Lifestyle
A new play peers into a band's life, from the inside
Stereophonic, a new play on Broadway with music by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, tracks the volatile creation of a rock and roll album over the course of a year in the 1970s.
Julieta Cervantes/Stereophonic
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Julieta Cervantes/Stereophonic
Stereophonic, a new play on Broadway with music by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, tracks the volatile creation of a rock and roll album over the course of a year in the 1970s.
Julieta Cervantes/Stereophonic
Stereophonic, a new play on Broadway with music by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, tracks the volatile creation of a rock and roll album over the course of a year in the 1970s.
The fictional five-member band, on the surface, looks a lot like Fleetwood Mac – it has two couples, one American, one British, and they squabble and break up as they make the record.
But, for the show’s creative team, it is a hyper realistic look at the costs and glories of making art.
“There are iconographic elements that I stole from Fleetwood Mac,” said playwright David Adjmi, “but I also stole from other things.”
He did a lot of research on bands of the 1970s and recording studios of the time and has written the play in a documentary style.
“We’re going to ask you to peek in,” Adjmi said. “And that’s what creates this kind of weird, titillating feeling for the audience and the feeling that you’re getting something really, really intimate.”
The set for Stereophonic is a working recording studio – from the banged-up mixing console to the 24-track tape machine to the big glass windows looking into a soundproof room where the musicians play and listen on their headphones. The vintage equipment is so real that director Daniel Aukin said, “I’ve learned recently that the song ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ was recorded on it.”
Over the course of three hours, the audience really gets to know the band and the engineers. They see the musicians hanging out, eating junk food, rolling joints, talking about movies, and squabbling.
Adjmi said he began writing Stereophonic at a point when he was feeling discouraged with theater and thought about quitting. The fights the characters are having with each other are the internal fights he was having with himself.
“Why am I doing this?” he said he asked himself. “I shouldn’t be doing this. This is terrible. It’s not worth it. No, it is worth it. It’s beautiful. I wouldn’t trade this for anything.”
To help the group feel like a band, Will Butler had them open for him in Brooklyn.
Julieta Cervantes/Stereophonic
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Julieta Cervantes/Stereophonic
To help the group feel like a band, Will Butler had them open for him in Brooklyn.
Julieta Cervantes/Stereophonic
Turning actors into musicians
Before he had written a word, Adjmi got together in a diner with Will Butler, of the band Arcade Fire, to see if he’d write music for the play. Butler said he got excited as he learned that in the show, the music would be in the process of being created.
“And you’d hear a demo and then you’d hear them mixing in the vocals and you’d hear fragments of it. And the fragments are so compelling, and you want more, but you can’t have more,” he said. “And then, just that initial idea was so rich, I was like, ‘I would love to do this!’”
But in order to pull off Adjmi’s idea, they had to turn actors with some musical ability who could pull off nuanced characters into a believable group of musicians. And that proved complicated.
“It was a long process to find the right balance of people,” said director Daniel Aukin.
“We had to have actors who you would want to cast in a Chekhov play, and we had to have actors who had enough musicality that we could project forward, given support, that they could get to where we needed them to be to pull it off.”
While Chris Stack, cast as the drummer, was already a solid player, the rest of the cast took music lessons before rehearsal, said Will Brill, who plays the band’s bass player.
“I learned to play really badly right before we started rehearsals,” he said. “And, really, I mean, did a lot of catching up during rehearsals. Like, I didn’t play a note before this thing!”
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Butler said it was a leap of faith, hoping these five actors could become a band. For the first few weeks, much of the rehearsal process was spent in band rehearsals, rather than acting rehearsals. Then, Butler asked the quintet to open for him at a club in Brooklyn.
“And they were great and they learned so much,” he said, “and even just getting to the point where they had to stand on a stage in front of people, before they played a note. Like, that taught them so much of what a being a band is like, that taught them the energy that they’re bringing to the studio.”
Andrew R. Butler and Eli Gelb as sound engineers use realistic-seeming equipment.
Julieta Cervantes/Stereophonic
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Julieta Cervantes/Stereophonic
The play tracks the band’s process of creating an album for over a year.
Brill said he’s moved by the final scene of the play, which is just the engineer onstage alone, playing with the faders of that vintage recording console.
“There is this glass box above his head that sort of looks like a thought bubble in some way,” said the actor, “and it’s as though the artist is sitting alone at his table and you wonder, like, ‘Did he dream all this? Did it ever exist? Was this David [Adjmi] sitting alone at his table with all of his demons and gods?’ It’s very, very moving to me.”
Jennifer Vanasco edited the audio and digital versions of this story.
Neve Campbell in Scream 7.
Paramount Pictures
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Paramount Pictures
The OG Scream Queen Neve Campbell returns. Scream 7 re-centers the franchise back on Sidney Prescott. She has a new life, a family, and lots of baggage. You know the drill: Someone dressing up as the masked slasher Ghostface comes for her, her family and friends. There’s lots of stabbing and murder and so many red herrings it’s practically a smorgasbord.
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Abriana Vicioso is the host of the Flower Hour, which takes place monthly.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Each flower carries a personal history. For Abriana Vicioso, the calla lily was her parents’ wedding flower — a symbol of her mother’s beauty. “She had this big, beautiful white calla lily in her hair,” Vicioso says. “I love my parents. They’re the reason I’m here. I’ll never forget where I came from.”
The Flower Hour begins with Vicioso announcing, with a warm smile: “Today is about touching grass.” The florist-by-trade gestures behind her to hundreds of flowers contained in buckets — blue thistles, ivory anemones and calla lilies painted silver — all twisted and unfurling into the air. “Tonight is going to be so sweet and intimate,” Vicioso says, eyeing the beautiful chaos at her feet. A grin buds across her face.
Moments before the workshop, participants sit at candlelit tables exchanging horoscopes and comparing their favorite flowers. A mention of the illustrious bird-of-paradise flower elicits coos and awe from the women. Izamar Vazquez, who is from Jalisco, Mexico, reveals her fondness for roses, which make her feel connected to her Mexican roots.
Vicioso hosts her flower-themed wellness workshop near the iconic Original Los Angeles Flower Market in downtown L.A. In January, the first Flower Hour event sold out, prompting her to make it a monthly series. Vicioso describes the event as a “three-part journey” where participants are invited to drink herbal tea, smoke rose-petal-rolled cannabis joints and create a floral arrangement. “The guide is to connect with the medicine of flowers,” Vicioso says.
Rose petal joints, tea and flower arranging are all part of The Flower Hour event’s offerings.
The event is hosted at the Art Club, a membership-based co-working space. “The Flower Hour is really beautiful. Everyone gets to explore their creativity while meeting new people,” says Lindsay Williams, the co-owner of the Art Club.
The idea for Flower Hour came to Vicioso during a conversation with her mother. “We joke all the time that flowers were destined to make their way into my life,” she says. She works as a florist and models on the side, even appearing in the pages of Vogue. Vicioso grew up in a Caribbean household, where flowers and offerings were part of daily life. “In my culture and religion, a lot of my family practices — an Afro-Caribbean religion — we build altars.”
Like many cultures, flowers carry sentimental value in her religion. “I’m Caribbean, so a lot of my family practices a Yoruba religion, which comes from Africa. In the Caribbean, it’s well known as Santería.”
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After a difficult year and a breakup, Vicioso wanted to marry her love of flowers with community building. Because Vicioso uses cannabis medicinally, the workshop naturally includes a smoking component. “My family has smoked cannabis for a lot of reasons for a long time. It’s a really healing plant,” she explains.
In the workshop, even the cannabis gets the floral treatment. Vicioso presents her rose-petal-wrapped joints on a silver platter at each table. She rolled each by hand. “If you’ve never smoked a rose-petal-rolled joint, the difference with this is it’s going to have roses that have a slight tobacco effect,” she announces.
