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      Why Madhur Jaffrey and Michelle Zauner ‘Fell Toward Each Other’

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      Madhur Jaffrey: I learned about Michelle through my granddaughter. I read her book [“Crying in H Mart,” 2021] and listened to her music, and I thought she seemed like me. Our relationships to our mothers are in many ways similar — when she said in her book that her mother used to watch QVC and buy face creams, I thought of my own mother, who would have my sisters and me rub the cow’s milk from our own cows into our faces because she heard that Cleopatra bathed in the milk of an ass for her milky complexion. Our fathers were similar, too: Michelle’s father never took her music seriously, which reminded me of my father, who told the president of India that acting was just my hobby.culture banner More

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      Blair Tindall, Whose Music Memoir Scandalized, Dies at 63

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      Her 2005 book, “Mozart in the Jungle,” lived up to its subtitle, “Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” and was later made into an Amazon TV series.Blair Tindall, a freelance oboist and journalist who drew on both of those abilities to write “Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” an eyebrow-raising 2005 memoir that became an award-winning television series, died on April 12 in Los Angeles. She was 63.Her fiancé, the photographer Chris Sattlberger, said the cause was cardiovascular disease.Ms. Tindall had played in various ensembles and Broadway pit orchestras and was writing regularly for publications including The New York Times when “Mozart in the Jungle” appeared. Any reader holding a pristine view of the people who make classical music was quickly relieved of it: The book opens with Ms. Tindall’s visit to a cocaine-fueled party of musicians and goes on to detail assorted escapades, among them her own sexual liaisons, including an early one, with a middle-aged instructor, when she was a teenager studying at the North Carolina School of the Arts.“I got hired for most of my gigs in bed,” she wrote.The book set tongues wagging in the classical music world and divided critics.“Written with pop culture-savvy flair — a feat for a musician who, at one point, admits to being ‘proud that I couldn’t identify a pop song from Beatles to Blondie’ — ‘Mozart’ is a delightfully unlikely page-turner,” Ali Marshall wrote in Mountain Xpress, an alternative newspaper in North Carolina. “And, even if it doesn’t encourage readers to listen to classical music, it’s sure to instill in them an unprecedented admiration of this deviant art.”But the music writer Anne Midgette, in The New York Times, was not impressed.“The book’s biggest weakness is that it smacks of sour grapes,” she wrote. “By writing it as an autobiography, Ms. Tindall seems to be saying that everything that went wrong in her life is the fault of the classical music world.”Ms. Tindall’s book set tongues wagging in the classical music world. It also divided critics.In interviews after the book came out, Ms. Tindall was unapologetic about the salacious parts.“I did notice when I became involved in a relationship with someone in the business that my work picked up,” she told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2005. “You need all the friends you can get. The music world is very incestuous.”Speaking with The Daily News of New York the same year, she was matter-of-fact.“People always seem shocked that musicians would have sex,” she said. “I mean, where do little musicians come from?”The sensational content drew much of the attention, but Ms. Tindall said she was making serious points in the book about dysfunction in the classical-music world — pay inequities, for instance, that had a few star conductors and musicians making big money while musicians like her scraped by, and music schools that built up false hopes among students.“If you take all the major orchestras in America together, there are jobs for only 100 full-time oboists,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “Yet there are 300 union oboists in the New York area alone.”And the wild times she chronicled, she said, weren’t quite the same as the better-known excesses of rock ’n’ roll.“Sex and drugs are a show of exuberance in rock,” she said. “In the world of classical music, they are more of an escape from a sense of confinement and depression.”She told The Daily Telegraph that she hoped the book might interest someone in Hollywood. But she said she wasn’t optimistic: No actress would want to play her, since drawing music from an oboe requires puffed-out cheeks and leaves the musician bug-eyed.“Unfortunately, nobody looks good playing the oboe,” she said.Lola Kirke and Gael García Bernal in an episode of “Mozart in the Jungle,” the Amazon TV series based on Ms. Tindall’s book.Amazon StudiosYet nine years later, she got her wish: Amazon, still relatively new to the business of making television shows, used “Mozart in the Jungle” as the basis for a series of the same name that premiered in 2014 and ran for four seasons. Lola Kirke played a young oboist, Gael García Bernal was the sexy conductor of a New York orchestra, and the show became a talking point for musicians everywhere. It won the Golden Globe in 2016 for best television series, comedy or musical.Blair Alston Mercer Tindall was born on Feb. 2, 1960, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her father, George B. Tindall, was a noted historian who taught at the University of North Carolina, and her mother, Carliss Blossom (McGarrity) Tindall, had a master’s degree and assisted her husband in his research.Her parents made her study piano when she was young, though she wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the instrument. One day, she recalled in her book, someone from a music store brought instruments to her elementary school, and the band teacher allowed each student to choose one, going alphabetically.“By the time he got to Tindall, my options had narrowed to two unfamiliar instruments, oboe and bassoon,” she wrote. She chose the oboe.As she grew increasingly proficient on the instrument, she realized it had its advantages.“Composers wrote juicy solos for oboes that sent band directors into ecstasy,” she wrote. She also got excused from class for band competitions and tours.After finishing high school at the School of the Arts in 1978, Ms. Tindall earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music. She played in the pit orchestras of “Miss Saigon” and “Les Misérables” and performed with the ensembles Orpheus and Music Amici, the all-oboe trio Oboe Fusion and various orchestras. In 1991, at Weill Recital Hall in Manhattan, she played “a clever, stylistically varied debut program,” as Allan Kozinn put it in a review in The Times.In 1999, Ms. Tindall, who was becoming disenchanted with the musician’s life, received a fellowship to study journalism at Stanford and relocated to the West Coast. She earned a master’s degree in journalism there and worked for West Coast newspapers, including The Contra Costa Times and The San Francisco Examiner.In 2006, newspapers reported that Ms. Tindall had married Bill Nye, TV’s “Science Guy,” though seven weeks later the license was declared invalid and the union dissolved.Mr. Sattlberger said he and Ms. Tindall had planned to marry on May 1. She leaves no other survivors.Ms. Tindall wrote for numerous publications on a variety of subjects. Her articles for The Times were most often about music.When Broadway musicians went on strike in March 2003 over the efforts of producers to reduce the number of musicians required at shows and replace them with digital music, Ms. Tindall wrote in an essay for The Times about her final night in the pit of “Man of La Mancha” before the walkout.“This night, the music responded to the actors — and the audience,” she wrote. “If virtual orchestras take over, it will be mechanical and unyielding — measured by keyboard velocity, musical software interfaces, and the zeros and ones of digital musical samples.“We looked around the pit, grabbed our instruments, and shut out the lights.” More

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      In Her New Show, Rita Indiana Confronts All Kinds of Ghosts

