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      In Detroit, an Opera Leader Finishes With One Last Triumph

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      After Yuval Sharon became the artistic director of Michigan Opera Theater in 2020, the company renamed itself the Detroit Opera — perhaps the most visible among moves that have led to a remarkable streak of successes based on a new, ambitious approach.The house has placed itself at the center of operatic conversation with productions like a drive-through “Götterdämmerung” and a virtual-reality “Walküre.” It has broken fund-raising records, drawn first-time ticket buyers by the thousands and collaborated more with companies elsewhere. Robert O’Hara’s staging of Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” at the Metropolitan Opera last November, for instance, began life a year and a half earlier in Michigan; the Met asked Detroit if it could join the production, not the other way around.Sharon receives most of the plaudits for the rise in Detroit’s fortunes, but little of its advance would have been possible without the courage and acumen of Wayne Brown. One of the few Black leaders in the field, Brown served as the Detroit Opera’s president and chief executive from 2014 until he retired at the end of 2023.“Wayne has always been wonderful to deal with,” said Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met. “One doesn’t think necessarily of Detroit as a center of opera production or creativity, but by hiring Yuval he has accomplished that. He has changed that impression of Detroit.”From left, Ethan Davidson, Yuval Sharon and Brown onstage at the Detroit Opera House.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaBrown, 75, is a veteran executive with almost half a century of varied experience, from stints at regional symphony orchestras to a spell from 1997 to 2014 as the director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. Even upon his retirement, his enthusiasm for the process of putting on a show remains infectious.“The fascination is about making sure that those connections can be made,” Brown said. “It’s not just about transaction; it’s about, how does one find that sweet spot where the art and the audiences align?”Brown is widely admired in the field for being a leader different from the norm, and one reluctant to take the spotlight for himself.“He’s been a uniter of people,” said Deborah Borda, the former head of the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, who has known Brown since the 1970s. “He has a very quiet strength. He has a kind word for all, which is quite unusual in our business. I think he’s regarded as somewhat Solomonic.”Davóne Tines, the bass-baritone who served as an artist in residence at the Detroit Opera in 2021 and 2022, said that Brown’s support for creativity was an example, especially as “a young Black creator whose career began in arts administration.”“Someone in the position of the C.E.O. or the top executive of an opera company, you may have presuppositions about what that sort of person might be,” Tines said. “He’s a man of incredible gravity and conducts himself with a dignity that’s very inspiring. It’s wonderful to see that balance with how genuinely curious he is.”Davóne Tines, front center, in the title role of “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” at Detroit Opera in 2022.Micah Shumake/Detroit OperaBrown’s musical life began with learning the violin in fourth grade, and later the cello. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he joined the men’s glee club, and was its president. “Increasingly, it became not just performance” that mattered, he said, “but performance with context, the whole notion of making it work.”Shortly before Brown graduated from college, the dean of the music school asked if he would be interested in a job with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which was looking for an assistant administrator. “I said sure,” he recalled. “I mean, I didn’t know what it was.” He was quickly promoted to assistant manager, and embarked on a career working for orchestras that later included tenures as executive director of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts and, for a decade, the Louisville Orchestra.Brown also briefly worked as a producer for the Cultural Olympiad that took place during the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, a remit that included jazz, opera, chamber music and more. “Those were interesting opportunities,” he said, smiling.Borda recalled the tact with which Brown later convened the expert panels that advised the National Endowment for the Arts on its grants. “You had to go to Washington, D.C., for four days, you had to review literally a hundred applications, and listen to them, to do a good job,” she said. Brown made a burdensome process more meaningful. “When Wayne was there, I think he asked me almost every year, and I would go. After Wayne, I didn’t do it anymore.”Brown speaks fondly of the opportunity for public service that the N.E.A. afforded him, and he took useful lessons from the opportunity it gave him to see the field as a whole. “You can’t necessarily apply a scenario that’s taking place in one community to another,” he said. “Innovation is a relative term. Something can be innovative but be perceived as just a marginal difference in a larger setting.”At Detroit Opera, Brown said, “We wanted to make sure that we could convey a message of openness, inclusiveness, and a level of engagement.”Nick Hagen for The New York TimesContext certainly counted in Brown’s decision to return to Detroit to run Michigan Opera Theater in 2014. Going back to the city where his career had begun, Brown was determined to secure what the downtown house’s longtime leader, David DiChiera, had achieved after founding the company in 1971, four years after the 1967 race riots in the city.“If I could play a role in a place that I cared about, a place that inspired me, I could not imagine at the time any other role that would have been of interest,” Brown said. “We wanted to make sure that we could convey a message of openness, inclusiveness, and a level of engagement.”Marc Scorca, the president of Opera America, believes that Brown was the ideal person to manage the house’s transformation after DiChiera’s retirement. “It was Wayne’s extraordinary diplomacy that enabled that transition to happen with respect and dignity,” Scorca said.Hiring Sharon in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic was something of a tribute to the theater’s founding mission. DiChiera, Brown said, “had an interest in making sure that what was taking place in Detroit could resonate broadly.” Yet the theater was nothing if it was not rooted in its city.Sharon entered the job promising not only to make the house the most progressive in America, but also to embed it still more deeply in its community, even asking that it change its name when he arrived. Brown urged restraint, so that they could do the patient work necessary to build consensus.“My approach was very impulsive,” Sharon said. “Wayne’s more analytic and thoughtful approach, and his calm way of thinking through these things, made it so that when we ultimately took the vote on it, it had complete board support.”“I really saw the value,” Sharon added, “of what it means to not necessarily go into things like a bull in a china shop.”Sharon singled out the co-production of “X” as Brown’s other major achievement during their time working together in Michigan. “It really was so out of the realm of what the company has ever done in terms of its scale,” Sharon said. Almost half of the sold-out crowd that attended the run in Detroit was visiting the company for the first time.“The art form spans centuries; it’s not stopping,” Brown said of opera. “It’s about moving forward and being bold about it, and there’s no better time to do so than now.” More

