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      What ‘The Bear’ Gets Right About Chicago

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      The show celebrates a kind of ambition — humane and independent — that’s often neglected by Hollywood. Maybe that’s why the setting is so important.FX’s “The Bear,” now in its second season, is about grief and family and food, but there’s something else there, too. Its protagonist, Carmen Berzatto, is an accomplished chef who has worked in the vaunted kitchens of restaurants like Noma, the French Laundry and Eleven Madison Park. When the show began, he had come home to Chicago after the death of his brother, who left him a struggling shop selling a local staple, Italian beef sandwiches. Carmy could have run the place like any of the hundreds of modest lunch counters in the city, or else he could have sold it and angled to return to the world of fine dining. Instead, we watched him attempt a third thing, turning the business into a new, forward-thinking restaurant. This is the other stuff the show is about: ambition, and Chicago, and the freedom the nation’s third-largest city can offer to follow your ambitions on your own terms.“The Bear” is among relatively few TV shows that truly lean into a Chicago setting: In addition to copious shots of elevated trains and city skylines, there are nods to local culture hallmarks ranging from the obvious (Scottie Pippen, Bill Murray, Vienna Beef hot dogs) to the deeper cuts (Harold Ramis, Pequod’s Pizza, Margie’s Candies). Some of network television’s most popular procedural shows are set here — “Chicago Med,” “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago P.D.” — but like so many Chicago stories on TV, they use the city for its unmarked, adaptable qualities: It is a metropolis big enough to accommodate any type of person or story, big enough that viewers do not expect to be offered quaint local color, and yet not culturally defined in the American mind in the ways New York City and Los Angeles are. Chicago is in the sweet spot, asking for no explanation, happy to serve as a kind of median city. Insofar as it does have a national reputation, it is as an unpretentious workhorse of a place: the “City of the Big Shoulders,” the city Nelson Algren compared to loving a woman with a broken nose. (“You may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”) The sort of place a restless, plucky Midwesterner like Carmy would leave in order to pursue his ambitions, hoping to prove something to everyone back home — and the sort of place he would return to, stoic and remote, to dole out unglamorous sandwiches from a broken-nosed kind of shop.Their ambitions revolve around the excellence of the work itself.Leave it to a Chicagoan like me to note that there are, in fact, more than 20 restaurants in the city with at least one Michelin star. But “The Bear” captures something real about the city’s dining culture — and, more broadly, what you might call the geography of ambition. In one scene in the second season, Sydney Adamu, the woman who is now chef de cuisine for the new restaurant Carmy hopes to start, is discussing the menu with him when she notices his old chef’s uniform from New York, embroidered with his initials. He sees her looking at it. “New York — lame, right?” he says. Sydney replies: “I want to hate it. Like, don’t get me wrong, I do. But it looks sick, and I bet it felt really good wearing it.” It did, Carmy acknowledges; nobody here is going to deny New York’s cultural domination. But he goes on to talk about having earned Michelin stars, saying that his brain raced right past the joy of it to dread — that it felt imperative to keep them at all costs. “New York,” here, signifies a heightened awareness of status and image, stress and precarity, ruthlessness dressed as sophistication.And Chicago, for “The Bear,” is depicted — accurately — as a place where the goal is not necessarily to win status or acclaim so much as to create something great and original, ambitious without pretense, committed to excellence for its own sake rather than prestige or fame. This is the kind of chef we see Carmy transforming into, and the kind of chef we’re shown surrounding him. When Sydney, planning for the new business, visits other restaurants seeking guidance, she finds people glad to assist; at the well-regarded eatery Avec, she gets crucial advice from the real-life restaurateur Donnie Madia, playing himself. The show casts the city’s restaurant culture as sophisticated but warm, human. It continually suggests that once you abandon the ladder-climbing it associates with the coasts, ambition can be more about playing the game on your own terms or not playing it at all — pursuing your ambition without the brutal expense or atomizing ultracompetitiveness of places closer to the cultural spotlight.Chicago is in the sweet spot, asking for no explanation.In another second-season scene, Sydney has a video chat with the pastry chef Marcus, who has gone to Copenhagen to hone his skills. She has been reading “Leading With the Heart,” a book by the former Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski — a gift from her father. Her offhand summary of its lessons is a little dismissive, but Marcus, a former athlete, gets it: The team “kept drilling,” he says, grinding slowly toward excellence. Marcus receives his own lesson about ambition when he asks Luca, the chef he’s studying under, how he got so good. Luca replies that after working with a superior cook, he realized he wasn’t the best and wasn’t ever going to be the best. He came to see this as a good thing: “I could take that pressure off myself. And the only logical thing to do was to try and keep up with him.” At some point, he says, doing great things is less about skill and more about being open “to the world, to yourself, to other people.”This kind of ambition — humane and independent — is often neglected in Hollywood portrayals of driven people, but “The Bear” nails it. It’s something you encounter in the real Chicago, too. This really is a city where people are able to do unique and forward-looking things with food; where comic actors are funny in person long before they are (or aren’t) pulled to the coasts to be funny on camera; where large and underrecognized shares of Black and Latino cultural and business leaders have done their work; where there are rich and idiosyncratic scenes in theater and music and art and literature that seem to thrive regardless of whether any national spotlight will ever tilt in their direction.In “The Bear,” even in the tense run-up to the restaurant’s opening, you don’t see Sydney or Marcus burnishing their egos or waiting for people to recognize how special they are. Their moments of triumph come not from critics or crowds but from the people around them: Marcus’s presenting a dish named in memory of Carmy’s brother, or Sydney’s lovingly preparing an omelet for Carmy’s beleaguered sister, Natalie, and then lingering, vulnerable, to see how it goes over. Their ambitions revolve around the work itself and the people with whom they do it. Carmy struggles his way toward the same sensibility, even when it scares him. Cooking, he admits by the season’s end, has, for him, been about routine and concentration, about single-mindedly pursuing a goal — an approach that helped him avoid the messiness of human connection, hiding his vulnerability behind the armor of his own accomplishments.Carmy went back to Chicago because he had to. He stays because he wants to. For him, and for Sydney, and for Marcus, the point is to do a great thing, for its own sake, alongside people you care about, without much concern for image or status. “The Bear” seems to see this as a very Chicago thing. Resilient but vulnerable, ambitious but sincere, sophisticated but real, somehow too subtly original to be easily defined in the American mind — that feels like my city to me, too.Opening illustration: Source photographs by Chuck Hodes/FXNicholas Cannariato is a writer living in Chicago. He last wrote about celebrity travel shows. More

