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Jesse Armstrong and Steve Carell on set earlier this year. Photo: Macall Polay/HBO

I’m in a seven-story mansion in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah that looks like a ski lodge commissioned by Tony Stark. It’s late March, and actors Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith (Saturday Night), Ramy Youssef, and Jason Schwartzman are shooting an outrageous scene for Mountainhead, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong’s directorial debut about four arrogant tech moguls who get together for a boys’ weekend that goes fantastically awry.

The context: Youssef’s character, Jeff, owns a company that has just devised a filter that can identify and block hyperrealistic generative-AI images. Smith’s character, Venis — rhymes with tennis, not the appendage — is the founder and current owner of Traam, a Facebook-esque social-media platform. He desperately wants Jeff’s tech because Traam is being overrun by politically and theologically inflammatory false images that have triggered violent outbreaks around the world. Carell plays Randall, a.k.a. Dark-Money Gandalf, a venture capitalist and father figure to the others (Jeff even calls him Papa Bear). Jeff, Venis, and Randall are all worth billions. The fourth guy, Schwartzman’s Hugo Van Yalk, is the only one in the group who isn’t a billionaire. The others have nicknamed him Souper, short for Soup Kitchen.

In the scene they’re currently filming, Jeff catches Hugo in a lie about knowing somebody at the International Monetary Fund. Jeff gets him to agree that if he can prove Hugo is lying, he’ll have permission to perch atop Hugo’s chair like a jungle cat on a tree branch and “fuck your head.” Hugo admits to lying, and Youssef climbs onto the chair and begins dry-humping the back of Schwartzman’s skull.

Between takes, Armstrong and the actors discuss how best to calibrate the hip movements and Youssef’s pornographic vocalizations, tweaking the blocking to get the best view of everyone’s faces no matter what perspective the camera assumes. After calling “action,” Armstrong watches the monitor, his look morphing from wondrous delight to a coolly detached scrutiny. Armstrong’s crew struggles not to crack up. “This is fuckin’ gold!” a crew member whisper-giggles.

Gold or not, that scene doesn’t actually end up in the movie. “I’ve had to cut a bunch,” Armstrong tells me a few weeks later, when the edit is complete and the actors are in a London recording studio dubbing new lines. “I’m keen for it not to be too long!”

He doesn’t want to take too long, either. Mountainhead’s rushed schedule is by design. Armstrong worried that the film might seem irrelevant if he took his sweet time with it. He came up with the basic story in November 2024, pitched it to HBO executive Casey Bloys in December, assembled the cast and crew in January and February while simultaneously writing the screenplay, and shot it over five weeks this spring for a May 31 debut. He says he was intrigued by the challenge of “kind of running headlong into something that felt like it was culturally still happening.” Succession, he tells me, was “partly about an older guy looking at his mortality,” but it was also about the idea of one cultural power center dying out as another one supplanted it. “The real power is now in social media and tech, and so it felt interesting to do something very current.”

The seed for the film was planted in the fall of 2023, when the Times of London asked Armstrong to review Michael Lewis’s book Going Infinite, about convicted fraudster and crypto pusher Sam Bankman-Fried. The assignment spurred Armstrong to “read more tech stuff than I had done for a while.” He became so engrossed in the research that he started listening to podcasts about technology and the deals surrounding it. In the process, Armstrong began noticing that most of the power brokers in tech had a very specific “tone of voice that I couldn’t get out of my head” — one marked by “a straight-up arrogance, which is both scary and comic. You know, being unaware is a key reason why people are funny, and arrogance is a good way of being unaware. And then there’s a whole intellectual framework, which, broadly speaking, the Silicon Valley tech world brings.” He describes it as a “first-principles approach,” one that begins “by asking, ‘What are we trying to achieve here, and how do we get there in the cleanest, most financially and humanly efficient way?’ There’s something very appealing about that. But it also has a comic side, which is like, Do I need my mum and dad? Do I need my kids? Do I need to keep on feeding my kids? What will happen if I zero this out? Oh — my kid died? Shit! We need to buy more food for the kids! Otherwise they won’t be alive!”

The film feels as if it could be unfolding in an unexplored corner of the Succession universe. And like Armstrong’s acclaimed series, it blends erudition, wit, cruelty, and perversity, sometimes in the same scene. Prior to this, Armstrong says, he felt no impetus to keep pace with 21st-century life. Succession was loosely inspired by real events and people (in particular the Murdoch family), and it sometimes seemed to coincidentally mirror the news, especially during the final season, when the children of media boss Logan Roy got in bed with a fascist American presidential candidate, but it was never riffing off specific things that were happening as the scripts were being written. The scope and expense of the production made that impossible. Besides, it wasn’t in the mission statement to reflect or critique real events, nor was it dramatically advisable. Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom became the most ridiculed series on HBO by trying to do that.

Mountainhead isn’t Newsroom-ing it. It’s creating characters who are sort of like people you know, but not exactly. Certain elements are combined and rearranged: Randall seems like a bit of Steve Jobs and a bit of Bill Gates and maybe a bit of Warren Buffett, but he’s his own person. So are Venis and Jeff, who are much cooler and more naturally bro-y than Mark Zuckerberg could ever be, no matter how much bling he buys. But it does have the frisson of immediacy. How could it not, having been cranked out so quickly? “It feels like he called me on a Tuesday, we shot it on a Thursday, and then it’s coming out, like, the next Friday!” Carell tells me. “It’s the most compact production process I’ve ever experienced.”

Ramy Youssef celebrates his birthday on set. Photo: Macall Polay/HBO

Although Armstrong hasn’t had an official big-league directing credit until now, the 54-year-old has spent so many hours writing, producing, or supervising the editing of various TV programs (including Armando Iannucci’s political satire The Thick of It, on which he was a writer-producer, and the sitcoms Fresh Meat and Peep Show, in collaboration with his friend Sam Bain) that this leap would seem a mere formality. Youssef — who landed on Armstrong’s radar because of his Hulu series, Ramy, in which Succession actor ​​Hiam Abbass plays Youssef’s mother — felt pretty certain that Armstrong wasn’t the sort of guy who’d break a sweat over directing a small movie. At least not after Succession, anyway. “It was so exciting to just see Jesse work like, ‘Yeah, fuck it, I could do a movie — I mean, I usually do ten of these a season,’ ” he says.

Armstrong disagrees, telling me his esteem for “actual directors” like his friend Mark Mylod, a co–executive producer of Succession, is so great that to act as if he fully understood film direction before stepping onto the set “would have been disrespectful to the craft.” Has he always been this reverent when contemplating the job? Armstrong is a film buff, so yeah, probably. But in talking to him, it seems just as likely that his zoological study of Billionaireus doucheus made him extra cautious of falling into the same thought traps as the species he’s portraying. Chief among them: Acting as if your achievements in one field make you an expert in all things. “I don’t want to pretend that the people in Silicon Valley don’t know things I don’t know and aren’t able to do things I’m not able to do,” he tells me. “But with that comes arrogance. It happens if you’re a railroad person in 1880, and it happens if you’re a general in 1945, and it happens if you’re a tech guy right now. It just seems like you’re right at the center of the culture, and everything is about you, and you’ve got all the answers.”

Armstrong is so outwardly self-deprecating that at first he comes off as insecure or perhaps reflexively deferential. But to watch him direct is to realize that, no matter how forcefully he downplays his skills, he’s a duck in water. He has clear ideas of what he wants from a scene and an easygoing, conflict-averse way of getting it. He might, for instance, make a suggestion to cinematographer Marcel Zyskind or executive producer Jill Footlick, then conclude it with something like, “But of course, if that’s completely absurd and unfeasible, we don’t have to.” Or he’ll ask if it’s theoretically possible to make some incredibly basic adjustment, like bringing down the heat on a line reading or repositioning a camera, then add, “D’ya think?”

Armstrong is also, for a university-schooled Englishman who references Plato, Marcus Aurelius, and Immanuel Kant in dialogue, keen to guard against seeming pretentious. “He’s an incredibly smart guy, but he doesn’t wear it on his sleeve,” Carell says. “I guess what I did not expect is that he’s quite, quite goofy and quite silly, really.” I experienced this during a break between scenes when I told Armstrong that the setup of Mountainhead reminded me of the 1962 Luis Buñuel satire, The Exterminating Angel, wherein a rich couple’s servants abandon them on the day of a dinner party, and the guests, who don’t actually know how to do anything, are paralyzed with indecision and functionally trapped there. Armstrong kicked the comparison around with me for a couple of minutes, but when Zyskind beckoned him away to discuss the next camera setup, he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at me and stage-whispered, “He thinks I know who Luis Buñuel is! Help me out here!”

Armstrong’s default expression on set is an enchanted grin when he’s watching actors play his scenes — which, as on Succession, are always shot linearly from beginning to end with two cameras, rather than in fragmented, nonchronological setups, the better to generate momentum and keep the performers focused. Schwartzman says he had wanted to work this way since he began watching Succession. He describes the series as catnip to a “dorky” side of him that treats acting as a rarefied athletic event in which high-level technique is its own source of excitement. “It seemed to me, and I could be wrong, that as the show went on, the scenes became not longer, exactly, but felt as if they were longer; as if you were watching actors in longer, more complete takes, doing these immense and powerful scenes,” he says, “and it was really just inspiring to watch.”

As on Succession, Armstrong inserted alternate lines into script pages (clearly marked as ALTS) so that the actors could surprise their scene partners and kept takes running long after their official end point, letting the performers marinate in uncomfortable silence until one of them said something to break the tension. Calling “cut” immediately seems “rude” to Armstrong “because you never quite know if they might say something; you don’t want to cut them off. So I like being polite, and they often give you things.”

Mountainhead. Photo: Macall Polay/HBO

Despite the tight schedule, which made it impossible to do more than a few takes of each scene, the atmosphere on Mountainhead was relaxed. Everyone seemed willing to accept suggestions from colleagues, even ones with different areas of expertise, as when production designer Stephen Carter, one of many Succession department heads imported to Utah, came up with the idea of Schwartzman’s character having expensive band equipment, then ran with a suggestion from Schwartzman that the instruments should look as if they’d never been touched.

