Company & Six: Broadway's Back Baby!

The last thing I saw on Broadway was Hangmen in February 2020, right before everything shut down. Well, this past weekend, I made my triumphant return to a Broadway theater to see not one, but two brilliant shows. If you're a New Yorker, or happen to be visiting, head to the box office and pick up some tickets, because boy oh boy is live theater still a magical thrill.

Company: You may love this Sondheim musical, but get ready to love this revival even more. Directed by Marianne Elliott, this production originally debuted on the West End where it won an Olivier award for Best Musical Revival, but now it has transferred over to Broadway where I am certain it is due to win a Tony. 

Company originally centers on a man named Bobby on his 35th birthday where he is surrounded by his coupled-up friends who are all pushing him to get married. What follows is a series of vignettes where he visits these various couples and witnesses their shenanigans, and we also follow his relationships with three different women, none of whom seem to be quite right for him. However, in this revival, we get a gender swap, where our lead is a 35-year old woman named Bobbie, played brilliantly by Katrina Lenk. And of course, we've got Patti LuPone reprising her role as Joanne, Bobbie's older, cynical, oft-divorced friend, who will belt the hell out of "Ladies Who Lunch" in the second act.

It's amazing what a little gender flip can do. In the original version, Bobby's relationship with an airhead flight attendant, April, can feel a bit played out, but now watching Bobbie struggling to make it work with the airhead flight attendant, Andy, made me chuckle. The engaged couple of Paul and Amy are now a same-sex couple of Paul and Jamie, and hearing "Getting Married Today" sung by a panicked groom instead of an anxious bride is so much fun. The staging of this show is also impeccable, with every piece of the set containing surprises (during "Getting Married Today" characters will pop out of the most unlikely places and you will be delighted). The costumes are vivd and memorable, with Lenk's red jumpsuit tying the whole show together, but then LuPone swanning out in her glasses and fur coat for "Ladies Who Lunch" is a showstopper. We also had technical difficulties during the second act that took about fifteen minutes to fix - in that time, some of the cast, including LuPone, came out to entertain the audience, with Patti declaring "theater is an accident waiting to happen." I swear to God, Broadway is the only place where a mistake can make things even more exciting than a perfect show. 

Given Stephen Sondheim's recent passing, it feels even more poignant to watch this show and see how his work has been adapted and re-vitalized for the 21st century. The show's themes are of course as relevant as ever, but this fresh take on the casting is an exciting update and made these familiar and popular songs feel brand new again. So get some tickets (there's a daily lottery, or there are rush tickets at the box office to cater to every budget!) and treat yourself to the best that Broadway has to offer.

Six: I have been entering the Six lottery for months and finally got tickets to see it on Sunday. Originally put on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by a bunch of Cambridge University students (isn't this the origin story of all great British comedies?) the show then went on to the West End and has now arrived stateside. It's the story of the six wives of Henry VIII, as sung by those six queens in the style of iconic pop stars, and it is a raucous, feminist celebration.

The show kicks off with the familiar rhyme, "Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived." But there's nothing familiar after that, as we get six women claiming the stage with their microphones and iconic outfits and competing to be recognized as the most well-known of Henry's wives. They each get a solo performance to make their case - though you can expect most of them to be interrupted by Anne Boleyn who claims that if they didn't get beheaded, they can't possibly win this contest of who has the most tragic tale. Each woman has such a singular story of what particular nightmare she had to face as a wife of Henry VIII and then more generally as a woman in this particular time period. And of course, they are all only remembered because they were his wives, but no one knows anything about them beyond that. 

This musical is a spectacularly entertaining history (*cough* herstory *cough*) lesson, and in a short 90 minutes, you will learn more than you probably did in watching four seasons of The Tudors. And you'll be dancing in your seat as you do so. The music and lyrics by Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow are hysterically toe-tapping and whether it's a soaring ballad by Jane Seymour or some German techno and rap delivered by Anna of Cleves, you are bound to find some song that you will get obsessed with for the next year. Six is such a clever, and inventive, and innovative idea for a musical, and it is also short, sweet, and so damn catchy. So head on over to the theater and get down with the Queens - you'll have a royally good time. 

Plane Movies: Pig, Dear Evan Hansen, Shiva Baby

One of my favorite things about going on vacation is the plane ride where I get to watch an eclectic bunch of movies that I missed in theaters earlier in the year. Therefore, please enjoy three reviews of insanely different movies that span quite a wide spectrum in terms of entertainment value and critical acclaim.

