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      Bill C. Davis, Who Had a Hit Play With ‘Mass Appeal,’ Dies at 69

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostBill C. Davis, Who Had a Hit Play With ‘Mass Appeal,’ Dies at 69He was an unknown playwright in his 20s when his comic drama about a priest and a seminarian drew raves off and on Broadway. It was turned into a movie.Bill C. Davis in an undated photo. His play “Mass Appeal” was a “moving and very funny comedy about the nature of friendship, courage and all kinds of love,” Frank Rich wrote.Credit…via Davis familyMarch 5, 2021Updated 6:07 p.m. ETBill C. Davis, whose play “Mass Appeal” was a hit both off and on Broadway in the early 1980s and has been performed countless times since, died on Feb. 26 in Torrington, Conn. He was 69.His sister, Patricia Marks, said the cause was complications of Covid-19.Mr. Davis was virtually unknown in theater circles and still in his 20s when he wrote “Mass Appeal,” a two-character comic drama in which a middle-aged Roman Catholic priest finds his complacency challenged by an outspoken young seminarian. A friend — a priest, in fact — sent the play to the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, who in turn brought it to Lynne Meadow, the artistic director of the Manhattan Theater Club.Ms. Meadow, in a telephone interview, recalled first reading the play.“I put it down and I had this feeling of lucidity,” she said. “It was crystal clear what he was trying to talk about.”The play, directed by Ms. Fitzgerald, opened at Manhattan Theater Club in spring 1980 to rave reviews. “There are few more invigorating theatrical experiences than hearing the voice of a gifted writer for the first time,” Frank Rich’s review in The New York Times began.“Though ‘Mass Appeal’ starts out as a debate between two men on the opposite sides of a generational-theological gap,” Mr. Rich wrote, “it quickly deepens into a wise, moving and very funny comedy about the nature of friendship, courage and all kinds of love.”The play, starring Milo O’Shea as the older man and Eric Roberts as the younger one, enjoyed an extended run at Ms. Meadow’s theater before moving to Broadway, where Michael O’Keefe replaced Mr. Roberts. It ran for 212 performances at the Booth Theater, earning Tony Award nominations for Ms. Fitzgerald and Mr. O’Shea.Mr. Davis adapted the play for a 1984 film version that starred Jack Lemmon as the priest and Zeljko Ivanek as the younger man.Mr. Davis’s subsequent plays were performed Off Broadway and in regional theaters (one, “Dancing in the End Zone,” about the tribulations of a college football star, had a brief Broadway run in 1985), but none approached the success of “Mass Appeal,” which was beloved by both audiences and actors. A 1982 production in Colorado starred Charles Durning and John Travolta.For Ms. Meadow, “Mass Appeal” led to an enduring friendship with Mr. Davis.“He was a person who loved the theater and loved ideas,” she said. “He was innocent and wise at the same time.”The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      Tony Hendra, a Multiplatform Humorist, Is Dead at 79

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTony Hendra, a Multiplatform Humorist, Is Dead at 79He took his British brand of satire to nightclubs, TV, film (“This Is Spinal Tap”) and National Lampoon. But a memoir led to a sex-abuse accusation.Tony Hendra at his home in New York in 2004. He had a peripatetic career as a stand-up comedian, actor and writer.Credit…Tina Fineberg/Associated PressMarch 5, 2021Updated 2:48 p.m. ETTony Hendra, a humorist whose wide-ranging résumé included top editing jobs at National Lampoon and Spy magazines and a zesty role in the mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap,” died on Thursday in Yonkers, N.Y. He was 79.His wife, Carla Hendra, said the cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which was first diagnosed in 2019.Mr. Hendra, who was British but had long lived in the United States, began writing and performing comedy while a student at Cambridge University, traveling in the same circles as future members of the Monty Python troupe. In 1964 he and his performing partner, Nick Ullett, took their stage act to the United States, and from there he fashioned a steady if peripatetic career doing stand-up comedy, writing and editing for various publications, acting and publishing books.One of those, “Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul” (2004), was his account of his long relationship with a Benedictine monk named Joseph Warrilow, who, he wrote, had helped ground him through personal setbacks and instances of moral turpitude and led him back to an appreciation of the Roman Catholic faith of his childhood; as he put it late in the book, “The spiritual muscles I hadn’t used for decades began to acquire some tone.”“Father Joe” received glowing reviews. Andrew Sullivan wrote in The New York Times Book Review that it “belongs in the first tier of spiritual memoirs ever written.”But it had at least one detractor: Jessica Hendra, Mr. Hendra’s daughter from his first marriage. She submitted an unsolicited Op-Ed essay to The Times stating that Mr. Hendra had sexually abused her on several occasions when she was a girl, something not mentioned in his book. The Times didn’t publish the essay, but instead assigned an investigative reporter to look into the accusation.Mr. Hendra’s memoir received glowing reviews but was denounced by his daughter, who said it failed to mention that he had sexually abused her. He denied the accusation.Credit…Penguin Random HouseA month after Mr. Sullivan’s review, the newspaper published an account of her allegations under the headline “Daughter Says Father’s Confessional Book Didn’t Confess His Molestation of Her.”