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‘Myths and Hymns,’ a Theater Cult Favourite, Adjustments Form Once more

‘Myths and Hymns,’ a Theater Cult Favorite, Changes Shape Again

Listening to Adam Guettel’s song cycle “Myths and Hymns,” after a year of pandemic isolation and cautiously hoping for vaccinated freedom, you might feel of a pang of recognition in the lyric “So get me up, and get me out, and let me never return,” swelling to “I’m out of here/I am going there/I am gone!”

A little timelessness is to be expected in Guettel’s songs, a genre-hopping clash of ancient Greek tales and hymnal texts that debuted in 1998 (with a brief run at the Public Theater that has taken on a mythic status of its own) and has since inspired artists to take it up in a variety of forms as simple as a recital showpiece, and as elaborate as a book musical adaptation.

The latest iteration reunites Guettel with Ted Sperling — the music director of that original production at the Public, and now the artistic director of MasterVoices, which is presenting “Myths and Hymns” as an online mini-series whose four thematically organized episodes conclude Wednesday with the premiere of “Faith.” (The whole production will remain on YouTube through June.)

In a typical season, MasterVoices marshals luminaries of Broadway and opera for concerts and semi-staged performances of both classic gems and newer works. But no production has been as starry as this “Myths and Hymns,” whose nimble eclecticism opens it up to diverse casting. (Stephen Holden, reviewing the Public performances for The New York Times, wrote that Guettel had “created a kaleidoscopically heady musical-theater piece in which Gabriel Fauré meets Stevie Wonder, Caetano Veloso embraces Earth, Wind and Fire, and they all dance together around the tribal hearth.”)

Each of the piece’s 24 songs was treated as a discrete project — with its own cast and creative team — which made it easy for performers to contribute compared with, say, a weekslong timeline for something at Carnegie Hall. Sperling cast a wide net, not getting everyone on his wish list (like James Taylor) but gathering, among many others, Kelli O’Hara, Renée Fleming, Joshua Henry, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Jennifer Holliday, John Lithgow and the group Take 6.

“It’s a pretty incredible roster,” Guettel said in a recent joint interview with Sperling. “It might be damn near impossible to get all these people together for one night onstage.”

It’s unsurprising that so many singers were willing to join the production. Guettel’s music isn’t the material of Broadway blockbusters, but it is widely beloved for its originality, even for its difficulty, leaning toward the tradition of American art song — or even the high-level writing of golden age musical theater composers like his grandfather Richard Rodgers.

O’Hara, who starred in Guettel’s 2005 musical, “The Light in the Piazza,” as well as in workshops for his work in progress “Days of Wine and Roses,” said that the word that always comes to mind with his music is “satisfying.”

“It’s so rich, and there’s so much work to it, but it begs us to take in and understand it,” said O’Hara, whose appearances in the MasterVoices production include a luxuriously cast “Migratory V” adapted as a trio for her, Fleming and the soprano Julia Bullock. “I don’t want to be spoon-fed easy melodies and things I can hum. I want ones that get inside and kill me, really. And that’s what ‘Myths and Hymns’ does for me.”

This “Myths and Hymns” is a rare opportunity to hear Guettel’s music, which has been absent on Broadway since the lushly sensuous score of “The Light in the Piazza” resounded from the pit of the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Not that he hasn’t been busy; in fact, he’s written entire musicals.

“Two of them are finished, and they’re circling La Guardia,” Guettel said, “for understandable reasons, between the pandemic and some other complications that have come up, in terms of how and where the shows were meant to be produced.” (The embattled megaproducer Scott Rudin had been attached to “Days of Wine and Roses.”)

For now, though, Guettel has been able to revisit some of his earliest music, and in a new medium. Over lunch, he and Sperling talked more about the genesis of “Myths and Hymns,” then and now, and what may be in store for the piece’s future. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Was this conceived as a virtual production from the start?

