“Heated Rivalry” and Its Wine-Mom Fans Reunite
What’s the only thing that could make “Heated Rivalry” gayer? That’s right: turning it into a musical. Doing the honors is Dylan MarcAurele, a composer, writer, and parodist extraordinaire, whose previous projects include spoofs of the “Real Housewives” franchise and of the 2022 horror movie “M3gan.” His latest undertaking is “Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody,” which begins previews on May 12, for an eight-week run at the Club, near Hudson Yards.
As anyone on social media probably knows by now, “Heated Rivalry” is a sex-forward TV show about closeted hockey players. Its first season, based on the “Game Changers” series by Rachel Reid, was released last November and was promoted with steamy clips that quickly blanketed Instagram and TikTok. The show focusses on two young N.H.L. stars playing for different teams: Shane Hollander, an aw-shucks Canadian, and Ilya Rozanov, a standoffish Russian. They gradually progress from furtive hotel-room hookups, when their game schedules intersect, to emotional intimacy and self-acceptance.
The series has attracted attention for, among other things, the size of Ilya’s ass, which, in MarcAurele’s adaptation, is its own character. Filling out the role of Ilya is Jay Armstrong Johnson; Jimin Moon plays Shane; Ryann Redmond plays a wine-mom narrator who lives for their clandestine love. (Women constitute a sizable chunk of the series’ fans; a childhood friend who is now a mother of two persuaded me to keep watching the TV show when I’d given up, after Episode 3.) Audiences can expect such penetrating songs as “This Fuck Was Different” and “A Heavy Load,” plus, as in the TV show, a character whose only line is “Girl!” The production is directed by Alan Kliffer, whose qualifications include twenty years’ experience writing and directing comedy, and a lifetime of being Canadian.—Dan Stahl
About Town
Phoebe Bridgers has done indie music a great many favors, but one of the most significant is rescuing the Los Angeles trio MUNA from major-label purgatory. The group, originally signed to RCA Records, released two albums of bustling synth pop and opened for Harry Styles in the late twenty-tens but was cast off in the early days of the pandemic owing to low sales. The Bridgers-founded label, Saddest Factory Records, stepped in, and, in 2022, MUNA reintroduced itself with an opalescent self-titled LP that made its already infectious grooves feel enriched. The songs were radiant, ecstatic, and cleansing, a deep exhale from a band freed from boardroom expectations. This May, the trio returns with another glowing album, “Dancing on the Wall,” reaffirming its commitment to the alternate path.—Sheldon Pearce (Music Hall of Williamsburg; May 16-19.)
Grappling with questions of the human condition with no expectation of an answer is an inevitability of life. The Brooklyn Art Song Society is tackling this conundrum in its ongoing New Voices Festival, this year titled “Longing,” focussing on themes of morality and compassion. The next installment of the series includes Missy Mazzoli’s “Self-Portrait with Dishevelled Hair,” after Rembrandt’s vulnerable and revealing early work of the same name; a new commission, Lembit Beecher’s “After the Fires,” about how natural disasters are both environmental tragedies and profoundly personal ones; and Huang Ruo’s “The Work of Angels,” which examines the devastating—and all too relevant—history of immigrants held in detention on Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, in the early nineteen-hundreds.—Jane Bua (Roulette; May 10.)
Whoever titled the exhibition “Holding Back” must have a morbid sense of humor, because the paintings of Juanita McNeely (1936-2023) are anything but restrained. In the artist’s frenzied canvases, humans and animals—and hybrids of the two—crawl, climb, splay, and stretch; here, in a set of pieces created between 1985 and 2010, they do so in vertiginous spaces marked by refractive windows and water. The dominant color is a sickly blue, tinged with greens and purples. McNeely devised a remarkably visceral blend of German Expressionism, Surrealism, and feminism. In “Pre-Abortion Law Remembrance” (1985), inspired by her own experiences, a faceless figure connects a naked, bleeding woman to a contraption with meat hooks, while a ghoul and a monkey look on. These works are so much more than images or symbols—they’re psychic explosions.—Jillian Steinhauer (James Fuentes; through May 16.)
