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    Erica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostErica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48Best known as a regular on a local morning talk show, she also wrote plays and acted in movies. She died of complications of Covid-19.Erica Watson  was a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning TV talk show in Chicago. She also did stand-up comedy and acted in movies.Credit…Patti K. GillMarch 4, 2021, 6:23 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.When a candidate for state’s attorney in Cook County, Ill., held a lunchtime fund-raiser in downtown Chicago in 2016, the campaign hired a local comedian and television personality named Erica Faye Watson to warm up the crowd.Ms. Watson had never met the candidate, Kim Foxx, but that didn’t keep her from diving into an extended riff about Ms. Foxx’s hair. “I had never been publicly roasted before,” Ms. Foxx said in an interview. “I was like, who is this woman?”But the jokes were just a setup for Ms. Watson’s real point: what it would mean to have a Black woman as the county’s chief prosecutor, and how proud she would be to see Ms. Foxx in that role. The two became fast friends.“She was very much about empowering Black women,” said Ms. Foxx, who is now in her second term. “She was fighting not just for herself but for people like her.”Ms. Watson was a Chicagoland celebrity, best known as a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning talk show on WLS-TV, Chicago’s ABC affiliate. She also performed stand-up comedy, wrote and directed plays and acted in movies.Ms. Watson died on Saturday in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She was 48. The cause was Covid-19, Patti Gill, her former agent, said.“Erica was a hidden gem of Chicago and a voice for overlooked businesses and causes,” said Ms. Gill, who cast her in “BlacKorea,” a short film she wrote, in 2017.Erica Faye Watson was born on Feb. 26, 1973, in Chicago, to Henry Watson, a postal worker, and Willie Mae Watson, a homemaker.Her survivors include her parents and her brother, Eric.Ms. Watson attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was a fixture on the school’s Black arts scene.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    The Time-Warped Charm of Valerie June

    Valerie June has built a devoted following by ignoring expectations.Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexThe Time-Warped Charm of Valerie June“The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers,” the introspective, quietly hopeful album she made more than a year ago, sounds just right in 2021.Valerie June has built a devoted following by ignoring expectations.Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 4, 2021A fire crackled in a cast-iron stove behind Valerie June. She had a bright carnation in her abundant dreadlocks, a mug of tea, a banjo by her side and an Etta James album propped against an amplifier as she chatted via video about her new album, “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers.” She had all but finished the music last January, after two years of on-and-off recording, and was expecting at first to release it in 2020. But her label, Fantasy, convinced her that would be a “bad idea,” she said with a laugh.Now, the 39-year-old musician was ensconced at an Airbnb rental house in upstate New York, where she could make music at any time without disturbing the neighbors at her Brooklyn apartment. She had set up instruments, microphones and lights for home recordings and for the livestreamed performances that she’s substituting, for now, for her years of perpetual touring.“It feels so strange,” she said. “It just feels so different to not travel. I value just being alone, but this is way too much.”Although “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers,” due March 12, arrives in a different era than the one it was made in, it sounds unexpectedly timely. Even before the isolation of the past year, Valerie June’s artistic intuition had led her toward thoughts of stillness, meditation and inwardness. She also completed a book that is due in April under her full name, Valerie June Hockett: “Maps for the Modern World” (Andrews McMeel), a collection of poems, drawings and homilies about consciousness and mindfulness, like “Visualization”: “When you don’t see a path/Before you,/Maybe it’s time to fly.”Valerie June has built a devoted following by ignoring expectations. She is simultaneously rural and cosmopolitan, historically minded and contemporary, idiosyncratic and fashionable, mystical and down-to-earth. She calls her style “organic moonshine roots music.” Her voice has a wayward twang and a sly finesse, while her music wanders amid soul, country, folk, jazz and blues — along with nods, on the new album, to hip-hop and Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat.“Not every song that I write fits a certain genre,” she said. “Songs are teachers — they’re like bosses, basically. They’re like, this is what we want. They have lives and feelings and potentials and desires and dreams. And I have to be the one who’s listening to them and telling whoever it is, what I hear that they want.”She added, “A whole lot of magic has to happen to make music. A whole lot of minds have to see something invisible. The act of making music — that could be spiritual. You’re taking something that’s not physically seen and you’re bringing it from nowhere, pulling it from thin air, so people can experience it.”Valerie June was born in Jackson, Tenn. and grew up in nearby Humboldt. She learned to sing from all the voices around her at church services — young, old, pure, cracked — while she was exposed to the secular music business through her father, a part-time concert promoter. She also dug into the musical history of Tennessee, the Appalachians and the Deep South, from early blues singers like Memphis Minnie to Dolly Parton to the Memphis rap group Three 6 Mafia. Valerie June moved to Memphis as a teenager and began singing with bands and then as a solo act. In 2010 she landed a spot on an online MTV series about Memphis musicians, “$5 Cover.”“Not every song that I write fits a certain genre,” Valerie June said. “They have lives and feelings and potentials and desires and dreams.”Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesHer reputation spread fast among musicians. She sang featured backup vocals with the country singer Eric Church, the rapper John Forté and the songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello; she released her own recordings, including a bluegrassy EP, “Valerie June and the Tennessee Express,” co-produced by the fiddler Ketch Secor from Old Crow Medicine Show. Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys was a co-producer for her 2013 debut album with a label, “Pushin’ Against a Stone.”By then, she had moved to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, though she rarely stayed in New York City for long. “For basically a decade,” she said, “what I was doing was flying to New York, washing my clothes and going back on the road.” “Pushin’ Against a Stone” and “The Order of Time” from 2017, her first albums released nationally, had the naturalistic sound of musicians playing together in real time. They drew comparisons to expansive stylistic hybrids like Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.” But for “The Moon and Stars,” Valerie June decided to incorporate some studio time-warping. She wrote new material and dug into a backlog she estimates at 150 songs; one, the fragile “Fallin’,” dates back to the early 2000s. And with her co-producer Jack Splash — a Grammy-winning Los Angeles producer whose extensive credits include tracks with Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Hudson and Anthony Hamilton — she layered live band recordings with low-fi demos and multitrack experiments.“When I was working with Jack,” she said, “I told him certain words and feelings that I want the record to be able to have for people. Spirituality was one, iridescence was one, illuminance was one. Ethereal was one. And magical, fairylike, dreamy, colorful.”From his studio in Los Angeles, Splash said, “Valerie writes like a poet writes. That’s something that very much gets overlooked in contemporary music in the constant quest for hits and success. It’s not often when I get a chance to work with an artist who actually cares enough about the world to want to write those types of things.”They worked on the songs at home and saved up material until they were ready to gather musicians at professional studio sessions. Those tended to be scheduled on nights with a full moon, by “absolute cosmic coincidence,” said Splash. “It was very beautiful though. We felt like the sky was smiling down on us.”Splash connected Valerie June to vintage Memphis soul by bringing in the string arranger Lester Snell, who was a mainstay of the Stax Records studio band and a frequent collaborator of Isaac Hayes in the 1970s; they recorded his ensembles at the renowned Sam Phillips Studio in Memphis. Valerie June also garnered a cameo appearance from the soul singer Carla Thomas, who had mid-1960s hits like “B-A-B-Y” and made duet albums with Otis Redding. On “The Moon and Stars,” Thomas recites an African proverb — “Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet” — and then sings along with Valerie June on “Call Me a Fool,” a Southern soul ballad testifying to impulsive love.But the album also includes hypnotic songs like “Within You,” which stays on one chord throughout its five minutes as Valerie June sings thoughts like, “The only truth to know/Is in the letting go.” It’s a sonic assemblage built from a mantra-like acoustic guitar line, tendrils of electric-guitar improvisation, an off-kilter drum-machine loop, wisps of Valerie June’s voice and Snell’s hovering string-section chords.The final track for “The Moon and Stars” was going to be “Home Inside,” a song about a search for peace, which reflects, “I know there is a home inside/Window to soul, where every dream abides.”