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      ‘The Doors Didn’t Open Easily’ on Her Path to ‘Cinderella’

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      The choreographer JoAnn M. Hunter has quietly become an important figure in the world of musical theater, especially with her work for Andrew Lloyd Webber.LONDON — Midway through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new “Cinderella,” the male ensemble throws itself into a thrusting, muscle-popping number that perfectly illustrates the musical’s fictional setting of Belleville, a town devoted to beauty in all its superficial forms. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious, a sly take on an objectification more usually embodied by a female chorus, and a witty amplification of the musical’s reimagining of the Cinderella myth.That dance (which incorporates kettle bells), and all the others in this West End production, is the work of JoAnn M. Hunter, a longtime Broadway performer and choreographer who has quietly become an important figure in a field that boasts very few women, and even fewer women of color.“A great number of choreographers go their own way,” Lloyd Webber said in a telephone interview, “but JoAnn is completely different, a wonderful collaborator who you can really talk to about what the show needs. She is hugely important to the look of the show.”“Cinderella,” which finally opened on Aug. 18 at the Gillian Lynne Theater here after multiple pandemic-related delays, has a book by Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”) and lyrics by David Zippel (“City of Angels”). It’s Hunter’s third collaboration with Lloyd Webber and the director Laurence Connor, after the 2015 Broadway production of “School of Rock” and the much-lauded 2019 West End revival of “Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”Carrie Hope Fletcher as Cinderella in the new West End production. Tristram Kenton A few critics jibed at Fennell’s rewriting of the Cinderella story: The heroine, played by Carrie Hope Fletcher, is a spirited, grumpy Goth; Prince Charming is M.I.A.; and his younger brother, Prince Sebastian (Ivano Turco), is the shy and awkward hero. But most reviewers concurred that the new musical is a great deal of fun, helped along by the wittily inventive, hugely varied dances that characterize Hunter’s style.“JoAnn M. Hunter’s choreography keeps it all swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes,” Sam Marlowe wrote in The I.Hunter, who is in her 50s, was born just outside of Tokyo, but grew up in Rhode Island with her Japanese mother and American father. She and her older brother were the only mixed-race children in their community. “I got taunted quite a lot, and I didn’t understand what was different about me,” she said.Ballet, which she started studying at 10, proved a savior. “In dance class I didn’t feel different at all,” she said. “I was just a dancer, with dancer friends. I always wonder if that’s why I fell in love with the art form.”At 16, she went to New York City on a summer dance scholarship. One night she bought a standing-room ticket for Bob Fosse’s Broadway musical “Dancin’.” As she watched, she made a silent vow: “I’m not going back home. This is where I belong.” What she saw, she said, was the possibility of “expressing all those things inside you.” Her family, she added, “never hugged, never said ‘I love you.’ But onstage I saw you had permission and freedom to show your feelings.”She went back to Rhode Island just long enough to tell her mother she wasn’t returning to high school, then moved to New York, taking dance classes, working at Barney’s and attending audition after audition, but staying under the radar in spite of her efforts. “I couldn’t get arrested at the time,” she said wryly.After working at the Opryland USA theme park in Nashville in the early 1980s (“we sang, we danced, we did four shows a day; I loved it”), she was hired for tours of “West Side Story” and “Cats.” But she experienced long periods of joblessness and insecurity.There was hardly any diversity on Broadway in the late 1980s, she said, and she felt acutely aware of looking different than the “beautiful tall blond girls” at auditions. “People would look at me, and say, ‘What are you?’” she recounted. “I would answer, ‘whatever you need me to be.’”She played the white cat in “Cats” for 15 months, and began to gain confidence. Then, in 1989, she had an experience that was pivotal for her subsequent choreographic career. She joined the cast of “Jerome Robbins’s Broadway,” an evening-length show of selections from Robbins’s choreography for musicals like “Fiddler on the Roof” and “On the Town.”The ball scene in “Cinderella.” A theater critic credited Hunter with choreography that keeps the story “swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes.”Tristram Kenton“Jerry was a tyrant,” she said, “but I adored working with him, and I think I was absorbing so many lessons without thinking about it. He was unsurpassed at telling a story through movement.”Ensemble roles in Broadway shows (“Miss Saigon,” “Guys and Dolls,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”) followed, and soon Hunter began to work as a dance captain, the ensemble member who can teach the choreography for every character. While she was performing in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2002, the director, Rob Ashford, asked her to be his choreographic associate.“JoAnn was always the smartest person in the room as well as the best dancer, and I knew she would be invaluable,” Ashford said in a telephone interview. Hunter, who had just gone through a divorce, wasn’t so sure. (She said her initial response was “aaarghhhh.”) But she had to take the chance.“She is a real problem solver and a great collaborator,” Ashford said. “In a musical, a choreographer has to get inside a director’s head and translate that vision into their own creation. She was always about the goals of the show.”The director Michael Mayer, who hired Hunter to oversee Bill T. Jones’s choreography for “Spring Awakening” in 2006, said in a telephone interview that one of her great gifts is to “understand why the steps are there, what the characters are trying to accomplish through the movement, and how the movement is in conversation with the rest of the elements of the show, even though at that point she hadn’t made up the moves.”Hunter’s first independent choreography for a musical was for a 2008 U.S. touring production of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” “I remember thinking, I’m never going to know unless I try this,” Hunter said. “And if I’m bad, not too many people will have seen it!”Asked whether she thought this kind of insecurity was particularly rife among women, Hunter looked thoughtful. Perhaps, she said. “Men tend to try things without worrying if they have the experience.” She added that the paucity of female choreographers on Broadway didn’t help her confidence.Although there are still relatively few female choreographers working on Broadway, this has begun to change: Camille A. Brown, Michelle Dorrance, Ellenore Scott and Ayodele Casel are all choreographing upcoming Broadway shows. Hunter agreed that women are now somewhat more visible in musical theater. “It’s amazing to think as a dancer I only ever worked with two female directors, Susan Stroman and Tina Landau,” she said. “At the moment these issues are at the front of our brains, as is racial diversity. I hope it’s something enduring, not a fad.”When she choreographed “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” she added, she was still too fearful about a choreographic career to give up the insurance having an Equity card provides. “I am afraid of failure; we all go through life thinking, ‘I’m going to be found out,’” she said. She laughed. “I’m still petrified.”Hunter’s choreography, the director Rob Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from [Jerome] Robbins of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesHer first Broadway commission came from Mayer, with the short-lived revival of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” Then came “School of Rock.”Hunter said she had worked closely with Lloyd Webber on “Cinderella,” both on Zoom during lockdown, and in person from August last year. “People don’t really understand that a choreographer on a musical does much more than the dance sequences,” she said. “You move people around, deal with the transitions, where the audience’s focus should go. You have to be totally connected to the vision of the composer, writer and director.”The choreographer also often works with a dance arranger, she added, who adapts the score for dance sections. “A script direction might say, ‘goes into a dance moment,’” she explained. “But I think, ‘What do we want to say here?’ You might want a Latin feel, a tango rhythm, a French chanson, as a way of making mood and story more understandable.”For the “Muscle Man” dance in “Cinderella,” for instance, she thought about what the musical was trying to say and suggested a sound equivalent. “They are such macho, testosterone guys, and I had the idea of using kettle bells, which sounds like something dropping and is funny.”For “Cinderella,” Lloyd Webber did the dance arrangements himself. “I sketched out what I thought the dance music should be,” he said. “Then JoAnn took that, and actually stayed very faithful to it, but we added accents and she would ask for elements that the dance might need. It’s a really important collaboration, because you can’t look at the dance if you can’t listen to the music; it has to be good.”Hunter said that while she doesn’t read music, she has an acute sense of instrumentation and rhythm. “I just say things like ‘I don’t want it so pingy-pingy!’” she said. “That way I can make funny funnier and sexy sexier.” She added, “I always want every movement to tell a story. When Prince Sebastian dances at the end, I told Ivano, it’s not about the dance, it’s about you speaking up for yourself.”Her choreography, Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from Robbins, of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Hunter, who last year directed and choreographed “Unmasked,” a concert retrospective of Lloyd Webber’s career, is working as both director and choreographer on “SuperYou,” a new musical written by Lourds Lane. Hunter described it as “a superhero, self-empowering piece about women finding their own voice” and said she hopes it will go to Broadway.Hunter added that she was still frequently the only woman on a creative team. “I’ve worked with great people, but the doors didn’t open easily,” she said. “I still feel I am constantly proving myself.” More

