Libretto’s Best of 2023

Neal

While the notion of the “auteur” seems like a relatively quaint concept these days, the works of two artists I encountered in 2023 led me to place them into that rarefied category of “I’m interested in pretty much anything they do.”

Atlanta
The first of these is Donald Glover, who previously starred on Community, and has had huge success as the musical act Childish Gambino. His brainchild Atlanta, whose finale aired in November 2022 after a four-season run, is a fixture on best-of-the-21st-century television lists, and it’s easy to see why. After leaving college, Glover’s character Earn signs on as the manager for his cousin Alfred (the amazing Brian Tyree Henry), a rapper with the stage name Paper Boi. Their friend Darius (an equally impressive LaKeith Stanfield) and Earn’s ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Zazie Beetz) round out the primary cast. In addition to chronicling the arc of Paper Boi’s rising fame, the show delves deeply into the lives of the (beautifully drawn) lead characters, and also features installments where none of the principals appear, including a surreal episode about reparations that’s pure genius. Glover’s embrace of these narrative shifts, while slightly disorienting, packs a tremendous cumulative wallop. Atlanta demonstrates the unique and boundless possibilities that arise when brilliant Black artists maintain creative control over how Black lives are depicted and Black stories are told: the results are stunning.

Our Flag Means Death
To use another slightly antiquated word, the oeuvre of Taika Waititi ranges from the vampire sitcom What We Do in the Shadows and the groundbreaking depiction of Native American lives in Reservation Dogs to his Oscar-winning screenplay for JoJo Rabbit (in which he played Hitler). With Our Flag Means Death—where he serves as producer, director, and actor—Waititi has lurched into yet another narrative dimension, that of the (wait for it) gentleman pirate. Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) is a skittish, conflicted dandy who abruptly abandons his wife and children for high-seas adventure on the vessel Revenge, taking his vast library (and wardrobe) with him. His ragtag crew runs the gauntlet in terms of race, ethnicity, temperament, and sexual orientation; crisp, hilarious writing weaves their antics into a delightful (and often moving) whole. And from the moment that the legendary buccaneer Blackbeard (played by Waititi) attacks the Revenge and strides across its deck, all Heaven and Hell breaks loose as an epic relationship is born.

Act V
My nephew is majoring in criminal justice, which inspired me to share a legendary episode of This American Life with him that focuses on a production of Act V of Hamlet staged at a Missouri prison. More than two decades after its initial airing, “Act V” remains the most profound depiction of the power of theater I’ve ever encountered. The incarcerated men who form the cast use Shakespeare’s script as a springboard for ruminating on the nature of rage, power, loss, and what it means to deal with the lifelong consequences of heinous acts committed under brutal circumstances. An unforgettable hour.

Jason

I love going out to see music but my requirements for live performances have changed since I was a teenager. For one thing, I need a seat. None of this general admission business. My back, legs, and hips won’t allow me to stand for two hours, no matter how good the music is. I also need shows that start no later than 9pm and end by 11. I need my sleep. Easy parking is a plus, and tickets under a hundred dollars are a big plus. These three venues make the cut:

Boston Harbor Distillery is spacious yet homey (all seats are comfy living room chairs with arm rests), offers plenty of free waterfront parking, attracts great talent, and is a working distillery, so there’s plenty of good spirits to drink, too.

The Porch is a Southern-themed restaurant with a full music schedule, great food and drink, and free garage parking. Aside from shows during the week that I might go see, I’m almost always drumming at the weekly blues jam, Sundays from 1-4pm.

MGM Music Hall at Fenway is the largest of the three by far—accommodating 5,000 patrons—but ticket prices remain fairly reasonable, at least for the cheaper seats. Since it’s at Fenway Park, parking is a hassle but the MBTA takes you right there. The acoustics are good, they get national talent, and the stage views are excellent.

Honorable mentions: Sally O’Brien’s, The Square Root, and Jimmy’s Jazz & Blues Club.

Adrian

Severance
Imagine you could perfectly separate your memories to ensure that everything you do at work would remain at work and you would never have to answer an after-hours email. From your perspective, your day would be nine hours shorter, but your work-life balance beam would tip all the way to the side of “life.” It sounds like a compelling proposition until you think about it from the perspective of the version of you who is working—for whom the work day never, ever ends. Would you still take the job?

This is the central premise of the show Severance, a slow-burning Apple TV series that a team of scientists might as well have designed explicitly to appeal to me. For Adam Scott’s character Mark, who recently lost his wife, the chance to forget his troubles for nine hours per day is too good to pass up. We follow him into the office and watch him transition into a new version of himself.

Mark’s grief is replaced by a different set of challenges as he struggles to piece together who he is and why he’s working at the mysterious tech company Lumon (think Apple plus Amazon). As audience members, we’re equally perplexed by the deeply unsettling work world he has entered. His job is inscrutable. The decor is an out-of-time combination of 80s and 90s tropes, featuring CRT monitors and DVDs that produce VHS-quality images. The workspace is a maze of twisting, lifeless corridors based on the internet creepypasta The Backrooms.

