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      A Season to Savor a Cherished Musical Again and Again (and Again)

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      Our critic didn’t set out to see “Caroline, or Change” seven times, but amid so much uncertainty the show turned out to be just what she needed.Settling into my seat at Studio 54, I let the sound design begin to transport me like a musical overture — the chittering of creatures and the bubbling of water, echoing from tall grasses and low haze on the edge of a Southern swamp.At each performance of “Caroline, or Change,” I look forward to this calming bit of preshow acclimation, even as a Confederate statue stands imposingly at center stage. And I keep my eyes peeled for the theater’s Covid safety enforcer patrolling the orchestra, arms crossed, scanning the audience for any unmasked faces. Spotting him calms me, too.When the lights dim, the statue is wheeled off, and in its place when they come up again is Caroline Thibodeaux, in the person of the astonishing British actor Sharon D Clarke, doing laundry in a Louisiana basement in 1963.I didn’t set out to see this musical masterpiece by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori seven times this season, but I have. For the record, I’d been scared to see it even once — scared the way you get when you cherish a work of art so fiercely that you don’t want to risk finding it diminished.It didn’t matter to my brain that theater’s habit of reinvention is one of the things I love about the form, or that this Broadway revival got rave reviews in London. “Caroline” is my favorite musical, and I was protective of my memory of it. I’d been mad since 2004 that George C. Wolfe’s original Broadway production ran only a few months. (Hold a grudge much? Yeah, I know.)Yet Michael Longhurst’s gorgeous iteration, for Roundabout Theater Company, turned out to be just what I’ve needed: a work of intricate beauty to savor again and again in this strange, uncertain season. After catching the first preview in October, I started telling people that I would see it three times a week if I could.Sounded like I was exaggerating. I was not.Inspired by Kushner’s own Louisiana childhood, “Caroline” is the fictional story of a divorced Black maid working for a Jewish family mired in grief and paying her what they know is too little to get by on. Comedy and fantasy leaven the ugliness and pain, but the music, the lyrics, the characters are complex. It’s not a show to be absorbed in one swoop.If this production had opened as planned in what was to have been the busy spring of 2020, there’s no way I would have seen it as many times as I have. Repeated viewing at any scale is a rare luxury for me, and the chance to do it to such an extent with “Caroline” is a direct effect of the pandemic. In an unsettled season with a cascade of postponements and cancellations, lower ticket demand and fewer productions mean bargain prices and, if you’re a theater journalist like I am, a lot more free evenings.So I have been taking advantage — which I feel guilty admitting, because of course I could have spent that same time seeing deserving new work that I missed completely. Instead I’ve been giving one show a closer, longer look than usual, watching extraordinary cast members deepen their performances so far beyond that thrilling first preview that I can’t honestly regret it.Domhnall Gleeson, with Aoife Duffin in the background, in Enda Walsh’s “Medicine” at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesCritics tend to see multiple productions of the same play — especially in seasons when there seem to be 47 stagings of “King Lear” or 18 of “The Tempest” — but not multiple performances of a single production, unless it transfers somewhere, usually to Broadway from Off Broadway or an out-of-town tryout. Even then, we only see the beginning of each run, while the production keeps changing after that.In theater — unlike films and TV shows, which stay frozen no matter how many times you watch them — the ritual of repetition coexists with change. As in other kinds of live performance, exact duplication is impossible, and also not the point. Evolution is the hope, which I’ve seen realized in “Caroline.”It has been quite frankly exhilarating to watch the company get tighter and tighter, especially at a time when public perception is that Broadway in particular and theater in general are a pandemic shambles. At the matinee just this Wednesday — the matinee! — Clarke gave a shattering performance, as alive to the text and the moment as any other I’d seen, but with elements new to me: an inflection, a movement, a vocal fillip at the end of a song. Such are the many layers of her character.“I love dissecting it. I love it,” Clarke exulted to me in an interview in October, the day after the first preview.Three months on, with the musical’s limited run set to close this weekend, it feels like she is still investigating.The other show I revisited this fall was Enda Walsh’s “Medicine,” but that wasn’t because I’d been wild about it initially. Walsh’s plays sometimes land with me and sometimes don’t. This one — chaotic, often funny, with Domhnall Gleeson’s understated performance at its heart — did not.I first saw it in November at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Six days later, in an interview, Gleeson told me that he had only just figured out how the show, which the company had performed elsewhere, worked in the St. Ann’s space. I gave it another shot because of that — and because his passion for another Walsh play, “The Walworth Farce,” prompted me to read it, an experience that left me wide awake when I finished it after 1 a.m., my every nerve ending taut.The second time I saw “Medicine,” in December, I watched it more deliberately, and it absolutely landed. Outside afterward, I walked through a patch of park and stood staring out at the East River, shaken. If the play had stayed in town longer, I’d have gone again.But when I see a show repeatedly in the same run — as I did with two of the plays in Phyllida Lloyd’s Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare trilogy, also at St. Ann’s — I tend to top out at three viewings.Zawe Ashton, from left, Charlie Cox and Tom Hiddleston in the 2019 Broadway production of “Betrayal” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s what happened with the Broadway productions of “The Cher Show” (where seeing Stephanie J. Block’s understudy at one performance made me realize Block’s particular power) and “Sea Wall/A Life” (where I listened ferociously to figure out what was sound design and what was sound bleed from outside). My curiosity about both was