6 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
album, “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Be-
lieve in You,” is boundless and scenic, push-
ing well past acoustic folk rock and deep into
Americana. The sprawling music is guided by
Lenker’s unassuming, enchanted voice and
her quiet, self-contained narratives.—Sheldon
Pearce (Streaming on select platforms.)
“Don Carlos”
OPERA The elements of Verdi’s “Don Carlos”
that qualify it as a French grand opera—the
five-act structure, the ballet—are the ones that
typically get cut when it is presented in its
more frequently produced Italian translation.
For the first time in the Metropolitan Opera’s
history, the company offers the original ver-
sion of Verdi’s staggering drama, which pits
love and political idealism against an unholy
union of church and state during the Span-
ish Inquisition. An all-star cast, including
Matthew Polenzani, Sonya Yoncheva, Jamie
Barton, and Eric Owens, handles the work’s
string of magnificent solos and unusually
probing confrontations; Yannick Nézet-Séguin
conducts, and David McVicar directs (Feb. 28-
March 26). Also playing: Lise Davidsen and
Brenda Rae lead competing troupes of trage-
dians and comedians, respectively, in Strauss’s
“Ariadne auf Naxos” (March 1-17), and Alek-
sandra Kurzak takes on the demands of Puc-
cini’s “Tosca” (March 2-12).—Oussama Zahr
George Coleman Quartet
JAZZ No one expects the tenor saxophonist
George Coleman, now deep into his eighties,
to sound the way he did when he was storming
through the changes with the likes of Max Roach
and Miles Davis, in the fifties and sixties. Yet
a listen to Coleman’s two affecting guest spots
on Nicholas Payton’s 2021 album, “Smoke Ses-
sions,” is convincing evidence that this patriarch
remains firmly steadfast. If Coleman’s notes are
now parsed out with deliberation, his phrasing
stays sure, and his warming tone tingles like an
Irish coffee on a stormy night.—Steve Futterman
(Dizzy’s Club; Feb. 26–27.)Superchunk: “Wild Loneliness”
ROCK The Chapel Hill, North Carolina, indie-
rock institution Superchunk has managed to
mature gracefully, maintaining the exuberance
that’s defined the band’s work since its début, in- On “Wild Loneliness,” the group’s twelfth
album, the singer-guitarist Mac McCaughan’s
reedy, perpetually adolescent tone hasn’t
changed much, but it’s never callow; at one point
he even flashes a surprisingly supple falsetto.
Some of the material makes steps toward the
drawing room—more piano, slower tempos—but
the album is also, per the Superchunk standard,
festooned with rah-rah choruses: “If you’re not
dark / At least in some little part / What are you
on? / Can I have some?”—Michaelangelo Matos
(Streaming on select platforms.)
Voices of Mississippi
BLUES As a young man, in the nineteen-six-
ties, William Ferris crisscrossed his native
Mississippi to document unsung blues and
gospel artists, ultimately assembling that trea-
sure trove into a commanding 2018 boxed
set, “Voices of Mississippi.” This imaginative
companion concert, hosted by Jazz at Lincoln
Center, pairs Ferris’s recorded narration and
archival visuals with live performances. Most
of the folklorist’s subjects are long gone. Yet,
as with many endangered languages, the blues
breathes on through its progeny, with Ferris’s
anecdotes of late musicians (R. L. Burnside,
Othar Turner, and Jim Dickinson) presented
alongside performances from their descen-
dants (Cedric Burnside, Shardé Thomas, and
Luther and Cody Dickinson). The bill’s most
colorful entrée is an elder—Bobby Rush, who,
at eighty-eight, remains a stylistically versatile
and saltily funny performer. He flourishes in1
THETHEATRE
Black No More
George Schuyler’s classic speculative 1931
novel gets a musical adaptation—directed by
Scott Elliott for the New Group—with a book
by John Ridley and music by, among others,
Tariq Trotter (a.k.a. Black Thought, of the
Roots, a rapper for the ages). The result is a
very messy, often indigestible stew of ideas
about Blackness, assimilation, self-love, and,
perhaps above all, trying to make a buck in
America. In nineteen-thirties New York City,
a vaguely sinister doctor, Junius Crookman
(Trotter)—who is Howard-educated, as he
never lets us forget—has invented a treatment
to make Black skin appear white. Suddenly,
any Black person with fifty dollars to spare can
live out a passing plot. Max Disher (Brandon
Victor Dixon), a trickster from Harlem, de-
cides to take the challenge. This production
is a cartoony engagement with ideas that were
given sublime expression during the Harlem
Renaissance. It feels amateurish, and some-
times disastrous—Trotter is a leaden presence,
it pains me to say—but the show is compelling
in a B-movie way.—Vinson Cunningham (Persh-
ing Square Signature Center; through Feb. 27.)Intimate Apparel
It’s a real risk to add a new element to a play
that already works. In the case of Lynn Not-
tage’s 2003 drama, “Intimate Apparel,” it turns
out that a skillful addition—music—acts only
as enhancement. Now transformed into a fleet,
emotionally astute opera—in a collaboration
between Lincoln Center Theatre and the Met-
ropolitan Opera, directed by Bartlett Sher—
the piece tells the story of Esther (Kearstin
Piper Brown), a talented seamstress, in 1905,
whose yearning for love lands her in a trou-
bled relationship—first epistolary, then all too
expensively real. The opera matches the tone
and the emotional tenor of the original play
strikingly well. Ricky Ian Gordon’s music sets
a trotting, melancholy, urbane pace, redolent
of early-twentieth-century New York; the
melodies, shared between two pianos, sound as
if they were inspired by the sight of gleaming,
rain-soaked pavement. Brown’s voice is won-
derful, and, like Nottage’s libretto, helpfully
multivalent: talky and demotic in the lower
registers, sweet and elegant up top.—V.C.
(Mitzi E. Newhouse; through March 6.)Prayer for the French Republic
Joshua Harmon’s new play, directed by David
Cromer for Manhattan Theatre Club, tells the
story—partly in the quasi-present, partly in
the years following the horrors of the Second
World War—of a Jewish family in France who
are continually pressurized by anti-Semitism,
which, through decades and generations, is
always morphing, finding new ways to nip
at their heels. An American cousin, Molly
(Molly Ranson), is studying abroad in FranceThe rapper Snoop Dogg spent his most
successful (and controversial) years per-
forming for Death Row Records; more
than two decades after his messy split
with the label, he returns to the com-
pany, now as its owner, for his nine-
teenth album, “BODR,” or “Back on
Death Row.” Released to coincide with
his Super Bowl performance alongside
his longtime producer Dr. Dre, the re-
cord is clearly nostalgic for the G-funk
of his most formidable days. Snoop isn’t
as nimble as he once was, and the music
doesn’t quite have the same bite or ap-
petite, but it is refreshing to hear the
charismatic rapper back in his element.
On songs such as “Doggystylin” and
“House I Built,” he is highly self-refer-
ential, as if reëstablishing his pedigree,
yet his silky, near-timeless flow remains
coolly casual.—Sheldon PearceHIP-HOP
ILLUSTRATION BY AJ DUNGO
the contemporary moment, but he belongs
to an exotic world where octogenarians en-
thuse about “making love” and kvetch about
romantic partners running off with—who
else?—“the garbage man.”—Jay Ruttenberg
(The Appel Room; Feb. 25-26.)