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      It’s His Party, and He’ll Cry if He Wants To

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      “Slave Play” received a record number of nominations, though took home none. Still, Jeremy O. Harris found reasons to celebrate.Upstairs, removed from the bouncing party celebrating his Tony-nominated drama, “Slave Play,” the playwright Jeremy O. Harris cried — out of happiness for his friends who won awards but also frustration with himself for believing he would too.Mr. Harris’s buzzy, polarizing Broadway debut, in which an imaginary sex therapy retreat for interracial couples is used to examine the legacy of slavery in America, set a Tonys record for nominations — 12, including best play — but didn’t take home any prizes. (The last time a Black playwright won for best play was 1987. This year it went to “The Inheritance,” written by Matthew López, the first Latino writer to win the award.)Mr. Harris, 32, who developed his play while attending the Yale School of Drama, has secured his place as a shape-shifting cultural voice, or as one partygoer said: “the coolest guy in New York.” He attended Sundance for the premiere of the film “Zola,” which he co-wrote; released a capsule collection; signed a deal with HBO; modeled for Gucci; made a cameo on “Gossip Girl”; smoked a cigarette on the steps of the Met Gala; is set to appear on the next season of “Emily in Paris”; and will bring “Slave Play” back to Broadway in November.Sipping Casamigos tequila, dressed in Zegna and Cartier, Mr. Harris held tightly to the hand of his 11-year-old niece, who joined him at the Tonys. He had never expected to win, but for a minute, he imagined it.Mr. Harris’s niece, Kyra, accompanied him throughout the night.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times“I decided to take the wall down for a second when they were saying the nominees,” he said. “And I think, in that one moment, I felt really excited. And I felt all the emotions of it, and then it didn’t happen,” he said, as tears broke through his sentences.“I know for a person like me, to hope that the systems that you agitate will affirm you, is a lost cause,” he continued. “If I’m hitting a nerve that people don’t like to be hit, there’s no reason for them to be like, ‘Now come, I’m going to give you a prize for that.’”Mr. Harris spent the day leading up to the awards show with his mom, niece and high school drama teacher. He wrote a speech, took a picture of it, then burned the paper, afraid putting anything down would be bad luck. In it, he thanked everyone who had helped him — let him sleep on couches, invited him to parties and brought him to dinner.“That award would have been some sort of evidence and recognition of everyone that sat in those audiences — that the work was not just real, but worthy,” he said. “And not that it is any less worthy now, because it truly is.”Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesAdrienne Warren, who took home the award for best leading actress in a musical.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesRobb Nanus, the executive director of Broadway Advocacy Coalition.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesDownstairs, a crowd still came out late on a Sunday night to NeueHouse, a plant-filled co-working space and private club on a quiet street in the East 20s. Dressed in leopard prints, tuxedos, sequins and ball gowns, guests submitted Covid-19 test results and vaccination cards for entry, then went mostly maskless. Pizza trucks waited outside and the D.J.s Oscar Nñ and Mazurbate played Latin New Wave.Unlike previous years, post-Tonys festivities were limited — New York City said no to the request for an official after-party on the street — and there were only a few official events.The space was filled with Broadway performers including Adrienne Warren, who won a Tony for her role in “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical”; Dyllón Burnside, who will soon appear in “Thoughts of a Colored Man”; and Chalia La Tour, who was nominated for a Tony for her role in “Slave Play.” There was also Antwaun Sargent, a director of Gagosian Gallery, the photographer Tyler Mitchell and DeRay Mckesson, an activist.The party was co-hosted with the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, which was honored for a special Tony Award for its efforts to challenge racism through storytelling and theater. Attendees were invited to write down their biggest dream for change in the industry. In the back, an artist translated the messages into a drawing on a dry erase board.Ms. Warren, who co-founded the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, said she hopes the industry will start re-examining and reimagining itself.Dyllón Burnside and Josh WyattRebecca Smeyne for The New York Times.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesDeRay Mckesson, left.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times“The truth is, I don’t know where Broadway is going to go. I can only have these dreams of where I hope it will go,” she said. “We are at a true turning point, and it is up to this industry to decide where they want to turn.”Mr. Mckesson said he is interested in ways to get more people into the theater, and opportunities to make it easier for New Yorkers to see plays.“What would it look like to proactively invite communities to come that otherwise might not?” he asked. “Are we doing everything we can to invite people into these spaces that have historically excluded them?”Hari Nef, the actress and model, said she would also like to see more stories that push audiences.“I would like to see confrontation and pleasure and little payoff. It runs the risk of feeling a little orderly if we’re not careful,” Ms. Nef said. “There would be maybe a little violence. It would be upsetting.”The party was scheduled to end at 1 a.m., but Mr. Harris led the group further downtown to the lounge Socialista. For him, the night was still young.“I’m going to party until 5 a.m. I have two hotel rooms, one at the Edition and one at the Bowery. I’m going to choose which one feels the best to me,” he said. “And I might not sleep at all tonight.” More

