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      Hollywood’s First Family of Putting It Out There

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      On the first page of Will Smith’s recent memoir “Will,” the global superstar recounts a gruesome story of watching his father strike his mother in the side of the head so hard that she spit up blood. The early chapters of the book continue in much the same way — a young Will, naturally charismatic and eccentric, takes on the role of family entertainer to save his mother, himself and everyone else.“I would be the golden child,” he writes. “My mother’s savior. My father’s usurper. It was going to be the performance of a lifetime. And over the next 40 years, I would never break character. Not once.”That he became a perpetual conqueror in his films starting in the mid-1990s — an alien-defeater in “Men in Black,” a robot-defeater in “I, Robot,” a mutant-defeater in “I Am Legend,” a druglord-defeater in “Bad Boys,” a George Foreman-defeater in “Ali” — might have been a trauma response, but it also turned him into one of the world’s most bankable actors. Off camera, he behaved much as he did on camera, revealing little: an unknowable person beloved by millions.Over the last couple of years, Smith’s muscles have slackened somewhat. He’s become a loose and only semi-rehearsed presence on Instagram and TikTok. In addition to his uncommonly vulnerable autobiography, he also recently appeared in a six-part YouTube Originals series, “Best Shape of My Life,” ostensibly about losing weight but more about the deepening fissures in the outer shell of his public-facing character. For decades, he became one with his hardened facade; now he’s melting it down.This pivot to transparency makes him the patriarch of a family that has lately made intimacy its stock in trade. The Smiths — Will, 53; his wife, Jada, 50; their children, Jaden, 23, and Willow, 21 — have become the first family of putting it all out there. Between Will’s newfound chill, Jada and Willow’s cut-to-the-quick chat show “Red Table Talk” and Willow and Jaden’s music, the Smiths have remade an elite old Hollywood unit for the new era of reality-driven celebrity.From left: Adrienne Banfield-Norris, Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Will Smith in an episode of “Red Table Talk.”Facebook WatchTheir path has been the opposite of, say, the Kardashians’, the platonic ideal of the reality-TV clan that willed itself into more traditional stardom (forever blurring the lines between old and new fame along the way). The Smiths, by contrast, have downshifted from a conventional style of celebrity into the more fraught and garish one, and, crucially, have done so with a kind of grace — shocking, especially given the intensity of some of the revelations at play.Inside Will Smith’s WorldFor decades, the global superstar has won over audiences with his charm and charisma. Now, he is showing his more vulnerable side.A Commanding Presence: In a Times interview, the movie star reflects on his career, being a parent and learning to let go of perfectionism. ‘King Richard’: Here is what Smith said after he was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the father of Venus and Serena Williams. His Memoir: “Will” is a fairy tale of dazzling good fortune told by an admittedly unreliable narrator, our book critic writes. Hollywood’s First Family: Among his various roles, Smith is also the patriarch of a family that has made intimacy its stock in trade.Theirs is a perfectly timed reframing for the age of online confessional and trauma-based personal brands, especially for a family in which the parents are receding from the camera eye, and the children were famous before they ever had a choice to opt out. It is also a profound validation of the power of emotional directness and its destigmatization for the famous, turning the sorts of revelations that would have been relegated to salacious tabloids and unauthorized biographies in earlier eras into the stuff of self-empowerment.Will might be the Smith family member with the highest public profile, but it is Jada who helped draft the template of the family reinvention with “Red Table Talk.” The show, which appears on Facebook Watch, began in mid-2018, and quickly became known for unexpectedly vulnerable conversations, both with celebrity guests, and also between the hosts: Jada, Willow and Jada’s mother, Adrienne. Each woman holds her ground — take, for example, the episode about polyamory, in which Willow seems to baffle her co-hosts — but the inter-family good will prevents the show from ever erupting into true tension.Reality programming has only become an alternate safe space for the most famous in the last couple of decades. Previously, behind-the-scenes confessionals were more the purview of tabloids, an unsavory side effect of fame to be avoided at all costs. But beginning in the early 2000s, the era of “The Osbournes” on MTV, reality programming began to provide an escape hatch in which the famous could leverage their renown before being nudged toward the offramp of career irrelevance.It was novel then, and it ended up fomenting an entire cottage industry of second-chance grasps for attention, typically for C- and D-listers, both family docu-soaps and also shows like “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew” and “Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars.” Social media extended the available possibilities, granting new oxygen for the well known who were on their way to becoming less well known.For the Smith family, “Red Table Talk” provided proof of concept — it was acceptable, and even desirable, for the most prominent celebrities to make confessionals part of their brand.More than one episode delves into the challenges of Will and Jada’s marriage, offering small brushstrokes of revelation about an oft-gossiped-about couple. They insist they will never split, because after surmounting unspecified challenges, “We don’t have any dealbreakers.” (At the end of the chat, Will aims to dispel some frequent rumors: “We’ve never been Scientologists, we’ve never been swingers,” though Jada does point out that the second is a term for a “specific lifestyle.”)Watch enough “Red Table Talk” after reading Will’s book and absorbing his YouTube series and you might encounter the same tale told a few different ways — he’s been workshopping this unburdening for some