The Washington Post - 18.03.2020

C4 eZ re THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAy, MARCH 18 , 2020

BY CHRIS RICHARDS

on a Sunday afternoon in

November 2014, Bob Dylan and

his band took the stage at Phila-

delphia’s Academy of music and

played a concert for one person:

fredrik Wikingsson, a fan who

agreed to be filmed for a Swedish

television show in which individ-

uals experience events that

would typically summon large

crowds. As perverse as this per-

formance must have felt, Wik-

ingsson only acted as if he’d won

a game-show prize. “my jaw hurt

for hours afterwards because I

couldn’t stop smiling,” he told

rolling Stone, perhaps too star-

struck to fully grasp the absurd

premise that had presumably

lured Dylan to the stage that

afternoon.

The idea of a concert-for-one

is unsettling; not because it

might feel wacky or decadent,

but because it shouldn’t feel like

a concert at all. Concerts require

crowds — crowds that sing and

dance and cheer and heckle and

ultimately affirm that we’re par-

ticipating in some form of con-

sensus reality. When we listen to

live music alongside others,

those invisible vibrations c oming

from the stage can start to feel

real. Think about all of the

unbelievable concert perfor-

mances that prompted you to

turn to a friend between songs

and ask, Are you hearing this?

Now, as the coronavirus pan-

demic sweeps across the planet,

our real-time, physical-space re-

lationship to music has been

severed. Nightclubs, festivals

and dance floors have gone dark,

heeding the direction of health

experts and government officials

who hope to curb the spread of

the virus by halting large gather-

ings. Same for churches, theaters

and stadiums, along with every

other room that forfeits its

meaning when deserted.

Without other people, our

shared rituals stop being what

they are. That’s obvious, right?

maybe listeners could use the

reminder. In today’s music mar-

ketplace, the stars are big and

the s treaming i s endless — w hich

can m ake the rest of us feel s mall,

passive and inconsequential. At

least the social fallout from this

pandemic shows us how wrong

we are to ever feel that way.

Whether we’re talking about a

sparsely attended gig inside a

struggling jazz venue o r a capaci-

ty crowd at a starry arena con-

cert, m usic n eeds an audience for

it to truly exist. When you’re in a

crowd, you’re more than a con-

sumer or a spectator. You’re a

collaborator.

The British scholar Christo-

pher Small minted a fantastic

word for that collaboration:

“musicking.” Small believed that

we should think of “music” as a

verb, as an activity that involves

the people who perform it, the

people who listen to it, the

people who compose it, the peo-

ple who dance to it. “We might at

times even extend its meaning to

what the person is doing who

takes the tickets at the door or

the hefty men who shift the

piano and the drums or the

roadies who set up the instru-

ments and carry out the sound

checks or the cleaners who clean

up after everyone else has gone,”

Small writes in “musicking,” his

book from 1998. “They, too, are

contributing to the nature of the

event that is a musical perfor-

mance.”

many of those contributors

are facing hard times. In addi-

tion to thousands of concerts

across the country, the season’s

most popular music festivals —

Coachella, South by Southwest

and others — have been can-

celed or postponed, leaving the

ticket-takers, the roadies, the

piano movers, the cleanup crews

and many others in an impossi-

ble bind. Helping the musicians

is easier — but considering the

pathetic rates that today’s

streaming services currently

pay to recording artists, listen-

ing alone won’t help. If you have

the disposable income, think

about the artists you hope to

hear from on the other side of

this thing. Purchase their digital

recordings and physical mer-

chandise, or make a direct on-

line donation.

Until we reach that other side,

we’re saying goodbye to the affir-

mational beauty of communal

nightclub singalongs, goodbye to

that mysterious sensation of be-

longing that we can only achieve

on a dance floor packed with

strangers, goodbye to the sheer

physical pleasure of a night

spent soaking up high decibels,

goodbye to all of that and then

some. for now.

music won’t disappear from

our individual lives completely,

and with so many songs current-

ly at our digital fingertips, we

won’t run out of stuff to listen to.

We’ll get reacquainted with old

faves and continue to seek out

new ones. We’ll dance in our

living rooms. We’ll sing in the

shower. We might even dig old

instruments out of our closets

and experience music the way

human beings did before the

advent of recording technology.

music will feel old and new.

on social media, artists and

promoters have already started

live-streaming performances in

lieu of public concerts. If we

watch enough of them, maybe

we’ll learn to smile like Dylan’s

one-man audience, until it hurts.

[email protected]

CrItIC’s nOteBOOK

With the venues’ amps unplugged,

a shift in our relationship with music

maggIe sHannon for tHe WasHIngton Post

the wiltern theater in Los Angeles is among the venues across the

country that have closed their doors in response to the coronavirus.