TED SPERLING From the very beginning. My concept was that it should be kaleidoscopic. I wanted a lot of directors, a lot of input, a lot of difference. I didn’t even want the directors to know what they were doing.

That reflects the music’s range. Adam, can you explain how “Myths and Hymns” took this form to begin with?

ADAM GUETTEL I had been writing these myths just because I was just starting out as a writer, and you don’t know what to write. I did stuff that was tried and true. That was enough to keep me busy. Then I came across this book in an old antique shop, and it was a tiny book, the size of an iPhone. And it was just the words to a bunch of hymns. And for some reason out of this Upper West Side Jew comes all of this music to these hymn lyrics.

So there were these two stacks of things. And Tina Landau came over one day and said, “What are you working on?” and I said, “Well I’ve got these two stacks of things,” and she listened to a bunch of them and said, “Well, why wouldn’t they work together?” And we realized in some ways that the hymns are who we would have ourselves be, and the myths are basically who we are, and that they can kind of antiphonally talk to each other.

What has it been like revisiting this music?

GUETTEL I’ve gone to see a few productions, but I hadn’t listened to it in a long time. I might have had a small case of the usual “Oh my God, I did go on a bit”; “Jesus, that needs help”; “boy, those lyrics are over couplet-y.” There’s stuff that I was a little embarrassed by at first. But I let go of my vanity and let it be what it was. And there’s the honor of being a composer who wrote something 22 years ago that’s getting done again. That’s really what you write for, so that you leave something behind.

SPERLING I imagine every writer feels with more experience that their craft grows. My impression is you have to acknowledge that you were a certain person of a certain age when you wrote a piece and you keep changing, but the piece is a record of who you were then. If you try to monkey with it too much from a later perspective you run the rusk of muddying the waters.

GUETTEL You’re operating on a patient whose anatomy you’re not familiar with anymore.

In this form, “Myths and Hymns” is probably reaching its largest audience yet.

SPERLING We’re at over 50,000 now, which is way more than we would get in a season. We are planning to package it as a single work and re-edit it, and it will be broadcast on PBS.

And with such a starry cast, will there be an album, too?

GUETTEL There are six songs that are not on the Nonesuch record [released in 1999] that no one’s ever heard, except the people who saw it at the Public.

SPERLING And one of them not even that! One of my impulses to do this was that I wanted a more complete recording. People on YouTube have been asking, “Can we please have this as audio?” It would be lovely to have a little more time with it.

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Taking part in the Function of New York? Toronto. That View of Paris? It’s Montreal.

Playing the Role of New York? Toronto. That View of Paris? It’s Montreal.

There are countless examples of this Canadian urban stunt doubling, often pieced together via tight shots and computer graphics. Toronto plays Tokyo in “Pacific Rim,” Chicago in the movie “Chicago,” Baltimore in “Hairspray” and Boston in much of “Good Will Hunting.”

Vancouver plays New York in the Jackie Chan movie “Rumble in the Bronx” (leading to an infamous oversight, in which the city has mountains lurking behind it), and it plays Seattle, Budapest and Mumbai in “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.” Montreal has played Marseille and Montrichard, France, in “Catch Me if You Can” and Paris in “X-Men: Days of Future Past”; Washington, D.C., in “White House Down”; and Brooklyn in the movie “Brooklyn.”

Particularly popular filming locations include the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, a beloved Art Deco complex in Toronto that has played sinister locations in movies like “Undercover Brother” (portraying The Man’s headquarters) and “In the Mouth of Madness” (a mental hospital). The University of Toronto has played Harvard, M.I.T. and Princeton, among many other schools.

The reasons for Canada’s prime status as a film “impostor” are many, Mr. Theodore said: tax breaks, lower costs, diverse landscapes, high-quality shooting and editing facilities, friendliness and a general unfamiliarity with Canada among international movie audiences, allowing it to easily stand in without being recognized.

Another factor, according to the exhibition’s designer, Thomas Balaban, an architect and professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Montreal, is that Canada’s cities are more generic than those in many countries, particularly those in the United States, which Canada plays most often.

