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    Lin-Manuel Miranda and Disney: Timeline of a Collaboration

    Lin-Manuel Miranda’s relationship with Disney started inauspiciously. He wrote a song on spec for a holiday show. The company rejected it.“It was a holiday song, called ‘Holidays at Our House,’ and I will never play it for you,” he recalled recently. “It was not very good.”But in the years since, the partnership has blossomed, so much that Miranda recently joked about the idea that Robert A. Iger, the company’s executive chairman, might burst into his house if he talked too much about an upcoming project.The company and the composer have a mutual fandom. Miranda named his firstborn son Sebastian, partly in honor of the crab in “The Little Mermaid.” And Iger said that among the reasons he was interested in acquiring the live-capture film of “Hamilton” was that “I wanted to strengthen the partnership we have with him.”That “Hamilton” film began streaming Friday, on Disney+. Here’s a timeline of collaborations between Disney and Miranda:2011: He Pitches Dog Treats on ‘Modern Family’“I basically told them that I would run craft services to be part of the show,” Miranda told TV Guide. Instead, he was cast, by his own description, as a “pathetic loser” in an episode of “Modern Family.” The show aired on ABC, a Disney subsidiary.2012: He Takes a Leaf From ‘Timothy Green’He played Reggie the botanist in Disney’s “The Odd Life of Timothy Green.” Among his castmates: the rapper Common, who later told The New Yorker, “I will always remember us freestyling during lunchtime on the set and thinking, ‘Wow, this guy is talented.’”2015: He Joins the ‘Star Wars’ UniverseOn the night that the filmmaker J.J. Abrams saw “Hamilton,” Miranda introduced himself. According to both men, Miranda just blurted out an offer to write music for “Star Wars,” which Disney had acquired in 2012 as part of its purchase of Lucasfilm. Miranda “comes up to me … and he says, ‘Hey if you need music for the cantina, I’ll write it,’ and he walks off,” Abrams said in an interview with Jimmy Fallon. Miranda wound up contributing to two “Star Wars” sequels, co-writing with Abrams the songs “Jabba Flow” for “The Force Awakens” (2015) and the song “Lido Hey” (above) for “The Rise of Skywalker (2019). He also made an uncredited cameo as a pilot in the latter film. “I was working in Wales, and visited J.J.,” Miranda recalled in a recent interview with The New York Times. “I was just there intending to visit, and he said, ‘Do you want to put on a suit?’”2016: He Writes Songs for ‘Moana’The week Miranda found out he was about to become a father, he was hired by Disney to write songs for “Moana.” He won a Grammy for one of them, “How Far I’ll Go.” “I feel very grateful that we managed to create a Disney heroine who isn’t looking for a boyfriend,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “She’s saving her family, she’s saving her island, she’s saving the world.”2018-20: He Becomes a ‘Duck Tales’ RegularHe voiced Gizmoduck and his alter ego, Fenton Crackshell-Cabrera, in Disney’s “DuckTales” reboot. “We looked at the original character, as we do with all of our updates, and thought, ‘Well OK, he talks a mile a minute, he’s got 100 plans at once, he’s impossibly earnest, and he wants to do what’s right’,” Francisco Angones, one of the show’s writers, told Entertainment Weekly. “So we said, ‘Oh, that’s Lin-Manuel Miranda.’”2018: He Kicks Up His Heels in ‘Mary Poppins Returns’Miranda starred in “Mary Poppins Returns” as a Cockney lamplighter, an old friend of the title nanny, dancing and singing in several numbers, most memorably “Trip a Little Light Fantastic.” “As a child, of course, you’re just dazzled by the fantasy of this umbrella-wielding nanny and the world that she conjures,” he told Vogue, “but as an adult, you realize that the narrative is a modern-day fable about the importance of family above all else, particularly in times of hardship.”2020: He Looks Back on His Rap Improv Years“We Are Freestyle Love Supreme,” an 82-minute documentary about the improvisational rap troupe Miranda co-founded, is to be streamed by the Disney-owned Hulu starting July 17. (The premiere was delayed in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.) The filmmaker, Andrew Fried, began following the group in 2005; the troupe had a run on Broadway last fall and winter. “Freestyle Love Supreme probably has shaped my writing more than any other creative endeavor I’ve been a part of,” Miranda told The Times in 2018, “because it’s writing in real time in front of an audience with nothing but your brain and your friends.”Still to come: Songs set in Atlantica, and South AmericaMiranda has two major Disney films in his future.He is collaborating with the composer Alan Menken on new songs for a live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid.” The film, which Miranda is co-producing, is to star Halle Bailey as Ariel, and the cast includes Melissa McCarthy, Javier Bardem, Awkwafina and Daveed Diggs.And, working with some of the alumni of “Zootopia,” Miranda is co-writing a new animated musical film, still untitled but set in Colombia, for Walt Disney Animation Studios. 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    This Theater Plans Dividers to Keep Patrons Socially Distanced

