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      in Television

      Ellen Holly, Trailblazing Star in ‘One Life to Live,’ Dies at 92

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      Ms. Holly was the first Black performer to play a lead role on daytime television.Ellen Holly, whose star turn in the soap opera “One Life to Live” made her the first Black actor to play a lead role in daytime TV, died on Wednesday at a hospital in the Bronx. She was 92.Her publicist, Cheryl L. Duncan, confirmed her death in a statement. No cause was given.Ms. Holly was born in Manhattan on Jan. 16, 1931, and grew up in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens. Her parents were William Garnet Holly, a chemical engineer, and Grayce Holly, a writer. Relatives included several prominent figures in the civil rights movement.After graduating from Hunter College, she debuted on Broadway in 1956 in “Too Late the Phalarope,” then went on to perform in several other Broadway productions.In 1968, Ms. Holly wrote in The New York Times about the difficulty of finding roles as a Black woman with lighter skin. The column caught the attention of a television producer, Agnes Nixon, who gave Ms. Holly the groundbreaking role of Carla that would catapult her to fame after “One Life to Live” launched on ABC. She played the role from 1968 to 1980 and 1983-’85.The character for a time passed as white, before revealing that she was Black, amid a love triangle with two doctors: one white and the other Black. When her character appeared to be in an interracial relationship with a Black man, a station in Texas canceled the show, and Ms. Nixon, the producer, received hate mail, she said in an interview in 1997.“A white woman falling in love with a Black man,” Ms. Holly said in a 2018 interview, “people started looking at that soap opera because they were saying, ‘This is something new, we better see where this is going.’”She wrote about her experience in a New York Times column in 1969, writing that she found the storyline of a Black woman passing as white “fascinating.”“I felt that the unique format of a soap would enable people to examine their prejudices in a way no other format possibly could,” she wrote, because unlike a play or movie, viewers would follow the character for months.“The emotional investment they made in her as a human being would be infinitely greater,” she wrote, “and when the switch came, their involvement would be real rather than superficial. A lot of whites who think they aren’t prejudiced — are. It seemed like a marvelous opportunity to confront their own prejudices.”Ms. Holly wrote that while she called herself Black, she also had French, English and Shinnecock ancestry.Ms. Holly wrote an autobiography, “One Life: The Autobiography of an African American Actress,” which was published in 1996. Over the years, she wrote opinion columns for The New York Times about the arts, race and civil rights.After retiring from acting, she became a librarian in the 1990s, working at the White Plains Public Library for years.Ms. Holly, who never married or had children, is survived by several grand-nieces, cousins and other family members. More

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      in Television

      Julianna Margulies Apologizes After Remarks on Black Support of Jews

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      The actress had said on a podcast that some Black people not standing with Jews after the Hamas attacks had been “brainwashed to hate Jews.”The actress Julianna Margulies, who drew criticism this week after saying on a podcast that some Black people not standing with Jews after the recent attack by Hamas had been “brainwashed to hate Jews,” said on Friday that she “did not intend for my words to sow further division, for which I am sincerely apologetic.”On the Nov. 20 episode of “The Back Room With Andy Ostroy,” Margulies, who has starred on the television series “E.R.,” “The Good Wife” and, presently, “The Morning Show” on Apple TV+, accused Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people of showing insufficient support for Israel and Jews in the United States since the deadly Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.“I am horrified by the fact that statements I made on a recent podcast offended the Black and LGBTQIA+ communities, communities I truly love and respect,” Margulies said in a statement on Friday afternoon to Deadline, which her publicist sent to The New York Times in response to a query. “I want to be 100% clear: Racism, homophobia, sexism, or any prejudice against anyone’s personal beliefs or identity are abhorrent to me, full stop.”Some social media users objected to Margulies’s comments as racist, and questioned why she was focusing her criticism on marginalized groups.Margulies, who is Jewish, contrasted Jews’ vocal support for Black civil rights in the 1960s with the present: “Now the Black community isn’t embracing us and saying, ‘We stand with you the way you stood with us?’”She added, “The fact that the entire Black community isn’t standing with us, to me, says either they just don’t know or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews.”She also said on the podcast that progressive protesters on college campuses, whom she accused of “spewing this antisemitic hate,” include gender nonbinary people who, she said, “will be the first people beheaded and their heads played like a soccer ball on the field” in places run by militant Islamist groups like Hamas.Margulies also said on the podcast, “There was a film being shown by this Black lesbian club on the Columbia campus, and they put signs up that said, ‘No Jews allowed.’” (The president of LionLez, a group for queer women and nonbinary people of color at the university, had emailed, “Zionists aren’t invited,” The Columbia Spectator reported.) Margulies said that to Hamas and its ilk, members of that student club would be “even lower than the Jews — A. you’re Black, and B. you’re gay. And you’re turning your back against the people who support you?”Margulies added that she was offended as someone “who plays a lesbian journalist on ‘The Morning Show.’ I am more offended by it as a lesbian than I am as a Jew, to be honest with you.”In her statement on Friday, Margulies said that she usually seeks to “forge a united front against discrimination.” More

