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      Spotify Stands by Joe Rogan: ‘Canceling Voices Is a Slippery Slope’

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      Spotify is not canceling Joe Rogan.Two weeks into an evolving and far-reaching controversy over its star podcaster, who has been accused of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus, and condemned for his past use of a racial slur, Spotify has faced growing pressure to take a stronger stance about the podcasts it hosts.But in a memo to employees over the weekend, Daniel Ek, the company’s chief executive, discussed the recent removal of a number of episodes and made it clear that it would not drop Rogan’s show, “The Joe Rogan Experience.” That show has been exclusive to Spotify since 2020, when the company made a licensing deal with Rogan that has been reported to be worth $100 million or more.“I do not believe that silencing Joe is the answer,” Ek wrote in the memo, which Spotify provided to The New York Times. “We should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope.”Ek also confirmed that Spotify recently removed dozens of episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” after a compilation video was shared online by the singer India.Arie showing Rogan repeatedly using a racial slur on his show. In a video over the weekend, Rogan apologized and called it “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly,” though he also said that at the times he made those comments — over 12 years of his podcast, Rogan said — he had believed that they were acceptable in context. Many commentators found that apology insufficient.In his memo, Ek said that Rogan made the decision to remove the episodes, which appear to number about 70, after meetings with Spotify executives and after “his own reflections.”Ek also said that Spotify would invest $100 million for the “licensing, development and marketing” of music and other forms of audio “from historically marginalized groups.” What that would entail was not immediately clear. Spotify licenses most of its music from record labels and music distributors, and music from Black artists and other minorities are among the most popular on the platform; Spotify has also promoted minority podcasters with its “Sound Up” program, for example. Representatives of the company did not respond to a request for clarification.Since Jan. 24, when Neil Young demanded that his music be removed from Spotify, citing complaints from health professionals about Covid-19 misinformation on Rogan’s show, the company has faced a mini boycott from musicians, and constant criticism online. Joni Mitchell, Arie and Young’s sometime bandmates in Crosby, Stills and Nash, have all pulled their music. A handful of other artists, like the alternative band Failure, have followed suit, while others have staged protests of various kinds. The band Belly, for example, added a “Delete Spotify” banner to its own Spotify profile page, and explained on social media that for many artists, removing their music from the service is easier said than done.In media circles, Spotify’s stance over Rogan has also raised questions about the responsibility of online companies to police the content on their platforms. In recent years, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others have come under frequent attack for the content they host, usually about politics or the pandemic. They have responded with a variety of measures, but tended to avoid labeling themselves as publishers.That stance has been more difficult for Spotify, given its exclusive deal with Rogan. In his memo, Ek doubled down on recent comments denying that Spotify is Rogan’s publisher. In a company town hall last week, he told employees that despite its exclusive arrangement with Rogan, Spotify did not have advance approval of his shows, and could remove his episodes only if they ran afoul of Spotify’s content guidelines. (Spotify released those platform rules for the first time last week; it was not clear whether the episodes that were removed last week violated them.)In his letter, Ek alluded to growing employee discontent about that position, and said he was “wrestling with how this perception squares with our values.”“I also want to be transparent,” he added, “in setting the expectation that in order to achieve our goal of becoming the global audio platform, these kinds of disputes will be inevitable.” More

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      Whoopi Goldberg Apologizes for Saying Holocaust Was ‘Not About Race’

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      Ms. Goldberg’s comments, on Monday’s episode of “The View,” came amid growing ignorance about the Holocaust and rising antisemitism.Whoopi Goldberg, the comedian and actress who is also a co-host of the ABC talk show “The View,” said repeatedly during an episode of the show that aired on Monday that the Holocaust was not about race, comments that come at a time of rising antisemitism globally. She later apologized.In the episode, Ms. Goldberg said the Holocaust was about “man’s inhumanity to man” and “not about race.” When one of her co-hosts challenged that assertion, saying the Holocaust was driven by white supremacy, Ms. Goldberg said: “But these are two white groups of people.”She added, “This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.” As she continued to speak, music came on, indicating a commercial break.There was a fierce backlash. Jewish groups said Ms. Goldberg’s comments were dangerous and the latest example of growing ignorance about the Nazi genocide. During World War II, under a policy of mass extermination, the Nazis killed six million Jews — about a third of the world’s Jewish population at the time — because they believed Jews were an inferior race.Later Monday, Ms. Goldberg appeared on Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” where she apologized, explaining that, as a Black person, she thinks of racism as being based on skin color but that she realized not everyone sees it that way. “I get it. Folks are angry,” she said. “I accept that, and I did it to myself.”She apologized again on Tuesday at the start of “The View.” She expressed remorse over her remarks, saying she realized that they were misinformed and that she had misspoken.“I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention,” Ms. Goldberg said. “And I understand why now, and for that I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful and helped me understand some different things.”On Monday, Ms. Goldberg had been discussing a Tennessee school district’s recent decision to remove a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust from its curriculum when she made her initial comments on Monday’s episode. On Monday night, she released a statement apologizing for them. On Tuesday, she said that she had learned from the experience.“It is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race,” she said. “Now, words matter, and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people, as they know and y’all know because I’ve always done that.”During an appearance on the show on Tuesday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said it was critical to combat hate and misinformation about the Holocaust.“The Holocaust happened and we need to learn from this genocide if we want to prevent future tragedies from happening,” Mr. Greenblatt said.Mr. Greenblatt suggested that “The View” should consider adding a Jewish host to its panel.“Think about having a Jewish host on this show who can bring these issues of antisemitism, who can bring these issues of representation to ‘The View’ every single day,” he said.Ms. Goldberg, 66, did not mention having a Jewish background, as she has in the past. She has said in interviews that she does not practice any religion but identifies as Jewish and adopted her distinctive stage name partly because of that. She was born Caryn Johnson.In 1994, Ms. Goldberg mentioned her ties to Judaism in an interview with The Orlando Sentinel, after the Anti-Defamation League criticized a recipe that she contributed to a charity cookbook for “Jewish American princess fried chicken.” The title was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, she said.“I am a Jewish-American princess,” she told the newspaper. “That’s probably what bothers people most. It’s not my problem people are uncomfortable with the fact that I’m Jewish.”This week, the criticism of Ms. Goldberg’s remarks was intense. Before he was invited onto “The View,” Mr. Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League wrote on Twitter: “No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race. They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous.”And Mrs. Goldberg’s former co-host, Meghan McCain, said on Twitter on Monday that antisemitism was “a poison that is increasingly excused in our culture and television — and permeates in spaces that should shock us all.”According to a 2014 report by the Anti-Defamation League, more than one billion people globally hold antisemitic views. More than a third of people in the 102 countries polled had never heard of the Holocaust, the report found.Jewish communities around the world have indicated an increase in annual antisemitic incidents, according to research by the Anti-Defamation League. That feeling is pronounced in Europe, where 89 percent of Jews felt that antisemitism in their countries had increased between 2013 and 2018, according to a 2018 European Union survey of about 16,500 Jewish people.The survey also found that 40 percent of European Jews worried about being physically attacked, and across 12 E.U. countries where Jews have been living for centuries, more than a third said they were considering emigrating because they no longer felt safe as Jews.Last month, the United Nations adopted a resolution that condemns denial and distortion of the Holocaust. Ms. Goldberg’s comments also came weeks after a gunman held several people hostage at a Texas synagogue for 11 hours.David Baddiel, a British comedian and the author of the book “Jews Don’t Count,” said in an interview that antisemitism has very little to do with religion itself — descendants of Jewish people who had converted to Christianity were also killed in the Holocaust because they were viewed as members of the Jewish race.“If you are a race, an ethnicity, as Jews are, that have suffered persecution over many, many centuries, principally because that happens to be who you are, happens to be who your parents are, happens to be who your ancestors are, then that is racism,” Mr. Baddiel said.“There is no other word for it.” More