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      For a Broadway Torn by a Pandemic, a Split-Personalities Tonys

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      The streaming part of the ceremony actually did a better job conveying the electricity of being in a theater than the CBS special billed as “Broadway’s Back!”It’s no surprise that the Tony Awards ceremony on Sunday night took much more time and bandwidth than usual, swallowing up more than four hours that were split between two platforms. After all, it had a big agenda: to honor the shortened 2019-2020 season and everything that came after, including the ongoing pandemic and a cultural reckoning in the theater, as in the world. Also, of course, with special urgency now, the event wanted to encourage possibly wary theatergoers to buy tickets to shows by highlighting Broadway’s performers as they return to the stage.With so much on its to do list, how did the Tonys do? Jesse Green, The New York Times’s chief theater critic, discussed the presentation — or, rather, the presentations: one on Paramount+ and one on CBS — with James Poniewozik, The Times’s chief television critic, and the contributor Elisabeth Vincentelli.JESSE GREEN The Tony Awards ceremony was deliberately broken into two halves: the first more like a private industry dinner, on Paramount+, to give out most of the awards efficiently; the second more like a desperate advertisement, on broadcast television, to lure tourists back to Broadway. (The second was even called, somewhat ambitiously, “Broadway’s Back!”) But did either of you feel, as I did intensely, that the two shows were almost psychotically different, even if they were written and directed by the same team? One half gave us the art form that wants to speak in serious terms of the human soul and cultural change. The other gave us weak comedy bits and bad timing.ELISABETH VINCENTELLI It felt like one of those horror films where a lab-made creature’s parts suddenly take on a life of their own: What used to be an awkward — but often very entertaining, in its own way — whole suddenly became split into separate bits and pieces. Mind you, those bits and pieces meant that even with four hours of airtime, the show still ran long!JAMES PONIEWOZIK The two shows were undeniably different. I’m not sure I mind that, though, at least in theory — we can get to my issues with the execution. Broadway was hit by the pandemic uniquely among art forms, but the Tonys really have the same challenge that all televised awards shows have now: Who is this production for? Is it for the die-hards or the casuals? Is it for the artists or the audience? Is it meant to honor the creative work of the past year(s) or sell tickets for the next? The Tonys answer was essentially, “Why not both?” There was definitely whiplash for those of us who managed to find Paramount+ and watch both halves. But I’m not sure how big that audience was compared with the CBS-only crowd.VINCENTELLI Splitting the awards from the musical numbers is what, I suspect, CBS had wanted to do for ages: shove the awards to the side because nobody (in the network’s view) cares, and focus on the fun stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if they continued with that format in the future.PONIEWOZIK That split, by the way, is what the Grammys have done on CBS for years — shunt most of the awards off prime time and put on a big show for the general audience. That worked pretty well for them this year.GREEN The difference, and what makes the split feel more neurotic to me, is that the theater, abetted by pretentious theater critics like myself, often tries to imagine it is upholding a more noble tradition. Certainly it’s an older tradition. In any case, given the choice to divide the awards, it’s surprising how the first half managed to provide everything the second half was supposed to — warmth, dignity in a difficult time, Jennifer Holliday live! — and the second half largely failed to, except in the recorded segments from the nominated musicals.VINCENTELLI The combination of Sheryl Lee Ralph’s introduction and Jennifer Holliday’s performance of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” is bound to become a YouTube classic. CBS might be trying to turn the Tonys into the Kennedy Center Honors, which they also broadcast — they’re well placed to know that in 2019, the Honors scored more viewers than the Tonys. So that’s the model: celebrity presenters of big numbers. Having the awards themselves on Paramount+ also testifies to the siloing of audiences.Danny Burstein in a performance by the “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” cast. The critics agreed that the number worked well on TV.