Pig: The trailer for this movie seemed so odd - Nicolas Cage is on a revenge mission to get back his stolen truffle pig! - but critics kept saying it was one of their favorite movies of the year and I couldn’t understand why. Then I watched it and oh man. The hype was real. 

Yes, this is a movie where Nicolas Cage gets increasingly disheveled and beaten up as he goes on a quest around Portland to find the people who stole his beloved truffle pig. But this isn’t some sort of John Wick-esque action thriller. Instead, writer-director Michael Sarnowski has created a profound movie about the toll that grief can take on a man, the need for isolation and a retreat from humanity, and then the process of slowly putting the pieces back together through your one connection to the outside world.

And this is a movie about food. Cage’s character is a renowned former chef, and every meal he prepares is this meditative exercise, the one last thing of beauty and enjoyment he has in his daily existence. I really don’t know how to explain this film to you except to say that it is a MOOD, and at one point I got very emotional about how the story had gotten very existential and meaningful. Granted I had woken up very early to take this flight and was a tad sleep-deprived, but still, I promise, this is a really surprising and wonderful film and more people need to watch it. Come back and tell me what you thought and we can all be weirdly moved together. 

Dear Evan Hansen: People did NOT love this movie, and now that I have seen it, I can see why. As you go along, you start to wonder why the hell people didn’t turn on this story sooner when it was an award-winning Broadway musical. But they've certainly turned on it now!

Ben Platt stars as the titular Evan Hansen, a high schooler who is plagued by anxiety and is struggling to make friends. Due to a series of unlikely mishaps, when a troubled student dies by suicide, his family mistakenly thinks that Evan was his only friend at school and they are desperate to connect with him and learn more about the times when their son might have been more happy. Rather than setting the family straight, Evan lets this lie snowball, to the point where he becomes a national celebrity for his relationship with the dead student.

Oh it’s all so weird and icky. There’s an all-star cast, including Amy Adams, Kaitlyn Dever, and Julianne Moore, but there’s so much going on with these characters, and all of it is a little bit twisted and a little bit sad. Contrivance is heaped upon contrivance, and it all feels so manipulative and awful, because at the end of the day, our protagonist is a kid who is lying about a dead kid, and giving false hope to a grieving family. I’m sure there are fans of the musical who will defend it to the death, but this story is just a little too insane. And while the cast, production value, and music are all perfectly decent, I felt vaguely unsettled throughout my viewing. So if being uncomfortable is your jam, this is the movie for you. But if you are seeking an inspirational and uplifting musical, please go elsewhere.

Shiva Baby: What a freaking delight. This movie is only 78 minutes long, but all those minutes are a nonstop comic masterpiece, a farce of epic proportions that keeps heaping indignities upon the main character until everything culminates in a hysterical sequence in a minivan that is *chef’s kiss.* 

Frankly, I am loath to give too much away, so here’s a very broad plot description. Danielle (Rachel Sennott) is a Jewish college student who has come home to attend a shiva with her parents (played by the incredible Polly Draper and Fred Melamed). Unfortunately, when they get there, she discovers her sugar daddy has also been invited to attend the shiva and unbeknownst to her, he used to work with her father. If that wasn't enough, her ex-girlfriend (who her mother insists was just part of an experimental "phase") is also in attendance. And things just proceed to unravel further from there.

It's impossible to be bored for a second while watching this movie. You will cringe, you will laugh, you will gasp. Anything that can go wrong, does go wrong, sometimes in quiet ways, and sometimes in very loud ways, and writer-director Emma Seligman does an incredible job of slowly charting how Danielle loses her mind over the course of this disastrous day. It is such a well-observed, perfectly crafted gem of a movie, and it is the perfect pick-me-up when you need a rapid infusion of entertainment. Seek it out immediately and  then grab a bagel and come giggle about it with me afterwards. 

Sort Of & Station Eleven: Something Fresh for Your TV

Over the past month I got caught up on two very different but very intriguing shows on HBO Max. Do you want a contemplative tale about a not-so-dystopian post-pandemic future? Or a slice-of-life queer dramedy that deals with gender expression, family dynamics, and self-acceptance? Come on, you know you want both.

