Berlin im Licht

Komm, mach mal Licht,

Damit man sehn kann, ob was da ist,

Komm, mach mal licht,

Und rede nun mal nicht.

Komm, mach mal Licht,

Dann wollen wir doch auch mal sehen,

ob da ‘ne Sache ist: Berlin im Licht.

- “Berlin im Licht,” by Bertolt Brecht

Turn on the light,

So we can fin’ly see what’s inside.

Turn on the light,

And keep those lips shut tight.

Turn on the light,

Because we all just want to take in,

Whatever’s really there: Berlin in Light.

It’s rough, but you can only ask so much of me on a rainy Tuesday morning at the end of a week spent walking around Berlin. My shoes, my feet, my right hip, and my brain are all tired.

The original German lyrics come from “Berlin im Licht,” Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 novelty song inspired by a festival of the same name, which aimed to show off what electric lighting was capable of. The goal, the marketing said, was to turn nighttime in Berlin into day. It’s a funny thing to consider, given that I can’t think of another Western city more associated with nighttime in the cultural imagination than Berlin. Paris is gorgeous at night, and New York is famous for refusing to go the fuck to bed, but when I think of Berlin, I think of nightclubs. I think of bars, and drugs, and fetish. That can’t be wildly off. I’m not drawing from anything approaching personal experience (I have been in bed no later than 11:00 pm most nights of this trip, thank you). That association has to be coming from somewhere. It has certainly been supported by the hundreds of posters for an upcoming leather party that I’ve been seeing throughout the city.

“Berlin im Licht” is a novelty, but it takes on new meaning when considered within the context of German history following its publication. What was a jaunty tune about a light fair carries with it the implication that there’s more out there in the darkness. It’s not much of a stretch to assume some of that “more” could be sinister. Hitler was already a national figure by 1928, after all. There was a lot hanging out in the darker corners of Berlin in those days. Turns out the light didn’t help much.

The city as it stands today is full of museums and memorials dedicated to remembering, to keeping those lights on. The Jewish Museum, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the series of parks commemorating the Wall, and the Soviet War Memorial exist to keep fresh in the mind all the ways in which things can go horrifically wrong. At times, I can hear Germany as a country frantically turning through her notes and asking if it would possible to do any more extra credit. Berlin is the most guilt-ridden city I’ve ever been to, which is not to say that guilt is undeserved, and not to say other cities shouldn’t be guilt-riddener than they currently are.

To what end all that guilt, though, I’m not sure. The synagogues are under 24 hour police protection and the AfD (Germany’s leading far-right party) keeps winning more seats in parliament. There was a teacher with a group of young students at the Soviet War Memorial. I wanted to ask him how he teaches World War II to his students. How do you thread that needle, making sure you relate the stakes of something without burdening students with a sense of guilt that could ultimately prove counter-productive? What’s the emotional experience like, going through that material? As an American, I should be in the best position in the world to relate, but we don’t teach slavery as something that Could Come Back, do we? That’s something that’s over now, we’re pretty sure, thank you.

The most effective exhibit I’ve attended in my week here was Otto Wendt’s Workshop for the Blind, a modest free museum tucked away in a courtyard just past the entrance to die Hackeschen Höfe. It commemorates the efforts of Otto Wendt and a large number of his collaborators (non-derogatory) to save the lives of as many Jews as possible, hiring them to work in his brush factory.  There are many such stories from that time, of ordinary people doing extraordinary and selfless things in the name of righteousness. It is always, that museum drove home, a choice.

That is what gives the best parts of historical Berlin their particular flavor: You see the best and the worst in people all at once. These memorials and parks and museums, when they’re on their game, make it clear that there is always another choice, and that it is right to make that choice. There were several biographies in the Workshop for the Blind that ended by noting those individuals never received acknowledgement for their actions during their lives. How entirely beside the point.

On Sunday, I went to Mauerpark. Deep in former East Berlin, Mauerpark is a wonder. Every 150 feet, you encounter a new musical act, all of them earnestly plying their trade. At the back, on a cobblestone platform surrounded by a half-circle of large stone stadium seats, a prickly Irishman runs karaoke every Sunday.

When I got there, I was thrilled to see the seats completely filled. Hundreds of Berliners had gathered to sit, to listen, to sing. What struck me most about it, coming from karaoke in the U.S., was the complete lack of irony. There was no self-consciousness permitted. Nobody seemed aware of or concerned about the quality of their singing. The audience couldn’t give two shits about anything other than the enthusiasm with which the performers took to their tasks. People cheered consistently and joined in singing when performers grew nervous. During my time on stage, I received reassuring eye contact from a number of people. Berlin, as a city, separate from its history, is fantastically alive.

