FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
stop wearing masks, once
restaurants are back at capacity.
But what “Take off your mask”
really does is make explicit a
power imbalance that’s always
been there. It is one group of
people announcing, in the
starkest possible terms, that
their viewing pleasure is more
important than another group’s
personal safety.
“In a way, it’s refreshing to
finally have that level of honesty,
finally,” Brooks said. “We’ve
dropped the pretense that this is
not a looks-based profession. I
have regulars who have said to
me, ‘I really only came in here
because you looked pretty.’ And
now we can have a conversation
about how my literal paycheck
now depends on how well I can
contour my face or do my hair.”
She tries to refuse customers’
orders to take off her mask. But
she feels like something has
been exposed anyhow: the
darker secrets of her industry,
the expectations that before
went unspoken. “It’s all out in
the open now.”
[email protected]Monica Hesse is a columnist writing
about gender and its impact on
soc iety. For more visit wapo.st/
hesse.when they refused, they were
yelled at, called derogatory
names and left with unpaid bills.
“I don’t know how to say to
them, ‘I don’t think you
understand that your request is
worse than you think it is,’ ” said
Liz Brooks, who works with
Allison in Knoxville.
“The men seem to think it’s
charming,” said Haeli Maas, a
bartender in Lawrence, Kan.
“But the way they say it — take
off your mask — the connotation
becomes something dirty. I’m 22.
These men are in their 50s, and
they’re saying to me, ‘You’re
really pretty. I w ish you didn’t
have to wear that mask.’ ”
Before the pandemic, these
men might have been ogling her
anyway; she knows that. But
“Take off your mask” had made
the transaction explicit. These
men weren’t even trying to hide
their staring. They were making
it clear that they felt entitled to
her face, and they saw providing
it as part of her job.
This pandemic has changed
behaviors, routines and social
mores. It’s tempting to read
“Take off your mask” as a new
form of harassment —
something that will, like most of
2020, hopefully drift away once
we have a vaccine, once we canComiskey Park for a “Disco
Demolition Night” rally. Fans
could get into the game for
98 cents if they brought a disco
album to add to a heap that was
to be blown to smithereens in the
outfield. Plenty of those albums
were Bee Gees records; Dahl used
to inhale helium on the air to do a
mocking imitation of the band.
The event ended, deplorably,
in a riotous melee that police had
to break up. House music pioneer
Vince Lawrence, who was work-
ing that night as a teenage usher,
remembers seeing a dispropor-
tionate number of Black artists in
the album pile. For many, Dahl’s
“Disco Sucks!” movement took
on the pall of a fascist uprising.
“It was a book burning. It was a
racist, homophobic book burn-
ing,” Lawrence says. “And the Bee
Gees got caught up in that, be-
cause they were part of that
culture that was lifting a lot of
people up.”
The brothers were hurt and
confused by the sudden back-
lash; record companies started
dropping disco acts, and every-
one’s gaze was about to turn
toward MTV. A sked about it then,
Barry grew testy with an inter-
viewer and looked angrily into
the camera: “Does anybody mind
if [the Bee Gees] exist in the ’80s,
thank you?”
Yet “The Bee Gees” hardly ends
on a note of bitterness. The
brothers reinvented themselves
once more, this time as master
collaborators and surefire love-
song wizards writing for others,
including Barbra Streisand
(“Guilty,” “A Woman in Love”),
Dionne Warwick (“Heartbreak-
er”), and Dolly Parton and Kenny
Rogers (“Islands in the Stream”).
Respect came in due time (in-
cluding a Rock & Roll Hall of
Fame induction in 1997), as did a
recurring theme of loss.
“I can’t honestly come to terms
with the fact that [Robin, Mau-
rice and their younger brother
Andy] are not here anymore. I’ve
never been able to do that,” Barry
says. “I’d rather have them here
and no hits at all.”
[email protected]The Bee Gees: How Can You
Mend a Broken Heart (11 0
minutes) premieres Saturday at 8
p.m. on HBO.advance, leaving it to the Bee
Gees to come up with “the best
love song you’ve ever written.”
They delivered, with “How Deep
Is Your Love,” followed by “Stay-
in’ Alive” and “Night Fever,” on a
dou ble album that eventually
sold 45 million copies.
In the relentless pursuit of
hits, the Gibbs were remarkably
unfazed by popularity. Rather
than reject it or treat it in an aloof
manner, they always seemed to
acquiesce to it. The point, after
all, is to be adored.
Living in their own glitzy bub-
ble, they were completely un-
aware, while performing in Oak-
land on July 12, 1979, that a
belligerent rock DJ in Chicago,
Steve Dahl, had summoned tens
of thousands of listeners to a
White Sox doubleheader atBroadway,” Barry was pushed to
improvise near the song’s end,
eliciting a sonic falsetto he never
knew he had. (“Blamin’ it all!
