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      De La Soul’s Dave Jolicoeur, a.k.a. Trugoy the Dove, Dies at 54

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      The trio expanded the stylistic vocabulary of hip-hop in the 1980s and ’90s, but its early experiments with sampling led to legal troubles, and the group’s longtime exclusion from streaming.David Jolicoeur of De La Soul, the rap trio that expanded the stylistic vocabulary of hip-hop in the late 1980s and early ’90s with eclectic samples and offbeat humor, becoming MTV staples and cult heroes of the genre, died on Sunday. He was 54.His death was confirmed by the group’s publicist, Tony Ferguson, who did not specify a cause or say where Mr. Jolicoeur was when he died. In recent years, Mr. Jolicoeur has openly discussed a struggle with congestive heart failure, including in a music video for the group’s song “Royalty Capes.”De La Soul arrived with the album “3 Feet High and Rising” in 1989, a time when hip-hop was still relatively new to the mainstream. The genre’s public face was often confrontational, with groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A speaking out about the racism, police violence and neglect faced by Black communities in America.By contrast, De La Soul — three middle-class young men from Long Island — presented themselves with hippie floral designs and a music video set in a high school for their song “Me Myself and I.” The group wore baggy, brightly colored clothes, to the sneers and side-eyeing of their classmates in gold chains, black shades and matching B-boy outfits.Mr. Jolicoeur — whose original stage name in the group was Trugoy the Dove, though he was also known as Plug Two, Dove and later, just Dave — had the first lines of the track, riffing on a fairy tale. “Mirror mirror on the wall/Tell me mirror, what is wrong?” he rapped. “Can it be my De La clothes/Or is it just my De La song?”That album, with singles also including “Say No Go” and “Eye Know,” reached only as high as No. 24 on the Billboard 200 chart, but it was an instant classic that pointed to new directions in hip-hop. Later albums included “De La Soul Is Dead” (1991), “Buhloone Mindstate” (1993) and “Stakes Is High” (1996).With its producer, Prince Paul, the group developed an idiosyncratic and freewheeling style of sampling that brought new textures to hip-hop. “3 Feet High” contained pieces of more than 60 other recordings, including not only Funkadelic and Ohio Players grooves — de rigueur in 1980s rap — but also oddities like sounds from old TV shows and recordings of French language lessons.But legal problems related to its samples became the bane of the group. One sample, of the Turtles’ organ-driven psychedelic pop track “You Showed Me” (1968), had not been cleared properly, and the Turtles sued; the case was settled out of court.Ongoing legal problems with sample clearances prevented the group from releasing its music in digital form, which effectively blocked the trio from music’s most important marketplace in the 21st century. Recently, the group finally cleared those samples and was gearing up to release its music in digital form in March.The group’s lighthearted style — whimsical in-jokes, and lyrics that could be irreverent or earnest — delighted fans and captivated critics. It was one of the first in hip-hop to cross over to the collegiate crowd, and took on the reputation of “thinking-person’s hip-hoppers,” as the critic Greg Tate put it in a review of “Buhloone Mindstate” in The New York Times.“With irreverence and imagination,” Mr. Tate wrote, “De La Soul has dared to go where few hip-hop acts would follow, rejecting Five Percenter polemics and gangster rap for reflections on an array of topics: ecology, crack-addicted infants, Black suburbia, roller-skating, harassment by fans, male sexual anxiety and even gardening as a hip-hop metaphor.”Mr. Jolicoeur distilled the group’s worldview into a few lines in “Me Myself and I”: Write is wrong when hype is writtenOn the Soul, De La that isStyle is surely our own thingNot the false disguise of showbizDavid Jolicoeur was born on Sept. 21, 1968, in Brooklyn and moved to Long Island with his family as a child.In Amityville, N.Y., Mr. Jolicoeur joined with high school friends Kelvin Mercer, known as Posdnuos, and Vincent Mason, or Maseo, to form De La Soul. The group’s demo for “Plug Tunin’,” which later appeared remixed on “3 Feet High and Rising,” caught the attention of Prince Paul, the D.J. of the group Stetsasonic, who was then quickly establishing himself as one of the most gifted producers in rap. Their collaboration introduced the abstract, alternative hip-hop it would become known for.“Every last poem is recited at noon,” Mr. Jolicoeur rapped as Trugoy — yogurt backward, for a preferred food. “Focus is set, let your Polaroids click/As they capture the essence of a naughty noise called/Plug Tunin’.”The trio honed its sound and comedic stage presence at school concerts and parties at a space it called “the dugout,” on Dixon Avenue in Amityville. Proudly repping “Strong Island,” De La Soul noted that its proximity to New York City allowed it to keep an eye on the hip-hop stronghold, while the suburbs gave it space to grow and learn.“The island has given us the opportunity to see more things,” Mr. Jolicoeur told The New York Times in 2000. “It broadened our horizons.” He added, “We had the opportunity to soak in a lot more. And that’s why we are who we are today.”De La Soul went on to lead what was known as the Native Tongues, a loose collective of outsider hip-hop groups like A Tribe Called Quest and the Jungle Brothers, which influenced artists like Mos Def and Common.In addition to sampling, De La Soul was formative in the incorporation of skits — spoken dialogue between tracks — on its albums. In a live review from 1989, the Times critic Peter Watrous wrote that the group “seemed on the verge of inventing a new type of performance — part talk show, part rap concert — where their funny conversations and routines were as important as their raps, even if the funniest lines were accusations about Trugoy’s status as a virgin.”The group’s absence from digital services kept it from reaching new audiences for years.“We’re in the Library of Congress, but we’re not on iTunes,” Mr. Mercer told The Times in 2016. Two years earlier, in frustration, the group gave away virtually all of its work, releasing it online to fans at no charge. Its 2016 album, “And the Anonymous Nobody,” was financed by a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $600,000. The album was largely sample-free.Still, the group retained a strong following among fans and fellow artists. In 2005, De La Soul was featured on “Feel Good Inc.,” a hit by Gorillaz, the multimedia project created by the British singer-songwriter Damon Albarn and the visual artist Jamie Hewlett. Mr. Jolicoeur co-wrote the song with Mr. Albarn. The song went to No. 2 in Britain and No. 14 in the United States.In the group’s interview with The Times in 2016, Mr. Jolicoeur spoke about the urgency the trio felt about getting its older work back before the public.“This music has to be addressed and released,” he said. “It has to. When? We’ll see. But somewhere it’s going to happen.”Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting. More

