A FEW YEARS AGO, Rachel Bloom’s 3-year-old asked her if she’s going to die. “My husband and I answered with ‘We are going to be around to care for you for a long time,’” she tells me in an East Village café across the street from the Orpheum. “And that assuaged her because she’s not actually asking if we’re going to die. From reading and talking to my own therapist, I know they’re asking, ‘Are you going to leave?’ Not ‘Explain the nature of death and decomposition to me.’” Then again, most toddlers’ mothers don’t have a job like Bloom’s.
Death, Let Me Do My Show, her one-woman Off Broadway production, is about Bloom’s longtime musical collaborator Adam Schlesinger’s sudden death from COVID complications in a New York hospital in April 2020, which coincided exactly with the birth and NICU stay of her first child on the opposite coast. Bloom’s daughter is now fine, but Schlesinger’s death floored Bloom in a way she was utterly unprepared to cope with, which is why, nearly four years later, she has found herself reliving it onstage every night in front of an audience in song and dance.
Esta historia es de la edición January 01 - 14, 2024 de New York magazine.
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Esta historia es de la edición January 01 - 14, 2024 de New York magazine.
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THE BEST ART SHOWS OF THE YEAR
IN NOVEMBER, Sotheby's made history when it sold for a million bucks a painting made by artificial intelligence. Ai-Da, \"the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork auctioned by a major auction house,\" created a portrait of Alan Turing that resembles nothing more than a bad Francis Bacon rip-off. Still, the auction house described the sale as \"a new frontier in the global art market.\"
THE BIGGEST PODCAST MOMENTS OF THE YEAR
A STRANGE THING happened with podcasts in 2024: The industry was repeatedly thrust into the spotlight owing to a preponderance of head-turning events and a presidential-election cycle that radically foregrounded the medium's consequential nature. To reflect this, we've carved out a list of ten big moments from the year as refracted through podcasting.
THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
THE YEAR IN CULTURE - BEST BOOKS
THE BEST THEATER OF THE YEAR
IT'S BEEN a year of successful straight plays, even measured by a metric at which they usually do poorly: ticket sales. Partially that's owed to Hollywood stars: Jeremy Strong, Jim Parsons, Rachel Zegler, Rachel McAdams (to my mind, the most compelling).
THE BEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR
2024 WAS one big stress test that presented artists with a choice: Face uncomfortable realities or serve distractions to the audience. Pop music turned inward while hip-hop weathered court cases and incalculable losses. Country struggled to reconcile conservative interests with a much wider base of artists. But the year's best music offered a reprieve.
THE BEST TELEVISION OF THE YEAR
IT WAS SURPRISING how much 2024 felt like an uneventful wake for the Peak TV era. There was still great television, but there was much more mid or meh television and far fewer moments when a critical mass of viewers seemed equally excited about the same series.
THE BEST COMEDY SPECIALS OF THE YEAR
THE YEAR IN CULTURE - COMEDY SPECIALS
THE BEST MOVIES OF THE YEAR
PEOPLE LOVED Megalopolis, hated it, puzzled over it, clipped it into memes, and tried to astroturf it into a camp classic, but, most important, they cared about it even though it featured none of the qualities you'd expect of a breakthrough work in these noisy times.
A Truly Great Time
This was the year our city's new restaurants loosened up.
The Art of the Well-Stuffed Stocking
THE CHRISTMAS ENTHUSIASTS on the Strategist team gathered to discuss the oversize socks they drape on their couches and what they put inside them.