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Tag: Annie

  • New Songs From Mumford & Sons, Maren Morris, Lucy Dacus and More

    New Songs From Mumford & Sons, Maren Morris, Lucy Dacus and More


    The Spanish pop songwriter Pablo Alboran usually deals in romance. But “Clickbait” confronts a different class of relationships: the parasocial ones online. “Many say they know me, but they have no idea who I am,” he complains in Spanish, with an Auto-Tuned edge. In Spanglish, he continues, “Flash flash, mucho clickbait, mucho fake.” It’s a choppy track that jump-cuts between a minor-chorded ballad and pounding drums, then unites them. Alboran sings about people with “poison in their hearts,” and he’s willing to break character to fight back.

    Since its formation in 1990, the Chicago instrumental band Tortoise has been blending jazz, rock, Minimalism, electronics and improvisation. Its first new track since 2016 is “Oganesson,” named for a synthetic, very short-lived element with atomic number 118. It’s an off-kilter, 7/4 funk tune with a spy-movie ambience: laconic guitar chords, plinks of distorted vibraphone and a hopscotching bass line. Perhaps the stretch of noise at the end represents atomic decay.

    The title track of Lucy Dacus’s new, love-besotted album, “Forever Is a Feeling,” exults in a romance that just might endure. “My wrists are in your zip tie / 25 to life, why not?” Dacus sings, marveling at the possibility of permanence. The verses surround her with nervous, pointillistic patterns in stereo — piano notes, percussion — as she sings about what were tentative beginnings; the chorus reassures her with rapturous vocal harmonies.

    Here’s an unexpected but sensible alliance: the Canada-to-Nashville songwriter Allison Russell joined by Annie Lennox of Eurythmics. “Superlover” is a plea and a prayer for the world’s children, especially in combat zones. It’s accompanied mostly by Russell’s banjo picking, but adds churchy overtones. “There’s no God of fire and blood / If there’s a God, God is love,” Lennox sings. Is that enough to save lives?

    A thoroughly retro torch song — with cocktail piano, a studio orchestra and a relaxed swing beat — gets combustibly overwrought as Mon Laferte’s jealousy builds and explodes in “Otra Noche de Llorar” (“Another Night to Cry”). With her usual mastery of dynamics, Laferte starts out sweetly caressing each phrase. But that sweetness rises to a raspy near-scream before she lets her boyfriend know, “I have to hang up on you now / she’s surely by your side.” The timing of this release is odd; Laferte sings that it’s almost Christmas. But the fury of being betrayed knows no season.



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  • Hundreds of Artists Call on N.E.A. to Roll Back Trump’s Restrictions

    Hundreds of Artists Call on N.E.A. to Roll Back Trump’s Restrictions


    In one of the first signs of collective pushback to the Trump administration’s arts initiatives, several hundred American artists are calling on the National Endowment for the Arts to roll back restrictions on grants to institutions with programming that promotes diversity or “gender ideology.”

    Among the 463 writers, poets, dancers, visual artists and others who signed the letter are the Pulitzer-winning playwrights Jackie Sibblies Drury, Lynn Nottage and Paula Vogel. There is also one name with striking historical resonance: Holly Hughes, a performance artist who in 1990 was one of the so-called N.E.A. Four, denied funding by the agency because of concern from conservative critics at the height of that era’s culture wars.

    “In some ways this just feels like déjà vu all over again,” Ms. Hughes, now a professor of art and design at the University of Michigan, said in a telephone interview. “These funding restrictions are a good barometer for who is the easy punching bag in American culture at the moment.”

    The artists on Tuesday sent a letter to the N.E.A. objecting to new requirements for grant applicants that the organization put in place this month to comply with executive orders signed by President Trump. One of the requirements is that applicants “not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws”; the other is that federal funds not be used “to promote gender ideology,” referring to an executive order, prompted by Mr. Trump’s concern about public policy toward transgender people, that declares that American policy is “to recognize two sexes, male and female.”

    The artists’ letter asks the N.E.A. to “reverse” the changes, saying “abandoning our values is wrong, and it won’t protect us. Obedience in advance only feeds authoritarianism.”

    “Trump and his enablers may use doublespeak to claim that support for artists of color amounts to ‘discrimination’ and that funding the work of trans and women artists promotes ‘gender ideology’ (whatever that is),” the letter adds. “But we know better: the arts are for and represent everybody.”

    The letter was sent to 26 N.E.A. officials on Tuesday morning; the agency has not yet commented.

    The letter-writing effort was spearheaded by Annie Dorsen, a writer and theater director — and a recent law school graduate — who was a recipient of a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2019. “I felt it was important in this moment to signal to the N.E.A. and to anyone else paying attention that artists were aware of what was happening and not staying silent,” Ms. Dorsen said.

    The changes at the N.E.A. are occurring at the same time that Mr. Trump has assumed control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He replaced numerous board members, and the new board appointed him as the center’s chairman; several staffers have been ousted, and some artists have resigned from positions there or canceled appearances.

    Some programming has also been canceled, including a touring production of a musical for young audiences, “Finn,” about a gray shark who wishes to be a glittery fish. The show’s creators believe the tour was canceled because the show’s message of self-acceptance was deemed problematic during the Trump era, but Kennedy Center officials say there was not sufficient interest in the tour from presenters around the country to make it financially viable.



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  • An Abortion Scene Gets Theater Audiences Talking, and Fainting

    An Abortion Scene Gets Theater Audiences Talking, and Fainting


    About 40 minutes into a recent performance of “The Years” in London, Stephanie Schwartz suddenly felt ill and had to put her head between her legs.

