Children and Childhood

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Bob McGrath, Longtime ‘Sesame Street’ Star, Dies at 90

      by

      He was an original cast member who, for nearly half a century, played a sweater-clad and easygoing music teacher who dispensed advice.Bob McGrath, who played the sweater-clad neighborhood music teacher and general advice-giver on “Sesame Street” for almost half a century, died at his home in New Jersey on Sunday morning. He was 90.Mr. McGrath’s daughter Cathlin McGrath confirmed his death by email on Sunday. She said Mr. McGrath died from complications after a stroke. She said that the night before Mr. McGrath passed, his family had decorated his room for Christmas, and sung and danced around him. “We just knew that he wanted to go the way he lived.”Mr. McGrath wasn’t particularly interested when an old Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brother stopped him one night to tell him about his new project, a children’s show on public television. But then he had never heard of Jim Henson, the puppeteer, and he had never seen a Muppet. After his first meeting and a look at some of the animation, he knew this show would be different.“Sesame Street” had its premiere in November 1969, with Mr. McGrath and other cast members gathered around an urban brownstone stoop, in front of the building’s dark green doors, beside its omnipresent collection of metal garbage cans. His character, conveniently and coincidentally named Bob, was reliably smiling, easygoing and polite, whether he was singing about “People in Your Neighborhood” (the butcher, the baker, the lifeguard), discussing everyday concerns with young humans and Muppets, or taking a day trip to Grouchytown with Oscar the Grouch.Viewers were outraged when Mr. McGrath and two other longtime cast members — Emilio Delgado, who played Luis, and Roscoe Orman, who played Gordon — were fired in 2016. When HBO took over the broadcasting rights to “Sesame Street,” their contracts were not renewed.But Mr. McGrath took the news graciously, expressing gratitude for 47 years of “working with phenomenal people” and for a whole career beyond “Sesame Street” of doing family concerts with major symphony orchestras.“I’m really very happy to stay home with my wife and children a little bit more,” he said at Florida Supercon, an annual comic book and pop culture convention, later in 2016. “I’d be so greedy if I wanted five minutes more.”Robert Emmett McGrath was born on June 13, 1932, in Ottawa, Ill., about 80 miles southwest of Chicago. He was the youngest of five children of Edmund Thomas McGrath, a farmer, and Flora Agnes (Halligan) McGrath.Robert’s mother, who sang and played the piano, recognized his talent by the time he was 5. He was soon entering and winning competitions in Chicago and appearing on radio. He did musical plays and studied privately but, as a practical matter, intended to study engineering.But he was invited to attend a music camp outside Chicago the summer after his high school graduation. Teachers there encouraged him to change his plans, and he “did an about-face,” he remembered in a 2004 video interview for the Television Academy Foundation.He majored in voice at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1954. He spent the next two years in the Army, mostly in Stuttgart, Germany, where he worked with the Seventh Army Symphony. Then he went to New York, where he received a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music.He took a job with St. David’s, a private boys’ school in Manhattan. Freelance singing assignments, obtained through a vocal contractor, paid the bills until 1961, when “Sing Along With Mitch” came along. He was one of 25 male singers who appeared every week on that show, on NBC, performing traditional favorites like “Home on the Range,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”As St. Patrick’s Day approached, the program’s host and producer, Mitch Miller, asked Mr. McGrath if he knew the song “Mother Machree.” He was so impressed with Mr. McGrath’s rendition and his light lyric tenor — he had been singing the sentimental Irish American number since he was a little boy — that he doubled his salary and made him the show’s featured male soloist.After “Sing Along With Mitch” ended in 1964, the cast played Las Vegas and did a 30-stop tour in Japan. That led to an unusual chapter in Mr. McGrath’s career: teenage idol.Schoolgirls chanted his name at concerts and organized fan clubs. Their demand brought him back to Japan nine times over the next three years, and he recorded nine albums there, singing in both English and Japanese. His repertoire included Japanese folk ballads on which he was accompanied by a shakuhachi, or bamboo flute. Back home, he amused American television viewers by