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      in Music

      A Revival of ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Seeks a New Generation of Followers

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      In staging the storied rock opera in Chicago, its creators argue that the show’s exploration of celebrity worship and childhood trauma is more relevant than ever.Thirty years ago, when the Who’s 1969 concept album “Tommy” was transformed into a rock opera for Broadway, it was hailed as a triumph of the form — a production that had finally managed to authentically marry theater and rock ’n’ roll.Fueled by the spiritual exploration of a 23-year-old Pete Townshend, the Who guitarist and songwriter, the original production of “Tommy” drew crowds of baby boomers primed with adolescent nostalgia for the story of a boy who discovers a superhuman aptitude for pinball despite not being able to see, hear or speak.The Broadway show raked in a record number of ticket sales the day after opening night, ran for nearly 900 performances and won five Tony Awards, including one for its director, Des McAnuff.With its depictions of rebellion against authority and analogies to spiritual enlightenment, the show was firmly rooted in the youth culture of the 1960s. So why would McAnuff, for whom “Tommy” was a career-defining success, take the risk of reimagining the work for today’s audiences?“Sometimes you just don’t get things out of your system,” McAnuff said in an interview shortly after his new production of “The Who’s Tommy” opened last month at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. “I felt like it was time to make it contemporary.”In resurrecting “Tommy,” McAnuff and Townshend, who wrote the book together, sought to prove that the work was not simply of an era, but carried the promise of timelessness.In 2023, McAnuff argues, Tommy’s transformation from catatonic schoolboy to a kind of charismatic cult leader resonates even more strongly when considering the modern-day culture of celebrity worship. And the show’s exploration of trauma — including post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual abuse and bullying — is something that audiences now have a much deeper understanding of.The reimagining of “Tommy” is not so much in story but in style, with McAnuff opting for futuristic austerity over 1960s nostalgia. Tommy displays his skill not on a kitschy pinball machine but a spare set piece (designed by David Korins) in which the outline of a machine is represented by narrow panels of light. The personality cult that encircles Tommy feels more sinister than in the original production.A 1972 concert staging of “Tommy” at the Rainbow Theater in London brought together, from far left, Merry Clayton (whose back is to the camera), Peter Sellers, Sandy Denny, Graham Bell, Steve Winwood and Roger Daltrey.Getty ImagesThe production, which runs through Aug. 6, has received rave reviews in Chicago, with the critic Chris Jones of The Chicago Tribune calling it a “ready-for-prime-time stunner.” The Goodman says the show is on track to be its highest-grossing production ever, a boon for the organization during a time of high anxiety around regional theater’s post-pandemic return. The show’s commercial producer, Stephen Gabriel, said several options for the production’s future are being weighed, including a Broadway run.The story at the center of this production is much the same as the one the Who told when it played its new album at Woodstock in 1969.A 4-year-old Tommy watches as his father — a British Army captain believed to have died while on duty — shows up at the family’s home, ultimately killing the mother’s new lover during the ensuing fight. Tommy then loses his senses, becoming the victim of sexual abuse by his uncle, relentless bullying by his cousin and medical exploitation by an army of invasive doctors. After the world discovers his stunning talent for pinball, he becomes a messiah-like figure with a band of devoted followers.Whether “Tommy” can become a national phenomenon again, and not just a nostalgic tribute, depends, in part, on its ability to capture a new audience.McAnuff sees Ali Louis Bourzgui, the 23-year-old lead, as the show’s “doorway to Gen Z” — though not long out of college and largely unknown, he is viewed by the director as a natural star who will be appealing to a new generation of prospective “Tommy” fans.To Bourzgui, Tommy’s meteoric rise has parallels to the frenzy over certain social media influencers, artists or tech gurus.“He gets filled up by his followers,” Bourzgui said. “He keeps feeding off that, getting more gluttonous with power, until he realizes they’re following him because they want to feed off his trauma.”Bourzgui was born 30 years after the release of “Tommy” the album, but he has his own memory of his first listen — to the vinyl, in fact — in a friend’s apartment his freshman year. He remembers feeling moved by the music, if not a little bit befuddled by the plot. (McAnuff likes to call the story a “fable,” gesturing at the suspension of disbelief required to accept Tommy’s arc from silent child to pinball wizard to cult leader.)In preparation for the role, Bourzgui pored over performance videos of the Who on YouTube, finding himself in awe of the band’s magnetism. Wary of falling into mimicry, he hasn’t watched videos of the earlier production.“We’re not in the business of presenting museum pieces,” said Roche Schulfer, the Goodman’s executive director, who was approached about staging “Tommy” before the pandemic upended the theater world.Schulfer was persuaded by McAnuff and Townshend’s ideas for an update as well as their consideration of how certain themes and language might translate onstage today.The Who performing “Tommy” in Los Angeles in August 1989. Des McAnuff developed the show for the stage in the early 1990s.Ebet Roberts/Redferns, via Getty ImagesThe question is one that theater makers across the country are grappling with: Should revived works be altered to align with the worldviews and sensitivities of present-day audiences?In “Tommy,” McAnuff and Townshend’s answer was, largely, no.For example, the lyrics “deaf, dumb and blind” are central to some of the album’s hits, including its most famous: “Pinball Wizard.” When Townshend originally wrote “Tommy” in the 1960s, the word “dumb” was commonly used to refer to someone who was nonverbal, but it is now considered to be an offensive and archaic term. McAnuff said that he and Townshend did not seriously consider changing that language, viewing it as too much of a lyrical departure in foundational songs such as “Amazing Journey.”“‘Sensory impaired’ — I don’t think it would work,” McAnuff said. “I think it’s a song that has a certain amount of pedigree and dignity.”The story behind the concept, Townshend told an interviewer in the 1970s, came from his devotion in his early 20s to the writings of the Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba — also an inspiration for one of the Who’s biggest hits, “Baba O’Riley” — who taught, as he put it, that as humans, “there are whole chunks of life, including the whole concept of reality, which escapes us.”Over the years, Townshend has described the character of Tommy as autistic, explaining that his condition was a metaphor for humanity’s limited view of reality.Revivals over the years, including one by McAnuff a decade ago in Ontario, Canada, have given the book writers the opportunity to re-examine the show’s handling of sensitive issues. Around that time, Townshend acknowledged in an interview that the rock opera does not allow for explanation or discussion around serious issues such as sexual abuse, but that audiences can consider those topics themselves in a modern context.“We have to live with the rock opera version that we did 20 years ago,” Townshend said at the time. “We also have to live with the fact that ‘Tommy’ started as a rock opera in 1968, ’69. And yet times have changed. Attitudes have changed.”In the 1990s, McAnuff, who first developed the show at La Jolla Playhouse in California, staged the sexual abuse scene in such a way that had little need for alterations today. A revolving bed suggests the violation without any significant physical touch — an approach the director views as key to protecting the child actors involved in the show.After the Broadway debut, there were some complaints that the scene was less daring than the one in Ken Russell’s provocative 1975 film, to which McAnuff responded, “That’s a real little boy up there. Does anyone actually need me to abuse that child to get the idea across?”The most significant change in the Chicago production on the issue of abuse is the removal of a short song, “Tommy’s Holiday Camp,” that brings back the sexually abusive uncle in a way that no longer seemed necessary, McAnuff said. There is also some toned-down staging in “The Acid Queen,” the wailing barnburner — performed by Tina Turner in the film version — in which Tommy’s father takes him to a prostitute and con artist who promises to cure his condition with drugs.Without being too heavy handed in any moralistic messaging, McAnuff hopes the audience sees what the intent of the work has been since the beginning.“At the end of the day, we portray what happens to him not to condone it but to condemn it,” McAnuff said. “And I think that’s the point of view of the whole piece.” More