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPONIEWOZIK I would question whether the theater is more inherently “noble” than TV or any other art form. But another argument, another day. More to the point, if the theater wants to celebrate its hard work and creative spirit, you can rent a nice hall for that and do it privately. If you expect a broadcast TV audience, your obligations are different — no one is entitled to the attention of millions of people. But I agree that (to my surprise) the first, industry-awards part actually did a better job of conveying the excitement and electricity of being in a theater!GREEN The “concert” half, not a bad idea in theory, was in fact so poorly routined and timed that it erased all the gains of the “awards” half. The final 30 minutes, which felt like an entire additional day, was a train wreck of bad calls: ballads, duets, redundant improv from “Freestyle Love Supreme” — when what you really wanted in that spot was the “Moulin Rouge!” kickline and confetti cannons.VINCENTELLI I don’t think I ever need “Moulin Rouge!” anything. That said, that number worked on TV and may well have done its job, which is to sell tickets.GREEN I’m not a huge fan of “Moulin Rouge!” myself, but I thought it looked fantastic on the screen, using the cool medium to tone down its manic red hotness. Even if it hadn’t won 10 awards, the most of any show, it would have done itself a lot of good with that performance.PONIEWOZIK The flow of the CBS portion was just weird. The “concert” wasn’t an awards show, but there were three major awards, and the last one was given out a half-hour before the end, sabotaging the momentum. I also question whether the song choices — between the general nostalgia of the production and Broadway’s reliance on jukebox musicals — did much to sell an audience on experiencing new theater. (Disclosure: I already have tickets for “Caroline, or Change.”) You’re telling me to feel excited (and safe) going back to a theater in 2021, and giving me a selection of songs I could have heard on one night of “American Idol” in 2005.VINCENTELLI And as on “American Idol,” there was no mention of plays, which the Tonys still don’t know what to do about. Unless I blinked and missed it, there was no attempt to even describe them, let alone feature excerpts.PONIEWOZIK Yes, Elisabeth! Four hours (plus overtime!!!), and you can’t even give us a taste of the plays you want us to come back to Broadway for?GREEN Generally you can’t come back for the plays; they’ve closed. But the world of Broadway is changing, even when the awards don’t. “The Inheritance” swept the big play categories, winning four major awards, and “Slave Play,” its main competition, got skunked — but it was “Slave Play” that has announced a return Broadway engagement, starting in November. I’m shocked “Slave Play” didn’t win, but there’s no point in litigating the voters’ choices; they are always unintelligible and, as far as television is concerned, beside the point. Unintelligibility may even be a plus. Drama!Daniel J. Watts, right, and Jared Grimes during their performance. The spoken word piece, featuring tap, addressed the racial equity concerns of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, which received a special Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesVINCENTELLI In terms of the overall tone, I was very happy to be spared the usual self-conscious posture of theater, which thinks of itself as a beleaguered band of misfits toiling for an underappreciated art form/industry and reacts with a bizarre mix of self-importance and defensiveness. Theater folks feel like the Marvel and “Star Wars” nerds of yore, before they became the de facto rulers of popular culture. Sunday night had a much more interesting, and overall healthier, balance of positivity, eagerness and joy. Of course at times there was frustration and anger, too, expressed most starkly in Daniel J. Watts’s spoken-word number, but that’s another way to let passion speak.PONIEWOZIK To me, the job of the whole shebang was to convey through TV the excitement of seeing theater live, in a room. What did that well? Jennifer Holliday’s performance, of course — not just because she’s a legend, but because it was a theatrical performance. She was in character. (Whereas too many of the duets, however beautifully sung, simply felt like watching two celebrities I like enjoy being back together.) I thought the recorded performances from other theaters might kill the live vibe, but it helped that they had audiences. And the buzz of the first awards portion — you could just feel how pumped everyone was to be in the room — in a way recreated the live experience better than some of the performances.GREEN Yes: What was good was whatever felt like live theater, not like an “I Love New York” commercial. Still, it’s very strange to me that the main thing all these Broadway creatives couldn’t pull off was a Broadway entertainment spectacular. (Who puts all the socko material at the beginning, leaving none for the end?) I think it’s time to give other writers and directors a chance.VINCENTELLI The second half of the show felt a little rote because something changed over the past 18 months in terms of access. The Tonys used to be the only place we could catch Broadway stars do a number on a screen. But in 2020, we streamed them a lot, and the newness of watching, say, Kelli O’Hara or Audra McDonald slay a number was dulled — because we watched Kelli O’Hara and Audra McDonald slay a lot of numbers online last year.PONIEWOZIK It would not be awful for the Tonys (and other awards) to learn a little from streaming. The most entertaining work of theater I saw during the pandemic may have been Annaleigh Ashford doing an insane version of “Mr. Mistoffelees” from “Cats” while cooped up at home for Miscast21.VINCENTELLI Yes! The Tonys need a good dose of that freewheeling social-media spirit.GREEN And maybe, hear me out, it should keep to a TikTok length. More