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      Carlos Saura, a Leading and Enduring Spanish Director, Dies at 91

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      Called “one of the fundamental filmmakers in the history of Spanish cinema,” he began making movies under Franco, often hiding his messages in allegory.Carlos Saura, a Spanish director who began making films during the regime of Francisco Franco and was still making them at his death, exploring Spanish identity through allegory-rich storytelling and, later, vividly capturing flamenco and other art forms, died on Friday. He was 91.The Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Spain said he died at his home but did not say where. The next day, the Goya Awards, Spain’s annual film awards, had planned to present him with the Honorary Goya Award in recognition of his “having shaped the history of modern Spanish cinema,” as the organization put it when announcing the award last October.Instead, he received the statuette a few days before his death, the organization said. It called him “one of the fundamental filmmakers in the history of Spanish cinema.”Mr. Saura was a photographer who began making short films in 1956 and released his first feature, “The Delinquents,” about youths living on the edge in Madrid’s slums, in 1959.Filmmakers under Franco, who came to power during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s and controlled the country until his death in 1975, had to be careful not to run afoul of censors. Mr. Saura became adept at alluding obliquely to Spanish history and the strains the country endured, as he did in his third feature film, “The Hunt” (1966), the story of two middle-aged men who go on what is supposed to be a relaxing rabbit hunt with a business tycoon and his nephew. Things take a brutal turn.When the movie played in Manhattan in 1967, Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times, “The vivid manifestations of wholesale shooting of frightened rabbits as they scoot across the hills of an area that was a famous section of battlefield in the Civil War are unmistakable allusions to that conflict of friend-against-friend and brother-against-brother that so thoroughly affected the politics and society of Spain.”“‘The Hunt,’” he added, “is the toughest Spanish picture I have ever seen, and the most amazingly revealing.”Geraldine Chaplin and Fernándo Fernan Gómez in a scene from “Anna and the Wolves” (1973). Its initial script was blocked by the government. via Everett CollectionMr. Saura and Ms. Chaplin arriving at the International Film Festival in Cannes in 1978. They had a long romantic relationship.Ralph Gatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat kind of filmmaking sometimes got him in hot water with government censors. In 1971, his initial script for “Anna and the Wolves” was blocked by the Information Ministry. It told the story of a young governess who takes a job in a broken-down mansion inhabited by three brothers, each of whom pursues her.“They represent for me the three monsters of Spain,” Mr. Saura told The Times in 1971, “perversions of religiosity, repressed sexuality and the authoritarian spirit.” Of having his script blocked, he said, “They have made dust of me.”He eventually made the movie, however; it showed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973. The movie starred Geraldine Chaplin, a daughter of Charlie Chaplin, who had appeared in several other Saura films and had a long romantic relationship with him. Her character meets a gruesome end.“The ending, when she is raped, shot and tortured by her respective assailants, is an unmistakable indictment of Spain’s stifling social conventions,” the film critic Alexander Walker wrote in The Evening Standard of London, “and a brave one to have made on the home ground.”The year after Franco’s death, Mr. Saura won a special jury award at Cannes with another film that looked to the past, “Cría Cuervos,” about a girl (played by Ana Torrent, who went on to a long career) with a trauma-filled childhood. (Ms. Chaplin played her as an adult.) Vincent Canby, writing in The Times, called the movie “funny and heartbreaking and bursting with life.”Mr. Saura soon began to focus on cultural subjects, especially dance, whose beauty and excitement he had a knack for capturing on film. “Blood Wedding” (1981), “Carmen” (1983) and “El Amor Brujo” (1986) all featured the flamenco dancer Antonio Gades. “Flamenco” (1995) was a music- and dance-filled documentary, as was “Flamenco Flamenco” (2010). “Tango” (1999) was a musical drama built around that dance genre.A scene from Mr. Saura’s musical drama “Tango” (1999). He was noted for capturing dance on film. Graciela Portela/Sony Pictures Classics“It’s no slight to the lovers seen in Carlos Saura’s thrilling ‘Tango’ to say that the kissing seen here is less torrid than the dancing,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The Times.Marvin D’Lugo, a professor at Clark University and the author of “The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing” (1991), drew a connection between the director’s work during the Franco years and after them.“Saura’s great theme was the painful memories of the Civil War visited on contemporary Spaniards,” he said by email. “A photographer before he was a filmmaker, his particular genius, and what brought him to international acclaim early on, came from his unique ability to visually translate trauma onto the bodies of his characters. This is as much a cultural as a political narrative thread, and it guided him in the post-Franco years as he shaped the plots of his dance films around the images of bodies now creatively submitting to artistic design.”Carlos Saura Atarés was born on Jan. 4, 1932, in Huesca, in northeastern Spain. His mother was a pianist, and his father worked in the Interior Ministry. After the Civil War he was separated from his parents for a time, living with his maternal grandmother, but the family eventually reunited in Madrid.He studied engineering at the University of Madrid but was also having some success as a photographer, particularly with portraits of ballet and flamenco dancers, and in 1952 he switched to the recently created National Film School.Mr. Saura’s most recent film, “Las Paredes Hablan,” a documentary about art, was released a week before his death.His survivors include his wife, Eulàlia Ramón, and several children.Mr. Saura made a sequel of sorts to “Anna and the Wolves” called “Mama Turns 100,” released in 1979. The contrast was notable: “Anna,” made during the Franco years, was a drama; “Mama,” looking in on some of the same characters, was more of a comic drama. It was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film.It was as close as he came to realizing one dream.“I often think it would be fantastic, a magnificent experience, to make the same picture over and over, year after year,” he told LA Weekly in 1984, “to watch it evolve — to see things differ.” More

