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    A Hallowed London Jazz Club Comes to Life Onscreen

    The new documentary “Ronnie’s” tells the story of a venue that reshaped the city’s jazz scene, and the mysterious musician who lent it his name.Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club has been an enduring beacon of musical genius in London. Any self-respecting jazzhead had to make the pilgrimage to the venue during its 1960s heyday. Musicians, too: Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald played it, along with Buddy Rich and Dizzy Gillespie.Scott, one of its benevolent owners, was as hallowed as the establishment itself, but remained a somewhat mysterious figure throughout his life. A charming tenor saxophonist with a warm demeanor and great comedic timing, he also had a gambling addiction and endured bouts of depression. Even those closest to him didn’t feel like they connected with him.“He was a very hard person to know,” Paul Pace, the club’s current music bookings coordinator, said in an interview. “He was a very quiet, private man.”Scott died in 1996 at the age of 69. The venue he opened with a fellow saxophonist, Pete King, is still holy ground among jazz supper clubs in the United Kingdom, and “Ronnie’s,” a new documentary getting a wider release in the United States this week, offers a multidimensional view of Scott and the nightclub through the perspective of journalists, friends and musicians who knew him — and a host of live performance footage. The film celebrates how the spot with narrow hallways and a tiny stage housed all sorts of grand performances, including Jimi Hendrix’s last gig before his 1970 death. And it reveals that the secret of the venue’s success largely was Scott, himself, who drew in patrons like he was an old friend who just happened to know the best players of his era.The tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins first went to Ronnie Scott’s in the 1960s as part of a deal that allowed American musicians to play British venues and vice versa. That partnership was brokered by King, who served as the club’s manager and saw the need to book established jazz artists to draw bigger crowds. His work paved the way for other notable artists, like the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and the multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk, to play there.The club is still active today, drawing a range of artists from different scenes.Greenwich Entertainment“A lot of people hadn’t seen me in Europe,” Rollins said in a phone interview. “It was my first time in London, so I had a good time just looking at the scene. Every club has its own demeanor, and playing there was a wonderful experience. That was the place to go — Ronnie Scott’s club.”Scott, whose jazz career started in his teens, helped open the club in 1959 after a trip to New York City, where he heard Charlie Parker and Davis play at the Three Deuces along East 52nd Street. He was so taken by the jazz emanating from the New York scene that he wanted to replicate the feeling at home. “To walk in this little place and hear this band with this American sound we’d never really heard in person before — amazing,” Scott says in the film.With assistance from a £1,000 loan from Scott’s stepfather, he and King opened the club as a basement venue on Gerrard Street in Soho, a neighborhood with coffee shops and after-hour venues that catered to British counterculture. Before then, the space had been used as a tea bar and restroom for taxi drivers. Scott and King saw it as a place where British jazz musicians could work out material in a safe space — all strains of jazz were welcome — and get paid fairly, not a small thing in that era. The club, which moved to a bigger space on Firth Street in 1968, is known as the birthplace of British jazz.Yet the narrative wasn’t all sunny: Ronnie Scott’s had good and bad times financially, and sometimes teetered on the verge of closing until some last-minute lifeline kept the lights on. Then there was the issue of Scott’s gambling. “When things were really desperate,” King says in the film, “I used to come to work and there were guys in suits with notebooks there in the afternoon, making notes of how much the piano was worth, and how much the tables and chairs were worth. We were very close to just having to forget it all.”The film’s director, Oliver Murray, heard many similar stories about Scott while making his documentary. “Multiple people said to me that if he was able to gamble the club on certain occasions, he would’ve gambled away the club and then been absolutely devastated,” he said in an interview. “But that’s the complexity of the guy, just a true jazz man in that sense. He does live up to the stereotype of the musician with demons.”Ella Fitzgerald onstage at the club in a scene from “Ronnie’s.”Greenwich EntertainmentMurray was brought into the project by one of its producers, Eric Woollard-White, who frequented the club. One of Murray’s goals was to humanize Scott for a younger audience less familiar with the club’s golden era. “I wanted to make something that was like a passing of the torch from one generation to the next,” Murray said. The story felt especially ripe for this moment, when venues are in jeopardy because of ongoing pandemic challenges.Ronnie Scott’s remains vital, and “cultivates so much talent,” he explained. “It’s not necessarily even just the people that play, but it’s giving people in London a platform to see the very, very best, and that in itself raises the caliber of what’s going on in the city.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    ‘Clue’ Review: A Whodunit That Looks a Lot Like a Board Game

