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      Review: Living the ‘Dream,’ on Your Laptop or Phone

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      Gorgeous but thin, this half-hour experiment from the Royal Shakespeare Company turns Puck into an avatar and “theatergoers” into fireflies.Do you know of a site where the wild thyme blows? You do now.“Dream,” an interactive experience from the Royal Shakespeare Company, which runs through Saturday and lasts about as long as a power nap, transports its thousands of viewers to a sylvan grove, then to a rehearsal space in Portsmouth, England, for a live Q&A. Tickets are free, though those who prefer a lightly interactive experience can purchase seats for 10 British pounds (about $14) and appear onscreen as fireflies.Inspired by Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — in the wispiest, most gossamer way imaginable — “Dream” signifies a bounding leap forward for theater technology and a short jog in place for theater itself.A different “Dream” was meant to open in Stratford-upon-Avon about a year ago, as a showcase for Audience of the Future, a consortium of institutions and tech innovators assembled in 2019 and tasked with exploring new ways to make and deliver theater remotely. (Theater on your phone? They saw it first.) The 2020 “Dream” would have played to both a live audience and a remote one, integrating actors, projections and live motion-capture into a verdant whole.Jamie Morgan as Peaseblossom, a character rendered as sticks and flowers.Stuart MartinBut in-person audiences are rare these days, and this remote “Dream,” however gorgeous — and it is gorgeous, enormously gorgeous — feels thinner for it, less a forest of imagination and more a small copse of some really lovingly rendered trees. It begins with Puck (E.M. Williams), that merry wanderer of the night, imagined here as an assemblage of pebbles in the approximate shape of a human body. Why render Puck — nimble, fleet and girdling the earth in the time it takes most of us to load the dishwasher — as a pile of rocks? Dunno. Looks cool.In traveling around the forest, Puck encounters Shakespeare’s other fairies, like Moth (an accumulation of moths), Peaseblossom (sticks and flowers) and Cobweb (an eyeball inside a squirrel’s drey). Apparently, Puck also met Mustardseed (more sticks?). I missed it. And the singer Nick Cave contributed some voice acting! I missed that, too.“Dream,” performed live, is exquisite, denatured and almost entirely contentless. It isn’t quite theater, and it isn’t precisely film, though it could pass for a highbrow “Avatar” short. For stretches, it resembles a meditative video game, but it isn’t that either, mostly because the interactive elements (clicking and dragging fireflies around the landscape) are wholly inconsequential.Those who purchase tickets are represented onscreen as fireflies.Paul MumfordWatching it, I felt inexplicably cranky, like a toddler who has been offered a variety of perfectly nice snacks but doesn’t want any of them. Because maybe what the toddler really wants is to safely see an actual play in an actual theater with an actual audience. And that just isn’t available right now.So I don’t really know what to say about “Dream.” Because it represents an obviously fruitful and seemingly happy collaboration among top-of-their-game actors, directors, designers, composers and technicians, many of whom assumed some physical risk in the making of it. (Among them are Robin McNicholas, credited with direction and narrative development; Pippa Hill, credited with script creation and narrative development; and Esa-Pekka Salonen, the production’s music director and co-composer.) It also signals real progress in the use of live motion-capture (something the Royal Shakespeare Company has already experimented with) and offers a tantalizing glimpse of how that technology might be used when proper in-person theater returns.But this isn’t proper theater. Or even improper theater. It’s a sophisticated demonstration of an emergent technology. Shakespeare is the pretext, not the point. The pentameter, pushed into random virtual mouths, helps us better appreciate the software architecture — which is great if you like software and less great if you like the language itself, or the original play’s plot or characters or keen insights into our big, dumb, desiring hearts. This “Dream” is beautiful. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all wake up now?DreamThrough March 20; dream.online More

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      in Television

      Nicola Pagett, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ Actress, Dies at 75

