Anthony Rapp’s one-man show details the development of Rent (photo by Russ Rowland)
ANTHONY RAPP’S WITHOUT YOU
New World Stages
340 West Fiftieth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through June 11, $110-$399 withoutyoumusical.com newworldstages.com
Anthony Rapp’s Without You is a sweet-natured, heartfelt true story about life’s ups and downs, about love, exhilaration, and loss, told by an engaging entertainer, even if it doesn’t go quite as deep as we might want it to.
Actor and singer Rapp was born in October 1971 in Chicago and raised with his older brother and sister in Joliet, Illinois, by their mother; his parents divorced when he was two. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be a performer; his big break came when, in September 1994, he got an audition for a show described as “a new rock opera based on La Bohème about a group of friends in the East Village,” to be workshopped for four weeks at New York Theatre Workshop. The semiautobiographical musical was called Rent, by little-known composer and lyricist Jonathan Larson (Superbia,Tick, Tick . . . Boom!). Adapted from Rapp’s 2006 memoir, Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical “Rent,” and first presented in 2012, the ninety-minute Without You follows the development of Rent — which turned out to be one of the most popular musicals of all time — alongside the concurrent illness of Rapp’s beloved mother.
In 1994, Rapp was working at Starbucks and sharing an apartment in the East Village with his brother, Adam, who would go on to become a successful playwright, director, screenwriter, and novelist (The Sound Inside,Blackbird). Anthony checked in regularly with his mother, who had always been supportive of “Tonio” and his career. In Without You, Rapp discusses meeting Larson, “a young curly-haired guy, with ears that stuck out a bit” who believed he was “the future of musical theater.” He talks about hanging out and working with his Rent colleagues, which included actors Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega and director Michael Grief, and sings tunes from the show in addition to his audition song and several originals he wrote with David Matos and Joe Pisapia.
As the buzz around Rent and Larson’s tragic fate grows to deafening heights, Rapp, who plays Mark Cohen in the show, has to balance the success with his mother’s failing health. “I’ve known / All of my life / If I ever lost my way / She’d carry me home / She loved to / Carry me home,” he sings wistfully.
Anthony Rapp sings and shares personal stories in Without You at New World Stages (photo by Russ Rowland)
Set and lighting designer Eric Southern has transformed the stage into a cramped downtown New York apartment, complete with exposed brick walls and a fire escape. The five-piece band — cellist Clérida Eltime, bassist Paul Gil, drummer Jerry Marotta, guitarist Lee Moretti, and music director, orchestrator, and keyboardist Daniel A. Weiss — are situated in three separate places, including a few that seem to be under ever-present New York City scaffolding. David Bengali’s projections include photographs Rapp took during the Rent rehearsal process. The costumes are by Angela Vesco, with sound by Brian Ronan and additional arrangements by Tom Kitt.
Director Steven Maler (Suburbia,Starfuckers!) doesn’t add too much razzle-dazzle as Rapp walks across the stage sharing his story; he jumps on a table belting out one song and often talks to empty chairs that represent those people he has lost. He affects different accents for the various people in his life, from his mother to Jonathan to Jonathan’s parents. Understandably, he makes no mention of his sexual abuse allegations against Kevin Spacey, nor does he delve into other parts of his life (he is now engaged and has a child) and career, which comprises more than seventy-five appearances on film, television, and stage; most notably, he has been on Broadway in If/Then and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and, since 2017, has portrayed Lt. Paul Stamets on Star Trek: Discovery.
As likable and kindhearted as Rapp is, Without You lacks the necessary dramatic tension to lift it to the next level. While some of the tidbits he offers about Larson are appealing, most of them are not new, regardless of whether you’ve read Rapp’s book. The majority of the songs are well executed, but Rapp’s own “Wild Bill,” in which he dons a cowboy hat and stands in front of projections of the West, is too silly. And as touching as his relationship with his mother is, it’s not heavy enough to carry half the show.
As he sings in the title song from Rent, “How can you generate heat / When you can’t feel your feet? . . . / How do you leave the past behind / When it keep finding ways to get to your heart / It reaches way down deep and tears you inside out / ’Til you’re torn apart.” Without You is plenty heartfelt, but it won’t tear your insides out or generate heat the way Rent itself did.
Anybody who’s listened to British rock in the past six decades has heard Denny Laine’s songs and his guitar playing, but they may not recognize his name. That’s about to change as he begins a solo tour of City Wineries across the USA this month, including a stop February 7 at the City Winery next to Little Island. (He’ll also be at the Hudson Valley City Winery on February 8 and My Father’s Place at the Metropolitan in Glen Cove on February 23.)
Born Brian Frederick Hines in Birmingham, England, Laine is an acclaimed musician and songwriter who has been performing solo and in bands since the late 1950s. He is a founding member of the Moody Blues (1964–66), singing lead vocals on their number one hit “Go Now,” and Wings (1971–81), which he formed with Paul and Linda McCartney. Among the other groups he played in and/or started were Balls, the Electric String Band, and Ginger Baker’s Air Force, and he’s released a dozen solo records.