I do wonder to what extent the implied menace of “Berlin im Licht” was intended. It was written by Bertolt Brecht, after all, so anything is possible. It could very well have been just what it says on the tin, a fun and breezy tune meant to entertain on its way in one ear and out the other, but it’s also entirely possible that Brecht was being, well, Brecht. To me, the German lyrics don’t carry much of a sense of foreboding. They were written in 1928, though, and I’m translating them in 2024. It’s hard not to let the intervening century creep in.

His Three Daughters

His Three Daughters is about death. There’s no getting around it. For most of the film, which takes place almost entirely within the living room of a single Manhattan apartment, the man in the next room is dying. Despite that, there isn’t a whole lot of talk about death. The characters don’t waste any breath speculating on the hereafter. Death isn’t a mystery to be pondered so much as it is a process to be borne out. It is scheduled nurse visits, DNR orders, and shifts keeping watch in case the inevitable should suddenly happen.

The protagonists are a trio of estranged—well, no, not estranged, but certainly distant—sisters who have come together in the final days of their dad’s hospice care. Not only do they not talk about death, you get the impression that they don’t talk about anything all that much. When they do, they seem to be talking past one another. Katie (Carrie Coon), the eldest, talks at, mostly.

The particulars of their lives are slowly and meticulously established. Katie lives in nearby Brooklyn and has a teenage daughter who won’t speak to her. Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) places daily sports bets and spends her days high. She’s been providing live-in assistance to their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), for an unspecified amount of time. It would be easy to make Rachel a stock comedy stoner, a slacker, but Lyonne plays her as sensitive and clear-eyed, someone whose drug habit comes from a need to create a buffer between herself and the world so she can bear to function. The youngest sister, Christina (Elizabeth Olsen, who is magnificent), lives in another state, seemingly happily married and with a young daughter. The two moments when she talks to her daughter on the phone are the only expressions of joy we get for most of the movie.

That’s not to say this is a dour affair. It isn’t. It is often funny, and in unexpected moments, as befits the setting. The hardest I think I’ve ever made my mom laugh was during my grandfather’s funeral, on the way from the car to the door of the funeral home. The script is full of dialogue that reflects back on what we see in unexpected ways. One night at dinner, Katie tries to engage Rachel in conversation about the food, but Rachel is watching the final game in her parlay on her phone. “You think watching will change its outcome?” Katie didn’t intend it as a joke, but it is, and it’s a grim one. All three of them have upended their lives to sit around an apartment and watch their dad die. Do they think watching will change what’s going to happen?

After a particularly exhausting interaction with the hospice care provider, the sisters relax into their first and only real conversation, one in which nobody has any walls up and little seems to be at stake. Christina tells the story of a time when she and dad were watching something on TV and he became furious at the way it depicted death. What was on that screen had nothing in common with the real thing, he said. The mistake the movies and TV always make is using the depiction of death itself to represent the feeling of death, of what it is to have someone pass away. “The only way to sum up a person’s life, to communicate how death truly feels, is through absence.” The movie itself has been following his advice. Up until now, Vincent has been nothing but a suggestion, the beeping of a heart monitor. His absence has managed to take up the entirety of these women’s lives.

“I think what dad meant,” Katie follows up, “is that we don’t really know who people are until after they’re gone.” I agree with Victor’s belief that absence is the real impact of death, but I bristled at Katie’s interpretation. You may learn more about a person after they die as you go through their possessions, but surely we can learn more from the living? At least, in an ideal world. That’s particularly true when talking about our parents, full human beings who’ve often closed off entire portions of themselves in the interest of having and raising us.

At that point, having finally moved past their differences, the three of them go into Vincent’s room for the first time as a trio. He responds to their presence and, as best he can, asks them to bring him out to the living room so he can sit in his recliner.

In some stories, there comes a point where the limitations of reality run up against the need to express something, and reality, however briefly, loses. That moment in The Worst Person in the World when Julie, about to break up with her boyfriend, flicks the kitchen light switch and spends an entire imaginary day elsewhere. The ballet at the end of La La Land, when Seb and Mia play out the decade they could have had together if only they’d been different people. These are, unfailingly, my favorite pieces of storytelling. In His Three Daughters, that point comes when Vincent stands up from his recliner, goes into the kitchen, and opens himself a beer.

At that point, Jay O. Sanders delivers a wonderful monologue. You can always tell when a theatre actor knows they’ve been given a good piece of meat to bite into. He winds up by getting the beer, and then he uncorks. He speaks directly to each of his children, speaking to the hearts of their disagreements and insecurities. He tells them how much he loves them, how much he loved their mothers, and tells them the story of the first woman he ever loved. It’s all wonderful, beautifully acted and emotionally gripping.

As the monologue ends, Vincent leans against the apartment window and looks over to his chair, where he sits dying. His daughters are crying against him. He has, of course, said none of what we just heard. He makes and holds direct eye contact with himself. It seems to me that in his final moments he has imagined all of this, saying the things he never got to. Katie and Rachel are on their own to figure out why they get along like oil and water. Christina will never know why she didn’t get the sense of family that she needed. No person alive will ever again know the story of the first woman he loved. “We really don’t know who people are until after they’re gone” is nonsense. You have to tell people who you are and who they are now, while you’re here, before it’s too late.

