yes, it’s a stand-alone feature with my character’s name in the
title, but it’s not all about him.”
After all, many of Cumberbatch’s big moments as Doctor
Strange have come while sharing the screen. In 201 9’s “A veng-
ers: Endgame,” with no words and just one finger, he told Rob-
ert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man that it was time to die. He played a
key role in another multiverse tale, last winter’s “Spider-Man:
No Way Home,” the billion-dollar hit that has been the biggest
movie in the pandemic era so far at the box office.
Cumberbatch still gets opportunities to flex own his super-
hero muscles in the new film by playing multiple alternate
universe versions of Doctor Strange. These include heroic,
seemingly evil and zombielike versions of the superhero, who
was created by the late Steve Ditko and Stan Lee and first ap-
peared in Marvel Comics “Strange Tales” No. 110 back in 1963.
Cumberbatch first dabbled with a Doctor Strange from a dif-
ferent world when he voiced the character in the animated se-
ries “What If... ?” last year.
Ego seems to be the common denominator among the vari-
ants — he never works well with others. But Cumberbatch says
Strange has to learn to rely on someone other than himself.
“These parallel existences have a similarity about them but
SEE BENEDICT ON C3BY DAVID BETANCOURT
M
any of the most-anticipated things about the new
Doctor Strange movie involve everything but
Doctor Strange.
What will happen to Wanda Maximoff (Eliza-
beth Olsen), whose streaming success with “Wan-
daVision” made her one of the most popular superheroes at
Marvel Studios? How much will we see of America Chavez
(Xochitl Gomez), who in the comics is Latina and a lesbian?
Will the X-Men make their Marvel Studios debut? What about
Namor the Sub-Mariner? Could the original actor connected to
the role of Iron Man, Tom Cruise, show up as the new Tony
Stark? Okay, maybe that’s pushing it.
But Cumberbatch, returning to the role of Marvel’s super-
powered sorcerer, perhaps the most self-confident of all
Avengers, says he knew exactly what he was signing up for in
“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” which is now
out in theaters. And he’s fine with it.
“This is a very crowded marquee with a lot of characters
and a lot of plot, a lot of story, especially because we properly
explore the multiverse in this one,” Cumberbatch told The
Washington Post. “The complexities and layers of that meanKLMNO
Style
SATURDAY, MAY 7 , 2022. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STYLE EZ RE C
Keeping Strange companyC umberbatch on his character sharing the screen with a big cast: ‘It’s not all about him’BY MICHAEL ANDOR BRODEURIt was only moments after German
conductor Christian Reif had taken the
stage Thursday at Strathmore to lead the
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra that
things swirled into a bacchanalian tem-
pest of unbridled passion and orgiastic
revelry.
That’s what happens when you front-
load a p rogram with the German compos-
er Hans Werner Henze’s “Mänadentanz,”
an excerpt from his 1965 opera “The
Bassarids.” The piece cracks open like
Pandora’s box and releases all manner of
stalking, swooping and cavorting figures
— a Dionysian riot that plummets into the
dark depths of pleasure.
I’ve grown accustomed to orchestras
opening programs with a warm-up work
that hits you like a cold bucket of water, a
choice that often seems purely calisthenic.
Reif, on the other hand, dealt “Mänaden-
tanz” like a calling card. Its jagged peaks
and tranquil valleys, its pent-up energy
and ample o pportunities for dynamic dra-
ma (like the growing insistence of the
strings’ replies toward the end) all offered
a forecast of the program to come.
Reif, who late this summer will lead his
debut season as inaugural music director
of the Lakes Area Music Festival of Minne-
sota, was an arresting force from the
podium, his body snapping like a whip,
tightening and softening as though he
were loaded with springs. At times the
work was entirely a matter of his hands,
SEE BRODEUR ON C2
MUSIC REVIEW
Conductor
leads BSO
program to
a furious start
JAY MAIDMENT/MARVEL STUDIOSstill partying like it’s March 2020, a.k.a.
avoiding indoor restaurants and
parties and concerts and museums and
department stores and Jiffy Lubes and
movie theaters and FedEx stores and
dentists’ offices and retirementdinners, and who can count on two
hands the number of buildings your
child has ever been inside (my
daughter thinks Safeway is Disney
World), I know what you want for
Mother’s Day a nd it is not a bathrobe.This mom’s wish? The gift of the jab.
