Innholdsfortegnelse for December 20, 2021-January 2, 2022 i New York Magazine

Earns the kind of applause you too rarely hear at And this thundering response testifies not only musicals these days: the kind that doesn’t merely to the excellence of the production, but to the end a song, but expresses genuine, heartfelt joy. enduring brilliance and insight of Sondheim’s score.” “ DEEPLY FUNNY.” Peter Marks, “ BLOWS THE ROOF OFF THE THEATER!” Tim Teeman, “ SUBLIME.” Naveen Kumar, MUSIC & LYRICS BY STEPHEN SONDHEIM BOOK BY GEORGE FURTH DIRECTED BY MARIANNE ELLIOTT “ THE CAST IS OUTSTANDING.” Matt Windman, “ DAMN, IT’S GOOD.” David Rooney, “SUPERB.” Greg Evans, Official Sponsor of COMPANY “ KATRINA LENK IS A KNOCKOUT!” David Cote, “ PATTI LUPONE IS A GENUINE GOLDEN AGE STAR.” Maureen Dowd, “ GLORIOUSLY TRANSFORMATIVE. A GODSEND. The leading character of the…

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT to Bing Bong Nation, the most exciting local basketball squad right now is the men’s team at Yeshiva University, which won its 50th-straight game recently and is currently the top-ranked Division III team in the country. Yeshiva—hardly a traditional basketball powerhouse—isn’t just winning games; it’s dominating them. The Maccabees’ average margin of victory through 14 games this season is more than 29 points, and only twice have they won by fewer than ten. Much of their success can be attributed to Ryan Turell, a senior from Los Angeles who leads all Division III players in points. Turell had offers to play for Division I schools—which would have meant more exposure to scouts and a more conventional pipeline to a pro career—and briefly committed to Army. “I…

IN THE SPIRIT OF THIS ever-changing, slightly nerve-racking holiday COVID season, the latest Ignacio Mattos venture, called Lodi, which opened a few months ago in Rockefeller Center, seems to have been designed with every possible occasion in mind. It’s an Italian espresso bar equipped with hissing coffee machines and a counter made of polished white marble where you can sip a bracing cup under your mask before ducking back into the cold. It’s a pastry shop, too, and a bakery that turns out six comforting varieties of Italian bread beginning at 8 a.m. There are eggs over toast for breakfast and a variety of to-go panini for lunch, and if you’re in the mood for a proper sit-down meal, you can dine outdoors with a view of the great Christmas…

➽ KATHRYN VANARENDONK: This was a good year in TV. It was also a bad year in TV. It was an everything year in TV, because TV is too many things now. My own impression, looking over the list of things I watched in the past year, is there were exquisite seasons of television and there were crummy ones but that the vast, yawning middle of “just fine” grows larger each year. There is a place for “just fine”—don’t get me wrong. I personally enjoyed Peacock’s Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol way more than it had any right to be enjoyed by anyone. But do we need that much “just fine”? Does the ever-increasing bulk of it dilute our ability to feel like it was a good year in TV?…

➽ ALISON WILLMORE: This was an overwhelming year in film. There have been so many movies—some held over from last year, some new—that I have never felt less like I’ve had a handle on things. I could have played catch-up forever and still not felt like I’d seen enough. But at some point, you have to call it. Top-ten lists are always a personal snapshot of someone’s moviegoing year, but this year it seemed especially personal. ➽ BILGE EBIRI: I really think a top-20 list often makes more sense nowadays. Film critics tend to see more work than a lot of other folks. I saw 145 new-release films last year, and that was a slow year. (I saw 292 in 2015.) I don’t know if the average book critic reads…

1. Wildermyth This tactical, turn-based strategy game seeks to simulate a Dungeons & Dragons session, with absurdly bespoke narrative elements that fuse together in perfect combinations. 2. Back 4 Blood A gigantic map is besieged by zombies; try to make it to the next safe house with most of your body intact, while enjoying the huge arsenal and gobs of viscera. 3. Cruelty Squad This game needs to be seen to be believed, then never spoken of again. You complete a mission by bagging a bounty, but the magic is found in Cruelty Squad’s interstitial horrors. 4. Chivalry 2 Two armies clash under vague circumstances until one team eclipses the other. Comes with an extra-stupid “Battlecry” button to hit as you charge…