singing “Danny Boy” in Japanese.When “Sesame Street” began, it led to a very different collection of albums for Mr. McGrath, with names like “Sing Along With Bob” and “Songs and Games for Toddlers.”He also learned American Sign Language, which he used regularly on camera with Linda Bove, a cast member who was born deaf.Asked about important memories of his years on the series, Mr. McGrath often named the 1983 episode devoted to children’s, adults’ and Muppets’ reactions to the death of Will Lee, who had played Mr. Hooper on the show for 13 years. Another favorite was the holiday special “Christmas Eve on Sesame Street” (1978), particularly the Bert and Ernie segment inspired by the O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi.”In 1958, Mr. McGrath married Ann Logan Sperry, a preschool teacher whom he met on his first day in New York City. They had five children. He is survived by Ms. McGrath, who is 89, and their five children, Liam McGrath, Robert McGrath, Alison McGrath Osder, Lily McGrath and Cathlin McGrath, as well as eight grandchildren. He is also survived by an elder sister, Eileen Strobel.“It’s a very different kind of fame,” Mr. McGrath reflected in the Television Academy interview about his association with “Sesame Street.”He recalled a little boy in a store who came up to him and took his hand. At first he thought he had been mistaken for the child’s father. When he realized that the boy seemed to think they knew each other, Mr. McGrath asked, “Do you know my name?” “Bob.” “Do you know where I live?” “Sesame Street.” “Do you know any of my other friends on Sesame Street?”“Yep,” the boy answered and promptly gave an example: “Oh, the number 7.”Livia Albeck-Ripka More

    • 75 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Aaron Carter, Singer, Dies at 34

      by

      Mr. Carter, who released his first album at age 9 and “Aaron’s Party” at age 12, was the younger brother of Nick Carter, a member of the Backstreet Boys.Aaron Carter, the singer and actor who briefly became a teenage sensation in the early 2000s and who was known for the hit song “I Want Candy,” was found dead on Saturday at his home in Southern California. He was 34.Taylor Helgeson, a representative for Big Umbrella, an entertainment management company, confirmed Mr. Carter’s death but declined to comment on the cause.The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department responded to a call at Mr. Carter’s home in Lancaster, Calif., on Saturday and found a person dead at the residence, according to Deputy Alejandra Parra, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department. Officials said they could not yet confirm that it was Mr. Carter.Mr. Carter, who released his first album at age 9 and the popular album “Aaron’s Party (Come Get It)” at age 12, became a fixture of teenage programming and magazines and made appearances on shows like “Lizzie McGuire.”“Aaron’s Party” peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 list, selling some three million copies. He released five studio albums and was a contestant on the show “Dancing With the Stars.”His career later stalled, and in recent years he has been embroiled in legal trouble and has shared his struggles with addiction. In 2018, he released his first album in some 15 years, “Love,” to lukewarm reviews.Aaron Carter performing at the South Street Seaport in New York City in 2003.Stuart Ramson/Getty ImagesMr. Carter, who was described in The New York Times as a “tween heartthrob,” began performing at age 7, singing lead for the band Dead End for two years, according to an online biography.At 9, he was opening for the Backstreet Boys in Berlin for his first solo appearance. (His older brother, Nick Carter, was a member of the band.)The performance led to a record contract and then the release of his first single, “Crush on You.” He also opened for Britney Spears.Mr. Carter was also an actor, guest-starring in shows like “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and “7th Heaven.” He also performed on Broadway, appearing in “Seussical,” the Dr. Seuss-themed musical, and “The Fantasticks,” the world’s longest-running musical.On his sophomore album, Mr. Carter also released the song “That’s How I Beat Shaq,” with a music video featuring the basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, who has said that Mr. Carter once beat him in a game of HORSE and later asked if he could make a song about it.In 2019, Mr. Carter’s brother, Nick, and sister, Angel, said they had filed for a restraining order against him. In a statement at the time, Nick Carter said his brother had confessed to having violent thoughts about his wife and that family members “were left with no choice but to take away every measure possible to protect ourselves and our family.” Aaron Carter