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      National Theater, Source of Broadway Hits, Gets Its First Female Leader

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      Indhu Rubasingham will lead the venerable London institution where plays including “War Horse” and “The Lehman Trilogy” originated.Since the National Theater opened in London in 1963, its artistic directors have been among the greats of British theater: Laurence Olivier, Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn, Nicholas Hytner and Rufus Norris. They also had two other things in common. All six are white men.On Wednesday, the theater brought that era to an end when it announced the appointment of Indhu Rubasingham to the top position. She will be the first woman and person of color to lead the National Theater.Rubasingham, 53, will join next spring, the theater said in a news release. She will work for a year alongside Norris, who is departing, before taking sole charge in spring 2025, when she will also share the role of chief executive with Kate Varah, the theater’s current executive director. That sharing of responsibilities is a change for the theater, where Norris currently holds both roles.With three theaters in its building alongside the River Thames, the National, as it is known, stages around 20 plays and musicals each year, and has almost 900 full-time employees. Critics and theatergoers expect it to produce the best new shows and revivals in London, while also staging work that comments on the state of the nation. On top of that, it is tasked with incubating new talent, mounting touring productions across Britain and running an extensive education program.Rubasingham will have to do all of that in the face of a shrinking budget and soaring inflation. Many theaters in Britain, including the National, receive annual government grants meant to cover about a fifth of their operating costs, but the amount of those subsidies is declining. Last year, Arts Council England, the funding body, slashed the National’s subsidy by 5 percent, to 16.1 million pounds (about $20 million), as part of a drive to reallocate grants to institutions outside London.Beginning in fall 2024, the National will face further budgetary pressure when it has to start repaying a loan worth about $25 million. Britain’s government lent the theater the money during the coronavirus pandemic to help the shuttered institution shore up its finances.Rubasingham will be expected to produce money-spinning transfers to both the West End and Broadway. Over the past decade or so, the National’s transfers to New York have included “War Horse,” “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” and “The Lehman Trilogy.” Next year, it is sending “The Effect,” a recent hit, to The Shed.The National, as it is often known, stages around 20 plays and musicals each year.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAt the much smaller London playhouse that she currently leads, the Kiln, Rubasingham has directed several hits that have found their way to New York, including “Red Velvet,” about the experiences of an African American actor in 19th-century London, which played at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2014, and Zadie Smith’s “The Wife of Willesden,” which recently played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her programming at the theater, which changed its name from the Tricycle to the Kiln under her leadership, included acclaimed shows like “The Father,” “The Mother” and “The Son” from Florian Zeller’s trilogy, and works by emerging playwrights.Her time at that theater has not been without controversy.When Israel invaded Gaza in 2014, Rubasingham announced that the theater would no longer host some screenings for the U.K. Jewish Film Festival if it continued to accept funding from the Israeli government. The ultimatum caused a minor furor, and the editor of The Jewish Chronicle called the Tricycle “officially antisemitic” on social media. (The screenings went ahead at other venues.)A spokeswoman for the National Theater said that Rubasingham was unavailable for an interview, and the theater had no comment about the incident.The rebranding of the Tricycle in 2018, so that it became the Kiln, also caused a fuss, and many critics were mystified by the name change.Born in the northern English city of Sheffield to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, Rubasingham has said in interviews that as a teenager she expected to become a doctor until she accepted a work experience placement at the Nottingham Playhouse, a regional theater. She studied drama at Hull University and then worked as a trainee director at the Theater Royal Stratford East in London, where she worked with Mike Leigh, the movie director.Even with a lengthy track record at the Kiln, the National appointment is a huge step up. Clint Dyer, the National Theater’s deputy artistic director, outlined the challenges of running the organization in a recent interview with the Times of London. Whoever got the top job, he said, needed to have the “experience, understanding, empathy, desire” and “forward thinking” required to run any major arts institution, but also “the knowledge of the canon, of new playwriting and the ability to speak to donors, to government, to people like me.”“It’s a herculean task,” Dyer said. More