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      Gotham Award

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      The Gothams will replace the best actress and best actor categories with a single category for “outstanding lead performance.”Should acting prizes be gender neutral? The question has been percolating for years, with zealous arguments for and against.But the biggest ceremonies that honor acting, aware that change would kick a cultural hornet’s nest, have adhered to tradition. Best actor. Best actress.On Thursday, a significant stop on the annual road to the Oscars broke ranks. The Gotham Awards said that, beginning with its November ceremony, prizes for acting would no longer be broken out by gender. The Gothams will replace its best actress and best actor categories with a single category for outstanding lead performance. For the first time, there will be a category for supporting roles: outstanding supporting performance.Each category can have up to 10 nominees, with the field chosen, per custom, by committees of film critics, festival programmers and film curators. Separate juries made up of writers, directors, actors, producers and other film professionals will determine the final recipients, the same as always. The acting categories at the Gothams previously had five nominees.“There are so many talented nonbinary individuals, and it’s not fair to force them into male and female boxes,” said Jeffrey Sharp, the executive director of the Gotham Film and Media Institute in New York. “We have a really proud history of inclusivity. It’s part of our DNA. But it was time for us to evolve, too.”Will other significant ceremonies follow?“We can only speak for ourselves, but we do have a history of leading the conversation,” Mr. Sharp said, referring to the position the Gotham Awards has as the first significant ceremony of Hollywood’s prize-collecting season.The influential Berlin Film Festival went gender neutral with its performance awards in the spring. Although not taken seriously as markers of artistic achievement, the MTV Movie & TV Awards stopped separating acting prizes by gender in 2017, along with MTV’s Video Music Awards. The Grammys did away with the division in 2012.But none of the organizations behind the most prestigious acting awards — Oscars, BAFTAs, Tonys and Emmys — have indicated that they will take the same action. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which manages the Oscars, has perhaps gone the furthest, telling The New York Times in 2019 that, while it planned to keep its current structure in place, it would “continue to be sensitive to the evolving conversation.” The Academy Awards for best actress and best actor were first presented in 1929.The Screen Actors Guild Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and Golden Globes also have male and female acting categories.The debate has roots in older conversations about whether carving out places in a male-dominated field for one group, in this case women, comes at the cost of excluding others.Those seeking change contend that, in addition to forcing nonbinary performers into boxes, gendered categories give the false appearance that prime roles for women are far more prevalent than they actually are.“We should be more afraid of upholding a discriminatory, sexist policy than we are of abolishing it,” the nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon, known for their role on Showtime’s “Billions,” wrote in an essay last year. They added, “There are ultimately, two tangible obstacles to abolishing the actress category at awards shows, and they are — to be blunt — money and feelings.”Supporters of gendered categories say that absent such distinctions, men would dominate the nominees and winners. There are also those who swat away potential change as an example of progressive ideology run amok.Mr. Sharp said that the concern about maintaining an equitable mix of nominees when doing away with gendered categories was “valid.”“In terms of the danger of being skewed one way or another, we have great faith in the individuals who make our nominations decisions,” he said, referring to the Gotham Awards’ committee system. (The New York Times is a corporate sponsor of the awards and had no role in the decision about the new categories.)Mr. Sharp noted that his organization’s longtime “breakthrough actor” award, which will be renamed “breakthrough performer,” has always been gender neutral, having been given to stars like Amy Adams (“Junebug”), Elliot Page (“Juno”), Michael B. Jordan (“Fruitvale Station”) and Mya Taylor (“Tangerine”).The most-recent Gotham Awards ceremony took place in January and was staged virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. Nicole Beharie was named best actress for her performance in “Miss Juneteenth” and Riz Ahmed won the best actor prize for “Sound of Metal.”The Gotham Film and Media Institute (formerly the Independent Filmmaker Project) also said on Thursday that it had created two new television categories: breakthrough nonfiction series and outstanding performance in a new series.Cara Buckley More