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      in Music

      In 'Black No More,' the Evolution of Black Music, and a Man’s Soul

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      The new show “Black No More,” inspired by a 1931 satirical novel about race relations, has “the point of view of people who are very much products of now.”A Black man in New York City, during the Harlem Renaissance, is hoping for a life without bigotry. This is Harlem after all, a Black enclave, the epicenter of culture and creativity. Here, he’d have an easier time in getting along.Or so he thought. He soon learns that utopia is an illusion, that racism prevails no matter the location. In the North, he discovers, the racism is subtle: He’s somehow not the right fit for his job, though his supervisor, a white man, says he’s doing well. Others think he’s too uppity, so he is let go.Distraught, he undergoes a procedure to turn himself white and retreats to Atlanta. There he sees how prejudiced whites speak of Black people when they aren’t in the room: The “n” word is tossed around with the hard “-er.” He soon realizes that his new skin tone can’t save him, either. The life he wants means nothing if he loses his soul along the way.This is the plot of “Black No More,” a new musical presented by the New Group and inspired by George S. Schuyler’s 1931 novel of the same name. The show, an expansive, Afrofuturistic take on race relations in America now in previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan, is set against an equally vast arrangement of jazz, gospel, R&B, hip-hop and reggae meant to connect the past and present. By using older and newer styles of music, coupled with the protagonist’s struggles to rise above the same discrimination endured today, the show explores how little race relations have progressed.Jones, far right, working on the show’s choreography with cast members, including Lillias White, center.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesAnd it almost didn’t see the light of day.The screenwriter John Ridley, who wrote the show’s book, was inspired to adapt the story after reading Schuyler’s novel over a decade ago, before he’d written his Oscar-winning adaptation of “12 Years a Slave.” “I read it and was really taken with the wit and unbridled satire,” he said. “So much of the writing was timely and timeless and painful and painless.”He initially wrote it as a screenplay in 2013, but couldn’t get financing for a sci-fi-inspired film about Black existence. Someone suggested trying to have it produced as a play, but that also proved to be a tough road. Of the stage directors he reached out to, Ridley said that Scott Elliott, the artistic director of the New Group, was the only one who expressed interest. He read the novel and thought it would work best as a musical. “It had the possibility to be an amazing theatrical satire, but with humanity in it, with real people, not like ‘wink-wink satire,’” Elliott said.There was just one problem: Ridley didn’t like musicals. “I was like, ‘Well, yeah, but that’s OK,” Elliott said. “Let’s go on this journey together and see what happens.” Ridley’s view on musicals changed after meeting with Tariq Trotter, better known as Black Thought of the Roots, and seeing “Hamilton.” He said that show convinced him that musicals can be vehicles for sending a strong message.They enlisted Trotter, who wrote the lyrics and developed the music with Anthony Tidd, James Poyser and Daryl Waters, and the Tony-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones. Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton,” owns the commercial rights. And with all the star power (Broadway veterans, including Brandon Victor Dixon, Lillias White and Ephraim Sykes), it seems “Black No More” could very well be destined for Broadway.John Ridley with the show’s associate director Monet during a recent rehearsal. Marc. J. FranklinAmong other themes, the show holds up a mirror to those in the Black community who aspire to whiteness. The protagonist, Max Disher (played by Dixon), decides to lighten his skin after meeting a white woman, Helen Givens (Jennifer Damiano), in the Savoy Ballroom during a night out. That he’d be willing to sacrifice his identity after a chance encounter with the woman is a longstanding critique of some Black men: No matter how much they’re supported by Black women, they still see dating white women as the ultimate societal prize.The musical also delves into the internal baggage that comes with Blackness, the weight of external pressure applied by those who look like you but don’t know your circumstances. How do you stay true to yourself without disappointing your peers? And what does it mean to be real Black anyway?“For me, the lesson to be learned is that there is a cost,” Dixon said. “There is a cost to the choices we force each other to make to become happy, accepted members of society. It’s time for us to re-examine those costs. Is this the construct in which we can really rise and grow and evolve as a human population?”“Black No More” begins amicably, with a flurry of Black and white ensemble dancers gliding in unison across the stage, surrounding a barber’s chair used for the skin-altering experiment. Out walks Trotter, who plays Junius Crookman, the doctor performing the procedure. He paints Harlem as a deceptive place where dreams don’t always come true. “You’ll find all things … both high and low,” he says in his opening monologue. “Here where every Black baby must try to grow.”The music of “Black No More” largely fits this era, smoothly transitioning from swing jazz to big band to soul. Some of the verses have a rap lilt to them — Trotter, after all, is the lead vocalist of the Roots — but his writing here explores a broad range of musical textures, conjuring old Harlem while conveying music’s full spectrum. After Max becomes white, the music becomes softer and more delicate, sounding almost like bluegrass or folkish in a way. Near the end of the show, two white women sing over what sounds like an R&B track, a genre typically associated with Black women. “Black No More” is full of this sort of cross-pollination.“I’ve always been very big on allowing the universe to sort of write the songs, allowing the material to work itself out,” Trotter said. “These songs represent the different elements of Black music. What we arrived at is something that feels like an education in the evolution of Black music, which, at its core, would be the evolution of American music.”Tamika Lawrence and Brandon Victor Dixon during a dress rehearsal.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesThe Harlem Renaissance is widely seen as an artistic movement in which Black creators like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Duke Ellington made landmark work. Indeed, the Renaissance helped change how Black people were viewed culturally; from it came a new, fearless creative generation. Yet the Renaissance had its detractors. Some said the literature only catered to whites and the Black middle-class. Even one of Harlem’s most famous establishments — the Cotton Club — was only for whites. “Black No More” demystifies Harlem as a mecca by wrapping its arms around it, wiping off the glitter while celebrating its charm.“The show, in my mind, is a critique of a critique,” said Jones, who is also choreographing the new Broadway musical “Paradise Square.” “We’re trying to make a musical about a historical novel, but with the point of view of people who are very much products of now. For God’s sake, we are post-George Floyd.”“Black No More” was originally slated to premiere in October 2020. But then the pandemic shut down theaters, forcing shows to postpone or cancel their runs. And in May 2020, Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by the police officer Derek Chauvin. Protests ensued. Coupled with outcries over the deaths of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, these rebellions felt different. The precinct in which Chauvin worked was burned. In New York City, protesters and law enforcement regularly clashed, intensifying the already-strained relationship between certain residents and the police.Near the end of “Black No More,” over an aggressive rap beat, a white antagonist asserts that Black lives don’t matter, a perceived reference to the modern-day Black Lives Matter movement. Within the context of the musical, he’s upset that his sister got involved with a Black man. Yet the subtle nod acknowledges the cloud of George Floyd hanging over this musical.“We just happen to be in a space where certain audiences are ready to receive what we’re trying to say, as opposed to pre-2020,” said Tamika Lawrence, who plays Buni Brown, Max Disher’s best friend. “There are certain cultures in America — white cultures, specifically — that I think are now ready to have tough conversations and ready to see this kind of art.”Trotter concurred. “I think some people may take offense,” he said. “Some people may be appalled, some may take it as a challenge to widen their scope, to tear some of the bandages off these bullet wounds that we deal with as a society.”“Black No More” is presented with the hope that Black and white people can find common ground somewhere. That we can at least see one another’s differences and be respectful of them.Just don’t do something drastic like change your skin color. As the musical teaches us, the grass isn’t greener.“What it says is, ‘Look at yourself, take a look at where we are, take a look at where we’ve come from, how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go,” Trotter said of the show. “It speaks to a commonality that we all share as humans, as people, as inhabitants of this planet. I don’t think we’re ever going to exist in perfect harmony, but I think there’s a possibility for us to coexist in peace.” More