“Everything goes through a design review board,” said Mr. Balaban, whose architecture firm, TBA, is spearheading the exhibition’s design as well. “There’s this feeling that the cities are designed by committee.”

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Evaluate: The Charms and Pitfalls of Dancing the Gods on Digital camera

Review: The Charms and Pitfalls of Dancing the Gods on Camera

Since 2011, the World Music Institute’s Dancing the Gods festival has consistently delivered high-quality Indian dance to New York. Last year, like so much else, it was canceled. This year, like so much else, it’s virtual — which means that another stage experience is being mediated by cameras, with all the attendant possibilities and pitfalls.

In at least one respect, classical Indian dance should benefit from the camera’s eye. One of its glories is storytelling, often concentrated in facial expressions — details that close-ups can magnify. But just as a stage actor’s performance pitched to the second balcony can seem too broad, too loud, when it fills a screen, so can a dancer’s.

That’s what I came to feel about Rama Vaidyanathan’s contribution. Vaidyanathan appears on a porch in Delhi, embodying three women in love in three Bharatanatyam pieces titled “Vexed,” “Arrogant” and “Anxious.” (The festival, available on demand for the next three weeks, comes in two installments, each featuring a headliner filmed in India and an opening act who’s a New York local.)

As is common, Vaidyanathan introduces each dance with a synopsis. That’s helpful for those who don’t know the story or language of the accompanying song, but also useful for anyone wanting to track how a simple scenario can be elaborated and expanded into song and dance. Perhaps it was the true-confessions tone of her synopses that put me off. “I knew something was wrong when my friends started behaving strangely with me,” begins one, a story of a woman whose lover kisses and tells, “the worst thing that can happen to a woman.”

Vaidyanathan is a masterful artist, but in the collapsed distance of film, her program’s emphasis on what the text called “feminine wiles” was too much: too much eye-rolling, too much attitude. Only in the final episode, when her character is extolling the beauty of her lover, Krishna, did the dance expand and vibrate with the energy of a god.

In the second program, Surupa Sen appears at Nrityagram, the village in southern India where she has lived and worked for three decades. She, too, offers three solos in her style, Odissi; three poems from the Gita Govinda; three depictions of women in love with gods. But these achieve an immediacy and intimacy suited to the closer view.

The first is a prepandemic stage performance, which shows Sen’s authority in her usual setting. But I preferred the second two: gorgeous compositions choreographed by the Odissi guru Kelucharan Mohapatra and filmed in a cozy dance studio at Nrityagram.

In one, the woman waits in a bower for her lover, adorning herself, and the anticipation, so strong it hurts, comes through in the physicality and rhythms of the dance. If that’s before, the final piece is after, a postcoital scene. Here, the languor and softness of Sen’s performance are very far from the stagy attitudes of Vaidyanathan. The camera captures something close to emotional nakedness.

That’s a gain for a virtual festival, whereas the festival’s opening acts are mostly misfires. In “Willow,” the New Jersey-based Kathak dancer Jin Won goes in for double exposures and crass music reminiscent of a cheap horror film; it buries her skill. In “The Sun Unto a Day,” the Bharatanatyam dancer Sonali Skandan places herself in cyclorama void like the one on “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver”; it exposes her imprecision.

Dancing the Gods

Through June 12 (Program 1) and June 13 (Program 2), worldmusicinstitute.org.

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Watch Marvel Studios’ Eternals Trailer

Watch Marvel Studios' Eternals Trailer

After what seems like an eternity, Marvel just dropped the first teaser for the highly anticipated Eternals. Set to span across multiple centuries, the film follows a group of immortal alien beings called the Celestials as they reunite to fight their evil counterparts, the Deviants. By the looks of the trailer, we’ll get to learn more about the Celestials’ origins and how they work as a group. It also seems like we’ll get to see them in their secret Earth lives as well, although Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo does not keep a low-profile. “We’re supposed to keep quiet and I’ve become the biggest Bollywood movie star,” Nanjiani shared on Deadline’s New Hollywood podcast back in March.