at the time denied the allegations. The news of the restraining order came one day after he canceled his 2019 tour, according to E! News, saying he needed to put his “health first.”Mr. Carter has been open over the years about his mental health struggles. He told People magazine in 2018 that he felt he had “hit a rock bottom personally and emotionally,” and that he had sought treatment at a wellness facility.Mr. Carter, who appeared on the Nov. 2 episode of the “No Jumper” podcast, said he was focusing on selling real estate and that he had been “Cali sober” for five years, though he said that he occasionally smoked marijuana and had been prescribed anti-anxiety medication. (“Cali sober,” short for “California sober,” is loosely taken to mean avoiding addictive substances with the exception of marijuana and alcohol.)Adam Grandmaison, the host of the podcast on YouTube, said that a close friend of Mr. Carter’s told him about his death.“I just interviewed him a couple weeks ago and it was pretty clear he wasn’t in a great place,” Mr. Gandmaison wrote on Twitter. “He was a good guy despite all the demons he was battling. I’m sad to see him go.”Throughout the interview, Mr. Carter said he considered himself a rapper, a singer, a producer, an artist and an actor, and that he was especially proud of his most recent album. He also said he hoped to make a new one soon.“I cover all bases,” he said. “It means so much more to me than the stuff I did growing up because I wrote and produced it all.”Mr. Carter said he was “never going to give up” on making music and that despite the turbulence, he had enjoyed his career. He also vowed to regain custody of his son, who Page Six reported was temporarily placed in the care of Mr. Carter’s fiancée’s mother amid domestic violence and drug use concerns.“I’m about to be 35 years old,” Mr. Carter said. “I’m a grown man and it’s time to start behaving that way and doing the right thing and focusing on myself, my career, my kid and my family.” More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Embrace the Insightful Gibberish of ‘Pingu’

      by

      This children’s show teaches everyone, even adults, to find meaning in made-up language. In the unreal early days of the pandemic, when it seemed foolish to try to comprehend the enormity of what we were collectively living through, a clay penguin reacquainted me with the clarifying power of gibberish. “Pingu” is a stop-​motion children’s television show about the titular character, a penguin tyke who lives with his family in a little igloo village at the South Pole. Initially, the episodes appear to be light five-minute affairs about the small dramas of toddler penguinhood: Pingu spits his veggies into the toilet; a municipal penguin employee turns Pingu’s play area into a parking spot. But with a balance of farce and sentiment, the show also gestures toward some of early life’s more complicated realities — sibling rivalries, parental punishment and the loneliness of childhood. Created by the German animator Otmar Gutmann, “Pingu” premiered in Europe in the early 1990s and became a worldwide phenomenon; but unlike other global cultural crazes, the show did not need to be dubbed or subtitled. Nothing could be lost in translation because there was nothing to translate. Every “Pingu” character speaks the language of Penguinese, which sounds like Thai, Indonesian, Italian, something in between or something else entirely. Yet, despite the lingo’s seeming inscrutability, it is mysteriously — hilariously — comprehensible. Take the following scene: Pingu finds himself caught between a whistling kettle, a ringing phone and his father gruffly dictating commands at him. His eyes dart around the room — kettle, phone, dad, kettle, dad, phone, kettle. The overwhelmed little penguin’s voice rises from confusion to panic to wails of despair, and he dissolves into a puddle of tears, covering his watery eyes with tiny flippers. Pingu’s mom then waddles into the frame, and with motherly resolve, takes the teapot off the boil, hangs up the phone in a nonnegotiable tone and gives the blubbering Pingu a pat on the head. We, of course, don’t know what any character has actually said. But based on body language, vocal inflection and a recognizable family dynamic, viewers intuit the scene’s meaning. Each of us conjures our own associations — in my case, maternal competence, paternal annoyance — to complement the story. The result, straddling the boundary between familiarity and strangeness, is the magic of “Pingu.”The language of ‘Pingu’ is built upon the wisdom of children: The border between sense and nonsense is poorly guarded. Rewatching the show after 25 years was an oddly unmediated, even moving experience, like dreaming or getting stoned. Emotions became sounds, language