Station Eleven: Based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel, this is the story of a traveling theater troupe in the US, twenty years after a pandemic has decimated the majority of the global population. Yeah, I know this sounds grim in 2022, and maybe you don’t want to subject yourself to any pandemic fiction when we are still living in a pandemic reality. But the show is immensely intriguing, offering up a startlingly decent portrait of humanity and how we might all just settle into our new normal without turning into zombie hordes.

I’ll admit, my main takeaway from watching this show has been that I immediately want to read the novel in order to flesh out some of the sketchier aspects of the show where plot points kind of came and went without too much background. But each week, this show offered up major vibes. It deserves to win a host of technical Emmys for achievement in costume design, production design, cinematography, and music, because here is a show that celebrates human creativity and the arts. Most post-apocalyptic tales are consumed with the base human struggles of survival, and we do get that somewhat when the show flashes back to the initial days of the pandemic when people were dying all over the place and supermarkets were raided for all available supplies. But in the flash forwards, we see a much gentler vision of the new society that has been established, where people honor the “before” times by putting on Shakespeare plays and singing karaoke to Lisa Loeb. 

The show is also beautifully scripted by creator Patrick Somerville and his team of writers. There are multiple story arcs that span geographies and time periods, and at times it was a struggle to keep things straight (another reason I’m looking forward to reading the book). But if you immerse yourself in the show (and now that it’s all available, if you just straight up binge it) you are in for a real treat of watching how those arcs collide or complement each other as we go through this epic tale. The cast is phenomenal, with special kudos to Himesh Patel who is doing a stellar American accent (and also does good ABCD Hindi when called upon to do so), and Mackenzie Davis who has to channel all the emotion of her younger self as well as the woman she has grown into over the course of this dystopian future. I didn’t think this show was as feel-good as many critics were claiming (maybe the fact that the pandemic on this show is way worse than Covid made people feel better about our real pandemic?), but ultimately, it was gorgeous to look at, and had clever story elements that captivated me. Each week, I had to stay glued to my TV lest I forget a name or some minor detail that would be recalled in a later episode, and maybe that’s this show’s greatest accomplishment. In a world full of second screening and distractions, it demanded your attention and got you to watch some Shakespeare.

Sort Of: Co-created and written by Bilal Baig and Fab Filippo, Baig stars in this show as Sabi Mehboob, a non-binary first generation Pakistani-Canadian who uses they/them pronouns and is trying to sort out what exactly they want from life. Over the course of the first season’s eight episodes, we will follow the evolution of Sabi’s relationship with their mom (played by the incredible Ellora Patnaik who embodies the typical immigrant Pakistani woman who is slightly regressive but trying to become more woke now that her husband is off in Dubai and exerting less control over the household). This particular story arc is both sweet but fraught, because while Sabi's mom believes she raised a son, she now has to come to terms with what it means to have a non-binary child and how she will navigate this among her wider immigrant Muslim community.

The main story arc, however, concerns Sabi’s employers. Sabi works as a nanny to two young kids, and when their mom is in a terrible accident and ends up in the hospital, Sabi becomes even more of a crutch for the family to lean on, even though they and the father might clash over what constitutes good parenting advice. Along the way, you will be introduced to Sabi’s best friend 7ven (Amanda Cordner), and their aspirations to live their best queer life in Berlin. Which brings us to the central conflict of whether Sabi is ever going to also make a drastic change or continue to be buffeted along their current path of least resistance.

This show is very funny, but it is a dry, sarcastic kind of humor, precisely the kind I relish. This is not your stereotypical sitcom that’s trying to get big laughs. Instead, this is sly and observational, a sort of world-weary comedy delivered by someone who is trying to make their way in the world and wishes all the humans around them wouldn’t make it so difficult. And the show is genuinely heartwarming and affirming about what the journey to queer acceptance looks like. Many people in Sabi’s life get it wrong, but the simple act of someone asking them what their pronouns are is all it takes for Sabi to realize this a question they’ve never even dared to ask themself. There is nothing on TV that is quite like this show, so please give it a shot. Each episode is less than 30 minutes long and you can polish it off in an afternoon, but you’ll be thinking about it for a lot longer once you’re done.

Italian Storytelling: The Lost Daughter & The Hand of God

As we head into the first long weekend of 2022, it's time to see what Netflix has on deck. If you spent New Year's Day bingeing your way through the new seasons of Queer Eye and Cobra Kai, perhaps you need a change of pace. In which case, I bring you two films that are guaranteed to be awards contenders this year. I would say I found these movies mostly intriguing rather than pleasing, but nonetheless, it's worth giving them a try.