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      JoJo Siwa to Have First Same-Sex ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Partner

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      The “Dance Moms” alum and TikTok personality will join the ABC show as the first contestant to compete in a same-sex pairing.On Thursday, “Dancing With the Stars” history was made with the announcement that the dancer and social media personality JoJo Siwa would be the first contestant on the ABC program to compete with a same-sex partner.The executive producer Andrew Llinares shared the milestone during a “Dancing With the Stars” Television Critics Association panel.IM SO EXCITED https://t.co/EN1ygC5Jj3— JoJo Siwa!🌈❤️🎀 (@itsjojosiwa) August 26, 2021
      (The show also announced that the gymnast and Olympic gold medalist Suni Lee would be featured in its 30th season, and that other celebrity competitors would be revealed on Sept. 8 on “Good Morning America.” The season begins Sept. 20.)“I have a girlfriend who is the love of my life and who is everything to me,” Siwa told USA Today in an article published Thursday. “My journey of coming out and having a girlfriend has inspired so many people around the world.”“I thought that if I chose to dance with a girl on this show, it would break the stereotypical thing,” she said, adding that it would be “new, different” and a “change for the better.”Siwa came out as part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community earlier this year, when she posted a photo of herself wearing a T-shirt that read “Best Gay Cousin Ever” on Instagram. In April, she told People that “technically I would say that I am pansexual.”At the critics’ association panel, the model and TV personality Tyra Banks — who hosts and executive produces “Dancing With the Stars” — said that she supported the move.“You’re making history, JoJo,” she said. “This is life-changing for so many people. Particularly because you are so young doing this. For you to say this is who you are and it’s beautiful, I’m so proud of you.”Siwa, known for her sparkling hair accessories and bubbly personality, met her girlfriend, Kylie Prew, on a cruise. They began dating in January, and in June, the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization Glaad had named her in their 20 Under 20 List.Glaad’s head of talent, Anthony Allen Ramos, lauded the show’s move in a statement on Thursday. “At 18, JoJo Siwa is once again using her platform to inspire and uplift the L.G.B.T.Q. community,” he said. “As one of today’s most watched and celebrated programs on television, ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and Tyra Banks are making the right decision to feature JoJo Siwa competing alongside a female professional dancer.”“The show has such a wide, far-reaching audience,” he said, “and there is a real opportunity here for people to celebrate the same-sex pairing and root for JoJo and all L.G.B.T.Q. young people.” More

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      Micki Grant: ‘I Wanted to Open Eyes’

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      The composer and lyricist, who died at 92, was a trailblazer in virtually every field she touched.Theater in Manhattan was bristling with Black voices in the early 1970s, but these tended to be heard in smaller spaces like the New Federal Theater, the Negro Ensemble Company and the Urban Arts Corps. Micki Grant’s “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope” spent time in such theaters before winding its way to Broadway in 1972, making it the first time a woman had written the book, music and lyrics to a Broadway musical.The result — four Tony Award nominations, a run of more than two years — was a testament to Grant, a trailblazer in virtually every field she touched. She died on Aug. 21 at 92. But the success of the show also stemmed in part from its image of Black America, one that Grant created through a blend of conviction and calculation.Just as “Hair” channeled the era’s countercultural passions into a package that (most) staid Broadway theatergoers could handle — Joe Papp, who squired that show to Broadway from his brand-new Public Theater in 1968, described it as “marvelous for middle-aged people” — “Don’t Bother Me” took a cleareyed but rarely confrontational stance at race relations. At one point, the cast members raised clenched fists, which then turned to peace signs.“I wanted to open eyes but not turn them away,” Grant told me in a 2018 interview about the work, which she described as a conscious divergence from more incendiary pieces by such Black playwrights as Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka. “I wanted to come at it with a soft fist.” (Grant had just come home from the hospital when we met, but was still energetic enough to shave more than a decade off her stated age at the time without raising any suspicions.)And so the show discussed slavery and slumlords but also Flip Wilson and Archie Bunker, resulting in what the New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes described as “a mixture of a block party and a revival meeting.”As it happens, Grant was in a rare position to call the shots on these decisions. She had spent several years as a contract performer on a soap opera — one of the first Black actors to do so — playing an attorney, Peggy Nolan, on “Another World.” (She also starred in “Don’t Bother Me.”) She would go on to find success writing advertising jingles, winning a Clio award along the way.In 2018, Grant and Savion Glover, the choreographer and director, led a table reading of “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope” at New York City Center.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut the advertising and soap opera industries aren’t exactly known for cultivating auteurist voices. Theater gave Grant a chance to write every syllable and every note of “Don’t Bother Me,” which earned her half of the show’s four Tony nominations. (Her frequent collaborator Vinnette Justine Carroll, who became the first Black woman to direct on Broadway, was also nominated.)It came up blank at the 1973 Tony Awards — “A Little Night Music” and “Pippin” also opened that season — but “Don’t Bother Me” showcased a musical voice equally comfortable with calypso, spoken-word, soul, funk, jazz, and even what could be described as proto-hip-hop. Not to mention gospel, which came to the forefront in “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” and other subsequent shows that Grant wrote or co-wrote.Dabblings in Black musical idioms were nothing new for Broadway, of course: Cole Porter never met an Afro-Caribbean rhythm he couldn’t use, while Frank Loesser all but trademarked the still common use of a gospel-style roof-raiser to get the crowd agitated near the end of a show. But Grant’s wide range of repurposings was of an altogether different nature, because it drew so heavily from her own background.This versatility turned her into a go-to lyricist for pre-existing melodies by Eubie Blake (“Eubie!”) but also Harold Arlen (“Sweet & Hot”) and Jacques Brel (“Jacques Brel Blues”), and it also earned her a spot on the all-star writing team of 1978’s “Working” alongside James Taylor, Stephen Schwartz and Mary Rodgers. When I spent long college afternoons listening to published Broadway scores, one particularly fast passage in her “Working” song “Lovin’ Al” had me hitting rewind on the library’s cassette player for a solid half-hour.Grant, a former national chairwoman of the Actors Equity union’s Equal Opportunity Employment Committee, viewed as her biggest professional disappointment “Phillis,” a 1986 musical about the pioneering Black poet Phillis Wheatley. In a recent interview for American Theatre magazine, published after her death, she blamed the white director for the show’s failure, saying he had no knowledge of or sensitivity to the subject matter.But Grant bounced back from this, as she had done from the many other setbacks along the way in becoming her own sort of pioneer. “There’s so little time for hatred,” Grant sang almost 50 years ago in the show that earned her a place in history. Her hand was equally capable of clenching tight and relaxing into a peace sign. The fist was soft, but it held considerable force. More

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      Michaela Coel Puts Herself Together in ‘Misfits’

