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      James Ivory, Famous for Buttoned-Up Films, Is Frank About Sex and Much Else in His Memoir

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      The movie director James Ivory is most closely associated with decorous period pieces, paeans to inhibition like “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day,” so I wasn’t expecting his memoirs to be quite such a “Remembrance of Penises Past.”At young Jim’s elementary school in Klamath Falls, Ore., after formative comparisons at the urinals, he watched a playmate stick his “cherubic (and uncircumcised) member” in the hillside dirt to demonstrate adult sexual congress. In high school, he encountered “a dangling pink foreskin that I still recall, shaped like the ones on ancient marble statues illustrated in our copy of Will Durant’s ‘The Life of Greece,’” and heatedly observed the private parts of identical-twin male cheerleaders, Ted and Fred, turning “a deep purple” in a tanning booth at the gym. Granted a closer look at Ted’s “heavy, charged-looking” equipment, of the “garden-hose variety,” he felt his “mouth go dry” and his “hands shake.” Furtive orgasms began to abound.Though Ivory was a 118-pound teenage weakling uninterested in athletics, an approving steam-room glance from his father, who ran a lumber company, assured the son that his own endowment (cut, a distinction of some socioeconomic preoccupation) was more than adequate. By film school, at the University of Southern California, Ivory was assessing with a connoisseur’s air a pal’s “very shapely American frat-boy” arousal, “to my eye the best of the national norm.” How did the English travel writer Bruce Chatwin, a later lover, rate? “Uncut, rosy, schoolboy-looking,” like notes on a fine wine.Born Richard Jerome Hazen and renamed as an infant by his adoptive parents, Ivory is now 93. There is a wistful defiance to his sexual frankness as a Protestant gay man who came of age in an era of intense repression, as well as the Depression (his mother regularly fed “tramps,” he writes, on the family’s back porch). Throughout his career he felt compelled to underplay the most important romantic relationship of his life: the one with his gregarious producing partner, Ismail Merchant, a Muslim from Mumbai whom he met on the steps of the Indian consulate in New York. Why isn’t there a plaque commemorating this, wonders Ivory, the recipient of several Oscars, most recently for the screenplay of “Call Me by Your Name.” Despite his laurels, Ivory nonetheless seems to have a chip on his shoulder about reductive assessments of the couple’s variegated oeuvre, like the oft-repeated scoff that they came from the “Laura Ashley school of filmmaking.” (All critics are a “lesser form of life,” he once declared at a luncheon party.)James Ivory, seated, with Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, in 1995.Everett/ShutterstockMerchant and Ivory, normally working with the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, were one of the most dominant cinematic forces of the late 20th century, rolling out luxuriously appointed adaptations of E.M. Forster and Henry James novels, with the occasional more contemporary anomaly like Tama Janowitz’s “Slaves of New York.” Merchant died in 2005; Jhabvala in 2013. After decades conjuring the Anglo-American aristocracy clinking cups in gardens and drawing rooms, Ivory, the survivor, is ready to spill the tea.He spills it not in the typical big autobiographical splash but in dribs and drabs: letters, diary entries, tumbling sense-memories of fashion, food and furniture (and the other F-word), with scores of appealingly casual photographs sprinkled throughout. An established master of the slow reveal, Ivory serves gossip with a voile overlay. Contrasting with the homages to men that got away, “argyle sweater, erections and all,” are the chapters devoted to Difficult Women like the bombshell actress Raquel Welch, who had the temerity to resist a forceful lovemaking scene; the politically active and litigious Vanessa Redgrave; and the intellectual Jhabvala, whom Ivory saw as a civilizing “preceptor” but never forgave for dissing Merchant-Ivory’s adaptation of Forster’s homosexually themed novel “Maurice.” It also seems to irk the author that Jhabvala (a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and mother of three) didn’t do housework — “Ruth never lifted a finger, except to her typewriter” — which, excuse me, but: goals.I kept thinking that “Solid Ivory,” which was edited by the novelist Peter Cameron, amounts to more of a scrapbook of finely wrought prose sketches than the fully carved self-sculpture suggested by its title, whose touching origin story I won’t spoil. Then, after a little night Googling, I discovered that the bulk of the material was originally published — bound in antique silk, naturally — by Cameron’s private press, Shrinking Violet. About a quarter of the material also previously appeared in various publications, from Sight and Sound magazine to a Christie’s catalog.It’s all very effectively spliced together here, but with occasional lapses in continuity, as they say in the movie biz — like a journal entry about The New Yorker writer Lillian Ross that fails to footnote her death, in 2017, as if she is still filing “Talk of the Town” pieces from heaven (honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised). Ivory’s account of hanging out with Ross at her son’s christening is one of the more enjoyably chaotic in the book, with cameos by a cranky J.D. Salinger, that annoying friend who refuses to pose for pictures commemorating the occasion, and William Shawn, the famously subdued editor and Ross’s longtime lover, who convulsed with sobs during the ceremony.We are admitted into the elegant homes of Stephen Tennant, the tarnished Bright Young Thing who was an early proponent of working from bed (“like some outlandish work of art that you cannot put anywhere,” Ivory describes him, “but which has its own terrible integrity”); of George Cukor, an early mentor from the Golden Age of Hollywood; and of the itinerant Ivory himself. “What the hell is Susan Sontag doing in my bedroom?” he forehead-smacks in Paris one night, watching her leaf with presumed judgment through his night-stand reading after a dinner party. And at his Claverack, N.Y., manor, a uniquely Merchant-Ivory storage problem: “Does anyone need a gondola?”This book does tend to skirt over or even coldly aestheticize unpleasant truths, like the “half-burned bits of bodies” floating past a film crew in the river Ganges; or the fact that Chatwin died of AIDS, not specified here; or even a chauffeur’s offer of a handshake refused by the vestigial “nobles” with whom Ivory, blackballed by college fraternities, found himself consorting after his success. I can’t quite work out his position on snobbery, and I don’t think he has either. But I now look at the famous scene in “A Room With a View” that so embarrassed me as a young teen, naked men splashing full-frontally at a swimming hole, in a new and dappling light. More