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      Putin Ally Valery Gergiev to Lead Bolshoi Theater

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      The Russian maestro, who heads the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, will also control the Bolshoi in Moscow, replacing Vladimir Urin, who spoke out against the Ukraine war.Valery Gergiev, the star Russian maestro and prominent supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin, was tapped on Friday to lead the storied Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, the Russian government announced .The move will expand Mr. Gergiev’s dominance at the pinnacle of Russia culture. He already serves as the artistic and general director of the nation’s other premier performing arts institution, the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. In Moscow, he will replace Vladimir Urin, the Bolshoi’s general director since 2013, who signed a petition last year expressing opposition to the war in Ukraine.Russia’s government said in a post on Telegram that Mr. Gergiev would serve a five-year term under an order signed by Prime Minister Mikhail V. Mishustin. The post said that Mr. Urin had been “relieved of this position at his own request.”In selecting Mr. Gergiev, 70, to lead the Bolshoi, Mr. Putin has rewarded a renowned musician and staunch ally who once endorsed his re-election and has appeared at concerts in Russia and abroad to promote his policies. The men have known each other since the early 1990s, when Mr. Putin was an official in St. Petersburg and Mr. Gergiev was beginning his tenure as the leader of the Mariinsky, then called the Kirov.Mr. Urin’s fate at the Bolshoi, which houses renowned ballet and opera companies, had been uncertain since his name appeared on the petition opposing the war. Mr. Putin at times seemed to hint that Mr. Urin’s days were numbered; in March 2022 he publicly asked Mr. Gergiev if he was interested in “recreating a common directorate” that would unite the Bolshoi with the Mariinsky.But Mr. Urin, 76, defied expectations for a time, maintaining his post even as other artists who denounced the war faced reprisals or left the country. He said in an interview with a Russian news outlet earlier this year that it was “not an easy time” for the Bolshoi.Mr. Urin announced his resignation to colleagues on Thursday after a performance of César Cui’s “The Mandarin’s Son” and Stravinsky’s “The Nightingale” at the Bolshoi, Russian news outlets reported.“Today I say goodbye to you, because today is my last working day at the Bolshoi Theater,” Mr. Urin said in a speech to his colleagues, according to a video that circulated online.After Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Gergiev, whose extensive international career once made him one of the busiest maestros in the world, has been persona non grata in the United States and Europe. His touring schedule dried up in the West, and he was fired by the Munich Philharmonic, where he had been chief conductor, because of his long record of support for Mr. Putin.After the invasion, many cultural institutions in the United States and Europe rushed to cut ties with Russian artists and institutions closely aligned with Mr. Putin, upending decades of cultural exchange that had endured even during the depths of the Cold War.The Bolshoi and Mariinsky theaters faced cancellations of performances set for London, Madrid, New York and elsewhere, and a popular program to broadcast Bolshoi performances into more than 1,700 movie theaters in 70 countries and territories was suspended. Licenses to perform foreign works at Russian theaters expired, and some Russian choreographers and directors asked that their names be removed from works performed in Russia. Several Russian stars with ties to Mr. Putin lost work in the West, including the soprano Anna Netrebko and the pianist Denis Matsuev.Mr. Urin, who played a key role in steering the Bolshoi after the shock of the 2013 acid attack on the ballet director Sergei Filin, tried to maintain a sense of normalcy, pushing forward with performances of classics like the ballet “Giselle” and the opera “Eugene Onegin.” But the war created new complications. He said at one point that he could not stage works by artists who spoke out against the invasion because it might create a “serious negative reaction,” according to Russian news reports.Demand for performances at the Bolshoi and Mariinsky has appeared to remain strong. A stampede broke out outside the Bolshoi last month as several hundred people lined up to buy tickets for a popular holiday run of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” according to Russian news outlets.With the West off limits, the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky have turned to other overseas markets, including China, where Russian artists and cultural groups have been warmly received. Mr. Gergiev and the Mariinsky have led three tours in China this year; the Bolshoi appeared in Beijing over the summer.Alex Marshall More