    This Paper Mill Playhouse production is a welcome throwback to an era of physical comedy.“Clue,” the campy 1985 film based on the popular board game, became a cult classic because of an all-star cast delivering delicious mile-a-minute quips. A new stage production, adapted by Sandy Rustin from Jonathan Lynn’s screenplay, with additional material by Hunter Foster and Eric Price, may not be the out-and-out hoot the film is, but the show is a very fun, very silly 1950s-set whodunit that strikes some contemporary parallels on the way to its grand reveal.As the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings drone on a television set, the eager-to-please butler, Wadsworth (an agile Mark Price), prepares for the arrival of his boss’s six guests, invited under undisclosed circumstances and each assigned aliases for the night.There’s a handsy shrink, Professor Plum (Michael Kostroff); the vivacious madame, Miss Scarlet (Sarah Hollis); and Mr. Green (Alex Mandell), a gay Republican who is hiding the fact that he didn’t vote for Eisenhower in the last election. These three play straight against the production’s broader comics: the dimwitted Col. Mustard (John Treacy Egan, with excellent timing); Mrs. White (Donna English), a multiple divorcée; and Mrs. Peacock (Kathy Fitzgerald, hilarious), a senator’s wife with a drinking problem who dresses like an American Girl doll. (Jen Caprio did the costumes.)They soon discover that their ties to Washington, ranging from the morally murky to the criminal, have landed them on the wrong end of a blackmailing scheme. After their host, Mr. Boddy (Graham Stevens), arrives, he adds McCarthyism blacklisting to their worries. The lights turn off, things — specifically a candlestick, a wrench, a lead pipe, a revolver, a rope and a dagger — go bump in the night, and Mr. Boddy winds up dead, with the dwindling survivors scrambling to make sense of it all.“Is this about the Red Scare?” Mr. Green whimpers. Released in the Reagan era, the film was a pointed satire of conservative hypocrisy. Though the stage version begins with a strong undercurrent of paranoia, which reads believably as both Covid-19 apprehensions and a paralyzing fear of outing yourself as possibly cancelable, it mostly drops politics once the “big scary mansion” high jinks get underway. The plot’s whodunit structure is a surefire farce setup, but given the state of U.S. affairs, the production could have used a stronger political backbone.Casey Hushion directs with a steady eye toward possible laughs, and Lee Savage’s set conveys an appropriately stuffy mansion, with hidden passages and falling chandeliers. The finely tuned cast scurrying about to convince a stray cop (Kolby Kindle) that the propped-up corpses are merely having a good time is a welcome throwback to an era of physical comedy that’s been mostly usurped by sarcasm.Wadsworth’s conclusive explanations — a clever take on the film’s notorious alternate endings, which played at different theaters — make a case that what was then dismissed as a marketing gimmick was actually an early predecessor of today’s multiverses. As those left standing rush to blame one another, in different possible scenarios, they mirror our own increasingly selfish desire to think our perception as being the correct one. Like the board game, and life itself, the play winds up making only one perception true — but thank goodness this one’s fun.ClueThrough Feb. 20 at the Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N.J.; papermill.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    ‘Alice’s Wonderland Bakery’: Recipes for Real Life, if Not Real Kitchens

