Awards, Decorations and Honors

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      in Music

      Harry Styles Dedicated a Brit Award to Female Acts Who Weren’t Nominated

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      In 2022, the Brit Awards merged its top artist prizes to include male, female and nonbinary acts. This year, the event faced backlash for not nominating any women.On Saturday night at a glittering ceremony in London, the pop star Harry Styles was named artist of the year at the Brit Awards, the highest honor at Britain’s equivalent of the Grammys.After punching the air as he headed onstage, the singer then thanked his family, his mother and his former bandmates from One Direction.But to some watching the televised ceremony in Britain, the acclaim for the pop icon was a little soured because Styles triumphed in a category that did not have a single female nominee — an unintended consequence of the decision a little more than a year earlier by the Brit Awards to merge its categories for best male and best female artist of the year into one gender-neutral top prize.For the past few weeks, prominent figures in Britain’s music industry, and even some politicians, have been discussing the effects of that change on the visibility of female musicians here.At a time when other major cultural award shows — including the Tony Awards and the Academy Awards — are facing pressure to include nonbinary artists, the experience at the Brits shows the difficulties that can arise from removing gendered categories.Onstage, Styles made it clear he was conscious of the conversation. “I’m very aware of my privilege up here tonight,” he said, “so this award is for Rina, Charli, Florence, Mabel and Becky.” Those are the names of five female British pop stars — Rina Sawayama, Charli XCX, Florence Welch, Mabel and Becky Hill — who were not nominated.For much of the past decade, the British Phonographic Industry, or BPI, which organizes the awards, has broadcast its efforts to make the event more inclusive. But three years ago, the organization faced a dilemma after the singer Sam Smith announced they were nonbinary and used they/them pronouns.The Dreamy World of Harry StylesThe British pop star and former member of the boy-band One Direction has grown into a magnetic and provocative performer.A Destination for Fans: A stray lyric in Harry Styles’s song “Falling” radically changed the clientele — and fortunes — of a Beachwood Cafe, a cheerful spot with an all-day menu in Los Angeles.Latest Album: The record-breaking album “Harry’s House” is a testament to the singer’s sense of generosity and devotion to the female subject.Styler Fashion: Stylers, as the pop star’s fans are called, love to dress in homage to their idol. Here are some of the best looks seen at a concert.Opening Up: For his solo debut, Styles agreed to a Times interview. He was slippery in conversation, deflecting questions with politeness.That made the pop star — and frequent Brit Award winner — ineligible for the show’s artist of the year awards, which had long been split into “best male” and “best female” categories.When the BPI announced that it would drop gendered categories for the 2022 awards, the move was praised by British musicians and newspapers as long overdue.At last year’s Brit Awards, which was the first time the ceremony featured a gender-neutral best artist category, Adele won the trophy, along with three others. Kate Green/Getty ImagesThat decision did not immediately lead to the exclusion of women: Last year, Adele won the first best artist prize. “I understand why the name of this award has changed,” she said at the 2022 ceremony, “but I really love being a woman and being a female artist.”This year, however, the nominees list included four men alongside Styles: the rappers Stormzy and Central Cee, the dance act Fred Again.. and the singer George Ezra.Francine Gorman of Keychange, an organization that aims to increase female and nonbinary involvement in Europe’s music industry, said in a recent interview that the all-male list was “a real step backward” for inclusion.“We’re faced with five men, and they’re supposed to be representative of every British artist making music today,” she said.Smith — who was in the running for two awards at Saturday’s event — also criticized the all-male nominees in a recent interview with The Sunday Times, a British newspaper. “There’s so much incredible female talent in the U.K. — they should be on that list,” they said. (Smith’s representatives did not respond to an interview request for this article.)Sam Smith arriving at the 2023 Brit Awards. After the singer came out as nonbinary, the awards decided to award a single gender-neutral artist of the year prize.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockOn Wednesday, concern about the issue even made it to Britain’s parliament, where the Women and Equalities Committee was holding an inquiry into misogyny in music. Caroline Nokes, the committee’s chair, said afterward that she thought that the Brit Awards had acted “too soon” to remove gendered categories, given the significant barriers women face to building careers in music.In an era when some people in Britain see conflicts between women’s rights and those of transgender and nonbinary people, the absence of female nominees for the top award touched a nerve, though most commentary has focused on the barriers facing women in music.The BPI has not announced any steps to avoid another all-male shortlist at next year’s awards. YolanDa Brown, a saxophonist and the BPI’s chair, said in a video interview this week that the organization would review the nomination process and determine if any changes were needed to support women. That could include expanding the number of nominees, she said, but she would not guarantee that any measures would be taken.“Change and evolution is uncomfortable,” Brown said. The success of the move to gender-neutral categories should be judged over a longer time period, she added, noting that “this is just the second year.”The Brits’ best artist category has strict eligibility criteria. Acts must have released either a Top 40 album or two Top 20 singles, within a yearlong period, to make the longlist. This year, only 12 female acts and one nonbinary act qualified, compared with 58 men. The awards’ voting body, made up of some 1,200 music industry insiders, then chooses nominees from the longlist. This year’s voting bloc was 52 percent female.An all-male shortlist “was always going to happen sooner or later” because of the unequal nature of Britain’s music industry, said Vick Bain, a consultant on diversity issues and the president of Britain’s Incorporated Society of Musicians. Women make up only about 20 percent of artists, and 14 percent of songwriters, signed to British record labels and publishers, Bain said.Charli XCX performs at the 2022 Glastonbury Festival. That year, the singer’s album “Crash” was No. 1 in Britain, but she wasn’t nominated for artist of the year at the Brit Awards.Kate Green/Getty ImagesBain said the one positive aspect of the exclusion of female and nonbinary acts was that “it’s shone a spotlight” on that inequality. Women are similarly underrepresented in the British and American movie industries, Bain said, so the Academy Awards could expect similar problems if the academy were to do away with gendered acting categories.In 2020, the BAFTAs, Britain’s main film awards, made a host of changes to try to increase the diversity of its honorees. That included reserving half of the spots on the longlist for the best director prize for women. Yet at this year’s awards, just one female director was among the final six nominees.Before Saturday’s awards, few British musicians commented directly on the backlash. Representatives for more than 20 British pop acts declined interview requests for this article, including the publicists for all 12 female artists who were eligible for this year’s award, as well as all five of the representatives for the male nominees.Bain said the lack of diversity at the Brits requires action across Britain’s music industry, not just from the awards themselves. Record labels should sign more female acts and provide them with the same marketing support as male stars, she said, while festivals should book more women and more radio stations should play their music.Until those wider shifts happen, award shows will “have to be prepared to keep changing” their procedures to stay inclusive, said Bain, who noted that it was true of film awards as well as the Brits.On Saturday night, some acts suggested the Brits needed to up its game. When asked about the lack of female nominees for best artist on the Brits red carpet, Charli XCX told a BBC reporter that female musicians were “doing everything right.”“I don’t think it’s our fault,” she said. “I think it might be theirs.” More