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      She preferred the stage, but she won praise for her work on television as the rebellious and thoroughly spoiled Elizabeth Bellamy, and later as Anna Karenina.Nicola Pagett, the actress who played the rebellious and thoroughly spoiled Elizabeth Bellamy on the beloved British television series “Upstairs, Downstairs” and the title role in an acclaimed BBC version of “Anna Karenina,” died on March 3 at a hospice center in suburban London. She was 75.The cause was a brain tumor, her daughter, Eve Swannell, said.Ms. Pagett was 26 when she was cast in the original “Upstairs, Downstairs” (1971-76), the prestigious, multi-award-winning British drama set in a spacious Belgravia townhouse during the first three decades of the 20th century. The Bellamys, Richard and Lady Marjorie, live there with their two grown children and about a half dozen servants, as the world of London aristocracy changes around them.In the first season, Elizabeth comes home from school in Germany, a changed girl-woman of 17. She reads Goethe, talks politics incessantly, refuses an arranged marriage with a rich Scotsman, walks out on her debutante ball, rejects her parents’ conservatism and entertains ill-mannered socialist poets in the morning room.Then she marries a charming poet (played by Ian Ogilvy) who shares her progressive social attitudes but not her physical desires. In Season 2, inconveniently pregnant by his publisher (from an assignation the husband had arranged), she goes home to her parents. She gives birth to a daughter, goes to jail with fellow suffragists, has an affair with an Armenian financier and tries running a hat shop before sailing away to New York, leaving others in the household to deal with England’s experience of World War I, the Spanish flu and the stock market crash.“Nothing more could have happened to me anyway,” she told The Washington Post years later about her decision to leave the show. “I could see the writers saying, ‘What the hell do we do with her now?’”Ms. Pagett remained busy onscreen, most notably in “Anna Karenina” (1977), a lush 10-part, eight-hour BBC production of Leo Tolstoy’s novel. Her performance as the doomed, adulterous title character earned glowing reviews.Ms. Pagett in the 10-part BBC adaptation of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (1977). She received glowing reviews for her performance as the doomed, adulterous title character.AlamyAnd she had a thriving London theater career for decades. She toured with “The Contessa” (1965), starring Vivien Leigh. She appeared with Alec Guinness in “A Voyage Round My Father” (1971). In 1974, she tackled the work of three great playwrights (Shakespeare, Chekhov and Ibsen) at once during a special Greenwich Theater season. She was Ophelia in “Hamlet,” Masha in “The Seagull” and Regina in “Ghosts.”A favorite of the playwright Harold Pinter, she played Helen when he directed Jean Giraudoux’s “The Trojan War Will Not Take Place” (1983). In a 1985 revival of Pinter’s “Old Times,” she was the center of an emotional triangle in which her husband and her long-ago roommate compete to prove their love. She was part of the original London cast of his “Party Time” (1991), about a cocktail-hour gathering of fashionable narcissists, chatting about island vacations and past love affairs while a violent conflict rages outside.In 1995, while playing a psychiatrist’s purposeful wife in Joe Orton’s black comedy “What the Butler Saw,” she had a breakdown. Doctors said she had manic depression, more often referred to now as bipolar disorder.During this period, Ms. Pagett wrote love letters to Alastair Campbell, the press secretary of Prime Minister Tony Blair, with whom she had become obsessed after watching him on television. With the help of the drug lithium and more than one stay in a psychiatric hospital, she largely recovered, but she soon retired from acting.She had gone “completely noisettes,” she wrote in “Diamonds Behind My Eyes” (1997), a memoir about her psychiatric crisis, but asked not to be described as mentally ill. “It gets right up my nose.”Nicola Mary Paget Scott was born on June 15, 1945, in Cairo, to British parents who had met in Egypt. Harold Scott was a Shell Oil executive, and Barbara (Black) Scott was stationed there with the Women’s Royal Naval Service.Nicola spent her childhood abroad. When she was 8 or so, she played Snow White at her convent school in Yokohama, Japan, and decided to make acting her career.At 17, she entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for a two-year program, then appeared in repertory productions and changed her name (including adding a “T” to Paget). She made her London stage debut in “The Boston Summer” in 1968.By then Ms. Pagett had already begun her screen career, mostly by making guest appearances on British television series. In the film “Anne of the Thousand Days” (1969), she was Princess Mary, the teenage daughter of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII. In “There’s a Girl in My Soup” (1970), she was a radiant young bride ravished by a lecherous TV host (Peter Sellers) during her wedding reception.She later appeared in “Frankenstein: The True Story” (1973), a television movie whose co-writer was Christopher Isherwood. She played a socialite in “Scoop” (1987), based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel; a mother-of-the-bride who fancies the father-of-the-groom in the series “A Bit of a Do” (1989); and a second-rate Liverpool stage actress in the film “An Awfully Big Adventure” (1989).Ms. Pagett in her final screen role, in the British mini-series “Up Rising” (2000).ITV/ShutterstockHer final screen role was in “Up Rising” (2000), a mini-series about a retired couple in a village of oddballs.Ms. Pagett married the actor turned writer Graham Swannell in 1975. He was the co-author of her memoir, but they divorced after its publication.In addition to her daughter, a film and television production manager, Ms. Pagett is survived by a sister, Angela. Like many actors, Ms. Pagett preferred theater to film, especially after the movie “Oliver’s Story” (1978), the largely forgotten “Love Story” sequel, in which she played Ryan O’Neal’s shy furniture-designer blind date. Many of her scenes were cut.Yes, a live theater audience’s immediate reaction was great. But also, as The Telegraph quoted her as saying: “Onstage for two hours, I’m my own mistress. I can’t be cut or stopped or changed — or lost.”Besides, Ms. Pagett had learned what really mattered. As she told The Independent in 1992, her original ambition was “to open in the West End and have men with cloaks take me out to dinner.” But she soon discovered a bigger thrill.“I like looking into the eyes of someone whose work I respect,” she said, “and seeing them look back as if to say, ‘I think you can do it, too.’” More

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      in Music

      The Arts Are Coming Back This Summer. Just Step Outside.

