12 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/arts/critics-look-forward-2020.html

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As a new year begins, our critics highlight the movies, music, TV, comedy and other art they anticipate before summer.

Over the last decade, in movies like “Before Midnight,” “Born to Be Blue,” “Maudie,” “Juliet, Naked” and “First Reformed,” Ethan Hawke has quietly emerged as perhaps our boldest and most distinctive screen actor. That’s reason enough to be excited about the Showtime mini-series “The Good Lord Bird” (Feb. 16), based on James McBride’s irreverent National Book Award-winning novel, in which Hawke takes on his first major television role, starring as the abolitionist John Brown. More reasons: Wyatt Russell of “Lodge 49” as the Army officer J.E.B. Stuart and Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass. MIKE HALE

Angelica Garcia was born in California, though she now lives in Richmond, Va.; her family came from Mexico and El Salvador. Her brashly determined second album, “Cha Cha Palace,” is due Feb. 28. Garcia’s 2016 debut album, “Medicine for Birds,” on Warner Bros., leaned toward guitar-centered roots-rock, but her new one, on the independent label Spacebomb, defies formats. Garcia flaunts her bicultural Latin-American heritage, singing about “wearing my roots and flying this flag.” She switches between English (mostly) and Spanish. She cites Latin cultural touchstones and favorite foods. She considers spirituality and practicality, and she recognizes the sweat and aspiration of immigrant strivers. But she’s a musician as much as an advocate. Her songs mingle Pan-American rhythms with pop exuberance, deploy electronics amid live instruments, and stack her confident vocals into overpowering virtual choirs. She proclaims the joy of crossing borders. JON PARELES

I’m absolutely dreading the end of “BoJack Horseman” on Netflix because it’s one of my all-time favorite shows, and when it ends, I’ll be sad forever. But more of me is looking forward to it because “BoJack” is its most spectacular self when it is echoing, satirizing and reimagining well-known TV formats. It’s done it for hokey family sitcoms, for cable news, for weird game shows, for bleak antihero dramas — and now for the prestige finale rollout. Series finales are successful when they feel like the natural, inevitable consequences for the characters’ behaviors, and despite its appetite for the wildly strange and imaginative, “BoJack Horseman” is never random. It has the best memory of any show since “The Shield” — every small story line works its way back somehow, even when the space between causes and effects can be years. Eight episodes, coming Jan. 31, will never be enough, but I can’t wait. MARGARET LYONS

It’s been three years since we last got to see Greta Gerwig act, in Mike Mills’s “20th Century Women.” (We got to hear her, at least, in Wes Anderson’s 2018 stop-motion film “Isle of Dogs.”) Since then, she’s been busy writing and directing “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” both of which star Saoirse Ronan as Gerwig’s muse and avatar. When I interviewed Gerwig in October, she told me that she wasn’t interested in directing herself as an actor — she loses herself too much in a role to also run a set — so fans of her performances and her films will always feel a little bereft. I’ll be happy to see her again soon, onstage in Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” acting opposite Oscar Isaac in a New York Theater Workshop production due in 2020. AMANDA HESS

How can the voice and body be a site of resistance and transformation? That’s a key question behind “Utterances from the Chorus,” Danspace Project’s latest platform series. Beginning Feb. 22, Okwui Okpokwasili, a MacArthur recipient, and Judy Hussie-Taylor, Danspace’s executive director and chief curator, delve into ideas about performance and protest with programs featuring the Algerian-French choreographer Nacera Belaza, the Moroccan choreographer Meryem Jazouli and the Bengali-American performer Samita Sinha. If contemporary dance holds a certain allure yet still seems intimidating, the platform series, now celebrating its 10th anniversary, is a way in. And, of course, you can count on the glittering presence of Okpokwasili, whose artistry will be visible throughout: Not only will she release an album and a collaborative book of songs and poems with the writer Asiya Wadud, she offers a weekly performance installation with the director, designer and filmmaker Peter Born, “Sitting On a Man’s Head.” With a rotating cast of 30, it is inspired by the act of Igbo women of Nigeria publicly shaming a man with dances and songs. Here, the artists aim for restoration. GIA KOURLAS

Two Broadway musical revivals have me (and the busy theater web) buzzing. “West Side Story,” opening on Feb. 20, is a classic that’s familiar enough to handle some aesthetic meddling, which is why I’m eager to see how the Belgian avant-garde director Ivo van Hove cracks it open with video, violence and no preconceptions. “Caroline, or Change,” opening on April 7, is just the opposite: a not-yet-classic that deserves to be. As such, my hope is that the new production will be faithful enough to the 2003 original — about a black woman who works as a maid for a Jewish family in Louisiana in 1963 — to show everyone why. JESSE GREEN