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      The book, adapted from a speech by the creator and star of “I May Destroy You,” codifies her efforts to achieve transparency in her work and in her life.The city of Edinburgh was the epicenter of a powerful energy pulse on Aug. 22, 2018 — not the kind that precise scientific equipment can detect, but one whose ripples would be felt by sensitive human instruments in the weeks and months that followed.That evening, Michaela Coel, a rising British TV star, was invited to address her colleagues at the prestigious Edinburgh International Television Festival. Speaking to a few thousand industry peers in a lecture hall and countless more viewers watching her online, she shared stories from her ascent, a narrative that was by turns wryly comic and devastating.Coel talked about growing up a member of one of only four Black families in a public housing complex in East London. She described her time at drama school, where a teacher called her a racial slur during an acting exercise. She discussed her surprise, after achieving some professional success, at being sent a gift bag that contained “dry shampoo, tanning lotion and a foundation even Kim Kardashian was too dark for.” She recounted how she had gone out for a drink one night and later realized she had been drugged and sexually assaulted.She spoke of resilience gained from a life spent “having to climb ladders with no stable ground beneath you,” and she classified herself as a misfit, defined in part as someone who “doesn’t climb in pursuit of safety or profit, she climbs to tell stories.”Three years later, Coel — now 33 and the celebrated creator and star of the HBO comedy-drama “I May Destroy You” — regards this speech as a satisfying moment of personal unburdening.As she said in a video interview a few weeks ago, “We go in and out of working with people and we never quite know who they are, and no one ever quite knows who you are. There’s something quite liberating about just letting everybody know.”A misfit, Coel said during her 2018 speech, “doesn’t climb in pursuit of safety or profit, she climbs to tell stories.”Ken Jack/Corbis via Getty ImagesWith its explicit calls for greater transparency, Coel’s address (known formally as the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture) resonated across the entertainment industry and provided a narrative and thematic foundation for “I May Destroy You.” Next month, the speech will be published by Henry Holt & Co. as a book titled “Misfits: A Personal Manifesto.”To an audience that is still discovering Coel, her life and her work, “Misfits” may seem like an artifact preserving the moment that its author became the fullest version of herself.But to Coel, it represents a particularly validating episode in a career where she has always felt empowered to speak her mind.“I’ve always been annoying people about these things,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t know where I got the cheek to be like this. But from the beginning, there’s always been a story where Michaela was pushing and saying, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”To this day, Coel is relentlessly candid about the choices that go into her work, even when it comes to the decision to call “Misfits” a “manifesto,” which she said was foisted upon her by her publishers.As she explained, “I was like, ‘But it’s so small, it’s not really a book.’ They were like, ‘A book is a binding of papers.’ OK, fine, can we call it an essay book? ‘Mmm, no.’”Coel’s book “Misfits” is out on Sept. 7.She was more circumspect about discussing where on the planet she was while we had our video conversation. Despite a report in Variety that Coel had joined the cast of the Marvel superhero sequel “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” she said, “I’m in America. I don’t know why I’m here. I have a feeling that I’m not supposed to say.” (A spokesman for Marvel declined to comment.)The actor Paapa Essiedu, a co-star on “I May Destroy You” and a longtime friend of Coel’s, said that since their time together as students at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he had known Coel to be a courageous, forthright person.“Her voice was always very clear,” Essiedu said. “She always felt like she was unperturbed by what was expected of her, and she was able to think and speak independently.”Even so, Essiedu said, “Remember that she is just a normal person,” who talks trash with her friends “and can be funny and can be really annoying. Her day-to-day life is not her espousing how to make the world a better place.”In the speech, Coel described frustrations she had endured on her breakthrough comedy series, “Chewing Gum,” which ran on the E4 channel in Britain and on Netflix in America. She spoke about crying into an unpurchased pair of tights at a drugstore following a phone call where she it was suggested that she would have to hire co-writers to help her on the series.She also talked about turning down an offer to make “I May Destroy You” with Netflix when the streaming service declined to let her keep any ownership rights for the series. (In the lecture, she told this story with an allegorical flair, imagining it as a negotiation with a fictional stepmother she called “No-Face Netanya.”)“I don’t know where I got the cheek to be like this,” Coel said. “But from the beginning, there’s always been a story where Michaela was pushing and saying, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”Wulf Bradley for The New York TimesAmy Gravitt, an executive vice president at HBO who oversees its original comedy programming, said that she was moved by Coel’s lecture when she watched it online.“There was so much that she said in that speech that resonated as a woman working in this industry,” said Gravitt, who first met with Coel in 2017 following the success of “Chewing Gum.”“When she talked about her desire to see another person’s point of view represented onscreen, that resonated deeply with me as a programmer,” Gravitt said.Far from feeling reluctant to work with someone so outspoken, Gravitt said, “I feel like I only want to work with people who feel comfortable speaking their mind.”Coel ultimately ended up making “I May Destroy You” for HBO and the BBC. When I asked her if Netflix must cry itself to sleep every night for losing out on the show, she answered, “Well, melatonin works a charm.”A press representative for Netflix said in a statement said, “Michaela is an incredibly talented artist who we were thrilled to work with on ‘Black Mirror’ and ‘Black Earth Rising’ among others, and who we hope to work with again in the future.”Coel said she never hesitated to tell her lecture audience about having been sexually assaulted. “I never had that thing where I kept it to myself and was afraid to say it because of what people thought,” she said. “And because I never had that incubation period for shame and guilt to make a home inside of me, it never did.”Talking about the assault now was like “looking at a scar,” she said.“I look at the scar, and it’s like, whoa, that happened,” Coel said. “But now I’m alive to look at this scar, which means that I’ve come around the bend.”At the time she gave the lecture, Coel was already writing what would become “I May Destroy You,” in which her character, a young writer named Arabella, is served a spiked drink and sexually assaulted.“I May Destroy You” is up for nine Emmys, including outstanding lead actress.HBO, via Associated PressTo this day, Coel said, she encounters people who are fans of the show but do not realize it is based on her experience. Other viewers approach her, over social media and in person, to tell her about their own traumas. “I’ve cried with strangers on the street,” she said.“I May Destroy You” became a pandemic-era staple when it ran last spring and summer, and it has inspired its fans in other ways.In February, the series received no nominations for Golden Globes, prompting an outcry from its audience. Deborah Copaken, an author and memoirist (“Ladyparts”) who was a writer on the first season of the gauzy Netflix comedy “Emily in Paris,” wrote in an essay for The Guardian that the snub “is not only wrong, it’s what is wrong with everything.”In an interview, Copaken praised Coel for putting “people on the screen you’ve never seen on TV except as extras or others,” in a series that encompassed topics such as sexual consent and the assimilation of immigrants.“It doesn’t do the thing of making people who aren’t white and Western into paragons of virtue,” Copaken said. “These are interesting people with messy lives. At every turn, it challenges viewers’ assumptions.”Coel herself said she was too enchanted with the broader reaction to her series to worry about the Golden Globes controversy. “I was on this cloud of gratitude,” she said, “and I could hear there was something happening. I was like, guys, I don’t know how to come down from the cloud and deal with this.” Last month, “I May Destroy You” was nominated for nine Emmy Awards, including limited or anthology series. Coel and Essiedu both received nominations as actors, and Coel was also nominated as a director and as a writer on the series.Now Coel faces the happy challenge of figuring out a follow-up to “I May Destroy You,” and she is emphatic that the series has concluded.“To me, it’s very clearly finished, isn’t it?” she said. “Imagine if there was a Season 2? I just think guys, come on, it’s done. Unless somebody has this amazing idea for Season 2 that doesn’t destroy Season 1, for me it is closed and finished.”Coel said she faced no external pressures to deliver her next project. “HBO and BBC were very kind,” she said. “They said, ‘Hey, Michaela, you’ve done a great thing for us. You can just chill out, take as long as you need.’ But I’m not like that.”She quickly pointed her camera at a whiteboard on which she had started to map out a new story arc, but she turned the camera back at herself before any words were legible. She would say no more about the new series except that the BBC had committed to making it.Viewers of “I May Destroy You” sometimes approach Coel, over social media and in person, to tell her about their own traumas. “I’ve cried with strangers on the street,” she said.Wulf Bradley for The New York Times(Gravitt, the HBO executive, said that her network was “in the early stages of talking to Michaela and the BBC and various artists who are all a part of the team of ‘I May Destroy You,’ and excited at the prospect of having this new project to work on together.”)Essiedu said that Coel had not been changed much by reaching a new echelon of fame, and that she remained an artist who was motivated more by the work more than by the celebrity.“She deserves the credits and the plaudits,” he said. “She’s not going to shy away from that, which is something that us Brits are very good at doing. She’s maybe a bit more like you Americans in that approach.”But having twice experienced the satisfaction of feeling that her viewers truly and fully received what she was saying — with her MacTaggart lecture, and with “I May Destroy You” — Coel said she could hardly ask for much more.“As a writer, sometimes I’m fraught, I’m frazzled,” she said. “I’m trying to be clear, piece by piece, and the audience valued me and listened to me.”With a mixture of relief and delight, she exclaimed, “The way that people listen to me in this life! All I’ve learned is to be heard.” More