The Samurai by Shusaku Endo

If there’s one thing you need to know about Japanese author Shusaku Endo before you start reading his novels, it’s that he was Catholic. Fortunately, when Endo’s name comes up, that bit of information is usually close at hand. It’s right there in the first sentence of his Wikipedia article: “Shusaku Endo was a Japanese author who wrote from the perspective of a Japanese Catholic.”

That phrasing is tortured, but there’s a point to it. It is worth noting that Endo was Japanese and a Catholic, since less than .35% of Japan’s population identifies as such, but his writing grapples both ex- and implicitly with questions of faith and religion, of systems and change, and his perspective on such matters is, to say the least, complex. Even operating within the boundaries of his own faith, his novels are very much the work of a man who was, by nature of being Japanese, somewhat outside of Catholicism, and, by nature of being Catholic, somewhat outside of what it means to be Japanese. He very much wrote from the perspective of a Japanese Catholic.

As is often the case with those who live just outside of a group with which they are deeply familiar, Endo was remarkably critical of both Japan and Catholicism. In fact, two of his most explicitly religious works, Silence and The Samurai, feature Japan and the Catholic Church as, at best, self-absorbed and malignant actors, if not outright villains.

Admittedly, the setting doesn’t help. Both novels concern the tumultuous early 1600s, when Japan closed its borders to Christian missionaries after a 40 years period during which the Jesuits had achieved no inconsiderable amount of success. The Japanese response was firm, to put it mildly. The Japan of Endo’s period novels is cold, calculating, unyielding, and cruel. It is a Government consumed only with maintaining order and the status quo, with flushing out bad actors. Throughout both novels, Japan as a nation is more than happy to use its own citizens as sacrificial pawns. Their humanity never enters the equation.

Missionaries and those affiliated with the Church do not fare any better under Endo’s gaze. Their faith is always beyond reproach, consumed as they are by the need to spread their beliefs, but they are uniformly portrayed as self-aggrandizing. As a random example, one of the protagonists in Silence writes, “It might well be that the poverty-stricken Christians were hungering for a priest to administer the Blessed Sacrament, hear their confessions and baptize their children. In this desert from which missionaries and priests had been expelled the only one who could give the water of life to this island tonight was myself. Yes, only myself.” The ardency of his belief is matched only by his ego. In The Samurai, the missionary Velasco constantly schemes to become the Bishop of Japan once it is formally included within Christendom.

Endo writes with anger towards those who forced Christianity onto a nation that did not need it, and simultaneously for the Government who took that as an excuse to consolidate power through violence. Despite the fact that Endo’s own faith is a result of the missionary work he depicts, he portrays them uniformly as contemptible. The pit at the center seems to be the unwillingness of missionaries to consider the ramifications of their actions. His feelings seem best summarized in “Araki Thomas,” the remarkable short story published in 1965 that likely germinated into Silence the following year:

Whilst fully aware of the ban on Christianity, foreign missionaries continued to steal into Japan. Fired by an intense vision to convert Japan to Christianity, their heroic spirit spurned even death. But what was to be done about the poor Christian peasants who were implicated along with them? The missionaries urged dreams of martyrdom upon the Japanese Christians. They expected them to die as martyrs. Martyrdom was now the only path which led to God, and they believed that, if they were to ignore it, they would be guilty of ignoring God. But did their faith offer nothing but this cruel path?

To Endo, the answer seems to be “No.” “Enough Christian blood had already been shed,” he writes a bit later in the same story, “and every time more missionaries slipped into Japan, more Japanese blood would necessarily be spilled. [Araki Thomas] begged the Church in Rome to forsake the people of Japan, to stop forcing its dreams and ideals upon the Japanese.” Over and over again, the Church is shown to be self-absorbed. The lesson of Silence, as I take it, is that the formalities of faith are nothing compared to its values. What good is Christianity if it prioritizes its promulgation over the safety of the souls it espouses saving? To Endo, true Christians are those who understand that the heart of Christianity is much greater than the rules and rituals.

In reading The Samurai, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the Church and Japan. The Church exists to spread itself as far as possible, to make as much Christian as it can, while blanching in the face of any changes that new influences bring into the church. Japan, during the time of these novels, is intensely interested in defining what Is and Is Not Japan. While the Church “invites” people in so long as they conform to its ways, Japan keeps people out. Endo seems to believe both approaches are wrong. You cannot spread yourself without risking change to the fabric of your being, and you should not reject the possibility of such changes out of hand.

Three Houses at the Signature Theater

Copyright Marc J. Franklin.

“During the pandemic, when the lockdown hit, I had just separated from my girlfriend, and was living on my own in Brooklyn, New York.”