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      The return of Shakespeare to Central Park is among the most visible signs that theaters, orchestras and opera companies aim to return to the stage — outdoors.The path back for performing arts in America is winding through a parking lot in Los Angeles, a Formula 1 racetrack in Texas, and Shakespeare’s summer home in New York’s Central Park.As the coronavirus pandemic slowly loosens its grip, theaters, orchestras and opera companies across the country are heading outdoors, grabbing whatever space they can find as they desperately seek a way back to the stage.The newest sign of cultural rebound: On Tuesday, New York City’s Public Theater said that it would seek to present Shakespeare in the Park once again this summer, restarting a cherished city tradition that last year was thwarted for the first time in its history.“People want to celebrate,” said Oskar Eustis, the theater’s artistic director, who is among the 29 million Americans who have been infected with the coronavirus. “This is one of the great ways that the theater can make a celebration.”New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio (center) at a press event inside the Delacorte on Tuesday, detailing plans for the reopening of Shakespeare in the Park.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLarge-scale indoor work remains a ways off in much of the country, as producers wait not only for herd immunity, but also for signs that arts patrons are ready to return in significant numbers. Broadway, for example, is not expected to resume until autumn.But all around the country, companies that normally produce outdoors but were unable to do so last year are making plans to reopen, while those that normally play to indoor crowds are finding ways to take the show outside.This is not business as usual. Many productions won’t start until midsummer, to allow vaccination rates to rise and infection rates to fall. Limits on audience size are likely. And attendees, like those visiting the Santa Fe Opera, will find changes offstage (touchless bathroom systems) and on: Grown-ups (hopefully vaccinated), not children, will play the chorus of faeries in the opera’s production of Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”There remain hurdles to overcome: Many of the venues still need to win permission from local officials and negotiate agreements with labor unions. But the signs of life are now indisputable.In Los Angeles, the Fountain Theater is about to start building a stage in the East Hollywood parking lot where it hopes in June to open that city’s first production of “An Octoroon,” an acclaimed comedic play about race by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Austin Opera next month aims to perform outdoors for the first time, staging “Tosca” in an amphitheater at a Formula 1 racetrack, while in upstate New York, the Glimmerglass Festival is planning to erect a stage on its lawn.Usually presenting shows inside, the Phoenix Theater Company has set up an outdoor stage in the garden at a neighboring church.Reg Madison PhotographyAt that outdoor venue, the armrests have QR codes, one to read the program, and one to order food and drink. Reg Madison PhotographyOrganizations that already have outdoor space have a head start, and are eager to use it.Mark Volpe, the president and chief executive of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, said that later this month he will ask his board to approve a plan to hold performances once again this summer at Tanglewood, the company’s outdoor campus in Western Massachusetts. The season, if approved, would be just six weeks, mostly on weekends, with intermissionless programs lasting no longer than 80 minutes, and no choral work because of concerns that singing could spread the virus.The audience size remains unknown — current Massachusetts regulations would allow just 12 percent of Tanglewood’s 18,000-person capacity — and Volpe said that, even if the regulations ease, “we’re going to be a tad conservative.” Nonetheless, the prospect of once again hearing live music on the vast lawn is thrilling.“Having the orchestra back onstage with an audience,” Volpe said, “I can only imagine how emotional it’s going to be.”The Muny, a St. Louis nonprofit that is the nation’s largest outdoor musical theater producer, is hoping to be able to seat a full-capacity audience of 10,000 for a slightly delayed season, starting July 5, with a full complement of seven musicals, albeit with slightly smaller than usual casts.“Everyone is desperate to get back to work,” said Mike Isaacson, the theater’s artistic director and executive producer. “And our renewal numbers are insane, which says to me people want to be there.”An artist’s rendering of the Fountain Theater’s planned new stage in its parking lot, where the Los Angeles company expects to present “An Octoroon” in June. Fountain TheaterThe St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, which performs in another venue in that city’s Forest Park, has much more modest expectations: It is developing a production of “King Lear,” starring the Tony-winning André De Shields of “Hadestown,” but expects to limit audiences to 750.The Public Theater, which has over the years featured Al Pacino, Oscar Isaac, Meryl Streep and Morgan Freeman on its outdoor stage, is planning just one Shakespeare in the Park production, with an eight-week run starting in July, rather than the usual two-play season starting in May.“Merry Wives,” a 12-actor, intermission-free version of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” adapted by Jocelyn Bioh and directed by Saheem Ali, will be set in Harlem and imagine Falstaff as an African-American seeking to woo two married women who are immigrants from West Africa.How many people will be able to attend? Current state regulations would allow the Public to admit 500 virus-tested people, in a Delacorte Theater that seats 2,000, but the theater is hoping that will change before opening night. And will there be masks? Testing? “We are planning on whatever needs to happen to make it safe,” Ali said.For professional theaters, a major potential hurdle is Actors’ Equity, the labor union, which throughout the pandemic has barred its members from working on any but the small handful of productions that the union has deemed safe. But the union is already striking a more open tone.“I am hopeful now in a way that I could not be earlier,” said Mary McColl, the union’s executive director. She said the union is considering dozens of requests for outdoor work, and has already approved several. As for Shakespeare in the Park, she said, “I’m very excited to see theater in the park. We are eagerly working with them.”E. Faye Butler starred in “Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer,” a one-woman show on the new outdoor stage at the Asolo Repertory Theater in Sarasota, Fla.Cliff RolesA few theaters already have union permission. Utah’s Tuacahn Center for the Arts starts rehearsals next week for outdoor productions of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Annie.” Tuacahn, which stages work in a 2,000-seat amphitheater in a southern Utah box canyon, is planning to use plexiglass to separate performers during rehearsals, but expects not to need such protections by the time performances begin in May.“I’m extremely excited,” said Kevin Smith, the theater’s chief executive. “We had a Zoom call with our professional actors, and I got a little emotional.”Because Broadway shows, and some pop artists, are not ready to tour this summer, expect more homegrown work. For example: the 8,000-seat Starlight Theater, in Kansas City, Mo., which normally houses big brand tours, this summer is largely self-producing.In some warm-weather corners of the country, theaters are already demonstrating that outdoor performances can be safe — and popular.The Phoenix Theater Company, in Arizona, and Asolo Repertory Theater, in Sarasota, Fla., both pivoted outdoors late last year; the Arizona company borrowed a garden area at the church next door to erect a stage, while Asolo Rep built a stage over its front steps.The audience seems to be there. Asolo Rep’s six-person concert version of “Camelot” sold out before it opened, and the Phoenix Theater’s current “Ring of Fire,” featuring the music of Johnny Cash, is also at capacity.Now others are following suit. There are big examples: Lincoln Center, the vast New York nonprofit, has announced that it will create 10 outdoor spaces for performance on its plaza, starting next month, while the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Playwrights Horizons are planning to stage Aleshea Harris’s play, “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” in June in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.And on Monday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association said it anticipates limited-capacity live performances at the Hollywood Bowl this summer.The finances are complicated so long as there are capacity limits imposed by health officials. For some, performing outdoors promises more revenue than working indoors with social distancing.“I was sitting in my theater alone, looking out at the empty seats, and realized that if audiences were forced to sit six feet apart, it reduced my audience size from 80 to 12, which is not a robust financial model to present to your board of directors,” said Stephen Sachs, a co-founder and artistic director of the Fountain Theater. “So why not go outside?”But for larger organizations that cost more to sustain, capacity limits pose a different challenge. In San Diego, the Old Globe says that, at least in the near term, it might only be allowed 124 people in its 620-seat outdoor theater.“Just to turn on the lights requires an investment that will eat up most of what those seats will yield,” said the theater’s artistic director, Barry Edelstein. “It’s just incredibly challenging to figure out what we can afford to do — maybe a little cabaret, or maybe a one-person performance of some kind.”Nonetheless, Edelstein said he expects, like his peers, to present work outside soon. “There is a lot of stuff happening outdoors — dining, religious services, sports,” he said. “We’re not really fulfilling our mission if we’re sitting here closed.” More

