“I’m in a New York state of mind”
--Billy Joel
New York is a city of islands or near-islands. In all, there are more than three dozen of them, inhabited and uninhabited. Some are historic (Liberty Island, Ellis Island). You can take the tram to one of them, Roosevelt Island (it’s a fast four-minute journey over the East River and highly recommended). Roosevelt has its share of historic sites, including the neo-gothic ruin of a former smallpox hospital. Staten Island is the most suburban of the five boroughs. Since Queens and Brooklyn are both on the western end of Long Island, only the Bronx is actually attached to the American mainland.
Other islands are not as well known, especially to non-New Yorkers. The 172-acre Governors Island in New York Harbor, which is a former Army base, then later used by the Coast Guard, has no residents but it does present festivals and concerts and, more recently, an ambitious public arts program. The combined Randalls and Wards Islands also have their share of music festivals as well as a track and field stadium and miles of wetlands. City Island is known for its seafood restaurants. Hart Island is the city’s public cemetery as well as the site of a former Civil War prison camp for Confederate soldiers. The city’s newest island, the wonderful Little Island, is currently running a performing arts festival this summer at its outdoor amphitheater through September.
The most famous island of them all is, of course, Manhattan. At 23 square miles with roughly 1.7 million residents, it is much smaller than Queens, the largest of the boroughs and less populous than Brooklyn but what it lacks in size it makes up for in its iconic cultural status.
I spent a few days last month taking in its sights and cramming in as many cultural activities as I could, including the politically charged two-woman drama N/A costarring Holland Taylor as Nancy Pelosi and Ana Villafañe as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater; a revival of Cabaret starring Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin at the August Wilson Theatre; the American Ballet Theatre’s production of Woolf Works, inspired by the novels of Virginia Woolf, at the Metropolitan Opera House; and two exhibitions, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vivian Maier: Unseen Work at Fotografiska.
This is my report.
Come to the Cabaret
Since its original Broadway production in late 1966, Cabaret has attempted to reflect the moment, whether the Vietnam War then or the chaotic times today. Cabaret is based on Christopher Isherwood’s collection of stories Goodbye to Berlin and John Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera. His most famous character, Sally Bowles, was inspired by a real person, Jean Ross, a young English chanteuse who sang in second-rate cabarets in Berlin. She was 19 at the time, recently expelled from boarding school when she moved to Germany. Cabaret’s Kit Kat Club was intended to evoke those tawdry Weimar-era clubs. In her biography, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, which will be published next month, Katherine Bucknell has called Bowles Isherwood’s alter ego, “his female double, enthusiastically sleeping her way to nowhere.”
In April 2024, the latest revival of Cabaret opened at the August Wilson Theatre straight from London’s West End. Directed by Rebecca Frecknall, it stars Eddie Redmayne reprising his role as the Emcee while Gayle Rankin took over from Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles. But its themes remain the same: fascism, anti-Semitism, abortion, the Holocaust.
Frecknall, working with set and costume designer Tom Scutt, transformed the space into an immersive experience. Patrons queue up at one of two stage doors and enter through a narrow entryway—speakeasy-style. Once inside, they are offered a free cherry schnapps while the Prologue cast, as they are referred to, mingle and dance and even flirt with the audience. Patrons can also buy pre-show drinks in one of the various rooms of the theater: the Pineapple Room, the Red Bar, the Green Bar, the Vault Bar. It’s a fun way to get people in the Weimar mood.
Frecknall’s Cabaret is markedly different from previous versions. The biggest change is the use of a round and rotating small stage. The stage is so small in fact that it leads to some awkward staging: there is neither furniture to sit down on nor a bed to lie on. A typewriter is set on the floor or propped up on a suitcase. Another major change is the treatment of the Kit Kat Club ensemble. In Sam Mendes’ famous revivals, the actors did double duty singing and playing their own instruments. Here, the orchestra is positioned in two mezzanines, opposite each other, overlooking the cast.
Frecknall has also reinvented the Emcee. Rather than being the victim of the Nazis, as he was in Mendes’ revivals when it was revealed he was both Jewish and gay, here he is the one in control: a master puppeteer, manipulating not only the characters on stage but also the emotions of the audience. As portrayed by Redmayne, he is also creepy and grotesque. He wears a tiny, and rather silly, party hat, his movements peculiar. Both arms hang loosely at his side, his back hunched over. Later he transforms into various manifestations from a skeleton to a Nazi clone in a three-piece suit. An amoral nihilist—(“I Don't Care Much” is one of his signature songs), he also serves as a deadly one-man Greek chorus, anticipating a savage future (“Tomorrow Belongs to Me”). Part entertainer and part bringer of Death, he is meant to be repellent and seductive but to me, he was more the former than the latter.
On the other hand, Sally Bowles, “the queen of Mayfair,” remains the same insecure and frivolous creature that she has always been—but with a difference.