Armstrong tells me that he briefly toyed with the notion of establishing Mountainhead as occurring within the Succession universe by having the moguls watch a news report on ATN, Logan Roy’s channel. He nixed it because it seemed too cute and because he wanted the movie to have a distinct identity. And it does. There’s no shortage of knuckle-head comedy bits, including Randall walking face-first into a glass door and the guys gathering atop a snowy cliff, opening their ski vests and shirts, and writing their net worths on their bare chests with a red Sharpie. But there’s an overriding sense of moral emptiness and a whiff of sulfur. Where the Succession siblings wanted to be seen as good and sometimes pretended to have principles, the Mountainhead quartet is all about greed, nihilism, and delusions of godhood: They want to rule as much of the world as they can and watch the rest burn. Youssef says that another difference between the billionaire tech bros of Mountainhead and the Royco players is that “there’s a level of nepotism on Succession that I think doesn’t quite exist with these characters, at least the way that I saw it. The Roy children are very much bred into a certain pedigree. What’s so different about these guys is that, as far as I interpreted it, they did come into wealth on their own. I think these guys viewed themselves as nerdy underdogs. That view, which made them so successful coming up, has not been adjusted for the reality of what power they wield.”

The Rehearsal

Kissmat

Season 2

Episode 4

Editor’s rating

4 Stars

****

Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO

One of the Sinister Tricks of Documentaries – To Say Nothing of their Mutant Cousin, the Reality Show – is How Easily They Make Forget About Their Essential Artisan and Invest in Humans Who We Accept As Living Normally, THOUND THOUGH WHAT’ That doesn’t mean that trush isn’t posseible to achieve, but part of Nathan Fielder’s genius is how comrapsiesly he with the unreality of the reality he’s staging. This Season, He’s Poured HBO Money Into, Say, A Maticulous Full-Scale Studio Replica of a Houston Airport Terminal or A San Jose Apartment Circa 2011, but the Interactions with Those Environments, Often by Actors Trained in “The Fielder Method,” Are ConSpicuOO. weird. Yet he knows, despite all this nonsense, that we’ll buy into subplots like a-pilot named color trying to make a love with an actress who interests mayself be a performance.

Tonight’s episode of The Rehearsal doesn’t go as far out on a bimb as the last one, which is no great slight against it, Because the redwood forest doesn’t have limbs long encommodate a diaped-up fielder ACTING AS BABY “SULENBERGER, GUZZLING MATER’S MIRE teat. But he keeps adding fascinating New Layers of Scare-Quote “Reality,” Placing Himself in the Middle Like A Scientist Still the Results of An Experiment, thorns though he setting the lab on fire. It is not the case as if his basic premise about Airline safety is misguided or that his insights intto performance are not genuinely profound at times. He just take the hilarious comic posture of the deadpan ringmaster of His Own Surreal Circus.

The episode doesn’t get any funnier than the opening, which pays off fielder’s obligations to the contestants of Wings of Voiceyou Canadian idol Clone he’d created entireled as a means to prompt his-pilot Judges to tell People news they didn’t want to hear. In the Second Episode, he had promised singers at the audition that they’d appears on national television, not in a single show, but “a single compatition as part of another TV Show that has nothing to do with singing. ” And SO, with the fog machine running in his houston airport, the 50 Remaining Hopefuls Perform A Group of the Public-Domain Hymn “Amazing Grace” Through Various Genres Like Country, Techno, and, My Favorite, Hip-Hop. Sweet i can taste taste it. ”) Meanwhile, Fielder stands pensively in the shadows, still laser-free on improving Cockpit communication and saving lives in the process. HBO wants to be funny, though, so pretends like it relactantly couugha This Week.

One Pattern and Been Focus on Lately is the isolation, loneliness, and stress of the pilots he’s brought into his experiment. The idea that pilots could risk Their Flying licenses by seeing a therapist SOIEMS SO AS ACTORS AS CREW MEMBERS TO ENGAGE HIS PILOT-JUDGES BETWEEN TAKES. (“I JUST WANT TO BE CLEAR IN CASE The faa is Watching: this is in no way therapy. This is just two peopleking.”) That leads Him to Colin, an Affable if ungainly pilot for an air cargo company, whom he approaches with the line, ” You talked to the operator, “as if it was weren’t the least organic interaction imaginable. With colin as his test case, Fielder embarks on an episode-long journey to get him a girlfriend-or some weird approsimation of a girlfriend, anyway-to be sort of personal related to communicate more effectatively in the cockpit. Or something to that effect.

Becusee Colin has Such Low Confidence, Fielder First Up With the Idea of ​​the Human Version of a “Pack,” Which in the Wild “GIVES EACH ANIMAL THE CONFIDENCE TO THEY WOULDN’T Normally will on their Own.” Nothing Much Comes of Colin’s Pack in Terms of Actual Insight – The Act of Hunting Is Not the Same As the Act of a Successful Coffee Date, in Rehearsal Form – but it offerrofer the absurdity of a dosen dressed dresactly. Patterns and half-laughs. And it also leads to the next step, which is finding Him someone to love.

ENTER EMMA, AKA “Jennifer Kissme,” the Most promising of a handful of actresses who purport to be into colin, for what Camera-Ready nonsense foiler has in store for say. (Another candidate is stuck on the idea of ​​Colin as a sexy albert einstein type, Clalimg to have once been “wet and awake” while reading an einstein biography.) Emma and colin strike up a conversation various Various TRAVEL DESTRIBUTIONS If not any Show of Physical Afflection. To break through barrier, the episode ramps up the absurdity yet again: training five actors apiece to study and emma and get a sense of where they are in their Relationship, Fielder hasn to say Pair off and interact staged replicated replications. This Way, Colin Can See Various Examples of How HIS Romance with Emma Might Evolve.

It is here that “kissme” hits on its biggest idea, which is the freedom that actors have wen playing a roles. Where the real colin and emma have trouble getting much fury than a Clumsy Hug AFTER A PUTT-PUTT DATE, ACTING COUPLES HAVE INCREED THEIR Intimacy Levels with Breattaking Speed. He’s particularly intrigue by an actress who has real-life boyfriend, but can get into a character Enough to feel Like in a fiction scenario. Reflecting on His Own Experience Acting Opposite Emma Stone in The curseFielder Muses, “I didn’t underestand how an actor could feel love in a Completely fake Relationship.” Maybe he’s just not a good actor. Or Maybe Approaching a Situation like An actor Will Allow You to Play the Part.

And so we get a scnee where Poor Colin and Emma Are Cast as Captain Powers and Jennifer Kissme, Gioven the Simple Stage Direction That Captain Powers “Has No Problem Squaring for A Kiss and Doing it” and that Jennifer Kissme up to Her Surname. Though getting to that kiss is an an excruciating ordeal, with small talc over exotic drums and portuguese red wine, a peck on the cheek happy, and the two get what they privately telti fielder. His conflict is that “maybe we all need an excuse to be our true Selves, and we’re just looking for permission.” How Much Colin and Emma’s Triumphant Performance Can a Model for How Co-Pilots Can Speak Frankly to their Captains is an Open Question. Buth The Rehearsal Is Also Just a Show About Human Relationships and How We Can Better Communicate, spreads and onto something.

• Spreads The Future Will Offer a Step Pulse to Sugget the Flop Sweat Coming off Colin’s Unanswered Text to A Woman About Travel Tips for Greenland and Icelland.

• an actress shoots her shot with Colin: “You know you remind me of einstein. You have a certin reserved sexuality you.”

• No one does crawl-uoner-your-chair Cringe comedy like Nathan Fielder. The scnene where he and consider “the eye” as a signal a woman sends to get kissed is deliciously brutal to watch.

• Speaking of AWKWARD, How About Fielder Invising the Actresses’ Boyfriends to Watch Smooching Their Screen Partners? (“She’s Pretty Talent, Huh?” “Yeah, look at her go.”)

Eurovision doesn’t do subtle.
Photo: Eurovision Song Contest via YouTube

This article was originally published on June 30, 2020. Since then, countries have continued to send some of their most original artists to the annual Eurovision competition for memorable (and downright wild) performances. We’ve updated the list accordingly.

When the first Eurovision contest was held, in May 1956, founder Marcel Bezençon couldn’t have imagined his soon-to-be wildly famous Pan-European song competition would one day give us the likes of dancing grannies, rapping astronauts, and the almighty Ukrainian drag queen Verka Serduchka. But as the contest for catchy three-minute tunes has grown, so has its propensity for outlandish costumes, staging, and choreography. As many of its most unforgettable moments prove, some of the best Eurovision competitors involve one country submitting a performance with the simple hope that millions of others will either tap their feet or get the joke.

With this year’s contest in Basel just around the corner, we’ve updated our original collection of the craziest, wackiest, and most downright unhinged entries to include 2023 and 2024, two years that certainly weren’t short of musical madcappery: In fact, one particular cha-cha-cha-ing individual nearly ended up winning the whole thing. (And judging by early rehearsals for 2025, the likes of Finland’s giant microphone-straddling Erika Vikman, Sweden’s sauna obsessives KAJ, and Australia’s self-proclaimed “Milkshake Man” Go-Jo will all join the exclusive club in the near-future).

This list is going to focus mostly on the modern iteration of Eurovision — performances that come after 1999, when the contest got rid of live orchestra accompaniment in favor of backing tracks — but we’ve got to honor the catchy penguin ditty “Papa Pingouin” and the costumes it gave the world. Luxembourg’s 1980 submission featured singing sisters Sophie and Magaly in bright, triangular tuxedo suits that predate Klaus Nomi’s similar fashion, accompanied by a tall man who waddles around onstage in a large sequin penguin costume (the backup singers were in penguin sequins, too). Eurovision entries sometimes waver between bleeding-heart power ballads and eager dance tunes, but this one is silly just for the sake of it, advancing an attitude that would inform countless playful and memorable entries from the decades to come.

Some countries seem to offer submissions that intentionally throw their chances of victory into the trash, but it was a Lithuanian supergroup that declared themselves winners from the very first sentence. Bringing some pompous sarcasm to the contest’s playful nature, “We Are the Winners” forces audiences to associate its title phrase with their hooky melody, bouncing along like a Green Day song sans crunchy guitars. Performed with specific minimalism, the act featured the men standing on the stage and eyeing the camera, until one of them breaks out into flailing dance moves to the tune of a violin solo. Though the tune only went to sixth place, LT United succeeded in stealing a piece of Eurovision history.

“Dancing Lasha Tumbai,” from Ukraine’s silver-adorned drag queen Verka Serduchka, is undoubtedly one of Eurovision’s most famous performances. Her set in the 2007 contest looked like it was dropped in from a space disco that specialized in sequin dresses. Driven by a repetitive accordion hook, the song has Serduchka marching around the stage in high heels with a big star on her head. Her outfit alone helped make this an iconic moment, but the song achieved its own history when it ended up winning second place that year.

For some reason, Switzerland wanted to earnestly tell Eurovision audiences that vampires were indeed alive, and also that “we will be forever young.” Built around these sentiments, this peppy banger from DJ BoBo is total Eurovision-grade cheese. There’s no bloodsucking here, but plenty of fierce looks with questionable hair and makeup choices.

