Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 138 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    Theaters for Young Audiences Say They Need to Be More Diverse

    The audiences at theaters for young people around the country are often quite diverse, reflecting the schools whose field trips fill the seats.But the programming and creative teams: not so much.A new study finds that about 80 percent of the shows presented around the country are by white writers, and 85 percent of the productions are led by white directors. Also of concern: Much of the industry’s diversity is concentrated in a small number of productions about people of color, while the shows that dominate the industry’s stages, generally adapted from children’s books and fairy tales, have overwhelmingly white creative teams.The study, by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at the University of California, Los Angeles, was commissioned last year, well before the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis set off a wave of national unrest over racial injustice. That unrest, in turn, has prompted renewed scrutiny of inequities in many aspects of American society, including theater.“The numbers don’t lie,” said Idris Goodwin, the director of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. Goodwin is a playwright who has written for young audiences and who previously ran StageOne Family Theater in Louisville, Ky.“In the world of theater, the efforts at inclusion have not been effective enough,” he said. “What this report shows is that we’ve got to interrogate the ways white supremacy has built structures that keep whiteness pervasive.”The study was commissioned by Theater for Young Audiences/USA, an organization representing about 250 theaters around the country that produce professional work for audiences ranging from infants to adolescents. (The casts are generally adults, and are paid; these are not youth theaters featuring unpaid children as performers.) The industry’s willingness to study itself differentiates it from other segments of the cultural world, including nonprofit and commercial theaters for adults, that are generally studied by academics or advocacy organizations.“It’s important to recognize the gains — playwrights of color doubled over the last 10 years, which is a sign of progress,” said Jonathan Shmidt Chapman, the Theater for Young Audiences executive director. “But we have a long way to go in terms of reaching equity across the field.”The industry is fueled by titles familiar to children: During the 2018-19 season, the most-produced show was “Elephant & Piggie’s ‘We Are in a Play!’,” based on a series of children’s books by Mo Willems.“Our industry for a long time has relied heavily on book adaptations as a driver of ticket sales, so the problems are the same that exist in the book industry,” Chapman said. “When we do invest in new work, we are far closer to reaching our goals.”Among those investing in new work is the Chicago Children’s Theater, which in recent years co-commissioned Cheryl L. West to adapt two well-regarded children’s books, Matt de la Peña’s “Last Stop on Market Street” and Christopher Paul Curtis’s “The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963.” The theater’s artistic director, Jacqueline Russell, said the new study sends a message to the industry, “making us question again where we’re looking for our source material, and how we’re putting together our seasons.”The report also raises questions about why the most commonly produced work — adaptations of fairy tales and well-known titles — has less diverse creative teams. “Possibly it is because the underlying intellectual property is written by white people, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hire someone of color to adapt it or direct it,” said Yalda T. Uhls, the founder and executive director of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers.The study compared the 2018-19 theater season to that a decade earlier, reviewing 441 productions at 50 theaters. Some of the key findings:“Culturally-specific productions,” in which people of color were essential to the narrative, made up 19 percent of all productions. Playwrights of color wrote 69 percent of those shows, but only 8 percent of other shows.Among playwrights whose work was produced at theaters for young audiences, 36 percent were women, up from 33 percent, while 20 percent were people of color, up from 9 percent.There was gender parity among directors: 52 percent were women, up from 38 percent. But only 15 percent of directors were people of color, up from 10 percent.There was also gender parity among actors: 52 percent were women, up from 45 percent. Among actors, 37 percent were people of color, up from 24 percent.The coronavirus pandemic poses a new challenge to the sector, as it has hobbled theaters financially. Chapman said there is a risk that theaters for young audiences will recover even more slowly than other theaters because schools might cut arts spending and be reluctant to resume field trips. There is also a risk that, once theaters for young audiences do reopen, they will rely even more heavily on familiar titles in an effort to sell tickets.But the events of this year, including not only the pandemic but also the unrest, could also inspire new plays. “We’re talking with colleagues around the country about ways to commission new work that is reflecting the resilience of young people that we’ve seen over and over in this unusual year of 2020,” said Julia Flood, the artistic director of Metro Theater Company in St. Louis. She said the study’s findings were not a surprise, but should be a spur.“I think it’s going to help galvanize the field,” she added. More

