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      With ‘In the Heights,’ Jimmy Smits Sings a Little but Gave It a Lot

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      He doesn’t have a musical theater background, so he worked hard to make one line — “Good morning, Usnavi” — ring out. Now that’s how he’s being greeted.Why shouldn’t your morning stop at a bodega be worthy of a break-into-song moment? That’s the winning way “In the Heights” introduces Jimmy Smits’s character: He strolls into the corner store run by Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) to pick up his café con leche while cheerfully crooning, “Good mooorning, Usnavi!” In a musical filled with all sorts of twisty wordplay from the lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda, somehow this simple line is the most sublime — and hey, who knew the Emmy-winning actor from “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “L.A. Law” could carry a tune?Directed by Jon M. Chu, the screen adaptation of the Broadway show casts Smits in the supporting role of Kevin Rosario, a car-service owner who’s determined to put his wavering daughter, Nina (Leslie Grace), through an expensive college education. But is that his dream and not hers? The characters have an awfully complicated clash that Smits was eager to take on, but first he had to make it through “Good morning, Usnavi,” the line that loomed above all others. Last month over Zoom, Smits told me just how much went into that brief moment.These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Are you prepared to have people singing “Good morning, Usnavi,” to you for the rest of your life? Have people already started?I’m actually OK with that! On the family text thread that my kids and everybody’s on, that’s the way they’ll say hi now: Instead of, “Hey tio” or “Yo pops,” they’ll go, “Good morning, Usnavi.”That’s your very first line in the movie. I would imagine there was a lot of pressure to nail that moment in cast read-throughs, since people don’t really know you as a singing actor.That’s when you get, “Have you been in a musical before? I didn’t know you sang.” And I don’t! I don’t sang with the S-A-N-G. There’s some people in that cast, they can sang — I just tried to hold my own. All I know is that when I got through those first couple of lines, everybody was smiling. There were no people looking down at the scripts.Still, you’ve done a little bit of in-character singing before in episodes of “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “The West Wing.” And I know you did a cameo on “Cop Rock” back in the day, but I couldn’t find out whether they made you sing or not.You’re embarrassing the hell out of me. No, I didn’t sing on that.Jimmy, you appeared on “Cop Rock” and you didn’t sing? What’s the point?That’s exactly right. Oh, man! Even on this, I had six lines that were musical, and I had four different vocal coaches. Warner Bros. was telling my agents like, “Really? Does he have to have two vocal coaches on each coast?” Yeah, because I wanted to be on point as much as possible!And even though it’s just a few sung lines, they do convey a lot.I appreciate you saying that because even with the three lines that are in that song, we did this whole character-based, psychological approach. It’s a switch-up from the rhymes that are happening, and it’s more your traditional thing. Originally I was like, “I’m going to make this count, and I want it to be big!” And they were like, “No, no, no. Let’s talk about the character and what’s going on there.” It was part of the exact same things that I had to do with the back-and-forth dramatic scenes in the family.Smits grew up in Brooklyn, but from age 10 to 12, he lived in Puerto Rico: “Everything that I am now as an adult relates to that experience.