Flight attendants don’t have many songs to call their own, but the United Kingdom sought to adjust that with the anthem “Flying the Flag,” as performed by bubblegum-pop group Scooch. This performance was pure flight-attendant campiness, with beverage carts and preflight instructions incorporated into dance moves and lyrics that barely conceal their innuendos (“Would you like something to suck on for the landing?”). It’s one of those Eurovision performances that aimed for a big wink more than anything else; they even made sure to include a metal detector onstage.

Eurovision’s history of silliness hit another high point when puppet Dustin the Turkey took the stage in 2008 to perform his not-so-subtle earworm “Irelande Douze Pointe.” As a cheeky bid for 12-point votes (the highest any nation can give to another), it was performed by the puppet and accompanied by high-energy dancers meant to look like Irish turkeys. The song leaned into the nation’s desperation of getting points from other nations, even to the point of self-deprecation: “Give us another chance / we’re sorry for Riverdance.” The performance won 15th place.

Sometimes, a country’s Eurovision submission seems written by the costumes first, as was the case with the Latvian group Pirates of the Sea. Their 2008 performance “Wolves of the Sea” was basically little more than a pirate costume party that happened to have singing, fist-pumping, and a generic beat. To their credit, the Latvian group fully commits to their wobbly plastic swords, kitschy costumes, and simple choreography. It was enough to get the song to 12th place.

Comedian Rodolfo Chikilicuatre, wearing an Elvis-esque wig, opened his Eurovision performance with a toy-guitar riff that led into his reggaeton goof “Baila el Chiki-Chiki.” It’s a performance designed to disrupt the usual smoothness of a Eurovision dance routine, with one dancer even making a point to constantly stagger after she initially falls to the ground. All the while, Chikilicuatre’s lyrics are full of sly political references, cementing this as a deep troll move from Spain that adds to the contest’s overall absurdity.

We have Ukraine and Svetlana Loboda to thank for a Eurovision performance that breathlessly mixes sexy Roman soldiers, a blinding light show, and a set piece that features three massive gears. Before you even get your bearings, the high-energy Loboda sits behind a drum set and performs a solo while surrounded by Ukrainian flags and pyrotechnics. The lyrics to “Be My Valentine (Anti-Crisis Girl)” might seem like they were devised in a factory, but this must-see moment from Eurovision history is assuredly not.

Rap does not have an expansive history in the Eurovision contest, but it does have one standout moment from 2013. The rap duo Who See put on astronaut suits for their hardcore rap/dubstep song “Igranka,” set amid a haze of smoke and green lasers. Things got nuttier when singer Nina Žižić emerged from the floor in a makeshift cyborg costume, inspiring the two rappers to pretend like they’re moving in slow motion. The whole thing was presented with complete seriousness, which somehow makes Montenegro’s musical statement (which took 12th place that year) even more spectacular.

The closest that Eurovision ever got to producing a mosh pit came in 2015. That’s when Finland sent punk-rock band Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät to barrel through their minor-key power chords and garage-ready riffs by performing “Aina Mun Pitää,” the shortest song in the contest’s history. Rarely does a Eurovision track rock this hard (even harder than Lordi’s winning “Hard Rock Hallelujah”), as lead vocalist Kari Aalto screams his words with dissonant abandon.

Slavko Kalezic’s commanding performances of his disco ballad “Space” is one for the books — the seductive eyes, the mesh see-through shirt, the lyrics about rocketing to the stars. But what truly launches it into the hall of fame is the moment when Kalezic grabs his long ponytail and twirls it around onstage, like some sort of sexy helicopter. While crowded productions and flashy set pieces have their place, sometimes all you need for an unforgettable Eurovision performance is the right hairdo and the right delightfully cheesy song.

Call it the “Ja Ja Ding Dong” Curse. COVID canceled Iceland’s chance to show off for the 2020 event, just before receiving a loving if goofy representation as the star country in the Netflix comedy Eurovision: The Story of Fire Saga. The next year, the funky bunch was selected to represent Iceland again but had to pull out of the contest when one of them — you guessed it — tested positive for COVID. Thankfully, we have this rehearsal footage that was used in place of a live performance, which features their iconic turquoise jumpsuits (and eight-bit avatar emblems) and a crafty approach to the synthesizer. Of course, it’s up to you whether “10 Years” is as memorable as 2020’s “Think About Things,” but fans of Eurovision’s most assured and creative trailblazers win either way.

Some of the best dance moves aren’t elaborate — they’re relatable. Take the free-flying but coordinated arms, legs, and hands that define the choreography of the Roop’s “Discoteque.” Aided by a minimalist stage presentation and lead singer Vaidotas Valiukevičius’s sultry facial expressions, this earworm of an anthem made it all the way to the grand final in 2021 — but left with a disappointing eighth place. Long may it flourish in solo dance parties.

“Every Russian woman needs to know — you’re strong enough, you’re gonna break that wall.” Russian singer-rapper Manizha delivered that message with full fury in her toe-tapping performance of “Russian Woman,” a song that seemed to piss off all the worst people. Manizha, an immigrant from Tajikistan who has become a vocal critic of the invasion of Ukraine, kicked off the song’s competition by stepping out of a Russian doll–inspired dress, one of many ways in which she has publicly criticized conservative ideals. Her performance wasn’t just for the people in the title but anyone with a similar fervor and demand for change.

Go_A dazzled Eurovision audiences with their “folktronica” approach in “Shum,” a ferocious dedication to spring that featured ring lights being used like Frisbees, a fife solo, and singer Kateryna Pavlenko rocking a fabulous green boa. (If you want even more of the group’s Mother Nature vs. steampunk flavor, you have to check out the official video for the song, which has a leather-clad Pavlenko cruising on a Mad Max–ready truck.)

A sexually empowering funk track for all you proud vegans, reusable baggers, and anyone else who identifies as “green.” “Eat Your Salad” was presented with maximum horny swagger by the Latvian chaps of Citi Zeni, who fused funk, rap, and ecofriendly messages in this sly but underappreciated highlight from 2022. The group gave us plenty to savor, though, including veggie-colored blazers and a slick saxophone solo to make sure we got our groovy vitamins. And don’t forget the juicy cherry on top, when guitarist Krišjānis Ozols ditches his axe at the end of the song before doing a split at center stage.

The wildly catchy “Give That Wolf a Banana” (“before that wolf eats my grandma,” the next line goes) from 2022 represented Norway’s bombastic sense of humor and love of earworm dance-pop. Performed by the mysterious duo known as Subwoolfer (later unmasked to be Ben Adams and Gaute Ormåsen), the two don black suits and snazzy sunglasses with wolf ears, their pouncing dance moves accompanied by three dancers in bow ties and yellow spandex. Never underestimate the legends of Eurovision when it comes to party-starting playlists and Halloween-costume inspiration.

You might not think so from their frontman’s Hitler-like appearance, but Croatian shock rockers Let 3’s unashamedly dissonant, and slightly disturbing, entry was, in fact, a fervent anti-war protest song. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “Mama ŠČ!” took aim at both Vladimir Putin and tractor-gifting Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko (“crocodile psychopaths”) in a metaphorical cacophony which often sounded like half a dozen songs playing simultaneously. The band’s message may have got slightly lost, however, amid their acid-trip screen visuals, military drag, and the climactic near-naked reveals, not to mention the sudden appearance of a rocket-straddling Vladimir Lenin impersonator who looked more like the Smurfs’ arch-nemesis Gargamel.

2023 fan favorite “Cha Cha Cha” is a “forget about your troubles” anthem that extols the virtues of hitting the clubs, sinking a few piña coladas, and dancing like no one’s watching. Breaking out of a wooden cage to grind against a stripper pole in a green bolero jacket, tongue-flashing rapper Käärijä certainly committed to the theme. Likewise, the back-up ballroom troupe delivered a daringly intimate routine that briefly threatened to turn Eurovision into The Human Centipede: The Musical. “Cha Cha Cha” twice tore the roof off the Liverpool Arena, and both the jury and voters at home embraced the madness, sending the bowl cut-haired Finn to a well-deserved second place.

Käärijä (above) resembled a shy wallflower compared to his successor, a Weird Al Yankovic lookalike seemingly obsessed with both jeanswear and Bill Gates’s finest. Emerging from a super-size denim egg sporting only a crop top befitting his stage name and some flesh-colored underwear, Windows95man (a.k.a. visual artist Teemu Keisteri) then used a smoke machine, a cameraman, and an audience member’s conveniently placed hat to protect his modesty in a Eurodance throwback designed to reflect Finland’s “Looney Tunes deep inside” nature. But the pièce de résistance was the pair of jorts that emerged from the skies, which, when donned, ejaculated waves of pyrotechnics. On this occasion, however, the organized chaos placed no higher than 19th.

Ireland had been dismissed as no-hopers before rehearsal footage showed that Bambie Thug’s distinctly radio-unfriendly screamfest had been elevated by the year’s best, if most unsettling, staging. Indeed, Eurovision had never witnessed anything quite like “Doomsday Blue,” an electro-folk-metal hybrid largely performed within a candle-adorned pentagram alongside a heavily inked, heavily pierced demonic figure whose hand emerges Carrie-style from a grave. Sporting a pagan feathered outfit complete with antler headwear and gothic makeup, Thug also delivered a truly mesmeric performance, whether dancing balletically, unleashing an almighty Satanic cackle, or, in a proud display of solidarity, stripping off to reveal a swimsuit bearing the trans flag. “Crown the Witch” indeed!

Kehinde Wiley in his studio in August. A painting of his partner, Kenneth Okorie, hangs behind him. Photo: Elinor Carucci for New York Magazine

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Derrick Ingram, a well-known Black Lives Matter activist, was hanging out in a private party room at the Soho Grand one night in 2021 when, as he remembers it, a man approached and offered to buy him a drink. Ingram, then 29, tall and muscular, recalls that the man wasn’t really his type — he was “older, short, heavyset,” with a big gap-toothed smile. Ingram declined the drink. “He just wasn’t doing anything for me.”

Over the course of the night, Ingram noticed how people were lingering around the man and taking turns speaking to him. “Everybody’s attention was on him in the room,” he says. As the party wound down, the man cut through the crowd to again offer Ingram a drink. This time they had a conversation and Ingram realized that “he had a level of charisma that was just out of this world,” he says. “I was like, Oh, I want to get to know him.”

He learned that the man was the artist Kehinde Wiley, then 44, who had risen to international fame in the mid-aughts for paintings that replace images of the heroic white men of art history — like Napoleon astride a stallion in Jacques-Louis David’s portrait — with young Black men in streetwear. Ingram wasn’t familiar with Wiley’s work until he discovered that he was also the artist behind that “beautiful” presidential portrait of Barack Obama seated against a wall of lush, green leaves.