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      ‘Impeachment’ Focuses on the Women Behind Clinton’s Scandals

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      Ryan Murphy’s anthology series “American Crime Story” debuted in 2016 with “The People v. O.J. Simpson.” A second installment, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” arrived two years later. In these initial series, which won 16 Emmy Awards between them, the crimes at issue were obvious: the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman; the killing of Versace.In “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” which premieres Sept. 7 on FX, the offenses are more ambiguous.Set in the 1990s, the 10-episode series revisits the miasma of scandal and innuendo that shrouded the Clinton White House: Paula Jones’s sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton; Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky; Lewinsky’s friendship with Linda Tripp; and the tangle of lies, half-truths and illicit recordings that were ultimately detailed in the Starr Report, the infamous and lurid document prepared by the independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The report led the House of Representatives, in 1998, to impeach President Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The Senate, declining to remove him from office, found him not guilty.But those high crimes and misdemeanors didn’t especially interest the creators of “Impeachment.”Tina Thorpe/FX“To me, the crime is that Monica, Linda and Paula had no control over how they were perceived,” said Sarah Burgess, an executive producer who wrote most of the episodes. Burgess, a playwright, studied the media coverage of these women: the late-night punch lines, the drive-time banter, the scathing opinion columns. “It was unbelievable, the hate,” she said.Burgess was speaking on a recent Monday afternoon from the gleaming reading room in the cellar of the Whitby Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Murphy joined her, alongside the executive producers Brad Simpson and Alexis Martin Woodall and four of the actresses in the series: Annaleigh Ashford (Jones), Edie Falco (Hillary Clinton) Beanie Feldstein (Lewinsky) and Sarah Paulson (Tripp). Lewinsky, a producer on “Impeachment,” was not present. (No one else involved in the administration or its scandals worked on the show. Tripp died in 2020.)The series delves into the lives of Lewinsky, Tripp and Jones — and, to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton. Its aim is not necessarily rehabilitative, but the creators and actors wanted to understand the ambitions, fears and desires that motivated these women.“We all know what happened,” Murphy said. “But we don’t know how it happened.”In a round-table interview, the cast and creatives discussed how the Clinton era’s swirl of partisan politics and fungible notions of truth resonates today, as well as why these scandals still captivate us, how the media came for these women and whether we would treat them any better now.“I just hope when people watch this, they still feel implicated,” Simpson said. “We’re not that distant from it — this is a piece of history, but we are still living it.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Monica Lewinsky, seen here hugging President Clinton in 1996, Beanie FeldsteinAPTV, via Associated PressWhat do you remember about living through these scandals?ANNALEIGH ASHFORD I remember this era from a late-night comedy perspective. It was really dark and really chauvinistic, terrible to the women involved, so grossly sexual and inappropriate. And it was funny. We all clapped.RYAN MURPHY Monica and Linda and Paula — I remember just feeling that their lives were taken away from them. I felt very sympathetic, because I was picked on in high school, I guess. Just seeing them attacked and constantly made fun of — it was a national sport — I felt bad for them. And I continue to feel bad for them. When I ran into Monica at a party, we had announced that we were doing this. She came up, and I said, “I want you to be a part of this.”Why does this story still fascinate us?SARAH BURGESS The Starr Report is a part of that; it’s still shocking how explicit it is. And then Monica, I can’t think of someone else who has had that seething hatred that she experienced, that delight in taking her apart.BRAD SIMPSON The Clintons haven’t left us. We all remember the moment where Donald Trump brought the women who made accusations against Bill Clinton to the debates. It still haunts the culture.ALEXIS MARTIN WOODALL But the end of the day, it’s still a conversation about the women. Even in 2021, we’re still talking about Monica and Linda and Hillary. Bill’s not really part of that conversation.“I think more people would come to Monica’s defense today,” said Ryan Murphy, bottom left, with, clockwise, Sarah Burgess, Brad Simpson and Alexis Martin Woodall.Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesIn some ways, the impeachment trial prefigured today’s partisan politics. The left argued that Bill Clinton was the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy. The right held that they had a duty to investigate a fundamentally dishonest leader. How does the series grapple with these two opposing narratives?MURPHY We present both points of view. That’s the interesting thing about the show, it lives in a gray world.SIMPSON Both things can be true. What we’re interested in, really, is flawed individuals intersecting with these systems of power, especially these systems of male power.Recently we seem to be re-examining the ways we treated women at the center of scandals in the ’90s and ’00s — Tonya Harding, Britney Spears. Is the series participating in that reassessment?BURGESS Yes, of course. I think about that a lot. There was no constituency for Monica. There was no one on her side. There was a faint heartbeat of, like, three feminists, somewhere. To watch Beanie play her and walk in her shoes and hopefully put us in a point of view to understand how young she was, I hope that does reorient how people think about her. But do you think it would be any different now?MURPHY If you look at the Britney Spears case, I think more people would come to Monica’s defense today.SARAH PAULSON I think there would be more defenders. But there would be an equal measure coming down on her. We have so many platforms from which to do that now.MARTIN WOODALL People I know, closely, when I talk about the show, they still make jokes. And I’m like, “Hey, stop it with the jokes.”“I really care about her as a character and as a person,” Beanie Feldstein said of Monica Lewinsky.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“I’m not trying to humanize her,” Sarah Paulson said of playing Linda Tripp.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“How did this woman make sense of any of this?” Edie Falco said about Hillary Clinton.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“There’s a real childlike quality,” Annaleigh Ashford said of playing Paula Jones.Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesClinton’s popularity soared. Lewinsky became a punchline. Why did we hate this woman so much?ASHFORD Some of it has to do with how uncomfortable people are with sex. People can’t handle not making a joke about it.PAULSON I wonder if it’s what we’re unwilling to look at in ourselves, in terms of this hatred toward Monica. I would have gone into that back room [Bill Clinton’s Oval Office study, where he and Lewinsky engaged in sexual activity], without question.MURPHY I would have done it, too.PAULSON It’s just the whole patriarchal story of accepting his desire, and it being celebrated and understood. And she’s really punished for giving in to her own desire. There is something about vilifying that when it comes from a woman.BEANIE FELDSTEIN To Monica’s credit, even in the Barbara Walters interview, she doesn’t shy away. She doesn’t apologize. She just states the fact. She holds her ground in saying it was mutual. Now we obviously see there was a deep imbalance of power and a very nuanced situation. But why should she be shamed for that, when he, the President of the United States, was never shamed for that? I’m getting a little emotional because I love her so much — I really care about her as a character and as a person. I think it’s just devastating. And it doesn’t get less devastating the more we talk about it. I hope that the show undoes some of the pain.We don’t see the sex that the Starr Report details. We do see the famous thong reveal —SIMPSON That thong moment [when Lewinsky lifted her jacket so that President Clinton could see the waistband of her underwear] wasn’t in the original script. Monica asked for us to put it in.BURGESS She said, “Everyone knows I did this. And I know you’re trying to protect me, but it needs to be in the show.”But why don’t you show the sex?MURPHY The behavior that led to the act was more important than the act. We spent a lot of time asking these questions, and also asking Monica, “What do you think and what do you want?”What did she want? What was her involvement in the show?MURPHY We would go through every page of a script. Sometimes she would have a lot of comments, sometimes nothing. I found the process fascinating and necessary. She never wanted the easy choice. She always wanted it more complicated, more nuanced.The Starr Report led the House of Representatives to impeach President Clinton, here in 1998 with Hillary Clinton, but the Senate found him not guilty.Win McNamee/ReutersWhat did you want to make clear about her relationship with Bill Clinton?FELDSTEIN Monica, at that moment, was a bundle of contradictions. She was naïve yet savvy, sensual yet innocent. That’s been the wonderful struggle, playing both sides. Like any 22-year-old, she thought she knew the world. She had to learn the world. This was her learning.SIMPSON The Hillary point of view is complicated, too.BURGESS It was and still is. There’s a mystery at the center of that story, which is what happens when [Bill and Hillary Clinton] are alone together in a room. There’s no Tripp tape for that.EDIE FALCO It is something that everybody I know has wondered about: What the hell was that like, when she found out? How did this woman make sense of any of this? There was nothing she could do that was right — her glasses, her last name, the way she talked.You’re playing women whom viewers think they know. How important was it to perfect their speech, gait, gestures?FELDSTEIN Her emotionality mattered to me more than her physicality or her voice. I just tried to focus on how she was feeling and what was motivating her, and really tune out everything else. But it’s one thing to play a real human being, and it’s another thing to play a real human being whom you text and call. I want her to watch it and feel validated.FALCO Hillary is a woman who has been imitated on late-night talk shows and on “Saturday Night Live” by pretty much every cast member. So that was troubling to me. I was not interested in being another interpretation. And over the years, she changed a lot — her accent, the way she walked, the way she presented herself — as she evolved as a person in public life. I thought, this whole story is about getting at who this woman is. So for me, it was more about an inner life.PAULSON I worked with a movement teacher, who was with me every day, to try to create a different physical shape than I have, in terms of my posture. It was helpful to look in the mirror and not see myself. I still consider what [Tripp] did to be beyond morally questionable. I’m not trying to humanize her; I’m just trying to be her in the situation and in the circumstances. I connect to a certain kind of internal rage that she has that I have a really easy time dipping into.FELDSTEIN I call it the Tripp dip.ASHFORD For Paula, it’s always about trying to please her husband, trying to please somebody else. It’s part of why she talks so high; it’s part of why she makes herself so small. There’s a real childlike quality. I also worked with a movement coach.MURPHY I want a movement coach.You had so much archival material to draw from — the recordings, the congressional records, the media response. The Starr Report alone runs to more than 112,000 words. How did you decide what to include?BURGESS It’s character first. In the ’90s, Linda and Monica were afterthoughts in the ways this was perceived and reported. They were these idiots who talked about Macy’s on the phone. It was the lawyers and the men who mattered.SIMPSON The way this story has traditionally been told is the story of these great powerful men facing off: Bill Clinton versus Ken Starr, Newt Gingrich versus Bill Clinton. Then off to the side are these nutty women. We decided, from the beginning, we’re going to start with these women.FELDSTEIN These characters, in different ways, have never been given full humanity. What the show does, it prioritizes the humanity over the plot. More