“You know, the negativity is always going to be there. It’s just, how do you work with it?” Valerie June said. “We all have these seeds of darkness within us and we all have these seeds of light. We get the choice.”Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesBut during the first months of quarantine in 2020, Valerie June returned to her family home in Humboldt, where her mother still lives. “It was starting to be summer,” she recalled. “I was still out in the country, away from everybody in the world. And all I heard was bird song, day and night. I would wake up and just go out there and record bird song.”Eventually, she decided to give the album a new ending. With her bird recordings, she and Splash layered on keyboards, flutes and the bell tones of a Tibetan singing bowl to make “Starlight Ethereal Silence,” the album’s postscript. “You go into this nature world,” she said, “And you can sit there and let them be the singers — because they’re the best singers — and just be immersed in all of what is around us all the time.”Although the album was finished in 2020, the context of that turbulent year changed the way Valerie June saw her songs. “Smile,” a song that arrives midway through the album, is about a determination to make it through rough times. In 2020, she was listening to the track and watching Black Lives Matter protests and, with the death of the Georgia congressman and civil-rights activist John Lewis, footage from the marches and rallies of the 1960s.“I saw everything that we’re fighting for now, with systemic racism and injustice,” she said. “And I saw this older Black woman sitting on the steps of, like, a sharecropping house or something. Maybe she had been a slave and maybe she had truly known the hard times. And she just started smiling. Because she had done everything. She had fought for freedom. She had tried, you know, and all she could do was smile. And in that smile, there was some joy and some happiness that just couldn’t be taken from her no matter what anyone ever did. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, is that what the song is connecting me to?’”Above all, a willed and unblinking optimism courses through Valerie June’s songs. “One of my lessons for this life is, how can I keep my energy?” she said. “I know darkness. I know the blues. And so how can I use the blues as a fuel for what I wish to say? You know, the negativity is always going to be there. It’s just, how do you work with it? We all have these seeds of darkness within us and we all have these seeds of light. We get the choice.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Chadwick Boseman wins a best actor Golden Globe and his widow accepts in an emotional speech.

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main story‘Nomadland,’ ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’ and ‘The Crown’ Led a Remote Golden GlobesChadwick Boseman wins a best actor Golden Globe and his widow accepts in an emotional speech.Feb. 28, 2021, 10:56 p.m. ETFeb. 28, 2021, 10:56 p.m. ET More

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    Emmanuel Acho to Host ‘The Bachelor’ Television Special

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEmmanuel Acho to Host ‘The Bachelor’ Television SpecialMr. Acho, author of “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man,” will host “After the Final Rose” after the show’s longtime host went on hiatus over comments dismissive of racism.Emmanuel Acho will host “After the Final Rose” after the announcement that the show’s longtime host, Chris Harrison, would be “stepping aside.”Feb. 28, 2021, 4:08 p.m. ETEmmanuel Acho, an author and former National Football League player, will host a post-finale special of “The Bachelor” after the show’s longtime host, Chris Harrison, said he was “stepping aside” after he made comments that were dismissive of racism.Mr. Acho, who wrote the book “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man” and hosts a show by the same name, said in a statement that it was “both an honor and privilege” to host the hourlong special on March 15.