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      Echo Brown, Young Adult Author and Performer, Dies at 39

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      A one-woman show that used her date with a white hipster to talk about life, race, love and sex, led an editor to sign her to write two novels.Echo Brown, a late blooming storyteller who mined her life to create a one-woman show about Black female identity and two autobiographical young adult novels in which she used magical realism to help convey her reality, died on Sept. 16 in Cleveland. She was 39.Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her friend Cathy Mao, who said the cause had not yet been determined. But Ms. Brown was diagnosed with lupus in about 2015, leading eventually to kidney failure, Ms. Mao said by phone. A live kidney donor had been cleared for a transplant, which was expected to take place early next year.Ms. Brown, who grew up in poverty in Cleveland and graduated from Dartmouth College, had no professional stage experience when her serio-comic show, “Black Virgins Are Not for Hipsters,” made its debut in 2015. It told her autobiographical story, through multiple voices, about dating a white hipster, including wondering what his reaction to her dark skin would be, and the sex, love, depression and childhood trauma she experienced.“It’s very revealing, and I felt very vulnerable doing it,” she told The Oakland Tribune in 2015, adding, “It’s as if you get onstage and share your deepest, darkest secrets. Putting my sexuality out there in front of people can make me feel very exposed.”The show was successfully staged in theaters in the Bay Area; she also performed it in Chicago, Cleveland, Dublin and Berlin.Robert Hurwitt, the theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, called Ms. Brown “an instantly attractive and engaging performer” who “has us eating out of her hand well before she gets everyone up and dancing to illustrate (with a little help from Beyoncé) why Black women shouldn’t dance with white men until at least after marriage.”And the writer Alice Walker said on her blog in 2016, “What I can say is that not since early Whoopi Goldberg and early and late Anna Deavere Smith have I been so moved by a performer’s narrative.”When “Black Virgins” was mentioned in a profile of Ms. Brown in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2017, Jessica Anderson, an editor at Christy Ottaviano Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, took notice.“I reached out blindly to see if she would turn her attention to writing for a young adult audience,” Ms. Anderson said in a phone interview. “She wasn’t familiar with young adult or children’s literature. I sent her some books, and she had an immediate sense of what her storytelling should be.”The result was “Black Girl Unlimited” (2020), a novel that Ms. Brown tells through the lens of her young self as a wizard who deals with a fire in her family’s cramped apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration, sexual assault and her mother’s overdose.Ms. Brown’s first novel presents her young self as a wizard and carries readers through events like a fire in her family’s apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration and her sexual assault. Macmillan“Brown’s greatest gift is evoking intimacy,” Karen Valby wrote in her review in The New York Times, “and as she delicately but firmly snatches the reader’s attention, we are allowed to see this girl of multitudes and her neighborhood of contradictions in full and specific detail.”Ms. Brown’s second book was “The Chosen One: A First-Generation Ivy League Odyssey” (2022), a coming-of-age story that uses supernatural elements like twisting portals on walls to depict her disorienting and stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Ms. Brown’s second novel focuses on her stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Christy Ottaviano BooksPublishers Weekly praised Ms. Brown for the way she ruminated on her “independence, fear of failure and mental health” with “vigor alongside themes of healing, forgiveness and the human need to be and feel loved.”Echo Unique Ladadrian Brown was born on April 10, 1984, in Cleveland. She was reared by her mother, April Brown, and her stepfather, Edward Trueitt, whom she regarded as her father. Her father, Edward Littlejohn, was not in her life. During high school she lived for a while with one of her teachers.Ms. Brown thought that Dartmouth, with its prestige and stately campus, would represent a “promised land” to her and be “the birth of my becoming,” she said in a TEDx talk in 2017.But early on she heard voices from a speeding truck shout the N-word at her.“They weren’t students, they probably weren’t affiliated with Dartmouth in any way, but it was enough to shatter me,” she said. The incident taught her a lesson: “There are no promised lands in this world for marginalized people, those of us who fall outside the category of normal.”She graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in political science — she was the first college graduate in her family — and was hired as an investigator with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent oversight agency of the New York City Police Department. She left after two years, believing that “we didn’t have the power to do the work that was necessary,” she told the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.She worked as a legal secretary and briefly attended the Columbia Journalism School. She became depressed, started to study yoga and meditation, and moved to Oakland in 2011. While there, she was hired as a program manager at Challenge Day, a group that holds workshops at schools aimed at building bonds among teenagers.Her job included telling students about her life, which helped her find her voice.“I found that I could drop people into emotion and pull them out with humor,” she said in the Dartmouth magazine article. “That’s where I learned I was a good storyteller and wondered, ‘Where can I go to tell more stories?’”She began taking classes in solo performing with David Ford at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco. At first, she wrote comic scenes, then created more serious ones.“It was clear that she was someone who was ready for this, and she had a very easy time getting the words off the pages as a performer,” Mr. Ford said. “There was something miraculous about her.”In addition to her mother and stepfather, Ms. Brown is survived by her brother Edward. Her brother Demetrius died in 2020.Ms. Brown’s latest project was a collaboration with the actor, producer and director Tyler Perry on a novel, “A Jazzman’s Blues.” It is based on a 2022 Netflix film of the same name that Mr. Perry directed from a script that he wrote in 1995, about an ill-fated romance between teenagers (the young man becomes a jazz musician) in rural Georgia that takes place largely in the late 1930s and ’40s. It is to be published early next year.Ms. Anderson said the project came about because, as Ms. Brown got sicker, “it was too energy-consuming for her to work on her own material. So she was looking for a more creative partnership. and this came about through her agent.” More