Starring Angelina Jolie (Thena), Richard Madden (Ikaris), Nanjiani (Kingo), Lauren Ridloff (Makkari), Brian Tyree Henry (Phastos), Salma Hayek (Ajak), Lia McHugh (Sprite), Don Lee (Gilgamesh), Barry Keoghan (Druig), Gemma Chan (Sersi), and Kit Harington (Black Knight), the cast is filled with heavy hitters, and we can’t wait to see what they do in a superhero role. The film is also directed by recent Oscar winner Chloé Zhao, who called Eternals a big melting pot and has a writing credit for the film as well. Ahead of the movie’s premiere on Nov. 5, you can watch the full teaser above.

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The Pleasure of Eurovision Trend

The Joy of Eurovision Fashion

It is an uncomfortable reality of the modern communal spectacle that more often than not, when it comes to a major award show or performance extravaganza or even sporting event, marketing has overwhelmed personal expression — at least when it comes to the clothes. Red carpets are a big business for public personalities, and fear of looking silly an equally powerful deterrent. Brands have swooped in to exploit that tension to their own ends.

We wrote off the Oscars years ago, but when even the MTV Video Awards and the Olympics become hashtag opportunities for Valentino, Giambattista Valli and Ralph Lauren (among many, many others), you know we’ve reached peak fashion penetration.

Which is why Eurovision 2021, that no-holds-barred mash-up of emotion, inanity, genres, nationalities, wind machines, bursts of fire and just plain weirdness, was such a joy to watch.

The hosts didn’t just use “Open Up” as their official slogan and then open the arena in Rotterdam to thousands of people (thousands of people! in one room! yelling and dancing!). They opened up the stage to a parade of ridiculous outfits that were nevertheless worn with so much exuberance it was a great reminder that sometimes just the freedom to express your own taste should be the goal.

The sheer fact that Italy’s Maneskin, the winner of the whole shebang, actually worked with a big-name designer and no one would ever know because the rock band’s identity completely overshadowed the fashion brand, is symptomatic of what makes Eurovision special. And, increasingly, unique.

That designer — Etro — is, after all, an Italian family-run brand that has made a signature out of a certain boho deluxe aesthetic, most often expressed in floaty paisley fabrics and a sort of sand-swept romance. Yet there Maneskin was, doing their very energetic best to revive the whole idea of glam rock in laminated laced-up leather flares and studded leather jackets, and gold-speckled poet’s sleeves. It did make you think Jimi Hendrix-meets-“Velvet Goldmine,” but it didn’t make you think “Milan Fashion Week.”

That’s actually all to the good. Indeed, by the end of the show, it was hard not to wish that along with the winning song, viewers had gotten to vote for the winning outfit. After all, the two are fairly intertwined.

If Italy won the competition, for example, Vegas-style silver clearly won the night. Spangly, abbreviated shine was the go-to performance look, as seen on Anxhela Peristeri from Albania (in a high-necked steel-sequined leotard with icicles of sparkles dripping from her hips and shoulders); Elena Tsagrinou from Cyprus (in some sort of halter neck bikini confection with crystals and beading); Destiny from Malta (silver fringe-y minidress); and Natalia Gordienko from Moldova (long-sleeved plunge-neck bodysuit with — yup! — more silver fringing).

Apparently, their costume designers had all watched last year’s satire, “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga,” and been inspired to take it literally.

Though the bright yellow outfits of Lithuania’s the Roop, which combined shoulder pads, jumpsuits, and schoolgirl pleats and called to mind the early days of MTV, not to mention both New Wave silhouettes and sunny-side-up eggs, were equally hard to forget. There’s a reason that they caught the eye of supporters in Vilnius, who according to a local government blog enlisted MK Drama Queen, the brand that created the costumes for the Roop to help dress local statues in bright yellow accessories as a form of home-country boosterism.

