Latest news with #GeorgeLewis
Irish Independent
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Navigating the terrible twos: ‘If we understood the chemistry of what's going on in toddlers' brains, we would have such empathy for them'
Forget adolescence, there's another stage of life when our children are moody, rebellious and going through big changes that needs increased societal and scientific attention British comedian George Lewis (37), owes his recently skyrocketing career to his toddlers' meltdowns. On a Zoom call ahead of his Irish gigs in June, the father of three children aged six, five and two, from Stockport, reckons his viral 'toddlers chatting' sketches were inspired by the most mundane of domestic moments. 'I think it was the first time one of my kids ever dropped a banana on the floor — and it was like the end of the world,' he says. 'I was thinking, 'it's just a banana'. But then I thought, 'Well, from your point of view, you've never dropped a banana on the floor before, and nothing bad has ever really happened to you in the same way that it has for us. You've never experienced the big, bad things in life. So to you this probably is the worst thing that's ever happened to you.' So it's the right reaction, you know?'
New York Times
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Lincoln Center Summer Festival to Bring Back Some Classical Music
Lincoln Center's summer festival will highlight the city's diverse cultural traditions, the center announced on Tuesday, including performances by an experimental collective; a celebration of Brazilian culture; and the staging of a Sanskrit epic. The collective, American Modern Opera Company, which is made up of musicians and dancers, will present a dozen productions, making its Lincoln Center debut. The festival, Summer for the City, will run June 11 through Aug. 9, and it will also include a six-performance engagement by the string quartet Brooklyn Rider to celebrate the group's 20th anniversary. Since the festival began, in 2022, it has scaled back the classical music and opera programming that used to define summer events like the Lincoln Center Festival and the Mostly Mozart Festival. This edition is a restoration of some of those types of offerings. 'This is a constantly evolving city and artist community and audience, and it's our job to be in that conversation,' Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center's chief artistic officer, said in an interview. 'You will never see a summer that looks like the summer before.' Summer for the City is part of the center's efforts to appeal to new audiences by promoting an array of genres, including classical music, comedy, pop and social dance. Last year, the festival attracted 442,000 people, up from 380,000 in 2023, the center said. In June, members of the American Modern Opera Company will perform the New York premiere of 'The Comet/Poppea,' which pairs George Lewis's adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois's story 'The Comet' and Monteverdi's 'L'Incoronazione di Poppea.' Additional programming by the collective includes a staging of Messiaen's song cycle 'Harawi,' sung by the soprano Julia Bullock, and the staged premiere of Matthew Aucoin's 'Music for New Bodies,' directed by Peter Sellars. The lineup also features 'Rome Is Falling,' written by the bass player Doug Balliett, and described as a 'zany lesson on the absurdity of what can happen when influential people lose power.' Lincoln Center said it hoped this year's festival would help shine a light on the city's vibrant cultural communities. The lineup includes 'Mahabharata,' a large-scale retelling of a Sanskrit epic by Why Not Theater, a Canadian group, and a weeklong celebration of Brazilian culture featuring the singer-songwriter Lenine and the rock band Os Mutantes. The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, under the baton of its music and artistic director Jonathon Heyward, will perform a mix of new and old. Each of its programs will feature at least one living composer. But the ensemble will also perform Robert Schumann's Fourth Symphony, Clara Schumann's Konzertsatz in F minor, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and other classic works. The giant disco ball that has become a staple of the festival will once again hang over a dance floor built on Lincoln Center's main plaza. Clint Ramos, the Broadway costume and set designer, will return to decorate the center's outdoor spaces, this year based on the theme of birds.
