Movies

“Spirited,” a revisionist “Christmas Carol,” leads with tap, thanks to the choreographer Chloé Arnold and her team, Ava Bernstine-Mitchell and Martha Nichols.The trailer for “Spirited” arrives feet first. Two silhouetted bodies trade syncopated riffs in a lively tap showdown. “It’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas,” the title cards announce, before the dancers are revealed to be the film’s stars: Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds.“How did you know all that?” Ferrell’s character exclaims, panting slightly, as the dancing concludes. “I didn’t! I was just following you!” Reynolds’ character shoots back. “Tap is new for me. It’s a very expressive medium.”It’s rare, these days, for a major motion picture to lead with dance. But the dancing in “Spirited” — a revisionist take on “A Christmas Carol,” in theaters Nov. 11 (and streaming Nov. 18 on Apple TV+) — is more than holiday window dressing. A self-aware musical in the vein of “Spamalot” and “Schmigadoon!,” “Spirited” aims to charm musical theater skeptics by poking gentle fun at the genre’s oddities. The film’s elaborately choreographed production numbers offer a new way for Ferrell and Reynolds, neither of whom had previous dance experience, to explore the winkingly self-referential humor they’re known for as actors. They are constantly bursting into dance, and constantly cracking jokes about how strange it is for people to burst into dance.That they’re often in tap shoes can be credited to Chloé Arnold, the extraordinary tap dancer who led the film’s choreographic team. The director and co-writer Sean Anders fell for Arnold’s work after watching videos of her Syncopated Ladies ensemble online. They featured “some of the most intense, badass tap dancing I’d ever seen,” Anders said in an email. “I knew she was the secret weapon I was looking for.”To help manage an ensemble cast that featured several dozen dancers, Arnold brought in two associate choreographers, Ava Bernstine-Mitchell and Martha Nichols, entertainment-industry standouts with backgrounds in an array of dance styles. Together, they created pull-out-all-the-stops numbers of ebullient variety: If a crew of tappers is dancing atop tables, aerialists might be spinning in hoops above them while a ballet group whips through a pirouette sequence on the floor below.Tap it out: Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell in “Spirited.”Claire Folger/Apple TV+They also helped coach the top-billed actors, working for several months with Ferrell, Reynolds and their co-star and fellow dance newbie Octavia Spencer. “I’ve already asked this incredible choreography team to be best friends,” Reynolds wrote on Instagram during filming. “Just filed the paperwork and I’m excited for our new life together.”The resulting film brims with dance. Nearly every extra is a dancer, even in nonmusical scenes — look for the three choreographers in bit parts — and dance spills over into the film’s marketing. “Tap! In the trailer!” Arnold said. “When I saw that, I cried.”The significance of a trio of Black women leading a creative department on a big-budget movie has not been lost on Arnold, Bernstine-Mitchell and Nichols, all of whom are making their choreographic feature film debuts.“In the art of dance and the art of tap in particular, Black women have almost never had a position of leadership, proper recognition or proper compensation,” Arnold said. “There are so many times when, you know, your spirit is challenged. So for this creative group to bring us in, and not try to silence our voices, that trust was so beautiful.”Arnold, Bernstine-Mitchell and Nichols gathered on Zoom to talk about to talk about the dancing in “Spirited,” diversity in musical theater and choreographing for the stars. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.This is the first time the three of you have worked together. What was the chemistry like?CHLOÉ ARNOLD Ava and I both come from the school of Debbie Allen, and we’ve worked together in TV a lot, on James Corden’s show. We have a very symbiotic work flow, so I knew she had to be part of this. And Martha and I know each other from teaching at [the dance convention and competition] New York City Dance Alliance — whenever I had a free moment, I’d take her class.AVA BERNSTINE-MITCHELL Our three personalities are the perfect balance. Chloé wants to move fast, she jumps first and thinks later. Martha moves very slow, like a scientist, she wants to look carefully at every piece. And I’m the organizer, trying to keep everybody on track.There were a lot of dancers to keep track of. How did you approach casting?ARNOLD That was wild, because it was during the pandemic, so we had to do it virtually. And we had 1,000 submissions. 1,000! Unreal. We had Zoom callbacks for 400, and then deliberated and got it down to an initial core 30 — later that went up to 90. We called upon our old friends, people we trusted. And we met new friends.I’m very thankful that I was able to bring all of the Syncopated Ladies into the movie. Because they’re a backbone for me. Having your people with you, that’s one of the best gifts of life.MARTHA NICHOLS Watching Chloé and her heavy hitters — Pam Yasutake, Anissa Lee, Gisele [Silva], Maud [Arnold, Chloé’s sister], the whole crew — to see tap done at such a high level on a film, with this many individuals, was super, super special. Because when you have something as specialized as tap, it’s much more common for the number of participants to shrink. And in this, it didn’t shrink. It was magnified.Chloé, were you brought in because the team wanted a tap movie? Or did it become a tap movie because you were brought in?ARNOLD It definitely wasn’t a tap movie to start! [laughter] It was going to be, like, Will and Ryan would do a little tap number, we’ll have a bit of dance here and a bit of dance there. But it ended up being eight or nine full-throttle dance numbers.And you know, having this big-movie budget, we kept asking for more. “Could you build a two-story scaffold that we could tap on?” “Can we cover the floor with water?” And Sean would always say, “Let’s go!”The choreographers on the “Spirited” set.Claire Folger/Apple TV +Of course, dancers want more dance everywhere. But why was dance important to this particular project?BERNSTINE-MITCHELL What’s great about the script is that dancers, our role in the movie was very integral. We weren’t “added happiness.” We were part of the storytelling.A lot of dancers ended up with speaking parts too, right?ARNOLD All the dancers were allowed to audition for acting roles, which is really special and really unusual.BERNSTINE-MITCHELL And all of the dancers got to name their characters — like, with a name that shows up in the credits. We all had a purpose for being in this world.The film tries to strike a balance between earnestness and we’re-in-on-the-joke nods to the audience. How do you do that in dance?BERNSTINE-MITCHELL I think that’s something dance can actually do pretty naturally.ARNOLD If you take it seriously, but it’s absurd, it