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      A Celebrated Afghan School Fears the Taliban Will Stop the Music

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      The Afghanistan National Institute of Music became a symbol of the country’s changing identity.For more than a decade, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music has stood as a symbol of the country’s changing identity. The school trained hundreds of young artists, many of them orphans and street hawkers, in artistic traditions that were once forbidden by the Taliban. It formed an all-female orchestra that performed widely in Afghanistan and abroad.But in recent days, as the Taliban have been consolidating control over Afghanistan again, the school’s future has come into doubt.In interviews, several students and teachers said they feared the Taliban, who have a history of attacking the school’s leaders, would seek to punish people affiliated with the school as well as their families. Some said they worried the school will be shut down and they will not be allowed to play again. Several female students said they had been staying inside their homes since the capital was seized on Sunday“It’s a nightmare,” Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the head of the school, said in a telephone interview from Melbourne, Australia, where he arrived last month for medical treatment.The Taliban banned most forms of music when they previously ruled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001. This time, they have promised a more tolerant approach, vowing not to carry out reprisals against their former enemies and saying that women will be allowed to work and study “within the bounds of Islamic law.”But the Taliban’s history of violence toward artists and its general intolerance for music without religious meaning has sowed doubts among many performers.“My concern is that the people of Afghanistan will be deprived of their music,” Mr. Sarmast said. “There will be an attempt to silence the nation.”In 2010, Mr. Sarmast, an Afghan music scholar who was trained in Australia and plays trumpet and piano, opened the school, which has more than 400 students and staff members, with the support of the American-backed government. It was a rarity: a coeducational institution devoted to teaching music from both Afghanistan and the West.The school’s musicians were invited to perform on many of the world’s most renowned stages, including Carnegie Hall. They played Western classical music as well as traditional Afghan music and instruments, like the rubab, which resembles the lute and is one of the national instruments of Afghanistan.The school placed special emphasis on supporting young women, who make up a third of the student body. The school’s all-female orchestra, Zohra, founded in 2015, earned wide acclaim. Many were the first women in their families to receive formal training. In a symbol of its modern ways, head scarves for girls at the school’s campus in Kabul were optional.The school’s habit of challenging tradition made it a target. In 2014, Mr. Sarmast was injured by a Taliban suicide bomber who infiltrated a school play. The Taliban tried to attack the school again in the years that followed, but their attempts were thwarted, Mr. Sarmast said.Now, female students say they are concerned about a return to a repressive past, when the Taliban eliminated schooling for girls and barred women from leaving home without male guardians.Several female students — who were granted anonymity because they feared retaliation — said that it felt like their dreams to become professional musicians could disintegrate. They worried they might not be able to play music again in their lives, even as a hobby.In recent weeks, as the Taliban swept through the country, the school’s network of overseas supporters tried to help by raising money to improve security on campus, including by installing an armed gate and walls.But it’s now unclear if the school will even be permitted to operate under the Taliban. It is also increasingly difficult for citizens of Afghanistan to leave the country. Airport entrances have been chaotic and often impassable scenes for days, even for people with travel documentation. The Taliban control the streets, and though they say they are breaking up crowds at the airport to keep order, there are widespread reports that they are turning people away by force if they try to leave the country.The State Department said in a statement that it was working to get American citizens, as well as locally employed staff and vulnerable Afghans, out of the country, though crowding at the airport had made it more difficult. The department said it was prioritizing Afghan women and girls, human rights defenders and journalists, among others.“This effort is of utmost importance to the U.S. government,” the statement said.In the 1990s, the Taliban permitted religious singing but banned other forms of music because they were seen as distractions to Islamic studies and could encourage impure behavior. Taliban officials destroyed instruments and smashed cassette tapes.Understand the Taliban Takeover in AfghanistanCard 1 of 5Who are the Taliban? More

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      Saving Pop Punk? That’s Just Their Warm-Up Act.