time. Unlike Jada, who approaches the show and sharing her truths more casually, Will has fully embraced this shift and is treating it like he would a blockbuster film: rehearsal, polish, flawless delivery.Smith promoting “Will” with Queen Latifah last year. The actor’s memoir is surprisingly candid.Matt Rourke/Associated Press“Best Shape of My Life” begins as a weight-loss show — Will has a mild dad-bod paunch. To address it, he flies to Dubai to work with his personal trainer, as one does. He wants the process filmed, he says, because “the cameras act like my sponsor — they keep me accountable.” He partakes in intense physical challenges — walking to the top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on the planet, or navigating the Dubai Police Academy obstacle course — and is also working on his memoir.Soon, he begins to chafe at that accountability. Agonizing over the weight loss goal begins to feel like false tension. So does stress about the deadline for his book (underscored by what feel like staged voice mail messages from his assistant). Instead what unfolds is a tug of war between his compulsion to perform and his need to retreat. The fourth episode is titled “I Quit,” and then he continues for two more episodes — this is, after all, a Will Smith production. But seams are fraying: In the fifth episode, he crows, “[expletive] the budget, [expletive] the deadline — they’ll get what we give them.”Several segments of the show are given over to Will’s reading segments of his memoir to family members and friends. These moments limn vulnerability without ever detaching it from performance — Will cries about the challenges in his childhood home, and his onlookers, including his therapist, nod along. At least a few years past his box-office-domination peak, he has built a more scalable reward system.(And lest you forget that the family rebrand is in no small way a business venture, there are untold cross-promotional opportunities. On “Best Shape,” Will often wears clothes from his Bel-Air Athletics line. When the family gathers in Miami to hear Will read chapters about them, the table is stocked with the signature blue square bottles of Just Water, Jaden’s company.)Jaden Smith holding a bottle of his Just Water at a film premiere in New York.Noam Galai/Getty ImagesOnce the sort of superstar known for smooth maximalism, Will has experimented with this sort of behind-the-scenes content before: “Will Smith’s Bucket List,” a series on Facebook Watch, and “Will Smith: Off the Deep End,” a nature immersion doc. But the last year has constituted a multiplatform career rebrand in which Smith uses all the tools of celebrity in service of peeling back its layers.In his autobiography, he writes movingly of the tug of war he feels in regards to his father, who instilled in Will the discipline with which he would build his astronomically successful career but was also abusive. In one section, he suggests that he considered pushing his elderly father down a flight of stairs as retribution.But the real revelation about Will’s relationship to parental authority comes in “King Richard,” last year’s biopic about Richard Williams, father of Serena and Venus. Richard Williams was often maligned for the single-minded way he raised his daughters, but Will plays him empathetically as a stubborn hero, leaning into his doggedness but never making him an object of derision. (He was nominated for an Oscar for the performance.) No means are beyond bounds when the ends are so enviable.It’s likely the role has double meaning for Will — on the one hand, it’s a celebration of the transformative discipline he learned from his own father (in a non-abusive context), and on the other, it’s an argument for his own style of parenting. In both the memoir and at the Red Table, he speaks openly of how his heavy-handed fathering of Jaden and Willow exploded in his face on multiple occasions. When Willow’s first single, “Whip My Hair,” became a hit, she rebelled against the pressures of touring by shaving her head. The action film he made with Jaden, “After Earth,” was a colossal flop. (Will has another son, Trey, from his first marriage, who is a sometime D.J. and occasionally appears on “Red Table Talk.”)And yet the levelheadedness of the younger Smiths is somewhat remarkable. They are untethered thinkers in the way that children of privilege can often be, but they are also curious and empathetic and, all things considered, decidedly warm. (Listen to Jaden talk about learning how to navigate paying for dinner and you’ll melt.) Given their parents’s full-circle journey to untouchable celebrity and back, and given that they were born into a far more transparent generation, it’s easy to adapt to their family’s newfound visibility.Jaden has largely retreated from the spotlight, though he did release an album last year, “CTV3: Day Tripper’s Edition,” full of spacey dream-pop. When he shows up on “Red Table Talk” or in the “Best Shape of My Life” series, he appears almost impossibly wise.Willow has, relatively quietly, released five albums, recently homing in on a wiry pop-punk style that’s both tart and fashionable. Last year’s “Lately I Feel Everything” is her best album, and it includes the scarred anthem about duplicity “Transparentsoul” and raw songs like “Xtra,” in which she seeks space for a deep exhale: “I don’t mean to break so easily under the pressure/Need some time alone to breathe, I need some tree and fresh air.” And the album she released in 2020 as part of the duo called the Anxiety (which also includes Tyler Cole) features “Meet Me at Our Spot,” which became a huge hit on TikTok last year as a soundtrack for young creators to shamanistically lose themselves in dance.At the Red Table, Willow is a beacon of earnestness and humanity. Feeling deeply is the center of her public presentation; her conversation with Paris Jackson was less interview than sympathetic embrace. (At one point, Willow suggested that she’d cut herself in her younger years.) In her music and in her Red Table conversations, she grasps the futility of hiding her feelings, so she doesn’t bother.For Will and Jada, though, the high wire act of confession is, naturally, a reassertion of power. To be this vulnerable, effectively without fear of reprisal or public collapse, is perhaps the ultimate test of celebrity. The only question that remains is what secrets still lurk behind all this transparency. More