Ingram’s and Wiley’s accounts of what happened next diverge dramatically. In Ingram’s version, they went home together that night and then stayed at Wiley’s Soho loft for nearly a week: “We hit it off, and he didn’t want me to leave.” Ingram remembers the apartment was “very artistic and extravagant” but also “absolutely trashed and chaotic.”

Over the next couple of months, Ingram says, they dated casually — going on walks with Wiley’s Afghan hounds and out to dinner and parties, including one for Wiley’s friend, the artist Mickalene Thomas.

Wiley splits his time among New York, Dakar, and Lagos. He was generous, Ingram says, with both his money and his time. Sometimes he offered Ingram cash for no reason. “My impression,” Ingram says, was that “he had a thing for getting guys that he thought were of a lower class.” Ingram had recently left his career in marketing to focus on a nonprofit he had co-founded, Warriors in the Garden, which organized racial-justice protests. He says Wiley made promises about “introducing me to people, growing my nonprofit.”

But, according to Ingram, Wiley could also be controlling. “He demeaned me,” he says. “He would choose my clothes. He would tell me at a party when I could talk, when I couldn’t talk.” He says Wiley often had drugs around and insisted they communicate via Signal, the encrypted messaging app, or by telephone, rather than text. Once, Ingram says, Wiley FaceTimed with a young man in Senegal in front of Ingram. The man “was naked and pretty much doing a nude cam show for Kehinde and asking Kehinde to wire him money.”

Wiley denies any of that happened. He also denies the escalation Ingram says soon followed. Ingram claimed that Wiley once hit him in an Uber and that, in September 2021, he raped him. When I ask him to walk me through the encounter, Ingram tells me, “I would rather not do a play-by-play,” unless he files a lawsuit.

The end of the relationship came, Ingram says, after he stopped complying with Wiley’s demands, including refusing to sign an NDA. (Wiley also denies that he sought an NDA.) “He took it fine,” Ingram says of the split. “I think I was just a dime a dozen to him.”

Wiley’s work at the Rubell Museum in Miami. Photo: Aleksandr Dyskin/Alamy Stock Photo

Two and a half years later, in March 2024, the 28-year-old Ghanaian artist and writer Joseph Awuah-Darko posted a video on his Instagram, which currently has 274,000 followers. Through tears, he silently flipped through a series of posters — like that part in Love Actually — on which he’d written, in capital letters, I KNOW MY LIFE WILL CHANGE 4EVER AFTER I SHARE THIS, BUT IT’S TIME TO COME TO THE LIGHT / A FEW YEARS AGO, I WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED (SEVERELY)  / BY A SEMINAL FIGURE IN THE ART WORLD, SOMEONE I LONG ADMIRED WHOSE WORK IS RECOGNIZED IN MAJOR MUSEUMS ACROSS THE GLOBE. He said his fundraising target was $200,000 through PayPal or Cash App to aid “current and projected legal fees.” In a second post two months later, he alleged that his abuser was Kehinde Wiley.

Ingram says he immediately received “an influx of text messages and Instagram messages” from friends whom he said he’d told of his own experience with Wiley. Ingram adds that he reached out to Awuah-Darko, and three weeks later, in a joint Instagram post, they shared Ingram’s story: “On September 20th 2021, I was raped (unprotected) and sexually assaulted by Kehinde Wiley at his apartment in New York.” Ingram wrote that “there were moments of extreme violence. Along with severe emotional manipulation” throughout the relationship.

The next day, Wiley posted a response, saying that he and Awuah-Darko “had a one time encounter. Everything was consensual.” He also said that he believed Awuah-Darko had “managed to conspire” with Ingram to concoct his allegations, perhaps to extort money or perhaps because they both “wanted far more than I was willing to give them.”

Around the same time, two other men came forward on Instagram: U.K. artist and poet Nathaniel Lloyd Richards, with an allegation of “aggressive and forceful” touching of his knee and thigh during a date with Wiley in Beijing in 2019, and Terrell Armistead, an independent historian from Yonkers who accused the artist of trying to “grab my genitals aggressively” and of “performing forced oral penetration on me” at the artist’s apartment in 2010. (Wiley denies the accusations, saying he has never met Lloyd Richards or Armistead; neither responded to requests for interviews, and both have since deleted their posts.)

So far, none of the accusers has brought suit against Wiley. Yet the allegations alone could dethrone one of the world’s most popular contemporary artists, whose work, more explicitly than any other, has inserted Black figures into the white art-historical canon. A large painting by Wiley frequently sells in the low-to-mid six figures (though sometimes for more), which is relatively modest for an artist of his stature, but not for one whose output is so prodigious as his has been. Wiley has studios in Beijing, Dakar, Brooklyn, and Lagos where assistants help create his work. His paintings have been acquired by hundreds of museums, as well as by celebrities and prominent art collectors including Elton John, Spike Lee, Venus Williams, Don and Mera Rubell, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, Alicia Keys, and Swizz Beatz. Now, some of those same museums, once eager to be associated with Wiley, are calling off his shows.

Meanwhile, his market appears to be stalling. Collectors who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Wiley’s paintings in the past are sitting on investments whose value might not be what it once was assumed to be. “You have to be really desperate” to sell a significant Wiley now, says art adviser Heather Flow, who adds that no one has asked her about him in the past six months or so. Not long before the allegations came out, the auction house Phillips in London set a record for Wiley’s work — $844,000 for an enormous, seven-by-15-foot painting of a reclining young man, eyes cast heavenward.

In June and October, Phillips withdrew two of Wiley’s works from auction at the last minute — a sign that no bids were coming in. “That upward trajectory has certainly been chopped off for now,” says art adviser Todd Levin of Wiley’s prices. A third work that came to Phillips in October, however, a painting, titled Sleep, of a man lying in a vulnerable position, sold for $327,000, which was above its estimate.

It’s unclear how long Wiley’s career might withstand gridlock. “I don’t know how the entire matter will eventually be resolved, but he can’t think it’s going to disappear on its own,” Levin says. “The issue will always be an asterisk next to his name until it’s dealt with.”

Wiley at the opening of “Havana” at Sean Kelly Gallery in 2023. Photo: Jason Crowley/BFA

Even Wiley acknowledges that people have decided they’re “going to need to see something other than just ‘he said, he said.’” Maybe that is why he, along with a watchful PR rep, agrees to meet me at his Williamsburg studio.

Wiley seems to be in an irritable mood. He had cut short a photo shoot, telling me that he didn’t like being looked at so up close.

After the allegations came out earlier in the summer, three museums had scrapped exhibitions of his work. The Pérez Art Museum in Miami and the Minneapolis Institute of Art both called off plans to host stops of his touring exhibition “An Archaeology of Silence,” while the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha indefinitely postponed its September show of paintings Wiley had made of members of the city’s Sudanese diaspora.

“Was I pissed? Hell yeah,” Wiley says.

One of the portraits slated for the Joslyn Art Museum now sat on its side in the studio. It shows a blue-haired young woman giving side-eye. “I really like this series of works because it allows me to go into deep, dark skin tones, where normally I use a lot of reds,” says Wiley. She stands against one of his trademark backgrounds: intensely chromatic flat patterns you’d expect to see on 18th-century French wallpaper or drapery, perhaps fleur-de-lis or filigree. In this case, it is a high-contrast floral design.

Wiley, wearing similarly busy patchwork jeans, continues his polite but half-hearted tour. He takes me to a table where he has laid out his latest project, miniature portraits of students he scouted at a university in Lagos. The pictures are headed to London for a show that has not been canceled, at Stephen Friedman Gallery. These paintings are about “quietude” instead of the “grand, chest-beating bravado” of much of his work. “My obsession,” he says, “is the big, billboard-size paintings that are, in a sense, showing off.”

Wiley started developing this signature bombast while earning his M.F.A. at Yale. There, he befriended the program’s other two future stars, Wangechi Mutu and Mickalene Thomas, but has recalled that his work was frequently criticized by his peers as being too obvious and impersonal. At Yale, he was evidently steeped in the identity politics and postmodernism of the 1990s and wanted to both embrace and critique the Eurocentric art history he had been taught about. He admired how the older painter John Currin mashed up old-masters-style portraiture with an exuberant sexuality that borrowed from pornography. “He was capable of at once using the language of painting as a rhetorical strategy and inserting his own what you might call perversions into the picture,” Wiley said in 2003. “Currin is allowed to do that because it is Currin’s history. I never wanted to be white but that indisputable access to the history of Western painting becomes sickly desirable.”

Wiley, coffee in hand, rubs his eyes as we take a seat on the couch. When I ask how he’s doing, he doesn’t hesitate. “It’s been a nightmare. It’s been an absolute nightmare,” he tells me. “I’m recovering from this traumatic exploding of my world that was so, so obviously calculated.”

Wiley’s anger is particularly focused on Awuah-Darko, whom he calls “the ringleader to this entire circus.” The younger artist posts heavily produced and intensely confessional videos and photos on Instagram. Tears flow frequently, followed by words of empowerment; sometimes he poses in barely covered nudes with captions about vulnerability. He shares his struggles with bipolar disorder and impostor syndrome, with cancer and growing up gay in Ghana, where homosexuality is illegal. To Wiley, his allegations are part of an elaborate social-media performance.

“It starts with the teaser, with the emotional music and the signs and the glycerin tear — it was masterfully done, I have to say — and it presupposes a real, intuitive, and emotive understanding of the way that social media works,” he says. Awuah-Darko followed the “teaser” with “Episode Two: The Naming,” as Wiley puts it. “It’s just so vulgar and absurd.”

“From the first moment that this happened, I’ve had to make some adjustments,” he says. “I’ve had to think about the shows that I had coming up and think about the ways in which they were seen. You know, do I want my public to be viewing my work through the rubric of this situation? Or do I want my work to be seen in its best light? And to that extent, I wanted to in many ways reconsider doing shows.”

When I ask what kind of changes he had in mind, he seems to catch himself and says he didn’t actually make many. “There’s tons and tons of interest in my work. People know this is bullshit,” he says. “The demand for my work is robust.”

Nonetheless, he raises a valid concern. Wiley’s art, both in its subject matter and in its process, has always intertwined sexuality and power dynamics. The nature of the allegations could make it harder for some viewers to separate this art, in particular, from the artist and what they think they know about his personal life.

Wiley has long been explicit about the erotic aspects of his work and the often fine line that separates admiration and exploitation. “I want to aestheticize masculine beauty and to be complicit within that language of oppressive power while at once critiquing it,” he said in 2003. He’d just finished a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a neighborhood “teeming with this sexy black young energy,” he later told The New Yorker.