“It’s being seen as completely confessional, totally honest, the whole story,” Ms. Hendra, who was then 39, told the paper. “It’s not the whole story. By not saying anything, I felt I was being complicit in it. This book is an erasing of what happened to me.”In 2005 Ms. Hendra published a memoir of her own, “How to Cook Your Daughter,” in which she recounted what she said had been done to her. Mr. Hendra denied her accusations.Anthony Christopher Hendra was born on July 10, 1941, in Willesden, England, northwest of London. His mother, he wrote in “Father Joe,” was a “good Catholic” but “didn’t allow the precepts of the Gospels and their chief spokesman to interfere much with her daily round of gossip, bitching, kid-slapping, neighbor-bashing, petty vengeance, and other middle-class peccadilloes.” His father was not Catholic but because of his job — he was a stained-glass artist — “spent far more time inside churches and knew far more about Catholic iconography than his nominally Catholic brood.”Mr. Hendra attended St. Albans School, in southeast England, and was intent on becoming a monk when, he wrote in his memoir, Father Joe advised him instead to accept the scholarship he had been offered at Cambridge. There he became less preoccupied with religion and more interested in satire. By 1961 he was performing with the Cambridge Footlights theatrical group, doing comic routines in its annual revue as part of a cast that included John Cleese and Graham Chapman, who later in the decade would be among the founders of the groundbreaking Monty Python.Mr. Hendra formed a comedic partnership with Mr. Ullett, the two “purveying a nightclub-accessible form of the then fashionable political satire launched by ‘Beyond the Fringe’ and ‘That Was the Week That Was,’” as Mr. Hendra put it in a 1998 article in Harper’s Magazine, name-checking two pillars of late-’50s and early-’60s British comedy. In London they shared a bill with the American comic Jackie Mason, who offered to help them give New York a try.In 1964 they did. One of their first appearances was at the Greenwich Village club Café Au Go Go, opening for Lenny Bruce.“And a delightful introduction to America it was,” Mr. Hendra wrote in the introduction to “Last Words” (2009), his friend George Carlin’s memoir, which he finished after Mr. Carlin died in 2008. “The third night of the gig, undercover N.Y.P.D. cops arrested Lenny as he came off stage — allegedly for obscenity but as likely for being too funny about Catholics.”Mr. Hendra, right, performing on television with Nick Ullett. The two maintained a comedy partnership throughout the 1960s.Credit…Donaldson Collection/Getty ImagesMr. Hendra and Mr. Ullett worked the comedy circuit for the rest of the 1960s, often bombing in clubs outside New York, their droll British sense of humor not meshing with sensibilities in places like Dallas and the Catskills. They also turned up on television, including on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”“It’s a legendary show, but for comedians it was like playing a mausoleum,” Mr. Hendra said in a 2009 interview on Don Imus’s radio program. The audience was full of “Long Island car dealers and their wives” who were too uptight to laugh, he said, as was the host.“We used to call it the night of the living Ed,” he said.Hendra & Ullett never made it into comedy’s top tier, but the two worked regularly. They even appeared in a musical version of “Twelfth Night” at the Sheridan Square Playhouse in Manhattan in 1968, Mr. Hendra as Sir Toby Belch and Mr. Ullett as Sir Andrew Aguecheek. “Mr. Hendra’s bluffness and the wraithlike woebegone simpering of Mr. Ullett had quality,” Clive Barnes wrote in The Times.Seeking a steadier income, Mr. Hendra abandoned the comedy act in 1969 to try his hand at television writing on the West Coast. He had two moderately successful years, writing for “Playboy After Dark” and “Music Scene,” but when his manager got him a high-profile job writing for a coming special sponsored by Chevrolet, he torpedoed his own career. He was “deeply into the burgeoning environmental movement,” Mr. Hendra wrote in Harper’s in 2002, and decided to take out advertisements in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter in the form of an open letter to James Roche, chairman of General Motors, scolding him for the company’s record on pollution.“I was flooded with supportive calls from Hollywood’s nascent left,” he wrote, “and I was finished in network television.”He headed back East and into his stint at National Lampoon.The magazine was founded in 1970 by alumni of The Harvard Lampoon, and Mr. Hendra wrote for it from the beginning. In 1971, he was made managing editor, and he remained at the magazine for much of the decade. It was the Lampoon’s most fruitful period, and Mr. Hendra helped turn it into a franchise, with books, record albums and more.John Belushi, left, and Alice Playten performing in “National Lampoon’s Lemmings” at the Village Gate in Manhattan in 1971. Mr. Hendra produced, directed and helped write the show, a revue full of rock parodies.Credit…National LampoonIn 1972 he produced, directed and helped write “National Lampoon’s Lemmings,” a revue full of rock parodies that ran at the Village Gate in Manhattan. The idea, Mr. Hendra wrote in Harper’s, was to stage the show just long enough to record a live album, since the first National Lampoon album, “Radio Dinner,” had met with some success earlier that year.Instead, “Lemmings” became an Off Broadway hit. Among the cast were Chevy Chase and John Belushi, still three years away from becoming household names as part of the original “Saturday Night Live” troupe. Another cast member was Christopher Guest, who 12 years later would take rock parody to new heights as a writer and star of “This Is Spinal Tap,” Rob Reiner’s deadpan fake rock documentary.In that film, Mr. Hendra played Ian Faith, the not-terribly-competent manager of a heavy metal band that was struggling to draw crowds on a tour. (He tells the band the cancellation of a Boston concert isn’t a big deal because “it’s not a big college town.”)Mr. Hendra was the last editor in chief of the initial incarnation of the satirical magazine Spy, holding the position for about a year before the publication folded in early 1994. He was not involved in the magazine’s revival later that year.Mr. Hendra at the New York premiere of a film about National Lampoon in 2015. He wrote for the magazine from its inception in 1970 and was its managing editor for many years. Credit…Laura Cavanaugh/Getty ImagesMr. Hendra and Ron Shelton wrote the screenplay for a 1996 boxing comedy, “The Great White Hype,” which starred Samuel L. Jackson, Damon Wayans and Jeff Goldblum.