lost its hard edges and I recovered a small glimpse of childhood perception. My first brush with “Pingu” came when my Canadian cousin, a more cultured toddler than I, once brought a VHS tape of the series with her during a visit. I dimly remember watching an episode on a Sunday morning, while squeezed together in bed with my family. The show was a revelation. “Pingu” did not speak two languages, one to children, another to adults. There was no hierarchy of comprehension, no winking jokes meant to soar over young heads to keep the adults in the room vaguely interested. The language of “Pingu” is built upon the wisdom of children: The border between sense and nonsense is poorly guarded. There is raw, ridiculous power in expressing oneself through noise alone. It’s a truth adults tend to forget. As we age, we are asked to convert our emotions into more socially acceptable forms of articulation. But sometimes we have feelings that speech is ill equipped to convey, which demand audible expression nonetheless, in the form of yowls, bleats and groans.The art of speaking without words is known as “grammelot.” It’s a tradition that had its high point in the raucous early professional theaters of Commedia dell’arte (which inspired Molière, Rossini and Puccini) but may go back as far as the Greco-​Roman mimes. Theatrical troupes made up of professional actors and the occasional charlatan traversed Renaissance Europe performing plays in improvised language. Their gibberish often served as a form of mutual intelligibility with audiences, both literate and not, with whom they otherwise couldn’t communicate. In their vowel-rich dialect, these actors spoke through the ascending and descending scales of real language without using real words, tapping into a subterranean world of sense. And so it is with “Pingu,” which extends the democratic conceit of grammelot from the stage to television, accessible to all regardless of education or age. Carlo Bonomi, the Italian clown who voiced every character on “Pingu,” practiced grammelot as a young man and was perhaps one of its best living representatives until his death this August at 85. Today grammelot has largely disappeared and is kept alive only by a handful of troupes around the world. But in one of the strange, unpredictable ways cultural forms from the distant past weave themselves into the contemporary moment, it lives on in an anthropomorphic clay penguin.“Pingu” enjoys a second life online, where it is tailor-made for internet meme culture. There are “Pingu” NFTs and Maoist “Pingu” YouTube videos, and a Google search for “noot noot” — the sound Pingu makes when he feels strongly about something — returns more than 1.3 million results. But the untranslatable original maintains its sway over me. Watch it, and you’ll realize that the preverbal is not just the province of tots but a reservoir of meaning that lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness — if only we stop to listen.Gabriel Rom is a freelance journalist based in New York City. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘The Whalebone Theatre,’ by Joanna Quinn

      by

      Joanna Quinn’s “The Whalebone Theatre” breathlessly follows a trio of British youngsters from frolics on the beach to service and spycraft.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE, by Joanna QuinnWhales loom large not just in the ocean but in landlocked imaginations: these mysterious mammals, gentle but fearsome, threatened and threatening, almost unfathomably enormous. So like us with their warm blood and communication skills, and yet so not.You might never have cracked Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and still use the phrase “great white whale” to mean an obsessive but elusive goal. The massive model in the Museum of Natural History was immortalized further by Noah Baumbach in “The Squid and the Whale.” Don’t forget Carvel’s Fudgie, the ’70s sheet cake that won’t quit. And one of the most appealing characters in Lidia Yuknavitch’s recent novel “Thrust” was the wearily maternal whale who helped out the human protagonist.The 60-foot-long, seven-foot-tall creature that appears in Joanna Quinn’s first novel, “The Whalebone Theatre,” is, alas, D.O.A., found beached on the coast of Dorset, England, by a 12-year-old named Cristabel, with the all-too-apt surname Seagrave. She quickly pierces her discovery with a homemade flagpole fluttering with the family coat of arms and shouts, “A mighty leviathan, I have claimed it,” to amused fishermen in the vicinity.Taking up toy weapons and disdainful of marriage plots, Cristabel is outlined in the endearing if slightly stock shape of unconventional heroine. Having wondered, “Why aren’t there interesting girls in the stories?” while being read the “Iliad” by Maudie, the kitchen maid