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      ‘It Was a Crusade’: Karen Brooks Hopkins Revisits Her BAM Tenure

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      In a new memoir, the former president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music reflects on some of the organization’s most memorable stagings and artists.“Fund-raising is like a military operation,” Karen Brooks Hopkins writes in her new memoir, “BAM … and Then It Hit Me,” an account of the 36 years she spent at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “The odds are always against you. It’s going to be 90 percent rejection with many ‘casualties’ along the way, and you must constantly shift your strategy to find new ways forward.”Hopkins, 70, who joined the organization as a 29-year-old development officer in 1979, became its president in 1999, and discovered early on she had “the fund-raising gene.” During a long tenure (she retired in 2015), her tenacity and ability to raise money for ambitious experimental projects was a vital element in establishing the academy as a cultural force and a hub for must-see work by artists like Peter Brook, Laurie Anderson, Ivo van Hove and Pina Bausch.Her memoir, which will be published by powerHouse Books on March 1, combines personal history, fund-raising strategies and an informal account of some of the academy’s most memorable stagings and artists. It will have its official book launch on Feb. 17 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Hopkins will discuss her career with Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director.Hopkins, second from right, with, from left, Bruce Ratner, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson around 1984. BAM Hamm ArchivesHopkins recounts her early years spent working with the visionary arts programmer Harvey Lichtenstein and — after he retired — her extensive tenure as president alongside Joseph V. Melillo, the academy’s executive producer.“Karen was the person standing right behind Harvey, who took up a lot of space, quietly doing a lot of very crucial things,” Anderson said in a phone interview. “Not just with presenting work, but in the initiatives with the neighborhood and the audience.”Together, Melillo and Hopkins extended Lichtenstein’s uncompromising legacy.“We had a shared vision for BAM,” Melillo wrote in an email. “I had the confidence as I curated the artists and their works for the three stages that she would identify the financial resources.”During their tenure (Melillo retired from the position in 2018), the academy’s artistic budget grew from $21 million to $52 million; Hopkins established an endowment that now stands at $100 million; and the BAM campus expanded to include a new theater, the Richard B. Fisher Building, and a new building project, BAM Strong, to link three of its spaces.Hopkins, who has an MFA in directing, said her theater background meant that she had always remained profoundly connected to the work onstage and to the priority of an artistic vision.“I have been so lucky to have these great artistic partners, Harvey and Joe,” she said in a recent video interview. “We were all in it together. For us, BAM wasn’t a job, it was a crusade.”Over a two-hour anecdote-filled conversation, Hopkins — now a senior adviser to the Onassis Foundation — picked out some highlights of her time at the academy. “I love talking about BAM,” she said.‘The Mahabharata’Lichtenstein “would do anything,” Hopkins said, for the British born, France-based director Peter Brook. So when Brook, in 1986, suggested a nine-hour adaptation of an ancient Hindu epic, which he had developed with Jean-Claude Carrière, the answer, naturally, was an immediate yes. “The Mahabharata” was produced by the academy the following year.Peter Brook’s nine-hour production of “The Mahabharata” in 1987.Gilles Abegg“We created a new theater just for that show,” she recounted, describing the renovation of the dilapidated Majestic Theater into what is now called the BAM Harvey, a block away from the main theater, which Brook felt was too formal a space for the work.“It was like moving a small country to New York and having them live here for a month,” Hopkins said. “And we had no money to do it.” But after she heard Brook describe the genesis of the work she decided “this was the greatest fund-raising story of all time.” She took the director and a group of donors to see the play in Paris, where it had been staged at Brook’s home theater, the Bouffes du Nord, raising the money in a relatively short time.“In the world of Brook, there is no real separation between spectator and performer, between the past and the present; they exist side by side in the theater and in life,” Hopkins said. “What you saw was the most profound combination of theatricality and the human condition finding an expression that was mind-blowing.”‘United States Parts I-IV’The pioneering, avant-garde work of the composer Laurie Anderson came to the academy soon after Lichtenstein started the Next Wave Series (which became the Next Wave Festival in 1983). “In 1982, we did ‘United States,’ Hopkins recounted. “It was risky to put an artist who wasn’t that well-known in a 2,000-seat opera house, but the work was a masterpiece. She held the stage for hours as a musician, a storyteller and a visual artist, and the entire show, a remarkable comment on America, was her conception. You felt you were watching an artist really come into her own.”A poster advertising what Hopkins called Laurie Anderson’s “masterpiece.”BAM Hamm ArchivesAnderson’s work was everything Lichtenstein wanted: “genre-bending, breaking forms, offering new ways of bringing shows to the stage,” Hopkins said.‘The Island’Many South African plays were presented at the academy over the years, but one that resonated most forcefully for Hopkins was “The Island,” in 2003, starring John Kani and Winston Ntshona, who wrote the play with Athol Fugard.“‘The Island’ was a piece that was like an arrow to your heart,” Hopkins said, “like the most intense short story you ever read.” She added: “It was simple, dark and profound. You were on the island with them, and in an hour you understood what they had been through for so long. Of course, it was really about Mandela, and you understood that when people are confined in an utterly inhospitable place, yet find each other and are committed to the same cause, there is a beauty and purity to the friendship that is a life bond.”Winston Ntshona, left, and John Kani in “The Island” in 2003.Richard TermineKani and Ntshona were “a partnership, a chemistry made in heaven,” she said.Watching a post-apartheid play by Nicholas Wright, “A Human Being Died That Night,” at BAM in 2015, offered “a remarkable historical trajectory told by theater,” she added. “When you stay in a place for 36 years, you realize it’s not about one season, even 10 seasons. It’s about generations of artists, and about history.”The Work of Pina BauschWhen Lichtenstein, who was a dancer before becoming an arts administrator, saw the work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, “he absolutely went berserk,” Hopkins said.“Café Müller,” one of the first shows Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble presented at the academy in 1984, was a revelation, Hopkins said. “Each artist had a distinctive personality and role, and you knew them like you knew actors.”The works were often “crazily difficult” to stage, she added. “For ‘Arien,’ we needed tons of water to rain on the stage, and by mistake toxic waste was delivered and had to be removed from our parking lot by guys in hazmat suits.” In “Palermo Palermo,” a wall stretching across the stage had to fall; in “Nelken” thousands of carnations had to be installed over the whole stage.Pina Bausch’s “Palermo Palermo” in 1991.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library“One year we did ‘Bluebeard,’ which had a million dead leaves onstage,” Hopkins added. “It was June, 90 degrees and we had no air conditioning. One critic said it smelled like a compost heap.”The Tanztheater Wuppertal was a huge audience draw for the academy. “Pina was a discovery who became a blockbuster,” Hopkins said.‘Happy Days’ and ‘Endgame’Samuel Beckett’s experimental, difficult and poetic work was a natural fit for the academy, Hopkins said, and Melillo was particularly keen on finding new productions of his work. Two in particular, stand out for her.In “Happy Days,” directed by Deborah Warner, “the great Fiona Shaw found the yin and yang of that role in a way I had never seen,” Hopkins said. “It’s not every actress who can be buried up to her neck, and communicate both the desperation of her circumstances and an optimism despite them. You were laughing and crying at the same time.”Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner’s 2008 production of Beckett’s “Happy Days.”Brooklyn Academy of Music The other enduring memory, she said, was of John Turturro playing Hamm in a wheelchair, with Max Casella as Clov, in the “unrelenting and unforgiving” play “Endgame.”One night, she recalled, the wheelchair collapsed, sending Turturro flying through the air. “He never broke character, even when the stagehands came on to pick him and the wheelchair off the floor,” Hopkins said. “The audience went nuts that night.”‘Einstein on the Beach’Lichtenstein discovered the work of the American director Robert Wilson, who was making a name for himself in Europe, around the time he took over at the Academy in 1967. “Harvey, in his most avant-garde heart, loved Robert Wilson, and felt he was on a divine mission to make sure that Bob’s large-scale work was seen in the U.S.,” Hopkins said. “There was almost no one in the audience for early pieces like ‘Deafman Glance,’” she said. “Or they would go home, do some laundry, come back; the pieces went on for hours!”In 1984, Lichtenstein told his team that they needed to raise $300,000 to present a Wilson collaboration with the composer Philip Glass, called “Einstein on the Beach.” Hopkins agreed. “I don’t know how, but we’ll do it,” she said.“Einstein” was a success. “After that the legend just grew and grew,” she said; the show returned to the Academy in 1992 and in 2012. “Bob works in a very inside-out way, not traditionally theatrical and very stylized,” Hopkins said. “But it comes from the gut and although the pieces can look cold, they are not. The heat comes from the ice around it; it’s an artistic trip.”She added that she particularly loved his 2014 adaptation of the Soviet writer Daniil Kharms’s “The Old Woman” with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe. “It was devastating, about someone starving to death, and you felt it,” she said. More