“With a gleeful script by Tony Hendra and Ron Shelton,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The Times, “not to mention a gamely funny cast, this raucous film comes close to what it’s after: delivering a race-conscious ‘Spinal Tap’ for the world of sports.”After the fallout over “Father Joe,” Mr. Hendra kept a low profile, although in 2006 he did publish his first novel, “The Messiah of Morris Avenue,” about a not-too-distant future in which the religious right is running America.He married Judith Hilary Christmas in 1964; they divorced in the 1980s. In 1986 he married Carla Meisner. In addition to her, he is survived by his daughter Jessica and another daughter from his first marriage, Katherine; three children from his second marriage, Lucy, Sebastian and Nicholas; a brother, Martin; two sisters, Angela Hendra and Celia Radice; and four grandchildren.Mr. Hendra lived in Manhattan. Carla Hendra said he loved his adopted country and even during his illness, which causes loss of muscle control, remained engaged in politics. One of his last smiles, she said, came when he learned the results of the presidential election in November.“He was an immigrant who sailed from London into N.Y. Harbor on the SS United States after being given free passage in exchange for performing stand-up,” she said by email. “What was to be a two-week visit became 57 years, because he believed in the promise of America.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Henry Goldrich, Gear Guru to Rock Stars, Is Dead at 88

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHenry Goldrich, Gear Guru to Rock Stars, Is Dead at 88The owner of Manny’s Music in Manhattan, he brought wah-wah to Hendrix and Clapton and connected musicians with equipment that helped define their styles.Henry Goldrich in an undated photo in front of his store, Manny’s Music, which until it closed in 2009 was the largest and best-known of the cluster of music shops on West 48th Street in Manhattan.Credit…via Ian GoldrichMarch 4, 2021, 6:29 p.m. ETWhen asked about his musical ability, Henry Goldrich would often demur, “I play cash register.”His stage was Manny’s Music in Manhattan, where Mr. Goldrich, the longtime owner, supplied equipment to a generation of rock stars. But even though he sold instead of strummed, Mr. Goldrich secured an important role in rock by connecting famous musicians with cutting-edge equipment.“To these guys, Henry was the superstar,” his son Judd said. “He was the first guy to get gear they had never seen before.”Mr. Goldrich died on Feb. 16 at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his other son, Ian, who said he had been in frail but stable health.Manny’s, which closed in 2009 after 74 years in business, was long the largest and best-known of the cluster of music shops on the West 48th Street block known as Music Row.It was opened in 1935 by Mr. Goldrich’s father, Manny, and it was a second home for Henry since his infancy, when the shop’s clientele of swing stars doted on him. Ella Fitzgerald would babysit for him in the shop when his parents went out for lunch, Ian Goldrich said.By 1968, when his father died at 62, Henry Goldrich had largely taken over operations and had turned the shop into an equipment mecca and hangout for world-renowned artists.He did this by expanding its inventory of the latest gear and by solidifying connections with suppliers that helped him consistently stock high-level instruments and new products.Mr. Goldrich sold guitars to Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend and many others. He was not happy about Mr. Townshend’s penchant for smashing them.Credit…Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesAt a time before rock stars were lavished with the latest equipment straight from the manufacturers, Manny’s was favored by top musicians searching for new gear and testing out new equipment.These included two guitar gods of the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton — to whom, Ian Goldrich said, his father recommended the wah-wah pedal, an electronic device that immediately became a staple of both musicians’ approaches. He added that Hendrix would buy scores of guitars on credit and have Mr. Goldrich fine-tune them to the guitarist’s demanding preferences.Many rock and pop classics were either played or written on instruments sold by Mr. Goldrich.John Sebastian, founder of the Lovin’ Spoonful, recalled in an interview how Mr. Goldrich in the mid-1960s helped him select the Gibson J-45 he used on early Spoonful recordings like “Do You Believe in Magic?”Mr. Goldrich similarly matched James Taylor with a quality Martin acoustic guitar early in his career, his son Ian said. And Sting used the Fender Stratocaster Mr. Goldrich sold him to compose “Message in a Bottle” and many other hits for the Police before donating it to the Smithsonian Institution.The photos on the Manny’s Wall of Fame constituted a Who’s Who of popular music. Credit…Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesIn 1970, he sold the Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour the 1969 black Stratocaster he played on many of the band’s seminal recordings. It sold at auction in 2019 for a record $3,975,000.Pete Townshend of the Who would order expensive electric guitars by the dozens from Mr. Goldrich, who was not happy when he heard about the guitarist’s penchant for destroying his instrument onstage for theatrical effect.“It was good business,” Ian Goldrich said, “but my father was annoyed that Pete was breaking all the guitars he was selling him.”Unlike many of his flamboyant rock-star customers, Mr. Goodrich always dressed conventionally in a sport coat and kept a blunt demeanor that put his customers at ease.“He had a gruff personality; he treated them all the same,” Ian Goldrich said. “He’d tell Bob Dylan, ‘Sit in the back and I’ll be with you in a minute.’”There was the day in 1985 — it was Black Friday, and the store was packed — that Mick Jagger and David Bowie stopped by together, creating a commotion that halted sales. An annoyed Mr. Goldrich quickly sold them their items and rushed them out.