Prior to the pandemic, he began putting together “Acoustic Songs & Stories,” an evening of music and anecdotes from throughout his life and career, during which he has played and toured with an inordinate amount of remarkable colleagues. He recently spoke with me over the phone from his home in Florida, where he was preparing to hit the road.
Laine, who is seventy-eight, has an easygoing, casual way about him, sharing jaw-dropping tales that he recounts as if it were just another day, which for him it was. He talks about being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and hanging out with the Beatles, the Moodies, Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, and Jimi Hendrix like it’s no big deal. He’s a musician’s musician, quintessentially British, equally comfortable in the background or center stage. What follows is a kind of prelude to Laine’s upcoming one-man concerts as he discusses getting his first guitar, playing football in the hallway with Jeff and Rod before a gig, writing with Paul McCartney, the unusual genesis of a Beatles classic, and his philosophy of life.
Denny Laine cofounded Wings with good friends Paul and Linda McCartney (photo courtesy Denny Laine)
twi-ny: My very first concert was Wings at Madison Square Garden in 1976.
denny laine: That sounds good.
twi-ny: My father took me for my thirteenth birthday. I’d never seen anything like it.
dl: Well, that was a good day, man, I’ll tell you.
twi-ny: I read that your first concert was Ella Fitzgerald and the Oscar Peterson Trio. That’s not a bad beginning either.
dl: That’s absolutely true. First time I went to see anybody in a theater. It was at Birmingham Hippodrome, I believe.
twi-ny: You must have been a kid, right?
dl: Well, I was working as a trainee buyer for musical instruments, can you believe? That was the only job I ever had, a real job where you had to get up in the morning. So a friend of mine who worked in the record department was a big fan of Ella Fitzgerald, and I was sort of a Django Reinhardt fan at the time.
twi-ny: And Stéphane Grappelli, I understand.
dl: Right. All of that gypsy jazz stuff. He got some tickets, and I went with him. I loved that music. That trio was unbelievable. And Ella was just great. That’s where I started really listening to music, because I’ve now been to see it, you know, it’s like, you listen to bits here and bits there, but it was the first time I ever got to see it and appreciate the professionalism and the talent. So that was it, really.
twi-ny: When did you get your first guitar?
dl: Around that time, I would think. No, probably a year before that or so, when I was in school. And skiffle was around. Actually, when I was twelve, I played my first live show. It was a cheap old guitar, really a cheap guitar. And I played at the Birmingham Institute. I don’t know how I got on it, but I did. I did some Lonnie Donegan song and really didn’t get it properly until later on. But I started being in bands at school and stuff like that. So, I’d say I got the guitar when I was twelve, but I didn’t take it seriously. I went in for competitions; once I got to the finals and then chickened out. But I was starting to plonk around on it. I didn’t know how to tune it in those days. And then a friend at school — his brother was a jazz guitarist — taught me to tune it. It was just a four-dollar job, a cheap old job. But it worked.
twi-ny: So I remember very well at the Garden that night that it was a big deal because McCartney hadn’t played a lot of his Beatles songs since they had broken up. But one of the songs that stood out for me was “Time to Hide.” It was a thrill for me to see that, because here’s this superstar — I knew who the band was because I was listening to all the records and studying the covers. But here’s the sideman jumping to the front of the stage.
dl: [laughs] Well, I was encouraged to do that by Paul all the time. He was trying to drag that out of me, to get me to write more. He didn’t want the full profile all the time. Of course, it was impossible for him because of how famous he was. I know that he got me into that band because I had already been in the Moody Blues, and I’d got to know him years before, in the Birmingham days. I got to know the Beatles a little bit. So then when we moved to London, we really got friendly with him. So I think he got me into that band because he wanted me to be more of a band member, because he used to be in a band, like me. So he didn’t want to be the front man all the time. But of course, he couldn’t help it, you know? But anyway, I started with that song, it was one I wrote, and he dragged it out of me. He wanted me to play “Go Now” onstage as well.
twi-ny: I remember that from the live album and the concert film.
dl: Yes. Because the idea was that we weren’t gonna go on there and have him do Beatles songs and me do Moody Blue songs. We didn’t put Wings together for that reason. We wanted to do something new.
twi-ny: You also were cowriting a lot of songs with Paul. You wrote about half of London Town, and cowrote “Mull of Kintyre.” I still have the 45 for that. Obviously, Paul was famous for collaborating with John. What were your collaborations with Paul like?
dl: Well, again, I knew him and we all grew up on the same music, in a sense, American music. But before that it was all British folk. And skiffle; skiffle was a sort of a mixture of American stuff and English folk. That’s really what it was.
twi-ny: Did you write both the lyrics and the music together?
dl: In the case of “Mull of Kintyre,” he had the chorus. So I went over to his house up in Scotland. I was living over the hill on the same land. I went over for breakfast one morning. He had the chorus, and that to me was the song. So I encouraged him to go and finish it off. He wasn’t too sure about it because he thought, well, you know, I might be assassinated doing a Scottish song; it might not go down too well.