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      Horace Ové, Pioneering Black Filmmaker in Britain, Dies at 86

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      His feature-length film, “Pressure,” mapped the struggles of Black Britons in an era of unyielding racism. He was knighted in 2022.Horace Ové, a prolific and groundbreaking Trinidad-born filmmaker and photographer whose 1975 film, “Pressure,” explored the fraught experience of Black Britons and is considered the first feature film by a Black British director, died on Sept. 16 in London. He was 86.The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said his son, Zak.“Pressure” was made on a shoestring, shot in West London with neighborhood characters and Mr. Ové’s friends from film school volunteering their expertise. It was written with Samuel Selvon, a novelist from Trinidad, and it tells the story of Tony, a first-generation Briton and top student who has just graduated from school shouldering the expectations of his traditional West Indian parents and his own ambition, and navigating a community on the boil.As he looks for a job to match his talents, he slowly realizes his is a fool’s errand in racist London. Tony’s older brother is a Black militant — born in the West Indies, he has no illusions about the limitations of the society he has landed in — and he exhorts Tony to join his activist struggle.“Pressure” won awards and critical accolades when it was shown in film festivals in 1975, but it would take three more years to be widely released, as the British Film Institute, which had partly funded the movie, felt its depictions of police racism were incendiary. But Mr. Ové was documenting the climate of the times, and his own experience.“The English ‘Deep South’ has always been the West Indies and Africa,” he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1971. “Until recently, they managed to keep it out of the country. The problem is more complicated in England than in America. In America it’s a visible thing. In England, it’s more of a mental violence.”When “Pressure” was finally released in 1978, critics celebrated Mr. Ové as a significant Black filmmaker — “a talent with which we should reckon,” wrote The Sunday Telegraph — and roundly upbraided the British Film Institute.“It seems palpably absurd to be welcoming Horace Ové’s ‘Pressure’ when the film, one of the most important and relevant the British Film Institute’s Production Board has ever made, was actually shot in 1974 and completed in 1975,” Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian. “The BFI should hang its head in corporate shame.”In “Pressure,” Herbert Norville played the lead role of Tony, a recent graduate shouldering the expectations of his traditional West Indian parents and his own ambition.BFI National Archive & The Film FoundationMr. Ové had came of age as an artist in West London in the 1960s. It was a dynamic neighborhood, the heart of the British counterculture and also the Black Power Movement, of which Mr. Ové was an ardent participant.He was a skilled photographer who captured the movement’s leaders and events, as well as his artist peers and Carnival, the ebullient multicultural Caribbean festival that had been exported to Notting Hill in the late 1960s by community activists as a way to celebrate their heritage and ease cultural tensions.He met his second wife, Mary Irvine, at a socialist worker’s meeting; she was the fiercely political owner of a hip women’s clothing boutique called Dudu’s. (It sold no polyester or high-heeled shoes because she felt they were bad for women.)They were a formidable duo. Their West Hampstead apartment became a hub for artists and radicals of all stripes. Michael X, the civil rights activist born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad, lived upstairs. Mealtimes began with the family raising their fists and declaring “Power to the people,” Zak Ové recalled.James Baldwin was a family friend, and when he lectured at a West Indian student center with Dick Gregory, the comedian and activist, Mr. Ové made a compelling short documentary about it.A 1967 photograph by Mr. Ové of Michael X, a civil rights activist, and the Black Power boys in Paddington Station.Horace Ové, via the Estate of Horace OvéMr. Ové was a documentarian at heart — his aesthetic was naturalistic — and he made a number of films for the BBC. “Reggae” (1971) was live footage and interviews that some critics described as that culture’s “Woodstock” movie. “King Carnival” (1973) was a critically acclaimed history of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. Skateboard Kings” (1978) chronicled the star skateboarders — the Dogtown crew — of Southern California.