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      A Sweeping New History Looks Back at 100 Years of Black Filmmaking

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      The first chapter of Wil Haygood’s elegant and well-made book of history, “Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World,” is titled “Movie Night at Woodrow Wilson’s White House.”The movie was “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), D. W. Griffith’s notorious silent epic, filled with flying white robes, about the noble intent of the Ku Klux Klan. It portrayed Black people as criminals, sex fiends and goggle-eyed fools, in skulking league with Northern carpetbaggers.This was the first such White House screening, and the president had a stake in the film’s success. For one thing, it was based on a popular novel, “The Clansman,” written by his friend Thomas Dixon Jr. For another, the president made cameo appearances, of a sort. Griffith had adapted some of Wilson’s writing for interstitial explanatory frames.“The Birth of a Nation” became a sensation, the first blockbuster, seen by roughly a quarter of the American population. And it became grimly apparent, Haygood writes, that Black people “had yet one more enemy: cinema.”“Colorization” is Haygood’s ninth book. He’s written biographies of Thurgood Marshall, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson and Sammy Davis Jr.Some prolific nonfiction writers slowly grow bleary; you sense them, in their later books, going through the motions, rounding off corners. Haygood, on the other hand, has become a master craftsman, one whose joinery is seamless..“Colorization” tells the story of Black artists in the film industry, those in front of and behind the camera, over more than a century. Some of these stories are little-known. This is sweeping history, but in Haygood’s hands it feels crisp, urgent and pared down. He doesn’t try to be encyclopedic. He takes a story he needs, tells it well, and ties it to the next one. He carries you along on dispassionate analysis and often novelistic detail.He moves from “The Birth of a Nation” to tell the story of Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951), the former Pullman porter, plains farmer and novelist who almost single-handedly created Black filmmaking. Micheaux’s movies played in Black-owned theaters and weren’t reviewed by white publications.Haygood considers “Gone With the Wind” and the stereotype of the Black maid; the making of Douglas Sirk’s last Hollywood film, the daringly interracial “Imitation of Life” (1959); and the obstacle-filled careers of performers like Paul Robeson, Dorothy Dandridge, James Edwards and Lena Horne.There’s a chapter about Otto Preminger’s “Porgy and Bess,” which was dated when it appeared in 1959, nearly 25 years after the premiere of George Gershwin’s opera. The young playwright Lorraine Hansberry said about it: “We object to roles which consistently depict our women as wicked and our men as weak. We do not want to see six-foot Sidney Poitier on his knees crying for a slit-skirted wench.”Haygood writes about Poitier, who seemed to step out of a dream many Americans were planning to have, and Harry Belafonte; the arrival of Melvin Van Peebles, Pam Grier and the so-called blaxploitation genre; the talents, largely wasted by Hollywood, of actors such as Billy Dee Williams; and the disaster that was “The Wiz” (1978).Later chapters hail the careers of directorial stars such as Spike Lee, John Singleton, Ava DuVernay, Steve McQueen and Jordan Peele, and trace a body of linked influences.This film history plays out against the backdrop of American history, from the Scottsboro Boys and the Tuskegee Airmen through Rodney King, Clarence Thomas, Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter.Wil Haygood, whose new book is “Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World.”Jeff SaboIt plays out, too, against the ways the Academy Awards ignored Black performances. Federico Fellini, at the 1993 Oscars, unwittingly underlined why this mattered when he remarked, “The movies and America are almost the same thing.”As you read, you may find yourself making lists of films to watch or rewatch: the pre-Code “Baby Face” (1933) starring Barbara Stanwyck and the Black actress Theresa Harris; “Home of the Brave”; “Lilies of the Field”; “Duel at Diablo”; “Sounder”; “Cane River”; “Get on the Bus”; “Love Jones.”I spent an afternoon watching the trailers for these films and many others Haygood mentions. I was reminded that sequential trailer-watching is a vastly underrated pleasure.Cinema, it need not be said, is a unique art form in the sense that many of us become children again in front of a moving image. Our defenses are lowered. We long to watch, often enough, with a child’s simple heart.This fact about movies, Haygood is aware, has made the worst of them especially harmful to Black people across the last American century. It’s a problem that had many aspects. James Baldwin put one of them this way: “It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.” Stale language begins to creep in toward the end. It’s past time for an ambitious young copy editor to invent a search widget called ClicheCatcher™ to routinely run on manuscripts before they go to press.Yet this is important, spirited popular history. Like a good movie, it pops from the start. (Haygood was wise to omit an introduction.) Like a good movie, too, it comes full circle.Haygood recognizes that Wilson was an especially racist president, even by the standards of his time. On the last page of “Colorization,” he notes that in June 2020, Wilson’s alma mater, Princeton, announced that a building bearing his name would bear it no more. More

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      Give Phoebe Robinson the Title She Deserves: Boss