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesWhat did you do on set to get yourself into that musical mode?I like to use music a lot, especially when I’m in prep for something, and I was playing my boy Carlos Gómez [who originated the role onstage]. I was playing “Inutil” over and over again, which is the song he sings from the Broadway version. So Carlos, he was with me the whole time.And he does a pretty great “Good morning, Usnavi,” too.Pretty great? It’s incredible!Do you remember when you first met Lin-Manuel Miranda?There was a friend of mine who worked at the Drama Book Shop who told me, “There’s these kids from Wesleyan doing stuff in the basement here. Jimmy, they’re the real deal.” And then a couple years later, I was at 37 Arts with my lady, seeing “In the Heights” Off Broadway, and we realized, “Oh, this is the kid that Stu was talking about. This is the new wave.” Next thing I know, he’s spitting rhymes for Barack and Michelle.I remember telling them when they went to Broadway, “Anything you need from me …” He gave me a call one day and said, “We’re going to do the commercial for the show. Could you do the voice-over?” “Come on, man. Yes, I’m there!” During my first meeting with Jon, I actually referenced Michelle Yeoh in terms of “Crazy Rich Asians,” and I was saying, “I want to do what she did for that film. I want to help in any way I can.”You grew up in New York. Could you relate to what these characters are going through?I grew up in Brooklyn, but I lived all over New York, and we moved to Puerto Rico from 10 to 12. I went from listening to Motown and R&B and the Beatles to boom, I’m in Puerto Rico listening to Trio Los Panchos. Everything that I am now as an adult relates to that experience: Where do you fit in? I think all of the moving around has something to do with me doing what I do.Smits in “In the Heights.” He didn’t even get to sing when he appeared in a cameo on “Cop Rock.”Macall Polay/Warner Bros.You had to learn how to play different sides of yourself to different types of people.Absolutely. And in Puerto Rico, it was traumatic because I was the Yankee! But everything that I hold dear to me in terms of culture comes from that time that I can trace back. The speech that Kevin has about shining shoes? I shined shoes in the plaza in Ponce, I know what that was like as a kid and how it resonates. Even when I do Shakespeare and Shaw and Pinter, there are parts of me culturally that make all of those roles unique, but here there are things that I can really relate to because I can channel my tios, my uncles, and my parents and all their expectations and hopes and dreams on a wonderful level.How did your family feel about you becoming an actor?Well, I don’t come from a musical or theatrical kind of background. It’s not like my parents took me to the movies — I wound up doing the bulk of my work on television, and I think it has something to do with the fact that the TV set was the thing that we coalesced around as a family. But they were always very supportive, and I joke around about the fact that they would come see me do something like a Shakespearean play and go, “That was nice. Why does everybody talk like that?”Did you know as a kid that you wanted to do this?I knew pretty early. I went to George Gershwin Junior High School in Brooklyn, and if you did good in school, you could be part of the musical — “Damn Yankees” and “Carousel” and all of that stuff. After that, I went to Thomas Jefferson High School in a not-great neighborhood in East New York, and there happened to be this English literature teacher who I’m still very friendly with and he took us to plays. Seeing Raul Julia and James Earl Jones for the first time, they probably were the most inspirational to me, because I saw the parallels there: “That guy is from the same place Mom is from, and he speaks with an accent!”And then there was another professor who was working at Brooklyn College, Bernie Barrow, who encouraged me. He said, “You’re showing this interest in the classics and you probably could go to L.A. and be the crook of the week on ‘Hill Street Blues,’ but you should think about graduate school and adding some tools to the toolbox.” So he helped me navigate applying to all these schools and I wound up at Cornell, which had a very small, almost monastic M.F.A. program. But for me, that was joy. That was the right thing to do, even when it was 6 a.m. and I was at the ballet bar, wondering if I made the right decision.If you were singing and dancing at Cornell and aspiring to be in those musicals in junior high, then this is something of a full-circle moment for you.Absolutely. This is the whole thing about the business, you’ve got to keep your instrument in tune. When I took all those dance and voice classes, it’s not like it went to the wayside, but I wasn’t using that as much here in L.A. because I was doing television. But I should have still been doing it. I kick myself about that now.See, that’s just more proof that they should have let you sing on “Cop Rock.”Exactly! More