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      J Dilla Was a Revered Rap Producer. A New Book Deepens His Legacy.

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      The Detroit musician wasn’t known to give many interviews, and his influence has grown exponentially since his 2006 death. “Dilla Time” by Dan Charnas explores what drove him.Even during his lifetime, there was something unexplainable about J Dilla, the Detroit-born hip-hop producer and M.C. He was an open secret, an under-acknowledged force shifting and shaping modern music. Followers spoke of him reverentially and with enough hyperbole that he could feel inaccessible to listeners who didn’t quite get it. In the 16 years since his death, the aura around him has only grown.The writer Dan Charnas conducted nearly 200 interviews to write “Dilla Time,” a 400-page biography out on Tuesday that thoroughly examines the hip-hop producer’s unique approach. But Charnas, the author of the 2010 book “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop,” could barely recall anything that J Dilla, born James Dewitt Yancey, said during the one occasion they spent together, in the summer of 1999.He remembered Dilla crouched over his MPC3000 sampling drum machine in the basement studio of his family’s home in the Conant Gardens neighborhood of Detroit. He remembered going out for Mongolian barbecue with the rapper Chino XL, Dilla and Common, who was in town to work with Dilla on what would become his album “Like Water for Chocolate.” But that’s about it.“I was talking rather than listening,” Charnas said in a recent video interview, “and so the big shift for me is that I’ve had to do really, really careful listening over the past four years to try to get this story.”Dilla, who came to attention via his work with the Pharcyde, A Tribe Called Quest and his own group Slum Village, died in February 2006 from complications of a rare blood disease three days after he turned 32. He was beloved by his contemporaries and a small following of fans for his off-kilter beats — and he was not known to talk to journalists often. (Charnas could find only 16 interviews.)Common remembered seeing Pharrell Williams bow down to Dilla when they met and recalled how Kanye West excitedly showed everyone in the studio the album that Dilla had given him to pull drum samples from.“I didn’t grow up listening to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. I didn’t even grow up listening to Fela Kuti or Jimi Hendrix,” Common said in a phone interview. “I’m bringing up their music because these artists and their work are everlasting. And J Dilla is one of those individuals.”Dilla’s career was rooted in seemingly contradictory ideas. He became known for matching somber, yet comforting tones with rugged, crackling drums. He often worked alongside artists who were positioned as the sanctimonious counterbalance to the increasingly materialistic and hypersexualized world of late ’90s hip-hop, but he himself was unapologetically enthralled with jewelry, expensive cars and strip clubs. As technological advances made music production easier, and as a result, more uniform, Dilla used those tools to find possibility in imperfections.Charnas wrote “Dilla Time” to help make J Dilla’s contributions to music known.Listenership and the breadth of Dilla’s influence have grown exponentially since his death. There are now annual Dilla Day events around the world, and his music has been celebrated by institutions like Lincoln Center and the Detroit Institute of Arts. His MPC3000 is displayed behind a glass case at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Charnas teaches a course about Dilla, which is how the book originated, as an associate professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University.Over the years, there has been almost a deification of Dilla; Charnas’s book takes great efforts to humanize him. Though he is sympathetic to his subject’s struggles — particularly his misfortunes as an artist in the major label system and his deteriorating health — Charnas does not shy away from describing his imperfections.Dilla had a temper and could become jealous, those closest to him said to Charnas. When he was frustrated, his quietness would break as he lashed out at them. But the same people who told Charnas these unflattering stories continued to care about Dilla unconditionally.“He was private, and there’s still things I don’t talk about,” said Frank Nitt, Dilla’s close friend since middle school whose music he later produced as part of the group Frank-n-Dank. “But on the flip side, being who he was and how he’s being perceived by the people at this point, there’s a lot of misconceptions.”One of the foundational Dilla myths is how he arrived at his signature sound, in which the rhythm can feel off, different or just wrong. Some have said it was a failure to quantize his compositions, a feature in digital recording that eliminates human error and puts the timing of drum beats in their “correct” place.Charnas explains that Dilla’s process was more complex and that he took multiple steps to purposefully accentuate the sonic effects of error. The result was a fresh rhythmic feel that Charnas labels the titular “Dilla time” — differentiating it from straight time and swing time, the two rhythmic patterns that defined Western music. Dilla’s explanation for his innovation? He would just say that’s how he nodded his head.Charnas traces Dilla’s influence beyond hip-hop and soul, as it extended to pop, electronic music and jazz. His imprint can be found in songs by artists like Michael Jackson, Flying Lotus, the 1975 and Robert Glasper. (“Dilla Time” reveals that Dilla blew off potentially working with ’N Sync, twice.) Sometimes Dilla’s impact has been circuitous. He inspired young Los Angeles jazz musicians like Terrace Martin and Thundercat. Then Kendrick Lamar had those artists work on and expand the palette of his landmark 2015 album, “To Pimp a Butterfly.”Charnas also clarifies the story around “Donuts,” an instrumental album that Stones Throw Records released right before Dilla’s death that has become a key entry point for new generations of fans. It’s been said that Dilla recorded “Donuts” in the hospital, embedding messages for loved ones in his compositions as the end approached. In reality, “Donuts” was born from one of the many beat tapes he had made. It was largely edited and extended by Jeff Jank, who worked at Stones Throw, and completed months before Dilla died.Though he settled on J Dilla around 2001, he was alternately credited under names including Jay Dee, Jaydee, J.D. and Jon Doe. For much of the mid-90s into the turn of the century, he was part of two production collectives, the Ummah and the Soulquarians, alongside more famous members.In the book, Charnas relates how during the making of D’Angelo’s 2000 opus “Voodoo,” D’Angelo and Questlove called Dilla and Prince their “two North stars.” Dilla was around for many of the recording sessions at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, but none of the songs he initiated were completed. In the end, when he received his copy of the record, he was disappointed to realize that his name was nowhere in the liner notes.“The main theme for James in this story is credit, being seen,” Charnas said, “and he’s struggling to be seen.” Even on Common’s “The Light,” the biggest hit Dilla ever produced, he’s listed as “The Soulquarian’s Jay Dee for the Ummah,” leaving him, as Charnas said, “smothered in brotherhood.”Charnas’s main reasons for writing the book are not only to make Dilla’s contributions to music known but to also explain that the devotion from fans is justified. “Ultimately it’s really about me saying to everybody who loves Dilla: ‘You were not wrong. Your affection was not misplaced,’” he said. “He is special, more special than many of you all even know.” More