Blame it on the nights on Broad-
way!”) That, more than anything,
put the Bee Gees’ stamp on
popular culture — and again
borrowed heavily, the film notes,
from such bands as the Spinners
and Stylistics.
Their new sound leads, of
course, to a level of fame and
riches the brothers never imag-
ined. Stigwood asked the band to
add some songs to the sound-
track of a movie he was produc-
ing about the flourishing disco
scene in Brooklyn. To persuade
the studio to release “Saturday
Night Fever” in as many theaters
as possible, Stigwood promised
to attach a No. 1 hit to it inAtlantic, urged the Bee Gees to do
what his other big client, Eric
Clapton, had done — move to
Miami and experiment.
“Those guys were actually an
R&B band that hadn’t really
worked that out yet,” Clapton
observes.I
t is here that “The Bee Gees”
makes an enlightening argu-
ment for the kind of musi-
cianship that happens at the
studio control board. It’s not so
much about manipulation as it is
a startling degree of precision
and perfectionism. “Jive Talkin’,”
a revelatory new Bee Gees hit in
1975, was divined from the
rhythm produced by car tires
speeding across a Miami bridge.
Working with producer Arif Mar-
din on the song “Nights onobserves that making music with
family members is “the greatest
strength and the greatest weak-
ness you can have.” Bee Gees fan
Nick Jonas agrees: “Brothers, in
general, is a very complicated
thing.” One wishes the movie
went even more deeply on this —
the depth with which Barry, Rob-
in and Maurice loved one an-
other comes through; the darker
moments often don’t.
Robin briefly went solo and
wouldn’t talk to Barry. (The
good-humored Maurice says he
always had to be the “Mr. Fix-It”
between the two.) The 1970s
dawned with another big hit
(“How Can You Mend a Broken
Heart”), but, even reunited, the
brothers yearned to find a new
sound. The supportive Stigwood,
who by now had his own label atinvariably lure you out of your
chair (or have you choked up
during those achingly perfect
chord progressions in the band’s
ballads), “The Bee Gees” insists
the Gibbs’ musicianship and pro-
longed success is as impressive as
anyone in the rock pantheon. The
film also has an adept awareness
that such statements are always
up for careful review and heated
debate. No greater authority than
Barry Gibb himself, the band’s
sole survivor at 74, can confirm
the ways in which celebrity sto-
ries, and images, change with
time.
“I am beginning to recognize
the fact that nothing is true,” he
says at the film’s opening. “Noth-
ing. It’s all down to perception.
My immediate family is gone, but
that’s life. It’s the same thing in
every family, that someone will
be left in the end. [At] this time in
life, I have fantastic memories,
but everybody’s memories are
different. So they’re just my
memories, you know?”
In other words, “The Bee Gees”
is years too late to present the
fullest possible account, relying
on past documentary interviews
with Maurice (who died in 2003)
and Robin (who died in 2012) to
supplement the narrative of a
band that continually recalibrat-
ed itself to radio’s whims. In-
spired by the work of others
(including Otis Redding and the
Mills Brothers) in a time when
appropriation was just part of
the game, their greatest gift to
music could have started and
ended with the writing and re-
cording of their much-covered
1967 hit ballad “To Love Some-
body.”
The footage and music from
the band’s initial dalliance with
fame is as much or more fascinat-
ing than the “Saturday Night
Fever” superstardom that lurked
ahead. As noted by Coldplay
singer Chris Martin, who consid-
ers himself something of an ex-
pert on pop-star backlash, the
Bee Gees were among the first
groups to understand that long
careers in the recording industry
come with stretches that are as
low as any high. Ego clashes were
complicated by familial resent-
ments. Oasis’s Noel Gallagher
TV REVIEW FROM C1
On HBO, Frank Marshall’s ‘The Bee Gees’ will rend then mend your heart
GETTY IMAGES/HBO
Barry Gibb, left, with brothers Robin and Maurice. Barry, the last of the Bee Gees, says: “It’s the same thing in every family, that someone
will be left in the end.... I have fantastic memories, but everybody’s memories are different. So they’re just my memories, you know?”to harassment.
“ ‘Take off your mask’ really
means expose yourself to the risk
of death,” said One Fair Wage
Executive Director Saru
Jayaraman, “so that I may judge
you.”
I spent a day talking to servers
and bartenders about the times
that customers had asked them
to remove their masks: The way
the request was delivered as a
flirt but landed as a threat. The
fact that male customers might
not realize how much power
their demands had over the
livelihoods of their female
waitstaff — or worse, that they
might be fully aware. The way
the masks seemed to
dehumanize servers in the eyes
of their customers — now that
workers’ frowns and grimaces
were made invisible, customers
could pretend they didn’t exist,
blowing past any sense of shame
that might previously have held
them in check. The way thattake off her mask — and it kept
happening — it almost felt like
he was asking her to take off her
shirt.