professional, though; going more than once was about reporting.Jamie Lloyd’s 2019 revival of “Betrayal,” starring Tom Hiddleston, was different. Its first preview blindsided me: a Pinter play that could make me cry? I became fascinated with the geometry of emotion in the production — with where Lloyd placed the characters on the set, and how their isolation signified. Determined to watch the staging from different angles in the house, I went five times in all.When I told Lloyd about that, during an interview toward the end of the show’s run, he inquired about the actors: “And have you noticed variations in their performances?” I still wonder which answer he might have been looking for: reassurance that the show had stayed lively or that it hadn’t flown off the rails.I would be a little heartbroken if “Caroline” had gone off the rails — always my worry when a production runs for a while. As it is, when it gives its final performance on Sunday, I plan to be there, seeing it for the eighth time.After that, I expect I’ll be in the market for a new obsession. I’m thinking maybe “Company.” More

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      11 of Sidney Poitier's Greatest Movies to Stream Now

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      As an actor and filmmaker, he strove to bring layered Black individuals to the screen at a time when that was rare.Sidney Poitier has died at age 94. A perennial Oscar nominee in the 1960s, Poitier became a movie star at a time when Hollywood tended to relegate Black actors to roles as servants, appearing for just a scene or two, often as comic relief. But he was rarely a supporting player, even at the start of his career. He took leads, specializing in a specific type: the educated, well-mannered, middle-class professional who had assimilated into the parts of white society willing to accept him.Throughout his first two decades in show business, Poitier’s films often promoted powerful messages about the ignorance of bigotry. His charisma and grace made him popular with white and Black audiences alike, and played no small part in easing some of the racial tensions in America — just by giving controversial issues an amiable advocate.These 11 Poitier movies span the ’50s to the ’90s, when he semiretired. They offer a good overview of not just the scope of his career, but of how the country changed during his 50-plus years in show business.1950‘No Way Out’After a relatively short stint as a New York stage actor, Poitier made an auspicious big-screen debut in 1950 with the writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s unusual hybrid of social drama and film noir. As a doctor struggling against the ingrained racism of his patients — including a career criminal played by Richard Widmark — Poitier allowed audiences to see what even accomplished Black Americans were facing every day, and how that kind of abuse could rattle a person’s psyche.Stream it on The Criterion Channel; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1957‘Edge of the City’In Poitier’s best 1950s film, he plays a longshoreman who becomes fast friends with a co-worker (played by John Cassavetes) who’s secretly AWOL from the military. Though one’s an upstanding citizen and the other’s a deserter, they are treated differently by their cruel boss (Jack Warden), who doesn’t like seeing any of his people getting chummy — especially not when one’s white and one’s Black. Less preachy than many of Poitier’s pictures from this era, “Edge of the City” has a bracing naturalism, born of its roots in the adventurous, progressive New York theater and television scenes.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1961‘A Raisin in the Sun’In a sublime bit of cultural kismet, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s masterpiece arrived when Poitier was the right age to tackle one of theater’s great characters: the pragmatic, prickly Walter Younger. Unlike the softer-edged, friendlier men Poitier had been portraying up to then, Walter doesn’t have much faith in the great dream of integration. He argues with his more idealistic family members about whether they should use a financial windfall to move into a white neighborhood, and his cynicism brings to light arguments that were being had by Black families everywhere in the ’50s and ’60s — except on the big screen.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.Poitier opposite Ruby Dee, a frequent co-star, in “A Raisin in the Sun.”Columbia Pictures/Alamy1965‘A Patch of Blue’Poitier won a best actor Oscar for “Lilies of the Field” (1963), which would become the first of a short string of films (including “To Sir, With Love” from 1967 and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”) in which he played handy, disarming individuals, helping white people improve their attitudes. Most of these movies are more interesting now for how they reveal the subtle racism of well-meaning left-leaning filmmakers, but “A Patch of Blue” is a refreshing exception, and the first movie to watch from this batch. As a kindly soul who helps a poor, abused blind teenager stand up for herself, Poitier is saintly but grounded. And the writer-director Guy Green’s adaptation of an Elizabeth Kata novel is unusually wise about how sometimes class matters as much as race in America.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1967‘In the Heat of the Night’In between his social-issue films, Poitier made plenty of genre pictures where race was a key element of the plot (as in the two-fisted 1958 adventure “The Defiant Ones,” and the 1966 western “Duel at Diablo”). The most popular of these is the best picture-winning “In the Heat of the Night,” in which the actor plays a brilliant Philadelphia homicide detective, Virgil Tibbs, who is drafted to help a small-town Mississippi police department crack a difficult case. Refusing to defer to his virulently prejudiced hosts, Tibbs carries himself as a truly free man, in ways that audiences back in 1967 found thrilling. He’d go on to play the character twice more: in “They Call Me Mister Tibbs!” (1970) and “The Organization” (1971).Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1967‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’The critical reputation of this Oscar-winning blockbuster hit has diminished in recent years. It’s been held up as an example of Hollywood’s heavy-handed social messaging — rather than as a groundbreaking interrogation of some purportedly open-minded white and Black families’ conflicted feelings about interracial marriage. Nevertheless, Poitier gave one of his most memorable performances in the film, using his charisma and wit to peck away at the underlying prejudices of the older generation, represented here primarily by characters played by the venerable movie stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The points that the director-producer Stanley Kramer and the screenwriter William Rose are making may be blunt, but Poitier delivers them in electrifying fashion.