works. And Will and Ryan are obviously great at being silly, but they were also like, “All right, if we’re not supposed to look silly, and we do, you’re going to tell us, right?” There was a lot of trust there.How do you teach actors — who happen to be big stars — to dance?NICHOLS It was about speaking to them in a way that bridged the gap between dance and the physical vocabulary that they already have, to make it seem less daunting. Like, we don’t need to say “stand in jazz second position” to Ryan Reynolds. Superhero stance! He knows what that is.BERNSTINE-MITCHELL Ryan wasn’t able to touch his toes at the beginning, but we got him there.ARNOLD That was a milestone day! Their willingness to be beginners, as these masters of their craft, was great.They were also really good at disarming everyone on set. Will started his rehearsal period right around National Tap Dance Day, which, you know, he hadn’t known there was such a thing as National Tap Dance Day, but as soon as he found out, he was walking around going, “Hey, guys, happy National Tap Dance Day!” “Did you know it’s National Tap Dance Day?” [laughter]When Octavia Spencer first met us over FaceTime, she cried. Because she didn’t know we were going to be Black women. She was like, “I’m so proud of you. I know I’m in good hands.” That’s a beautiful thing to feel — knowing we’ve got to lead her through this journey, that we’re starting from a place where she already sees us, she’s already connected.How did your perspectives as Black women shape the film?ARNOLD I think that you won’t see, generally speaking, a lot of African dance influence in traditional musical theater. But that’s the crux of my movement, my natural movement, coming out of the land of tap dance, which has the African influence in it.BERNSTINE-MITCHELL The way we heard the music was very different than how I think other people would hear the music. We found funk in all the songs.NICHOLS There’s always a pocket.ARNOLD And we created a cast that is diverse in every way, shape and form — the cast we want to see in musical theater in the future. Because growing up, our reality was not seeing that. So in this film you’re going to see dancers from ages, I think, 7 to 74. You’re going to see people from all types of cultures. You’re going to see all different body types in all their glory. And I hope that unlocks more possibilities, more ways to expand how films present work and how they hire. More

The Hulu documentary covers a high-profile affair involving a pool attendant and the prominent evangelical couple Becki Falwell and Jerry Falwell Jr.“God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty,” a Hulu documentary from the director Billy Corben, concerns a sensational, high-profile affair between Giancarlo Granda, a pool attendant at a luxury hotel in Miami Beach, Fla., and Becki Falwell, the wife of the prominent Republican evangelist Jerry Falwell Jr. — whom Granda claims participated in these relations as a silent voyeur. At the time, Falwell Jr. was the president and chancellor of one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges, Liberty University, and one of the best known evangelical supporters of former President Donald J. Trump.The film describes, in graphic and sometimes vulgar detail, a seven-year sexual relationship that had surprising political ramifications involving the attorney Michael Cohen, the actor Tom Arnold, and President Trump, each of whom, as the film illustrates, became tangentially embroiled in the ensuing drama and fallout.“God Forbid” tries to rationalize its often lurid account of these events, emphasizing the Falwells’ hypocrisy and castigating them as “predators” who showed patterns of abuse — the charming husband and beloved wife are “not the good Christians they present themselves to be,” one observer concludes righteously.But while Falwell Jr. may indeed be a charlatan, ridiculing his sexual predilections seems like a pretty dubious way to prove it. (We’re meant to savor the irony that, as Granda says, Falwell is “trying to appear as the strongman” when he is in fact “the cuck in the corner of the room.”) I’m not sure what’s gained from scrutinizing so many of Becki Falwell’s candid texts and voice messages, other than making her seem foolish.The film combines archival materials, original interviews and various text messages and video and audio recordings pertaining to the case. Its smoking gun is a recording of a late-night video call in which Becki is shown drinking wine and stripping naked, reminiscing with Granda about their past dalliances. I found it incredibly depressing. What, exactly, I had to wonder, is being documented here, and what, exactly, am I meant to conclude?God ForbidNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

She documented her attempt to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in a popular blog that became a best-selling book and a hit movie.Julie Powell, the writer whose decision to spend a year cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” led to the popular food blog, the Julie/Julia Project, a movie starring Meryl Streep and a new following for Mrs. Child in the final years of her life, died on Oct. 26 at her home in Olivebridge, in upstate New York. She was 49.Her husband, Eric Powell, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Ms. Powell narrated her struggles in the kitchen in a funny, lacerating voice that struck a nerve with a rising generation of disaffected contemporaries.The Julie/Julia Project became a popular model for other blogs, replicated by fans of the cooks Ina Garten, Thomas Keller and Dorie Greenspan, and helped build the vast modern audience for home cooking on social media.In 2002, Ms. Powell was an aspiring writer working at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan. She was about to turn 30 and had no real career prospects. It was, she said in an interview with The New York Times, “one of those panicked, backed-into-a-corner kind of moments.”To lend structure to her days, she set out to cook all 524 recipes from her mother’s well-worn copy of Mrs. Child’s 1961 classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.” But as an untrained cook who lived in a small Long Island City loft, she found the road to be long, sweaty and bumpy.In a blog for Salon.com that she called the Julie/Julia Project, she wrote long updates, punctuated by vodka gimlets and filled with entertaining, profane tirades about the difficulties of finding ingredients, the minor disappointments of adult life and the bigger challenges of finding purpose as a member of Generation X.Before the year was up, Salon reported that the blog had about 400,000 total page views, as well as several thousand regular readers who hung on the drama of whether Ms. Powell would actually finish in time.Blogging made it possible for Ms. Powell to reach readers on a relatively new platform and in a new kind of direct language. “We have a medium where we can type in the snarky comments we used to just say out loud to our friends,” she said in a 2009 