He developed a process he calls “street casting,” in which he invited men (and sometimes women, but far less frequently) into his studio to photograph them — in hoodies, jerseys, and boxers scrunched up at the waist — and offered them a selection of haughty poses from art history, sometimes accessorized with swords or spears. The New Yorker called his street casting “a practice that parallels cruising” and added that “Wiley excels at the pickup line.” He has searched out people with style, and, according to a GQ writer who profiled Wiley as he was scouting teenage boys in Morocco in 2013, he preferred the shy, skeptical types — the ones he had to win over. On occasion, especially in countries where homosexuality is illegal, Wiley has worn a wedding ring to allay fears about his intentions; flashing the Obama portrait can also help seal the deal.

In a controversial Village Voice review from 2015, the critic Jessica Dawson wondered, “In what world is a Yale-minted artist who lures young men into his studio with the promise of power and glamour not predatory?” A wave of response pieces branded the review as racist, homophobic, and at the edge of libel, but numerous people I spoke with brought it back up amid the recent allegations. Dawson acknowledges today that she wasn’t aware of any actual wrongdoing on Wiley’s part when she wrote it. “It was simply my reaction to the work. I could never have anticipated, prophesied, or foreshadowed any recent allegations,” she says.

When I broach the subject with Wiley, he is quick to point out that the writer “got reprimanded, to say the least.” His contempt for the review, and for being asked about it, is palpable. “It was roundly criticized and presumed to be blatantly homophobic. Yeah — what about it?” he says. Then his tone softens and he says that viewers should trust the feeling they get in the presence of his paintings (which, technically, is what Dawson did, at least through her critical lens). “Is there a loving embrace in the work, or is there something sinister in the work?” he says. “You can trust your heart on that.”

Wiley’s strategy for dealing with the allegations has been to publicly fight back. He hired Marathon Strategies, a crisis-PR and investigative firm that has been helping him highlight unflattering information about his accusers. Awuah-Darko suggested on Instagram that Wiley had also hired the U.K.-based firm Vantage Intelligence as part of an effort “to discredit me and other survivors.” A spokesperson for Wiley says his lawyers hired the firm “to assist in their investigation into the accusations” and not “as part of some attack campaign to dig up dirt.”

Wiley argues that he has had no choice but to bring in professionals to help him. By speaking out primarily on social media, his accusers have controlled the narrative and largely evaded the scrutiny of lawyers and journalists. “Someone makes these false statements about you and you’re just expected to live with it?” Wiley says.

In June, he posted screenshots on Instagram to clear up the “baseless and defamatory” claims against him. He confirms that he and Awuah-Darko first met at an event held at the younger artist’s Noldor Residency in Ghana, a program for emerging African artists. “He looked like a completely responsible, sane individual with something to lose, with an arts organization,” Wiley says. The screenshots show that Awuah-Darko called Wiley twice at 4 a.m. that evening before going to Wiley’s hotel room.

According to Awuah-Darko, Wiley had already “inappropriately groped” him earlier in the night, and, although he went to his room later, he claims he didn’t consent to sex. A second assault that was “much more severe and violent” allegedly then took place. He wrote on Instagram, “It almost destroyed me.”

Wiley characterizes it as a “flirtatious night, a little, you know, queer hookup situation.” He points out how, afterward, Awuah-Darko continued to send Wiley messages and posted dozens of Instagram Stories about him. A year after their encounter, Wiley invited him to his birthday party in Lagos, and Awuah-Darko, who then lived in London, attended; another time, he asked to visit Wiley at his Catskills cabin.

In July, Artnet News reported that Foster Sakyiamah, a former artist at Awuah-Darko’s residency, was demanding $266,527 from Awuah-Darko, claiming he’d sold Sakyiamah’s paintings and never paid him. Sakyiamah’s lawyer says he delivered the letter to Awuah-Darko in March, two weeks before Awuah-Darko posted his plea for $200,000 to aid a legal fight with his then-unnamed abuser. When Sakyiamah had still allegedly received no payments by June, he sued.

When asked about the similarity between the two sums, Awuah-Darko tells me in an email that perhaps Wiley was behind Sakyiamah’s suit. “I find the timing of this baseless lawsuit by a former resident peculiar and disappointing,” Awuah-Darko writes. “I am presently engaged in the process of filing a counterclaim in Ghana to clear this.”

Sakyiamah’s lawyer, Joachim Benzaang, tells me in an email, “The suit was mounted independently by Foster upon legal advice he received from his solicitors without any external influence whatsoever.”

When I ask what he did with the donations he raised, since no legal action has been taken, Awuah-Darko says, “My wonderful friend Rose McGowan sold her home a few years ago in order to finance pending and anticipated legal action against her rapist, Harvey Weinstein. This surprised me. And so with this knowledge, and considering my abuser’s power and profile, on March 23rd, my appeal for contributions was made towards anticipated legal fees for the battle ahead.”

In August, Wiley gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal, whose affluent readership includes many art collectors. The story shared Wiley’s rebuttal to the allegations — the flirtatious texts both Awuah-Darko and Ingram sent Wiley after the alleged rapes, the coordinated social-media posts by the four accusers. Awuah-Darko told the paper that “I gaslit myself for so long because I admired Kehinde’s work and the pedestal I’d put him on.” He admitted that he was not the “perfect sexual assault victim” but reiterated, “I was raped.”

The story also pointed out apparent inconsistencies, like Armistead’s recollection that Wiley had two big dogs at his apartment when he was there in 2010. Wiley produced receipts showing that he and his ex-boyfriend bought an Afghan hound from breeders in 2015, which Wiley says proves he didn’t own any big dogs before that. (He has been pictured with Italian greyhounds, a smaller breed, in those years).

When I ask Wiley how he feels about the Journal story, he says he was “relieved” after reading it. “I had dinner with some friends last night, and they were all pretty happy that it’s like, finally, a situation in which the other side of the story is coming out.”

Yet the matter is clearly still consuming him emotionally. Wiley can’t speak for long about any subject without returning to his outrage over the accusations. Awuah-Darko “needs to answer for why my evidence makes sense in one direction and he has nothing to support his accusations other than ‘I’m not the perfect victim,’” Wiley says. “Well, therapyspeak is not enough to destroy someone’s life.”

He walks me through it. “Look at their social media,” he says, now referring to Ingram and Armistead. “They’re both doing ads for grocery money, rent money. When you think about motive or where they are in their lives — we’re literally talking about rent and grocery money here — and then all of a sudden, you’re seeing online (Awuah-Darko) saying, ‘Hey, have you met Kehinde Wiley? We have money. We have lawyers. Wink, wink.’ What do you expect when you have such a vulnerable, high-profile person in the world?”

Indeed, Armistead’s posts on X last year discuss losing his unemployment benefits, and he has periodically asked followers for help buying food in the months since.

As for Ingram, the ad in question is a GoFundMe page created more than four years ago, at the height of the pandemic. In it, Ingram writes that his apartment had been burglarized and he’d lost his job at a property-development firm for speaking out about gentrification. He had been a recognizable fixture at protests against police brutality — in a tank top on the front lines, megaphone in hand — since 2014. That was the year he graduated with an M.B.A. from St. Louis University and the year that Michael Brown, a guy he’d seen around the neighborhood, was shot and killed by a police officer. Ingram joined the protests in Ferguson and then, after George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020, decided to dedicate himself fully to his activism. During that transition, he wrote on the GoFundMe, “I will need help with rent, groceries and bills. Black lives matter is my life.” (Ingram has since hosted online fundraisers for the Lupus Foundation and for medical aid to Gaza.)

Wiley’s suggestion that someone’s socioeconomic status could be taken as evidence for or against a sexual-assault allegation is surprising to hear, particularly from an artist who has made a career in part out of elevating people from traditionally marginalized groups into aristocratic poses.

According to Wiley, he doesn’t really know Ingram at all. He says that every single thing Ingram told me was a lie, except for the fact that they met at the Soho Grand and hooked up after (though they disagree about whether that happened in July or September).

“It was a one-night stand,” Wiley says. “That’s it. There’s no Signal, there’s no Mickalene party. There’s no crystal meth, there’s no coke. Sorry, all of that is complete fiction.” (Mickalene Thomas did not respond to a request for comment.)

Wiley pulls out his phone to show me the text history between him and Ingram. His phone showed it starting on September 8 with Wiley sending Ingram screenshots from an article that the New York Times had published about the activist, whose home the NYPD had “besieged” in what the DA’s office later denounced as “extraordinary tactics.”

If Ingram had ever responded to Wiley’s screenshots, it wasn’t via text message. A few days later, Ingram wrote Wiley at 8:24 p.m., saying, “Hey I’m ready handsome.” If Wiley had ever responded, it also wasn’t via text message. That exchange seemed to contradict Wiley’s claims that they had met only once.

When I later press his reps about why Ingram might have said “I’m ready” days after the “one-night stand,” they eventually concede that the pair did meet at least one other time. The exchange also seems to contradict Wiley’s claim that the whole relationship could be seen in these dozen texts.

Still, these inconsistencies don’t prove Wiley’s guilt any more than Ingram’s use of heart emojis proves he’s lying, as Wiley suggests: “Do we use love emojis to someone who has violently raped you?” he asks at one point. “It takes a lot of bending over backward and folding yourself into a pretzel to understand these arguments.”

Research in recent years has shown it’s relatively common for victims of sexual violence to not immediately recognize it as such and to blame themselves. Confusion can be even more pronounced among male victims, who “are conditioned by society to believe that all sex is good sex, and if you’re a man, to have any sexual opportunity is welcome,” says Lara Stemple, a UCLA Law assistant dean who specializes in sexuality and gender. The picture becomes even more complicated among gay men. One study found that “homophobic attitudes toward gay male victims increased the blame attributed to them,” while “perpetrators of rape of gay men were seen as least responsible for their actions.”

Ingram says it took him years to process what had happened to him. In his mind, Wiley was a brilliant eccentric whose lifestyle seemed somehow exempt from social norms. Perhaps his behavior was even considered typical among people of his stature. “I was meeting so many new people and other celebrities and getting access to spaces I’d never been before, and I thought, truly, Damn, maybe this is actually what comes with this type of lifestyle, and he’s providing and showing me things that I’d never experienced before, so I was blaming myself.”

Ingram told me that he, too, could prove — through messages, voice memos, and photos — that Wiley was lying about their relationship. But our conversations ended after I asked him multiple times if he could provide any of it or refer me to people who might corroborate his account. When I later presented him with Wiley’s version of events for response, Ingram said that my questions had “retraumatized” him and did not send any documentation.

