Latest news with #TheMasterandMargarita
Washington Post
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A play about the 2017 Charlottesville rally, and a rock musical with the devil
Do you associate the Devil only with evil? Think again. In the savory new musical 'Professor Woland's Black Magic Rock Show' the archfiend leaves justice in his wake. The Spooky Action Theater production is one of several current shows that ponder polarized extremes: Peace and violence. Inclusive and exclusionary visions of America. Cosmic yins and yangs. 'Professor Woland' adapts 'The Master and Margarita,' Mikhail Bulgakov's Stalin-era novel about the Devil and his retinue wreaking havoc in Soviet Moscow. The musical's creators, including book writers Jesse Rasmussen and Elizabeth Dinkova (the latter directs), shrewdly reimagine the tale's demonic characters as louche but charismatic rock musicians performing in a dive bar. Strutting around a cabaret stage, the Satan-esque Woland (Fran Tapia, radiating shady bravado) introduces us to a mortal Moscow writer, the Master (Camilo Linares), whom authorities have forcibly disappeared after they perceived his Pontius Pilate-themed novel to be subversive. His lover, Margarita (Jordyn Taylor), is in agony until Woland's team recruits her to host a consequential diabolical ball. Dinkova and her colleagues made some savvy choices in condensing Bulgakov's epic masterpiece, preserving its wicked humor and elegiac sadness, while necessarily sacrificing much anti-Stalinist satire. The musical's plot twists and numerous characters may dizzy audiences new to the tale, and the Master-Margarita love affair, which is not the most interesting part of Bulgakov's novel, gets too much focus. But the prog rock score, an intoxicating weave of haunting hooks and propulsive verses, composed by Michael Pemberton, who wrote the lyrics with Andrea Pemberton, is an excellent match for Woland's anarchic energy. It helps that most actors double as musicians. Bassist Danny Santiago nails the rascally fallen angel Azazello, while ace guitarist Oliver Dyer, cellist Jeremy Allen Crawford and music director Marika Countouris vividly channel additional demons, and flutist Stephen Russell Murray sings beautifully as a crazed poet. Luis Garcia's projections are vital to capturing a phantasmagoric world. The musical's final song, 'Time to Go (Moscow Goodbye),' does reach too overtly for political relevance. By contrast, such relevance is essential to Priyanka Shetty's '#Charlottesville,' a methodical, sometimes stirring solo play recalling the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in the college town. Now in a world premiere run at the Keegan Theatre in partnership with Voices Festival Productions, the play draws on interviews with more than a hundred Charlottesville-area residents, plus court transcripts and news reports. Directed by Yury Urnov, Shetty does a reasonable job calibrating diction and mannerisms as she channels people who witnessed, or were affected by, the 2017 events: A sweetly callow student. A seething local musician. And, most movingly, the desolate mother of Heather D. Heyer, who died when an avowed neo-Nazi rammed his car through a crowd. Other moments chillingly summon alt-right voices, sometimes through Shetty's mimicry and sometimes with video of white supremacists and their memes. (Dylan Uremovitch designed the projections and lighting.) Interwoven with Shetty's own experiences as a University of Virginia graduate student, and unfurling on Matthew J. Keenan's cracked-marble-like set, which evokes national ideals, '#Charlottesville' asks whether Unite the Right was an aberration or a strand in long-term American bigotry. A more abstract confrontation between civilization and savagery drives German author Rebekka Kricheldorf's blunt-force satire 'Testosterone,' running in Neil Blackadder's English translation in an ExPats Theatre production. The 2012 fable tells of smug doctors Solveig and Ingo (Amberrain Andrews and Elgin Martin), who live in a walled, moated community, initially safe from a violent dystopia. But when their well-intentioned plan to help a sex worker change profession irks a crime boss (Bruce Alan Rauscher, all jovial menace), only Ingo's amoral and hyper-macho brother Raul (a swaggering Gary DuBreuil) can help. As Raul boasts about his kills, weight-lifts with furniture and flaunts his victims' mutilated body parts, the play explores how primal urges like aggression and sexual desire might make a mockery of society's rules of behavior. Director Karin Rosnizeck's production boasts effective touches, like baroquely grim news footage (Jonathan Dahm Robertson is scenic/projections designer), but scenes can be stiff, and the play's Grand Guignol swerves will not appeal to everyone. Still, the concepts here, as in the other two shows, are a reminder that theater can offer bracing ideas that help us navigate reality. Professor Woland's Black Magic Rock Show, through April 13 at the Universalist National Memorial Church in Washington. About 2 hours including intermission. #Charlottesville, through April 13 at the Keegan Theatre in Washington. About 70 minutes, no intermission. Testosterone, through April 6 at Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington. About 90 minutes, no intermission.