    A new Disney show teaches children useful lessons in the guise of a cooking show. The recipes are less practical (unless you stock dancing dodo eggs).Everyone eats.That simple truth, which has persuaded even quarreling heads of state to sit down together, has now inspired a new television series that aims to teach another frequently fractious group — children ages 2 to 7 — cooperation, compassion and cultural literacy. Disney has taken on this challenge in “Alice’s Wonderland Bakery,” a novel blend of sweetness and spice that uses globally inspired food to help little viewers master resilience and adaptability.Debuting on Wednesday on the Disney Channel, Disney Junior and the streaming service Disney+, the show takes its brightly colored universe and rapid-fire surprises from “Alice in Wonderland,” the company’s fantastical — and fantastically food-filled — 1951 animated feature film of the classic Lewis Carroll story.“We had been looking at doing something with ‘Alice’ for a while,” Joe D’Ambrosia, the senior vice president for original programming and general manager at Disney Junior, said in a telephone interview. “And we also had really been trying to find a cooking show for preschoolers.”This half-hour animated series is not, however, a traditional cooking show with recipes to follow. Although D’Ambrosia said he hoped it would inspire families to bake together, you won’t find ingredients like dancing dodo eggs and shrinking powder in your pantry. Instead, the dishes the series features — some entirely fanciful, like dwindling dewdrop cake, and others based on the real world, like gingerbread — become vehicles for creativity and problem-solving. The show’s Alice may concoct something delectable so she can make a new friend, comfort an old one or show how a situation, just like a recipe, can be approached in more than one way.Alice, who relies on the magical talking cookbook of her great-grandmother, the original movie’s heroine, “uses food as essentially her superpower,” said Chelsea Beyl, the series’s executive producer and showrunner. “This is, you know, how she connects with all these curious and peculiar characters.”Some of those characters have hardly changed since the 1951 film’s premiere. The series’s Cheshire Cat, with his indelible grin and magenta stripes, and Alice’s feline companion, Dinah, could have leapt right out of one of the old movie’s frames. Others have transformed or become diverse versions of the figures that inspired them. (This is a multicultural Wonderland.) Alice herself is not the film’s preadolescent English schoolgirl but a very American-seeming 7- or 8-year-old, running her own bakery inside a giant teacup. (In Wonderland, all things are possible.)“In the movie, you know she’s thinking,” said Frank Montagna, the co-executive producer and art director for the show, which uses computer-generated animation to create a heightened version of the film’s world. “And so we wanted to really home in on that part of our Alice — that, you know, she’s always trying to figure things out.”That entails trial and error for her, including at least one spectacular failure: In the pilot, the birthday cake Alice has baked for Princess Rosa, a new character who is the daughter of the formidable Queen of Hearts, has magic sprinkles that unexpectedly fly onto all the royal guests, causing the disgusted queen to end the palace festivities. (Pandemic-weary children will probably identify with the disappointment of a canceled birthday party.)To redeem herself and cheer up Rosa the next day, Alice hosts an intimate unbirthday celebration, a concept found in both the 1951 film and Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.” This cake isn’t ordinary, either.Alice “is very, very curious,” said Libby Rue, 13, who is making her TV debut as the heroine’s voice. “Her curiosity sometimes gets the best of her, but she is very kind, and she loves making her friends happy by baking.”Other series characters get into trouble, too, like Alice’s best friend, Fergie, a descendant of the White Rabbit who appears in the book and the film. In one episode, Fergie struggles by himself to help Alice bake a huge order of pies and then lies, as