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      in Theater

      As ‘A Strange Loop’ Ends, Its Creator Looks Back on a ‘Supernova’

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      Michael R. Jackson discussed his Pulitzer and Tony-winning musical, which closed Sunday after a nine-month Broadway run.The musical “A Strange Loop” won a Pulitzer Prize even before it got to Broadway, and then it won the Tony Award for best musical shortly after opening. But on Sunday, it closed after only a nine-month run.It has been a tough theater season all around — “A Strange Loop” was one of six shows that closed Sunday — as the industry continues to face audiences that are smaller than they were before the pandemic.But “A Strange Loop,” a meta-musical in which a gay, Black musical theater composer endeavors to write a show about a gay, Black musical theater composer, exited at a high point: During its final week, it pulled in $955,590 at the box office, which was the highest weekly gross of its run, and which set a new house record for the Lyceum Theater.The final night was a celebration: The playwright Michael R. Jackson, who began developing this show when he was 23 and who is now 41, got a standing ovation when he took his seat. There were more standing ovations for the show’s three Tony-nominated performers, Jaquel Spivey, L Morgan Lee and John-Andrew Morrison.Minutes after the show ended, Jackson sat for an interview about the run, the closing and his next project, in a hideaway up a spiral staircase above the stage. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Jackson and the director of “A Strange Loop,” Stephen Brackett, at the final performance.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThis show has been part of your life for 20 years. What was this night like for you?It was emotional, and it was a reminder of why I even began to write it. I wanted to fill an empty space that I saw, both in myself and in the world. And so to see that realized and to see everybody filling in that space in all these colorful ways that are even bolder and more beautiful than what I started with was so powerful and so affirming and so necessary.There’s so much anger and pain in the show. Was that anger and pain yours, and do you still feel it?I have access to it. It’s one of many of the colors in the crayon box. But it doesn’t motivate me. There was a time in my life where the anger was the thing that propelled me forward, but I think harnessing it and digging into it and questioning it and living with it and subverting it and making fun of it and then ultimately accepting it really helped me become the artist that was able to write it.The show won the Pulitzer and the Tony but is closing earlier than you would have wanted. Do you think of the show as successful or not?The more that I’ve reflected on it, it really makes sense to me that “A Strange Loop” would be a supernova that cuts across the firmament and then explodes. It’s not necessarily a piece of art that’s meant to fill a commercial need indefinitely, and I now can’t imagine how it would do that without compromising its artistic integrity. So I consider it to be a fantastic success because that’s how I define success. And I’ll always prioritize the artistic integrity over the commercial and the financial.Jackson embraces the actor Jason Veasey at the party after the final performance.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMany people imagine that your parents are like Usher’s parents, who can’t accept his homosexuality and are skeptical of his career ambitions. I gather that’s not the case.Everything in the show is a fiction, even if it’s drawn from life. Whatever experiences I had with my parents, I took them in as I saw them, and I remixed them into a story. That’s not my parents, which I think is one reason my parents are able to watch the show and see its success and cheer for me so loudly.Do your parents accept you both as gay and as a musical theater writer?They do.I gather the show has led you to meet some famous people.As a child, I adored Whoopi Goldberg in “The Color Purple” and “Soapdish” and “Sarafina!” I thought, when I heard she was coming, that when I met her I would see that lady from “The View.” But the minute I saw her eyes, she was that wonderful performer from my childhood, and that brilliant artist, who loved my show, and it was such a beautiful moment to meet her and to talk with her about the show. And then there were people who didn’t see the show, but who I got to meet as a result of it. I got to spend time with my idol, Tori Amos, and that was a life-changing experience.One person who didn’t come is Tyler Perry, who is mentioned repeatedly in the show, often critically.The interesting thing there is that he and I have a phone relationship. He called me right after I won the Pulitzer, and we text every once in a while, and we spoke recently. He’s probably one of the most complex relationships in my life with someone who I’ve never met. He has a kind of phobia around “A Strange Loop,” without having ever seen it, whereas I’ve seen most of his work. We’ll see where that relationship goes. Maybe it’ll go nowhere. I told him we need to sit down and have dinner.In the last year and a half there have been a record number of shows by Black writers on Broadway. Many have struggled at the box office, but so have a lot of other shows. What’s happening?We need to look at the larger economic realities that are happening in the world more broadly, and the ways those trickle down. A lot of people get very confused in thinking that theater and Broadway live in their own separate economy, outside of everything else, and it doesn’t.Jackson onstage with cast members at the final performance of “A Strange Loop.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThroughout its run, the show faced a number of cast absences. What do you think was going on?Coming out of the pandemic, there’s been illness, there’s been all kinds of things going on, and people are taking care of themselves. And I think that’s going to be a new normal: People taking care of themselves, and shows will have to adapt to that.One of the adaptations was that the weekend before the closing, you went on as Usher for three concert-style performances. What was that like?It was really cathartic and terrifying and thrilling. I went from having to live the role to having to play the role, and bringing those two halves together gave me tremendous closure. Over the last couple of months, I’ve had some daily self-loathings that come in and say “Maybe the show’s not that good,” but once I stepped into it, I was again reminded of its power and of its audacity and of its singularity, and I sent daily self-loathing packing.This show has a white director and a white lead producer, which I understand has led to some pushback.There’s this hunger to infantilize me, or any Black artist, for making the choice to collaborate with who they want to collaborate with, and always wanting to use race or gender or some identity marker as an assumed obstacle, when it may not be at all. I wish that people would respect the choices that artists make and not want to undermine them by assuming that there’s some sort of racial discord that is always waiting to tear people apart or animate their artistic decisions. I’m a grown man, and I stand behind my artistic choices.Your next musical, “White Girl in Danger,” starts previews Off Broadway in March. What is it about?It’s a soap opera fever dream about representation in storytelling.I know it’s prompted in part by your own affection for soap operas. If you were a soap opera character, who would it be?Sammy Jo Carrington. She was on “Dynasty,” played with great aplomb by Heather Locklear. She’s a troublemaker, but she always gets what she wants.Jaquel Spivey and John-Michael Lyles take their bows at the final performance of “A Strange Loop.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesDo you see any thematic overlaps with “A Strange Loop”?In some ways I’ve been thinking of it as a companion piece. It’s not a sequel. It’s not direct. But there’s themes that I’ve been working through on “A Strange Loop” that I expound upon in a larger way in “White Girl in Danger,” if that makes any sense. You’ll have to see it.What’s next for “A Strange Loop”?I’m really hoping that people will pick it up and make their own interpretations of it. It’s a story that is like a jewel that has many facets, and you can hold it up to the light and you can see different things in it, depending on how you interpret it. So I really hope that regional theaters and colleges and universities and whoever else decide to take the risk on doing it, and really put their own stamp on it. More