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      The comic has a publishing imprint, TV deals, even a primer on leadership she wrote after noting the absence of Black women’s perspectives in business books.Mention “The Devil Wears Prada” to the comic Phoebe Robinson and she’ll lean forward and tell you she has some opinions. The real villain in the tale of an ultra-demanding fashion magazine editor and her assistant is the assistant’s boyfriend, played by Adrian Grenier, for complaining when she has a work event. “Do you know centuries of women stood by their men pursuing careers?” Robinson said over lunch. “Adrian, calm down.”As for the title character — Miranda Priestly, the Anna Wintour-type boss — Robinson, 37, has more mixed feelings. “It’s easier to judge someone from afar,” she said, adding that women of her generation had to be tough to get ahead. “At the same time, you don’t have to be a monster.”In a time when pop culture and the news are filled with portraits of bad bosses, Robinson has been thinking a lot about what makes a good one. In the past few years, she has evolved from a hustling stand-up into a mini-mogul with a staff, a production company and myriad projects. This year alone, she released a Comedy Central series, “Doing the Most With Phoebe Robinson”; shot her debut hour special (“Sorry, Harriet Tubman,” premiering Oct. 14 on HBO Max); started a book imprint, Tiny Reparations; guest-hosted for Jimmy Kimmel; sold a half-hour sitcom; and wrote her third book, “Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes,” which is, among other things, a primer on leadership. If that’s not enough, she’s in the process of moving.Robinson backstage before filming her new comedy special, “Sorry, Harriet Tubman.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times“It’s a lot, not going to lie,” she said, pointing out that her career models have shifted from comics like Wanda Sykes to multihyphenates like Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling.Robinson’s style has always been down to earth, self-deprecating, with proudly basic music taste (U2 is a lodestar). Her instinct was to be the cool boss, she said, but the uneasy looks on her employees’ faces after she asked them to go bowling on a Friday night taught her a lesson: “I was like: ‘Right right right right right, I get it. If my boss asked me to hang out on a Friday I’d be like, no, I see you every day, I’m good.’”The first time I saw Phoebe Robinson was a decade ago. She had been doing stand-up for a couple of years, typically in vests, jeans and a T-shirt. “I dressed so nothing would signal I’m a woman,” she said, adding that she was hyperaware of being the only female comic in the room. “I was so insecure and nervous.”Even then, she had an ingratiating voice that cut through the clutter of competition, often playing with language, tweaking words, showing signs of a literary bent that would eventually lead her to publishing. When I reminded her of a joke she told about movies that cast handsome people as rapists, she cringed, saying she would do that in a more nuanced way now. At that moment, the sunlight shifted and she grabbed her sunglasses. Before putting them on, she said: “I don’t want you to think I’m doing this to look cool.”In early August, a week before shooting her new special at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Robinson walked onstage at Union Hall in a headband and comfy dress. The Delta variant had forced audiences to put their masks back on and she wasn’t hearing the explosive laughter that she had only weeks earlier, even though the crowd immediately responded when she started talking about her relationship, which has become a regular part of her act. “I’m the Rosa Parks of the bedroom,” goes one line aimed at her British boyfriend. “I’m not getting up for any white man.”Robinson decided to write about leadership after realizing there were a dearth of business books with a Black woman’s perspective.Penguin RandomhouseA week later, Robinson said she was too in her head in that show, that she needed to remind herself to have fun. “It’s hard to stay in the moment for someone like me who is always thinking about the next 20 moves,” she said by phone.Robinson had done a chunk of material about the difference between her 20s and 30s, including one bit about being more concerned with frivolous things earlier, like shaving body hair, which she did so much, she said, “that she didn’t read a book for 10 years.”Now she’s an author and publisher who tries to read a book a week. “I miss that innocence a bit,” she said, explaining that she didn’t have to worry about her employees or brand back then. A few years later, her profile would grow thanks to a regular show with Jessica Williams called “2 Dope Queens” that moved from small rooms to HBO. In the years since, she said, their paths have diverged. “It’s one of those things where you meet for an amount of time and then you grow in different ways.”A multitasker at heart, Robinson has juggled writing, performing and podcasting. She even recently joined Michelle Obama on her book tour, interviewing the former first lady, a major career turning point for Robinson, one that also provides the set piece closing out her new special.An imprint that would let her champion writers of color had been a longstanding dream that Robinson pitched over the pandemic. She said her first book, the 2016 best seller “You Can’t Touch My Hair,” was rejected by every publisher except Plume (which now runs her imprint), and the reason she heard was that books by Black women don’t sell. That stuck with her. Following the September debut of “Please Don’t Sit,” Tiny Reparations has two releases set for the spring, both debut novels by authors of color: “What the Fireflies Knew,” by Kai Harris, a coming-of-age story, and “Portrait of a Thief,” by Grace Li, about an art heist. “I don’t want to read trauma all the time. That’s something I have been particular about,” Robinson said. “I really want hopeful stuff.”Robinson filming her special at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times“Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes” is filled with thoughts on management and work, the product of an immersion in business books, podcasts and personal experience. The book is in part a response to the absence of Black women’s perspective in this genre. She writes: “Where’s ‘Lean In’ for us?”Robinson calls herself a “reformed workaholic,” but she’s not short of plans: an idea for a romantic comedy, a talk show, specials she would produce and, perhaps the most challenging one, a two-week vacation. Meanwhile, she must manage a growing business. With the pandemic, people are questioning how they work, and while Robinson understands balking at excessive hours, she insists there’s a middle ground that involves working more efficiently. She has cut down on meetings, for instance. “I love Zoom but I don’t need to see your face,” she said.Robinson said she knew that stereotypes about Black women might get her judged more harshly, but she had learned that one of the hard things about being a boss is asking your employees to do things they don’t want to do. “As someone who does comedy where you want everyone to feel good, you’re like, oh, I’m the problem?” she said, laughing at herself.Miranda Priestly isn’t as far from her as she used to be. “It’s really tough to be a boss,” she said, “because you have to accept you are going to piss people off.” More