TV 1. Watch The Kennedy Center Honors Oh, look who showed up. CBS, December 22. The celebration of great artists this year includes Bette Midler, Lorne Michaels, Berry Gordy, opera singer Justino Díaz, and Joni Mitchell. But the headline may be that, for the first time in four years, the president of the United States joins the celebration. JEN CHANEY MOVIES 2. See The Tragedy of Macbeth Denzel Washington at his best. In theaters December 25; Apple TV+, January 14. Come for the great, mournful Denzel Washington performance and the chance to see Joel Coen going solo as a director. Stay for Kathryn Hunter, who is genuinely otherworldly playing all three of the witches. ALISON WILLMORE THEATER 3. See The Lehman Trilogy Put it in the bank. Nederlander Theatre, through…

WOOOOOO, we’re on drugs! We’re gonna make it happen! It’s gonna be really cool! And I have more drugs that we can doooooooooo!” I’m sprinting carelessly across Eighth Avenue on an early-December Saturday night with a 40-something woman I barely know, and she is singing this to me or to herself. We’re heading to one of the (pre–Omicron surge) after-parties for Horizons, New York’s annual psychedelics conference, at a sports pub near Penn Station, and we are, needless to say, completely out of our minds and would get only more so. Let me backtrack on how we got here. Back in the fall, sitting outside a neighborhood dive bar drinking irresponsibly late on a Sunday night, I met Gloria—which is not her name, but she’s a mother and doesn’t need…

‘‘THEY CAN’T ARREST US ALL,’’ a future defendant had posted days before, and this was the vibe in the moment, the ecstatic invulnerability that leads someone to smear feces on the floor of the building in which the most powerful country on earth writes its rules. The worry set in later, when the swarm resolved into 9,000 separate bodies in separate homes in separate beds. At first it was just a feeling, watching the news, as the word rally gave way to the word riot, that the mood of the day had not carried onward into the present. The FBI was at the airport, someone heard. A friend had been arrested. One hundred arrests in the first two weeks. There were photographs on the FBI’s web page and online sleuths trawling…

THE NEW YORK OUTPOST of a three-branch Los Angeles enterprise, Breakfast by Salt’s Cure, opened in an unmarked West Village storefront in September with nary a peep, never mind a PR blitz, and the mouthful of a name yields few clues as to its mission beyond morning meal service. (Salt’s Cure refers to chef-owner Chris Phelps’s first meat-centric restaurant, whose buzzy brunch gave rise to the separate breakfast concept.) In fact, as the Underground Gourmet discovered when we stopped by on a brisk December afternoon, Breakfast is actually open through 2 p.m. with a streamlined menu revolving around the specialty of the house: oatmeal griddle cakes, inspired by the ones Phelps’s mother made every weekend of his childhood. There are good things to eat here besides the signature dish, including…

1. Jazmine Sullivan, Heaux Tales When we first met Sullivan through her 2008 debut, Fearless, it was obvious we had a world-class talent on our hands. On subsequent albums, she refined her pen and expanded her repertoire, but none of this prepared us for Heaux Tales, Sullivan’s first release in six years. The singing will melt your face. The beats reinforce the sheer breadth of styles Sullivan can handle. Heaux Tales jumps in and out of characters as much as it does genres: “Pick Up Your Feelings” is a classic Sullivan breakup tune. “The Other Side” pines for the financial windfall a rich boyfriend could offer. “Bodies—Intro” frets over the dangers of drunken hookups, with some of the finest vocals we heard this year. Out of intersecting…

1. Caroline, or Change History has spoken. Despite a difficult first outing on Broadway in 2003, Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s masterwork about a Black maid in Louisiana has emerged as one of the most important pieces of American musical theater this century: rueful, honest, funny, grave. The Roundabout production adds a world-beating set of performances, first among them by Sharon D Clarke, who plays Caroline with a ragged power that contains all the fear, frustration, and pent-up longing of a woman—and a people—too long denied. 2. Only an Octave Apart Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo were the perfect double act in this breathtaking cabaret fantasia based on the unlikeliest of vocal collaborations: Costanzo, a world-class countertenor, singing duets with Bond, New York’s favorite…

YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW before going into West Side Story that Steven Spielberg has been itching to make a musical for pretty much his entire career. You can feel it in the film’s opening sequence, in the glee with which he follows members of the white gang, the Jets, as they emerge from beneath a pile of rubble and snap and strut their way down a bustling 1950s Upper West Side street. Spielberg punctuates their walk with offhand glimpses of everyday objects moving in rhythm—a closed lighter, a tossed coin, a blown newspaper. It’s musical, sure, but it’s also … Spielbergian, reminiscent of any number of playfully choreographed scenes from his previous pictures. You half-expect Indiana Jones to swing in and start cracking his bullwhip in time to the…

HE SHOULD HAVE been a contender. As backbenchers and prattling senators piled into the 2020 race for president, Bill de Blasio entered as the manager of the nation’s largest city, overseeing a police force the size of a small army, a school system that had more children in it than the entire population of seven different states, and the successful response to not one but two infectious-disease outbreaks. He had created early-childhood-education programs that served more than 100,000 children under the age of 5 each year, given paid family leave and higher wages to city workers, added or preserved 165,000 units of affordable housing, granted greater access to health care for the poor, imposed fair-scheduling requirements for fast-food workers, and kept the annual increases on rent-regulated apartments to a minimum.…

THE 20TH CENTURY BROUGHT with it a deluge of paper. As American businesses expanded in both number and scale in the wake of the Civil War, so did their printed material; there were graphs, memos, charts, forms, and more correspondence than ever. This “paperization” eventually spilled into the home, where a rise in personal documentation meant that houses were filling up with bills, letters, tax forms, receipts, birth certificates, recipes clipped from magazines. As these archives ballooned, a new technology rose in popularity: the filing cabinet, whose history the scholar Craig Robertson documents in The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information. One 1918 advertisement described the filing cabinet as “oracle-like” with a “great gigantic memory”: “It is only a bit o’ steel, yet no brain was ever made /…

NO ONE WOULD argue that the past two years have been good for Manhattan’s Chinatown. Weeks before the first case of COVID-19 was found in New York, local shopkeepers saw their traffic plummet—a disturbing indication of what was to come for a neighborhood where many survive on the slimmest of margins. As the city went into lockdown, businesses shuttered. Unemployment skyrocketed. And soon residents were dealing with other anxieties as the news filled with stories of Asian New Yorkers who were attacked on the street, incidents fueled in no small part by a president who delighted in blaming China for the pandemic. Somewhat perversely, though, it has been a good time for the bottom line at what has become one of Chinatown’s most contentious institutions: the Museum of Chinese in…

MASTER BUILDER and installation artist Randy Polumbo wasn’t exactly looking for a lighthouse, or at least that’s the way he tells it. “I was on a government website late at night looking for decommissioned fuel tanks,” he says. “I was going to make a weird garden out of those tanks. And I clicked on a large cylindrical item for $5,000 and it was the lighthouse.” For most people, none of that makes all that much sense. But for Polumbo, it was the perfect next challenge. He has never liked the easy or the obvious. His office is in a five-ton vintage Dodge Travco camper that is hoisted in the air inside his 4,000-square-foot Gowanus studio. (It just wouldn’t have been as fun if it had been left on the floor.)…

THE WAY TEENAGERS in the new musical Kimberly Akimbo express love—their love language, if you’re into that kind of thing—is by making anagrams of each other’s names. A high-school student, Kimberly, crushes on the tuba-playing, Elvish-speaking Seth, and the two nerdy adolescents express their affection by making word scrambles. Kimberly Levaco becomes “cleverly akimbo”; Seth Brett Weetis becomes, a touch too perfectly, “the bitter sweets.” Puzzles require attention, which is the first component of love. To change David Lindsay-Abaire’s poignant 2001 comedy into this fresh and gorgeous musical required this same deep-play, letter-by-letter concentration. Lindsay-Abaire and the composer Jeanine Tesori pick up the original (Kimberly Akimbo the play) and rearrange its pieces carefully (Kimberly Akimbo the musical), and in doing so, they find hidden, sideways beauty. In both versions, Kimberly…

AFTER WATCHING THE first four episodes of And Just Like That …, the follow-up series to Sex and the City, I couldn’t help but wonder, Where is the sex? The HBO show about the romantic exploits of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and her three best friends—Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall)—broke ground during its late’90s and early-aughts run for its frank depiction of female sexual experience and the fortifying nature of friendships among women. And Just Like That … reacquaints us with three members of that famous quartet (Cattrall opted out of this ten-episode HBO Max series, so Samantha is present only via references to how she’s currently living in London) as they navigate life in their mid-50s, which apparently involves a lot of confusion…