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      in Theater

      Review: This ‘Importance of Being Earnest’ Is a Fabulous Romp

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      A new production in London, starring Ncuti Gatwa, releases Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy from period convention and brings it stunningly into the 21st century.Purists may reach for their smelling salts at the National Theater’s wild revival of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” the Oscar Wilde comedy concerned with self-identity, veiled sexuality and forming “an alliance,” as one character drolly puts it, “with a parcel.”More adventuresome audience members, however, are likely to have a blast with this (often literally) unbuttoned take on a familiar text from the director Max Webster, who was a 2023 Tony nominee for “Life of Pi.”Keeping one foot in the here and now, this “Earnest” — which runs through Jan. 25 and will be in movie theaters worldwide via National Theater Live from Feb. 20 — lands the verbal invention and wit of Wilde’s 1895 classic while incorporating contemporary music, the occasional swear word and a decidedly queer sensibility. At times, it may indulge in one wink at the audience too many — but even then, Webster’s intention is clearly to release a time-honored comedy from the confines of period convention.Does this sound too much? I doubt Wilde would have thought so. The Irish writer’s renegade spirit is felt here from the outset, with the introduction of a high-camp prologue that finds a gown-wearing, pink-gloved Algernon Moncrieff (Ncuti Gatwa, TV’s latest Doctor Who,) tearing into Grieg’s Piano Concerto as if he were the star attraction at Dalston Superstore, a queer East London nightlife venue that gets a passing mention.Minutes later, the play proper begins, and Algernon reappears in an extravagantly patterned suit worthy of the Met Gala.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      In Marlon James’s ‘Get Millie Black,’ Colonial Rule Haunts Jamaica

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      Marlon James’s new HBO detective series, “Get Millie Black,” draws on Jamaica’s colonial history as well as his family’s experiences.In 2015, the author Marlon James was in London, where he had just won the Booker Prize for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings.” Holed away in a hotel room after the ceremony before he flew home to Minneapolis, the characters for a TV show began to take shape.“I’ve always looked at novel writing and storytelling as a kind of detective work,” he said in a recent video interview. “Characters show up in my head and I wonder why. They’re a mystery to be solved.”In the resulting HBO limited series, “Get Millie Black,” there are several other mysteries to be solved. The five episodes, from the showrunner Jami O’Brien, tell the story of an obsessive detective, Millie (Tamara Lawrance), who returns to Jamaica from London to reconnect with her sister and join the local police force. While investigating the case of a missing teenage girl, she comes close to breaking point.With all the requisite twists and turns of the detective genre, “Get Millie Black” — which premieres Monday — is a confronting look at Jamaica’s criminal underworld, set against the misty backdrop of a colonial past that is never far away. “In this country, nothing haunts like history,” Millie says in Episode 1: “Pick something ugly, bigoted hateful, shameful, violent and you see a shadow reaching back 400 years.”James’s mother became a police detective in Jamaica in the 1950s, when it was rare to see women in the role, and even rarer to see them succeed.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThis long shadow has fallen across much of James’s writing, stalking him since he was growing up in Portmore, a town just outside Jamaica’s capital, Kingston.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Morgan Jenness, Whose Artistic Vision Influenced American Theater, Dies at 72