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      Everett Lee, Who Broke Color Barriers on the Conductor’s Podium, Dies at 105

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      He was known as the first Black conductor on Broadway and the first to conduct a white orchestra in the South. Mr. Lee went on to a successful career in Europe.Everett Lee, a conductor who broke down racial barriers but then fled the prejudice that Black classical musicians faced in the United States to make a significant career in Europe, died on Jan. 12 at a hospital near his home in Malmo, Sweden. He was 105.Mr. Lee’s daughter, Eve, confirmed the death.Already a concertmaster leading white theater orchestras by 1943, Mr. Lee made a significant breakthrough on Broadway when he was appointed music director of Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Town” in September 1945. The Chicago Defender called him the first Black conductor “to wave the baton over a white orchestra in a Broadway production.”In 1953, Mr. Lee conducted the Louisville Orchestra in Kentucky, a nerve-shredding afternoon for him because of little rehearsal time and the pressure of history. United Press reported that Mr. Lee’s concert was “one of the first” at which a Black man led a white orchestra in the South; other outlets went further, claiming that it was the very first such time. The Courier-Journal critic said that he “made a most favorable first impression.”Then, in 1955, shortly after Marian Anderson had made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, Mr. Lee conducted the New York City Opera, another first. (His wife, Sylvia Olden Lee, a vocal coach, had been appointed the first Black musician on the Met’s staff around that time.)“Not only was his conducting expert in all its technical aspects,” a New York Times critic wrote of his “La Traviata,” “but it was informed with musicianship and an exceptionally keen grasp of the character of the opera.”Despite the breakthroughs, racism constrained Mr. Lee’s U.S. career, though he refused to let it define his work. “A Negro, standing in front of a white symphony group?” the artist manager Arthur Judson asked him, according to Ms. Lee, in the late 1940s, declining to sign him up. “No. I’m sorry.”Judson suggested that Mr. Lee follow other Black musicians into exile abroad. Mr. Lee didn’t leave at first, but eventually did so in 1957 and prospered in Germany, Colombia and especially Sweden, where he succeeded Herbert Blomstedt as music director of the Norrkoping Symphony Orchestra, from 1962 to 1972.Mr. Lee frequently said that he longed to return to the United States but would only do so to become the music director of a major orchestra.“I did not have very much hope at home, despite some success,” he told The Atlanta Constitution in 1970, saying that racism was less of a factor in his life and work in Europe. “It would be nice to work at home. I’m an American — why not?” If he could make it in Europe, he concluded, “I should be able to make it here.”Only one top ensemble, the Oregon Symphony, has ever given such a post to a Black conductor: James DePreist.Everett Astor Lee was born on Aug. 31, 1916, in Wheeling, W. Va., the first son of Everett Denver Lee, a barber, and Mamie Amanda (Blue) Lee, a homemaker. He started the violin at age 8, and his talent prompted the family to move to Cleveland in 1927.Mr. Lee ran track in junior high, a few years behind the Olympian gold medalist Jesse Owens, and led the Glenville High School orchestra as concertmaster. He came under the mentorship of the Cleveland Orchestra’s conductor, Artur Rodzinski, after a chance meeting at the hotel where Mr. Lee worked as an elevator operator. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music with the Cleveland Orchestra’s concertmaster, Joseph Fuchs.Graduating in 1941, Mr. Lee enlisted in the Army and trained to become a Tuskegee airman in Alabama, but he injured himself and was released.Mr. Lee moved to New York in 1943 to play in the orchestra for “Carmen Jones,” an Oscar Hammerstein II rewrite of Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” that had an all-Black cast but a primarily white orchestra. When the conductor was snowed in, early in 1944, Mr. Lee stepped from the concertmaster’s chair to conduct Bizet’s music. Spells conducting George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” followed, before Bernstein hired him as concertmaster and later music director of “On the Town.”“In an era of Jim Crow segregation in performance,” the musicologist Carol J. Oja has written, “Lee’s appointment was downright remarkable.”Mr. Lee then played in the violin section of the New York City Symphony for Bernstein, who arranged a scholarship to Tanglewood in 1946, where Mr. Lee studied conducting with Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony; he conducted the Boston Pops in 1949.Mr. Lee with with the coloratura soprano Virginia MacWatters preparing for a concert of the Cosmopolitan Little Symphony at Town Hall in New York City in 1948.The New York Times“Like most young people,” Mr. Lee told New York Amsterdam News in 1977, “I thought I could go out and conquer the world.”But there was a color line Mr. Lee could not cross. Rodzinski, now conductor of the New York Philharmonic, refused to let him audition for its violin section, knowing the inevitable result. Hammerstein considered him for a touring production but told him that “if a colored boy is the conductor, and we go into the South,” it would cause an uproar and cause bookings to be canceled.Mr. Lee responded by creating the Cosmopolitan Little Symphony in 1947, an integrated ensemble that rehearsed at Harlem’s Grace Congregational Church. It made its downtown debut with him on the podium at Town Hall in May 1948, with a bill that included the premiere of “Brief Elegy” by Ulysses Kay, one of many Black composers Mr. Lee programmed during his career.By 1952, the Cosmopolitan was giving a concert performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” before 2,100 people at City College, with the Met’s Regina Resnik as Leonora.“My own group is coming along fairly well,” Mr. Lee wrote Bernstein, suggesting “it may be the beginning of breaking down a lot of foolish barriers.” But starting any ensemble was hard then, let alone an integrated one. Recruitment had been difficult because trained Black musicians now believed “that there was ‘no future’ in achieving high standards of proficiency,” Mr. Lee wrote in The Times in December 1948.Despite signing with the New York City Opera staff in 1955, Mr. Lee left for Europe. He moved to Munich in 1957, founding an orchestra at the Amerika Haus and leading a traveling opera company. Guest spots came quickly; he led the Berlin Philharmonic in June 1960, one of many European dates.Like Dean Dixon, a Black conductor who led the Gothenburg Symphony from 1953 to 1960, Mr. Lee found sanctuary in Sweden. He maintained an ambitious repertoire in Norrkoping, performing operas from “Aida” to “Porgy,” conducting vast quantities of Swedish music, with Hans Eklund’s “Music for Orchestra” a favorite, and often collaborating with jazz players led by the saxophonist Arne Domnerus. It was a balance of new and old, local and otherwise, that Mr. Lee repeated as chief conductor of the Bogotá Philharmonic from 1985 to 1987.Even so, Mr. Lee never quite gave up on U.S. orchestras. He started to make guest appearances again. “The inescapable conclusion is, he should be around more often,” a Times critic wrote in 1966. In 1973, he took command of the Symphony of the New World, a New York ensemble that had been founded in 1965 as an integrated orchestra, like his now defunct Cosmopolitan. After an association with the Philadelphia-based Opera Ebony, he took a last bow, with the Louisville Orchestra, in 2005.Mr. Lee at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Marian Anderson Theater in New York in 1994. From left are Jessye Norman, Max Roach, Martina Arroyo and the City Council member C. Virginia Fields.Associated PressAlthough Black conductors such as Mr. DePreist, Paul Freeman and Henry Lewis had become more prominent by the 1970s, Mr. Lee saw little real improvement.“There has been no major change in my field,” he told The Afro-American Newspaper in 1972. “Orchestra companies feel if they had a Black orchestra leader last year, they don’t need one this year.”Mr. Lee fulfilled a dream of conducting the New York Philharmonic on the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1976, leading Sergei Rachmaninoff, Jean Sibelius and David Baker’s “Kosbro” — short for “Keep on Steppin’ Brothers.” Mr. Lee’s marriage to Ms. Lee ended in divorce. He married Christin Andersson in 1979. She survives him, as does Eve Lee, his daughter from his first marriage; a son from his second, Erik Lee; two granddaughters; and one great-granddaughter.Despite the barriers that Mr. Lee faced, he said in an interview published in 1997 that he was not “bitter.”He recalled being denied violin auditions at two major U.S. orchestras.“I then made up my mind that if I can’t join you, then I will lead you. I did make good on that promise to myself. Those two orchestras that denied me even an audition, I have conducted,” he said. “I just had to. I just had to show them that I was there.” More