  • 138 Shares129 Views

    in Television

    ‘Bold and the Beautiful’ to Resume Production With On-Set Covid Rules

    The Forresters will be back scheming and sashaying on set on Wednesday when CBS’s soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful” becomes what is believed to be the first scripted U.S. broadcast series to return to production amid the pandemic.The Emmy-winning series, which has filmed more than 8,000 episodes since its premiere in 1987, was recently renewed through 2022. Production has been shut down since March 17 because of coronavirus-related restrictions, and the last original episode aired in April.Of course, it’s unsure when viewers will be able to see the drama unfold, as no air date has been set for the series’ return. But the hope is that it would be in early to mid-July, said Eva Basler, the vice president of communications at Bell-Phillip TV Productions, the studio that produces the series.Safety protocols will include masks for all actors and crew members — except the actors who are filming a scene — as well as regular testing for cast and crew, and shorter work days with fewer actors on set and staggered call times. All of the measures are in accordance with the Covid-19 guidelines set by the city, county and state; the series also hired a Covid-19 coordinator to ensure compliance.While “The Bold and the Beautiful” may be the first scripted network series to return to production, some reality shows have been continuing to tape remotely. “American Idol” and “The Voice” returned in May. “Idol” producers shipped video and lighting equipment to performers and asked them to record from their bedrooms, backyards or basements. “The Bachelorette” has not yet returned to production, but producers have been exploring renting a private resort for several weeks to do so. More

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    ‘Billions’ Season 5, Episode 7 Recap: Moral Inconvenience