“This is an incredibly pivotal episode on one of the most storied shows in television history,” he said.The installment of a Black host caps a season that featured the ABC franchise’s first Black “Bachelor,” Matt James, but has also been overshadowed by a series of controversies amid calls from the show’s fans to increase its efforts toward diversity and inclusion.Mr. Harrison’s hiatus came after an interview with Rachel L. Lindsay, the show’s first Black “Bachelorette,” in which Mr. Harrison defended racist actions by one of this season’s three finalists.The “After the Final Rose” special will “cover the current events about the franchise,” ABC said in a statement, as well as conversations between Mr. Acho, Mr. James and the three finalists.One of the finalists, Rachael Kirkconnell, has faced criticism over photos that have recently surfaced, including one of her attending an “Old South” plantation-themed ball. Ms. Kirkconnell apologized in an Instagram post, saying, “I was ignorant, but my ignorance was racist.”Mr. James said that the interview between Mr. Harrison and Ms. Lindsay “was troubling and painful to watch,” adding that “it was a clear reflection of a much larger issue that ‘The Bachelor’ franchise has fallen short on addressing adequately for years.”Mr. Harrison, who is still listed as the show’s host on its website, apologized, writing on Instagram that his comments, like his use of the term “woke police” in defending Ms. Kirkconnell, were “unacceptable.”Ms. Lindsay had suggested last week that Mr. Acho “would be fantastic” as a host for the special because he has been “very outspoken about racial injustice, for social justice, and has pretty much been the person who said, ‘I can have these uncomfortable conversations and people trust it.’”Mr. Acho said on Instagram about the announcement: “I love being a bridge for reconciliation. Our world is disconnected & divided, my goal is to unify.”Mr. Acho, an analyst for Fox Sports, is a former linebacker for the Cleveland Browns and Philadelphia Eagles football teams. He left the N.F.L. in 2016 to join ESPN as an analyst.His YouTube show, “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man,” has covered topics like policing, national anthem protests and “Karens & Cancel Culture.” An episode titled “A Conversation With the Police” has more than two million views.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Spike Lee’s Children Are This Year’s Golden Globe Ambassadors

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Awards SeasonHow to Watch the GlobesWhat to ExpectOur Movie PredictionsGolden Globe NomineesGolden Globes SuitAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySpike Lee’s Children Are This Year’s Golden Globe AmbassadorsJackson Lewis Lee and Satchel Lee are the first Black siblings selected to represent “Hollywood’s next generation.”Jackson Lewis Lee, left, and Satchel Lee outside their father’s studio in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.Credit…Adraint Bereal for The New York TimesFeb. 28, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET More

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    History Meets the Present on the ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ Album

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s PickHistory Meets the Present on the ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ AlbumThe songs inspired by Shaka King’s film about the 1969 police killing of the Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton mostly don’t appear in the movie, but they expand its story.“Judas and the Black Messiah” arrived with an ambitious soundtrack stocked with songs featuring a soulful, somber and retro aesthetic.Credit…Glen Wilson/Warner BrosFeb. 24, 2021, 12:10 p.m. ETJudas and the Black Messiah: The Inspired AlbumNYT Critic’s PickA movie’s message doesn’t have to end with the closing credits. Black filmmakers and musicians have been making the most of “inspired by” albums that are anything but afterthoughts; they boldly extrapolate from the story told onscreen. “Black Panther,” “The Lion King” and now “Judas and the Black Messiah” — the director Shaka King’s film about the 1969 police killing of the Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton — arrived with companion albums that connect fantasy and history to their repercussions in the here and now.“Judas and the Black Messiah: The Inspired Album” overflows with music and ideas: 22 tracks, many of them collaborative. With Hit-Boy as one of the executive producers (and the rapper on a track of his own), the album gathers past and current hip-hop hitmakers, with Nas, Jay-Z and the Roots’ Black Thought alongside Pooh Shiesty, Polo G, Lil Durk and BJ the Chicago Kid.Although the album is a compilation from dozens of rappers, singers, producers and songwriters, it has a coherent sound: soulful, somber and retro like the film’s closing song, H.E.R.’s “Fight for You,” which is steeped in Marvin Gaye’s mournful determination. Much of the album looks back toward 1990s hip-hop: relying on instruments and samples of full bands, laced with melodic hooks and firmly enunciating the lyrics.H.E.R. provides the movie’s closing song, “Fight for You.”Credit…Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressSome tracks directly address the film’s particulars. The album opens with an appearance by Fred Hampton Jr. in “Cointelpro/Dec. 4”: memorializing his father, reminding listers about Cointelpro (the F.B.I.’s illegal covert 1960s Counterintelligence Program aimed at civil rights groups and other perceived