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      in Movies

      John Bailey, Oscars President at a Time of Strife, Dies at 81

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      A respected cinematographer, he guided the motion picture academy at the height of the #MeToo movement and dealt with infighting around the Oscar ceremony.John Bailey, an accomplished cinematographer who was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2017 to 2019, a tumultuous period when Harvey Weinstein was excommunicated from the group and complaints mounted about the Academy Awards ceremony, died on Friday. He was 81.His death was announced by the academy, which did not say where he died or specify the cause.As a cinematographer, Mr. Bailey collaborated frequently with celebrated directors like Paul Schrader and worked on many well-known movies, including “Groundhog Day” (1993) and “The Big Chill” (1983).Before he was chosen to head the academy, he had never held a prominent public role, and he was never nominated for an Oscar himself, though he helped others win the award. In an interview in 2020 with the publication American Cinematographer, Mr. Bailey said he generally tried to make his own work “invisible.”After the academy announced in August 2017 that he would be its next president, The New York Times reported: “Hollywood scratched its head. Who?”It took only two months for Mr. Bailey to find himself in the news. Shortly after The Times and The New Yorker published investigations revealing previously undisclosed allegations of sexual harassment against the producer Harvey Weinstein, the academy voted overwhelmingly to “immediately expel” him. It was only the second known instance of an expulsion from the academy.(The first happened in 2004, when the character actor Carmine Caridi had his membership revoked after he broke rules about lending DVD screeners of contending films. Since then, the comedian and actor Bill Cosby, the director Roman Polanski and the cinematographer Adam Kimmel have also been expelled.)In a letter Mr. Bailey sent to members of the academy days after the vote, he wrote that the organization could not become “an inquisitorial court.” But he also expressed passionate support for the decision.“We are witnessing this venerable motion picture academy reinvent itself before our very eyes,” Mr. Bailey said to a luncheon of Oscar nominees several months later, according to Vanity Fair. “I may be a 75-year-old white male, but I’m every bit as gratified as the youngest of you here that the fossilized bedrock of many of Hollywood’s worst abuses are being jackhammered into oblivion.”In the kind of head-spinning turn of events that became familiar during the height of the #MeToo moment, Mr. Bailey himself became the subject of a sexual harassment accusation only weeks later.Variety reported that the academy had received three harassment complaints about Mr. Bailey. But the academy later announced that it had only one such accusation to look into, and within weeks it determined that there was no merit to the claim.More turmoil for Mr. Bailey’s academy lay ahead. The 2018 Oscars telecast saw a drop-off in ratings that has never been fully reversed. The comedian Kevin Hart was hired to host the 2019 ceremony, then stepped down amid criticism of jokes he had made years earlier about not wanting his son to be gay, leaving that year’s event hostless.Mr. Bailey made the case for two changes to the ceremony designed to maintain viewer interest in a new era: adding a “popular film” category, to include the kind of blockbuster movies that the Oscars otherwise overlook, and holding some award announcements during commercial breaks to shorten the broadcast. The academy encountered such severe blowback to those proposals that it scrapped both of them.In 2019, when term limits compelled Mr. Bailey to step down from his position, The Times described his tenure as “chaotic,” but in hindsight, perhaps none of the scandals of Mr. Bailey’s era rose to the level of Will Smith giving Chris Rock an unscripted slap to the face midbroadcast. (Mr. Smith received a ban of 10 years from the Oscars.)Getting embroiled in culture wars and power struggles was an unexpected career development for Mr. Bailey. He made it his modus operandi, he told American Cinematographer, to avoid “tawdry” films. Describing his youthful aspirations in a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bailey said, referring to a long-dead French film critic, “I wanted to write — to be the American André Bazin.”Mr. Bailey in 1983 with the director Lawrence Kasdan on the set of “The Big Chill.”Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionJohn Ira Bailey was born on Aug. 10, 1942, in Moberly, Mo. He grew up in Norwalk, a city in Los Angeles County, California. He told American Cinematographer that his father was a machinist who never went to high school.He earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 1964, and several years later he earned a graduate degree in cinema from the University of Southern California. He entered that program to pursue film studies, a young cinephile hoping to become a critic, but found himself drawn instead to cinematography.Early in his career, he had small jobs on several enduring films, like being the camera operator on Mr. Malick’s “Days of Heaven.” The beauty of Néstor Almendros’s cinematography in that movie remained an inspiration for Mr. Bailey.When Mr. Schrader was preparing to shoot “American Gigolo” (1980), he planned to find a European cinematographer. But then, American Cinematographer reported, he was introduced to Mr. Bailey, found himself impressed by Mr. Bailey’s knowledge of foreign film and decided to hire him instead. The two men would go on to work together on five movies.That same year, Mr. Bailey worked with Robert Redford on “Ordinary People,” Mr. Redford’s directorial debut, which won several Oscars, including for best director.In later years Mr. Bailey repeatedly collaborated with the directors Michael Apted (on the 1996 movie “Extreme Measures” and other films) and Ken Kwapis (on films including “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” in 2005 and “He’s Just Not That Into You” in 2009). He also wrote a blog about film for American Cinematographer.His accomplishments at the academy included expanding international membership, which he told The Times helped the South Korean film “Parasite” win the best-picture award in 2020.He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Carol Littleton, an Oscar-nominated film editor.At the 2018 luncheon for Oscar nominees, Mr. Bailey had some useful advice for winners, The Times reported.“Thank your mom,” he said, “not your personal trainer.” More