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      in Theater

      Klauss Dörr Quits Volksbühne Over Sexual Harassment Allegations

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      Klaus Dörr resigned as head of the Volksbühne after 10 women accused him of sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment.The director of the Volksbühne theater in Berlin quit on Monday after accusations of sexual harassment, creating a hostile work environment and humiliating older actresses were published in a German newspaper. Klaus Dörr had led the Volksbühne, one of Europe’s most influential theaters, since April 2018.His resignation, which the theater confirmed in an email, came just days after Die Tageszeitung, a daily newspaper, said that complaints against Dörr by 10 women were being investigated by Berlin’s culture ministry, which oversees the playhouse. The women said Dörr had stared inappropriately at women who worked at the theater, made sexist comments and sent inappropriate text messages, the newspaper reported.City officials received the complaints in January and were investigating them, the ministry confirmed in a statement released on Saturday. Dörr was interviewed as part of this process at the start of March, the statement added.“I take full responsibility, as the artistic director of the Volksbühne, for the allegations made against me,” Dörr said in a statement released by the theater.“I deeply regret if I have hurt employees with my behavior, words or gaze,” he added.A spokeswoman for the theater declined to comment further.Dörr’s resignation is only the latest scandal to hit the storied Volksbühne. In 2018, Chris Dercon, its previous director and the former leader of the Tate Modern museum in London, quit just months into the job after widespread protests over his appointment. Those included an occupation of the theater by left-wing activists; at one point, someone left feces outside his office.The activists, who included members of the theater’s staff, accused Dercon of trashing the company’s tradition of ensemble theater, in which a permanent company of players creates a rotating repertoire, and turning it into a space for visiting international performers to mount their shows. Many saw the strife around Dercon’s appointment as a proxy for debates about gentrification in Berlin.Dörr was meant to be a stabilizing, if temporary, force at the theater until a new permanent director could be found. In 2019, René Pollesch, an acclaimed German playwright and director, was named as the new leader, set to take up the role in summer 2021.The latest problems at the Volksbühne emerged at a time of focus on the behavior of male leaders in Germany toward female members of staff. On March 14, Julian Reichelt, the editor in chief of Bild, Germany’s largest newspaper, took a leave of absence after women who worked at the paper accused him of misconduct.A law firm is investigating the allegations, which have so far not been specified. Reichelt denies all wrongdoing.Jagoda Marinic, an author who has written extensively about the #MeToo movement in Germany, said in a telephone interview that she saw Dörr’s resignation as a watershed. That the revelations in Die Tageszeitung concerned a group of women, rather than an individual accuser, was significant, she said, adding that the case was also the first time someone in Germany had resigned so quickly after a complaint became public.“My hope is it spurs other people to speak out,” Marinic said.On Tuesday, the Volksbühne’s ensemble expressed its “unreserved solidarity” with the women who spoke out against Dörr, in a message posted on the theater’s Instagram account. “Our industry suffers under outdated power structures,” the message said. “This discourse must not end with Klaus Dörr’s resignation.” More