“My father was like, ‘What are you guys doing here today?’” Ian recalled. “He didn’t throw them out, but he was not happy.”When the band Guns N’ Roses asked to shoot part of the video for their 1989 hit “Paradise City” in the store, Ian Goldrich recalled, his father agreed only reluctantly, saying, “OK, but we’re not shutting down for them.”Ever opinionated, Mr. Goldrich told Harry Chapin in 1972 that his new song “Taxi,” at nearly seven minutes, was too lengthy to be a hit. (It reached the Top 40 and is now considered a classic.) And he told Paul Simon, who as a boy had bought his first guitar at Manny’s, that he thought Simon and Garfunkel was a “lousy name” for a group.But he also advised new stars in a fatherly way not to squander their newfound wealth.“He’d take them aside and say, ‘You’re making money now — how are you going to take care of it?’” Ian Goldrich said.From left, the singer Richie Havens, the singer and radio host Oscar Brand and Mr. Goldrich at a celebration of Manny’s Music’s 50th anniversary at the Rainbow Grill in 1985.Credit…Marilyn K. Yee/The New York TimesHenry Jerome Goldrich was born on May 15, 1932, to Manny and Julia Goldrich, and grew up in Brooklyn and in Hewlett on Long Island. After graduating from Adelphi College, he served in the Army in Korea in the mid-1950s and then went to work full time at Manny’s.His father opened the store on West 48th Street, a location he chose because it was close to the Broadway theaters and the 52nd Street jazz clubs, as well as numerous recording studios and the Brill Building, a hub for music publishers. In 1999, Mr. Goldrich sold Manny’s to Sam Ash Music, a rival store, which largely retained the staff until Manny’s closed in 2009.In addition to his sons, Mr. Goldrich is survived by his wife, Judi; his daughter, Holly Goldrich; seven grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Mr. Goldrich often used his celebrity clientele to market the store. “He recognized value of these people being in the store and it made the business, certainly,” his son Judd said.When a young Eric Clapton, then with the group Cream, was stuck in New York without the money to fly home to England, he offered his amplifiers to Mr. Goldrich to raise funds.“He said, ‘I’ll buy them from you as long as you stencil them with the Cream logo,” Ian said.Then there was the store’s Wall of Fame, thousands of autographed publicity photos of famous customers that constituted a Who’s Who of popular music. Mr. Goldrich helped cultivate the photos, many of which were inscribed to him, and often kept his staff from stacking merchandise in front of them.Mr. Taylor, in a video interview, described being mesmerized by the photos as a teenager and being proud when his own was added. “It was sort of an inside thing, not as celebrated as a Grammy or a gold record or a position on the charts,” he said. “But definitely you had arrived if you were included on that wall.”Mr. Goldrich became close friends with many musicians, including the Who’s bassist, John Entwistle, who attended Judd’s bar mitzvah in New Jersey and hosted the Goldrich family at his Gothic mansion in England. Ian remembered the band’s drummer, Keith Moon, sitting on his father’s lap while drinking cognac at a screening of the film “Tommy.”In a video interview, Mr. Goldrich described selling the violinist Itzhak Perlman an electric violin. When Mr. Perlman tried bargaining, Mr. Goldrich parried by asking if he ever reduced his performance fee.“He said, ‘It’s different, I’m a talent,’” Mr. Goldrich recalled. “I said, ‘I’m a talent in my own way, too.’”That talent was palpable to Mr. Sebastian when he asked Mr. Goldrich to allow him to test out his stock of Gibson acoustic guitars in a merchandise room.“Henry’s famously prickly demeanor receded slightly,” Mr. Sebastian recalled, and he agreed to open early the next morning to allow him in.“He knew exactly what I wanted,” he said. “And I’ll be damned if I didn’t catch Henry smiling as he made out the bill.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Erica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostErica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48Best known as a regular on a local morning talk show, she also wrote plays and acted in movies. She died of complications of Covid-19.Erica Watson  was a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning TV talk show in Chicago. She also did stand-up comedy and acted in movies.Credit…Patti K. GillMarch 4, 2021, 6:23 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.When a candidate for state’s attorney in Cook County, Ill., held a lunchtime fund-raiser in downtown Chicago in 2016, the campaign hired a local comedian and television personality named Erica Faye Watson to warm up the crowd.Ms. Watson had never met the candidate, Kim Foxx, but that didn’t keep her from diving into an extended riff about Ms. Foxx’s hair. “I had never been publicly roasted before,” Ms. Foxx said in an interview. “I was like, who is this woman?”But the jokes were just a setup for Ms. Watson’s real point: what it would mean to have a Black woman as the county’s chief prosecutor, and how proud she would be to see Ms. Foxx in that role. The two became fast friends.“She was very much about empowering Black women,” said Ms. Foxx, who is now in her second term. “She was fighting not just for herself but for people like her.”Ms. Watson was a Chicagoland celebrity, best known as a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning talk show on WLS-TV, Chicago’s ABC affiliate. She also performed stand-up comedy, wrote and directed plays and acted in movies.Ms. Watson died on Saturday in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She was 48. The cause was Covid-19, Patti Gill, her former agent, said.“Erica was a hidden gem of Chicago and a voice for overlooked businesses and causes,” said Ms. Gill, who cast her in “BlacKorea,” a short film she wrote, in 2017.Erica Faye Watson was born on Feb. 26, 1973, in Chicago, to Henry Watson, a postal worker, and Willie Mae Watson, a homemaker.Her survivors include her parents and her brother, Eric.Ms. Watson attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was a fixture on the school’s Black arts scene.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      Roger Englander, Producer of ‘Young People’s Concerts,’ Dies at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRoger Englander, Producer of ‘Young People’s Concerts,’ Dies at 94He collaborated with the charismatic conductor Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic for 14 years of programs aimed at educating children about the joys of music.Roger Englander, foreground, in 1955. He was the production force behind Leonard Bernstein’s televised Young People’s Concerts beginning in 1958. Credit…University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research CenterMarch 4, 2021, 5:56 p.m. ETRoger Englander, the Emmy Award-winning producer and director of the acclaimed Young People’s Concerts, which featured the magnetic Leonard Bernstein leading the New York Philharmonic, died on Feb. 8 at a hospital in Newport, R.I. He was 94.The cause appeared to be pneumonia, said Michael Dupré, his companion and only survivor.Mr. Englander was a staff director at CBS in 1958 when he and Mr. Bernstein began collaborating on the Young People’s Concerts, embracing the mission to educate children about the joys of music. Mr. Englander had years earlier helped stage operas by Gian Carlo Menotti.“Lenny totally trusted Roger,” said the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Corigliano, who was an assistant to Mr. Englander for the Young People’s Concerts. “If he weren’t comfortable with the director, it would have been impossible. But he didn’t have to worry.”He added, “Lenny adored him.”The concerts, initially mounted at Carnegie Hall and later at Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, have become a classic of educational programming and a powerful presence in the lives of many musicians, and musically minded people, even today.Mr. Bernstein was their undisputed star. He wrote his own scripts; talked to guest musicians like the pianist Andre Watts; played the piano to illustrate his commentary; and led the Philharmonic in classical, folk, jazz and pop music.But he left the TV production to Mr. Englander, who regarded the scores selected by Mr. Bernstein as his directing guide.“The choice of pictures — wide views, close-ups, tracking shots, rapid-fire montages or slow, languorous dissolves from one shot to another — is determined by the music itself,” he wrote in an essay for “Leonard Bernstein: The Television Years,” a 1985 exhibition at the Museum of Broadcasting in New York (now the Paley Center for Media). “The orchestra score becomes the shooting script, and the music holds all the answers for the director’s task of translating sound into picture.”Using shots from as many as eight cameras — two of them on the stage and one trained, from behind the orchestra, on the emotive Mr. Bernstein — Mr. Englander directed all 53 hourlong episodes of the concerts, which were staged and broadcast intermittently over the years through 1972.A reviewer for The New York Times wrote in 1964 that Mr. Englander had “again demonstrated that although confined to the limits of the concert stage, he is extremely adept at mobile camerawork, which always keeps the viewer interested.”His work on the concerts brought him an Emmy in 1965.Mr. Englander, left, with the conductor Andre Kostelanetz at Avery Fisher Hall, which was formerly Philharmonic Hall and is now David Geffen Hall, at Lincoln Center. Credit…Dan J. Coy/New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital ArchivesRoger Leslie Englander was born on Nov. 23, 1926, in Cleveland. His father, William, owned a men’s clothing store, where his mother, Frieda (Osteryoung) Englander, also worked.At Cleveland Heights High School, Roger studied piano, French horn and trumpet and achieved an early ambition — to be a conductor — by leading the school’s band and orchestra. He studied drama, composition and theory at the University of Chicago and graduated in 1945.He quickly became associated with opera. In 1946, he was the stage manager for the debut of Mr. Bernstein’s production of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass. He also worked briefly at the Chicago Opera Company for its conductor, Fausto Cleva.Over the next few years, he staged several of Mr. Menotti’s operas, including two, “The Telephone” and “The Medium,” in 1948, on WPTZ-TV in Philadelphia, an NBC affiliate. He distilled his knowledge of opera into a book, “Opera: What’s All the Screaming About?” (1983).Mr. Englander started at CBS in the early 1950s, working on news, sports and public affairs programs. He also directed episodes of the cultural program “Omnibus” about the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the Vienna Boys Choir and the French horn.In 1957, he had an idea for a musical series for children and pitched it to a CBS executive, but the interview did not seem to go well. A few days later, he learned that the executive “had actually been interviewing me for a totally different music series that his boss, William S. Paley, had cooked up with Leonard Bernstein,” Mr. Englander wrote in his essay for the 1985 Bernstein exhibition, referring to the chairman of CBS.Leonard Bernstein conducting a Young People’s Concert in 1958 with the New York Philharmonic. One of the eight cameras involved in the productions was always trained on him.Credit…CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesThe Young People’s Concerts debuted in January 1958 with a program called “What Does Music Mean?,” and the reviews were favorable. Without a commercial sponsor, though, Mr. Englander worried that the series would not last long.But when Newton N. Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, famously excoriated television as a “vast wasteland,” CBS saw an opening to demonstrate that not all its programming was drivel. It moved the concerts from Saturday afternoons to Sundays at 7:30 p.m. More people tuned in, and Shell Oil signed on as the first sponsor.During and after his tenure on the Young People’s Concerts, Mr. Englander worked on musical segments for NBC’s “Bell Telephone Hour” — which earned him a Peabody Award in 1959 — and the Emmy-nominated “Vladimir Horowitz: A Television Concert at Carnegie Hall” (1968), which CBS carried. He recalled how that virtuoso pianist had to be persuaded to give his first recital on television.“I think what finally broke down Horowitz’s resistance,” he told The Evening Sentinel of Carlisle, Pa., “was the question: ‘Don’t you wish there had been film in Franz Liszt’s time so you could see him play the piano?’”After his CBS years, Mr. Englander staged Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” (“The Soldier’s Tale”), a theater piece conducted by Leon Fleisher, narrated by John Houseman and mimed by Bil Baird’s marionettes at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan; wrote an interactive CD-ROM musical guide to Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”; and produced a series of videotapes for Music Theatre International in which writers and composers of Broadway musicals described their production techniques.But Mr. Englander understood that the concert series with Mr. Bernstein was the acme of his career. He called them “53 of the best hours that music on television had ever seen — to this day.”Mr. Englander in 1990. He directed all 53 of the Young People’s Concerts and remained active in music productions in later years.Credit…Michael DupreOne of the young people who paid rapt attention to him was Jamie Bernstein, one of Mr. Bernstein’s three children. When she was 12, she recalled in a phone interview, she would observe Mr. Englander in the production truck outside Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall).“He was like a wizard, with the score marked up in front of him, calling the shots,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Ready, Camera 3’— the one on the French horn — and he’d snap his fingers and Camera 3 came up on the central monitor. It was exciting to watch.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Moufida Tlatli, Groundbreaker in Arab Film, Dies at 78

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTHOSE WE’VE LOSTMoufida Tlatli, Groundbreaker in Arab Film, Dies at 78With “The Silences of the Palace,” a story of oppressed women in colonial Tunisia, she was first female director from the Arab world to achieve worldwide acclaim.Hend Sabri starring in Moufida Tlatli’s “The Silences of the Palace.” In a film that explored the stifling of women, she played the daughter of a servant of Tunisian princes.Credit…CinetelefilmsMarch 4, 2021, 4:50 p.m. ETMoufida Tlatli, the Tunisian director whose 1994 film “The Silences of the Palace” became the first international hit for a female filmmaker from the Arab world, died on Feb. 7 in Tunis. She was 78.Her daughter, Selima Chaffai, said the cause was Covid-19.“The Silences of the Palace,” which Ms. Tlatli directed and co-wrote with Nouri Bouzid, is set in the mid-1960s but consists largely of flashbacks to a decade earlier, before Tunisia achieved independence from France.The protagonist, a young woman named Alia (played by Hend Sabri), reflects on the powerlessness of women in that prior era, including her mother, Khedija (Amel Hedhili), a servant in the palace of Tunisian princes. Alia’s memories prompt a revelation that she has not achieved true autonomy even in the more liberated milieu of her own time.“Silences” won several international awards, including special mention in the best debut feature category at Cannes, making Ms. Tlatli the first female Arab director to be honored by that film festival. It was shown at the New York Film Festival later that year. In her review, Caryn James of The New York Times called it “a fascinating and accomplished film.”In an interview, Hichem Ben Ammar, a Tunisian documentary filmmaker, said “Silences” was “the first Tunisian movie that reached out to the American market.”Its significance was particularly great for women in the Arab world’s generally patriarchal film industry, said Rasha Salti, a programmer of Arab film festivals. Though “Silences” was not the first feature-length film directed by an Arab woman, “it has a visibility that outshines the achievements of others,” she said.Moufida Ben Slimane was born on Aug. 4, 1942, in Sidi Bou Said, a suburb of Tunis. Her father, Ahmed, worked as a decorative painter and craftsman at palaces of the Tunisian nobility. Her mother, Mongia, was a homemaker. Moufida, one of six children, helped care for her younger siblings. As a teenager she spent nights at a local movie theater watching Indian and Egyptian dramas.She grew up during a period of social reform under the Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba, a supporter of women’s rights. In high school, Moufida’s philosophy teacher introduced her to the work of Ingmar Bergman and other European directors. In the mid-1960s, she won a scholarship to attend the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Paris. After graduating, she continued living in France until 1972, working as a script supervisor.In Tunisia, Ms. Tlatli became admired as a film editor, working on such classics of Arab cinema as “Omar Gatlato” and “Halfaouine.” “Silences” was her debut as a director.The movie’s theme of silence is dramatized by the refusal of the servant Khedija to tell Alia the identity of her father. Alia never solves this mystery, but she does glimpse a brutal reality: how her mother had quietly suffered through sexual bondage to the palace’s two princes.Silence is a hallmark of palace culture. During music lessons in the garden and at ballroom parties, aristocrats make small talk and servants say nothing. Discretion signifies gentility. Yet that same discretion also cloaks the palace’s sexual violence and muzzles its victims. Female servants learn to communicate with one another through grimaces or glares.“All the women are within the tradition of taboo, of silence, but the power of their look is extraordinary,” Ms. Tlatli said in a 1995 interview with the British magazine Sight & Sound. “They have had to get used to expressing themselves through their eyes.”Ms. Tlatli discovered that this “culture of the indirect” was ideally suited to the medium of film.“This is why the camera is so amazing,” she said. “It’s in complete harmony with this rather repressed language. A camera is somewhat sly and hidden. It’s there, and it can capture small details about something one is trying to say.”After “Silences,” Ms. Tlatli directed “The Season of Men” (2000), which also follows women of different generations contending with deeply ingrained social customs. Her final film was “Nadia and Sarra” (2004).In 2011, Ms. Tlatli briefly served as culture minister of the interim government that took over Tunisia following the ouster of the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. “She commands respect not only as a filmmaker and film editor, but also because she was not co-opted by the system,” Ms. Salti, the film programmer, said.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Tlatli is survived by her husband, Mohamed Tlatli, a businessman involved in oil and gas exploration; a son, Walid; and five grandchildren.Ms. Tlatli was inspired to make a movie of her own after giving birth to Walid and leaving him with her mother, following Tunisian tradition, even though her mother was already caring for four sons of her own. Her mother had long been a “silent woman,” Ms. Tlatli told The Guardian in 2001, before falling ill with Alzheimer’s disease and losing her voice.Her mother’s life, she said, had become “insupportable, exhausting, suffocating.”Ms. Tlatli spent seven years away from film as she raised her children and helped her mother. The experience gave her a sense that unexamined gulfs lay between women of different generations, much like the one she would portray between a mother and daughter in “Silences.”“I wanted to talk with her, and it was too late,” she said about her mother in 1995. “I projected all that on my daughter and thought, Maybe she wasn’t feeling close to me. That made me feel the urgency to make this film.”Lilia Blaise contributed reporting from Tunis.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Bunny Wailer, Reggae Pioneer With the Wailers, Dies at 73

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBunny Wailer, Reggae Pioneer With the Wailers, Dies at 73He was the last surviving original member of the group, which also featured Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Together they helped spread the music of Jamaica worldwide.Bunny Wailer, one of the founders of the seminal reggae group the Wailers, in performance in 2016.Credit…Mediapunch/ShutterstockMarch 2, 2021Updated 6:28 p.m. ETBunny Wailer, the last surviving original member of the Wailers, the Jamaican trio that helped establish and popularize reggae music — its other founders were Bob Marley and Peter Tosh — died on Tuesday at a hospital in Kingston, Jamaica. He was 73.His death was confirmed by Maxine Stowe, his manager, who did not state a cause.Formed in 1963, when its members were still teenagers, the Wailers were among the biggest stars of ska, the upbeat Jamaican style that borrowed from American R&B. On early hits like “Simmer Down” and “Rude Boy,” the three young men — who in those days wore suits and had short-cropped hair — sang in smooth harmony, threading some social commentary in with their onomatopoeic “doo-be doo-be doo-bas.”“The Wailers were Jamaica’s Beatles,” Randall Grass of Shanachie Records, an American label that worked extensively with Bunny Wailer in the 1980s and ’90s, said in a phone interview.By the early 1970s, the Wailers — now in loose clothes and dreadlocks — became one of the flagship groups of a slower, muskier new Jamaican sound: reggae. The group’s 1973 album “Catch a Fire,” with songs like “Concrete Jungle” and “Slave Driver,” is one of the canonical releases of so-called roots reggae, with a rock-adjacent production style and socially conscious lyrics.Marley and Tosh were the group’s primary songwriters and lead vocalists. But Bunny, who also played percussion instruments, was a critical part of their harmony style. Among fans at least, the three men settled into character roles like reggae superheroes.“Peter Tosh was the real militant one, then Bob was the poetic revolutionary humanist,” said Vivien Goldman, the author of “The Book of Exodus: The Making and Meaning of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Album of the Century” (2006). “Bunny was regarded as the spiritual mystic.”Born Neville Livingston, he took the name Bunny when he joined the group; he was variously credited as Bunny Livingston or Livingstone before settling on Bunny Wailer in the 1970s.The Wailers toured Britain and began to build international acclaim, but by 1973 the original trio had split up. Marley, heading toward global stardom, began performing under the billing of Bob Marley and the Wailers. Bunny disliked touring and, as a follower of the Rastafari faith, he’d been uncomfortable performing in bars, viewing them as unsuitable venues for the group’s spiritual message.Neville Livingston was born in Kingston on April 10, 1947, and grew up in the village of Nine Mile in St. Ann Parish, off the northern coast of Jamaica. He and Marley met as children there, and for a time Marley’s mother, Cedella, lived with Neville’s father, Thaddeus, in the Trench Town section of Kingston.The two friends met Peter Tosh — whose real name was Winston McIntosh — through Joe Higgs, of the Jamaican pop duo Higgs and Wilson. Early on the Wailers also included Junior Braithwaite and Beverly Kelso, and they recorded with top producers of the day like Coxsone Dodd, Leslie Kong and Lee (Scratch) Perry.After leaving the Wailers, Bunny continued to make music, including his first solo album, “Blackheart Man,” in 1976; he produced it himself, wrote most of the songs and released it on his own label, Solomonic. But while Marley and Tosh toured widely, Bunny largely stayed in Jamaica, where he built a powerful mystique.He made his New York debut in 1986 at Madison Square Garden, with opening acts and backup groups, like the vocal ensemble the Psalms, that he had chosen to represent Jamaican musical history. Three