One Fair Wage, a campaign
dedicated to ending sub-
minimum wages nationwide,
released a study last week
detailing how workers in the
service industry were faring in
the pandemic. Across the board,
One Fair Wage found diminished
wages and increased health-
related fears, which it had
expected. It hadn’t expected a
rise in sexual misconduct. But
40 percent of respondents said
that harassment — always an
issue in an industry in which
low-wage workers rely on tips
(and are taught that the
customer is always right) — had
gotten worse during the
pandemic. The mask, meant to
protect essential hourly workers,
had instead become a doorway
HESSE FROM C1
MONICA HESSE
Boors make harassment
even more of a hazard
BY SONIA RAO
Reader, I tried.
I tried to banish every precon-
ceived opinion of Matthew Morri-
son playing the Grinch from my
mind Wednesday night before
flipping to “Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch
Musical!” on NBC. I tried to look
past his tenure on “Glee” as Will
Schuester, a character so dreadful
he turned Morrison into a TikTok
villain. Mostly, I tried to forget the
Broadway alum recently com-
pared his Grinch’s style of danc-
ing to Joaquin Phoenix’s “carefree
and raw” performance on the
steps in “Joker .”
But, it turns out, that all adds
spice to the “Grinch” viewing ex-
perience, an otherwise middling
two hours directed by Julia
Knowles. Taped at London’s Trou-
badour Theatre in lieu of a live
broadcast, this attempt at the
heartwarming tale makes the
Grinch’s hatred of song and dance
seem reasonable. Halfwa y
through, you might find yourself
advocating for the Whos to adopt
his way of life.
This is only the latest adapta-
tion of the Dr. Seuss book aboutthe hairy green recluse with a
too-small heart, of course, includ-
ing Chuck Jones’s animated spe-
cial, two movies and, most rel-evant, the stage version by Timo-
thy Mason and Mel Marvin that
wound up on Broadway in the
mid-aughts. Especially after for-
going the Grinch’s trademark
growl, Morrison can’t hold a can-
dle to Jim Carrey’s cinematic
take. Nor did the musical ever
stand a chance at capturing the
spirit of Jones’s classic.
Tack on a production that fails
to immerse the audience in
Whoville’s musical charm, and
you’ve got a show that ceaselessly
reminds you of your misguided
decision to sit on the couch — a
couch the Grinch hates, as he
spits directly into the camera —
and watch Morrison climb on top
of tables, twirling his green hair
in a disturbingly flirty manner.
It’s not unlike the behavior that
made his “Glee” character, an
inar guably inappropriate high
school teacher, so unlikeable in
the first place.
This Grinch is essentially a
furry Mr. Schue taking out his
pent-up anger on innocenttownspeople. And, as with Mr.
Schue, you at least have to hand it
to Morrison for his clear commit-
ment to the performance. But
that doesn’t make it any less
haunting.
Maybe it would’ve worked out
had Morrison lived up to his
“Joker” steps promise (a sentence
you’ll never hear from me again).
The Grinch’s troubled psyche,
shaped by solitude and years of
neglect, has always been an inter-
esting layer to the juvenile story.
But each time it seemed the show
might head in that direction, NBC
cut to commercial or the charac-
ter would break the fourth wall.
How could anyone possibly stay
invested in Cindy-Lou Who
(Amelia Minto) lamenting the
Grinch’s lonely existence when he
responds, “Let’s hear it for the
single folk,” with his massive hips
swaying?
The Whos often stand in as the
audience proxy, but the musical
hands that duty to Old Max, an
aged version of the Grinch’s dog,played by an excellent Denis
O’Hare. The Tony winner opens
the show as its narrator — per-
haps setting expectations too
high — and returns throughout,
performing “You’re a Mean One,
Mr. Grinch” just over an hour in.
(Finally, a good song!). Young
Max (Booboo Stewart) is a chip-
per delight, dancing alongside
Morrison as he tags along on the
Christmas heist.
Whatever points the musical
gets for the Maxes and its nostal-
gic, Seussian set design — per-
haps the only element to truly
nail the exaggerated style of the
source material — it loses when
the Grinch enters the picture. If
only this were a musical about
Old Max. Instead, the Grinch re-
peatedly interrupts the dog, at
one point, yelling as he is dragged
away: “This is my Emmy nomina-
tion! Stop! Stop!”
We live in bleak times, Morri-
son, but not that bleak. Better
luck next Christmas.
[email protected]TV REVIEW
Stink, stank, stunk: Morrison’s unsettling, ‘Glee’-ful Grinch steals this show
DAVID COTTER/NBC/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“This is my Emmy nomination! Stop! Stop!” Matthew Morrison
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