“You can imagine Horace showing up in Venice Beach in a massive caftan swathed in African jewelry,” said Zak Ové. “Those kids looked at him and just fell in love.”And then there’s “Black Safari” (1972). It’s a Pythonesque mockumentary about a group of African explorers searching “darkest Lancashire” for the heart of England along the Leeds and Liverpool canal, a good-humored spoof of the traditional colonial narratives.Their boat is called the Queen of Spades, and Mr. Ové is its captain, a character named Horace Ové. Along the way, he and his crew mates have all sorts of adventures, like getting stuck in a lock, coming down with the flu and losing their tempers, witnessing the mysteries of clog dancing and suffering the noise of an oompah band.Mr. Ové in 1979 on the set of “The Latch Key Children,” a television series he directed. via the Estate of Horace Ové“For me, a director is a director no matter what color he is,” Mr. Ové told an interviewer in 2020. “Here in England there is a danger, if you are Black, that all you are allowed to make is films about Black people and their problems. White filmmakers, on the other hand, have a right to make films about whatever they like. People miss out by not asking us or allowing us to do this. We know you, we have to study you in order to survive.”Horace Courtenay Jones was born on Dec. 3, 1936, in Belmont, a suburb in Port of Spain, Trinidad. His parents, Lawrence and Lorna (Rocke) Jones, ran a cafe and hardware store that sold basically everything, including goods for Carnival makers.Horace changed his name to Horace Shango Ové when he emigrated to Britain in 1960. Like many who were involved in the Black Power movement, he wanted to shed his so-called slave name for one that reflected his African heritage. Shango is the Yoruba god of thunder, lightning and justice. But the meaning of “Ové” is still a mystery, Zak Ové said. “It’s a bit like Rosebud,” he said. “I never got a proper answer.”Mr. Ové in the early 1940s in Belmont, Trinidad, with his grandmother, Imelda. The Estate of Horace OveHorace Ové was 24 when he left for England to pursue a career as an artist or an interior designer. He lived in Brixton and West Hampstead, communities populated by West Indian immigrants who had been lured to Britain in the post World War II years by the promise of good jobs, only to be met by offers of menial work and abject racism; Mr. Ové recalled the “No Blacks” signs in the windows of boardinghouses there.He worked as a porter in a hotel, on a fishing boat in the North Sea and as a film extra. When he was cast as a slave in the 1963 film “Cleopatra,” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the production moved to Rome. He stayed three years, working as a painter and a photographer, and he returned to London determined to make movies, having been deeply influenced by the Italian naturalist approach to filmmaking.Back in London in 1965, Mr. Ové studied at the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).Over his long career he worked extensively in film and television. His documentary about the Bhopal gas leak in India that killed at least 2,000 people, “Who Shall We Tell,” aired in 1985.A feature film, “Playing Away” (1987), is an amiable comedy of cultures gently clashing when a West Indian cricket team from London is invited to a match in a quaint and insular fictional Suffolk village. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it a “movie about the comic pretensions of social and political organisms — the kind of community-comedy at which British moviemakers have excelled.”In addition to his son Zak, from his second marriage, Mr. Ové is survived by his daughter Genieve Sweeney, from his first marriage, to Jean Balosingh; a daughter, Indra, from his second marriage; and a daughter, Ezana, and a son, Kaz, from his third marriage, to Annabelle Alcazar, a producer of “Pressure” and many of Mr. Ové’s films. All three marriages ended in divorce.Mr. Ové, left, with the writer James Baldwin in 1984 at the opening of the exhibition “Breaking Loose,” a retrospective of Mr. Ové’s photographic work. via the Estate of Horace OvéIn 2022, Mr. Ové was knighted for his “services to media.” In 2007, he was made a commander of the British Empire; while he was in a taxi on the way to the palace for the ceremony, Mr. Ové pulled out a CD of James Brown’s funk anthem “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and asked the African cabby to play it at full volume, which he was delighted to do.“I’m always interested in characters,” Mr. Ové told the Black Film Bulletin in 1996. “I’m interested in people that are trapped, Black, white, whatever race: That is what attracts me to the dramatic film, the trap that we are all in and how we try to get out of it, how we survive and the effects of that trap.” More

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      Hattie McDaniel’s Historic Oscar Will Return to Its Desired Home

