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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

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      Yuval Waldman, Bridge-Building Violinist, Is Dead at 74

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyYuval Waldman, Bridge-Building Violinist, Is Dead at 74A conductor as well as a skilled soloist, he liked to spotlight music composed in times of oppression, including the Holocaust.The violinist and conductor Yuval Waldman in 1977. Performing the music of composers who had been persecuted for their beliefs, he once said, was “not just a privilege but a calling.”Credit…Tyrone Dukes/The New York TimesFeb. 27, 2021Updated 4:00 p.m. ETYuval Waldman, an accomplished violinist and conductor with particular interests in building musical bridges between countries and rediscovering neglected works composed under oppressive circumstances, died on Feb. 1 in Brooklyn. He was 74.His son, Ariel Levinson-Waldman, said that the cause was coronary artery disease and that Mr. Waldman had also tested positive for the coronavirus shortly before his death.Mr. Waldman, who lived in Brooklyn, was the son of Jewish parents who survived the purges in Ukraine during the Nazi occupation of World War II, and his childhood involved several dislocations before the family eventually settled in Bat Yam, a Tel Aviv suburb. His career in some ways reflected his multinational upbringing and his sense of music as a lifeline in a turbulent world.He conducted the New American Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble formed in the 1990s and made up of Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union. In 2004 he founded Music Bridges International, which fostered concerts and educational programs that included music from different cultures — one program, for instance, featured American and Kazakh composers.He also played and conducted programs of music that had been composed under duress. Among them was a solo program titled “Music Forgotten and Remembered” and that featured works by Eastern European Jews, many of whom died in World War II or were silenced by the repressive practices of the Soviet Union. Another was “The Music of Oppression and Liberation,” featuring composers of various nationalities who were persecuted for their beliefs.“I feel it’s my duty to revive the memory of these composers by performing their music,” Mr. Waldman told The Oklahoman in 2011 when he performed the “Liberation” program at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha. “It’s not just a privilege but a calling.”Vladimir Waldman was born on Dec. 21, 1946, in Lvov, which was then part of the Soviet Union (and is now in western Ukraine, with the name usually rendered Lviv). He changed his first name to Yuval after the family had settled in Israel, taking the name of a figure from the Hebrew Bible associated with music.His father, Eliezer, was a lumber worker who was at one point conscripted into the Soviet Army; his mother, Chaya (Spivack) Waldman, was a teacher. As a boy in Lvov, Yuval was entranced by the violin music he heard at the movies and asked his parents for an instrument. He proved to have a gift for it. At the age of 7 he performed on Soviet radio.During a period of relaxed policies toward Jews after the death of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, the family left the country, living in Poland for a time and then in immigrant camps in Austria and Italy before reaching Israel in 1957. Eventually Yuval’s musical skills came to the attention of Isaac Stern, the great violinist, who became a mentor.Mr. Waldman studied at the Samuel Rubin Israel Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and played with Israel’s national orchestra as a teenager. After he graduated from the academy, Mr. Stern helped arrange for him to continue his studies in Geneva and then the United States, at both Indiana University and the Juilliard School. In 1969, at 22, he made his Carnegie Hall debut.Mr. Waldman’s musical career took off thanks to performances like one in 1970 at Riverside Park in New York City, where he was a soloist in a program by the West Side Orchestral Concerts Association. “Eloquent tribute to Mr. Waldman’s virtuosity in the finale was the spontaneous chorus of bravos that went up from his colleagues in the orchestra,” Robert Sherman wrote in a review in The New York Times.In July 1973 Mr. Waldman interrupted his career to join the reserves of the Israel Defense Forces. Because of all of the languages he had mastered through his multinational upbringing and touring, he was assigned to the intelligence unit. His musical skills had gotten him assigned to the entertainment unit as well. When the Yom Kippur War broke out that October, his son said, he was assigned to play for tank units in Sinai.Mr. Waldman’s son said he told the story of the time he clambered onto a tank when a commander ordered him to play something to soothe the troops after a particularly intense bombing. He played Bach. Many in the unit were recent Moroccan immigrants to Israel and had not heard Bach before.“My father remembered a moment when he was playing the Chaconne of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor,” Ariel Waldman said, “and looked up to see tears streaming down their faces in the dust.”By 1974 Mr. Waldman had returned to his musical career and was performing to acclaim in recitals and with orchestras. He had married Cathy Walder, a pianist and composer, in 1970, and they often performed together. But he also began branching out, serving as concertmaster for ensembles including the Kansas City Philharmonic and music director for events like the Madeira Bach Festival. He conducted and recorded with numerous orchestras, and he was a founder of several quartets and other ensembles.His first marriage ended in divorce in 1997. In addition to his son from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife, Lyudmila Sholokhova, whom he married in 2010; a sister, Rina Weiss; a stepdaughter, Valeriya Sholokhova; and two grandchildren.One of Mr. Waldman’s many activities was directing the Mid-Atlantic Chamber Orchestra in the 1980s and ’90s. At an online memorial service a few weeks ago, Mr. Levinson-Waldman told about a time when that ensemble was going to small towns, performing and bringing along experts to talk at schools, including a singer who would instruct the school choirs about breath-control techniques.“My dad spoke with an accent,” Mr. Levinson-Waldman said. “English was, depending on how you count it, his eighth or ninth language.”And so when he proposed the program to the town of Pulaski, Va., “unfortunately, some of the town leaders heard the wrong thing.” They were outraged, Mr. Levinson-Waldman said, that these out-of-town musicians wanted to instruct their students about birth control.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Antoine Hodge, Opera Singer With a Powerful Work Ethic, Dies at 38

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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 LostAntoine Hodge, Opera Singer With a Powerful Work Ethic, Dies at 38Mr. Hodge, a bass-baritone, was recently a chorus member in “Porgy and Bess” at the Metropolitan Opera. He died of Covid-19.Antoine Hodge dressed in costume as King Balthazar for Opéra Louisiane’s performance of Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” He played that role three times for the company.Credit…Linda MedineFeb. 27, 2021, 12:21 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.When it came time for chorus members to audition for solos in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2019 production of “Porgy and Bess,” the bass-baritone Antoine Hodge tried out for nearly every role available to him — not one was too obscure.He saw the production as a milestone in his career, and he was gunning for a part and the exposure it would bring, said Rocky Sellers, a friend and fellow chorus member. Mr. Hodge ultimately won a sought-after solo in the prayerful scene referred to as “Oh, Doctor Jesus,” which Mr. Sellers said he sang with a tone that was commanding, yet sweet and buttery. Mr. Hodge, a hard-working singer who performed with opera companies across the country, died on Monday at AdventHealth Orlando hospital in Orlando, Fla., where he had been flown to receive specialized treatment. He was 38.The cause was Covid-19, his sister Angela Jones said. “My brother had opera singers’ lungs,” she wrote in a Facebook post, “and Covid destroyed them.”Over the past two decades, Mr. Hodge appeared with more than 15 professional companies, singing mostly small or featured roles with troupes like Charlottesville Opera in Virginia and Opéra Louisiane in Baton Rouge and performing in the chorus at the Met, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Atlanta Opera and Opera Colorado.He sang at every opportunity, including Sundays in the professional choir at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      Florence Birdwell, Singing Teacher to Broadway Stars, Dies at 96

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFlorence Birdwell, Singing Teacher to Broadway Stars, Dies at 96She was a tough yet empathetic voice professor at Oklahoma City University for 67 years. Two of her students, Kelli O’Hara and Kristin Chenoweth, won Tony Awards.The voice teacher Florence Birdwell in 2015. She helped her students unlock the mysteries of captivating an audience.Credit…Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesFeb. 25, 2021Updated 3:57 p.m. ETFlorence Birdwell, an inspiring voice teacher whose many students included the Tony Award-winning musical stars Kelli O’Hara and Kristin Chenoweth, died on Feb. 15 in Yukon, Okla. She was 96.Her death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her son Brian.Professor Birdwell taught voice from 1946 to 2013 at Oklahoma City University, establishing herself as a dramatic, no-nonsense mentor. She helped aspiring musical theater and opera singers unlock the mysteries of captivating an audience, but she could also make her students weep with her candid feedback on their progress.“That’s life,” she told The New York Times in 2015. “If they can’t take the criticism they’ve asked for — don’t come.”During a visit to Manhattan in 2015 to see the Tony-nominated performances of Ms. O’Hara in “The King and I” and Ms. Chenoweth in “On the Twentieth Century” — Ms. O’Hara would win (Ms. Chenoweth had already won a Tony in 1999, for “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”) — Professor Birdwell conducted a master class of about a dozen former students.“At 90, she is girlish and soft one minute, fearsome and sharp the next,” Sarah Lyall wrote in The New York Times, “and she commands all the attention in the room.”After Scott Guthrie performed “It All Fades Away,” from “The Bridges of Madison County,” for the class, Professor Birdwell cheered, then ticked off his imperfections: He was tensing his shoulders, forcing his vowels and doing something wrong with his breathing.He sang the song several more times. She pointed to a spot where his neck met his shoulder and said: “You’re putting a strain on that muscle. I don’t want it to get worse.”Professor Birdwell emphasized that singers must memorize the words of a song before learning the melody, so that the lyrics are not only in their vocabularies but also in their hearts.“You have to open up a little bit of your insides,” she told The Times. “You have to learn about yourself as a person.”Professor Birdwell backstage in 2015 with her former student Kelli O’Hara. She traveled to New York to watch Ms. O’Hara in “The King and I” and another former student, Kristen Chenoweth, in “On the Twentieth Century.”Credit…Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesFlorence Gillam Hobin was born on Sept. 3, 1924, in Douglas, Ariz., on the border of Mexico, and raised in Santa Fe, N.M., and Lawton, Okla. Her mother, Grace (Gillam) Hobin, was a legal secretary; her father, Warner, was not a part of Florence’s life from the time she was young.Florence’s operatic soprano helped her earn a scholarship to Oklahoma City University after a music professor heard her sing with her high school orchestra. Before she graduated in 1945 with a bachelor’s degree in voice, her plans to perform on Broadway were derailed by an infection in her throat that damaged her larynx.Recalling the critical moment for The Oklahoman in 2015, she said that she tearfully told her teacher, Inez Silberg, who advised her, “You cannot sing now, maybe, but you can certainly talk.” She suggested that Florence teach, and sent her three students.“Each one of them was terribly lost in one way or another,” Professor Birdwell said. “And what I learned was warmth and caring and love. And it stayed with me all my teaching life.”One of those students was Barbara Fox (now Barbara DeMaio), an opera singer who, at 19, was in an emotional spiral: She had been sexually assaulted, and her father had recently died. When her voice teacher threw her out of her studio, her music theory teacher suggested that she study with Professor Birdwell — who, she recalled, later told her, “‘I couldn’t believe they were so willing to throw out the talent I saw in you.’”“And she made me go to therapy,” Ms. DeMaio said by phone. “She took me by the nape of the neck and said, ‘I will not let you waste this talent.’”Ms. DeMaio went on to perform widely in Europe is now a professor of voice at the University of Central Oklahoma and the executive director of the Painted Sky Opera company, based outside Oklahoma City in Edmond.“When I say that Florence Birdwell saved my life,” she said, “I’m not exaggerating.”In 1985 Professor Birdwell received the Governor’s Arts Award, the State of Oklahoma’s highest arts honor. She was inducted into the Oklahoma Higher Education Heritage Society’s Hall of Fame in 2012.And in the late 1950s she recovered her voice, if at a slightly lower register, and performed regularly, most notably in an annual one-woman show in Oklahoma City during the 1980s and ’90s, in which she sang music from various genres and recited poetry and short stories.“People have so much inside of them that just has to come out,” she told The Oklahoman in 1990 before her 11th annual show. “This is my coming-out party.”In addition to her son Brian, Professor Birdwell is survived by her daughter, Robyn Birdwell; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandson. Another son, Todd, died in 1980, and her husband, Robert, died in 2013.Despite Professor Birdwell’s sometimes daunting style, Ms. O’Hara said she had never feared her.“She ripped me down, she tore me apart,” she told The Oklahoman in a video interview in 2015. “She built me back up, and every single bit of it seemed to be the path that I was supposed to be on. It never scared me. It just made me feel right.”During her Tony Award acceptance speech, Ms. O’Hara thanked Professor Birdwell “for giving me wings.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Douglas Turner Ward, Pioneer in Black Theater, Dies at 90

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDouglas Turner Ward, Pioneer in Black Theater, Dies at 90A founder of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York in the 1960s, he was outspoken about limited opportunities for fellow Black actors and directors.Douglas Turner Ward, right, in 1971 with the director and producer Michael Schultz on the set of the play “The Sty of the Blind Pig.”Credit…Edward Hausner/The New York TimesFeb. 22, 2021Douglas Turner Ward, an actor, playwright and director who co-founded the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company, a New York theater group that supported Black writers and actors at a time when there were few opportunities for them, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.The death was confirmed by his wife, Diana Ward.Mr. Ward was establishing his own career as an actor in 1966 when he wrote an opinion article in The New York Times with the headline “American Theater: For Whites Only?”“If any hope, outside of chance individual fortune, exists for Negro playwrights as a group — or, for that matter, Negro actors and other theater craftsman — the most immediate, pressing, practical, absolutely minimally essential active first step is the development of a permanent Negro repertory company of at least Off-Broadway size and dimension,” he wrote. “Not in the future … but now!”The article got the attention of W. McNeil Lowry, the Ford Foundation’s vice president of humanities and the arts, who arranged a $434,000 grant to create precisely the kind of company that Mr. Ward was proposing. Thus the Negro Ensemble Company was born, in 1967, with Mr. Ward as artistic director, Robert Hooks as executive director and Gerald S. Krone as administrative director.The company went on to produce critically acclaimed productions, among them Joseph A. Walker’s “The River Niger” (1972), which won the Tony Award for best play in 1974 and was adapted for film in 1976. Mr. Ward not only directed the play but also acted in it, earning a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a play.Other notable productions by the company included Samm-Art Williams’s “Home” (1979) and Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “A Soldier’s Play” (1981), about a Black officer investigating the murder of a Black sergeant at a Louisiana Army base during World War II, when the armed forces were segregated. The cast included Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. (It, too, was adapted for film, as “A Soldier’s Story,” in 1984.)Frank Rich of The Times called the production, directed by Mr. Ward, “superlative.” (The play was revived last January on Broadway, starring Blair Underwood, before being forced to close because of the pandemic.)The Negro Ensemble Company became — and continues to be — a training ground for Black actors, playwrights, directors, designers and technicians. Many of the troupe’s actors over the years went on to become stars, among them, in addition to Mr. Washington and Mr. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Louis Gossett Jr. and Phylicia Rashad.Mr. Ward, right, in 1967 with the ensemble company co-founder Robert Hooks. They started the troupe that year with a grant from the Ford Foundation, setting up headquarters at St. Mark’s Playhouse in the East Village.Credit…Don Hogan Charles/The New York TimesThe company, and Ford’s contribution, won immediate praise after its founding. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said the grant represented “a magnificent step toward the creation of new and greater artists in the community,” and Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the N.A.A.C.P. at the time, said the foundation had “recognized the potential in the Negro theater” and the talent of “hundreds of actors and entertainers who have struggled individually.”The company began racking up Obie, Tony and Drama Desk awards and recording firsts. In 1975, the Times critic John J. O’Connor acknowledged the historical significance of a “superb” television production of Lonne Elder III’s play “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” set in 1950s Harlem. “The event marks the debut of a major Black theater organization, the Negro Ensemble Company, on American network television,” he wrote.Mr. Ward starred with Rosalind Cash in 1975 in the well-received ABC television movie adaptation of the play “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men.” Credit…Bert Andrews/ABC, via Getty ImagesThe company enabled Mr. Ward to solidify his own career as an actor and director.“I love acting for the communal thing — you know, working with people,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1975. But directing, he added, “sort of happened to me.”“I never had any intention of functioning as a director,” he continued, “but as the artistic director of the company, I choose the plays, and if I can’t find someone to direct them for us, I do it myself.”One of the first plays he directed was Richard Wright and Louis Sapin’s “Daddy Goodness” (1968), about a town drunk in the rural South who falls into such a stupor that his friends think he is dead.In an interview, Mr. Fuller said, “Doug is the only director I have worked with that could read any play and know whether its story line and characters would ‘work’ onstage.”The Negro Ensemble Company was not immune to criticism, however. The founders were criticized early on for setting up their headquarters at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in Manhattan’s East Village rather than at a theater in Harlem, and for appointing a white administrator, Mr. Krone. (He died last year at 86.)Mr. Ward, front left, on opening night of a revival of “A Soldier’s Play” in New York last January. He shook hands with the play’s author, Charles Fuller. Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRoosevelt Ward Jr. was born on May 5, 1930, in Burnside, La., to Roosevelt and Dorothy (Short) Ward, impoverished farmers who owned their own tailoring business. His family moved to New Orleans when he was 8, and he attended Xavier University Preparatory School, a historically Black Roman Catholic institution.Mr. Ward was admitted to Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1946, then transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he studied politics and theater. He quit college at 19 and moved to New York City, where he met and befriended the playwrights Lorraine Hansberry and Mr. Elder.In the late 1940s, Mr. Ward joined the Progressive Party and took to left-wing politics. He was arrested and convicted on charges of draft evasion and spent time in prison in New Orleans while his case was under appeal. After his conviction was overturned, he moved back to New York and became a journalist for the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker.He also began studying theater, joining the Paul Mann Actors Workshop and choosing the stage name Douglas Turner Ward, in homage to two men he admired: the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner, who led a revolt against slavery.One of Mr. Ward’s first acting roles was in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” in 1956 at Circle in the Square in Manhattan; another was as an understudy in Ms. Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway in 1959, with Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil in the lead roles.He also began developing as a playwright. In 1965, an Off-Broadway double-bill production of his satirical one-act comedies “Happy Ending” and “Day of Absence” became a hit, bringing him a Drama Desk Award for outstanding new playwright. Surviving a transit strike, the production ran for 15 months.Mr. Ward had lead roles in many plays, including “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” for which he won the Drama Desk Award, and “The Brownsville Raid,” about an incident of military racial injustice in a Texas town. Clive Barnes, reviewing “Brownsville” for The Times, wrote “Ward, who, to be frank, I usually admire more as a director than an actor, has never been better.”Among his many awards and honors, Mr. Ward received the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award. In 1996, he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.He continued to write into his later years. Last March, he published “The Haitian Chronicles,” a series of three plays that he had been working on since the 1970s, all centered on the Haitian Revolution, which threw off colonial rule in the early 1800s. His wife said that he had considered the project his magnum opus and that she and others were hoping to have the plays staged in New York with alumni from the Negro Ensemble Company.In addition to Ms. Ward, whom he married in 1966, he is survived by their two children, Elizabeth Ward-Cuprill and Douglas Powell Ward, and three grandchildren.At the Negro Ensemble Company, Mr. Ward often played matchmaker in connecting actors to roles, seeking out opportunities for people whom he knew had not been getting much work.“Doug never saw N.E.C. as a place to feature himself,” the playwright Steve Carter, who was a production coordinator for the company, said in a phone interview for this obituary in 2017. “He was always looking for new people.”Mr. Carter, who died last year, said Mr. Ward had been known for his willingness to step into any role in which he was needed. He recalled in particular a 1972 production of “A Ballet Behind the Bridge,” by the Trinidadian playwright Lennox Brown. With the actor Gilbert Lewis unable to appear one evening, Mr. Ward was hastily summoned to fill in.“Doug went on with script in hand,” Mr. Carter said. Then Mr. Ward actually injured his hand on the set and began bleeding profusely, but he refused to go to the hospital until he had finished the show.“He would always do what was necessary for N.E.C.,” Mr. Carter said.Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Fernando Hidalgo, Cuban-Born TV Host, Dies at 78

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesVaccine RolloutSee Your Local RiskNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostFernando Hidalgo, Cuban-Born TV Host, Dies at 78For 14 years, “El Show de Fernando Hidalgo,” a racy variety show with a Cuban flair, was appointment viewing in Latino households across the United States.Fernando Hidalgo in Los Angeles last year. His Spanish-language variety show, “El Show de Fernando Hildago,” aired from 2000 to 2014.Credit…GP/Star Max, via GC ImagesFeb. 22, 2021Updated 3:22 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Every weeknight for 14 years, Fernando Hidalgo burst into the living rooms of Spanish-speaking households across the United States to lively Cuban fanfare, as dancers in colorful lingerie shimmied to bongos and trumpets and a theme song bearing his name.Broadcasting from a studio in Hialeah Gardens, Fla., just outside Miami, Mr. Hidalgo filled his show with interviews, monologues, skits with winking double entendres, scantily clad dancers who shocked abuelas and a generous helping of live Cuban music for nostalgic abuelos. At 7 p.m. or 11 p.m., “El Show de Fernando Hidalgo,” which aired on América TeVé and later on MegaTV, was appointment viewing in Latino households, particularly in South Florida, New York and Puerto Rico.Mr. Hidalgo produced and starred in an English-language film, “Ernesto’s Manifesto,” in 2019.Credit…Nereida DellanMr. Hidalgo died on Feb. 15 at Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 78. His death was confirmed by his son Marlon Corona, 28, who said the cause was complications of Covid-19.América TeVé said in a statement that Mr. Hidalgo showed an “enormous talent for interpreting the sensibilities of our community, as well as his impressive capacity for improvisation and thematic renewal.”Fernando Corona was born in Marianao, Cuba, on Sept. 18, 1942, to Robert Corona, a Cuban soldier who later owned a flower business, and Concepción (Hidalgo) Corona, a homemaker, his son said.He was an adolescent when he moved with his family from Cuba to Chicago, where he got a job reading poems about Cuba on the radio, said Nereida Dellan, his former wife.As he established himself as a performer and a broadcaster, Mr. Hidalgo took his mother’s maiden name as a stage name, Ms. Dellan said.His career took him to Puerto Rico and Venezuela and back to the United States as he acted in and hosted shows, including a situation comedy, “Cómo Ser Feliz en el Matrimonio,” or “How to Be Happily Married.” He also hosted a game show similar to “The Newlywed Game” called “Los Casados Felices,” or “The Happy Married Couples.”The Coronavirus Outbreak More