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      Chita Rivera’s Book Will Introduce Fans to the Real Her

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      Over the last seven decades, the Broadway star Chita Rivera has taken on and defined some of American musical theater’s most iconic roles: Anita in “West Side Story,” Rose in “Bye Bye Birdie,” Velma Kelly in “Chicago.”In her forthcoming memoir, Rivera introduces her fans and readers to a character she has rarely played in public: her alter ego of sorts, Dolores. And Dolores, which is Rivera’s given name, can be a little prickly, according to Rivera’s co-author, the journalist Patrick Pacheco.When they first sat down to discuss the memoir in the summer of 2020, Pacheco asked Rivera what people didn’t know about her.“She said, ‘Well, I’m not nearly as nice as people think I am,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘Great, let’s introduce the public to her.’”In her still-untitled book, which is due out in 2023 from HarperOne and will be released simultaneously in English and Spanish, Rivera describes her unlikely path to stardom. Born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero in 1933, Rivera grew up in Washington, D.C., where her mother worked as a government clerk and her father was a clarinet and saxophone player for the U.S. Navy Band.She was so rambunctious and theatrical at home that her mother enrolled her in ballet school. She won a scholarship to George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and went on to land roles in musicals like “Call Me Madam,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Can-Can” and “West Side Story,” where she delivered a breakout performance as Anita in the musical’s original production. Over the decades, she has been nominated for 10 Tony Awards and has won twice, and received a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2009, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Early in her career, Rivera, who is of Puerto Rican descent, worked to defy the stereotypes that were imposed on her in a largely white creative industry.“She was always very empowered from the beginning to play anything she felt she was capable of playing,” Pacheco said.Some of the theater world’s most influential composers and choreographers were drawn to Rivera’s magnetism and perfectionism. In her memoir, she describes working with Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Bob Fosse, Hal Prince and Fred Ebb, and her experiences with stars and castmates like Elaine Stritch, Dick Van Dyke, Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis Jr.Rivera, who turned 89 this month, has done career retrospectives before, including “The Dancer’s Life,” a musical celebrating her career. But while friends and colleagues had nudged her over the years to write a memoir, she never felt compelled to until recently.“I’ve never been one to look back,” Rivera said in a statement released by her publisher. “I hope my words and thoughts about my life and career resonate and readers just might discover some things about me they never knew.”Though she’s had a lasting influence on theater as a performer, Rivera is not a writer, and Pacheco was a natural collaborator — he first met her in the 1970s and had already interviewed her extensively in 2005 when he was brought on as a researcher for “A Dancer’s Life.”He and Rivera would meet or talk on the phone once or twice a week as they were working on the book, and he urged Rivera to open up about her private life and to be candid about her not-so-nice side, Pacheco said. “Let’s put them in the room with Chita,” he remembered telling her, “but let’s also put them in the room with Dolores.” More

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      James Maraniss, Librettist of Long-Silent Opera, Dies at 76