While the specifics change from episode to episode, that’s how each of the three stories in Three Houses, Dave Malloy’s newest musical, begins. The show takes place during an open mic night at a mysterious bar. The bar is obviously not real. As the bartender, Scott Stangland (the only Broadway Pierre I didn’t get a chance to see) emits a sinister ambiance that permeates the theater. Each of the protagonists is compelled to present in turn, and “compelled” is just the word. There’s no indication that this is a choice. “Don’t be scared to dig deep,” Stangland says to each of them before they start, more mocking than encouraging. He knows they will.

The form is similar to Malloy’s previous production at the Signature, Octet, another show in which each character takes a turn to tell their story. Octet takes place at an internet addiction support group, an AA meeting for people hooked on notifications and Instagram feeds. The participants in that group would often share numbers, intertwining their stories when common threads were presented. The separation between sections in Three Houses is much stronger. But for the unifying elements and ensemble support between the three leads, Three Houses is divided into three fully individual extended sequences. When Susan (Margo Seibert) started singing, I had no idea she’d still be singing half an hour later.

I have to confess, when she began her monologue by mentioning the pandemic, I let out a (quiet) sigh. I didn’t know Three Houses was going to be a Pandemic Show. I have an instinctive distrust of anything that tackles COVID-19 explicitly. It feels too recent, and most of the things written about it too flat. “Oh, you were miserable? Cool.” “Oh, you found meaning in enduring those difficult times? Neat.” Fair or not, I couldn’t tell you. My distaste operates at a level below metacognition, in the realm of reflexive hostility. My general position is that most great art about COVID-19 will never call COVID by its name. It will be inferred, subtextual, a vibe.

Three Houses gets away with it because the show isn’t about the pandemic. The pandemic is very important to what’s happening on stage, and certainly important to my thoughts on the show, but it recedes to an ambience most of the time. COVID-19 is why these people are holed up. COVID-19 is why we watch them lose themselves in their obsessions.

If there’s one thing Malloy loves, it’s an obsession. He is compelled by and, it seems pretty clear, terrified of them. Octet is entirely about the compulsions of technology. Moby Dick is, well, we all know what Moby Dick is about. Even Great Comet can be looked at as an interlocking series of obsessions, a group of people consumed by their passions and their ideas. The obsessive moments of Three Houses fit comfortably within Malloy’s corpus, rendered, as ever, with humor and horrible understanding.

Susan is holed up in her late grandmama’s Latvian house. She smokes pot, drinks mulberry wine, and reorganizes her grandmother’s library. Her preoccupations are harmless enough, all things considered, though her recitation of her grandmother’s extensive collection has the edge of compulsion.

Sadie (Mia Pak) loses herself in a Sims-like video game, playing 14 hours a day. During what is probably the show’s highpoint, she recounts a childhood episode at the carnival, when she fed quarter after quarter into an arcade machine. “Quarter in. Roll. Click. Push, push, push, push, push, push,” Sadie repeats over and over, faster and faster, until the quarters have run out. “What happened? Where did I go?” That is a quintessential Malloy lyric. His work suggests that obsessions and compulsions are to be feared because of how they supersede our selves.

Beckett (J.D. Mollison) has the roughest go of it. His segment is when COVID-19 is most present, most suffocating. He completely cuts himself off from the outside world, choosing instead to box himself in. Literally. He orders compulsively from the internet. He names the spider that lives in the corner of the living room. He loses his grandparents to COVID, misses his sister’s “small outdoor” wedding, and loses his job due to poor performance.

If that setup works for all three protagonists, it can work for me, right? During the pandemic, when the lockdown hit, I had just separated from my girlfriend, and was living on my own in Brooklyn, New York. Like Susan, Sadie, and Beckett, I had just gotten out of a relationship when the pandemic hit. I too spent the early pandemic alone, my roommates cast to the far corners of Brooklyn while I stayed in the center. I bought and played and thought about board games. It got to the point where they were all I could think about, even though I myself was sick of them. It’s a strange thing, to have obsessive thoughts that you yourself are aware of as obsessive. It was a mania, and the only way through that I could find.

That behavior receded with time, thank god. Other things have hung around, though. After months of solitude, thinking about a Finnish man she met during her travels, Susan says, “I think he was the last person I touched.” I was alone for 76 days, and I have no idea who the last person I touched was. It feels like such an important thing. It might have been my roommate Sam, the last person to leave. It might have been the woman I went out on a date with the Monday before I decided I wasn’t leaving the apartment again. I don’t know. What I do know, as I contemplate that question, is that I cannot be alone anymore.