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      The plaque that McDaniel, the first Black winner of an Academy Award, bequeathed to Howard University has been missing for about 50 years. Now a replacement is on its way.After becoming the first Black person to win an Academy Award, in 1940, Hattie McDaniel called the plaque she received a cherished beacon for all that could be accomplished.McDaniel had earned the award for her portrayal of Mammy, an agreeable slave at the whim of Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” a movie that arrived as a cinematic triumph but has since been rebuked for its blind eye toward slavery.Before dying in 1952, McDaniel deflected the criticism she received for taking many stereotypical roles throughout her career.“I’d rather play a maid than be one,” she would say, envisioning that her work would open better doors for future Black actors. She also had an eternal resting spot in mind for that beacon, bequeathing the Oscar plaque to Howard University in Washington.But for about 50 years, McDaniel’s plaque has been missing, a cinematic void that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is now filling. The university will receive a replacement plaque this weekend in a ceremony titled “Hattie’s Come Home.”“It’s 100 percent overdue,” said Jill Watts, the author of “Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood.” “It was so meaningful historically as an award. Not just in the history of film, but also within American history and it was meaningful to her personally. She would be absolutely delighted to know that it’s going home to where she wanted it to be.”Kevin Goff, McDaniel’s great-grandnephew, said that his father started petitioning for a replacement plaque in the 1990s, and that the decision would help cement McDaniel’s legacy.Over the years, theories have circulated about the whereabouts of the plaque, which was given to all supporting acting winners from 1936 to 1942 rather than traditional Oscar statues. A spokesman for Howard University did not respond to a request for comment.Goff said there were rumors that the plaque was stolen during student unrest about the university’s mission in the late 1960s.“Apparently, a gentleman said he had thrown it in the Potomac,” he said. “Someone said maybe a drama professor took it with him. But none of it has been verified or proven. It’s never shown up on eBay. So, here we are 50-plus years later and no one has a clue where it is or if it still does exist.”W. Burlette Carter, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, wrote a paper about the missing award more than a decade ago. Her best guess is that it may still be somewhere at Howard, misplaced during a move by the drama department.“That makes sense to me, having worked at a university, that when they moved the department, it got packed and it got lost,” Watts said. “I have this feeling that it’s probably still someplace, tucked away in a box.”Watts said she and several others approached the Academy about replacing the Oscar following her book’s publication in 2005. “We were told no,” Watts said. “Just a flat no.”That stance has shifted. The replacement plaque will soon reside at the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.Jacqueline Stewart, the president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the Academy, said in a news release that the upcoming ceremony would celebrate McDaniel’s remarkable craft and historic win.“Hattie McDaniel,” they said, “was a groundbreaking artist who changed the course of cinema and impacted generations of performers who followed her.” More

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      Pearl Bowser, Expert in Early Black Filmmakers, Dies at 92