During the workshop, Vicioso stresses the importance of buying cannabis from local vendors. The cannabis provided was purchased from a Northern Californian vendor. The wellness workshop aims to reclaim the healing ritual of smoking cannabis. “This is a plant that has been commercialized,” Vicioso says. “There’s a lot of Black and Brown people who are in jail for this plant.”
The resulting workshop is what Vicioso describes as “an immersive wellness experience that is the intersection of wellness, creativity, community and an appreciation of flowers.” The workshop serves as a reminder to enjoy Earth’s innate beauty in the form of flowers — including cannabis. “It’s this gift that the universe gave us for free and that I have this deep connection with,” Vicioso says.
Conversation cards to generate discussion among participants (top, letf). The workshop serves as a “third space” for Angelenos to engage in tactile creativity and community building outside of traditional nightlife settings.
After enjoying lavender chamomile tea and smoking a joint, Vicioso introduces the flowers to the group before inviting them to pick their own. She emphasizes each flower’s personality traits, describing green dianthus as a “Dr. Seuss” plant. Then, there are calla lilies with their “main character moment.” It gets personal. “Start thinking of a flower in your life that you can discover,” she says. “If you’re feeling like you need inspiration, you can always remember that these flowers have stories.”
Vicioso infuses wisdom into her instruction on floral arrangements: There are no mistakes. Let the flowers tell you where they want to go, she urges. Intuition will be your guide — the wilder, the better.
“Hecho in Mexico” reads a sticker on a bunch of green stems. “Like me,” says Vazquez with a laugh. “They’re all doing their own thing. Like a family,” she says later, arranging stems.
The Flower Hour participants and Vicioso, center, chat as they build their own floral arrangements at the sold-out event.
Two participants — Vazquez and Rebeca Alvarado — are friends who run a floral design company together called Izza Rose. Like Vicioso, the friends have a connection to flowers through their Latin American culture. They met Vicioso in the floral industry and were overjoyed to discover her workshop.
“This is a great way to connect with other people,” says Vazquez.
Alvarado agrees, adding: “You’re getting to know people outside of going to bars. You can connect in different ways when there’s an activity.”
Vazquez uses flowers to stay connected to her Mexican heritage, adding that she prefers to support Mexican vendors. In recent months, the downtown L.A. flower market has struggled to recover from ongoing ICE raids. “Some are scared to come back,” says Vazquez.
Hand-rolled cannabis joints wrapped in rose petals are presented on a silver platter at The ArtClub (top, right). The Flower Hour aims to reclaim the healing rituals of cannabis and flowers.
Another participant, Barbara Rios, was attracted to the workshop for stress relief. “You can hang out with your friends, but it’s nice to do things with your hands,” she says. “I work a stressful job, and it’s nice to have that third space that we’re all craving.”
On this February night, the participants were predominantly women, save for one man. In the future, Vicioso hopes that more men learn to engage with flowers. “There’s a statistic about men receiving flowers for the first time at their funerals, and I think we have changed that,” she says.
To conclude the workshop, Vicioso encourages participants to build lasting friendships and incorporate flower arranging into their daily practice — even if it’s just with a small, inexpensive bouquet.
“Get some flowers together, go to the park, hang out with each other and hang out with me,” she says. Participants leave with flower arrangements in hand. In the darkness of the night air, it briefly looks as though the women carry silver calla lilies that are blooming from their palms.
An underwater view shows US’ Lilly King competing in a heat of the women’s 200m breaststroke swimming event during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the Paris La Defense Arena in Nanterre, west of Paris, on July 31, 2024. (Photo by François-Xavier MARIT / AFP) (Photo by FRANCOIS-XAVIER MARIT/AFP via Getty Images)
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This week’s show was recorded in Bloomington, Indiana with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Bill Kurtis, Not My Job guest Lilly King and panelists Alonzo Bodden, Josh Gondelman, and Faith Salie. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.
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Not My Job: Olympic Swimmer Lilly King answers our questions about Lil’ Kings
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Lightning Fill In The Blank
All the news we couldn’t fit anywhere else
Predictions
Our panelists predict, after American Girls, what’ll be the next toy to get an update.
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