Initially, I had reservations about Rankin. Sometimes she shouts, rather than sings her songs. But given that the Sally Bowles of Isherwood’s stories could barely carry a tune, Rankin’s interpretation makes sense. After all, Bowles was never meant to be a great singer until, that is, Liza Minnelli changed the trajectory in the film version. But later, in the torch ballad, “Maybe This Time,” Rankin shows off her powerful pipes.
As it turns out, Rankin is a magnificent Sally Bowles: shallow and petty, yes, but also desperate and vulnerable and, ultimately, sympathetic. And when she sings her showstopper title song (dressed in an oversized beige man’s suit no less), the crowd roared in appreciation.
The role of Clifford Bradshaw, the young American writer and a stand-in for Isherwood, is usually problematic and has been since the beginning. In the film and television adaptations, the character was English, like Isherwood, but in the stage productions he has always been American. In recent years, Bradshaw (one of Isherwood’s middle names) has become more substantial, changing from a generic white American writer abroad to a more complicated and nuanced figure. In recent productions he is usually played as Black and bisexual. Here, Ato-Blankson Wood, a Tony nominee for his role in Slave Play, is the first Black man and the first Black gay man to play Bradshaw on Broadway. He is a warm presence and has great chemistry with Rankin. In an interview in Playbill magazine, Blankson-Wood said he used the lives of the Harlem Renaissance-era writer Claude McKay and philosopher Alain Locke as inspiration. Both men lived in Berlin between the world wars. “One of the things that Claude McKay said was that he felt that he could be treated like a human in Europe, Berlin specifically,” he said. Meanwhile, Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell as the older couple, Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz, are perfection and, in some profound ways, are the soul of the production.
I had some issues with this revival—mostly involving the staging and the interpretation of the Emcee—but it still brought me to tears when Natascia Diaz as Fraulein Kotz sang her dramatic rendition of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” At the Finale, before the curtain came down, the cast stood together on the rotating platform, everyone trapped in a vicious cycle of violence, their uniformly beige suits symbolizing the rule of conformity and the triumph of fascism. It’s a poignant and powerful moment. Redmayne and Rankin will play their final performances on September 14. Cabaret will continue its run through the end of the year.
Stones in Her Pockets
On March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf placed a large and heavy stone in her coat pocket and waded into the River Ouse. Her body was found a short distance away a week or so later when children playing under a bridge came across her body.
Woolf was famous for experimenting with form—she was a genius in her use of internal monologue to capture her characters’ thought processes, after all--but she was also interested in music and dance.
Her life, and death, forms the subtext of Wayne McGregor’s powerful contemporary ballet, Woolf Works, which received its New York premiere last month by the American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House. (It premiered at London’s Royal Ballet in 2015.) Woolf Works consists of three acts inspired by Woolf’s novels with an original score by composer and frequent McGregor collaborator Max Richter.
McGregor weaves biographical elements from Woolf’s novels, diaries, essays, and letters, blurring the boundaries between her life and her characters. The first act, “I now, I then,” based on Mrs. Dalloway, is the most traditional of the triptych. Poignantly, it opens with the tolling of Big Ben followed by an audio of Woolf’s own voice. Sitting in the stunning surroundings of the Met, it is jarring to hear, serving as it does as an emotional reminder of her absence. The first act captures the lyrical rhythm of Woolf’s prose as it features Clarissa Dalloway, the title character, and her husband, Richard, and the shell-shocked World War I soldier Septimus who takes his own life. The Italian ballerina Alessandra Ferri, who originated the role and returns here at age 61, plays the author and Clarissa as she dances with her younger self and old flames, both male and female. Giant bookends form a set piece, echoing the literary theme.
The second act, “Becomings,” is based on Woolf’s wild and ahead-of-its time novel Orlando. Not surprisingly, it’s the most fun of the three acts, a gender-fluid romp through 300 years of history and full of agile movements, Elizabethan-like costumes, and a mesmerizing, if somewhat incongruous, laser display accompanied by Richter’s pulsating electronic score.
Woolf Works ends on a somber note with the third act, “Tuesday,” inspired by her novel The Waves as Richter’s score rises and falls with the sounds of the sea, an image of rolling waves projected onto a huge screen. It features a recording by the actor Gillian Anderson reading Woolf’s suicide letter, written to her husband, Leonard. With its themes of decay and renewal, childhood and adulthood, the piece ends with Ferri as she metaphorically makes tentative steps toward the river, disappearing from view, before she is engulfed into the darkness.
From the North Shore to Harlem
Vivian Maier was a bit of a disappearing artist herself.
Maier, as most people know, was the North Shore nanny who took thousands of thousands of photographs during her life but only became famous when a Chicago real estate agent bought the contents of her storage lockers on the North Side after she had stopped paying the rent.
Billed as Maier’s first major U.S. exhibition and running through September 29 at Fotografiska (281 Park Avenue South), “Vivian Maier: Unseen Work” consists of 200 of her works from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s, including vintage and modern prints, color photographs, black and white photographs, and even Super 8 films.
