Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Fabelmans’ Is Judd Hirsch’s Latest Great Story

      by

      The veteran actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in Steven Spielberg’s drama. It’s the latest chapter in a long career full of anecdotes.“Have we met before?” Judd Hirsch asked enthusiastically as he strode into a French bistro last month. “I’ve met everybody before. Maybe we met when you were a baby and I said, ‘I’ll see you when you’re older.’”When you invite Hirsch, the veteran actor and raconteur, on a lunch date, you’re going to hear stories on top of stories — stories you knew you wanted and stories you didn’t know you were going to get.The instant he took his seat, Hirsch spun a tale about the afternoon’s dining spot, Boucherie West Village, whose building once housed the Off Broadway theater where he co-starred in the original 1979 production of “Talley’s Folly” by Lanford Wilson.As the actor told it, an agent affiliated with the play wanted to replace Hirsch because his role in the hit sitcom “Taxi” was going to conflict with a planned Broadway transfer for “Talley’s Folly.”Instead, Hirsch helped bring the play to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where he performed it that summer and fall during his downtime from “Taxi.” The following winter, Hirsch said proudly, “I came back and did it on Broadway, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.”Riding on similar waves of showbiz know-how and sheer bravado, Hirsch can currently be seen barnstorming his way through a crucial portion of “The Fabelmans,” the director Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama.Hirsch has only a few minutes of screen time, playing Boris, the cantankerous great-uncle of its adolescent protagonist, Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle). But the 87-year-old actor makes every frame count as he delivers a galvanic speech to the young Spielberg stand-in, exhorting him to commit to his artistic aspirations while warning that they will be in perpetual conflict with the needs of his family.Hirsch opposite Gabriel LaBelle in “The Fabelmans.” He’s not on the screen for long but he makes every frame count.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressHirsch’s unexpectedly intense performance in “The Fabelmans” — the latest in a decades-long career spanning stage, screen and a 1972 commercial for JCPenney polyester slacks — would seem to be a testament to his endurance in a singularly fickle industry.But while he is happy for the plum opportunity in a prestigious year-end film, Hirsch could not quite point to any particular reason he should be enjoying another moment in the spotlight right now.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.“I have no idea why I get any part that somebody else can play,” he said. “Or why I don’t get one when I do want to play it. But I’m old enough to know that’s OK.”Approval is always nice, but Hirsch suggested that an actor’s temperament was forged in far more frequent instances of rejection. When you don’t land a role, he explained, “you can say, ‘What the hell did they see in me that made them turn me down?’ Or you can say, ‘They don’t know what the hell they’re missing.’”Though he’s long split his time between Los Angeles and New York, Hirsch was born and raised in New York, and didn’t expect much for himself after studying acting at HB Studio in the early 1960s. “I never thought I’d play anything more than a construction worker, criminal or some schlubby guy,” he said.Instead he went on to play a variety of prominent roles on television (“Taxi,” “Dear John,” “Numbers”), in film (“Ordinary People,” “Independence Day,” “Uncut Gems”) and onstage (“I’m Not Rappaport”).Presently, when Hirsch wasn’t kibitzing playfully with a waiter (“You don’t mind if I don’t speak French?” the actor said, looking over his menu. “I could say some of those words with a French accent”), he was just as fond of sharing anecdotes from an era when he wasn’t well established.There was, for instance, the fateful introduction he received while visiting Universal to audition for a TV movie in the early 1970s.Hirsch has been an awards contender before. He was up for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony for work he did in 1980, and didn’t win any of the prizes.Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesA woman working there began to show him around to other people in the office: “This is so-and-so,” Hirsch recounted. “And this is so-and-so. This is Mr. Spielberg, and he’s sitting behind a desk, and on his desk is ‘Jaws,’ which I had no idea was anything. And she said” — his voice dropped to a stage whisper — “‘He’s going to be very big.’”“He would not have known of me,” Hirsch said of the fleeting encounter. “Look at all the Spielberg movies since — and I’m not in any of them.”But their trajectories intersected again a half-century later on “The Fabelmans.” The dramatist Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”), who wrote the screenplay with Spielberg, said that the Boris character was based on an actual member of the director’s extended family.The real-life Uncle Boris “had worked in some animal handling in the early days of Hollywood and he had been in the circus,” said Kushner, who has collaborated with Spielberg on “Munich,” “Lincoln” and “West Side Story.” Kushner added that the actual Boris “had lived a wild, itinerant life, and that had made him a fearsome figure to his sister, and to his nieces and nephews.”The scene written for the fictional Boris was intended to impart a lesson about the cost of pursuing an artistic life, Kushner said: “Art has a power that one only imagines one controls. When you access it, if you’re really practicing it, it’s going to take you to the truth. And the truth is sometimes going to be very dangerous.”Hirsch, who was cast after a video conversation with Spielberg, said his preparation was far less weighty.“He said you can play it with an accent or not,” Hirsch recalled. “After I read it, I said, what schmuck would not? He’s going to have to like it this way because I’m not going to do it any other way.”Hirsch said he could channel the frantic passion of the film’s Boris, who feels frustrated that his message is not reaching young Sammy. But the actor said there was only one moment he was “truly scared to do,” when the scene required him to get physical with LaBelle.“I line the kid up against the wall and I say, ‘Look at me — look at me,’” Hirsch said. “After all that, I want him to see what I had to go through.”LaBelle said he encouraged Hirsch to “beat the [expletive] out of me.”“The moment where he pinches my face, I was like, ‘No, no, hurt me. Come on, let’s do it,’” LaBelle recalled.He added, “It’s not like I’m hanging on the side of a plane. I’m just getting my face pinched.”Whether his “Fabelmans” performance garners any attention for a year-end film award, Hirsch noted that he had been down this road before.Hirsch said the only “Fabelmans” scene that gave him pause was one requiring him to get physical with LaBelle. But the younger actor wasn’t fazed. “I was like, ‘No, no, hurt me,’” LaBelle said.Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesHe pointed out that for work he did in 1980 alone, he was nominated for an Oscar (for “Ordinary People”), an Emmy (“Taxi”) and a Tony (“Talley’s Folly”) — and won none of them. Though Hirsch didn’t mention this, he did go on to win Emmys for “Taxi” in 1981 and 1983.Hirsch said he was actually relieved he didn’t win for “Ordinary People,” in which he played a psychiatrist treating a traumatized teenager (Timothy Hutton). Both men were nominated as supporting actors, and Hirsch suggested that Hutton — who ultimately won — was more deserving of the honor.“I said, what’s the worst thing that could happen to me?” Hirsch explained. “I win this damn thing and then have to look at him and make excuse, excuse, excuse — ‘They made a terrible mistake, it should have been you.’”After a server asked him if he would like some black coffee (“That’s the usual color, isn’t it?” Hirsch replied without missing a beat), the actor resumed delving into his trove of stories from projects that did not earn him any trophies or recognition.He spoke of his performance in the 1978 drama “King of the Gypsies,” in which his character is shot by Eric Roberts and falls out an apartment window to his death.“So I said who’s going to do that?” Hirsch recalled. “They said, ‘You.’ I said, ‘OK.’ I arrive at the set and there’s one of those enormous air mattresses in the street.”Hirsch said he filmed three takes of his fatal fall, but while the finished sequence in the movie shows him taking gunfire and toppling out the window, the part where his character lands on a car was performed by a stuntman.“Luckily I didn’t have to hit a car,” he said. “Otherwise, you and I would not be talking here.” More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Playing Santa Onscreen Takes Much More Than Just Donning a Red Suit