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      in Television

      Conrad Ricamora on His Bumpy Road to ‘Little Shop of Horrors’

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      The actor reflects on continuing the Off Broadway revival’s hot streak, and fighting against the stereotypes facing Asian American actors.Since it opened in October 2019, Michael Mayer’s well-received “Little Shop of Horrors” revival has drawn quite the handsome string of leading men: Jonathan Groff was the first to step into Seymour Krelborn’s Converse sneakers, and he was followed by Gideon Glick and Jeremy Jordan. This reflects the casting evolution of the character, a painfully shy plant geek. Not many roles have been played by both Rick Moranis (in the show’s 1986 movie adaptation) and Jake Gyllenhaal (in a 2015 concert production).When asked about joining this, ahem, hot streak, Conrad Ricamora burst out laughing. “I played a nerdy IT guy for six years on ‘How to Get Away With Murder’ so I don’t know if there’s a full consensus that I’m in the Jake Gyllenhaal Hall of Fame of Hot Actors,” he said.Since Jan. 11, Ricamora, 42, has been taking center stage at the Westside Theater, and while he displays serious comic muscle, he also taps into the character’s painful loneliness. When he sings “Someone show me a way to get outta here / ’Cause I constantly pray I’ll get outta here” in the opening number, the ache is palpable.This versatility won’t be news to those who have seen him onstage before — yes, Oliver stans, he can sing! There was the way Ricamora would summon a shamanic intensity as the magnetic political leader Ninoy Aquino in “Here Lies Love,” the David Byrne and Fatboy Slim hit show that opened at the Public Theater in 2013. And then there was his ardent romanticism as the doomed Burmese scholar and lover Lun Tha in the 2015 Lincoln Center production of “The King and I” — oh, those duets with Ashley Park’s Tuptim!Chatting after a recent rehearsal, the actor was candid about the obstacles he had to overcome on the road to Skid Row, the derelict neighborhood where “Little Shop of Horrors” is set.Ricamora as Seymour, with his seemingly innocent plant, in the Off Broadway revival of “Little Shop of Horrors.”Emilio MadridThere was, for example, the time the director of his first professional show, a production of “Anything Goes” in North Carolina, asked if he could sound more Chinese. “We call it ‘ching chong’ in the Asian acting community — ‘they want you to be ching-chong-y’ ” said Ricamora, who is half-Filipino. “It didn’t feel great.”Even with the production of “The King and I,” which had great resources, he talked about being frustrated by what he felt was a lack of attention to dialects. “I didn’t want to make any waves because I wanted this job — I still had debt, so much debt,” he said. “And No. 2, I thought the best way to work was to say yes to everything because then they would tell other people that you’re easy to work with.” (The financial pressure was assuaged only after he started making “TV money,” as he put it, on the show “How to Get Away with Murder,” in which he played the computer whiz Oliver Hampton for six years.)It was a relief for Ricamora to be cast in David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s “Soft Power,” a deliciously acid meta-musical from 2019 that looked at mythmaking and the way American culture deals with ethnic clichés — including a whole Rodgers and Hammerstein pastiche number about correct Chinese pronunciation.“He’s kind of a charisma machine,” the playwright David Henry Hwang said of Ricamora, who starred in Hwang’s “Soft Power.”Cole Wilson for The New York TimesOne day, Tesori asked the largely Asian American cast what it had cost them to tell such a personal, emotional story in the show. Reliving that moment, Ricamora turned her question on its head, and was once again overcome with the pain and anger the question had unlocked as he thought about the cast getting the still-rare opportunity to play fully human characters after so many years of stereotypical roles.“What does it [expletive] cost me, us all of my Asian American brothers and sisters?” he recounted, his voice shaking. “Here’s what it costs us: Women are constantly made to play prostitutes and just sexual beings. As Asian American men, we’re constantly asked to get rid of our sexuality completely and to be the butt of the joke and to be treated as third-class citizens.“When you see Asian Americans standing up onstage in the theater, they’re overcoming so many years of people telling them to push that aside and be a stereotype,” he continued, tearing up. “We all wonder, ‘When are we going to get a chance to exist fully?’ And ‘Soft Power’ felt like that for all of us.”It had been a long ride up to that moment — yet for quite a while, Ricamora’s life was focused not on theater but on tennis.“You don’t know how many times I wrote over and over again ‘I’m going to win the U.S. Open’ in my journal in college,” he said, laughing. “Wanting to get to Broadway was never a goal of mine because I didn’t know it existed. I grew up on Air Force bases in very toxic masculine culture, so there was no theater. There were no arts at all.”His military dad, who had emigrated from the Philippines, moved the family around until settling for a longer spell in Florida, where young Conrad attended middle and high school. His mother, who is white, had left when he was an infant, and his father remarried when Conrad was 8.He majored in psychology at Queens University of Charlotte, N.C., which he attended on a tennis scholarship. And then he had an epiphany: In his junior year he took a theater class and was assigned a monologue from Lanford Wilson’s “Lemon Sky,” about a teenage boy attempting to connect with his estranged father. “I remember thinking, ‘This is my experience — I just have to stand here and say these words because I know what this person is talking about,’” he said. “The electricity I felt in that moment, that connection between actor, playwright and audience is something I’ve been chasing ever since.”Ricamora as the Filipino politician Ninoy Aquino in “Here Lies Love,” the musical by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRicamora with Francis Jue in David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s  musical “Soft Power.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAfter completing his degree, he started acting in local community theater and moved on to professional productions. Low point: that “Anything Goes.”High point: “Shakespeare’s R & J,” in which he played Juliet opposite Evan Jonigkeit’s Romeo in 2008. “For a queer person, it blew my mind away,” Ricamora said of the Philadelphia production. “It felt like it exploded the world open for me. There was so much more that I could be accessing in my work.”He was almost done with his graduate studies in acting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, when he saw the casting call for “Here Lies Love” and traveled to New York to audition.“Immediately you just could tell you’re in the presence of someone really special and — I hate to use this word — starry,” the director Alex Timbers said over the phone. “There was a real connection with the role, but also something where you want to be a part of that actor’s career early on because they’re going to go to extraordinary places.”Hwang was similarly impressed: “He’s kind of a charisma machine.”And still, the outpouring unleashed by Tesori’s question is haunting. Yes, Ricamora is succeeding three Tony-nominated actors in “Little Shop of Horrors,” but it’s also hard to not feel a little frustrated for him: Why did it take so long to land a starring role? Why aren’t actors like Ricamora, Jason Tam (“Be More Chill”) or Telly Leung (“Allegiance”) better known?“There haven’t been those roles for Asian romantic leads, that more or less hasn’t existed,” Hwang said. “Even when you get a role like Lun Tha, which is sort of in that direction, it’s still not the center.”He added: “It’s hard for Asian women in a different way: They tend to be over-sexualized, portrayed as either lotus blossoms or dragon ladies, as we like to put it. So they are limited as well but in a different set of stereotypes.”Tom in “The Glass Menagerie” is one of the characters Ricamora said he’d like to play. Cole Wilson for The New York TimesNever mind the quality: even the quantity is lacking. According to a report by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition, only 6.3 percent of all available roles in New York City went to Asian American actors during the 2018-19 season.A partial solution is exactly what Ricamora is doing now: putting his stamp on an iconic role such as Seymour. He allowed that he was “white-knuckling it a little” after being propelled onstage following just two weeks of rehearsal, so for now he is focusing on making the role his — “I’ll fill it out more and more as the run goes on,” he said.For Tammy Blanchard, who has played Seymour’s love interest, Audrey, from the start: “Conrad is very deep, very centered. Jeremy was very comedic, but you also had this sense of feeling for him. I think that Conrad’s going to be more what Michael Mayer originally intended with Jonathan Groff — a dark, kind of emotional journey.”And when that experience concludes, Ricamora is ready to tell more stories.“I’d like to play Tom in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ or Hal in ‘Henry IV, Part One’ — my daddy issues run deep,” Ricamora said, with a laugh, of his dream parts. “But especially after doing ‘Soft Power,’ I think the roles are still being written by playwrights I haven’t even met, by Asian American playwrights that I haven’t even met.”The challenge is obvious for that last demographic: The coalition’s report points out that Asian American playwrights, composers, librettists and lyricists made up only 4.4 percent of all writers produced on New York stages in 2018-19. When a promising slate of Asian American-steered productions was lined up, at long last, in 2020, Covid-19 hit.Ricamora is willing to do his part there, too, though in television for now: He and his friends Kelvin Moon Loh and Jeigh Madjus just sold “No Rice,” a half-hour comedy series that they are writing, executive producing and starring in. “The title comes from what people on Grindr or Tinder or Match or whatever would put,” he explained, referring to racist shorthand descriptions. “Around 2015-2016 and earlier, it was all over the dating apps — people would freely write ‘no rice,’ ‘no spice,’ ‘no fats,’ ‘no fems.’” (He would not reveal yet where it will air.)In the meantime, he is happy to be back onstage, battling a bloodthirsty plant and singing of loneliness and ache. “I love coming back to theater so much because you get to show up every day,” Ricamora said. “Theater grounds you — eight shows a week is no joke.” More