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      in Music

      How the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Is Trying to Evolve

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      John Sykes, the chairman of the organization behind the hall, talks about the ouster of Jann Wenner, the need to diversify inductees and surprises at this year’s ceremony.The 38th annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony will take place at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Friday, bringing Kate Bush, Willie Nelson, George Michael, Sheryl Crow, Missy Elliott, Rage Against the Machine and the Spinners into pop music’s leading pantheon.In addition, Chaka Khan, Al Kooper and Bernie Taupin will receive the musical excellence award. DJ Kool Herc and Link Wray will be inducted as influences and Don Cornelius, the “Soul Train” creator and host who died in 2012, will be honored as a nonperformer.This year’s event comes at a pivotal moment for the Rock Hall, which has been under pressure for years to diversify its ranks, and in particular to admit more women. While the hall is already home to pop heroines like Aretha Franklin, Madonna, Joan Jett and Whitney Houston, overall women are woefully underrepresented, making up fewer than 100 of the nearly 1,000 inductees since 1986.The institution’s public image problems were compounded recently when Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone magazine co-founder who helped start the Rock Hall, spoke to The New York Times about “The Masters,” his book of interviews with stars like Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon — all of them white men. Justifying the absence of women and people of color, he said that none were “as articulate enough on this intellectual level” and did not qualify as “philosophers of rock.”The response was harsh and immediate, including from the Rock Hall itself: The day after Wenner’s interview was published, the board of the hall’s governing foundation voted to eject him immediately.But the effort to remake the Rock Hall has been underway for several years now, and many give credit to John Sykes, a longtime media executive who took over from Wenner as chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in 2020. He has pushed the hall to diversify its makeup, particularly on its nominating committee, which largely operates outside of the public eye. This year the hall even opened up its definition of rock ’n’ roll, calling it “a spirit that is inclusive and ever-changing.”Still, change is taking time at an institution that has spent the better part of four decades heavily favoring male artists over females.Four years ago, Evelyn McDonnell, a music critic and journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University, published an essay that included detailed numbers about the hall’s ranks. According to her research, just 7.7 percent of individuals who had been inducted to that point were women.McDonnell has updated her numbers for 2023. Despite a sharp increase in the number of female inductees in recent years — among them Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, Carly Simon and the Go-Go’s — she found that only 8.8 percent of people in the hall are women.“They’ve dug themselves into such a hole,” McDonnell said in an interview, “that you really have to do something structural and significant to turn the ship around.”The Rock Hall prefers to count each act as one inductee, no matter how many members it has; using that methodology, the hall says that 15 percent of inductees are, or include, women.In an interview last week, Sykes addressed the hall’s progress so far, as well as its need for further change. He also spoke about plans for this year’s ceremony, including a surprise appearance by Olivia Rodrigo.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.When you became chairman of the foundation, what was your mission or goal? Did you see it as an institution in need of change?I saw it as an institution that, like the music, had to continue to evolve. Rock ’n’ roll music, since its inception in the ’50s, has constantly evolved to different sounds, different styles. But one thing it’s had in common is attitude and spirit. My top priority coming in was to remind the music community that rock ’n’ roll was not rock. It was not one sound. It was an amalgam of rhythm and blues, country and gospel created in the ’50s. And it kept evolving.Number two, I needed to reset the board and the nominating committee to reflect those artists that we’re honoring. So we added nine new board members, four women, four African Americans. What I’m trying to do now is to update the general voting body that actually decides who gets in the Hall of Fame, to reflect the artists that are eligible. I want to make sure the voting body is young and diverse enough to really make the most educated decisions about who should be inducted.The biggest complaint has been about a relative lack of women inductees. How have you addressed that specifically?What I’ve tried to do with the nominating committee is shine a light on the fact that these women and people of color have been underrecognized and need to be nominated and then inducted. So if you look at the last three years, we’ve inducted the Go-Go’s, Tina Turner, Carole King, Dolly Parton, Carly Simon, Pat Benatar. Sylvia Robinson, who started the first hip-hop label. Elizabeth Cotten, great blues player. Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, Missy Elliott, Chaka Khan.We have to do better, but we’re making progress.How do you actually make that change? How can you increase the representation of women without putting a thumb on the scale of what’s supposed to be a deliberative process?It starts with the people you put on the nominating committee. We have six more members now on the committee, and we’ve been focusing on putting more women and people of color on the committee, because that’s how it starts.Number two, we just remind them to understand the genesis of rock ’n’ roll. It doesn’t hurt to basically refresh people every year as to where this came from, and the fact that all of these sounds are to be honored.Why was it important for the board to take action against Jann Wenner so quickly?This had nothing to do with Jann Wenner as a person or anything about his history. It would have happened to anyone on that board who said those things. That’s what I made clear to the entire boardroom when we discussed this. Because those things go against the heart and soul of what the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is all about. Rock ’n’ roll doesn’t know color. It doesn’t know gender. And for us to have one of our board members say that, we felt that we couldn’t do our jobs continuing with someone like that as part of our community.When you talk about the evolution of the Rock Hall and how it includes other genres, it raises the question of boundaries. Like, what isn’t it?Rock ’n’ roll is what’s moving youth culture, what a 16-year-old is obsessed with. The only other qualification I would put on it is which of those artists inspired those that followed. In the ceremonies you’ll see Harry Styles, Pink, Olivia Rodrigo, Dave Matthews, Ed Sheeran come up and play. I call those Future Hall of Famers. They’re there because they’re so inspired by those artists that are getting inducted.Olivia Rodrigo is coming in this year. Last year she got up and sang “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon. She’s going to play with Sheryl Crow this year. It’s this mutual admiration that connects the past with the present.What is your night like at the ceremony? When there’s a question of whether such-and-such will perform, or if there’s one member the others are feuding with, are you the negotiator backstage?I’m one of the negotiators. We have a great team that works on the show, along with Joel Peresman, the president. And if there’s an issue we’ll go to the artists. But at the end of the day, we’re all fans.The drama can be good, right?Rock ’n’ roll is not always nice. So if the members of Blondie all don’t want to stand on the stage together, well, sometimes you’ll hear it come out. We don’t edit anything. They’re free to do whatever they want. And yeah, if there is a little bit of animosity or rebellion, you know, that’s rock ’n’ roll. More