    Like most other large regional nonprofit and commercial theaters, the Wilma in Philadelphia plans to stay closed through the fall.But this theater has an unusual idea for how to reopen when the time comes: it will prevent theatergoers from breathing on one another by separating them with wooden dividers.The Wilma, which normally seats 300 people in a traditional auditorium, says it will build a new structure, seating as many as 100 or as few as 35, on its stage. The two-tiered structure, which can be configured in the round or as a semicircle, is based in part on Shakespeare’s Globe Theater.The most distinctive feature is that each party of patrons — whether they be solo or in groups of up to four — is seated in a box, physically separated from all other parties.“As we were thinking about how to approach next season, and recognizing that even when we gather we would still likely have some sort of distancing and limited capacity, the idea of having everyone spread out in our existing space didn’t feel like it served our work,” said Leigh Goldenberg, the theater’s managing director. “So we looked at other models through history that allowed both distance and intimacy with the artists.”The structure is expected to cost up to $115,000, which the Wilma said it should be able to afford with its production budget, because it will be spending less on sets. The theater also hopes to be allowed to stream its productions, to recapture some of the revenue lost as a result of having a lower seating capacity.The theater has not yet decided what other safety measures it will put into place upon reopening, and plans to consult with medical professionals.The Wilma, established in 1973 as a feminist collective called the Wilma Project, moved into its current theater in 1996.Earlier this year, it announced an unusual leadership structure, in which four artistic directors are jointly overseeing the organization; their hope for next season is to stage productions of “Fairview,” the Pulitzer-winning play by Jackie Sibblies Drury, “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” a play by Will Arbery that was a Pulitzer finalist, as well as “Fat Ham” by James Ijames and “Minor Character” from the troupe New Saloon.“We’re embracing forward motion,” Goldenberg said of the seating plan. “We want to experiment with how we can keep creating and producing, and this feels like the next step of that.” More

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    ‘Hamilton’ Review: You Say You Want a Revolution