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      Father and Son Return to the Stage, Together. Again. No Regrets.

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      Reed and Ephraim Birney are in the Berkshires, reprising their roles in “Chester Bailey.” They discuss what it’s like to play off — and fight — each other.In his Instagram profile, Ephraim Birney describes himself as “the black sheep out of work actor in a family of black sheep working actors.” Born and raised in New York, the 24-year-old actor is the elder child of Reed Birney (a Tony winner in 2016 for his performance in “The Humans”) and Constance Shulman (“Doug,” “Orange Is the New Black”). His little sister, Gus Birney, has appeared in the TV series “The Mist” and “Dickinson.” Ephraim Birney has booked jobs, too — “Gotham,” “The Americans” — but not quite as many.“The weird thing isn’t that I’m an actor,” he said during a recent video call. “The weird thing is that I’m not working as an actor.”But Ephraim Birney, who was seated next to his father in the kitchen of their summer home in the Catskills, is working now. On Friday, the father-son actors begin performances indoors (indoors!) of “Chester Bailey,” Joseph Dougherty’s heart-raking two-hander at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass. (The show, running through July 3, is being advertised as this summer’s first indoor theater event in the Berkshires approved by the Actors’ Equity Association.) Ephraim Birney stars as the title character, a Navy Yard worker who suffers a devastating injury in 1940s Brooklyn, and his father plays the doctor assigned to his care. The drama explores illusion, reality and the comfort imagination can provide.“As sad as this play is, and it is deeply sad,” Reed Birney, 66, said, “there’s something so beautiful about how these two men have affected each other.”The Birneys first took on these roles two years ago, for the Contemporary American Theater Festival in West Virginia. After a long pandemic-prompted break, spent mostly swimming and gardening at their upstate house, they have returned to them, with the same director, Ron Lagomarsino. During our hourlong call, the Birneys spoke about the vagaries of the business, learning to treat each other as colleagues and getting back to theater, together. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.For “Chester Bailey,” were you recruited as father and son?EPHRAIM BIRNEY No, it was a thing that I had auditioned for, on my own.REED BIRNEY I knew Ron Lagomarsino, the director, because I’d done “Hay Fever” with him in 1982 at the Kenyon Festival Theater. We’d stayed friends. So I wrote Ron, and I said, “My boy’s coming in for your show.” Suddenly I got an offer. I was not really interested in doing a play again for a while. But then I thought, if I say no to working with Ephraim, I will regret it for the rest of my life.EPHRAIM And you’ve regretted it ever since.When you started rehearsing the play in 2019, what was it like to encounter each other as co-stars?REED We were both nervous about that. But we both were really impressed at how very quickly we became colleagues.EPHRAIM It’s like your second home, a rehearsal room. It’s what you’ve always said. And it feels very, very cool that I get to play in that same room.REED One of the last days we were in West Virginia, we were driving back from the theater. And he said to me, “Thank you for treating me as an equal.” He’s so beautiful in the play. It’s really something to see. It’s a beautiful, beautiful performance, really simple and heartbreaking.Reed, when did you know you wanted to be an actor?REED I was about 5. I remember saying to a group of grown-ups that I wanted to be an actor. They all laughed nervously and exchanged looks like, oh dear, oh dear. There might have been a week where I wanted to be a fireman. But the rest of the time, it was an actor.EPHRAIM I’m still looking forward to being a fireman.When you knew that Ephraim wanted to be an actor, did you ever try to talk him out of it?REED Not ever. Because everybody had tried to do that to me. Anybody who wants to do it should try it. They’ll figure it out on their own. If there comes a point where they say, “Oh, this isn’t for me,” I don’t think there’s any shame in leaving. But I also know it’s one of the greatest professions in the world. Ephraim and Gus, they were always aware of the times when you don’t work or you lose a part or you get a bad review. Certainly, they saw that stuff. But I think they also saw how fantastic the community is.EPHRAIM When I started expressing interest in acting, you said, “Well, don’t you see how miserable I am?” And I said, “But I see that you’re still doing it, despite being so miserable.”The father-son duo first performed “Chester Bailey” in West Virginia in 2019. For their return engagement, they will perform at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., starting Friday.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesDid you try to give Ephraim any advice?REED Even now, I haven’t gotten that television series that suddenly takes me over the brink. So it’s an ongoing thing. If my career is an example, it’s a long ride. You have to keep your eye on the prize.EPHRAIM I remember getting [an audition] for that Hugh Jackman movie with the robots, “Real Steel.” I remember coming to you, and I was like, “I don’t think there’s a world where I get this. How do I even attempt to try?” And I remember you saying, “Because that’s the job, and one of those times, it’ll be your turn.Were there parts your dad played that really stood out for you?REED Most of the plays I did when they were little, they couldn’t come see. They never saw “Blasted” [a famously upsetting play by the English playwright Sarah Kane that involves nudity, rape and cannibalism]. Connie saw it and told them all about it. When I came home from the theater, our daughter said, “Do we see your heinie in that play?”EPHRAIM I was like, “I want to eat a baby in a play!”What is it like going back to “Chester Bailey”?REED Once we were finally back, I was like, “Oh, this feels incredibly familiar.” But I also am very aware that because the world has changed so much, the resonance of the play has changed, too, and the need for imagination and the need for the arts and the need for human contact, those things are much more profound in the production than they were before.“Chester Bailey” involves a physical altercation. What’s that like to perform?EPHRAIM That’s just a regular Tuesday for us!REED I don’t think Ephraim and I have ever had a fight. So it’s really interesting to suddenly be in the middle of one. That’s one of the things that acting does — it takes you places you don’t usually go. He’s pretty good at it, too. I wouldn’t want to get in a fight with him.What do Connie and Gus think of the play?EPHRAIM They love it. They really do. Mom is not someone who will pretend to like something.REED Yeah, Mom is a tough critic. And Gus couldn’t stop crying. There were a lot of tears.Is there a play the whole family could do together?REED People weirdly say, “You guys should do ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” That would be incredibly weird. That’s kind of gross.EPHRAIM People forget what that play’s about. We could do a fun version of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” But I don’t think anyone wants to see us to do that.REED I don’t think the play has been written, honestly. More