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1972‘Buck and the Preacher’After acting in films almost nonstop throughout the ’50s and ’60s, Poitier slowed his output from the mid-70s onward, in part because he began working more behind the camera. He made his directorial debut in 1972 with this offbeat western, which arrived toward the start of the blaxploitation era, when the movie industry began to realize the commercial potential of films about self-actualized Black protagonists. Joined by Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee, a frequent co-star, Poitier cast himself in “Buck and the Preacher” as a skilled scout having lightly comic adventures on the frontier. While attuned to 19th-century racial strife, this film is more an amiable entertainment than a hard-hitting commentary. As such, it has held up better than some of the star’s more incendiary projects.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.Poitier as a skilled scout in “Buck and the Preacher,” which he also directed.Columbia Pictures1974‘Uptown Saturday Night’Many of the Black-themed films that filled American theaters in the ’70s were raunchy and R-rated, but Poitier had hits in that era with three PG caper comedies, which he directed and starred in alongside Bill Cosby and a host of A-list African American entertainers. The first in this loose trilogy was “Uptown Saturday Night,” with Poitier and Cosby playing buddies who go on an all-night odyssey through their neighborhood — encountering colorful characters played by the likes of Belafonte, Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor — while searching for a stolen lottery ticket.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1975‘The Wilby Conspiracy’One of Poitier’s first feature films was a 1951 adaptation of Alan Paton’s best seller, “Cry, the Beloved Country,” an unusually forward-thinking exposé of the horrors of South African apartheid. Poitier returned to that theme 24 years later with “The Wilby Conspiracy,” a chase thriller in which he plays a revolutionary on the run from the authorities with a sympathetic white buddy (played by Michael Caine). Though essentially an action picture, the movie does a fine job of making injustice come alive. Poitier and Caine would later team up again for the 1997 TV movie “Mandela and de Klerk,” dramatizing apartheid’s last days.Stream it on Tubi; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play or YouTube.1992‘Sneakers’Poitier made some baffling professional choices during the ’80s and ’90s, when he rarely acted, and directed more than his share of duds. But it’s hard to fault him for joining Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn and River Phoenix for the ensemble adventure-comedy “Sneakers.” As a former C.I.A. agent aiding a team of well-meaning super-hackers, Poitier makes good use of his iconic screen presence, representing one of the last sparks of ’60s idealism in an increasingly synthetic age.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1999‘The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn’One of Poitier’s last screen performances was in this 1999 TV movie, in which he plays an intensely private, self-sufficient, elderly Georgian whose mental competency is questioned when he refuses to sell his land. Noah Dearborn is the kind of character Poitier played throughout his career — skilled, stubborn and deeply decent — but it says something about how the culture changed during his lifetime that his race is no longer the defining element in his story. That’s a direct consequence of how Poitier spent his career defying stereotypes and fighting to bring layered Black individuals to the screen.Stream it on IMDbtv; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube. More

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      LaChanze on Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind”

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      Since October, the actress has been performing the lead role of Wiletta Mayer in the Broadway debut of Childress’s 1955 play.“I started to scream but no sound come out … just a screamin’ but no sound …”Alice Childress wrote those words in her 1955 play “Trouble in Mind,” which the Roundabout Theater Company produced on Broadway this fall, in a limited run that will end on Sunday. The backstage comedy-drama, about the rehearsal process for an anti-lynching play, tackles racism in the theater industry, and that quote sums up what Black Americans have historically experienced — a consistent outcry to be heard by the dominant society that refuses to listen.In “Trouble in Mind,” I play Wiletta Mayer, a middle-aged actress who dreams of doing something “real grand … in the theater.” This is Wiletta’s first time as the lead in a play, not a musical. Surprisingly, this role in a play is a first for me as well, even though I have been performing in Broadway musicals for over 30 years. And it’s the perfect role, because of many of my career experiences: as an actress onstage, my length of time in this business, not having the opportunity to be considered a serious dramatic actress. I draw on all of them to step into Wiletta’s shoes.Now I go to the American Airlines Theater six times a week to portray a character I first came to know in college. I get to feel her life experiences as my own. I get to convey the things so many Black actors have expressed, but, as Wiletta says, “You don’t want to hear.”I first read “Trouble in Mind” — along with a wide range of works by Black American playwrights — as a student at Morgan State University in Maryland, one of our nation’s historically Black colleges and universities. Writers who used their plays as art and activism — Childress, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks and so many others — inspired me to become a performing artist. Studying their works ignited my ambition to delve as deep as a person can into the values that make an artist and activist. I wanted to feel their kind of power, their eloquence, and their courage. This courage, this fire that led Childress to produce such timeless words. In fact her play is being performed word-for-word in its original form.Childress was born in Charleston, S.C., in 1916, and died in Queens in 1994. She wrote and produced plays for four decades. She put up “Trouble” Off Broadway in 1955, four years before