      by

      David Harbour, George Wendt and Tim Allen explain the acting challenge that is Jolly St. Nick.David Harbour isn’t the first actor most of us would cast as Santa Claus. Maybe it’s because he prefers to roll in the muck with his characters — the police chief Jim Hopper in “Stranger Things,” the super-soldier Alexei Shostakov in “Black Widow” — rather than snuggle with them.But to the director Tommy Wirkola, Harbour was perfect.For “Violent Night,” his new holiday gore-fest, Wirkola needed an actor with presence and chops: the ability to play Santa as a drunk depressive who has lost faith in humanity, Christmas and himself, but whose goodness still radiates.“Literally in our first meeting, somebody brought up his name, and it was one of those moments where we just looked at each other,” Wirkola said in a video call from Los Angeles. “It was almost too obvious; it’s such a good idea.”“Violent Night” puts Santa in the right place at the wrong time, a Christmas Eve heist at a billionaire’s mansion. He’d happily fly back up the chimney were it not for 7-year-old Trudy (Leah Brady), who has pleaded for help over the walkie-talkie her parents told her was a direct line to Santa. So he digs deep into himself and his sack of toys to summon the courage and the weaponry to save her.“I’m pretty sure it’s intimidating to some extent for an actor to do the role of Santa Claus,” Wirkola said. “So many actors have done it before, in so many movies. So how can we make it stand out?”Suiting up as St. Nick may sound like a frolic around the tannenbaum, a welcome break from more serious roles.If only.We talked with three stars about what went into portraying a Santa for the ages.David Harbour, ‘Violent Night’Alex Hassell, left, Beverly D’Angelo, Edi Patterson, Alexis Louder and Leah Brady with Harbour in “Violent Night.”Allen Fraser/Universal StudiosAs Harbour and Wirkola fleshed out their Santa, they decided he couldn’t be comical or the movie wouldn’t work. So Harbour played him straight.“It’s just inherently funny when people treat him as if he’s in on the joke, like, ‘Oh hello, Santa,’” he said, “and he’s completely deadpan because he is Santa.”And because the dynamic between Trudy and Santa needed to be respectful — and never condescending or cloying — Harbour watched the 1947 version of “Miracle on 34th Street” on his iPhone at night, recording scenes with the Santa and the child characters to discuss the next day as he and Wirkola developed the script.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.“That was the real movie I thought about all the time on set,” he said by video from Budapest, where he was shooting the upcoming film “Gran Turismo.”Harbour’s Santa was visually modeled on an old-school Coca-Cola advertising fantasy, with a curlicue beard and rosy cheeks. But that Santa wouldn’t drink himself horizontal or power-vomit on a woman. Nor would he display a Viking’s ferocity.This Santa was a warrior, which meant that Harbour had to become one, too.But as more of Santa’s origin story was revealed through action sequences, the question became what to show when.“David was adamant that he didn’t want him to be too good too quickly, or too cool too quickly and say too many cool lines too fast,” Wirkola said. “In the first couple of fights, he’s stumbling around and barely surviving. David didn’t want him to feel superhuman in any way.” Even if Harbour sometimes felt that the role’s demands required feats of imagination that more dramatic roles — where the depth and complexity is written into the script — did not.“It was a lot of digging in and trying to create a character and an arc that would be meaningful,” Harbour said. “The funny thing is, we might look down on work that happens in a soap opera or an action movie as being not artistic. But when I see somebody do something impressive in a soap opera, I’m always like, ‘You must have worked really hard on that.’”“And yeah, I worked really hard.”George Wendt, ‘Elf: The Musical’George Wendt opposite Sebastian Arcelus in “Elf: The Musical.” He was asked to humanize his Santa.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times George Wendt used to joke that if you stayed fat enough and got old enough, the Santa roles would start rolling in. But that was hardly what landed him “Elf: The Musical,” a 2010 stage adaptation of the 2003 Will Ferrell comedy. (He reprised the role in 2017 at Madison Square Garden.)“Did I want to be in the original cast of a new Broadway musical? It was a big yes,” Wendt, who is now starring in the rom-com “Christmas With the Campbells” on Amazon Prime Video, said in a call from Los Angeles. “I had just been on Broadway in ‘Hairspray.’ I was fresh meat, so to speak.”His instinct, and that of the show’s writers, was to humanize his Santa, maybe make him a little funnier than you’d think he would be — but go light on the schmaltz.“Any time I started to veer into what might be sappy Santa, Casey Nicholaw, the director, would be like, ‘Bup bup bup bup bup, don’t you dare!’” Wendt said. “He wanted me to keep it real and flip, not a reverential Santa in any way.”Wendt has played Santa five or six times — he’s lost count — and while “Elf” might have been his highest-profile gig, “A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!,” in 2008, was his weirdest one.“I came down the chimney with a bowie knife between my teeth because this bear was stalking Colbert,” he said, referring to the late-night host Stephen Colbert. “So I brawled with the bear, and I ripped him open with my knife, with Colbert cowering in a corner. And when I slit his belly open, Elvis Costello came out dressed as Bob Cratchit.”But whether he’s cracking New Jersey jokes, like in “Elf: The Musical,” or saving TV hosts, being Santa comes with an inescapable irritant that makes you wonder how the jolly old fellow grew rotund in the first place.“It’s really hard to eat much with all that hair on,” Wendt said. “That beard — that’s awful. It just goes right in your mouth, no matter how careful you are.”Tim Allen, ‘The Santa Clause’Tim Allen, opposite Eric Lloyd, in “The Santa Clause,” the film that kicked off the franchise.DisneyFor nearly three decades, Tim Allen — who jokingly claims not to be fond of children, his own included — has played Scott Calvin, a divorced dad forced to fill Santa’s suit and boots, starting in “The Santa Clause” (1994). Two sequels later, he has extended his run with “The Santa Clauses,” a new Disney+ series about Calvin’s quest to find a worthy successor.Now Allen can’t get away from kids.“I have to make up stories to real children all the time when their parents say, ‘This is Santa Claus,’ and I’m like, ‘No, it’s not,’” he said, calling from Manhattan. “I play along, and I joyously do it. But it’s a little overwhelming, to be honest, for a very aggressive comedian.” In fact, “The Santa Clause” was a far darker comedy when Allen signed on. He kind of remembers that Calvin might have shot Santa.“To this day, it’s one of the best scripts, top to bottom, I’ve ever read,” he said.But for the series, Allen wanted — demanded, really — a story with a beginning, middle and end, as well as explanations for some lingering questions about what happened to the original Santa and the process for selecting a new one.“We answered those in a very wonderful, organic way,” he said. “So I had, in this one, conceptual strength in the script room. ‘Let’s get to these points and the jokes will come. And once we get to the funny stuff, I can add.’ That’s kind of my strength.” Physically getting into character originally was not.In the first film, Allen spent four hours in the chair each day, often followed by 10 hours in a hot, heavy suit — an affair he called psychotic.The process has since been streamlined, but its effect is still undeniable.Allen recalled the hush that fell over 225 people on the first day of shooting not so long ago, as he walked onto the set in his gorgeous velvet suit and uncannily realistic headpiece with beard, mustache and flawless skin that make him look younger even if you’re right next to him.“And all of a sudden you have adults, half adults, children looking at me with these big grins on their faces, and they’re silent,” he said. “I realized the magic of this image — that whatever it means, it means the same thing to all of the children in these people.”“It’s a responsibility. I don’t make fun of it.” More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘La Race,’ a Fight Back From the Margins