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      in Television

      Joseph Zucchero, Whose Mr. Beef Sandwich Shop Inspired ‘The Bear,’ Dies at 69

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      Mr. Beef, the Chicago restaurant Mr. Zucchero co-founded in the 1970s, specializes in the Italian beef, a classic American sandwich. The acclaimed FX series “The Bear” was partly filmed there.Joseph Zucchero, a co-founder of the popular sandwich shop that inspired the acclaimed FX restaurant drama “The Bear,” and was where much of the series was filmed, died on March 1 at a hospital in Chicago. He was 69.His death was confirmed by his son, Christopher Zucchero, an owner of Mr. Beef, the family’s restaurant in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, who said a cause was not known.The restaurant specializes in the Italian beef sandwich, a Chicago classic made with thin-sliced roast beef and giardiniera or roasted peppers. All of that is typically piled on a sandwich roll, and it is either drizzled with or dipped in beef juice.“He loved being there,” Joseph Zucchero’s son, Christopher, said of his father. “He was there day and night.”To create “The Bear,” a series about a young chef who leaves a career in New York’s high-end restaurant scene to run his family’s sandwich shop, FX shot inside and outside Mr. Beef, fictionalized as the Original Beef of Chicagoland in the show. It also created a replica of the restaurant’s kitchen in a Chicago studio, Mr. Zucchero’s son said.The series, which premiered on Hulu last summer, drew acclaim from food writers and restaurateurs. And in a fine example of life imitating art that imitated life, its success led to a nationwide surge in demand for the Italian beef sandwich, including at Mr. Beef itself.“Mr. Beef’s always going to be attached to that, and we’re very grateful for that,” Christopher Zucchero said of the TV series. “They’re together. It’s symbiotic for sure, but I don’t want it to overshadow what my dad did.”Joseph Zachary Zucchero was born on Feb. 21, 1954. He grew up on Chicago’s northwest side and started his career as a butcher, Christopher Zucchero said.In the late 1970s, Mr. Zucchero and his brother, Dominic, opened Mr. Beef on North Orleans Street in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, a once-gritty area that has since been heavily gentrified.On a visit to the restaurant in the mid-1990s, a New York Times reporter found customers eating $3.50 Italian beef sandwiches at a Formica countertop near an autographed picture of Frank Sinatra. The short menu posted above the grill was not really necessary, because virtually everyone ordered the same thing.“You want a hot dog, you go to a hot-dog stand,” Mr. Zucchero said. “You want a beef sandwich, you come here.”In addition to his son and his brother, Mr. Zucchero is survived by his wife, Camille; his daughter, Lauren; and his sister, Claudine Grippo.Mr. Beef on North Orleans Street in Chicago in October.Aaron M. Sprecher, via Associated PressMr. Zucchero was a movie fan, his son said, and his restaurant had admirers in Hollywood. The actor Joe Mantegna and the comedian Jay Leno “would come in all the time,” Christopher Zucchero said. He said that he has been friends with Christopher Storer, who created “The Bear,” since the two were in kindergarten, and that they spent time at Mr. Beef as children.During filming, the older Mr. Zucchero visited the movie studio on Chicago’s West Side where Mr. Storer’s team had built a replica of his restaurant. What he saw made his jaw drop.“I mean, from the floor to the ceiling to the countertops to the equipment,” he told NPR last year, “you actually walked inside and walked into Mr. Beef.” More