Lorraine Hansberry made history by debuting “A Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway, and was the first playwright I ever read to show authentic conversations between Black Americans, things that are said about whites when whites aren’t around. She exposed a Black cultural way of speaking that we call code switching, which the Urban dictionary defines as customizing “style of speech to the audience or group being addressed.” Childress cleverly demonstrates this in “Trouble in Mind.” She gives the audience a peek into what we, as Black actors, must do to accommodate white audiences.In the beginning of the play, Wiletta tells John, a young actor, how to act around white people, explaining there are certain things you must do:WILETTA But don’t get too cocky. They don’t like that either. You have to cater to these fools too …JOHN I’m afraid I don’t know how to do that.WILETTA Laugh! Laugh at everything they say, makes ’em feel superior.JOHN Why do they have to feel superior?WILETTA You gonna sit there and pretend you don’t know why?JOHN I … I’d feel silly laughing at everything.WILETTA You don’t. Sometimes they laugh, you’re supposed to look serious, other times they serious, you supposed to laugh.The stereotypes have changed over the years — now there’s the hyper-masculinity of Black men; the strong Black woman who doesn’t seem to have a need for vulnerability or tenderness; Black children whose innocence has been removed — but the same rules still apply.LaChanze with Brandon Micheal Hall (who plays the young actor John), Chuck Cooper and Danielle Campbell in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Trouble” was optioned for Broadway, but never opened there because Childress would not tone down the dialogue for the show’s white producers. The white director in the play, Al Manners, tells Wiletta, “The American public is not ready to see you the way you want to be seen because, one, they don’t believe it, two, they don’t want to believe it, and three, they’re convinced they’re superior.” I have also had white male directors debate with me about what a Black woman would say, feel, even how she would dress.Childress was unapologetic about her intentions, even if it meant her work wouldn’t make it to Broadway in her lifetime. I have debated this with other artists, wondering whether she was even more brave than brilliant. But we agree that she was a truth teller, a soothsayer.As a student and young actor, I was astonished that the canon of Black American writers and artists that so richly shaped my artistic life were mostly unknown and so poorly understood. The play’s director, Charles Randolph-Wright, the first Black director with whom I have worked as a leading actor on Broadway, shepherded this project for 15 years. He also read the play in college and fell in love with Childress’s unapologetic writing.He is the champion of “Trouble in Mind.” Charles, who studied at Duke University and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, and danced with Alvin Ailey in New York, was told many times that he could not make this happen. It is as if, with her words in the play, Childress wrote directly to Charles six decades ago, “I’m sick of people signifyin’ we got no sense.” Charles wants to give her the voice she should have had before he and I were born.In our many conversations, I am invigorated in speaking to him about Black representation in the entertainment industry. Working with a director who I feel lives in my head is thrilling. My private thoughts that I’m sometimes too shy to share, Charles boldly speaks them before I can even get them out. Much like Childress, Charles is committed to telling the truth in his work and in having multidimensional portrayals of Black people, not just the broad strokes we see. And quite frankly, we’re both tired of seeing these examples. In my own career, I’ve taken jobs I didn’t want to do, but I had to play these parts because I needed a job.I get to work with a dedicated, resilient Black director, and a fearless, committed cast. Childress wanted to speak for the have-nots, the invisibles, and to share her eloquence with the Broadway community and universities across the world. She used her play about Black actors to explore the values of America. But some people weren’t ready, and so many people never got to hear her words. Now I proudly stand on her shoulders, opening my soul to her and teaching my daughters and other lovers of truth about her brilliance.“Some live by what they call great truths,” Wiletta says in the play. “I’ve always wanted to do somethin’ real grand … in the theater … to stand forth at my best … to stand up here and do anything I want …”And that’s exactly what Alice Childress did.LaChanze won the Tony Award for best actress in a leading role in a musical in 2006 for “The Color Purple.” In 2019, LaChanze and her eldest daughter, Celia Rose Gooding, became one of the few pairs of mothers and daughters to perform on Broadway as leading actors in the same season. More

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      Harry Colomby, Teacher Who Aided a Jazz Great’s Career, Dies at 92

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      A chance encounter with Thelonious Monk led to a 14-year stint as his manager. After seeing a young Michael Keaton at a stand-up club, he became his manager, too.Harry Colomby was a schoolteacher with a love of jazz when he stopped by the Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village in 1955 to remind the drummer Art Blakey that he and his band, the Jazz Messengers, were scheduled to perform in a few days at the school where Mr. Colomby taught.While waiting, Mr. Colomby greeted the celebrated composer and pianist Thelonious Monk; they had met once before. “Oh, Harry. Yeah, I remember you,” Mr. Colomby recalled him saying, as detailed in the liner notes to the live 1965 Monk album “Misterioso.” “Say, you got your car here? You can drive me uptown?”In the car, Monk asked if Mr. Colomby was ready to quit teaching. “So I drove Thelonious to his house at 2:30 in the morning and at 3 a.m., a half-hour later, became his personal manager,” he wrote. “I’m still not sure how it happened.”Mr. Colomby’s younger brother, Bobby, the original drummer with Blood, Sweat & Tears and later a record producer and an executive at several record companies, said in a phone interview that Monk viewed Harry as someone who was “bright, honest and would work hard,” adding, “Harry told him, ‘I can’t promise you you’ll be rich, but you’ll be appreciated as an artist.’”Thelonious Monk in 1961. “I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician,” Mr. Colomby said. “He was potentially a symbol.