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      in Music

      Joni Mitchell to Be Honored With Gershwin Prize and Tribute Concert

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      The award from the Library of Congress comes amid a wave of recognition for the singer-songwriter, who performed in public last year for the first time since a 2015 health scare.Joni Mitchell, the revered singer-songwriter who has recently begun tiptoeing back into the public eye, has been named this year’s recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, an award delivered by the Library of Congress, the institution announced Thursday.Mitchell, 79, has received a wave of accolades over the past few years, including recognition at the Kennedy Center Honors; a tribute from MusiCares, a Grammy-affiliated charity; and an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music. The commendations have made once-rare public appearances by Mitchell not so rare. In July, she performed in public for the first time since she suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015, stunning attendees at the Newport Folk Festival — and viewers of the viral videos filmed there.As part of the Gershwin Prize, Mitchell will be honored with a tribute concert on March 1 in Washington, D.C., that will air on PBS on March 31. Typically, honorees perform at least one song at the event.Mitchell, who was one of the defining singer-songwriters of the 1960s and ’70s, was already expected to return to performing later this year. The musician Brandi Carlile, whom Mitchell has referred to as her “ambassador,” announced last year that Mitchell would headline a concert at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington State in June, a day after Carlile anchors her own show there.Recognition for Mitchell’s creative achievements has surged in recent years, as her 1971 album “Blue” was widely celebrated for its 50th anniversary and the musician started an ongoing project called the Joni Mitchell Archives, which unearths rich collections of previously unheard music.Performing alongside Carlile at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, Mitchell sang some of her most beloved songs, including “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Both Sides Now” and “A Case of You.” Writing in The New York Times, the critic Lindsay Zoladz called Mitchell’s resurgence “heartening,” noting that “it allows a beloved if somewhat underappreciated artist to receive her laurels while she’s still living.”“Younger artists got the chance to pay earnest homage to their elder; a mature woman who was not yet finished reinterpreting her life’s work reclaimed the stage,” Zoladz wrote.The Gershwin Prize was established in 2007 to honor living musical artists whose contributions to popular music “exemplify the standard of excellence associated with George and Ira Gershwin.” The recipient is chosen by the librarian of Congress — currently Carla Hayden — who receives advice from scholars, producers, songwriters and other music specialists. Previous recipients include Tony Bennett, Emilio and Gloria Estefan, Carole King, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder. More