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      in Theater

      Why Some Black Playwrights Are Saying Their Shows Must Not Go On

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      Several Black playwrights have canceled productions of their works, in some cases after performances started, because of concerns about conditions at the theaters presenting them.In Ohio, the playwright Charly Evon Simpson scuttled last month’s planned Cleveland Play House production of her latest work, “I’m Back Now,” after the director said that the theater had mishandled an actor’s report that she was sexually assaulted at the building where the theater housed artists.In Chicago, Erika Dickerson-Despenza forced Victory Gardens Theater to stop its production of “cullud wattah,” her Flint water crisis-prompted family drama, in the middle of its run last summer to protest actions that included the ouster of the theater’s artistic director.And in Los Angeles, Dominique Morisseau shut down a Geffen Playhouse production of her play “Paradise Blue” a week after its opening in late 2021, saying that Black women who worked on the show had been “verbally abused and diminished.”The steps by playwrights to halt productions of their own work reflects concerns by Black artists frustrated by what they see as a failure of theater administrators to live up to the lofty promises made during and after the spring of 2020, when George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police prompted nationwide protests and calls for change in many corners of American society, including the arts. In theater, an anonymously-led coalition of artists, known by the title of its first statement, “We See You, White American Theater,” circulated a widely read set of demands for change.“We don’t want to be pulling our plays — we are playwrights, we want our plays to be done, we are walking away from money, and we are walking away from seeing our work onstage,” Morisseau said. “But this is not an ego act and it is not a diva act. What we are doing is standing up when no one else will.”The cancellations have come just as theaters have been trying to reopen and rebuild following the lengthy pandemic shutdown.There has been notable change to address concerns about diversity and representation: An increase in the number of plays by Black writers staged on Broadway and beyond; a wave of appointments of administrators of color to high-level theater industry positions; the renaming of two Broadway houses after Black performers (James Earl Jones and Lena Horne).More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.But the cancellations reflect recurrent concern about conditions in the industry. There is pain all around — although actors are often still paid, the playwrights can lose fees and the theaters lose box office revenue and sunk production costs. And there are reputational risks: Will theaters still want to hire these artists? Will artists still want to work at these theaters?“It’s damaging to the theaters, it’s damaging to the playwrights, and it’s damaging to all the artists involved, but it puts a spotlight on issues that need a spotlight, and I hope it’s catching the field’s attention and reminding us that we haven’t solved all the problems,” said Sheldon Epps, a senior artistic adviser at Ford’s Theater in Washington, the former artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse, and the author of a new memoir, “My Own Directions: A Black Man’s Journey in the American Theater.” “We had all those conversations and all those conference calls, and the talk was valuable but clearly a lot more action is needed.”The playwright Jeremy O. Harris threatened to pull “Slave Play” from the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles to protest its dearth of works by women. After they agreed to stage more, the play, starring Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and Paul Alexander Nolan, went on.Craig SchwartzThese cancellations began in October of 2021, when Jeremy O. Harris posted on Twitter an email he had sent to the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles, saying he wanted to “begin the process” of canceling that theater’s production of “Slave Play,” his acclaimed drama about interracial relationships. The Los Angeles production was to be the first since a pair of buzzy Broadway runs, but Harris was upset that the theater had announced a season with just one work by a woman.The reaction was immediate. The company apologized publicly, and within a week had pledged that the following season at its Mark Taper Forum would feature only work by women or nonbinary playwrights. Harris then allowed “Slave Play” to proceed; the production became the best-selling show at the Taper since the pandemic shutdown.“We have nothing to lose by telling a theater that we don’t want to be their mascots any longer,” Harris said.“Here’s the thing: writing a play is an act of community service, and even in pulling the play you are doing an act of community service — that is theater as well, because the conversation that gets sparked is similar to the conversation sparked by doing the play,” he added. “The only cost is to the ego of theater administrators who have dropped the ball in upholding the politics of the playwrights they’ve programmed.”Harris ultimately praised the Center Theater Group for its responsiveness, and Meghan Pressman, the theater’s managing director and chief executive, said she was “grateful” for Harris’s confrontation, even though it was difficult.“We’re being called to task, and we learned a lot,” she said. Morisseau was next, pulling the rights for “Paradise Blue” from the Geffen. The precipitating incident has never been made public, but Morisseau said at the time that “Harm happened internally within the creative team, when fellow artists were allowed to behave disrespectfully.” The Geffen apologized, saying, “an incident between members of the production was brought to our attention and we did not respond decisively in addressing it.”In an interview, Morisseau said she considered pulling her play a last resort.“I felt there was nothing else for me to do,” she said.And why have there been several cancellations in recent months? “I think what you’re seeing is a failure of institutions and institutional leadership to take seriously the harms against Black women,” Morisseau said. “It’s nothing new to us, but it is very disappointing to experience it in a theater ecosystem that we all seek to be better. You can’t welcome us and our stories, and not welcome the people who tell our stories and the bodies on whom our stories are told.”Playwrights, unlike screenwriters, have enormous power over the use of their work, sometimes by virtue of their contracts, and sometimes by virtue of the nature of their relationships with regional theaters.Prepandemic, there were occasional instances of playwrights exercising such rights for a variety of reasons. In 2016, Penelope Skinner withdrew a Chicago theater’s right to stage her dark comedy, “The Village Bike,” after a news report detailed allegations that the theater’s leader had mistreated performers; in 2012, Bruce Norris withdrew a German theater’s right to stage his Pulitzer Prize-winning race-relations satire, “Clybourne Park,” because he was angry about plans to cast a white actor to play a Black character; and in the 1980s, several playwrights canceled productions because of a union dispute.“We encourage authors to exercise all of their contractual rights to the extent possible,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs at the Dramatists Guild of America, an association representing playwrights.For the affected theaters, the cancellations have been disruptive — in each case, tickets had already been sold. Victory Gardens, which was already imploding when “cullud wattah” was pulled, has since stopped producing shows; the Cleveland Play House and Geffen Playhouse both issued apologies.“Cleveland Play House acknowledges there were missteps in efforts to respond to a sexual assault,” that organization said in a statement last month.The financial implications vary from case to case. Morisseau said that, when “Paradise Blue” was canceled, “Every artist got paid through their contracts. I, as the writer, and the Geffen, as the institution, are the only ones who took any financial hit.” David Levy, a spokesman for the labor union Actors’ Equity Association, said that “Every Equity agreement anticipates worst case scenarios in which a production is canceled before the full run of the show is completed. When that happens, the union does our part to enforce the contract so that actors and stage managers are taken care of.” In Cleveland, the union filed grievances that led to payment to its members for the canceled show there.The current round of cancellations is directly tied to the racial reckoning that has roiled theaters over the last three years; there have been a wide array of calls for change, from term limits for industry leaders and more diverse creative teams sought by the We See You petitions, to the renaming of theaters and the use of racial sensitivity coaches won in a pact negotiated by the organization Black Theater United.Black artists have cited the issues that propelled those movements in describing their current concerns. In Chicago, Dickerson-Despenza pulled the rights to her play after the dismissal of the theater’s artistic director, Ken-Matt Martin, who was one of three Black leaders in top positions at Victory Gardens. At the time Dickerson-Despenza decried the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values” of the board. On Wednesday, the board issued a statement saying, “Victory Gardens Theater vehemently disagrees with the characterization,” noting that it had had a diverse staff and board, and adding that “it is our hope that, rather than jumping to conclusions and casting aspersions, we can all move forward with a shared goal of having a vibrant and inclusive theater community for all.”Stori Ayers, who directed both the canceled production of “I’m Back Now” in Cleveland and the canceled production of “Paradise Blue” in Los Angeles, used similar language in an Instagram post about the two experiences, citing “white supremacy theater making culture.” Both of those theaters declined to comment beyond their written statements.Simpson, the playwright who pulled the rights for “I’m Back Now” from the Cleveland Play House, said she had decided to take that step after Ayers withdrew from the production over the theater’s response to an actor who said she had been sexually assaulted in an elevator at the theater’s artist housing.“To put it simply: if the health, safety and well-being of people working on my play is in question, then there’s no reason for the play to happen,” Simpson said. “I could no longer trust that the theater was going to take care of the people putting on my show.”Simpson said she’s not sure what will happen next with “I’m Back Now,” because it was commissioned by the Cleveland Play House, and this was to be its first production. The play is about three generations of Cleveland residents, including a historical figure named Sara Lucy Bagby, who was the last person forced to return to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act.“You want the production, and you want to make it possible, and many of us are taught to be so grateful for that and to ignore things that may bother us,” Simpson said. “I didn’t ever imagine having to pull the rights.” More