twi-ny: They might call that cultural appropriation today.
dl: [laughs] I ended up doing quite a lot of the lyrics on that song. We recorded it up there and it was a huge hit. It was easy. I never had a hard time writing with him at all. We had the same ideas. We were trying to do something new and it was all something current, based on what we were going through or who, where we were, and who we were hanging out with and whatever. So we all did everything together a lot. We even lived together on the same farm. We would go up there every year to rehearse and get away from everything. For the privacy and stuff. Sometimes we’d go to another country just to take a week to go and write, get influenced by wherever we were.
twi-ny: You mentioned “Go Now” before. People forget that you were a founding member of the Moody Blues, and you are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a Moody Blues founder.
dl: That’s because of “Go Now.” The thing is that Paul used to stand at the side of the stage and watch me do that every night because we toured with the Beatles, the second British tour. So he encouraged me and wanted me to do that live again because, again, he’s trying to tell the public who I was. And even to this day, believe it or not, [Moody Blues cofounder] Ray Thomas’s wife, who we are still in touch with, she was trying to convince all the Moody Blues fans who didn’t even know I was in the band. But there was another Moody Blues before them. And some of them don’t even accept it. A lot of people didn’t know Paul was in the Beatles, how ’bout that?
twi-ny: Right! When Paul plays at awards shows, the Twitterites don’t know who he is or say, Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings? If they even know who Wings are.
dl: You gotta laugh.
twi-ny: It’s very funny.
dl: That’s the way it goes; young people coming along, what’re you gonna do.
twi-ny: Another early group of yours was the Electric String Band, which opened for Procol Harum and Jimi Hendrix in ’67. I believe that there was a show in ’67 where Jimi played a Beatles song from Sgt. Pepper and Paul was in the audience, not expecting it because the record had only just been released. Was that the show?
dl: Yeah. He used to always do that. Anytime there was a Beatle in the audience, he’d play, “It was twenty years ago today.” Jimi was just as excited about the Beatles and that era as anybody else. And the fact that he got to come to England, and as Eric Burdon puts it, he became one of us. A lot of the American bands used to come over to London, and me and Paul would go and see them all, me and George [Harrison] or all of us would go and see some of the bands that came over. The Byrds. Talk about David Crosby and all. I met all these people in those days through the Beatles, going out with the Beatles, and the Moodies had parties and all stuff like that.
Denny Laine (2nd from l.) cofounded the Moody Blues with Mike Pinder, Ray Thomas, Graeme Edge, and Clint Warwick in 1964
twi-ny: I mean, that’s quite a historic night. Procol Harum, your band, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, and McCartney in the house, Jimi Hendrix playing a Beatles song. Was that just another night for you guys?
dl: Well, no, it was pretty big for me. It was big for me for two reasons. The first reason being is I was supposed to do it two weekends. And the first one I was supposed to be on, my bass player got sick and there’s no way I was gonna go up there. I practiced with the drummer from the Pretty Things, and he got the bass player from that band to come down and rehearse and he couldn’t cut it. So I canceled that particular night. And I heard later on that John [Lennon] had said, “Where’s Denny? We only came to see him.”
Anyway, the next weekend I did it, and it went down really well. And Jimi even paid me a compliment that night at the club. He said, “Oh, I liked your guitar player, man.” I said, “The guitar player, that was me.” He went, “Oh yeah. Sorry, man.” But that was a nice little backhanded compliment. I knew Jimi through Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell; I knew them from way before. So I was part of that crowd, and especially with the String Band being a folk rock type of thing. That was obviously influenced by the Beatles and George Martin.
But having said that, I always loved classical music too. I was brought up on classical music through my parents and sisters. I was into amalgamating music and joining different styles. The drummer in my first band started ELO with Jeff Lynne, Bev Bevan. So the connection was always there. And so this folk thing was my thing. I ended up hanging around with all the folkies and in fact, on my solo record Say You Don’t Mind, I had a couple of folk players on that. I had Danny Thompson from Pentangle, and I had a couple of other people; we were folk people. Donovan was a big friend of ours as well.
So anyway, getting back to the Jimi Hendrix thing, it went down really well. It was the first time, I think, anybody used pickups on the violins and cellos. We’d already done about a year in Europe, so we were pretty good by then. Peter Asher was in the audience, who is still a friend of mine to this day. So it came back that everybody was really pleased with it. In fact, we got a standing ovation, so it was really cool.
twi-ny: You mentioned Ray Thomas, who passed away a few years ago, and then more recently some other people who you played with or opened for have left us. You brought up David Crosby, and now Jeff Beck, whose death I think was even more surprising because he was just playing on tour with Johnny Depp.