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      in Movies

      Golden Globes: How to Watch, What to Know About the Scandal

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      The group that puts on the ceremony has promised reforms since it plunged into scandal two years ago. On Tuesday, it will try to win back viewers.In 2021, actors accepted Golden Globes remotely at a time when organizers were just beginning to grapple with a growing scandal around finances, ethics and diversity in its ranks.Last year, NBC refused to air the show at all, saying that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the troubled organization at the center of the scandal, needed time to make “meaningful reform.”But on Tuesday, the 80th annual Golden Globe Awards are back on NBC with a show that will attempt to win the trust of viewers and participants.What is not yet clear is how many of those viewers will return, after a precipitous drop in ratings during the pandemic, and whether celebrities and other members of the industry will appear en masse.The Globes have long had a reputation for booziness and irreverence. Will the revived ceremony still be seen as a less-staid alternative to the Academy Awards? Or will the Hollywood Foreign Press take the show more seriously?Here’s a brief history of the ceremony’s downfall, how its organizers are trying to rehabilitate it and what to expect from this year’s telecast.What brought down the Golden Globes?Days before the ceremony in 2021, an investigation by The Los Angeles Times took account of financial and ethical lapses at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and revealed that it had no Black members.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.A Lovelorn Romantic: An ‘80s child star, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blending action and drama.The Costume Designer: Shirley Kurata, who defined the look of the movie, has a signature style that mixes vintage, high-end designers and an intense color wheel.Gotham Awards: At the first big show of awards season, which is a spotty Oscar predictor but a great barometer for industry enthusiasm, the film took the top prize.At the time, there were 87 total members in the group, and a lawsuit filed by a Norwegian reporter, Kjersti Flaa, who had thrice been denied admittance to the group, accused members of accepting “thousands of dollars in emoluments” from members of the industry who were campaigning for recognition at the Globes. (A lawyer for the association said the lawsuit was a “a transparent attempt to shake down the H.F.P.A. based on jealousy,” The Los Angeles Times reported.)One story of wooing voters became emblematic of a reputation for accepting lavish perks. The Netflix comedy series “Emily in Paris,” which was the subject of lackluster reviews, received two nominations after dozens of association members flew to Paris to visit the “Emily” set and were put up by the Paramount Network at a five-star hotel.There was also scrutiny over how much members were paid for their involvement. According to filings from the tax year ending in June 2019, the nonprofit paid more than $3 million in salaries and other compensation to members and staff. Serving on one committee, for instance, meant $1,000 a month, a 2021 internal association report shows.How did the H.F.P.A. react?At the ceremony in 2021, the hosts, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, made repeated jabs at the press association over its lack of Black members, and midway through the program, leaders of the group took the stage and pledged to increase the diversity of its membership.In the two years since, it has recruited new members, overhauled eligibility rules and enacted a stricter code of conduct. All existing members — some of whom have had their journalistic credentials questioned over the years — needed to reapply. The 96-member group now has six Black members — up from zero in 2021 — and has added 103 nonmember voters, a dozen or so of whom are Black.Todd Boehly, the interim chief executive, has moved to end the association’s tax-exempt status and turn it into a for-profit company with a philanthropic arm. (He has been awaiting final governmental approval for that plan, after which he is expected to disband the H.F.P.A.)How has Hollywood responded?The H.F.P.A.’s practices have been scrutinized for decades, but this time, Hollywood couldn’t turn away.Netflix, Amazon and WarnerMedia said they would not work with the association unless changes we made.There were condemnations by A-list stars and producers. Shonda Rhimes called out the organization for its treatment of her shows; Tom Cruise returned his Globe trophies; Scarlett Johansson suggested the industry step back from the H.F.P.A. until it tackled “fundamental reform.”And more than 100 Hollywood publicity firms called on the association to “eradicate the longstanding exclusionary ethos and pervasive practice of discriminatory behavior, unprofessionalism, ethical impropriety and alleged financial corruption.” Until the group made its plans for change public, the firms said, they would not advise their clients to engage with the group’s journalists.Now that the organization has outlined its plans for reform, publicists and agents say that some stars are open to participating, while others want the Globes to be permanently retired. Based on this year’s list of presenters — which include Billy Porter, Natasha Lyonne and Quentin Tarantino — many are planning to show up on Tuesday.When and how do I watch?Wait, aren’t awards shows usually on Sunday? Typically, but this one was bumped to avoid clashing with NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.”Held at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif., the telecast will air at 8 p.m. Eastern time, 5 p.m. Pacific time on NBC. For the first time, the show will also be available simultaneously online, through NBCUniversal’s streaming service, Peacock.Who is the host?The comedian Jerrod Carmichael will be the master of ceremonies. His HBO special “Rothaniel,” in which he came out as gay, won an Emmy and was considered among the best of 2022. And he may be familiar to NBC viewers from his 2015-17 sitcom, “The Carmichael Show,” or from his turn as host of “Saturday Night Live” last year.Who is expected to attend?The show has announced a list of presenters, including Ana de Armas, who is nominated for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in the Netflix biopic “Blonde”; Jamie Lee Curtis, who is up for a supporting actress award for “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; and Niecy Nash, who is nominated for her role in Netflix’s “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”Also listed as presenters are Ana Gasteyer, Colman Domingo, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Nicole Byer and Tracy Morgan. Eddie Murphy and the producer Ryan Murphy are receiving special honors.It is not likely to be clear until Tuesday whether a significant group of celebrities intends to boycott the ceremony.Brendan Fraser, who is nominated for best actor in a drama for his performance as a morbidly obese man in “The Whale,” has said that he would not attend the ceremony, citing the H.F.P.A.’s handling of his accusation that a former leader of the organization, Philip Berk, groped him at a luncheon in 2003. Berk denied the accusation and is no longer a member.Who is up for awards?The film with the most nominations is “The Banshees of Inisherin,” an Irish drama from the writer-director Martin McDonagh about a fractured friendship. It is up for eight awards. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — the sci-fi comedy about a Chinese immigrant and laundromat owner, which is co-directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — is up for six.The best film directing category contains some heavyweights — James Cameron for “Avatar: The Way of Water,” Steven Spielberg for “The Fabelmans” and Baz Luhrmann for “Elvis” — as well as McDonagh, Kwan and Scheinert.On the television side, the schoolroom sitcom “Abbott Elementary,” created by Quinta Brunson, is up for the most awards, with five nominations, including best musical or comedy series.In the increasingly prestigious limited series category, the talked-about drama “White Lotus” is up against “Pam & Tommy,” “The Dropout,” “Black Bird” and “Monster.”HBO Max and Netflix are tied with the highest number of nominations, at 14 each.Brooks Barnes contributed reporting. More