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      She aided in the rediscovery of Oscar Micheaux and others who were telling stories for Black audiences early in the last century.Pearl Bowser, a film historian, curator and collector who was instrumental in preserving and bringing to light the works of Black filmmakers from early in the last century, especially those of Oscar Micheaux, whom one writer described as “the Jackie Robinson of American film,” died on Sept. 14 in Brooklyn. She was 92.Her daughter Gillian Bowser confirmed the death.Ms. Bowser developed an interest in the forgotten works of early Black filmmakers in the 1960s when, while working as a researcher on a colleague’s idea for a book about Micheaux, she traveled to California from New York to interview aging actors who had been in movies made by Micheaux decades earlier.She began hunting down and collecting movies by Micheaux and other Black filmmakers from the early decades of the 1900s — works that were, for that period, triumphs of independent filmmaking, since they were generally made on shoestring budgets and sometimes dealt with topics that mainstream movies would not touch. Micheaux’s “The Symbol of the Unconquered” (1920), for instance, was an indictment of the Ku Klux Klan.In addition to being a student of film, Ms. Bowser made a few films herself.Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureThose films also serve as historical documents, depicting Black communities in ways not seen in mainstream movies of the time.“Oscar Micheaux’s early films are full of ordinary settings of community: the church, the house, the apartment,” Ms. Bowser told USA Today in 1998. “You see the way people lived in that period.”By the early 1970s, Ms. Bowser was curating film series, taking the works she had discovered by Micheaux and others into theaters and classrooms. She continued to do that for decades.“They were telling stories that were not being shown on the screen, Black stories,” she told students at Fort Lee High School in New Jersey in 2004 before showing them “The Symbol of the Unconquered” (a film that, like others of Micheaux’s, was shot in Fort Lee). “And by showing the Black experience, we’re telling the American story in its totality.”Donald Bogle, the noted film historian, said Ms. Bowser’s work on Micheaux was pivotal.“Not much was known or acknowledged about Micheaux for too long a time,” he said by email. “But Pearl made it her mission to bring his work and career to light. Over the years, she devotedly dug for information on him, and I can remember those occasions when she excitedly told me about new things she was unearthing.”Among the places her search took her, she said in newspaper interviews, were the national archives of Spain and Belgium, where she found silent classics by Micheaux with the title cards written in the languages of those countries, which she then had to have translated back into English.In 2000, she and Louise Spence published “Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films and His Audiences.”“Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence’s scholarly examination of Micheaux serves a dual purpose,” Renée Graham wrote in a review in The Boston Globe. “Through six essays, they analyze Micheaux’s work, how it was received by both Blacks and whites, and how his films encouraged fresh discussions about race. But Bowser and Spence’s book also rescues the filmmaker’s accomplishments from decades of obscurity.”Ms. Bowser’s expertise, though, encompassed much more than Micheaux-era films. Her lectures and film series covered a wide range — for instance, she presented “Films of Africa and the Caribbean” at the Brooklyn Museum in 1986. And the collection of hundreds of films, videotapes and audiotapes she donated in 2012 to the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution is rich in material related to Black filmmakers in the 1960s and ’70s.“Pearl didn’t just revive Micheaux’s legacy; she helped preserve and shape the narrative of independent Black film,” Ina Archer, media conservation and digitization specialist at the museum, said by email. “Across her five-decade career she wove a continuous thread through a century of Black film that is only just now beginning to come into focus.”Pearl Johnson was born on June 25, 1931, in Harlem, where she grew up. According to a Smithsonian Institution biography, her mother, also named Pearl, was a domestic worker, and young Pearl would often accompany her to work at apartments in Lower Manhattan, helping to fold handkerchiefs in exchange for an allowance.As a child she came to know Ellsworth (Bumpy) Johnson, a Harlem underworld figure who was also well known in the borough for giving out food baskets and encouraging children to borrow books from his vast library.“I remember one time I mentioned to Bumpy that I wanted to grow up to be a philosopher,” Ms. Bowser told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1997, “and he said, ‘I’ve got a book you might be interested in.’”He gave her something by Friedrich Nietzsche. She was about 15 and didn’t understand a word.“It taught me to think before I spoke to Bumpy,” she said. “because even though I was young, he took me and my dreams quite seriously.”Later, according to the Smithsonian biography, she worked in one of his numbers joints. She also studied for a time at Brooklyn College before dropping out and taking a job at CBS, where she worked on a team that analyzed television ratings.In 1955 she married LeRoy Bowser, who would later become a regional vice president of the National Urban League. He died in 1986. Her daughter Gillian survives her. Another daughter, Joralemon Bowser, died in 1978.Ms. Bowser made a few films herself, including “Midnight Ramble,” a documentary she made with Bestor Cram for the PBS series “The American Experience” about “race movies,” as films made by Micheaux and others for Black audiences were called.In the late 1960s Ms. Bowser also wrote a newspaper cooking column. In 1970, with Joan Eckstein, she published her best recipes in a book, “A Pinch of Soul.”“The authors,” one reviewer said, “provide a complete array of soul food cookery to fit the needs of today’s elegant hostess.” More

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      ‘Paul Robeson’ Review: A Tribute to an Entertainment Titan

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      The film’s subtitle is drawn from one of the performer’s quotes in his autobiography “Here I Stand”: “I’m a Negro. I’m an American.”The opening of “Paul Robeson: ‘I’m a Negro. I’m an American.’” offers an unintentional caveat about the 1989 documentary directed by the East German filmmaker Kurt Tetzlaff. Paul Robeson’s rich baritone undergirds archival footage of Black children playing in a dusty open space, smokestacks in the background. The use by the director of a Negro spiritual, however beautiful, swaps whatever joy these kids might have been experiencing (they are at play after all) for a questionable sentimentality around Black life and suffering.But then much of Tetzlaff’s documentary, recently restored and receiving its first theatrical run in New York, casts an aura — admiring and melancholy — around Robeson to the detriment of a more shaded portrait. The athlete-performer-activist’s achievements are well known (gridiron great, Columbia University Law graduate, first Black Othello on Broadway), but in this film, their roots and meaning go mostly unexplored.The documentary shows glimmers of promise when featuring interviewees who had an intimate grasp of the America that shaped but also tore down Robeson. Harry Belafonte turns teary talking about Robeson’s grace. The singer Pete Seeger’s account of white rioters attacking attendees at a Peekskill, N.Y., concert in support of workers in 1949 remains chilling. Tetzlaff aims to dive into Robeson’s mistreatment by the United States government for his activism, as well as his expressed admiration of the Soviet Union and its people — but the movie sticks to the shallow end.Hinted at, but never fully realized here, is a more compelling film about the tantalizing promise Black progressives like Robeson held for Eastern Bloc citizens, like the director.Paul Robeson: ‘I’m a Negro. I’m an American.’Not rated. In English and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Bobby Schiffman, Guiding Force of the Apollo Theater, Dies at 94