a small child might, about what he did wrong. When the truth comes out, Alice reassures him that it’s always all right to ask for help.Alice’s friends on the show include her best friend, Fergie, who is descended from the White Rabbit in the original book and the film, and Hattie, whose habits reflect Japanese traditions.DisneyIn creating Fergie and the other Wonderland characters, the concern was “to really be reflective of today’s young audiences,” D’Ambrosia said, which also meant giving them origins that Carroll might never have dreamed of.Rosa and the Queen of Hearts, for instance, look and sound Hispanic, practicing customs inspired by Cuba’s. (Because the characters come from Wonderland, their habits are sometimes inspired by the real world but are not, technically, of it.) Dad Hatter, patterned after the host of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and his dapper son, Alice’s friend Hattie, reflect Japanese traditions — a nod, Beyl said, to the importance of tea in that country’s culture.Later in the 25-episode first season, the show will introduce a caterpillar family whose influences are Persian. (Parents will be relieved that the lead caterpillar, familiar to Wonderland fans, is blowing bubbles instead of smoking a hookah.) The show’s creators have also made some formerly male characters female, and the queen herself is now merely a diva instead of a homicidal tyrant.Bringing diversity to Carroll’s work “means a lot,” said Eden Espinosa, who voices the queen and is herself the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, “because I feel like it is acknowledging that these classics — although there might not have been representation in them when they were, you know, brand-new — they transcend culture lines.”The food also reflects the ethnicities the series embraces. In an episode in which Alice and Princess Rosa bake apple crumble pastelitos, this Cuban pastry functions as a preschooler’s version of Proust’s madeleine, reminding the King of Hearts (Rosa’s grandfather, voiced by the Cuban American singer Jon Secada) of the wife he misses so much. Another episode highlights mochi, Japanese rice cakes.But at a time of national concern over childhood obesity, the executive producers have taken special care not to build the entire series around desserts.“We have a lot of episodes that are about, you know, Fergie growing veggies in his garden, which I think is really fun for kids to see and maybe want to do,” Beyl said. Even in references to sweet recipes, she added, “we rarely say ‘sugar.’”Young viewers will also watch Alice make dishes that include vegetables or fruits, like a carrot calzone, grape gazpacho, huevos habaneros and kuku sibzamini (Persian potato patties).“It was really cool to not only bring the cultural elements into the food, but the music, the costumes, the casting and the set as well,” Beyl said.For example, “The Baking Song,” written and composed by the show’s music director, John Kavanaugh, recurs throughout the series in different ways: The queen sings a salsa version, while the caterpillar episode has a version featuring Persian instruments. The series also incorporates tunes from the 1951 movie, like “The Unbirthday Song,” and other work by Kavanaugh, such as “Food for Thought,” which conveys series themes like flexibility. (Alice believes there’s a recipe for anything or, as she puts it, “Where there’s a whisk, there’s a way.”)The musical emphasis — this month, Walt Disney Records will release a digital soundtrack album from the show — also called for singing talent, so in addition to Espinosa, who has starred in “Wicked,” the voice cast includes Broadway veterans like James Monroe Iglehart (“Aladdin”) and Mandy Gonzalez (“Hamilton”). Several comics are featured, too, like Donald Faison, Craig Ferguson and the “Saturday Night Live” alumni Ana Gasteyer, Bobby Moynihan and Vanessa Bayer.According to Montagna, “We really tried to push the comedic performances,” while also “pushing the boundaries of what preschool entertainment can be.”“We didn’t want people to compare this with any storybook environment or other Disney shows,” he added. “We wanted it to stand out as Wonderland.” More