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      in Theater

      Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Laura Grill Jaye Win 2022 Relentless Award

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      The award’s first prize to a musical went to the writing duo for “How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia.”Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Laura Grill Jaye have won the 2022 Relentless Musical Award for their new work, “How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia,” the American Playwriting Foundation announced on Thursday.It is the first Relentless Award to go to a musical. Chowdhury and Jaye, known as the writing duo Grill and Chowder, will receive a $65,000 prize and have the option to hold staged readings at prominent theaters across the country, including a series at Theater Row in New York.“How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia,” which centers on race and identity in a musical chock-full of ’90s touchstones like Tamagotchi cyberpets and Abercrombie & Fitch, tells the story of a young white girl whose suburban life is interrupted when she finds an unexpected scar on her shoulder in the form of a brown spot.“At this moment in time when there are so many different approaches to dealing with issues of race, what they’re up to is so complex,” said David Bar Katz, the foundation’s artistic and executive director. “They come at it through humor and discovery.”The Relentless Award was established in honor of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman after his death in 2014. This year, the award was limited to musical submissions to honor the songwriter Adam Schlesinger, who died in 2020 from complications of the coronavirus.Applicants had the challenge of embodying both artists.In previous years, when plays were evaluated for exemplifying Hoffman’s spirit, “it was more about if someone’s art seemed like they’d ripped their heart out and threw it down on the stage,” Katz said. Schlesinger, on the other hand, “loved creating well-constructed pop songs that were hummable that people would enjoy,” Katz said.“Having to reconcile those things is almost an impossible task,” he added.Going forward, there will be two awards: one for plays with a $45,000 prize and one for musicals with a $65,000 prize.More than 500 entries were read by a panel of judges, including the playwrights Thomas Bradshaw and Lynn Nottage, and the musicians James Iha and Stephin Merritt.The jury also awarded $3,000 prizes to three finalists: Joe Stevens and Keaton Wooden, for “Hills on Fire”; David Gomez and John-Michael Lyles, for “Shoot for the Moon”; and Oliver Houser, for “XY.” More