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      Taking over for his father in 1961, he transformed a former vaudeville house in Harlem into a pre-eminent R&B showcase.Bobby Schiffman, who guided the Apollo Theater in Harlem through the seismic cultural and musical changes of the 1960s and early ’70s, cementing its place as a world-renowned showcase for Black music and entertainment, died on Sept. 6 at his home in Boynton Beach, Fla. He was 94.His death was confirmed by his son, Howard.In 1961, Mr. Schiffman inherited the reins of the storied neoclassical Apollo Theater on West 125th Street in Manhattan from his father, Frank Schiffman. The elder Mr. Schiffman, along with a financial partner, Leo Brecher, had taken over the theater — a former burlesque house that opened in 1914 as a whites-only establishment — in 1935.Frank Schiffman transformed the theater from a vaudeville house hosting acts like Al Jolson and the Marx Brothers into an epicenter for Black artists performing for largely Black audiences in an era of de facto cultural segregation. During the 1930s and ’40s, the elder Mr. Schiffman provided early exposure to countless African American luminaries, including Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington.Frank Schiffman was respected and feared for his fierce competitiveness. “In Harlem show business circles he was God — a five-foot-nine-inch, white, Jewish, balding, bespectacled deity,” the music writer Ted Fox observed in his 1983 book, “Showtime at the Apollo.”Bobby, the younger of his two sons, was more affable and easygoing, but lacked none of his father’s drive or ambition.“I don’t think Bobby Schiffman gets enough credit for being a great impresario,” Mr. Fox said in a phone interview. “Through enormous changes in musical tastes, styles and culture in general, he kept the theater going, doing 31 shows a week, seven days a week, year after year for decades, in a way that no other theater has ever been able to do.”His father had run the theater along the old vaudeville model, as a venue for variety shows. “Frank was old school,” Howard Schiffman said of his grandfather in a phone interview. “He was like Ed Sullivan. He thought that there should be a juggler and an animal act on every show.”Mr. Schiffman, second from left, with his father, Frank Schiffman; the tap dancer Honi Coles, who worked for many years as the Apollo’s production manager; and, standing, Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington’s son and later the leader of the Ellington orchestra. Mr. Schiffman took over the Apollo from his father in 1961.via Apollo Theater“My father,” he added, “turned the Apollo into the R&B showcase that it became.”Faced with keeping the lights on at a compact 1,500-seat theater with little financial cushion, Bobby Schiffman “made it his business to find out what the people in the streets were listening to,” Mr. Fox said.“He would go into the bars and see what was on the jukebox,” he added, “he would talk to local D.J.s and record store owners to find out what was coming out, and book them while they were still unknown.”Winners of the theater’s famous and long-running Wednesday Amateur Night during Mr. Schiffman’s tenure included Gladys Knight, Ronnie Spector, Jimi Hendrix and the Jackson 5.By providing support and exposure, he nurtured young stars “before they became superstars,” Mr. Fox said, “and would later appeal to them to appear, at great financial sacrifice, to come back and play for the people who made them.”During the years Mr. Schiffman managed the Apollo, it became a symbol of arrival to generations of performers. “It was the pinnacle,” the Motown star Smokey Robinson once said.Tyrone Dukes/The New York TimesDuring Mr. Schiffman’s tenure as manager, the Apollo served not only as a launching pad to fame but also, eventually, as a symbol of arrival to generations of performers. “It was the pinnacle,” the Motown star Smokey Robinson once said. “It was the most important theater in the world. Once you could say you had played the Apollo, you could get in any door anywhere.”The Apollo’s reputation went global, thanks in part to hit live recordings made there by stars like James Brown, an Apollo regular, who recorded the landmark album “‘Live’ at the Apollo” in October 1962. Widely regarded as one of the great live albums, it hit No. 6 on the Billboard chart in 1963 and remained in the Top 10 for 39 weeks.The Apollo’s reputation went global thanks in part to albums like James Brown’s “‘Live’ at the Apollo,” which spent 39 weeks in the Billboard Top 10 in 1963.King“For years,” Mr. Schiffman said in a 2014 interview with The Daily News in New York, “you could write ‘Apollo Theater’ on a postcard, drop it into a mailbox anywhere and it would be delivered. How many theaters can you say that about?”Robert Lee Schiffman was born on Feb. 12, 1929, in Manhattan, the youngest of Frank and Lee Schiffman’s three children.He grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., a suburb north of the city, where he attended A.B. Davis High School with Dick Clark, the future host of “American Bandstand.”After earning a bachelor’s degree in business from New York University, Mr. Schiffman spent the early 1950s working his way up the ladder at the Apollo. “He did every terrible job in the place, from cleaning bathrooms to taking tickets,” his son said.During Mr. Schiffman’s heyday at the Apollo in the 1960s, his office functioned as a nerve center for Black culture. Local politicians like Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and sports stars like Muhammad Ali would drop by for a chat.By the 1970s, however, Harlem was being increasingly buffeted by drugs, crime and economic decline, and the live-music business was changing. With color barriers in music breaking down, the Apollo was unable to maintain its lure for artists who had become arena-packing juggernauts.“The big stars would say, ‘We love you, Bobby, but we can play the Apollo and sell 1,500 tickets or play Madison Square Garden and sell 18,000,’” Howard Schiffman said.Mr. Schiffman finally shuttered the theater in 1976. The Apollo reopened under new management in 1978 but closed again the next year. In 1981, the media and technology executive Percy E. Sutton, a former Manhattan borough president, purchased the theater with a group of investors. It was declared a state and city landmark in 1983, and in 1991 it was taken over by the Apollo Theater Foundation, a nonprofit organization.Mr. Schiffman later oversaw the Westchester Premier Theater in Tarrytown, N.Y., before retiring to Florida.In addition to his son, from his marriage to Joan Landy, which ended in divorce in 1973, he is survived by his fourth wife, Betsy (Rothman) Schiffman; his stepsons from that marriage, Barry and Michael Rothman; six grandchildren; and two great-grandsons. His marriages to Renee Levy and Rusty Donner also ended in divorce.While the Apollo became famous for its stars and spectacle, Mr. Schiffman never forgot its unique role as a locus for Harlem life.“We were in the business of pleasing the Black community,” he said in an interview for the book “Showtime at the Apollo.” “If white folks came as an ancillary benefit, that was fine. But the basic motto was to bring the people of the community entertainment they wanted at a price they could afford to pay.”When he overstepped his bounds, the community let him know. “The highest price I ever charged was six dollars,” Mr. Schiffman added. “I tried seven for Redd Foxx once, and they stayed away in droves.” More