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Under the baobab: Community gathers to remember Osagie 6 years after tragic death
Ramadan Mubarak. Kul 'am wa enta bi-khair. Happy Holi. Chag Pesach Sameach. The usual beautiful people were gathered at Unity Church of Jesus Christ on Thursday for the annual Osaze Osagie Scholarship dinner, 'Heart & Soul: Celebrate Connection, Kindness and Community,' welcomed by senior Pastors Harold and Sherren McKenzie, executive Pastor Ephraim McKenzie and congregation members. Professors Iyun and Sylvester Osagie, Osaze's parents, greeted supporters with loving hugs as we all recalled with sad fondness their gentle son. State College Mayor Ezra Nanes was the MC. Attendees included Community & Campus in Unity chair Terry Watson; Dean Clarence Lang from Penn State's College of the Liberal Arts; Professor Jennifer Hamer; State College Borough Council members Gopal Balachandran, Kevin Kassab and Nalini Krishnankutty; Patton Township Supervisor Pamela Robb; school board candidate Jesse Barlow; neighbor Shih-In Ma; NAACP officer Leslie Laing and more. The gathering honored the memory of Osaze Osagie, who was tragically killed by police at his apartment on March 20, 2019. The officers had come to serve a 302 warrant, which would've allowed them to take Osaze to the emergency room to have a doctor evaluate his mental state and determine if he should be hospitalized. It was the first fatal police shooting in the department's 103-year history. We are a different community because of what happened to Osaze. Transformed by grief, we now know that catastrophe can happen in Happy Valley. Yet we are made stronger in the realization we can overcome such difficulties if we work together. Elsewhere around town Professor Matt Jordan, Bellisario College of Communications, screened 'The Master and Margarita,' directed by Michael Lockshin, at The State Theatre. Based on the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, the fantasy-drama film addressed speech freedom and censorship. Despite attacks by Russian state news and officials, it became the highest grossing 18+ content film ever released in Russia, earning $27 million. The screening was followed by an insightful discussion with the director Lockshin, Prof. Jordan, Russian Professor Irina Mikaelian and Adrian Wanner, Distinguished Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature. Congrats to Penn State sports teams. The men's gymnastics team won the Big Ten regular season championship and now move on to the NCAA tournament in Ann Arbor. The Philly sports news called the PSU wrestling team a 'dynasty.' They advanced all ten wrestlers to the national quarterfinals. The Nittany Lions women's ice hockey team concluded the 2024-25 season with 31 victories, the most in program history. The team's 19 AHA wins set a conference single-season record. WPSU and the State College Area School District collaborate on their annual Multicultural Children's Festival on Saturday at the State College Area High School from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. The first 750 kids who attend will receive a PBS Kids Passport booklet. The Penn State Traditional American Indian Powwow organized by Professor Emeritus John Sanchez will be held at C3 Sports Complex on March 29-30. The PSU College of Liberal Arts, Department of Philosophy, Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Rock Ethics Institute will present a conference, 'The Dialectics of Freedom: The Critical Theory of Angela Davis,' on Friday, March 28 at 3:30 p.m. in 101 Chambers. Davis, distinguished professor emerita, UC, Santa Cruz, will deliver the keynote, 'We Can Always Hope for Something More: Freedom as the Journey that Never Ends.' The conference continues Saturday, March 29, in Marriott Foundation Building, from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. And the School of Theatre will present 'Love's Labour's Lost: The Musical' based on Shakespeare's play and adapted by Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers, directed and choreographed by Christine O'Grady with music by Ben Kiley. The musical runs April 1-12. The Center for the Performing Arts will present 'Duck Pond' on Saturday, March 22, at 7:30 p.m. at Eisenhower Auditorium. It is a touching, funny and entertaining tale using dance and music created by Yaron Lifschitz and the Circa Ensemble. Stay strong. Charles Dumas is a lifetime political activist, a professor emeritus from Penn State, and was the Democratic Party's nominee for U.S. Congress in 2012. He lives with his partner and wife of 50 years in State College.
