Cuba Libre will make you wish youd taken those salsa lessons your ex suggested.
  • Owen Carey
  • Cuba Libre will make you wish you'd taken those salsa lessons your ex suggested.

Rookie Editor in Chief Tavi Gevinson is headed to town! Are you a grown adult who reads this website for teenagers? You're not alone! And per our interview, you have Gevinson's blessing:

And unless you're leaving "weird comments from someone with the username 'Disappointed Dad,'" says Gevinson, she's happy to have an adult readership, not least of all because Rookie's subject matter—friendship, fashion, sex, necessary playlists—doesn't lose its relevance in your twenties and thirties. "You don't really reach a point where you have everything figured out... some things get better, some things get worse," says Gevinson. "I think when people are trying to figure out how to be there for teenagers or really market to them they often jump through hoops to try and understand the current generation... as if it's totally foreign... "[But] if you just write from your own experience, the emotions resonate even if some of the circumstances are different."

Gevinson reads at Powell's Cedar Hills on Sunday. Take your nieces!

Elsewhere, Joshua James Amberson reviewed Mairead Case's debut novel, See You in the Morning, which bridges YA with literary fiction. "Somewhat refreshingly," writes Joshua in his review, "this is not a book about how music saves or acceptance within counterculture; instead, it's about feeling constantly at sea, unsure of what belonging could even look like... In a conversational voice that borders on prose poetry, our narrator sets quotidian observations against existential questions, and brilliantly odd witticisms emerge regularly and unexpectedly. 'It is helpful, when you are sort of scared, to set a date when you should be really scared,' she reminds us."

At Artists Repertory Theatre, Thomas Ross took in the spectacle of Cuba Libre, Carlos Lacámara's musical featuring music from timba band Tiempo Libre. It was a musical he actually liked, recalling one particularly affecting sequence of many in his review:

One of the play's best scenes is a danced depiction of the Cuban economy, in which Alonso needs a trumpet, but all he has to trade is a jacket, and the woman with a trumpet needs new teeth. The dentist needs milk, a woman with milk needs a shoe fixed, the cobbler needs a carburetor, etc.—until someone finally says, "A jacket." Garcia's choreography in this scene is especially visceral, both fun and deeply frustrated.

Plus! Comedian Nathan Brannon on race, relationships, and why every stand-up you know has a podcast. Profile Theatre's artistic director steps down. Cheryl Strayed's advice collection, Tiny Beautiful Things, is getting the HBO treatment.