    The opening scenes of the filmed version of the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” which starts streaming on Disney Plus on Independence Day weekend, pull you back in time to two distinct periods. The people onstage, in their breeches and brass-buttoned coats, belong to the New York of 1776. That’s when a 19-year-old freshly arrived from the Caribbean — the “bastard, immigrant, son of a whore” who shares his name with the show — makes his move and takes his shot, joining up with a squad of anti-British revolutionaries and eventually finding his way to George Washington’s right hand and the front of the $10 bill.But this Hamilton, played with relentless energy and sly charm by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the music, book and lyrics, also belongs to the New York of 2016. Filmed (by the show’s director, Thomas Kail, and the cinematographer Declan Quinn) in front of a live audience at the Richard Rodgers Theater in June of that year, the movie, while not strictly speaking a documentary, is nonetheless a document of its moment. It evokes a swirl of ideas, debates, dreams and assumptions that can feel, in the present moment, as elusive as the intrigue and ideological sparring of the late 1700s.“Hamilton,” which premiered at the Public Theater in early 2015 before moving to Broadway and then into every precinct of American popular culture, may be the supreme artistic expression of an Obama-era ideal of progressive, multicultural patriotism.[embedded content]Casting Black and Latino actors as the founding fathers and their allies — Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette, Christopher Jackson as George Washington, and Leslie Odom Jr. as Hamilton’s mortal frenemy Aaron Burr — was much more than a gesture of inclusiveness. (Jonathan Groff channels the essential, irreducible whiteness of King George III.) The show’s argument, woven through songs that brilliantly synthesized hip-hop, show tunes and every flavor of pop, was that American history is an open book. Any of us should be able to write ourselves into it.Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury and an architect of the American banking system, was Miranda’s chosen embodiment of this belief: an outsider with no money and scant connections who propelled himself into the center of the national narrative through sheer brains, talent and drive. Miranda shares some of his hero’s ambition and intelligence, and turns Hamilton into an avatar of modern American aspiration. Just like his country, he sings, he’s “young, scrappy and hungry.”The tale of his rise fuses individual striving and collective struggle. For all his sometimes comical self-regard (he has a pickup line about “my top-notch brain”), Hamilton doesn’t measure success just in personal terms. That’s Burr’s great shortcoming: He scrambles after power and prestige without taking a risk or committing himself to a principle. But Hamilton wants to make his mark by making a difference. Self-making and nation-building are aspects of a single project.“Hamilton” is a brilliant feat of historical imagination, which isn’t the same as a history lesson. Miranda used Ron Chernow’s dad-lit doorstop the way Shakespeare drew on Holinshed’s Chronicles — as a treasure trove of character, anecdote and dramatic raw material. One of the marvels of the show is the way it brings long-dead, legend-shrouded people to vivid and sympathetic life. The close-ups and camera movements in this version enhance the charisma of the performers, adding a dimension of intimacy that compensates for the lost electricity of the live theatrical experience.The glib, dandyish Jefferson is a perfect foil for Hamilton: his rival, his intellectual equal and his sometimes reluctant partner in the construction of a new political order. Though Hamilton hates it when Washington calls him son, the father of the country is also a warm, sometimes stern paternal presence in his protégé’s life. The duplicitous Burr may be the most Shakespearean figure in the pageant, a gifted man tormented and ultimately undone by his failure to make himself matter.Not that public affairs are the only forces that move “Hamilton.” I haven’t forgotten the Schuyler sisters, who have some of the best numbers and who somewhat undermine the patriarchal, great-man tendencies inherent in this kind of undertaking. Miranda weaves the story of revolutionary ferment and the subsequent partisan battles of the early national era into a chronicle of courtship, marriage, friendship and adultery that has its own political implications. Angelica Schuyler (the magnificent Renée Elise Goldsberry), the oldest of the three sisters, is a freethinker and a feminist constrained by the narrowness of the options available to women of her time and class. Her sister Eliza (Phillipa Soo), who marries Alexander, is saved from being reduced to a passive, suffering figure by the emotional richness of her songs.Still, the personal and the political don’t entirely balance. “Can we get back to politics?” Jefferson demands after an especially somber episode in Hamilton’s family life, and it’s hard to keep from sharing his impatience. The biographical details are necessary to the structure and texture of the show, but it is fueled by cabinet debates and pamphlet wars, by high rhetoric and back-room dealing, by the glory and complexity of self-government.Again: This isn’t a textbook. Liberties have been taken. Faults can be found. The problem of slavery isn’t ignored, but it has a way of slipping to the margins. Jefferson’s ownership of slaves is cited by Hamilton as a sign of bad faith (“your debts are paid because you don’t pay for labor”), but Washington’s doesn’t come up.“Hamilton” is motivated, above all, by a faith in the self-correcting potential of the American experiment, by the old and noble idea that a usable past — and therefore a more perfect future — can be fashioned from a record that bristles with violence, injustice and contradiction. The optimism of this vision, filtered through a sensibility as generous as Miranda’s, is inspiring.It’s also heartbreaking. One lesson that the past few years should have taught — or reconfirmed — is that there aren’t any good old days. We can’t go back to 1789 or 2016 or any other year to escape from the failures that plague us now. This four-year-old performance of “Hamilton,” viewed without nostalgia, feels more vital, more challenging then ever.Its central questions — “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” — are staring us in the face. Its lyrics are an archive of encouragement and rebuke. Over the years, various verses have stuck in my head, but at the moment I can’t get past the parts of “One Last Time” that are taken, word for word, from Washington’s farewell address, ghostwritten by Hamilton. And I can’t escape tears when the outgoing president hymns “the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government.”HamiltonRated PG-13. Bare-knuckle politics. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. Watch on DisneyPlus. More

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    The Story of the Lehman Brothers, from Bavaria to Alabama, and From the Heights to the Crash