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      Challenges Aplenty Onstage in London, With Some Fun Along the Way

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      As London venues reopen, theatergoers can choose to reckon with works like “The Death of a Black Man” or enjoy frothier fare from George Bernard Shaw.LONDON — Intimations of mortality have weighed heavily on our minds during the pandemic, so what better work to reanimate the National Theater than “After Life,” a play set in a mysterious space between this world and the next?The director Jeremy Herrin’s often startling production, staged in conjunction with the theater company Headlong, is the first in the National’s smallest auditorium, the Dorfman, for some 15 months, and has had its run extended to Aug. 7.The source material is an acclaimed 1998 film of the same name from the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, here adapted by the prolific Jack Thorne, of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” renown.The play is thematically challenging material to offer audiences recently well acquainted with the possibility of illness, or worse. And yet the abiding achievement of Herrin and his expert design team, headed by the Tony winners Bunny Christie (sets and costumes) and Neil Austin (lighting), is the delicacy they bring to what could be fairly heavy going. You’re aware throughout of the high stakes involved for the so-called “guided,” who are asked to select a single memory to take with them for eternity into the afterlife.The takeaway from an evening at “After Life,” though, is the visual wit and delight of a stage dominated by filing cabinets reaching to the ceiling that allows for a sudden cascade of falling petals and permits one conversation to occur with the characters perched halfway up the back wall.Anoushka Lucas in Jack Thorne’s “After Life,” adapted from the film by Hirokazu Kore-eda and directed by Jeremy Herrin at the National Theater’s smallest auditorium, the  Dorfman.Johan PerssonThe cast includes the veteran June Watson in robust form as an anxious woman ceaselessly fretting about her cat and the fast-rising Luke Thallon as a tremulous guide left to navigate a dreamscape that has a fablelike quality, even if the writing feels not quite fully developed and could deliver greater emotional force.The demands placed upon audiences are increased, and so are the rewards, across town at the Hampstead Theater. The north London playhouse has reopened after five months with “The Death of a Black Man,” a play that was originally scheduled last year as part of a 60th-anniversary series of revivals of titles first seen there.Premiered in 1975, the three-character drama offers a rare glimpse of the work of Alfred Fagon, a Jamaican-born writer and actor who died of a heart attack in London in 1986, age 49. Dawn Walton’s expert production, on view through July 10, leaves no doubt as to what was lost with Fagon’s premature death, even as it hints at the resonance for today of a play steeped in the specifics of the 1970s.Mention is made of the film “Last Tango in Paris” and of Princess Anne’s looming marriage to Captain Mark Phillips, and we hear pulsating snatches of “The Harder They Come,” the reggae classic from the 1972 film. But the core of the play, set in a Chelsea flat inhabited by 18-year-old Shakie (Nickcolia King-N’da), lies in what sort of future awaits this budding entrepreneur and the 30-year-old woman, Jackie (the astonishing Natalie Simpson), with whom he has a child and who has arrived back in his life after a two-year absence.From left, Alex Bhat, Dorothea Myer-Bennett and Hara Yannas in “Overruled,” part of the “Shaw Shorts” double bill directed by Paul Miller at the Orange Tree Theater.Richard Davenport/The Other RichardThe pair are joined before long by a political firebrand, Stumpie (a charismatic Toyin Omari-Kinch), who promises a better life for them all in “mother Africa” and doesn’t believe in right or wrong, only the need to “just grab what you can get.” Much of the unabashedly talky proceedings anticipate the Black Lives Matter movement, while the title reaches beyond an explicit reference to the death of Shakie’s father to connect with audiences today who, after the murder of George Floyd and others, understand the reality of such deaths all too well. (A namecheck is given to the divisive politician of the age, Enoch Powell, whose modern-day equivalents are easily found.)The plotting carries distinct echoes of Harold Pinter in its reversals of power and authority, and Simpson wears Jackie’s bravura like a shield, all the while falling to pieces internally. At one point, Walton has her actors stare down the audience directly as if daring them to acknowledge the play’s increasingly nihilistic landscape head-on as something we cannot help but understand and even share. It’s to this fierce production’s credit that you cannot look away.Weightiness, it would seem, is a London theatrical constant just now, even when it misfires, as in the case of Amy Berryman’s “Walden,” a worthy but synthetic sibling-relationship drama set against an ecowarrior backdrop that struggles to sound authentic. (That play finished its limited run at the Harold Pinter Theater on June 12.)Those in search of frothier fare will alight with pleasure on “Shaw Shorts,” two one-acts at the always-inviting Orange Tree Theater in Richmond, west London, that can be booked separately or together through June 26, depending how much time potentially Covid-skittish audiences want to spend in an auditorium.Olatunji Ayofe, center, in “After Life.” Johan PerssonThe pairing of “How He Lied to Her Husband” and “Overruled” reminds us of the subversive morality of a playwright eyeing the amorous goings-on among a sector of society who — guess what? — pass their time going to Shaw plays. In a cheeky nod toward himself, Shaw has the lovers in his 1904 “How He Lied to Her Husband” compare themselves to characters in his earlier and better-known “Candida,” which it seems these adulterers have seen.In the polygamy-minded “Overruled” (1912), the ever-breezy Mrs. Lunn (the able Dorothea Myer-Bennett) as good as offers her husband to another woman, leaving the male half of the other couple (played by Jordan Mifsúd) to expound on the boredom inherent in a happy marriage. The director, Paul Miller, runs the Orange Tree and has long included Shaw in an eclectic lineup of writers that extends to the contemporary as well.The result is a two-part bagatelle that serves for now as a starter in advance of heavier fare to come. These may be difficult times, but there’s room among the thematically fearsome for some fun, too.After Life. Directed by Jeremy Herrin. National Theater, through Aug. 7.The Death of a Black Man. Directed by Dawn Walton. Hampstead Theater, through July 10.Shaw Shorts. Directed by Paul Miller. Orange Tree Theater, through June 26. More