    Season 5, Episode 7: ‘The Limitless ____”Bobby Axelrod can see the Matrix. Or whatever the moneymaking equivalent of the Matrix would be.After popping a barely legal brain enhancement pill called Vigilantix, provided by Axe Cap’s resident dark-arts practitioner Victor Mateo, Bobby is convinced that both he and any of his employees who have taken this dubious drug are thinking five, 15, 50 steps ahead of their competitors. As stock-ticker numbers fly across the screen, his eyes glow as blue as the Night King’s from “Game of Thrones,” as if he had literal superpowers. And he is focusing those powers on a single goal: Corner the rare-minerals market by investing in meteor harvesting.No, really.It takes all the argumentative power of his protégé turned rival turned partner, Taylor Mason, to convince him of the truth: This get-rich-quick scheme will shoot a $3 billion hole in the company’s bottom line. Didn’t he realize that if meteors become an abundant source of precious minerals, those minerals will become … not so precious anymore? It’s simple supply and demand, and thanks to Victor’s little pink pills, blue-eyed Bobby’s vision was too clouded to see it.Directed by David Costabile (who plays Wags) from a script by Emily Hornsby and the co-showrunners Brian Koppelman and David Levien, this episode of “Billions” is replete with punchy plotlines and payoffs. Schemes are cooked up and pulled off in rapid-fire succession, ending with a declaration of all-out war. Thanks to a Covid-19-necessitated hiatus, the episode stands as an ersatz season finale, and as such it stands tall.Let’s circle back to Taylor, for instance. Taylor Mason Carbon starts the episode in a bind, as a company in which the firm has invested reveals that the tin it uses to build cheap solar panels has been sourced from the conflict-ravaged Congo. As impact investors, they have both a moral and a financial imperative to change directions, and pronto.So too does their fellow investor Mike Prince. He may be Bobby Axelrod’s latest bête noire, but he’s also a potential ally in the effort to right this particular ship.With Lauren and Wendy in tow, Taylor makes the pilgrimage to Prince, where their two teams are to collaborate on a plan of action. Mike makes the call against a slow transition to a more ethical source of tin, on the grounds that eating a few quarters of losses is a small price to pay for what they would otherwise lose in reputation. He even offers to buy Taylor Mason Carbon out of their position should they prefer it. Both Taylor and Wendy feel he’s being honest with them, so they volunteer to stay aboard and back Prince’s rapid-transition plan.Only a few scant hours pass between when Taylor saves Bobby’s bacon on the meteor-mineral play and when Taylor divulges the partnership with Prince. To say it goes over like a lead balloon would be to insult lead balloons. Axe, and his right-hand man Wags, are convinced Prince has played Taylor, that the whole partnership was concocted to put a multiquarter loss on Axe Cap’s balance sheet. Quoting “The Godfather” (of course), Axe and Wags vow to go to the mattresses, declaring all-out war on Prince and anything he holds dear. No Vigilantix-derived mania here: He means what he says.And it’s hardly the first time he has gone to war in this episode. Over the course of this season, Axe has seemed increasingly unable to bear Wendy’s relationship with the Michalengelo to his Medici, Nico Tanner. After a cringingly awkward dinner date involving Wendy, Tanner, the real-life tennis star Maria Sharapova, Wags and … well, the intended mother of Wags’s children, Axe unilaterally holds a viewing party in Tanner’s studio, allowing a bunch of real-life “appearing as themselves” bigwigs (C. C. Sabathia, sports fans!) to browse the artist’s latest works.When an attractive socialite catches Tanner’s attention, Axe’s plan becomes clear. He wants to shatter the illusion of integrity for Wendy, showing her that her new beau is just as corruptible by money, power and influence — and not to mention sex — as anyone else. It’s an ugly power play to pull on someone Bobby has considered a peer and partner for years. But by this point we know him too well to put any amount of ugliness past him.The same is almost true of our relationship with Chuck Rhoades. Some of the New York attorney general’s ends seem to justify their means well enough, as when he sends his Yale Law students on a fishing expedition for evidence against the unctuous treasury secretary Todd Krakow. When half the class bails and the other half fails, he heeds his lieutenant Kate Sacker’s advice and ushers Krakow to his own undoing. By simply hinting that an investigation into his wrongdoings might be underway, he causes Krakow to torpedo his own career, getting him bounced out of the cabinet within 24 hours. Fortunately for those of us who hold out hope for the fate of Chuck’s soul, there are still some measures he won’t stoop to in order to get the job done.Sure, he’ll drum up a fake blood drive in the attorney general’s office in order to see whether any of his employees are viable donors for his ailing father, whose failing kidneys currently constitute a death sentence. But that’s really just a workaround for his original plan: tapping the sketchy fitness impresario Pete Decker (Scott Cohen) and his mind-boggling sleazy friend Dr. Swerlow (Rick Hoffman) for help in beating the tests that prove his old man isn’t a fit donation recipient — and in finding a black-market donor source, should it come to that.Chuck ultimately stops short of agreeing to harvest a kidney from an undocumented child in federal custody, as Dr. Swerlow proposes. But when he has danced right up to that line, would it surprise anyone if, eventually, he marched right over it?Loose change:“Godfather” reference watchers will of course have made note of Axe and Wags’s disquisition on “going to the mattresses,” but the more subtle allusion — well, by “Billions” standards — is the sound of a subway that accompanies Krakow’s in-the-moment decision to torpedo himself, borrowed directly from the crescendoing cacophony that accompanies Michael Corleone’s assassination of Captain McCluskey and the Turk.I don’t know about you, but my biggest laugh-out-loud moment in this episode was when the new Mason Carbon hire Rian claimed to have become fluent in Spanish thanks to Victor’s brain pills, but then spewed forth utter gibberish along the lines of John Lennon’s Spanish folderol in “Sun King.”Bobby’s vision of the stock numbers flying through the air around him will be an animated gif by night’s end, mark my words.Considering the state of the world, it’s a small thing indeed, but I’m choosing to look at the breakup of this season of “Billions” into two separate halves as a good thing. It means one more “Hey, it’s ‘Billions’ season again!” to look forward to. More

  • 88 Shares149 Views

    in Theater

    Upright Citizens Brigade to Overhaul Its Leadership

    The Upright Citizens Brigade comedy organization, which has been financially troubled in recent years, has announced an effort to diversify its ranks and remake itself, at least in part, as a nonprofit.The group’s founders, Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh, who control operations of the organization’s training program and theaters, said that they have been seeking nonprofit status since February, and that they intend to pass control of their theaters to a new board “of diverse individuals.” They revealed the outline of their plans in an email on Saturday addressed to the “U.C.B. community.”The statement said that they want the board to address “the questions of systemic racism and inequality within the theaters,” among other issues. The news comes less than two months after U.C.B. announced the closing of its two Manhattan locations — a theater in Hell’s Kitchen and a training center on Eighth Avenue — after they had gone dark in response to the pandemic.U.C.B. still has two locations in Los Angeles, and has been operating online improv and sketch classes as part of its efforts to weather the pandemic’s financial impact.Even before it closed its New York locations in April, the organization had been under strain: In what was not the first round of cuts in the last few years, it laid off many employees on both coasts in March, and early last year it closed a third New York location, in the East Village. More