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      in Theater

      A Play About Black Women’s Experiences, Met With Violence

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      Rébecca Chaillon’s “Carte Noire Named Desire” provoked harassment in France this summer, leading one actor to pull out of a new run in Paris.One performer is missing from the current Parisian run of Rébecca Chaillon’s “Carte Noire Named Desire,” an arresting show about the experiences of Black women in France. When the actors gathered onstage for a dinner scene at the Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe this week, Fatou Siby’s chair remained empty, and a monologue inspired by her life was delivered instead by a guest artist.The reason for Siby’s absence? She and other members of the all-Black cast were targets of racist attacks after “Carte Noire” played this summer at the Avignon Festival, which followed widespread protests in France over the police shooting of Nahel M., a 17-year-old of North African descent.“I need to protect myself,” Siby told the French news site Mediapart of her decision to withdraw from the Paris performances.In one short scene from “Carte Noire,” the cast stages a game of charades inspired by anti-Black racism. To help the audience guess the answer “colonization” this summer, Siby went into the auditorium and jokingly took bags and coats belonging to audience members. (The items were then set aside near the exit to be collected after the show.)According to Mediapart, one male audience member forcefully twisted Siby’s arm as she performed the scene. Others physically hit performers, called them “dictators” and implied they didn’t belong in France. In the days that followed, Siby told Mediapart, an audience member accosted her and her child on the street in Avignon. Since the incidents became public — in a statement, the Avignon Festival described them as “an outpouring of hate” — Chaillon and her team have also been cyber-harassed and become the subject of far-right pundits.Sitting in the audience at the Odéon this week, I found it hard not to feel anger on behalf of the seven cast members who have soldiered on. “Carte Noire” relies on their willingness to be highly vulnerable onstage. The excessive media attention on the charades scene obscured the rest of the piece, which is by turns powerful, lyrical and visually dazzling — an ode to Black women’s imagination in a world whose default setting is whiteness.In the show, Makeda Monnet sings a song about coffee — a product often produced in colonized countries — before being covered in a cloud of cocoa powder.Vincent Zobler“Carte Noire Named Desire” — the title is a play on a famous French ad for the coffee brand — offers some redress, starting with the seating arrangement. As the audience streams into the theater, a recorded announcement explains that 20 or so seats are reserved on comfortable-looking couches at the back of the stage for Black women or nonbinary people. There, they’re handed drinks, while the rest of the audience remains in folding seats for the next 2 hours and 40 minutes.The first half-hour prompts a different kind of discomfort. On her hands and knees, Chaillon, dressed in white, with white lenses covering her pupils and white powder all over her skin, tries to scrub an all-white floor clean, even as darker liquid drips from cups above her. As the scene stretches on, she starts stripping and using her own clothes as mops, ultimately dragging herself around the floor to wipe it.Coolly, without a word, the scene speaks to the disproportionate number of Black people in menial jobs in France. Chaillon, a bold performer and director who has been at the helm of her own company, Dans le Ventre, since 2006, excels at showing before telling. A castmate ultimately pulls her from the floor, and slowly washes the white powder off her body. Then the other women gather around her to braid oversized ropes into her hair — an evocative variation on a Black hair salon.The scenes that follow are often humorous and surreal. Chaillon reads from classified ads written by white men looking for Black women. Makeda Monnet, a trained soprano, trills her way through a song about coffee — a product often produced in colonized countries — on a table engulfed in white foam, before being covered in a cloud of cocoa powder.On the night I attended, however, the game of charades steered clear of its most controversial element. While the performers had audience members guess “Black Sea,” “Josephine Baker” or the film “12 Years a Slave,” the game didn’t include “colonization,” and no bags or coats were taken. While that word was intentionally removed from one Avignon performance to protect the cast, a spokeswoman for Dans Le Ventre said that its absence in Paris that night was random; charade rounds are sometimes skipped over when the game runs too long.What remained that night was a deeply felt production, interspersed with skits and monologues that walk a fine line between true accounts of pain and quasi-performance poetry. On that day, the story of the absent Siby was delivered by special guest Alice Diop, the filmmaker behind the award-winning “Saint Omer,” who sat on the couches in the back with other Black women.At the very end, the audience was left with an indelible tableau: Chaillon, naked, her heavy braids attached to a tangle of ropes above, as the other women sat at her feet — all assembled like roots in a tree of life. That any actor would be fearful of joining them onstage in “Carte Noire” only proves Chaillon’s point: For Black women, even an act of community is political.Carte Noire Named DesireOdéon–Théâtre de l’Europe through Dec. 17; theatre-odeon.eu More