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      in Music

      R. Kelly Sentenced to 20 Years for Child Sex Crimes

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      The singer will serve most of the sentence in federal prison at the same time as a 30-year term for racketeering and sex trafficking.CHICAGO — A federal judge on Thursday sentenced R. Kelly to 20 years in prison for child sex crimes, after a jury found that he had produced three videos of himself sexually abusing his 14-year-old goddaughter.In a victory for the defense, the judge ruled that all but one year of the prison sentence would be served at the same time as a previous 30-year sentence that Mr. Kelly received after a jury in Brooklyn convicted him of racketeering and sex trafficking charges.The jury in Chicago convicted Mr. Kelly of six of the 13 charges brought against him in connection with sexual abuse during the 1990s, including counts of coercing three minors into sexual activity and three of producing sex tapes involving a minor. He was acquitted of a charge that he had attempted to obstruct an earlier investigation into his abuse of the goddaughter, and two other counts of enticing minors to have sex.Federal prosecutors had argued that Mr. Kelly, 56, deserved 25 years in prison on top of his earlier sentence, citing the singer’s “lack of remorse” as a reason he would pose a danger to society if released.“The only way to ensure he will not reoffend is to impose a sentence that will keep him in prison for the rest of his life,” Jeannice Williams Appenteng, one of the prosecutors, said in court on Thursday.A lawyer for Mr. Kelly, Jennifer Bonjean, argued that her client was “likely to die in prison either way,” but that if he did not, he would not pose a threat in old age.Judge Harry D. Leinenweber agreed, saying in court that he did not think Mr. Kelly would be likely to commit the same kind of crimes in his 80s. The judge acknowledged that he would have dealt a heftier sentence if the Chicago trial had come first.As in the trial, Mr. Kelly remained mostly silent during the sentencing hearing, declining to speak on his own behalf. Taking into account a possible early release because of good behavior, Mr. Kelly could walk out of prison in his late 70s.The ruling caps a lengthy legal battle in Chicago, where Mr. Kelly was once widely viewed with pride as a product of the city’s South Side. In 2008, he was acquitted on charges of producing child sexual abuse imagery of his goddaughter, with some jurors telling reporters that they had been influenced by the lack of testimony from the young woman. She had denied to a grand jury that she was the person in an infamous tape that prosecutors said showed Mr. Kelly sexually abusing and urinating on her.But in last year’s federal trial, which followed a resurgence of scrutiny over Mr. Kelly’s treatment of girls and young women in response to the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” the woman took the stand, identifying herself as the underage girl being abused in three videos, snippets of which were shown to the jury.In Thursday’s hearing, a lawyer for the woman — identified in court as Jane — read a statement about how the repeated sexual abuse affected her life, asking that Mr. Kelly be put in jail for “as long as the law allows.”“I’ll never be able to unsee the child pornography,” she said in the statement, which was read by her lawyer, Christopher Brown. “No amount of therapy will make me normal.”Ms. Bonjean, who said she was appealing the convictions in both Brooklyn and Chicago, had lobbied for the minimum 10-year prison sentence, arguing that Mr. Kelly had suffered his own history of sexual abuse as a child and that he had intellectual disabilities that “shed some light on why he engaged in inappropriate relationships.”The additional sentence reduces the chance that Mr. Kelly would get out of prison even if his defense team wins its appeal of the Brooklyn conviction. He still faces sex crimes charges in Minnesota, which have been on hold during the federal trials. State prosecutors in Illinois recently dropped sexual abuse charges against him, citing the previous convictions.Judge Leinenweber also ordered Mr. Kelly to pay one of the sexual abuse victims $42,000 in restitution for therapy bills, denying it to the goddaughter and the third woman whose account led to a conviction. The woman who was ordered to receive the money — referred to in court as Pauline — had testified that Mr. Kelly sexually abused her repeatedly when she was a teenager, sometimes at the same time as the goddaughter.The third woman, referred to as Nia during the trial, addressed Mr. Kelly directly in the courtroom on Thursday, recounting how she met him as a “star-struck teenager” asking for an autograph in a mall but ended up “completely damaged” after the sexual abuse.“I’m not a vengeful or hateful person,” the woman said in court, “but I highly suggest you spend your time in prison reflecting.” More