  • 113 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    Dave Chappelle’s Netflix Special: Three Key References to Know

    Dave Chappelle released a lacerating new special, “8:46” — the length of time that a police officer held his knee on George Floyd’s neck as Floyd pleaded for his life — that has become among the first live shows in the Covid era to reckon with the protests gripping the nation.“This is weird,” Chappelle tells audience members, wearing masks in socially distanced seats.The show was taped in Ohio on June 6, and a title card explains that it was Chappelle’s first performance in nearly three months. Dressed in black, he refers regularly to a notebook and smokes a cigarette onstage.Chappelle’s performance isn’t much of a comedy set, because, as he notes, there aren’t really any jokes. Instead, it’s a raw accounting of police brutality, punctuated with images of black men who died at the hands of officers, and deftly interweaving his own personal history.He covers a wide range of topics, including the media, the death of Kobe Bryant, and his family members, some of whom were in the audience. But three subjects, including a run-in Chappelle had with an Ohio police officer who went on to kill a young black man, are not well known. Here’s more context for the special.The Killing of John Crawford IIIIn 2014, days before the police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a 22-year-old black man named John Crawford III was shot and killed in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio — Chappelle’s community — by a white police officer. The night before, Chappelle says in the special, the same officer pulled him over. He “let me off with a warning and the next day kills a kid.” More

