Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Zdenek Macal, Conductor With an International Reach, Dies at 87

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      Shuttling between Europe and the United States, he conducted the world’s great orchestras. He was music director of the New Jersey Symphony for 11 years.Zdenek Macal in 2010. His sound, rounded and warm, was ideally suited to the 19th-century repertoire with which he was most closely associated.Michal Krumphanzl/Associated PressZdenek Macal, a Czech-born conductor who drew a distinctively rich and full sound from orchestras in several countries, including the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, where his tenure is regarded by musicians and administrators as something of a golden age, died on Oct. 25 in Prague. He was 87.The orchestra announced his death.With the New Jersey Symphony, where he was music director from 1992 to 2003, Mr. Macal (pronounced ma-KAL) was especially known for his robust performances of works by his compatriots Antonin Dvorak and Josef Suk, and by late-Romantic composers like Gustav Mahler and Sergei Rachmaninoff.But his career was international: He shuttled between Europe and the United States and conducted the world’s great orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Czech Philharmonic, where he was principal conductor from 2003 to 2007.After he left the Czech Philharmonic, he continued as guest conductor there and freelanced with other orchestras, a spokesperson for the Philharmonic said in an interview.Mr. Macal conducting the French National Orchestra. Among the many other European orchestras he conducted was the Czech Philharmonic, where he was principal conductor from 2003 to 2007.INA, via Getty Images“He was an old-world figure in music, and he really brought an old-school sound,” the New Jersey Symphony’s concertmaster, Eric Wyrick, said in a phone interview. “He would always ask, ‘Where is my sound?’ And he was relentless in pursuit of this sound world he was famous for.”That sound, rounded and warm, was ideally suited to the 19th-century repertoire with which Mr. Macal was most closely associated.“You must feel something, and you should try to show it or say it, and that’s the point for any kind of art,” he told the radio interviewer Bruce Duffie in 1990.Mr. Wyrick recalled: “There is a real aerobic feeling to the way he wanted us to play. He would tell the winds, ‘Don’t step out of the texture.’ He was marvelous.” He added that the slow tempos Mr. Macal sometimes favored were ideally suited to Dvorak, though perhaps less so to Beethoven.“He would say, ‘I don’t know how I do it. I take off with my elbows,’” and then he would gesture with his elbows, Mr. Wyrick said.In a review of a 1990 performance of Czech music by the Pacific Symphony led by Mr. Macal, the critic Chris Pasles noted in The Los Angeles Times that Mr. Macal “obviously had a sense of the correct style — the folk elements transmuted by the composer — and he emphasized the vigorous rhythms while maintaining uncluttered balance.”Reviewing a 1994 performance of the New York Philharmonic conducted by Mr. Macal, Bernard Holland of The New York Times called him “a good manager of excitement” who “manipulated the accumulating dramas” in Mussorgsky’s “A Night on Bald Mountain” with “admirable control.”The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians called Mr. Macal “a conductor of strong personality, clarity of purpose and firm structural logic in performance.”That personality could manifest itself in a certain impetuousness. When the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Mr. Macal fled his homeland in a taxi, telling the driver to take him to the German border.“His wife and he and his young daughter, they left with whatever they had, and he had to start all over again,” said Larry Tamburri, the former executive director of the New Jersey orchestra.Looking back in 1990, Mr. Macal told Mr. Duffie: “In the whole of my life I started a few times from the beginning. I started my career in Czechoslovakia, and then after the Russian invasion we left in ’68. So I started again and had my base in Western Europe. We came every year a little to the United States, but my base was in Europe.”He moved to the United States in 1982 and, after becoming a citizen, assumed the directorship of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra in 1986. He held that position until 1995; for the last three years he was the music director of both the Milwaukee and New Jersey orchestras.The New Jersey Symphony’s recording of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, which he conducted, won a Grammy Award for best engineered classical album in 2001.Mr. Macal conducting in Olomouc, Czechoslovakia, in 1966. Two years later, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, Mr. Macal fled his homeland with his wife and daughter in a taxi.Frantisek Nesvadba/CTK, via Associated PressZdenek Macal was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, on Jan. 8, 1936, and studied violin with his father from the age of 4. He enrolled at the conservatory in Brno, won an international conducting competition in Besançon, France, in 1965 and conducted the Czech Philharmonic for the first time shortly after winning the Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting competition in New York in 1966. He made his American debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1972.Mr. Macal’s wife, Georgina, a singer, died in 2015. A daughter, Monika, died last year. More