      by

      Bleu Beckford-Burrell’s play about a City Council campaign aims to catalog a gamut of social ills and how Black women rise to meet them.What does it take to speak up for your community? In “La Race,” which opened at the McGinn/Cazale Theater on Monday night, the question is both practical and personal. For a reluctant candidate running a grassroots campaign in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, the race is more of an impetus for self-reflection than a quest for power. In order to speak for anyone, the play suggests, you first have to find your voice.It’s 2017, liberal resistance is in the air and residents of the coastal district have been pushed so far to the margins that they are practically falling off the map. Beloved by beachgoing New Yorkers and encroached upon by developers, Far Rockaway is also home to low- and middle-income people feeling the creep of gentrification — represented here by the arrival of Le Sea Bean, a comically bougie cafe where a latte costs $13. That’s where Maxine (Naomi Lorrain) goes to do some enemy reconnaissance after she loses a personal assistant gig, leaving her searching for renewed purpose.Her devoted friend and roommate A.J. (Shaunette Renée Wilson), a staunch warrior against all manner of oppression, is urging Max to run for City Council and be an advocate for the area’s underserved constituents. Max’s knee-jerk hesitance gives way as A.J. rounds up a campaign team, including A.J.’s admirer Trey (Christopher B. Portley); Uriel (Auberth Bercy), a silly-sweet barista who works multiple jobs; and Dejani (Stacey Sargeant), who’s looking to earn goodwill points in a custody battle for her children. Each character’s investment in rallying around Max, and its relation to their personal back story, comes to light over the course of the play with varying degrees of clarity.Like Max, who articulates her platform in a broad-ranging spoken-word poem addressing everything from police violence and consumer capitalism to big pharma, the playwright Bleu Beckford-Burrell swings big, aiming to catalog a gamut of social ills by illustrating how they affect — and meet defiance from — Black women. Max’s visits to a psychologist (also played by Sargeant, in a skillful double turn) demonstrate the mental and emotional burdens she carries, as well as her tendency to bear responsibility for them, before a breakthrough helps her recognize the extent to which they are shared and systemic.Taking up untold stories can be unwieldy, and “La Race” would benefit from more streamlined character development and a sharper focus. At just over two and a half hours, the halting progress of community organizing starts to drag, while Max’s romantic involvement with a white man (Vince Nappo) feels like an easy contrivance to generate conflict neatly reflecting social tensions. Even Max herself can seem like a totem, despite disclosing her feelings in periodic therapy sessions, another on-the-nose device.The production, from Page 73 and Working Theater, is a feat of versatile and often witty design by Arnulfo Maldonado, whose set goes from a living room to an open-mic night to a day at the beach with clever ease, and with remarkable work from lighting designers Stacey Derosier and Bailey Costa. The director Taylor Reynolds, and the wholly appealing cast, create an engaging sense of place and affinity, such that “La Race” is perhaps, above all, a love letter to the very idea of a neighborhood. Take a step back, and it’s also an argument for coexistence and democracy, even at the edge of the world.La RaceThrough Dec. 23 at the McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; page73.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Amid Global Turmoil, Salzburg Festival Plans a Summer of Reflection

      by

      “Our present reality seems to be completely out of joint with universal bonds and perspectives,” the festival’s artistic director said.With the pandemic still lingering and the war in Ukraine raging on, the Salzburg Festival in Austria announced plans on Friday for a summer season that would seek to offer space for reflection.The festival, classical music’s most storied annual event, will stage two operas based on works by William Shakespeare: “Macbeth” and “Falstaff,” both by Verdi. There are also plans for more offbeat repertoire, including Bohuslav Martinu’s “The Greek Passion,” which tells the story of a Greek village staging a Passion play, in a production led by the conductor Maxime Pascal.“Our present reality seems to be completely out of joint with universal bonds and perspectives,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview, quoting from “Hamlet.” “Therefore, we have constructed a festival giving artists the opportunity to address these issues directly and indirectly.”The festival will feature more than 200 events — a mix of operas, spoken drama, orchestra concerts and recitals — over six weeks beginning July 20.The festival’s house band, the Vienna Philharmonic, will perform several concerts, including “Ein Deutsches Requiem” (“A German Requiem”), an hourlong choral work by Brahms, under the conductor Christian Thielemann. Among other prominent orchestras making appearances are the Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.The mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli will star in Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice”; the conductor John Eliot Gardiner will lead a concert performance of Berlioz’s “Les Troyens,” featuring his ensemble, the Monteverdi Choir; and the soprano Renée Fleming and the pianist Evgeny Kissin team up for a recital of works by Schubert, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Duparc.Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra and a Salzburg regular, will take the baton for “Macbeth,” which opens in July, in a production by Krzysztof Warlikowski. In August, Welser-Möst will lead the Vienna Philharmonic in a concert featuring works by Ligeti and Richard Strauss.The festival will again prominently feature the conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has faced scrutiny since the start of the war in Ukraine because of his ties to a state-owned bank in Russia. He will take the baton for a concert presentation of Henry Purcell’s opera “The Indian Queen” with his new ensemble, Utopia. Currentzis will also lead Utopia in performances of Mozart’s Mass in C minor.Currentzis announced the formation of Utopia, which is backed by European benefactors, in August, after he faced a wave of criticism for his longtime association with the Russian ensemble MusicAeterna, which is sponsored by VTB Bank, a state-owned institution that has been sanctioned by the United States and other countries. (Currentzis had been trying for several years to secure funding for Utopia.)While the pandemic has wreaked havoc across the performing arts, the Salzburg Festival, drawing on government subsidies and sponsorship deals, has managed to minimize the disruption.The festival never canceled a season during the pandemic. In 2020, it staged a robust program for limited audiences, before returning to relative normalcy in 2021.Even as turnout for many classical events around the world has been tepid since the return of live performance, the Salzburg Festival continues to attract an enthusiastic audience. Attendance was 96 percent last summer, the festival said. More