years later, when he performed at Radio City Music Hall, Jon Pareles of The New York Times described the show as being “like a gospel service with a reggae beat,” with Bunny dressed in a robe decorated with the silhouette of Africa, a Star of David, the Lion of Judah and marijuana leaves.Bob Marley died of cancer in 1981. Peter Tosh was shot to death in 1987.According to Ms. Stowe, Bunny Wailer’s survivors include 13 children, 10 sisters, three brothers and grandchildren. Ms. Stowe said that Jean Watt, his partner of more than 50 years, had dementia and had been missing since May.Bunny won the Grammy Award for best reggae album three times. Two of those albums were tributes to Marley.He was given Jamaica’s Order of Merit in 2017. Peter Phillips, a minister in Jamaica’s parliament, said that his death “brings to a close the most vibrant period of Jamaica’s musical experience” and called him “a good, conscious Jamaican brethren.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Derek Khan, Onetime Stylist for Hip-Hop Stars, Dies at 63

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostDerek Khan, Onetime Stylist for Hip-Hop Stars, Dies at 63He was an architect of the over-the-top look known as “ghetto fabulous.” Later, unable to support his own lavish lifestyle, he fell from grace.The fashion stylist Derek Khan at his home in Dubai in 2008. He presided over the marriage of pop music and high fashion that began in the 1990s. Credit…Daryl Visscher for The New York TimesFeb. 28, 2021, 12:36 p.m. ETDerek Khan, a celebrated fashion stylist to hip-hop and R&B stars like Salt-N-Pepa, Pink and Lauryn Hill who later fell far from those glittering heights, died on Feb. 15 at a hospital in Dubai. He was 63.The cause was complications of Covid-19, said Beverly Paige, a former vice president of publicity at the Island Def Jam Music Group.Mr. Khan, a diminutive man with outsize charm and a high-wattage smile, presided over the marriage of pop music and high fashion that began in the 1990s. A creator of the over-the-top look known as “ghetto fabulous,” he persuaded rap stars to shed the street wear they were known for, dressing them in Fendi, Chanel and Dolce & Gabbana and bedazzling them with jewels from Harry Winston, Piaget and Van Cleef & Arpels.When he was the in-house stylist for Motown, he was known as “Dolce” around the office, Andre Harrell, once the chief executive of that label — and a hip-hop star maker as founder of Uptown Records — told The New York Times in 2003. Mr. Khan swathed Mary J. Blige in yards of white fur (accessorized with Fendi sunglasses and a Rolls-Royce) for the cover of her album “Share My World.” He introduced Pink to Chanel, and he oversaw Lauryn Hill’s haute bohemian look for her debut album, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” which made her a Vogue darling.He was a visual impresario of a cultural shift in the music business that put hip-hop front and center and made its stars into mainstream fashion avatars.In the mid-1990s Ms. Paige of Island Records hired him to overhaul the look of the three young women who made up Salt-N-Pepa: Cheryl James, Sandra Denton and Diedra Roper, otherwise known as DJ Spinderella. The group was already wildly popular and would soon win a Grammy. Out went the eight-ball jackets and door-knocker earrings, which Mr. Khan, once a salesman at luxury boutiques, exchanged for Yves Saint Laurent tuxedos and ropes of diamonds.“We were just regular kids shopping at Rainbow on Jamaica Avenue, and then Derek came along with his over-the-top way and said, ‘You don’t know who you are. It’s time to step it up,’” Ms. James said in an interview. “The music is important, but how you show up is important, too. He taught us to show up in the room.”Salt-N-Pepa (from left, Cheryl James, Sandra Denton and Diedra Roper) after winning a Grammy Award in 1995. “We were just regular kids,” Ms. James said, “and then Derek came along with his over-the-top way and said, ‘You don’t know who you are. It’s time to step it up.’” Credit… Philippe Aimar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy the turn of the millennium, Mr. Khan was one of the most sought-after stylists in the business. And he was living as extravagantly as the acts whose images he was amplifying — hosting enormous dinners at Mr. Chow, flying first class and treating himself to $1,000 jars of Crème de la Mer face cream.And then the bottom fell out of the music business. Music sharing platforms like Napster drained revenue from album sales. Music videos lost their luster. At the same time, artists who once doted on Mr. Khan found a new cadre of stylists to bedazzle them, and up-and-coming young artists had their own favorites.Unable to sustain the lavish lifestyle he had built, Mr. Khan developed a dangerous habit: He borrowed jewels from Harry Winston and others, as he had long done, but instead of adorning his clients, he pawned the baubles for cash.“After that first pawning I said I would never do it again,” Mr. Khan told The Times. “But then something would come up and I would need money, and then it snowballed.”The rapper Lil’ Kim, as styled by Mr. Khan in a Chanel outfit, at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in 2002.Credit…Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesAs the young fashion editor of Vibe magazine in the early 1990s, the stylist Stefan Campbell watched Mr. Khan’s dizzying rise. “As generous and creative as Derek was, he was straddling many worlds that he wanted to impress,” Mr. Campbell recalled. “He was introducing his young hip-hop clients to a whole new world of glamour, and he had to seem ‘of it.’ And in that world, generosity was expensive.”Mr. Khan’s world came crashing down in 2003, when he was sent to prison for defrauding the jewelers. After he was released in 2005, he was immediately deported to his native Trinidad.Then, in yet another reversal of fortune, Mr. Khan remade himself two years later in Dubai, initially embraced by a city where living large is a religion. His engaging smile beamed from the pages of lifestyle magazines there, and he signed a deal to design a line of jewelry.The Coronavirus Outbreak More