The Lost Daughter: Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Elena Ferrante, and starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Jessie Buckley, this is a "woman's picture" through and through. The original novel is set in Italy (like most Ferrante novels) and the characters are all Italian, but in this adaptation, the setting is a Greek island and the characters are all British or American so the actors can do their regular accents (well except for Jessie Buckley who has to sound English as she is playing the younger version of Olivia Colman's character). This is the story of a professor named Leda (Colman), who has arrived in Greece for a holiday. She runs into a raucous Greek-American family on the beach, and while they initially clash, she ends up befriending Nina (Johnson), who is a young and exhausted mother of a three-year-old girl. Leda can relate to Nina's depression over being a young mother, and in flashbacks, we see how the young Leda struggled with taking care of her own two daughters.

The story unwinds slowly, ratchetting up the tension as you piece together some of Leda's history, as well as speculate on how exactly this "friendship" with Nina is going to turn out. This is mostly a tale of motherhood and resentment, and how "children are a crushing responsibility." The fathers, naturally, seem to be mostly absent when it comes to the business of child-rearing, and the women are struggling to establish their own identity while having a child constantly clamor for their attention. This film re-emphasized to me how having children is an absolute nightmare, but for people who already have kids, they will probably sit in judgment of these women and claim that they are just bad mothers. 

I always knew Olivia Colman as an incredible comic actress from her work in many British sitcoms. But lately, the world simply knows her as this incredible dramatic actress who can cry on cue. In this film, we see a stupendous spectrum of emotions flitting through her face, and yet she is also such an enigma, a woman who is complicated and conflicted, and doomed to make many mistakes. It's a fascinating performance, and while ultimately, I didn't much care for this story (a problem I have had with a lot of Ferrante's work in general), I had to admire the actors and Gyllenhaal's impeccable direction. This is a visually striking and emotionally evocative mood piece, and while it can be a bit difficult to watch, it's certainly well worth a viewing.

The Hand of God: An Italian film written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, this is the tale of Fabietto Schisa (played wonderfully by Filippo Scotti), a teenage boy in 1980's Naples, and the events that shaped him into the man he will become. I wasn't aware this film was autobiographical, but it felt so lived-in and specific that I suspected it reflected Sorrentino's own adolescence, and turns out I was right. Towards the end, there's a wonderful explanation of why he wanted to become a filmmaker that is rather devastating and really strikes a chord.

Now, that being said, this is a movie by Paolo Sorrentino, the man who gave us The Young Pope. Which means it is insanely weird, and over-the-top, and very Italian in its sensibility (i.e. get ready for a lot of female nudity and a rather classically European sex scene). As I watched this film, my immediate impression was, oh this is Italian Licorice Pizza, and we all know how I felt about that movie. Thankfully in this film, the auteur is only writing about his own experience, rather than trying to shoehorn in too much of the experience of another woman, so I was spared any manic pixie dream girl caricatures. I still don't love the depiction of most of the women in this film - there's a running gag about Fabietto's sister who is always in the bathroom, you will see a LOT of his depressed Aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri) who spends most of the film being called a whore, and the broader Schisa family seems to be composed of women who are either grumpy matriarchs or desperate for a husband. There is a very loving depiction of Fabietto's mother though, played by the wonderful Teresa Saponangelo, a woman who likes to play pranks and juggle oranges, but also has to endure her own share of tragedy. 

Give this movie a try. It's definitely a vibe, and you'll get a hefty dose of Italy if you're feeling confined and need to travel from your couch for a few hours. There were moments that genuinely made me laugh out loud and then there were some heartbreaking scenes. This film showcases how bizarre your extended family can be and the adventures you can have with these raucous weirdos. But ultimately, it's a film that accurately captures the emotional rollercoaster of adolescence and what a formative period it can be in determining your destiny. 

83: The Best Sports Movie of the Year

When I went to see 83, a Hindi movie about the 1983 Cricket World Cup between the West Indies and India, I knew it was probably going to be right up my alley. I love cricket, I love underdog stories (India had never won a World Cup match going into this tournament, but...spoiler alert, they ended up winning the whole thing), and I love a good Bollywood movie. I did worry the movie might go spectacularly off the rails, but nope. It knocked it right out the park (and into the commentator's box).