When it came to camp, however — which is, after all, the signature aesthetic value of Eurovision — no one beat Norway’s Tix. His giant white fur and even more giant white wings took his crystal-studded silver bodysuit to a whole different level, as did the silver chains that bound him to both the Earth (and a couple backup demons gyrating nearby), the better to evoke the point of his song, “Fallen Angel.”

Speaking of angels, feathers were also a key component of the look from San Marino’s Senhit along with a giant gold headdress (along with Flo Rida, who joined her onstage). Which was only outdone in the “how-in-the-world-do-you-move-in-that?” sweepstakes by Russia’s Manizha, who made her entrance in the robes of what looked like a giant matryoshka doll only to answer the question by emerging in the freedom of red coveralls to illustrate the theme of her song, “Russian Woman.”

You couldn’t help but smile at it all, which is the point. Fashion is supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to make you feel good. That’s something everyone needs. That Eurovision hides that under a bushel of kitsch doesn’t make it any less true.

Little wonder no one could muster up any enthusiasm (or votes) for England’s James Newman, who donned a … plain leather coat for his number. One of the takeaways of Eurovision 2021 should be that Coco Chanel’s whole “elegance is refusal” stance doesn’t really work in this context. Except, perhaps, when it comes to France’s Barbara Pravi, who took to the stage in a simple black bustier and black trousers to croon her song “Voilà,” winning a rapturous reception from her home market and coming in second in the jury vote.

Given the plaudits, it was hard not to wonder — with a bit of a sinking heart — if, say, a Dior ambassadorship might be in her future.

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5 Current Science Fiction Motion pictures to Stream Now

Five Recent Science Fiction Movies to Stream Now

Questions, questions: at their best, science-fiction films ponder and ask, then are so compelling that you forget you ever wanted an answer. This month’s selection will particularly reward viewers who have no patience for easy resolutions — or distinct genre classifications.

Stream it on Netflix.

The Taiwanese director Cheng Wei-Hao’s ambitious movie will frustrate viewers who like their genres neatly defined. Set in 2032, it follows the efforts of the prosecutor Liang Wen-Chao (Chen Chang) to solve the gruesome death of a local business tycoon, slaughtered by his estranged son — at least that’s what it looks like. A giant question mark also hovers above the dead man’s second wife, Li Yan (Anke Sun, chilly and unsettling).

Liang is especially desperate to figure out what happened because he has cancer and this could be his last case.

Nothing in the convoluted plot is at it seems, and “The Soul” careers wildly from one red herring to another, from horror to procedural to science fiction to melodrama to thriller to romance, and back again.

For the most part Cheng succeeds in keeping his disparate themes in the air: It’s like watching someone juggle a knife, a ball, a pin and a glass, only occasionally dropping one. And underneath the “oh no, they didn’t!” plot twists, the movie’s bittersweet concern is our inability to accept the inevitable and let things — or people — go.

Buy or rent it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu.

Some movies come preloaded with lengthy exposition. Others dispense information in a slow, steady drip. And then there are those that dare audiences to embrace a state of puzzlement. “Doors” squarely belongs to that last category, and your reaction to it will vary based on your tolerance for unexplained events with a whiff of the metaphysical. If the last part of “2001: A Space Odyssey” drives you crazy, stay away from this anthology effort, in which millions of the title objects appear overnight, with no clue about their origin.

The best of the movie’s three distinct parts are the first and last. In the introductory “Lockdown,” the director Jeff Desom conjures up a mini-horror movie as a group of kids taking a test must figure out what to do about a door that popped up in a hallway. Saman Kesh’s meandering “Knockers” takes place after millions of people have disappeared through the doors and into … another reality?

“Lamaj,” directed by Dugan O’Neal, is back on solid footing as Jamal (Kyp Malone, from the band TV on the Radio) monitors a door deep in the woods. One day, the door talks to him — not to explain what is happening, though. For that, we still have to use our imagination.

Buy or rent it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu.

