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      John Boyega Won’t Let Go of ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Coming to America’

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      The star of “Breaking” talks about Fela Kuti, Hans Zimmer, Cha Cha Chicken and other sources of inspiration.John Boyega was born in London to parents who grew up in Nigeria and raised their children in a house that felt like a piece of their home country inside the United Kingdom.“When we got into our house, that was Lagos to us, that was Nigeria,” Boyega said in a recent interview. “The way we were disciplined and the lessons that we learned were all in direct link to Nigeria.”That meant he was always told he was going to work hard, education was a priority, bible study was on Tuesday and church was on Sunday. At services, he played the drums, his sister played keyboard, and his father was the minister.“Other ministers would say the story of Noah’s Ark in a way that was kind of simple,” he said. “But my dad would give the animals characters and break the story down so you could relate and he would act out things.”Boyega inherited his father’s flair for storytelling and was drawn to acting. Hollywood, however, seemed remote. “Growing up in inner-city London, American movies felt worlds away,” he said. “We didn’t even have the same accents.”American films don’t get any bigger than the Star Wars franchise, which carried Boyega to international stardom when he was cast as Finn — the stormtrooper turned resistance fighter — in the most recent trilogy, culminating with 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker.” This month, Boyega stars in the movie “Breaking,” as a father and former Marine who robs a bank to avoid homelessness.Here, he talks about the films that inspired his career, the music that brings him closer to home and the chicken he takes extra-spicy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Burna Boy He’s one of the most prolific leaders in bringing Afro beats to the forefront. The lyrics, melody, soul and spirit of his music includes what we know as African and what we know as Nigerian. His song, “Time Flies,” is almost like an emotional letter for me. I just love his music.2. “MJ the Musical” I think Michael Jackson was one of the main factors that motivated me to act. It was the music videos for me, the imagination, the dance moves, the energy of the performance. Going to see “MJ the Musical” on Broadway recently was mind-blowing. The lead actor, Myles Frost, was an absolute standout.3. “Coming to America” This movie is a lifelong classic in my family. The first time we watched it, my dad walked in during the scene where the woman tells him: “The royal penis is clean, your highness.” That was real awkward. I watch it at least once a year just to get a little giggle on. There’s always something new I find.4. Young Vic Theater Especially for me growing up in the theater scene, the Young Vic in London has always been a place where you can see new writers and directors come in and do some really great plays. The last time I went there, I was actually working at the Old Vic, just a few yards away.5. New Afrika Shrine: I first visited Fela Kuti’s venue in 2017 to see a concert by his son, Seun Kuti. It was my first time being with my boys in Nigeria. We had a great night. Now I go back every time I go to Nigeria. For me, it’s one of the most prolific cultural hubs, especially if you are into Afro beats and if you want to hear music from the same lineage from the king of Afro beats, which is the great Fela Kuti.6. “Half of a Yellow Sun” I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, which takes place against the backdrop of the Nigerian civil war, after I was offered to play a role in the movie. Knowing that I was going to star in the feature film while I was reading it brought me closer to a history that I didn’t know about my own culture.7. Hans Zimmer I’ll listen to any of Hans Zimmer’s movie scores. I don’t always listen to music that tells me what to think. I find that with movie scores, especially if you’re an avid listener, the songs can change up on you and mean something completely different. Also, I like to work out to a song of his called “I Don’t Think Now Is the Best Time” off the “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” score. It’s more than 10 minutes long and it gets me through a lot of my workouts.8. “Kidulthood” I never considered that I would exist in American movies. But when I watched “Kidulthood,” which had Black Brits in it, I thought: wow, you can be an actor. The accents that are in it, I’m sure that they were local, from places I knew in London. It kind of opened my eyes that there was British film and there were opportunities in British film for Black actors.9. Cha Cha Chicken This is one of my favorite places to go in Santa Monica. It’s a really grounded, Jamaican/Caribbean-inspired restaurant. I literally just took my mom and nephews down there. The food is delicious. I get the half Cha Cha chicken — extra spicy — plantains, rice and beans, and the salad on the side.10. “Star Wars: Battlefront” This is the video game that I play the most. I started playing it before Finn was an idea, long before I was cast in the films. Now, sometimes I play as Finn against people I don’t know. So, being a fan of it and now being on it, that’s something that I’ve always kept private. More

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      ‘Look Both Ways’ Review: To Be and Not to Be

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      This Netflix drama stages a delusion of young womanhood by tracking its heroine down forking paths: one in which she gets pregnant, and one in which she pursues a career.Natalie (Lili Reinhart) is an ambitious college senior with her future mapped out. But after a one-night stand leads to vomiting, she decides to take a pregnancy test.“Look Both Ways,” a deluded Netflix drama, stages this moment as a crossroads. It envisions divergent futures for our heroine: one in which her test is negative and another in which it is positive.Mimicking the thought experiment conducted in “Sliding Doors,” the movie intercuts scenes from these two fates. The first finds Natalie on a road trip to Los Angeles with her bestie, Cara (Aisha Dee), where she pursues a job in animation. At the same time, a parallel Natalie grimly resigns herself to motherhood and moves home to raise the baby alongside her chagrined parents (Andrea Savage and Luke Wilson).In a handy cinematic shorthand, the director, Wanuri Kahiu, distinguishes between the two realms through color, applying reds to the set design of Natalie’s exhilarating Hollywood adventures and blues to that of her lonelier mommy time in Texas.That an accessible third course of action — an abortion — goes essentially ignored by both Natalie and the screenwriter, April Prosser, is a mind-boggling factor in this otherwise predictable movie. It’s jarring to see Natalie’s unplanned pregnancy introduced as a cool dose of reality rather than decision to be made, and the movie’s post-Roe release only adds insult to injury.Never mind that “Look Both Ways” seems to posit that, for women, child rearing and a career are in relative opposition — when Natalie comes to a fork in the road, the movie hardly lets her look both ways. It bulldozes her down one path, and then the other.Look Both WaysNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Wolfgang Petersen, Director of ‘Das Boot,’ Is Dead at 81

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      He made it big in Hollywood with box-office hits, but he’s best remembered for a harrowing, Oscar-nominated German film set inside a U-boat in World War II.Wolfgang Petersen, one of a handful of foreign directors to make it big in Hollywood, whose harrowing 1981 war film, “Das Boot,” was nominated for six Academy Awards and became one of Germany’s top-grossing films, died on Friday at his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. He was 81.The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to Michelle Bega, a publicist at the agency Rogers & Cowan PMK in Los Angeles. His death was announced on Tuesday.Mr. Petersen was the most commercially successful member of a generation of filmmakers active in West Germany from the 1960s to the ’80s, whose leading lights included Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. But he was equally known in Hollywood.Over five decades Mr. Petersen toggled between his native Germany and the United States, directing 29 films, many of them box-office hits like the 1990s political thrillers “In the Line of Fire,” with Clint Eastwood, and “Air Force One,” with Harrison Ford.With a knack for genre filmmaking — action films were another strong suit — he also made forays into fantasy “(The NeverEnding Story”), sword-and-sandal epic (“Troy’) and science fiction — all while attracting marquee names to star in them, like Dustin Hoffman in “Outbreak,” Brad Pitt in “Troy” and George Clooney in “The Perfect Storm.”Jürgen Prochnow, right, played a U-boat captain in “Das Boot.” It’s considered among the finest antiwar films ever made.Columbia PicturesFor all his success in Hollywood, however, “Das Boot,” a tense drama about sailors on a German U-boat during World War II, is the work for which Mr. Petersen will mostly likely be remembered. In the English-speaking world, that frequently mispronounced title alone (“Boot” is spoken exactly like the English “boat”) has attained a kind of pop-cultural status, thanks to references on “The Simpsons” and other TV shows.“‘Das Boot’ isn’t just a German film about World War II; it’s a German naval adventure epic that has already been a hit in West Germany,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The New York Times when the film opened in the U.S. in early 1982.The movie won high praise for its historical accuracy and the clammy, claustrophobic effect achieved by the cinematographer Jost Vacano, who shot most of the interior scenes with a small hand-held Arriflex camera. Although the critical response in Germany was divided, with some accusing the film of glorifying war, it encountered a more uniformly positive response abroad. Nowadays it is considered among the finest antiwar films ever made.“Das Boot” (also titled “The Boat” in English-speaking countries) grossed over $80 million worldwide, and though it did not win an Academy Award, its six Oscar nominations — including two for Mr. Petersen, for direction and screenplay, and one for Mr. Vacano, for cinematography — remain a record for a German film production. (It was not nominated in the best-foreign-language-film category; West Germany’s submission that year was Mr. Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” which did not make the Academy’s short list for the Oscar).Mr. Petersen in 1997 with the director’s cut of “Das Boot.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Petersen prepared various versions of “Das Boot” over the next decade and a half. In 1985, German TV broadcast a 300-minute version (twice as long as the theatrical release), which Mr. Petersen claimed was closer to his original vision but commercially unfeasible at the time.After “Das Boot,” he teamed up with the producer Bernd Eichinger, whose fledgling studio, Constantin Film, co-produced the English-language “The NeverEnding Story,” an adaptation of a 1979 fantasy novel by the best-selling German children’s author Michael Ende.Released in 1984, “The NeverEnding Story,” about a bullied boy who enters into an enchanted book, was another-box office hit in Germany and abroad — although it, too, received its share of negative reviews, including from The Times’s film critic Vincent Canby, who called it “graceless” and “humorless.”Despite a tepid U.S. box-office return, which Mr. Petersen chalked up to the film’s being “too European,” “The NeverEnding Story” became a cult favorite over the decades, for its trippy production design, scrappy special effects and synth-heavy theme song, written by Giorgio Moroder and sung by the British pop singer Limahl.The film was mostly shot at Bavaria Film Studio, near Munich, where present-day visitors can ride Falcor, the “luck dragon” that Mr. Canby compared to “an impractical bath mat.” (The studio’s theme park, Bavaria FilmStadt, also offers tours of the submarine from “Das Boot.”)Mr. Petersen with Clint Eastwood on the set of “In the Line of Fire,” in which Mr. Eastwood played a Secret Service agent trying to prevent a presidential assassination. Bruce McBroom/Sygma via Getty ImagesWolfgang Petersen was born on March 14, 1941, in Emden, in Northern Germany. His father was a naval lieutenant in World War II who later worked for a shipping company in Hamburg.Growing up in the immediate postwar period, the young Mr. Petersen idolized America and American movies. On Sundays he would go to matinee screenings for children at the local cinema to see westerns directed by Howard Hawks and John Ford and starring Gary Cooper and John Wayne.“I got to know the medium of film when I was 8 years old, and I was immediately enthusiastic about it,” he told Elfriede Jelinek, a future Nobel Prize winner for literature, in a 1985 interview for German Playboy. “When I was 11, I decided I wanted to become a film director.”In 1950, his family moved to Hamburg, and when Wolfgang was 14, his father gave him an eight-millimeter film camera for Christmas.After graduating from high school, Mr. Petersen was exempted from compulsive military service because of a spine curvature. In the early 1960s, he worked as an assistant director at the Junges Theater (now the Ernst Deutsch Theater) in Hamburg. He then studied theater in Hamburg and Berlin for several semesters before enrolling at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin, West Germany’s first film school, which opened in 1966.In 1970, his graduation film, “I Will Kill You, Wolf,” was picked up by West German television, and this led to a directing offer for the long-running German crime series “Tatort.”Mr. Petersen, right, on the set of “Poseidon,” a 2006 remake of the 1972 movie “The Poseidon Adventure.” Claudette Barius/Warner Brothers PicturesOver the next decade, Mr. Petersen worked at a feverish pace, directing for both television and the big screen, starting in 1974 with the psychological thriller “One or the Other of Us.”From the beginning, audience approval was of central importance to him. “I crouched in the cinema to see how the audience would react” to one particular film, he recalled in the Playboy interview. “And what happened? People walked out of the film. I was devastated. Because I’m obsessed with making films for everyone.”He often succeeded, with popular early-career thrillers that tackled thorny political and social issues. “Smog” (1972) dealt with the effects of pollution in the Ruhr, the industrial region in Northwest Germany. “The Consequence” (1977) was controversial for its frank depiction of homosexuality, a taboo topic at the time.He was married to the German actress Ursula Sieg from 1970 to 1978. He later married Maria-Antoinette Borgel, whom he had met on the set of “Smog,” where she worked as a script supervisor.He is survived by his wife as well as a son from his first marriage, Daniel, a filmmaker, and two grandchildren.Mr. Petersen had nearly 20 films to his credit by the time he made “Das Boot.” A triumph that few, if any, could have predicted, the movie established his international reputation and opened the door to Hollywood.Mr. Petersen with the cast of “Troy” at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2004. With him, from left, were Eric Bana; Saffron Burrows; Sean Bean; Mr. Petersen’s wife, Maria-Antoinette Petersen; Brad Pitt; Jennifer Aniston, who was Mr. Pitt’s wife at the time (and not in the film); Orlando Bloom; and Diane Kruger.Pascal Guyot/AFP via Getty ImagesIn his autobiography, “I Love Big Stories” (1997, written with Ulrich Greiwe), Mr. Petersen recalled the first American test screening of “Das Boot” in Los Angeles. At the beginning, the audience of 1,500 applauded when the screen flashed with the statistic that 30,000 Germans onboard U-boats were killed during the war. “I thought: This is going to be a catastrophe!” Mr. Petersen wrote. Two and a half hours later, the film received a thunderous ovation.After “The NeverEnding Story,” Mr. Petersen made “Enemy Mine” (1985), a science fiction film starring Dennis Quaid about a fighter pilot forced to cooperate with a reptilian enemy after they both land on a hostile alien planet. Ms. Maslin called it “a costly, awful-looking science-fiction epic with one of the weirdest story lines ever to hit the screen.”A year later, Mr. Petersen moved to Los Angeles, where he would remain for two decades, working with big stars in a string of mainstream successes that included the political dramas “In the Line of Fire” (1993), about a Secret Service agent’s efforts to prevent a presidential assassination, and “Air Force One” (1997), about the hijacking of the presidential jetliner. There were also the disaster films “Outbreak” (1995), about a deadly virus, “The Perfect Storm” (2000), about commercial New England fishermen caught in a terrifying tempest, and “Poseidon” (2006), a remake of “The Poseidon Adventure,” the 1972 blockbuster about a capsized luxury liner.Mr. Petersen accepted applause during a 25th anniversary celebration of “Das Boot” in Berlin in early 2007. Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesEven at their most commercial, Mr. Petersen’s films often had undercurrents of political commentary. Discussing the “Iliad”-inspired “Troy” (2004), Mr. Petersen drew parallels between Homer’s epic and the reign of George W. Bush. “Power-hungry Agamemnons who want to create a new world order — that is absolutely current,” he told the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.His film career seemed to come full circle in 2016 with “Vier gegen die Bank,” a remake of his 1976 comedy-heist film based on an American novel, “The Nixon Recession Caper,” by Ralph Maloney. It was Mr. Petersen’s first German-language film since “Das Boot” a quarter-century earlier.Throughout his career, he seemed unconcerned by critics who called his artistic merit into question.“If someone asked me whether I felt like an artist, I would have a strange feeling, because I don’t really know,” he once said. “What is an artist? Maybe it’s someone who produces something much more intimate than film, more like a composer or writer or painter.”“My passion,” he added, “is telling a story.” More

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      ‘Le Temps Perdu’ Review: Proust Club

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      This cozy documentary sits in with a group of older readers in Buenos Aires who gather at a cafe to savor Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”At the very least, María Álvarez’s “Le Temps Perdu” might give hope to anyone who has always meant to finish — or start — Proust. Shot almost entirely in a Buenos Aires cafe, the cozy black-and-white documentary sits in with a group of seniors who gather to savor “In Search of Lost Time” in Spanish translation. They’ve gone through the novel a few times, meeting for nearly two decades.Seated around a table, the men and women read aloud from what look like laminated printouts from the beloved multivolume book. They muse over certain passages and share echoes with their daily lives: the enduring memory of a late husband’s smile, or a hospital visit where madeleines were on the menu. One man keeps explaining that his daughter is named Albertine, like the key character in the book who is the narrator’s romantic obsession.The film, perhaps like a certain writer, seeks out the nexus between the quotidian and the transcendent in the group’s activity, book ended by poetic montages and liberal use of Debussy’s “Syrinx.” There’s some poignancy and amusement in how the experiences of time and love transpire in the novel and in the readers’ lives. (The movie is probably best seen in a cinema, another communal space.)You couldn’t ask for richer reading material, even if the film doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its premise. Believe it or not, there’s already stiff competition: a similar documentary from 2013, “The Joycean Society,” tackles “Finnegans Wake” in just under an hour.Le Temps PerduNot rated. In Spanish with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      An Oscars Apology for Sacheen Littlefeather, 50 Years After Brando Protest

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      The Apache activist and actress was booed onstage in 1973 after she refused the best actor award on Marlon Brando’s behalf and criticized Hollywood for its depictions of Native Americans.The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has apologized to Sacheen Littlefeather, an Apache and Yaqui actress and activist who was booed onstage at the Oscars in 1973 after she refused the best actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando.The Academy said in a statement on Monday that it had apologized to Ms. Littlefeather, 75, in June, nearly 50 years after Ms. Littlefeather pierced through the Academy Awards facade of shiny statues and bright lights in 1973 and injected the ceremony with criticism about Native American stereotypes in media.Her appearance at the ceremony, the first time a Native American woman stood onstage at the Academy Awards, is perhaps one of the best-known disruptive moments in the history of the award ceremony.When Ms. Littlefeather, then 26, spoke, some of the audience cheered her and others jeered. One actor, John Wayne, was so unsettled that a show producer, Marty Pasetta, said security guards had to restrain him so that he would not storm the stage.Ms. Littlefeather said she was “stunned” by the apology in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I never thought I’d live to see the day I would be hearing this, experiencing this,” she said.“When I was at the podium in 1973, I stood there alone,” she added.Ms. Littlefeather also brought attention to the federal government’s standoff at Wounded Knee with Native Americans in the 1973 speech, which she came up with shortly before being called onstage on behalf of Mr. Brando, who was to receive the best actor award for his performance as Vito Corleone in “The Godfather.”Ms. Littlefeather said in an interview with the Academy, which was published on Monday, that she had been planning to watch the 45th Academy Awards on television like everyone else when she received a call the night before the ceremony from Mr. Brando. The two had become friends through her neighbor, the director Francis Ford Coppola. Mr. Brando asked her to refuse the award on his behalf if he won.Ms. Littlefeather arrived at the ceremony with only about 15 minutes left of the official program, wearing a glimmering buckskin dress, moccasins and hair ties. Ms. Littlefeather said she had little information about how the night would work, but Mr. Brando had given her a speech to read if he won.That plan evaporated when a producer for the Oscars saw the pages in her hand and told he she would be arrested if her comments lasted more than 60 seconds, she said.She introduced herself, then explained that Mr. Brando would not be accepting the award because of his concerns about the image of Native American people in film and television and by the government. She paused when a mix of boos and cheers erupted from the audience.“And I focused in on the mouths and the jaws that were dropping open in the audience, and there were quite a few,” she told the Academy. “But it was like looking into a sea of Clorox, you know, there were very few people of color in the audience.”The crowd quieted, and Ms. Littlefeather mentioned the Wounded Knee standoff and then left the stage without touching the golden Oscars statue. She said some audience members did the so-called “tomahawk chop” at her and that when she went to Mr. Brando’s house later, people shot at the doorway where she was standing.“When I went back to Marlon’s house, there was an incident with people shooting at me,” she said. “And there were two bullet holes that came through the doorway of where I was standing, and I was on the other side of it.”Ms. Littlefeather, who was not available for an interview on Tuesday, told the Academy that speaking about these events in 2022 “felt like a big cleanse.”“It feels like the sacred circle is completing itself before I go in this life,” said Ms. Littlefeather, who told The Guardian in June 2021 that she had terminal breast cancer.The former president of the Academy, David Rubin, wrote in the apology to Ms. Littlefeather that the abuse she faced because of the speech was “unwarranted and unjustified.”“For too long the courage you showed has been unacknowledged,” Mr. Rubin wrote. “For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration.”Mr. Rubin’s letter will be read next month at a program at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, “An Evening with Sacheen Littlefeather.”The Academy described it as an event of “conversation, reflection, healing and celebration.” Ms. Littlefeather said in a statement that she was looking forward to the Native American performers and speakers at the event, including Calina Lawrence, a Suquamish singer, and Bird Runningwater, the co-chair of the Academy’s Indigenous Alliance, who is Cheyenne and Mescalero Apache.“It is profoundly heartening to see how much has changed since I did not accept the Academy Award 50 years ago,” she said. “I am so proud of each and every person who will appear onstage.” More

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      Netflix’s “13” Brings Back Memories For Its Stage Cast

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      For the creators and cast of the 2008 musical “13,” a new Netflix adaptation brings back memories — theatrical and hormonal.It’s one thing to wrangle a few Von Trapp kids. Some Matildas. A Gavroche or two.But a baker’s dozen of newly minted teenagers, raging hormones and all, packed into a handful of dressing rooms backstage in a Broadway theater? And aside from the crew, the musical director — and, yes, three child wranglers — no adults in sight?This was the great experiment of “13,” the 2008 coming-of-age musical both about and performed by a group of kids going through one of the more chaotically vulnerable stages of life. The show, about a 13-year-old named Evan juggling his parents’ divorce, his upcoming bar mitzvah and a seemingly life-shattering move from New York to the middle of Indiana, was not just a test in managing this particular company — an all-teen cast and band — but in finding exactly what the audience appetite was for a work that sat squarely in the limbo between Disney and “Spring Awakening.”Adult reviewers were lukewarm — though, to be fair, the 14-year-old companion of the New York Times critic Ben Brantley found it to be “pretty good” — and “13” closed three months after opening night, one of numerous Broadway casualties during the recession.But in the years since, the show, with music by Jason Robert Brown and a book by Dan Elish and Robert Horn, has found renewed life in schools — and now on Netflix, where a new generation of tweens have picked up the mantle with a film adaptation that began streaming on Friday.Most of the original cast members are now in their late 20s. They’ve graduated from having adolescent showmances to planning their weddings. Some are still acting or directing or choreographing, on TV and Broadway and elsewhere; others have left the business entirely.And one actress — Ariana Grande, making her Broadway debut as the gossip-prone, flip-phone-wielding Charlotte — has become a bona fide pop supernova.Ahead of the film’s release, members of that cast, band, creative team and production crew looked back on their memories of the show — in conversation with a reporter who, years earlier, at age 11, happened to be sitting in the audience of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater to see “13,” her first Broadway musical. Here are edited excerpts from our discussions.A book editor at Scholastic reached out to Jason Robert Brown to see if he would be interested in brainstorming a new project: an original musical that would also tie into a new book series. The collaboration eventually fell through, but not before Brown thought up a pitch: a story about young teenagers that would become the framework for “13.”JASON ROBERT BROWN (music and lyrics) Dan Elish had seen me do an interview where I said I really wanted to do a show with a bunch of dancing teenagers. We were doing “Parade” in the same season as “Footloose,” and people didn’t respond to “Parade” very well when it came out — it’s very heavy. I got the sense that we were spending the whole season competing against dancing teenagers.DAN ELISH (book) He was kidding, you know? But I had just had this young adult novel come out, about two eighth grade boys in New York. Maybe I was the guy to write the Great Dancing Teenager Musical.BROWN Dan sent me a copy of his novel. And I liked it, but I didn’t think it was a musical. But I said, “If you’re into working on something with me, I do have this idea that I came up with once about a show with nothing but 13-year-olds in it.” And Dan said, “Sure, that sounds fun.”The musical premiered in 2007 at Center Theater Group in Los Angeles. As the show’s producers set their sights on Broadway, the writer Robert Horn and the director Jeremy Sams joined the creative team and started searching for their New York cast.JEREMY SAMS (director) We saw hundreds of kids in New York and L.A. from all over the place. It was absolutely obvious, the more kids we saw, who we should have in our show. When Ariana Grande turns up, and Liz Gillies and Allie Trimm and Graham [Phillips], it’s quite clear. I’ll never forget when Ariana sang to me and Jason. BROWN At the end of the opening number, there are four scat solos. And I remember a day [in rehearsal] with everyone going around the piano and just improvising, and some of them clearly were like, I have no idea how to improvise a solo. And some of them were Ariana Grande.Ariana Grande, left, with Williams, Phillips and Chris Raymond during the opening night curtain call. Walter McBride/Corbis, via Getty ImagesARIANA GRANDE (Charlotte) Working with Jason is the ultimate master class — not only in musicianship, but his storytelling and creativity, his problem solving. I remember him leaving the room whenever they felt something was missing and coming back 30 minutes later with a brand-new brilliant song.AARON SIMON GROSS (Archie) I was simultaneously working and star-struck at virtually all times.ELIZABETH GILLIES (Lucy) Ariana and I joke about it a lot, because she was so social and making friends with everyone. And I was so hard core back then when I first started auditioning that I just kind of tucked away into a corner. I was so determined to book this role that I didn’t want to talk to anyone until we started the reading process.BRYNN WILLIAMS (Cassie) All of our pressure was self-inflicted. We wanted to do well because we wanted to prove that we were capable. But there wasn’t any outside pressure at all; they did a fantastic job of treating us like professionals while also being aware that we were teenagers.BROWN A lot of them had done more Broadway shows than I had. And my feeling was, look, I’ve written some hard music, but I know it’s possible. I wasn’t going to simplify it for them unless they couldn’t do it. But let’s find out first. And they all rose to it.ROBERT HORN (book) It was so interesting to see that divide between the incredible work ethic that they had at such a young age, and the talent and commitment they bring to it — and the next moment they’re running off and getting into trouble. And you realize that they’re kids.Case in point: an out-of-town tryout in the summer of 2008 at Goodspeed Musicals in Chester, Conn.BROWN In the middle of July or August or whatever it was, we just let loose 20 kids on this little town in Connecticut, all living in the same house. They were 13 years old; they were a bunch of punks.GILLIES The closest thing we had to entertainment was the pizzeria, a graveyard and the woods.EAMON FOLEY (Richie) It was summer camp with the most talented kids in the world. Like wildly creative children who, one half of the day, had this really sick show being built on their talents, and then the other half of the day were running through the woods and smoking weed out of Gatorade bottles.HORN Someone got caught with a joint. I’m not going to mention names.Through the Goodspeed run, and even as performances began on Broadway in September 2008, the show was constantly changing.HORN We were writing it with those kids. They were giving us the authenticity. I can bring my humor and storytelling, but I was never a 14-year-old girl.DELANEY MORO (Kendra) They were so good at giving us agency to share our ideas, and they would pick up on things that we said or did and try to write it in.GRAHAM PHILLIPS (Evan) New jokes were being put in and taken out. Depending on how the audience reacted, I’d put up one of five fingers [onstage, directed at Horn in the audience]. If it was really bad, I’d put up a crooked index finger. That was like the equivalent of a trombone womp, womp.From left: the composer Jason Robert Brown, the book co-writer Robert Horn and Phillips, the musical’s leading (young) man.via Robert HornBROWN I put in a big finale of the first act at Goodspeed — my idea was a James Brown soul revue kind of thing. That lasted one performance. But on Broadway, we had a whole Dance Dance Revolution number that replaced it.HORN At one point, the girls came out in these background-singer sparkly dresses, and then all these Dance Dance Revolution machines came out — and poor Graham Phillips, who was phenomenal, was not a dancer.ALLIE TRIMM (Patrice) We spent hours teching it so that we had the Dance Dance Revolution arrows lighting up to match with our choreography.The actors weren’t the only teenagers onstage.BROWN We also had a band that was entirely kids. So that was a whole other level of crazy — of course, that’s the kind of crazy that I most enjoyed, the kid musicians.TOM KITT (musical director) They were just a joy. They were game for anything. The band was onstage and I, of course — the one adult — was hidden by scenery.CHARLIE ROSEN (swing bass, guitar and percussion) We were kids — we had shortcomings, you know? We weren’t the greatest sight readers. But Jason didn’t dumb down any of his writing. We really had to step up and become professional musicians way earlier than even kids in college might really understand — things that they don’t teach in music school, like showing up on time and rehearsal etiquette and how to follow your music director.GRANDE I think it is safe to say that all of us quickly developed the discipline and stamina that we’d have for the rest of our careers doing eight shows a week as young teenagers, even just vocally alone.For the cast, backstage was often more dramatic than the show itself.PHILLIPS I was sharing a dressing room with Eric Nelsen [playing Brett], who was dating Liz at the time, who was sharing a dressing room with Ariana, who I was dating at the time.BROWN Robert really got into the gossip.HORN Somebody would be going out with somebody, and then a few days later, they’d be going out with somebody else.PHILLIPS I remember a lot of sneaking around. I became more acquainted with the nooks and crannies of the Jacobs Theater than probably anybody else. One of the wranglers was really good at finding me.TRIMM Everyone was figuring out their sexuality and finding themselves. And I think everybody was kind of going through such a massive awakening of who we are as people, which is kind of a funny, beautiful parallel to the show.Eli Golden, center, is Evan in the Netflix movie, which includes adult actors and some new songs.Alan Markfield/NetflixBut in some ways, when “13” closed in January 2009, it still wasn’t finished. Brown and Horn spent six months tearing the show apart and revising the version that would be licensed in schools for community theater productions.BROWN I always loved “Brand New You,” at the end of the show. And I remember watching it one night, maybe somewhere toward the end of the run, and thinking this is what the whole show was supposed to have been, as far as this audience is concerned. A lot of exactly what I started saying: It should have been teenagers dancing. It should have been this sort of kinetic rock-concert sort of thing. And instead, over the course of developing it, it had become very personal and very intimate.GILLIES The audiences [at Goodspeed] were so receptive, and our theater was very quaint. By the time we got to Broadway, it was a whole other animal. It’s a very large stage for a very intimate, small show.BROWN We had invited a whole bunch of kids to the dress rehearsal, and it was a very young and a very rowdy audience. I just remember the shrieks that the show got that night. I called my wife and I said, “I think we have a hit.” And I was so wrong. But I wish I could have just frozen the show that night, because that feeling was exactly what I wanted. More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Announces $31.5 Million in Grants

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      The third round of funding for the year will support 226 projects across the country.A PBS documentary on the 400-year history of Shakespeare’s plays, a New York Public Library summer program for educators on efforts to secure equitable access to education in Harlem in the 20th century, and research for a book on the history of red hair are among 226 beneficiaries of new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Tuesday.The grants, which total $31.5 million and are the third round awarded this year, will support projects at museums, libraries, universities and historic sites in 45 states and Washington, D.C., as well as in Canada, England and the Netherlands.Such projects include a documentary, to be co-produced by Louisiana Public Broadcasting, about the Colfax Massacre — named after the town and parish where dozens of former slaves were killed during Reconstruction. Another, at Penn State, uses computational methods to analyze the clouds in landscapes by John Constable and to trace the adoption of his Realist techniques by other 19th-century European artists. Funding will also go toward research for a book examining how different cultures have envisioned Jesus, both in his own time and throughout history, by Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion at Princeton University.Shelly C. Lowe, the endowment’s chairwoman, said in a statement that the projects, which include educational programming for high school and college students, “will foster the exchange of ideas and increase access to humanities knowledge, resources and experiences.”In New York, 31 projects at the state’s cultural organizations will receive $4.6 million in grants. Funding will support the creation of a new permanent exhibition exploring 400 years of Brooklyn history at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as well as books about St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York during the height of the AIDS crisis and the Hospital of the Innocents, a 600-year-old children’s care institution in Florence, Italy.Funding will also go toward the development of a podcast about the Federal Writers’ Project, a U.S. government initiative that provided jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression, by the Washington-based Stone Soup Productions. Another grant will benefit a history of the Cherokee Nation being co-authored by Julie Reed, a historian at Penn State, and Rose Stremlau, a historian at Davidson College in North Carolina.The grants will also benefit the Peabody Collections, one of the oldest African American library collections in the country, at Hampton University, and a book by John Lisle on a 1980s lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency over its Cold War-era MK-Ultra program, which involved experiments in mind control. More

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      Nicholas Evans, Author of ‘The Horse Whisperer,’ Dies at 72

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      He was a first-time novelist whose tale of a manly vocation and family trauma broke publishing and then movie rights records when Robert Redford bought them.Nicholas Evans, the British journalist turned author whose novel-turned-film, “The Horse Whisperer,” broke publishing and movie records, along with the hearts of readers who made the book a best seller in 20 countries, died on Aug. 9 at his home in London. He was 72.The cause was a heart attack, said his longtime agent, Caradoc King.In 1993, Mr. Evans, at 43, was broke and adrift. He had been working as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, and had spent two years on a film project that ultimately collapsed, when he began casting about for an idea for a novel. It was perhaps not the most winning formula for worldly success, as he noted in retrospect on his website: “Why would a debut novel from an unknown author have any more chance of getting off the ground than a movie?”Yet he had found an intriguing subject: the mystical, manly art of horse whispering. His source was a farrier, and Mr. Evans soon learned that the vocation of calming horses had a long history stretching back centuries.In England, however, horse-y matters have too much class baggage, as he put it, so he looked to the