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      in Movies

      Sidney Poitier, Who Paved the Way for Black Actors in Film, Dies at 94

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      The first Black performer to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.”Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of resolute heroes in films like “To Sir With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No cause was given.Sidney Poitier was the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry.Matt Sayles/Associated PressMr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle.Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.Mr. Poitier with, from left, Katharine Houghton, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967). He played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws.Columbia Pictures“It’s a choice, a clear choice,” Mr. Poitier said of his film parts in a 1967 interview. “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”At the time, Mr. Poitier was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood and a top box-office draw, ranked fifth among male actors in Box Office magazine’s poll of theater owners and critics; he was behind only Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and John Wayne. Yet racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks.“To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-sexual circumstances is difficult, you know,” he told an interviewer. “And the reasons why are legion and too many to go into.”Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. In “No Way Out” (1950), his first substantial film role, he played a doctor persecuted by a racist patient, and in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1952), based on the Alan Paton novel about racism in South Africa, he appeared as a young priest. His character in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), a troubled student at a tough New York City public school, sees the light and eventually sides with Glenn Ford, the teacher who tries to reach him. In “The Defiant Ones” (1958), a racial fable that established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, he was a prisoner on the run, handcuffed to a fellow convict (and virulent racist) played by Tony Curtis. The best-actor award came in 1964 for his performance in the low-budget “Lilies of the Field,” as an itinerant handyman helping a group of German nuns build a church in the Southwestern desert. Mr. Poitier and Lilia Skala in “Lilies of the Field” (1963), for which Mr. Poitier won an Oscar. United ArtistsIn 1967 Mr. Poitier appeared in three of Hollywood’s top-grossing films, elevating him to the peak of his popularity. “In the Heat of Night” placed him opposite Rod Steiger, as an indolent, bigoted sheriff, with whom Virgil Tibbs, the Philadelphia detective played by Mr. Poitier, must work on a murder investigation in Mississippi. (In an indelible line, the detective insists on the sheriff’s respect when he declares, “They call me Mr. Tibbs!”) In “To Sir, With Love” he was a concerned teacher in a tough London high school, and in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a taboo-breaking film about an interracial couple, he played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Throughout his career, a heavy weight of racial significance bore down on Mr. Poitier and the characters he played. “I felt very much as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made,” he once wrote.Mr. Poitier grew up in the Bahamas, but he was born on Feb. 20, 1927, in Miami, where his parents traveled regularly to sell their tomato crop. The youngest of nine children, he wore clothes made from flour sacks and never saw a car, looked in a mirror or tasted ice cream until his father, Reginald, moved the family from Cat Island to Nassau in 1937 after Florida banned the import of Bahamian tomatoes.When he was 12, Mr. Poitier quit school and became a water boy for a crew of pick-and-shovel laborers. He also began getting into mischief, and his parents, worried that he was becoming a juvenile delinquent, sent him to Miami when he was 14 to live with a married brother, Cyril.Mr. Poitier played a Philadelphia detective and Rod Steiger played a bigoted Mississippi sheriff in “In the Heat of Night,” one of three hit films in which Mr. Poitier appeared in 1967.Mirisch/United Artists, The Kobal CollectionMr. Poitier had known nothing of segregation growing up on Cat Island, so the rules governing American Black people in the South came as a shock. “It was all over the place like barbed wire,” he later said of American racism. “And I kept running into it and lacerating myself.”In less than a year he fled Miami for New York, arriving with $3 and change in his pocket. He took jobs washing dishes and working as a ditch digger, waterfront laborer and delivery man in the garment district. Life was grim. During a race riot in Harlem, he was shot in the leg. He saved his nickels so that on cold nights he could sleep in pay toilets.In late 1943 Mr. Poitier lied about his age and enlisted in the Army, becoming an orderly with the 1267th Medical Detachment at a veterans hospital on Long Island. Feigning a mental disorder, he obtained a discharge in 1945 and returned to New York, where he read in The Amsterdam News that the American Negro Theater was looking for actors.His first audition was a flop. With only a few years of schooling, he read haltingly, in a heavy West Indian accent. Frederick O’Neal, a founder of the theater, showed him the door and advised him to get a job as a dishwasher.Undeterred, Mr. Poitier bought a radio and practiced speaking English as he heard it from a variety of staff announcers. A kindly fellow worker at the restaurant where he washed dishes helped him with his reading. Mr. Poitier finally won a place in the theater’s acting school, but only after he volunteered to work as a janitor without pay.His lucky break came when another actor at the theater, Harry Belafonte, did not show up for a rehearsal attended by a Broadway producer. Mr. Poitier took the stage instead and was given a part in an all-Black production of “Lysistrata” in 1946. Although panned by the critics, it led to a job with the road production of “Anna Lucasta.”“No Way Out” was followed by a sprinkling of film and television roles, but Mr. Poitier still bounced between acting jobs and menial work.In 1951 he married Juanita Marie Hardy, a dancer and model, whom he divorced in 1965. They had four daughters, Beverly, Pamela, Sherri and Gina. In 1976 he married Joanna Shimkus, his co-star in “The Lost Man” (1969), a film about a gang of Black militants plotting to rob a factory. They had two daughters, Anika and Sydney.Ms. Shimkus survives him. His daughter Gina Patrice Poitier Gouraige died in 2018. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Poitier with Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones” (1958), which established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.United ArtistsAfter breakout movies like “Blackboard Jungle” and “The Defiant Ones,” Mr. Poitier’s fate was tied to Hollywood, his purpose to expand the boundaries of racial tolerance. “The explanation for my career was that I was instrumental for those few filmmakers who had a social conscience,” he later wrote.In “The Defiant Ones” and “In the Heat of the Night,” racial politics coincided with meaty roles. Just as often, however, Mr. Poitier found himself playing virtuous messengers of racial harmony in mawkish films like “A Patch of Blue” (1965) or taking race-neutral roles in less than memorable films, like a newspaper reporter in the Cold War naval drama “The Bedford Incident” (1965), Simon of Cyrene in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965) or the former cavalry sergeant in “Duel at Diablo” (1966). “The Defiant Ones” remained one of Mr. Poitier’s favorite films, but to get the part he had to cross swords with Samuel Goldwyn, who was assembling a cast for “Porgy and Bess.” After Mr. Belafonte turned down the role of Porgy as demeaning, Mr. Goldwyn set his sights on Mr. Poitier, who also regarded the musical as an insult to Black people. As Mr. Poitier told it in his lively, unusually frank first memoir, “This Life” (1980), Mr. Goldwyn pulled strings to ensure that unless Mr. Poitier played Porgy, the director Stanley Kramer would not hire him for “The Defiant Ones.”Mr. Poitier, seething, bowed to the inevitable. “I didn’t enjoy doing it, and I have not yet completely forgiven myself,” he told The New York Times in 1967.The critics who would later accuse him of bowing and scraping before the white establishment seemed to dismiss Mr. Poitier’s longstanding, outspoken advocacy for racial justice and the civil rights movement, most visibly as part of a Hollywood contingent that took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Early in his career, his association with left-wing causes and his friendship with the radical singer and actor Paul Robeson made him a politically risky proposition for film and television producers.His style, however, remained low-key and nonconfrontational. “As for my part in all this,” he wrote, “all I can say is that there’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose, but that’s never been my role.”Mr. Poitier with Claudia McNeil in the 1959 Broadway production of “A Raisin in the Sun.” Reviewing his performance, Brooks Atkinson of The Times wrote, “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control.”Leo FriedmanIn 1959 Mr. Poitier made a triumphant return to Broadway in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” winning ecstatic reviews. “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times. “Cast as the restless son, he vividly communicates the tumult of a high-strung young man. He is as eloquent when he has nothing to say as when he has a pungent line to speak. He can convey devious processes of thought as graphically as he can clown and dance.” Mr. Poitier repeated the role in the 1961 film version of the play.With the rise of Black filmmakers like Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Poitier, now in his 40s, turned to directing and producing. He had proposed the idea for the romantic comedy “For Love of Ivy” (1968), in which he starred with Abbey Lincoln. After joining with Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand in 1969 to form a production company called First Artists, he directed the western “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), in which he acted opposite Mr. Belafonte, and a series of comedies, notably “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974) and “Let’s Do It Again” (1975), in which Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby teamed up to play a pair of scheming ne’er-do-wells, and “Stir Crazy” (1980), with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.The critics thought little of Mr. Poitier’s directing talents, but enthusiastic audiences, Black and white, made all three films box-office hits. Neither audiences nor critics found much to like in subsequent directorial efforts, like the comedy “Hanky Panky” (1982), with Mr. Wilder and Gilda Radner, or “Ghost Dad” (1990), with Mr. Cosby as a dead father who refuses to leave his three children alone.President Barack Obama presented Mr. Poitier with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn his later years, Mr. Poitier turned in solid performances in forgettable action films and thrillers like “Shoot to Kill” (1988), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “Sneakers” (1992). It was television that provided him with two of his grandest roles.In 1991 he appeared in the lead role in the ABC drama “Separate but Equal,” a dramatization of the life of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. In 1997 he delivered a widely praised performance as Nelson Mandela in “Mandela and de Klerk,” a television movie focusing on the final years of Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment by the white-minority government in South Africa, with Michael Caine in the role of President F.W. de Klerk.“Sidney Poitier and Nelson Mandela merge with astonishing ease, like a double-exposure photograph in which one image is laid over the other with perfect symmetry,” Caryn James wrote in a review in The New York Times.In 2002, Mr. Poitier was given an honorary Oscar for his career’s work in motion picture. (At that same Oscar ceremony, Denzel Washington became the first Black actor since Mr. Poitier to win the best-actor award, for “Training Day.”) He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1995. And in 2009, President Barack Obama, citing his “relentless devotion to breaking down barriers,” awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Mr. Poitier was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974.Mr. Poitier’s memoir “This Life” was followed by a second, “The Measure of a Man,” in 2000. Subtitled “A Spiritual Autobiography,” it included Mr. Poitier’s thoughts on life, love, acting and racial politics. It generated a sequel, “Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter” (2008).Despite his role in changing American perceptions of race and opening the door to a new generation of Black actors, Mr. Poitier remained modest about his career. “History will pinpoint me as merely a minor element in an ongoing major event, a small if necessary energy,” he wrote. “But I am nonetheless gratified at having been chosen.” Neil Vigdor contributed reporting. More