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      in Music

      Prosecutors in Chicago Will Drop Abuse Charges Against R. Kelly

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      The musician is already facing decades in prison after being convicted of federal charges, prompting the Cook County state’s attorney to halt her case.Noting that the R&B singer R. Kelly is facing decades in prison after two federal convictions, the top prosecutor in Chicago said on Monday that her office planned to drop its sexual abuse charges against him.The Cook County state’s attorney’s office had been waiting for its turn to bring Mr. Kelly, 56, to trial, which it could not do before the federal court cases in New York and Chicago were brought to a jury.In 2021, Mr. Kelly was convicted on racketeering and sex trafficking charges, for which he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Last year, he was convicted on sex crimes charges, including coercing minors into sexual activity and producing sex tapes involving a minor. He is scheduled to be sentenced for that conviction next month, which could add decades to the total.“Mr. Kelly is potentially looking at never walking out of prison again for the crimes he’s committed,” Kim Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney, said at a news conference in which she announced plans to drop the charges. “We believe that justice has been served.”A lawyer for Mr. Kelly, who is mounting appeals in both federal jurisdictions, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Kelly is being held in federal prison in Chicago.The charges in Cook County, brought nearly four years ago, were a turning point in Mr. Kelly’s lengthy downfall.After a Chicago Sun-Times report alleging that he abused minors, and a failed prosecution in Chicago in 2008, Mr. Kelly became the focus of renewed scrutiny in the wake of the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” which was broadcast in January 2019 and included testimony from several women who accused the singer of abuse dating back to the 1990s.After the documentary aired, Ms. Foxx made a remarkable public request, asking anyone with sexual abuse allegations against Mr. Kelly to come forward.A month later, Mr. Kelly was charged with aggravated criminal sexual abuse involving four victims, three of whom were underage. Mr. Kelly pleaded not guilty to the charges, and he sat down for an infamous television interview with Gayle King of CBS News, in which he screamed, cursed and claimed that he did not do what he was accused of.Ms. Foxx spoke about the case against Mr. Kelly in unusually personal terms: She had been attending a Chicago high school when he was a rising R&B artist in the city, and a sex crimes prosecutor there when Mr. Kelly was tried on child pornography charges in 2008 and ultimately acquitted. Ms. Foxx has also divulged her own accounts of sexual abuse when she was a child.“I know firsthand how difficult it is for you to tell your stories,” Ms. Foxx said on Monday, noting that one of the accusers was disappointed by the decision because she had not yet had her day in court.Others involved in the case had also been involved in Mr. Kelly’s federal trial, in which a jury convicted him on six of 13 charges. The jury found the singer guilty of producing three videos of himself abusing his 14-year-old goddaughter, who took the stand last year after her direct testimony was not part of the 2008 case.Mr. Kelly was acquitted of a charge that he had attempted to obstruct an earlier investigation about his treatment of his goddaughter, among others.Part of the thinking in dropping the charges, Ms. Foxx said, was a desire to focus resources on alleged perpetrators who still walk free. She said the decision was not related to financial calculations or questions about whether the prosecution would be successful.“There are survivors — hundreds of survivors — whose files remain on our desks,” she said. “That was the calculation we made.”Robert Chiarito More