New York Times
03-03-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
This Week in Mets: Spending a spring morning with the busiest person in camp
'Manuscripts don't burn.' —'The Master and Margarita,' Mikhail Bulgakov It's 8:30 on a Saturday morning at Clover Park, and Dave Racaniello has already been up for 3 1/2 hours. He's setting up the pitching machines on the six-pack of pitchers' mounds just outside the New York Mets' clubhouse, making sure the curveballs they'll deliver are just enough in the dirt for the club's catchers to work on their blocking. Advertisement This will be a light day for Racaniello. There are only seven pitchers throwing bullpen sessions and four throwing live batting practice — about half of what it could be this early in spring. And so, Racaniello will have a pair of 15-minute breaks during a 112-minute span in which he catches 254 throws from seven different pitchers. Remember, a light day. (Pitch counts have been recorded since 1988; the Mets have played six games since then with more than 254 pitches, all of them at least 14 innings long.) Most people arrive at spring training with a blueprint for how to work themselves as close to midseason shape as possible by the time camp breaks. The bullpen catcher, though, will never be as busy as he is in the first few weeks of camp. 'We probably work our hardest right out of the gates,' Racaniello said. 'The first two to three weeks with 37 pitchers in camp, that's the most amount of work we'll do throughout the season. You've got to be ready, your arm's got to be in shape more than anything else.' Because of course, catching 254 deliveries in less than two hours isn't the problem. It's throwing it back all those times. 'There's no replicating coming in here and playing catch nine times a day,' he said. 'There's no simulating getting your arm ready.' Racaniello is, remarkably, entering his 25th year as New York's bullpen catcher. (The Mets added Eric Langill as a second bullpen catcher in 2011.) A catcher in high school and college, he first got his foot in the door as an emergency fill-in. On July 5, 1997, Racaniello attended a game with a childhood friend from Stamford. Stamford being Stamford, the friend's father knew Bobby Valentine, and they met with the Mets manager before the game. Valentine noted that the club's usual bullpen catcher was unavailable that day; could Racaniello fill in? Advertisement Racaniello thought it was a joke. By the second inning, he was rushing to put shinguards on to warm up long man Cory Lidle; Armando Reynoso wasn't long for the evening. 'I had no idea what I was doing,' Racaniello said. 'I was there with four or five friends, and they came over to the bullpen with hands in the air, like what is going on? It was crazy.' Racaniello helped out at home games the rest of that season before going back to college. Before the 2001 season, Valentine got back in touch. How about doing it full-time? 'I thought it was an amazing thing that happened and I never expected to be called back,' he said. 'I had never thought about it. I didn't even know the position existed. I grew up a baseball fan my entire life, I never even thought about a bullpen catcher.' In the quarter-century since, Racaniello has biked from New York to spring training, he's climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with R.A. Dickey (which he joked was a heck of a lot easier than catching R.A. Dickey), he's had surgery to remove bone spurs from his elbow and he's become David Wright's close friend and chief punching bag. On this Saturday morning, fans often know him better than the pitcher he's catching. He is as much a fixture with the Mets as 'New York Groove.' 'It's a good time to be a Met,' he said. 'I'll be here as long as they let me.' When discussing how his four-seam circle change operates differently than other pitchers, Mets reliever Kevin Herget casually mentioned the break he wants: 'It gets like 16 to 20 (inches) of horizontal.' This is something you hear all the time in conversations with pitchers now — specific numbers on their movement goals. This was not the case for the first several years I wrote about baseball; in 2014, a pitcher saying he looked at that type of data merited a profile. Advertisement So I asked Herget, drafted by the Cardinals out of New Jersey's Kean University in 2013 (in the 39th round, which no longer exists), how his understanding of his bread-and-butter changeup has evolved while in pro ball. When he started, he said, you knew a pitch was good if hitters swung and missed at it. Now, you know why they swing and miss. '(The proliferation of data) makes adjustments easier,' he said. 'It used to be, 'That looked good and that felt good. I don't know if it actually moved the right way.' Your eyes aren't moving in slow motion so it's hard to tell. '(Now), the movement was here and it might need to be here. That pitch felt like this, and the data showed it wasn't great. It makes the adjustments, especially in a controlled setting, a little bit easier and a little bit faster.' Herget said more sophisticated data wasn't introduced in the St. Louis organization until around 2016. By 2021, he estimated, it was fully incorporated across the sport. 'Especially young guys, that's the only language they speak,' he said. 'They know the data stuff, which is great. From a player development standpoint, it's why these guys are getting so good so quick and why their stuff is evolving so quickly.' Parental leave is unfortunately not a fruitful time for one's reading, and so for a little bit the epigraphs may have to come from books I've mentioned before, like Bulgakov's masterpiece. Like 'The Recognitions' last week, 'The Master and Margarita' easily makes my top 10 or so novels I've ever read. A Mets reliever has struck out at least one-third of opposing hitters nine times in franchise history. Edwin Díaz has done it five times, Armando Benitez twice, and Reed Garrett did it last year. The other remaining time happened in 2020. Do you remember what Mets reliever struck out an even one-third of hitters he faced that season? HINT: He returned to the Mets in 2022 but didn't pitch nearly as well. (I'll reply to the correct answer in the comments.) (Top photo of Racaniello, left, with fellow bullpen catcher Eric Langill: Courtesy New York Mets)
New European
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Marianne Faithfull: death of a troubled icon