The members of the 1983 India World Cup squad are probably household names to everyone who grew up in India, but I'll confess I only knew Kapil Dev (played by Ranveer Singh) and Sunil Gavaskar (played by Tahir Raj Bhasin). So the first sign that this is a great film is that I found myself completely fascinated by all the players I had never heard of before and looked forward to seeing what role they would play in leading India to victory. Krishnamachari Srikkanth (played by Jiiva), who I guess was really famous but I knew nothing about, might have been my favorite of the pack. I'm biased because he is South Indian and the movie has him periodically muttering in Tamil, which is one of my top favorite things in any Hindi movie. There's also a very entertaining interlude with him trying to get access to some homemade dosas in London. But the performances from all the other actors were just as superb and nuanced, picking up on all the strengths and weaknesses of these different players, the struggles they were facing on and off the field, and how that all coalesced into creating this incredible team.

Most Bollywood movies are just about the lead actor(s). But 83 is a true ensemble piece, reflecting how that 1983 World Cup was a true team effort. Ranveer Singh has the difficult job of portraying Kapil Dev, which could descend into caricature very easily (especially with those fake teeth), but he walks that tightrope delicately, speaking all that terrible English, but conveying that beating Punjabi heart and grit that propelled him to lead his team to dizzying heights. We see how his team both mocked and loved him, and how he rallied them around this seemingly impossible task, fighting all the naysayers at home and abroad. And it is wonderful to watch the interplay between him and the team's manager, PR Man Singh (played perfectly by Pankaj Tripathi), a man who wants this team to succeed, but is also thinking about the finances and that it would be cheaper to just buy plane tickets for them to come home before the semi-finals. 

I thought that this movie would focus more on the battle between India and the West Indies and potentially get racist about the WI team. But wow, the WI team probably got just as much adulation from the filmmakers as the Indians. The Indian players were starstruck by the likes of Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards (fun fact: Neena Gupta has a small role in this movie as Kapil Dev's mother - she famously had a relationship with Viv Richards in the 80s, so any time they showed her on screen watching the WI matches, I had a little chuckle about what might be going through her head). While the matches between the two sides were brutal and hard-fought, it's clear that all anyone cared about was playing a damn good game of cricket. So in the end, like all great Bollywood cinema, the theme becomes that England are the real villains. You'll get plenty of scenes with supercilious British men talking down to the Indians, and eventually having to (literally) eat their words. When I spoke to a Barbadian colleague of mine about this movie, he remembered watching this match in Barbados, and how his friends would try to emulate the Indian players on the cricket pitch. They were disappointed that West Indies didn't win, but they were glad that at least they didn't lose to England. It's nice to know that even in 2021, we can still be united by our hatred for colonialism.

Which brings me to the cricket. Oh the cricket. There's so much of it! And it's all so amazing! This movie is nearly three hours long; almost all of that consists of these men playing a series of cricket matches, and it is GLORIOUS. There's also a lot of fabulous cricket commentary from Farokh Engineer (played by the always wonderful Boman Irani), which adds to the hype of every match. The screenplay and editing is top-notch, focusing on just the right overs to generate maximum drama and show us the interplay between all the behind-the-scenes conversations we have seen with these players and how that is reflecting in their ability to play the game. The script by Kabir Khan (who also directed), Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan, and Vasan Bala, should be revered for its ability to find all the ways to turn a cricket match into an emotional whirlwind. And of course, you can't discount the score from Julius Packiam. While I didn't pay particular attention to any of the Pritam-composed songs that played throughout this film, the background score is exactly the kind of heart-pumping thing you need in a sports movie and it ensured I was on the edge of my seat for every boundary and every wicket.

The movie occasionally intersperses real-life photos and videos from the matches, and the actors' resemblances to the men they are portraying can sometimes be uncanny from certain angles (like when Kapil is bowling), though most of the time you will just smile at the obvious dissimilarities. Still, there's an obvious devotion to authenticity and researching all the events surrounding this tournament that is such a treat. 83 is a wonderful tribute to a very uplifting story and will ensure that future generations continue to respect and admire this 1983 World Cup squad. It makes you love the players and it makes you love the game, and that's why it's an instant classic. It is also incredibly funny and warm, striking just the right tone throughout and never descending into too much sentiment or too much nationalistic fervor. There is plenty of commentary throughout about what this game meant to India (Indira Gandhi makes an appearance for a bit, using this match to quell some riots, as you do) but at the end of the day, eleven men showed up at Lord's and played their damn hearts out. What a joy to watch.