who for a time shares her attic bedroom, she is determined, perhaps a little overdetermined, to write her own.She and her younger half sibling, Flossie (nicknamed “the Veg” for an indelicate countenance), and cousin Digby, whom she treasures as a brother, circumvent the laws about “fishes royal” belonging to the king, and will make of the whale skeleton a giant play space: to stage actual plays, the greatest hits of Shakespeare’s catalog, with help from the bohemian adults visiting Chilcombe, the estate where they live. Quinn has said in interviews she got the idea of the skeleton set from a Kate Bush concert.She is being eagerly interviewed because “The Whalebone Theatre,” a generous slab of historical fiction cut from the same crumbling stone as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “The Cazalet Chronicles,” is a big hit in England. Centered on imperiled aristocracy during the well-trod period of 1919-45, it’s also been compared (inevitably, and to Quinn’s dismay) to “Downton Abbey,” Chilcombe being almost a character in its own right. I was reminded further, at least during its delightful first third, of Dodie Smith’s cult classic “I Capture the Castle” and of a lesser-known work by the prolific children’s book author Noel Streatfeild, “The Growing Summer,” in which four siblings are sent to live with their eccentric aunt in Ireland.Shimmeringly if sometimes a little preciously, Quinn depicts the strange, resourceful magic that can be conjured by a cluster of children when they’re neglected by selfish adults. Overseen by a vague French governess, they educate themselves with books stolen from the study, by eavesdropping from cloakrooms on drunken dinner parties and by running around with young “savages” they encounter scuttling naked around the shore, the progeny of Taras, a daring Russian artist.We first meet Cristabel when she is just 3, finding the taste of snow “disappointingly nothingy.” Her mother died in childbirth and her new stepmother, Rosalind, is vain, beautiful and cold like the snow, though not evil. Her stolid father, Jasper — still mourning his late wife, who haunts the ancestral pile like a more benign Rebecca de Winter — will soon be dead as well, tumbled from a horse (of course), his dashing younger brother, Willoughby, stepping easily into his shoes.The new couple will entertain a parade of international visitors of which Taras is the most vivid and voluble, enjoying boozy picnics by the sea and shopping expeditions — at least until it’s time to fight the Nazis. “We don’t have a choice,” Willoughby tells Rosalind, crackling his newspaper, when the doted-upon Digby enlists. “Surely they had a choice. They always had a choice,” she thinks, suspended in the recent past. “They chose extravagantly and at length. Fabrics, perfumes, tables in restaurants.”On atmospherics, “The Whalebone Theatre” is absolute aces, to borrow the patois of the Americans who drop in for cultural contrast, new-moneyed and loud. Reading it is like plunging into a tub of clotted cream while (or whilst) enrobed in silk eau-de-Nil beach pajamas. You’ll immediately want to change your font to Garamond and start saying things like “Toodle-pip, darlings!” The weather, whether misty or stormy, dappling sunshine or “moonlight falling through the window like an invitation,” is consistently impressive.Quinn is an energetic narrative seamstress. Into her giant tapestry she stitches in letters, lists, scrapbook entries, dramatic dialogue, Maudie’s sexually adventuresome diary entries and the occasional piece of concrete poetry. All of this is lovely and unforced.The novel begins to veer off the rails, however, when a grown Cristabel, “sick of pushing tiddlywinks about” as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, becomes a secret agent, wrestling down an SS officer with the sudden physical dexterity of Angelina Jolie in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” The theater of childhood has become, yes, the theater of war. Flossie joins the Women’s Land Army, remaining at Chilcombe, where the finances have become predictably shaky, skinny-dipping with a German prisoner of war as vegetables fill their onetime proscenium. Maudie writes of sleeping with a Black soldier who plays her Billie Holiday (“he calls me a tall drink of water, but he is a river and I will lay myself along him”). Like many characters, even the older principals, even the poor whale, he is just passing through.Gorgeous and a little breathless, with luscious food scenes from beginning to end — enough cake and pudding for a thousand Carvels — “The Whalebone Theatre” could have been tighter corseted. But Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold, boding more commanding work to come.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE | By Joanna Quinn | 576 pp. | Knopf | $29 More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      ‘A Perfect Party’ That Celebrates All Its Guests