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      in Movies

      Lin-Manuel Miranda responde a las críticas sobre el elenco de ‘In the Heights’

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      La película generó malestar por presentar actores latinos de piel clara en los papeles principales, a pesar de la prevalencia de latinos de piel oscura en el barrio donde se rodó.Lin-Manuel Miranda reconoció las críticas de que la adaptación cinematográfica de su musical In the Heights no había representado adecuadamente a la población afrolatina de piel oscura de Washington Heights, el barrio del Alto Manhattan en el que está ambientado, y también se ha disculpado por quedarse corto al “intentar pintar un mosaico de esta comunidad”.La película, adaptación del musical de Broadway, ganador de un Tony por mejor guion, sobre el propietario de una bodega que sueña con volver a República Dominicana, se estrenó en los cines y en HBO Max la semana pasada, obteniendo críticas positivas y elogios por todo lo alto.Sin embargo, la película también suscitó críticas en internet por la decisión de los cineastas de seleccionar actores latinos de piel clara para los papeles principales, a pesar de la prevalencia de latinos de piel oscura en el barrio donde se rodó la película.Miranda, que formó parte del equipo creativo de la película, dijo en su declaración que estaba prestando atención a las opiniones en línea, incluidas las muestras de pesar y frustración por el colorismo y por “sentirse aún invisibles” en la película.“Empecé a escribir In the Heights porque no me sentía visto”, escribió Miranda en un comunicado publicado en Twitter el lunes por la noche. “Y durante los últimos 20 años todo lo que quería era que nosotros —TODOS nosotros— nos sintiéramos vistos”.“He oído que sin suficiente representación de afrolatinos de piel oscura”, continuó, “la obra se siente explotadora de la comunidad que tanto queríamos representar con orgullo y alegría”.“En los comentarios puedo escuchar el pesar y la frustración por el colorismo, por sentirse aún invisibles”, dijo en el comunicado.La película, un proyecto que tardó una década y que tuvo un presupuesto de 55 millones de dólares, fue protagonizada por Anthony Ramos como el dueño de la bodega, Melissa Barrera como una aspirante a diseñadora de moda y Leslie Grace como Nina, una estudiante de Stanford en dificultades.En una entrevista reciente, la guionista de la película, Quiara Alegría Hudes, habló de la decisión de hacer de Nina un personaje afrolatino en la versión cinematográfica. “Quería hacer conscientemente que Nina fuera afrolatina en esta versión de In the Heights. Desde que estrenamos el espectáculo en Broadway, se ha producido esta conversación nacional en torno a las microagresiones y cosas realmente interesantes que siento que serían aplicables a la situación de Nina”.Corey Hawkins, que interpreta al interés amoroso de Nina y empleado del servicio de taxis de su padre, es negro, pero no latino (algunos también criticaron a los realizadores por eliminar un punto de la trama, que había existido en el musical, en el que el personaje de Hawkins dice que el padre de Nina no cree que sea lo suficientemente bueno para ella). More

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      Lisa Banes, 'Gone Girl' Actress, Dies at 65 After Hit-and-Run

