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      in Music

      The (Very Brief) Return of Gastr del Sol

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      In the ’90s, the duo of Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs made quiet, intricate music amid a loud rock underground. A new compilation brought them back together.In late January 2016, Akinobu Oda — a Japanese restaurateur and concert promoter — taped a red-and-black handbill demanding “Don’t disturb!!!” to the window of his vegan dive in Tokyo. The reason? The American art-rock band Gastr del Sol was dining inside.It had been 18 years since the duo split. During the late 1990s, David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke enjoyed an intense and prolific partnership, working together in multiple groups and running the audacious label Dexter’s Cigar. But they hadn’t seen each other since 2002, communicating only through sporadic emails. In Tokyo, they were finally face to face.“Our breakup was hard, because what had started as a very easy collaboration wasn’t easy anymore,” Grubbs, 56, said during a recent video interview from his Brooklyn apartment, where he was surrounded on one side by rows of records and on the other by decorative plates and vases. “I wasn’t sure how it would be, but we were there for hours after the restaurant closed.”That summit became the first move in a long path to “We Have Dozens of Titles,” a three-LP boxed set due Friday that includes the first previously unheard music from Gastr del Sol in a quarter-century. It is the end of the vault, and there will be no reunion shows or sessions.Still, with its out-of-print obscurities and several unreleased live recordings, the compilation reaffirms just how unusual the music that Grubbs and O’Rourke made during their five-year run still is. Though their music began with two carefully intertwined acoustic guitars, it stretched to encompass orchestral fantasias, electronic abstraction and collage sensibilities imported from the avant-garde. Grubbs’s image-rich writing felt poetic and detached. In an era of plangent indie rock, they were the studied, intricate eccentrics.Jim O’Rourke said he craved artistic freedom outside of Gastr del Sol: “I didn’t like my life being constrained by one thing.”Manfred RahsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Andrew Davis, 80, Dies; Renowned Conductor Who Championed Britain’s Music

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      Celebrated for his long tenure with Lyric Opera of Chicago, he led this and other orchestras with force and a notably energetic podium presence.Andrew Davis, an ebullient British conductor who brought energy to his countrymen’s compositions and passion to hundreds of opera performances, died on April 20 in Chicago. He was 80.His manager, Jonathan Brill, said the cause of Mr. Davis’s death, in a hospital, was leukemia.More than many conductors, Mr. Davis was remembered by those who worked with him as deriving a sense of physical enjoyment from the music — “almost a palpable pleasure,” the pianist Emanuel Ax said in an interview. And that translated into a pleasure for his collaborators. “People loved playing for him,” Mr. Ax said.Mr. Davis spent 21 years, from 2000 to 2021, as music director and principal conductor of one of America’s great opera companies, Lyric Opera of Chicago, in a vast repertoire ranging from Mozart through Wagner to Berg. He also led orchestras in Canada — the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, from 1975 to 1988 — and Australia — the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, from 2013 to 2019. He also conducted at the Glyndebourne Festival in England from 1988 to 2000.But it was as an interpreter of 20th-century British music, and particularly the works of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Holst, Britten and others, that Mr. Davis made his mark and earned his way into the affections of his fellow Britons. With its fervid, billowing patriotism and ruminative pastoral interludes, this music sometimes struggles to cross national boundaries.Mr. Davis conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1995. He was the orchestra’s principal conductor for a decade.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty ImagesMr. Davis, as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1989 to 2000 and at summer London Proms concerts in front of enthusiastic audiences of thousands in the Royal Albert Hall, made the most of the British compositions that were his specialty. This deep homegrown commitment led The New York Times’s Bernard Holland, reviewing a 1987 Avery Fisher Hall appearance by Mr. Davis that included little-known works by Arnold Bax and Michael Tippett, to write that “the music of 20th-century Britain has hugely profited from the fervent ministrations of British musicians and the British musical press.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      The Era of Klaus Mäkelä, Conducting Phenom, Begins in Chicago

