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Rachel Syme
Staff writer
A few lazy Sundays ago, I was strolling down leafy Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn’s Park Slope when I spotted a line stretching halfway down the block. I was instantly intrigued: Park Slope is not a place where people tend to wait in a queue. What was even more surprising was that the hot spot du jour was not an Instagram-touted pizza pop-up or even a new Glossier location. It was . . . a bookstore.
In August, the sisters Bea and Leah Koch opened the Ripped Bodice, near the corner of Fifth Avenue and President Street. It has been a continually packed scene ever since. The airy bookstore, whose storefront is painted the chalky pink of a rose macaron and whose shelves are devoted almost entirely to the genre of romance novels, is technically a franchise—the Koch sisters opened their first Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles in 2016, after funding the project through a Kickstarter campaign. The day I visited T.R.B. (as devotees call it), the patrons, mostly bookish, tote-bag-hauling women in their twenties and thirties, looked giddy to be inside the ornate space, which features kitschy wall sculptures made of vintage books and decorative birdcages.
Photograph by Adrienne Grunwald / The New York Times / Redux
The Koch sisters are certifiable romance experts—Bea, thirty-three, published a cultural history of Regency-era women in 2020, whereas Leah, thirty-one, brings a deep connoisseurship of queer fiction—and they saw a gap in the retail market. As Publishers Weekly reported, last year saw a more than fifty-per-cent rise in romance-book sales. The genre is soaring—perhaps due to pandemic escapism, or to a dramatic increase in diverse love stories, or because the Internet has helped romance devotees form vibrant communities—and the Ripped Bodice is clearly meeting the moment. As I wandered through the shelves, I overheard a group of strangers becoming fast friends next to the historical-fiction books, gabbing about what to read if you are looking for naughtiness on the Scottish Highlands. Here, the “erotica” section is centrally located. It has never felt so fun—or so freeing—to collectively browse for steamy smut.
I admit that I am a late-blooming romance reader; the genre never quite gripped me (though as a lover of tawdry Hollywood memoirs and tea-heavy British mysteries, I am no stranger to the joys of a quick read). But, wanting to be a part of the enthusiasm that spilled out of T.R.B.’s pink doorway, I heeded the suggestion of a friendly store clerk and scooped up Kate Goldbeck’s “You, Again.” The novel, which came out in September, sets the “When Harry Met Sally” story—enemies become friends become lovers—in modern-day New York. (The main characters are a downtown chef and a Queens-based comedian.) I found it funny, warm, and quite addictive. After devouring the book in a few hours in the bathtub, I realized that I had been missing out on a whole universe of frothy delight. I’m heading back to the Ripped Bodice soon to get my fix. See you in line.
Spotlight
Photograph by Agathe Poupeney
Dance
Most of the shiniest offerings on this year’s fall dance calendar come courtesy of Dance Reflections, a sprawling new two-month festival sponsored by Van Cleef & Arpels. The tilt is French and experimental, as exemplified by the Ballet National de Marseille, directed by the upstart collective (La)Horde. Their “Room with a View,” at N.Y.U. Skirball (Oct. 20-21), made with the composer Rone, is a club dance of despair that pushes through to hope. But, first, Lyon Opera Ballet kicks off the festival, at New York City Center (Oct. 19-21), with a gem of American postmodernism: Lucinda Childs’s “Dance.” That 1979 work is, like its Philip Glass score, both minimal and maximal, tracing insistent patterns. A re-creation of Sol LeWitt’s original film, magnified on a scrim, mounts the current performance in a vintage setting.—Brian Seibert
About Town
The Theatre
The director Maria Friedman’s ravishingly sweet revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” Stephen Sondheim and the book writer George Furth’s famously flopped 1981 musical (which moves to Broadway from New York Theatre Workshop), gives the bitter text the spoonful of sugar it desperately needed. In “Merrily,” time reverses, so we see three doomed friends progress from a final, irreparable fracture to their first, innocent pledge on a rooftop, swearing to be dear to one another forever. The world’s most lovable trio—Daniel Radcliffe (funny when furious, funnier in love), Jonathan Groff (seraphic, incandescent), and Lindsay Mendez (her voice flashing like a sabre)—play Charley, Frank, and Mary, but also, somehow, the tenderness we feel for our younger selves. Surely here is “Merrily” ’s definitive version; at the least, it’s how we’ll measure the musical’s promises, past and future.—Helen Shaw (Hudson Theatre; through March 24.)
Opera
In 2014 and 2015, R. B. Schlather staged a Handel series for a Lower East Side gallery space, far from the classical-music locus of Lincoln Center. Now he’s inaugurating a series of the composer’s work even farther afield, in upstate New York. A director known for his spare style and intentional process (the public was invited to attend rehearsals of those gallery performances), Schlather stages Handel’s beautifully crafted “Rodelinda” in a nineteenth-century building, with sets by the same construction company that restored it. Ruckus, a Baroque ensemble that plays without a conductor, accompanies a cast led by Keely Futterer, Sun-Ly Pierce, and Karim Sulayman.—Oussama Zahr (Hudson Hall, Hudson, New York; select dates Oct. 20-29.)
Folk
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Photograph by Michelle Mercado
Faye Webster established an eye-rolling ethos for her music on the 2019 song “Jonny”: “This wasn’t ’posed to be a love song / But I guess it is now,” she mutters, the words barely creeping out of her mouth. Since 2013, the Atlanta-born artist has written about love as if embarrassed by its monotony and predictability, threading quiet, quirky narratives that have spun off into their own awkward, droll romantic microverse. She performs as if she’s sulking, with lyrics that reflect an insulated overthinker swept up in her own imagination. A folk sound with muted R. & B. flourishes lends Webster’s “sad songs”—a distinction given by her mother, on “Hurts Me Too”—a bittersweet tinge, as she tries to appease the longings of an achy, breaky heart.—Sheldon Pearce (Brooklyn Steel; Oct. 23-25.)
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