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      in Television

      For Sutton Foster, Crochet Is a Survival Tactic

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      Sutton Foster is finishing up a 15-week run at the Barbican as Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” a role for which she won a Tony a decade ago, and she is preparing to return to Broadway later this year to co-star with Hugh Jackman in “The Music Man.”But before we got into all that, she wanted to show off a washcloth.“They didn’t have any washcloths here in the flat,” Foster said during a video interview from London last month, “so I was like, ‘Well, I’ll make some!’” She plans to give them as Christmas presents.When she isn’t performing onstage or onscreen (recently as one of the stars of the television series “Younger”), there is a decent chance that Foster is crocheting, cross-stitching, baking, drawing or gardening, hobbies she explores in her new essay collection, “Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life,” which Grand Central will release on Tuesday.The chapters are craft-themed, but this book is not all about Mod Podge and Jo-Ann Fabrics. Foster, 46, writes about how keeping her hands busy has helped her cope with the stress and pressure of her career and the ups and downs of a life in which she didn’t always get what she needed from her family, loved ones or colleagues.“Hooked” is out on Oct. 12.“Anxiety runs in my family — in me,” she writes. “I am the daughter of an agoraphobic mother. I make a living as a performer. It’s complicated. And yet, if I’m feeling anxious or overwhelmed, I crochet, or collage, or cross-stitch. These hobbies have literally preserved my sanity through some of the darkest periods of my life.”There are light moments, like when we learn that Foster crocheted an octopus toilet-paper-roll cover as a wedding gift for her “Younger” co-star Hilary Duff. But these are balanced with heavier revelations, such as when Foster writes about the baskets she cross-stitched for her mother as a means of escaping toxic cast dynamics early in her career.She opens up about snowman-shaped holiday cookies she baked with the family of her first husband, Christian Borle, and the floral blanket she pieced together, one “granny square” at a time, when that marriage ended. She describes drawing interconnected circles with paint pens while undergoing fertility treatments, and the striped baby blanket she crocheted while waiting for her daughter’s birth mother to go into labor.Foster taught herself how to crochet when she was 19, and estimates that she has eight to 10 projects going at a time. She has a yarn dealer who shipped three boxes of Lion Brand supplies to London, then flew over to see “Anything Goes.” (You know what a big deal this is if you’ve ever been a novice in a certain kind of a yarn store, where customers tend to be sorted into varsity, junior varsity and invisible.) Sometimes Foster works from a book or consults YouTube for assistance, but she also creates her own designs.Foster said she has crafted many evenings of song, so she brought the same approach to writing her book: “You’re taking a reader on a journey, like taking an audience on a journey.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesGrowing up in Georgia and, later, Michigan, Foster got her start, like many thespians of her generation, in a community production of “Annie.” After performing in national tours of “Grease” and “Les Misérables,” she appeared in Broadway productions of both shows, as well as “Annie” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” In 2002, she won her first Tony for “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Like her perennially cheerful “Younger” character, Liza Miller, Foster was a bundle of can-do energy and enthusiasm, until our conversation turned to her mother. Then she spoke slowly, eyes closed, choosing each word painstakingly.Helen Foster’s health began to decline when Sutton and her brother, Hunter, were teenagers. She had a fraught relationship with Sutton and stopped speaking to Hunter for close to a decade; the siblings’ connection with their father suffered as a result. Since Helen Foster’s death in 2013, Sutton and Hunter have enjoyed a new chapter with the man known as Papa Bob, and “Hooked” includes his tips for growing the perfect tomato. (No. 9: “Pick the tomatoes when they’re near ripe but not quite ripe, so others can grow.”)“Crafting was the way I could tell my mother’s story that felt most authentic to me,” Foster said. “A way to weave, pun intended, all the facets of my life together in a way that felt true to me today.”In the book, she takes readers inside the squalid house in Florida where her mother spent her final years. “I flipped on the light and gasped,” she writes. “All of her windows had been blacked out with black garbage bags, secured to the walls with duct tape.” Her mother had been bedridden for months, refusing to seek medical treatment: “That explained the bedpan and pee pads on the floor next to her bed.”In “Younger,” Foster plays a 40-year-old empty-nester who lands an entry-level publishing job — and a whole new life — by pretending to be a millennial.Nicole Rivelli/CBS“It was mental illness that was never treated, never dealt with,” Hunter Foster said in a phone interview. After mentioning that he spends as much time as possible outside, he added, “I don’t allow myself to sleep past a certain time because my mom stayed in bed half the day.”His and his sister’s relationship with their mother is likely to surprise some readers, Sutton Foster said. “It’s a part of our story that people don’t know. It’s this underbelly: my mother’s illness and protecting her and being afraid of her. No one talked about it, and there’s this freedom now.”Behind her on the wall was a framed poster that said “Breathe.”Foster wrote “Hooked” with Liz Welch, who has collaborated on best sellers by Malala Yousafzai, Elaine Welteroth and Shaun King. “Sutton is a Broadway musical actress, my mother was a Broadway musical actress. Sutton’s an adoptive mother, I’m an adoptive mother. Honestly, I think we’d be friends anyway,” Welch said. “Crochet was the perfect metaphor for holding oneself together, taking all these different threads of her incredibly interesting, not-what-you’d-expect life.”Suzanne O’Neill, a vice president and executive editor at Grand Central, said: “One thing that’s very hard for people who are writing memoirs to do is to excavate their stories, and Sutton was game for it, even if there were moments that were hard. She wanted the book to be excellent. She dove into it. It was a piece of art for her, and she worked really hard to make it the book it is.”In “Hooked,” Foster recalls being 16, mesmerized as her idol, Patti LuPone, belted out “Being Alive” on TV. “There was something simultaneously terrifying and thrilling about her confidence,” she writes. Her mother, who had recently stopped driving and grocery-shopping, said, “You can do that.”Foster, center, won a Tony for her performance in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe later met LuPone, who also played Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” and LuPone inspired one of Foster’s favorite collages: a colorful confection of craft paper on plywood, spelling out BADASS.“She’s a beautiful creature,” LuPone said of Foster. “She exudes a very positive light. We’re drawn to tortured souls, just to find out why they’re tortured. And we’re also drawn to the light, and the light is much more nourishing. You see somebody onstage that makes you feel better. That’s Sutton.”Foster is set to open “The Music Man” in December, playing Marian Paroo opposite Jackman as Harold Hill. But before she embarks on more soul-soothing craft projects backstage at the Winter Garden Theater, she will have time to settle into the Orange County farmhouse she moved into last spring with her husband, Ted Griffin, a screenwriter, and their 4-year-old daughter, Emily.She plans to bring at least one piece of her past into this next phase of life: a cross-stitched scene depicting baskets of various shapes and sizes that she made for her mother. For years, the piece hung in the front hallway of her parents’ house and was a stabilizing presence during difficult visits.Foster recently collected the baskets from her father’s basement. “I have them now,” she said. “They’ll go in the new house.” More