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      Pulitzer-Winning Critic Wesley Morris Captured the Moment

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      For his piercing insights on race and culture, Wesley Morris recently received his second Pulitzer Prize. But he won over colleagues long before that.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Wesley Morris was ready for his medal.In 2012, he had just won his first Pulitzer Prize for criticism, as a writer for The Boston Globe, and was at the ceremony at Columbia University with his mother. But when he wondered out loud where he could pick up the award, he got a surprise.“Oh, sweetie,” Tracy K. Smith, that year’s poetry winner, told him. “We don’t get a medal, only the public service winner gets that. We get a paperweight.” (OK, she was exaggerating a little.)“My mom was like, ‘Oh my God, Wesley,’” he said, laughing.It was the rare oversight for Mr. Morris, a deep thinker and New York Times critic at large who recently won his second Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the only person to receive that award twice.He was recognized for an ambitious body of work over the past year on race and culture that included not only incisive essays about the racial justice movement and the impact of cellphone videos on Black Americans, but poignant personal pieces like a Times Magazine story about how growing a mustache was connected to his sense of Blackness.“I love important, weighty ideas,” he said, though he added that he also likes considering topics that are lighthearted and frivolous.Gilbert Cruz, The Times’s culture editor, said Mr. Morris’s pieces stood out for their scope and accessibility.“He has a unique ability to step back, look across the cultural and social landscape and speak to us in a way that makes it seem as if we’re engaged in a conversation,” Mr. Cruz said. “A funny, smart, sometimes emotional and always riveting conversation.”Sia Michel, The Times’s deputy culture editor who has edited Mr. Morris’s work for three years, similarly praised both Mr. Morris’s intellect and his common touch. “He has an imposing sense of critical authority and moral authority but always invites the reader in,” she said.Mr. Morris said his dreams of becoming a critic dated back to when he received an assignment in eighth grade: Write a report after either reading Howard Fast’s 1961 novel “April Morning” or watching the TV movie version of it. He decided to do both, then wrote a scathing critical review.“You didn’t really do what I asked you to do,” he recalls his teacher, John Kozempel, telling him. “But you did do a thing that exists in the world. It’s called criticism, and this is a good example of it.”Of course, not everyone can write elegant essays that educate even when they excoriate, and which provide an entry point to a conversation rather than closing a door to opposing views. But when Mr. Morris begins to put words on a page, the ideas flow.“I don’t know how I feel about a lot of things until I sit down to write about them,” he said. “That’s my journey as a writer — to figure out where my brain, heart and moral compass are with respect to whatever I’m writing about.”When Mr. Morris files a story, Ms. Michel said, she always knows she’ll get four things: surprising pop cultural and historical connections; a brilliant thesis; at least one “breathtaking” passage that reads like poetry; and a memorable, revised-to-perfection ending.“He always reworks his last graph until it slays,” she said.Mr. Morris said his biggest challenge is that he has so many ideas, he never has time to pursue all of them.“I can be paralyzed by my glut of ideas,” he said, “which often means I wait to write things until the last minute.” He added that he’s been known to write 3,000-word pieces on a same-day deadline.Yet somehow, amid writing for the daily paper, the Sunday Arts & Leisure section and The Times Magazine, as well as co-hosting the weekly culture podcast “Still Processing,” Mr. Morris manages to make time for everyone, his podcast co-host, Jenna Wortham, said.When Mr. Morris won his first Pulitzer in 2012, Mx. Wortham, who uses she/they pronouns, was a newly hired Business reporter for The Times who had been assigned to write a story about him. They left a voice mail message and sent an email to Mr. Morris.Thinking he would be too busy to respond right away, Mx. Wortham went out for coffee but after returning found a long, thoughtful voice mail from Mr. Morris with “more information than I needed.”“It left the deepest impression on me,” Mx. Wortham said. “And I remember thinking I would strive to be someone who always made time for other reporters.”Their friendship, which began six years ago, has only blossomed and deepened since then, Mx. Wortham said.“I’ve seen Wesley give a barefoot unhoused man money for a pair of shoes and absolutely demolish a dance floor with equal amounts of grace,” she said. “There’s no one like him, and we are all so lucky to exist in this iteration of life alongside him.”Although Mr. Morris’s profile is much higher now, he said he intended to respond to every one of the hundreds of congratulatory emails, texts, calls and Twitter messages he received after this year’s win — a goal that’s still in progress.“I’m still not done,” he said recently. “Even with strangers, if someone took a second out of their life to congratulate me for this, it’s important to me to say thank you.” More