What I would like for
Mother’s Day t his year is
a new duvet cover, some
sunglasses, a professional
carpet c leaning for the
dining room rug, and a
[expletive] vaccine for my
[expletive] child.
I am writing this
column from t he b asement of my i n-
laws’ home in an active-living
retirement community, where my
family has b een mooching child care in
the waning days of the pandemic, and
where my p rimary means of
entertaining my 1 0-month-old
daughter is taking her t o watch athletic
85 -year-olds p lay pickleball, and I can
honestly s ay t hat we are very lucky and
also t hat what I would like for Mother’s
Day this year is a [expletive] v accine for
my [ expletive] child.
For a large percentage o f you, this
column does not resonate. Perhaps you
don’t h ave children. Perhaps your
children a re older than 5 and have been
vaccinated for months. Perhaps your
children a re part of the 7 5 percent of
children ( !!) who apparently h ave
already h ad c ovid as of the e nd of
February, a ccording to the C DC.
For the percentage of you who areYou have wanted this since
December of 2020 when vaccines
became available for individuals 16 and
older. And then since May 2021, when
use was expanded to adolescents 12
and older. And then since October of
2021 when kids ages 5 to 11 could get
the shot, and then since November
2021 when experts predicted a baby
vaccine by year’s e nd. And then since
Feb. 11, 2022, when another unexpected
snag delayed things for “two months.”
The FDA now says vaccines for
children younger than 5 might be
available as soon as June. Ha h a. Ha h a
ha ha ha.
What I would like for Mother’s Day i s
to go b ack in time to the part of the
pandemic when officials were still
saying things like “We’re all in it
together.” I would like them to clarify
that what they actually meant was,
“We’re all in it together until most of us
get antibodies, at which point the
parents of uninfected infants and
toddlers are in it by themselves.” I
would like them to take a hard look at
the double helix of boredom and rage
that lives inside parents who still have
to ask off work because there’s b een a
covid outbreak in the toddler room at
SEE HESSE ON C4Monica
HesseISTOCK
BY REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL
Emily Bingham’s new book offers a
powerful story of how, exactly, we fool
ourselves into thinking the p ast is past.
In “ My O ld Kentucky Home: The Aston-
ishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic
American Song,” Bingham — a historian
and member of an influential Louisville
newspaper family — takes readers
through the song’s erased histories, as
well as the Bingham family’s own. It is a
chronicle of how generations — of n ot just
Kentuckians but people across the coun-
try and in many parts of the globe — have
sung out bucolic longing, not for a home
but for an enslaver’s plantation: “We will
sing one s ong for the old Kentucky home/
For the o ld Kentucky h ome, far a way.”
Bingham begins with Stephen Foster,
who is unironically known as “the father
of American music.” Foster, it turns out,
came from a family of Pittsburgh Confed-
erate defenders. They were a family who
pretended to be of means when they
weren’t. They n eeded Stephen to earn. He
proved he could when he turned to writ-
ing minstrelsy, that racist and profit-gen-
erating variety s how.
Today’s crowds who e njoy the song “My
Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!” — the
state song of Kentucky and the hallmark
of the Kentucky Derby — often fail to
realize t hat Foster first wrote it i n buffoon-
ing dialect. Bingham a rgues that this early
version, which was called “Poor Uncle
Tom, Good Night!,” adapted and bent the
story by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In bor-
rowing the novel’s celebrity while also
changing the story’s terms, Foster would
give his minstrel show’s v iewers a n unsav-
able Tom, who i n the song dies wishing he
could return to the p lantation.
But Foster thought to make even better
money, realizing that if h e recast the l yrics
without a named c haracter, and in Gener-
al American E nglish dialect, he could also
reach t he p arlor demographic, those mid-
dle-class piano-playing White women
who were buying up all the sheet music.
He could write a song that worked for
different audiences, depending on who
was s inging. A nd w hy.
That’s just this book’s first chapter.
Bingham has given us an account that is
SEE BOOK WORLD ON C2
BOOK WORLD
‘Old Kentucky
Home’ has big
problems with
its foundation
MY OLD
KENTUCKY HOME
The Astonishing
Life and
Reckoning of an
Iconic American
Song
By Emily Bingham
Knopf. 352 pp. $30Doctor Strange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch, pictured) comes first in the title of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of
Madness,” but the multiverse gets some of the best plotlines. “This is a very crowded marquee,” the British actor says.