Eliana Willis

Broadway producers have agreed to pay hundreds of actors, musicians, stagehands and others for the first few weeks of the industry shutdown, and to cover their health insurance for at least a month.The “emergency relief agreement,” announced Friday evening, was negotiated by the Broadway League, a trade organization, with 14 labor unions representing a range of workers, from ushers to makeup artists to publicists.The Broadway shutdown, prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, has cost thousands of people their jobs, and is causing trickle-down damage to many Times Square businesses that depend on theater patrons. The industry, which was idled on March 12, had initially said it hoped to resume performances on April 13, but now expects a reopening is more likely to be in May or June.Under the agreement, all unionized employees will be paid for the week that was cut short by the shutdown, and the following two weeks. For the first, partial, week, they will receive their normal salary, but there is a cap of 150 percent of the minimum salary for their positions as spelled out in labor contracts. For the following two weeks, everyone will be paid at the contractual minimum, meaning that those who normally earn more than the minimum will see a pay cut for those weeks.The workers will get full benefits (health, pension, and 401(k)) for those two and a half weeks, and after that will get only health benefits through April 12; the two sides agreed to talk before then about whether those benefits can be further extended if the shutdown continues.“It’s the best deal we could get under trying circumstances,” said the actress Kate Shindle, the president of Actors’ Equity Association, which represents 1,142 actors and stage managers working on affected productions. “We’ve been trying to find the sweet spot between getting the greatest number of benefits for our members, while still trying to make sure we don’t bankrupt the individual shows in the process. Our members would like to have jobs to go back to.” More

James V. Hatch, a historian of black theater who, with his wife, the artist and filmmaker Camille Billops, created a vast archive of interviews with black actors, singers, writers and artists, died on Feb. 14 in Manhattan. He was 91.His son, Dion Hatch, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Professor Hatch, who taught English and theater at City College for three decades, was the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, including “The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938” (1990), which he edited with Leo Hamalian, and “Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson” (1993), about the black poet and playwright.His area of scholarship sometimes raised eyebrows because Professor Hatch was white.“I was born in Iowa, and the only thing I knew about black people was what I read in books — Mark Twain,” he said in an interview for an exhibition called “Still Raising Hell: The Art, Activism, and Archives of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch,” mounted at Emory University in Atlanta in 2016.“I wanted to find out, Who were all the other people that didn’t live in the Baptist church in Oelwein, Iowa?,” he added.“I got good cooperation from almost all black people,” he said. “Some of them were jealous — ‘White man, what are you doing writing about our history?’ ‘I’m trying to learn it. Help me!’”Certainly the person who helped him the most was Ms. Billops, who was black and whom he met in 1959; they began a romantic relationship and married in 1987. For years their loft, purchased in 1973, in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan was a gathering spot for artists, academics and others.“We invited everybody here: friends, students and white folks, gallerists and curators,” Ms. Billops told Topic Magazine in an interview for an article published just before her death last June.The two began amassing their archive, not only recording interviews with prominent and not-so-prominent black artists and performers, but also accumulating play scripts, handbills, photographs and other materials. They published a number of the oral histories in the journal Artist and Influence; 20 volumes of the journal appeared from 1981 to 2001.Much of the archive is now at Emory; another cache is at City College. Pellom McDaniels III, curator of African-American collections at Emory, said by email that the couple’s work “has had a monumental impact on the practice and execution of theater specialists, art historians, and scholars for decades.”James Vernon Hatch was born on Oct. 25, 1928, in Oelwein, a small city northeast of Des Moines. His father, MacKenzie, was a mason, welder and boilermaker, and his mother, Eunice, was a homemaker.Professor Hatch earned a bachelor’s degree in 1949 at the University of Northern Iowa and did postgraduate work at the University of Iowa, where he encountered black intellectuals like the playwright Ted Shine. He received a master’s degree there in 1955 and a Ph.D. in 1958.In 1958 he took a job teaching theater arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he struck up a relationship with a black pianist and composer, C. Bernard Jackson. The two collaborated on a musical, “Fly Blackbird,” which addressed race relations and civil rights; it was staged in Los Angeles in 1961 and had a run in New York the next year.“In the course of that, I learned a lot about black culture and attitudes and why things happened,” he said in the interview for the Emory exhibition.He also met Ms. Billops, who was the stepsister of a member of the Los Angeles cast. Professor Hatch had married Evelyn Marcussen in 1949 and had two children; the marriage ended in divorce in 1965.Professor Hatch, who joined the City College faculty in 1965 after a stint as a Fulbright lecturer in Egypt, became an expert in the history of black theater, not only rediscovering overlooked works but also unearthing the black origins of elements that had been appropriated by white playwrights and entertainers, including those who found fame by performing in blackface.“The names of the Big Four white minstrel men — Christy, Rice, Emmett, Bryant — were widely known and written about,” he wrote in the introduction to “Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940” (1996), which he edited with Mr. Hamalian, “but who knows the slave musicians, street performers, church singers and riverboat roustabouts whose songs and jokes and dances were stolen by the white minstrel men?”He called out stereotypes in plays and movies like “Gone With the Wind,” whose Mammy character is “still pushing the image of Blacks-as-retarded at our neighborhood theaters and in our living rooms,” he wrote in the introduction to “The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938” (1990), another project with Mr. Hamalian.Professor Hatch wrote a number of plays in addition to his books, and he and Ms. Billops collaborated on several films. Most notable among those was “Finding Christa” (1991), a documentary about Ms. Billops’s decision to give up a daughter she had had before she met Professor Hatch, and her reunion with that daughter 20 years later. The film won the grand jury prize for documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival.Professor Hatch took emeritus status at City College in 1996. In addition to his son, who is from his first marriage, he is survived by a daughter, Susan Blankenship, also from that marriage, and a grandson.Professor McDaniels took a version of the “Still Raising Hell” exhibition to a middle school in Atlanta (though the name was eventually changed to “Speak What Must Be Spoken” because a principal didn’t want the word “hell” in large letters on the wall). A sixth grader asked him what it was about.“I explained to him who Jim and Camille were,” Professor McDaniels recalled, “and how throughout their lives they challenged the gatekeepers of the New York art scene and encouraged their students and colleagues to speak truth to power.”The boy studied the exhibition, he said, “then looked at me and stated, ‘I’m going to raise hell all my life.’” More