      by

      Trusty Sidekick Theater Company has created an outdoor adventure for young people on the autism spectrum.Like many festive occasions, “A Perfect Party for Trees” involves giving and receiving presents: a pine cone, a jar of found objects, a song, even a badger and a bird (both are inventively portrayed by puppets). But perhaps the greatest gift this new play offers its audience is intangible: the freedom to be themselves.The show’s producer, the Trusty Sidekick Theater Company, has created an interactive woodland adventure for children ages 5 and older who are on the autism spectrum. In the show, which is filled with music, young spectators become part of the cast and can participate — or not — while happily defying the constraining conventions of traditional theater. Sit still? This production is a promenade. Be quiet? Please sing along. Don’t get your hands dirty? The plot of “A Perfect Party” includes treasure boxes, filled with trinkets and real dirt, that children can dig into.“It feels like a celebration of this audience instead of a segregation of this audience,” Leigh Walter, Trusty Sidekick’s executive creative producer and the play’s director, said in a recent interview with the show’s creative team. “It’s us, like, going into a public space and throwing a party like we’re throwing a party.”City parks provide the convivial setting. Originally scheduled to debut in June on the Autism Nature Trail at Letchworth State Park in Castile, N.Y. — a coronavirus outbreak in the cast ended that plan — “A Perfect Party” will now have multiple performances, all free, on Sunday at the Little Island Storytelling Festival in Manhattan and Sept. 23 to 25 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. (Email registration is strongly encouraged, though walk-ups are allowed, space permitting.)John Rankin III, left, as the Beekeeper, and Jesse Greenberg as the Bear.Leah ReddyThe show is a birthday tribute to the spirit of the forest. Two quirky characters — the Beekeeper (John Rankin III) and the Bear (Jesse Greenberg) — join forces with Ms. Branch (Naeemah Z. Maddox), a cheerful delivery person who transports both the birthday presents that the cast and the audience create and the offerings that the forest spirit unexpectedly leaves.Arriving in acorn-shaped containers, the spirit’s gifts include the Badger, assembled on the spot from a sock, a cushion and a couple of back scratchers, and the Thrush, whose components are a gourd, a handkerchief and a penny whistle. Designed by Eric Wright, a founder of the Puppet Kitchen, these transformative animals underscore that objects, like people, can play many roles.“We’re trying to create this perfect party for the spirit to come out and visit us,” Walter said. “And all along the way as well, our characters are sort of stumbling along in this story of self-acceptance, really of discovering themselves.”Trusty Sidekick is undergoing its own process of self-discovery. A pioneer in theater for audiences with autism — it has created two such commissions for Lincoln Center, whose Big Umbrella Festival for children on the spectrum is also this weekend — the company is staking new territory with this mobile, open-air play.“I wanted to see what we could do to give all the characters a little story arc and have the audience move with that story arc,” said Marty Allen, the show’s playwright.Because the spectators change locations twice during each 45-minute performance, Greenberg and Maddox, who are also the production’s composers, chose percussive, acoustic instruments that are easily transportable, including a kalimba (thumb piano), a pandereta (hand-held drum) and a West African bell. (At one point, children can choose from a variety of small instruments to join in.) The main musical source, however, is a lightweight glockenspiel, which Greenberg plays with yarn mallets, yielding a softer, more ethereal sound.Cast and audience members celebrating with a collective interactive puppet, the Spirit of the Trees, in a rehearsal of the show’s finale.Leah Reddy “We definitely wanted textures and timbres that would be clear, but not too intense,” he said.Reactions to sound, however, were just one consideration. In creating theater for audiences who might find certain sensations stressful, Trusty Sidekick not only tried out aspects of the show in classrooms of autistic children but also, for the first time, brought people on the spectrum onto the creative team.