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In “Hell’s Kitchen,” Alicia Keys smoothes her complex R. & B. catalogue and her spiky teen-age relationships into a musical that’s half coming-of-age fable, half glossy advertisement for nineteen-nineties New York—staged, not coincidentally, by the director of “Rent,” Michael Greif. (Cue “Empire State of Mind” and cargo pants.) Maleah Joi Moon plays the Alicia-counterpart at seventeen; Shoshana Bean is her protective mom; Kecia Lewis is her piano teacher, wise about grief; Brandon Victor Dixon is her undedicated dad. The show’s stunning vocal casting succeeds even when Kristoffer Diaz’s repetitive script falters. Moon’s soaring, Broadway-ready tone already rasps a little; Bean’s blues notes have a similar, fractured quality—and a whole mother-daughter relationship is contained in the singers’ two approaches to making beauty out of strain.—Helen Shaw (Public Theatre; through Jan. 14.)
Movies
Alongside awards-friendly features, late fall offers a batch of noteworthy documentaries, including Jialing Zhang’s “Total Trust,” which relies on clandestinely shot footage to reveal the Chinese government’s use of massive high-tech networks as part of its repression of dissent. The film is centered on several civil-rights lawyers who have been imprisoned for representing people charged with political offenses, such as a journalist arrested for her reporting on sexual abuse by officials. The stories reflect both old-fashioned authoritarian measures—including surveillance, arbitrary arrest, and torture—and the power of systems like a facial-recognition program that blocks citizens from social media and even from travelling. The story, as Zhang tells it, has, for now, no ending at all.—Richard Brody (Opening Dec. 8 at Film Forum.)
Pick Three
The staff writer Sarah Larson shares current obsessions.
1. My utter lack of interest in making gravlax, cardamom ice cream, musk ox with cloudberries, or reindeer meatballs somehow only enhances my love of the plein-air wonder “New Scandinavian Cooking,” on PBS and streaming, in which the delightful Andreas Viestad zips around Norway and prepares food in front of gorgeous vistas: fjords, birch forests, mountaintops. The energetic Viestad is prone to earnest declarations like “If I were to have a tattoo, it would say, simply, ‘duck fat.’ ”
2. This year, the photographer, director, and indie-rock musician Naomi Yang (of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi) released “Never Be a Punching Bag for Nobody,” an artful documentary centered on an old-school boxing gym in East Boston. Its title, a motto of the gym’s sage proprietor, touches on its narrative strands—East Boston’s colorful history, the residents’ struggles with their behemoth neighbor Logan Airport, and Yang’s learning to box. It’s a luminous meditation on power—personal, political, pugilistic—scored by Yang’s dreamy original soundtrack.
Illustration by Lorena Spurio
3. Liz Phair’s current tour of the immortal “Exile in Guyville,” from 1993, gives us another opportunity to appreciate and argue about her œuvre. Since the release of her 2021 album, “Soberish,” I’ve been urging skeptics rattled by Phair’s 2003 pivot popward to give it a whirl. “Soberish” brings the pleasures of her first few albums—humor, honesty, heart, hooks—to the material of middle age, and the results are enjoyable as hell, without the tinge of nostalgia. Lyrics such as “Dosage is everything / It hurts you or it helps” really hit the spot in one’s pharmaceutical years.
P.S. Good stuff on the Internet:
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