“Martin Eden” is a somewhat autobiographical novel by Jack London, published in 1909 and less well known among American readers than London’s tales of adventure. The book is more popular in Europe, and it has inspired the Italian filmmaker Pietro Marcello to cook up an adaptation that is both scrupulously faithful and wildly, almost insanely inventive. When I first saw the movie — with dialogue in Italian and décor that suggests a 20th-century run through a blender — I almost lost my mind. American literature and Italian cinema are two of my longstanding passions, but I never dreamed they would meet in such a frenzied, high-minded hookup. Kino Lorber is releasing it this spring. A.O. SCOTT

In 2012, Maria Bamford performed a stand-up special to an audience of two, her parents. Five years later, in her follow-up, she performed to an audience of one, her husband, before changing its stage and the audience several more times in a roving production. These shows were wonderfully innovative and hilarious, and it takes nothing away from them to conclude that I’m thrilled that her new special, “Weakness Is the Brand,” out on Jan. 28, gets back to basics, with her standing on a theater stage telling jokes. Bamford is one of the absolute masters of the craft, and while she has far too restless an imagination to stick to convention, just seeing her do stand-up (albeit with a little fourth-wall breaking, to be sure) is more than enough. JASON ZINOMAN

Sensibility is a crucial ingredient for turning books into movies. Why do it? Why are you doing it? We have to feel your feeling, especially when the book is about 170 years old. But something about Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield” seems to want the irreverence of the man responsible for “In the Loop” and “Veep” and “The Death of Stalin.” Yes, Armando Iannucci is doing Dickens’s first truly great novel, and he’s made Dev Patel his David. The movie, called “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” is keeping things in the 19th century. So what will this satirist’s penchant for third-degree banter and sloshing social engagements locate in this giant book about maturing through misfortune? Will it address that Patel is of South Asian descent, that Davy’s benefactors and antagonists (Ben Whishaw is playing conniving Uriah Heep!) are white? Will it care? The real excitement is that Patel, who was also good as a duped assassin in last year’s “The Wedding Guest,” might get to do more in a movie than be a sidekick or symbol. WESLEY MORRIS

On a dank winter’s night in 1997, a block away from Union Square, I discovered my face was wet with tears I hadn’t even realized I had shed. I had just left a new play by Paula Vogel called “How I Learned to Drive” at the Vineyard Theater. And only as I started to walk home did the impact of its portrait of irreparably damaged lives fully register in my body. It was a memory play unlike any I had seen before, of delicate lyricism and awful truth, in which a grown woman recalls the young girl she was and the uncle who sexually abused her. Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse originated the roles of the girl and her uncle, and their gentle but harrowing performances have never entirely left my mind. Now, they are recreating those parts in the Broadway debut of this Pulitzer Prize winner in a Manhattan Theater Club production, which begins previews in March at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Mark Brokaw, the original director, returns as well. And a play that is partly about recapturing lost time — and the illumination, distortions and redemption that come with retrospect — seems guaranteed to achieve a whole new level of resonance. BEN BRANTLEY

In February, the New York Philharmonic inaugurates Project 19, an ambitious, multiseason commissioning project of 19 female composers to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment. As part of the festivities, the Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the 1947 American opera “The Mother of Us All” by the composer Virgil Thomson and the librettist Gertrude Stein. The “mother” in the title is Susan B. Anthony, and the opera tells her story, though in the context of a fantastical musical and literary pageant of 19th-century America, in which historical and fictional characters from disparate eras meet, greet and grapple with issues of women’s rights. This site-specific staged production will be presented in the museum’s American Wing, with singers from the Juilliard School and musicians from the Philharmonic. If you don’t know the piece, don’t miss it. If you do, you won’t. ANTHONY TOMMASINI

I’m looking forward to — hoping for — a year in which Latino artists, specifically artists of Latin descent living in the United States and the Caribbean, get their due. Latino art continues to be all but ignored by major museums. It has, for example, virtually no presence in the recent MoMA rehang (which gives significant space to abstraction from South America, a market favorite). There have been flashes of attention. In 2017, “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA,” sponsored by the Getty Foundation, demonstrated the rich history of Chicano art on the West Coast. The 2019 Whitney Biennial included work by five artists, including Daniel Lind-Ramos (above), living and working in Puerto Rico. But what’s needed is sustained institutional follow-up, meaning commitment. I’ll be on the lookout for that in the year, and the decade, ahead. HOLLAND COTTER