Nobody’s story — not Ingram’s, not Awuah-Darko’s, not Wiley’s — looks completely convincing from the outside. But even unresolved, the accusations have thrown open a rereading — the kind Wiley didn’t want — of his life and work and the art world’s own tradition of propping up the powerful. What started out 20 years ago as a compelling way to expose the racism of art history and exalt those ignored by it now seems less like a critique than a celebratory reenactment of a ruling social order of which Wiley has become a part.

Now, Wiley, who is self-made, has everything to lose. He grew up in a well-educated working-class family in South Central Los Angeles. Even as a teenager, Wiley was a gifted promoter. While attending the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, he began staging art shows for friends and family at home, serving sparkling cider. “I understood very early about the social component to art,” he told The New Yorker. The proceeds helped him afford the expenses of attending the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned a B.F.A. in 1999.

Wiley found an ideal early partner in Jeffrey Deitch, a dealer known for spotting buzzy talent and throwing big parties. It was immediately clear that Wiley was Deitch’s kind of artist. “It was never about just hanging up six paintings or ten paintings,” he says of Wiley’s shows. “It was creating a world.” For their first show together, “Faux Real” in 2003, “he wanted to paint a ceiling like Tintoretto” — and he did. The following year, when the artist was just 27, the Brooklyn Museum gave him his first institutional solo show.

The museum would later acquire and display the nine-by-nine-foot Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps, depicting a black horseman in camouflage and Timberlands against a background with tiny sperm swimming throughout — a recurring theme in his early work.

In a review of Wiley’s equestrian portraits at Deitch Projects in 2005, New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that he was “a history painter, one of the best we have. By this I mean that he creates history as much as tells it.” From there, his career skyrocketed. VH1 commissioned him to paint portraits of rappers including LL Cool J, which later went on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Wiley’s style doesn’t impress everyone — Roberta Smith of the New York Times called his surfaces “dead and mechanical,” and the critic Ben Davis has likened Wiley to “an art director selling a formula.” But Wiley ascribes his work’s popularity to “how hungry people are to see what they know to be beautiful acknowledged as such.”

“The whole idea” of the street casting, says Wiley’s friend and occasional collaborator Dwayne Rodgers, is that he meets strangers who are, say, “walking from A to B on a dreary street in Queens” and then, “through a series of magical wand waves, they end up on the walls of major museums.” Wiley relishes that power; instead of Andy Warhol’s (apocryphal) 15 minutes of fame, he offers a kind of immortality. “Fuck the 15 minutes,” Wiley once said. “I’m going to give you a painting, and I’ll make you live forever.”

Clevins Browne was an unemployed 24-year-old when he answered a Craigslist ad a decade ago seeking Black male models around five-foot-ten. Browne, now a stand-up comic and spoken-word artist in Philadelphia, tells me he left the job with $125 or so in earnings, happy that he wasn’t asked to do any nudes. Years later, he heard from friends that they’d seen a painting of him by Wiley. “I haven’t seen it in any galleries myself,” he says. “But it’s just amazing to know that it’s possible that that painting probably has impacted someone somewhere.”

In recent years, Wiley has experimented with even more grandiose scale and materials: equestrian statues in the style of Confederate war memorials, lifeless bronze figures reminiscent of imagery from police shootings, stained-glass windows of Black people in high-tops and puffy jackets assuming the postures of saints.

In 2019, he cast himself in the role of Paul Gauguin by visiting Tahiti to make portraits. Wiley acknowledges the “creepy” gaze that led Gauguin to Tahiti at 43 to paint nude Indigenous girls and to marry one who was probably 13. But Wiley nonetheless decided to take the great artist as the “contact lens” through which to view his own pictures of Polynesians. “The ways we see Black and brown bodies from the Pacific are shot through his sense of desire. But how do you change the narrative? How do you change the way of looking?” Wiley wondered. He decided to paint the island’s “third gender” mahu people and have them pick their own poses.

But it’s not always clear that Wiley is shifting the dominant gaze as much as he may think. And not everybody he paints is a nobody. In addition to President Obama and Naomi Campbell, last year he painted 11 African heads of state for a show titled “A Maze of Power.” He didn’t want to give what he called “a morality test” to the subjects, who include former Guinea president Alpha Condé, who was accused of torture and deposed in a coup. “I’m trying to look at the African presidency in images because there is no tradition of it,” he said at the time.

In 2019, he opened Black Rock Senegal, a resortlike residency that provides emerging artists with studios, a spa, a pool, a gym, a library, an on-site chef, and apartments overlooking the ocean. It opened with an enormous party at which Alicia Keys, Swizz Beatz, and artists like Henry Taylor were on hand. In late May, just after Awuah-Darko made his allegations public, Wiley reportedly told staff that “the coffers are empty” and that Black Rock was shutting down. The magazine Jeune Afrique later reported that the residency wouldn’t close after all but would operate under “a new model” that Black Rock was “currently defining.”

Wiley was supposed to be in control of this kingdom. He now laments the arrival of Warhol’s future, where everyone can be famous for 15 minutes. “Every individual has that power in their palm with devices. It starts to create this echo chamber in which we need the adults in the room more than ever,” he says. “Warhol was right. I don’t know how he did it, but he predicted it. And so our jobs now are to create traditions, institutions, practices, in which we say, ‘All right, hold on, let’s fact-check.’”

When Awuah-Darko posted his allegations, he also started a Change.org petition, currently signed by 1,361 names, asking for Wiley’s galleries to “conduct thorough and independent investigations into these claims to ensure justice and support for all victims.”

Sean Kelly, Wiley’s gallery in New York, has never responded to the allegations. But two of Wiley’s other galleries have pushed back against that idea. It is “crucial that any claims are addressed through proper legal channels,” reads a statement from Templon. “As a private art gallery, we respect the presumption of innocence and believe it is not our role to comment on these posts publicly.”

A representative for Stephen Friedman Gallery says, “It is important not to discount or discredit the voices of victims of abuse. Equally, we should rush neither to the judgment of alleged perpetrators, nor to their defense. There is an appropriate forum for each to be heard.”

What that forum might be is unclear. A lawsuit seems unlikely. Awuah-Darko and Lloyd Richards live in Europe, and the statute of limitations has run out in Armistead’s case. Ingram may be the only one able to file a claim against Wiley, which he told me he’s considering: “I’m dealing with a lot of pressure and anxiety about feeling like this is all riding on me.”

And Wiley, for his part, doesn’t seem all that inclined to bring defamation charges (although his spokespeople emphasize that he hasn’t ruled it out). Instead, he seems to be hoping it will blow over or that the media will help resolve what he sees as the “lapse of some core and almost elementary principles surrounding storytelling.”

Friedman Gallery’s decision to show Wiley’s work at this moment has been met with some surprise.​​ “It’s so crazy to me,” says Heather Flow. “I guess they’re just pretending like it doesn’t matter.” Flow had noticed that Templon hung a 2012 Wiley painting front and center at its booth at Art Basel Paris in late October. “Who in their right mind would try and resell that painting right now?” she says she wondered — except perhaps Wiley himself, who at some point may be in need of funds, given the expense of his global operation. Some art-world observers tell me that Wiley misstepped in publicly lashing out at his accusers, but they also tend to think he will recover. “He probably needs to keep his head down and do his work,” says the art adviser Victoria Burns. “In this recalibration-of-the-market moment, the cream is rising to the top again, and Kehinde Wiley will definitely remain cream.”

Museum directors, however, have been much quicker to cancel Wiley. This rapid response to controversy is the status quo for museums shaken up by the social-justice movements of recent years, Levin says. Protesters pushed out key staffers like San Francisco Museum of Art chief curator Gary Garrels, who said a ban on collecting white guys would be “reverse discrimination,” and trustees like Whitney Museum board member Warren Kanders, who resigned after Whitney Biennial artists pulled out to protest his company’s manufacturing of tear gas. As a result, “if there’s an iota — just a shred of an iota — of any impropriety, it’s wiser to simply shut that idea or exhibition down,” says Levin.

There was some pushback against the museum cancellations. The National Coalition Against Censorship, a group formed by ACLU activists in 1973, issued a statement condemning museums for improperly acting as “enforcers of moral orthodoxy.” A few months earlier, the group had urged Indiana University to reinstate its museum’s retrospective on the Palestinian American abstract painter Samia Halaby, which it shuttered for unspecified “security concerns.”

“This kind of response,” says Elizabeth Larison, the coalition’s arts-and-culture advocacy-program director, “feeds this reactionary culture of fear and erasure that impoverishes the cultural sphere.”

A suit of armor stands against a wall at the entrance to Wiley’s studio. He may have worn this suit, or perhaps it was another one, he can’t remember, for the cover of a special portraiture edition of Vanity Fair in 2019.

On the one hand, armor, as Wiley sees it, is a metaphor for portrait painting itself. “I think the narrative always with portraiture has to do with armor,” he once told Hyperallergic. “Clothing as armor. Something (at) once that keeps something out and holds something in.” On the other hand, it represents a form of protection one might need after achieving a certain rank in life.

“Let’s face it: I have the ability to rally heads of state and to exhibit my work in some of the biggest museums across the world, and still do I have among my friends some very celebrated people — I’m not nuts; like, I recognize my position,” he says. “But I just didn’t recognize my vulnerability in the sense that I didn’t know how easy it was to come into someone’s life and cynically manipulate social media.”

An early example of Wiley incorporating armor in his work was his 2009 portrait of Michael Jackson. Jackson had seen one of Wiley’s equestrian paintings and had asked if he could commission a similar portrait of himself. “I was like, ‘Well, normally no because I usually paint just randos,’” he tells me. But he thought, Let’s try this — it’s Michael Jackson. The resulting painting, inspired in part by Peter Paul Rubens’s portrait of King Philip, shows the King of Pop on horseback, in glinting gold armor, with cherubs fluttering overhead.

Wiley has said that Jackson viewed armor as a kind of artifice and as a part of the “castle” he had built: “He was interested in the armor as a metaphor, and I thought it was great, and it was this kind of weird negotiating of his career.” Today, Wiley says he’s become “obsessed with armor” and plans to use it more in his upcoming work.

Just across from the armor is a painting of a glowing young man with close-cropped hair and high cheekbones standing in a tangle of flowering vines. It’s Wiley’s partner, the 27-year-old Nigerian model Kenneth Okorie.

Okorie’s Instagram shows what his life has been like since he and the artist met on a dating app a few years ago: private jets, an invitation to a Louis Vuitton fashion show, partying with Wiley and Naomi Campbell in Cannes.

Wiley says the crisis has brought the couple closer together. “We’re on the phone every day. We travel incessantly together, just trying to create little moments of quiet away from all of this and being there for each other.” But the timing of the allegations couldn’t be more “monstrous.” Wiley says he was “literally on the phone with my fertility doctor — ” His voice starts to quaver. He was in the process of having a baby around the time the news broke. “I’ve had my life going prior to this nuclear bomb dropping on it.”