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      When Jewish Artists Wrestle With Antisemitism

      by

      In this unsettling moment, comedians, filmmakers, playwrights and others have been struggling against a long-ingrained American response to look away.Antisemitism has such a long, violent history that it seems absurd to claim it’s getting worse. Compared with when? And yet, there’s something about our current moment that feels different.Consider a recent Sunday. I woke up to news reports that two men were arrested at Penn Station with weapons, a swastika armband and a social media history of threats to attack a synagogue. After taking a shower, I opened my dresser to find my Kyrie Irving T-shirt. The Brooklyn Net was returning to the N.B.A. that evening after being suspended for tweeting a link to a documentary that cast doubt on the Holocaust.I didn’t expect getting dressed in the morning to turn into a test of loyalties between my favorite basketball team and my murdered ancestors, but here we are.That night, when I arrived at Barclays Center, scores of people belonging to what the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group were handing out pamphlets with the blaring headline “The Truth About Antisemitism.” I opened Twitter and saw Elon Musk was making fun of the Anti-Defamation League and Ye was tweeting again. He had kicked off the recent cycle of discourse by leveling violent threats against Jews.Quantifying antisemitism right now by numbers of hate crimes is useful, but doesn’t capture the peculiar anguish and human complexities of its day-to-day pervasiveness. That’s a job better suited to artists, and more than any year in memory, some of our most accomplished ones have taken up the challenge, from the biggest names in comedy (Dave Chappelle, Amy Schumer) to the most celebrated storytellers in theater and film, like Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg. What resonates most in this impressive body of work are the Jewish artists exploring the challenge of antisemitism, and while they started these projects years ago, their hard-earned pessimism now seems uncomfortably prophetic.The thorniest recent work on these issues was the “Saturday Night Live” monologue by Dave Chappelle. He poked fun at Ye and Irving while speaking to the antisemitic idea of a Jewish conspiracy in Hollywood. In between myriad jokes, he shrugged off this stereotype as an understandable thought best not verbalized. One of the maddening traps of modern antisemitism is that it takes a source of pride — Jewish success in the arts, the rare field where we were welcome — and makes it seem sinister. This old tactic got a new hearing.There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, Chappelle observed mischievously, before undercutting the comment with a joke that called the trope that they control show business “a delusion.” Unlike the blunt social media posts of Ye and Irving, this set was a work of art, elusive and layered, displaying finesse and paradox. It’s a prickly kind of funny with corkscrew punch lines that tickled the mind and bothered the conscience. (“If they’re Black then it’s a gang, if they’re Italian it’s a mob, but if they’re Jewish it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”)Dave Chappelle on “Saturday Night Live.” His monologue was a prickly kind of funny that bothered the conscience.Will Heath/NBCArt can be formally beautiful and morally ugly. Despite what you have heard, good comedy can be built on lies as easily as on the truth. This is what makes Chappelle’s set so slippery: His storytelling and gravitas are so magnetic that you can miss how far he goes in making the old slur of a Jewish conspiracy seem reasonable. He whitewashed Irving’s tolerance for Holocaust denial with one good line. With another, he says you can’t “blame Black people” for Jewish pain, erecting a straw man with deftness. To suggest, as he does, that it’s dangerous for him to say “the Jews” is tiresome hyperbole.For as much controversy as this set provoked, it was also predictable. How often have we seen Chappelle bring up celebrity transgression, and then defend, mitigate and complicate it, while inviting us to admire the feat? This is his move. There’s no wondering where he will come down on the latest scandal. We know.Antisemitism in AmericaAntisemitism is one of the longest-standing forms of prejudice, and those who monitor it say it is now on the rise across the country.Perilous Times: With online threats and incidents of harassment and violence rising nationwide, this fall has become increasingly worrisome for American Jews.Donald Trump: The former president had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a prominent antisemite, at Mar-a-Lago, causing some of Mr. Trump’s Jewish allies to speak out.Kanye West: The rapper and designer, who now goes by Ye, has been widely condemned for recent antisemitic comments. The fallout across industries has been swift.Kyrie Irving: The Nets lifted their suspension of the basketball player, who offered “deep apologies” for posting a link to an antisemitic film. His behavior appalled and frightened many of his Jewish fans.EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote about the Jewish tendency to turn antisemitism into comedy. But there’s another coping mechanism that we like to talk about less: looking the other way. When asked about Chappelle’s monologue, Jerry Seinfeld diplomatically told The Hollywood Reporter that “the subject matter calls for more conversation.” When asked about it as a guest on “The Late Show,” Jon Stewart only became earnest when he pleaded for free speech. What’s striking about these responses from star comics is that they seem to be more interested in calling for debate than engaging in it.Then again, I get it. I’ve stayed quiet when peers wrote things that seemed, if not indifferent to Jewish pain, then at least to be applying double standards to it. I gave them the benefit of the doubt or concluded that a call-out would be counterproductive. But saying nothing in the face of such moments exacts its own cost. It eats at you. Several Jewish artists have been making work that explores such decisions with a skeptical eye.In “The Patient,” a sly, suspenseful FX series from Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, creators of “The Americans,” a therapist played by Steve Carell awakens to find himself chained to the bed of a serial killer looking for help with his mental health. The title is a reference to this maniac as well as the way his therapist responds.The killer says he was looking for a therapist who is Jewish, a specific request that goes uncommented on. Small moments tip you off to a tolerated culture of antisemitism. In a flashback, the therapist, Alan, spots a swastika on a poster and, instead of making a fuss, keeps walking.Steve Carell as a therapist and Domhnall Gleeson as a serial killer in “The Patient,” which raises the urgent question of how to fight back.Suzanne Tenner/FXNow he has no such option. Imprisoned by a captor who wants something from him, he is faced with the urgent question of how to fight back. He chooses to use his skills in mental health to help his oppressor get better. The deeper he gets in dialogue, though, the more uncomfortable Alan grows, especially after he teaches the murderer the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and then sees it being used to mourn his latest victims.In many ways, the relationship at the center of “The Patient” is a metaphor for both the lengths Jews will go to extend empathy toward their oppressors and for the existential toll that takes. Playing a man wracked by guilt, grief and doubt, Carell is extremely subtle illustrating how accommodation can be justified and yet wear you down. We also see scenes in his head of him talking to a shrink (David Alan Grier) who asks why he doesn’t fight back, attack the killer. To which Alan replies: “I’m using what I have.” Grier, a figment of his imagination, flashes a look that suggests he doesn’t believe that.Similarly, “The Fabelmans” and “Armageddon Time,” two personal movies by Jewish directors dramatizing their own childhoods, grapple with the question of what weapons Jews have. In both, sensitive boys facing antisemitism at school struggle with how to stand up for themselves.