It’s delightfully strange, mysterious, and campy, with a pervading existential creepiness that feels at any moment like it could burst into pure terror. I love it.

Shrinking
Weirdly, this is another Apple TV series about a middle-aged, middle-class man who is struggling to recover from the tragic death of his wife—but that’s where the similarities end. To whit: This show’s hilarious.

Jason Segal plays the protagonist Jimmy, the aforementioned widower, who works as a psychotherapist at a specialty clinic under the tutelage of his mentor Paul, played by Harrison Ford. The joke, of course, is that anyone would come to Jimmy for help with their problems when he is such a mess himself.

Much like Ted Lasso, Shrinking concerns itself with redemption rather than realism (Brett Goldstein, who played Roy Kent on the former, is a co-creator of Shrinking). Characters are flawed, but they acknowledge their flaws and work to overcome them. There are real moments of pain and sadness, but they are almost always resolved positively. Communication—and especially naming one’s feelings—is constant, and constantly rewarded. Jimmy might not be a great therapist, but watching Shrinking is great therapy.

Finally, of course, I can’t finish my Best of 2023 without talking about attending Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, which was everything you’ve heard and more. Truly a spectacular event. Not that I’m biased.

Connor

The Glutton, A.K. Blakemore
Let’s just get this out of the way: this is a weird book. It’s based on the bizarre true story of an eighteenth-century French peasant named Tarare who ate everything—and I mean everything. Meals meant for fifteen people. Entire country larders. Rats, cats, corks, forks. He was even accused of consuming a toddler. A.K. Blakemore pulls at the threads of this legend and weaves a compelling novel that’s surprisingly tender, despite the brutality faced by Tarare as he is driven out of his home village, falls in with a band of thieves, becomes a kind of street performer, and ultimately joins the French Revolutionary Army. Blakemore’s prose is lyrical yet precise, and she avoids slipping into the conspicuous archaism that historical novelists can fall prey to, but without sounding too self-consciously modern, either.

Dropout
The last thing any of us really need is another streaming service, and yet I’m compelled to tell you that Dropout is something different. Completely independent and ad-free, Dropout is what has become of the early-2010s web video producer CollegeHumor, which through a series of mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies ended up being owned by writer, performer, and producer Sam Reich (son of Clinton-era labor secretary Robert Reich, which is probably something only I find interesting). Reich and his partners have assembled a large slate of performers who produce primarily unscripted content for the platform. Their flagship is Dimension 20, Brennan Lee Mulligan’s live-play Dungeons & Dragons show, but my personal favorites are Game Changer (“the only game show where the game changes every time”) and Make Some Noise, in which “contestants” are given a series of improvisational prompts to act out. Each prompt lasts the exact right length of time for an improv bit—which, let’s be honest, is no more than about forty-five seconds, max. Pretty much everything Dropout does is breathtakingly funny, unabashedly leftist, and tough to find anywhere else—which for $5 a month sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Symphony No. 8 in C Minor, Anton Bruckner
I’ve been listening to a lot more classical music lately, delving into the work of composers who I didn’t have as much exposure to during my years as a music student. Often overshadowed by his contemporaries, Austrian composer Anton Bruckner was a distinctly odd cat—deeply religious and socially inept, with a reputation as something of a country bumpkin. And yet he was responsible for writing some of the most gorgeous secular and sacred music I’ve ever heard. Although neither as fluid and melodic as Brahms, nor as bombastic and aggressive as Mahler, Bruckner’s symphonies exhibit all the passion and emotional extremes that characterize the Romantic era. I’m especially fond of his eighth symphony, in particular the live recordings by Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache with the Munich Philharmonic.

Ian

St. Mark’s Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street, Ada Calhoun
When I moved to Brooklyn, the first thing I heard was that I arrived too late. The best bar closed down last year, all the artists moved upstate, the bagels don’t taste like they used to, yada yada. In St. Mark’s Is Dead, Ada Calhoun guesses the sentence, “you should’ve seen this place in [insert year here]” is uttered hundreds of times a day in New York City. That lament is often directed at the titular St. Mark’s Place, a tiny street in Manhattan’s East Village that’s witnessed everything from 19th century literary movements to the birth of punk. Instead of indulging in nostalgia, however, Calhoun (who grew up on St. Mark’s) argues that continuous change is the point—and makes for great stories. She writes eloquently about the many eccentric characters who called St. Mark’s home, from the anarchist Emma Goldman to the rock icon Debbie Harry, each believing the street lived and died with them.