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      Depending on where you’re from and where you’ve been, you may be able to imagine a place like Davenport, Fla., which vibrates with the sleepy malaise of suburban sameness. Beige strip-mall storefronts unfurl along the streets. Some have no real names, just signs reading BARBER, TATTOOS, GUNS, TACOS. Davenport is about 35 miles from the center of Orlando, and on the drive the freeway starts to loosen and flow more easily. The atmosphere quiets. The signs of chain restaurants push into the dimming sky.Outside a cluster of resort homes was a security guard, skeptical but joyfully talkative. I told him I was there to see a band. He asked if I was sure I was in the right place. Based on the landscape beyond the gate, I didn’t feel entirely sure that I was. The place had a Pleasantville eeriness; I could imagine everyone stepping out at the exact same moment to pick up the morning papers. There were rules here, the guard told me, tentatively handing over a visitor’s pass. I had to be out by 10 p.m., no exceptions. I couldn’t park on the street or on the grass. And — he leaned close to my ​window — no loud music.Wandering down the dimly lit corridor of homes, it was hard to find addresses, or any distinctive traits at all, until I noticed something that had fallen off a door and was now sitting on a doorstep: a metal sign reading “ROCK-N-ROLL AVE.” This house was the unimaginative container for the brightness and enthusiasm of one of the most talked-about young bands of the past year: the guitarist Téa (pronounced TAY-Uh) Campbell, the lead singer Edith Johnson and the drummer Ada (pronounced ADD-Uh) Juarez, who make up the group Meet Me @ the Altar.I’d been summoned to see the would-be future of pop-punk, the new queens of noise, the band supposedly destined to drag a whole genre back to its heyday of big choruses and bigger feelings. Pop-punk has a circuitous history, full of sonic shifts and different regional scenes, but it found a peak of influence back in the early and mid-aughts, when bands like Paramore, Fall Out Boy and New Found Glory gave it a glossy sheen and a huge commercial reach, driving untold sales of studded belts and hair dye and getting their best lyrics quoted on untold MySpace profiles. What made that era special, to someone like me, was the way all of pop-punk’s scenes were rising at once — on the radio, on the music-video channels, even on the charts. But then things stalled; the mainstream moment faded; bands broke up or pivoted to different sounds. Soon enough people were looking backward at that moment, sometimes with mild amusement.The three young women who were expected to change that were sitting in one corner of a sprawling, corporate-looking leather couch on the house’s main floor. The home was one of those prefurnished affairs, with a coffee table that looked too precious to touch and a glass dining table that looked too precious to sit at. The walls were stark white and barren, save for some sparse bacon-themed art. (“We did a thing with Wendy’s, and they sent it to us,” Campbell said, shrugging.) But then, up the stairs, taped onto the walls, were rows and rows of fan letters and fan art — depictions of the band spanning from the cartoonish to the alarmingly realistic.The Meet Me @ the Altar house in Davenport, Fla.Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesFan art in their house.Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesBefore this house, the trio was scattered up and down the East Coast. Campbell is from Davenport, and the band played early shows in Orlando, but Juarez is from North Plainfield, N.J., and Johnson was in Peachtree City, Ga. Their recordings were initially made in separate places and stitched together. Then came a rise that, from the outside, seemed impossibly rapid. First the video for one of their songs, “Garden,” circulated online, catching the attention of pop-punk stalwarts. Then, in the midst of a pandemic, came a deal with the iconic label Fueled by Ramen, and a simmering campaign of hype. They gathered here because they needed to focus on making songs but also on learning how to be a band, in granular ways — ways it can take a band years of playing and touring together to pick up. The house was meant as a type of incubator, a vessel for emotional and creative acceleration.The members of M.M.A.T.A. have a magnetism that goes far beyond their music making. But the band is still relatively new, and facing high expectations. Watching them on that couch, talking over one another and exploding into laughter, I realized that what some might read as their youthful unawareness of the stakes was really something else. M.M.A.T.A. are a confident band — one that knows exactly where it stands, but hasn’t yet considered the possibility of failure.At a pizza shop, a few blocks away from the Orlando venue where the band cut its teeth, the 20-year-old Campbell and 22-year-old Juarez gave me the short version of their story.In the summer of 2015, bored at her grandmother’s house, Campbell went on YouTube, looking for videos of drummers covering songs by TwentyOne Pilots. That search brought her to Juarez, who had built a vast catalog of drum covers on her YouTube channel. “I had no idea where Ada was,” Campbell told me. “To me, she was just on the internet.” Still, Campbell reached out, and they exchanged contacts on the app Kik. They began by covering songs together remotely, sporadically posting the results, until they eventually decided they needed a singer.Edith Johnson was 14, living in Peachtree City and poking around online — “the beginning of my emo phase,” she says now — when she, too, saw a video posted to Juarez’s YouTube channel. The title was “I’m in a Band, and We Need a Singer.” At the time, Johnson was sinking into the music scene at an Atlanta venue called the Masquerade, whose logo she has since had tattooed on her forearm. She sent in a video of herself singing Paramore’s “All I Wanted.”Juarez and Campbell, sorting through submissions, narrowed their choices to two. It was 2016, and they posed one question to help them decide: They wanted to know their potential future singer’s preferred political candidate. “At the time,” Juarez told me, “if someone said Hillary and not Bernie, that was a red flag.” Johnson said Hillary, and so — whether or not you think it’s prudent for teenagers who can’t yet vote to make personnel decisions this way — she was rejected.“I was really angry, actually really mad,” Johnson said. “And I was like, ‘This is wrong, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m going to be in the band anyway.’ And literally that’s all I thought about, every single day, every single hour, for like two years.”The issue wasn’t just being in a band, something Johnson could have done easily. It was being in this band, with two girls she saw as at least somewhat like her — the kinds of Black and brown kids sometimes pushed to the margins of punk scenes. For Johnson, joining the band was an obsession, a mission, a destiny. “I texted her literally almost every day,” she said, nodding at Campbell. It was two years later, when things hadn’t worked out with the other singer, that Campbell relented, and the trio was complete.There is something specifically miraculous about this band’s emergence, something most easily recognized if you are of a certain age — say, a teenager in the early 2000s, when your time around any capital-S Scene would intersect with the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web. An era spent spiraling into message boards and chat rooms, lonely or bored and reaching out into a thrumming wilderness of faceless personas, hoping to brush up against another set of hands that matched enough of your desires to form something that felt like a bond. Someone “like you,” even if all that really meant was someone who loved some of the same songs, or who also felt lousy in her own scene sometimes and wanted to rage and shout. And of course, there were those of us who dreamed of starting our own bands, kicking around names on Instant Messenger with strangers we’d never meet, a thin veil of fantasy laid over the realities of our circumstances.Meet Me @ the Altar is a thrilling result of a generation beyond all that: kids who grew up communicating on the internet, with one another and with the world, and who could eventually say, “Let’s start a band,” and do it. The internet may seem to become less innocent with each passing hour, but there is still much to be said for what a young person can find on it. Here is a trio of young people who used the internet to its highest exploratory potential, and found one another — and then flourished, reveling in an unfinished but fluorescent version of themselves.First they posted covers on YouTube. Then they took to the road on small tours. It helped that they had the support of their parents, with each member coming from a musical family. Campbell’s parents met, she says, when her father, a producer, heard a recording of her mother, a singer, and fell in love. Johnson’s family has roots in gospel singing, and Juarez’s father is a drummer from El Salvador; when she was young and learning to play, he was