  • 100 Shares159 Views

    in Television

    Blackface on British TV Finally Faces a Reckoning

    LONDON — On Thursday night, the British chat-show host Trisha Goddard discussed the impact of an impersonation of her by a white comedian in blackface that was popular on television here in the early 2000s.“I’ve only recently discovered how bullied my children were” as a result of the character, Goddard said on the BBC program “Newsnight.”“Let me be clear on this. If the parody was just of me, that would be one thing,” she said. But “it was racial, over-the-top: the big lips, the big wide hips, the rice and peas.” It was “all the things that every black child has been bullied about,” she added.The character was one of several caricatures of black celebrities on the show “Bo’ Selecta!” that were played by the white comedian Leigh Francis, wearing masks with grotesquely exaggerated features. At the time, the musician Craig David described in interviews how humiliating he found the show’s character based on him.Last Friday, Francis apologized via a video on Instagram for these impersonations, saying, “I didn’t realize how offensive it was.” A few days later, the broadcaster Channel 4 removed the show from its streaming service.“Bo’ Selecta!” is one of a host of once-popular British comedy shows that have been pulled from streaming services here this week, including Netflix and the BBC’s iPlayer, because they include blackface or racial slurs, some from as recently as 2010.For many Britons, blackface is understood to be an ugly relic of the country’s past, used to ridicule and demean people of color and perpetuate racist stereotypes. Blackface on British TV is largely associated with “The Black and White Minstrel Show,” a now notorious but once extremely popular variety show that featured people singing in blackface. The BBC stopped airing it in 1978, but the shows pulled this week, including “The League of Gentlemen,” “Little Britain” and “The Mighty Boosh,” highlight how many more recent depictions have been accepted on British television.Now, with the mainstream representations of black lives at the forefront of many people’s minds, after tens of thousands attended Black Lives Matter protests across the country and protesters removed a slave trader’s statue in Bristol, British television is having to grapple with these recent racist depictions.Gina Yashere, a British comedian and the executive producer of the CBS series “Bob Hearts Abishola,” said in a telephone interview that it shouldn’t have taken George Floyd’s killing and the global response to make people rethink blackface.Black comedians had been pointing out that using blackface in comedy was wrong “for years,” she added. “We were told we had no sense of humor. We were told we were being negative,” she said. “We were told that it was sour grapes, that we were jealous.”“They say, ‘Oh it’s just us playing characters,’” Yashere added. “It isn’t characters. It’s always in comedy and it’s always sending up black people.”Some of the shows pulled from streaming services were made by household names here. On Tuesday, the BBC removed “Little Britain,” a sketch show created by David Walliams and Matt Lucas that aired from 2003-05, from its streaming service because it featured Walliams playing an obese black woman in a sauna. “Times have changed since ‘Little Britain’ first aired,” a BBC spokesman said in an emailed statement. The pair both also played minority characters in their follow-up BBC show from 2010, “Come Fly With Me,” which was not available for streaming.Earlier this year, Lucas was appointed a host of “The Great British Baking Show.”On Wednesday, Netflix removed the surreal comedy shows “The League of Gentlemen” and “The Mighty Boosh” from its platforms. Noel Fielding, who is also a host of “The Great British Baking Show,” appeared as a character called The Spirit of Jazz in one “Mighty Boosh” sketch, wearing dreadlocks and blackface. (“The League of Gentlemen” and “The Mighty Boosh” are still available to stream on the BBC’s platform.)Ava Vidal, a British comedian, said in a telephone interview that she had never been surprised about the use of blackface in these shows. “I think it’s so ingrained,” she said, “people don’t even realize what’s going on.”“You’ve got to let black people and people of color decide what racism is,” she added.In Britain, blackface has promoted “harmful stereotypes that are often not even based in truth,” she said. She pointed to the impersonation of Goddard, saying it also included a Jamaican accent.“It was simply generic nonsense,” Vidal said, adding that people often talk to her with “fake” West Indian accents. “Those types of stereotypes make life hell for people, and kids suffer terribly at school because of it.”Yashere said she had spent her school years being mocked with references to the “Black and White Minstrel Show.” “These are the things you put up with because of blackface, because we were dehumanized and made to look stupid,” she added.It’s not just on comedy series. On Wednesday, Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly — two high-profile presenters of British reality TV — posted an apology on social media for “impersonating” people of color in order to prank other celebrities on their show “Saturday Night Takeaway.”On Friday, it emerged that UKTV, another streaming service, had taken down an episode of the John Cleese comedy “Fawlty Towers” that contains racial slurs. (The segment had long been edited out of the episode when it was broadcast on television, but is still viewable on Netflix.) On social media, some people of color expressed concern that the pushback around removing an episode of a “classic” comedy such as “Fawlty Towers” risks distracting from the wider debate about race in Britain.“It makes me sick to think of all the petty culture war nonsense that’s going to absolutely flood the zone soon and risk turning an epic moment into just more ammunition for bad faith actors to say black people and lefties are trying to cancel everything,” Nesrine Malick, a columnist for The Guardian, wrote on Twitter.Representatives for Fielding, Lucas, and other stars whose shows were removed from streaming services all declined or did not respond to interview requests. But in the past, several have defended or sought to explain their use of blackface.“There was no bad intent there,” Lucas said in a 2017 magazine interview. “The only thing you could accuse us of was greed. We just wanted to show off about what a diverse bunch of people we could play. Now I think it’s lazy for white people to get a laugh just by playing black characters.”Reece Shearsmith, one of the writers and stars of “The League of Gentlemen,” has repeatedly said that one of his characters on the show, Papa Lazarou — a carnival owner whose face is painted black with white circling his eyes and mouth — was not intended to be black. In February, The Independent newspaper asked Shearsmith if he understood the complaints. “I guess so,” he said.“It was always this clown-like makeup, and we just came up with what we thought was the scariest idea to have in a sort of Child Catcher-like way,” he added.After hearing Shearsmith’s claims, Yashere said they were scarcely believable given that the makeup looked the same as old racist imagery. “That was not a clown. That was a golliwog,” she said, naming a minstrel caricature once shown on jar labels in Britain. “He didn’t come up with anything,” she added. “All he did was take all the horrible depictions of black people on products as far back as the 1800s and reconstituted it, and said it’s ironic.”British comedy has a long and uneven tradition of continuing to push boundaries of taste, even when people of color raise concerns. The last week even saw one former star defend blackface on BBC radio.On Thursday, Harry Enfield, a comedian who was popular on British TV in the 1990s, said he had appeared as black characters “several times in the past,” including once playing Nelson Mandela as a drug dealer. That was “so wrong, it was right,” he said of the sketch. “I wouldn’t do it now,” he added, “but I don’t think I regret it.” He then mentioned the stage name of one music hall star despite it containing a racial slur.Several British comedians mocked Enfield’s comments online. “Essentially a lot of the defense of blackface in comedy comes down to people being more outraged that they’re not allowed to play dress up than racism itself,” tweeted Lolly Adefope, who stars in Hulu’s “Shrill.”On the radio show, Enfield tried to make a final defense for blackface by asking what would happen if Rishi Sunak — Britain’s chancellor — ever became prime minister. “I’ve played Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron,” he said. “I would find it difficult that I would not be allowed to play him because of the color of his skin.”Vidal was a guest on the show and was asked for her response. She said she was sure Enfield could find ways to mock the prime minister “without blacking up.”Comedy, she had said earlier in the segment, is “about being funny, first and foremost. Punching down and picking on oppressed people is not funny.” More