There’s little science in this new Swedish movie, and even less fiction: It’s hard not to think that the events could happen all too easily.

“The Unthinkable” squarely belongs to the pre-apocalyptic genre: Mysterious explosions paralyze Stockholm, the Swedish power grid collapses, nobody can figure out what’s happening, and in no time the country completely falls apart. As is typical in survival tales, the movie — which is credited to the film collective Crazy Pictures — follows a small group of archetypes trying to make it through the ordeal: a tormented guy (Christoffer Nordenrot, who helped write the screenplay) trying to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart (Lisa Henni), herself desperately looking for her small daughter; a conspiracy theorist (Jesper Barkselius) who may or may not be right about what’s happening; a high-ranking government official (Pia Halvorsen) trying to do the right thing.

The movie’s first third feels like a fairly run-of-the-mill family drama, complete with flashback to traumatic childhood events. And then the machine clicks into high gear and you’re too distracted by the impressive set pieces to be bothered by the murky explanations — an unnecessary coda during the end credits feels like a jokey cop-out. And the biggest question remains unanswered: How the heck did Crazy Pictures pull this off on a $2 million budget?

Stream it on Hulu.

Try not to get stuck on the convoluted plot — time-travel paradoxes are hell on screenwriters. What matters in this Australian eco-dystopia is the human element. More specifically Kodi Smit-McPhee’s performance as Ethan, a lowly worker who is sent from 2067, when an oxygen-starved Earth is in its death throes, to a time centuries ahead that may hold the key to salvation. Tall and slightly gaunt, with wide-spaced eyes that give him a haunted look, Smit-McPhee — first noticed 12 years ago as the young boy in the adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy post-apocalyptic novel “The Road” — does not resemble the he-men usually assigned to single-handedly rescue the world. But that’s exactly what makes him so distinctively appealing here.

Seth Larney’s film does not always make sense, and you wish it made better use of Ryan Kwanten and Deborah Mailman in key supporting roles. But Smit-McPhee is a strong anchor. That Ethan accepts the mission less for the sake of saving humanity and more for that of saving a single person (his wife), makes terrible sense.

When a crisis hits onscreen, characters often seem to instantly become experts in survival, no matter their jobs — remember, Tom Cruise was a simple longshoreman in “War of the Worlds.”

But what if the folks facing an alien invasion were woefully inept, for a change? That’s the case in this very funny satire from Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. A couple of Brooklyn hipsters, Jack (John Reynolds, from “Search Party”) and Su (Sunita Mani, “GLOW”), are spending an off-the-grid week upstate when mysterious fur balls crash-land from space. Lacking follow-through and entirely devoid of practical skills — the movie suggests that an overreliance on smartphones is partly to blame — our two earthlings sink rather than rise to the occasion, and soon Su and Jack are on the run, screaming, from the killer “pouffes” (whose resemblance to the Tribbles of old “Star Trek” cannot be fortuitous).

The movie pokes fun both at science-fiction conventions and coddled millennials, while besting many other comedies by miraculously not running out of gas halfway through.

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Assessment: Invoice Robinson’s Rags-to-Riches Faucet Story

Review: Bill Robinson’s Rags-to-Riches Tap Tale

Every year, National Tap Dance Day is celebrated on or around May 25 — the birthday of Bill Robinson, the most prominent Black tap dancer of the first half of the 20th century. Seldom, though, do Tap Day events honor Robinson himself.

Since 2018, three of the contemporary scene’s most prominent tap dancers — Derick K. Grant, Jason Samuels Smith and Dormeshia — have been celebrating Tap Day in Harlem with a festival they call Tap Family Reunion, a few days of classes and a show they collectively choreograph and direct. This year, it’s all virtual, and the show, presented for the first time by the Joyce Theater, is streaming on demand on the theater’s website through June 3.

This one is about Robinson. It’s called “The Mayor of Harlem,” after the honorary title that Robinson earned as an informal philanthropist in his neighborhood: appearing at countless benefit performances, covering back rent and bail. It tells his rags-to-riches story.