Tears are now streaming down his face as he seems to plead with me: “I’m not the kind of person who rapes people. I’m the kind of person who wants to give a child love.”

The publicist interrupts to make sure Wiley is okay. He wipes the tears away, excuses himself, and heads to another room. When Wiley returns a few minutes later with a tissue, his indignation has come back, too. “I’m the victim. I’m the victim,” he says, his voice still shaky. “When you say ‘Believe victims,’ you should — you’re staring at one.”

Director and writer Tina Landau in rehearsals for the Broadway revival of Floyd Collins. “My body of work has been a surprising mirror back to myself,” she says. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

In the semi-twilight of tech rehearsal at the cavernous Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, Tina Landau is scrutinizing the movement of lanterns. Unassuming in a flannel shirt and beanie, the director’s watching her ensemble work through a scene change of Floyd Collins, the musical she wrote three decades ago with composer Adam Guettel about the Kentucky explorer who became trapped in a cave and inspired a 1920s media circus. The show had a brief run Off Broadway in 1996, then lived on with a miniature national tour and a beloved cast recording. It’s been produced around the country and internationally since but not again in New York City until now. On this March afternoon, it’s still becoming what it will be on Broadway: Crew members come up to Landau to discuss the process of making the floor resemble real dirt and mud, whether a test-your-strength carnival machine can be struck in time with the music, as well as drafts of a digital rendering of the sky that will grace the LED screen at the back of the stage. “The thing I’ve known about this show from the beginning,” she tells me, “is the more we try to be literal, the less it works.” Floyd spends most of the action stuck underground, a predicament rendered figuratively by having the actor Jeremy Jordan confined to a chaise longue–esque construction integrated into the rest of the rocky stage.

Landau starts thinking about how the ensemble will navigate a change into another scene at the encampment that has sprung up around Floyd’s entrapment. “The last time we did this transition, it felt a little transition-y,” she announces through a mic, “as opposed to seeing the meaning of these characters moving through the space, being purposeful. We want to watch a passage of time at the site.” As a director, Landau is known for her work with space — she’s co-written a book on the theory of Viewpoints, a movement-based theatrical practice — though she’s also taken the helm of big Broadway musicals. Landau brought SpongeBob to Broadway, and earned a Tony nomination, while she’s also directed regularly at Steppenwolf. “For years, I felt I had a split personality,” she says, “And I’m a Gemini, so it was appropriate.”

This spring, Landau is taking on two musicals at once and has written the book for both. Just days before jumping into rehearsal for Floyd Collins, which opens on April 21, she debuted Redwood, starring Idina Menzel, a semi-autobiographical piece about a woman who works through a personal tragedy by finding herself in the California forest. Landau discovered the shows speak to each other in surprising ways. One goes up to the canopy; the other down to the depths. Both reckon with loneliness and connection. Landau’s still putting together the links and disjunctions.

There hasn’t been a revival of Floyd Collins in New York since its premiere in 1996 because you and Adam held on to the rights. What was it about this show that made you so certain you wanted to return to it?
The original run at Playwrights Horizons was so short. We were fortunate in 1999 to do a small national tour, and we rewrote some of it and added a new song, but we ended that feeling like we weren’t done yet. From early on, talk of Lincoln Center came up and I had this image of doing the show at this theater. We spoke with artistic director André Bishop about it over the years, but Adam in particular wanted to make sure he had other shows in place before he went back to Floyd. We did get a lot of offers from other people who wanted to direct it, but Adam was great in that he said, “No, it’s Tina’s show.” It hasn’t been vastly done elsewhere, but it has over the decades developed a cult following.

You must have also been in the middle of developing Redwood when the offer for Floyd came up.
I remember the moment we got word that André wanted to schedule Floyd for his final production and getting word the very same week that we had a theater for Redwood. When I first got the two schedules, they opened the same week. I fought for four days off between Redwood opening and the start of Floyd.

With Redwood, you built the show with a star in Idina Menzel, so that was set from the start. What were you looking for in casting Floyd?
Casting took awhile, and it became clear when we started that the role of Floyd was more demanding than even we had remembered. You need a serious, nuanced, deep, and funny actor, and the vocal demands are through the roof. There are not many people who could sing it, so I thank my lucky stars every day that it’s Jeremy Jordan. I didn’t know at the time what the physical demands were going to entail. The opening number, “The Call,” involves a lot of climbing and sliding and acrobatics and descending a rope. Jeremy’s a monkey. He will climb on and through anything — he’s like Floyd.

When you’re staging the show now, how much does your original version of it stick in your, I guess, spatial memory?
There were certain key approaches that were part of the original production that I knew from the beginning were going to come alive again. I had an idea about bodies and silhouettes against the sky, and I knew I was keeping that. And there’s a sequence toward the end called “The Dream” in which the cast emerges in all white. There were also things that were a little broken and needed to be improved. In the first version, we were determined to get every nuance and piece of research we had done into it. The script as it’s written is in the way some of those old-fashioned Rodgers and Hammersteins are where the dialect is written in. It’s very idiom-heavy. I’ve done a whole pass on the script to streamline and not have that stuff get in the way.

But we also did things in the original writing and the structure because we were in our 20s, knew no better, and didn’t care what anyone thought. Today, both of us feel like, Would we be as brave now? We decided to open a show with a 14-minute number of a man climbing solo into a cave. What were we thinking?

“The thing I’ve known about this show from the beginning is the more we try to be literal, the less it works,” Landau says of Floyd Collins. Photo: Joan Marcus

Redwood is also about an individual going off into nature, and in SpongeBob as in Floyd, there’s a send-up of a media circus. How conscious are you of these sorts of recurring themes?
My passion takes me, stylistically, in very different directions, but there are a lot of core themes and echoes. My body of work has been a surprising mirror back to myself. The main pattern I recognized, years and years ago, was that I was always telling in some form the story of an outsider, an individual and their relationship to society — both the loneliness and the freedom of that journey. I guess I have felt that way my whole life. When I went to preschool, I sat in a corner and drew on paper and would not talk to the other kids. My parents thought there was something amiss, but the doctor said there was “nothing wrong with Tina. She is creating the world she wants to be in.” By age 6, I was putting on shows in the basement. I was walking around saying I wanted to be a director. I don’t know where that came from.

Your parents were movie producers, so you must at least have heard of directing as a profession.
And we did go to the theater all the time. I grew up on Broadway musicals, and it wasn’t until my teenage years and in undergrad at Yale that I steeped myself in more avant-garde or experimental theater. Half of me was Broadway musicals, and half of me was this weird other stuff. It took me a very long time to realize they could meet and be happy together. In college and high school, I directed The Music Man and I directed Guys and Dolls. I don’t remember the concept for The Music Man exactly, but it had something to do with Harold Hill being out of the story in a Brechtian way and constructing the story for us. It was something like that.

And you directed a revival of Bells Are Ringing on Broadway in 2001, though I’ve read you say you regretted compromising your vision on that.
I had a very clear and strong idea when I went into it that gradually got watered down because I was young and trying to please legends of the business. In retrospect I wish I hadn’t done that, but it was all part of my learning and growing.

You’ve been a member of Steppenwolf since 1997, which, from what I understand, had reached out because of an interest in doing Floyd Collins.
Frank Galati, the director, came to see Floyd at Playwrights and then called the artistic director Martha Lavey and said, “We have to do this musical at Steppenwolf.” We talked about it and it became clear to me that Steppenwolf at the time wasn’t equipped to do a musical like this, especially since it wanted to, as always, cast ensemble members and it didn’t have the group to perform and sing this particular musical. But Martha and I started speaking about what else I could do.

It had, especially then, a reputation for doing realist drama, which isn’t necessarily your stock and trade.
My first show at Steppenwolf was a Chuck Mee play called Time to Burn and it wasn’t straight-up naturalism, but there were naturalistic elements to it. I remember thinking it might be a disaster because I’m going to be in a room with people who want to act around the kitchen sink and hit baseball bats and know what their motivation is, and I’m bringing in this movement technique that I practice, teach, and write about called Viewpoints. It’s not instead of working from the inside out, but it is in addition to that — there are ways we can listen to and work with our bodies to create movement onstage. But I’ll never forget our first Viewpoints session, when I said to the company to give me two hours of an open heart. There was an amazing Chicago actor named Mike Nussbaum who was in the show and he raised his hand and said, “I learned something today.” I was like, Oh no. He said, “You can teach an old dog new tricks.” I was talking with another ensemble member about Viewpoints and other acting techniques, and what Steppenwolf aspired to and what Viewpoints aspired to were the same values. They’re about being bold, spontaneous, and the ultimate goal’s the same as Meisner or Stanislavski. It’s just a variety of ways to get there.

What does it look like when you introduce Viewpoints in a rehearsal room?
I definitely take a certain amount of prescribed time to explain what the Viewpoints are and individually introduce them and practice them. Then the hope is that over time the company starts integrating that into their work and the performance in an unselfconscious way. I feel like that’s where we’ve gotten with the Floyd company. I always say that part of the deal is that we’re applying a language to the things actors do organically. If there’s a lot of people onstage at Floyd, sometimes, instead of having to say, “Jack, move stage right two feet. Sally, come down one foot.” I can say, “Spatial Relationship,” which is one of the Viewpoints, and you can see the whole cast adjust and reconfigure based on their spatial relationship to each other.

You could see a lot of that at work in SpongeBob, which to me melded experimentation with this big commercial property. What did it feel like to have that come into New York in 2017 and get this great critical reception?
It was freeing and joyous and less about the critical reception. I would go back to the show regularly to watch the audiences’ experience of glee. SpongeBob was fantastic because it had real development time. Nickelodeon and our producers put their money where their mouth is in terms of “this is not a cash cow. This is something we are developing artistically.” Every workshop we did, and we did a lot of them, was focused on a very particular element of the show. What does it mean to have a cartoon character walk onstage? What is the music? It was over ten years that we worked on it at least once a year.

You got a Tony nomination for SpongeBob, and I can imagine other producers coming in with offers to do similar work. Did it feel like a change in the profile of your career?
Sometimes I think, Well, if I just did that other musical I didn’t connect to, I’d have a bigger, more lucrative career. But I’ve never been able to do that. When I’ve done projects I haven’t felt the deep reason for doing, I have gotten sick and I quit them.

Physically sick?
That happened early on in my career. Two or three shows I had to leave. I’m no good at working at something that doesn’t feel true and meaningful to me. So I don’t remember if there were more offers, but I’m so picky it didn’t feel like a huge difference. I maybe just said no a little more. Plus there was the pandemic. Anything that might have been cooking just stopped.