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mInIserIes

little Fires everywhere (Hulu)

reese Witherspoon and Kerry

Washington produce and star in an

eight-episode adaptation of celeste

ng’s 2017 bestseller of the same

name. see Hank stuever’s review

on c1.

PremIeres

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— Nina Zafar

more at washingtonpost.com/

entertainment/tv

tV HIgHlIgHts

daVId BuKacH/freeform
motherland: Fort salem (fr eeform at 9) a drama series set in an
alternate-history version of present day in which witches really did exist in
colonial times and now fight for our nation on the front lines.

start to feel like an attempt to

squeeze two seasons of a ’90s-era

family drama into one miniseries.

The teenage heartaches and

other flare-ups are predictably

overwrought; the series also gets

mired in a tangential story (that

eventually becomes germane) of

an undocumented Chinese immi-

grant (Huang Lu) searching for

the baby daughter she aban-

doned at a Cleveland fire station.

These additional little fires, of the

subtextual sort, explore the no-

tion of what makes a “proper”

parent.

There’s a bit more drag in the

fifth and sixth hours, with long

flashbacks to the 1970s and early

1980s (“This Is Us”-style), where

we see mia and Elena’s separate

experiences as young women

(played here by Tiffany Boone

and AnnaSophia robb). It fills

out the story, but it takes us away

from the show’s main event: the

tension and crackle between

Washington and Witherspoon.

By the seventh episode, the

central act of arson feels more

like a group effort, after so many

family members and neighbors

have been betrayed. It’s possible

to savor the series and yet also

root for the flames. Burn it all

down!

[email protected]

little Fires everywhere (eight

episodes) begins streaming

Wednesday on Hulu with episodes 1-

3. a new episode will stream each
   week.

spoon will be playing variations

on this part to her dying day, and

why not? She’s r einvented a trope,

giving such women a level of

depth that turns a caricature into

a complicated yet relatable per-

son. It’s her calling — the curse of

Tracy flick.

Washington’s role is far more

cryptic and powerfully simmer-

ing: What’s mia running from?

Why does she keep having night-

mares about a man on the New

York subway? Why does she de-

cide to settle in a town where you

can get a ticket for letting the

grass grow an inch too high? Why

is she drawn to Elena even as she

resents everything about her?

Has mia come here merely for the

sake of her disdainfully pointed

art project, photographing the

richardson family and other

Shaker Heights denizens in their

spoiled splendor?

“Little fires Everywhere” l ands

with confidence between the al-

lure of prestige streaming televi-

sion and a Shonda rhimes-like

propensity for soap suds. (Cre-

ator/showrunner Liz Tigelaar’s

past credits include the teen dra-

ma “Life Unexpected,” and writ-

ing early seasons of “Nashville”

and “revenge.”)

flaws are few, but crucial. Epi-

sodes dawdle and dabble too long

in too many convoluted story

lines, which probably worked fine

on the page and filled Ng’s novel

with layered and thematic coinci-

dences. To ld as hour-long TV epi-

sodes, however, those stories

volved in the lives of the richard-
son siblings — a popular jock
(Jordan Elsass); an entitled prom
queen (Jade Pettyjohn); a nerdier
son (Gavin Lewis) who has a
crush on Pearl; and the aforemen-
tioned Izzy, who struggles with
her sexual orientation and en-
dures the torments of the other
freshman girls.
It’s not exactly opaque, nor
does it quite reach the entrancing
mood and style of HBo’s “Big
Little Lies,” to which “Little fires
Everywhere” will inevitably be
compared — and warmly wel-
comed by a nation that has shut
itself in and craves just this kind
of show to help pass the days and
weeks ahead.
At that lowered threshold, “Lit-
tle fires Everywhere” c omes com-
plete: juicy bestseller, class- and
race-based conflagrations, a
glimpse at the lifestyles of the
unhappily rich. It’s also expertly
stippled with nostalgic, ’90s-spe-
cific details.
Witherspoon once more
throws her whole self into the role
of the atrociously nosy neighbor-
hood frenemy — a prim perfec-
tionist whose life revolves around
rules and schedules, down to the
two nights per week (Wednes-
days and Saturdays) she permits
Bill to make love to her. (“It’s
Thursday,” she says, rejecting his
kisses and pointing to a bedside
clock that reads 12:02 a.m.)
one gets the feeling Wither-

tV reVIew from C1

Miniseries finds a sweet spot between

prestige TV and prime-time soap

erIn sImKIn/Hulu

In Hulu’s “Little Fires everywhere,” reese witherspoon plays elena, a prim perfectionist who leases a
duplex unit to a single mother played by Kerry washington.