Or, really, it tells a rags-to-riches story that could almost be anyone’s. Maurice Chestnut, as Robinson, adds some routine narration to danced scenes of the train ride to the city, the big break, the Hollywood years. The familiar structure is essentially scaffolding for a series of period-style dance numbers.

Fortunately, Chestnut is an excellent dancer. Unlike Robinson, though, he’s not much of an entertainer, and his letter-but-not-the-spirit version of Robinson’s signature staircase dance, performed on a squashed version of the staircase, has itself a squashed quality. In place of Robinson’s starched erectness and ease, Chestnut is coiled like a boxer. Later, when he drops the imitation and lowers his heels into his own more free-flowing style, it’s a release and a relief — a high point of the show.

But Chestnut doesn’t have to carry “Mayor of Harlem” alone. Along with an able jazz quartet led by the trumpeter Ryan Stanbury, the show features a six-member ensemble that actually handles most of the dancing — a tap chorus significantly more skilled and sophisticated, technically and rhythmically, than usually found on Broadway stages, when Broadway was open.

With its skilled hoofers and rote dramaturgy, “Mayor of Harlem” is nice but not so interesting, except in two respects. The first is its attitude toward Robinson. In the 1996 Broadway musical “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk” — the seminal production in the youth of the directors of “Tap Family Reunion,” a show in which they performed and which taught them tap history — Robinson was portrayed as a race traitor and sellout, a figure named Uncle Huck-a-Buck.

The program for “The Mayor of Harlem” calls him “a man who made the best of circumstances.” His Hollywood years with Shirley Temple are presented blankly, without comment, but then, out of nowhere, the ensemble dances angrily in front of a stock slide show of Black protest and they and Chestnut raise Black Power fists as a voice-over tells us that Robinson was “one of the greatest champions of justice and equality this country has ever seen.”

There are missed opportunities here, since Robinson’s biography contains relevant evidence — like the time he was stopping a mugging and was shot by a white policeman. A more serious treatment of Robinson would consider his complexity and the conflicted views of him — how, for example, many of those benefit performances were for police charities.

This isn’t that kind of show, but it is important in another way. Tap chorus dancing is a neglected tradition, and “The Mayor of Harlem” is really about the ensemble, as all Tap Family Reunion productions have been. The focus on the chorus can have the somewhat deadening effect of treating background as foreground. This show is most exciting when a member of the chorus breaks out, as when Amanda Castro impressively incarnates Jeni LeGon in the Robinson-LeGon number from the 1936 film “Hooray for Love.” It could be the birth of a star.

But an art form isn’t only its stars. As much as I might miss the appearance of Grant, Smith and Dormeshia in front of the curtain — canceling out a production’s weaknesses with their brilliance, as Robinson did — they caught the importance of their behind-the-scenes work in the title of their first Tap Family Reunion show, “Raising the Bar.”

The Mayor of Harlem

Through June 3, joyce.org.

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The Parks and Recreation Solid Had a Mini Reunion

The Parks and Recreation Cast Had a Mini Reunion

Rob Lowe turned his guest-hosting gig on The Ellen DeGeneres Show into a mini Parks and Recreation reunion, and we’re (*Chris Traeger voice*) lit’rally overcome with nostalgia. Lowe invited both Adam Scott (Ben Wyatt) and Kathryn Hahn (Jennifer Barkley) onto the show to reminisce about starring on the NBC sitcom, which aired from 2009 to 2015 and hosted a one-time-only reunion special last year to support Feeding America’s COVID-19 Response Fund. Lowe first interviewed each costar separately before the trio played a game called Literally Local Laws, which challenged them to fill in the blanks on rather peculiar regulations in random cities across the country. Grab a plateful of whipped-cream-covered waffles and watch each adorable clip ahead to transport yourself right back to Pawnee, IN.