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      in Theater

      Tony Awards to Be Staged in Manhattan’s Washington Heights

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      The annual ceremony honoring Broadway’s top productions and performers is moving to the New York neighborhood where the musical “In the Heights” was set.After 75 years of ceremonies in and around New York’s theater district, the Tony Awards next year will move uptown, holding the annual best-of-Broadway awards ceremony in Washington Heights.Tony Awards administrators made the surprise announcement Tuesday morning, saying that the next ceremony would take place on June 11 at the United Palace, an ornate theater in northern Manhattan that was constructed as a movie theater and is now used for religious and cultural activities.The administrators did not immediately offer a rationale for the move, but it brings the ceremony to a neighborhood with a large Hispanic population, and to a theater that has been championed by one of Broadway’s best-known stars, Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Miranda’s first Broadway musical, “In the Heights,” is named for, and takes place in, the neighborhood.)The ceremony, which will honor plays and musicals that opened on Broadway between April 29, 2022 and April 27, 2023, will be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+. The nominations will be announced on May 2.The United Palace is a landmark building that opened in 1930 as a Loew’s “Wonder Theater,” which were large and luxurious movie palaces. The building has 3,400 seats, which makes it the fourth largest theater in Manhattan — it is significantly smaller than Radio City Music Hall, where the Tony Awards have often taken place, but larger than the Beacon Theater, where the awards have sometimes been staged in recent years.The Tony Awards have, since 1947, changed locations multiple times. They were initially held in hotel ballrooms, then Broadway theaters before switching to larger venues in the 1990s.The Tony Awards, formally known as the Antoinette Perry Awards, were founded by the American Theater Wing and are now presented by the Broadway League and the Wing. Next year’s ceremony will be directed by Glenn Weiss, who has frequently played that role; Weiss and his longtime collaborator, Ricky Kirshner, will produce the broadcast with the League and the Wing. More

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      in Music

      MacArthur Foundation Announces 25 New ‘Genius’ Grant Winners

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      The 2022 awards are going to artists, activists, scholars, scientists and others who have shown “exceptional creativity.” The grants are a bit bigger than before: $800,000 over five years.The 2022 MacArthur fellows include a sociologist working to understand what drives people to own guns; an astrodynamicist trying to manage “space traffic” and ensure that satellites don’t crash into each other in Earth’s orbit; and a lawyer seeking to expose inequities in the patent system that stifle access to affordable medications.The 25 winners of the fellowship, announced on Wednesday, study things as small as molecular materials and as vast as outer space. They are esteemed in their fields, if not yet all household names. And now, in addition to being publicly celebrated for their work, they will have more funding to keep it going.Known colloquially as the “genius” award — to the sometime annoyance of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation — the MacArthur Fellowship comes with a no-strings-attached grant of $800,000 to be awarded over five years. (Program officials noted that the size of the stipend has increased for the new group of fellows, from $625,000.)The class includes scholars tackling some particularly timely topics. Jennifer Carlson, 40, investigates the motivations and assumptions that shape gun culture in America. The longtime activist Loretta J. Ross teaches a class that works to combat so-called cancel culture. And some of Yejin Choi’s work involves using computational linguistics to help detect everything from fake consumer reviews to fake news.“I didn’t think much of myself,” said Professor Choi, 45. “I thought this award was supposed to be for other people out there — not ever for me.”