“The Fabelmans” isn’t a movie about being Jewish so much as it is suffused with Jewishness. But when its young protagonist, Sammy Fabelman, moves to California in the 1960s, he’s confronted with Aryan boys who mock his religion and with gentile girls intrigued by it. He happily prays with one girl but puts up a fight with the bullies, who at first seem like the cartoon villains from early Spielberg movies. The most dramatic way Sammy pushes back is by putting his antagonists in a movie. After filming his classmates on a trip to the beach, the footage, shown to the whole school, makes one bully look ridiculous and another glamorous, bigger than life. Oddly, being romanticized by the Jewish kid he beat up rattles the bully more than any insult. His discontent in the face of this attention is the most baffling section in the movie, one that has the ring of a point being made. But what is the point?Is the antisemite feeling shame? If so, Spielberg is working hard to extend empathy. But this exchange also rattles Sammy. When the bigot demands to know why Sammy made him look like a star, the response sounds pained and unsure: “Maybe I did it to make the movie better?”It’s a shockingly unsentimental moment to find in a Spielberg movie, one in which the young version of himself learns that pleasing the crowd might require turning an antisemite into the hero. No one loves the movies more than Spielberg, and in this intimate, morally probing film, he shows how they can move, inspire and reveal the truth. But in these more hardheaded scenes, he also makes it clear that their impact can be unpredictable, and like comedy, they can deceive just as deftly.Chloe East as a classmate intrigued by the religion of the Steven Spielberg stand-in, played by Gabriel LaBelle.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressIn “Armageddon Time,” a humbler, realistic and affectingly bleak portrait of the struggles of a young Jewish kid, James Gray digs into his 1980s Queens upbringing in the story of an 11-year-old boy named Paul Graff whose grandfather is the son of a refugee who fled pogroms in Europe. The patriarch tells him that changing his name (from Grasserstein) will help him in life. This same man urges him to speak up when other students make racist comments to a peer. These are the competing messages he grows up with: assimilate or fight back.A friendship with a Black classmate also makes clear to Paul how not all inequities are the same, that his privilege protects him in a way that other minority groups don’t experience. In a time when Black and Jewish communities are pitted against each other by entertainers like Ye and others, this movie feels exceedingly topical and depressing. It painfully dramatizes how antisemitism can lead Jews to overlook other injustices, protect your tribe and harden your heart to the plight of others.As with Spielberg’s movie, the new play by Tom Stoppard, “Leopoldstadt,” is being described as his most personal as well as a reckoning with his Jewish identity, which in his case he didn’t understand until middle age. It’s also one of his worst plays: intellectually thin, overly familiar, blandly generic. If the way you tell the audience it’s the 1920s is by a woman dancing the Charleston, you’ve become too comfortable with cliché. And yet, this sprawling portrait of a half century in the life of a Jewish family from Vienna is drawing sold-out crowds of weeping audiences.I suspect the reason is the timely and heavy-handed portrait of Jewish complacency and denial. We see this most nakedly in the stand-in for the playwright, a comic writer born Leopold Rosenbaum who now goes by Leonard Chamberlin (a name that evokes the prime minister famous for appeasement). In 1955, Chamberlin is glibly naïve about the Holocaust, a patriotic fool set up for tears when remembering the horrors of the Nazis. The play ends with a roll call of the dead. Of course, the audience cries.TWO THINGS STAND OUT about these dramas, whether onscreen or onstage: The first is that none of the Jewish protagonists are exactly triumphant in the face of antisemitism. Therapy, the movies, assimilation — nothing saves them. These characters are ambivalent, morally compromised or far worse. When it comes to their ability to protest an antisemitic culture, pessimism reigns.The second is how much these works look to the past, exploring the current moment through a historical lens. (That includes Bess Wohl’s play “Camp Siegfried,” a drama about a 1938 Nazi youth camp on Long Island whose themes are clearly meant to echo with today.) Even the contemporary “The Patient” borrows its most blunt power from flashbacks to the moral simplicity of concentration camps. Looking at history can be a useful way to understand the present, but it can also be a way to evade it. One wonders what Stoppard would come up with if he dramatized the more subtle Jewish denial of the cultural world he came up in, where he flourished as a playwright whose religion never seemed to come up. Or how Spielberg or Gray would capture the conflicts of Jewish life now.As usual, comics are the artists taking the earliest and most direct approaches. David Baddiel, a British comic, is receiving glowing reviews this month for a BBC documentary version of his book “Jews Don’t Count” that castigates the double standards applied to prejudice against Jews in progressive spaces today. Marc Maron’s next special, which recently taped in New York, begins a series of jokes on the increased prominence of conspiracies about Jews by saying that in this polarized country, antisemitism is one thing that brings everyone together. At the Kennedy Center Honors, Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the antisemite Borat, skewered Ye and sang a brief parody version of U2’s “With or Without You,” switching the lyrics to “With or Without Jews.”Amy Schumer is one of the few sketch comics to dig into antisemitism today, lampooning the tentativeness our culture has for calling it out in the new season of “Inside Amy Schumer.” She imagines a workplace harassment seminar where everyone is hypersensitive to all kinds of slights except antisemitic ones. It’s a premise that not only counters the trope of a Jewish conspiracy but also taps into the paranoia of being gaslit by an entire culture. It hints at what a Jewish “Get Out” could look like.Part of the resilience of antisemitism is its resistance to critique. Jewish artists are obviously not going to end the lie that they control show business by making more movies, plays, TV shows or sketches about it. But they can illuminate its impact and capture the complex damage it does to the psyche. That matters. For a certain kind of Jew, art can be its own religion. And one lesson we keep learning and forgetting is that the greatest art is much better at portraying conflicted minds than changing them. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Who Committed the ‘Ohio State Murders’? Who Didn’t?