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      in Movies

      Sandra Seacat, Much Admired Acting Coach, Dies at 86

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      She helped Laura Dern, Marlo Thomas, Mickey Rourke and many others overcome fears, find their characters and discover “the joy of acting.”Sandra Seacat, who had a modest career as an actress and a formidable one as an acting coach, putting her own spin on techniques she had learned under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio to help Laura Dern, Marlo Thomas, Mickey Rourke and numerous other stars achieve some of their best performances, died on Jan. 17 in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.Her husband, Thurn Hoffman, said the cause was primary biliary cholangitis, an autoimmune disease.Ms. Seacat joined the Actors Studio in the early 1960s, when Mr. Strasberg was the artistic director and imparting the rehearsal and acting techniques often called simply the Method. Before long she began leading classes, and her reputation as an acting coach started to grow.By the early 1980s she was applying the psychiatrist Carl Jung’s theories about dreams and the unconscious to her coaching, helping students use their dreams to illuminate their own feelings and the characters they were developing, a technique called “dream work.”“The artist is a shaman, a wounded healer,” Ms. Seacat said in a 2015 video interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “We have wounds that we want to bring forth through the material. It’s joyful, it’s painful, but not painful in a bad way. And when you do that you also heal people in the audience.”Actors who worked with her echoed that sense.“The work was our bond,” Marlo Thomas, for whom Ms. Seacat was a coach, teacher and mentor for more than 40 years, said by email. “She taught me to seek the truth in myself, to heal my wounds and those of the audience. She changed me as a human being, teaching me to cast off my protective armor and see the world as a baby might see it, feeling and experiencing it for the first time.”Ms. Thomas’s career had for years been defined by her role in the 1960s sitcom “That Girl,” but Ms. Seacat helped her branch out, leading to more substantial parts and an Emmy Award for outstanding lead actress for her role as a woman who had spent years in a mental institution in the television movie “Nobody’s Child” (1986).Peggy Lipton had also achieved some 1960s TV fame, as one of the stars of the crime show “The Mod Squad,” but she then stepped away from acting for years to raise her children. By the late 1980s she was thinking about returning, but, she told The Los Angeles Times in 1993, “it was very scary.”She joined one of Ms. Seacat’s classes, nervous at first. “I used to sit under the table near the door,” she said, “so if she ever called on me I could get out.”But, she said, Ms. Seacat eventually helped her break through the fear. Ms. Lipton, who died in 2019, went on to accumulate dozens more TV and film credits, most memorably as the diner owner Norma Jennings on the trendy series “Twin Peaks” and its sequels.Mickey Rourke had done little acting — he had been an amateur boxer — before he arrived in New York in the 1970s and eventually began working with Ms. Seacat. He has often credited her with helping him to get serious about the craft of acting, leading to attention-getting roles in the 1980s in “Body Heat,” “Rumble Fish,” “Angel Heart” and other movies. She was responsible for “channeling all it was that was messing me up into something creative and challenging,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1984.Younger stars also benefited from her coaching, among them Andrew Garfield, who played the title character in “The Amazing Spider-Man” (2012) and its sequel and earned an Emmy nomination for his lead role in the mini-series “Under the Banner of Heaven” last year (in which Ms. Seacat played his character’s mother).“She was a revolutionary, a culture-changing teacher of acting and storytelling,” Mr. Garfield said in a statement. “She is a beacon for all of us of what a life of deep meaning and beauty can look like.”Ms. Seacat and the actress Laura Dern in an undated photo. “Sandra gave me the greatest gift an actor could ever ask for,” Ms. Dern said. “Sandra gave me the joy of acting.”Katie Jones/Variety, via Penske Media, via Getty ImagesSandra Diane Seacat was born on Oct. 2, 1936, in Greensburg, Kan., in the midst of the Dust Bowl, to Russell and Lois (Cronic) Seacat.After graduating from Northwestern University, Ms. Seacat moved to New York and began her acting career. In 1959 she married Arthur Kaufman, and some of her early credits are under the name Sandra Kaufman.Once she was admitted to the Actors Studio — she said she auditioned while pregnant — she appeared in various productions, including “Three Sisters” on Broadway in 1964, in which she had a small role. She had small roles in two other Broadway productions as well, “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1973 and “Sly Fox” in 1976.Ms. Seacat also took occasional roles on television and in films throughout her career. She directed one feature film, the 1990 comedy “In the Spirit,” which had a star-studded cast that included Ms. Thomas, Olympia Dukakis, Elaine May, Melanie Griffith and Peter Falk.“‘In the Spirit’ is a flat-out New York comedy, with all of the pluses and minuses that go with that territory,” Bob Strauss wrote in his review in The Los Angeles Daily News. “Director Sandra Seacat, one of the industry’s most respected acting coaches, lets her cast get away with Method murder. But the performers’ mannered joy is also infectious; even when the jokes don’t work, you smile along just to feel part of the party.”Ms. Seacat’s marriage to Mr. Kaufman ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Michael Ebert. She married Mr. Hoffman in 1982. In addition to him, she is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Greta, and a sister, Serena Seacat.The long list of other stars Ms. Seacat worked with includes Jessica Lange, Rachel Ward, Ryan Gosling and Laura Dern.“Sandra gave me the greatest gift an actor could ever ask for, which was beyond a method or a craft or anything anybody talks about,” Ms. Dern said in the 2015 Hollywood Reporter video. “Sandra gave me the joy of acting.” More