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      Dwight Twilley, Rootsy Power-Pop Hitmaker, Dies at 72

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      With a sound inspired by the Beatles and Elvis Presley, he climbed the charts and drew critical praise in the 1970s and ’80s. But long-term stardom proved elusive.Dwight Twilley, a singer and songwriter from Tulsa, Okla., who fused Merseybeat melodicism with a chugging rockabilly energy, earning critical praise if not stardom as a progenitor of what came to be called power pop, died on Oct. 18 in Tulsa. He was 72.His wife, Jan Twilley, said the cause was a cerebral hemorrhage. Mr. Twilley had been hospitalized for several days after suffering a stroke while driving alone and crashing into a tree.Heavily influenced by both the Beatles and Elvis Presley, Mr. Twilley made his mark in the mid-1970s with the Dwight Twilley Band, which he formed with a friend from his teens, the drummer and vocalist Phil Seymour. The band signed to Shelter Records, co-founded by a fellow Oklahoman, the musician and producer Leon Russell, in 1974, and released its first single, “I’m on Fire,” the next year.A roadhouse rafter-shaker leavened with syrupy pop hooks, the song shot to No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and drew critical praise. The San Francisco Chronicle was particularly extravagant, calling it “the best debut single by an American rock ’n’ roll band ever.”But the band was unable to capitalize on the momentum, as the partnership behind Shelter dissolved, leading to lengthy delays on a follow-up single and album. The Dwight Twilley Band’s first album, “Sincerely,” finally came out in 1976 but fizzled commercially, rising no higher than No. 138 on the Billboard album chart.Even so, critics were again effusive in their praise. In a review in Rolling Stone, Bud Scoppa called it “the best rock debut album of the year,” comparing the Dwight Twilley Band to the acclaimed band Big Star.“Like Big Star, the Twilleys wrap themselves handsomely in ’60s filigree, with an emphasis on pre-psychedelic Beatles, adding some rockabilly echo for greater resonance,” Mr. Scoppa wrote. “They do it so well and with such personality that it seems nothing short of miraculous.”The band’s second album, “Twilley Don’t Mind” (1977), offered still more hook-laden confections, along with guest vocals by Tom Petty. While it failed to spawn a hit like “I’m on Fire,” it did manage to climb to No. 70 on the Billboard chart.The band found itself lumped in with what became known as the Tulsa sound, which included bluesy rockers like J.J. Cale and Elvin Bishop. The categorization made little sense to Mr. Twilley, who was best known as a pop craftsman.“I think nobody at the time knew what the Tulsa sound was,” he said in an interview this year with the British music website Americana UK. “It was a big mystery, everyone was running around — where’s that Tulsa sound at? — and nobody knew.”He was equally baffled when critics, responding to his knack for low-fi, high-energy pop, called him a father of new wave. “I’m new wave one day and power pop the other and rock ’n’ roll sometimes,” he said in a 2017 interview with the music writer Devorah Ostrov. “You know, whatever.”He added, “It was a lot more fun when everybody was just trying to make great rock records.”Mr. Twilley was interviewed by Dick Clark when he appeared on “American Bandstand” in 1984.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesMr. Twilley was born on June 6, 1951 in Tulsa. A music lover from an early age, he found inspiration for his future career by watching the Beatles’ storied first performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964.“The songs were so great, the voices were great, they looked great and then they had all these chicks screaming at them,” he said in the Americana UK interview, “so I was like, that looks like a good job.” While in middle school, he formed a band called the Intruders.Three years later, the Beatles figured into another pivotal moment. As a high school student at Thomas Edison Preparatory, he started talking with Phil Seymour, another music-loving teenager from his neighborhood, while waiting in line at a movie theater to see a screening of “A Hard Day’s Night.”The two later went back to Mr. Twilley’s house to work on songs that Mr. Twilley had written. The two of them, with occasional contributions from a guitarist named Bill Pitcock IV, performed around Tulsa for several years, taking the name Oister. After a detour through Memphis, where the musicians brought a honky-tonk grit to their sound, they eventually landed in Los Angeles and signed with Shelter as the Dwight Twilley Band.Mr. Twilley, right, with Phil Seymour. The two met as teenagers and went on to form the Dwight Twilley Band.Mark Sullivan/Getty ImagesThe band’s run turned out to be brief. Mr. Seymour left in 1978 and pursued a solo career. (He died of lymphoma in 1993.)Mr. Twilley embarked on a long and prolific solo career. He released his first album under his own name, “Twilley,” in 1979.His third album, “Jungle” (1984), rose to No. 39 and featured his other best-known song, the infectious “Girls.” Released as a single and buoyed by a racy locker-room video recalling the teenage comedy “Porky’s,” it climbed to No. 16 on the Hot 100, the same spot “I’m on Fire” had reached.Mr. Twilley continued to release music for decades. His last studio album, “Always,” came out in 2014.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Twilley seemed to take the ups and downs of his career in stride. “I was just a damn genius when I was young, and I just got stupider and stupider each year afterwards,” he told Americana UK.Still, he added: “It was an adventure, you know, a kind of amazing adventure. You are a kid, and all the other musicians in the world are trying to make a record, a little disk with their name on it and their picture on the sleeve and things like that, and trying to get on the radio, and we were able to accomplish that.” More