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMr. Colomby died on Dec. 25 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 92. His brother confirmed the death.When Mr. Colomby began working with Monk, he was little known beyond the jazz cognoscenti and his unorthodox approach divided critics. He was also rarely heard in New York City because he lacked a cabaret card, which in those days was needed to perform in bars and nightclubs there; he had not had one since 1951, when it was revoked because of a drug arrest. In 1957, Mr. Colomby helped Monk get his card back. His subsequent extended engagement at the Five Spot in the East Village was the beginning of his emergence as a jazz star.For most of the 14 years that he managed Monk from obscurity to renown, Mr. Colomby taught English and social studies at high schools in Brooklyn, Queens and Plainview, on Long Island. “I had no illusion about how much money there is in jazz,” Mr. Colomby told the historian Robin D.G. Kelley for his biography “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original” (2009). “But I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician. He was potentially a symbol. He was symbolic of strength, stick-to-it-iveness, purity, you know, beyond music, beyond jazz.”Harry Golombek was born on Aug. 20, 1929, in Berlin, and fled with his parents and his brother Jules to New York City in the spring of 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. Family members who had immigrated earlier to the United States changed their surname to Colomby. His father, Saul, who became Fred in the United States, started a watchmaking company in Manhattan. His mother, Elsie (Ries) Colomby, worked there.After graduating from New York University in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Harry began his teaching career.As a manager, Mr. Colomby had only four clients: Monk; the singer and pianist Mose Allison; the comedian and impressionist John Byner; and the actor Michael Keaton.Mr. Byner said that he met Mr. Colomby in the early 1960s at a John F. Kennedy impression contest. “He was fantastic,” he said in a phone interview. “He knew everybody.” But they parted in 1986 because Mr. Colomby became focused on his business with Mr. Keaton.“He left me for another guy,” Mr. Byner said.Mr. Colomby first encountered Mr. Keaton, then a stand-up comic, performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood in the late 1970s.“What I saw in Michael was something original,” Mr. Colomby told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I also saw charisma onstage. Something about his look and timing was exquisite.”Mr. Colomby was also the producer or executive producer of starring vehicles for Mr. Keaton including the television series “Working Stiffs” (1979) and “Report to Murphy” (1982) and the films “Mr. Mom” (1983), “Johnny Dangerously” (1984) and “One Good Cop” (1991).In addition to his brother Bobby, Mr. Colomby is survived by his wife, Lee, and his son, the actor Scott Colomby. His brother Jules, who briefly ran a jazz record company, Signal, died in the 1990s.Mr. Keaton was Mr. Colomby’s client for about 25 years, and the two remained friends afterward.“What we shared was, we saw things in an offbeat way and we’d talk for hours and make each other laugh,” Mr. Keaton said in a phone interview. “I was probably the only stand-up whose manager was funnier than he was.” More

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      They Screamed, We Screamed. Now They’re in ‘Scream’ Again.

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      After more than a decade, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette return to take a new stab at the meta-horror franchise. They didn’t jump in right away.Twenty-five years after “Scream,” Neve Campbell is still seeing Ghostface everywhere she goes.This past Halloween, Campbell brought her children to a pumpkin patch in Hollywood, where they saw fellow visitors dressed in the groaning Ghostface masks worn by the murderers who have tormented her character in these undying horror movies.Though the costumed revelers didn’t seem to notice Campbell, she resisted her older son’s urgings to reveal that they were in the presence of Sidney Prescott, the intrepid “Scream” heroine she has played since 1996.“My 9-year-old hasn’t seen the movies, but he obviously knows about them,” Campbell said. “And he was like, ‘Mom, you should go tell them!’ I’m not going to walk over and be like, ‘Hey, do you know who I am?’” She laughed and added, “Although it probably would be fun for them.”Hearing Campbell’s tale, her two longtime “Scream” co-stars joked about how their connections to the films affected them at Halloween. Courteney Cox, who plays the strident TV personality Gale Weathers, said that she kept her own supply of Ghostface masks: “I bought five from Amazon.”David Arquette said it was even easier to remind people of his screen identity as the hapless officer Dewey Riley. “Why do you think I have this mustache?” he asked.At its release, “Scream” reinvented the slasher picture, populating it with photogenic cast members who were well-versed in the genre’s rules and tired of its clichés. It made a star of its screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, reinvigorated the career of its director, Wes Craven, and kicked off a cottage industry of imitators and parodies.The slow-burn success of the first movie elevated its lead actors: Campbell, a star of the TV drama “Party of Five”; Cox, enjoying her first flushes of success from “Friends”; and Arquette, a scion of a family of character actors. Three sequels bonded them for life, and Cox and Arquette fell in love and got married.Cox and Arquette in the first “Scream,” released in 1996.Dimension FilmsArquette and Cox found themselves with a storyline that echoed their real-life split.Brownie Harris/Paramount PicturesBut following “Scream 4” in 2011, the series seemed to grow tired. By then, Cox and Arquette had separated and would later divorce; Craven died in 2015. A “Scream” TV series only loosely connected to the movies ran for three years on MTV and VH1 but gained little cultural traction.Now, after a decade-long absence from theaters, a new “Scream” — with no numerals or subtitles, from new directors and new screenwriters — will be released on Jan. 14. It is both a reboot and a sequel, introducing new characters (played by Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid and others) to an audience equally accustomed to franchise do-overs like “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and art-house horror films like “The Babadook” and “Midsommar.”The latest “Scream” also brings back Campbell, Cox