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      in Theater

      Roberta Pereira to Lead New York Performing Arts Library

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      Roberta Pereira, the director of the Playwrights Realm, will lead the library, which is home to more than eight million items relating to music, theater and dance.Roberta Pereira has had a career-long goal to make the performing arts accessible for all.So when she saw a posting for an executive director position at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, one of the country’s leading repositories relating to music, theater and dance, she had an immediate thought: dream job.“I believe the arts are stronger when more people can participate,” said Pereira, 43, who will become the first Latino person to lead the institution, which is home to more than eight million items. “And the library’s mission is free access and knowledge for all.”Pereira, currently the executive director of the Playwrights Realm, an Off Broadway theater company devoted to early-career playwrights, will start the position in January. She succeeds Jennifer Schantz, who left the library in 2022 after two years. (Linda Murray, the curator of the Performing Arts Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division and the associate director of its collections and research services, filled in as interim director.)Brent Reidy, the New York Public Library’s director for the research libraries who led the search for Schantz’s replacement, said that the library had received dozens of applications, but that Pereira stood “head and shoulders” above the other candidates.She had a track record, he said, of innovation. During her eight years at the Playwrights Realm, the organization became a leader in the field of offering caretaker support to audiences and theater workers, which included matinees with free child care and stipends for employees with caretaking responsibilities of both children and adult dependents. She has produced nine Off Broadway premieres, including Sarah DeLappe’s play “The Wolves,” which was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for drama.In 2017, Pereira co-founded the Artists’ Anti-Racist Coalition, a grass-roots group working to make the theater industry more diverse.“It’s clear that she has dedicated her career in the performing arts to engaging the public, increasing access and focusing on how to make more people part of the theater community,” Reidy said.The performing arts library, located in Lincoln Center, is one of the New York Public Library’s four research divisions, with a collection that includes not only books, but also manuscripts, photographs, scores, sheet music, stage designs, costume designs, video and film.Among its collections are its expansive archive of recorded sound, which includes symphonic recordings, radio plays, political speeches, and its Theater on Film and Tape Archive, which includes more than 8,000 recordings of Broadway, Off Broadway and regional theater productions, such as a filmed performance by the original Broadway cast of “The Phantom of the Opera.” (The archive, which has led to similar efforts at other institutions, received a special Tony Award in 2001.)Pereira, who was born in Brazil, was a classmate of Lin-Manuel Miranda at Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Connecticut, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in theater. She later earned a master’s degree in theater management from the Yale School of Drama. She previously worked as a commercial theater producer, including on the Broadway premiere of “Grace,” which starred Paul Rudd, Michael Shannon and Ed Asner, in 2012, and the Olivier Award-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” in the West End in 2013.She said she had made frequent use of the library’s holdings over the years. And now, she said, her goal is to tell others about the “undiscovered jewel” on the Upper West Side.“I want to show people that this incredible archive is open to all, not just researchers,” she said. More

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      André Bishop Will Depart as Head of Lincoln Center Theater