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      in Theater

      Frank Galati, Mainstay of Chicago Theater, Dies at 79

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      He brought his adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” to Broadway and won Tony Awards. He also directed the long-running hit “Ragtime.”Frank Galati, a writer, director and actor whose work in Chicago, especially his celebrated adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath,” furthered that city’s international reputation in theater, and whose long résumé included directing the Broadway hit “Ragtime,” died on Monday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 79.His husband, Peter Amster, said the cause was complications of cancer.Mr. Galati was a towering figure in Chicago-area theater for decades, working with the Goodman and Steppenwolf theaters and other houses there and teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He specialized in adaptations, and in 1988 his version of John Steinbeck’s dust-bowl epic, “The Grapes of Wrath,” was a hit for Steppenwolf.He both wrote and directed “The Grapes of Wrath,” though it took work to persuade Steinbeck’s widow, Elaine Steinbeck, to release the rights. She told The Chicago Tribune in 1988 that once she saw what Mr. Galati had done with the novel, she was glad she did.“I took the script to bed with me,” she said. “As soon as I started reading it, I sat bolt upright. I didn’t think it would be that good.”It was good enough to make the trip to Broadway, with Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney and Lois Smith leading the cast. When it opened at the Cort Theater in March 1990, Frank Rich reviewed it for The New York Times.“The production at the Cort,” he wrote, “an epic achievement for the director, Frank Galati, and the Chicago theater ensemble at his disposal, makes Steinbeck live for a new generation not by updating his book but by digging into its timeless heart.”The production earned Mr. Galati two Tony Awards, for best direction of a play and best play.Gary Sinise, left, and Terry Kinney in Mr. Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” The production’s run on Broadway in 1990 earned Mr. Galati Tony Awards for both writing and directing.Later in the 1990s Mr. Galati directed another high-profile show, the musical “Ragtime.” Based on the E.L. Doctorow novel and adapted by Terrence McNally, with music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, it opened in Toronto in December 1996 to acclaim, and in January 1998 it settled in for a two-year run on Broadway. Mr. Galati received a Tony nomination for best direction of a musical.Those were just two highlights from a career that stretched back to his college days at Northwestern, where, at the School of Communication, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965, a master’s in 1967 and a doctorate in 1971. For the Forum Theater in 1973, he adapted “Boss,” the Chicago columnist Mike Royko’s book about Richard J. Daley, the city’s longtime mayor, into a musical, for which he also wrote the lyrics; it won a Joseph Jefferson Award (Chicago’s version of the Tonys) for best new play. Other Jeffersons followed, with Mr. Galati winning for directing, writing and acting.Adaptations were a specialty — in addition to “The Grapes of Wrath,” the works he adapted included two books by Haruki Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore” and “after the quake” (Mr. Murakami’s only demand, Mr. Galati said, was that the title be rendered in lowercase letters), as well as William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and numerous others. He and Lawrence Kasdan even shared an Oscar nomination for adapting Anne Tyler’s novel “The Accidental Tourist” into the 1988 film of the same name.“Almost every novel conceals a drama,” Mr. Galati told Stay Thirsty magazine in 2014. “Some of those dramas are very hard to coax out, some jump out of the book and run up onto the stage. Of course, if the novelist creates scenes that play through brilliant dialogue, that’s half the battle. That’s very true of Steinbeck. The scenes in his books are completely stage worthy. Other writers, like Henry James, are much harder to adapt.”If he had success as an adapter, he told The New Haven Register in 2006, when “after the quake” was being staged at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., it was because he was “not afraid to keep much of the narrator’s voice.”“Long narrative passages don’t scare me in performance,” he said.Countless actors knew of Mr. Galati’s touch as a director, and many issued tributes on learning of his death.“Every actor will know what I mean when I say Frank waited for me,” Molly Regan, a member of Steppenwolf, said in a statement. “He waited for me. He cast you, and then he trusted you. Sometimes he knew me as an actor better than I knew myself.”Last year, when Mr. Galati was inducted in the Theater Hall of Fame, he returned those kinds of compliments.“I’m honored, I’m humbled, I’m grateful,” he said in his acceptance speech, “but I cannot accept this honor for myself. Rather, I dedicate this honor to my students, and to every single actor I have been inspired by and learned from. The rehearsal hall is where I have spent the happiest hours of my life.”A scene from the Broadway production of “Ragtime.” Mr. Galati’s direction of the show earned him a Tony nomination.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFrank Joseph Galati was born on Nov. 29, 1943, in Highland Park, Ill., north of Chicago. His father, also named Frank, was a dog trainer and boarder, and his mother, Virginia (Cassel) Galati, was a saleswoman with Marshall Field, the department store.He grew up in Northbrook, Ill., and enrolled at Northwestern, where one of his earliest notices resulted from his appearance in a faculty and student talent show in 1964.“A born comic, Frank Galati of Northbrook, a junior in the school of speech, made eight appearances,” The Chicago Tribune wrote. “In one, he portrayed a professor who spent so much time telling his class how far behind it was that he never caught up with the class schedule.”Mr. Galati had a lifelong fascination with Gertrude Stein, which he incorporated into his theatrical life beginning in the mid-1970s, when he directed a reading of some of her works called “Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled.” — a title borrowed from a Stein work. In 1976, for the Chicago Opera Theater, he directed “The Mother of Us All,” the Virgil Thomson opera for which Ms. Stein wrote the libretto.In 1987, at the Goodman, he staged perhaps his most ambitious Stein-inspired piece, “She Always Said, Pablo,” featuring Ms. Stein’s words and Pablo Picasso’s works — the one a writer who expanded our view of language, the other an artist who changed our way of seeing. Richard Christiansen, reviewing it for The Tribune, called it “a high point of Galati’s work as an interpretive artist.” The production was later seen at the Kennedy Center in Washington.Mr. Galati said he found Ms. Stein’s texts mesmerizing.“They’re just beautiful to listen to,” he told The Tribune in 1987. “They gallop, leap, jump and tinkle in our ears.”Mr. Galati and Mr. Amster, who had been together for 52 years and married in 2017, relocated to Florida in the mid-2000s, about the time Mr. Galati took emeritus status at Northwestern. At his death they were dividing their time between homes in Sarasota and on Beaver Island in Michigan.Both have been active in the Asolo Repertory Theater of Sarasota. Mr. Amster is directing its production of “Ken Ludwig’s The Three Musketeers,” which opens Jan. 11. Last year Mr. Galati, reuniting with Ms. Ahrens and Mr. Flaherty, directed the premiere of a new musical there called “Knoxville,” based on James Agee’s autobiographical novel, “A Death in the Family.” Mr. Galati, of course, did the adaptation.In addition to Mr. Amster, he is survived by a sister, Franny Clarkson.At the Theater Hall of Fame induction, Mr. Galati was introduced by B.J. Jones, artistic director of Northlight, a Chicago-area theater for which Mr. Galati directed the inaugural production in 1975 when it was known as the Evanston Theater Company. Mr. Jones singled out a moment in Mr. Galati’s long career that, he said, showed “the depth of his humanity”: his insistence that Susan Nussbaum, a young actress who was in a wheelchair since being hit by a car a few years earlier, be cast in the role of Gertrude Stein in the premiere of “She Always Said, Pablo.”Ms. Nussbaum, who became a disabilities-rights advocate and died last year, often cited Mr. Galati’s support as pivotal to her post-accident life. In an interview in 1994, when she was playing the Stein role at the Kennedy Center, she credited him with “always going beyond the vision that other people have seen.” More