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      in Theater

      LaChanze on Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind”

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      Since October, the actress has been performing the lead role of Wiletta Mayer in the Broadway debut of Childress’s 1955 play.“I started to scream but no sound come out … just a screamin’ but no sound …”Alice Childress wrote those words in her 1955 play “Trouble in Mind,” which the Roundabout Theater Company produced on Broadway this fall, in a limited run that will end on Sunday. The backstage comedy-drama, about the rehearsal process for an anti-lynching play, tackles racism in the theater industry, and that quote sums up what Black Americans have historically experienced — a consistent outcry to be heard by the dominant society that refuses to listen.In “Trouble in Mind,” I play Wiletta Mayer, a middle-aged actress who dreams of doing something “real grand … in the theater.” This is Wiletta’s first time as the lead in a play, not a musical. Surprisingly, this role in a play is a first for me as well, even though I have been performing in Broadway musicals for over 30 years. And it’s the perfect role, because of many of my career experiences: as an actress onstage, my length of time in this business, not having the opportunity to be considered a serious dramatic actress. I draw on all of them to step into Wiletta’s shoes.Now I go to the American Airlines Theater six times a week to portray a character I first came to know in college. I get to feel her life experiences as my own. I get to convey the things so many Black actors have expressed, but, as Wiletta says, “You don’t want to hear.”I first read “Trouble in Mind” — along with a wide range of works by Black American playwrights — as a student at Morgan State University in Maryland, one of our nation’s historically Black colleges and universities. Writers who used their plays as art and activism — Childress, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks and so many others — inspired me to become a performing artist. Studying their works ignited my ambition to delve as deep as a person can into the values that make an artist and activist. I wanted to feel their kind of power, their eloquence, and their courage. This courage, this fire that led Childress to produce such timeless words. In fact her play is being performed word-for-word in its original form.Childress was born in Charleston, S.C., in 1916, and died in Queens in 1994. She wrote and produced plays for four decades. She put up “Trouble” Off Broadway in 1955, four years before Lorraine Hansberry made history by debuting “A Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway, and was the first playwright I ever read to show authentic conversations between Black Americans, things that are said about whites when whites aren’t around. She exposed a Black cultural way of speaking that we call code switching, which the Urban dictionary defines as customizing “style of speech to the audience or group being addressed.” Childress cleverly demonstrates this in “Trouble in Mind.” She gives the audience a peek into what we, as Black actors, must do to accommodate white audiences.In the beginning of the play, Wiletta tells John, a young actor, how to act around white people, explaining there are certain things you must do:WILETTA But don’t get too cocky. They don’t like that either. You have to cater to these fools too …JOHN I’m afraid I don’t know how to do that.WILETTA Laugh! Laugh at everything they say, makes ’em feel superior.JOHN Why do they have to feel superior?WILETTA You gonna sit there and pretend you don’t know why?JOHN I … I’d feel silly laughing at everything.WILETTA You don’t. Sometimes they laugh, you’re supposed to look serious, other times they serious, you supposed to laugh.The stereotypes have changed over the years — now there’s the hyper-masculinity of Black men; the strong Black woman who doesn’t seem to have a need for vulnerability or tenderness; Black children whose innocence has been removed — but the same rules still apply.LaChanze with Brandon Micheal Hall (who plays the young actor John), Chuck Cooper and Danielle Campbell in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Trouble” was optioned for Broadway, but never opened there because Childress would not tone down the dialogue for the show’s white producers. The white director in the play, Al Manners, tells Wiletta, “The American public is not ready to see you the way you want to be seen because, one, they don’t believe it, two, they don’t want to believe it, and three, they’re convinced they’re superior.” I have also had white male directors debate with me about what a Black woman would say, feel, even how she would dress.Childress was unapologetic about her intentions, even if it meant her work wouldn’t make it to Broadway in her lifetime. I have debated this with other artists, wondering whether she was even more brave than brilliant. But we agree that she was a truth teller, a soothsayer.As a student and young actor, I was astonished that the canon of Black American writers and artists that so richly shaped my artistic life were mostly unknown and so poorly understood. The play’s director, Charles Randolph-Wright, the first Black director with whom I have worked as a leading actor on Broadway, shepherded this project for 15 years. He also read the play in college and fell in love with Childress’s unapologetic writing.He is the champion of “Trouble in Mind.” Charles, who studied at Duke University and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, and danced with Alvin Ailey in New York, was told many times that he could not make this happen. It is as if, with her words in the play, Childress wrote directly to Charles six decades ago, “I’m sick of people signifyin’ we got no sense.” Charles wants to give her the voice she should have had before he and I were born.In our many conversations, I am invigorated in speaking to him about Black representation in the entertainment industry. Working with a director who I feel lives in my head is thrilling. My private thoughts that I’m sometimes too shy to share, Charles boldly speaks them before I can even get them out. Much like Childress, Charles is committed to telling the truth in his work and in having multidimensional portrayals of Black people, not just the broad strokes we see. And quite frankly, we’re both tired of seeing these examples. In my own career, I’ve taken jobs I didn’t want to do, but I had to play these parts because I needed a job.I get to work with a dedicated, resilient Black director, and a fearless, committed cast. Childress wanted to speak for the have-nots, the invisibles, and to share her eloquence with the Broadway community and universities across the world. She used her play about Black actors to explore the values of America. But some people weren’t ready, and so many people never got to hear her words. Now I proudly stand on her shoulders, opening my soul to her and teaching my daughters and other lovers of truth about her brilliance.“Some live by what they call great truths,” Wiletta says in the play. “I’ve always wanted to do somethin’ real grand … in the theater … to stand forth at my best … to stand up here and do anything I want …”And that’s exactly what Alice Childress did.LaChanze won the Tony Award for best actress in a leading role in a musical in 2006 for “The Color Purple.” In 2019, LaChanze and her eldest daughter, Celia Rose Gooding, became one of the few pairs of mothers and daughters to perform on Broadway as leading actors in the same season. More

