6 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
ILLUSTRATION BY KELSEY WROTEN
Your appetite for the new seven-part Netflix documentary series “Pretend
It’s a City” will depend on particular factors: your interest in the œuvre
of Martin Scorsese, your tolerance for discursive monologuing, and your
baseline affinity for New York City. The show follows Fran Lebowitz, the
gruff, opinionated cultural critic in Chaplinesque suiting whose cocksure
cosmopolitan takes landed with a provocative ker-thunk on the Manhattan
literary scene, starting in the late seventies, with her books “Metropolitan
Life” and “Social Studies.” Then Lebowitz quit writing and became a kind
of curmudgeon emeritus, espousing unyielding advice on all aspects of
urban life to anyone who will listen. (Some of her steadfast beliefs: tourists
walk too slowly, iPhones are accursed objects, cigarettes are great, people
who leave Manhattan for greener pastures are lily-livered.) Scorsese, for
his part, finds pure joy in Lebowitz’s musings, which he also featured in his
2010 film “Public Speaking.” I loved that film, and so I should have inhaled
“Pretend It’s a City.” Instead, I found it to be too much of a good thing.
Scorsese allows his subject to wax grandiloquent even when her outrage
engine runs out of steam. The series is at times a potent valentine to a city
lost, but you can only listen to someone kvetch for so long.—Rachel SymeONTELEVISION
1
TELEVISION
Lupin
In 1905, in reaction to the runaway success
that the British writer Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle was enjoying with Sherlock Holmes,
the French writer Maurice Leblanc invented
Arsène Lupin, a dashing thief and cunning
mischief-maker who often wore a top hat and
a monocle while pocketing the world’s most
valuable diamonds. The Lupin character be-
came a hit, and Leblanc spent decades churning
out adventures. This massive body of work has
been translated to television many times—but
never as compellingly as in “Lupin,” a new
Netflix series (by way of Gaumont Television,
in France) in which the rakish Omar Sy plays a
modern-day mastermind named Assane Diop,
who works as a janitor at the Louvre. When
Diop comes across an original Lupin novel, it
grants him superpowers, including the ability
to pull off near-perfect heists, and he sets out
to avenge his late father. The show is stylish,
1
DANCE
Ballet Hispánico
In lieu of live performances, the company has
been hosting periodic watch parties, screening
archival footage adorned with live conversa-
tions. For the next few installments, it turns
back to the nineteen-eighties and nineties,
when its current artistic director, Eduardo
Vilaro, was a dancer in the troupe. On Jan. 13,
the selection is Vicente Nebrada’s 1984 work
“Arabesque,” a flamenco-tinged suite of dances
set to music by Enrique Granados.—Brian
Seibert (ballethispanico.org)Mark Morris Dance Group
The revelatory “Dance On! Video Vault” series
keeps spilling gems, now with footage picked
by veteran dancers. For the latest installment,
available through Jan. 31, Tina Fehlandt and
Guillermo Resto have chosen “Champion-
ship Wrestling After Roland Barthes” (1984),
a wicked sendup of the conventions of televi-
sion wrestling, and “New Love Song Waltzes”
(1982), an unromanticized look at the effort of
love, set to Brahms. The second piece comes in
a 1988 performance distinguished by the voices
of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and her mother,
Marcia Hunt.—B.S. (markmorrisdancegroup.org/
dance-on-video-vault)Martha Graham Dance Company
This month, America’s oldest dance company
pays attention to nature. On Jan. 19, its online
program zooms in on “Canticle for Innocent
Comedians,” a pantheistic dance poem that
Graham created in 1952. Some of the footage
is vintage (Yuriko and Bertram Ross in the
“Moon” duet), some recent (Lloyd Knight
and the guest star Wendy Whelan in “Moon”),
and some brand-new (the “Wind” section,
rechoreographed by the company alumnus
Robert Cohan).—B.S. (marthagraham.org)Sadler’s Wells / “Dancing Nation”
Sadler’s Wells reopened briefly in the fall, but,
along with every other London theatre, it was
recently forced to close. With the help of the
government-run Arts Council, it presents a one-
day festival of virtual dance, staged and filmed
in accordance with COVID protocols. The fes-
tival will be shown in three hour-long tranches
on Jan. 14 (at 3:30, 6:30, and 9:30) on the venue’s
Web site. Performances include a starry duet
for Akram Khan and Natalia Osipova, choreo-
graphed by Khan; a performance of Matthew
Bourne’s “Spitfire,” a comic gem from 1988,
in which six male dancers preen and pose to
well-known nineteenth-century ballet music;
the excellent “Blak Whyte Gray,” by the sophis-
ticated hip-hop ensemble Boy Blue; and a 2018
work, “Contagion,” by a group called Shobana
Jeyasingh Dance, inspired by the ravages of the
Spanish flu.—Marina Harss (sadlerswells.com)story shifts again: Dory has been kidnapped
by a wee psychopath (a very silly and scary
Cole Escola), who keeps her locked in a padded
basement. The season is part “Room” and part
“Silence of the Lambs,” while still maintaining
its sardonic, quippy tone. The result is a truly
absurdist, effervescently trippy ride.—R.S.suspenseful, and, most of all, a wild romp
through Paris; it makes for perfect armchair
travel.—Rachel SymeSearch Party
This show has been described in many ways:
“Scooby-Doo” for millennials, a hipster crime-
spree comedy, a devilish skewering of the enti-
tled bruncherati that swanned around pre-pan-
demic Brooklyn. It is all of these things, and
yet, season after season, the show, created by
Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Mi-
chael Showalter, zigs when you think it will
zag, managing to reinvent itself. The fourth
season, which débuts Jan. 14 on HBO Max,
continues the tale of four ragtag friends (Dory,
Drew, Elliott, and Portia) who find themselves
in hot water when they go searching for a miss-
ing college classmate and end up committing
an accidental murder (oops!). The first season
ended with the crime, the second chronicled the
coverup, and the third became a propulsive legal
drama in which Dory (Alia Shawkat) turned
into a tricksy Amanda Knox cipher. Now the