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    John Williams, Hollywood’s Maestro, Looks Beyond the Movies

    The composer of “Star Wars” and “Jaws,” who turned 90 this week, says he will soon step away from film. But he has no intention of slowing down.UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, when film production came to a halt and recording studios shuttered, John Williams, the storied Hollywood composer and conductor, found himself, for the first time in his nearly seven-decade career, without a movie to worry about.This, in Williams’s highly ritualized world — mornings spent studying film reels and improvising at his Steinway; a turkey sandwich and glass of Perrier at 1 p.m.; afternoons devoted to revisions — was initially disorienting.But in the months that followed, Williams came to relish his freedom. He had time to compose a violin concerto, immerse himself in scores by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, and go for long walks on a golf course near his home in Los Angeles.“I welcomed it,” Williams said in a recent interview. “It was an escape.”Now the film industry is back in action, and Williams, who turned 90 on Tuesday, is once again at the piano churning out earworms — pencil, paper and stopwatch in hand.Even as he plans to slow down his film scoring, Williams is focused on conducting and composing concert music for collaborators like Yo-Yo Ma.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesBut Williams, whose music permeates popular culture to a degree unsurpassed by any other contemporary composer, is at a crossroads. Tired of the constraints of film — the deadlines, the need for brevity, the competition with ever-blaring sound effects, the work eating up half a year — he says he will soon step away from movie projects.“I don’t particularly want to do films anymore,” he said. “Six months of life at my age is a long time.”In his next phase, he plans to focus more intensely on another passion: writing concert works, of which he has already produced several dozen. He has visions of another piece for a longtime collaborator, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and he is planning his first proper piano concerto.“I’m much happier, as I have been during this Covid time, working with an artist and making the music the best you can possibly make it in your hands,” he said.Yet the legacy of his more than 100 film scores — the “Star Wars,” “Jaws” and “Harry Potter” franchises among them — looms large, to say nothing of his fanfares, themes and celebratory anthems for the likes of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “Sunday Night Football,” the Olympics and the Statue of Liberty’s centennial.The Music of John WilliamsThe composer of “Star Wars” and “Jaws” has been a fixture in the film industry for half a century.Beyond the Movies: The 90-year-old Hollywood maestro will soon step away from film to focus on another passion: writing concert works.In the Concert Hall: Williams’s symphonic pieces tend to be skillful but less imaginative than his film scores. Here are five examples.A Source of Inspiration: “Star Wars” is rooted in the classics, and so is Williams’s music for the soundtracks. Listen to these comparisons.“He has written the soundtrack of our lives,” said the conductor Gustavo Dudamel, a friend. “When we listen to a melody of John’s, we go back to a time, to a taste, to a smell. All our senses go back to a moment.”Williams’s music harkens back to an era of Hollywood blockbusters, when crowds gathered at theaters to be transported. He has excelled at creating shared experiences: instilling in every member of an audience the same terror about a menacing shark, conjuring a common exhilaration in watching spaceships take flight.The pandemic has robbed Hollywood of some of that magic. But Williams’s admirers say his music, with its appeal across cultures and generations, is an antidote to the isolation of the moment.“We need him more now than we’ve ever needed him before,” said Hans Zimmer, another storied film composer.Leatherbound scores for a small sampling of the many films Williams has worked on, including the “Harry Potter” series and “War of the Worlds.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesWilliams — a fixture in the industry since the 1950s, with 52 Academy Award nominations, second only to Walt Disney, and five Oscars — recognizes that he might be the last of a certain type of Hollywood composer. Grandiose, complex orchestral scores, rooted in European Romanticism, are increasingly rare. At many film studios, synthesized music is the rage.“I feel like I’m sort of sitting on an edge of something,” he said, “and change is happening.”Born in New York, Williams became interested in composing as a teenager, entranced by the orchestral scores and books brought home by his father, a jazz percussionist.After stints as a studio pianist in Hollywood in his 20s, he found work as a film and television composer, making his feature film debut at 26, in 1958, with “Daddy-O,” a comedy about street racing.In the 1970s, Williams’s work caught the attention of Steven Spielberg, then an aspiring filmmaker searching for someone who could write like a previous generation of Hollywood composers: Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bernard Herrmann.“He knew how to write a tune, and he knew how to support that tune with compelling and complex arrangements,” Spielberg recalled in an interview. “I hadn’t heard anything of the likes since the old greats.”The two began a partnership that has spanned a half century and more than two dozen films, including “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Schindler’s List” and “Jaws,” for which Williams’s two-note ostinato became a cultural phenomenon.“When everyone came out and said ‘Jaws’ scared them out of the water, it was Johnny who scared them out of the water,” Spielberg said. “His music was scarier than seeing the shark.”Williams pointing to a sketch of a Tyrannosaurus rex chase scene from “Jurassic Park.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIn 1974, when he was 42, Williams suffered what he called “the tragedy of my life” when his first wife, the actress Barbara Ruick, died suddenly.