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      A mainstay of the New York stage, she also acted in films, including “Gone Girl.” She died 10 days after she was struck by a scooter as she was crossing a street in Manhattan.Lisa Banes, a versatile actress who came to prominence on the New York stage in the 1980s and went on to a busy career that also included roles on television and in the films “Cocktail” and “Gone Girl,” died on Monday of head injuries she sustained 10 days earlier when she was struck by a scooter in Manhattan. She was 65.Her death, at Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital, was confirmed by the New York Police Department, which said she had been struck by the scooter on June 4 as she was crossing Amsterdam Avenue near West 64th Street in Manhattan.The operator of the scooter had driven through a red light before crashing into Ms. Banes and then fled, said Sgt. Edward Riley, a police spokesman. Sgt. Riley said on Tuesday that no arrests had been made.Ms. Banes lived in Los Angeles and had been in New York visiting friends, her wife, Kathryn Kranhold, said.Known for her wry humor and confident, elegant presence, Ms. Banes appeared in more than 80 television and film roles, as well as in countless stage productions, including on Broadway.Ms. Banes, as the mother of a missing woman, with Ben Affleck in the 2014 movie “Gone Girl.” Alamy Stock PhotoShe found quick success in the theater after coming east from Colorado Springs in the mid-1970s and studying at the Juilliard School in New York.In 1980, when the Roundabout Theater revived John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” with Malcolm McDowell in the lead role as the angry Jimmy Porter, she played his overstressed wife.“Lisa Banes has a remarkably effective final scene,” Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Times, “on her knees in anguish, face stained with failure, arms awkwardly searching for shape and for rest.”The next year, at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., she was in a production of the James M. Barrie comedy “The Admirable Crichton,” playing a daughter in an upper-crust British family that becomes shipwrecked on a deserted island.“As Lady Mary,” Mel Gussow of The Times wrote in his review, “Lisa Banes has a regal disdain. Gracefully, she plays the grande dame, and with matching agility she becomes a kind of Jane of the jungle, swimming rivers and swinging on vines — a rather far-fetched transformation, brought off with panache by this striking young actress.”Off Broadway roles kept coming. Later in 1981 she and Elizabeth McGovern had the lead roles in Wendy Kesselman’s “My Sister in This House” at Second Stage Theater. In 1982, at Manhattan Theater Club, she was the sister Olga in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” part of a starry cast that included Dianne Wiest, Mia Dillon, Jeff Daniels, Christine Ebersole and Sam Waterston.In 1984, when Ms. Banes was in the midst of a run in Wendy Wasserstein’s comedy “Isn’t It Romantic” at Playwrights Horizons, The Times named her one of 15 stage actresses to watch. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her performance in that play. More

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      Nine Ned Beatty Movies and Shows to Stream

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      This prolific actor may not have been the star of these pictures but he brought a depth that made his time onscreen count.Ned Beatty, who died on Sunday at 83, was the quintessential character actor. He looked like a regular guy, not a movie star, so he didn’t play leading roles — he played supporting characters, best friends, background figures and bureaucrats. He did so in 165 films and television shows before retiring quietly in 2013, and he always understood the assignment; some projects were great, others less so, but Beatty always shone Here are a few of his highlights, and where you can watch them. More