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      National Endowment for the Arts Announces Jazz Masters

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      Its 2022 class includes the bassist Stanley Clarke, the drummer Billy Hart, the vocalist Cassandra Wilson and the saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr.The National Endowment for the Arts has announced its 2022 class of Jazz Masters — and it represents a broad swath of the blues-based, boundary-pushing music that has been made in the last 50 years under the label of jazz.The new Jazz Masters are the bassist Stanley Clarke, the drummer Billy Hart, the vocalist Cassandra Wilson and the saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr. They will be honored in April 2022, at a ceremony at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, the N.E.A. said on Tuesday. The Jazz Masters award is the highest national honor given to living American jazz musicians, and comes with a $25,000 cash prize.Clarke, 70, is best known as a founding member of the seminal jazz-rock fusion band Return to Forever, though he has also enjoyed a vibrant career as a solo artist. Hart, 80, can be heard on timeless recordings by Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and others. In recent decades, his quartet has often been hailed as one of the leading bands in jazz.Wilson’s husky, confiding vocal style and passion for scrambling genres made her one of the leading jazz vocalists of the 1990s. Both Wilson, now 65, and Clarke are multi-Grammy winners.Harrison grew up in New Orleans, immersed in the city’s Black musical heritage, and after earning national recognition in the 1980s and 1990s he recommitted to cultivating his hometown scene through activism and education work. Harrison will be this year’s recipient of the A.B. Spellman Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy, which the N.E.A. more typically gives to non-musicians. More

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      Special Tony Awards Go to 'American Utopia,' 'Freestyle Love Supreme'