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      in Television

      The ‘Sentimental Excess’ of Sarah Stiles

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat I LoveThe ‘Sentimental Excess’ of Sarah StilesThe actor, who stars in the Netflix series ‘The Crew’ and is a regular on ‘Billions,’ is like a slightly goofy sitcom neighbor with an otherworldly home.Sarah Stiles’s Otherworldly Style14 PhotosView Slide Show ›Katherine Marks for The New York TimesMarch 16, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETSarah Stiles’s first address in New York was the Stratford Arms, an Upper West Side building that serves as campus housing for students at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Fittingly, the experience had its share of theatrics.The year was 1999. Ms. Stiles’s parents, though long divorced, jointly shepherded her from “the hippie woods of New Hampshire” to the urban jungle of West 70th Street. “And when we got there, there was a giant inflatable rat in front of the building, and people were picketing,” said Ms. Stiles, 41, a star of the new Netflix comedy series “The Crew” and a recurring cast member — Axe Capital trader Bonnie Barella — on Showtime’s “Billions.”The room at the Stratford Arms was too small to accommodate a standard twin bed, and at the time, some of the building’s nonstudent residents were being treated for mental illness, she recalled.“There was a guy who would scream ‘Maria’ at me every night in an angry voice,” said Ms. Stiles, a two-time Tony nominee — for her performance in the play “Hand to God” and her showstopping turn in the musical “Tootsie.” “Things could only go up from there.”The Upper West Side apartment shared by Sarah Stiles, a two-time Tony nominee and a star of the new Netflix series “The Crew,” and her husband, Jeff Dodson, has an otherworldly feeling. She prefers the term “sentimental excess” to describe her style.Credit…Katherine Marks for The New York TimesSarah Stiles, 41Occupation: ActorHome comforts: “I’m the kind of person who makes a home out of anywhere I go. If I’m working regionally or shooting a movie far away, I bring things like photos.”And they did. After bouncing around the boroughs, followed by a brief marriage that landed her in Washington, D.C., and a lot of couch-surfing when she returned to New York, Ms. Stiles got the fairly steady use of a two-bedroom rental not far from that Upper West Side residence hall. Now she lives there full-time — and officially — with her husband of almost six months, Jeff Dodson. (The second bedroom has been outfitted to accommodate Mr. Dodson’s two daughters, Lily and Addy, who spend part of each week there.)“This place has major history for me,” Ms. Stiles said.It began almost 20 years ago, when she visited the apartment as a plus-one for a game night; her future first husband was a pal of the host. Soon, Ms. Stiles became the host’s pal, too. The friendship survived the breakup of her marriage, and Ms. Stiles often used the apartment as a crash pad.“When ‘Hand to God’ came around, my friend’s roommate was moving out and my friend was spending a lot of time in Los Angeles,” she said. “So, basically, it was my own place for this really incredible time in my life both personally and professionally. I did a lot of growing up here.”In the fall of 2018, two years after she met Mr. Dodson, who is the head electrician at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Ms. Stiles moved from the apartment she loved to the Inwood apartment of the man she loved. Three months later, just about the time she had finished redecorating Mr. Dodson’s apartment, and right before the start of rehearsals for “Tootsie,” her friend called. He was vacating the apartment for good and wanted to sign the lease over to her. “He said that he wanted me to live there with Jeff and Jeff’s daughters,” recalled Ms. Stiles. She was happy to oblige.Ms. Stiles has a thing for squirrels, so the acorn lamp makes perfect sense.Credit…Katherine Marks for The New York Times“We moved everything in, like, a weekend,” she said. “We repainted. We got some furniture, and now it’s our house.”Several years and several rentals ago, Ms. Stiles made an unsuccessful stab at minimalism. Recently, she has contemplated following the example of a friend whose apartment was done in shades of cream and gray. “It was beautiful,” she said.But she knew perfectly well that the red plastic chair that is part of her reading nook in the main bedroom, and the layered, multicolored tasseled rugs and pea-green side chair in the living room would be out in the cold with such a restrained palette. She loves bright colors. She loves bold patterns.Ms. Stiles is the square root of a charming but slightly goofy sitcom neighbor. Her apartment reflects those qualities. The aesthetic may best be summed up as otherworldly woodland: tarot cards and an abundance of crystals mix with tiny figures created from sticks and twigs. A bird made of straw seems poised for flight in one window. In another, there’s a plush pigeon — a gift from Mr. Dodson, who, when he was first courting Ms. Stiles, saved the day when an actual pigeon flew into the apartment. Squirrels and their accouterment are represented in many forms: The base of a bedside lamp, for example, is shaped like an acorn.Ms. Stiles prefers the term “sentimental excess” to describe her style.Paintings by her aunt, her grandmother and great-grandmother hang in the living room and the main bedroom. Every window sill has a vignette, composed in part of drawings by Ms. Stiles’s niece and nephew, keepsakes from friends and tender mementos like the pine cone from a hike Ms. Stiles and Mr. Dodson took the day before their wedding.“This apartment, the way it is with Jeff and his kids and me, is the most comfortable space I’ve ever had,” said Ms. Stiles (in Riverside Park with Mr. Dodson and her stepdaughters, Lily Dodson, left, and Addy Dodson).Credit…Katherine Marks for The New York TimesA map of Oklahoma, Mr. Dodson’s home state, hangs in the bedroom. “Everything is here for a reason, and it all means something to me,” Ms. Stiles said.The apartment isn’t perfect, and she’d be the first to say so. It’s either too hot or too cold. No matter how often she scrubs the bathtub, it doesn’t look clean. Because of a wall, the refrigerator barely opens a foot.And yet. “It feels like I’ve been waiting my whole life to feel as safe and comfortable in a physical place as I do in this apartment,” Ms. Stiles said. “The things that my family and I love are here. We don’t think, ‘Oh, we’ll get nicer versions when we have more money.’ We’d choose them regardless.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Theater

      Review: Royalty as Horror Show in ‘Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!’