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      in Television

      Lloyd Newman, Teenage Chronicler of ‘Ghetto Life,’ Dies at 43

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      He and LeAlan Jones recorded stories of life and death in a Chicago housing project for NPR, winning a Peabody Award and inspiring the birth of StoryCorps.Lloyd Newman, who teamed up with a fellow teenager in the 1990s to record two award-winning radio documentaries that bared the pernicious underside of growing up in a Chicago public housing project, died on Dec. 7 in Elmhurst, Ill. He was 43.His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of sickle cell anemia, his brother Michael said.Mr. Newman, the understated, harder-luck half of the duo, was 14 and in the eighth grade when he and his best friend, LeAlan Jones, 13, tape-recorded 100 hours of oral history and interviews to produce “Ghetto Life 101.” The producer David Isay transformed into a 28-minute segment on National Public Radio in 1993.In 1996, the youths won a Peabody Award, the youngest broadcasters at the time to do so, for “Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse,” a collage of recordings exploring the killing of a 5-year-old boy, tossed from the window of a vacant 14th-floor apartment in the Ida B. Wells Homes by a 10 and an 11 year old because he had refused to steal candy for them, according to the police.The two young journalists “squeezed magic from the streets of their struggling South Side neighborhood,” the reporter Don Terry wrote in The New York Times in 1997.The radio broadcasts were adapted into a book, “Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago” (1997), which they wrote with Mr. Isay.Mr. Isay had produced both documentaries, and they inspired him to establish the StoryCorps oral history project. It began with a recording booth in Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan in 2003 and since then has interviewed a half-million people, an effort to encourage mutual understanding by asking “to hear someone’s truth,” as the project puts it.Even when he was only 14, Lloyd Newman seemed unlikely to outlive his friend. “It’s easy to do wrong around here,” he told The Times in 1996. “It’s easy to get caught up by mistake.”Mr. Jones had been raised by middle-class grandparents in a private home a block away from the housing project. He graduated from high school on schedule, earned a bachelor’s degree in social science from Barat College in Lake Forest, Ill., ran for Barack Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat as the Green Party candidate in 2010 (he polled 3.2 percent) and became a mentor and professional journalist. Yet he seemed more pessimistic of the two.“Unfortunately, Lloyd and I both knew we had accomplished very little with the challenges introduced in the documentaries,” Mr. Jones said in an email this week, citing, among other metrics, the rising toll of Black teenagers killed in Chicago.Mr. Newman’s trajectory was more problematic, but he seemed more spirited.He was “whip smart, street smart, with a huge heart and a shy smile,” Mr. Isay said on NPR last week, but “he lived through more in his first dozen years than most people live in a lifetime.”Lloyd Sentel Newman was born on March 3, 1979, to Michael Murry, an alcoholic who, by the time his son was a teenager, hadn’t lived with the family for a decade, though he kept in touch with them and lived nearby. His mother, Lynn Newman, also drank heavily and died of cirrhosis when she was 35 and Lloyd was 15.Lloyd was raised in a rowhouse, part of the Ida B. Wells Homes, by a sister who was six years older. She and another sister also died of complications of sickle cell anemia.In addition to his brother Michael, he is survived by another brother, Lyndell; and a sister, Ericka Newman.Mr. Newman in 2019. He struggled academically but completed high school and attended college.Michael NewmanLloyd, who sold laundry bags with his father and peddled newspapers, struggled at Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago. But he was able to transfer to Future Commons Technical Prep High School (now closed), where he received closer supervision in smaller classes.“It isn’t hopeless,” he told The Times in 1997. “I’ll go to summer school and regular school and night school — I’ll never drop out.”He didn’t. After six years, he finally received his diploma and enrolled at Langston University in Oklahoma, though he never graduated.He returned to Chicago, where in 2006 he was arrested outside his sister’s apartment and charged with the manufacture, delivery and possession of crack cocaine.He pleaded guilty on his lawyer’s advice and was sentenced to two years’ probation. In 2021, his conviction was vacated thanks to another lawyer, Joshua Tepler, after it was determined that the evidence used to convict Mr. Newman had been faked by corrupt police officers who were implicated in more than 100 other phony arrests.In interviews, Mr. Newman said he dreamed of going to college, opening a hardware store or becoming a journalist. After moving to DeKalb, Ill., west of Chicago, to be closer to his brother, he worked as a cabby and as an Uber driver.In 2018, he was hired as a part-time shelver by the DeKalb County Library System and was later promoted to a $16-an-hour position mostly handling book loans to and from other libraries.Before he lapsed into a coma seven months ago, he and a partner were planning to open a tobacco and CBD retail store.“Ghetto 101” originated when Mr. Isay was hired at WBEZ radio, NPR’s Chicago affiliate, to contribute to a series of broadcasts inspired by Alex Kotlowitz’s book “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America” (1991).Michael Newman said that Lloyd had responded to a leaflet distributed by Mr. Isay seeking boots-on-the-ground reporters. Lloyd, he said, “thought that it would be fun and something different to do.”Mr. Kotlowitz said in an email that the project had imbued Mr. Newman with a quiet confidence and gave him a job that fit his character, as an “understated yet fiercely powerful storyteller who so relished making individual connections often with people whose lives so differed from his own.”“He was such a generous spirit and such a thoughtful soul,” Mr. Kotlowitz added. “I don’t know if he fully grasped the impact his storytelling had on others, but it inspired so many and challenged them in ways that brought us all closer.”Both youths understood the challenges they faced in the other America, the one outside the ghetto.“If we go in the store, we’re looked at wrong, as if we was going to steal,” Mr. Newman told Charlie Rose on PBS in 1997. “We’re not trusted, and most people feel that way.”By his own reckoning, Lloyd Newman might not have expected to die of natural causes. In 1997, enumerating the most common causes of death in the projects, he told The Times: “People get thrown out of windows, drowned, stabbed, shot. But a lot of that killing would stop if the government would make it livable around here. We don’t have no parks. The swings are broken. There’s nothing for people to do. There’s no fun. Life isn’t worth living without some fun.”In the documentary “Remorse,” Mr. Newman and Mr. Jones stood on the roof of the public housing building from which 5-year-old Eric Morse had been dropped from a 14th-floor window by two other young kids, or “shorties,” in the parlance of the streets. Looking over the edge, Mr. Jones asked Mr. Newman what would have gone through his mind if it was he who had been plunging to the ground.“I’d be thinking about how I’m going to land and if I’m going to survive,” Mr. Newman said. “I’d be thinking about how it is in heaven.”They mulled how long the fall would take and whether there would be time enough to say a prayer. Regardless, they concluded, Eric was so young that he would surely have gone to heaven.“Dude, you think they got a playground in heaven for shorties?” Mr. Jones asked.“Nope,” Mr. Newman said. “They don’t got a playground in heaven for nobody.” More