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      “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts Friday in New York, is a spiritual multimedia performance from the 45-year-old novelist and musician.“In the time you dropped a chorus, I wrote five novels.”It’s the kind of shot that only Rita Indiana could fire off in a song. The lyrics — which appear in “Como un dragón,” the lead single from the musician and writer’s last album, “Mandinga Times” in 2020 — encapsulate the interdisciplinary abundance she has cultivated over the last 20 years. They also show off a slick-talking, Caribbean kind of realness, which lives in the characters that populate her world.On a recent Friday afternoon, Indiana was running around at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, posing for photos and working on set decorations with an assistant. She and her wife, the Puerto Rican filmmaker Noelia Quintero Herencia, were putting the final touches on a multimedia performance called “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts on Friday at the Clemente’s Flamboyán Theater.Indiana, who sports a huge tattoo of an American buffalo on her right hand, sighed as she paused to rest on a bench. Tufts of gray sprouted from her shaggy pixie cut. “I’m a punk abuela,” she said, laughing. Not quite your average grandma.Over the last two decades, the 45-year-old Dominican artist has transformed into one of the Caribbean’s foremost cultural agitators. Indiana’s repertoire unsettles deeply entrenched cultural norms — she’s not afraid to write queer sex scenes in her award-winning books, or condemn corrupt politicians in her genre-shattering songs. In 2010, she and her band Los Misterios released the blistering “El juidero,” a record about diasporic longing and Dominican identity that shredded up merengue, rock and Afro-Dominican folk styles.Indiana’s early works were almost documentarian, exploring the everyday joys and contradictions of Caribbean life. In recent years, she has journeyed into freakier, more fantastical universes. For “Mandinga Times,” which was nominated for a Latin Grammy, she developed a demonic nonbinary alter ego, meant to symbolize all kinds of marginalized bodies.Her 2015 novel “La mucama de Ominculé,” a dystopian tale set in Santo Domingo, follows a transgender protagonist who travels back in time via a divine sea anemone to save the world from nuclear catastrophe. Scholars praise Indiana’s constellatory style, particularly the way she integrates tropical futurism, queer poetics and the buoyancy of Dominican speech to imagine the liberatory possibilities of the present. The acclaim has made her a literary superstar; she is currently serving as the acting director of New York University’s Creative Writing in Spanish M.F.A.At the Clemente, Quintero Herencia, who designed the sets for “Tu nombre verdadero,” whittled disembodied clay fingers while Indiana traced the creative process behind the show. It features her first new music since “Mandinga Times,” the LP that ended a 10-year hiatus during which she focused on writing. It’s also Indiana’s first piece as a New York resident. (The couple spent 14 years in Puerto Rico.)The show’s nonlinear story immerses the audience in experiences of death and illness, particularly as they relate to artists. Indiana said it explores the weight that an artist’s name has when they die. She cited the photographer, painter and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz; the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca as some of the figures that shaped the spirit of the performance. Indiana herself goes by a shortened version of her birth name (Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez), and said she chose it not to Anglicize her identity, but because she felt Indiana was more interesting.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya, where she studied alongside the visionary actors Claudio Rivera and Viena González. Quintero Herencia has worked as a director, prop designer and set builder in most of Indiana’s films and music videos, and said the piece will feature dreamlike visual projections. “Tu nombre verdadero” is the “inevitable fate of our practices,” Indiana added.While conceptualizing the show, commissioned by the Americas Society, the couple navigated a wave of death, both personal and collective. They mourned the millions lost in the pandemic, as well as close friends, relatives and beloved musicians, like Quintero Herencia’s mother, the Dominican painter Jorge Pineda and the merengue icon Johnny Ventura. In part, the performance is a way to guide “our ghosts” to a better place and process our memories of them, Indiana said.The couple’s longstanding fascination with death and ancestral energies has surfaced in their previous work. “I never separate my art from my spiritual world and the world of my ancestors,” Quintero Herencia said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, a documentary or a drawing. There’s always a channel that I open, that I know is connected to the ancestral world.” Indiana, whose father died violently when she was around 12, explained that death has intrigued her for as long as she can remember. She often wonders how a body “that we love with, fight with, work with, understand with, cry with” suddenly becomes nothing.It’s a subject that has also emerged from Caribbean colonial wounds. The island of Hispaniola, home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was the first New World colony settled by Spain in 1493. Indiana said the region is still confronting its sordid past — the massacre of native Taínos, the cruel violence of the Atlantic slave trade — and all the cultural knowledge and traditions that were annihilated in the process. “Colonialism is a machine of death,” she said. “We are a part of that — of all that pain and that whole factory of bones.”Indiana tapped a small crew of musicians for the show, including the composer and frequent collaborator Luis Amed Irizarry, who arranged the songbook for piano and drums. Efraín Martínez, a drummer who has toured with the merengue idol Olga Tañón and recorded with the reggae group Cultura Profética, also joined the lineup.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesIndiana described the compositions as “bare bones,” far removed from the conventional structures of popular music. “It’s a more poetic language, more absurd,” she said. “The references are from my childhood, the music I heard when I was very small.” She recalled the influence of her great-aunt Ivonne Haza, a decorated soprano, who was a vocal coach for some of the Dominican Republic’s most renowned singers, including Fernandito Villalona and Sonia Silvestre. Haza would give lessons at Indiana’s grandparents’ house, where Indiana lived until she was 7.“That was like the soundtrack to my homework — four hours, five hours of that,” she explained, chuckling.The songbook is impressionistic, sculpting Dominican gagá, Spanish copla, Cuban son and other genres into abstract shapes. There is even an experimental merengue, inspired by Danny Elfman’s Tim Burton scores, and an English-language satirical country number that addresses the brutality of Latin American dictatorships. Indiana burst into the chorus of the song, adopting a Southern twang: “He’s our strong man, he’s our puppet, he’s our pawn/You should see how he trips/Over our banana splits/When we choose his killers from among his own.”Indiana’s fearlessness helped inspire the Dominican artist La Marimba to fuse and tinker with disparate genres — to not be afraid to “have your own identity and show it.” She called Indiana a key figure in a movement of Dominican musicians who adapted the country’s folk traditions for the contemporary moment.A generation of young Dominican writers also identifies Indiana as a lodestar. Johan Mijail, who appeared in a 2018 anthology of contemporary Dominican literature that Indiana edited, said that Indiana’s novels permitted Mijail’s own writing to “offer a view of Santo Domingo and its outskirts where music, popular culture and the urban could be taken as possible horizons for sexual diversity to bloom.”With “Tu nombre verdadero” almost behind her, Indiana is working on her own books, too. “I wrote a novel last year that’s in a drawer right now,” she said, describing it as a “gender horror novel” she will revisit later. Another book, set in Puerto Rico and related to the Vietnam War, is coming later this year.No matter the medium, Indiana’s work is nourished by endless interrogation. She noted that the commitment to scrutiny — both of self and community — is grounded in her lived reality. “As a queer person, I’m questioning my identity until I’m dead,” she said. “In this perpetual transitional state,” she added, “what is my real name?” More

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      The Last Days of Beckett’s, a Smoky New York Literary Salon