“There’s the common saying, ‘If you’ve met one person on the autism spectrum, you’ve met one person on the autism spectrum,’” said Andrew M. Duff, the play’s associate director, who was diagnosed when he was 2. In addition to making audience members comfortable by incorporating repetitive gestures and rhythms into the show, Trusty Sidekick will email registering families an intake form about their children’s individual sensitivities. The company can then take the responses into account when performing.Every moment of interactivity is also a choice: Audience members who don’t want to dig with their fingers can use small shovels or simply “supervise”; those who don’t want the treasure boxes’ unearthed trinkets to become gifts can hang onto them during the show.Children might even “chuck the box and dirt,” Duff said. He added, “I think my job, more than anything, was just to encourage our cast and crew to not only be prepared for that, but to look for moments of encouragement in these styles of play.”“A Perfect Party” ultimately teaches that perfection is illusory: In life, the different, the unusual, the flawed can often be the most prized. When a speech to that effect was cut during the play’s development, Twig Hu, the show’s 18-year-old assistant director, who is also on the spectrum, asked that it be restored. “It was important for people to hear,” she said.Trusty Sidekick, which also produces theater for general audiences, wants these children to know that they won’t be judged. However they choose to participate, Allen said, “there’s just not a wrong way to be here with us.” More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Archie Roach, Who Lived and Sang the Aboriginal Blues, Dies at 66

      by

      His song “Took the Children Away,” inspired by his childhood, shook Australians into confronting a grim era when their government tore apart Aboriginal families.One day in 1970, Archie Cox’s high school English class in Melbourne, Australia, was interrupted by a voice from the intercom: “Could Archibald William Roach come to the office?”An uncanny feeling took hold of 14-year-old Archie: This name, which he had no recollection of, he somehow knew to be his own.A letter to Archibald William Roach awaited him. It announced that Nellie Austin, a name he had never heard, was his mother, and that she had just died. His father and namesake was dead, too, the letter said. It was signed by Myrtle Evans, who identified herself as his sister.Within a year, Archie had dropped out of school, abandoned Dulcie and Alex Cox — who, he realized, were only his foster parents — and embarked on a quest to discover who he really was.He spent years without a home. He was imprisoned on burglary charges twice. He tried to kill himself. All the while, he kept bumping into revelations about his family and why he had been taken away from them.When he left home, there was not a name for what Archie was. But today people like him are considered part of the Stolen Generations — Indigenous Australians seized from their families as children to be assimilated into white society.This history is known thanks in no small part to Mr. Roach, who turned his wayward life into the material for a career as one of Australia’s best-loved folk singers, and who in doing so dramatized the plight of his people.He died on July 30 at a hospital in Warrnambool, a city in southeastern Australia, his sons Amos and Eban announced on his website. He was 66.The announcement did not cite the cause, but Mr. Roach had struggled with lung cancer and emphysema, requiring him to perform while breathing through a nasal cannula.His rise to prominence began in the late 1980s and early ’90s, on the strength in particular to one autobiographical song: “Took the Children Away.” He performed it at Melbourne Concert Hall when he opened for the popular Australian rock singer Paul Kelly.“There was this stunned silence; he thought he’d bombed,” Mr. Kelly recalled to The Guardian for a 2020 article about the song’s impact. “Then this wave of applause grew and grew. I’d never heard anything like it.”Mr. Kelly was a producer of Mr. Roach’s first album, “Charcoal Lane,” released in 1990. When the two toured together, Aboriginal audience members approached Mr. Roach, saying they, too, had been taken from their families.“He started to realize it was a much broader story,” Mr. Kelly said.The song became a national hit. “When he sings ‘Took the Children Away,’ or any of the tracks on ‘Charcoal Lane,’ it cuts through like great blues should,” Rolling Stone Australia wrote in 1990. “The experience becomes universal.”In a 2020 article commemorating the 30th anniversary of “Charcoal Lane,” Rolling Stone Australia credited “Took the Children Away” with helping to inspire a landmark 1997 government report estimating that as many as one in three Indigenous children were seized from their families between 1910 and 1970.Fourteen more albums followed “Charcoal Lane,” ranging in style from blues to gospel, while Mr. Roach’s wife, Ruby Hunter, gained renown of her own as a musical partner of Mr. Roach’s, and as a songwriter in her own right.The Aboriginal singer and songwriter Emma Donovan told The Guardian that when she was growing up, “we’d see Archie and Ruby on TV.”