“It taught me who I was and the meaning of my work,” he said, but added that the next several years were difficult, and he struggled as a single parent of three children with a busy career. “Star Wars,” which premiered in 1977, brought a new level of fame and marked the beginning of a four-decade-long project that has encompassed nine films, dozens of musical motifs and more than 20 hours of music.George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” said Williams was the “secret sauce” of the franchise. While the two sometimes disagreed, he said Williams did not hesitate to try out new material, including when Lucas initially rejected his scoring of a well-known scene in which Luke Skywalker gazes at a desert sunset.“You normally have, with a composer, giant egos, and wanting to argue about everything, and ‘I want it to be my score, not your score,’” Lucas said. “None of that existed with John.”Williams’s career as a conductor also took off. In 1980, he was chosen to succeed Arthur Fiedler as the leader of the Boston Pops. Over the next 13 years in the position, he worked to promote film music as art, and forged friendships with leading classical artists.In 1993, when he was working on “Schindler’s List,” he called the renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman. “I hear a violin,” he said, according to Perlman. To this day, Perlman added, the aching theme from that film remains the only piece that audiences specifically request to hear at his concerts.Perlman said Williams had a talent for conveying the essence of disparate cultures: evoking Jewish identity in “Schindler’s List,” for example, or Japanese traditions in “Memoirs of a Geisha.”“His music has a fingerprint,” he said. “When you hear it, you know it’s John.”Williams’s bookshelves at home, with a bust of Aaron Copland and a copy of Cole Porter’s lyrics. “I hadn’t heard anything of the likes since the old greats,” Steven Spielberg says.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesWilliams’s concert works, more abstract than much of his film music, have been less widely embraced. But Ma, for whom Williams has written several pieces, said curiosity and humanity anchored his works. In 2001, moments before Ma was to begin a recording session of “Elegy,” a piece for cello and orchestra, he recalled that Williams told him he had written the music in honor of two children who had been murdered.“I think of him as a total musician, someone who has experienced everything,” Ma said. “He knows all the ways that music can be made.”Inside his studio on the back lot of Universal Studios Hollywood, Williams is surrounded by mementos: a miniature bust of Beethoven, vintage movie posters chosen by Spielberg and, on a coffee table, a yellow bumper sticker reading, “Just Say No.” A model of a dinosaur, a nod to “Jurassic Park,” watches over the piano.At 90, he is astute and energetic but soft-spoken, looking much the same as he has the past two decades: black turtleneck, faint eyebrows and a wispy white beard.This year, he will complete what he expects to be his final two films: “The Fabelmans,” loosely based on Spielberg’s childhood, and a fifth installment in the “Indiana Jones” series.“The Fabelmans” has been particularly emotional, he said, given its importance to Spielberg. On a recent day, he recounted, the director wept as Williams played through several scenes on the piano.Williams said that he expected “The Fabelmans” would be the pair’s final film collaboration, though he added that it was hard to say no to Spielberg, whom he considers a brother. (Spielberg, for his part, said that Williams had promised to continue scoring his films indefinitely. “I feel pretty secure,” he said.)“Music has been my oxygen,” Williams says, “and has kept me alive and interested and occupied and gratified.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAt the end of his film career, Williams is making time to pursue some longtime dreams, including conducting in Europe. His works were once considered too commercial for some of the great concert halls. But when he made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2020, players asked for photos and autographs.The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter said she was disappointed that there had been skepticism about his music.“Everything he writes is art,” said Mutter, for whom Williams wrote his second violin concerto, which premiered last year. “His music, in its diversity, has greatly contributed to the survival of so-called classical music.”And his peers say he has helped establish, beyond doubt, the legitimacy of film music. Zimmer, who wrote the music for “Dune,” said he is “the greatest composer America has had, end of story.” Danny Elfman, another film composer, called him “the godfather, the master.” Dudamel drew comparisons to Beethoven.Williams is more modest, describing himself as a carpenter. “I don’t know if it’s a passion,” he said of composing, “as much as an almost physiological necessity.”He said he still gets a thrill when people tell him that his music has been formative in their lives: He was delighted several years ago when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said he had insisted on playing “Star Wars” at his bar mitzvah, over his parents’ objections.Williams said he tries not to fixate on age, even as hundreds of ensembles around the world — in Japan, Australia, Italy and elsewhere — host concerts to mark his birthday. And he said he does not fear death; he sees life as a dream, at the end of which we awaken.“Music has been my oxygen,” he said, “and has kept me alive and interested and occupied and gratified.”Williams recalled a recent pilgrimage to St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany, where Bach once worked as a cantor. He listened intently as a pastor described the efforts to protect the great composer’s remains during World War II; he marveled at the dedication to preserving Bach’s legacy.On his way out of the church, he paused. An organist was filling the grand space with the hymn-like theme from “Jurassic Park.”Williams, beaming, turned to the pastor.“Now,” he said, “I can die.” More