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      Tyler Christopher, ‘General Hospital’ Actor, Is Dead at 50

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      Christopher won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2016 for his role on “Days of Our Lives.”Tyler Christopher, an actor best known for his long-running role on the TV soap opera “General Hospital,” has died. He was 50.A former co-star, Maurice Benard, said on Instagram that Mr. Christopher had died Tuesday morning in his San Diego apartment because of a “cardiac event.” Mr. Christopher’s death was also confirmed by his manager, Chi Muoi Lo.Mr. Christopher won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2016 for best lead actor as Stefan DiMera on “Days of Our Lives,” another soap opera. He is best known for playing Nikolas Cassadine on “General Hospital” from 1996 to 2016, while also appearing in several other TV shows and movies.“Tyler was a truly talented individual that lit up the screen in every scene he performed and relished bringing joy to his loyal fans through his acting,” Mr. Benard said. “Tyler was a sweet soul and wonderful friend to all of those who knew him.”He described Mr. Christopher as a mental health advocate, adding that he spoke openly about his struggles with bipolar disorder, depression and alcohol.Mr. Christopher wrote about his struggles with bipolar disorder and alcohol abuse in Reader’s Digest. He said he regularly saw a psychiatrist and a therapist and took medications to treat his mental health conditions.In a social media post from last year, he reflected on how far he had come since turning 40.“In the decade since then my daughter was born, I won an Emmy, was the lead actor in 4 television shows, completed a dozen movies, lived in a half dozen states, relapsed and recovered, survived a traumatic brain injury,” he wrote.But he said he was looking forward to a “quieter life” with his two children.He is survived by his children and his father, Mr. Benard wrote.Mr. Lo said the news of his death “was incredibly shocking”“He was a very gifted actor, and more importantly, an amazing friend,” Mr. Lo said. “My heart goes out to his friends and family who loved him so much.” More

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      Aaron Spears, Drummer for Usher and Ariana Grande, Dies at 47