interview.Those comments were posted just as popular interest in food, cooking and chefs was rising. Ms. Powell’s self-deprecating style became a bridge from the authority of food writers like Mrs. Child, James Beard and M.F.K. Fisher to the accessibility of Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson.Just weeks before Ms. Powell’s self-imposed deadline was up, Amanda Hesser, a founder of the website Food52 who was then a reporter for The Times, wrote about her project, and interest exploded.The Julie/Julia Project upended food writing, Ms. Hesser said in an email. “I’d never read anyone like her,” she wrote. “Her writing was so fresh, spirited — sometimes crude! — and so gloriously unmoored to any tradition.”Ms. Powell inspired other amateur food writers to begin cooking their way through cookbooks and made professional food writers realize “they’d been stuck in the mud of conformity,” Ms. Hesser said. “The internet democratized food writing, and Julie was the new school’s first distinctive voice.”The writer Deb Perelman, who started her food blog (now called Smitten Kitchen) in 2003, said: “She wrote about food in a really human voice that sounded like people I knew. She communicated that you could write about food even without going to culinary school, without much experience, and in a real-life kitchen.”Little, Brown & Company turned the blog into a book, “Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.” Although some critics wrote that it lacked literary heft, it went on to sell more than a million copies, mostly under the title given to the paperback: “Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.”Amy Adams as Ms. Powell in front of a photo of Meryl Streep as Mrs. Child in a scene from “Julie & Julia.”Columbia Pictures, via AlamySales spiked after the popular 2009 movie “Julie & Julia,” Nora Ephron’s last work as a writer and director, which starred Ms. Streep as Mrs. Child; Stanley Tucci as her husband, Paul; and Amy Adams as Ms. Powell.Ms. Powell “was happy for the story to be Nora Ephron’s story,” said Mr. Powell, a deputy editor at Archaeology magazine. “It did kind of sand down the quirky and the spiky and a lot of the things everyone knew her for and loved her for. And she was OK with that.”The film’s success also lifted Mrs. Child’s book to the best-seller list for the first time.Mrs. Child never saw the film — she died in 2004 — but she was familiar with Ms. Powell’s project.Russ Parsons, a former Los Angeles Times food editor who was among the first to report on the blog, sent Mrs. Child, then in her 90s, some excerpts. She took the project as an affront, not the self-deprecating romp that Ms. Powell intended, and told Mr. Parsons that she and others had tested and retested the recipes so they would be accessible to cooks of all skill levels.“I don’t understand how she could have problems with them,” he recalled her telling him. “She just must not be much of a cook.”Ms. Powell in her apartment in 2005, chopping leeks to make Ms. Child’s recipe for potato leek soup.Henny Ray Abrams/Associated PressJulie Foster was born on April 20, 1973, in Austin, Texas, to John and Kay Foster. Her father was a lawyer. Her mother stayed home to care for her and her brother, Jordon, and then went back to college for a master’s degree in design from the University of Texas.Ms. Powell graduated from Amherst College in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in theater and fiction writing.As a child, her brother said, Ms. Powell was both bookish and dramatic.“She loved to be onstage, and loved just being over the top and having everyone watch her,” he said. And, he added, she was “the most experimental and sophisticated cook among us, and we were all people who cooked.”She met the man who would become her husband when they were playing the romantic leads in a high school production of the Arthur Miller play “All My Sons.” They married in 1998.Ms. Powell’s second book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession,” published in 2009, dived deeply into their relationship, which sometimes flourished and sometimes faltered. She described in detail her struggle with an extramarital affair she had and, later, one her husband had. This time, the food connection was darker: She juxtaposed her apprenticeship as a butcher with a dissection of her moods and the marriage.Without the sauciness and celebrity connection of her first book, “Cleaving” was not as well received, and although Ms. Powell continued writing, it was her last book.“She had so much talent and emotional intelligence,” said Judy Clain, editor in chief of Little, Brown, who was Ms. Powell’s editor. “I only wish she could have found the next thing.”After years splitting time between Long Island City and a cozy house in the Catskill Mountains that she purchased in 2008, the couple moved upstate permanently in 2018. In addition to her husband and her brother, Ms. Powell is survived by her parents.Ms. Powell, who was politically candid and a staunch advocate for animals, maintained her lively voice on social media, a natural extension for the quirky and direct voice she honed as an early blogger. On Twitter, she posted pointed commentary, mixed in with mundane bits of daily life. As ever, she made her feelings public, whether she was depressed, frustrated or excited.Mr. Powell, her husband, once said to her: “You hate everyone and you love everyone. That is your gift!” She turned it into her Twitter bio. More

Serena and Venus Williams and Ava DuVernay, and the artists who portrayed them, talk about their choices, which will be on view at the National Portrait Gallery.Three strikingly personal and introspective new portraits of three famous women — the tennis champions Serena and Venus Williams and the filmmaker Ava DuVernay — go on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington on Nov. 10 as part of the institution’s Portrait of a Nation Award.The award, recognizing individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the United States, includes the gallery’s acquisition of the new portraits of these groundbreaking Black women and the other honorees this year — the chef José Andrés, the music executive Clive Davis, the president’s chief medical adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, and the children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman. (For Edelman, the gallery’s curators acquired a photograph by Ruven Afanador from 2013.) Each of the other honorees worked with the curators to select the artist to represent them, and the works will remain on view in the exhibition “Portrait of a Nation” until Oct. 22, 2023.This award program, begun in 2015 and honoring people every two years, is an effort “to grow our collection in a way that truly recognizes the diversity of the country,” said the director, Kim Sajet, “working with dynamic contemporary artists who are pushing the boundaries of what portraiture can be.”The Williams sisters and DuVernay each chose to collaborate with a rising Black artist on the new commissions (as did