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      in Movies

      ‘South to Black Power’ Review: A Great Migration in Reverse

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      In a new documentary, the opinion columnist Charles M. Blow calls for Black Americans to move to the South to gain political footholds.The documentary “South to Black Power” — directed by Sam Pollard and Llewellyn M. Smith — employs many of the gestures a newspaper opinion piece might. Which is apt, since Charles M. Blow, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, is the film’s searching guide — but also, at times, its expounding subject.Based on his 2021 book, “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto,” the film revisits Blow’s argument that the only way for Black Americans “to lift the burden of white supremacy” is head to the South. With this “Great Migration in reverse,” they can build a majority and take hold of the political levers of those states and their legislatures.During the 2020 presidential election, Georgia, where Blow now resides, offered tantalizing evidence of the kind of might he envisions. In this documentary, which is filmed in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Blow visits Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas (with a warm stopover at his childhood home in Gibsland, La.).He bolsters his thesis but also stress tests it with people who have never left, who have left and returned, or, like the author Jemar Tisby, who have put down new roots with uplift in mind.In a nice bit of journalistic even-handedness, several of Blow’s interviewees are not entirely convinced by his thesis, or they believe there are other paths to political gains. For example, the community strategist Asiaha Butler shares why she decided to stay in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, despite the gun violence and the tug of family in the South. Her story of how seeing a young girl playing alone in a vacant lot and throwing bottles into the street cinched it — she had to remain — is as moving as it is authentic. And her reasons are as committed to empowering Black Americans where they are as Blow’s call for mass migration.South to Black PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Stamped From the Beginning’ Review: Examining Racist Thought

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      The documentary, based on Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book, looks at the ugly history of anti-Black ideology.The documentary “Stamped From the Beginning,” based on the 2016 book by Ibram X. Kendi, begins with a trick question and ends with a sage retort.“What’s wrong with Black people?” asks the director Roger Ross Williams of the film’s heady roster of Black female scholars as they consider the ways in which the slave trade created anti-Black racism and, as Kendi argues, not the reverse. The formidable interviewees include the novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers; the historian Elizabeth Hinton; and the activist and scholar Angela Davis. When Davis discusses the work “not done” at slavery’s end to retool “the entire society so that it might be possible for previously enslaved individuals to be free and equal,” her words are as muscularly poignant as they are pointed.The subtitle of Kendi’s book is “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” And Williams employs several methods to distill the National Book Award-winning tome’s ambitions as it moves from the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, back to the Portuguese enslavement of Africans and forward to the rise of Trumpism in reaction to the presidency of Barack Obama.In addition to interviews and archival images, film clips and news footage, Williams (“Cassandro” “Life, Animated”) leans into animation. In an engaging gambit, the director utilizes a mix of visual effects, painting and collage to tell the stories of the poet Phillis Wheatley; the author Harriet Jacobs and the journalist and anti-lynching pioneer Ida B. Wells. In a film brimming with visual gestures, these mini portraits of anti-racists are among its most memorable.Stamped From the BeginningRated R for some violent content, language, drug content and nude images. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Theater

      Danielle Brooks and Sam Jay on Confidence and ‘The Color Purple’

