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      in Theater

      Hinton Battle, Three-Time Tony Winner in Musicals, Dies at 67

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      He won awards for his roles in “Sophisticated Ladies,” “The Tap Dance Kid” and “Miss Saigon” — the most ever in the category of best featured actor in a musical.Hinton Battle, a dazzling dancer who won the first of his three Tony Awards in 1981 for his performance in the Duke Ellington musical revue “Sophisticated Ladies” after learning how to tap dance in the weeks leading up to opening night, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 67.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Leah Bass-Baylis, a family spokeswoman, who danced with him on Broadway. She did not provide a cause.“Some people are born with the spirit of the dance,” said Debbie Allen, the dancer, choreographer and actress, who had known Mr. Battle since he was 16. “Hinton Battle was that kind of person.” She added: “He was just technically superior to anyone who came close to him. He had rhythm and style. You were looking at a supernova.”Mr. Battle auditioned for “Sophisticated Ladies” several years after he originated the role of the Scarecrow in “The Wiz,” the all-Black adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz,” when he was 18. Trained as a ballet dancer, he didn’t know how to tap and felt the pressure of being in a show with virtuoso tappers like Gregory Hines and Gregg Burge.Mr. Battle playing the Scarecrow with Stephanie Mills as Dorothy in the Broadway musical “The Wiz” around 1975. Hulton archive/Getty ImagesAt his audition, Mr. Battle said that he fudged a soft-shoe routine.“I panicked,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “It used to be you didn’t need to know how to tap. Tap was out for so long, and there wasn’t much of it to see.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Michael Watford, a Minister of Gospel House Music, Dies at 64

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      His signature hit, “So Into You,” was omnipresent in 1994 — the rare record “you heard at every club,” one D.J. said. But his time at the top was brief.Michael Watford, a church-trained club singer whose baritone boomed over the world’s dance floors for much of the early 1990s, and in the process helped birth a subgenre of club music known as gospel house, died on Jan. 26 in Newark. He was 64.His cousin Lorie Watford said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was dementia.Mr. Watford’s signature hit was “So Into You,” a jubilant ditty that paired his romantic, yearning vocal, inspired by Luther Vandross, with insistent strings, a lush piano line, and frequent handclaps and drum rolls. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard dance chart in April 1994, only to be replaced a week later by Barbara Tucker’s “Beautiful People” — on which Mr. Watford provided backing vocals.“There were different styles among house D.J.s, and different songs that appealed to their particular crowds,” said Tony Humphries, a D.J. and producer who helped push Mr. Watford to the top of the dance-music heap by playing his early records on his weekly radio show on WRKS (Kiss-FM) and during his marathon sets at Club Zanzibar in Newark (where the video for “So Into You” was shot). “But there was a smaller number of records everyone had to have, songs you heard at every club, and ‘So Into You’ was absolutely one of those.”Little Louie Vega, a producer and D.J. who between 1992 and 1994 had his hand in more than a dozen songs that reached the top of the dance charts, said of Mr. Watford: “He comes from church. You could tell that from the way he sings, and he brought that to the music.” Mr. Vega worked with Mr. Watford on “My Love,” a song from his first and only album, “Michael Watford,” released by EastWest/Atlantic in 1994.Michael Wayne Watford was born in Suffolk, Va., on July 20, 1959, but grew up largely in Newark. His mother, the Rev. Betty Brower of the Clinton Memorial AME Zion Church, was a gospel singer who performed in the 1970s with the Alvin Darling Ensemble. His stepfather, George Brower, was also a gospel singer.He is survived by his mother; two younger brothers, Duncan and Terrance Artis Watford; his children, Michael Watford Jr., Symphony Watford and Taylor Watford; and two stepsiblings, Ruby Washington and Erroll Brower. His marriage to Joanne Collins ended in divorce. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Is TikTok Over?