“They were our royalty, our king and queen,” she said.Archibald William Roach was born in the Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve, in southwestern Australia, on Jan. 8, 1956. When he was older, he recovered a memory of a tall man with long limbs and curly hair reaching toward him while police officers were grabbing him. That man, he realized, was Archibald, his father.He was raised largely by the Coxes. The implications of the fact that he was Black and that the Coxes were white dawned on Archie only gradually.His foster father, who was Scottish, longed for his homeland, and at night tears came to his eyes as he sang ballads around the family’s organ. “For years I thought I missed Scotland,” Mr. Roach wrote in “Tell Me Why,” his 2019 memoir. “I took great joy in sharing those songs with Dad Alex, because I wanted to be close to him, and I also wanted to understand the power that the songs had over him.”Mr. Cox gave Archie his first guitar. After Archie left home at 15, he never saw his foster parents again.He took a circuitous path to the return address on the letter he had received, in Sydney; by the time he arrived, his sister had left, without informing her neighbors of her next destination.A homeless one-armed Aboriginal man named Albert took care of Archie, showing him where in Sydney to sleep free of charge and teaching him how to panhandle. Archie began drinking with his new Aboriginal friends from morning till night.“I look back now and see the darkness that would have touched every moment unless we numbed it with beer and port and sherry,” he wrote in his memoir. “We were part of an obliterated culture.”He built a life from openness to chance and the coincidences that ensued. Archie found his family by running into one of his sisters at a bar in Sydney. On a coin flip, he decided to visit the South Australia city of Adelaide, where he met Ms. Hunter, who would become the love of his life. She, too, was an Aborigine who had been taken from her parents.Chance also granted Mr. Roach knowledge about his past. In 2013, he stumbled across the first photographs he had ever seen of his father as a boy, and of his grandmother.He learned that there were dangers in trying to recover tradition. He and his peers sought approval from elders before going on dates with other Aboriginal people, to ensure that they were not related. Taking up the old profession of his father and brother, Mr. Roach became an itinerant boxer. He realized in the middle of one bout that he was fighting his own first cousin.At other times he earned a living by picking grapes, pushing sheep up kill runs at an abattoir and doing metalwork at a foundry. He often lost jobs in a blur of drunkenness. The binges induced seizures. During one bender, overcome with despair at his prospects as a father and husband, he tried hanging himself with a belt. After more than a decade of patience, Ms. Hunter left him.Mr. Roach was jolted into sobriety. He found work as a health counselor at a rehab center in Melbourne. He rejoined Ms. Hunter and their two sons, and he threw himself into writing songs.“Like my daddy before me/I set ’em up and knock ’em down/Like my brother before me/I’m weaving in your town,” he wrote in “Rally Round the Drum,” a song from the early 1990s about his boxing days.“Have you got two bob?/Can you gimme a job?,” he wrote in the 1997 song “Beggar Man.”“At 15 I left my foster home/Looking for the people I call my own/But all I found was pain and strife/And nothing else but an empty life,” he wrote in “Open Up Your Eyes,” which was not released until 2019.Mr. Roach at Carrara Stadium on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, in 2018. His songs helped uncover the history of the Indigenous Australians known as the Stolen Generations.Dita Alangkara/Associated PressComplete information about his survivors was not available, but in addition to his sons, Mr. Roach and Ms. Hunter unofficially adopted 15 to 20 children. The impetus in some cases was simply encountering a young person on the street looking “a little worse for wear,” he told the Australian newspaper The Age in 2002.Ms. Hunter died suddenly in 2010 at the family home in Gunditjmara country, in southeast Australia, the ancestral land of Mr. Roach’s mother.As “Took the Children Away” grew in fame, even to the point of overshadowing Mr. Roach’s other work, he was often asked whether he got sick of singing it.“I say, ‘Never,’” he told ABC News Australia in 2019. “It’s a healing for me. Each time I sing it, you let some of it go.” More