Three Houses is about isolation, obsession, and fear. Like all of Dave Malloy’s creations, it is funny, breathless, and discursive in extremis. The show is unified by the idea of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf, which feels neither wholly successful nor wholly necessary. I can’t tell what he is. Is he the things we avoid confronting in our lives? Is he death? Is he both? What does it mean to dance with him, as all three protagonists ultimately do? I don’t know, and I’m not sure the show knows either. That’s alright. There are worse things than having too many ideas.

The Notebook at the Schoenfeld Theatre

It is worth acknowledging from the jump what many of you, my dear and indulging friends, suspect: my expectations for a Broadway adaptation of The Notebook (a movie I do not particularly like) with music from Ingrid Michaelson (a singer-songwriter whose work I do not particularly enjoy) were not, well, they weren’t particularly high. I was mostly interested in seeing it to celebrate a former collaborator, Jordan Tyson, who’s making her Broadway debut as Younger Allie. 

When my parents announced they were coming to town, I knew just the show to recommend. Everything about the idea of a Broadway adaptation of The Notebook that caused me to approach it with eyebrow arched also makes it ideal My Parents Are Coming to the City material. And it is. The Notebook is indeed perfect fodder for the MPACttC crowd. That’s a backhanded compliment in many cases, but The Notebook also happens to be good.

I was more or less instantly charmed. Given the cast, I should have known. It’s hard to watch Dorian Harewood and not be charmed. Harewood, who plays Older Noah, and Maryann Plunkett (Older Allie) are both great actors, and it is a joy to watch them. The contemporary portions of The Notebook are set in the nursing home where Older Allie receives live-in care for advanced Alzheimer’s. Plunkett is remarkable, and exhausting to watch. I mean that as a compliment. I don’t know how she gives that performance eight times a week. It must be physically exhausting. Her Tony nomination is richly deserved.

I assume you know the story. So does the show, come to think of it. There are no attempts to couch anything in a twist, no reveals that a lesser adaptation might try to milk. We find things out as they happen. Perfect. Older Noah reads to Older Allie, his wife, from a mysterious notebook. We “learn” after a little while that the contents of the notebook are their story. I remember that being a bit more of a reveal in the movie version, but here the staging makes that more or less apparent from the start. Again, that’s fine. The Notebook isn’t interested in hiding that from you. The ultimate revelation about the notebook—if you know, you know—still hits, and it hits like a fucking truck.

The most interesting and inspired choice The Notebook makes is dividing both Allie and Noah into three flavors: Younger, Middle, and Older. Prior to seeing the show, I assumed that was a concession born out of practicality. I thought the show might jump back and forth too frequently to allow for aging or de-aging, whether through makeup or quick changes. Instead, the leads in triplicate are part of the conceptual fabric. Even if the idea started as a matter of practicality, the creative team has turned it into an inspired choice. The three eras don’t interact with one another, by which I mean they do not speak to one another, but they do create echoes. The various ages sing together, and spend much of the show on stage simultaneously.

Directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams make smart, tasteful use of the conceit. They never lean on it. This is a shockingly unsentimental show given what it could have been. One of my favorite moments, which comes during the absolutely tear-drenched finale—I have cried that hard in a theater only twice before—is when the Allies and Noahs kiss. The Olders are towards the back, the Middles in the middle, and the Youngers are right out front. It passed quickly, a moment content to be only an instant (treat the moment present as a present for the moment, indeed) and everyone goes their separate ways in the staging. That idea, that we are all of the versions of ourselves at any one moment, that to love someone is to love who you have been together and who you are and who you will be, it’s beautiful. I’m tearing up now thinking about it. The Notebook didn’t need to be this thoughtful.

I also have nothing but compliments for the book, which is sharp, funny, and expedient (Bekah Brunstetter earned that Tony nomination). The songs are where The Notebook struggles most. Individually, they are enjoyable, but as a score, they smear together. None of them make an impression, even if none of them offend. They are too similar. Joy Woods, who is phenomenal as Middle Allie, singlehandedly turns “My Days” into a great 11 o’clock number, but that was the only time I found myself getting lost in the music. The odd lyric jumps out here and there—Older Allie’s “I am in love with all of the things I forget” is wondrous—but there’s little to grab onto. With a better score, The Notebook might have a chance at entering the pantheon. I’m sure it will do just fine in any case.

One final thought before I go. In The Notebook, we get to see Harewood and Plunkett do something we don’t often get to see great older actors do: be people who are old. That phrasing is intentionally belabored. They aren’t playing Old People. Older Allie and Older Noah aren’t sagacious grandparents. Nor are they there to reflect on the younger characters around them. Though it would have assuredly wrecked me, The Notebook features nothing like Light in the Piazza’s “Let’s Walk,” a song about the passage of time framed around the behavior of The Kids These Days, and that’s as it should be. Allie and Noah are the narrative, in all three eras we see depicted. The Notebook gives equal time and weight and dignity to their experiences near the end of their lives as it does to those nearer the beginning. Older Noah’s flirtation with Older Allie is given the same energy as Younger with Younger. That is a kindness we do not normally see afforded in popular entertainment. I looked over at one point to notice my parents quietly holding hands. Who knows what memories they were sharing in that moment.