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      The Broadway Advocacy Coalition, “David Byrne’s American Utopia” and “Freestyle Love Supreme” win special Tonys.The Tony Awards, long delayed by the pandemic, announced on Tuesday the first recipients, honoring the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, an organization started five years ago by a group of actors and others as a tool to work toward dismantling racism through theater and storytelling.The other recipients were “David Byrne’s American Utopia,” an intricately choreographed concert by the Talking Heads singer, and “Freestyle Love Supreme,” a mostly improvised hip-hop musical that was created, in part, by Lin-Manuel Miranda. These honors, called special Tony Awards, were presented to three recipients that the Tony administration committee thought deserving of recognition even though they did not fall into any of the competition categories, according to a news release.The recipients were announced more than one year after the ceremony had originally been expected to take place. During the coronavirus pandemic, the ceremony was put on indefinite hold. The awards show — a starry broadcast that will celebrate Broadway’s comeback — is now set to air on CBS in September, when Broadway shows are scheduled to return to theaters in almost full force. Most of the awards, however, will be given out just beforehand, during a ceremony that will be shown only on Paramount+, the ViacomCBS subscription streaming service.The award for the Broadway Advocacy Coalition is indicative of how deeply the American theater industry was affected by the mass movement for racial justice set off by the police killing of George Floyd last year.In a statement, Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, and Heather A. Hitchens, the chief executive of the American Theater Wing — the two organizations that present the awards — said that the coalition has provided an “unparalleled platform for marginalized members of our theater community and tools to help us all do better as we strive for equity.”Among the organization’s projects is Theater of Change, a social justice methodology — developed with Columbia Law School — that brings together Broadway artists, legal and policy experts and people whose lives have been shaped by forces such as the criminal justice, immigration and educational systems to collaborate on storytelling as a means to advocate “just policies.”This year’s ceremony for the Tonys, formally known as the Antoinette Perry Awards, will be the 74th such event and will recognize work performed on Broadway between April 26, 2019, and Feb. 19, 2020.Broadway’s 41 theaters have been closed since March 12, 2020; right now, the first planned performances are for “Springsteen on Broadway,” the rock legend’s autobiographical show, which is set to open this Saturday at the St. James Theater. As of now, the next show scheduled to open is “Pass Over,” a play about two Black men trapped on a street corner, on Aug. 4 at the August Wilson Theater.“American Utopia,” which opened on Broadway in October of 2019, is planning to restart performances on Sept. 17. “Freestyle Love Supreme,” which opened that same month, is scheduled to play again for a live audience on Oct. 7. More

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      Katori Hall Wins Drama Pulitzer for ‘The Hot Wing King’

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      The play, which had its run cut short because of the pandemic, centers on a kitchen in Memphis, where a man is trying to concoct award-winning chicken wings.Katori Hall, who has told stirring stories about Black life in America both onstage and onscreen, has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “The Hot Wing King,” a family dramedy that centers on a man’s quest to make award-winning chicken wings while personal conflict swirls around him.The Off Broadway play — produced last year by the Pershing Square Signature Center, where it had a truncated run — drew praise for challenging conventional conceptions of Black masculinity and fatherhood.Its main character, Cordell, has recently moved into a home in Memphis with his lover, Dwayne, whom Cordell enlists to help him make his submission to the annual “Hot Wang Festival.” Things get complicated when Dwayne wants to take in his 16-year-old nephew, whose mother died while being restrained by the police — a tragedy for which Dwayne blames himself.In the awards announcements on Friday, the Pulitzer board called the play a “funny, deeply felt consideration of Black masculinity and how it is perceived, filtered through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition.”Hall, 40, the author of the Olivier Award-winning “The Mountaintop,” wrote a play that was full of frenetic action (stirring pots, dismembering chickens, spicing sauces), emotional exchanges and sitcom-style ribbing.She also co-wrote the book for “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” which is nominated for numerous Tony Awards (including best musical and best book of a musical), and created the Starz drama “P-Valley,” which follows a crew of dancers at a strip club in the Mississippi Delta. Hall is currently working on Season 2 of the series, which is based on one of her plays.With theaters across the country closed during the pandemic, the Pulitzer committee made some adjustments to its qualifications: Finalists were allowed to include works that were performed virtually or those that were canceled or postponed during the pandemic. “The Hot Wing King” opened at the beginning of March 2020 but was not able to finish its run because of pandemic closures.“What’s refreshing here,” Ben Brantley wrote in his review for The New York Times, “is the matter-of-fact depiction of Black gay characters who may be dissatisfied, to varying degrees, with their own behavior but not, ultimately, because of their sexuality.”“Watching Cordell and Dwayne casually snuggle and kiss,” he went on, “draping their bodies over each other, you sense a bond in which erotic attraction has segued into something both more relaxed and more complex.”The other two finalists for the prize were “Circle Jerk,” by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, and “Stew,” by Zora Howard. More