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      in Theater

      Jürgen Flimm, Director of Festivals and Opera Houses, Dies at 81

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      He left his mark in Hamburg, Berlin, Salzburg and elsewhere. He also directed a memorable “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth.Jürgen Flimm, who led some of Europe’s most important theaters, opera houses and performing arts festivals over the last 40 years, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Wischhafen, Germany, northeast of Hamburg. He was 81.His death was announced by the Berlin State Opera, where he had been general manager from 2010 to 2018. His wife, the film producer Susanne Ottersbach Flimm, said the cause was heart failure following pneumonia.Mr. Flimm’s Berlin appointment was his last in a long career that also included directorships at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Ruhrtriennale festival in northwestern Germany and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. He also staged Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 2000.He directed acclaimed productions outside the German-speaking world as well, including at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.A dress rehearsal for Mr. Flimm’s 2000 production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” one critic wrote of the production, “but the shock was considerable.”Jürgen Flimm was born in Giessen, Germany, on July 17, 1941, to Werner and Ellen Flimm, who were both doctors. His family had fled there after bombs began falling on Cologne, where they had been living, and where they resettled after the war.In a 2011 interview with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mr. Flimm recalled his childhood. His father was a surgeon who, Mr. Flimm said, used the family’s apartment to see patients: “Every morning I put up my bed and our living room became a waiting room: patients everywhere.” His mother was a general practitioner, but like so many German women in the immediate postwar period, a time of general deprivation, she scrounged to bring home butter and meat. As a child, Jürgen sold old newspapers to fishmongers. While his older brother, Dieter, played drums in jazz bands around the city, Jürgen invented dialogue for his puppets in the attic. Dieter Flimm eventually founded an architecture studio and worked as a set designer and a musician. He died in 2002.Their father, who loved theater, would attend performances as a doctor on duty, and Jürgen often accompanied him. “I secretly hoped that an actor would get sick, so I’d be able to go backstage and see what went on there,” he said, although his father disapproved of his sons’ artistic proclivities and would have preferred for them to study medicine.Jürgen enrolled at the University of Cologne, where he studied theater, German literature and sociology. He abandoned his studies to become an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele theater in Munich, where he worked from 1968 to 1972. He received an acting degree from the Theater der Keller in Cologne.In 1969 Mr. Flimm married the actress Inge Jansen, a colleague at the Kammerspiele. The marriage ended in divorce, but Mr. Flimm remained close to Ms. Jansen’s five children from her previous marriage, four of whom are still living. Ms. Jansen died in 2017.Mr. Flimm married Susanne Ottersbach. The couple lived in a two-story thatched house built in 1648. She is his only immediate survivor.He directed his first production at a theater in Wuppertal in 1971 and held positions at theaters in Mannheim and Hamburg in the 1970s, while also building up his résumé as director in Zurich, Munich and Berlin.He directed his first opera in 1978, the German premiere of Luigi Nono’s 1975 “Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore” in Frankfurt. The work remained dear to Mr. Flimm’s heart: Decades later, he programmed it, in an acclaimed production by the British director Katie Mitchell, in both Salzburg and Berlin.In 1979, Mr. Flimm returned to Cologne to lead the city’s main theater, the Schauspiel Köln. During his six years as artistic director there, he programmed works by the influential choreographer Pina Bausch and the fanciful French-Argentine director Jérôme Savary.He moved to Hamburg in 1985 to lead the Thalia Theater, which he is widely credited with putting in the international spotlight by inviting avant-garde artists like the American director Robert Wilson.From left, the director Robert Wilson, the author William S. Burroughs and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits at the premiere of their work “The Black Rider” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. It was the most lauded production during Mr. Flimm’s tenure there.Frederika Hoffmann/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1990, Mr. Wilson’s “The Black Rider,” a collaboration with the singer and songwriter Tom Waits and the author William Burroughs, became the most lauded production of Mr. Flimm’s tenure in Hamburg. Despite some famously sour reviews (the German magazine Der Spiegel likened it to “a version of ‘Cats’ for intellectuals and snobs”), it was a hit and toured worldwide.Mr. Flimm left the Thalia in 2000. That summer, his “Ring” cycle had its premiere at Bayreuth.“It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, “but the shock was considerable.” While praising some aspects of the cycle, Mr. Ross concluded that it ultimately left a very mixed impression.“The production felt unfinished,” he wrote, “and the flurry of painted curtains during the ‘Götterdämmerung’ apocalypse suggested that in the end it had simply run out of money.”Mr. Flimm made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” that October. This time Mr. Ross raved, concluding his review by saying that “Flimm is a smart director, and the Met should give him anything he wants.” The production was revived three times between 2002 and 2017.Mr. Flimm’s follow-up at the Met, a 2004 production of “Salome” that was a vehicle for the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, was more polarizing. In his review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini noted that Mr. Flimm received some loud boos on opening night. But, he noted, “the bravos won out, and rightly so.”In 2005, Mr. Flimm became artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a multidisciplinary arts festival in the rust belt of Germany. He stayed an extra summer past his three-year contract after his designated successor, the German theater director Marie Zimmermann, took her life in April 2007.His time there dovetailed with the start of his artistic directorship at the Salzburg Festival, where he had previously served as head of drama from 2002 to 2004. During his first summer, he commissioned a new staging of “Jedermann,” the morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition, from the young Bavarian director Christian Stückl. The production was a hit and remained a festival mainstay for a dozen years.Mr. Flimm ascended to the festival’s leadership in 2007. It was a tumultuous time: Gerard Mortier had taken the festival in a radically new direction throughout the 1990s, and after his departure in 2001, it had struggled to hold on to an artistic director.The four seasons Mr. Flimm spent as Salzburg’s leader were regarded as successful artistically, but he made clear that he was not interested in staying for the long run. In 2008, he announced that he would step down at the end of his term to head the Berlin State Opera.In September 2010, shortly after Mr. Flimm arrived in Berlin, four steamers sailed down the river Spree, conveying 500 members of the opera company westward to the Schiller Theater, where it planned to spend three seasons during renovations to its historic home. Instead, the construction dragged on for seven years.Mr. Flimm imported a number of acclaimed productions to Berlin that had first been seen at Salzburg. One of his original productions in Berlin was a 2016 staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which featured an abstract set designed by Frank Gehry that reportedly cost 100,000 euros.In addition to his work in theater, Mr. Flimm taught at the University of Hamburg and was a guest lecturer at Harvard and New York University. Among his many honors was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the German government’s highest, which he received in 2002. In a 2011 interview with the Bavarian radio station BR, Mr. Flimm was asked what accomplishments he was particularly proud of. Among those he mentioned was his 2000 “Fidelio.”“After the premiere,” he said, “I stood on the balcony of the Met, looked out into Manhattan and thought to myself, ‘Not bad, Jürgen!’” More