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      He received a Grammy nomination for Usher’s 2004 album “Confessions” and played on tracks by Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga and many other major pop musicians.Aaron Spears, a Grammy-nominated drummer who played with Usher, Ariana Grande and many other major pop stars, has died. He was 47.His death was confirmed on Monday in a statement on his official Instagram account by his wife Jessica that was co-signed by the couple’s son August. The statement did not provide details about other survivors or specify a time, place or cause of death. Representatives for Spears could not immediately be reached for comment late Monday night.In 2004, he earned a Grammy nomination as a producer for Usher’s album “Confessions,” which sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. The next year, Spears drummed during the Grammys for a medley of Usher’s “Caught Up” and James Brown’s “Sex Machine,” a performance that made the drumming community take notice.Over the years, Spears would play with Grande, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Lil Wayne, among many other artists.“You’ve seen Aaron drum prolly 5-10 times in your life if you attend concerts & sometimes without knowing,” Questlove, the D.J., drummer and producer, said in an Instagram post on Monday. “That’s how much in demand his services were.”Aaron Spears was born on Oct. 26, 1976, according to a profile published by Remo, a drumming equipment manufacturer that sponsored him.He was from Washington D.C., grew up in the Pentecostal faith and developed an interest in drumming through his involvement with the church. As a child, he later said in an interview with the German show drumtalk, he would sit on someone’s lap in church playing “the stuff up top” while they played the pedals.One of his first professional gigs was drumming in Gideon Band, a group with a style spanning jazz, rock and R&B. He demonstrated his musical prowess by never repeating a “chop,” or rhythmic phrase, the band said in a statement.Moving from the local scene in Washington to the national one was intimidating, Spears said.“The level of musicianship had me questioning if I belonged there,” he told drumtalk in 2018. “I just didn’t know if I was ready to make the jump.”He clearly did belong. For nearly two decades after his breakthrough performance at the Grammys, Spears played with a long list of major artists, including Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. He also performed on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and was the music coordinator and drummer for a season of the television show “The Masked Singer.”Offstage, Spears held drum clinics and master classes around the world. During one such educational visit this year to Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., he sat in for a performance with the school’s marching band, the Human Jukebox.But even after a long career, Spears expressed humility about his success, saying that he was careful to “stay relatable” and avoid developing a false sense of entitlement.“The success that I’ve had is not necessarily because of me,” he said in a video published in May on the website of Ludwig Drums, one of his sponsors. “It’s really the connection that I’ve had with other musicians has helped to make me better.” More

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      Matthew Perry, ‘Friends’ Star, Dies at 54