Andrés, selecting Kadir Nelson; Davis worked with DavidHockney and Fauci with Hugo Crosthwaite). DuVernay took the opportunity to support Kenturah Davis, an artist she knows and collects. Serena Williams had followed the career of Toyin Ojih Odutola and selected her from a shortlist under consideration. Venus Williams was more exploratory, meeting with multiple artists culled by the gallery’s curatorial team and her own research and picking Robert Pruitt from some two dozen possibilities.Here is how those three portraits came together.From left, Robert Pruitt, Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kenturah Davis.From left: Brandon C. Luckain; Beth Wilkinson; via Kenturah DavisVenus Williams and Robert PruittThe idea of Venus Williams dropping by for a visit was surreal to Pruitt, born in Houston and based in the Bronx. He typically hires models for his large-scale figurative portraits, informed by comic book graphics and symbolic objects, which explore Black experiences and mythologies. “She came to my studio and was so down to earth,” Pruitt said. They immediately bonded over his huge comic book collection on display.The Fine Arts & Exhibits Special SectionBigger and Better: While the Covid-19 pandemic forced museums to close for months, cut staff and reduce expenses, several of them have nevertheless moved forward on ambitious renovations or new buildings.A Tribute to Black Artists: Four museums across the country are featuring exhibitions this fall that recognize the work of African and African American artists, signaling a change in attitude — and priorities.New and Old: In California, museums are celebrating and embracing Latino and Chicano art and artists. And the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum is working to engage visitors about the realities of climate change.A Cultural Correction: After removing all references to Columbus from its collections the Denver Art Museum has embraced a new exhibition on Latin American art.More From the Special Section: Museums, galleries and auction houses are opening their doors wider than ever to new artists, new concepts and new traditions.After being selected, Pruitt visited Williams in Florida armed with a massive photo download. “I wanted to get a sense of what kind of images of herself she likes and she was very clear, picking a photo she had taken of herself in the mirror,” Pruitt said.He used that as the compositional reference to build out his double-figured portrait of her — with Williams in one instance facing the viewer and encircled by a celestial halo of kinetic white beads (referencing her beaded hair in motion on the court as a young girl). A mirrored Williams, shown from behind and in profile, wears a tennis skirt made of raffia and the Wimbledon trophy dish refashioned as a collared chestplate apropos for a warrior superhero.Williams gave Pruitt information about her family and her relationship to tennis history that he has embedded, such as studding the swirling beads with the birthstones of her siblings. “It was really interesting to work with another voice involved in the process,” he said, a first for him.Pruitt sees “a fertile space of reflection” between his two Venuses. “My hope,” he said, “is that the duality of the portrait gives us this sense of a person looking back at themselves, considering where they came from and where they’re going.”Ava DuVernay and Kenturah DavisKenturah Davis’s portrait of Ava DuVernay. “I wanted to push myself in a different direction than I’m used to seeing myself,” DuVernay said.National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutionKenturah Davis takes language as a departure point, using rubber stamps of letters spelling out personal texts meaningful to her portrait subjects to draw their images. This process mesmerized DuVernay when she first met Davis several years ago.When the two women, based in Los Angeles, met up to discuss the portrait, Davis suggested using a blur technique she has recently introduced. “I was really interested in making a figure in motion and thought it paired well given Ava’s relationship with motion pictures,” Davis said. DuVernay was hesitant initially, she said, but “I wanted Kenturah to feel free.” And, she added, “I wanted to push myself in a different direction than I’m used to seeing myself.”They collaborated on a photo shoot, where Davis used a long exposure to capture the turning of DuVernay’s face from front to side view in a single elongated image. Then, Davis translated the photographic information onto a larger-than-life-size drawing, rendering DuVernay’s double-faced image pixel by pixel using rubber stamps dipped in ink spelling out a message of encouragement that DuVernay received from her father shortly before he died.“It’s a kind of embodiment, that she’s made up of these words,” said Davis. DuVernay likes that the message is only legible in pieces up close, like “a secret inside of the work.”DuVernay described being startled, in a good way, when she saw the result. “I’ve never seen anything like that of myself — that large, that personal,” she said. “There’s a spirit moving between the two countenances that feels revelatory.”Serena Williams and Toyin Ojih Odutola“I wanted to show her physique but also show her relaxed,” Ojih Odutola said of her portrait of Serena Williams.National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution“What I am interested in as an artist is what is often overlooked, what people might not notice about a subject,” said Toyin Ojih Odutola, the Nigerian-born, New York-based artist known for her life-size figurative drawings exploring identity and rendered in charcoal, pastel, ballpoint pen and pencil. With Serena Williams, among the most photographed people in the world and often framed as fierce or glamorous, what was missing in representations was her sense of joy, Ojih Odutola felt.“I thought about her being a mother, a sister, a daughter, and how funny she is,” Ojih Odutola said. In a first exploratory Zoom conversation, the artist asked about depicting her laughing, Ojih Odutola said. “Serena loved that.”Ojih Odutola traveled to Williams’s home in Florida to take reference photos, from which she would construct a composite. “Serena looked at them on the day and liked it, but kind of left it to me,” Ojih Odutola said.Ultimately, the artist decided to go with her gut, presenting Williams with a wide rapturous smile and resting her head on her hand, almost becoming enveloped by vibrant green foliage encroaching from behind.“I wanted to show her physique but also show her relaxed,” Ojih Odutola said. “I wanted to show her as a beautiful Black woman.” She finished the portrait before Williams announced she would step away from tennis after the recent U.S. Open, giving the image another layer of meaning.“This year had been a season of change and evolution for me,” Williams said in an email. “Toyin’s perspective as an artist is unparalleled and to be able to say Toyin Ojih Odutola painted my portrait feels surreal.” More