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      Two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation. This time: the actress and the comedian.Viewers first saw the actress Danielle Brooks as Taystee, the smartest and funniest of the prisoners on “Orange Is the New Black,” the incarceration dramedy that began in 2013 and ran for seven seasons on Netflix. This month, she’ll appear in “The Color Purple,” the second film adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, this one based on the 2005 Broadway musical it inspired. Brooks’s character, Sofia, forced to work a grueling job as a maid for a white political family in early 1900s Georgia, was portrayed by Oprah Winfrey in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation; Brooks, 34, a Juilliard School-trained actress who was raised in South Carolina, played her in the musical’s 2015 revival. That production was Brooks’s Broadway debut; last year, she starred alongside Samuel L. Jackson in a revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” (1990).The comedian Sam Jay, who grew up in Boston and whose humor Brooks has long admired, recently released her first HBO special, “Salute Me or Shoot Me.” Jay, 41, spent years doing stand-up in Los Angeles before joining the writers’ room of “Saturday Night Live” in 2017. She left the show after three seasons for two series, “Pause With Sam Jay” (2021) and “Bust Down” (2022), both of which she helped create and starred in, and which highlight her frank, anecdotal style. This past October, the two gathered in a photo studio in downtown Manhattan to discuss acting, impostor syndrome and learning the importance of asking for what they need.T: Many stage shows that perform well are rumored to get adaptations that never materialize — but this one did, and quickly. Is that just the power of the film’s producer Oprah Winfrey?Danielle Brooks: I think for Oprah it’s making sure the story continues to have a life — that it lives through generations.Sam Jay: You shot in Georgia, right? I always wonder about Black people shooting these period films where they have to go back to being downtrodden, sweaty Black. How do you snap out of that and then just, like, go chill at Checkers?D.B.: It was tough but at times cool because you’re in it. It’s the difference between doing it on a stage versus on an actual plantation. It did get real at times: All I could think about was how many of my people were hung from those trees. I had the responsibility of making sure I told this very beloved story as honestly as I could to represent those people who aren’t here.Brooks and Corey Hawkins in the forthcoming film adaptation of “The Color Purple.”Eli Ade/Waner Bros.S.J.: Are they going to let the main characters Shug and Celie be gayer? Because they’re gay as hell in the book, and they really skipped over that in the first movie. When I read the book … it wasn’t just some crush; they were together.D.B.: You’re going to be satisfied. You get that, which I was happy about.S.J.: I feel like that was a part of the story Walker was trying to tell.D.B.: I got to meet her on set, and my close friend Corey Hawkins, who plays Harpo [Sofia’s husband], took a video of it, which was great because for me it starts with her. My whole pop-off — my Broadway career — started through her book.S.J.: These Broadway runs. …D.B.: It’s crazy. I imagine there was a lot of preparation before doing your HBO special, though, too. Do you remember how many shows you did before that?S.J.: I did somewhere around 300 shows for a year and a half. I was maybe three or four months into touring when I bumped into Chris Rock. We had dinner and he was like, “I don’t do less than 250 shows before filming.” So I immediately called my agent and got more on the books. Then I’m feeling myself because I’m, like, 20 shows away from my 250 and Chris goes, “Yeah, 50 more shows. I’m not telling you to do anything I wouldn’t do!” But I watch that special now and think, “Ah, growth.”D.B.: That’s how I feel with “The Color Purple.” When I did the Broadway show, I had so much anxiety and was going to therapy because I felt like an impostor. Cut to five years later, doing the movie, I felt such comfort. I might have done 500 shows, now that I think about it. One year, eight shows a week — someone do the math — but I felt more confident, worthy enough to portray this character.S.J.: Confidence, I’ve come to feel, is just knowledge. The more information you have, the more confident you are. When I look at my special, I can tell I was free.D.B.: I always thought you were free, every time I’ve watched you. I’m pretty picky about comedians; I don’t laugh at a lot of stuff. I’m the person in the audience the comedians make fun of, like, “Look at this bitch not laughing,” and then I’m still not laughing.S.J.: I think only you know what you’re hiding. In real life, I’m very silly and physical when I’m talking but, for some reason, when I’m onstage, I’m like, “You ain’t no clown! You don’t need to be doing all that flailing around.” It’s dumb because it’s comedy, but it was really me just being afraid to let that side out.D.B.: Did you ever feel, when you were starting out, that there was a comedian you wanted to style yourself to be like?Jay’s 2023 HBO special, “Salute Me or Shoot Me.” Courtesy of HBOS.J.: I don’t think I wanted to be like anyone, but you get ideas from others. Chris Rock was the first comic I saw who made sense to me. I grew up in a “Def Comedy Jam” era, with Black and white comedy being very separate. I love that era, but that’s not