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      A beloved figure in the theatrical community, she redefined the role of dramaturg, influencing playwrights like David Adjmi and David Henry Hwang.Morgan Jenness, a dramaturg, teacher and theatrical agent who nurtured the work of countless playwrights — including Taylor Mac, David Adjmi, David Henry Hwang, Larry Kramer and Maria Irene Fornés — died on Nov. 12. Ms. Jenness, who in recent years began using the pronouns they/them and she interchangeably, was 72.Mx. Mac confirmed the death. “In Act 3 of her life, she was exploring her gender identity,” said Mx. Mac, who went to Ms. Jenness’s apartment in the East Village of Manhattan with two friends after she failed to show up for a class she taught at Columbia University and discovered her body. The cause of death had not yet been determined.Ms. Jenness was a revered and beloved figure in the theater community — particularly the downtown theater community. (In many ways, she was its embodiment.) She had a deep moral seriousness, colleagues said, as well as a fierce artistic integrity and a passion for subversive work that had depth charges in all the right places. She also had “a complete indifference to material success,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, where Ms. Jenness began her career. “She was frankly repelled by it.”The play was the thing.“She would ask writers, ‘What do you want to inject into the bloodstream of the American theater?’” recalled Beth Blickers, a theatrical agent.“If you said, ‘I just want to tell good stories,’ she would turn to me and say, ‘That was a terrible answer,’” Ms. Blickers continued. “She wanted someone to say, ‘I have a passion for this community or this idea.’ To tell good stories wasn’t enough.”A dramaturg has been defined as a sort of literary and theatrical adviser who helps the actors and director understand the play they’re presenting. “But that was the European model, focused primarily on the classics,” Mr. Eustis said. “Morgan was one of the first generation of people who were defining what a new play dramaturg was: the midwife and support system of a playwright.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Overlooked No More: Go-won-go Mohawk, Trailblazing Indigenous Actress

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      In the 1880s, the only roles for Indigenous performers were laden with negative stereotypes. So Mohawk decided to write her own narratives.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.For a long time, theatrical roles for Indigenous characters were laden with stereotypes: the savage, the tragic martyr, the helpless drunk. And it was rare in stories of any kind, on the page or on the stage, for an Indigenous character to have a starring role.By the late 1880s, the actress Go-won-go Mohawk had had enough. “I grew tired of being cast in uncongenial roles,” like meek princesses or submissive women who were restrained in corsets, she told The Des Moines Register and Leader in 1910. So she decided to write her own roles, ultimately carving out a groundbreaking career in which she told stories onstage about Indigenous people as the heroes of their own lives. She also did it while performing as a man.Mohawk’s primary work was “Wep-ton-no-mah, the Indian Mail Carrier” (1892), which follows the title character, a young Indigenous man, as he saves a young white woman from a stampede, winning her heart and earning the respect of her family.The woman’s father, a colonel, offers Wep-ton-no-mah a position as a mail carrier, which he initially turns down. “I could not start being under the control of anyone but the great Manitou,” Wep-ton-no-mah says, referring to the spiritual power of the Algonquians. “I want to be free–free–free like the birds, the eagles and deers — owning no master but one.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 200 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Book Review: ‘Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,’ by Rob Sheffield

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      HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, by Rob SheffieldIt’s possible that I know too much about Taylor Swift. I know the words to all her singles and every name on her long list of ex-lovers. Thanks to her current relationship with Travis Kelce, I know details about the various social entanglements of his Kansas City Chiefs teammates that I would prefer not to. I listen to her music about as much as the median American, which is to say: all of the time. Swift has become America’s Muzak, her songs the soundtrack to our Starbucks lines and her life the fodder for our tabloid stories.In “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,” Rob Sheffield charts how Swift, who rose to fame writing songs for teenage girls (when she was still one herself), became ubiquitous — and he makes the case that even as her cultural dominance can work to obscure her skill, everything always leads back to her virtuosic writing.Sheffield is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he publishes consistently glowing reviews of Swift’s seemingly limitless offerings. Here he steps back to consider the roots of her appeal. Swift has “always had a unique flair for writing songs in which people hear themselves — her music keeps crossing generational and cultural boundaries, in ways that are often mystifying,” he writes. She makes her “experiences public property, to the point where she makes the world think of her as a character.”Swift’s self-mythologizing stretches beyond her music to become a collaborative storytelling prompt, one that manages to absorb even her critics. As her superfans brand themselves as “Swifties” and build an extended Taylorverse of analysis and intrigue on social media, they recruit her haters into their project, using them to cast their billionaire idol as a complex and scrappy protagonist.A character becomes more interesting when she has challengers and flaws. “Taylor’s hubris, her way-too-muchness, her narcissism disguised as even more narcissism, her inability to Not Be Taylor for a microsecond — it’s a lot,” Sheffield writes. “You can’t fully appreciate her without appreciating the wide range of visceral reactions she brings out in people.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      A Hollywood Drought and a Game Show Dream