When Ben Platt was a kid, listening to show tunes in the family car, he developed a fondness for “This Is Not Over Yet,” an optimistic and upbeat Jason Robert Brown song from the short-lived musical “Parade.”It was only years later, as Platt grew up, that he encountered the rest of the show, and realized what it was actually about — the 20th-century lynching of a Jewish Southerner, fueled by antisemitism.Now Platt is starring in a seven-performance revival of the 1998 musical at New York City Center, and says the timing is sadly perfect, given the antisemitism once again coursing through the nation’s culture. “It’s felt urgent,” he said, “in a way that is shocking to all of us.”The musical, which won Tony Awards both for Brown’s score and Alfred Uhry’s book, tells the story of Leo Frank, an Atlanta factory manager who was convicted in 1913 of murdering a 13-year-old girl. A public outcry over whether Frank was actually guilty prompted the Georgia governor to commute Frank’s death sentence, at which point Frank was lynched by a mob.Laura Dreyfuss with Ben Platt as Evan in “Dear Evan Hansen.” “It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something,” he said in an interview, “and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe City Center revival, directed by Michael Arden, begins performances Tuesday and runs through Sunday; there is already talk of a possible Broadway transfer, but no firm plans.Platt, 29, vaulted to fame, and won a Tony, playing the title character in the 2016 musical “Dear Evan Hansen.” In the years since, he has been working onscreen, starring in “The Politician” for Netflix and a film adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen,” as well as the forthcoming “The People We Hate at the Wedding” for Amazon Prime Video and a movie called “Theater Camp,” which he wrote with a group of friends. He also created a new lane for himself as a performer: writing songs, recording albums and touring.In an interview, he talked about “Parade,” the ups and downs of “Dear Evan Hansen” (the stage version was a hit; the film adaptation was panned), and his decision to drop off Twitter. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me why you wanted to do “Parade.”This was a character I related to. I recognized this guy. And I realized how much modern application there is for it. It’s a lot harder to distance from than I was hoping it would be. This show is all about not only antisemitism, but the failure of the country to protect lots of marginalized groups, and we’re all feeling that really intensely right now.How do you connect to your character?The very obvious thing is that we’re both Jewish. He’s also, similar to other characters that I’ve played, not the best at expressing his emotions. Leo learns during his journey that vulnerability does not mean you’re any less strong, and I definitely relate to that journey. Being wrongly convicted of murder, I fortunately cannot relate to. I hope I never learn that.What does this show tell us about antisemitism?I don’t necessarily want to dictate what people feel when they come away from the show. There’s a lot of gray in the show. It doesn’t make any decisions for you. Hopefully, most of all, it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.“Hopefully, most of all,” Platt said of the show, “it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhat’s it like being back onstage after five years away?It’s just the best. I spent my whole life doing it, pretty much nonstop, from 6 years old to 24. It just feels like a homecoming.I never fully understand why actors want to do these short-run shows. You put in all this time for a few nights.Two reasons. One is the unselfish reason, which is it’s just a story worth telling, especially right now. The selfish reason is that I carry ulterior hopes that maybe we’ll have a longer opportunity in the future.You spent so many years working on “Dear Evan Hansen.” How are you feeling about that experience?I’m feeling really grateful for it. It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something, and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music. It will always be a piece of me. I feel a simultaneous constant pride and desire to keep it in my heart at all times, but also a real readiness and excitement at having moved forward and embracing my adulthood and playing characters that live in different worlds than that. I got to live in that world for a very long time, and it was not the easiest world to live in. So I look at it fondly but I’m also happy to be moving ahead.Your boyfriend is your successor in the role, Noah Galvin. Is that weird?I don’t think about him in that way, because I knew him for three or four years before we even had that experience. There’s this lore that that’s how we met, but it’s not. But it’s nice to have that detail of him understanding deeply what that experience was. And I feel very lucky to be with him — he’s changed my perspective, and made things, in a very positive way, feel a bit smaller and more manageable.You’ve been working on a film version of “Merrily We Roll Along,” to be shot over 20 years. What’s that like?There are so many variables. The only way I’ve found to approach it is that you have to treat [each shoot] like short films, let it go, and move on and live your life, and as the next one rolls around, find your way back into it. If I constantly have it in the back of my head, it just feels so unimaginable to get to the end, that I get scared about it in a way that’s not productive. So I’m just taking each of the little gifts along the way and hoping we make it to the end of the road.Platt in “Dear Evan Hansen.” After the film version of the musical was criticized, he left Twitter. “I wasn’t getting anything positive,” he said, “and it’s been really nice to be away.”Erika Doss/Universal PicturesOne of your closest friends, Beanie Feldstein, who is also starring with you in “Merrily,” had a bumpy ride with “Funny Girl” on Broadway. I wonder what you make of how her experience went.I know more than anything, she just wants everybody to move on. So I’ll just say that I love her and I admire her strength.You had your own rough ride with the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen.”It was definitely a disappointing experience, and difficult, and it definitely opened my eyes to the internet and how horrific it can be. You’d think, after doing “Dear Evan Hansen” onstage for four years, I would have already known that. I try my best to focus on people who tell me it was moving to them and they really felt seen by it. It is very easy for the good to get drowned out by the bad.I don’t know if this is connected, but I noticed that you’re no longer on Twitter. What’s that about?I find that Twitter is almost exclusively for tearing people down. I wasn’t getting anything positive, and it’s been really nice to be away.Since “Evan Hansen” you’ve become a pop performer, recording and touring.It’s a whole different animal because it’s been the only avenue in which to express my perspective. I find that in everything else — film and TV and especially theater — as much as you’re giving of yourself, you’re also doing your best to disappear, to serve somebody else’s mission or tell somebody else’s story. I love that experience, being a cog in a larger wheel. But I also think that being afforded the opportunity to do the opposite is a very liberating and freeing experience. One makes me really appreciate the other.Do you see yourself back on Broadway?I would love to, yes. I’m very much so hoping, whether it’s this or something else, to get back there as soon as I can. More