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      An uncanny new play imagines Meghan (and Kate, too) trapped in a nightmare palace where racism reigns.“Were you silent,” Oprah Winfrey asked Meghan Markle, “or were you silenced?”That transfixing moment from Sunday’s televised interview between the Queen of Empathy and the Duchess of Sussex rang in my ears as I watched, on Monday, a new play, by Vivian J.O. Barnes, that explores the same question in 32 minutes instead of two hours. With uncanny timing and daring theatricality, “Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!” — now streaming from the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago — dissects the phenomenon of Black women who, in exchange for privilege, forfeit their ability to speak, or have it taken from them.I don’t mean Winfrey, of course. In Barnes’s play, which she started writing in 2018, the interview is rather between a woman called the Soon-to-Be Duchess, who is like Markle shortly before her wedding to Prince Harry, and a woman called the Duchess, a Kate Middleton figure reimagined as Black. The occasion is a meeting, evidently arranged by palace apparatchiks, in which the experienced royal wife is supposed to school the totally inexperienced royal fiancée in the finer points of duchessing: how to hold one’s legs (“the Duchess slant”) and especially how to hold one’s tongue.Cooper, right, conferring with Sydney Charles as an experienced royal in the Steppenwolf Theater Company production.Lowell ThomasBy making the Middleton figure Black, Barnes both generalizes the problems of royalty to encompass any woman who joins “the firm” and stakes a claim on particular themes without having to spell them out. The Duchess (Sydney Charles) is sleek and sophisticated, with straight hair, silky diction and a profound mastery of self-abnegation. Soon-to-Be (Celeste M. Cooper) is less processed in every way: She shows too much skin, says what she thinks and has condoms in her purse.Still, she’s jittery. At night she dreams of her mouth turning into a hand that waves as if to perpetual crowds. She has already been pilloried in racist terms in the press and, even within the palace, has been advised to tone herself down. One internal memo asks that she try to be “a little less cocoa, a lot more beige” — a line that, though written earlier, recalls Markle’s description of royal family members expressing concern about the skin tone of the children she and Harry might have.Unlike them, Soon-to-Be laughs off the matter, tearing the memo to pieces along with many others. But if she expected to find the Duchess a comforting sister, “one person who gets it, who’s gonna look out for me,” she is as mistaken as Markle apparently was in the parallel situation.There is no solidarity to be found in a hollowed-out personality; the Duchess, who has recently had a baby she can’t quite recall giving birth to, imagines her public self as a “person who’s taking up the me-shaped hole I left behind.” She has bought so deeply into the royal mythology that she seems to believe she now exists in a rarefied world beyond personality and thus beyond race.As the Markle interview made clear, no such world exists. Institutions can be racist even when their leaders (as Markle said of Queen Elizabeth) have “always been wonderful.” Because this can only be seen from outside, it is not the assimilated royal in Barnes’s play who ends up teaching the outsider how to speak, but the reverse. In ways that are both fascinating and intensely disturbing, Soon-to-Be takes both women to places they could not reach in real life.This puts “Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!” in the line of recent movies, including “Get Out,” “Us” and “Antebellum,” that figure racism as a species of horror, complete with surrealistic touches, eerie mash-ups of sounds and music (by Pornchanok Kanchanabanca) and a culminating dose of (implied) gore. Yet it is still recognizably a play: The director, Weyni Mengesha, stages it elegantly on a minimal set, against a black backdrop, with just enough editing to stitch the two characters, who were filmed separately, together.Even aside from creating mini-studios in their own apartments, the cast has a difficult job here. Working hard to split the genre difference, they aim for a performance style that is neither too stagy for film nor too subtle for theater. Charles has an easier time of it; Barnes has given the Duchess a clear dramatic profile with a rising arc of crisis. Cooper’s role is rangier and harder to corral: Soon-to-Be toggles so fast between nerves and nerve that she starts to seem like a firefly.That’s a trap built into the setup: Someone has to keep goading the action when the primary antagonists are deliberately kept offstage. Another trap is that horror can lend those absent antagonists a kind of otherworldly glamour; why were the Duchess and Soon-to-Be — or Markle and Middleton, for that matter — attracted to royals in the first place?Yet as Markle reminded us, racism isn’t glamorous, even when it wears a tiara. It’s ordinary and sour.If “Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!” can’t strike that note clearly, it strikes plenty of others. The obtuseness of privilege — and the mania that aims to preserve it with absurd rituals and at unimaginable emotional cost — get a thorough workout, even in such a short play. The writing itself is wonderfully operatic; you could almost imagine the script as a libretto. No surprise that among Barnes’s inspirations are such musical stage stylists as Ntozake Shange, Caryl Churchill and George C. Wolfe.Beyond that, it’s no small thing to find a young playwright — Barnes is still in graduate school, at the University of California, San Diego — using the theater’s big tools so presciently and fearlessly. She’s got a voice, and she knows it.Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!Through Aug. 31; steppenwolf.org More

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      Carmel Quinn, Irish Singer and Storyteller, Dies at 95