how my brain works. I’m not good at roasting. I’d seen George Carlin, too, and that seemed very white. But Chris was this hybrid I thought was cool.D.B.: I feel like some people won’t give you the real — where you think, “I can’t believe they just said that” — but also make you examine why you think the way you do. That’s so important in any medium, and the point of what we do, so we can see ourselves. Comedy’s always been that easier pill to swallow, for the truth. So when somebody can do that, not just make you laugh but question why you think about, you know, disabled people in some way, or why you don’t like to use the N-word, I find it important. What I’ve always enjoyed is that you don’t hold back. In a way, I can be guarded, but you’re very, “No, let’s talk about it.”S.J.: It comes from a kind of twisted place of my mom passing away [in 1998, from lupus] and me accepting the idea of mortality, that you don’t live forever. I moved out when I was 16 — I’ve had no parent longer than I’ve had a parent. I sometimes don’t remember my mother’s face, but I remember how she made me feel. That’s all that remains. I remember the lessons she taught. So it’s just about trying to be intentional in every interaction.D.B.: I think that’s the same for me … being more guarded because my mother is a minister. She’s very much, “Be careful what you do; what you say is going to affect you till you die.” I love my mom, I respect her 100 percent, but I have to live for me because it’s my life. But I want to hear about your experience booking “S.N.L.” I want to be on that show so bad!S.J.: I get this call from my manager, “Will you audition for ‘S.N.L.’ tomorrow?” I’m like, “Do they really want me? I’m not doing a character.” I didn’t want to set myself up for failure. I audition, then get a call saying, “We know you auditioned for the cast but how would you like to come be a writer?” I hang up and I’m like, “Damn, OK, too ugly for TV.” But I needed to step into something new at that point in my career. I’m all about going toward things that you’re afraid of, so I said yeah.Brooks (center) as Sofia in the 2015 Broadway revival of “The Color Purple.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesD.B.: Do you ask for what you need when you’re doing a show, or do you settle a bit?S.J.: I’m going to ask for what I need.D.B.: I think about a lot of women in comedy who aren’t matching up to what men are making or getting, in terms of perks. It’s just not happening. I was watching Luenell’s comedy show, and she was talking about being on a plane with comedians, and the men are flying first class and she’s in coach.S.J.: At first, I was absolutely scared to ask. I didn’t know what was OK.D.B.: You do have a core group of people that you can go to where you can say, “Let’s be real: How much do you make on this?”S.J.: I wish it was stronger, but I do feel like I got a couple of people where we try to be pretty transparent about that stuff. That’s the age-old trick where you have a 9-to-5 and they’re like, “You guys aren’t allowed to talk about this.” And it’s like, “Yeah, so you can keep us all poor.”D.B.: That’s been one of the best parts of having a friend group in the industry, our transparency. We’re not gonna brag about our contracts, but if you want to know, we’ll lay it out so we can come up together. You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s what drives me crazy: when you find out someone had a personal chef or a trainer, and you’re like, “Nobody told me that was a possibility, and I needed it more than they did.”S.J.: I think working behind the scenes, working on “S.N.L.,” knowing the lengths they’ll go to make sure the talent is OK, now when I’m being the talent, I’m like, “Do that for me.” It sometimes feels bitchy, but that’s just a stigma in our heads as women.D.B.: There are a lot of ways we should be given more respect. I think about hair and makeup: Why is it so much to ask for someone who can actually do my hair, rather than teaching somebody to do it? And why is it so wrong to ask for somebody who can do my face rather than having to come to them with the products I use?S.J.: The ask, at its core, is coming from a place of having to build up the confidence to do this work. That’s the thing that gets misconstrued when Black people say they want Black people in these spaces. The reverse racism crowd sees that as wanting everything to be all Black, when, no, it’s because we know we need this stuff.D.B.: I don’t want to go to a costume fitting and have to give them a list of shops and places to get my clothes. On “The Color Purple,” our hair and makeup departments were phenomenal — the wigs matched; the lace was lacing.S.J.: You know “The Color Purple” is coming correct.T: How do you work comedy into your performance of Sofia, who’s one of the most visibly oppressed, but also most joyous, characters in the film?D.B.: Sometimes, when people go through so much, they don’t want to dwell on that; they’re longing for joy and laughter. She’s somebody who tries to stop generational curses, whether that be through an abusive marriage or abusive parents. She’s trying to bring her community to the right path. She might not have all the skills to do so — she might use her fists or her mouth — but, at her core, she’s not looking for a fight. She’s looking to have a great day.This interview has been edited and condensed.Danielle Brooks: Fashion: ObyDezign. Hair: Tish Celestine at La Belle Boutique, NYC. Makeup: Renee Sanganoo using Nars at the Only AgencySam Jay: Hair and makeup: Merrell Hollis More