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      in Television

      Cody Longo, ‘Days of Our Lives’ Actor, Dies at 34

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      Mr. Longo died in his sleep, likely from accidental alcohol poisoning, at his Austin, Texas, home on Wednesday, his representative said.Cody Longo, an actor known for his roles in the television series “Hollywood Heights” and “Days of Our Lives,” was found dead on Wednesday at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 34.He died in his sleep, likely from accidental alcohol poisoning, his representative, Alex Gittelson, said. Mr. Gittelson said that Mr. Longo had struggled with alcohol addiction for several years, but he believed that Mr. Longo had recently been sober.Mr. Longo was a singer, songwriter, musician and music producer and served as a music supervisor and executive producer on film and television projects. He released his first EP, “Atmosphere,” in 2012 and the single “She Said” in 2013.Mr. Longo starred in episodes of “Days of Our Lives” as Nicholas Alamain in 2011 and in the Nick at Nite drama “Hollywood Heights” as Eddie Duran, a music superstar, in 2012.In 2016, he had roles on the ABC series “Nashville,” “Secrets and Lies” and “The Catch.” Mr. Longo starred in the pilot for “Santa Cruz” on Fox and in the ABC Family teen drama “Make It or Break It.” He also appeared in the movies “High School” and “Piranha 3D” in 2010.Mr. Longo was born in Colorado on March 4, 1988, and studied psychology and film at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began acting professionally in 2009, according to his website.“He had taken some time away from acting to pursue his music career and spend more time with his family in Nashville,” Mr. Gittelson said, “but we had kept in touch regularly and he was excited to get back into acting this year.”Mr. Longo is survived by his wife, Stephanie, and three children, Lyla, Elijah and Noah. More