Though Bruce Springsteen is neither an urban planner nor a New Yorker, he summed up Calhoun’s never-ending cycle of renewal succinctly in the 1982 song “Atlantic City”: “Everything dies, baby that’s a fact / But everything that dies someday comes back.” St. Mark’s Is Dead is an entertaining tale of perpetual resurrection—and offers a broader view of the deeply weird, ludicrously expensive, and endlessly compelling multiverse that is the Big Apple.

Is It?, Ben Howard
Ben Howard’s latest album was the perfect accompaniment to many of my afternoon walks this year. Is It? is many things: Slightly woozy and ambient, it also has strong melodic hooks and danceable grooves—hitting the sweet spot between delightfully strange and easily accessible. Lyrics such as “colors shifting like a landslide” pair well with the soft daylight and deep reds of golden hour. Musically, hints of folk, house, and electronica resemble a dreamy soundscape, one I returned to many times during 2023.

Tiffany

Barbie
What can I say about Barbie? It’s my movie of the year—though granted, I watch maybe 3-4 new movies every year at most. I’m more of a “tried and true” shows and films kind of gal.

It was hilarious, and the casting was truly phenomenal, but the story—I cannot tell you how good it felt to watch a movie made for women, by women, about women. The way it so perfectly encapsulates the complex emotions and societal pressures of a woman—be a boss, but don’t be bossy; be pretty, but not too pretty—there’s so much more, and it’s all summarized so well in the speech America Ferrera’s character Gloria gives near the end of the film that I couldn’t possibly do it justice here. But even with such a serious undertone, the movie is entertaining with its dance numbers and jokes and bright colors—and Ryan Gosling as Ken is probably the best casting I’ve ever seen in a film. In the end, Barbie is a lighthearted, fun watch, and I can’t recommend it enough.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
As I stated earlier, I’m one of those “tried and true” consumers of media, where I tend to watch and rewatch the same things rather than try out something new, and Star Trek fits perfectly into that category. I’ve been watching Star Trek since childhood, and it’s been an adventure rewatching the shows and seeing what I recall from those nights in the 90’s. What struck me the most was how relevant and timely Deep Space Nine is even 30 years later. Beyond it being the first series to feature a captain who’s a person of color, this was also the first series not set on a ship—instead, it takes place on a space station near two planets who had been engaged in a decades-long power struggle wherein one species claimed superiority over another, and occupied their planet, killing thousands in the process. Not only that, but the space station is located right next to a wormhole, and serves as the first touchpoint for any species traveling into the Alpha Quadrant—i.e., Earth’s quadrant.

Deep Space Nine got a lot of flack for being more people-focused than battle-focused back in the day, but 30 years later, many viewers’ tunes have changed. Episodes spanning seven seasons focus on a variety of species—those involved in the nearby conflict, those just passing into the quadrant, those who are regulars of the quadrant—and they provide more depth and background to these cultures than the ten minutes of screentime in the ship-based adventures of The Next Generation and Voyager. It serves as a good reminder to slow down and take the time to get to know someone, not just write off their cultural differences as offensive or weird. It’s incredible how that message is still so timely, possibly even more so than it was in the 90’s, and it made rewatching Deep Space Nine all the more interesting today.

Madison

Renaissance World Tour
As someone who regularly frequents concerts, it was almost destined that I’d find my way to Beyonce’s Renaissance tour. However, I could never have imagined my 50-something mother, Althea, by my side. Crowds and loud music don’t typically suit her, but throughout the eight enchanting hours at our hometown arena, I can’t recall a single moment when she was without a radiant smile.

We felt this incredible energy from everyone around us as we eagerly awaited Beyonce’s performance. For me, the show wasn’t just about the music; it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience shared with my mother. Yes, Beyonce delivered an awe-inspiring show, and we danced and sang until our voices gave out. But what truly made it extraordinary was the sense of community she fostered.

People of all ages and backgrounds, from every corner of the globe—the concert became a celebration of our differences and what we have in common. It was a space to be unabashedly silly, loud, fierce, and authentically ourselves. Beyonce hadn’t just orchestrated a performance; she had woven together a platform that allowed us to revel in the joy of being together.

Leon Thomas III
Growing up with Nickelodeon shows like iCarly, Victorious, and The Naked Brothers Band, I always found a comforting presence in the form of Leon Thomas III. Witnessing a lead character of color on my television screen was truly remarkable. Little did I know that, while roaming the streets of New York with my roommates in college, I’d come face to face with this icon of my childhood. Fast forward seven years, I found myself attending one of his sold-out shows in Brooklyn for what I believe to be his breakout album, Electric Dusk—a journey that beautifully intertwined my admiration from the screen to real-life.

He is a man of many talents. His project is named after Los Angeles’ longest-running outdoor drive-in movie theater, and each song is individually beautiful. Thomas skillfully intertwines artificial and natural instrumentation, seamlessly blending sonic elements typically considered beyond the realm of R&B. The result is a body of work where his eclectic influences are all evident, reflecting the diverse knowledge he has gathered from every space he has inhabited.