thundered. Make that, especially in silence.The last two times I saw the mighty Michael Gambon onstage, his characters didn’t have much to say, and in one case, nothing at all. Both the plays in which this British actor, who died on Wednesday at the age of 82, was appearing on those occasions were by Samuel Beckett, “Eh Joe” and “All That Fall.”Few, if any dramatists, made better use of the resonance of the unspoken than Beckett. And few actors brought such profound visceral weariness — and agitation — to Beckett’s wordlessness. Even in performances that required him to bellow, quip or speechify, Gambon made sure we were aware of the gravitational force of mortality, tugging the men he played so commandingly toward a void beyond meaning, beyond will, beyond life.He was not an obese man, but he was an uncommonly solid and fleshly presence in live theater, from his haunted, corrugated face to his bearlike torso and unexpectedly expressive feet. Here was someone, you felt, whom it was better never to cross.That impressive avoirdupois made him a natural onscreen for roles as different as the magisterial wizard Dumbledore in the “Harry Potter” movies; the terrifying, vengeful gangster in Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”; and the hospital patient, fantasist mystery writer in Dennis Potter’s sublime television mini-series “The Singing Detective.” Onstage that presence allowed Gambon to convey, effortlessly, the subliminal menace and explosiveness in the husband and lover of Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” and David Hare’s “Skylight,” and the rueful rage beneath Falstaff’s heartiness in the Henry IV plays.Yet he always gave the impression that all that powerful density might melt into the helplessness we associate with the newborn and the dying, a sense that thrums like a bass line through Beckett’s work. In “Eh Joe,” a television play that was brought to the London stage by the director Atom Egoyan in 2006, Gambon’s role was almost entirely passive.The only words we heard were spoken by an unseen woman, who voiced a droning litany of accusations of a life lived in bad faith. It was Egoyan’s conceit to have Gambon’s face projected on a scrim in immense, simultaneous video close-up, registering each blow of memory with flickers of expression so subtle as to seem subterranean.It was a device that reminded us of the miraculous way cameras can discover, in certain seemingly unchanging faces, a multitude of conflicted feelings. The astonishment was how even more complete a portrait Gambon provided through the physicality of his live presence, when the camera wasn’t running.Wearing a threadbare bathrobe in a shadowed, shabby room, Gambon’s Joe began the play by running his fingers across window curtains as he closed them, then sitting with immense weariness onto his bed. For much of those opening moments, you couldn’t even see his face.Nonetheless, you sensed you had been vouchsafed a vision of a man at his most defeated, so overcome by his own futility that movement had become pointless. The very set of his shoulders let us know that Joe was so raw, so spent that you felt, as you sometimes do with great actors, that you were violating a privacy you had no right to witness.I am sorry I missed Gambon in Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” in London in 2010. But I did get to see him in a lesser-known Beckett work, “All That Fall,” three years later in New York. Brought to the stage by the director Trevor Nunn, “All That Fall” follows a day in the life of the chattery, scrappy Mrs. Rooney (played, wonderfully, by Eileen Atkins), who goes to pick up her blind, broken-down husband at the train station.Gambon’s Mr. Rooney made his entrance late and didn’t begin to match his wife in loquacity. His physique, though, spoke volumes. He was, I wrote at the time, “a crumpled Goliath,” as he sloped onto the frail support of Atkins’s shoulder. Just to see the two of them, side by side, alone, in their codependency, was to understand the dynamic of a marriage.It is, however, as perhaps befits what was originally a radio play, a single sound that I remember most vividly from that production. The wife had quoted the text from the local church sermon: “The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.”And with those words, Gambon and Atkins roared, coarsely and deeply, with laughter. To grasp the absurdity of the text, you had only to look at the derelict couple before you. But there was the triumph of defiance in their laughter.That triumph was implicit in every performance that Gambon gave us. More