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Assessment: Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Bitter’ Album Is a Critic’s Choose

Review: Olivia Rodrigo's 'Sour' Album Is a Critic's Pick

Her paramours are playing these sorts of games, too. “Which lover will I get today?/Will you walk me to the door or send me home crying?” she sighs over the dampened piano of “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back.” And it’s on “Drivers License” where that realization fully crystallizes: “Guess you didn’t mean what you wrote in that song about me,” she gasps. There are few colder jolts than learning someone you loved was simply playing a role.

Rodrigo’s juggle is also embedded in her musical choices on “Sour,” which is written almost wholly by Rodrigo and produced almost wholly by Dan Nigro, formerly of the band As Tall as Lions (who also contributed songwriting). She plants a flag for the divided self right at the top of the album, on the spectacular “Brutal,” which begins with a few seconds of sober strings before she declares, “I want it to be, like, messy,” which it then becomes. That tug of war persists throughout the album: more polished songs like the singles and the rousing, Paramore-esque “Good 4 U” jostling with rawer ones like “Enough for You” and “Jealousy, Jealousy.”

“Traitor,” one of the album’s highlights, is a stark song masquerading as a bombastic one. “I kept quiet so I could keep you,” Rodrigo confesses, before arriving at an elegant way of understanding, if not quite accepting, how someone who loved you has moved on: “Guess you didn’t cheat/but you’re still a traitor.”

That songwriting flourish is emblematic of what Rodrigo has learned from Taylor Swift on this album (which, in shorthand, is Swift’s debut refracted through “Red”): nailing the precise language for an imprecise, complex emotional situation; and working through private stories in public fashion. There is residue of Swift throughout “Sour” — whether the way that “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” interpolates “New Year’s Day,” or the “Cruel Summer”-esque chants on “Deja Vu.”

But really, Swift persists in the lens, which is relentlessly internal — Rodrigo only breaks out of it in a couple of places on the album, like on “Jealousy, Jealousy,” where she pulls back to assess the self-image damage that social media inflicts (“I wanna be you so bad, and I don’t even know you/All I see is what I should be”) and on the final track, “Hope Ur OK,” a melancholy turn that’s thoughtfully compassionate, but thematically out of step with the rest of the album.

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‘Seance’ Overview: Summoning Hassle with Lipstick and Latin

‘Seance’ Review: Summoning Trouble with Lipstick and Latin

When a group of mean girls invite Camille (Suki Waterhouse), the protagonist of “Seance”, to get in touch with a dead classmate, she shrugs her shoulders.

“Why not?” Says Camille. “Sounds weird.”

This is essentially the thesis of this genre-confused film: why not? Sounds weird.

“Seance”, directed by Simon Barrett, takes place at the fictional Edelvine Academy, a boarding school for girls where an evil presence arises after a clique of students tries to conjure up a ghost. Newcomer Camille arrives as girls start disappearing.

Given Barrett’s career as a horror screenwriter – he wrote the curvy “You’re Next” and contributed to the “V / H / S” series – it’s no surprise that “Seance” is strongest when it’s full and all the humor of the genre. As the film reaches its lively end, bloodshed and absurdity peak. Barrett enlivens things with practical effects and fights against choreography.

Unfortunately, the movie’s climax is at odds with its construction, a trotting narrative that revolves around weak characters with even weaker motivations. “Seance” meanders for most of its runtime, fluctuating between tones and styles. It’s both confident and overly serious. It tries to be a thriller, a slasher, a coming-of-age story, and a haunted house film at the same time.

Occasionally, when the movie picks a genre, it gets stuck, but “Seance” ends up feeling messed up. Countless bizarre decisions – like dressing up the teenage characters in figure-hugging pajamas and randomly inserting music into scenes – don’t help.

Like his characters making a planchette out of lipstick and a phone case, “Seance” brings ideas together and hopes for the best. But moments of true innovation can be found under the mistakes.

seance
Rated R for buckets of blood and unladylike language. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. To rent or buy in theaters and on FandangoNow, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay-TV operators. Please consult the Policies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before viewing films in theaters.