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    Troy Kotsur Makes History as the First Deaf Actor to Get a Nomination

    A couple of weeks ago in The Hollywood Reporter, Troy Kotsur compared the opportunities for deaf actors like himself to one small hair in a beard’s worth of roles for those who can hear.With Sian Heder’s “CODA,” which stands for Child of Deaf Adults, he plucked it and made history. He’s the first deaf actor to be nominated for an Oscar. In 1987, Marlee Matlin became the first deaf performer to be nominated; she went on to win the Oscar, for “Children of a Lesser God.” Matlin happens to be Kotsur’s co-star in “CODA.”Kotsur plays Frank Rossi, a deaf fisherman, gruff yet surprisingly tender, trying to keep his business in Gloucester, Mass., afloat with the help of his teenage daughter, Ruby (Emilia Jones), the only hearing member of their family. Ruby has served as the interpreter for Frank, her mother, Jackie (Matlin), and her brother, Leo (Daniel Durant) for most of her life. But she longs to go to music school and become a singer, a dream her parents can’t understand. (“If I were blind, would you paint?” Jackie asks.) And the thought of having to navigate life on their own is terrifying.The critical response to Kotsur’s portrayal has been overwhelmingly warm. Owen Gleiberman of Variety called him “an extraordinary actor”; Steve Pond of The Wrap declared him “a treasure as Matlin’s gloriously profane husband”; and Peter Travers of “Good Morning America” said he was “hilarious and heartbreaking.”The role has also earned Kotsur 31 nominations, including a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, the first Screen Actors Guild nod for an individual deaf male actor and now an Oscar for best supporting actor. So far he has tallied nine wins, including a Gotham Award and a Spotlight Award from the Hollywood Critics Association.In a statement on Tuesday after the Oscar nominations were announced, Kotsur said he was stunned, explaining, “I can still remember watching Marlee win her Oscar on television and telling friends I was going to get nominated one day and them being skeptical. I would like to thank everyone for this huge honor.”Despite the scarcity of jobs for deaf actors, Kotsur is not exactly a stranger to the limelight. In 2003, he shared the role of Pap with a hearing actor in the Tony-nominated 2003 American Sign Language adaptation of “Big River” on Broadway. More recently he helped to develop a sign language for the Tusken Raiders in “The Mandalorian.”Still, “I’m so glad that they recognized me,” Kotsur told The Hollywood Reporter of the accolades that have come his way, “not because I’m deaf but because I’m a talented actor.” More

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    The nominees for best picture.

    “Belfast”“CODA”“Don’t Look Up”“Drive My Car”“Dune”“King Richard”“Licorice Pizza”“Nightmare Alley”“The Power of the Dog”“West Side Story” More

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    Beyoncé Gets Her First Oscar Nomination for 'King Richard'

    Look out, Lin-Manuel Miranda — Beyoncé has entered the chat.The 40-year-old singer, already the female artist with the most Grammy wins, picked up her first Oscar nomination on Tuesday for best original song for “Be Alive,” a pulsing power ballad that she wrote with the songwriter Dixson for “King Richard,” a biopic about the father of Venus and Serena Williams.The song, which plays during the film’s end credits and is accompanied by archival footage of the real Williams family, features inspirational lyrics that recount the journey the Williams sisters have taken to the top of the tennis world.Backed by a drum-heavy beat and layered vocal harmonies, Beyoncé, in soaring voice, intones:Look how we’ve been fighting to stay aliveSo when we win we will have prideDo you know how much we have cried?How hard we had to fight?Other lyrics speak to the importance of Black pride, family and sisterhood, with a chorus that underscores the importance of having the singer’s “family,” “sisters” and “tribe” by her side.The song, with its blunt, steady beat and vocal pyrotechnics, “insists on the community effort behind the triumph,” The New York Times’s chief pop music critic Jon Pareles wrote. Clayton Davis of Variety compared “Be Alive” to the Common and John Legend song “Glory,” which concluded Ava DuVernay’s 2014 historical drama “Selma.” That song took the Oscar.Though this is Beyoncé’s first Oscar nomination, it’s hardly the 28-time Grammy winner’s first film crossover. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role as Deena Jones in the 2006 film adaptation of the Broadway musical “Dreamgirls”; starred as the R&B singer Etta James in the 2008 biopic “Cadillac Records,” about the pioneering Chicago blues label; and voiced Nala in the 2019 live-action remake of “The Lion King,” in addition to recording music for that film’s soundtrack.But to take home her first statuette, she’ll have to overcome some stiff competition. Miranda, the “Hamilton” creator who needs only an Oscar to attain EGOT status, was nominated for “Dos Oruguitas,” a Spanish love song about two caterpillars that he wrote for Disney’s animated musical “Encanto.” The other nominees in the category are Billie Eilish and Finneas, for the James Bond song “No Time to Die,” which won the Golden Globe; Van Morrison, for “Down to Joy” from “Belfast”; and “Somehow You Do” from “Four Good Days.” More

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    The nominees for best actress.

    Nicole Kidman, “Being the Ricardos”Olivia Colman, “The Lost Daughter”Kristen Stewart, “Spencer”Jessica Chastain, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”Penélope Cruz, “Parallel Mothers” More