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How a British Dad Made Comedy Gold Imagining Two Toddlers Chatting
A few years ago, George Lewis was driving back from performing in a comedy club when he realized he had to change his life. He had played the same club several years earlier, also for just a few minutes and also for little more than gas money. Both times, he did what he had to do. He showed up. He made the audience laugh. Now, though, he was a parent. He needed a more stable income, and his material felt tired. Yet the thing that filled his days — looking after his children — was a no-go for standup, older comics told him: a sure way to get pigeonholed. 'It was like: 'Maybe when you have kids, don't mention that you've got kids,'' he said, recalling their earlier advice. 'Obviously,' he continued, 'now I realize it's quite the opposite.' In the years since that night, Mr. Lewis, now 37, has become a bard of British parenting comedy. He's on his first tour as a headliner, and his shows keep selling out. His route to success began after the pandemic, when he began posting short online videos that gently mocked (and commiserated with) his fellow British millennial parents. In some sketches, Mr. Lewis acts the harried grown-up. In the clip below, he's trying to adhere to a nap schedule while driving. There's an unseen toddler in the back who mustn't be allowed to fall asleep. As they approach home, he gets increasingly desperate. 'Should we sing?' he asks. 'Do the actions! Big energy!' he commands. Then, he tries swerving, which is more dangerous than fun. Other times, he pretends to be a kid. In one long-running series, he stages conversations between toddlers who sound a lot like adults but who deadpan the baffling logic of two year olds. (The series, Two Toddlers Chatting, is his most popular, he said, with about 60 million views on Instagram alone.) In one sketch, a toddler shares some real concerns. His father keeps covering his face — which makes him disappear. Then, his dad comes back, saying this odd, upsetting word. 'He was behaving so erratically,' the toddler tells his friend. 'He just started shouting, 'Peek-a-boo.'' ''Peek-a-boo?'' his friend replies. 'Is he OK, like, mentally?' It's a low-budget effort, run almost entirely off his phone. He films in his kitchen, plays all the characters and edits clips between school pickups and bath time. In video after video, he unspools comedy gold about the gulf between the earnest rituals of modern parenting and the essential, eternal weirdness of a small child's inner life. 'The more mundane and frustrating, the better the sketch that comes out,' he said. 'So it really is a great way of going about your day.' He has the timing just right: TikTok and Instagram have arguably become comedy's biggest stage. And it's not just videos: Several parenting and relationship podcasts took off during the pandemic and now crowd the top of British comedy lists. 'The audience has always been there,' said Sophie McCartney, a Liverpool-born comedian, who turned her 'Tired and Tested' mom persona into a comedy career with a podcast, two books and live stand-up tours. But the pandemic supercharged demand and supply of parenting comedy online, she said. 'We were all trapped inside of our houses with our children of varying ages, and the internet was just pure escapism.' Celebrities come on 'Parenting Hell with Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe' (episodes include 'The Christmas Stress Tornado' and 'Playdate from Hell') to dish about life with kids. 'The reason it works is it comes from a place of 'We're really trying,'' said Mr. Widdicombe, a veteran of Britain's stand-up circuit. It would be grating to listen to venting, he said. Instead, it's precisely because they actually like being parents that their jokes land. 'You can love your kids, but also think, 'I can't engage with playing shop for three hours without feeling like my brain is rotting,'' he added. Mr. Lewis and Mr. Widdicombe are among the British comics riffing on millennial parenting, in which men are expected to — and want to — play more active roles at home than their fathers or grandfathers did. Many households are also juggling the particular challenges of this era: expensive child care and housing shortages, both partners working and a perfectionist approach to child rearing that can be intensified by sunshine-and-rainbows influencers and the latest 'gentle parenting' edicts. Yes, the comics say, their kids are wonderful, hilarious, the actual lights of their actual lives. But also, parenting can be isolating. And even with the best of intentions, things go wrong. 'Failure is funny,' explained Sam Avery, a British comic who has long joked about raising kids. 'And parenting is 90 percent failure.' The increasing success of the genre may also be a function of the technology itself, several British comedy critics and experts said. Online, specificity sells. The almighty algorithm sorts users by interests, so creators who stay on message get more traction. They do one thing, over and over, to delight their followers. Much like playing with a toddler. For Mr. Lewis, the dad stuff was kind of an accident (His children — now 6, 5 and almost 2 — were not). He'd post a sketch, then wait anxiously by his phone, as likes trickled in. He does cover other subjects — like cringe-watching the surprisingly explicit movie, 'Saltburn' — but his most successful work is parenting-related. Of his more than half-a-million followers on Instagram, about 80 percent are women, he said, and most are between the ages of 30 and 44. ('Quite clearly, overwhelmingly, mums!' he said.) 'Have we got parents in?' he said, opening a show in Brighton, a city on Britain's south coast. The packed club laughed and cheered. 'Yeah,' he grinned. 'I thought there might be.' 'He kind of makes light the really challenging parts of parenthood,' said Hannah Worrell, a mother in her 30s who came to the show. 'It makes you feel like it's, 'Oh, it's not just us that go through that.'' Mr. Lewis keeps track of ideas in disordered lists on the Notes app — a fragment of a joke, a sentence he overheard at a school pickup. He writes when his older children are at school and his toddler is asleep, a stolen hour or two around midday. Sometimes, he reminds them to be quiet while he records a few takes into his phone, often standing in the kitchen (it gets the best light). The kids only kind of understand what he does for work. 'Tells jokes?' his daughter said, squirming in her seat once her parents had served dinner. 'What's daddy's job?' prodded Harriett Brettell, his wife, who is an education consultant. 'Who does he try to make laugh?' 'Grown-ups?' his son asked. But they are his inspiration. 'This is all actual research,' Ms. Brettell, 36, joked as she and her husband orbited each other in the controlled chaos of mealtime. Minutes later, their 5-year-old daughter walked up to them with blue marker drawn on her lips like lipstick (it was not toxic, luckily). Mr. Lewis bent down, gently explaining that markers are not makeup, while Ms. Brettell wiped it off. Maybe there would be a joke in that, too.