Marianne Faithfull, who has died aged 78, was one of many women in the history of the arts who was branded a 'muse' and chronically underestimated as a consequence. Inspiring the Rolling Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want (1969) and Wild Horses (1970), both released towards the end of her high-profile relationship with Mick Jagger, as well as being the woman responsible for putting a copy of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita in his hands, sparking the idea for Sympathy for the Devil (1968), was always going to loom large in her mythology. But Faithfull's six-decade career was one of bold creativity and admirable personal honesty. Faithfull's family background could only have encouraged her unconventionality. The family boasted glamorous European roots – Faithfull's great-great-uncle wrote the erotic novel Venus in Furs , her grandfather was Austro-Hungarian nobleman Artur Wolfgang, Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, and her mother, Eva, had been a dancer in Weimer-era Berlin. Yet Faithfull grew up in the staid surroundings of a terraced house in Reading after her parents divorced (her father had been a British intelligence officer during the war, later becoming a professor of Italian literature). While Eva, who styled herself as a baroness, told her daughter 'wonderful stories about castles and parties and balls', as Faithfull put it, there was a dark side to her family inheritance, rooted in the traumas of the twentieth-century. Both Eva and her mother Flora had been raped when the Red Army marched into the city in 1945. Misandry was a large part of the atmosphere of Faithfull's childhood, and her own attitude to men was always complex. Faithfull was still a teenager when she came into the orbit of the Rolling Stones and all the dangerous masculinity they represented. 'Discovered' by the Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham (his description of her as 'an angel with big tits' summed up the lot of women in the music industry at the time), Faithfull was given a debut single, As Tears Go By, that was written by Jagger and Keith Richards. A haunting pop ditty with a mournfulness that echoed chanson française , As Tears Go By was proof that, even though her material was less serious, she was the British pop starlet who most convincingly matched the vocal gravitas of the likes of Françoise Hardy. The single made it to number nine in the charts in September 1964 and three Top 10 singles followed over the next ten months. But the image of the fresh-faced convent school girl turned chanteuse was fleeting. Married and a mother at just 18, Faithfull nevertheless soon became firmly associated with rebellion. In Michael Winner's I'll Never Forget What's 'Is Name (1967) she uttered a partially obscured f-word – a first for mainstream cinema – and she had by that time begun her relationship with Jagger. Moving in with Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg, who were locked in a violent, drug-fuelled relationship, marked the beginning of her own descent into heroin and cocaine addiction. A 1967 drug raid of Keith Richards' house, where she was discovered wearing only a fur rug, cemented Faithfull's reputation for unconventional living. She later said 'It destroyed me. To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother.' Indeed, Faithfull's complete disregard for social convention was remarkable given the huge gender inequality of the era. The 1960s may have been swinging, but they were also deeply sexist, and at the time of Faithfull's debut the criminalisation of marital rape, the availability of the pill to unmarried women, and the passing of the Abortion Act lay in the future (Faithfull herself had had an illegal abortion in 1965). Faithfull symbolised another way of being for women – a symbolism that was writ large when she appeared as a married woman in black leather and with Alain Delon as a lover in Jack Cardiff's The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) (a film that was not without its problematic aspects) – and her struggle with addiction never stopped her creativity, often even fuelling it. Her 1967 appearance at the Royal Court in Chekhov's Three Sisters with a cast that included Glenda Jackson was followed two years later by a starring role as Ophelia on the same stage, where her portrayal of the tragic character's madness was aided by her being high. Sister Morphine, which she co-wrote with Richards and Jagger, and released as a B side in 1969, was a devastating portrait of drug addiction that was a stand-out moment of her career. But this all came at huge personal cost. By the time the Stones re-recorded Sister Morphine for their Sticky Fingers in 1971, Faithfull had lost custody of her son and was homeless, and she was erased even from the history of that most personal song by receiving no writing credit on the LP. It was a long road back to personal and professional rebirth, but when it came, it was a dramatic resurgence. Her 1979 album Broken English arrived at the moment of musical history between punk and synthpop and effortlessly melded genres into something that captured the zeitgeist. The album would be nominated for a Grammy. Faithfull's discovery by later generations brought new projects and new collaborators. Her 2002 album Kissin' Time found her working with Billy Corgan, Beck, Pulp and Blur, and she followed that with Before the Poison (2004), which was as poetic and dark as the heavy involvement of both PJ Harvey and Nick Cave might suggest. Her final works, made in her adoptive home of Paris, were a pair of albums made with the Bad Seeds' Warren Ellis – the hugely personal Negative Capability (2018), and She Walks in Beauty (2021), her twenty-first studio album which set the poetry of the British Romantics to music, and also featured contributions by Cave and Brian Eno. She had by then rekindled her relationship with her son and her three grandchildren, and she died in London surrounded by her family. 'My main priority in my head was always my work, but then, of course, the men came…', Faithfull said in 2018. 'It wasn't really what I wanted, but I was too pretty to be left alone.' Repeatedly written off and weighed down by the misogynistic constraints of the times she lived in, it was against the odds that Faithfull proved her artistry across a career of unique experimental breadth.