and Arquette as the founding characters, who have grown well into adulthood and been altered in different ways by their past encounters with the various Ghostface killers. For the actors, the proposition of returning to “Scream” is, well, a double-edged one: a chance to rekindle old connections and remember what made the previous films great — tempered by the fear that they will squander the series’ legacy if they cannot duplicate past glories.When she was approached about the new movie, Cox said, “I was really like, What? They want to do another ‘Scream’?” But as she considered it further, she thought, “Why not go back to something that was such a huge part of my life and play a character that was fun? They must have a real vision for this if they want to bring back the franchise and take the risk.”As they spoke in a video interview at the end of November — Campbell and Cox together in one window, Arquette by himself in another — the actors shared a tentative intimacy, like old classmates encountering each other at a high school reunion. They traded goofy laughs as each claimed to have forgotten key details about the past “Scream” films and made self-deprecating jokes about their accomplishments.Asked how she was hired, Cox said her manager suggested her. Or: “It could be that my manager said, ‘She’s not that good and I don’t think you should hire her.’ But who knows?”What they agreed on about the first film was the brilliance of Williamson’s convention-busting script and their admiration for Craven, who previously made seminal horror movies like “The Last House on the Left” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” The cast was largely shielded from behind-the-scenes conflicts between him and Dimension Films, which produced the original “Scream” series and had reservations about Craven’s work on the first movie. Campbell said of the director, “He was very gentle and kind and quiet.”Jenna Ortega is among the new cast members trying to escape Ghostface.Brownie Harris/Paramount Pictures“Scream” withstood a fourth-place opening weekend in December 1996, overshadowed by the animated hit “Beavis and Butt-head Do America.” Several days later, Campbell got a call from her agents. “I thought, Uh-oh, something’s wrong,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘It’s at $30 million.’” Her voice dropped to a whisper: “I was like, ‘Is that bad?’” In fact, the film would run until the summer and gross more than $100 million in the United States alone.A sequel was already in production and released in December 1997. (“It was college next, wasn’t it?” Campbell asked. “You went to college,” Arquette affirmed.) “Scream 3” followed quickly in 2000, adding more layers of metacommentary as the characters’ brushes with death continue to inspire a hastily made movie-franchise-within-a-franchise called “Stab.”With each entry, the “Scream” stars said, they never felt the pressure was on them to sustain the overall quality of the series. “In television, when I go out and do something new, it’s petrifying,” Cox said. “You feel nothing can live up to what you’ve done before. But in movies, we get the script and come to play our characters.”But Williamson said that “Scream 4” left him and Craven feeling burned out. “The studio was second-guessing themselves and kept giving note after note after note,” the writer said. “I finally was like, ‘Guys, I don’t know what I’m writing anymore — I’m just typing.’”After Craven’s death, he said, “in my heart, it was over. Without Wes, I didn’t think there would be a ‘Scream.’”Years went by, and the Weinstein Company, which owned Dimension Films, collapsed after its co-founder Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual assault and harassment by numerous women. (He has since been convicted and sentenced for sex crimes and faces further charges.)The rights for “Scream” were eventually acquired by Spyglass Media Group, which partnered with Paramount to produce a new entry written by James Vanderbilt (“Zodiac”) and Guy Busick (“Ready or Not”) and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of the filmmaking group Radio Silence (“Ready or Not,” “V/H/S”).Williamson, an executive producer on the new “Scream,” said that the project had his blessing. “My first thought was, Wait, they’re not going to ask me to write it? How dare they,” he said with a laugh. But after hearing the creative team’s plans for the film, he said, “They had it all figured out. I’m like, ‘OK, this works.’”Naturally, this “Scream” sees another Ghostface once again plaguing the fictional California town of Woodsboro, requiring the return of Sidney, Gale and Dewey. But bringing back the actors who played them was hardly a certainty.The biggest obstacle, they said, was the absence of Craven: “I don’t see how that happens — emotionally but also practically,” said Campbell. “Who’s going to do it as well as Wes?”But one by one, the actors were placated by the film’s directors, who wrote them letters praising their past work and urging their involvement.Campbell in the original “Scream,” directed by Wes Craven. She and her fellow stars had a hard time imagining another movie without the filmmaker, who died in 2015.Dimension FilmsCampbell in the new “Scream.” She consulted with the original screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, before agreeing to return.Brownie Harris/Paramount Pictures“It was weirdly the easiest and the hardest thing to do,” Gillett said. “It’s so easy to express our admiration for them as actors and for Wes and his work.” The challenge, he said, was that “there was a lot on the line and a lot of pressure.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Betty White Recalled as a Trailblazer With a Love for Life