subversives) and firmly connecting political oratory to hip-hop; the track ends with a loop of the elder Hampton proclaiming, “I am a revolutionary!”Rakim’s “Black Messiah” delivers a terse, magisterial biography of Hampton over samples of a 1967 soul single, Them Two’s “Am I a Good Man.” In “Somethin’ Ain’t Right,” over bluesy guitar chords, Masego sings about corruption and Rapsody vows, “Cointelpro got the target on me/But we don’t stand down till the people all free.”But the focus inevitably widens to encompass the present. Polo G’s “Last Man Standing” — with bleak piano chords and a shivery vocal sample — bitterly connects thoughts of Hampton and the Black Panthers to deep-seated systemic racism, police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. Smino and Saba collaborate on “Plead the .45th,” sketching paranoia and resentment in brisk, jazzy phrases. Black Thought’s “Welcome to America,” with gritty vocal choruses from C.S. Armstrong and flashes of a gospel choir, is a vehement reminder of centuries of exploitation, remembering “every lost body crossed, tarred, feathered and tossed” and insisting, “This American cloth has never been soft/while history was running its course.”Memorial and news flash combine in “What It Feels Like” by Nipsey Hussle — who was killed in 2019 — and Jay-Z, a hip-hop march with foreboding piano, horn-section chords and hovering choral vocals. The song warns that success turns Blacks into targets: “You get successful, then it get stressful,” Hussle rapped. Then Jay-Z’s verse pivots from similar ideas — “You know they hate when you become more than they expect” — to the inadequate police response to the insurrection on Jan. 6: “You let them crackers storm your Capitol, put they feet up on your desk/And yet you talkin’ tough to me, I lost all my little respect.” Jay-Z was born December 4, 1969, the day Hampton was killed in a police raid. The history sounds personal.Various Artists“Judas and the Black Messiah: The Inspired Album”(Six Course Music Group/RCA)AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Douglas Turner Ward: A Lens on ‘Questions That the Country Wasn’t Asking’

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDouglas Turner Ward: A Lens on ‘Questions That the Country Wasn’t Asking’Samuel L. Jackson, David Alan Grier, Phylicia Rashad and others remember the Negro Ensemble Company founder.Douglas Turner Ward waiting to go onstage after the opening night performance of “A Soldier’s Play” in January 2020. Kenny Leon, who led the production, called Ward’s presence and smile up there that night “the greatest experience for me as an American director.” Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 23, 2021Updated 5:20 p.m. ETDouglas Turner Ward, who died at 90 on Saturday, left a legacy of extraordinary reach.By the time he founded the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967 with Robert Hooks and Gerald Krone, he had already been on Broadway in the original 1959 cast of “A Raisin in the Sun,” playing a tiny role while understudying Sidney Poitier.In the mid-’60s, Ward made a splash with his short satire “Day of Absence” — in which Black actors in whiteface makeup played white characters — and with an essay in The New York Times titled “American Theater: For Whites Only?” He dedicated his career to making sure that the answer was no.Nurturing the talents of Black artists through his company, he watched a remarkable number go on to fame — not least those from his acclaimed 1981 original production of Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Soldier’s Play,” whose cast included Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson and David Alan Grier.This week, company alumni and other colleagues reminisced about Ward and how he shaped the field. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson JacksonNegro Ensemble Company alums; in a joint interviewLATANYA RICHARDSON JACKSON He wanted the work of great African-American and Black artists to be as important to the world and to the artists themselves as the dominant culture. And his love of that original Negro Ensemble Company was always first in his conversation about art, because he so respected all of those actors and felt that they represented the best of the best inside the business, period.SAMUEL L. JACKSON He carried, like, four newspapers around with him. Every day. And when we were in rehearsal, he would sit in the back of the theater reading the paper. He would be in the back left corner reading the paper, and then, you know, you’d look up, and by the time you’d finished the first act, he’d be in the middle of the theater reading the paper, and then he’d be in another corner reading the paper, or in the balcony reading the paper. And at the end of rehearsal, he’d come down and give you notes! And we’d be like, “You’ve been reading the paper!” And then we started to find out that he only looked up from reading the paper when there was a