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      A Spanish scholar who taught for more than four decades at Amherst College, he waited, along with the composer, 32 years for “Life Is a Dream” to be staged.James Maraniss, a Spanish scholar who wrote the libretto for an opera that was finished in 1978, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 but was not fully staged for another decade, died on Jan. 9 at his home in Chesterfield, Mass. He was 76.The cause was a heart attack, his brother, David, said.Mr. Maraniss, a professor of Spanish and European studies at Amherst College, had never written a libretto when the composer Lewis Spratlan, a faculty colleague, approached him in 1975 to collaborate on an opera based on Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s early 17th-century drama “La Vida es sueño” (“Life Is a Dream”). The piece had been commissioned by the New Haven Opera Theater in Connecticut.Excited at how Calderon’s vivid writing quickly conjured musical images in his mind, Mr. Spratlan told Mr. Maraniss the news about the commission — not knowing that Mr. Maraniss was an expert on Calderon’s work.“It was a wonderful happenstance that this was the case,” Mr. Spratlan, now retired from Amherst’s music department, recalled in a phone interview. The two men, friends and neighbors in adjoining apartments in a campus house, soon started working together and completed the three-act opera in 1978. That year, Mr. Maraniss also published “On Calderon,” a study of the writer’s plays, including “La Vida es sueño,” which is about a prince in conflict with his father, the king.Mr. Maraniss’s familiarity with Calderon’s rhythms and language animated the libretto.“Jim managed to take extremely elaborate 17th-century Spanish, the equivalent of Elizabethan English, with very exalted levels of diction, and rendered it into modern English that preserved all the grandeur of Golden Age Spanish,” Mr. Spratlan said.By the time they were finished, though, the New Haven Opera Theater had gone out of business, and no other opera company would produce it. Frustrated for many years, Mr. Spratlan finally raised money for concert performances of the second act in early 2000, first at Amherst, then at Harvard. Mr. Spratlan nominated himself for the Pulitzer for music and won.Still, “Life Is A Dream” did not receive a full production until 2010, at the Santa Fe Opera.In his review in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini described the libretto as “elegantly poetic,” and said that Mr. Maraniss and Mr. Spratlan “honor Calderón by adhering closely to the philosophically ambiguous play, considered the ‘Hamlet’ of Spanish drama. Sometimes too closely.”A scene from the Santa Fe Opera’s production of “Life Is a Dream,” by the composer Lewis Spratlan and Mr. Marannis, colleagues at Amherst.Ken HowardDavid Maraniss said that his brother didn’t complain about the long wait for a full production.“But that libretto meant as much to Jim as anything he had done in his life,” Mr. Maraniss, a journalist and biographer who won a Pulitzer in 1993 for his coverage of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign for The Washington Post, said in a phone interview. “I can’t say the waiting was as torturous for Jim as it was for Lew, but it was a great feeling of relief when it was finally produced.”James Maraniss and Mr. Spratlan won the 2016 Charles Ives Opera Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.James Elliott Maraniss was born on March 22, 1945, in Ann Arbor, Mich. He moved several times with his family before settling in 1957 in Madison, Wis., where his father, Elliott, a journalist who had been fired from his job as rewrite man at The Detroit Times after an informant identified him as a Communist, found work at The Capital Times. His mother, Mary (Cummins) Maraniss, was an editor at the University of Wisconsin Press.After graduating from Harvard in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish literature, Mr. Maraniss earned a master’s there in the same subject. He then began work on his Ph.D in Romance languages and literature at Princeton University. It was granted in 1975.Following several months working for Wisconsin Gov. Patrick Lucey on Native American and migrant worker issues, Mr. Maraniss was hired at Amherst in early 1972 where he remained until he retired in 2015. He taught Spanish culture and literature in Spanish.Until recently, he had been working on a translation of “Don Quixote.”In addition to his brother, Mr. Maraniss is survived by his wife, Gigi Kaeser; his daughter, Lucia Maraniss; his sons, Ben and Elliott; his stepson, Michael Kelly; and his sister Jean Alexander. Another sister, Wendy, died in 1997.Mr. Maraniss in 2015, the year he retired from Amherst College after teaching there since 1972. Amherst CollegeAfter his work on “Life Is a Dream,” Mr. Maraniss wrote the Portuguese lyrics to James Taylor’s 1985 song “Only a Dream in Rio” and translated fiction and essays in the 1990s by Antonio Benitez-Rojo, a Cuban émigré and a major voice in Caribbean literature who was a professor of Spanish at Amherst.“I was bored with being an academic until I began a new life as his translator,” Mr. Maraniss said in an obituary of Mr. Benitez-Rojo, “and in a sense his presenter to the English-speaking world, to share that degree of his power, which was that of a great art.” More

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      Brian Cox Takes Stock of His Eventful Life on Stage and Screen