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      in Movies

      ‘Rustin’ Review: A Crucial Civil Rights Activist Gets His Due

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      Colman Domingo carries this biopic of a March on Washington organizer, the first narrative feature from Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company.Every so often an actor so dominates a movie that its success largely hinges on his every word and gesture. That’s the case with Colman Domingo’s galvanic title performance in “Rustin,” which runs like a current through this portrait of the gay civil-rights activist, a close adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Pacifist, ex-con, singer, lutist, socialist — Bayard Rustin had many lives, but he remains best known as the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was Rustin who read the march’s demands from the podium, remaining near King’s side as he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.At once a work of reclamation and celebration, “Rustin” seeks to put its subject front and center in the history he helped to make and from which he has, at times, been elided, partly because, as an openly gay man, he challenged both convention and the law. His was a rich, fascinatingly complex history, filled with big personalities and tremendous stakes, one that here is primarily distilled through the march, which the movie tracks from its rushed conception to its astonishing realization on Aug. 28, 1963, when a quarter million people converged at the Lincoln Memorial. It was the defining public triumph of Rustin’s life.After a little historical scene-setting — via images of stoic protesters surrounded by screaming racists — the director George C. Wolfe, working from a script by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, gets down to business. It’s 1960, and King (Aml Ameen) is exasperated. Several activists have asked King to lead a mass protest against the forthcoming Democratic National Convention. Sighing, King directs his eyes upward as if beseeching a witness from on high and politely declines: “I’m not your man.” A few beats later and his gaze is again directed up, but now at Rustin, who’s towering above King, challenging him.The protest, Rustin explains, will send a message to the party and its nominee, the front-runner John F. Kennedy. Unless the Democrats take a stand against segregation, Rustin says with rising passion and volume, “our people will not show up for them.” His directness and body language nicely dramatize Rustin’s gifts as a strategist, which reach a crescendo when he sits down, so that now it’s him who’s looking up at King. Swayed by Rustin’s forceful argument, King agrees to lead the protest, enraging establishment power brokers like the head of the N.A.A.C.P., Roy Wilkins (a miscast Chris Rock), and the U.S. Representative for Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (a ferocious Jeffrey Wright, taking no prisoners).Five minutes into the movie, and you’re hooked; everything works in this punchy opener. Yet while Domingo, the unfortunately underused Wright and most of the rest of the cast keep charging forward, the movie soon sags under the weight of its central personality and the monumental history it condenses in under two eventful hours. As it straddles the personal and the political, it struggles to do justice to Rustin, whose life story emerges in frustrating piecemeal, along with an anemic love affair, nods at past hurdles, hints of future milestones and appearances by various major players. Carra Patterson shows up as Coretta Scott King; a vivid Michael Potts pops in and out as the labor organizer Cleveland Robinson.Powell and Wilkins succeed in derailing the 1960 protest, causing a rift between King and Rustin. The story picks up three years later shortly before Rustin begins organizing the 1963 march, shifting the movie into high gear with bustling characters, clacking typewriters and ringing phones. At their best, these scenes underscore how the civil rights movement was a titanic communal effort. Yet partly because the movie also wants to be a great-forgotten-man-of-history story, the larger movement fades amid the clamor of what can seem like a one-man show. It suggests, for one, that Rustin originated the idea for the march when, in a 1979 interview, he specifically credited his mentor A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman) — whose March on Washington Movement dates to the 1940s — with its creation.The largest problem with the movie is that it’s finally too conventional, formally and politically, to do full justice to the complexities of either the civil-rights movement or Rustin, a socialist whose activism was rooted in his Quakerism and was informed both by his moral beliefs and by economic analysis. When Rustin and other activists on the Left first planned the march, economics was at the fore. “The dynamic that has motivated” Black Americans in their own fight against racism, the plan read, “may now be the catalyst which mobilizes all workers behind the demands for a broad and fundamental program for economic justice.”Whatever its flaws, “Rustin” can’t help but move you with its images of so many people joined in righteous harmony. The optimism of its moment feels very distant from the fractiousness of our own, yet it lifts you, as does Domingo’s fantastically alive turn. From the second that Rustin sweeps into the movie, throwing open his arms to King — and, by extension, welcoming the future they will help make — the actor seizes hold of you. He grabs you with his expressive physicality and then pulls you closer with the urgency, yearning and luminous sincerity that openly plays across his face. It’s such a lucid, persuasive, outwardly effortless performance that you may not even notice he’s carrying this movie almost by himself.RustinRated PG-13 for adults being adults and sometimes smoking. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Theater