bad line reading, or something sounded off.From left, Sophie Okonedo, Denzel Washington, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Bryce Clyde Jenkins and Anika Noni Rose in a 2014 performance of “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLATANYA RICHARDSON JACKSON We stayed in touch with Doug. When I was doing “Raisin,” he was one of the first persons I saw when we came off the stage.SAMUEL L. JACKSON I remember when I was doing “Shaft,” he just walked into my trailer one night.LATANYA RICHARDSON JACKSON Yeah, he kept up with his people now. He would find you.SAMUEL L. JACKSON Sometimes when people pass, you can actually feel the hole in the universe. This is one of those.Robert HooksA founder of the Negro Ensemble CompanyWe bonded on the road with “A Raisin in the Sun.” Douglas got to play the Sidney Poitier role, Walter Lee [Younger], which was a role he had understudied from the very beginning.He was a highly intellectual man. Read all the time about everything. I was not into politics at all. But by the time we closed “Raisin in the Sun,” I was a politico. We talked politics all the time. We talked about Black art.His whole sense of humor as it relates to his writing was classic. He proves it, of course, in “Day of Absence,” when all the Black people disappear from this Southern town. It’s just hilarious. But the white folks that were laughing, their heads would roll down the aisle because that’s the kind of humor Douglas wrote: scathing, scathing stuff.Of all the men that I’ve ever met in my life, he was the greatest influence. My father died when I was 2. But when I met Douglas Turner Ward, I had a father and a brother.Phylicia RashadNegro Ensemble Company alum; in a written statementDouglas Turner Ward was a “salt of the Earth” person who brought those sensibilities to the art of theater. He was daring. He was bold. He was honest. He was kind. He made room for many theater artists. He even created space.Phylicia Rashad in the play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at the Broadhurst Theater in 2008. She said of Ward: “He was daring. He was bold. He was honest. He was kind.”Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWoodie King Jr.Producing director and founder of New Federal TheaterHe was touring in “A Raisin in the Sun,” and they came to the Cass Theater in Detroit, and I went down to see the play and waited around. Then I walked them back to the hotel, and we talked. I showed up the next night and the next night. Finally they said, “When you get to New York, man, we can talk all the time.” I said, “Well, while you’re in Detroit for these two weeks, can I come back tomorrow?” So that was my first encounter with Douglas Turner Ward.Two weeks later, I saw Sidney Poitier in “The Defiant Ones.” These two dark-skinned actors sort of like put a stamp on the acting profession. That’s what I wanted to be. It seemed possible. Absolutely possible.Sade LythcottChief executive of National Black Theater, founded by her mother, Barbara Ann TeerDouglas and my mom grew up together, artistically. It was such a seminal moment in our country, the mid-1960s. It was the birth of Black consciousness. And “Day of Absence” was such a seminal work. My mom was in it. And that was such a metaphor for so much of their relationship: the support onstage and behind the stage to do something that felt revolutionary and felt accurate in the telling of our stories, and that that could be the revolution — Black stories in the way that Douglas wrote that. From our lens, the questions that the country wasn’t asking.David Alan Grier, second from left, facing Nnamdi Asomugha in “A Soldier’s Play,” in 2020. Grier was also in the original 1981 production of the Charles Fuller play, with Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavid Alan GrierNegro Ensemble Company alum Growing up in Detroit, I read about the Negro Ensemble. My parents took me to see a road company of “The River Niger.” These were artistic heroes to me, and specifically Douglas Turner Ward. When I went into the company of “A Soldier’s Play” [in the original production], I auditioned for him. I was really nervous, and he directed and put me in.I was in town to do “Race” back in 2009, and I ran into Doug in a restaurant we used to hang out in. He came over and he said, “I really want to congratulate you on all of your success on television and in film. But please, you guys” — meaning me, Denzel, Sam Jackson, not to put myself on their level, but we were all in the play together, that was our connection — he said, “Don’t forget the theater, man. Always come back. We need you here, and the theater needs you here.”Sometimes those words, those moments of mentorship, mean and resonate so much and so deeply.Kenny Leon, with the microphone, thanked Douglas Turner Ward, second from left, and Charles Fuller, third from the left, on opening night of “A Soldier’s Play” last year.