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      It’s tough to get work in film and television these days. So one unemployed writer decided to study up on “The Price Is Right.”There is very little work to go around in Hollywood these days. So to stay inspired over the past several months, Emily Winter has met with a writing group on Zoom each weekday morning at 10 a.m.Celeste, do you have a meeting? You look fancy.Do you play softball? I can put you on the sub list!What’s everyone working on today?During one such meeting last spring, Winter remembered that she had tickets to an upcoming taping of “The Price Is Right,” where every audience member is eligible to win prizes like a billiards table or a car. “My hottest iron in the fire,” she explained to her writing group.Then she took a beat to think.She had used up all of her unemployment. She was starting to panic about her dwindling savings account. And she did not have anything better to do. Why not figure out how to increase her chances of being selected to compete on the game show?“Let’s win some $$$,” she wrote in an email to two friends when she invited them to attend the taping in May, “or a weird boat!!!!!”Building a CareerTo keep her sanity and make some money while between writing gigs, Winter has turned to standup comedy.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Charles Brandt, Whose Book Inspired ‘The Irishman,’ Dies at 82

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      “I Heard You Paint Houses,” his true-crime best seller about the death of Jimmy Hoffa, was brought to the screen by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.Charles Brandt, a former homicide prosecutor whose 2004 true-crime best seller, “I Heard You Paint Houses,” was adapted by Martin Scorsese into “The Irishman,” starring Robert De Niro as the Mafia hit man who killed the ex-Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, died on Oct. 22 in Wilmington, Del. He was 82.The death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by his brother-in-law, Gary Goldsmith, who did not specify a cause.Mr. Brandt’s book purported to solve the mystery of Mr. Hoffa’s disappearance and presumed death in 1975. He identified Hoffa’s killer as Frank Sheeran, a World War II veteran and truck driver who had been recruited into the underworld by the Mafia boss Russell Bufalino.Mr. Sheeran did some enforcement work for Mr. Bufalino, who introduced him to Mr. Hoffa, who said to Mr. Sheeran, “I heard you paint houses.” That was apparently mob slang for killing people — with the word “paint” meaning blood.In a series of interviews over five years, Mr. Sheeran told Mr. Brandt that he had been ordered to kill Mr. Hoffa, who had just been released from prison and was trying to regain power in the underworld.Mr. Sheeran recalled luring him to a house in Detroit for a supposed meeting with organized crime figures.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Three New Books Make the Case for Music as Medicine

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      Three new books make the case for music as medicine. In “The Schubert Treatment,” the most lyrical of the trio, a cellist takes us bedside with the sick and the dying.My colleague Dwight Garner is a great connoisseur of the quotation. I find myself stumbling around this week in the dark corners of the misquotation. Music may indeed have charms to “soothe the savage beast,” as is oft-declared, but the line actually ends “a savage breast,” and is attributable not to William Shakespeare, but to William Congreve, from his 1697 play “The Mourning Bride.”Now you know.Music’s soothing and stimulating effect — its use as a kind of medicine — is the subject of at least three books published this year. This is not a new therapy, but a blooming hot spot of research.I’ve been poking around there for a while, curious to figure out why my mother, a retired professional violist and pianist with advancing dementia, retains so much of her memory (including the ability to sight-read) in this particular realm. She still plays weekly string quartets and piano duos and sings in perfect harmony with Alexa’s somewhat middlebrow choices, though an old game of name-the-composer has faded.THE SCHUBERT TREATMENT: A Story of Music and Healing (Greystone, $24.95), by the cellist and art therapist Claire Oppert, is a slim but shimmery account of performing on her “forever instrument” for a series of patients with varied afflictions, including the inevitable final one.Oppert’s father was a beloved company doctor for several theaters in Paris, who himself played the piano, and she has worked with Howard Buten, a professional clown, novelist and psychologist specializing in autism. (This field teems with polymaths.) Though she tangles dutifully with charts, data and analytics, her philosophy is holistic: “trust and gratitude before the splendor of all things: This is life’s foundation, its bedrock.”Or, more bluntly: “Ten minutes of Schubert is the equivalent of five milligrams of oxy,” the chief of the palliative care unit at a Paris hospital tells her. (Maybe this is why Donald J. Trump played “Ave Maria” at that recent rally-turned-swayfest.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More