      Why a Boston Tea Party Patriot Is Being Honored in Brooklyn

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      Ebenezer Stevens was among those who boarded three British ships in a symbolic act that helped jump-start the American Revolution.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out why a grave in Brooklyn is getting a plaque about the Boston Tea Party. We’ll also find out about a new theater at the site of what is widely considered the first Black theater company in the United States.The Boston Tea Party took place in Boston.So why will officials from groups based in Boston that are preparing to celebrate the uprising’s 250th anniversary spend Wednesday morning at a cemetery in Brooklyn, 230 miles from where the tea was thrown overboard?To commemorate Ebenezer Stevens, a patriot who boarded one of the ships in Boston Harbor.“He’s a classic example of an ordinary person who does an extraordinary thing,” said Jonathan Lane, the executive director of Revolution 250, a consortium of Massachusetts organizations that is preparing for the anniversary on Dec. 16.“He doesn’t do it alone — he’s in concert with many of his friends and neighbors,” Lane said, “but he was part of a moment in time where people stood up for what they believed were their individual rights and liberties.”Lane will attend this morning’s ceremony at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, during which a plaque for Stevens’s grave will be presented to Jeff Richman, Green-Wood’s historian. The medallion will be the 136th placed on the grave of a Tea Party participant; Stevens is the only one buried in New York City.“He was a rather spirited individual, rather brave, of course,” said Evan O’Brien, the creative manager of Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, who devised the campaign to mark the graves of the Tea Party patriots. And, O’Brien added, Stevens “risked everything for this cause he believed in — you get a glimpse of his personality that he was involved in this rather outrageous event.”Stevens was one of about 150 people assigned to board three ships in the harbor to protest a British tax on tea and, more broadly, to protest taxation without representation.“What a lot of people think about is it was this unruly mob,” O’Brien said. “That is not true at all. It was a well orchestrated, finely tuned operation. Each man knew his job. Some would haul the chests of tea out of the holds. Others were waiting at the rails to break them open and shake the tea out.”Stevens went on to fight in the Revolution. He took part in the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 and was there when the British general John Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in 1777. He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and eventually served under the Marquis de Lafayette.Later, as a major general in the New York State Militia, he mobilized soldiers to defend New York City in case of a British attack during the War of 1812. A fort named for him guarded Hell Gate and the East River channels.Richman, the Green-Wood historian, said that Stevens’s life outside the military was also eventful: He amassed a fortune as an owner of ships — a notice in The Evening Post in 1807 advertised passage and freight shipping to Bordeaux, France, aboard one of Stevens’s “new and fast” sailing ships. He sold liquor to Thomas Jefferson. And a granddaughter became famous: the author Edith Wharton.WeatherLook for a sunny to partly sunny day with temperatures in the mid-50s. Tonight, under a partly cloudy sky, the low will be in the 40s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Nov. 23 (Thanksgiving Day).The latest New York newsJeenah Moon for The New York TimesMore local newsTurkey ties: A major federal corruption investigation into Mayor Eric Adams’s fund-raising is examining whether his campaign conspired with members of the Turkish government to receive illegal donations. Here’s what we know.Guilty plea: Samuel Miele is the second person who worked on Representative George Santos’s House election campaigns who has pleaded guilty to federal charges.E-bike blaze: After scooter batteries burst into flames on Sunday and killed three people at a home in Brooklyn, the fire commissioner blamed big corporations for contributing to a rising death toll from electric-vehicle batteries.Deadly dispute: A landlord was arrested and charged with murdering his tenants on Tuesday after three people were found stabbed to death in the bedrooms of a Queens home.A new theater that honors what was there beforeCarl Cofield, an associate arts professor at New York University, on the stage of the African Grove Theater.Jonathan KingFor the opening tonight of New York University’s new African Grove Theater, the site’s the thing. The original African Theater, widely considered to have been the first Black theater company in the United States, presented classics like “Richard III” and “Othello” at the same corner, Bleecker and Mercer Streets.