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      in Movies

      Solomon Perel, Jew Who Posed as a Hitler Youth to Survive, Dies at 97

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      His masquerade — a tale recounted in a memoir and in the film “Europa Europa” — saved his life. But “to this day,” he said, “I have a tangle of two souls in one body.”Solomon Perel, a German Jew who saved himself from death by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and later felt gratitude for the Nazi he pretended to be in order to live, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Givatayim, Israel, near Tel Aviv. He was 97.His great-nephew Amit Brakin confirmed the death.Mr. Perel, who was also known as Shlomo and Solly, recounted his survival story in a 1990 autobiography. It was adapted into a German movie, “Europa Europa,” released in the United States in 1991, which won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film.Like many other Holocaust survival stories, Mr. Perel’s began with Nazi oppression, which led his family to move in 1936 from Peine, Germany, to Lodz, Poland. After the German invasion on Sept. 1, 1939, they were forced into a ghetto that would house as many as 164,000 Jews. He fled later that year with an older brother, Isaac, in the hope of finding relative safety in Soviet-controlled eastern Poland.In Bialystok, where he parted with Isaac, Solomon was placed by a Jewish assistance organization in a Soviet orphanage in Grodno (now part of Belarus). He stayed for two years, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941; he recalled that the Jewish children at the orphanage were roused from their sleep and told to flee the German attack.Solomon became one of many refugees captured by the German Wehrmacht in an open field near Minsk.Fearful that his captors would learn he was Jewish and shoot him in a nearby forest, he dug a small pit in the soft ground with the heel of a shoe and buried his identification papers.After waiting on a long line, Solomon was asked by a German soldier, “Are you a Jew?” Heeding his mother’s last words to him, “You must live,” but not his father’s, “Always remain a Jew,” he lied: “I’m not a Jew. I’m an ethnic German.”Not only did the Germans believe him; they welcomed him into their unit under the name Josef Perjell, and made him an interpreter. One interrogation in which he participated was of Joseph Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili.“I became a split personality — a Nazi by day and a Jew by night,” Mr. Perel told The Week, an Indian magazine, in 2019. He remained there until his commanding officer sent him to the Hitler Youth boarding school in Braunschweig, Germany, during the winter of 1941-42.If anyone discovered he was Jewish, “they’d deal with me like cannibals,” he said in “Because You Must Live: The Story of Shlomo (Solly) Perel,” a part of the Survivors Testimony Films Series produced by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. He was relieved that the school’s showers had separate stalls, which prevented anyone from seeing that he had been circumcised.But, he said, “nobody suspected me because it was impossible to think that some Jewish boy would sneak into the center of that protected country.”He became, to the young Nazis surrounding him, a true believer, absorbing the lessons of National Socialism, wearing a uniform with a swastika and a Nazi eagle on his chest and preparing for military service.“I was a Hitler Youth completely,” he said in the Yad Vashem film. “I began telling myself, ‘Wow, I’m part of a force that’s conquering the world.’”But he could not switch off his real self entirely. In 1943, during the Christmas holiday, he received a holiday pass and took a train back to Lodz. For 12 days, wearing the black winter uniform of the Hitler Youth, he searched for his parents in the ghetto.He rode a streetcar, which Jews could not board, back and forth. He walked the city’s streets. He saw men rolling carts piled with Jewish corpses.But he did not find his mother, his father or his sister, Bertha, none of whom he would ever see again. His brothers, Isaac and David, survived.Marco Hofschneider portrayed Mr. Perel in the critically acclaimed German movie “Europa Europa.” Delphine Forest played his teacher. Orion ClassicsSolomon Perel was born in Peine on April 21, 1925. His father, Azriel, owned a shoe store. His mother, Rebecca Perel, was a homemaker.Solomon was nearly 8 years old when Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, but his life did not change appreciably until two years later, when antisemitic laws stripped Jews of their rights and citizenship. He was expelled from school.“It was my most traumatic childhood experience,” he said in “Because You Must Live,” “that barbaric expulsion from school because somebody considered me different.”The family moved to Lodz after his father was forced by the Nazis to sell his store for nearly nothing. Solomon attended a Polish state school for Jews. It was after the Germans invaded Poland and Jewish families were ordered into the Lodz ghetto that he started on the path that led to his lifesaving masquerade as a Nazi.Simmy Allen, a spokesman for Yad Vashem, said that Mr. Perel’s life as a Jew among the Hitler Youth was more than unusual.“We know of Jews using false papers and presenting themselves as non-Jews, even Aryans, during the Holocaust in different places throughout Europe, even in Berlin,” Mr. Allen said in an email. “But to be in the heart of the lion’s den, under that level of scrutiny all the time and, in a sense, part of the ideology of the ‘enemy,’ as Shlomo was, is a very unique and rare position.”Mr. Perel recalled how invested he had become in the Nazi philosophy even as the war turned against Germany.“I was deeply involved in a world that had been forced upon me, my reasoning powers had finally been completely anesthetized,” he wrote in his memoir, published in English and French as “Europa, Europa,” “and my mental faculties were so befogged that no ray of reality could penetrate. I continued to feel just like one of them.”Mr. Perel at his home in Israel. He lectured widely about his wartime experiences, condemning racism in any form. Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, via Associated PressAs the war neared its end, Mr. Perel was sent to the Western Front, assigned to a unit guarding bridges. When American soldiers arrested him and his squad and briefly held him in a prisoner-of-war camp, his war was over. He was no longer Josef Perjell. He was once again Shlomo Perel.Mr. Perel moved to Munich, where he was a translator for the Soviet Army during interrogations of Nazi war criminals. He emigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, fought in the Israeli war of independence and managed a zipper factory.In 1959, he married Dvora Morezky. She died in 2021. He is survived by a son, Uziel, and three grandchildren. Another son, Ronen, died in 2019.For many years Mr. Perel put his memories of the Holocaust aside. But in the late 1980s, after a near-fatal heart attack, he began to discuss his past and to write his memoir.The film adaptation, written and directed by Agnieszka Holland, starred Marco Hofschneider as Mr. Perel. It earned Ms. Holland an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.In addition to winning the Golden Globe for best foreign film, the movie was named best foreign film by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. But the German Export Film Union declined to select it as its entry for an Academy Award for best foreign film — a decision that prompted many of Germany’s leading filmmakers, including Wolfgang Petersen and Werner Herzog, to sign a letter of protest that was published in Daily Variety.Mr. Perel attended the film’s premiere in Lodz.In 1992, he reunited with some of his former Hitler Youth comrades and revealed to them that he was Jewish. Some years earlier, he had gotten together with surviving members of the Wehrmacht unit that had accepted him as a German.He lectured about his experiences in Israel and around the world.“He insisted on including, with every lecture or talk he gave, a message for accepting the other,” Mr. Brakin, his great-nephew, said in a text message, “including the one that is different, and a message against racism in any form it might take.”But Mr. Perel never fully purged himself of the Nazi identity he had adopted.“To this day, I have a tangle of two souls in one body,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “By this I mean to say that the road to Josef, the Hitler Youth that I was for four years, was very short and easy. But the way back to the Jew in me, Shlomo, or Solly, was much harder.”“I love him,” he said, referring to Josef, “because he saved my life.” More