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      in Music

      ‘Black No More’ to Land Off Broadway This Winter

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      The musical will feature the theatrical debut of the Roots’ Black Thought, who will be writing the music and lyrics and be in a lead role.“Black No More,” a musical with a book by the “12 Years a Slave” screenwriter John Ridley and music and lyrics by the Roots’ Tariq Trotter, a.k.a. Black Thought, will finally get its turn in the spotlight.The musical, originally scheduled to premiere in October 2020, was delayed by the pandemic. The production, from the New Group, will now begin this winter.“Black No More,” based on George S. Schuyler’s 1931 novel of the same name, will play a limited engagement, Jan. 11 through Feb. 27, 2022, at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Opening night is scheduled for Feb. 8.“The music transcends genre,” Trotter said in a phone interview. “But most of it feels like Black music. I feel like this play, we might be able to break it down and use it as an education in the origins and history of Black music.”“I didn’t feel like I was confined; I didn’t feel like I had to stick to music of the day,” he continued. “I felt like we were able to tell the story, and make it in very many ways a period piece — without only writing jazz music.”Schuyler’s satirical story, a piece of the Harlem Renaissance canon, follows the development of Black-No-More, a scientific procedure for turning Black skin white, created by one Dr. Junius Crookman. (Trotter, in a theatrical debut, will also play Crookman in the show.)The protagonist, Max Disher (Brandon Victor Dixon), decides to undergo the procedure after being spurned by a white woman for being Black. In the meantime, Black-No-More gains popularity nationwide. The more Black people make the transition, the more obvious the economic importance of racial segregation becomes.“I thought it was mind blowing,” Trotter said of Schuyler’s book. “I couldn’t believe that something of this caliber of science fiction and wit and just dark humor and something with so many layers was written at the time that it was.”Apart from Trotter and Dixon (“Hamilton”), the cast also includes Jennifer Damiano (“Next to Normal”), Tamika Lawrence (“Rent”), Theo Stockman (“American Psycho”), Tracy Shayne (“Chicago”) and Walter Bobbie (“Chicago”). Rehearsals begin in November. Additional casting will be announced at a later date.The show will be coming from a Tony-winning team: It will be directed by the New Group’s founding artistic director, Scott Elliott; choreographed by Bill T. Jones; and have music supervision, orchestrations and vocal arrangements by Daryl Waters.“There’s a very serious look that we need to take at history and at the story of this nation and the ways in which it has been told and will be told, moving forward,” Trotter said. “It’s my hope that this work and work like this are going to compel people to continue that examination.” More

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      in Movies

      Clint and Ron Howard Remember When They Were Just ‘The Boys’