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      About a year ago, a literary salon sprang to life in a run-down townhouse in the West Village of Manhattan. Dozens of young writers, critics, artists, theater actors and filmmakers started going there almost nightly to drink, smoke, talk, dance and argue, much like their bohemian predecessors in the days before sky-high rents priced poets out of the neighborhood.The venue had the clandestine air of a speakeasy. Notice of its existence was passed along by word of mouth. Guests stuffed cash into a cardboard box marked “donations” to receive canned Modelo from a fridge. There were readings, screenings and music shows in the grand, loft-like ground-floor space. Neighbors complained constantly about the noise. The police barged in once during a play.“This place has given us a taste of an older New York we never saw,” said Christian Cail, a jazz guitarist who visited the space. “This isn’t meant to exist.”The host was Beckett Rosset, a 53-year-old writer with a rocky past who lives in a book-cluttered apartment upstairs with his 18-year-old tabby cat, Micio. Mr. Rosset was named after Samuel Beckett, the 20th-century literary giant who worked closely with his father, the publishing maverick Barney Rosset. Gradually, his salon became known as Beckett’s, and its happenings included a debate about Shakespeare’s identity, a showing of the 1972 pornography classic “Deep Throat” and issue release parties for Dirty Magazine and the Mars Review of Books.The writers Rachel Rabbit White, left, and Nico Walker, in the townhouse stairwell with Mr. Rosset.OK McCausland for The New York TimesLate in the fall, as rumors swirled that the building was about to be sold, word went out that there would be one last gathering. On a November night, some 100 devotees shoved past the townhouse door to attend a rowdy wake inside. Poets in scarves sipped Fernet and writers in denim jackets drank cheap red wine. Others hung out on tattered sofas, flipping through the works of Henry James.In the rear, a hushed crowd sat on the floor of a dark theater space equipped with a piano and a disco ball, waiting for the evening’s entertainment to begin. Acts included the blind soprano Nafset Chenib, who sang Verdi, and the literary critic Christian Lorentzen, who read his old humor columns from The New York Observer. A woman in the audience wearing Converse sneakers kept coughing as she smoked a cigarette.Mr. Rosset, nervy and thin, wearing a dark suit, stood up and faced the crowd. “It wasn’t so long ago I was sitting here by myself and I didn’t even know any of you yet,” he said. “Now the building is getting sold, but I’m just thankful to so many of you for what this place became.” Some of the regulars started sobbing and hugging each other.To its adherents, Beckett’s had become a downtown sanctuary for the city’s creative underclass. It started last spring, when the playwright Matthew Gasda, who is known for staging his works in lofts and apartments, was looking for a place to mount his satire “Dimes Square.” So an actor in his play, Fernanda Amis (the daughter of the novelist Martin Amis), approached her cousin, Pablo Marvel, who lives in the townhouse and is related to the family that bought the building decades ago, to ask about renting the ground floor. Mr. Rosset soon started managing things. During the run of “Dimes Square” performances, a scene was born.Partygoers at the last Beckett’s gathering.OK McCausland for The New York TimesA poster for Evergreen Review, the literary publication run by Barney Rosset.OK McCausland for The New York TimesAfter Mr. Rosset thanked the crowd on that November night, the gathering turned into a drunken send-off to Beckett’s. Guests danced to Oasis beneath the disco ball while others chain-smoked beside space heaters in the host’s bedroom.Among the mourners was a writer named Jonah Howell. “I’m from a swamp town near New Orleans and haven’t been in New York long,” he said, “but I’ve already learned the bar to entry to literary scenes is high here. You got to know the right people to get anywhere. But here, you just come and you’re in.”“To read at those places like KGB Bar or the Franklin Park series it’s like you need a National Book Award or something,” Mr. Howell added. “There’s no segregated class here.”The playwright Matthew Gasda at the piano, with the artist Alida Delaney.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Cail, the jazz guitarist, was standing near the bathroom line.“Where are we supposed to go now?” he said.As things shook out, Beckett’s wasn’t over quite yet.‘It Ain’t Pretty’Because the sale of a debt-ridden building in New York can be sluggish, the salon survived a few more months, resulting in a series of farewell parties with names like “Afterlife” and “Resurrection.” Amid the cigarette smoke haze at these bashes, the conversation often turned to Mr. Rosset and what would become of him once the townhouse was sold.“I think this place will come to signify its era,” said Anika Jade Levy, a co-editor of the indie literary publication Forever Magazine. “Now that it’s ending, I hope Beckett knows he’s more to us than just a man with a cool loft.”Cassidy Grady, an actor and playwright, whose “Fire Wars” was staged in the townhouse, shared the sentiment. “Beckett has never lived an ordinary life,” Ms. Grady said. “He’s been trying to figure out who he is through all this, but I think he thought he’d have more time.”Mr. Rosset had become a subject of fascination to his acolytes, some of whom accosted him for selfies. They had heard whispers of a troubled life — that he was a scion of literary royalty who had been in and out of jail. And they wondered about the framed Richard Avedon photograph hanging in his bedroom, a 1979 portrait that shows him, at age 10, standing next to Samuel Beckett.Late on a recent night, as yet another party emptied out downstairs, Mr. Rosset stood in his room, looking at the boy in the picture. “I still remember that day,” he said. “I flew to Paris with my father, and we all met at a cafe. I remember Beckett didn’t seem to like Avedon much. He said he’d only do the portrait if I was in it.”“When I look at this picture,” he continued, “I feel sad for that kid. That’s not a happy child. He looks in pain. It’s like he’s looking at his future and it ain’t pretty.”The host holds his 18-year-old cat, Micio.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Rosset had a privileged Manhattan childhood. His father, the founder of Grove Press, was a towering figure who published writers like Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs. He changed the course of American letters with his crusade against censorship by publishing works including D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” His legal slugfests resulted in landmark First Amendment cases.The younger Mr. Rosset grew up in a townhouse not far from the one where he lives now. As a boy, he sat on the staircase to get a view of the cocktail parties attended by the likes of Norman Mailer and John Lennon. He spent weekends at a house in East Hampton, where the novelist Kenzaburo Oe stopped by for visits, and he sometimes encountered his father’s first wife, the painter Joan Mitchell.“She overheard me learning how to say curse words,” he recalled. “She called me over and told me, ‘Your language, it’s beautiful.’”Mr. Rosset’s struggles began in his teens. He said that he was expelled from two private boarding schools, Rumsey Hall and Blair Academy, and started experimenting with hard drugs at night in Central Park. He described his father, who married five times, as an absent parent, but said that, as his drug use worsened, so did their rift, resulting in a strained relationship that lasted until his death in 2012.“It was easy to tell I was going down a bad road,” he said. “I always felt abandoned by my father, and that feeling came to define my life. But in fairness to him and my family, I was unmanageable.”By his 20s, Mr. Rosset was using heroin and living in Bowery flophouses like the Providence and the Whitehouse Hotel. In the mid-1990s, he was charged with selling narcotics and petit larceny, putting him in Rikers repeatedly. Inmates nicknamed him “the Brain,” he said, after he taught a cellmate how to read.“At the Rikers library, I found a rare first-edition Beckett book,” he said. “I shoved it down my pants and stole it. I sent it to my father to try and make amends. He mailed me some cigarettes after that.”The actor George Olesky stood up from his place on the floor to the delight of the Beckett’s crowd.OK McCausland for The New York TimesIn his 30s, Mr. Rosset worked as a bartender, a proofreader and an assistant at a small record label. He befriended a West Village eccentric, Mary Kaplan, who took an interest in him. “She told me: ‘I feel sorry for your cats. Why don’t you all come stay at my home for a week?’” he said. “Well, I’m still here today. Mary saved me.”He moved into her townhouse, the same building that would become the site of his underground salon. As his stay expanded from weeks to years, he realized he had been taken in by a den mother of sorts. Ms. Kaplan’s father ran the Welch Grape Juice Company, and she used her largess to provide shelter for artists. Mr. Rosset helped take care of her until her death at 85.One of her great-nephews, Mr. Marvel, lives on the fourth floor, helping manage the building for his family. “I think what’s happened here with Beckett was guided by Mary’s bohemian spirit,” he said.In March, the building was put up for auction, and Beckett’s shut down indefinitely. Whatever happens next, Mr. Rosset said he was grateful for the ride, although he won’t exactly miss cleaning up after a bunch of hormonally charged poets and artists.Two Beckett’s regulars, Heather Simington, left, and Kitty St. Remy.OK McCausland for The New York TimesCasualties of another evening at Mr. Rosset’s salon.OK McCausland for The New York Times“Lots of them are privileged, highly educated, bored kids, but I’m not knocking them,” he said. “They’ve desired to become part of something, and that touches me, because I’ve felt like an outsider my whole life. For the first time, I feel like I belong.”Mr. Rosset declined to discuss the specifics of the Beckett’s business model, but said the money that guests kicked in had allowed him to make “enough to feed me and my cat.” The downtown scene that sprouted up around him, he added, also helped him make sense of his life. He’s even starting a publication, Tense, citing as its inspiration his father’s literary journal, Evergreen Review.“There’s an irony that I’m now channeling my father with this space and this magazine,” he said. “I’ve tried to be a lot of things in my life, but doing this finally feels right, because it’s in my blood, and that’s because of him.”The Last Last PartyMr. Rosset threw one last bash, billed in his email blasts as “The Rear End.” On the night of the party, March 18, the townhouse was packed. A group of women in fur coats stepped out of a black S.U.V. and tried to talk their way inside, only to be told by the volunteers at the door that Beckett’s was over capacity.“But I know someone reading tonight,” one of the latecomers said.Some of the guests were wondering where the scene would go now.The ballet dancer Ellen Frances in Mr. Rosset’s apartment on the night of her solo performance.OK McCausland for The New York Times“People are already trying to make new places a thing,” said Meg Spectre, an artist who had a Tamagotchi tied to her purse. “I heard at Manero’s in Little Italy people tried staging a play, but the restaurant got too loud. A scene has to happen organically, like it did here. You can’t force it.”The variety show that evening featured a reading by the novelist Nico Walker, a solo ballet performance by Ellen Frances and a pole dancing routine by Ella Wasserman-Smith. Mr. Rosset took part in a staging of a short Samuel Beckett play, “Catastrophe.”Around midnight, Ray Laurél, a musician from London, left the party and approached Mr. Rosset on the sidewalk, saying, “I just want to thank you, Mr. Beckett. I’m a theater kid from London and I was trying to find the scene here. Someone told me to come here because it might be closing. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”Mr. Rosset, in his apartment at the townhouse. “For the first time, I feel like I belong,” he said of his time as the host of the literary salon that took his name.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Rosset gave a smile. Then he went back to picking cigarette butts off the sidewalk.Two days later, Mr. Rosset was awakened by a call informing him that the movers had arrived. He rushed downstairs to watch them take away the piano, the chandeliers and the rows of antique chairs.Then the moving truck drove off, hauling a scene away with it.Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