The actress, who died Oct. 2, became famous for a protest at the 1973 Oscars. Now a researcher and Littlefeather’s own sisters dispute her claims that she was Native American. Her defenders say Indian identity is a complex matter.Two days after the death of Sacheen Littlefeather, her estranged sister was angrily scrolling Twitter.She was furious, she said in an interview this week, at the outpouring of praise for Littlefeather, the actress and activist who became famous when Marlon Brando sent her to the 1973 Oscars to refuse his best actor award and denounce Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans.“I was reading what all these people were saying: ‘Oh, rest in peace and she was a saint, and she sacrificed herself,’” the sister, Rozalind Cruz, said. The sisters had been estranged for about 13 years for a variety of reasons, Cruz said, but at that point she still believed her family had Indian ancestry.Then she saw tweets by the writer Jacqueline Keeler, a citizen of Navajo Nation who has stirred controversy with her efforts to expose what she calls “pretendians.” Keeler was disputing Littlefeather’s claims that her father was White Mountain Apache and Yaqui.Cruz replied to Keeler on Twitter on Oct. 4 that her grandmother was of “Yaqui and Spanish” descent. Cruz herself had tried to enroll in the White Mountain Apache Tribe. But over the next few weeks, Cruz said, Keeler showed her genealogical research that traced her father’s family back to Mexico in 1850 and said there was no evidence of Native ancestry.Cruz and the middle sister of the family, Trudy Orlandi, were both persuaded by the research. Last Saturday, less than a month after their sister’s death at age 75, The San Francisco Chronicle published an opinion column by Keeler under the headline, “Sacheen Littlefeather was a Native American icon. Her sisters say she was an ethnic fraud.”The column unleashed an intense response in Native American circles on social media.Some condemned Littlefeather, saying she had fabricated an identity to promote her Hollywood career. But others strongly objected to Keeler’s investigation, saying it ignored the complicated ways Native identity can be formed, particularly for those who do not meet the formal criteria for tribal membership. Enrollment typically requires proof of tribal ties, often described in terms of one’s percentage of “Indian blood,” or “blood quantum.”“What many people don’t understand about Native existence is that some Natives aren’t enrolled,” Laura Clark, a journalist who is Muscogee and Cherokee, wrote in Variety in response to Keeler’s column.“Some Natives are reconnecting with their tribes,” Clark wrote. “Some Natives don’t have enough ‘Indian blood’ to register because of blood quantum minimums. And some Natives have had their tribes nearly erased to the point that organized citizenship records simply don’t exist.”The Shoshone poet nila northsun, a friend of Littlefeather’s from their college days in the 1970s, said this week that she was not surprised that Keeler had failed to find tribal affiliations in family records.Native Americans, she said, might have hidden their backgrounds to avoid discrimination or were misidentified.“It’s what you feel in your heart, and what your belief system is,” said northsun, who lowercases her name. “Just because she’s not enrolled or can’t be identified in records doesn’t mean she’s not Indigenous.”In an interview on Wednesday, Keeler rejected such assertions, saying she and volunteer researchers had reviewed records for hundreds of Littlefeather’s relatives. None identified as Native American, nor did they live with or marry members of any Apache tribe or anyone identifying as Yaqui, according to a summary of the research she published on Substack.“Could their family have some distant drop of Indigenous blood from hundreds of years ago?” she wrote in the column. “It’s possible; many people of Mexican descent do. But Indigenous identity is more complicated than that. A U.S. citizen of distant French descent does not get to claim French citizenship. And it would be absurd for that person to wear a beret on stage at the Oscars and speak on behalf of the nation of France.”It was not known if Littlefeather had ever tried to enroll in a tribe. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe in Arizona said in a statement that Littlefeather was not an enrolled member of the tribe, and neither were her parents.“However,” the tribe said, “that does not mean that we could independently confirm that she is not of Yaqui ancestry generally, from Mexico or the Southwestern United States.”The White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona did not immediately release a statement.Littlefeather was born Marie Cruz in 1946 and said in interviews over the years that her father, Manuel Ybarra Cruz, was White Mountain Apache and Yaqui and had abused her and her mother, Geroldine Cruz, who was of French, German and Dutch lineage.Rozalind Cruz, 65, of Big Arm, Mont., and Orlandi, 72, of San Anselmo, Calif., have strongly disputed their sister’s accounts of their father’s alcoholism and abuse. He died in 1966 at age 44, when Littlefeather was 19.At the 1973 Academy Awards, Sacheen Littlefeather refused the Academy Award for best actor on behalf of Marlon Brando for his role in “The Godfather.”BettmannBy age 26, Littlefeather was fully identifying as Native American when she protested at the Oscars, wearing a buckskin dress, moccasins and hair ties. She spent the next five decades as an activist in the Native American community and was married to Charles Johnston, a member of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma, who died last year.She became a revered figure for some. In August, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it had apologized to Littlefeather, calling her treatment at the Oscars, where she was booed, “unwarranted and unjustified.”In a statement on Thursday, the Academy Museum, which hosted an event honoring Littlefeather in September, said that it was aware of claims going back decades about her background but that “the Academy recognizes self-identification.”Cruz said that her father, who was deaf and communicated with sign language or a chalkboard, had never told her about Native American relatives.She said she had grown up knowing she had Spanish and Mexican heritage but also believed for most of her life that she was “probably about a quarter” Native American because of her older sister’s professed identity.Cruz said she had even applied last November to become a member of the White Mountain Apache Tribe but was denied because the tribe could not find records to support her claim. But that all changed after her sister’s death. She recalled telling Keeler on the phone: “You’re right. She’s a fraud. She’s a phony.”Some scholars agree, saying Keeler’s research was persuasive.