American West for his story. He came up trumps when he met Tom Dorrance, a terse cowboy then in his 80s, and watched him soothe a frenzied mare in California. He then found two other cowboys who practiced the same compelling magic, and began to craft a character inspired by these three men.Mr. Evans sat down and wrote some 150 pages of what would become “The Horse Whisperer,” a soapy drama about a young girl and her horse who are hit by a truck, and what happens when her hard-driving East Coast magazine editor mother finds a horse whisperer in Montana to heal their trauma.The healing that ensues involved more than the horse. Mr. Evans showed his draft to Mr. King, who sent the partial manuscript to a number of publishers on their way to the Frankfurt book fair that year. Suddenly, Mr. Evans was in the middle of a bidding maelstrom, juggling offers from Hollywood as well as from book publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.When Bob Bookman, the agent at the Creative Artists Agency negotiating the sale of the film rights, asked Mr. Evans what he wanted, Mr. Evans proposed a modest $50,000. “I think we can get $3 million,” said Mr. Bookman, as Sarah Lyall of The New York Times reported. And they did. Hollywood Pictures and Robert Redford’s film studio, Wildwood Pictures, won the bid, at the time the largest amount ever paid for the rights to a first novel (almost $6 million in today’s money). Mr. Evans’s North American book advance, of $3.15 million from Dell Publishing, set another record.Mr. Evans had only written 150 pages of his novel when publishers began bidding for it. His advance, of $3 million, was a record for a first time novelist. no creditThen Mr. Evans had to finish the book. He told Ms. Lyall he had become morbidly superstitious: He stopped riding his bicycle, and took the slow lane when driving. What he did not disclose, not even to his agent, was that he had been diagnosed with melanoma. Nonetheless, he survived, and thrived. The book, which was published in 1995, was a global best seller that was translated into 40 languages, though critics slammed it for its melodrama. Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York Times, called it “a sappy romance novel, gussied up with some sentimental claptrap about the emotional life of animals and lots of Walleresque hooey about men and women.”“About the only thing missing,” she added, “is a picture of Fabio on the cover.”The movie, which came out in 1998, was more favorably reviewed and a modest box office success, thanks to Mr. Redford’s star power and firm hand as director. He delivered a more restrained version of Mr. Evans’s tale, playing Tom Brooker, the horse whisperer. Kristin Scott Thomas was Annie MacLean, the mother, and Scarlett Johansson played Grace, the daughter. Sam Neill was Annie’s cuckolded husband. Mr. Redford’s version ended rather ambiguously; Mr. Evans had chosen a more confrontational route, and he was initially upset by the change.Robert Redford as the star in the film “The Horse Whisperer (1998), which he also directed.TouchstoneFor better or worse, Mr. Evans had unknowingly introduced the word “whisperer” into the popular lexicon as a catchall term for experts who can tame complicated creatures, like babies.“It was an extraordinary event,” said Mr. King, remembering the frenzy surrounding Mr. Evans’s novel. “It was just the magic of the story. That was the thing.”Nicholas Evans was born on July 26, 1950, in Worcestershire, in England’s West Midlands. He studied law at Oxford University, graduating with a First, the highest honors. He worked as a journalist for newspapers and television and produced a weekly current affairs show. In the 1980s, he made documentary films about the artists David Hockney and Francis Bacon, the writer Patricia Highsmith and the filmmaker David Lean, among others.He followed “The Horse Whisperer” with three more novels, all best sellers. “The Divide” (2005), explores what led to the death of a young woman whose body is found in a frozen mountain creek. The story was inspired, he told The Associated Press, by his own interrogations into what causes rifts in a marriage — a marriage come asunder is the book’s back story. His own 25-year marriage had recently ended, he said.Like his characters, Mr. Evans was an avid outdoorsman, a charming Bill Nighy look-alike who skied and hiked. And in August of 2008 he seemed to fall into the plot of one of his own stories, a family idyll turned into a near tragedy.He and his second wife, Charlotte Gordon Cumming, a singer-songwriter, were staying with her brother, Alastair Gordon Cumming, and his wife, Lady Louisa, in the Scottish Highlands. They had picked and enjoyed a meal of wild mushrooms, which turned out to be poisonous. All four became sick, and their kidneys soon failed. Mr. Evans, Ms. Gordon Cumming and her brother required years of dialysis — and new kidneys. Mr. Evans’s daughter Lauren donated one of hers. Ms. Gordon Cumming was offered the kidney of her son’s best friend’s mother, and Mr. Cumming’s came from a patient who had died. Mr. Evans became a patron of a kidney donation charity. Ms. Gordon Cumming made a documentary film about her experience.Mr. Evans’s survivors include his wife and four children, Finlay, Lauren, Max and Harry.His reviews grew more positive with every book. Nonetheless, he tended to avoid reading them.“The book business is such a strange one — and the very definition of literary versus commercial fiction has always seemed to me to be bizarre,” Mr. Evans told The Guardian in 2011. “One is defined by how many it sells, and the other by its ideas and so-called literary merit. And there are all kinds of assumptions brought to bear on this. So for example, if you sell tons of books you can’t possibly have any interesting ideas or themes or things to say. And on the other hand, if nobody buys the book, it’s considered a mark of its esteem because nobody is bright enough to understand it.” More