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      The app once offered seemingly endless chances to be charmed by music, dances, personalities and products. But in only a few short years, its promise of kismet is evaporating.How much time do I spend on TikTok? I can tell you which chiropractor is demonstrating their technique without even seeing their face. I know which fashion content creator is partial to Rei Kawakubo, and who has a preposterous Carol Christian Poell collection. I know which New York City microinfluencers go on vacation together, and which creators are building a modest following joking about the music of a small scene of rappers who make Playboi Carti sound like Kendrick Lamar.Through endless hours of scrolling — an hour a day, at least, for several years now — I’ve been accumulating hyperniche expertise predicated on my interests, conscious and subconscious. The result has been a gathering of online characters that, at this point, shape my cultural consumption far more than any celebrity or news source.This is what TikTok intends to do, tapping into pure id, drilling down on what you know and what you might want to know in hopes that you never leave the app’s forever scroll. Of all the social media platforms, it holds the greatest promise of kismet. It’s the one that has seemed most in tune with individual taste and most capable of shaping emerging monoculture.But increasingly in recent months, scrolling the feed has come to resemble fumbling in the junk drawer: navigating a collection of abandoned desires, who-put-that-here fluff and things that take up awkward space in a way that blocks access to what you’re actually looking for.This has happened before, of course — the moment when Twitter turned from good-faith salon to sinister outrage derby, or when Instagram, and its army of influencers, learned to homogenize joy and beauty. (Some apps, like the TikTok precursor Vine, were shuttered before ever becoming truly tiresome.) Similarly, the malaise that has begun to suffuse TikTok feels systemic, market-driven and also potentially existential, suggesting the end of a flourishing era and the precipice of a wasteland period.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Theater

      Chita Rivera Tributes Pour in From Rita Moreno, the Cast of ‘Chicago’ and More

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      Onstage and off, she was celebrated as a pathbreaking triple-threat who left a huge legacy in musical theater and dance.Chita Rivera created several memorable Broadway characters that are now considered part of the canon, including the role of Velma Kelly in the original production of “Chicago.” So when the cast of the long-running Broadway revival took to the stage of the Ambassador Theater in New York on Tuesday night just a few hours after her death was announced, it was only natural that they would pay tribute to her.After the performance the cast assembled onstage as Amra-Faye Wright, who plays Kelly now, recalled Rivera as a “Broadway giant,” who championed other dancers.“I feel still an impostor in the role because it belonged to Chita Rivera,” Wright said, as cast members dabbed their eyes. “She created it. She starred in the original production of ‘Chicago’ and she lives on constantly in our hearts, on this stage, in every performance. We love you, Chita.”Rivera’s death on Tuesday at the age of 91 inspired an outpouring of testimonials from fans and colleagues, elected officials and stars of stage and screen, who recalled her as a pathbreaking triple-threat who left a huge legacy in musical theater and dance.The audience at “Chicago” listened as Rivera was recalled as a “Broadway giant.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn Instagram, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer, writer and actor, described Rivera as “The trailblazer for 🇵🇷 on Broadway,” using an emoji of the Puerto Rican flag, and called her “an absolute original.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Theater

      Chita Rivera’s Ballet Roots Shaped Her Dancing

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      Chita Rivera saw herself as a dancer, and that’s fitting: Her early ballet training was her secret weapon — and it never left her body.Chita Rivera grew up to be a Broadway queen, but you can’t leave out that she was a ballet kid. Her training began after a botched jump at her family home in Washington, D.C. Rivera — still Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero at the time — landed on the coffee table. It shattered.Her energy needed to be more than merely contained; it needed to find a release. It was her mother’s idea that the release might come in the form of dance, specifically ballet. She took Rivera to the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet, where she was introduced to Doris Jones, the esteemed teacher who became like a second mother. Jones, she wrote in her memoir, changed her life. “Are you willing to work hard, Dolores?” Rivera recounted Jones asking her at that meeting. “Harder than you’ve ever worked before?”She was. And she did. Rivera, who died on Tuesday at 91, always considered herself more a dancer than a musical-theater star. (She even called her 2005 musical revue “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life.”) “The natural inclination of dancers is to keep to themselves,” she wrote. “It’s the work that matters.”And a dancer is never satisfied. Broadway may be where Rivera flourished, but her foundational home was ballet. She and another Jones-Haywood student, Louis Johnson — who went on to have a spectacular career as a choreographer and dancer — were taken to New York for an audition at the School of American Ballet. They both got scholarships.The School of American Ballet, formed by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein in 1934, is the training ground of New York City Ballet. Rivera didn’t know it at the time, but the man auditioning her was Balanchine himself. “Something about the instructor made me want to please him,” she wrote.At first joining City Ballet was her dream, but that changed when she became aware of Janet Collins, then the only Black teacher at School of American Ballet. Her classes were a mix of modern dance, ballet and the technique of the choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. Rivera also started going to the Palladium Ballroom, the Midtown dance hall, for its Latin Nights. Soon she was, as she writes, “out on the dance floor fusing my ballet training with the salsa, mambo and rumba steps I was learning.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Music

      How Did Melanie’s ’Brand New Key” Hit No. 1?