      by

      Audra McDonald stars in Adrienne Kennedy’s 1991 play about the worst imaginable crime and the world that made it inevitable.Two 91-year-old titans made belated Broadway debuts this fall.In the case of the actor James Earl Jones, it was not in a play but on a marquee. In September, the Cort Theater, on West 48th Street, where he’d first performed in 1958, was renamed in his honor.And on Thursday, with the opening of a revival of “Ohio State Murders” on the same stage, Adrienne Kennedy finally had one of her works appear in what is, for better or worse, the center of American theatrical culture.Why it took so long in either case is a question you can answer in one word or many. In “Ohio State Murders,” Kennedy, an avant-gardist who deserves a place among our most honored and produced playwrights, does it in many, each of them a bullet.Not that the 75-minute play, first performed in 1991, is coldblooded or didactic. Rather, in Kenny Leon’s piercing production, starring Audra McDonald in another performance ripped from her gallery of harrowing women, it is painful both in the story it tells and in the immense effort expended to tell it properly.Or, better, improperly: “Ohio State Murders” is rigorously unconventional. The mystery suggested by its title is largely resolved in the first five minutes, when the crime and the criminal are almost casually (if incompletely) revealed. A middle-aged writer named Suzanne Alexander, who has come to Columbus in the play’s present tense to speak about the violent imagery in her work, quickly locates its source in the abduction and drowning of one of her infant twin daughters in 1952, when she was an unmarried undergraduate there.“That was later,” she says immediately after the out-of-sequence revelation, as if there was something yet more important to get back to.There is; Kennedy, who was herself an undergraduate at Ohio State in the early 1950s, uses the time that her tangled structure has bought her to assemble, collagelike, the atmosphere of dread and discrimination faced by Black students of the period. A white classmate accuses Sue, as the protagonist was then called, of stealing a watch, though Sue herself “owned beautiful possessions and jewelry that my parents had given me.” The English department will not allow her, or any other Black student, to declare that major without special consent, generally not forthcoming: “It was thought that we were not able to master the program.”McDonald as a college student and Bryce Pinkham as her professor in the play. It’s a lesson in itself to watch McDonald shift between her older and younger characters, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe older and younger characters are usually split between two actors, but Kennedy has given McDonald permission to play both. It’s a lesson in itself to watch her shift between them. Sue is innocent and trusting, until circumstances teach her not to be; she drinks in the literature she is reading as if with an endless thirst. Suzanne, though she has survived tragedy and fashioned a solid career for herself, is anxious and brittle, laughing inappropriately at times, reverting to a private language while furiously seeking the right words to convey the intensity of the forces at play.In neither role does McDonald have the support of ordinary dramaturgy. There is virtually no dialogue in “Ohio State Murders,” because what happened to Sue is less important than how Suzanne tries, as you feel she has tried for decades, to understand it. That the father of the babies was her white English professor (Bryce Pinkham) is merely a biological and later a forensic fact; that he admires her essays and teaches her to love Hardy (especially and relevantly “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”) are more salient pieces of the psychological puzzle.In a conventional drama, we might see the professor wooing or comforting or ultimately dismissing Sue; here we experience him only in small fragments, reading and lecturing and saying a few words in her general direction. The same technique keeps her roommate (Abigail Stephenson), aunt (Lizan Mitchell) and even her boyfriend (Mister Fitzgerald) at a distance, with Suzanne describing their interactions rather than Sue engaging in them.Kennedy, it seems, aims to forbid us the ease and release of a traditional scene, just as she has prescribed a conceptual set that in Beowulf Boritt’s rather stiff interpretation represents all locations and furniture as a tumble of library shelves full of law tomes. But McDonald is incapable of nonemotion; her performance builds to a shattering catharsis that may in some ways be unauthorized.Leon, too, works smartly against the grain of the play. In thoughtfully mimed vignettes, he shows us that the other characters, beautifully enacted if with little to say, are not just puppets of Suzanne’s memory but living creatures with their own struggles. They are lit (by Allen Lee Hughes) and costumed (by Dede Ayite) less forbiddingly than the script might lead you to expect, and accompanied by sound and music (by Justin Ellington and Dwight Andrews) that admits other emotions to the horror. Even the babies are touchingly represented: slips of pink fabric, delicate as scarves and as easily lost.In a demanding double role, McDonald conveys astonishing access to tragic feeling, our critic writes. Sara Krulwich/The New York. TimesThese warming, even sentimental additions do not detract from the intellectual integrity of Kennedy’s conception any more than McDonald’s astonishing access to tragic feeling diminishes the prickly oddness of the characters. To my mind these are instead enhancements, forcing us to experience the play’s central themes as internal conflicts and not just social ones.Not that society is in any way let off the hook. The racism at the heart of the murder mystery is also at the heart of everything else, making it unclear which is the cause and which the effect. So when Suzanne describes the white sorority houses as “columned mansions” sitting “like a citadel” off Columbus’s High Street, it’s impossible not to think of plantation architecture — a point that Sue, reading from a book about symbols, drives home at once:“A city should have a sacred geography,” she recites, “never arbitrary but planned in strict accord with the dictates of a doctrine that the society upholds.” In other words, Suzanne’s experiences of exclusion are no accident of racism, they are its goals.Just so with theaters — and what we see within them. If the balance is at last beginning to tip, both on the marquee and the title page, it’s not just luck, though we are lucky to get to experience it. It’s because our greatest artists, Kennedy, Jones and McDonald among them, have been using their artistry to argue the case for years.Ohio State MurdersThrough Feb. 12 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan; ohiostatemurdersbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Dick Rivington & the Cat’ Review: A Civic-Minded Holiday Treat