“Keeler proves Littlefeather was a troubled woman who made the stories of others her own,” said Liza Black, an associate professor of history and Native American and Indigenous studies at Indiana University, and a citizen of Cherokee Nation.She said that many Native people understand the complexity of identity because of multiple tribal affiliations, blood quantum restrictions and adoptions, but that “Littlefeather does not fall into any of these true, real and complex Native identities.”Keeler’s research to prove that people are faking Indian identities has prompted blowback from critics who said that her work casts a cloud of suspicion over all Indigenous people.It suggests that “Native people need to create a system where they have to prove who they say they are,” said Andrew Jolivétte, the director of Native American and Indigenous studies at the University of California San Diego, who describes himself as Creole of Opelousa, Atakapa Ishak, French, African, Irish, Italian and Spanish descent.“Why do American Indians have to do that and not other people?” he added.For Keeler, to be Native American or American Indian is to be part of a clearly defined political group that existed before European colonial contact.“We’re not just an identity,” she said. “We are actually a political class. We are citizens of nations. We are sovereign.” Her goal, she said, is to stop non-Indians from profiting off false claims of being Native American.“We want real change and we want real justice, and that’s not going to happen when it all comes down to actors playing us,” she said.For her part, Cruz said she had no regrets.“All I did was, I put a pebble out there,” she said. “And I let the water rip.” More

She worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, Frank Capra and John Ford, and she was known for her deft touch, particularly with action movies.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Dorothy Spencer was asked what it took to become a film editor, her answer was always the same: patience.In a five-decade career, she worked as an editor on more than 70 movies and received four Academy Award nominations across a range of genres: the Oscar-winning 1939 western “Stagecoach”; the espionage thriller “Decision Before Dawn” (1951); the costume epic “Cleopatra” (1963); and the disaster movie “Earthquake” (1974). She was sought out by directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for her deft touch, both with fight scenes and with subtle character moments.Bringing clarity to a confusing sequence might require sifting through 11 reels of footage, but Spencer easily got lost in her work.“I enjoy editing, and I think that’s necessary, because editing is not a watching-the-clock job,” she wrote in American Cinematographer magazine in 1974. “I’ve been on pictures where I never even knew it was lunchtime, or time to go home. You get so involved in what you’re doing, in the challenge of creating — because I think cutting is very creative.”Bill Elias, who worked with Spencer in the Universal Pictures editing department, spoke to her work ethic.“Every time I saw her,” he said in an interview, “she was sitting down at a Moviola” — the industry-standard film-editing machine in the era when the job required physically cutting and splicing film.In the movie industry, where important behind-the-camera roles have generally not been open to women, editing was an exception: Though the field was still dominated by men in Spencer’s day, there have been many notable women editors over the years, including Anne Bauchens (who edited Cecil B. DeMille’s films) and Thelma Schoonmaker (who edits Martin Scorsese’s). That might be because the job, which involved sorting and restitching, was somewhere between librarian and quilt maker — professions that were traditionally considered the domains of women.Spencer’s specialty was action movies, but one would not guess that from her short stature or from her quiet demeanor. “For some reason, I always seem to get assigned to pictures that are very physical,” she wrote in 1974.Not that she was complaining.“I like working on action pictures very, very much,” she said. “They’re more flexible, and I think you can do more with them.”“Stagecoach” (1939), the movie that made John Wayne a star, was one of four films for which Spencer was nominated for an Academy Award.Movie Poster Image Art/Getty ImagesDorothy Spencer, who was known as Dot, was born on Feb. 3, 1909, in Covington, in northern Kentucky, near the border of Ohio. She was the youngest of four children of Charles and Catherine (Spellbrink) Spencer. When she was a child, the family relocated to Los Angeles, where her older sister, Jeanne, began acting in movies (which she didn’t enjoy) and then became a writer and editor (which she did).Following her sister’s example, Dot started working in the film industry when she was a teenager — first as a junior employee at the Consolidated-Aller Lab, then as an assistant editor on silent movies like “The Strong Man” (1926) and “Long Pants” (1927), the first two features directed by Frank Capra.For four years beginning in 1937, Spencer worked with the editor Otho Lovering, cutting 10 films. She earned $5,000 in 1939 (about $102,000 in today’s dollars), but she still lived with her parents. That year marked the release of John Ford’s acclaimed western “Stagecoach,” which follows a group of strangers traveling together through perilous territory in the American Southwest in 1880. It was her most notable collaboration with Lovering — and not just because it made John Wayne a star.The editing of “Stagecoach” was regarded as masterly. Orson Welles said that he taught himself film editing by screening a print of “Stagecoach” 45 times at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Some aspects of the editing were groundbreaking: In his book “Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice” (2001), Don Fairservice pointed out that “Stagecoach” contained one of the earliest uses — maybe even the first — of the now-commonplace technique called a prelap, in which as one scene ends, dialogue from the next is already beginning on the soundtrack.Also innovative was the editing of the climactic action sequence, when Apache warriors attack the stagecoach. A fundamental law of film editing is the 180-degree rule: Although you can splice together a scene from diverse angles, you will confuse viewers if you cross an invisible 180-degree boundary, flipping the perspective so that a character who was facing left now faces right.In the attack sequence, Spencer and Lovering repeatedly and deliberately broke that rule. As David Meuel observed in his book “Women Film Editors: Unseen Artists of American Cinema” (2016), “by