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      His pending departure, in 2025, means that there are job openings for the top artistic positions at three of the four nonprofits operating Broadway theaters.André Bishop, the producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, will step down in the spring of 2025, ending a 33-year run leading one of the nation’s most prestigious nonprofit theaters.The organization has under Bishop’s stewardship been a leading producer of grand Broadway revivals of Golden Age musicals, and has simultaneously committed itself to nurturing emerging artists by constructing a black box theater for that purpose on its rooftop.“I’m exhilarated and sad at the same time,” Bishop said in an interview. “I will have been here many, many years — almost half my life — and it’s time for someone new and fresh to come in and pick up where I left off and go into other directions and do other things if they want to.”Bishop, 74, said he is choosing to leave at the end of the 2024-25 season because that is when his current contract ends, and because that will allow him to join in that season’s celebrations of Lincoln Center Theater’s 40th anniversary.His decision means that there are job openings for the top positions at three of the four nonprofits with Broadway houses, portending potentially significant change, and uncertainty, in a key sector of the theater industry that has had almost no leadership turnover for decades. Nonprofit theaters, which pay lower artist wages than commercial productions and are funded by philanthropy as well as box office sales, have become an important part of the Broadway ecosystem; Lincoln Center Theater has been able to stage musicals on a larger scale than many commercial producers can afford.On Wednesday, Carole Rothman, the president and artistic director of Second Stage Theater, said that after 45 years she would be leaving that institution, which she co-founded; Second Stage operates the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. And Roundabout Theater Company currently has an interim artistic director following the death in April of Todd Haimes, who led that organization for four decades; Roundabout operates three Broadway houses, including the American Airlines, the Stephen Sondheim and Studio 54.Lincoln Center Theater, which is a resident organization at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, has three stages of varying sizes, and has produced a wide variety of work. The company currently has an annual budget of $34.5 million and 55 full-time employees; Bishop received $783,191 in total compensation during fiscal 2022, according to an I.R.S. filing.The Vivian Beaumont Theater, where Lincoln Center Theater has staged Broadway revivals of “Camelot,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I” and “My Fair Lady,” is the third-largest stage in New York, after Radio City Music Hall and the Metropolitan Opera; it also features a thrust configuration that is quite rare on Broadway.When asked about the productions he was proudest of he named “The Coast of Utopia,” Tom Stoppard’s trilogy about 19th-century Russian intellectuals, which began running in 2006 and won the 2007 Tony Award for best play. Lincoln Center Theater’s other Tony-winning productions during Bishop’s tenure include “Carousel,” “The Heiress,” “A Delicate Balance,” “Contact,” “Henry IV,” “Awake and Sing,” “South Pacific,” “War Horse,” “The King and I” and “Oslo.”This season Lincoln Center Theater is planning to stage a Broadway revival of “Uncle Vanya,” with a new translation by Heidi Schreck; an Off Broadway production of “The Gardens of Anuncia,” a new musical by Michael John LaChiusa; and an Off Off Broadway production of “Daphne,” a new play by Renae Simone Jarrett. Bishop also plans, before he leaves, to produce new plays by J.T. Rogers and Ayad Akhtar, and a world premiere musical.“I’m proud of the variety of plays and musicals that we’ve done, from young experimental shows to well-known revivals,” Bishop said. He added that the theater is financially healthy and rebounding from the pandemic; although it has had fewer productions since the pandemic shutdown, he said he expected full-strength seasons ahead. “I think the future is glorious — we have an incredible staff and a very strong board and I see nothing but good things ahead.”Bishop arrived at Lincoln Center Theater in 1992 as artistic director, and he became producing artistic director in 2013. He had previously spent 16 years at a smaller Off Broadway nonprofit theater, Playwrights Horizons, where he served as artistic director for a decade.The Lincoln Center Theater board will conduct a search for Bishop’s successor. More