If you’re stuck at home and hankering for the fine arts, there’s plenty online. Since the coronavirus pandemic began temporarily shutting down performing arts venues and museums around the world, cultural organizations have been finding ways to share their work digitally. Performances are being live-streamed, archival material is being resurfaced and social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Facebook are serving as makeshift stages, concert halls and gallery spaces.Here’s a list of some of what’s streaming and otherwise available on the Internet. The offerings are increasing by the day, so be sure to check in with your favorite arts institutions to see what they’re providing as things develop. And check back here for updates.Theater“The Rosie O’Donnell Show” will return for one night only on Sunday at 7 p.m., in support of the Actors Fund. Patti LuPone, Kristin Chenoweth, Harvey Fierstein, Stephanie J. Block and other Broadway stars will appear or perform. The broadcast will be on Broadway.com and the site’s YouTube channel.The Sirius XM host Seth Rudetsky and his husband, James Wesley, are also producing a daily online mini-show called “Stars in the House,” with actors performing from home, to raise money for the Actors Fund.Tickets to watch a video of Ren Dara Santiago’s “The Siblings Play” at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater are now available.At Berkeley Repertory Theater, ticket holders for Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” and “Culture Clash (Still) in America” will be able to access a production broadcast of the show through BroadwayHD.American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco is offering the opportunity for ticket holders to watch Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Gloria” and Lydia R. Diamond’s “Toni Stone” from home on BroadwayHD.Irish Repertory Theater is releasing videos of its actors performing songs, poems and monologues on its social media channels.Melissa Errico’s concert performance of her “Sondheim Sublime” album will stream on Sunday at 4 p.m. on the Guild Hall’s YouTube channel.Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater is offering a free series of live-streamed and archival performances on its YouTube channel. More

The actor formerly known as Harry Potter continues his post-wizard evolution. (Being named as the first famous person diagnosed — not true — wasn’t part of the plan.) More