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      I’m such a fan of the HBO series “Succession,” about a morally depraved, megarich media family, that I hum its theme song in the shower and have taken to wearing commanding pantsuits. So when I picked up “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat,” the new memoir by Brian Cox, who plays the family’s tyrannical patriarch, Logan Roy, I was desperate for tidbits to tide me over during the long wait for Season 4.Well, there aren’t many. Cox writes gruffly of a newcomer director on the show giving Kieran Culkin, who plays his youngest son and is an ace at mixing up the script, notes to “slow down.” “Now, this is an actor who’s calibrated the patterns of his character’s delivery over the course of two previous seasons,” the author thunders, or so I imagine (as Roy, he’s a big thunderer). “He’s not going to suddenly slow down just because you’ve given him a note.”Brian Cox, whose new memoir is “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesCox confides furthermore that he doesn’t really relate to the intense, Method-like “process” that Jeremy Strong uses to get into the character of Kendall, Logan’s middle son. Fans already knew about Strong’s tactics from a profile of him in The New Yorker that was chewed over for weeks after it was published in December. Some perceived condescension in the article toward Strong’s working-class background, including an anonymous Yale classmate having marveled at his “careerist drive.”The heated discussion was fascinating and perplexing. When did acting become so bougie and aspirational? Wasn’t a working-class background once a key element of the Hollywood success narrative — getting yanked out, discovered and made over by the savior figure of agent or studio executive? Think Cary Grant (born Archibald Leach, son of a tailor’s presser), Lana Turner (miner’s daughter), Ava Gardner (child of sharecroppers) and all those other glamour figures of yesteryear.A humble background didn’t hinder Cox, who has gone from leading man of the British stage to one of America’s most prolific and consistent character actors — what is sometimes called a “jobbing actor,” though he now has the clout to negotiate a chauffeur, nice hotels and a double-banger trailer. Nobody rescued Cox, the consummate utility player. “I knew that simply wasn’t my ballpark,” he shrugs, on the subject of Hollywood stardom. “Besides, I’m too short.” He’s written two previous memoirs, one that tracks him to Moscow to direct “The Crucible” and another about the challenges of “King Lear.” Taking stock at 75, he’s not so much a lion in winter (indeed, he was fired as the voice of Aslan in the Narnia movies) as a seasoned workhorse finally able to enjoy a victory gallop.Cox writes eloquently about his origins in Dundee, Scotland, as the youngest of five children who occasionally had to beg for batter bits from the local chip shop. His parents met at a dance hall; his mother had been a spinner at jute mills and suffered multiple miscarriages and mental illness; his father, a shopkeeper and socialist, died when Brian was 8. Getting plunked in front of the telly rather than taken to the funeral was formative. So were later escapes to the movies, particularly ones like “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1960), starring Albert Finney: “a film that wasn’t all about the lives of posh folk in drawing rooms, or struggling nobly in far-off places, or having faintly amusing high jinks on hospital wards,” Cox writes. “It was all about working-class people — people like us.” A kind teacher told him about a gofer gig at the local repertory theater and boom, he was home.Brian Cox and his fellow cast members of the HBO show Succession.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesCox went on to attend the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and perform in esteemed halls like the Royal Court, learning the classics but also grooving nicely with the rise of the angry young man and kitchen-sink realism led by the playwright John Osborne, with whom he became friends. Before very long he was working with his gods, including Finney.At a time when theater, the fabulous invalid, is straitjacketed by the pandemic, it’s heartening and a little wistful-making to have it recalled in all its messy midcentury glory. Cox fluffed a flustered Lynn Redgrave’s wig; got felt up by Princess Margaret backstage; narrowly escaped dying in a plane crash on his way to audition for Laurence Olivier. Years later, as Lear in a wheelchair, he “frisbeed” his metal crown into the first row at the National Theater, injuring an audience member. He once compromised his testicles during a naked yoga scene. In the leaner years, he booked bikini waxes and cohabited with an army of cockroaches in a sublet apartment. There was drunkenness aplenty; one actor playing the priest in “Hamlet” got so soused he tumbled into Ophelia’s grave.Cox, who prefers cannabis to drink, can ramble on a bit. If times ever get lean again, it’s easy to imagine him doing bedtime stories for a sleep app. He salts all the idolatry with disdain. On Kevin Spacey: “A great talent, but a stupid, stupid man.” On Steven Seagal: “As ludicrous in real life as he appears onscreen.” On Quentin Tarantino: “I find his work meretricious. It’s all surface.” (Though he’d take a part if offered.) He’s softer on Woody Allen, owning up to himself dating an 18-year-old when he was in his 40s. “It seems that everybody in this book is either dead or canceled,” he notes with some rue. He’s preoccupied with making a “good death,” cataloging friends’ ends with an almost clinical relish (cancer, emphysema, suicide, a heart attack so massive it threw the victim “clean across the pebbles”).Like many actors, Cox treads more nimbly on the boards than in his personal life. He admits he wasn’t fully present for family tragedies, like his first wife’s stillborn twins and their daughter’s anorexia. “And that’s my flaw,” he declares. “It’s this propensity for absence, this need to disappear.” He loves the part of Logan partly because, when not thundering, he’s “reined in and bottled up.” But on the page, at least, he is present, lively and pouring forth, though the hints of his distinctive burr may send you heading for the audiobook instead. More