dl: I knew David in the very early days, from the Byrds days, and then I met him a couple of times in America; he was always hanging around doing different things in the same crowd, Laurel Canyon and all that crap. Jeff Beck, when he was in the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart, we used to do doubles with them. I remember doing a double with them where we all got into a fight because the guy wouldn’t let us play football in the hall before the gig started. So we were all part of that London scene. And we had the same agency, Marquee Artists, who brought all the blues players over from America and Europe. And so again, we would play a lot of the same venues, and that’s how I knew them.
twi-ny: You also played in Ginger Baker’s Air Force, so your connections are extraordinary.
dl: Same thing. Ginger and Jack [Bruce] I met in the early days because we were doing the very first Moodies theater tour, it was the Chuck Berry tour. Ginger and Jack were in the opening band, actually, the Graham Bond Organisation. So that’s how I met them. It’s a long story, but it was Steve Winwood’s birthday, and I was down there with Trevor [Burton] from the Move, and Ginger and Eric were down there that same day. We all sat around and had a little bit of a jam. And next party I went to, Ginger was there, and he asked me if I wanted to join a band. So I did that with him. That’s the way it goes, you know?
twi-ny: It’s fascinating. I can listen to these stories all day.
dl: Well, that’s what I’m doing. Telling stories.
twi-ny: Oh, yes, exactly. We’re gonna get to that in just a minute. I want to first ask you about something that is going to lead into that. So you’ve got all these other bands, you’ve got Balls, the Diplomats, and the Moodies, and you’ve put out some solo records, like Japanese Tears Reborn and The Blue Musician. So all those years ago, Paul McCartney is telling you, I’m putting you front and center. You’re gonna sing a couple songs a night. Is it easy to go back and forth between leader and sideman?
dl: Well, I was used to that in the Moody Blues, don’t forget.
twi-ny: Oh, that’s true. Right.
dl: I was the front man in the Moody Blues, so I’d already had that experience. In fact, Wings was like a day off for me because I didn’t have to do it all. But no, I’d already done that. One of the reasons that I walked away from — well, not walked away from — the Wings thing . . . I mean, I was still in touch with everyone, but I just wanted to do my own thing again. That’s all. I’d already put out an album, which was called Ahh . . . Laine, and that came out during the early Wings phase. But it was actually recorded before I joined Wings. It just hadn’t come out. So I’d already done that. It was partly to do with the fact that Paul had that thing with Japan, so we couldn’t really tour for a while after that. Eventually I just said, well, I want to go out and I want to start doing some live work. And so that was it. I started making albums then in the early eighties and played a lot of the instruments myself actually. But I had friends, Rick Wakeman, Chris Slade from AC/DC, on those albums. I basically just did my own thing, thanks to Paul for encouraging me to be more of a songwriter.
Denny Laine will perform songs and tell stories from throughout his career on City Winery tour (photo courtesy Denny Laine)
twi-ny: And so now you’re coming to City Winery with “Acoustic Songs & Stories.” You’ll be playing songs from throughout your career, along with some choice cover material. How did this come about?
dl: Well, it was inevitable because of the pandemic in a way. We all went off the road, but prior to the pandemic, I had been doing some of these things. Because although I’d done the band thing, I was going out and doing a set; the first half was just a selection of songs, and then the second half was the Band on the Run album. I had my band doing all the vocals on all of that. So I changed myself with that for a while, and then I did a couple of solo things I was invited to do and it just kind of caught on. I thought, well, this is easy. This goes down. I have a lot more freedom. I was getting to play songs that I felt like playing off the top of my head or if somebody shouted out something, whatever.
So it was just a more free thing and I enjoyed it so much. And then the pandemic hit, so that’s the way it goes. And I thought, well, I’ve gotta get back out there and do it again. I hadn’t had any injections at that time; it was Paul who talked me into getting them. And so it just was that easy to decide, I’m gonna go out and do the solo thing again. Why not, you know? And that’s what I did. So we booked this especially for that. But I’m doing mainly my own stuff, I’m doing obviously my career.
twi-ny: The songs you wrote and were involved in.
dl: I actually did it not too long ago, where I got to play a lot of songs of my own. It’s sort of a rehearsal. If I do a lot of these things, I can move it around a little bit, add a few extra songs here and there that I didn’t do on the show before.
twi-ny: I noticed that one night you played “Nights in White Satin.”
dl: That was just for a laugh. I don’t know how that came about, but I think we were talking about it and I just threw in a verse of it. I didn’t even know the words.
twi-ny: During the pandemic, I followed numerous British musicians, guitarists and songwriters, who played solo concerts online from home. I’m thinking specifically of Robyn Hitchcock, Richard Thompson, and they play whatever comes to mind. Is that a thing with you guys, with you?
dl: Well, I don’t know, maybe I started it.
twi-ny: Maybe you started it.