First a novel, by Iris Rainer Dart, and then a tearjerker film, starring Bette Midler, “Beaches” has become a musical by Dart (lyrics and book), Thom Thomas (book), and Mike Stoller (music). This version also makes you want to cry, but for different reasons. Although the basic plot remains—an adolescent friendship between the tough-talking, stardom-chasing Cee Cee (Midler’s role, played here by Jessica Vosk, who holds her own) and the wealthy Wasp Bertie (Kelli Barrett) becomes a lifelong bond—the pair’s odd-couple charm gets sanded down with schmaltzy songs and tacky groaners. (Of a Carmen Miranda-style hat, Cee Cee remarks, “It’s got more fruit than the audience at a Judy Garland concert.”) Lonny Price and Matt Cowart direct this loud, listless production.—Dan Stahl (Majestic; through Sept. 6.)
Yasujirō Ozu, who made dozens of masterworks from the nineteen-thirties through the early sixties, is among the most misunderstood of great directors. Daniel Raim’s documentary “The Ozu Diaries,” which brings together clips from many of Ozu’s great films with voice-over readings of Ozu’s diaries and interviews, helps to clarify his achievements. Often considered a formalist, Ozu describes practices, exemplified onscreen, that foreground spontaneous emotion and document the times. No mere chronicler of intimate conflicts, he’s revealed—as in his anguished personal and cinematic responses to his military service in the Second World War—to be a caustic social critic. Raim also offers a fascinating history of the Japanese film industry and insightful sidebars from Ozu’s associates and from such current filmmakers as Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Tsai Ming-liang.—Richard Brody (TCM; May 5.)
Like the graduation performances held at the School of American Ballet in June, this weeklong run by American Ballet Theatre’s junior troupe ABT Studio Company is a place to catch a glimpse of some of the city’s most promising ballet dancers in the moment before they step across the threshold into their professional lives. Every year, the level of talent and sheer ability seems more outrageous. The dancers, aged generally seventeen to twenty-one, take on not only the usual classic showpieces—such as the veiled pas de deux from the nineteenth-century exotic fantasy “La Bayadère”—but also recent works by contemporary choreographers including Twyla Tharp, Kyle Abraham, and Christopher Wheeldon. There’s also a dance by Brady Farrar, a graduate of the Studio Company who is now in the corps at A.B.T.—Marina Harss (Joyce Theatre; May 13-17.)
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Bar Tab
Taran Dugal snacks at one of the best new bars in the country.
In the seventies, the East Village was the punk capital of the world, and it had the grit to match. Nowadays, old-school residents bemoan the neighborhood’s evolution from grungy to grandiose; what was once a warren of hedonism has become a breeding ground for characterless watering holes whose lack of personality is bested only by the exorbitance of their beer prices. Such displeased denizens might appreciate Bar Snack, a cocktail lounge that was recently named one of the country’s best new bars. Wood-panelled, warmly lit, and dotted with mid-century seating and vintage novelty signs, the place has a distinctly low-key (if not quite punk) air. On a recent week night, two newcomers stopped by early and ordered a pair of the Split Ends—a whiskey sour imbued with raspberry amaro and topped with Guinness foam. They followed those up with the Spice Bag, a delectable jumble of chicken tenders, fries, onions, and red peppers, accompanied by a tangy curry sauce. As sunset approached and the shadows outside the bar’s pink-tinselled windows grew longer, a steady stream of customers settled in; here was a double date, then a bachelorette party, now a group celebrating a birthday, extinguishing candles and distributing cake. The guests, influenced by a secondhand spirit of festivity, ordered a round of Melonades, a refreshing, bittersweet concoction of vodka, lemon, and cantaloupe, topped with a heap of crushed ice. Just as “Rich Girl” by Daryl Hall & John Oates began playing, their bill arrived. Unable to rely on the old man’s money, the pair assessed the damage—a far cry from the nineteen-seventies, though they’d certainly seen worse—and departed for the dimming streets.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: