Black People

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      Taurean Blacque, Actor Best Known for ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Dies at 82

      by

      He received an Emmy nomination for his work as Detective Neal Washington, a character he strove to portray as something other than “that hip, jive Black man.”Taurean Blacque, the actor best known for his Emmy-nominated performance as a detective on the critically acclaimed NBC drama series “Hill Street Blues,” died on Thursday in Atlanta. He was 82.His family announced the death in a statement. It did not specify a cause, saying only that he died after a brief illness.Mr. Blacque, who began his career as a stage actor in New York, had several television appearances under his belt when, in 1981, he landed his breakthrough role: the street-smart Detective Neal Washington on “Hill Street Blues,” which drew praise for its realistic portrayal of the day-to-day reality of police work and was nominated for 98 Emmy Awards in its seven seasons, winning 26.The part of Washington, Mr. Blacque later recalled, was sketchily written, and it was his choice to play the character as quiet and reflective. “I think the original concept was that hip, jive Black man, you know,” he told TV Guide. “But I wanted to turn it around a little, give him some depth, not get into that stereotype.”Mr. Blacque was nominated for a 1982 Primetime Emmy for best supporting actor in a drama series, but he lost to his fellow cast member Michael Conrad. (All the nominees in the category that year — the others were Charles Haid, Michael Warren and Bruce Weitz — were members of the “Hill Street Blues” cast.)“Hill Street Blues” ended its run in 1987, and two years later Mr. Blacque starred with Vivica A. Fox and others on the NBC soap opera “Generations.” Probably the most racially diverse daytime drama of its era, “Generations” dealt with the relationship over the years between two Chicago families, one white and one Black. Mr. Blacque played the owner of a chain of ice cream parlors.He later moved to Atlanta, where he was active on the local theater scene, appearing in productions of August Wilson’s “Jitney,” James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner” and other plays. He was also involved in the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C.Taurean Blacque was born Herbert Middleton Jr. on May 10, 1940, in Newark. His father was a dry cleaner, his mother a nurse.He graduated from Arts High School in Newark but did not decide to pursue an acting career until he was almost 30 and working as a mail carrier. He enrolled at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York in 1969 and, he told USA Today, “Once I found out that acting was my niche, I poured all my energies into it.”He said he chose the stage name Taurean Blacque (Taurus was his astrological sign) in part as a way to get casting directors’ attention. Eventually, after several years of paying dues, he did.Work in community theater in New York led to roles with the Negro Ensemble Company and eventually to Hollywood, where he landed guest roles on “Sanford and Son,” “Taxi,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and other TV series before being cast on “Hill Street Blues.”In addition to being an actor, Mr. Blacque, who had two biological sons and adopted 11 other children, was an adoption advocate. He was the spokesman for the Los Angeles County adoption service. In 1989, President George Bush appointed him the national spokesman for adoption.Mr. Blacque’s survivors include 12 children, 18 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Baltimore Symphony’s New Conductor Breaks a Racial Barrier

      by

      Jonathon Heyward is the first person of color to be the orchestra’s music director in its 106-year history.For decades, the 25 largest orchestras in the United States have been led almost exclusively by white men.That is going to change. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra announced on Thursday that it had chosen Jonathon Heyward, a rising African American conductor, as its next music director. He will begin a five-year contract in Baltimore at the start of the 2023-24 season.Heyward, 29, who grew up in Charleston, S.C., the son of an African American father and a white mother, will be the first person of color to lead the orchestra in its 106-year history. In an interview, he said that he would work to expand the audience for classical music by bolstering education efforts and promoting underrepresented artists.“This art form is for everyone,” he said.Heyward will succeed Marin Alsop, the first female music director of a top-tier American orchestra, whose tenure in Baltimore ended last year. His appointment comes amid a broader reckoning in classical music over severe gender and racial disparities.The choice to hire Heyward is a milestone for Baltimore, where Black residents make up more than 60 percent of the population.“We are inspired by his artistry, passion and vision for the B.S.O., as well as for what his appointment means for budding musicians who will see themselves better reflected in such a position of artistic prominence,” Mark Hanson, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.Heyward, who is the chief conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie in Germany, has garnered a reputation as a sensitive and charismatic conductor. His appointment comes at a challenging time for orchestras, with many ensembles, including Baltimore’s, struggling to win back arts patrons because of the pandemic — a crisis that has exacerbated long-term declines in ticket sales and forced arts groups to look for new ways to reach audiences, including through livestreaming.The Baltimore Symphony recently announced that it would cut 10 concerts from its coming season at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, its longtime home, amid tepid ticket sales. Attendance in Baltimore during the 2021-22 season averaged at 40 percent of capacity, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Heyward said that he was confident audiences would eventually return, and added that he would work to make the orchestra more relatable by programming a wider variety of works, featuring a greater diversity of performers and moving some concerts away from traditional venues.“It’s simply a knack of being able to really understand what the community needs and listening to what the community needs and then being able to get them in the door,” he said.Although Heyward has been based in Europe for much of his career, he has started to appear more frequently in the United States. Last spring, he led several concerts in Baltimore, including the orchestra’s first performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15, as well as a benefit concert for Ukraine. He is scheduled to appear with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center in early August, leading a program that features the violinist Joshua Bell.In 2017, when Heyward was 25, he was widely praised for a series of performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, when he substituted at the last minute for an ill conductor. That program included a premiere by the composer Tania León, as well as works by Stravinsky, Glinka and Leonard Bernstein.“He knew when to lead and when to follow, effortlessly balancing his roles as a natural showman and sensitive collaborator in service to the music,” the critic Rick Schultz wrote in The Los Angeles Times.The conducting field has long struggled with a lack of diversity. In recent years, there has been only one Black music director in the top tier of American orchestras, and just a handful of leaders have been Latino or of Asian descent.With turnover expected soon at several major orchestras, there are signs of change. This season, Nathalie Stutzmann takes the podium at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She will be only the second woman to lead a top-tier American orchestra.Heyward will also be among the Baltimore Symphony’s youngest leaders. He began studying cello at 10. A graduate of the Boston Conservatory, he later served as an assistant conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in England, under its longtime music director, Mark Elder.Heyward said that his own experience of falling in love with classical music had convinced him of its enduring appeal.“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston, South Carolina, with no music education background, with no musicians in the family, can be enamored and amazed by this, by the best art form there is — classical music — then I think anyone can,” he said. “I plan on trying to prove that in many, many ways.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Aftershock’ Review: A Moving Ode to the Black Family

      by

      Black mothers are dying from childbirth at alarming rates. A new documentary explains why.There’s no getting around just how terribly sad it feels watching “Aftershock,” the new documentary from the directors Paula Eiselt (“93Queen”) and Tonya Lewis Lee. After all, it spotlights the tragic deaths of two Black mothers in New York City who died from childbirth-related complications — Shamony Gibson, in 2019, and Amber Isaac, in 2020 — leaving behind young children, partners, families and communities gutted by grief.But alongside the despair, there is also light in this documentary. Gibson’s partner, Omari Maynard, and her mother, Shawnee Benton Gibson, a medical social worker with a background in reproductive justice activism, had been mourning their loss for a year and a half when Maynard reached out to the newly bereaved partner of Isaac, Bruce McIntyre. The two men soon banded together with Benton Gibson and others to organize for change.Eiselt and Lee successfully put a human face on the now widely reported crisis of Black maternal deaths, which allows them to unpack the underlying factors that have led to the crisis without bogging down the narrative in a deluge of statistics. Yet scenes with the main subjects sometimes feel more staged than vérité, and the audience walks away wishing we knew them better as people.Still, the images of Maynard and McIntyre parenting their children in the midst of grief and outrage, and expressing vulnerability as well as strength, act as a powerful counternarrative to pervasive stereotypes about absentee Black fathers. “Aftershock” is a moving ode to Black families in a society where too many forces work to tear them apart.AftershockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Angel Blue Withdraws From Opera, Citing ‘Blackface’ in Netrebko’s ‘Aida’

      by

      The American soprano Angel Blue said she would not appear at the Arena di Verona after the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and other performers wore dark makeup in its production of “Aida.”A leading American soprano, Angel Blue, announced this week that she was withdrawing from her planned debut at the Arena di Verona in Italy to protest its use of “blackface makeup” in a production of Verdi’s “Aida” that starred the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko.“The use of blackface under any circumstances, artistic or otherwise, is a deeply misguided practice based on archaic theatrical traditions which have no place in modern society,” Blue, a Black soprano with a growing international career, said in a statement on social media, adding that she would withdraw from her upcoming performances in “La Traviata,” another Verdi opera. “It is offensive, humiliating and outright racist. Full stop.”Many leading opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, have only recently stopped the practice of having white singers darken their skin with stage makeup to perform the title roles in “Aida” and “Otello,” long after minstrel shows, blackface roles and other types of performances that rely on makeup that echoes racist caricatures disappeared from many stages. But the practice is still common in parts of Europe and Russia, and Netrebko has been a vocal proponent of wearing dark makeup.In an interview on Friday, Blue said she was disturbed when she saw photos of the production, including some that showed dancers and singers in dark makeup, circulating on social media on Monday evening while she was in Paris for another performance.“I was shocked; I just felt really weird in my spirit,” she said. “I just felt like I couldn’t go and sing and associate myself with this tradition.”Netrebko, who is trying to rebuild her career after losing a number of engagements following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because of her history of support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, posted photos on her Instagram this week showing her in extremely dark makeup and braids as she sang the role of Aida, an Ethiopian princess, in Verona.One of the photos the soprano Anna Netrebko shared on Instagram of the makeup she wore in a production of “Aida” at the Arena di Verona in Italy.Soon, Netrebko’s Instagram page was flooded with more than 1,000 comments, with many people denouncing her for using makeup that they said was racist and recalled blackface. She was not the only one in “Aida” who had darkened her skin: Some of her co-stars performed in the dark makeup, as did a different cast that appeared in the opera when it opened last month.A spokesman for Netrebko did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Netrebko has been a vocal defender of the practice, arguing that it helps maintain the authenticity of centuries-old works. When the Met tried to stop her from using makeup to darken her skin during a production of “Aida” in 2018, she went to a tanning salon instead. In 2019, appearing with dark makeup in a production of “Aida” at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, she wrote on Instagram, “Black Face and Black Body for Ethiopian princess, for Verdi greatest opera! YES!”The Arena di Verona noted in a statement that it had been performing this production of “Aida” for two decades, and that it was well known when Blue agreed to appear this summer.“Every country has different roots, and their cultural and social structures developed along different historical and cultural paths,” it said in a statement. “Sensibilities and approaches on the same subject might widely vary in different parts of the world.”It added: “We have no reason nor intent whatsoever to offend and disturb anyone’s sensibility.”While Netrebko has not addressed the recent controversy, her husband, the tenor Yusif Eyvazov, who also appeared in the production of “Aida” in Verona, lashed out at Blue. In a social media post, he called Blue’s decision “disgusting,” and questioned why she had not withdrawn last month when “Aida” opened, with a different cast that also used dark makeup. (That cast included the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska as “Aida.”)Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, where Eyvazov is a regular performer, sent a letter to Eyvazov on Friday calling his remarks “hateful,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times.“There is no room at the Met for artists who are so meanspirited in their thinking,” Gelb wrote in the letter.Gelb, who cut ties with Netrebko this year because of her previous support for Putin, said in an interview that he had not yet decided whether he would penalize Eyvazov. “We’re considering what steps we might take,” he said.Blue said her decision was not personal, and that she was not targeting Netrebko or her husband.“My decision doesn’t have anything to do with them,” she said in the interview. “My decision has to do with my convictions,” she added, saying that she had felt moved to take a stand against “something that is hurtful to people who look like me.”Blue said she hoped that more opera houses would eliminate blackface as they work to bring diversity to the stage.“In order to keep opera relevant in today’s society, there’s no place for blackface,” she said. “I felt hurt by what I saw because I feel like that’s a tradition that they’re trying to hold onto that hurts people.”Eyvazov’s manager said he was unavailable for comment on Friday.The decision by Blue, who has become a favorite at the Met Opera in recent seasons and who appeared this summer at the Paris Opera in Gounod’s “Faust,” was praised by many fellow singers and American opera executives.The revival of “Aida” in Verona is among Netrebko’s first staged opera engagements since her return to performing in late April as she tried to repair her career after being shunned in the United States and parts of Europe for her ties to Putin. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Revisiting the Pyramids’ ‘Avant-Garde African Jazz,’ Four Decades Later

      by

      The group that started at Antioch College in Ohio went to Africa and returned “transformed,” one of its members said. A new boxed set collects its little-heard albums from the 1970s.In the early 1970s, as many jazz musicians looked directly to Africa for rhythms and inspiration, a group of students from Antioch College pushed even further, creating music that was so overtly African, you would have thought it was coming direct from Kenya or Senegal, not a small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio.Between 1973 and 1976, the Pyramids released their music independently and sold albums hand-to-hand to classmates and during their travels on the road. Though the group earned a smattering of fans, its music — “avant-garde African jazz,” its bassist Kimathi Asante called it in an interview — was impossible to market.“It was a little bit too much for people,” said Margaux Simmons, who played flute in the group. “We were so eager and open and we went there.”On Friday, a new boxed set titled “Aomawa: The 1970s Recordings” will mark the widest release of the Pyramids’ music to date, reintroducing the band’s first three studio albums — “Lalibela,” “King of Kings” and “Birth/Speed/Merging” — and unearthing a 1975 live session for KQED TV in San Francisco.The group’s members started to come together after its future leader, Idris Ackamoor, returned to Antioch following a work-study period in Los Angeles, where he was mentored by the saxophonist Charles Tyler. Ackamoor founded a band with Simmons called the Collective, which Asante later joined. For the next year, they played original compositions influenced by Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, mid-60s-era John Coltrane and classical music.In the fall of 1971, the three students joined the Black Music Ensemble, a group started by the free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor, who came to teach at Antioch in the late 1960s, and began an intense period of musical training. “He would have us practice from 10 o’clock at night until 2 in the morning, seven days a week, for months on end,” Asante said. “We had chops that were just off the charts.”Nine months into their tenure with Taylor, Ackamoor had an idea: Antioch had a work-study program that allowed students to travel overseas, so he wrote a proposal to study the source of Black art. “I said, ‘I want to go to Europe, I want to form a band, and then I want to go to Africa for nine months and just study African music,’” Ackamoor recalled in a video interview.The school approved the request, requiring six weeks at a university in France. Ackamoor and Simmons flew to Paris in July 1972, where they befriended a young percussionist named Donald Robinson, who was studying there under the drummer Sunny Murray. At a university in Besançon, Ackamoor, Simmons and Asante played their first show as a trio, then played gigs around Amsterdam after Robinson officially joined the group. In France, they had lived in separate dorms that formed a triangle, giving the group its name. (An unrelated band called the Pyramids produced surf rock in the 1960s.)But the most pivotal part of the band’s journey was yet to come. After a week in Morocco and Senegal, the Pyramids spent seven months in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, engaging in spiritual practices, playing in drumming circles and buying instruments. As Black Americans, an almost indescribable feeling set in once they landed there.Ackamoor in Ghana in 1973. He applied for a program at Antioch College that allowed students to study overseas and traveled with fellow musicians to Europe, then Africa. Margaux Simmons/Pyramids Archive“It was the sense of community,” Simmons said. “It came from a place of spirituality, rather than something just to make music.”Ackamoor said when the group was in Africa, “We just wanted to be vessels,” adding, “We wanted to take in as much as we could, and fortunately, we were blessed and we were directed to the right sources.”The Pyramids returned to Ohio “transformed,” Asante said. “We were not the people or the musicians that had left Yellow Springs a year before.” The group bolstered its sound with Moroccan clay drums, a bamboo flute and Ugandan harp, giving its music a distinct African flair.Back in Ohio, the conga player Bradie Speller joined the Pyramids, adding even more percussive depth. The band played shows on campus and even opened for the jazz fusion band Weather Report in Dayton and Cincinnati. The Pyramids emphasized theater and costumes as a part of their live shows, eschewing street clothes for colorful face paint, ornate kente cloth and interpretive dance. “We had a pageant going on,” Ackamoor said, “a ritual pageant that was a visual feast, not only for the music, but for the eyes and the movement and the dance. We were a multimedia spectacle.”There was a consciousness-raising element to the group’s music, akin to experimental jazz luminaries including the Sun Ra Arkestra and Art Ensemble of Chicago. But Ackamoor said concerns about “humankind” were top of mind. “Although we were Afrocentric, we never defined ourselves as being Afrocentric,” he said. “We, at a very early point, were talking and speaking to all languages, all colors, all races, but we were African American doing it.”The Pyramids recorded their 1973 debut, “Lalibela” — inspired by Ackamoor and Simmons’s trip to the city in Ethiopia of the same name — in a friend’s Yellow Springs living room on a four-track tape. “A lot of it was on the first take,” Asante said. “It was a very pure album.” Its 1974 follow-up, “King of Kings,” was made during a marathon all-night session at a studio in Chillicothe, Ohio. Both albums contain long percussive suites, with searing saxophone wails and upper-register flute solos that work best when played front to back without interruption. The results were daring then and now.Simmons performing as part of the Collective, a group that pre-dated the Pyramids, in 1970.Idris Ackamoor/Pyramids Archive“We were more concerned with the progression of the music and creating a sound that was our own,” Speller said in a phone interview.By the time the Pyramids recorded their third album, “Birth/Speed/Merging,” in 1976, they had moved to the Bay Area to be closer to some sort of music industry. Ackamoor’s brother, who lived in San Francisco, helped fund the LP and put the band in a studio with better facilities and multitracking equipment. The Pyramids printed 5,000 copies of the LP, but they couldn’t find a record company to distribute it. Then the group began to splinter, and members relocated around the world.The Pyramids were trying to make a living as an avant-garde band when even the most popular jazz musicians struggled to find their footing in a marketplace dominated by funk. “It got deep,” Ackamoor said. “Those early days I had to pawn my instrument, do different things to survive. We were in the serious red, and once we were out of the college environment, we ran smack up to the reality of Black creative musicians trying to survive in America.” The Pyramids opened the Berkeley Jazz Festival in 1977, then broke up.The band was defunct until 2007, when Ackamoor organized a reunion concert after fielding requests to reissue the Pyramids’ 1970s music. By then, the music had reached a new generation of listeners, and the group’s albums were selling for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Three years later, a German agency organized a European tour for the band.In the years since, Ackamoor has resurrected the group in different forms, releasing the albums “We Be All Africans” in 2016, “An Angel Fell” in 2018 and “Shaman!” under the name Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids in 2020. But you don’t get those albums without the foundation laid by the original Pyramids in the ’70s, and the courage it took to trek into the unknown.“We were the original Do It Yourself musicians, producers, label, the whole nine yards,” Speller said. “Everything cats are doing now, we did 50 years ago.”Ackamoor isn’t done with the Pyramids yet — a new album is in the works — but he said the boxed set captures a bold moment. “It is an amazing historical document, but it’s also a living document,” he said. “The past is a wonderful thing, but I’m in the future and the band is in the future.” More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Adam Wade, Network Game Show Pioneer, Is Dead at 87

      by

      As a singer, he had three Top 10 hits in 1961. As an actor, he had a long career in film and on television. As an M.C., he broke a racial barrier.Adam Wade, a versatile, velvet-voiced crooner who scored three consecutive Billboard Top 10 hits in a single year, appeared in scores of films, plays and TV productions, and in 1975 became the first Black host of a network television game show, died on Thursday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 87.His wife, Jeree Wade, a singer, actress and producer, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.In May 1975, CBS announced that it would break a network television racial barrier by naming Mr. Wade the master of ceremonies of a weekly afternoon game show, “Musical Chairs.”Staged at the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan and co-produced by the music impresario Don Kirshner, the program featured guest musical performances, with four contestants competing to complete the lyrics of songs and respond to questions about music. (Among the guest performers were groups like the Spinners and singers like Irene Cara.)The novelty of a Black M.C. was not universally embraced: A CBS affiliate in Alabama refused to carry the show, and hate mail poured in — including, Mr. Wade told Connecticut Public Radio in 2014, a letter from a man “saying he didn’t want his wife sitting at home watching the Black guy hand out the money and the smarts.”The show was canceled after less than five months. Still, Mr. Wade said, “It probably added 30 years to my career.”That career began while he was working as a laboratory technician for Dr. Jonas E. Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine, and a songwriter friend invited him to New York to audition for a music publisher. He first recorded for Coed Records in 1958 and two years later moved to Manhattan, where he performed with the singer Freddy Cole, the brother of his idol Nat King Cole, and, rapidly ascending the show business ladder, opened for Tony Bennett and for the comedian Joe E. Lewis at the fashionable Copacabana nightclub.“Two years ago, he was Patrick Henry Wade, a $65-a-week aide on virus research experiments in the laboratory of Dr. Jonas E. Salk at the University of Pittsburgh,” The New York Times wrote in 1961. “Today he is Adam Wade, one of the country’s rising young singers in nightclubs and on records.”That same year, he recorded three songs that soared to the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100 chart: “Take Good Care of Her” (which reached No. 7), “The Writing on the Wall” (No. 5) and “As if I Didn’t Know” (No. 10).Patrick Henry Wade was born on March 17, 1935, in Pittsburgh to Pauline Simpson and Henry Oliver Wade Jr. He was raised by his grandparents, Henry Wade, a janitor at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (now part of Carnegie Mellon University), and Helen Wade.He attended Virginia State University on a basketball scholarship, but, although he had dreamed of playing for the Harlem Globetrotters, dropped out after three years and went to work at Dr. Salk’s laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. Undecided about whether to accept the recording contract that Coed offered, Mr. Wade consulted Dr. Salk.“He told me he had this opportunity,” Dr. Salk told The Times at the time. “I told him he must search his own soul to find out what is in him that wants to come out.”He changed his first name — because his agent said there were too many Pats in show business — and had his first hit with the song “Ruby” early in 1960. His smooth vocal style was often compared to that of Johnny Mathis, but Mr. Wade said he was primarily influenced by an earlier boyhood idol, Nat King Cole.“So I guess that tells you how good my imitating skills were,” he said.He appeared on TV on soap operas including “The Guiding Light” and “Search for Tomorrow” and sitcoms including “The Jeffersons” and “Sanford & Son.” He was also seen in “Shaft” (1971), “Come Back Charleston Blue” (1972) and other films, and onstage in a 2008 touring company of “The Color Purple.”He and his wife ran Songbird, a company that produced African American historical revues, including the musical “Shades of Harlem,” which was staged Off Broadway at the Village Gate in 1983.The couple last performed at an anniversary party this year.In addition to Ms. Wade, whom he married in 1989, he is survived by their son, Jamel, a documentary filmmaker; three children, Sheldon Wade, Patrice Johnson Wade and Michael Wade, from his marriage to Kay Wade, which ended in 1973; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.For all his success in show business, Mr. Wade said he was particularly proud that 40 years after dropping out of college he earned a bachelor’s degree from Lehman College and a master’s in theater history and criticism from Brooklyn College, both constituents of the City University of New York. He taught speech and theater at Long Island University and at Bloomfield College in New Jersey.“I was the first one in my family to go to college,” he told Connecticut Public Radio. “I promised my grandmother back then that I would finish college someday. Many years later, I kept that promise.” More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Accepted’ Review: Reaching for the Stars, Seeing Them Dissolve

      by

      After a scandal unravels at their private school in western Louisiana, four seniors pick up the pieces.In “Accepted” the director Dan Chen takes us inside the world of T.M. Landry, a Louisiana private school whose videos of African American students collecting Ivy League college acceptances once went viral. But nine months after the filmmakers’ first visit to the school, The New York Times published reports of physical abuse, falsified transcripts and “cultish” behavior on the part of its founders, Mike and Tracey Landry. Viewers of “Accepted” get a front-row seat to the life-altering impact of the school’s unraveling through the stories of four promising high school seniors: Adia, Alicia, Cathy and Issac.As we witness both the documentary’s subjects — and its director — navigate a shocking development in real time, a quietly probing film emerges that pierces the myth of American meritocracy.Chen makes the choice to plod along at the same measured pace throughout — even after the T.M Landry scandal comes to light — and forgo the cryptic scoring we’re used to hearing when the jig is up. Similarly, the cinematography by Chen and Daphne Qin Wu moves seamlessly between intimate hand-held shots and aerial views of western Louisiana landscapes that reflect the eventual loss of access to the Landrys and the school.In the end, it is the resilience of the film’s teenage subjects that lifts “Accepted” to new heights. As they sit for close-ups in front of a swirly blue backdrop, gone are the Georgetown and Stanford sweatshirts, and the hopes they once represented. But in their place sits a clear understanding of the misguided pressures placed upon individual minority students to succeed in a society that systemically disadvantages them and a surprisingly powerful tale about making peace with imperfection.AcceptedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Lessons in Survival: 1971’ Review: The Past Echoes in the Present

      by

      The writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni are at the center of a crackling work of verbatim theater at the Vineyard Theater.If the year weren’t in the title, you might come close to guessing it from the architecture of the sunken space: a conversation pit lined with couches upholstered in burnt orange, with blood orange carpeting to match. There’s a comfort to the room, a midcentury modern hospitality that invites you to take your shoes off, have a drink, light one cigarette after another, and talk and talk as you try to set the world to rights.And so the writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni do in “Lessons in Survival: 1971,” a crackling work of verbatim theater starring Carl Clemons-Hopkins and Crystal Dickinson. A time-capsule excavation of a moment in 20th-century Black American activist-intellectualism, it recreates a sprawling interview that Giovanni did with Baldwin for the WNET television talk show “Soul!” when he was 47, famous and living in France, and she was 28 and just getting started.“Jimmy,” Giovanni says, in the play’s first line, “I’m — I’m really curious. Why did you move to Europe?”It’s so potent, that familiarity: calling him Jimmy, not Mr. Baldwin. Before he even opens his mouth, he becomes for us not a god visiting from the pantheon but a human being. And in the question that her question implies — Why did a continent an ocean away seem like a healthier place for you, a Black American, to live? — we hear her set up the framework for an ever-thoughtful, sometimes contentious, particularly American dialogue.Directed by Tyler Thomas at the Vineyard Theater, this engrossing 90-minute show arrives at the end of a season of civic and social reckonings on New York stages, which puts it at risk of seeming like an eat-your-vegetables experience. It is emphatically not.Conceived by Marin Ireland, Peter Mark Kendall, Reggie D. White and Thomas, and created with the theater collective the Commissary, it was presented in an earlier version online during the industry shutdown. In person, it is the kind of electric theater that charges audiences with energy: a meeting between public intellectuals wrestling rigorously with the culture, and clashing with each other along the way. The drama is built in. All we have to do is listen.The actors are listening, too, wearing earpieces that feed them the audio of the interview, whose words they speak with the original stammers and hesitations. We hear, briefly, the voices of the real Baldwin and Giovanni captured on that old recording, but the performance is about channeling their essence, not impersonating them.So it doesn’t matter, really, that Clemons-Hopkins — tall, broad-shouldered, bearded, familiar to fans of the HBO Max series “Hacks” as the endearing workaholic Marcus — has such a different physical presence than Baldwin. It’s the writer’s mind that this show is after.Dickinson is riveting as the lesser-known Giovanni, a poised young Black woman with a soft surface and a spine of steel. Respectful of Baldwin, she belongs to a different sex and generation than he does. And she challenges him on his stubborn sympathy for notions of Black manhood that she believes must change.“Be careful as a woman what you demand of a man,” he warns, but she is having none of it — a resistance that got her finger snaps of approval from the crowd at the performance I saw.Baldwin and Giovanni are united, though, in having no use for white critics, so take my admiration for this show with that grain of salt. But do go, and do pause in the lobby, where one corner has been turned into an installation by You-Shin Chen, the show’s set designer, and Matt Carlin, its props supervisor, with a loop of period video clips full of famous Black faces and retro advertising (by Josiah Davis and Attilio A. Rigotti) playing on a vintage console TV.It will transport you straight back to the era of the interview, when Giovanni and the expatriate Baldwin were determined that Black Americans should take rightful ownership of their white-run country.“I do know that we have paid too much for it to be able to abandon it,” he says, with an eye on the ancestors. “My father and my father’s fathers paid too much for it.”“I’ve paid too much for it,” she says. “I’m only 28.”Lessons in Survival: 1971Through June 30 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More