Evil Does Not Exist and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

It would be hard for the two movies I saw last week, Evil Does Not Exist and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, to exist at further ends of the cinematic spectrum. Evil Does Not Exist is a new film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the writer and director of Drive My Car. It is a Japanese arthouse drama, and almost punishingly slow. If you’re inclined to like that sort of thing (I am), maybe you’d describe it as patient. “It’s boring,” I wrote in my notebook, a neutral acknowledgement of a seemingly objective truth rather than a complaint.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, on the other hand, is the fourth installment in the current iteration of a long-running blockbuster franchise. “Very excited to watch some apes beat the shit out of each other,” I texted a friend before heading into the theater. I got exactly what I wanted.

* * * * *

The slowness of Evil Does Not Exist is a lot to deal with. This is a movie with a 15- or 20-minute town hall meeting, and that’s arguably the most dynamic scene. I love a slow movie in a theater. Slow movies that should be snappy drive me nuts, but movies that have no intention of being anything other than a sensory bath are great excuses to relax in a distraction-free environment. I can let my thoughts off the leash to drift where they may. That’s often the point of slow movies.

In the midst of the many things that passed through my mind in the first forty or so minutes of Evil Does Not Exist, I spent a lot of time thinking about climate change. It felt intrusive, a distraction spurred by a coincidence. Evil Does Not Exist takes place during winter in a heavily-forested town. Everything is dusted with snow. The village of Mizubiki may be in rural Japan, but the way of life depicted didn’t look all that different from my childhood in the heavily-forested outskirts of Connecticut. An early scene in which Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) splits firewood and loads it into a wheelbarrow stirred up strong memories, memories that led me to think about the infrequency with which my childhood yard now likely sees any snow at all.

For a few minutes, I was worried this sudden focus was derailing my experience, but it quickly became clear I’d been played. Far from intrusive, thoughts of climate change had been cultivated. I got there via an unusually personal and immediate route, but Hamaguchi takes great pains throughout the first third of Evil Does Not Exist to establish the patterns of life in the village, and to get you thinking, on some level or another, about threats to those patterns. It’s hard to watch a man ladling water out of a creek without thinking about the fact that a lot of people can’t do that anymore. What once would have seemed quaint now seems precious.

* * * * *

The single aspect of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes that I found most remarkable was the physicality of the apes. I was always aware of their strength, in a sort of tactile way. “Can you imagine,” I thought to myself during an early fight scene, “getting punched by a gorilla who meant it?” Throughout all of the set pieces, the effects team and the animators in particular never lose sight of the weight of each hit. We are meant to marvel at them without ever feeling them to be fantastical. The power and presence of the apes reminded me of the day many years ago when I gazed in awe at the underwater scenes from Disney’s Pinocchio, processing the fact that Jiminy Cricket had weight.

The protagonist is Noa, a young chimpanzee on a mission to free his clan, who were all taken prisoner in a raid. Along the way, he encounters and befriends a human woman, Mae. Within the world of Apes, humans exist, but they are feral and pre- (well, strictly speaking, post-) verbal. The same virus that gave apes speech and intelligence, took them from humans. Mae is unusual. She can talk, fully fluent and cognitively unimpaired.

From that revelation, the movie loses its way a bit, sacrificing what it’s great at (world-building, mood, general vibes) for what it isn’t (plot and emotional payoff). Part of the reason it starts to wobble, I think, is because the creative team is never quite sure what they want to do with Mae. Is she the new audience surrogate, or are we supposed to dislike her? The movie itself seems unable to decide. It’s ambitious, and I like that the movie tries something, even if it doesn’t work. “The fact that she sucks is probably the most interesting thing about that movie,” a friend texted me after seeing the movie, and he’s right.

The movie ends with Noa and his tribe rebuilding their home, and Mae setting off to help humanity do the same. Before she goes, they have a final, standoffish conversation, during which Noa asks if humans and apes can ever live side-by-side. His question is hopeful, even if he asks it despairingly. He wants the answer to be yes.

There’s an insert shot there, brief enough that I almost missed it, of Mae holding a pistol behind her back. It is jarring, a fantastic and unexpected directorial choice. I love that shot, and how it collapses everything the movie has been struggling to articulate into a single frame. The gun is a visceral betrayal of Noa, who’s harmless, but we say that as the audience. The gut reaction of judging Mae is replaced almost instantaneously by self-reflection: Would you feel safe living side-by-side with these apes? Would you live with Noa? I realized in that moment that I wouldn’t. Because of the work that the production team put into making the chimps and gorillas—boy, that gorilla—feel real, I realized that I’d already known that for at least the last hour.