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      He was known for playing the sarcastic but lovable Chandler Bing and for his struggles with drugs and alcohol, which he chronicled in a memoir.Matthew Perry, who gained sitcom superstardom as Chandler Bing on the show “Friends,” becoming a model of the ability to tease your pals as an expression of love, has died. He was 54.The death was confirmed by Capt. Scot Williams of the Los Angeles Police Department’s robbery-homicide division. He said the cause was not likely to be determined for some time, but there was no indication of foul play.Several news outlets reported, without a named source, that Mr. Perry was found unresponsive in a hot tub at his home in Los Angeles. He had publicly struggled with drinking and drug use for decades, leading to hospitalizations for a range of ailments. By his own account, he had spent more than half his life in treatment and rehab facilities.“Friends” ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004. It chronicled the never-too-dramatic dramas and in-jokes and exploits of a group of six young friends living in New York City. Chandler was the yuppie of the group, with a well-paying white-collar job his friends did not entirely understand. He wore sweater vests but also moodily smoked cigarettes.Other “Friends” characters generated humor through their goofiness or haplessness; Chandler cracked jokes. He was often inspired by the airheadedness of his roommate and best friend, Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc), a struggling actor, and by the blunders of another buddy, Ross Geller (David Schwimmer), a paleontologist more competent in science than everyday life.During one episode, for example, Ross joined the group looking bizarrely tan and said he had gone to a tanning place that one of them had suggested. “Was that place the sun?” Chandler asked.The cast of “Friends” in the 1990s. Clockwise from bottom left, Courteney Cox as Monica Geller; Matt LeBlanc as Joey Tribbiani; Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay; David Schwimmer as Ross Geller; Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing; and Jennifer Aniston as Rachel Green.NBCUniversal via Getty ImagesThat speech pattern — the sarcastic rhetorical question asked in a tone of mock disbelief — was typical of Chandler. He was known on the show for wondering things like “Could she be more out of my league?”Mr. Perry himself brought this bit to the show, and it became a familiar way for Americans to talk — proof of the status of “Friends” as one of the most popular shows in sitcom history.For a while Chandler was in a secret romance with another core member of the “Friends” group, Monica Geller (Courteney Cox), a chef. Ultimately, the two achieve happily stable monogamy, marry and move to the suburbs. (In the spirit of the show, distilled into its theme song, “I’ll Be There for You,” Chandler’s new home has a “Joey room” for his old roommate.) Their steps toward adulthood helped bring an end to the group’s post-adolescent idyll and, with that, the story of “Friends” itself.Mr. Perry, like his co-stars, eventually earned $1 million per episode. He was rich, famous and handsome. But behind the scenes of “Friends,” his substance abuse was already an issue.In his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” Mr. Perry recalled Jennifer Aniston, who starred in the show as Rachel Green, coming to his trailer one day and saying, “in a kind of weird but loving way,” that it was clear he had been drinking too much. “We can smell it,” she added.“The plural ‘we,’” he wrote about that moment, “hits me like a sledgehammer.”The whole cast confronted him at one point in his dressing room.A Jet Ski accident in 1997 helped set in motion Mr. Perry’s addiction to pain killers. A year and a half later, he was taking 55 pills a day. He checked into a rehab facility weighing 128 pounds. “Of course, ‘Matthew Perry is in rehab’ became a huge news story,” he wrote.Mr. Perry testified before a House subcommittee in Washington in 2013 in support of federal funding for drug treatment programs, including those for military veterans. His own struggles with addiction were well known. Paul Morigi/Associated Press for the National Association of Drug Court ProfessionalsIn the years to come, his addiction would lead to a “medical odyssey,” The New York Times wrote in a profile last year, including an exploded colon, a stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag and more than a dozen stomach surgeries, among other travails.Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe Buffay on “Friends,” wrote in her foreword to Mr. Perry’s memoir that the single question she was asked most about “Friends” was “How’s Matthew Perry doing?”Matthew Langford Perry was born on Aug. 19, 1969, in Williamstown, Mass. His mother, Suzanne (Langford) Perry, worked as a press secretary for the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. His father, John Bennett Perry, was a character actor.His parents divorced when he was a baby, and Matty grew up largely with his mother and stepfather, Keith Morrison, in Ottawa. He was one of Canada’s top-ranked junior tennis players.When he was 15, he moved in with his father in Los Angeles, hoping to devote more time to tennis and leave behind unhappiness he felt about his place in his mother’s second family.After a couple of years in Los Angeles, Matthew decided that he had figured out what would make him happy.“Fame would change everything, and I yearned for it more than any other person on the face of the planet,” he wrote in his memoir. “I needed it. It was the only thing that would fix me. I was certain of it.”Mr. Perry in about 1988. “Fame would change everything, and I yearned for it more than any other person on the face of the planet,” he wrote in his memoir.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn 1988, still a teenager, he made his film debut, starring alongside River Phoenix in “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon.” He appeared on several sitcoms. It was clear that he was an up-and-coming actor — but he remained that way for several years. One day, when he was 24, alone in his small Los Angeles apartment, he got on his knees and prayed to become famous, no matter what else would happen to him in the process.Three weeks later, he was cast in “Friends.”Early on, Courteney Cox, whose career to that point had outpaced her fellow cast members’, announced to the group, “There are no stars here,” Mr. Perry recalled in his memoir. “This is an ensemble show. We’re all supposed to be friends.”Mr. Perry continued: “So we did what she suggested. From that first morning we were inseparable. We ate every meal together.”During his years on “Friends,” Mr. Perry starred in a number of movies that flopped commercially, like “Almost Heroes” (1998), with Chris Farley, and “Three to Tango” (1999). He got good reviews for his supporting role as a likable, beleaguered dentist in “The Whole Nine Yards” (2000), starring Bruce Willis.After “Friends,” Mr. Perry starred in a few more TV shows, like “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” (2006-07), written by Aaron Sorkin, and an adaptation of Neil Simon’s play “The Odd Couple” that ran on CBS from 2015 to 2017.In his memoir, Mr. Perry poignantly described struggles with self-esteem and commitment through several romantic relationships, including some with prominent actresses, like Julia Roberts. He never married or had children.He had several half siblings from his parents’ remarriages. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Since “Friends” went off the air, its fan base has only grown. The show has even helped people around the world learn English.Two years ago, Mr. Perry, by his own account newly sober, appeared in a televised reunion of the “Friends” cast, in which its stars revisited some of the show’s most famous sets, like the Central Perk coffee shop, to reminisce about old episodes.That came after years in which Mr. Perry resisted talking about “Friends.” He wrote in his memoir that he admired Kurt Cobain’s refusal to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a hit for Mr. Cobain’s group, Nirvana, and Led Zeppelin’s aversion to their anthem “Stairway to Heaven.”He did gain a new attitude toward publicly recalling his past thanks to writing, he told The Times last year. In a single interview, he spoke again and again about the idea that his confessional stories might help fellow addicts.“Whenever I bumped into something that I didn’t really want to share,” he said, “I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going.”Elisabeth Egan More