    There was a time when American readers kept pace with new plays, even if they didn’t live in New York or couldn’t afford tickets. Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” published by Viking Press, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection; Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” made good money in hardcover and paperback for Atheneum.When theaters went dark in March, good plays were left dangling early in their runs. Some will never re-emerge, at least not as audiences knew them. One was the Italian writer Stefano Massini’s “The Lehman Trilogy,” a broad-backed epic about the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers.Massini began writing “The Lehman Trilogy” in 2008, shortly after the firm precipitously crumbled, like a cigar ash, amid the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. When I initially saw photographs of the New York production, showing dark-suited men gesturing in a gleaming office cube, I assumed the play was a boiler-room account of that collapse.That’s not it at all. Massini’s play pans across 160 years of the firm’s history, beginning when Hayum (soon to be known as Henry) Lehman moved from Bavaria to Alabama and entered the cotton business. The play’s Italian version ran five hours. Sam Mendes, who directed the London and New York productions, whittled it down to three and a half.Massini’s original text, a novel in verse, has now been issued in English for the first time, in a translation by Richard Dixon. It’s a monster, a 700-page landslide of language with no obvious speaking parts. But it’s apparent right from the start that Massini is the real thing. His writing is smart, electric, light on its feet.At the same time, his book ominously circles the big questions: Were the original three Lehman brothers and their descendants heroes or villains? Did they inject spirit and muscle into the American experiment, or were they simply cowbirds, laying eggs in other birds’ nests? The answers are complicated.Less complicated is the criticism, articulated most exactly by Sarah Churchwell in a New York Review of Books essay, that Massini’s play glosses over the Lehmans’ participation in the slave trade in Alabama. Future productions should have to pinch and zoom in on these realities.Henry emigrates to America. Having arrived, hecan smell the stench of New Yorkall over him:a nauseating mix of fodder, smoke and every kind of mold,such that, to the nostrils at least,this New York so much dreamed aboutseems worse than his father’s cattle shed,over there in Germany, in Rimpar, Bavaria.He moves south, to Alabama, for the sunshine. Bertolt Brecht, another Bavarian, had never been to Alabama when he wrote “Alabama Song” (also known as “Moon of Alabama”) in the 1920s. One wonders what Henry expected. He arrives, as do his two brothers shortly thereafter. They are in constant motion, making sure their materials are the finest and their prices the lowest.ImageStefano MassiniThey perfect, if not invent, the all-American idea of the middleman. They become brokers, buying cotton and selling it elsewhere. Their business expands to coffee, oil and coal, and eventually to electricity, railroads, planes, comic books, Hollywood and computing. They enter banking, and the idea of what they do becomes increasingly abstract.Early on we read:First: when we were in businesspeople gave us moneyand we gave something in exchange.Now that we’re a bankpeople give us money just the samebut we give nothing in exchange.At least not for the moment. Then we’ll see.By the end of the book, the debt swapping and complicated mathematics lead a character to ask, “Have you at least asked whether a rodeo like this is entirely legal?”“The Lehman Trilogy” lives on the page because of its human moments: the wooing of spouses; the scandals and feuds; the perilous attempts to climb the class ladder.The best running set piece is one in which the Lehmans seek a better row in their Manhattan temple, competing with families like the Goldmans and the Sachses, with whom they have much in common. Massini writes:The only difference—since the truth should always be told—lies in the fact that the Goldmansdeal in that particular metalcalled goldand are so proud of itthat they flaunt it in their surname.For this, and only for this,they’re in the second rowof the Temple.The family has a lot of worms to drop, via well-buffed fingernails, into the beaks of their young. They learn to launder reputations through philanthropy. A long-anaesthetized sense of morality emerges among some of the young members of the clan.Lehman Brothers grows more predatory. Massini pauses to examine the language of finance. Where once words like “succeed” and “competitor” were used, now the terms are “impose” and “enemy.” The Lehmans wield their power through discipline, control and punishment. Upon their conquered enemies, they impose Carthaginian terms. Business isn’t business, business is war.There is a savvy and strange digression into the movies of the golden age, many of which Lehman Brothers financed. The European author contends that these movies, and actors like John Wayne, permanently dented American ideas of masculinity.“The man who kisses? Better if he spits,” Massini writes. “The man who understands? Better if he snaps.” He adds: “Years and years of good manners / swept away by a dozen movies.”Massini writes language that’s excited about itself, and that nearly always casts a spell. If at a few moments I wished I were reading a short nonfiction history of the firm instead, well, those moments were few.The Lehman brothers were good at what they did. They were also blessed with luck. They were a bit like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in the Tom Stoppard play, who toss “heads” on a gold coin 157 times in a row.The firm throws and throws until, in Massini’s words:they achieve a resultthey then regret. More