dl: I don’t think I’m famous enough to start a trend. But yeah, I was doing it way before a lot of people were, and now everybody’s doing it. We used to do that, don’t forget, in the Wings [acoustic] set, in the middle of the show. So I suppose in some ways we did influence a lot of people in that way. It was a way that Paul could do a couple of Beatles songs without it trying to sound like the Beatles. This is the way the songs were written. You hear them just with a guitar and the voice. And that’s really what I mean. I’m not taking a piano out with me. I’ve got piano songs I could do, but I’m not going to, and it’s just gonna be me and the way the songs originated. The audience likes that kind of thing.
twi-ny: It gets to the essence of the song. You had Springsteen on Broadway. You have Bono doing a tour right now where he’s doing solo songs and talking about his life.
dl: Really? I didn’t know that.
twi-ny: He’s got a book out. He’s doing it at the Beacon Theatre here in New York.
dl: Oh, cool. I think it’s great that people are doing that. You’ve got stories to tell, and you’ve got that connection with the audience more. You can’t have that in a big stadium. It’s like the old days when we used to do all the clubs and all the pubs, you were much more close up to the audience. Going back to roots is always good. That’s how we all started.
twi-ny: City Winery is a really good venue for this. I’ve seen Richard Thompson, Graham Parker, Ian Hunter, Eric Burdon, a lot of your contemporaries there.
dl: Oh, yeah. I’m doing all of them.
twi-ny: Right. You’re playing Nashville, Boston, Hudson Valley, Chicago, Philly.
dl: Yeah, I’m doing all of them. And that’s the point. I’d already booked to do them before the pandemic and couldn’t do them, so that’s why I’m doing them now. It’s a mixed audience, all out for a good time and something to eat, and they appreciate the music. They’re there to listen, they’re there to enjoy that instead of sitting in a crowd of thousands of people.
twi-ny: During the pandemic, I imagine you had a lot of time to think about the songs you would play and the stories you would tell.
dl: The stories, sometimes they come off the top of your head, sometimes you keep repeating yourself.
twi-ny: Are there any stories that you might have wanted to tell but might be a little naughty?
dl: Ah, that’s a bit of a leading question.
twi-ny: Yes it is.
dl: I don’t think anybody wants to hang all the dirty washing out in public. I mean, come on. But no, not really, because Wings and the Moodies, we were having fun. Nothing I’m ashamed of, you know what I mean?
twi-ny: But the Moodies were well known for their parties.
dl: They bloody were, because everybody used to come to our house out in Row Hampton and drink and chat and play music and just hang out. All the music business used to be there. If a bomb went off, there wouldn’t be any music business. I’m telling you. That’s what those parties were like. John Lennon used to be on the door.
twi-ny: Checking IDs?
dl: You know what’s a good story? He said to [Moodies founding member] Mike Pinder, we’re all standing in the doorway there. We had one of those little things you open up through the door to see, you know . . .
twi-ny: A peephole?
dl: Yeah. And John’s standing there, and he says, “Who’s this?” There’s a woman there he hadn’t let in. And Mike Pinder said, “Oh, she came in through the bathroom window.” No kidding. So that’s where that title came from. Even though Paul, I think, wrote that, but somebody climbed up the drainpipe into the bathroom window to get into the party.
twi-ny: That’s hysterical.
dl: I’m not kidding.
twi-ny: On New Year’s Day, you posted on social media the following quote: “The past is what we were; now is what we are.” How do you stay so positive in these crazy times?
dl: It’s not so much positive; it’s just being balanced. Like in the past, we did all that. Now we’re doing this. And that’s what life is. You can’t live in the past, and you certainly can’t live in the future. You live for the moment, and that way you are naturally just positive because you just gotta deal with whatever’s going on now. You talked about cell phones [before the interview officially started], whatever’s the new technology, you’ve gotta get to know, and you’ve got to deal with everybody else in the world. You’ve gotta keep up to date. That’s all I meant. A lot of people have come up with that conclusion because of the pandemic. It’s made people get up and rethink their lives. A lot of people don’t want to go back to the same old job they hated, and they’re starting their own businesses. There’s a silver lining in everything bad that happened.
twi-ny: A lot of creativity came out of the pandemic.
dl: That’s exactly what I’m saying.
twi-ny: The same thing happened in theater. And in many ways, your show is really a form of theater. It’s more than a concert.
dl: That’s the way I see it. I’m starting with the wineries, and I’m going to do the theaters after, just small theaters. It’s nice to have that sit-down thing, where everybody in the audience can hear and see and be part of it.
twi-ny: Terrific. I am so thrilled to have had the chance to speak to you. It was really a lot of fun. Good luck with the tour, with the shows. I look forward to seeing you at City Winery. You’ve entertained me endlessly over the years. I even still have my Wings T-shirt from the 1976 concert. I can’t fit into it anymore, but my wife can.
dl: You’re handing it down.
twi-ny: I’ve handed it down. She also looks a lot better in it than I ever did.
Ronald K. Brown’s The Equality of Night and Day makes its stunning NYC premiere at the Joyce this week (photo by Rose Eichenbaum)
Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, a Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
January 17-22, $51-$71
212-691-9740 www.joyce.org www.evidencedance.com
“When I work, in all situations, people meet me and they say, ‘You create family wherever you go,’ and so I think I have a nurturing side but I demand a lot,” Brooklyn-based choreographer Ronald K. Brown explains in an Alvin Ailey video about the making of Open Door, a piece Brown made for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 2015. “Why do you have to open the door, how do you open the door, this whole thing of easing, pushing through the door . . .”
Brown created a sense of family and community yet again when his troupe, EVIDENCE, a Dance Company, kicked off its home season at the Joyce on January 17. The program started, appropriately enough, with the company premiere of Open Door, which was inspired by Brown’s travels to Cuba. In front of a screen that changes colors (the lighting is by Tsubasa Kamei), Arturo O’Farrill’s eight-piece Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble performs Luis Demetrio’s “La Puerta,” Tito Puente’s “Picadillo,” and O’Farrill’s “All of the Americas” (from his “Afro Latin Jazz Suite”) and “Vaca Frita” as nine dancers move about the stage, led by solos and duets by Shaylin D. Watson and Isaiah K. Harvey. Originally commissioned for AAADT in 2015, it’s an uplifting twenty-six minutes, with the dancers often putting out their palms in gestures of welcome, beckoning not only fellow dancers but immigrants from Cuba and around the globe.
Open Door is just the right aperitif for the world premiere of The Equality of Night and Day (TEND), a sizzling emotional work in which Brown gets more explicit as he tackles his recurrent themes of social injustice and racism. Five men (Demetrius Burns, Austin Coats, Randall Riley, Christopher Salango, Harvey) and five women (Watson, Shayla Caldwell, Joyce Edwards, Stephanie Chronopoulos, Breana Moore), in loose-fitting flowing blue costumes by Omotayo Wunmi Olaiya, gather and separate to a powerful original score by pianist Jason Moran and the rallying words of activist and writer Angela Davis, who declared in a 2017 speech at Brown, “During the coming period, our primary job will be to build community, to create community — in ways that allow us to understand that the work that we do now does matter, even if we cannot see in an immediate sense the consequences of the work we are doing. It will matter eventually.”
Photos of protests from the last half century and more, curated by Debra Wills, are projected on the back screen, instilling a sense of immediacy in the proceedings, which are highlighted by poignant movement by Burns, Caldwell, and Edwards, the men at one point covering their faces and letting out primeval screams. Later the dancers remove their tops and walk around in a kind of memorial prayer for Black bodies, reacting to Davis’s facts about the racial imbalance in crime and punishment.
The evening concludes with Brown’s half-hour classic, Grace, an appropriate finale providing subtle elegance following the exuberance of Open Door and the psychological intensity of TEND. Commissioned for AAADT in 1999, the deeply spiritual piece begins with Edwards standing in a large doorway at the back of the stage; as opposed to the first two works, where the dancers often came onto the stage with a swagger, here they mostly walk on and off calmly, five women and six men in lovely white or red costumes by Olaiya. They strut out their elbows and their hands reach for the sky to songs by Duke Ellington, Roy Davis Jr., and Fela Kuti, spreading the energy to the audience.
Some years back, I saw Grace at the Joyce with Brown himself dancing a major role. The Bed-Stuy native saved one final, exhilarating moment for the curtain call on January 17, cementing the loving community he had built over the course of the program. He came onstage to uproarious applause, walking gently with a four-pronged cane and being helped by his partner and associate artistic director, Arcell Cabuag. Brown suffered a debilitating stroke in April 2021, at the age of fifty-four, shortly after a residency at Jacob’s Pillow to develop TEND, but has vowed to walk again on his own, and he is ahead of his doctors’ prognosis. The smile on his face was infectious, assuring everyone that there is a promising future to look forward to for all of us.
Theaster Gates pays homage to his father and his own childhood in Sweet Chariot and Seven Songs for Black Chapel #1–7 at the New Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
THEASTER GATES: YOUNG LORDS AND THEIR TRACES
New Museum
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 5, $12-$18 www.newmuseum.org online slideshow
“I make designations between a thing that I made that’s art, a thing I had fabricated that’s art, and a thing that was a preexisting thing that I put alongside other things that were made or fabricated. I don’t necessarily say, ‘Oh, this is all art,’ even though it’s all art, but I think that there are moments when I’m just trying to put things alongside each other like you would in your house or like you would in a shrine,” Chicago-born multidisciplinary artist Theaster Gates says in a video for his elegiac, beautiful, deeply moving “Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces,” continuing at the New Museum through February 5. “This show is about people who I’ve lost and the things that they left for me, or people who I love and the monument of love that I want to show for them.”
In the three-floor exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Gates pays homage to curator Okwui Enwezor, writer bell hooks, fashion designer Virgil Abloh, scholar Robert Bird, and enslaved potter David Drake (Dave the Potter) as well as his mother (Bathroom Believer), a devout Christian, and his father, a roofer (Roof Strategies for Museum Corridor,Sweet Chariot). Gates repurposes found objects gathered from demolished buildings and construction, including from St. Laurence Church on the South Side of Chicago and Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, where he hosted “Black Artists Retreat 2019: Sonic Imagination.” Among the highlights of the show are Black Madonna, encased in a vitrine; the short film A Clay Sermon; a music video of Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi performing an extended improvisational “Amazing Grace”; the fifty-foot-long Roof Strategies for Museum Corridor; and the silver monochrome Seven Songs for Black Chapel, which harkens back to Gates’s childhood.
There are still several special events being held at the New Museum in conjunction with this first-ever museum retrospective of the work of Gates, who turns fifty this year. On January 19 at 6:30 ($10), the panel discussion “Resurrections: Theaster Gates” features curators Jessica Bell Brown and Dieter Roelstraete and LAXART director Hamza Walker, moderated by Carrion-Murayari. On January 21 at noon (free with museum admission), independent archivist and memory worker Zakiya Collier will facilitate an “Out of Bounds” gallery talk about Gates’s archiving practices. On January 21-22 and from January 31 to February 3 (except January 30; free with museum admission), keyboardist and composer Shedrick Mitchell will activate the Hammond B3 organ in A Heavenly Chord, performing his unique mix of Gospel, reggae, R&B, jazz, and new age music. From February 3 to 5, Gates and the Black Monks will play impromptu performances in the fourth-floor gallery. And on February 4 at 4:00 ($8), Gates will be in conversation with writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman. But you needn’t rely on a special event to get you to the New Museum to see this well-designed, uncluttered, intimate exhibit, which also deals with social injustice, racism, and faith.
A Thousand Ways (Part Three): Assembly brings strangers together at the New York Public Library (photo courtesy 600 Highwaymen)
UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL
Public Theater and other venues
January 4-22, free – $60 publictheater.org
The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival is back and in person for its eighteenth iteration, running January 4-22 at the Public as well as Chelsea Factory, NYU Skirball, La MaMa, BAM, and the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch. As always, the works come from around the world, a mélange of disciplines that offers unique theatrical experiences. Among this year’s selections are Jasmine Lee-Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner, Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff’s Our Country, Roger Guenveur Smith’s Otto Frank, Rachel Mars’s Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters, Kaneza Schaal’s KLII, and Timothy White Eagle and the Violet Triangle’s The Indigo Room.
In addition, “Incoming! — Works-in-Process” features early looks at pieces by Mia Rovegno, Miranda Haymon, Nile Harris, Mariana Valencia, Eric Lockley, Savon Bartley, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and Justin Elizabeth Sayre, while Joe’s Pub will host performances by Eszter Balint, Negin Farsad, Julian Fleisher and his Rather Big Band, Salty Brine, and Migguel Anggelo.
Below is a look at four of the highlights.
600 HIGHWAYMEN: A THOUSAND WAYS (PART THREE): AN ASSEMBLY
The New York Public Library, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
455 Fifth Ave. at Fortieth St., seventh floor
January 4-22, free with advance RSVP publictheater.org
At the January 2021 Under the Radar Festival, the Obie-winning 600 Highwaymen presented A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call, a free hourlong telephone conversation between you and another person, randomly put together and facilitated by an electronic voice that asks both general and intimate questions, from where you are sitting to what smells you are missing, structured around a dangerous and lonely fictional situation that is a metaphor for sheltering in place. The company followed that up with the second part, An Encounter, in which you and a stranger — not the same one — meet in person, sitting across a table, separated from one another by a clear glass panel, with no touching and no sharing of objects. In both sections, I bonded quickly with the other person, making for intimate and poignant moments when we were all keeping our distance from each other.
Now comes the grand finale, Assembly, where sixteen strangers at a time will come together to finish the story at the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch in Midtown. Written and created by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, A Thousand Ways innovatively tracks how the pandemic lockdown influenced the ways we interact with others as well as how critical connection and entertainment are.
Palindromic show makes US premiere at Under the Radar Festival (photo courtesy Ontroerend Goed)
ONTROEREND GOED: Are we not drawn onward to new erA
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-8, $45 publictheater.org www.bam.org
What do the following three statements have in common? “Dammit, I’m mad.” “Madam in Eden, I’m Adam.” “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” They are all palindromes, reading the same way backward and forward. They also, in their own way, relate to Ontroerend Goed’s Are we not drawn onward to new erA, running January 4-8 at BAM’s Fishman Space. Directed by Alexander Devriendt, the Belgian theater collective’s seventy-minute show features a title and a narrative that work both backward and forward as they explore climate change and the destruction wrought by humanity, which has set the Garden of Eden on the path toward armageddon. But maybe, just maybe, there is still time to save the planet if we come up with just the right plan.
The world is obsessed with Moby-Dick much the way Captain Ahab is obsessed with the great white itself. Now it’s Norwegian theater company Plexus Polaire and artistic director Yngvild Aspeli’s turn to harpoon the story of one of the most grand quests in all of literature. Aspeli (Signaux,Opéra Opaque,Dracula) incorporates seven actors, fifty puppets, video projections, a drowned orchestra, and a giant whale to transform Herman Melville’s 1851 novel into a haunting ninety-minute multimedia production at NYU Skirball for four performances only, so get on board as soon as you can.