the one to post videos on YouTube. “He just wanted to send them to my family back home,” she says. “He didn’t realize the rest of the internet could see them.”The girls began gathering in Florida, playing shows at Soundbar in Orlando, where there was enough of a scene for the group to get its bearings, and begin to create a hum of excitement. That hum became a loud buzz in June 2020, when Dan Campbell of the band the Wonder Years tweeted about the song “Garden,” starting a domino effect. Alex Gaskarth from All Time Low also endorsed the band, as did the singer Halsey. At the time, this version of the band’s lineup had just two self-released EPs to its name. But more and more people were getting a first taste of M.M.A.T.A.’s signature experience — the soaring and infectious chorus — and by the end of the month, labels were sending offers.There was only one label the group had its eye on: Fueled by Ramen, the home of bands, like Paramore, that M.M.A.T.A. idolized. “That was always the goal, the end goal,” Campbell said. “That is what we would have been working toward, to be on Fueled by Ramen. And everything happened so fast that I feel like we didn’t even truly have time to realize, ‘Damn, we’ve been thinking about this since we were 14 years old, and it’s actually happening right now.’”When news of the band’s signing hit, in October 2020, there was palpable excitement. But much of the talk was about the band’s racial makeup’s being different from that of almost every other act previously pursued by the label. Pop-punk has an image that doesn’t always align with its fan base: The fans, often enough, are young Black people or people of color, or are not male, and yet the face of the genre remains largely white, largely male. This opens the door to a lot of less-than-desirable outcomes, from small things (exhausting repetition of the same lyrical themes) to large ones (men taking advantage of their influence over young fans). Of the many reasons people were excited about M.M.A.T.A., there was also the idea that they could signal a change, a corrective.M.M.A.T.A. are a band of young women of color who have their horror stories about the ways they’ve occasionally been treated — by peers, by fans, by men working the door. Now these young women of color were being labeled their genre’s saviors, and the predictability of the American imagination was on full display. There are those who are most at ease, most in awe, when the problems in a subsection of American culture are battled by those already most affected by them. It feeds a mythology that marginalized people are acting out of charity, not necessity. M.M.A.T.A. were suddenly expected to save a scene — as opposed to building a newer, more generous one.“White guilt is something, isn’t it?” Johnson said, grinning slyly, a crescent of pizza crust clasped by her iridescent nails. “If I’m being completely honest, that’s what it was. People were like, ‘Oh, here are all these bands of color!’ And we got to be at the forefront of that. And then, also being women —” She stopped for a split second, just long enough to snap back to a needed clarity. “And,” she said, “we’re also good.”At the Mill Hill in Trenton, N.J., in February.Leigh Ann RodgersWhen I met with M.M.A.T.A., they were riding high off performing a sold-out D.J. set at an emo night in Brooklyn, and were perhaps a little energized about arguing over the fates of their favorite genres. Emo was a commercial force 15 years ago; what did it mean now? Was the pop-punk scene in decline or ripe for resurrection? What parts of it were most worth saving? The need for some kind of pop-punk reconstruction was laid bare outside Soundbar, where one of the band’s friends showed off a new belt from the store Hot Topic, a mecca for generations of the pop-punk/emo set. Campbell tapped the belt’s metallic studs and then turned, incredulous, toward the rest of the band: “Plastic!” she exclaimed. “Hot Topic is using plastic these days!”“I feel like normies have changed the meaning,” she theorized, back at home, “because they don’t know what it is. Pop-punk didn’t go away. I think the mainstream just stopped paying attention.” Johnson agreed. “There is still a scene,” she said. “There will always be a scene.”Amid all the talk of M.M.A.T.A. as the saviors of pop-punk, there was significantly less discussion of them as purists of the form. They have a very specific goal, which became clearer as our conversation continued: They want to bring 2008 back. Someone my age might wince at this, but Campbell and Johnson stressed the simplicity of this aim. There were more guitars on the radio back then. M.M.A.T.A. want pop-punk to have another mainstream moment.They also know that to make that happen, they’ll need to pull from all their creative influences: Johnson’s soaring gospel impulses, Juarez’s affection for bands like Linkin Park and Korn, Campbell’s impeccable ear for pop. Johnson’s melodies, in particular, make you reach for the repeat button; the choruses arrive like sugar and sit long enough before dissolving that you develop a craving for the next one. Earlier in life, she could have sung anything — gospel, R.&B., folk — but she chose to sing pop-punk and infuse every other influence into the way she did it.At the house, Campbell was talking about “Model Citizen,” the EP the band was preparing to release on its new label. At the time, the record was in a place many artists know well: finished but not yet headed to the public. This left time for the band to get existential about the EP’s thematic concerns. “I think it tells the story,” Campbell said, “of realizing that, like, you’re not really OK.”The music finds the band expanding but keeping its sonic impulses close, growing new branches from a familiar tree. But there is something viscerally interior about the songs — a kind of curiosity, a surgical and sometimes comical analysis of what can and cannot be felt. So many of this genre’s songs insist on turning up the volume at the edges of feeling, but M.M.A.T.A. seem obsessed with analyzing the absence of feeling, or the awareness that feeling something important might require not feeling good. The record’s first single, “Feel a Thing,” is resigned but playful, a smirking tune about floating between youth and something that is no longer youth, aimless but with big aims. The second, “Brighter Days (Are Before Us),” has an almost evangelical groove, with the band members promising that they have seen the future and it ain’t all bad — they just need to get there, together.What fascinates most about “Model Citizen” is the way the band seems happy to examine inner terrors and turmoils for its own sake, with anyone listening just along for the ride. As much as coverage of M.M.A.T.A focuses on the members’ youth, they aren’t exactly kids anymore, and they’re not in a position most people who think of themselves as kids are in. They dreamed the impossible and then stepped into it as the world around them was falling into social, political and medical upheaval. It makes sense that “Model Citizen” is taking a magnifying glass to the question of what it means to grow older, and then what it means to grow up.The members of M.M.A.T.A. may not have time to be as in awe of themselves as others are. The band’s tour schedule, starting in late August, is a sprawling sprint, with 45 shows in less than three months, supporting Coheed and Cambria and the Used’s tour together and then All Time Low’s U.S. and U.K. tour dates.I soon noticed the clock pushing well past 10 p.m., the time I was told I would be exiled from the neighborhood. On my way out, though, I found myself compelled to ask the broad and boring question: What comes after all the hype? The band members are young, with seemingly endless potential and cultural good will at their disposal. What can be made of it?At Local 506 in Chapel Hill, N.C.Leigh Ann RodgersThey all chimed in. “I want us to be a household name,” Juarez said.“Like Green Day type [stuff],” Johnson added.“I want people’s kids to know that they have someone like us to look up to,” Juarez said.Campbell, who had been nodding along, paused before adding a finer point.“We want to be the biggest band in the world,” she began. “Not for the fame or the money or any other [expletive], because that doesn’t matter. But for the sole purpose of being able to have a bigger platform so more people can discover us and realize, ‘I have someone who looks like me in this band that I have never seen before.’ That’s all we can ask for at the end of the day, because I’m not getting existential, we’re all going to die one day and what we leave behind is what matters, and if our music and just our existence as a band can change someone’s life … we just want to pave the way for other bands, so that this is normal.”With any other band, I might have been cynical about this idea of selfless success that echoes outward. But everything else this band has manifested for itself, and for the world around it, has come true. It makes them easy to believe, and to believe in.Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, an essayist and a cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He last wrote about the band the Black Keys. More