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      in Theater

      Robert Brustein, Passionate Force in Nonprofit Theater, Dies at 96

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      A critic and dramatist himself, he started repertory companies at Yale and Harvard and fiercely defended the art form, even if it meant feuding with playwrights.Robert Brustein, an erudite and contentious advocate for profit-indifferent theater, in the service of which he wore many hats — critic, teacher, producer, director, playwright and even actor — died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his wife, Doreen Beinart.Mr. Brustein was dean of the drama school at Yale and founded and ran the Yale Repertory Theater and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, producing well over 100 plays and securing them in the regional theater firmament. He also taught at Yale as well as at Harvard.A prolific writer with the zeal of an environmentalist and the moral certainty of a martyr, he reviewed stage productions for The New Republic for more than 50 years. In many books and in countless newspaper and magazine articles, he argued for brave theater, intellectual theater, nonpandering theater, and worried that the art form was being attenuated by the profit motive.Mr. Brustein was a passionate defender of the resident, nonprofit theaters whose ranks expanded across the United States in the last decades of the 20th century, and as such he was perpetually concerned that they not be corrupted by commercial interests. The Broadway megahit “A Chorus Line,” in one instance — originally produced in 1975 by the Public Theater in New York — had made it clear that a hit show could funnel many years of economic fuel back to the source.“The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. “The basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”A public intellectual and supporter of the arts, Mr. Brustein delivered opinions that were often respectfully received but that just as often incited exasperation or outrage. Theater people, after all, are not especially fond of being called sellouts. When Frank Rich left his post as chief drama critic for The Times in 1994, his valedictory essay singled out Mr. Brustein:“I rarely had ugly confrontations with anyone in the theater, and my mail from theater people, even at its angriest, was civilized,” Mr. Rich wrote. “In 13 years the few significant exceptions invariably involved Robert Brustein.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Joanna Merlin, Known for Her Work Both Onstage and Off, Dies at 92

