Critics at Large | The New Yorker - Lyt her

After “Wicked,” What Do We Want from the Musical?The American musical is in a state of flux. Today’s Broadway offerings are mostly jukebox musicals and blatant I.P. grabs; original ideas are few and far between. Meanwhile, one of the biggest films of the season is Jon M. Chu’s earnest (and lengthy) adaptation of “Wicked,” the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West that first premièred on the Great White Way nearly twenty years ago—and has been a smash hit ever since. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss why “Wicked” is resonating with audiences in 2024. They consider it alongside other recent movie musicals, such as “Emilia Pérez,” which centers on the transgender leader of a Mexican cartel, and Todd Phillips’s follow-up to “Joker,” the confounding “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Then they step back to trace the evolution of the musical, from the first shows to marry song and story in the nineteen-twenties to the seventies-era innovations of figures like Stephen Sondheim. Amid the massive commercial, technological, and aesthetic shifts of the last century, how has the form changed, and why has it endured? “People who don’t like musicals will often criticize their artificiality,” Schwartz says. “Some things in life are so heightened . . . yet they’re part of the real. Why not put them to music and have singing be part of it?” Read, watch, and listen with the critics: “Wicked” (2024) “The Animals That Made It All Worth It,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker) “Ben Shapiro Reviews ‘Wicked’ ” “Frozen” (2013) “Emilia Pérez” (2024) “Joker: Folie à Deux” (2024) “ ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Review: Make ’Em Laugh (and Yawn),” by Manohla Dargis (the New York Times) “Hair” (1979) “The Sound of Music” (1965) “Anything Goes” (1934) “Show Boat” (1927) “Oklahoma” (1943) “Mean Girls” (2017) “Hamilton” (2015) “Wicked” (2003) “A Strange Loop” (2019) “Teeth” (2024) “Kimberly Akimbo” (2021) New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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The Elusive Promise of the First PersonThe first person is a narrative style as old as storytelling itself—one that, at its best, allows us to experience the world through another person’s eyes. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace how the technique has been used across mediums throughout history. They discuss the ways in which fiction writers have played with the unstable triangulation between author, reader, and narrator, as in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” a book that adopts the perspective of a serial killer, and whose publication provoked public outcry. RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys”—an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel—is a bold new attempt to deploy the first person onscreen. The film points to a larger question about the bounds of narrative, and of selfhood: Can we ever truly occupy someone else’s point of view? “The answer, in large part, is no,” Cunningham says. “But that impossibility is, for me, the actual promise: not the promise of a final mind meld but a confrontation, a negotiation with the fact that our perspectives really are our own.” Read, watch, and listen with the critics: “Nickel Boys” (2024) “The Nickel Boys,” by Colson Whitehead “Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov “Meet the Director Who Reinvented the Act of Seeing,” by Salamishah Tillet (The New York Times) “Great Books Don’t Make Great Films, but ‘Nickel Boys’ Is a Glorious Exception,” by Richard Brody (The New Yorker) “Lady in the Lake” (1947) “Dark Passage” (1947) “Enter the Void” (2010) “The Blair Witch Project” (1999) Doom (1993) “The Berlin Stories,” by Christopher Isherwood “American Psycho,” by Bret Easton Ellis “The Adventures of Augie March,” by Saul Bellow “Why Did I Stop Loving My Cat When I Had a Baby?” by Anonymous (The Cut) “Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930” at the Guggenheim Museum New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Critics at Large | The New Yorker

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