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      Melanie’s “Brand New Key” is just one of many weird songs that somehow topped the Billboard charts.When Melanie’s “Brand New Key” debuted in 1971, some people were confused. What did the singer, who died on Tuesday at 76, mean when she sang about having a brand-new pair of roller skates and someone else having a brand-new key?Melanie told interviewers that she wrote the song in 15 minutes, after ending a 27-day fast, and that it was intended to be cute. The folk singer said that it did not have a deeper meaning, though many thought its playful lyrics about biking and roller skating were really about sex (“Don’t go too fast but I go pretty far”). It sounded strange, like a song out of time — Melanie said she intended it to hearken to the 1930s — sung with what could now be called a warbling “indie girl voice.” And it somehow hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.The song has lingered in pop culture, from a lip sync battle between Jimmy Fallon and Melissa McCarthy to a post-apocalyptic DJ playing it endlessly on “Kids in the Hall.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Movies

      New (and Old) Moves for a Choreographer to Hip Hop’s Stars

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      For Fatima Robinson, choreographing “The Color Purple” was far more than a job. It was a callback to her youth, before becoming known for her pop work.The choreographer Fatima Robinson made her name, at 21, with an epic Michael Jackson video. Two decades later, she orchestrated the moves for 1,000 performers at a Super Bowl halftime show. Then she rose to become Beyoncé’s director of choreography.But among the most meaningful work of her career has boiled down to a series of handclaps.When Robinson was growing up in Los Angeles, her mother took her and her two younger sisters to see “The Color Purple” — a family milestone. After that, “I saw the movie probably every year of my life,” she said. The girls were inspired by the onscreen sisters’ patty-cake-style routine; they made the claps their own and share it to this day, often in emoji form. If “we’re getting on each other’s nerves,” Robinson said, it’s a symbol of peace. “We know that’s, like, that special love that we have for each other.”Now, as the choreographer for the latest version of “The Color Purple,” a movie musical directed by Blitz Bazawule, she helped devise the onscreen clapping pattern for the young siblings Celie and Nettie. “It was sooo special,” Robinson said. “That sister love in this movie is so what I have with my sisters.”“The Color Purple,” based on the Broadway musical of Alice Walker’s seminal Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, arrives with a mantle of heavyweight backers and performers, including the producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg and the stars Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, Taraji P. Henson and Colman Domingo. In Robinson, 52, they added perhaps the most elevated hip-hop and R&B choreographer working today, who has worked in music, TV, film and live events, including Super Bowl halftime shows in 2022 and 2011. (She was also recently named a creative director for the Knicks City Dancers.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      An Opera Superfan’s Surprise Gift: $1.7 Million for the Arts

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      Lois Kirschenbaum, who died in 2021, made the donations to cultural groups from unexpectedly large life savings.When Lois Kirschenbaum, a cultural aficionado who was a fixture at the Metropolitan Opera for more than half a century, died in 2021 at 88, star singers gave tributes and fellow fans offered remembrances.But that was not the end of Kirschenbaum’s relationship with the arts.Though even her closest friends didn’t know, Kirschenbaum, a former switchboard operator who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, had made plans to give away a large share of her life savings — some $1.7 million — to cultural groups upon her death. After years of legal proceedings, donations of $215,000 apiece have started to arrive, surprising groups like New York City Opera, American Ballet Theater, Carnegie Hall and the Public Theater.“I was just astonished,” said John Hauser, the president of the George and Nora London Foundation for Singers, one of the recipients. “I had no idea that she had that kind of money.”Kirschenbaum had no spouse, siblings or children, and lived a no-frills lifestyle, working as a switchboard operator for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organization, until her retirement in 2004. On most nights, she traveled by bus and subway to Lincoln Center, where she secured free or cheap tickets just before performances began.Kirschenbaum was known to rush to collect autographs after performances at the Metropolitan Opera.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesElena Villafane, a lawyer for the executor of the estate, said that Kirschenbaum had “an incredibly frugal, Depression-era lifestyle.” Her father was an optometrist who died in 1990, Villafane said; his first and second wives died before him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More