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCarmel Quinn, Irish Singer and Storyteller, Dies at 95A hit on the television variety-show circuit of the 1950s and ’60s, she also sang to packed crowds for many years at Carnegie Hall for St. Patrick’s DayMarch 14, 2021Updated 1:52 p.m. ETThe Irish-born singer Carmel Quinn gave an annual St. Patrick’s Day benefit concert at Carnegie Hall for a quarter-century.Credit…Carnegie Hall Susan W. Rose ArchivesCarmel Quinn, a blue-eyed, flame-haired Irish singer and storyteller who packed Carnegie Hall on St. Patrick’s Day for a quarter-century and regaled her audiences with tunes and tales from the Old Country, died on March 6 at her home in Leonia, N.J. She was 95. The cause was pneumonia, her family said.Ms. Quinn, who was born and raised in Dublin, came to the United States in 1954 and won an audition on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” the next year. Those auditions were famous for their rigor: Others who passed them included Pat Boone, Tony Bennett and Connie Francis; those who flunked included Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly.Ms. Quinn became a regular on another Godfrey television show, “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends,” for six years while rotating through other popular variety shows of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, including “The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom,” “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Mike Douglas Show” and many more. Much later, she showed up on “Live With Regis and Kathie Lee.”With the gift of gab and a voice that some compared to Judy Garland’s, she performed at the White House, first for John F. Kennedy and then for Lyndon B. Johnson.Ms. Quinn performed at the White House for President John F. Kennedy, right, and for President Lyndon B. Johnson.Credit…UPIThe standard Irish songs in her repertoire included “The Whistling Gypsy,” “Galway Bay” and “Isle of Innisfree.” In later years she filled out her act with a patter of anecdotes about life in general and amusing relatives in particular. One was her Aunt Julia.As Ms. Quinn told the story, Aunt Julia always wore her hat in the house so that if someone came to the door whom she didn’t want to see, she could say, “I was just on me way out.”Ms. Quinn disapproved of bachelors. “Make you sick, they would,” she would say, “out there sowing their wild oats and praying for a crop failure.”And her way of bringing people back down to earth if they got too big for their britches was to call out loudly: “Sorry to hear about the fire in your bathroom. Thank God it didn’t reach the house!”But holding pride of place for Ms. Quinn were her concerts at Carnegie Hall. They began in 1955, when she was approached by a group that wanted to raise money for a hospital in Ireland. Mr. Godfrey built an audience for her that first year, instructing his radio listeners, “Now, you get out there and go to Carmel’s concert.” But after that, she was draw enough on her own. She gave benefit performances each St. Patrick’s Day for more than two decades, and they all sold out.“The night of the concert, you couldn’t get in the place,” she told The New York Times in 1975 on the eve of the 20th anniversary of her first St. Patrick’s Day show. Hers was initially a solo act, but she later included groups like the Clancy Brothers and the Chieftains, their spirited performances turning Manhattan’s prestige concert stage into an old-fashioned Irish music hall.Writing after her St. Patrick’s Day show in 1969, Robert Sherman of The Times called her “a breezy hostess and a totally engaging singer.” Her music, he said, would “warm the cockles of any son, daughter or passing acquaintance of the auld sod.”Carmel Quinn was born on July 31, 1925, and grew up in Phibsborough, a now trendy neighborhood on the north side of Dublin. Her father, Michael, was a violinist and a bookie. Her mother, Elizabeth (McPartlin) Quinn, a homemaker, died when Carmel, the youngest of four siblings, was 7.Carmel sang with local bands and studied for a while at a teachers’ college, but she dropped out when she started winning singing engagements. Then she left for America.She married Bill Fuller, a colorful Irish music impresario, in 1955. As more Irish were coming to America, Mr. Fuller opened ballrooms in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, and she sang in many of those venues.The couple initially lived in the Bronx, but they would take Sunday strolls over the George Washington Bridge and soon found a small brick house in Leonia, just across the Hudson River. They separated in the early 1970s, and she lived in the same house for the rest of her life.Ms. Quinn is survived by two daughters, Jane and Terry Fuller, and a son, Sean Fuller; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her son Michael died of a heart problem in 1988.Ms. Quinn, second from left, with, from left, the actor Niall Toibin, the cabaret performer Julie Wilson and William Warnock, Ireland’s ambassador to the United States, in 1970 at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway, where Mr. Toibin was appearing in Brendan Behan’s “Borstal Boy.”Credit…Solters-SabinsonHer love of being onstage took her to cabarets, clubs and Off Broadway. She starred in several musicals, on the road and in summer stock, including “The Sound of Music,” “Finian’s Rainbow” and “The Boy Friend.”She also presented revues of her own work at the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan: “Wait ’Til I Tell You” in 1997 and “That and a Cup of Tea” in 2001, in which, Neil Genzlinger of The Times said, she demonstrated “a Jack Benny-like gift for comic timing.”She continued to perform until she was 88. But it wasn’t all laughter and song. One of her final performances was in November 2013, after the death of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Ms. Quinn took the stage at the Irish Rep and recited his “Aye” and “Old Smoothing Iron,” evoking the working women she knew so well. She received standing ovations.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘We’ll Be Back,’ Broadway Says, on Shutdown Anniversary