  • 138 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    Margaret Holloway, the ‘Shakespeare Lady’ of New Haven, Dies at 68

    This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.On the streets of New Haven, Conn., Margaret Holloway was known as the “Shakespeare Lady,” a tall, striking woman in ragged clothing who recited dramatic monologues for spare change.Her stage, often, was outside Willoughby’s coffee shop, a hangout for Yale students and professionals. Her repertoire included “The Tempest,” “Macbeth” and the Greek alphabet, which she acted out letter by letter.Many regarded Ms. Holloway as an eccentric local fixture; in the view of some business owners, however, she was an aggressive panhandler and public nuisance. But for those who knew her personal history, her life had tragic dimensions not unlike the material she performed.Ms. Holloway was a 1980 graduate of the Yale School of Drama and a once-promising director, playwright and actor. In the early 1970s she was a drama major at Bennington College in Vermont“She was star of the theater department,” Laura Spector, a college friend, said in an interview. “She was so talented, so powerful, so magnetic.”Ms. Holloway’s career was cut short by mental illness and drug addiction soon after she left Yale. But she never stopped seeking understanding, human connection and, above all, artistic expression.“She loved people — she had relationships with everyone all over New Haven,” said Joan Channick, a Yale drama school professor who struck up a friendship with Ms. Holloway in the 1990s. “She called herself a great thespian. She had a lot of confidence in herself.”Ms. Holloway died at 69 on May 30 at Yale New Haven Hospital. Gloria Astarita, her court-appointed conservator, said the cause was the novel coronavirus.In “God Didn’t Give Me a Week’s Notice,” a short documentary about Ms. Holloway released in 2001, Ms. Holloway said she began experiencing signs of mental illness about 1983. She described her mental landscape this way: “I’m being raped. I’m being raped 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”Living in a dingy rooming house or on the streets, Ms. Holloway performed in the shadow of Yale’s campus, clinging, in a way, to a time in her life when she was healthy, successful and full of promise. Through it all her aspirations remained high-minded.“She would want to have a disquisition about directing some Shakespeare play,” Ms. Channick said. “Having those conversations with someone who was living on the streets, it was jarring. Here’s this person so connected to people, well-educated, with a love of art and theater, whose life was destroyed by mental illness.”Margaret Ann Holloway was born on Sept. 7, 1951, in Albany, Ga., to the Rev. Walter Holloway, a minister, and Bertha (Prince) Holloway, a homemaker. Ms. Holloway became estranged from her family as an adult.Through a nonprofit group that provides scholarships to gifted minority students, Ms. Holloway attended Northfield Mount Hermon, a prep school in Massachusetts. She attended Carleton College in Minnesota for a year before transferring to Bennington, where she came into her own as a drama student.Ms. Spector said she vividly remembered the one-woman autobiographical play that Ms. Holloway wrote, directed and starred in for her senior thesis, a work that dealt with her upbringing as a young black woman in the rural South. “She brought down the house,” Ms. Spector said.After decades out of touch, Ms. Spector reconnected with Ms. Holloway in 2005 after reading a newspaper article about her. She found the same lively, gregarious, emotionally intelligent person she had known. “I knocked on the door and from the top of the stairs she called out, ‘Laura, how the hell are you?’” Ms. Spector said. “She didn’t miss a beat.”Ms. Holloway, who stopped performing in the street about three years ago because of failing health, found a measure of stability and calm in recent times. Residing in a nursing home in New Haven, she had clean clothes, regular meals, a shower and monthly visits from Ms. Channick and other friends, who brought her money and the small luxuries she asked for, like lipstick.“We would talk about what was going on in the world,” Ms. Channick said. “But mostly, we would talk about theater.” More

