Sleep is a precious commodity during events like AMC’s recent 31-hour Marvel Cinematic Universe marathon.
It’s all about planning: Fall asleep too early into the marathon, and there would be a good chance you’d conk out again during the main event, Avengers: Infinity War. Sleep too late, and you’d run the risk of feeling like garbage by the end. The human machines who can power through all 31 hours with no sleep are rare — almost as rare as the available outlets people flocked to when they entered the theater.
“A picture is a secret about a secret.” Percival Everett’s latest novel, So Much Blue, begins with this epigraph from Diane Arbus. It’s a fitting aphorism for this elliptical novel about a painter trying to work through the secrets and lies in his past. The line could also apply to Jay-Z’s 4:44, which is not just a rap album but a multimedia project that includes images of blackness and masculinity in popular culture, all set against the revelations of his own infamous marital infidelities.
But Broadway is a good deal more than that dazzling patch of neon and LED. It is a long, winding ribbon extending from Lower Manhattan through the Bronx and into the Westchester suburbs north of the city. Some blocks are graceful, many others far from it. Rarely, however, are they dull. In “Broadway,” his meticulously researched book, Fran Leadon, an architect steeped in New York’s heritage, takes us on an invigorating historical stroll along the 13 miles that are the thoroughfare’s Manhattan portion. Leadon offers textured snapshots of life as it once was, and sometimes still is, dividing his walk into 13 sections, one for each mile, from Bowling Green near the lower tip of the island to Marble Hill in what looks like the Bronx on a map but is administratively part of Manhattan.
At some point in the 1950s, Rodgers and Hammerstein transformed from a pair of hardworking men in the theater into An Enterprise, and by the time I was growing up in the ’70s, that enterprise was an established brand, reliably stodgy and comforting and firmly entrenched in Eisenhower-era values and, for me, not all that interesting. How these writers went from being considered brash, hungry innovators to drab gray-flannel-suit types, and how they have been restored to their rightful position as the progenitors of virtually all modern musical theater, is the story of Todd S. Purdum’s affectionate and richly researched “Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution.”