“Being an immigrant, being a woman — I had to overcome a lot,” she said. “I had impostor syndrome.”The fellowship is meant for those who “show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future,” according to the foundation.The purpose “has always been to provide recipients with unrestricted financial support so that they might further their creative work and their creative inclinations with as much freedom as flexibility as possible,” said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program.Few honors carry the prestige — and mystique — of the MacArthurs. Potential fellows cannot apply but are suggested by a network of hundreds of anonymous nominators from across the country and narrowed down by a committee of about a dozen people, whose names are not released.Professor Ross said she was driving when she got a call from the foundation. She assumed, at first, that someone wanted an employment reference: “I told them, kind of rudely, ‘I’m driving right now, I’ve got to teach today, call me back at 4:15.’”She did not give the caller time to explain. “I don’t drive and talk,” she said.The foundation called back at 4:15 p.m., as instructed.“I felt honored and I felt a little bewildered,” Professor Ross said. “The hardest part is that they told me a month ago and I had to keep it all to myself.”Much of the winners’ work feels urgent. Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer, investigates the scale and pathways of plastic pollution and is among the researchers who provided the first estimate of the amount of plastic waste entering the ocean annually (eight million metric tons).Moriba Jah, 51, the astrodynamicist, is an advocate for a different kind of environmentalism: space environmentalism, which calls for treating Earth’s orbit, which now contains almost 30,000 human-made objects, as a finite natural resource.Priti Krishtel, 44, the lawyer, is trying to change the patent system so that pharmaceutical companies can no longer file multiple patents on small changes to existing drugs — a move aimed at increasing access to affordable medications.In some cases, the urgent work is the study of the past. The literary historian P. Gabrielle Foreman founded the Colored Conventions Project, a digital initiative that documents Black organizing efforts between 1830 and the 1890s.“We know about white-led movements for social change in a way that has a tendency, in the public square, to overshadow Black brilliance, Black leadership and Black organizational capacity,” Professor Foreman said.“Why don’t we know about Black-led movements? One reason is because they are saying the same thing we are saying today,” she continued, noting that the conventions dealt not just with ending slavery but also with issues like equal pay, labor rights, voting rights and other issues that remain pressing almost two centuries later.There are multiple artists in the class as well. Among them is Amanda Williams, whose “Embodied Sensations” installation was at the Museum of Modern Art in 2021. There are also musicians like Ikue Mori, who, over five decades, transformed the use of percussion in improvised music, and the jazz cellist and composer Tomeka Reid.The youngest fellow is Steven Prohira, 35, a physicist engineering new tools to detect subatomic particles. The oldest, at age 69, are Professor Ross and Robin Wall Kimmerer, a plant ecologist known for environmental stewardship that is grounded in both scientific research and the body of knowledge cultivated by Indigenous peoples.Steven Ruggles, 67, is also among this class of fellows. A historical demographer, he built the world’s largest publicly available database of population statistics.“I’m not the most obvious candidate for something like this,” he said, noting that he is older and has already procured considerable grant money. Still, he, conceded, “It’s a humbling thing.”This year’s fellows also include: the artists Paul Chan, Sky Hopinka and Tavares Strachan; the mathematicians June Huh and Melanie Matchett Wood; the historian Monica Kim; the writer Kiese Laymon; Danna Freedman, a synthetic inorganic chemist; Martha Gonzalez, a musician and scholar; Joseph Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and naturalist; Reuben Jonathan Miller, a sociologist, criminologist and social worker; and Emily Wang, a primary-care physician and researcher.Professor Choi, a computer scientist with expertise in what is known as natural language processing, has focused much of her recent research on common sense knowledge and reasoning — and developing artificial intelligence systems that can reason with that common sense.“People really looked down on me,” she said, recalling that someone had once chased her down at a conference to convince her that attempting to study common sense was a fool’s errand.Getting a MacArthur, she said, has been “enabling” — both financially and mentally, Professor Choi said. The same person who had sought her out at the conference asked her years later to recommend reading for a class the person wanted to teach, she said. The topic of the class? Common sense. More