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      in Television

      In ‘My Unorthodox Life,’ Fashion Is a Flash Point

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      “Show me a law that says I cannot wear high-heeled shoes.”Early in “My Unorthodox Life,” the Netflix reality series about Julia Haart, the fashion executive who turned her back on her strict religious upbringing for the high life in Manhattan, Batsheva, her elder daughter, strolls onto the set in a trim pair of jeans.“What are you wearing?” Batsheva’s husband, Ben, asks dourly. “I got used to you not covering your hair. But pants?”She has upended not just his sense of decorum but a stringent, and oft-misunderstood, dress code dating from biblical times. Ben, who has been slower to abandon the traditions of his Orthodox upbringing, pleads for time to process her choice. Plainly, she is not having it.“The idea that a woman can wear short skirts but not pants — it’s really just a mind-set that you’re brought up with,” Batsheva said the other day. “I thought it was time to deprogram that thought.”Such debates over fashion are central to a show in which fashion, along with the splashier totems of secularism — the TriBeCa penthouse, the helicopter jaunts to the Hamptons — is itself a protagonist. It is also a flash point around which family tensions revolve.Those tensions are largely inflamed by Julia, the 50-year-old family matriarch and resident firebrand, who rejected the strictures of her Orthodox community in Monsey, N.Y., for a fairy-tale hybrid of “Jersey Shore” and “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”An irrepressible mix of ambition, entitlement and caustic indignation, she spends much of her time in the series railing against her culture’s restrictive mores and, in particular, its insistence on a version of modesty that prohibits showing one’s collarbone, knees and elbows.Waging philosophical war on the community she fled, she gives rein to a fiercely evangelical bent of her own. “The idea that women should cover, that they are responsible for men’s impulses and impure thoughts, that’s pure fundamentalism,” Ms. Haart said in an interview. “It has nothing to do with Judaism.”Fashion, she insists, has been a liberating force in her life, the most visible and immediately accessible badge of her unfettered self-expression.On the show she exults in pushing boundaries, flaunting generous expanses of what her daughters would call “boobage” and greeting visitors in metallic leather hot pants and thigh-high skirts.Ms. Julia Haart, in a sequined jumpsuit, at the Elite World Group fashion show.via NetflixMore provocatively, she throws on a tailored romper for an impromptu visit to Monsey. “You’re getting some looks,” her friend and colleague Robert Brotherton murmurs as she negotiates the aisles of her hometown supermarket. But Julia is unmoved.She is more inclined to preach the gospel of self-fulfillment than to discuss the high-end labels she favors. But even in the bedroom, it would seem, her own initials aren’t enough, her pajamas boldly stamped with fancy Vuitton monograms. She flaunts chili-pepper-colored trousers and a star-spangled top on the show, proclaiming, “To me every low-cut top, every miniskirt is an emblem of freedom.”Ms. Haart’s relentless sermonizing can seem abrasive at times. “The way she talks about freedom reminds me of someone who is very resentful of all the rules,” said Amy Klein, who alluded to her own abandonment of religious orthodoxy in an article on Kveller, a website focused on Jewish culture and motherhood.Was she acting out of zavka? “That’s Yiddish for ‘spite,’” Ms. Klein said. “The idea is you should dress provocatively so that it really feels like you’re rebelling.”No question, Ms. Haart’s journey was filled with trepidation, as will likely be detailed in her forthcoming memoir, “Brazen: My Unorthodox Journey From Long Sleeves to Lingerie.” After leaving her husband, Yosef Hendler, who is portrayed sympathetically on the show, “I was sleeping with other men but still wearing my wig,” she said. “That’s the level of fear I had. To me, taking my sheitel off meant God was going to kill me and I would go to hell.”She confronted her fears in baby steps, first selling insurance to save enough money to leave Monsey and eventually designing a line of killer heels not unlike the six-inch platform stilettos she wears on the show. “Show me a law that says I cannot wear high-heeled shoes,” she taunts.Or for that matter, the flashy togs that are part of the line she created for Elite World Group, the modeling and talent conglomerate she owns with her husband, Silvio Scaglia Haart, a collection replete with mock croc candy-pink jackets, emerald-sequined jumpsuits and the glittery like.Miriam, left, and Batsheva Haart. Like their mother, they have come a long way. via NetflixHer daughters tend to take their styles cues from mom. Miriam, 20, a student at Stanford, favors vivid tartan strapless tops, hot pink puffer coats and skinny tanks. Batsheva, 28, adopts a cottage-core-inflected look, all fluffy skirts and puffy sleeves, with an occasional, if not overtly racy, display of cleavage.Partial to labels including Valentino, Fendi and Dior, she shows off her caviar tastes on the series, as well as on Instagram and TikTok. Very much her mother’s daughter, she favors vivid prints and color: searing coral, sweet lilac and hibiscus. Like her mother, she has come a long way.Ms. Haart attended the Bais Yaakov seminary in Monsey, where she raised eyebrows when she wore a red dress. “Someone complained and I was called into the rabbi’s office,” she recalled. “He told me: ‘You have to stop wearing color. It’s not appropriate. You’re attracting attention.’ But where in the Bible does it say you can’t wear color?”Where indeed?“Modesty is not mentioned in the scriptures,” said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “Those rabbinical interpretations of modesty were retrojected into the biblical texts over time.”Deeply rooted in the Talmud, the primary source of Jewish law and tradition, those interpretations, Dr. Sarna said, were based largely on the supposition that the sight of a woman, and even her voice, is arousing for men.Ms. Haart on her wedding day in 1991.Elite World Group, via NetflixHistorically, the call to modesty was by no means uniformly or universally heeded. “A considerable degree of divergence was to be found in the social norms in this realm, which were significantly influenced by social, economic and geographic differences,” Yosef Ahituv observes in The Jewish Women’s Archive.Men, it should be noted, were hardly exempt from the rules. Boys were expected to turn up at school in an unvarying uniform of black pants and white shirts buttoned to the neck, Ben recalled. “That way they wouldn’t be distracted from their studies.”And yet, Dr. Sarna points out, “The paradox of modesty is that its obligations fall mainly on women.”Because standards rarely were codified, it was often left to schools to enforce regulations, including the edict to cover one’s knees. Dr. Sarna can still remember a time when teachers measured girls’ skirts to determine how many inches they were above the knee. “Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel also were modest,” he said. “But I have doubts as to whether anybody was measuring skirts in those earlier days.”Ms. Haart with Batsheva and her son Shlomo in 1999.via NetflixMs. Haart chafed under similar restrictions and ultimately ditched them along with her sheitel and calf-sweeping skirts, trading them for the gilded accouterments of corporate success. Her audacity has earned her a following, but it has also drawn ire.“The show is not called ‘My Fringe Sect Life,’ it is called ‘My Unorthodox Life,’” reads an opinion piece from The Jerusalem Post. Julia “is therefore pointing the accusatory finger at all mainstream Orthodox Jews.”Others question her motives, speculating that the show was a marketing ploy conceived to pave the way to a planned Elite World Group public offering.Julia’s style alone has spawned plenty of chatter.“I know Netflix loves fetishizing ex-Orthodox women who abandon their Judaism,” Chavie Lieber, a reporter for The Business of Fashion, wrote on Twitter, referring to the near prurient fascination spawned by shows like “Shtisel” and “Unorthodox.”But as she observes: “There are thousands (millions?) of Orthodox women who have a very different story. And yes, some of us work in #fashion too.”As Julia herself hammers home repeatedly, and somewhat defensively, her issue is not with her faith but with any and all expressions of religious extremism. Reaching for consensus, she aligns herself broadly with the precepts of feminism.“How many times was I told as a girl, ‘Julia, your dancing, your learning the Talmud, these things are not appropriate,’” she said. “I want to eradicate this whole concept of the well-behaved woman.”And with it the notion of suitable garb. “We are relying on men to tells us what God wants from us,” she likes to chide. “I want women to choose for themselves.” More