Brian Mendes and Jim Fletcher get ready for NYCP’s Field of Mars (photo courtesy New York City Players)
I’ll follow Richard Maxwell and New York City Players anywhere, whether it’s on a boat past the Statue of Liberty (The Vessel), an existential journey inside relationships and theater itself (The Evening,Isolde) and outside time and space (Paradiso,Good Samaritans), or even to the Red Planet and beyond. Actually, his newest piece, Field of Mars, playing at NYU Skirball January 19-29, refers not to the fourth planet from the sun but to the ancient term for a large public space and military parade ground. Maxwell doesn’t like to share too much about upcoming shows, but we do know that this one features Lakpa Bhutia, Nicholas Elliott, Jim Fletcher, Eleanor Hutchins, Paige Martin, Brian Mendes, James Moore, Phil Moore, Steven Thompson, Tory Vazquez, and Gillian Walsh and that the limited audience will be seated on the stage.
Oh, and Maxwell noted in an email blast: “Field of Mars: A chain restaurant in Chapel Hill is used as a way to measure the progress of primates, from hunter/gatherer to fast casual dining experience. Topics covered: Music, Food, Nature, and Spirituality. . . . I also wanted to take this opportunity to tell parents regarding the content of Field of Mars: my kids (aged 11 and 15) will not be seeing this show.”
John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered debuted at the Cloisters in 2018 (photo by Joshua Bright for the New York Times)
Who:American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) What:John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered Where:The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Ave. at 112th St. When: Wednesday, December 21, $5-$45 (choose-what-you-pay), 7:30 Why: Originally presented by American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) in 2018 at the San Martín at Fuentidueña chapel in the Cloisters, John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered will be performed one-time only at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, in a slightly revised iteration. A retelling of the traditional Christmas story, El Niño premiered in Paris in 2000, with a libretto by Peter Sellars. At St. John the Divine, the nativity oratorio, conceived and curated by Julia Bullock, includes soprano Bullock, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, violinists Miranda Cuckson and Keir GoGwilt, cellist Coleman Itzkoff, bassist Doug Balliett, flutist Emi Ferguson, percussionist Jonny Allen, pianist Conor Hanick, mezzo-soprano Rachael Wilson, and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street; the conductor is Christian Reif, who is responsible for the new chamber opera arrangement.
In a program note for the Met Museum digital premiere, Bullock wrote, “El Niño is one of my favorite pieces of music and I feel one of John and Peter’s greatest collaborations. . . . It is rarely programmed, either because of the resources needed or possibly because our North American holiday tradition insists upon multiple performances of Handel’s Messiah. The Messiah is, of course, a beloved work, but it doesn’t meditate solely on the nativity story; it also encompasses the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. El Niño, on the other hand, explores the central themes of the nativity — the immaculate conception, the unique relationship between mother and child, and gift giving — and also ruminates on the notion that with the promise of new life, there is the equal threat of inexplicable violence and sacrifice. In creating El Niño, John and Peter consciously decided that alongside European interpretations from the male-centric biblical canon, they would feature the contributions of women and Latin American poets.” Tickets for this special event are $5 to $45 based on what you are able to pay.
Christmas songs by Jews take center stage at NYFOS concert (photo by Cherylynn Tsushima)
Who: Lauren Worsham, Donna Breitzer, Rebecca Jo Loeb, Alex Mansoori, William Socolof, Cantor Joshua Breitzer, Steven Blier, Alan R. Kay What:Holiday concert Where:Merkin Concert Hall, Kaufman Music Center, 129 West 67th St. When: Wednesday, December 14, $45, 7:00 Why: Everyone knows that the Jewish Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas,” but there are lots of other seasonal favorites and lesser-known holiday gems that were also penned by Jewish composers. On December 14 at 7:00 in Merkin Hall’s Upper Lobby at the Kaufman Music Center, New York Festival of Song will present its thirteenth iteration of “A Goyishe Christmas to You!,” featuring Christmas songs — with a twist — written by Jews. Soprano Lauren Worsham, mezzo-sopranos Donna Breitzer and Rebecca Jo Loeb, tenor Alex Mansoori, bass-baritone William Socolof, and Cantor Joshua Breitzer, with clarinetist Alan R. Kay and pianist and host Steven Blier, will perform such holiday tunes as Roy Zimmerman’s “Don’t Let Gramma Cook Christmas Dinner,” Johnny Marks’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (in Yiddish arrangements), David Friedman’s “My Simple Christmas Wish,” Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song” (with new lyrics by Adam Gopnik), Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” and David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger’s “Can I Interest You in Hanukkah?” It might be worth it just for Joan Javits and Phil and Tony Springer’s “Santa Zaydee.” The concert will be followed by a wine reception with the artists.