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    Snapchat Expands Deals With N.F.L., Disney and Others

    LOS ANGELES — Disney, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, the National Basketball Association and the National Football League are expanding deals to supply Snapchat with customized short-form content, underscoring the platform’s renewed momentum.Snap, which makes the ephemeral-messaging app, unveiled the multiyear deals on Thursday, along with a spate of original series and a breaking news feature called “Happening Now” that counts The Washington Post, Bloomberg and ESPN as partners. Maggie Suniewick, president of NBCUniversal Digital Enterprises, said in an email that Snapchat was “a brand-safe environment where we can reach millions of new viewers.”Snapchat’s reassertion of itself in entertainment and news comes as one would-be competitor, Quibi, an app offering short-form shows designed for viewing on phones, attempts to regroup after a disastrous arrival in April. Quibi fell out of the list of the 50 most downloaded free iPhone apps in the United States a week after it went live. On Thursday it ranked No. 285.Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul behind Quibi, blamed the coronavirus pandemic for its rough start, but people have been spending more time on platforms like Snapchat and TikTok, an app for making and sharing short videos, since the shutdowns began. Snap said in April that daily active users had grown more rapidly than expected, reaching 229 million people. To compare, Twitter had about 166 million. Snap said time spent watching its original shows had doubled in recent months compared to a year earlier.Snap sells six-second, non-skippable ads for its originals. The company, based in Santa Monica, Calif., introduced scripted programs and docuseries in 2018 and unscripted shows in 2016. “The Rundown,” an E! News series, just celebrated its 500th episode. Episodes for scripted shows are typically five minutes long, with eight to 12 episodes in a season.Entertainment and news programming is still a small part of Snap’s business, however. “It’s not enough to move the needle — yet,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.Snap’s programming emphasizes inclusion and new storytelling tools, notably augmented reality lenses. A continuing unscripted series, “Nikita Unfiltered,” stars the transgender beauty influencer Nikita Dragun. Shows announced on Thursday include “Coach Kev,” billed as a daily dose of “positivity and wisdom” from the comedian Kevin Hart, and “Life by the Horns,” a docuseries about Ezekiel Mitchell, an African-American bull rider.Scripted shows coming to Snapchat include “Frogtown,” about an all-female skate crew (directed by Catherine Hardwicke of “Twilight” fame), and “Action Royale,” about a teenager who starts an underground e-sports gambling ring.“We’re getting better and better at programming,” Sean Mills, Snap’s content chief, said by phone. “It’s not about episode length. It’s not about aspect ratio. It’s not about how many stars you have. It’s how you tell the story and how well you know your audience.”Mr. Mills declined to give many specifics about the company deals that Snap unveiled, including how long “multiyear” meant. (“At least two,” he said.) All the deals call for expanded programming commitments. For instance, Disney has long had an agreement with Snap that covers exclusive content from ESPN; the new deal also covers Disney-owned properties like ABC and Freeform, a cable channel aimed at young adults, as well as unspecified Disney franchises.Under the expanded N.F.L. deal, the league will triple the number of what it calls “near real-time” highlights shows on Snapchat. The league will also continue to supply Snapchat with other video programming year-round and develop augmented-reality lenses and filters tied to specific teams and events, including the Super Bowl.Blake Stuchin, the league’s vice president for digital media business development, said that 70 percent of Snapchat users that view N.F.L. content are under the age of 25. Courting younger fans is crucial for the league’s future. Snapchat reaches more 13 to 34 year olds in the United States than Facebook or Instagram, according to public data from the companies.“We want to meet our fans where they already are, whether that means making sure they know there is a game coming up or telling them more about a favorite player or giving them creative tools to express themselves,” Mr. Stuchin said. More