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      On Thursday, the richly talented 28-year-old maestro led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director.On Thursday evening, when Klaus Mäkelä came onstage to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director, he seemed at pains not to bask in the roar that greeted his entrance.He smiled, bowed and quickly turned to give the downbeat. The orchestra had already released a video of the moment on Tuesday when the players were told he got the job. Many maestros would take the opportunity to wax a little eloquent before getting down to business; Mäkelä spoke for less than 20 seconds before raising his baton to start the rehearsal.Mäkelä, just 28, clearly wants to avoid seeming like a vain, spotlight-craving young man. He is already the topic of much discussion for being what some consider far too early in his career for such an august position — the Chicago Symphony has been among America’s finest for well over a century — especially when he has already taken on daunting responsibilities with European orchestras.His rise has been one of the most meteoric in modern music history. After completing his education in his native Finland, Mäkelä began his international career in earnest a mere six years ago; the pandemic was for him a period of unnatural acceleration.He is not, however, the first 20-something conductor to burst onto the classical scene. Gustavo Dudamel was Mäkelä’s age when he became the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Leonard Bernstein was 25 when his surprise New York Philharmonic debut, broadcast nationwide, made headlines.And Willem Mengelberg was just 24 when he took on the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the eminent ensemble at which Mäkelä is currently artistic partner. He will become chief conductor there in 2027, the same year he will officially become music director in Chicago. (And the same year that his current podium contracts, in Paris and Oslo, will lapse.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Reggie Wells, Makeup Artist for Oprah Winfrey and Other Black Stars, Dies at 76

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      At a time when cosmetic brands did not cater to Black women, Mr. Wells found a niche working with Black stars and models who had struggled to find makeup options for their skin tones.Reggie Wells, who parlayed a background in fine art into a trailblazing career as a makeup artist for Oprah Winfrey, Whitney Houston, Beyoncé, Michelle Obama and other Black celebrities, died on Monday in Baltimore. He was 76.His death was confirmed by his niece Kristina Conner, who did not specify a cause or say where he died.For Mr. Wells, every face was a canvas to explore. One of his most famous clients was Ms. Winfrey, for whom he worked as a personal makeup artist for more than 20 years at the height of her television career.“Reggie Wells was an artist who used his palette of talent to create beauty no matter the canvas,” Ms. Winfrey said in a statement. “He always made me feel beautiful. Ooo my, how we’d laugh and laugh during the process. He was an astute observer of human behavior and could see humor in the most unlikely experiences.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Theater

      Mike Nussbaum, Celebrated Chicago Theater Actor, Dies at 99

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      He appeared memorably in “American Buffalo” and in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” but gave up a career on Broadway for one in Chicago.Mike Nussbaum, an actor known as the dean of Chicago theater who found success during his early association with David Mamet, the Chicago-born playwright, died on Dec. 23 at his home in Chicago. He was 99.His death was announced by his daughter Karen Nussbaum, a labor organizer.For the last decade, Mr. Nussbaum has also been known as the country’s oldest working actor, a distinction that mildly irritated him. (For admiring journalists, he gamely performed his daily regimen of 50 push-ups, a practice he kept up until he was 98.) He often said he would have preferred to have been recognized solely for his acting skills, not the age at which he was acting.Mr. Nussbaum came up in Chicago’s community theaters, notably Hull House, an incubator of talent in the 1960s, while also running a successful exterminating business. When he was 40, he was tackling a wasp nest when he fell off a roof, smashing a kneecap and breaking a wrist. While he stewed on the couch recuperating, he decided it was the right moment to pursue acting full time.A pivot point in his acting career came in 1975 when Mr. Mamet, then a fledgling playwright, cast him in the role of Teach in an early production of the celebrated play “American Buffalo,” about a trio of hapless, double-crossing hustlers. The pair had met at Hull House, where Mr. Mamet had worked as a gofer when he was a teenager.“It was, for those of us who saw it, kind of an overwhelming, definitive experience,” Robert Falls, the former artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theater, told Chicago magazine in 2014. “Over the years I’ve seen actors like Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall play that part, and no one has ever played it the way Mike Nussbaum did. There was a Chicago quality to it in its voice, in terms of attitude, a sense of pathos and danger that he brought to it that’s never been really equaled.”Mr. Nussbaum won a Drama Desk Award for his role as George Aaronow, a beaten-down salesman, in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”When Mr. Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” another tale of desperate hustlers, opened on Broadway in 1983, Mr. Nussbaum, along with fellow Chicagoan Joe Mantegna, were cast as two of the play’s striving, venal real estate agents. Mr. Mantegna earned a Tony for his role as the slick Ricky Roma; Mr. Nussbaum won a Drama Desk Award for his role as George Aaronow, a beaten-down salesman with a nascent conscience; and the play would win Mr. Mamet the Pulitzer Prize in drama.“There’s particular heroism in Mike Nussbaum, whose frightened eyes convey a lifetime of blasted dreams,” Frank Rich wrote in his review for The New York Times. “and in Joe Mantegna, as the company’s youngest, most dapper go-getter.”The pair had performed years earlier in Mr. Mamet’s “A Life in the Theater,” a slight but biting two-man play about a young actor and an older one, goading and guiding each other, ego to ego. Mel Gussow of The Times praised their performances as effortless. “As the cynical old poseur, Mr. Nussbaum is a Jack Gilford with a touch of John Barrymore,” he wrote.Mr. Mantegna, speaking by phone, said that Mr. Nussbaum was “the role model for what everyone considers the Chicago actor.”“He wasn’t doing it for the end game,” Mr. Mantegna said. “In New York, there’s an end game: Maybe I’ll get to Broadway, get a shot at TV. It’s an industry. L.A. is an industry. In Chicago it was never an industry, we were doing it for the love of doing it.”He recalled Broadway producers urging Mr. Mamet to cast “Glengarry Glen Ross” with stars, and Mr. Mamet pushing back. “He said, ‘I’m going to do it with my kind of guys.’ Then there we were, this pack of unknowns, doing what would ultimately win the Pulitzer Prize.”Then Mr. Nussbaum walked away from it all.B.J. Jones, artistic director of the renowned Northlight Theater, in Skokie, Ill., which Mr. Nussbaum helped found in the 1970s, phoned Mr. Nussbaum during his run on Broadway to ask him to play the lead in a work by the English playwright Simon Gray.Mr. Nussbaum called out to his wife at the time, Annette, for advice. “Do it,” she said. “I’m tired of New York.”“Mike left Broadway to perform in a play for which we probably paid him a few hundred bucks,” Mr. Jones continued. “And when he did, they were scalping tickets in the lobby to see him. He was a Broadway star but he came home.”As Mr. Mantegna said, “We were on the carousel, and there was the brass ring and he could have grabbed it, but he decided he liked the carousel.”A slight man with a bushy mustache, Mr. Nussbaum could seemingly play anybody: He was a fierce Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” and a bawdy witch in “Macbeth,” two of his many roles for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. He also worked steadily in film and television. He was a pompous school principal in “Field of Dreams,” the 1989 baseball fantasy starring Kevin Costner, and a chillingly gentle jewelry store owner in “Men in Black,” the 1997 sci-fi comedy with Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith.A scene from the film “Men In Black” (1997), in which Mr. Nussbaum played a chillingly gentle jeweler.Columbia Pictures, via Alamy“Mike was the consummate ensemble player,” Mr. Jones said. “And he had an inherent warmth that infused all his characters.”Mike Nussbaum was born Myron G. Nussbaum on Dec. 29, 1923, in New York City, and grew up in Chicago. His father, Philip Nussbaum, was a fur wholesaler; his mother, Bertha (Cohen) Nussbaum, was a homemaker. Mike was a skinny, unhappy child, beaten and demeaned by his father, “a man I did not admire,” he told Chicago magazine.He was 9 and at summer camp when he discovered acting,though he froze during his first performance and had to be carried off the stage. He attended the University of Wisconsin before dropping out and enlisting in the Army during World War II.He worked as a Teletype operator in France, first in Versailles and then Reims, and was on duty on May 7, 1945, the day of the German surrender. He sent out the announcement declaring the end of the war in Europe, signing it not with his initials, as was customary, but with his full surname. He kept a framed copy as a memento.He returned to Chicago in 1946 and married Annette Brenner, who later worked in public relations for the American Civil Liberties Union and elsewhere. He went into the exterminating business because he wanted a home, a family and a stable life, which he knew he couldn’t have as a professional actor. “I wanted the American dream,” he said. Mr. Nussbaum in 2019. “I’m lucky,” he once said of his long career. “Chicago has given me chances that I don’t think I would’ve gotten in New York.”Neil Steinberg/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressHis first wife died in 2003. In addition to his daughter Karen, Mr. Nussbaum is survived by his son, Jack, a writer and activist; his second wife, Julie (Brudlos) Nussbaum; seven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Susan, a playwright, novelist and disability activist, died last year.“I’m lucky: Chicago has given me chances that I don’t think I would have gotten in New York,” Mr. Nussbaum told Patrick Healy of The New York Times in 2014. “There’s no real fame here, not like in New York. And your salary doesn’t go up when you win a Jeff” — otherwise known as The Joseph Jefferson Award, an honor given to the theater arts in Chicago — “not like when you win a Tony. But I’ve gotten steady work, great work, and all I ever wanted to do was act.” More

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      in Movies

      Just How Rich Were the McCallisters in ‘Home Alone’?

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      Fans have been debating the McCallister family’s wealth for years. We asked the Federal Reserve for answers.The battle in “Home Alone” between 8-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) and two burglars known as the Wet Bandits has unfolded on screens around the world every Christmas since the film premiered in 1990.And each year, for some viewers, the McCallisters’ grand home and lifestyle inspires its own tradition: wondering just how rich this family was.The New York Times turned to economists and people involved with the film to find the answer.The McCallisters are the 1 Percent.The McCallister family home is a real house in Winnetka, Ill., a wealthy suburb of Chicago.Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune va Getty ImagesEarly in the film, one of the burglars, Harry (Joe Pesci), tells his fellow Wet Bandit, Marv (Daniel Stern), that the McCallister home is their top target in a wealthy neighborhood.“That’s the one, Marv, that’s the silver tuna,” Harry says, before speculating that the house contains a lot of “top-flight goods,” including VCRs, stereos, very fine jewelry and “odd marketable securities.”The home is the best clue as to how much money the McCallisters have.The silver tuna, or its exterior anyway, is a real-world house at 671 Lincoln Avenue in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States, according to Realtor.com. It appears to have enough space for Kevin and his four siblings to each have their own rooms, but also can accommodate an army of visitors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Music

      Lise Davidsen Is an Opera Star Worth Traveling For

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      Her high notes emerging like shafts of sunlight, Davidsen is playing the title role in Janacek’s “Jenufa” at the struggling Lyric Opera of Chicago.A new pop song is the same streamed anywhere. And if you wanted to see Beyoncé this year, she likely came to a town not far from you, giving pretty much the same show in Barcelona as she did in Detroit.But an opera star doing a role in Berlin or London doesn’t mean she’ll bring it to New York. When it comes to the art form’s greatest singers, there are things you simply can’t hear by staying put. And Lise Davidsen is worth traveling for.Davidsen, the statuesque 36-year-old soprano with a flooding voice of old-school amplitude, has been singing the title character in Janacek’s crushing “Jenufa” at Lyric Opera of Chicago this month. Though she has been a regular presence at the Metropolitan Opera — where she will star in a new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” in winter — there’s no promise she’ll ever perform Jenufa there.So for those of us who hear in Davidsen’s rich, free tone the kind of golden-age instrument we otherwise know mostly through glimpses on old recordings, it was a privilege to be in Chicago.The added incentive was that the redoubtable soprano Nina Stemme would be onstage with her. At 60, Stemme is stepping away from the kind of dramatic touchstones, like Isolde and Brünnhilde, that Davidsen is gradually stepping into.Pavel Cernoch and Nina Stemme in “Jenufa,” directed by Claus Guth.Michael BrosilowDavidsen and Stemme in “Jenufa,” conducted by Jakub Hrusa, the young conductor recently appointed music director of the Royal Opera in London, in a grimly spare staging by Claus Guth: This was a coup for Lyric, especially since the Janacek has been running alongside a winning cast in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment,” as fizzily charming as “Jenufa” is desperately sad.Seen over the course of 24 hours this weekend, the pairing shows off the best of a venerable company that has been struggling in the pandemic’s aftermath, along with much of the American performing arts scene. Its chief executive, Anthony Freud, announced in September that he would step down this coming summer, two years before the end of his contract.Freud, 66, is retiring as the gap between opera’s costs and the demand for tickets grows ever wider. Financial pressures have prompted the company to pare back its performances; Lyric’s current season features just six mainstage productions, compared to eight in the last full season before the pandemic.But this was a weekend Freud could be proud of. The title character of “Jenufa,” set amid tangled romantic and familial relationships in a Moravian village in the 19th century, is secretly pregnant by a man who refuses to marry her. Her stepmother, a civic figurehead known as the Kostelnicka, desperate to keep the family from disgrace, kills the baby, a crime whose discovery leads to a stunned, sublime gesture of forgiveness.For this raw, agonized story, Janacek wrote tangy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths; obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters; passages of folk-like sweetness; vocal lines modeled on spoken Czech for uncanny naturalness even in lyrical flight and emotional extremity; and radiant climaxes.Davidsen’s upper voice is her glory: steely in impact but never hard or forced, emanating like focused shafts of sunlight. (In Janacek’s fast, talky music, the middle of her voice didn’t project as clearly, but this is a quibble.)For a singer of such commanding capacity, she is remarkably beautiful in floating quiet. She played the character with prayerful dignity, reminiscent of Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello”; at the beginning of the third act, when Jenufa starts to think her suffering might finally be behind her, Davidsen registered on her face and in her freshening tone a cautious but real happiness. This is a singer who acts with her voice.I’ve always thought of Jenufa and the Kostelnicka as antagonists — a spirited youngster facing a repressive older generation — but this performance movingly suggested they are more alike than different: two independent-minded women, both isolated from the village mainstream. And Stemme’s voice remains strong and even; this is not your standard acid-tone Kostelnicka; in soft duet at the start of Act II, she and Davidsen made a combination that evoked “Norma”-like bel canto.Hrusa supported that sensitivity on the podium. His vision of the score emphasizes its sheer beauty, encouraging smooth lyricism and a kind of musical patience, letting the drama unfold rather than spurring it on. Sometimes this feels like mildness, at the expense of spiky intensity. But that this “Jenufa” is played something like a sustained hymn often heightens the aching tragedy.Guth’s production emphasizes the uniformity and repetition that define this small town’s small-mindedness. A prisonlike atmosphere prevails in Michael Levine’s airy yet forbidding set, Gesine Völlm’s constricting costumes and James Farncombe’s lighting, all leached of color.Metal bed frames that line the walls in the first act are arranged, in the second, to form an eerie enclosure, reminiscent of a refugee camp, in which Jenufa has been hidden to give birth. An ominous crowd of women in “Handmaid’s Tale”-style bonnets lurks on the sidelines; a dancer is dressed as a slow-stalking raven. The folk-wedding dresses that finally add brightness in Act III convey genuine joy after so much ashy heartbreak.Fizzy joy: Lisette Oropesa in Laurent Pelly’s production of “La Fille du Régiment” at Lyric Opera.Michael BrosilowThat kind of joy permeates “La Fille du Régiment,” one of the repertory’s most delightful comedies, presented in Chicago in the winkingly stylized Laurent Pelly production that has been at the Met since 2008. (The mountain range made of old maps is still superbly silly.)Lisette Oropesa and Lawrence Brownlee are both sprightly in Donizetti’s stratosphere-touching coloratura; this opera is famous for a tenor aria with nine high Cs, and after an ovation Brownlee repeated it with flair. But the pair are even better in the score’s slower-burning, longer-arching passages of tenderness.Lyric Opera of Chicago may be in serious trouble; its chief may be taking an early exit. But, having attracted Oropesa and, especially, Davidsen to the company for these memorable debuts, Freud is leaving on a high note. More

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      in Music

      ‘The War on Disco’ Explores the Racial Backlash Against the Music

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      “The War on Disco,” a new PBS documentary, explores the backlash against the genre and the issues of race, gender and sexuality that informed it.The plan was simple enough: Gather a bunch of disco records, put them in a crate and blow them to smithereens in between games of a doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers at Comiskey Park. What could possibly go wrong?This was the thinking, such as it was, behind Disco Demolition Night, a July 1979 radio promotion that went predictably and horribly awry. The televised spectacle of rioters, mostly young white men, storming the field in Chicago, sent shock waves through the music industry and accelerated the demise of disco as a massive commercial force. But the fiasco didn’t unfold in a vacuum, a fact the new “American Experience” documentary “The War on Disco” makes clearer than a twirling mirror ball.Premiering Monday on PBS, “The War on Disco” traces the rise, commodification, demise and rebirth of a dance music genre that burned hot through the ’70s, and the backlash against a culture that provided a safe and festive place for Black, Latino, gay and feminist expression. Originating in gay dance clubs in the early ’70s and converted into a mainstream sensation largely through the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever,” disco engendered simmering resentment from white, blue-collar kids who weren’t cool enough to make it past the rope at Studio 54 and other clubs. The film details disco’s role as a flashpoint for issues of race, class, gender and sexuality that still resonate in the culture wars of today.“Saturday Night Fever” helped turn disco from a club phenomenon into a mainstream sensation.Alamy, via PBS“These liberation movements that started in the ’60s and early ’70s are really gaining momentum in the late ’70s,” Lisa Q. Wolfinger, who produced the film with Rushmore DeNooyer, said in a video call from her home in Maine. “So the backlash against disco feels like a backlash against the gay liberation movement and feminism, because that’s all wrapped up in disco.”When the Gay Activist Alliance began hosting feverish disco dances at an abandoned SoHo firehouse in 1971, routinely packing 1,500 people onto the dance floor, the atmosphere was sweaty and cathartic. As Alice Echols writes in her disco history book “Hot Stuff,” gay bars, most of them run by the mob, traditionally hadn’t allowed dancing of any kind. But change was in the air largely because of the ripple effect of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, when regulars at a Greenwich Village gay bar fought back against the latest in a series of police raids. Soon discos were popping up throughout American cities, drawing throngs of revelers integrated across lines of race, gender and sexual orientation.Some of disco’s hottest artists were Black women, including Gloria Gaynor and Linda Clifford (who is a commentator in the film). Many of the in-demand DJs, including Barry Lederer and Richie Rivera, were gay. In its heyday disco was the ultimate pop melting pot, open to anyone who wanted to move through the night to a pulsating, seemingly endless groove, and a source of liberation.“The club became this source of public intimacy, of sexual freedom, and disco was a genre that was deeply tied to the next set of freedom struggles that were concatenate with civil rights,” said Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American studies at Yale University who is featured in the film, in a video interview. “It was both a sound and a sight that enabled those who were not recognized in the dominant culture to be able to see themselves and to derive pleasure, which is a huge trope in disco.”Studio 54 in 1978, as seen in “The War on Disco.” The club was famous for its glamorous clientele and restrictive door policy.Alamy, via PBSAll subcultures have their tipping points, and disco’s began in earnest in 1977. The year brought “Saturday Night Fever,” the smash hit movie about a blue-collar Brooklynite (a star-making performance from John Travolta) who escapes his rough reality by cutting loose on the dance floor. Inspired by the movie, middle-aged thrill seekers began dressing up in white polyester and hitting the scene. The same year saw the opening of Studio 54 in Manhattan, which became famous for its beautiful-people clientele and forbidding door policy.“There was this image of the crowd outside the door on the news, with people being divided into winners and losers,” said DeNooyer, the “War on Disco” producer. “And the majority were losers because they didn’t get by the rope. It was an image that spoke powerfully, and it certainly encouraged a view of exclusivity.”At least one man had reason to take it all personally. Steve Dahl was a radio personality for Chicago’s WDAI, spinning album rock and speaking to and for the white macho culture synonymous with that music. On Christmas Eve in 1978 Dahl lost his job when the station switched to a disco format, a popular move in those days. He didn’t take the news well. Jumping to WLUP, Dahl launched a “Disco Sucks” campaign and, together with the White Sox promotions director Mike Veeck, spearheaded Disco Demolition Night.Organizers expected around 20,000 fans on July 12, 1979. Instead, they got around 50,000, some of whom sneaked in for free. Admission was 98 cents (WLUP’s frequency was 97.9), leaving attendees plenty of leftover cash for beer. Located in the mostly white, working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, Comiskey Park had a built-in anti-disco clientele.During the first game of the doubleheader, fans threw records, firecrackers and liquor bottles onto the field. By the time the crate of records was blown up, the place was going nuts, with patrons storming the field and rendering it unplayable. The White Sox had to forfeit the second game.The Disco Demolition Night promotion at Chicago’s Comiskey Park quickly spun out of control, with thousands of people storming the field.Chicago History Museum, via PBSThere were other anti-disco protests around the country in the late ’70s, but none so visible or of greater consequence. As the film recounts, reaction was swift; radio consultants soon began steering toward nondisco formats. “Disco Demolition Night was a real factor, and it did happen very quickly,” DeNooyer said. “And we hear from artists in the film who experienced that.” Gigs started drying up almost immediately.Commercial oversaturation didn’t help. Disco parodies were becoming rampant, including a memorable one in the 1980 comedy “Airplane!,” and novelty songs had been around since Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” in 1976 (followed up by the lesser-known “Dis-Gorilla” in 1977). But the film makes clear that the Disco Demolition fiasco and resultant coverage was a major factor in the death of disco’s mainstream appeal.“The War on Disco” also features a 2016 interview with Dahl, who insists racism and homophobia had nothing to do with that particular display of anti-disco fervor. Demolition Night attendees who were interviewed for the film echo this sentiment.“I would not dispute that is their truth,” Brooks said. “But I think one of the insidious ways that white supremacy has done a number on this country is that it permeates every aspect of our cultural lives. People don’t want to be told that they’re entangled in something that’s not entirely of their control.”It’s also important to note that disco didn’t die so much as its more mainstream forms ceased to be relevant. The music and the culture morphed into other dance-ready genres including house music, which ironically emerged in Chicago. When you go out and cut loose to electronic dance music, or EDM, you are paying homage to disco, whether you know it or not. The beat is still pulsating. The sexual and racial identities remain eclectic. The Who may have bid “Sister Disco” goodbye in their 1978 song, but the original spirit lives on. As Brooks put it, “Its vibrancy and its innovations just continued to gain momentum once the spotlight moved away from it.”The culture, and its devotees, outlived the clichés. Disco is dead. Long live disco. More