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      Carole Rothman to End 45-Year Tenure at Second Stage Theater

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      The nonprofit, a singular institution in New York’s theatrical ecosystem, has presented acclaimed works like “Between Riverside and Crazy” and “Next to Normal.”Carole Rothman, the president and artistic director of Second Stage Theater, will step down next spring after 45 years with the organization.The move is a major development in the world of New York’s large nonprofit theaters, several of which have leaders who have been in their jobs for three to five decades. Nationally, the field has experienced a much higher high level of turnover.Second Stage, which Rothman co-founded in 1979, is a singular institution in New York’s theatrical ecosystem. Established, as its name suggests, to stage revivals, it has long since added new plays to the mix, and focuses exclusively on work by living American writers. “No Brits. No Chekhov translations. No classics,” Rothman said in 2017.Second Stage is one of four nonprofits that operate theaters on Broadway: In 2015 the organization acquired the Helen Hayes Theater, which with about 600 seats is Broadway’s smallest house. Second Stage began programming at the Hayes in 2018, and last year its production of “Take Me Out” won the Tony Award for best play revival.Much of Second Stage’s work has been presented Off Broadway, in a former bank building in Times Square, as well as in a smaller theater on the Upper West Side. The company had a $25 million budget in fiscal 2022, according to an I.R.S. filing; Rothman’s total compensation was $369,000 that year.Rothman’s departure was announced on Wednesday not by Second Stage, but by a public relations firm representing her. That firm would not give more detail about the move, and said she would have no immediate comment beyond a written statement in which she said, in part: “I’m forever grateful to all the people who have helped make Second Stage the creative springboard it is today. I’m so proud of what we have accomplished together.”Asked for comment, the chairmen of the theater’s board, Terry Lindsay and Kevin Brockman, issued their own statement, saying: “Carole has been a driving force in American theater since founding Second Stage 45 years ago, and we’re all indebted to her for her vision, her leadership, and her unwavering commitment to championing new artistic voices and diverse new works. We look forward to the world-class productions Carole has programmed for the upcoming 45th anniversary season and to celebrating her remarkable achievements over the coming year.”The board has already formed a committee to search for Rothman’s successor, according to Tom D’Ambrosio, a Second Stage spokesman. The position is likely to be a desirable one given the organization’s strong track record and the opportunity to produce on Broadway.Under Rothman’s leadership, Second Stage has presented a slew of important shows, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays “Between Riverside and Crazy” by Stephen Adly Guirgis and “Water by the Spoonful” by Quiara Alegría Hudes and the Pulitzer-winning musical “Next to Normal” by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt. The theater also presented a pre-Broadway production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” which went on to win the Tony Award for best musical and to enjoy significant commercial success.This fall, Second Stage plans a Broadway production of “Appropriate,” a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins that will star Sarah Paulson, and next spring the company plans a Broadway production of “Mother Play,” a new drama by Paula Vogel, starring Celia Keenan-Bolger, Jessica Lange and Jim Parsons. More