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    Broadway Will Remain Closed Through the Rest of the Year

    Broadway will remain closed for at least the rest of this year, and many shows are signaling that they do not expect a return to the stage until late winter or early spring.The Broadway League said Monday that theater owners and producers will refund or exchange tickets previously purchased for shows through Jan. 3. Given the unpredictability of the coronavirus pandemic that has prompted the shuttering of Broadway, the League said it was not yet ready to specify exactly when shows will reopen.“Returning productions are currently projected to resume performances over a series of rolling dates in early 2021,” the League said in a statement. Among the logistical issues industry leaders are discussing with government and medical officials: “screening and testing, cleaning and sanitizing, wayfinding inside theaters, backstage protocols and much more.”“I’m cautiously optimistic, with the latest information that we’re getting from scientists and medical professionals, that we’re getting close to some protocols that would work in New York and on the road,” Charlotte St. Martin, the League’s president, said in an interview. “As long as they hold up, I do think that after the first of the year, a rolling rollout of shows reopening is possible.”St. Martin said that the rising levels of coronavirus cases in some parts of the country reinforced the industry’s cautious approach. “Frustration goes by the wayside when you’re talking about risking people’s life or health,” she said.Broadway shows went dark on March 12, and already this has been the longest shutdown in history. At the time, there were 31 shows running, including eight still in previews; another eight were in rehearsals before beginning previews.Thus far three shows, the Disney musical “Frozen,” which had opened in 2018, a new Martin McDonagh play called “Hangmen,” and a revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” both of which were in previews, have announced that they will not resume performances when Broadway reopens.Several producers have indicated that they are looking several months into the new year for a resumption of Broadway shows. The earliest date chosen thus far is for “The Minutes,” a new play by Tracy Letts, which hopes to open March 15. A revival of “American Buffalo,” a play by David Mamet, is aiming for April 14; “MJ the Musical,” a new show about Michael Jackson, says it will open April 15, and “The Music Man,” a revival starring Hugh Jackman, plans to open May 20.Several other shows have said they plan to open next spring, but have not announced exactly when, including a revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite” starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, as well as Lincoln Center Theater’s new musical, “Flying Over Sunset,” and Roundabout Theater Company’s revivals of the musicals “1776” and “Caroline, or Change.”Roundabout last week also announced that it would stage “Birthday Candles,” a new play by Noah Haidle that had been scheduled to open this spring, in the fall of 2021, and that in the winter of 2021-22 it would stage the first Broadway production of “Trouble in Mind,” a 1955 play by Alice Childress. The Childress play, which is to be directed by Charles Randolph-Wright, is about racism in theater, and is the first by a black writer added to the Broadway calendar since an intensified national discussion about racial injustice was prompted by the killing of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis. More

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    Netflix Series About Colin Kaepernick Is in the Works From Ava DuVernay

    Colin Kaepernick has yet to be invited back to the National Football League, but Netflix is welcoming him with open arms. The former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who sparked a movement when he knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality has joined forces with the writer-director Ava DuVernay for a six-episode Netflix series. The show, “Colin in Black & White,” will center on the athlete’s teenage years.Michael Starrbury (“When They See Us”) wrote the series and will serve as executive producer alongside DuVernay and Kaepernick, who will narrate the episodes.The show centers on Kaepernick’s life as a Black child growing up in Northern California with a white adopted family and his journey to becoming a professional quarterback.“Too often we see race and Black stories portrayed through a white lens,” Kaepernick said in a statement. “We seek to give new perspective to the differing realities that Black people face. We explore the racial conflicts I faced as an adopted Black man in a white community during my high school years.”The series was conceived in 2019. Starrbury completed the scripts in May.In 2016, Kaepernick started kneeling at the start of N.F.L. games, prompting other athletes in and out of football to do the same. His actions drew the ire of President Trump, who suggested that those who didn’t stand for the national anthem should be fired. Kaepernick opted out of his contract in March 2017 and was not hired by any other team. This prompted the quarterback, who took the 49ers to the 2012 Super Bowl, to file a grievance against the N.F.L., alleging that the 32 teams colluded to keep him out of the league. Kaepernick and the N.F.L. settled the dispute in 2019, yet he remains unsigned.His activism has received renewed attention in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism.“With his act of protest, Colin Kaepernick ignited a national conversation about race and justice with far-reaching consequences for football, culture and for him, personally,” DuVernay said in a statement. “Colin’s story has much to say about identity, sports and the enduring spirit of protest and resilience.” More