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      In a new memoir, the showbiz siblings recall their experiences growing up on “The Andy Griffith Show,” “Star Trek” and other Hollywood classics. But they weren’t all happy days.Growing up, Clint and Ron Howard never had to dream of stardom, because as children they’d already achieved it. Ron was just 6 when he was second-billed on “The Andy Griffith Show” and 8 when “The Music Man,” featuring him crooning “Gary, Indiana,” was released. Clint, his younger brother, was racking up roles on “Bonanza,” “Star Trek” and “Gentle Ben.”Today they are both Hollywood veterans: Ron, 67, is an Academy Award-winning director (“A Beautiful Mind”) and co-founder of Imagine Entertainment, while Clint, 62, is a prolific character actor who’s shown up everywhere from “Seinfeld” to the “Austin Powers” movies.But their lives were transformed by their time as child actors and the influence of their parents, Rance Howard and Jean Speegle Howard, who left Oklahoma to pursue their own ambitions of becoming actors — goals that were surpassed countless times over by the accomplishments of their two sons.Ron and Clint Howard retrace this formative period in a new book, “The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family,” which will be released by William Morrow on Tuesday. In their alternating accounts, the Howards look back on their parents’ lives, their own upbringings and their success at staving off the darker aspects of their profession — at least until the realities of adolescence and adulthood reared their heads.“The Boys” will be released on Oct. 12.William Morrow, via Associated PressWhen the brothers spoke in a video interview last month, they talked about how writing “The Boys” had helped reconnect them to each other and to their family history.“We’ve remained close, but we’re 3,000 miles apart and busy with our own families,” Ron Howard said, adding that the book “has everything to do with trying to put our lives into the context of who our parents were and what they gave us.”“We wouldn’t have done it just to tell our story,” he added. “Once again, Mom and Dad pulled us together.”Clint and Ron Howard talked about their early starts in show business, their earliest brushes with fame and how their parents helped them keep it together. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.It’s well-known that you’re the children of actors, but you’re not exactly Barrymore scions. What were your parents like? How did they find it in Hollywood?RON HOWARD There’s no reason they should have succeeded. They didn’t know a thing about where they were going. They weren’t bohemians, they weren’t hippies, but they certainly were not conservatives. But they had this dream. They had to chase that horizon. And when they got to the horizon, they never really fit in. They were always a little cornpone. Hence the term that they applied to themselves, sophisticated hicks.Were you ever made to feel that you were the breadwinners of your family?CLINT HOWARD We didn’t take show business home with us. Both Dad and Mom worked their tails off. Mom was just a championship mom. She was on the P.T.A., she was a basketball mom, she was a baseball mom.RON Dad was a kid-actor whisperer. But he said, I work with you boys because you’re my sons and I think you can learn something. I don’t think he believed this was our career for the rest of our lives. I don’t think he wanted to project that desire upon us.The book he and his brother wrote, Ron Howard said, “has everything to do with trying to put our lives into the context of who our parents were and what they gave us.”Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesYou probably could have lived much larger on the money you were earning — why didn’t you?RON We always lived on Dad’s salary. Somebody wanted to do an Opie line of clothing — I’m sure it would have meant hundreds of thousands of dollars at the end of the day. Mom and Dad turned that down for me because they didn’t want me wasting my time on that.CLINT We were never short for anything. But we didn’t go on vacation. They didn’t buy new cars. Once a year, Ron and I got new school clothes. No one was chasing those intoxicating elements that modern life or show business can overwhelm you with.As children, you were regularly crossing paths with venerated Hollywood artists. Clint, you got to meet Walt Disney when you were working on “The Jungle Book.” What was that like?CLINT I was completely blown away when Walt walked in and said, “You’re doing a fine job, Clint.” I was truly a Disney baby. But I was a little irritated that I hadn’t worked in more Disney shows. [Laughter.]RON Too bad you didn’t just say, “What took you so long? Walt, how many times have I been to Disneyland? Where’s the quid pro quo here, Walt?”CLINT These people all seemed pretty friendly but they weren’t handing out the contracts. I never got on “The Mickey Mouse Club.”Were either of you ever jealous of each other?CLINT Our age difference was ideal. Being five years apart, I would look at my brother and go, there’s no chance that I can kick his butt. There were a few times we would get into a fight over baseball cards or a toy, and Dad would physically pull us apart. He would say, you boys are going to want to be good friends when you grow up. So why don’t you just knock it off?RON He would say you have a chance to be good friends when you grow up.There’s a period you describe in the book, where things were starting to wind down for Ron on “The Andy Griffith Show” and Clint was beginning to take off on “Gentle Ben.” Did that create tension between you?RON I felt envy over what Clint was achieving. He was really popular at school, an excellent athlete, gregarious, smart, confident. Things that I don’t necessarily feel or exude. And I admired that about his persona. And I could see it in the work he was doing as well. He was a hell of a good child actor. The system is set up to make child performers feel like failures as they go through adolescence, that most vulnerable period, and I was beginning to experience that. Clint experienced a version of it later.CLINT I worked on “Gentle Ben,” I was one of the coleads of a television series that was really popular for a short period of time. What really knocked my chin in the dirt was getting hired to work on a TV series called “The Cowboys.” The job ended up just sucking. It was a bad show. I was still making money but the work was poor. That, and then pimples. Dad and Mom warned us about this period of show business. We knew it was coming. There was just no way to really quantify how I was going to feel about it.“We were never short for anything,” Clint Howard said. “But we didn’t go on vacation. They didn’t buy new cars. Once a year, Ron and I got new school clothes. No one was chasing those intoxicating elements that modern life or show business can overwhelm you with.”Rozette Rago for The New York TimesIn an era and an industry where drugs were prevalent, Ron avoided them fastidiously while Clint had a long period of addiction and recovery. Why do you think you had such different experiences?RON I was very introverted and my group of friends were likewise. I wasn’t really allowed to go to parties. If I was invited once or twice, I think my parents said no. But Clint was in a different group, much more socially mature. I also resented some of the restrictions that my parents put on me, and I was constantly imploring them to use a lighter hand with Clint.CLINT I had just some sort of odd fascination with smoking weed. To the point where I literally practiced — I took some pencil shavings from my pencil sharpener and I twisted up a joint and tried to smoke it. Ron was the first, he was a little more nerdy. I was socially more outgoing. I ended up with a group of friends where it was no big deal. The problem is, once that train leaves the station, it can get going pretty darn fast. It’s a slippery slope and I was throwing down the Crisco.Ron, did you ever feel guilty that you had somehow let your little brother down and hadn’t protected him from this?RON Yes, I did feel that. When we knew Clint was smoking pot, I said, look, it’s not the horrible curse of the demon you fear it might be. But as Clint started to go further, by then I was married and beginning to have kids. I was concerned and I tried to offer support and go to meetings. I continued to work with Clint and cast him when it made sense. I remember telling him pretty late in his period of abuse — we used a lot of baseball terminology — I said, you’re a bona fide .300 hitter who’s batting about .217.CLINT I have that letter. You wrote it on stationery from a New York hotel room.RON I was thinking about you while I was on the road. But I was very proud of Clint for having navigated it. That achievement meant so much to Mom and Dad, probably more than anything any of us had achieved.CLINT My recovery wasn’t easy-peasy, clean and snazzy. Ron had a lot to do with it and Dad had a lot to do with it, too. I struggled with Mom passing away, but I was very proud of the moment I could drop my nine-year chip in her coffin. I only wish it was a 10-year chip.What’s your favorite performance that your brother has given?RON Clint was tremendous in “The Red Pony.” But as I was doing research for this, I had forgotten that we had both been on “The Danny Kaye Show,” and there was this sketch where I was supposed to be this kid James Bond character and Clint was my boss. He nailed that scene. When I watched it, I said, my God, look how present he is. He really is playing a 50-year-old, hard-bitten guy, and I buy it.CLINT He talks about me being in “The Red Pony,” but I never got a chance to do what he did in “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.” There’s a scene in that movie where he has this panic attack that turns into a tantrum, and he just was so believable. I’m going, the guy’s got chops. Also, as a young man, he did a movie, “Act of Love.” That was weighty material and he nailed it.RON That was a euthanasia story, based on a real event, where a younger brother had been beseeched by the other to end it after a horrible accident. There’s a courtroom scene where he’s talking about how much he loves his brother and Clint was going through a difficult time during this period. It was one of the most personal moments I ever generated onscreen, because I was channeling my own sense of love and despair for what Clint was going through. The tears and the emotions were real — they came from my own gut. More

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      Why Write About Pop Music? ‘I Like When People Disagree About Stuff.’