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      in Theater

      When the Wig Is a Character: Backstage at Jocelyn Bioh’s New Play

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      The styles in “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” in previews on Broadway, require a wig designer, several braiders, some synthetic hair and lots of patience.Known for her amusing scripts and plaited hairstyles, Jocelyn Bioh can count only three times when she was without braids. “There’s a real freedom in getting your braids done,” she said. “Then you don’t have to worry about your hair for the next few weeks.”The playwright’s lifelong commitment to interwoven hairdos inspired “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” a Broadway comedy about a day in the life of a hair braiding salon. It’s most likely the first Broadway play to shine a spotlight on Black women’s hair, and what it takes to style it.Set in Central Harlem, around 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue (where many of these salons are clustered), “Jaja’s” presents a spirited group of West African hair stylists as their designs take shape and they juggle the uncertainties and perplexities of their new lives here. Because these women are rarely part of conversations about immigration, Bioh felt it was important for audiences to hear their stories.In writing the play, Bioh (“Nollywood Dreams,” “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play”) sought to put a face to something that was likely to be unfamiliar to many theatergoers. “I want to take them into this really unique, funny, crazy, exciting, in some ways mundane space that holds women who all have incredible stories,” said Bioh, a native New Yorker whose parents emigrated from Ghana. “That’s what I’m trying to unpack in my play. What’s the other? What’s in the other?”A mock-up of the wig, one of the play’s more colorful hair designs.Alongside the comedy and drama, “Jaja’s” features a multitude of strand mastery, as Bioh and the director Whitney White (“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”) were determined to show a range of hairdos coming to life onstage. To pull this off, most of these styles are executed in real time with a little stage magic courtesy of wigs constructed by the hair and wig designer Nikiya Mathis. Cast members, who braid hair onstage, practiced during rehearsals on wigs she designed for the performance.“There are so many moving pieces to the show that involve hair, and it’s not just me backstage,” Mathis said. “It’s also the actors onstage, it’s what Jocelyn has written, and it’s what Whitney will be helping us to reveal.”“Part of that,” she continued, “is going to be the magic of figuring out how we’re going to construct the wigs and how to potentially take them apart.”The show is running about 90 minutes, without an intermission, yet these hairstyles can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a whole day to complete. There’s also the art of the craft. Creating a single braid starts with a cluster of hair: fingertips planted against the scalp, grasped at the roots of three sectioned tufts, deftly and repeatedly crocheted until a pattern emerges. The options are endless. The humble braid can stand alone, of course, but when woven loosely, it becomes the box braid. Woven against the scalp, it becomes the cornrow. Woven infinitesimally, it becomes the micro.Building wigs that mimic these looks is labor intensive, and audiences are just beginning to see how the production, in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, pulls it off. This summer we followed along on the assembly and design of one of the flashier styles, a wig known as Jaja’s Strawberry-Swirl Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, worn by the actress Kalyne Coleman in the show.Sew, Braid, Dye: One Wig, Many HandsThe wig-making process begins when a gallon-size poly bag is fitted on the actor’s head to make a mold. Once the measurements are taken and the hairline is drawn, the bag is removed, and the mold is filled with polyester fiber and placed on a canvas wig block. Lace is secured to the frame, which serves as the wig’s foundation, and finally strands of hair are sewn in one by one.The show’s hair and wig designer, Nikiya Mathis, dyes the wigs in a solution of water and semi-permanent color. The more saturated the water is with dye, the deeper the pigment. She then agitates the hair to ensure all the strands attain the desired hue.The hair design team builds the look together, with each stylist completing one braid at a time. Human hair is woven into the lace infrastructure, then small pieces of synthetic hair are added to give each braid length and fullness. More synthetic hair is bunched and teased at the ends of each braid to create volume for the puff.Before the fitting, Kalyne Coleman’s real hair was braided into cornrows, which sit close to her head, so that the wig would fit over it easily. Then a stocking cap is placed over her head and secured with pins. The wig is then applied, and baby hair is pulled out. The edges are curled with gel to complete the look. More