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      Tina Turner and Jay-Z Lead Rock Hall of Fame’s 2021 Inductees

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      Foo Fighters, the Go-Go’s, Carole King and Todd Rundgren were also voted in, meaning nearly half of the 15 individuals in this year’s class are women.For years, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has been pummeled by criticism that its inductees — the marble busts in the pantheon of rock — were too homogeneous, and that the secretive insiders who create the ballots showed a troubling pattern of excluding women.This year the voters seem to have listened: The class of 2021 features Jay-Z, Foo Fighters, the Go-Go’s, Carole King, Tina Turner and Todd Rundgren — a collection of 15 individuals that includes seven women.That ratio alone should lend a new energy to the 36th annual induction ceremony, planned for Oct. 30 at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.In past years, when women have been inducted, they have been far outnumbered by men. In 2019, for example, Stevie Nicks and Janet Jackson may have stood triumphant, but their earnest speeches — Jackson: “Please induct more women” — did not seem to last as long as it took to name every male bass player of the rock bands that joined alongside them.Dave Grohl, center, and the members of Foo Fighters. Grohl is already in the hall as a member of Nirvana.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe latest inductees show a balance of genre and generation that has come to be a feature of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s expanding tent. Foo Fighters, led by Dave Grohl, represent the cream of 1990s-vintage alternative rock. Jay-Z is rap incarnate. And the Go-Go’s stand for joyful, upbeat 1980s power-pop.Each of those acts was a first-time nominee, although the Go-Go’s — the first and only all-woman rock band to score a No. 1 album on Billboard’s chart — have been eligible since 2006. (Artists can be nominated 25 years after the release of their first recording.)The Go-Go’s in the early 1980s: from left, Kathy Valentine, Jane Wiedlin, Gina Schock, Charlotte Caffey and Belinda Carlisle.Paul Natkin/WireImageRundgren, the prolific producer and multi-instrumentalist, occupies the role of the auteur from classic rock’s flowering in the late 1960s and early ’70s; Turner is a force of nature whose career has stretched from old-school R&B to MTV-era pop; and King is the singer-songwriter and conscience who brings gravitas to the proceedings.Three of this year’s inductees were already in the hall: Grohl as a member of Nirvana, Turner with Ike and Tina Turner, and King as a nonperformer, with her songwriting partner and former husband Gerry Goffin.The story of the inductions is also told by who didn’t make the cut. The voters — a group of more than 1,000 artists, journalists and industry veterans — decided against the bands Iron Maiden, Devo, New York Dolls and Rage Against the Machine, as well as Kate Bush, Mary J. Blige, Chaka Khan and Dionne Warwick.The Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti would have been the first Black musician from Africa to join the hall, but was not voted in this year. Leni Sinclair/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFela Kuti, the Nigerian-born pioneer of Afrobeat, had been the surprise nominee this year, and was one of the artists chosen in the Hall of Fame’s fan vote — an online public poll that creates a single official ballot — thanks in part to support from African stars like Burna Boy. Kuti would have been the first Black artist from Africa to join the hall, but he failed in his first time on the ballot. (Trevor Rabin of Yes is from South Africa, and Freddie Mercury of Queen was born in Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania; both bands are in the Hall of Fame.)And LL Cool J, a titan of hip-hop who also received high-profile support this year, lost after a sixth nomination. But he has been given a musical excellence award, for people “whose originality and influence creating music have had a dramatic impact on music.” This category was once known as the sidemen award, but it is also something of a consolation prize: The producer and guitarist Nile Rodgers won it in 2017 after Chic, his band, was passed over 11 times.The other musical excellence recipients this year include Billy Preston, the keyboardist who was a frequent collaborator of the Beatles, and Randy Rhoads, a guitarist with Ozzy Osbourne.Also this year, the Ahmet Ertegun Award, for nonperformers, will go to the record executive Clarence Avant, and “early influence” trophies will go to Gil Scott-Heron, Charley Patton and Kraftwerk, the German electronic pioneers who had been nominated for induction six times.The induction ceremony is to be broadcast later on HBO and streamed on HBO Max. More