Stereophonic at the John Golden Theatre

The set for Stereophonic, which recreates a 1970s recording studio, is immaculate. Walking into the Golden, I wasn’t sure what decade the play took place in, but I understood the moment I saw that set. The carpet, the pillows, the big beautiful Cadac G Type console, the sheer brownness of the whole thing, it was all correct.

Stereophonic was dreamt up by playwright David Adjmi and musician Will Butler, and what a fabulous idea for a play this is. The audience is presented with a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the tumultuous and torturous recording of a major 1970s rock album. Think Led Zeppelin or, far more accurately, Fleetwood Mac.

It’s easy to describe this as a play about Fleetwood Mac, but Adjmi has said that he researched dozens of bands and did not consciously choose Fleetwood Mac as his model. It is hard to believe, though I don’t think the man has any reason to fib. That there are so many similarities—three men, two women; three Brits, two Americans; a year-long recording process funded by the largest budget ever given to a band; an insufferable but very good lead guitarist who is newer to the band but drives its music—suggests a sort of carcinization process, as though the Fleetwood Mac constellation were ideal for creating a group of people who can’t stop fucking or fighting or, god help them, making great music.

And boy, that music. The music in Stereophonic is astonishing. If the band’s album were available to purchase, I would have bought it on the spot. Ryan Rumery can be congratulated in advance on his upcoming Tony Award win for Best Sound Design of a Play, but I worry Butler and orchestrator Justin Craig will be overlooked in their respective categories. Stereophonic has the best new music I’ve heard in a theatrical production since The Band’s Visit. It may not be a musical, but let’s not let that stop us from getting carried away.

Not only is the music excellent, the show’s relationship to it is exilarating. Every time the band picked up an instrument, the energy changed. Each performance feels spontaneous, carrying the energy of discovery and creation. I don’t know, I truly don’t know, how the performers do it, night after night. One scene has them attempt to record the song “Masquerade” five or six times in a row. I didn’t mind. The final take was exquisite. The sense of place in this production is strong enough that audience applause after takes felt jarring, but I clapped all the same. It’s good shit, man.

The play itself, the material surrounding the music, is uneven. Adjmi’s script is wondrously funny when it wants to be, a cascading series of jokes effortlessly based in character and situation, but too often it turns to dramatic interactions that carry little weight. The day-to-day matters concerning the band are always compelling. There’s a late interaction between the drummer and guitarist, discussing the band as a whole, during which they don’t mention either female member once. That’s smart.

The problems arise when we’re asked to engage with the lives of the band members outside of the studio. Those moments don’t work because the characters never cohere into compelling individuals. They’re archetypes. The guitarist is a narcissistic control freak with a unique vision. His girlfriend is the more gifted songwriter, despite having no self-confidence. The bass player has substance abuse issues. These aren’t people, they’re stand-ins.

As a result, and despite having numerous enthralling sections, Stereophonic is long. There is at least half an hour that could be cut from this three-hour play, and it would be easy to do it. The characters don’t have arcs. There are precious few through-lines of any substance. The characters change, but in bulletins. The bassist was a louche and then he’s clean. Cool. When’s the next song?

Adjmi has talked in interviews about how he consciously avoided making a musical. The songs here are “just” songs. They’re a vibe, an energy, divorced of what’s going on around them. That could be spun as a significant flaw of the show, particularly given its subject. “What Makes You Think You’re the One?” is so compelling because you can picture Lindsay Buckingham singing it while giving Stevie Nicks a death stare in the booth, and you can tell it pisses him off that she’s ignoring him. This music shouldn’t exist divorced of what’s happening around it, at least not in the dramatic portions of this play.

On the other hand, there’s a stretch at the beginning of Act IV, probably about 15 or 20 minutes long, during which the show becomes an out-and-out comedy centered on the premise, “Can you imagine what it must have been like to be the poor engineers working on Tusk?” Three of the band members, two of whom now cannot stand to be in the same room with one another, are recording vocal overdubs. In between takes, they take potshots at one another that are turned up to 11, so heightened that the interaction has no choice but to serve as comedy. The engineers struggle to maintain peace long enough to get what they need on tape. The singing is magnificent, and everything else drops away each time they start singing. There’s a sense of tragedy in it, and a sense of wonder, that these people who so fully loathe one another can still create this magic. The scene is also hilarious. A masterful stretch of theatre.

My experience of Stereophonic can be summed up by my reactions to two different moments in Act IV. When the drummer told everyone that his wife and kids had left him, I was more or less indifferent. I was sorry for him, sure, but only in the abstract. When the guitarist casually mentioned during a band meeting that they’d cut “Masquerade.” I was absolutely heartbroken. I think I may have even gasped out loud.

Beauty and the Beast (Work in Progress)

I love process. I love drafts and iterations, watching something take form. I often wish we celebrated the process more, instead of just focusing on the results, but I recognize I’m in the minority there. Nobody wants to see Yo-Yo Ma practice a piece for hours, they want to see the soaring performance that comes after.