    Onstage at the Harold Pinter Theater, the actress Romola Garai was holding two knitting needles while portraying a young Frenchwoman trying to give herself an abortion. The scene was set in 1964, a time when medical abortions were illegal in France, and Garai’s character wasn’t ready for motherhood.

    Schwartz, 39, said she had started feeling faint as Garai’s character, Annie, described her attempt to carry out the procedure in stark, if brief, detail. But then, Schwartz recalled, there was a commotion in the balcony above. An audience member had actually passed out.

    Since opening last summer for a short run at the Almeida Theater, then again last month on the West End, “The Years” has been the talk of London’s theaterland. That has as much to do with audience reactions to the six-minute abortion scene as the near-universal critical acclaim that the production and its five actresses received for their powerful portrayal of one woman’s life.

    While fainting theatergoers are nothing new — several passed out over the onstage torture in Sarah Kane’s “Cleansed” at the National Theater almost a decade ago — the sheer number keeling over at “The Years” stands out. Sonia Friedman, the show’s producer, said that at least one person has fainted at every performance despite a warning to ticketholders.

    Friedman said that she realized the scene’s power, especially at a time when many women, particularly in the United States, fear a rollback of reproductive rights. After failing to carry out the home abortion, Annie describes her visit to a backstreet clinic, then, later, miscarrying the fetus at home. Still, Friedman said she worried that the scene had overtaken discussion about a play that portrayed women’s lives in all their “power, pain and joy.”

    “What should dominate the discussion,” Friedman said, “is, ‘Why has it taken this long for such a work about women, by women, to be onstage?’”

    Based on a 2008 autobiographical book of the same title by Annie Ernaux, the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, “The Years” is an attempt to not just capture a woman’s life, but also show France’s shift toward sexual liberation and consumerism.

    Eline Arbo, the play’s director, said that, when she read the book, she immediately wanted to bring its blend of emotional, political and social history to the stage, even if Ernaux’s writing contained no dialogue. “Everybody thought I was crazy,” Arbo said.

    She didn’t think twice about including the abortion scene. It was such a key moment in Ernaux’s life, Arbo said (Ernaux almost bled to death), adding that it was vital to remind audiences of the importance of legal abortion.

    Garai said she performed the abortion scene when she auditioned for the show, and had felt it was a “great, accurate depiction” of something that many women experienced when abortion was illegal. “It’s their bodies, their histories,” Garai said.

    During rehearsals, Garai recalled Arbo mentioning that a handful of audience members had fainted when the director staged the show in the Netherlands. But Garai said she had dismissed the possibility of similar reactions in London. British theatergoers, Garai recalled thinking, were used to sitting through bloody productions of Shakespeare.

    Yet, two days after the play opened at the Almeida Theater, the stage manager rushed onstage mid-performance and stopped the show. Someone had fainted.

    The cast feared they had traumatized a woman who had experienced an abortion, but it soon became clear there was no pattern: Men were fainting, as well as women.

    Perhaps the summer heat was a contributing factor? But now that the play was running on the West End, during a bitterly cold winter, the fainting was “even worse,” Garai said. (The run concludes April 19.)

    Arbo said that her best theory for the reactions was that the show’s stripped-back style left room for audiences to imagine the abortion themselves, and so increased the scene’s intensity. Really, though, she said, she had no idea why West End audiences were fainting. “Do you have an answer?” she asked. “I don’t!”

    During a recent performance, the show, meant to run almost two hours without intermission, was stopped twice for about five minutes so that ushers could attend to flustered theatergoers. Other audience members said they had mixed feelings about those interruptions. Mary Tyler, 65, a retired management consultant, sighed when the play was first halted. “You are joking,” she said. “That is so rude to the performers.”

    When the play stopped a second time, Chi Ufodiama, 35, a public relations worker, said she was sympathetic if someone who had experienced abortion was struggling, but she was “suspicious” that the pauses were a deliberate part of the show. (Garai dismissed that notion: “Why would we do that?”)

    During each pause, Garai walked to the back of the stage and formed a circle with the other four woman playing Annie at different points in her life: Anjli Mohindra, Harmony Rose-Bremner, Gina McKee and Deborah Findlay. Garai said the cast had decided to remain onstage partly to signal to the audience that the play was about women’s communal experience. “We’re all here to tell the rest of this story together,” she said.

    Once ushers had ensured the audience member was all right (they sometimes provide bottles of water or medical assistance), Garai returned to the front of the stage and continued acting as intensely as before, without missing a word. It was no different than having a director interrupting her mid-rehearsal, Garai said.

    Within minutes of enduring the abortion, her character had moved on from that moment: She gets married, becomes a mother, and soon the play was racing through a divorce and other scenes that shed light on women’s lives. Some were comedic, like a moment when McKee, playing Annie in middle age, attends her first aerobics class. Other scenes were more passionate, including one in which Findlay, portraying Annie in her 50s and 60s, describes an affair with a younger man.

    For Garai, that May-December romance was as strong a statement as the abortion. Garai said it showed that older women “not only can desire, but can be objects of desire,” adding she had never seen such a relationship on a London stage before.

    Even for Schwartz, the audience member who felt she came close to fainting, the play’s broader messages struck home. She said certain moments made her ponder what past generations of women lived through, as well as reflect on her own life experiences and those of her friends.

    The play was “such a relatable depiction of womanhood,” Schwartz added, and that meant it had to include the abortion scene, too.



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