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      in Television

      Bill Zehme, Author With a Knack for Humanizing the Famous, Dies at 64

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      A prolific biographer, he charmed his way into access to, and insights about, Frank Sinatra, Hugh Hefner, Johnny Carson and many others.Bill Zehme, whose biographies and magazine profiles humanized the celebrities he described as “intimate strangers” — the “shy, succinct” Johnny Carson; the “blank” Warren Beatty; Frank Sinatra, whose “battle cry” was “fun with everything, and I mean fun!” — died on Sunday in Chicago. He was 64.His partner, Jennifer Engstrom, said the cause was colorectal cancer.Mr. Zehme’s biography of Mr. Sinatra, “The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’” (1997), was a best seller. He also shared the author credit on best-selling memoirs by Regis Philbin (“I’m Only One Man!” in 1995 and “Who Wants to Be Me?” in 2000) and Jay Leno (“Leading With My Chin” in 1996).His other books included “Intimate Strangers: Comic Profiles and Indiscretions of the Very Famous” (2002), “Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman” (1999) and “Hef’s Little Black Book” (2004), a stream-of-consciousness collaboration with Hugh M. Hefner, the founder and publisher of Playboy magazine.Mr. Zehme’s biography of Frank Sinatra, published in 1997, was a best seller, and he and Mr. Sinatra remained close.Mr. Zehme (pronounced ZAY-mee) conducted what is widely believed to have been the last major interview with Johnny Carson, whom he called “the great American Sphinx” and whom the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite called “the most durable performer in the whole history of television” when Mr. Carson retired in 1992 after some 4,500 episodes of “The Tonight Show.”Mr. Zehme’s “Carson the Magnificent: An Intimate Portrait” was published in 2007, but he never completed the full-fledged biography he had planned.The Chicago-born Mr. Zehme was often said to have cultivated recalcitrant sources with his Midwestern charm. His portraits were not hagiography, but neither were they tell-alls, and he remained close to some of the subjects he interviewed, including Mr. Sinatra and Mr. Hefner.“Bill didn’t dig around for dirt or comb through the proverbial closet hunting for skeletons,” David Hirshey, a former deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said by email. “What interested him was more subtle than that. Zehme looked for the quirks in behavior and speech that revealed a person’s character, and he had an uncanny ability to put his subjects at ease with a mixture of gentle playfulness and genuine empathy.”That’s why,” Mr. Hirshey continued, “Sharon Stone covered by nothing but a sheet allowed Bill to interview her while lying side by side as they enjoyed a couples massage.”Mr. Carson, Mr. Zehme wrote in an essay for PBS in conjunction with an “American Masters” documentary on him, “rose to reign iconic as the smooth midnight sentinel king whose political japes and cultural enthusiasms mightily swayed popular taste at whim or wink.” That wink, Mr. Zehme noted, transmitted “surefire stardom to aspiring personalities, especially comedians, and privileged co-conspiracy to regular viewers who became his spontaneous partners in sly mockery.”Andy Kaufman, Mr. Zehme wrote, was “a pioneering practitioner of various cultural trends long before they ever became trends.”Delacorte PressOf Mr. Beatty, Mr. Zehme wrote: “He speaks slowly, fearfully, cautiously, editing every syllable, slicing off personal color and spontaneous wit, steering away from opinion, introspection, humanness. He is mostly evasive. His pauses are elephantine. Broadway musicals could be mounted during his pauses. He works at this. Ultimately, he renders himself blank.“In ‘Dick Tracy,’ he battles a mysterious foe called the Blank. In life, he is the Blank doing battle with himself. It is a fascinating showdown, exhilarating to behold. To interview Warren Beatty is to want to kill him.”Mr. Zehme provided tips from Mr. Sinatra about what men should never do in the presence of a woman (yawn) and about the finer points of his haberdashery: “He wore only snap-brim Cavanaughs — fine felts and porous palmettos — and these were his crowns, cocked askew, as defiant as he was.”“Mr. Sinatra’s gauge for when a hat looked just right,” Mr. Zehme wrote, was “when no one laughs.”He described the unorthodox and at times controversial comedian Andy Kaufman as “the pre-eminent put-on artist of his generation” and “a pioneering practitioner of various cultural trends long before they ever became trends.”William Christian Zehme was born on Oct. 28, 1958, the grandson of a Danish immigrant. His parents, Robert and Suzanne (Clemensen) Zehme, owned a flower shop in Flossmoor, a village south of Chicago and not far from South Holland, where Bill was raised.Mr. Zehme in 2017. “Bill didn’t dig around for dirt or comb through the proverbial closet hunting for skeletons,” a colleague said. “What interested him was more subtle than that.”Loyola University Chicago School of CommunicationHe graduated from Loyola University in Chicago in 1980 with a degree in journalism.One of his first books was “The Rolling Stone Book of Comedy” (1991). In 2004, he won a National Magazine Award for his profile of the newspaper columnist Bob Greene.In addition to Ms. Engstrom, Mr. Zehme is survived by Lucy Reeves, a daughter from his marriage to Tina Zimmel, which ended in divorce; and a sister, Betsy Archer.Mr. Zehme bridled at being identified as a celebrity biographer, although most of the people he profiled had been famous long before he wrote about them. They had not, however, seemed as familiar as next-door neighbors until Mr. Zehme wrote about them.“The celebrity profile is the bastard stepchild of journalism, and I’m embarrassed sometimes to be associated with it,” he told Chicago magazine in 1996.“The truth is, I have never written about a celebrity,” Mr. Zehme wrote in “Intimate Strangers.” “I have always written about humans, replete with human traits and foibles and issues, who also happen to be famous.” More