Maier was born in New York, the daughter of a French mother and an Austrian father, but spent part of her childhood in France. She returned to the US and lived in New York from 1951 to 1956, before moving to Chicago, for reasons unknown. For many years she was a nanny on the North Shore. In the mid-1970s, according to biographer Pamela Bannos, she was hired by television talk show host Phil Donohue to work as a live-in nanny but since his boys didn’t take to her, she stayed for less than a year. During her last days in Chicago, she lived on Sheridan Road in Rogers Park. She died here in 2009 at the age of 83.
She was a street photographer in the tradition of such earlier masters as Eugene Atget, Bernice Abbott, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus. She had an insatiable urge to shoot whatever she saw, wherever she went. She took images of ordinary life with a keen eye for detail and composition. She took photos of people that others didn’t see or simply ignored.
Maier’s best subject was herself. Accompanied by her omnipresent Rolleiflex camera and floppy hat—both are on display here under glass—she took photos of her shadow self as reflected in mirrors and windows. She had a remarkable eye, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. Her specialty was the subtle interplay between light and shadow or the long dark shadow that she cast.
Meanwhile, uptown at the Metropolitan Museum, I had the pleasure of seeing the exquisite Harlem Renaissance exhibit, which is ending its run on July 28. Consisting of 160 works of paintings, sculpture, photographs, and film, it features major Harlem figures, including poet Langston Hughes, photographer James Van Der Zee, sculptor Augusta Savage, and artist Aaron Douglas. Douglas’ work is especially compelling. He specialized in African-American themes and played with African motifs. Among his best works are "The Creation" (1935), which was inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s 1927 poetry collection, God’s Trombones, and his monumental "Aspects of Negro Life from Slavery through the Reconstruction" (1934), which was designed as a series of murals for display at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
The exhibition has a strong Chicago connection: it prominently features the work of the Archibald Motley Jr., one of Chicago’s most famous and critically acclaimed artists. (His nephew was the writer Willard Motley.) A graduate of the School of the Art Institute, Motley is known for his vibrant representations of African-American street and nightlife, heavily influenced by jazz. Although one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance movement, he never actually lived in Harlem. But from Bronzeville to Montmartre, his vivid and brightly colorful paintings come to lively, throbbing life in such works as The Liar, The Plotters, Cocktails, Black Belt—all set in Chicago—and Blues, Café, Dans La Rue, Jockey Club—set in Paris.
Motley also painted portraits, including his own self-portrait, which he did shortly after the Chicago Race Riots in 1919. Here he looks dapper, with his neatly trimmed mustache and wearing a crisp white shirt, dark jacket, and dark tie with a horseshoe pin, an artist’s palette spread out before him." Portrait of the Artist’s Father" is reminiscent of 17th century Dutch Master portraits. His father was a former Pullman porter and here the artist captures the elder Motley’s dignity and courtly sense of decorum.
In a lovely coda, the exhibit ends with Romare Bearden’s "The Block", his lively tribute to Harlem that depicts evangelical churches, barbershops, and corner grocery stores—a life-affirming streetscape––as children play in the street and ordinary people go about their lives living cheek by jowl in crowded apartment buildings.
Historic and Literary Pubs
All this culture hopping can make one hungry and thirsty. In between the activities, I managed to fit in visits to two wonderful taverns. The Revolutionary War era Fraunces Tavern (54 Pearl Street), located at the tip of Manhattan, is New York’s oldest pub. Built in 1719 and originally called the Queen’s Head Tavern, it was later restored by the Sons of the Revolution and is now both a public landmark and thriving restaurant with brunch, lunch, and dinner menus. Upstairs is a museum--for a small admission fee, visitors can see the Long Room where George Washington gave his farewell address to his troops in December 1783, before returning to his home in Mount Vernon. Other notable patrons have included Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock who reportedly dined on fried oysters after the Battle of Lexington and Concord. A week before their famous duel in 1804, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr met here.
With its wooden tables, low ceilings, and warren of rooms, Fraunces Tavern has plenty of Old World charm to spare. To my mind, it is the closest thing in New York to London’s Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub, the literary haunt and watering hole of Dr. Samuel Johnson. Raise a glass in the picturesque Dingle Whiskey Bar and, in the evening, enjoy some live entertainment at the cozy upstairs piano bar.
In NoHo, the dimly lit Swift’s Hibernian Lounge (34 E. 4th Street) may not be as ancient as Fraunces Tavern—it was founded in 1995—but it looks old nevertheless, and has a bygone feel--and a literary feel too: it is named, after all, in honor of Jonathan Swift, the Irish satirist (that’s his image on the sign outside the front door and an illustration from his classic Gulliver’s Travels hangs outside the restrooms in the lower level). With its exposed brick walls, church-like pews, long bar, and colorful murals, it has become one of my favorite bars to go to whenever I’m in the city. Bonus: the night we were there several musicians—on the bagpipes, guitar, and fiddle––were having an informal session in one of the snug corners.
So, come for the Guinness and stay for the camaraderie. It’s the perfect place to end a New York evening.
Support arts and culture journalism today. This work doesn't happen without your support. Contribute today and ensure we can continue to share the latest reviews, essays, and previews of the most anticipated arts and culture events across the city.