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      “The world looks a little different now,” said the actor Ryan Reynolds, who was one of many to pay tribute to the actress who died on Friday.Television stars, comedians, a president and seemingly the entire internet paid tribute on Friday to Betty White, the actress whose trailblazing career spanned seven decades and who died on Friday at her home in Los Angeles.President Biden said that Ms. White had “brought a smile to the lips of generations of Americans.”“She’s a cultural icon who will be sorely missed,” he wrote on Twitter. “Jill and I are thinking of her family and all those who loved her this New Year’s Eve.”The actor Ryan Reynolds, who co-starred with Ms. White in “The Proposal,” a 2009 romantic comedy, wrote on Instagram that “the world looks a little different now.”He said Ms. White had excelled at defying expectations.“She managed to grow very old and somehow, not old enough,” Mr. Reynolds wrote. “We’ll miss you, Betty. Now you know the secret.”Many paid tribute to Ms. White as a performer who had been ahead of her times, championing equity causes before they became popular.In 1954, Ms. White was criticized for having Arthur Duncan, a Black tap dancer, on her variety show, the account for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center wrote.“Her response: ‘I’m sorry. Live with it,’” the center wrote. “She then gave Duncan even more airtime. The show was canceled soon after. Rest well, Betty.”The journalist Dan Rather wrote that Ms. White had been beloved because she “embraced a life well lived.”“Her smile,” he wrote. “Her sense of humor. Her basic decency. Our world would be better if more followed her example. It is diminished with her passing.”The comedian Bob Saget called Ms. White “a remarkable talent” who was witty, kind, funny and “full of love,” especially for her husband.“She always said the love of her life was her husband, Allen Ludden,” who died in 1981, Mr. Saget wrote on Facebook. “Well, if things work out by Betty’s design — in the afterlife, they are reunited. I don’t know what happens when we die, but if Betty says you get to be with the love of your life, then I happily defer to Betty on this.”Mel Brooks, the actor and filmmaker, wrote on Twitter that it was “too bad we couldn’t get another ten years of her always warm, gracious, and witty personality.”The actor George Takei described Ms. White as a “national treasure,” adding, “A great loss to us all.”“Our Sue Ann Nivens, our beloved Rose Nylund, has joined the heavens to delight the stars with her inimitable style, humor and charm,” Mr. Takei wrote, referring to Ms. White’s roles on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Golden Girls.”He added in another tweet, “When midnight strikes tonight, let us all raise a toast to Betty.” More

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      Betty White, a Beloved Sitcom Actress, Is Dead at 99

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      Whether it’s reporting on conflicts abroad and political divisions at home, or covering the latest style trends and scientific developments, Times Video journalists provide a revealing and unforgettable view of the world.Whether it’s reporting on conflicts abroad and political divisions at home, or covering the latest style trends and scientific developments, Times Video journalists provide a revealing and unforgettable view of the world. More

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      Clifton Collins Jr. Hopes ‘Jockey’ Makes Him a Familiar Name

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      Every time Clifton Collins Jr. boards a flight midproduction, the possibility of the aircraft crashing petrifies him. “I’ve got to finish the film,” the actor thinks to himself midair.Once the movie is completed, turbulence, ups and downs? None of that matters, because he knows “I got another film in the can, especially if I’m hopeful that it’s going to be good,” he said. “I don’t care if it goes down. I’d feel bad for the other people, but me personally, I’m OK. I finished.”Collins, 51, has maintained such intense focus for more than 30 years as a character actor embellishing the ensembles of renowned directors like Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic”), Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Babel”) and Quentin Tarantino (“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”), though you might know him better for scores of appearances on television series like “Westworld” and “Ballers.”Now the actor is breaking through, finally, with a rare lead role. In Clint Bentley’s heartfelt indie, “Jockey” (in theaters Dec. 29), Collins plays Jackson Silva, an aging horseman confronting physical ailments and potential fatherhood. The visceral performance, born of immersive preparation, has already earned him a best male lead nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards, a first for him, and a special acting prize at Sundance. It’s not his only role in a prominent picture this season — Collins plays a carny in Guillermo del Toro’s lush noir “Nightmare Alley” — but it may be the one that makes the biggest difference.Collins, pictured here with Moises Arias in “Jockey,” worked as a grunt at a racetrack so that other riders would see him as one of their own.Adolpho Veloso/Sony Pictures Classics, via Associated PressDuring a recent interview at a restaurant in the Studio City section of Los Angeles, where he wore a fittingly unpretentious Pink Floyd T-shirt, Homeboy Industries cap and cozy flannel shirt, he explained, “I’ve had other leading roles, just not like this.”The distinction isn’t only about screen time but also about his continuing collaboration with Bentley, a first-time director, and the producer Greg Kwedar, who cast him in his directorial debut, “Transpecos,” a 2016 thriller in which he played one of three Border Patrol agents forced into an illicit drug-trafficking mission. For “Jockey,” Collins expanded his investment, and put his money on the line as an executive producer.To play Jackson, Collins dropped some weight from his already thin build to match the scrawny frame of a jockey. But that was only the superficial transformation. At Turf Paradise, the Phoenix racetrack where the film was shot, he became a grunt, hanging around every day and helping with the horses, to rid himself of the performer label in the eyes of the real riders.“I didn’t want to be seen as an actor. I didn’t want to be treated special,” he explained, adding, “To be embraced by the very people you are portraying is the biggest gift that any actor could ask for.”When it comes to the integrity of a character, Collins goes all in, however small the part. For the 2001 prison drama “The Last Castle,” he consulted multiple speech therapists before agreeing to play a character with a speaking impediment, even if it was only a supporting role. On another job, the 2009 comedy “Sunshine Cleaning,” he nearly refused to embody an amputee because the director hadn’t thoroughly considered the details of the fictional man’s condition.His requests weren’t self-aggrandizing but a way of respecting the experiences of individuals for whom these circumstances aren’t a costume but their truth. “You can’t just desecrate the challenges real people out there are trying to overcome,” he said.The actor was inspired by his grandfather, a self-made entertainer who appeared in the western “Rio Bravo” and “was the only person who said, ‘Yes, you can do it,’” Collins said.  