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      ‘Nemesis’ Review: A Philip Roth Adaptation Resonates

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      The American writer’s last novel becomes surprisingly effective theater in the hands of Tiphaine Raffier at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe.You can imagine directors being warned away from adapting the work of Philip Roth. The film versions of his novels have been panned so consistently that a writer for The Atlantic in 2014 called for them to stop. Few playhouses have even attempted to translate them for the stage.Yet a young French theater director, Tiphaine Raffier, just proved that it can be done. On Friday — the ongoing strikes over France’s pension changes delayed the opening by a day — she unveiled an absorbing, ingenious adaptation of Roth’s final book, “Nemesis,” on the second stage of Paris’s Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe. All it took was two hours and 45 minutes, without an intermission; a cast of nearly 30, including eight children and five musicians; and the refashioning of an entire portion of the plot into a musical, complete with original songs.And that’s for one of Roth’s most concise novels. Set in 1944, “Nemesis” is centered on Bucky, a summertime playground director from Newark, N.J., who is caught in the middle of a polio epidemic in his Jewish neighborhood. The children he works with start dying, at a terrifying pace. After he escapes to Indian Hill, an idyllic summer camp in the Poconos, the disease catches up with his charges there, too.Raffier states in the playbill that the novel’s subject matter struck her in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but she steers clear of too-obvious parallels. What she evokes instead in compelling fashion is the moral complexity of “Nemesis,” especially the characters’ desperate need for an explanation of the unexplainable — a virus that appears to strike at random, because the means of transmission were still something of a mystery.It’s familiar terrain for Raffier, who created her company in 2015. Two years ago, she wrote and directed “La Réponse des Hommes” (“The Human Response”), a freewheeling, overlong play inspired by the Christian works of mercy, from feeding the hungry to caring for the sick, that explored the thorny notion of “doing good.” In “Nemesis,” however, her penchant for long-form theater — Raffier, a trained actor, has also been seen in the marathon productions of the French director Julien Gosselin — is balanced with greater control and urgency.In her hands, the three parts of the novel strike starkly different tones. The first takes place on a shadowy stage, lit through shutters on all three sides. Conversations are in turns hushed and high-pitched, in tune with the characters’ paranoia as polio spreads from child to child. Could the virus have come from the wind? Hot dogs? A group of Italians, or a disabled local man named Horace, whom teenagers attempt to wash with ammonia?The main character of “Nemesis” flees his New Jersey home for a summer camp in the Poconos.Simon GosselinRaffier highlights the contrasts between the suffocating Newark neighborhood — at “war” with polio, as Roth describes it — and Indian Hill. The sets change to reveal glorious, panoramic mountain views, printed on a semicircular curtain. Immaculately dressed children from the Conservatory of Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris, play the happy campers (though they could use more direction). When Bucky, who has fled to join his girlfriend Marcia as a counselor, is greeted by camp staffers, they instantly launch into song.“You’ll get cooler here,” one intones. “Welcome to paradise.”While this musical pivot 75 minutes into “Nemesis,” sounds odd for the first few scenes, it works as a metaphor. Musical theater is associated in France with happy-go-lucky American exceptionalism, and here it feels absurdly bright, leaving Bucky — who blames himself for abandoning his neighborhood — dumbstruck.To drive this point home, while the rest of the show is based on the French translation of “Nemesis,” by Marie-Claire Pasquier, the songs — credited to Guillaume Bachelé — are all in English. It’s an understandable choice, even though some of the performers aren’t fully equipped to handle them. (Additionally, like all Odéon productions, “Nemesis” is presented with English subtitles on Fridays. Unfortunately, the only screen is right above the edge of the stage, all but invisible from the first few rows.)In the role of the younger Bucky, Alexandre Gonin finds a sense of awkward seriousness that never tips over into dullness. A narrator speaks in voice-over throughout, and early on, it’s easy to assume it’s Bucky; as in Roth’s novel, however, we later learn that the narrator is Arnie, one of the children from the Newark playground who contracted polio. Onstage, Arnie (Maxime Dambrin), is revealed to have been narrating behind the scenes from the beginning.The final section, which is also the shortest, brings the adult Arnie together with a much older Bucky. Both characters suffer from the aftereffects of polio, yet they face off with entirely different perspectives on what happened. Bucky is consumed by lifelong guilt over the role he may have played in spreading polio, while Arnie argues for a life well lived and not limited by disability.As Bucky, the bilingual American actor Stuart Seide is brilliantly cantankerous, and Dambrin, who has a form of neuropathy that affects his ability to walk, makes a heartfelt match for him. “Chance is everything,” Dambrin pleads.At this point, it feels as if we’ve lived a life with these characters and their contradictions. It’s a feat Roth often managed on the page. For Raffier to match it onstage is a career-launching achievement.‘Nemesis’Through April 21, at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe (Ateliers Berthier) in Paris; theatre-odeon.eu. More

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      Jeremy O. Harris’s Writer’s Residency Under the Tuscan Sun