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      Harvey Awards to Induct New Hall of Fame Members

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      Neil Gaiman, Marjorie Henderson Buell, Gilbert Shelton and Roy Thomas will be honored for their comic book work at New York Comic Con on Oct. 7.The Harvey Awards, which honors exemplary comic book work, will be adding members to its Hall of Fame at New York Comic Con in October. The new inductees are Neil Gaiman, whose best-selling series The Sandman was recently adapted for Netflix, the underground cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, and Roy Thomas, a prolific writer and editor for DC Comics and Marvel Comics.Marjorie Henderson Buell, who died in 1993 and was the creator of Little Lulu, will be inducted posthumously. Little Lulu debuted in 1935 as a single-panel cartoon in The Saturday Evening Post. The character proved popular and Buell, who was known as Marge and who controlled the rights to Little Lulu, spun her into a syndicated newspaper strip and later, comics, cartoons and all manner of merchandise.“We’re thrilled to return to New York Comic Con for our first in-person Harvey Awards ceremony since 2019 and to induct four legendary creators into our Harvey Awards Hall of Fame,” said John Lind, a chairman of the Harvey Awards steering committee. The awards began in 1988 and were named after Harvey Kurtzman, the cartoonist who created and founded Mad magazine, who died in 1993.The Harvey Awards honor comic book work in six categories, including book of the year, best manga, and best adaptation. The nominees are determined via a survey of about 200 industry professionals, librarians, educators and creators who submit candidates for each of the categories. The selections are tallied and pulled into a ballot, which is then open to a vote by all industry professionals, creators and librarians.Looking back, Gaiman shared some fond memories of his Harvey experiences. “The first time I was given a Harvey award, it was 1991, 31 years ago, I had a whole career or two ahead of me and Harvey Kurtzman was still alive. It was the award that bore his name, and was thus the most important award I had ever received,” he said in a statement. “Now, with over three decades of comics career behind me, it’s just as thrilling to hear that I get to join a Hall of Fame named for Harvey. He was one of the greats, and so many of the people who have been inducted already have been people I looked up to over the years. So this is an unalloyed delight for me.” More