It was then that you and Idina started talking more seriously about Redwood.
We met around the time of Rent and Floyd Collins, which were the same season. I was close with Jonathan Larson, and I was there the night they performed after he passed away. After that, I auditioned Idina once or twice, and she says that when she first came to me with the idea of writing something about someone in a tree, that was partially because of Floyd. She was like, Well, Tina knew how to write a show about someone in one place. By the pandemic there were shards of ideas, but when we reunited we both agreed that we were no longer interested in those shards. We went in search of a new show, and emblazoned inside of us was this crystal-clear image of a woman sitting in a tree. We were both interested in why that mattered to us, trying to get to the bottom of that.

Idina Menzel in Redwood. “I’ve never done a show that’s anywhere near directly as personal as this,” Landau says. Photo: Matthew Murphy

This came up in some of the reviews of Redwood, but while the show’s about a person’s connection to the environment, it’s not about climate change or activism. She goes on an interior journey, processing her grief over a personal loss. Was that intentional?
Yes, and I think that was part of our change from our early musings, which were about a more historical story about lumber companies and tree logging. When we came back together, we were both more interested in a more personal story. We didn’t know if it was going to be a one-person show or a concert or an installation piece with Idina singing in the middle of it, and it slowly turned into something that is a little bit of all those things. But yes, it’s the story of a woman’s transformation more than someone learning about …

Look, I’ll be candid and say it: I was hurt by a lot of the reviews. I can’t argue with anyone’s experience or taste and I would never want to. There are people who loved it and really loved it, and there are people who really just say it’s bad. That was surprising to me. In some cases, I feel like my intentions were just somehow not translated clearly, or somehow those people didn’t get what I thought I was doing.

You didn’t expect that range of enmity or love?
No. And I get a lot of mail, more than I ever have, about that show. People are deeply moved by some aspect of it and sometimes seemingly oblivious to other aspects of it. It’s really about the environment or it’s really about grief or it’s really about escaping urban life. I guess that’s a good thing that people find in it some reflection of what they want and need that story to be. But it’s been surprising.

Was there a specific intention you felt that people were missing or misinterpreting?
No, not in general. I might have felt that way at the beginning, but since then I have gotten so much direct feedback from audiences and strangers and people I know who have deeply gotten what I intended. I feel very gratified and at peace with that part of it.

You’ve talked about how there’s a lot of you in the character of Jesse. She’s a queer woman. Your nephew’s overdose inspired part of the plot. That must add an extra layer of investment.
I’ve never done a show that’s anywhere near directly as personal as Redwood. When you open yourself up, things that aren’t the most positive sting in a different way. I’m pretty resilient about reviews. I do read them all. With this piece, I understood what other writers have told me, which is that your logical brain may know it’s not personal, but when your soul and family is in there in a direct way, it can hurt. I really am at peace with it, but that was a new experience for me.

What motivated you to include that part of your own story in the piece?
I lost my nephew at the beginning of the pandemic and without thought, but out of necessity, that became the subject. What I wanted to write about was that grief that I was in and the solace I found in the trees around me near my home. It was a bit like Floyd at its beginning where I didn’t second-guess it. I didn’t think about whether it was a wise move or not. It just felt like what poured out of me.

Were you into hiking as a kid? What gave you this love of trees?
No, and I don’t know. I think trees, for me, represented escape. It’s that childhood fantasy that many people share of climbing up into a tree and disappearing into another world. That’s not that different from being a little girl sitting in a corner drawing. It was a way of going somewhere and inventing my own reality. Later in life, I started experiencing the Redwoods. My first trip was to Muir Woods. I was in San Francisco and looking for something to do on my day off and I was staggered. I had that experience of silent awe when you look at the sky on a particularly starry night. It makes you small but in the way of being part of something larger than you fully understand.

In Redwood, Jesse reconnects with her Judaism, and in Floyd Collins, there’s so much questioning of God and the afterlife. How do you see faith playing into those shows? (Spoiler alert: We discuss the endings of both musicals going forward. Floyd Collins’s is historical fact, but fair warning.)
Going into the last song Floyd says, “Faith is believing in something you can’t see. I’ve had faith all my life.” For both characters, it’s really about surrender to what one might call a higher power, or the universe, or the truth of life, which is death. Jesse doesn’t die, but her final act is one of surrendering to something that she has been avoiding and is not given into and has tried to control. That’s very much what the sense of faith is in both of those shows. It’s not specifically about this or that God, Judaism, or Christianity.

One ends with death, while the other with reintegration.
Well, to me, both have a happy ending. I felt that in auditions for Floyd Collins when people kept coming in and singing “How Glory Goes.” Someone dies. But there’s a kind of peace, joy, and freedom. Floyd goes up to the sky. Jesse goes back to her life, but I think they’re both moments of transformation and release.

Floyd Collins opens on April 21 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center; Redwood is at the Nederlander Theatre.

A NUMBER OF WEALTHY APPLICATION BUYERS ANXIOUS STATE THE RECENT MARKET UNcerTainty and Tariffs News are seting these days for luxury rentals in new York City.
Photo: Anthony Devlin/Getty Images

Bill Kowalczuk was a littlest surprised by the interest he saw in a recent boerum hill listing. The Five-BEDROM, Three-Bath Townhouse on State Street-priced at Nearly $ 22,000 a month-Received seven in three days, and three of applied. “I don’t normally get that many People,” he Says, “Because you got to make a Million or more.” So what explained the bump in millionires looking to pony up a Mortgage payment in rent every month? Acciting to Kowalczuk, A Broker at Coldwell Banker Warburg, The People and Talking to Right Now Wealthy Enough to Buy Something Respectable But Currently Too Anxious to Commites.

Brokers Working at this End of the New York City Market, Both in Luxury Rentals and Sales, Areing a Number of Their Clients Getting FARED off their real -state by the economic chaos. Break Wild Market Swings caused by Trump’s “Liberation Day” Tariffs Announcement Along With Skepticism About The Potential Return on Current Real-Astate Investments Has Given the City’s Mid-Taier Rich Some Pause. “That $ 3 to $ 7 million Market Gets Spooky Very Easily,” Michelle Griffith, Do Douglas Elliman Agent, Tels Me. Acctinging to griffith, this is a segment of the buys who May still be financed part of their purcha, and probably pulling Money Out of the Stock Market as Well for Downs. Rich, but swimming Rich Rich. “So the minute there’s any level of uncetainty, what would they do? They Say, ‘Okay, We’re Going to Sit on the Sidelines.’ apartments rened for $ 20,000 or more Last month jumped 28 Percent Compared to April 2024; The firm found a roughly 30 Percent Increase in these luxury units being renead out so far this year versus the first four months in 2025.

Griffith has Also noticed a pattern in the luxury rental inventory and listening, like a $ 30,000-on Penthouse at 16 Jay Street: a lot of the interests “were represented by brokers who has Had Also my Sale Lisings,” She Says. They “were coming to look at bot.” Corcoran Broker Deborah Rieders Sa’i’s Been Seeing Sying Similar: A Lot of Calls Have Been Coming in About Her Townhouses and Condos “In the Good Brooklyn NeighBorhoods” – Each Listing for $ 7 Million Higher – But They Are From Clients Seller Would Consider Rening. “I think that they’re’re ussing a little bit of their fear as an excuse to think they can sort of test out a Neighborhod before they live,” she teles. Have Sellers Been Open to the Idea? “These are Beautiful Properties that are very turnkey and Most People don’t want to have a tenant in there Mucing up the property,” she Says.

SO: COLD FEET OR JUST SOME SPRING-MARKET WEIRDNESS IN A MARKET THAT’S PROPER TO BEING WEIRD? Multimillion-Dollar Sales field doing just fine, after all. Donna Olshan, Who Tracks the Manhattan Luxury Market, Says that Following a Brief Panic-Driven plume in contract signings the week of the initial tariffs announcement, there have ben 516 Contracts for Sales of $ 4 billion and higher through may 45 Signed During the Same Period in 2024. “The Luxury Market Has Shown Impressive Resilience,” she tells. AS always, there are many markets inside the market, Like Little Economic Microclimates. Some multimillionires are Feeling skittish with all this uncetainty, sura, but oters aren’t. “IT’S A BUYERS ‘Market right now,” Griffith tells, notting that many of her clients in this still-financing class have instead of the recent economic turmoil by becoming “a little aggrassive” on landing deals. Another Douglas Elliman Agent, Keyan Sanai, TELLS with some of these merely rich buyers might be used the looming threat of tariffs, nor the stock marketing to be rebounding, as a justification to delay they their figure. “The bottom line is more and more high-net-Worth People are renting,” he Says. “They have more disposable income, and they Also don’t want new York to be their Main Residence for Tax Purposes.”

For his part, kowalczuk renead out the state street townhouse in mess than two Weeks – and tan managed to secure some concessions from the tenant. There are the steep penalties included to deal if the tenant tes to break the lease the two -ear contract is up. That means, if buying conditions Improve, the tenant is fairly Locked in. A Little Insurance Against Uncertainty Never Hurts.

فوجئ متابعو برنامج The Voice بعو لجنة التحكيم شيرين عبد الوهاب تتلفظ بعبارة “مُزّ” على على الهواء.

فبعد بقاء المشتركة “وهم” في في فريقها ، قالت شيرين إنها تذكّرها وأنها تست أن يقف الجمهور معها ت تb:: “هي كانت حزينة لأن خيبها لم يحضر إلى الاستديو ليدعمها ، ونحن نقول له طُزّ مش عايزينك!”

ذكرت رئيسة البنك المركزي الأوروبي كريستين لاغارد أن الارتفاع الأخير في قيمة اليورو مقابل الدولار نتيج لسيج لسي mistake لسيج لسيج لسيج لسيج لسيج لسيج لسيج لسيج لسيج لسيج لسيج لساساساساساساساد الرئيس الأميركي دونالد ترامب الغريبة ويعد فرصة لأوروبا.

وقالت لاغاغارد لصحيفة لا تريبيون ديمانش “من المثير للإعجاب أن أنه في في فترة من عدم الين ، عندما أن مالمdu أن نشهد ارتفاعا كبيرا في قيمة الدولار ، حدث العكس ، ارتفعت قيمة اليورو مقابل الدولار ”

وأضافت إنه أمر يتعارض مع البديهة ، لكن مبسب عدم اليقين وفقدان الثقة في السيات الأمين بين بينة معينة معينة معينة الأسواق المالية ”.

وتابعت في مقابلة تم نشرها أمس السبت “أكثر من مجرد تهديد ، بل هو فرصة” الأوروبي ”مردة تصريحات سابقة.