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeRoast: Thick AsparagusVisit: National ParksRead: Shirley HazzardApologize: To Your KidsAndré De Shields, singing in Times Square at the “We Will Be Back” pop-up performance.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York Times‘We’ll Be Back,’ Broadway Says, on Shutdown AnniversaryA pop-up performance in Times Square on Friday, featuring stars like André De Shields, was full of excitement as reopenings may be on the horizon.André De Shields, singing in Times Square at the “We Will Be Back” pop-up performance.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 12, 2021, 5:50 p.m. ETOne year ago, the grim news that Broadway was shutting down was sweeping through the theater district. Performers were packing up their things and heading home; theater staff were stationed in lobbies to intercept ticket holders and explain to them that the show was canceled.As a return date was pushed further and further, performers and theater staff resigned themselves to finding work elsewhere.But on Friday, the anniversary of the day their beloved industry shut its doors, Broadway singers, dancers, actors and front-of-house staffers gathered in Times Square, just across from the TKTS discount ticket booth, to perform live for a small audience of industry insiders and passers-by.Chita Rivera spoke about the power of theater to heal society, at the pop-up show.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesDancers at the show, on the anniversary of the theater shutdown in New York.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe pop-up show was part concert, part rally. The Broadway legend Chita Rivera spoke about the power of theater to heal a beleaguered society, and then André De Shields, decked out in a glittering gold suit and a transparent face shield, sang the opening song from “Pippin” along with an array of Broadway stars, backup singers and dancers.“I’m just happy that we’re all trying to remind the world that we’re still here, and we will be back,” said Bre Jackson, a singer who belted out a solo in the “Pippin” number.One year ago, Jackson, 29, was returning to New York from a national tour of “The Book of Mormon,” and preparing herself for five auditions. Within 12 hours, she said, the auditions were all canceled, and suddenly she was thrust into a job market without much need for professional singers and actors. Jackson eventually found work as an office manager for a therapy practice, finding performing gigs every so often.Jackie Cox was in Times Square as Broadway singers, dancers, actors and front-of-house staffers gathered to perform for a small audience of industry insiders and passers-by.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesA dancer at the show. Bre Jackson, a singer who belted out a solo in the “Pippin” number, said, “I’m just happy that we’re all trying to remind the world that we’re still here.”Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHeath Saunders, singing at the show. The performance was funded by several organizations, including the nonprofits Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and NYCNext.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOne of the main purposes of these pop-up performances — of which there have been dozens across the city — is to provide paying gigs for people in the industry who have lost their entire incomes during the pandemic, said Blake Ross, one of the event’s producers. The performance was funded by a collection of organizations, including the nonprofits Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and NYCNext.Although they aren’t likely to perform inside theaters again until after Labor Day, the message of the show was that the end of the industry’s nightmare seemed to be getting closer. Last night, President Biden asked states to make all adults eligible to be vaccinated by May 1, a hopeful sign that shows might be able to start rehearsals over the summer.Lillias White, right, who, with Nikki M. James, Peppermint and Solea Pfeiffer, joined in “Home” from “The Wiz.”Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesJoel Grey, giving a speech in between numbers.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe performance landed on one of the first warm springlike days of the year in New York City, adding a jolt of excitement. It felt like a reunion of sorts: After a long time working from home, some people shrieked when they saw each other, keeping their distance, but air-hugging or elbow-bumping. To make sure that crowds didn’t form in Father Duffy Square, the event planners made no public announcement of the performance, but passers-by gathered on the edges of the makeshift stage and stood on elevated surfaces to get better views.The actor Charl Brown, among the participants in the event, which was part rally.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesCostumes from shows including “Wicked” and “Phantom of the Opera” lined the stage edges, glittering and gleaming on mannequins.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThere was no formal announcement of the pop-up show, and passers-by moved around to get better views, capturing it on cellphones.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesPeppermint, center, taking a photo with Nikki M. James, left, and Lillias White.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe cast started with a topical classic, George Benson’s “On Broadway,” with a group of high-energy sneaker-clad and masked backup dancers. (There had been barely any time to rehearse beforehand, so just before showtime, the dancers ran through their choreography just offstage on the concrete.) Next, the singers Lillias White, Nikki M. James, Peppermint and Solea Pfeiffer joined in “Home” from “The Wiz.” And a choir sang an original song written about the pandemic hiatus, “We Will Be Back,” by Allen René Louis. Costumes from shows like “Wicked” and “Phantom of the Opera” lined the stage edges, glittering and gleaming on mannequins.During the pandemic, two musicals, “Mean Girls” and “Frozen,” announced that they would not be returning to Broadway, as well as two plays that were in previews, Martin McDonagh’s “Hangmen” and a revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” On Friday, several shows promised that they would indeed be back, including “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which got through three performances before it was forced to close, and “Six,” which had been scheduled to open on March 12, 2020.Nikki M. James, in Times Square. She is among those who sang “Home” from “The Wiz.”Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesMembers of the media and other onlookers, capturing the midday show.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThat day, Judi Wilfore, the house manager for the Imperial Theater, remembers standing in the lobby before the scheduled evening performance of “Ain’t Too Proud” and breaking the news to ticketholders. Even though Broadway shut down on a Thursday, Wilfore came to work that weekend, too, in case any audience members showed up.Over the summer, Wilfore decided that she needed to find work elsewhere, so she took an online course at Health Education Services, to get certified as a Covid compliance officer. At Friday’s event in Times Square, it was her job to make sure people were following safety guidelines and to manage a team of front-of-house theater staffers who were hired to help run the event.Wilfore has been a compliance officer for gigs here and there — including the load-out of the “Beetlejuice” set from the Winter Garden Theater — but like many in the industry, she yearns for the eventual return to indoor theater, where she oversaw the bustling movements of staffers and audience members.“We love what we do,” she said, “and the fact that we haven’t been able to do it in a year is unfathomable.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More