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      The finalists for the 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize suddenly find themselves in Italy, with plenty of time to write, reflect and make pasta.CASTIGLIONCELLO DEL TRINORO, Italy — Just two weeks ago, the lives of four promising playwrights were upended: Not only did they receive an email announcing that their work had been shortlisted for the 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize, but they were also invited to participate in a monthlong residency in Tuscany, led by the American playwright Jeremy O. Harris.Which is how those playwrights found themselves eating gourmet meals this week in a medieval village turned boutique hotel with breathtaking views of the postcard-perfect Val d’Orcia countryside. With access to a sauna and spa, as well as pasta-making classes and truffle-hunting, they are very much in a pinch-me-I-can’t-believe-it’s-true state.“The first two or three days I was like, ‘How am I here, this is insane,’” Rianna Simons, 21, said of working alongside “very lovely, very talented people in a crazy, beautiful environment.” Simons, a Bermudian-British writer who lives in London, almost didn’t come, she said, laughing, because she initially thought the email about her play “White Girls Gang” was a scam.“I need to get back to my actual writing, because while it’s been really exciting to support other people, I am still an artist, you know, so I need to create my art,” said Harris, whose “Slave Play” received multiple Tony nominations.Guido GazzilliThere are no hard and fast rules for the fellows in the program, called Substratum, which was conceived by Harris (“Slave Play,” “Daddy”), a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, who judged the competition. “I just want people to write,” he said in an interview this week. The finalists, who were among those who submitted about 1,700 works, are “writers doing something a little different,” he said. “A little off the beaten path.”The prize went to Jesús Valles for “Bathhouse.pptx,” a play exploring queer history. But because Valles, who is pursuing an M.F.A. in playwriting, was unable to leave their studies at Brown University, the slot went to Raffaella Donatich, Harris’s former assistant and an “exciting emerging writer,” Harris said, adding that she was invited on the strength of her pilot “Sex Act.”The other fellows, all at various stages of their careers, agreed that having the time to write without distractions — and not having to sweat the small stuff — was the real reward.One rule: The fellows are required to eat dinner together to “catch up on your day, see how things have gone,” said Harris, center, sitting with Raffaella Donatich and the other fellows.Guido Gazzilli for The New York Times“There’s something about having everything taken care of,” said Chloë Myerson, a 32-year-old writer from London whose play “Class” was shortlisted. Being outside of her normal life felt almost like a “weird punishment,” she said, “because as a writer, I’m always trying to carve out space” from the demands of work, relationships and life.For Donatich, 26, who lives in New York, having “so much unstructured time” was forcing her “to define the reasons why I like the thing I claim to like to do.”And Asa Haynes, 27, an actor turned playwright from London who was recognized for his work “RACISM: an unfocused theater essay,” said the experience was giving his imagination free rein. “Writing isn’t necessarily sitting down at a table with a glass of water or a cup of tea listening to some music. It’s also taking in the sun, the views, going to the spa and having a very hot sauna,” he said. “Writing is actually a lot more thinking and ruminating.”This sort of pampering is exactly what Harris envisioned for the fellows participating in the residency — the first, he hopes, of many.The residency is sponsored by Gucci, and was conceived when Harris worked with that luxury brand. “I always remind them that the only reason they know who I am is because of the theater, and so it feels disingenuous of me to accept a paycheck without figuring out a way to bring it back to the theater somehow,” he said.Harris, right, with two of the fellows: Asa Haynes, left, and DJ Hills, who is slightly obscured. Harris said he was as eager to learn “from everyone here” as he was to mentor the playwrights.Guido Gazzilli for The New York TimesHaving spent time in Italy during pandemic lockdown, he decided it was the perfect place for writers to immerse themselves in an unfamiliar culture and “get the type of inspiration that can really shift an artist’s brain from the consciousness of society that you’re a part of to some new amalgamation of the expat brain,” he said.He was introduced to Michael L. Cioffi, the owner of Monteverdi Tuscany, the boutique property where fellows are staying. (Monteverdi is underwriting many of the on-property expenses and experiences, like the pasta-making classes.) Cioffi, a Cincinnati-based lawyer, came to Tuscany about two decades ago, and later encountered the decaying hilltop hamlet of Castiglioncello del Trinoro, about halfway between Florence and Rome.An initial purchase became a passion project, and eventually Cioffi bought many of the hamlet’s houses, transforming abandoned stables and dilapidated farmhouses into guest rooms, a restaurant and a wellness center and spa. Only a few original residents remain.From left, Chloë Myerson, Haynes and Rianna Simons on the property, a former medieval village.Guido Gazzilli for The New York TimesFrom the start, Cioffi said in a Zoom interview, he conceived of the Monteverdi as a “place to share with people, but also create a platform where people could really experience the arts in a meaningful way.” He established an artist-in-residence program and a concert series; the property had already attracted the likes of Wes Anderson, who wrote “The Grand Budapest Hotel” there.“I was like, well, it already has been like the muse has already wandered the halls there, and I want to meet her and see what she has to offer us,” Harris said of the space.The group is sharing a six-bedroom house called Muri Antichi (Ancient Walls), with en-suite bathrooms, and spacious common rooms where they’ve been gathering after dinner to watch movies.Days are mostly self-structured for the fellows. Mentoring has been informal as well. Harris said he was as eager to learn “from everyone here” as he was to mentor the playwrights.Hills, right, says the monthlong experience is providing plenty of “because you’re worth it” moments. Hills, Simons, left, and Haynes, center, were among those shortlisted for the annual Yale Drama Series Prize.Guido Gazzilli for The New York TimesFor DJ Hills, 27, whose play “Trunk Brief Jock Thong” was shortlisted, the pampering is giving them a “because you’re worth it” moment. “There is so much flagellation as an artist; I need to be constantly throwing myself onto the ground for my work,” Hills said, adding that time in the spa has been a gift. “I, as an artist, am worth the 30 minutes to be here.”As for Harris, he is keen to work on projects that had been put on the back burner while he basked in the success of his Tony-nominated “Slave Play” and sundry other projects which, besides modeling for Gucci, include releasing a capsule collection, producing plays, writing for television and cinema and performing in the Netflix series “Emily in Paris.”“I need to get back to my actual writing,” he said, “because while it’s been really exciting to support other people, I am still an artist, you know, so I need to create my art.”In the coming weeks, the fellows will encounter a range of artists (and possibly producers), including the filmmakers Pete Ohs (“Jethica”) and Eliza Hittman (“Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “Beach Rats”), the playwrights Jordan Tannahill and Jasmine Lee-Jones and the author Erika J. Simpson.Hilltop hamlet as muse: Monteverdi Tuscany, with views of the postcard perfect Val d’Orcia countryside, is about halfway between Florence and Rome.Guido Gazzilli for The New York TimesHarris’s experience in 2015 at MacDowell, a prestigious artists’ residency program in New Hampshire, also inspired this new program. He called that residency a confidence-boosting experience that “restructured my sense of self,” adding that he hoped the Tuscan experience would do the same for the fellows.MacDowell also showed him the importance of sharing meals. “That’s the only rule,” he added, “dinners where you can catch up on your day, see how things have gone,” and just talk.Two recent meals were an indication of the sort of banter that takes place, with topics ranging from — and this is just a small sampling — playwrights contemporary and not (from Aristotle to David Ireland and plenty in between); Pier Paolo Pasolini (whose film “Theorem” they had watched the night before); K-dramas and their Shakespearean influences; British actors doing American accents (not so great, some said); Fassbinder films; the biblical king David; olive oil; Shonda Rhimes (and how she’s not given enough credit for her innovations); a new stage adaptation of “Brokeback Mountain”; Michelin-starred restaurants; elaborate European film titles; and, because Monday was game night, good games to play (Spades, Exploding Kittens, Salad Bowl).Before dinner, the fellows learned to make ravioli and picci, a local pasta. “Also theater, you know,” said Harris, who had earlier described meals he’d eaten in terms of the pleasure he’d gotten from the chef’s storytelling, even more than the food.The group kneaded and rolled out the dough and joked happily.“Jeremy’s like the most wonderful fairy godmother,” Hills said. “We’re very fortunate to have him.” More