There is evidence, though, that people may want to see more of the process than they realize. The world (correctly) lost its mind three years ago when the Beatles documentary Get Back showed Paul McCartney will “Get Back” into existence over the course of about 45 minutes. The recent deluxe edition of Revolver offered something similar, as “Got to Get You Into My Life” thrillingly took form over four distinct versions.

Aside from the technical knowledge you can gain by consuming multiple drafts of something, the invaluable insights surrounding the “why”s behind each decision made, observing the process also makes great works seem within reach. The picture book Princess Mononoke: The First Story, for example, collects a series of conceptual paintings from a young Hayao Miyazaki. The story, which he wrote and illustrated in the early 80’s, contains the seeds of what would become not only Princess Mononoke, but also My Neighbor Totoro. That those two ideas were at one point intertwined makes both masterpieces seem less impossible as individual accomplishments, while it seems all the more magical—to me at least—that each arrived at its final, “inevitable” form.

* * * * *

In September of 1991, as Disney Animation was putting the finishing touches on Beauty and the Beast, the studio made the unusual decision to bring a work print to the New York Film Festival. Though it is not uncommon for live-action directors to screen rough cuts, this was an unprecedented choice for an animation studio. My guess is that Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg—for some reason I always want to call him Jeffrey Katzenberger—was eager to publicize Disney’s next musical. While The Little Mermaid had been a big success, subsequent release The Rescuers Down Under was a bomb.

The NYFF print was not a rough draft. The film had been locked for ages. The audio was basically finished. What made it a work in progress was the animation, 30% of which was raw pencil drawings, storyboards, or even concept art. In the age of the Internet, and having lived through the era of the DVD extra (RIP), we’ve grown accustomed to this sort of look behind the curtain. This was 1991. Most of the people in that audience had probably never seen anything like it. By all accounts, it was a success. Viewers responded with a lengthy standing ovation.

While I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be in that theater, I don’t have to imagine what it’s like to watch the print, which was included when Beauty and the Beast made its DVD debut in 2002. Despite having owned the print across two formats and two decades, I realized last night that I’d never watched it. I was surprised. I adore animation as a medium and technical process. I almost majored in animation in undergrad. The work in progress version of Beauty and the Beast feels like something I should be screening annually at my apartment, and I’ve never  seen it? I decided to put it on.

It was wonderful, obviously. It’s always wonderful to experience something you know and love in a new way. In my lifetime, I have watched Beauty and the Beast well over 100 times (if my mom is reading this, she probably just scoffed out loud at the idea that the number could be so low, but I’m being conservative). Over time, it has settled into something familiar. Not closed off, necessarily, but finished. The work print cracked it back open. Because I was paying more attention, watching it as a new work, I experienced it more intensely.

More than that, the unfinished pencils, storyboards, and concept paintings encouraged me to really think about the people who made the movie. Rather than focusing on the animation, I started thinking about the animators. I do that all the time when watching stop-motion, whose tactility actively encourages the audience to think about the artisans. Finalized hand-animation renders the process, and therefore the people behind it, invisible.

The rough pencil lines of unfinished animation bring a similar tactile quality. Much as you cannot see a slight indentation on a plasticine puppet without thinking of the thumb that made it, you cannot look at unvarnished graphite without imagining the pencil and the hand holding it.

Glen Keane, the supervising animator for the Beast, delivered something particularly astonishing. Because I was paying so much attention, I even noticed new details in the finished material. Take as an example the scene after the Beast rescues Belle from the wolves.

“If you would hold still, it wouldn’t hurt as much,” Belle chides.

“If you hadn’t runaway, this wouldn’t have happened,” Beast replies, a smirk on his face.

“If you hadn’t frightened me, I wouldn’t have run away.”

“Well,” he begins, frantically searching for a reply, “you shouldn’t have been in the West Wing.”

Look at his face! He is grinning! Grinning! In 33 years of watching Beauty and the Beast, I never before noticed that he is enjoying the flirtation, the back-and-forth. He is so pleased with himself for finding a riposte. “Keane should have gotten an Oscar nomination for Best Actor,” I muttered to myself during another scene. I stand by it.

The ultimate outcome of all this is that every pan, every zoom, every vocal inflection, every subtle bit of squash-and-stretch, all of it became transparently the result of human choices. Of course, it always was. Just like Yo-Yo Ma’s transcendent performances of Bach’s cello suites, the electric final arrangement of “Got to Get You Into My Life,” and the forms into which My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke ultimately settled, Beauty and the Beast as a movie exists because a remarkable, driven group of people got together and did the work. The NYFF work in progress print is a wonderful reminder that you have to build a house brick-by-brick, that the process is just as worthy of celebration as the end result.

If anyone wants to attend next year’s screening, please know ahead of time that seating at my place is limited. Tickets go on sale May 1st.