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      in Music

      AKA, Influential South African Rapper, Is Fatally Shot

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      The rapper, whose legal name was Kiernan Forbes, was one of the most formidable songwriters in South African hip-hop. He and another man were killed outside a restaurant on Friday.AKA, a generation-defining South African rapper whose blend of local sounds with American hip-hop vaulted him into stardom, was fatally shot on Friday night outside a restaurant in the coastal city of Durban.The police said that AKA, 35, had been walking to his car on a popular nightlife strip shortly after 10 p.m. when two armed people approached from across the street and fired several shots at close range before running away.AKA, whose legal name was Kiernan Forbes, and another man died at the scene, the police said. Although the police did not name the second victim, South African news reports identified him as AKA’s close friend Tebello Motsoane, a 34-year-old chef and music entrepreneur known as Tibz.The police said on Saturday that they were still searching for the suspects.The killing drew an outpouring of grief from around the country, with fans, artists, major political parties and the government sending out messages of condolence. On Saturday, fans gathered outside the restaurant where he was killed, Wish on Florida, to pay their respects, with some blasting his music from their cars.“AKA was counted amongst the best rappers on the continent,” South Africa’s Department of Sport, Arts and Culture said in a statement. “AKA was one of the most patriotic artists who literally flew the South African flag high everywhere he went around the globe.”Born in Cape Town, AKA moved to Johannesburg as a child. He attended an elite private school, the sort of setting where hip-hop first became popularized in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent because affluent students had access to rap from its birthplace, the United States. In a 2014 article in the South African publication The Sunday Times, AKA described his parents as being “scared but excited” when he told them that he wanted to pursue a music career.He produced for several artists before his own big breakout in 2011 with his hit single “Victory Lap” on his debut album, “Altar Ego.”He went on to become known as one of the most formidable songwriters in South African hip-hop, noted Cedric Dladla, a music and culture journalist based in the country. AKA would take beats and samples from popular South African genres like amapiano and kwaito and incorporate them into his music, Mr. Dladla said. That helped influence a new generation of rappers, some of whom became rivals of AKA.“AKA was a person who was an advocate for the South African identity of music,” Mr. Dladla said. “That’s what made him stand out, no matter where he went.”Some of his songs were laden with references that only people in South Africa would understand, like his single “Lemons (Lemonade),” which made reference to a derogatory term used for foreigners and the practice of police officers asking for a “cold drink” when they want a bribe. But AKA also gained acclaim across Africa, collaborating with popular artists like Burna Boy, the Nigerian Afrobeats star.What also set AKA apart, Mr. Dladla said, was his performance style — an energetic and captivating aura, often with the backing of a band. He once performed with an orchestra.“That’s when the evolution from him being a rapper to him being a well-rounded musician started,” Mr. Dladla said.Whatever international acclaim he received, AKA seemed to embrace being a star who catered to Africa rather than the United States.“Why not be big in Africa?” he told The Sunday Times. “The States know what they want and consume it. There are lots of dollars on the continent.”Two years ago, AKA lost his fiancé, Anele Tembe, to tragic and controversial circumstances when she fell to her death from the 10th floor of a hotel in Cape Town. The two had a rocky relationship, according to news reports, including an altercation about a month before Ms. Tembe’s death when AKA was accused of breaking down a door at the couple’s Johannesburg apartment after Ms. Tembe locked herself inside a room. A friend of Ms. Tembe’s told News24, a South African online publication, that AKA had slammed his fiancée’s head against a wall, but AKA denied ever abusing her.AKA had been scheduled to perform at a nightclub on Friday night in Durban as part of an extended celebration of his birthday, which was late last month. Earlier in the day, he had posted videos on Instagram of himself dancing in a gym, getting his hair cut and eating a plate of seafood at the restaurant he visited before his death. He had also plugged his upcoming album, “Mass Country,” which is due to be released in about two weeks.“Our son was loved and he gave love in return,” his parents, Tony and Lynn Forbes, posted in a statement on his social media accounts.AKA is also survived by a young daughter he had with D.J. Zinhle, a popular South African D.J. In an Instagram post on his birthday last month, AKA had posted a picture of his daughter and a cake.“Thank God for another year on this earth,” he wrote. “Looking forward to seeing what he has in store for me in 2023.” More