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      Michael Schur’s Unending Quest to Be Perfect

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      The comedy writer, known for shows like “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place,” has a surprising new project: a book about moral philosophy that explores how to be a good person.Several years ago, Michael Schur was stuck in Los Angeles traffic when he went into a philosophical tailspin. As he watched other drivers use the emergency lane to escape the gridlock, he started fuming about people who put their desires above everyone else’s, then wondered if such minor ethical lapses even matter.What started as a flash of irritation yielded an idea: What if there were a cosmic point system that tallied our good and bad behavior, and ranked people accordingly? From then on, when Schur saw drivers misbehaving, he would comfort himself by imagining them losing 15 points on their moral score cards.That fantasy helped shape the premise for Schur’s television series, “The Good Place,” a metaphysical comedy set in an afterlife where people are assigned to the Good Place or Bad Place based on their ethical ranking. The show, which starred Kristen Bell as a pathologically selfish pharmaceutical saleswoman accidentally sent to the Good Place, posed complex thought experiments and explored moral principles from philosophers like Aristotle and Kant, all in the framework of a 22-minute sitcom.“The Good Place” ran for four seasons on NBC and was a commercial and critical success. But when the final season aired in 2020, Schur, who’s also known for his work on comedies like “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” felt unsatisfied.“I had this nagging feeling, like I wasn’t done talking about it,” Schur said in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife J.J. Philbin, their children William and Ivy, their dogs Henry and Louisa, and a guinea pig named Coco. “I didn’t want to try to do another TV show on the same topic, because that just seemed weird. I’m not sure there’s another TV show that’s explicitly about moral philosophy that anyone would be interested in.”So, in a somewhat surprising pivot, he decided to write a book about ethics.Schur’s debut, “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question,” which Simon & Schuster will release on Tuesday, is likely the first book about moral philosophy to feature endorsements from Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Ted Danson and Mindy Kaling. Jeff McMahan, a philosophy professor at Oxford, called it “an enjoyably boisterous guide to the moral life.”From ‘How to Be Perfect’Listen to an audiobook excerpt from “How to Be Perfect,” featuring Michael Schur along with Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Ted Danson and D’Arcy Carden, stars of his TV show “The Good Place.”In about 300 pages, Schur covers some 2,500 years of Western philosophical thought, breaking down concepts like virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism and contractualism, analyzing principles espoused by Aristotle (“a good salesman, and he gets us all excited about his pitch”), Kant (“a pretty rigid dude”) and Camus (“a stone-cold hottie”), and examining arguments from contemporary philosophers like Judith Thomson, Peter Singer, T.M. Scanlon and Johann Broodryk. He raises quandaries that are easy calls (“Should I Punch My Friend in the Face for No Reason?”) along with more challenging thought experiments like the Trolley Problem (“Should I Let This Runaway Trolley I’m Driving Kill Five People, or Should I Pull a Lever and Deliberately Kill One (Different) Person?”) and fraught issues like whether it’s wrong to enjoy art and literature created by people who behave reprehensibly.As a philosophical layman taking on some of the most profound questions humans have pondered, Schur is, naturally, nervous about how the book will be received. “I’m terrified of people who know what they’re talking about reading it and saying, ‘You fool,’” he said. “That’s my greatest fear right now, is that someone is going to read it and out loud, alone in his or her office, say the words, ‘You fool.’”“How to Be Perfect” is out on Jan. 25.At the same time, he felt that as a comedy writer, he could bring a unique lens to the subject.“The smartest people who ever lived have been working really hard for thousands of years to try to explain to us how we can be better people, and how we can improve ourselves, but they wrote so complicatedly and densely and opaquely that no one wants to engage with it,” Schur said. “It’s like a chef had come up with a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that were both delicious and also helped you lose weight, but the recipe was 600 pages long and written in German, and no one read it. And I thought, if we could just translate that to, like, a human language, this would be very helpful.”In some ways, the topic felt unavoidable. Schur, 46, has been preoccupied with how to be a good person for as long as he can remember.“I have been interested-in-slash-obsessed with the concept of ethics my whole life,” he said. “There have been moments when I’ve confronted something about my own behavior, where I realized I was behaving in a ethically questionable way, or had wandered into some complicated situation, that seemed like I would be better equipped to handle it if I knew what the hell I was talking about, ethically speaking.”Writing a book about the quest for ethical perfection, Schur risked coming across as unbearably pedantic or worse, sanctimonious, but he grounds his overviews of abstract doctrines in self-deprecating digressions. He confesses he still has books by Woody Allen on his shelves and hasn’t been able to renounce him even after allegations of sexual abuse came to light. He describes the self-loathing he would feel whenever he left a tip at Starbucks but paused to make sure that the barista saw him do it. He agonizes over his privileged status as an educated, affluent white man, worries that his hybrid car is still bad for the environment and frets that the money he spends on baseball tickets and other luxuries could have gone to people in need. (He’s donating his earnings from the book to several charities and nonprofits, he said.)Born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Connecticut in a casually Unitarian family, Schur has had a charmed career that he attributes to a series of lucky accidents, beginning with the day he stayed home sick from school and his mom let him watch Allen’s movie “Sleeper.” At Harvard, where he majored in English, he joined the Lampoon, a comedy magazine that has served as a pipeline for TV writers, and those connections helped him land a job as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” in 1998.He was later hired as a writer for “The Office,” and around the third season, he signed an overall deal with NBCUniversal. He went on to cocreate “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” both wholesome workplace comedies. When the network gave him free rein to make a show about anything he wanted, he pitched “The Good Place.”Early on, he ran into a problem: He didn’t know much about moral philosophy. So he started a self-taught course in ethics, reading works by Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Bentham, Rawls and others, and devouring academic papers he found online.When he found concepts to be impenetrable, he sought out professionals. He asked Pamela Hieronymi, a philosophy professor at U.C.L.A, to be an adviser for the show, and she gave lectures in the writers room and guided writers through conundrums like the Trolley Problem. “He wants it to be digestible, but he doesn’t want to water it down,” she said of Schur.Schur also brought on the philosopher Todd May as a consultant after reading his book, “Death.” Schur would sometimes send May an urgent email with a “philosophical emergency” when he was worried he had bungled some ethical nuance.“He is extraordinarily precise, and it’s really important to him to get the theories right,” said May, who also advised Schur on his book.Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper and Ted Danson in a scene from “The Good Place” that explored the Trolley Problem.Colleen Hayes/NBCThe production sometimes felt more like a grad-school philosophy seminar than a sitcom set. William Jackson Harper, who played a conflicted philosophy professor on “The Good Place,” recalled having conversations with Schur about thorny variations on the Trolley Problem that made his head spin. Bell, who studied the long document that Schur prepared outlining different ethical theories that the show covered, remembers having a discussion with Schur about whether it was OK to eat almonds.“There aren’t a lot of people that have a commitment to examining their role in the world as deeply as he does,” she said.Danson, who played an immortal being and bureaucrat who operates the Good Place, said Schur brought seriousness and intensity to the set, an atmosphere that was unusual for a show that also trafficked in bathroom humor and physical comedy. “I don’t think there’s a casual bone in his body,” Danson said.After creating a show that seemed to defy the boundaries of a sitcom, blending heady concepts with extreme silliness, Schur felt he had discovered a winning formula that he could deploy in a book. He sold “How to Be Perfect” to Simon & Schuster in early 2020, just before the pandemic arrived and shut down much of the entertainment industry.As its release approaches, Schur is aware that he faces higher expectations than most debut authors. “I wanted the book to be conversational and engaging and funny enough so that people who had watched ‘The Good Place’ or anything else I’ve ever done felt like the same guy was talking to them, and I also wanted anyone who knows anything about philosophy to read it and think, like, hey, not bad,” he said.He’s somewhat reassured by the fact that “The Good Place” was so well received, suggesting that there’s an audience for goofy riffs on ethics, and said he’s gotten positive responses from friends and colleagues who loved the show and the dilemmas it raised.“And if they were lying, then that’s their problem,” Schur added, “because they’ve been unethical.” More

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      ‘The Kite Runner’ Is Coming to Broadway

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      The 2007 play based on Khaled Hosseini’s novel has been widely produced, including on the West End in London. It will come to Broadway in July.A stage adaptation of the best-selling novel “The Kite Runner” will be presented on Broadway in July.The play, which began its life in California in 2007 and has been widely produced since, is planning a limited run, from July 6 to Oct. 30.The announcement is encouraging news for Broadway, which has been clobbered by closings as the coronavirus pandemic continues to roil the industry. But there remain many producers with the appetite and the financing to bring new shows to Broadway as others end their runs.The “Kite Runner” novel, written by Khaled Hosseini and published in 2003, is a coming-of-age story about a man born in Afghanistan whose life is haunted by his failure to protect a childhood friend. The novel, a surprise hit, has sold millions of copies worldwide, and was adapted into a film in 2007.The theatrical adaptation was written by Matthew Spangler, and was first staged in 2007 at San José State University, where Spangler teaches performance studies. It had an initial professional production in 2009 at the San Jose Repertory Theater, which no longer exists, and has since been staged in multiple countries around the world.The Broadway version will be directed by Giles Croft, who has been directing productions of the play since 2013, when he oversaw a run for the Nottingham Playhouse in Britain; he has since directed productions in the West End and on tour in Britain.The play is slated to run at the Hayes Theater, which, with 600 seats, is the smallest on Broadway. The theater is owned by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, which will rent the space to “The Kite Runner.”The lead producers are Victoria Lang and Ryan Bogner; Daryl Roth will serve as executive producer. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the producers are seeking to raise up to $5.75 million, but a spokesman said that the actual Broadway capitalization is likely to be closer to $4.6 million. More