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      in Music

      Karla Burns, Who Broke a ‘British Tonys’ Color Barrier, Dies at 66

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      Her Olivier Award was for her signature role as Queenie in “Show Boat,” a part that once earned a Tony nomination. She later lost her voice in surgery and fought to regain it.Karla Burns, a singer and actor who in 1991 won a Laurence Olivier Award, Britain’s highest stage honor, for her role as the riverboat cook Queenie in a production of “Show Boat,” and who later fought to regain her soulful voice after losing it in an operation to remove a growth in her throat, died on June 4 in Wichita, Kan. She was 66.Her sister, Donna Burns-Revels, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by a series of strokes.A spokeswoman for the Olivier Awards’ sponsoring organization, the Society of London Theater, said it’s believed that Ms. Burns was the first Black performer to win that honor.Her Olivier, Britain’s equivalent of a Tony, for best supporting performance in a musical, came in 1991 in recognition of her work in a revival of “Show Boat,” co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the West End. Almost a decade earlier she had earned a Tony nomination for playing Queenie on Broadway.Ms. Burns’s musical journey began when she was a girl growing up in Wichita in the 1960s. Her father was a blues and gospel pianist, and every Saturday night she danced beside his piano while he played. On bus rides to school she broke out in song. One day a choir teacher told her, “Kiddo, you can really sing.”After studying music and theater at Wichita State University, Ms. Burns auditioned for the role of Queenie in a regional production of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1927 musical “Show Boat,” about the lives of the performers and crew aboard a floating theater called the Cotton Blossom that travels along the Mississippi River in the segregated South.Ms. Burns landed the role and was soon taking the stage at the Lyric Theater in Oklahoma City. Then she performed as Queenie in an Ohio dinner theater production, belting out “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” nightly. In the early 1980s, she headed to New York to audition for the part for a national tour of “Show Boat” presented by the Houston Grand Opera. She competed for the role against hundreds of other women.“I had no agent and I walked in,” Ms. Burns said in an interview on the “The Merv Griffin Show” in 1982. “Some of them, I knew their faces, I knew they were famous women, and I said, ‘Well, I‘m here, and I’m from Kansas, and I’m going to go out there and do my best.’”She was asked to sing 16 bars of one song, and then the audition ended. After weeks of silence, someone called to apologize for losing her phone number. The part was hers, she was told.The musical, which starred Donald O’Connor and Lonette McKee, toured the country for months and arrived on Broadway in 1983.“There is standout work by Karla Burns,” Frank Rich wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Miss Burns has been handed a sizzling, rarely heard song, ‘Hey, Feller,’ that’s been restored to ‘Show Boat’ for this production.”She was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance and won a Drama Desk Award. She later sang on a “Show Boat” studio album, released in 1988.Ms. Burns with Bruce Hubbard in the Broadway revival of “Show Boat” in 1983. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as a riverboat cook.Martha Swope/Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library“Karla was proud to play Queenie,” said Rick Bumgardner, a close friend of hers who directed her in productions of “The Wiz” and “Steel Magnolias.” “When she got the opportunity to put a rag on her head, she didn’t feel she was putting people down. She felt she was portraying strong women and reminding our nation of its past.”In the 1990s, Ms. Burns appeared in “Hi-Hat Hattie,” a touring one-woman musical based on the life of Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American actor to win an Oscar, for her role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Ms. McDaniel was also a Wichita native and had played Queenie in the 1936 movie version of “Show Boat,” and Ms. Burns had long considered her a kindred spirit. More

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      How Jodie Turner-Smith Is Reshaping Anne Boleyn's Story

