Culture Vulture: Justin Vivian Bond, Cécile McLorin Salvant, a tribute to Christopher Durang, and more

Anora – Director Sean Baker knows his way around the sex worker world, as he showed in Tangerine, Starlet, Red Rocket, and now this film about an “exotic dancer” who gets swept up in whirlwind love affair with a Russian oligarch’s wayward 21-year-old son. The movie is a showcase for Mikey Madison, best known (by me) for playing the oldest of Pamela Adlon’s three daughters on the great FX series (streaming on Hulu) Better Things.

Madison spends a huge amount of screen time naked and/or fucking, brave enough in itself, but she really goes there as a tough Brighton Beach working girl. It’s always fun to see and recognize Baker’s regular leading man, Karren Karagulian, who plays Toros, the Russian lad’s godfather and minder. But the discovery of this film for me was Yura Borisov, handsome and riveting as Toros’s quiet henchman Igor (below), who clearly has the hots for Ani from the minute he lays eyes on her. Their fairytale final scene surprised me, turned me on, and made me cry.

Justin Vivian Bond – We booked tickets to see Mx. Viv at Joe’s Pub figuring one way or another that would be a fitting post-election tonic. And it was. She caught the vibe perfectly with her opening number, Fun Boy Three’s “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum.” Otherwise the songs all came from lesbian songwriters. High points: Joan Armatrading’s “The Weakness in Me,” Ferron’s “Girl on a Road,” k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving.” New to me: the one by Two Nice Girls that goes “I spent my last ten dollars on birth control and beer/My life was so much simpler when I was sober and queer.”

Her band, led by the great Matt Ray (Taylor Mac’s longtime musical director), included something I’d never seen – an older black woman on drums, Bernice “Boom Boom” Brooks. As ever, there was no filter on Viv’s between-songs patter. Among other things, she let it be known that she is not a “crazyphobe.”

“How I Met Christopher Durang, and The People Who Love Him” – The celebration of Christopher Durang at Lincoln Center Theater was aptly titled (a reference to his 2009 opus Why Torture Is Wrong, And The People Who Love Them). A “This Is Your Life” slideshow put together by Durang’s adorable husband John Augustine alternated with excerpts from Mrs. Sorken, Adrift in Macao, and the Tony Award-winning Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike.

Longtime colleagues told wonderful stories: Emily Mann, David Hyde Pierce, and especially Marsha Norman, who regaled the assembly with tales of co-chairing Julliard’s playwriting department with him (prize pupils David Lindsay-Abaire and Joshua Harmon were on hand to testify).  Two people we would most have loved to hear speak about their dear friend Chris were Wendy Wasserstein, no longer with us, and Sigourney Weaver, who is in London playing Prospero onstage and sent a video reciting a speech from The Tempest.

We think of Durang as a writer of crazy comedies, as well as an amusing comic actor with a surprisingly adept musical-theater singing voice. But when I really think about his body of work – Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, Beyond Therapy, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Laughing Wild – I mean, those are some deep plays, often driven by immense sorrow and rage. I think about Betty’s Summer Vacation (1999) and the never-mentioned Sex and Longing (1996). Being in the audience for those two shows was as electric an experience as I’ve ever had in the theater – half the spectators (mainly younger) were laughing their heads off, and the other half (mainly older) were hating the show with every ounce of their beings. Few playwrights have generated such extreme belligerence in an audience, let alone someone with such a sweet disposition and cherubic face.

Bird – Andrea Arnold’s latest film (this week’s free-in-theaters choice for MUBI subscribers) continues her streak of capturing the lived-in details of working-class people whose real lives exist on the margins of what usually gets represented in movies and TV. Although her last film was the hair-raising American Honey, for Bird she returned to her native U.K. territory (very specifically, Kent).

Twelve-year-old Bailey (played with exceptional stony-faced fierceness by Nykiya Adams) struggles to make her way through the world, living in a squalid squat with her loving but hapless father (Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan, covered in homemade tattoos) and watched over by a curious figure who…well, let’s just say Franz Rogowski (Passages, Great Freedom) is perfectly cast.

Somebody Somewhere – we’re only three episodes in but loving the third season (on MAX), set in the ex-urban banality of Manhattan, Kansas, but brimming with talent from the downtown New York theater world (Bridget Everett, Jeff Hiller, Murray Hill, Lisa Kron). We already sniff that Everett’s character Sam is going to wind up dating the Icelandic beardo whose name she can’t pronounce (played by Olafur Darri Ólafsson, below). Can’t wait to see where that goes.

Cécile McLorin Salvant at Zankel Hall – What an astonishing singer! She’s not quite like anyone else – a real jazz musician who brings an improvisatory feel to inhabiting a song, reminiscent of Betty Carter but always on pitch. And she’s a character – she made her entrance with a spangly stiletto heel strapped to her buzzed head. She opened with “Promises Promises,” continued with Bessie Smith’s “Haunted House Blues” (to honor the “spooky season” we will be in for the foreseeable future), “With Every Breath I Take” from City of Angels, “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty” from Funny Girl, “Pirate Jenny” from Threepenny Opera like I’d never heard it before, and a Sting song called “Until” (from the OST of a Meg Ryan rom-com). She and her piano player Sullivan Fortner took the folk classic “John Henry” places you’d never expect it would go. Both of them share the quality of power in reserve; most of the time they evince a buoyant light touch, but every so often there’s a muscular explosion that you appreciate all the more because they’re not overdoing it.

Her version of Paul Simon’s “American Tune” opened with the Bach hymn that inspired the melody (“Erkenne mich, mein Hüter”) and incorporated the new verse Paul Simon wrote for Rhiannon Giddens (replacing “We came on the ship they call the Mayflower” with “We didn’t come here on the Mayflower/we come on a ship in a blood-red moon…”). A Puccini aria from “Turandot” sung in English was one of two encores. Someone called out for “Wuthering Heights” – McLorin Salvant’s outrageously fun arrangement of the Kate Bush classic on her most recent album clearly earned her a lot of new fans. The band did their two prepared encores (Kyle Poole played drums, Yasushi Nakamura the bass), then they came back and did a mashup of “Wuthering Heights” with “Breathing,” a deep cut from Bush’s Never For Ever album. Talk about eclectic – as in, my favorite kind of performer.

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