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      in Music

      Steve Bronski, of Pioneering Gay Band Bronski Beat, Dies at 61

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      He was part of a British trio whose songs often directly addressed gay themes and issues in a way few other pop music acts were doing.Steve Bronski, part of the 1980s British synth-pop trio Bronski Beat, whose members were openly gay at a time when that was uncommon and whose early songs unabashedly addressed homophobia and other gay issues, died after a fire on Dec. 7 at his apartment building in the Soho section of London, British news outlets reported. He was 61.The London Fire Brigade confirmed that it had responded to a fire on Berwick Street and taken an unidentified man to a hospital, where he later died. Josephine Samuel, a friend who had been helping to care for Mr. Bronski since he’d had a stroke several years ago, told The Guardian that Mr. Bronski was the fire victim.Mr. Bronski formed Bronski Beat in 1983 with Jimmy Somerville and Larry Steinbachek, and their first single, “Smalltown Boy,” was released the next year. It was a stark story of a young gay man’s escape from a provincial town where he had endured a homophobic attack; a haunting chorus repeats, “Run away, turn away.” The official video for the song, fleshing out the events the lyrics allude to, has been viewed more than 68 million times on YouTube.The song became a Top 5 hit in Britain and made the charts in other countries as well, including the United States. A follow-up, “Why?,” another chart success, was equally direct, the lyrics speaking to the ostracism and social disapproval experienced by gay people. “You in your false securities tear up my life, condemning me,” one lyric goes. “Name me an illness, call me a sin. Never feel guilty, never give in.”At the time, a number of mainstream performers — Elton John, the Village People, Boy George — telegraphed gayness, often with stereotypical flamboyance, but rarely addressed gay issues directly in song. Bronski Beat was different, eschewing coyness and gimmicks.“They buck stereotypes,” Jim Farber wrote in The Daily News in 1985, “presenting themselves as everyday Joes.”The group’s debut album, “The Age of Consent” (1984), was as forthright as the two singles. The album sleeve listed the “minimum age for lawful homosexual relationships between men” in European countries, an effort to underscore that the age in the United Kingdom at the time, 21, was higher than almost everywhere else. The sleeve also included a phone number for a gay legal advice line.Mr. Bronski said the trio didn’t start out as a political or social statement.“We were just writing songs that spoke about our lives at the time,” he told Gay Times in 2018. “We had no idea ‘Smalltown Boy’ would resonate with so many people.”But when they began doing live performances in 1983, he told The Associated Press in 1986, the audience reaction helped them realize that they had struck a chord.“We had all these people coming backstage saying, ‘I think it’s great you’ve been so honest about it,’” he said.That same audience reaction landed them a contract with London Records in early 1984. Mr. Bronski was on keyboards and synthesizers along with Mr. Steinbachek; Mr. Somerville’s distinctive falsetto vocals were the group’s signature.Warren Whaley, an electronic music composer based in Los Angeles and half of the synth-pop duo the Dollhouse, struck up a running correspondence with Mr. Bronski when he wrote to him after Mr. Steinbachek’s death in 2016.“I recall hearing their debut single, ‘Smalltown Boy,’ on the alternative music radio station in Los Angeles in 1984,” Mr. Whaley said by email. “The song starts with a heavy octave bass. Then a staccato hook. Then Jimmy Somerville’s lovely falsetto. I was hooked by 22 seconds in. This band was something special. Something new — but old. Their sound harkened to disco and R&B. But it sounded new, different.”Mr. Bronski in 1996. He continued to make music after the original Bronski Beat trio broke up. Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesThe original Bronski Beat lineup didn’t last long; Mr. Somerville left the group in 1985. But Mr. Bronski continued to make music, with Mr. Steinbachek for a time and with others over the years, most notably “Hit That Perfect Beat,” a hit in Britain and elsewhere in 1986 and a dancehall favorite ever since. Mr. Whaley said that though Bronski Beat’s best-known songs had gay-centric lyrics, “their appeal crossed the boundaries of sexual alignment.”“Everyone bopped their heads and danced to their music,” he said.Mr. Bronski was born Steven Forrest on Feb. 7, 1960, in Glasgow. He had made his way to London by the early 1980s, where he met Mr. Somerville and Mr. Steinbachek.“It was a lot easier living in London,” he told Classic Pop magazine in 2019, explaining why he and other gay men had gravitated to the city, “since there was a thriving gay scene compared to other parts of the country.”Information on his survivors was not available.In 2017, more than three decades after the release of “The Age of Consent,” the only album with the original Bronski Beat lineup, Mr. Bronski teamed with Stephen Granville and Ian Donaldson to release the album “The Age of Reason” under the Bronski Beat name, revisiting songs from the original record and adding new tracks.“I think a lot of the songs are as relevant today as they were all those years ago,” he told Gay Times. More