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      Kelefa Sanneh hopes to start some arguments with his new book, “Major Labels,” which chronicles the past 50 years of rock, hip-hop, country and other musical genres.Seventeen years ago, Kelefa Sanneh was doing what he likes best: poking at conventional wisdom.As a pop music critic for this newspaper, he wrote a piece against “rockism,” the longstanding critical bias that favored guitar-driven popular music written by its performers (Bruce Springsteen, U2) as more authentic and worthy than songs by production-heavy pop idols (Christina Aguilera, Usher). Sanneh argued for the possibility of “a fluid musical world where it’s impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures.”Rockism was an insider’s concept at the time, bandied about among critics, but it became a household word, along with its antagonist, poptimism, a belief in not only expunging the guilt from those pleasures but investing deep thought in them.Sanneh had been trying to muddle things, but soon afterward, they got very simple again. Poptimism won. In a rout.“At the time, it was easy to argue that pop and R&B music weren’t being taken seriously,” he said in an interview earlier this month. “I think it’s fair to say that that’s no longer a problem.”Sanneh is hoping to kick-start a few new disputes and revisit some older ones in his first book, “Major Labels,” a history of the past 50 years of popular music told through the stories of seven genres: rock ’n’ roll, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music and pop. It is due out from Penguin Press on Tuesday.Kelefa Sanneh’s book “Major Labels” is out on Oct. 5.Since 2008, Sanneh has been on staff at The New Yorker, where he’s written about politics, boxing, comedy and sociology in addition to music. After years away from the critic’s beat, “the idea of diving back into music started to seem exciting,” he said. “And I realized I was still obsessed with it.”Browsing through Metropolis Vintage, a T-shirt shop just south of Manhattan’s Union Square, Sanneh approvingly noted the democratic mix of concert mementos. “One of the things I like about popular music is how it frustrates pretension,” he said, skimming through the hangers. “You have all these arguments, but they all end up on T-shirts next to each other on the rack. The arguments fade and someone is like: ‘Should I grab a Madonna shirt or maybe Bob Seger?’”Sanneh, tall and reedy at 45, was wearing a baseball hat with the phrase “Woo Ah!” across the front in pink — a keepsake from a concert by the German star Kim Petras, a current pillar of poptimism.Sanneh writes early in the book that “Major Labels” is “a defense of musical genres.” It’s popular now to praise people who can “slip between” genres or “transcend” them, he said. But to his ear, genres are not only inevitable but valuable.“Every community is defined by inclusion and exclusion,” he said. “And every musical community is in part a critique — implicit and often explicit — of other forms of music, other communities. You don’t get that tight-knit sense of being part of something without at least a little bit of pigheadedness.”His book ponders the historical divisions between R&B and hip-hop, the disco wars and the ensuing paths of dance music, the ways in which country music has hewed closer to the mainstream without losing its defining characteristics. He wanted to retrace how genres developed and solidified (and where they might remain ductile), and to recount the types of debates that he says don’t arise much anymore, like “whether Prince is a sellout, or whether Grand Funk Railroad is the future of rock n’ roll.”Sanneh describes a typical Gen X childhood of being introduced to popular music — Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Bob Marley — by peers, sometimes taped off the radio. (Sanneh said he’s a full-time streamer these days and no longer buys physical copies of music.) But it wasn’t until he discovered punk as a young teenager — the Ramones, the Dead Kennedys, the Sex Pistols — that he felt a passion for it.“It really was linked to the idea of having opinions,” he says of the time when his fandom intensified. He had previously thought, “Here are the Beatles, everyone likes the Beatles and you’re listening to the Beatles. I didn’t realize you could say: ‘No, I’m turning this stuff off, and this stuff on; that’s bad, that’s good.’ That was almost more seductive to me than the music; the idea that you could make up your own mind about it.”Sanneh at Academy Records in New York’s East Village. In the 2000s, “it was easy to argue that pop and R&B music weren’t being taken seriously,” he said. “I think it’s fair to say that that’s no longer a problem.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesAs a student at Harvard, Sanneh worked in the punk department of the radio station WHRB, a position that required he pass a written examination. He still considers himself a punk at heart, a jarring claim for someone with his temperament and who writes about his mother chaperoning him at a Ramones concert when he was 14.It’s easy to imagine that he inherited his kindly but questioning spirit from his parents. His father, Lamin Sanneh, was born and raised in poverty in Gambia. Raised Muslim, as a teenager he converted to Christianity, which he discovered through his own studying. He went on to become a leading scholar of world religion who taught at Yale for 30 years.His son can remember him discussing various subjects at the family dinner table and becoming “impatient with pat explanations.” He was equally annoyed by simplistic Christian political positions and by knee-jerk dismissals of Christianity; and, after 9/11, by broad-stroke arguments that either lumped Islam together with Christianity or posited the faiths as polar-opposite rivals. Kelefa Sanneh’s mother, Sandra Sanneh, followed her own remarkable trajectory. White and raised in South Africa, she became a scholar of Zulu and other African languages, retiring from Yale in 2020 after her own three decades there.Kelefa Sanneh was born in Birmingham, England, and soon after moved to Accra, Ghana, where his father was teaching. Two years later, another job took the family to Aberdeen, Scotland, and when Sanneh was 5, the family moved to Massachusetts. He’s always been most comfortable and confident writing in a mode that’s “a bit more analytical, a little less hot-blooded,” he said, and tries to explain subjects as if coming to them from another world.“I always thought about it as related to being an immigrant,” he said.Growing up, Sanneh also recalls “an immigrant’s sense of wanting to figure stuff out: ‘What are they doing over there?’ And that immigrant’s sense of whenever someone says, ‘No, this is country music, they’re singing about the troops, this is not for you,’ saying, ‘Hold on a second, I’ll be the judge of that.’ So I’ve always thought of it as curiosity and maybe a bit of mischief.”“His basic stance is amused skepticism,” said Ben Ratliff, another former music critic for The Times who worked with Sanneh. “He can put on an extraordinarily dispassionate performance, in the best critical sense of that word.”Sanneh, who moved to the U.S. when he was 5, can remember, he said, “an immigrant’s sense of wanting to figure stuff out.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesSanneh comes across as more of a complicator than a contrarian, not reflexively antagonistic but suspicious of unanimity. “Fundamentally I like when people disagree about stuff,” he said. “Anytime there’s a situation in which people claim there can be no disagreement, I always get interested.” He has brought that interest to bear in nuanced pieces about affirmative action and antiracism, among other subjects.Henry Finder, the editorial director of The New Yorker, has known Sanneh for more than 20 years, and read drafts of “Major Labels” for him. Finder also met Sanneh’s father on several occasions before his death in 2019 and finds similarities in how father and son approach their fields.Lamin Sanneh, Finder said, “devoted a lot of energy to ecumenism; he wanted a world in which people can live together in a community without everyone being the same. In a cultural zone, K’s instincts are similar.” (Those who know Kelefa Sanneh call him K.)In the realm of music, Sanneh says, many listeners grow harder to please as they get older. He’s had the opposite experience, his interrogation of different genres opening him up to their various pleasures.“I got less judgmental over the years, which is probably a good thing for a music listener but maybe not such a good thing for a music critic,” he says. “I found it surprisingly more and more difficult to find stuff that I really, really hated.” More