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKenny LeonDirector of the Broadway production of “A Soldier’s Play,” in 2020The greatest experience for me as an American director was when the curtain went down that opening night, for me to call Douglas Turner Ward and Charles Fuller on that stage. To have Doug come up there and have him smile like that.Hattie WinstonA founding member of the Negro Ensemble CompanyDouglas Turner Ward is responsible for — and I say this without hesitation — the careers of not only Sam and LaTanya and Denzel and myself, but Phylicia Rashad, Debbie Allen, Charles Weldon, Adolph Caesar came through there. Not just actors, but costume designers, set designers, directors.Michael Schultz directed our very first production at the company, a play called “The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey” that was written by Peter Weiss, who was a German playwright who was a friend of Doug’s. It was all about colonialism in Africa. With that play, N.E.C. was chosen to represent the United States of America in the international theater festival in London. That was monumental.So Douglas Turner Ward, he’s in my heart, and he will always be in my heart. He’s responsible for me being who I am. It all came from Doug. We’re his children.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    ‘This Is the Life’ Review: A Valuable Part of Hip-Hop History

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘This Is the Life’ Review: A Valuable Part of Hip-Hop HistoryAva DuVernay’s 2008 documentary, now streaming on Netflix, is a personal love letter to a slice of Los Angeles’s 1990s hip-hop scene.Medusa is one of the hip-hop artists featured in Ava DuVernay’s 2008 documentary “This Is the Life.”Credit…ArrayFeb. 23, 2021This Is the LifeNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Ava DuVernayDocumentary1h 37mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Ava DuVernay’s 2008 debut feature, the documentary “This Is the Life,” is a refreshing portrait of a 1990s California hip-hop subculture that thrived separately from gangsta rap. DuVernay’s documentary, now available to stream on Netflix, is a personal project. She performed as part of the rap duo Figures of Speech at the Good Life Cafe — a South Central Los Angeles health food cafe that became a mecca for the underground rap community.Throughout the ’90s, the modest space’s open-mic nights fostered a bevy of young, raw, untainted lyrical voices telling stories of everyday life in L.A. DuVernay combines performer interviews with VHS footage and audio clips of their shows to retell a magical period in the hip-hop scene.In its intertitle graphics and visual typography, “This Is the Life” often mirrors VH1’s “Behind the Music” documentaries. When staging her interviews, however, DuVernay imprints unique compositions onto the familiar music-doc style by using the respondents’ spacious surroundings to frame them. To paint the cafe’s milieu, she identifies the institute’s stalwarts, such as supportive fans lovingly referred to as “Jean in the front row” and “Big Al.” Not only does DuVernay feature the cafe’s Black male M.C.’s like Abstract Rude and Chillin Villain Empire, she underscores the white, Latino and female artists who also appeared on the Good Life stage.[embedded content]The venue’s traditions are also outlined: No leaving gum on the floor; no leaning on the paintings; avoid the phrase “wiggidy wiggidy” in freestyles; and no profanity — meant to ensure a clean space and substantive rhymes. Audiences at the Good Life wanted to hear idiosyncratic freestylers using distinct techniques to tell unique stories. Rappers who failed to meet crowd expectations, in scenes akin to an amateur nightat the Apollo, were booed off the stage. In recalling the night the rapper Fat Joe bombed at the cafe, DuVernay creatively soundtracks the audio from the event over a time lapse of a chalk artist sketching the scene.Word of mouth inspired record deals for some Good Life performers. Jurassic 5, for instance, became gold record-certified in Britain. By 1994, the cafe had built such a reputation that artists like Ice Cube and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony came to listen. And it is claimed (by the rapper Abstract Rude) that those artists incorporated the underground style into their work. When DuVernay plays the Good Life M.C. Myka Nyne’s verse on Freestyle Fellowship’s “Mary” (1993) next to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads” (1996), it’s a difficult assertion to dispute.Outside of the film’s director, however, few from the Good Life became household names. But in the illuminating “This Is the Life,” DuVernay not only fills in an important formative gap in California’s hip-hop history, she displays the inventive eye that would later lead to her future cinematic successes.This Is the LifeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Netflix.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More