“If the model of the African Theater had been followed, American theater would be different,” said Michael Dinwiddie, professor of dramatic writing at N.Y.U.’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, who spearheaded a campaign to name the new performance space in the African Theater’s honor. “It helps us understand the complexity of the American theater.”Appropriately, the play being staged tonight is based on the story of the play that opened the earlier theater on the site, “The African Company Presents Richard III.”The original theater was organized by William Alexander Brown, a retired ship steward from the West Indies. The location at Bleecker and Mercer was his second. He had started out in what is now known as TriBeCa, staging poetry readings and short plays for Black New Yorkers. He moved to the location now occupied by N.Y.U.’s Paulson Center in 1821. Appearing as the king in “Richard III” on opening night was an enslaved man; New York would not outlaw slavery until six years later.Brown presented “Othello” in the second month, but he lasted only two years at the new location. “When he dared to go toe-to-toe with a nearby white theater, each presenting rival Shakespeare productions,” our critic Maya Phillips wrote in 2021, “he was harassed by police and his theater was raided. His performers were attacked. He changed the theater’s name and moved it several times, opening and closing and reopening until the financial well ran dry.”Carl Cofield, an associate arts professor at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts and the associate artistic director of the Classical Theater of Harlem, said that Brown was competing against a theater that was “bringing in the biggest stars from Europe,” including Junius Brutus Booth, a British actor whose actor sons included one who was famous, Edwin Booth, and one who was infamous — John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln.Dinwiddie told me that he had noticed a plaque commemorating the African Theater at the corner when he moved to the neighborhood in the 1990s. “I was like, I remember that — I had read about it,” he said, including a chapter in “Black Manhattan” by James Weldon Johnson, N.Y.U.’s first Black professor.Hopper’s paintings as operaThe opera “Later the Same Evening” takes five Edward Hopper paintings and imagines what happens to the figures in them. John Musto, who composed the music for Mark Campbell’s libretto, described “Later the Same Evening” as “a love letter to New York, set in 1932.”It’s a love letter as complicated as New York (and New Yorkers), with Hopper-esque moodiness and estrangement.There is a couple that is not getting along. There is a widow who has come to the city for a date she is not sure she wants to go on. There is dancer who is leaving town, her dreams of stardom dashed. The director, Alison Moritz, writes that all of the characters eventually “converge for a moment of true New York serendipity at — where else? — a Broadway show.”Backstage, there is a moment in one scene when four singers converge around a microphone. “Hopper could have done some painting around this one mic,” said Michelle Rofrano, the assistant conductor, who cues them for an old-fashioned radio commercial that is heard onstage. The four sing a made-up toothpaste jingle — “It’s not just white, it’s Pearladent white.”Without a Hopper to capture it, the little tableau dissolves. The singers have other roles in the opera, which will be performed tonight and Friday at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at the Juilliard School.“The odd thing is people keep talking about Hopper and his sense of color,” Musto said. “I have to keep telling them color means nothing to me. I am colorblind.”METROPOLITAN diary‘You are everything’Dear Diary:I was waiting for a friend outside a building on East 73rd Street when an S.U.V. pulled up and parked.The driver stayed in the car with the radio on and the windows open. “You Are Everything” by the Stylistics came on, and I began to sing along (quietly).As the song got to the chorus — “You are everything, and everything is you” — a guy walked past me. He was singing along too, and we exchanged man-this-is-such-a-great-song nods.Just then, the driver turned off the radio. The other guy and I shared a confused look. Then he approached the car.“Bro,” he implored the driver. “Turn that back on!”And he did.— Joe KatzIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Kellina Moore and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More