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      in Television

      Singing Competition Again Comes Under Fire After Use of Blackface

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      Contestants on a recent episode of a Polish reality TV show used blackface to imitate Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé. It was not the first time the racist tradition had been featured.A reality TV singing competition in Poland is under fire after two contestants used blackface to imitate Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé during an episode that aired over the weekend.“Your Face Sounds Familiar” (or, in Polish, “Twoja Twarz Brzmi Znajomo”) appears in multiple countries, including the United States, where it ran on ABC for one season in 2014 and was called “Sing Your Face Off.” The show encourages contestants to recreate the appearance and sound of famous singers as accurately as possible.In Saturday’s episode of “Your Face Sounds Familiar,” the singer Kuba Szmajkowski won with his rendition of Mr. Lamar’s “Humble.” Mr. Szmajkowski performed in blackface and wore his hair in cornrows in order to look like Mr. Lamar.Mr. Szmajkowski posted video of his transformation to his 163,000 Instagram followers, with the caption “get ready with Kendrick.” The video showed the singer in front of a mirror getting multiple layers of makeup applied. A representative for Mr. Szmajkowski did not immediately respond to a request for comment.While Mr. Szmajkowski’s post about his transformation received thousands of likes, hundreds of people commented on it, many of them expressing criticism and anger.“This is top racism. Do you not see how inappropriate this is? Not to mention offensive? Wrong,” one user wrote.Another contestant in Saturday’s episode, Pola Gonciarz, performed Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy,” also using blackface in an effort to evoke the look of the superstar.“Your Face Sounds Familiar” is produced by Endemol Shine Poland, which is owned by the French company Banijay. In a statement, the company said, “Banijay condemns Endemol Shine Poland’s local execution of ‘Your Face Sounds Familiar,’ which contradicts our group’s global values.” A spokeswoman declined to provide more details until an investigation is completed.It’s not the first time the program has come under fire for the use of blackface. In 2021, a white contestant wore blackface to portray Kanye West performing “Stronger.”In response to that criticism, the show said the negative comments were surprising. “The Polish edition of the show, seen as exemplary abroad, always tries to show great performances, which strive to be as close to the original as possible,” an Instagram post from the show read at the time.This time around, “Your Face Sounds Familiar,” which is in its 19th season, has not yet publicly responded.The show’s Instagram account indicates that multiple contestants have dressed in blackface to perform as Black singers, including Snoop Dogg, Ray Charles, Bill Withers and Missy Elliott. Mia Moody-Ramirez, a professor at Baylor University in Texas who specializes in how race is portrayed in the media, said Mr. Szmajkowski’s performance was particularly offensive because of the combination of blackface, cornrows and his use of a racial slur, which is among the song’s lyrics.She said the continued use of blackface on the show might be because the stigma surrounding it is smaller in Poland, which has a population that is overwhelmingly white, than it is in the United States. About 97 percent of Poland’s population identifies as ethnically Polish, according to Minority Rights Group International.“We are living in a global society,” Dr. Moody-Ramirez said. “If it is produced in one country, it is going to be seen around the world.”In the United States, blackface dates back to early 19th-century minstrel shows, and the racist tradition — even though widely condemned — has persisted, showing up at bachelor parties, in old photos of politicians and elsewhere. The popularity of blackface was at its height in the early 20th century and has waned sharply since the 1950s, but it has not disappeared around the world.In Europe, too, there has been something of a reckoning. In Britain in 2020, some comedy shows that included blackface or racial slurs were removed from streaming platforms, including BBC’s iPlayer and Netflix. And in the Netherlands, a holiday tradition in which people dress in blackface to portray Black Pete, a servant to St. Nicholas, is slowly changing. More