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      Soon after appearing in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” she began a new career as a prominent casting director.Joanna Merlin, who, after originating the role of Tzeitel, the eldest daughter, in the hit Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” became a renowned casting director, notably for Stephen Sondheim musicals including “Into the Woods” and “Follies,” died on Oct. 15 at her younger daughter’s home in Los Angeles. She was 92.Her older daughter, Rachel Dretzin, said the cause was complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disease.The idea of becoming a casting director came from Hal Prince, the powerful producer of “Fiddler,” after she had left “Fiddler” to raise her two young daughters. He had interviewed several candidates and told Ms. Merlin that most of them “just didn’t like actors,” she told Backstage magazine.“He felt that since I was an actor and a mother, that I might be a good choice,” she added. “He understood that I was raising children and told me that he didn’t care what hours I put in, just as long as I got the work done.”She set to work in 1970, casting replacement actors in “Fiddler” during its last two years on Broadway. For the next two decades, she cast six musicals that were composed by Sondheim and produced (and usually directed) by Mr. Prince on Broadway: “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures,” “Side by Side by Sondheim” and “Merrily We Roll Along.”From left, Ms. Merlin, the composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the director Harold Prince and the playwright George Furth during a casting session for the 1981 Broadway musical “Merrily We Roll Along.”Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsHer casting credits also include two other Sondheim musicals, “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods”; Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Evita”; and “On the Twentieth Century,” by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Cy Coleman. All those shows except “Into the Woods” were directed by Mr. Prince.“What I found so interesting with Joanna,” James Lapine, who directed “Into the Woods” and wrote its book, based on the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, said in a phone interview, “was her determination to pursue nontraditional casting in the theater, which for me, at a young age, was something I hadn’t thought much about.”Ms. Merlin’s pursuit of diverse casting led Mr. Lapine to choose a Black actress, Terry Burrell, to replace the white one who had played one of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters, and Phylicia Rashad, who is Black, as a replacement for Bernadette Peters in the leading role of the Witch.In 1986, Ms. Merlin was a founder of the Non-Traditional Casting Project (now the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts), which seeks more opportunities for actors of color and actors with disabilities.Ms. Merlin, noting that there were many talented, nonwhite actors, told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1990. “The reason they should be cast is because they’re good,”Ms. Merlin also cast six films, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” (1987), for which she won the Casting Society of America’s Artios Award. She also won an Artios for “Into the Woods.”Ms. Merlin, far right, with Zero Mostel, center, and three other “Fiddler on the Roof” cast members (from left, Maria Karnilova, Tanya Everett and Julia Migenes) backstage after the show’s opening night in 1964. Associated PressJo Ann Dolores Ratner was born on July 15, 1931, in Chicago. Her parents were Russian immigrants: Her father, Harry, owned a grocery store, and her mother, Toni (Merlin) Ratner, helped in the store and became a sculptor in her 60s.She moved to Los Angeles with her parents and her sister when she was 15.She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, for a year in the early 1950s and, after acting in plays in the Los Angeles area in the early and mid-1950s, appeared in her first movie role, a small part in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1956).After some more screen work and roles in Off and Off Off Broadway plays, Ms. Merlin made her Broadway debut in 1961 in Jean Anouilh’s “Becket,” as Gwendolen, the mistress of Thomas Becket, one of Britain’s most powerful figures in the 12th century, who was played by Laurence Olivier. Later that year, she returned to Broadway to portray Sigmund Freud’s wife in Henry Denker’s “A Far Country.”After four unsuccessful auditions for a role in Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which was staged by Jerome Robbins, she auditioned eight times for Mr. Robbins when he was casting “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened in 1964. Although she lacked a strong singing voice, she was cast as Tzeitel, the oldest daughter of Tevye the milkman, the show’s principal character.The syndicated columnist Leonard Lyons wrote that when Ms. Merlin was pregnant in 1965 with her daughter Rachel, Zero Mostel, who played Tevye, told the stage manager: “Joanna’s baby just kicked. Send baby a note — not to kick.”She left the show in 1965 after Rachel was born, returned as Tzeitel a year later, and departed again in 1967 when she was replaced by her understudy, Bette Midler (who was also Rachel’s babysitter). After Julie’s birth in 1968, Mr. Prince made his offer.She continued to act, mostly in films and on television. Her roles included the dance teacher in “Fame” (1980), Julia Roberts’s mother in “Mystic Pizza” (1988) and an old Jewish woman in a short film, “Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn” (2008), which she and Ragnar Freidank adapted from a one-woman play by Ellen Cassedy.TV viewers might be most familiar with Ms. Merlin’s recurring role in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” She played Judge Lena Petrovsky 43 times from 2000 to 2011. No other actor has played a jurist more often in the “Law & Order” franchise. She also appeared, as two different defense lawyers, in five episodes of “Law & Order.”Ms. Merlin as a lawyer in a 1994 episode of “Law & Order.” She also played a judge in 43 episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” setting a record for the franchise.Jessica Burstein/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesHer career as an acting teacher began in 1998 at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a year later she began holding workshops dedicated to the acting technique of her teacher, Michael Chekhov.In the foreword to her book, “Auditioning: An Actor-Friendly Guide” (2001), Mr. Prince wrote: “Her taste is impeccable. In no instance can I remember her recommending anyone less than interesting for a role.”In addition to her daughter Rachel, a documentary filmmaker, and her daughter Julie Dretzin, an actress, Ms. Merlin is survived by five grandchildren. Her first marriage, to Marty Lubner, ended in divorce. Her marriage to David Dretzin ended with his death in 2006 after a car accident in which he suffered a traumatic brain injury. Her sister, Harriet Glickman, died in 2020.For “Pacific Overtures,” which takes place in Japan after Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s visit in 1853 and which had an all-Asian cast, Ms. Merlin engaged in “what may be one of the most poignant talent searches undertaken for a Broadway show,” according to a 1976 article in The New York Times.Racism and economics often forced Asian actors out of the profession at the time. So when she had no luck finding actors in New York, she worked with Asian community and theater groups, Asian newspapers and the State Department to fill the roles. A third of those ultimately signed for the production were nonprofessionals.Among them was the actor Gedde Watanabe, who was a young street singer in San Francisco when she approached him and invited him to audition.“I didn’t believe her,” Mr. Watanabe said. More

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      Richard Moll, Towering Bailiff on ‘Night Court,’ Dies at 80

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      In a career that spanned more than four decades, the actor was best known for playing the imposing but lovable Bull Shannon on the NBC sitcom.Richard Moll, the 6-foot-8 actor who delighted television audiences with a childlike charm in his role as the hulking bailiff on the NBC sitcom “Night Court,” died on Thursday at his home in Big Bear Lake, Calif. He was 80.His death was confirmed on Friday by his publicist, Jeff Sanderson. No cause was given by the family.In a career of more than four decades, Mr. Moll played a variety of roles on television shows and in films. But he was best known for portraying the baldheaded, wide-eyed Aristotle Nostradamus (Bull) Shannon on all nine seasons of “Night Court,” which ran from 1984 to 1992 and competed with other hit television sitcoms like “The Cosby Show” and “The Golden Girls.”Mr. Moll worked as an actor and voice-over artist as late as 2018.Kathy Hutchins/Hutchins Photo Agency, via Associated PressBull Shannon’s dimwitted persona offered an air of lighthearted innocence on the series, which was set inside a fictional municipal night court in Manhattan and starred Harry Anderson, who played Judge Harry Stone and died in 2018, and John Larroquette as the prosecutor, Dan Fielding.Mr. Moll was “larger than life and taller too,” Mr. Larroquette, said Friday in a post on X.Richard Charles Moll was born on Jan. 13, 1943, in Pasadena, Calif. to Harry and Violet Moll. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, with a degree in history and passed over his father’s wishes that he pursue a law career, to take up acting.He started with theater work, performing in Shakespeare plays in California. His first television and film roles came in the late 1970s, and included a part in the 1977 movie “Brigham” and an appearance in an episode of the television series “Welcome Back, Kotter” in 1978.“Probably auditioning for ‘Night Court’ would be my first big break,” Mr. Moll said in a 2010 interview with MaximoTV. He noted that he had been asked if he was willing to shave his head for the part.“I said ‘Are you kidding?’ ” he recalled. “‘I’ll shave my legs for the part. I’ll shave my armpits. I don’t care.’”After “Night Court” ended in 1992, Mr. Moll went on to do voice-over work on various cartoons, including roles as Two-Face, a disturbed villain with a disfigured mug on the “Adventures of Batman & Robin” on Fox, and as Scorpion, one of the many adversaries on “Spider-Man: The Animated Series,” on the same network.Richard Moll, far right, with the cast of Night Court in 1988.Gary Null/NBC, via Getty ImagesThough largely known for his comedic work, including in movies such as “Scary Movie 2” and “But I’m a Cheerleader,” Mr. Moll was also featured in horror and science-fiction films. His first major movie roles included the 1985 horror feature “House” and the 1986 indie fantasy “The Dungeonmaster.”Mr. Moll worked as an actor and voice-over artist as late as 2018, according to IMDb. His final notable appearance was in the 2010 live-action film “Scooby-Doo: Curse of the Lake Monster,” in which he played the mysterious lighthouse keeper Elmer Uggins.Mr. Moll retired to Big Bear Lake in the Southern Californian mountains, where, according to his family, he reveled in the idyllic scenery and exercised his love of bird-watching.He is survived by a daughter, Chloe Moll; a son, Mason Moll; his ex-wife, Susan Moll; and two stepchildren, Cassandra Card and Morgan Ostling. More