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      Aaron Sorkin Battled a Stroke as He Reimagined ‘Camelot’

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      “Camelot” opened on Broadway 63 years ago, an eagerly anticipated new musical from the makers of “My Fair Lady.” But happily-ever-aftering took a while.Out-of-town, while trying to trim the overlong production, one writer was hospitalized with an ulcer, and the director collapsed of a heart attack. In New York, despite starring Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, “Camelot” took months to find its footing, and only did so following a televised segment on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”Today the musical, written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, is remembered as one of the last of Broadway’s Golden Age shows, but its traditional narrative — Arthurian legend with all of its romance, politics, swordplay and sorcery — has never quite clicked.“Unfortunately, ‘Camelot’ is weighed down by the burden of its book,” the New York Times critic Howard Taubman wrote of the opening. That assessment has persisted. “It has one of the great scores of all time,” said Theodore S. Chapin, the former president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, “but the plot starts to go haywire.”On April 13, a new version of “Camelot” is scheduled to open on Broadway, with its book rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. The Hollywood screenwriter is familiar to many as the creator of the television series “The West Wing,” and he won an Oscar for writing the movie “The Social Network.” He is also an accomplished playwright, whose first Broadway drama, “A Few Good Men,” became a hit film, and whose most recent Broadway outing, an adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was a critical and commercial success.Clockwise from top left: Aaron Sorkin, Phillipa Soo, Jordan Donica and Andrew Burnap.Photographs by Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesBut musicals have not been part of his repertoire, until now. He earned a B.F.A. in musical theater from Syracuse University, but this, in his slightly overstated words, is “the first time I’m putting it to use.” (He tried writing a musical once before, partnering with Stephen Schwartz on a show about Houdini. It didn’t work out.)This rewritten “Camelot,” starring Phillipa Soo of “Hamilton” fame as Guenevere, alongside Andrew Burnap (“The Inheritance”) as Arthur and Jordan Donica (“My Fair Lady”) as Lancelot, is now in previews at Lincoln Center Theater. By contemporary standards, it’s a large production, with a 27-person cast and a 30-piece orchestra.Sorkin is not the first to revise the musical — even Lerner and Loewe reworked it post-opening, and others have tried, too — but his deft hand with witty, fast-paced dialogue and audience nostalgia for “Camelot,” which is adapted from T.H. White’s fantasy novel, “The Once and Future King,” has made the production one of the most anticipated on Broadway this year, with theater mavens eager to see how Sorkin puts his stamp on it.“People think the show is about a love triangle, which of course it is,” said Alan Paul, the artistic director of Barrington Stage Company and director of his own production of “Camelot” a few years back, “but I really think it’s about the birth of democracy, and when you look back at ‘The West Wing,’ which is one of my favorite shows, that is a TV show that believes government can work for the people.”‘You’re supposed to be dead.’Just getting to this point is an unexpected relief for Sorkin.In November, two months before rehearsals were set to begin, he woke in the middle of the night and noticed that, while walking to the kitchen, he was crashing into walls and corners. He thought nothing of it until the next morning, when the orange juice he was carrying to his home office kept spilling.Sorkin called his doctor, who told him to come in immediately; his blood pressure was so high, Sorkin said, “You’re supposed to be dead.” The diagnosis: Sorkin, 61, had had a stroke.For about a month afterward, he was slurring words. He had trouble typing; he was discouraged from flying for a few weeks; and until recently, he couldn’t sign his name (he has just discovered, thanks to “Camelot” autograph seekers, that that’s improving). Those issues are now behind him, and the main lingering effect is that he still can’t really taste food.“Mostly it was a loud wake-up call,” he said during one of several interviews for this article. “I thought I was one of those people who could eat whatever he wanted, smoke as much as he wanted, and it’s not going to affect me. Boy, was I wrong.”Sorkin had been a heavy smoker since high school — two packs a day of Merits — and the habit had long been inextricable from his writing process. “It was just part of it, the way a pen was part of it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it too much, because I’ll start to salivate.”After the stroke, he quit cold turkey, cleaned up his diet and started working out twice a day. And, he said, “I take a lot of medicine. You can hear the pills rattling around in me.”“If you write the book to a musical with a score written by Lerner and Loewe, and they have this cast, and Bart Sher is directing it, and it doesn’t work, it was definitely your fault,” Sorkin said.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesSorkin told me about the stroke almost in passing, when we were having a get-acquainted cup of tea in a hotel lobby (he loves writing in hotels) earlier this year. Trying to understand his creative process, I asked whether he prefers to write longhand or on a device. That’s when he said writing by hand had become difficult.At first he told me about his stroke only off the record; we agreed we’d revisit the subject the next time we met, so he could think through the implications of going public. By then, he had decided he was ready to describe what he had been through, in the hopes that his experience might be a cautionary tale. “If it’ll get one person to stop smoking,” he said, “then it’ll be helpful.”He is aware how lucky he is to have recovered, and to be able to continue to do the work he loves. “There was a minute when I was concerned that I was never going to be able to write again,” he said, “and I was concerned in the short-term that I wasn’t going to be able to continue writing ‘Camelot.’”Now he’s commuting between Los Angeles, where he lives, and New York, where he’s trimming the script, offering pointers to actors, refining word choices that don’t strike him quite right. “Let me make this very, very clear,” he said. “I’m fine. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I can’t work. I’m fine.”‘Now with no magic!’For many people, “Camelot” is more familiar as a metaphor than as a musical — it depicts a noble effort to create a just society, often associated with the Kennedy administration, because Jacqueline Kennedy, in an interview shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, mentioned her husband’s fondness for the show, and quoted a final lyric: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”Four years ago, Lincoln Center Theater, which is a nonprofit, staged a fund-raising concert performance of the show, starring Lin-Manuel Miranda as Arthur. It went so well that the creative team began talking about a full-scale production.“The music is so good, and it’s incredibly fun, and I don’t know of any other pieces set in the Middle Ages with knights,” said Bartlett Sher, a veteran of Golden Age revivals (“South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “My Fair Lady”) who directed the concert and is now directing this revival. “I realized how extraordinary the score was,” he said, “and how complicated the experience of the book was.”Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, center, starred in the 1960 production of “Camelot.”Pictorial Press Ltd./AlamySher was debriefing with Miranda when Sorkin’s name came up. “I knew Sorkin was a fan of ‘Camelot,’ because he quotes it in ‘The West Wing’,” said Miranda, who grew up hearing songs from the musical, a favorite of his mother’s, and memorized them while a passenger in her car.Sher and Sorkin already knew each other because they had collaborated on “Mockingbird,” and they were eager to work together again.