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    BET Awards Put Black Lives at Center of Socially Distant Show

    Political performances by Public Enemy, DaBaby, Alicia Keys and John Legend, civic-minded speeches by Michelle Obama and Beyoncé, and a series of tributes to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor led a virtual, mostly socially distanced and social justice-themed version of the BET Awards on Sunday, the first major awards show of the pandemic era.The host, Amanda Seales, a comedian, actress and activist, cited “Covid and cops and Karens gone wild” as the reason for an atypical event, but insisted in her opening monologue: “We had to do the awards. We deserve a break. And when I say we, I mean all us black folks.”Nearly every act, appearance, acceptance speech and even advertisement that followed made some reference to the wave of protests against police brutality that spread worldwide after Floyd was killed in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, bringing renewed attention to many other cases of black people who have suffered at the hands of law enforcement or racist violence.[embedded content]The awards show, which was made up of taped performances and speeches because of the virus, aired for the first time on CBS, in addition to BET, following the merger last year of the broadcast giant and Viacom, BET’s parent company. And rather than the lo-fi, at-home performances from couches and kitchens that have become standard television fare during the Covid-19 crisis, BET provided budgets for its far-flung talent to produce remote segments that were often more like mini-music videos than the typically raw and sometimes glitchy live awards-show stagings.Megan Thee Stallion, who won the award for best female hip-hop artist, performed her hit “Savage” — sans Beyoncé, who appears on the remix — in a “Mad Max”-style desert landscape, complete with a black power fist background, while Legend was joined by a choir in an abandoned warehouse for a rendition of his latest tear-jerker, “We Will Never Break.”The show — celebrating its 20th year, along with 40 years of BET as a network — began and ended with gospel music, first featuring Keedron Bryant, a 12-year-old internet sensation whose song “I Just Wanna Live” starts, “I’m a young black man/Doing all that I can.” In a closing number, the mother and daughter combination of Kierra Sheard and Karen Clark Sheard (originally of the Clark Sisters) sang “Something Has to Break.”Earlier, in fiery segments, Public Enemy was joined by Nas, Rapsody, Black Thought, Questlove, YG and Jahi for an updated version of the hip-hop classic “Fight the Power”; Lil Wayne led a rapped tribute to Kobe Bryant; and the North Carolina rapper DaBaby opened his remix of the Billboard No. 1 single “Rockstar” pressed up against asphalt, a police officer’s knee pressed into his neck in an unmistakable reference to the video of Floyd’s death. Later in the song, DaBaby appeared atop a police car, smashing the windshield while surrounded by protesters in T-shirts reading “I Am George Floyd” and “I Am Breonna Taylor.”An epilogue following his performance read, “In loving memory of all the lives lost to racism and police brutality.”Anderson .Paak and Keys also centered their segments around black lives lost, with Keys singing “Perfect Way to Die” on an empty street corner surrounded by the names of victims written in chalk. Roddy Ricch performed “High Fashion” and “The Box” in a Black Lives Matter shirt.Additional tributes included Wayne Brady performing in honor of Little Richard, who died in May, and Jennifer Hudson doing her take on Aretha Franklin’s gospel version of “Young, Gifted and Black,” originally by Nina Simone.The former first lady Michelle Obama presented BET’s humanitarian award to Beyoncé (“To my girl, I just want to say: You inspire me, you inspire all of us,” she said), while the singer — whose new “Lion King”-inspired music film, “Black Is King,” will premiere on Disney Plus on July 31 — used her acceptance speech to thank protesters and encourage them to vote.“We have to vote like our life depends on it,” Beyoncé said, “because it does.” More