      by

      This wacky family show respects the codes of the British holiday tradition known as panto, which means playfully not holding anything back.New York City has a rat problem, but this holiday season one neighborhood is dealing with the menace: There is a new fearless cat on the Lower East Side, and he can take down an awful lot of vermin. He can also crack wise, twerk and land somersaults, because we are in the wacky land of pantomime, not the 6 o’clock news.The highly interactive, highly silly British holiday tradition known as panto has not made many inroads in the United States, but “Dick Rivington & the Cat” proves it can be done, respecting the genre’s codes while putting a local spin on them.The show borrows the structure of the panto classic “Dick Whittington and His Cat” and relocates it to the neighborhood surrounding Abrons Arts Center, where it is playing. Luckily the area has long been a haven for the downtrodden, so it welcomes the poor orphan Dick Rivington (Annette Berning) and his companion, Tommy the Cat (Tyler West), who have been wandering around looking for a place to call home. They introduce themselves to a rewrite of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” led by Tommy answering Robert Plant’s opening wail with “Meeeeeeeaoooow” — per panto formula, “Dick Rivington” features plenty of pop, rock and rap classic with new lyrics.Dick and Tommy make new pals — including Sarah the Cook (Michael Lynch), her son, Mitch (Matthew Roper), and the fetching Liliana (Jenni Gil) — and help them battle the rodent hordes (played by an ensemble of kids in furry outfits). The critters are led by King Rat (Bradford Scobie), who wants to extend his dominion from Chompkins Square Park “all the way from Corlears Hook to the very end of civilization, 14th Street!” (Is pizza involved, too? Do you need to ask?) Naturally, mayhem ensues, further boosted by the audience, which has been instructed to boo and hiss every time King Rat turns up. (New Yorkers, even children, need very little encouragement to loudly express their displeasure.)Bradford Scobie, center, as King Rat, with Muffy Styler, left, and Jonathan Rodriguez, right.Andrew T Foster for ONEOFUS/Abrons Arts CenterThe writer Mat Fraser and the director Julie Atlas Muz’s Panto Project had presented a very good “Jack and the Beanstalk” in 2017, but this second production, which had a curtailed run last year, is superior in every way. David Quinn created brilliantly inventive costumes on what must have been a tight budget (the cook’s outfit includes doughnuts and eggs over easy) and Steven Hammel’s sets make great use of Abrons’s relatively spacious stage.Most important, the action unfolds at a zippy pace and the jokes come nonstop. Parents will get a kick out of the double entendres involving Dick’s name (also a panto tradition) as well as the lighthearted allusions to the area’s gentrification — King Rat makes Dick and Tommy sleep with a potion so powerful that “a cookie in Essex Market could sell for less than 10 bucks and they wouldn’t wake up.”But what really elevates “Dick Rivington” is the acting, with a cast that perfectly understands that panto is no time for subtlety and “what’s my motivation?” interiority. West and Scobie, in particular, give some of the most exhilarating comic performances I have seen all year. West is tireless as Tommy — watch him chase a plastic bag — and manages to always be in the moment, reacting to whatever everybody around him is doing without coming across as obnoxious.As for Scobie, his King Rat is a ramshackle mixture of Alice Cooper and Adam Ant, prancing around with flamboyant assurance and unabashed glee at being a villain. (His big song is “The Phantom of the Opera,” of course.) He gets terrific support from Jonathan Rodriguez and Muffy Styler as the henchrats Scratchit and Ratchet. Too much of a good thing? Happily, this show does not believe in holding back.Dick Rivington & the CatThrough Dec. 18 at Abrons Arts Center, Manhattan; abronsartscenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More