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      Author of 'My Monticello' on Writing a Debut Book With Buzz

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      “It’s Never Too Late” is a series that tells the stories of people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.Jocelyn Nicole Johnson has been a public school art teacher for 20 years, but she is not in her elementary classroom this fall in Charlottesville, Va. Her debut collection, “My Monticello” — five short stories and the book’s title novella — will be published on Oct. 5. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead has called “My Monticello” “nimble, knowing, and electrifying,” and Esquire named “My Monticello,” published by Henry Holt, one of the best books of the fall, writing that it “announces the arrival of an electric new literary voice.”To top that off, Netflix plans to turn the book’s title novella into a film. In the novella, which is set in the near future, a young woman who is descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and a band of largely Black and brown survivors take refuge from marauding white supremacists in Monticello, Jefferson’s homestead. The book is extraordinary for another reason. Ms. Johnson is 50 years old, not the average age of your typical debut author. To be more blunt, the publishing industry is viewed by some trade observers as too often fetishizing young writers, so while 50 is considered relatively young in many circles, for a first-time author to find her way onto the grand stage is a rarity.The author, who lives in Charlottesville with her husband, a software engineer and photographer, and their 15-year-old son, is excited for the book to be out in the world but she is also a little nervous. “As an art teacher I can tell myself the kind of things that I would absolutely tell my students,” she said. “You made something, but it’s not you.” (The following interview has been edited and condensed.)When did you first start writing?Writing and art were my main interests from a very early age. I recently found this book that I wrote in the fourth grade. We had to write a story, illustrate it and bind it, and mine was called “Prom Queen.” It has a lot of vengeance in it, which surprised me. Then, when I was a teenager, I read “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton, that rough coming-of-age story. And I learned that Hinton was published when she was 18 years old, so I decided to write a novel, and I did it. I wrote a book at age 16. I still have copies of that book in a drawer.Ms. Johnson says her book, “My Monticello,” is partially inspired by the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally that took place in Charlottesville, Va., where she lives. Matt Eich for The New York TimesWhen were you first published?After I was a teenager, I put the idea of publishing a book on the back burner until much later in life. But I did like writing — I wrote that whole time — I just wasn’t making steps toward publishing my work when I was younger.In 2017 I submitted a short story about a college professor secretly using his son for a research experiment regarding racism, “Control Negro,” to Guernica, and I was delighted when I learned that they were going to publish it. Then it was tweeted about by Roxane Gay, who went on to select it for Best American Short Stories, a prestigious annual collection which she guest edited that year. I would say that was the true beginning of this book, my debut, “My Monticello,” which will make me a 50-year-old literary debutante.Tell us about your life before this book?I have taught public school art for 20 years. Anyone who has taught public school will know that it is a very robust job. A very time consuming job. It is a job you really commit to.I was kind of the Mr. Rogers of teachers: standing at my door with a chime and a cardigan, welcoming this very broad and diverse group of students that we have here in Charlottesville into my classroom.What would you consider the first step you took toward publishing this collection?I had a moment after I published “Control Negro” where I realized how that story and other stories I was working on were connected. And that was through this idea of place, through this idea of Virginia. And through the lenses of racial and environmental anxiety. So that’s when I realized that I wanted to publish a collection.How did you find the courage and strength to take that initial step?The first step that led to this book — reaching out — came naturally to me because I had been sending my work out for so many years. So I had the habit of trying. I had the habit of persistence and trying — without a lot of expectation, which I think is a nice place to be in. A familiarity with rejection.Do you remember your first reaction when you found out you sold the collection? That it was going to be published?I was at home teaching virtually, because of the pandemic. It was June 2020 — the end of the 2020 school year.It was really exciting but also a little terrifying. A lot of writers, myself included, are introverts. And you work really hard to make your book be in the world, but there’s also a vulnerability that comes with that. So I sat in that moment, and then I took a walk around the block with my husband and we debriefed. Because we could see our lives changing. I had to decide whether I was going to keep teaching. Eventually I decided, between the book deal and the pandemic, to take a break from the classroom.Ms. Johnson is pictured with glimpses of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s homestead, which is the setting of her title novella. Her words of wisdom? “Embrace rejection and find your people.”Matt Eich for The New York TimesWhat were the biggest challenges in your journey to publication?I enjoy writing, but it’s not all enjoyable. You can see what you want it to be, but it takes a lot of time and experience — and luck — to get your writing to where you want it to be. You often fail. You come against your own limitations.I was writing about things that mattered a lot to me. Things that were difficult for our community here in Charlottesville. The collection is partially inspired by the deadly Unite the Right rally that took place here, as well as this country’s troubled histories going back to the time of the founding fathers. I wanted to make sure I did the best I could to be honest about my perspective. To write something that was hopefully useful and engaging to people.Do you wish you had done this book sooner or do you feel it was right on time?I am so pleased that this book is my debut. It incorporates so much more of my lived experience and my life and my aspirations and my hopes.What are your future plans?Apparently I’m going to write a second book — because I am under contract to write a second book. I’ve told myself so many times throughout the course of my life, “I think I’ll take a break from writing.” But I’m always writing. So I’m looking forward to what comes next and how I manage my expectations again as I set out. Because every book is it’s own project.What would you tell people who feel stuck and want to make a change?Try something small. Do something differently that’s manageable. But start. That’s what I would tell students. You have to start somewhere. Find support. Find community. And start small.Has this experience made you a different person?I think we’re constantly changing, and I think we should change. I’m a different person now than the teacher who greeted students at her door, or even different than the person who wrote “My Monticello.” And that’s exciting.Is there anything else you’d like to share about the trajectory that got you here?People help you all along the way. Even those people who don’t say, “Yes.” Your first book doesn’t get published. And your second book doesn’t get published. Maybe your third doesn’t. But that creates the conditions, in a way, for what happens next. The difficulties along the way make it more satisfying in the end.What lessons can people learn from your experience?Embrace rejection and find your people.We’re looking for people who decide that it’s never too late to switch gears, change their life and pursue dreams. Should we talk to you or someone you know? Share your story here. More