disorienting and confusing the audience, it created a closer bond between viewers and the characters in the stagecoach, who are themselves thoroughly disoriented and confused. So, rather than compromising the cinematic experience, this deliberate breaking of the 180-degree rule actually intensified it.”Spencer began working solo in 1941, and over the next decade she averaged two movies a year, working with notable directors like Hitchcock (“Lifeboat,” 1944), Elia Kazan (“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” 1945) and Ernst Lubitsch (five movies in which Spencer showed off her impeccable comic timing, including “To Be or Not to Be,” 1942).She made most of those films as a staff editor at the 20th Century Fox studio, a job she took in 1943 and kept for the next 24 years. During her tenure, the Hollywood studio system collapsed and the aesthetics of editing evolved; for example, dissolving from one scene to another went out of style.Spencer remained a constant, working with geniuses and journeymen, deferring to directors who had a vision in mind but offering creative flourishes when there were opportunities.“When you work with a new director who has never had any editing experience, he often asks for the impossible,” she wrote in 1974. “You can’t tell him it won’t work. You just have to do it his way and let him realize that maybe he was wrong.”In the soapy “Valley of the Dolls” (1967), directed by Mark Robson and based on Jacqueline Susann’s best seller about three young women struggling with the temptations of show business, she cut together some striking montages that nodded to the French New Wave. In one sequence, Patty Duke spits out water in the shower, does a multiple-exposure somersault, exercises on a rowing machine (with the top half and the bottom half of the screen deliberately out of sync) and gets married — a significant plot point, seen only in a black-and-white still photograph.Spencer needed all her unflappability and dedication on “Earthquake,” the eighth movie she made with Robson, which featured Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Richard Roundtree and the destruction of Los Angeles.Many scenes of seismic mayhem were filmed with multiple cameras, meaning that she had to wade through 200,000 feet of film. Her feedback spurred Robson to change his approach to filming the earthquake: Early in the shoot, she realized that “the shake wasn’t very noticeable because there was nothing in the foreground to serve as a reference for the degree of background movement.” So Robson made sure there was a prominent steady object to orient viewers.By the time of “Earthquake,” Spencer was mostly retired and living in the rural town of Encinitas, Calif. She edited one last movie — “The Concorde … Airport ’79,” another disaster film — but otherwise kept her distance from Hollywood; her death at 93, on May 23, 2002, went unnoticed in the press.Frank J. Urioste, a three-time Oscar nominee for film editing himself, said in an interview, “I wanted to work for her one time, just so I could say I got to work for Dorothy Spencer.”If he had, he might have learned a lesson about striving for perfection: “The more you see a film, the more critical you get,” she wrote in 1974. “But a paying audience sees the film only once, so perhaps they won’t catch it.” More

This true-crime tale, starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain, dramatizes the story of Charles Cullen, a nurse who was discovered to be a serial killer.Tobias Lindholm narrates a sequence from his film featuring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne.JoJo Whilden/Netflix No one knows how many patients Charles Cullen murdered in his career as a hospital nurse. Cullen confessed to 29 intentional deaths; some experts speculate the actual count may be as high as 400. Why poison the people entrusted to his care? Cullen, currently serving multiple life sentences at New Jersey State Prison, has yet to share his motives, and the “The Good Nurse,” a grim feel-bad drama by the director Tobias Lindholm (a co-writer of the feel-good Oscar winner “Another Round”) isn’t interested in scrounging up a guess. When the film’s Cullen, played by Eddie Redmayne, tries to explain himself, Lindholm muffles his voice with a police siren and wailing violins.Instead, Lindholm and the scriptwriter, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, set out to answer a more fundamental question: how did Cullen get away with it for 16 years across nine different hospitals? Were his employers too strapped for resources and personnel to notice — or were they so scared of lawsuits that they selfishly pushed out Cullen to become another community’s problem without so much as a single bad letter of reference, let alone a call to outside authorities?Jessica Chastain, right, with Eddie Redmayne in “The Good Nurse.”JoJo Whilden/Netflix The movie implies the latter. Lindholm and Wilson-Cairns, who were both raised in countries with nationalized health care, view the United States medical system as a business centered on having patients, not helping them. They’ve fictionalized the names of the hospitals, as well as the names of the dead, to give themselves leeway to reconstruct Cullen’s last place of work as a house of horrors shot in such dingy, dungeon-y grays by the cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes that Dr. Frankenstein would fit right in.Nearly every scene is an indignity: corpses left neglected in beds, loved ones grieving next to the sickly glow of a vending machine, managers haranguing their exhausted staff about the cost of coffee filters. Even the story’s heroine, a nurse named Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) who provides the only empathy in this miserable tale, is also one of its victims. The single mother of two is tirelessly devoted to her patients despite a heart condition that puts her at high risk for a stroke. Yet her own hospital won’t provide her with health insurance until she’s worked there for a year, a common plight for contract workers that Lindholm sees as a moral affront that falls somewhere between bitter irony and indentured servitude.There’s a touch of Gogol-esque satire in a subplot in which two investigating detectives (Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich) are thwarted by hospital bureaucrats who downplay deaths as “unexplainable incidents,” in the words of a chillingly placid risk manager (Kim Dickens), and, when low on excuses, put the cops on hold with punishing Muzak. Similarly, while Redmayne mostly plays his murderer at a low hum, he allows himself one scene to unleash his big mime energy, theatrically gasping and twitching and letting his long fingers crawl over his face. The moment is reminiscent of Anthony Perkins at the end of “Psycho,” but “The Good Nurse” offers no assurances that its danger is safely locked away. In the judgment of the film, Cullen is just a side effect of an institutional cancer.The Good NurseRated R for language. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix. More