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      Jodie Turner-Smith portrays the ill-fated wife of Henry VIII in a new mini-series. The show has stirred debate in Britain, which is sort of the point.LONDON — Britain’s most recent rendering of the story of Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII’s six wives, begins at the end. When the new mini-series “Anne Boleyn” opens, it’s 1536, the queen is pregnant and powerful — and has five months left to live.Anne’s story, which occupies a special place in the British collective imagination, has spawned an abundance of fictionalized depictions onscreen (“The Tudors”) and in literature (“Wolf Hall”). It is generally told as a morally dubious young woman seducing an older king into leaving his wife and his church, before she is executed for failing to give birth to a male heir.But the new mini-series, which premiered last week on Channel 5, one of Britain’s public service broadcasters, attempts to reframe Anne’s story, instead focusing on her final months and how she tried to maintain power in a system that guaranteed her very little.In the three episode-long series, Anne is played by Jodie Turner-Smith, best-known for her role in the film “Queen & Slim.” It is the first time a Black actress has portrayed the Tudor queen onscreen.“We wanted to find someone who could really inhabit her but also be surprising to an audience,” Faye Ward, one of the show’s executive producers, said in an interview. Since there were already so many depictions of Anne Boleyn, the show’s creators “wanted to reset people’s expectations of her,” Ward said.Turner-Smith’s Anne Boleyn, center, desperately tries to maintain power in a system that guarantees her very little.Sony Pictures TelevisionAnne (Turner-Smith) and her brother George (Paapa Essiedu).Sony Pictures TelevisionMadge Shelton (Thalissa Teixeira), Anne’s cousin and lady-in-waiting.Sony Pictures TelevisionThe series employs a diverse casting playbook, in a similar vein to the Regency-era Netflix drama “Bridgerton.” But whereas that show’s characters are fictional, in “Anne Boleyn” actors of color play several white historical figures: The British-Ghanian actor Paapa Essiedu plays Anne’s brother George Boleyn, and the British-Brazillian actress Thalissa Teixeira portrays Madge Shelton, Anne’s cousin and lady-in-waiting.Although race does not figure overtly in the show’s plot, the program makers adopted an approach known as “identity-conscious casting,” which allows actors to bring “all those factors of yourself to a role,” Ward said.For Turner-Smith, that meant connecting her experiences with the ways in which Anne, who was raised in the French court, was an outsider and suffered at Henry’s court.“As a Black woman, I can understand being marginalized. I have a lived experience of what limitation and marginalization feel like,” Turner-Smith, 34, said in an interview. “I thought it was interesting to bring the freshness of a Black body telling that story.”Casting Turner-Smith as one of Britain’s best-known royal consorts has caused debate in the press and particularly on social media in Britain, with “Anne Boleyn” trending on Twitter the day after the series premiere.In the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, the writer Marianka Swain called Turner-Smith’s casting “pretty cynical” and wrote that it was designed to have “Twitter frothing rather than adding anything to our understanding of an era.”Others, though, have welcomed the show’s perspective. Olivette Otele, a professor of the history of slavery and memory of enslavement at the University of Bristol, noted in The Independent newspaper that the series arrived at a time when Britain was “soul searching” about how to understand its colonial past. “The past is only a safe space if it becomes a learning space open to all,” she wrote in praise of the series.It was important to the show’s creators to center the narrative around Anne’s perspective, rather than Henry’s (played by Mark Stanley).Sony Pictures TelevisionDuring the show’s press run, Turner-Smith’s comments about the royal family’s treatment of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex — including that having her in the family was “a missed opportunity” for the monarchy — made headlines in Britain.Meghan’s treatment by the palace — which she told Oprah Winfrey in a bombshell March interview had driven her to thoughts of suicide — is representative of “just how far we have not come with patriarchal values,” Turner-Smith said.“It represents how far we have not come in terms of the monarchy and in terms of somebody being an outsider and being different, and being able to navigate that space,” she said, adding that “you can draw so many parallels if you look for them” between Anne and Meghan’s attempts to figure out life within a British palace.“There is very little room for someone brown to touch the monarchy,” said Turner-Smith — who, upon being cast as Anne, fully expected the move to draw criticism in the country.For the actress, that presented even more reason to push back against people’s assumptions about Anne. “Art is supposed to challenge you,” she said. “The whole point of making it this way was for a different perspective. What is going to resonate with somebody by putting a different face to this and seeing it in a different way?”Dr. Stephanie Russo, the author of “The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen,” said there were many reasons for Britain’s fascination with and attachment to the Tudors, and Anne specifically. The “soap opera” of a younger woman disrupting a long-term marriage remains fascinating, she said, as does the rise and fall of a powerful woman.There is also a patriotic element, Russo said: Anne’s daughter was Elizabeth I, the monarch who oversaw Britain’s “golden age,” when William Shakespeare was writing his plays and many historians credit the British Empire as having been born.The series was conceived as a feminist exercise, unpacking what Eve Hedderwick Turner, the show’s writer, called “those big, insulting and detrimental terms” attached to Anne, which at the time included accusations of treason, adultery and an incestuous relationship with her brother.“There is very little room for someone brown to touch the monarchy,” Turner-Smith said.Sony Pictures TelevisionIn the mini-series, Anne falls out of favor with Henry after a stillbirth. No matter how nominally powerful or ambitious she is, she is no match for the forces that seek to extinguish her, which come to include her husband, his advisers and the country’s legal system. All the while, she tries not to show vulnerability in public.It was important, Hedderwick Turner said, for the creators to put “Anne back in the center of her story, making her the protagonist, seeing everything from her perspective.”The political machinations of Henry VIII and his advisers, his internal life and his motivations are largely obscured in the series. Instead, viewers are privy to Anne’s state of mind and her relationship with her household’s ladies-in-waiting.“Henry is spoken about as this great man, because he had all of these wives” and killed some of them, Turner-Smith said. “It’s just like: Actually, there’s a woman at the center of this story who is so dynamic and fascinating and interesting.”Hilary Mantel, the author of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy charting Thomas Cromwell’s life serving Henry VIII, wrote in a 2013 piece for the London Review of Books about how fictionalized accounts of Anne’s life communicate society’s contemporary attitudes toward women.“Popular fiction about the Tudors has also been a form of moral teaching about women’s lives, though what is taught varies with moral fashion,” she said.What, then, does this “Anne Boleyn” say about today’s world?“We’re finally getting to a place where we’re allowing women to become more than just a trope,” Turner-Smith said.Traditionally, when playing a female character, “you’re either the Madonna or you’re the whore, right?” she said. But in this series, “We’re saying we’re unafraid to show different sides of a woman.” More