Carlos Jaramillo for The New York TimesOn “Jockey,” Collins shares scenes with actual jockeys whom he tried to guide through the cinematic process with patience and space for spontaneity. The affecting banter in a hospital scene with an injured jockey, played by a real rider, Logan Cormier, resulted from the camaraderie he built over time with nonactors.“You might take it for granted when he’s being generous alongside Clint Eastwood” in “The Mule,” Bentley said. “But to have that same generosity with somebody who’s never acted before and in some cases is never going to act again speaks volumes to his quality as a person and artist.”Collins, who was born and raised in the Los Angeles area, also channeled memories of his father, who, when sober enough, would take him and his sister to his trailer in Inglewood, Calif. When his father met friends at Hollywood Park, a racetrack nearby, he would occasionally let Collins tag along and taught him how to bet on horse races from a tender age. The final speech Jackson delivers in the film — about Jackson’s father being an angry man who only showed affection while drunk or gambling — came precisely from these bittersweet childhood memories.Del Toro turned to Collins for “Nightmare Alley” (their second collaboration, after the kaiju epic “Pacific Rim”) because the actor “seems incapable of anything but being truthful and present and brimming with ideas,” the director said via email. Collins “has a cadence, rhythm and delivery that no one else has,” del Toro added. “He has cinema in his bloodline and his eyes. His eyes command the camera and our attention completely.”For the actor, wandering through the set of “Nightmare Alley” felt like stepping into the bygone realm of his maternal grandfather, Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez, a proud Tejano and self-made entertainer whose career began in traveling tent shows, or carpas. The vaudeville-esque Mexican American diversions, like La Carpa Garcia, were popular during the first half of the 20th century, and Collins’s grandfather mostly performed for other Latinos working the fields in Texas. He would go on to work as a contract player for John Wayne, most notably in the seminal 1959 western “Rio Bravo.”Where you’ve seen Collins: In “Transpecos,” above.Samuel Goldwyn FilmsIn the drama “One Eight Seven.”Warner Bros. Opposite Amy Adams in “Sunshine Cleaning.” Lacey Terrell/Overture FilmsAnd in the series “Westworld.”John P. Johnson/HBO“My grandpa was the only person who said, ‘Yes, you can do it,’ and all it takes is one voice, one person you respect, to say it,” said Collins, who first tried to go college for engineering before dedicating himself full-time to acting, with his grandfather’s blessing.Collins said that it was his work on “Capote” (2005), in which he played the death-row inmate Perry Smith, that convinced Gonzalez-Gonzalez he’d have a future in acting. “He was really worried if I was ever going to be successful or make it in this business,” Collins said.One evening while shooting “Nightmare Alley” in Toronto, del Toro encouraged Collins to write a screenplay about Gonzalez-Gonzalez. Collins began writing that very night.Gonzalez-Gonzalez himself received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011, five years after his death and decades after he first sought it. Instinctively switching to Spanish whenever quoting his grandfather, Collins recalled: “When he got cancer, the second he told me, ‘Mijo, I’ve had a life bigger that I could ever dreamt of, the only thing I never got was that pinche star,’ and I said, ‘Grandpa, I promise you I’m going to get you that star.’”The promise was kept thanks in part to the advocacy of Samuel L. Jackson, whom Collins considers a father figure. The two starred together in the 1997 crime drama “One Eight Seven,” in which Collins played a young gangbanger opposite Jackson’s high school teacher, and have remained close friends ever since.Collins embodies the “there are no small parts, only small actors” truism, Jackson said, citing “the preparation, the attention to detail, the love of the craft.” Collins is “the kind of actor that demands your best and gives you his.”Onscreen, Collins has walked on both sides of the law, as a border agent on several occasions, and many others as men behind bars, like Cesar in “One Eight Seven.” But there’s a double standard for Latinos, he said, when it comes to roles that, while psychologically three-dimensional and rich, are not positive portrayals or seem to perpetuate stereotypes. With “One Eight Seven,” mainstream critics discredited him, the actor said, by suggesting the production had simply found a real criminal for the part, as if he couldn’t have been an actor who worked on the role. Meanwhile, he said, the ALMA Awards, which honor American Latinos in entertainment, wouldn’t consider his performance because they only highlight what they consider to be edifying representation.“How come Robert De Niro and Al Pacino can get awards for playing gangsters of their communities? But when we play gangsters of our communities, they say, ‘Don’t do that. We got to be the good immigrants.’”Collins said he and other Latino actors faced a double standard with roles that are psychologically rich but not necessarily positive. Carlos Jaramillo for The New York TimesOne of his most notable criminal characters was the morally conflicted robber Jack “Bump” Hill in the mini-series “Thief,” for which he received an Emmy nomination. The show’s creator, Norman Morrill, recalled that Collins wasn’t enthusiastic about doing more television work. The actor admits his hesitation came from arrogance. He had romanticized the struggling actor persona.Convinced of his magnetism, Morrill persuaded him to join the cast opposite Andre Braugher. “A lot of actors need words to communicate; the really great ones don’t. Cliffy’s silence sizzles,” the showrunner said. “The camera can just sit there and you go, ‘I’m going to watch this.’ That’s about as great an accolade anybody can get.”Bentley also saw the silent fire within, notably in the very last scene of “Jockey,” when Jackson is walking away after a defining moment. “It’s about three minutes long on his face, and he’s going through this whole color wheel of emotions,” the director said. “You could not write dialogue that would get across what he’s giving the audience. We get exactly what he’s going through.”With “Jockey” and “Nightmare Alley” behind him, a determined Collins has shifted focus back to polishing the script about his grandfather. Having honed his storytelling skills for years helming music videos for country performers like the Zac Brown Band (“Chicken Fried”) and Jamey Johnson (“High Cost of Living”), he also aims to direct it.“That’s the only singular goal I have,” Collins said. “I can’t see past that.” More