“You would think we would have sat and talked for hours about the problems we had with the existing book, or what we were hoping for, but we didn’t,” Sorkin said. “I just got to work.”He made one key early decision that has guided his approach to the show: no supernatural elements. That means Merlyn, who in the original is a magician who can remember the future and can turn Arthur into a hawk, is now a wise tutor; Morgan Le Fey, who in the original can build invisible walls, is now a scientist; and the nymph Nimue is gone. Even Arthur’s sword-in-the-stone origin story is questioned.“It wasn’t that I don’t like magic — I do,” Sorkin said. “Nor were there commercial reasons — no producer wants to put on a marquee, ‘Now With No Magic!’ It was because I feel that this story, in particular, had a chance of landing more powerfully, more emotionally, if people felt real. If a problem can be solved by waving a magic wand, it doesn’t feel like much of a problem.”‘Musicals can get tangled with.’“Camelot,” like many older musicals, has its complications for a modern audience. “From a contemporary perspective, it’s very problematic,” said Stacy Wolf, director of the music theater program at Princeton University. “The musical is about heterosexual adultery ruining a visionary government, and the woman is ultimately blamed for it.”Nonetheless, Wolf is eager to see the revival. “The music that Lerner and Loewe wrote is just incredible,” she said, “and in the same way that Shakespeare gets tangled with, and operas get tangled with, musicals can get tangled with.”Sorkin quickly realized that two songs, in particular, posed problems: the sexist-sounding “How to Handle a Woman” and the classist-sounding “What Do the Simple Folk Do?”“When I first started writing it, I thought, there’s an easy way to solve this: Don’t sing the songs,” Sorkin said.But Sher asked Sorkin to reconsider, given fan fondness for the score. “There’s a reason we see ‘Camelot’,” Sorkin acknowledged, “and the reason isn’t me.”So he came up with an alternative solution: humor. The songs are back, preceded by dialogue in which Guenevere preemptively defuses their sting with Sorkin-esque wit.“When I joined, ‘How to a Handle a Woman’ wasn’t there in the script, but then one day it was,” Soo said. “But there was also a beautifully written scene — and this is another reason why Aaron Sorkin is brilliant at what he does — that explores the song in a new way.”The revival has been extensively nurtured — there were four developmental workshops along the way, and Sorkin estimates that he has written about 10 drafts of the script. Lancelot “went from being a buffoon, like Gaston in ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ to a three-dimensional person.” Arthur struggles to define his feelings for Guenevere, whom he marries as part of a peace treaty. And Guenevere is now a strategic helpmate, periodically outthinking her husband.“The ideas of democracy that are discussed in this show are the ones that are discussed in this country,” said Donica, left foreground, who plays Lancelot.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“There have been rewrites at each stage of workshop, and there are even more rewrites still going on,” said the actor Dakin Matthews, who is playing Merlyn and another character.A case study: Morgan Le Fey, who in the original is a sorceress with a sweet tooth, and a threat to Arthur’s reign. At first, Sorkin simply cut the character — as Lerner had done for some post-Broadway productions — but, Sorkin said, “she found her way in, and she got better.”In an early workshop, the actress Daphne Rubin-Vega (the original Mimi in “Rent”), read the role, when Le Fey was little more than a spurned ex-girlfriend. “She, in a very nice but direct way, said I could do better,” Sorkin said. “She was right.”He made Le Fey a scientist, an unmarried mother, and, for a time, an opium addict. (Sorkin has been clean for 23 years after battling his own addictions.) Now she makes and sells brandy. “People coming in and auditioning — they were just leaning into being high on opium, and it wasn’t working,” Sorkin said.Marilee Talkington, who plays Le Fey, has embraced the character’s evolution.“The old version of ‘Camelot’ felt distant, but also fun and entertaining,” she said. “This version is inviting the audience to ask themselves who they are, what they want, and where there’s hope.”How much “West Wing” is there in “Camelot”? Sorkin said the screenwriting device for which he is most famous — the so-called walk and talk, in which characters converse while in motion, is a.) “probably exaggerated” and b.) a screen technique that “has no implications for the stage.” Having said that: Arthur has his best ideas while pacing.One trick Sorkin did transfer from filmdom: He intercut three scenes together, as in a movie, held together with scoring, and challenged Sher to figure out the staging. “Give Bart something like that,” Sorkin said, “and he’s a happy guy.”And there are lines that can clearly be heard as allusions to our contemporary challenges.“All of his films are about game-changers, and ‘Camelot’ is no different, because Arthur is a game-changer,” said Donica, the actor playing Lancelot. “And the ideas of democracy that are discussed in this show are the ones that are discussed in this country.”‘I worry that if I stop worrying then I won’t do it.’I sat down with Sorkin the morning after the first preview performance, and he was obviously pleased. It struck me that this was the first time he had seemed happy with his work. “That’s not an illusion,” he said. “It’s the most positive I’ve been during the process. I feel ashamed I didn’t have more confidence in everybody.”There was still work to be done over the five-week preview period — the show was running too long (“I’m sure I’ll be called upon to make some cuts, and I’m not looking forward to that”), and Sorkin was still wrestling with various bits of language (Would it be exciting or distracting if he changed an “or” to a “like,” with the effect of implying that Guenevere might be agnostic?).But until that first performance before an audience, Sorkin had repeatedly fretted about what might go wrong, remembering that at one point he told a group of young librettists, “If you write the book to a musical with a score written by Lerner and Loewe, and they have this cast, and Bart Sher is directing it, and it doesn’t work, it was definitely your fault.”I found it hard to understand how someone as successful as Aaron Sorkin could be so worried, so I asked him about it.“I have had some success, and I’ve also had plenty of experience feeling anxiety about what I’m doing,” he said. “Am I going to have an idea? Am I going to be able to write this?”One startling example: “I wrote 86 episodes of ‘The West Wing,’ and every single time I finished one, I’d be happy for five minutes before it just meant that I haven’t started the next one yet, and I never thought I would be able to write the next one. Ever.”Is that kind of worrying a liability, or a strength, for an artist like Sorkin? “I hope it wasn’t a waste,” he said. “And I do think to myself, as I try to relax myself a little bit, I worry that if I stop worrying then I won’t do it. That it’s the worrying that’s driving me to do it.”Sorkin, who has already begun having meetings about possible next musicals, even while dreaming up a Jan. 6 movie he is contemplating writing and directing, said he has come to see “Camelot” as a narrative about narrative.“Ultimately, the show is a valentine to storytelling,” he said.“I like that Arthur thinks if we can just keep telling these stories, then people will be inspired and they’ll believe that we do have greatness in our grasp, and that you have to keep trying,” he added. “The greatest delivery system for an idea ever invented is a story.” More