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      in Theater

      Eugene Lee, Set Designer for Broadway and ‘S.N.L.,’ Dies at 83

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      He won Tony Awards for “Wicked” and other shows while also overseeing the sets for the late-night franchise’s fast-paced sketch comedy.For decades it was possible for Saturday night theatergoers in New York to get a double dose of Eugene Lee’s work, though it’s likely that few would have realized they were doing so. They might have taken in “Sweeney Todd,” “Ragtime,” “Wicked” or other Broadway shows whose striking sets were designed by Mr. Lee, then could arrive home in time to tune into “Saturday Night Live” — a show for which he served as production designer when it began in 1975, and on which he was still working this season.Mr. Lee, an inventive and remarkably prolific set designer who was also known for his decades with Trinity Repertory Company, a respected regional theater in Providence, R.I., died on Monday in Providence. He was 83.His family announced the death, after a short illness that was not specified.Mr. Lee won or shared three Tony Awards for his Broadway sets — for “Candide” in 1974, “Sweeney Todd” in 1979 and “Wicked” in 2003 — and six Emmy Awards for “Saturday Night Live,” most recently in 2021.In theater, he was known for imaginative designs imbued with authenticity.“Eugene loved real objects, objects with history,” Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, who worked with Mr. Lee at Trinity Rep and elsewhere, said by email, “but he’d use them in utterly nonrealistic ways onstage.”He was known for reconfiguring entire theaters, as he did for “Candide,” the musical based on Voltaire, which was staged at the 180-seat Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973 before moving to the much larger Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year. Mr. Lee, working with his partner at the time, Franne Lee, and the director Harold Prince, turned the Chelsea into “a ramped and runwayed circus midway,” The New York Times wrote, “surrounded by booths and mini-stages that could be changed, in a twinkling, from a corpse-littered battlefield to a vizier’s seraglio.”The “Saturday Night Live” stage crew at work in 2012. Mr. Lee created the basic stage look that has remained largely unchanged since the show began in 1975.Karsten Moran for The New York Times“The audience sat up, down and all around,” The Times said, “on stools, benches and ballpark-style ‘bleachers,’ between the ramps or along the runways or anywhere they wouldn’t be in the actors’ way.”Preserving that staging when the show transferred to Broadway took some effort, which included removing numerous seats, and for the first few performances some theatergoers asked for refunds because of problems with sight lines and other issues. But eventually the bugs were worked out.The show ran for almost two years and won five Tonys, including one for Mr. Lee and Franne Lee for scenic design. (Their relationship lasted for most of the 1970s but they were nevermarried, Patrick Lynch, Mr. Lee’s assistant and fellow designer, said by phone.)Five years later, for the Stephen Sondheim musical “Sweeney Todd” (which, like “Candide,” had a book by Hugh Wheeler and was directed by Mr. Prince), Mr. Lee brought pieces of an old iron foundry from Rhode Island and turned the Uris Theater into a stylized Industrial Age scene out of Victorian London.“The stagehands at the theater still remember how heavy the set was,” Mr. Lee told The Boston Globe in 2007. “You had to knock away bricks to support it. You can still see the scars all these years later.”Kristin Chenoweth left, and Idina Menzel in “Wicked,” for which Mr. Lee won a Tony.Sara KrulwichThe designs won him a second Tony Award, and a third came with “Wicked.” For that show, whose set featured an imposing dragon and a time motif, Mr. Lee drew inspiration in part from smashing apart old clocks in his Providence workshop and fiddling with the innards.Mr. Lee had more than two dozen Broadway credits, including “Agnes of God” (1982), “Show Boat” (1994), “Ragtime” (1998), “Glengarry Glen Ross” (2012) and, most recently, “Bright Star” (2016). While working on those projects and others, he oversaw the sets for “Saturday Night Live,” including creating the basic stage look that has remained largely unchanged since the show began in 1975.Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and executive producer, said in a phone interview that when he began formulating “S.N.L.,” he had recently seen “Candide” and was impressed with the look the Lees had created.“In those days, television was always on the floor,” he said — filmed on one level, with a polished sort of look — but Mr. Lee, still working with Franne Lee, had a different idea.“He said, ‘Well, I think we should probably build stages,” Mr. Michaels said. “And that meant we’d build a balcony, basically turn the studio into a theater.”“It looked like the city,” Mr. Michaels added of the look Mr. Lee created. “Something about it rang true.”Over the decades — taking a break only when Mr. Michaels did for five years in the 1980s — Mr. Lee would travel from his home in Providence to oversee the show’s design each week, whether it included a living room, a fake Oval Office or a special setting for the musical guest.In his work on “S.N.L.” Mr. Lee encountered many up-and-coming comedians, and he helped some of them branch out, working on the Broadway shows of Gilda Radner (“Live From New York,” 1979), Colin Quinn (“An Irish Wake,” 1998) and Will Ferrell (“You’re Welcome, America,” 2009). He also became production designer for “The Tonight Show” when Jimmy Fallon took it over in 2014.“When we were discussing the ‘Tonight Show’ set, he just had such a clear vision on the look and the stage and the curtain and the color of the wood,” Mr. Fallon said by email. “Every inch of it had meaning.”Whoever was in the “S.N.L.” cast in a given year, Mr. Michaels said, owed a debt to Mr. Lee.“He built this place for us to play in and do the show,” he said, “and it feels whole when we’re in it.”For “Sweeney Todd,” Mr. Lee turned the Uris Theater into a stylized Industrial Age scene out of Victorian London.Martha Swope/The New York Public LibraryEugene Edward Lee was born on March 9, 1939, in Beloit, Wis. His father, also named Eugene, was an engineer, and his mother, Elizabeth (Gates) Lee, was a pediatric nurse.His academic history was a patchwork.“I don’t think I have a degree from any place,” he told American Theater magazine in 1984. “Maybe I have a degree from Yale; I can’t remember.”He started out studying at the University of Wisconsin.“Then I saw Helen Hayes talking on television about Carnegie Tech and the stage,” he told The Times in 2000, referring to what is now Carnegie Mellon University. “So I got in my Volkswagen, which my grandmother had given me, and I arrived at the front door and said, ‘I’m here.’”He had a similarly casual approach to the Yale School of Drama, where he arrived in 1966 and studied for a time, although he did not finish his degree. (Some two decades later, the school granted him a master’s degree — “a real degree, not even an honorary one,” he told Yale Alumni Magazine in 2017.)With or without degrees, by the second half of the 1960s he was getting plenty of design work, including at Trinity Rep, where Adrian Hall, the founding artistic director, brought him in as resident designer. (Mr. Hall died on Feb. 4 in Van, Texas.) When Mr. Hall added the job of artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center in 1983, Mr. Lee worked with him there as well.Wherever he was working, Mr. Lee favored the genuine over the artificial.“Once you start painting, it has a painted look,” he told American Theater. “What please me are real textures used in the way nature left them. There’s nothing like a real piece of rusted tin — really rusted — put up on the stage. I don’t care how heavy it is, how dirty it is.”Mr. Eustis recalled one production — “Hope of the Heart” in 1990 — on which Mr. Lee’s enthusiasm for the realistic had to be reigned in.“Eugene could be risky, even reckless,” he said. “When I first worked with him at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, he insisted that the actors should use live ammunition (mercifully, only BBs) in the course of the show. We had to do a full-scale test, with a dozen of us wearing goggles, to prove to him that BBs would fly all over the auditorium and blind the audience if we used them. Reluctantly, he agreed to abandon the idea.”A model by Mr. Lee, later revised, of a proposed set for “The Tonight Show.” Mr. Lee became the show’s production designer when Jimmy Fallon took over as host in 2014. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMr. Lee married Brooke Lutz in 1981. She survives him, along with his twin brother, Thomas; a son from his relationship with Franne Lee, Willie; a son from his marriage, Ted; and two grandchildren.Mr. Lee was known as a man of few words, and a man who loved the water. Mr. Eustis recalled that Mr. Lee took him out on Narragansett Bay on his sailboat when they were working on Trinity’s production of “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 1995.“We spent a couple hours on the water, talking but not referring to the play, and then he said, ‘It would be too bad if they actually left the stage when they say they are leaving,’” Mr. Eustis recalled. “That was our whole conversation. He delivered one of the most brilliant and beautiful designs I’d ever seen.”Iris Fanger, reviewing the production in The Boston Herald, described that set as a series of rooms “that seem to stretch back into eternity.” More