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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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      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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      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

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      Drake Removes Himself From Competition for 2022 Grammy Awards

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      The superstar rapper and singer, long a critic of the awards, was nominated in two categories, best rap album and best rap performance.Drake, the chart-topping rapper and singer, has withdrawn his name from competition in the upcoming Grammy Awards, the latest problem involving headlining talent for the embattled awards, which have struggled with the alienation of other top acts like the Weeknd and Frank Ocean.Drake, one of the most popular and influential artists in pop music today, had two nominations for the 64th annual awards, which were announced two weeks ago. His song “Way 2 Sexy,” featuring Future and Young Thug, was up for best rap performance, and “Certified Lover Boy” — one of the biggest hits of the year — was up for best rap album. He was not nominated in any of the top categories, like album, record or song of the year.But Drake and his managers recently asked that his name be removed from the two rap categories, and the Recording Academy, the organization behind the awards, honored the request, according to representatives for the rapper.The Recording Academy had no comment, but a page on the Grammys’ official website, listing changes to the nominations, was updated on Monday noting the removal of Drake’s two citations.The news was first reported by Variety.Drake’s withdrawal, which emerged just as the final voting period for the awards was opening, is the latest complication for the Grammys. The academy has struggled for years to prevent an exodus among major artists of color, who have made a litany of complaints against the awards, including a poor record of wins for Black artists in the most prestigious categories, as well as a wider failure by the academy and its voters to recognize and appreciate the cultural heft and intricacies of contemporary Black music..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The Recording Academy has also taken steps in recent years to attract a younger and more diverse voting pool and to prove to the music industry that its processes are fair and transparent.But already this year, the awards have been dogged by questions about what has happened behind the scenes. The day before the nominations were announced last month, the academy’s board approved a last-minute plan to expand the ballot in the top four categories to 10 slots, from eight. Comparing the final ballot to an early version of its nominations list, which circulated throughout the industry, showed that the beneficiaries included Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Abba and Lil Nas X.Drake has been nominated for 49 Grammys in his career — counting the two nods he got this year — and has taken home four. But he has long expressed ambivalence about the awards, even after winning, and has often decided not to attend the ceremony even when he has been widely nominated.After his streaming smash “Hotline Bling” won best rap song and best rap/sung performance in 2017, Drake questioned his genre categorization in a radio interview. “‘Hotline Bling’ is not a rap song,” he said at the time. “Maybe because I’ve rapped in the past or because I’m Black, I can’t figure out why.” He added of the awards, “I don’t even want them, because it just feels weird.”In 2019, when Drake and Kendrick Lamar were the two most-nominated artists, each declined invitations to perform on the show. Drake did appear onstage to accept the best rap song award for “God’s Plan,” but seemed to allude in his speech to the Grammys’ fraught history in recognizing hip-hop — a rocky relationship that dated back to the first-ever rap award in 1989, when some artists boycotted the show because the category was not going to be televised.“This is a business where sometimes it’s up to a bunch of people that might not understand what a mixed-race kid from Canada has to say or a fly Spanish girl from New York, or a brother from Houston,” Drake said. “But the point is, you’ve already won if you have people who are singing your songs word for word — you don’t need this right here,” he added, holding up the Grammy.But as Drake started to continue speaking, the Grammys cut to commercial. Drake later called his words “too raw for TV.” A representative for the show said that producers had mistaken a pause in Drake’s speech for the end.Earlier this year, before the 63rd annual show, the Weeknd, who had been shut out of the nominations despite his album, “After Hours,” being one of the biggest hits of 2020, declared that he would boycott the awards in the future to protest its use of anonymous nominations review committees. Those were blue-ribbon industry panels that sorted through voters’ first-round nomination picks and settled on a final ballot.The review committees had long been a subject of intrigue in the business. A legal complaint by Deborah Dugan, who became the academy’s chief executive in 2019 — only to be ejected just five months later — said that those committees were rife with corruption and conflicts of interest. This year the Recording Academy, led by its new chief, the producer Harvey Mason Jr., eliminated those committees in most categories, though the last-minute rule change has once again put a spotlight on the nominations process.In response to the perceived snubs of the Weeknd last year, Drake wrote on Instagram that “we should stop allowing ourselves to be shocked every year by the disconnect between impactful music and these awards and just accept that what once was the highest form of recognition may no longer matter to the artists that exist now and the ones that come after.”He added, “This is a great time for somebody to start something new that we can build up over time and pass on to the generations to come.”The 64th annual Grammys are scheduled to be held in Los Angeles on Jan. 31. More

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      As ‘Nutcracker’ Returns, Companies Rethink Depictions of Asians

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      Ballet companies are reworking the holiday classic partly in response to a wave of anti-Asian hate that has intensified during the pandemic.A new character is featured in the Land of Sweets in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Nutcracker” this year: Green Tea Cricket, a springy, superhero-like figure meant to counter stereotypes of Chinese culture.Tulsa Ballet, hoping to dispel outdated portrayals of Asians, is infusing its production with elements of martial arts, choreographed by a Chinese-born dancer.And Boston Ballet is staging a new spectacle: a pas de deux inspired by traditional Chinese ribbon dancing.“The Nutcracker,” the classic holiday ballet, is back after the long pandemic shutdown. But many dance companies are reworking the show this year partly in response to a wave of anti-Asian hate that intensified during the pandemic, and a broader reckoning over racial discrimination.“Everybody learned a lot this year, and I just want to make sure there’s absolutely nothing that could ever be considered as insulting to Chinese culture,” said Mikko Nissinen, artistic director of Boston Ballet, who choreographed the ribbon dance. “We look at everything through the lens of diversity, equity and inclusion. That’s the way of the future.”Ao Wang performs the ribbon dance, which Mikko Nissinen added to the Boston Ballet’s “Nutcracker.”Liza Voll, via Boston BalletArtistic leaders are jettisoning elements like bamboo hats and pointy finger movements, which are often on display during the so-called Tea scene in the second act, when dancers perform a short routine introducing tea from China. (It’s one in a series of national dances, including Hot Chocolate from Spain and Coffee from Arabia.)At least one company, the Berlin State Ballet, has decided to forgo “Nutcracker” entirely this year amid growing concern about racist portrayals of Asians. The company said in a statement last week that it was considering ways to “re-contextualize” the ballet and would eventually bring it back.The changes are the result of a yearslong effort by performers and activists to draw attention to Asian stereotypes in “Nutcracker.” Some renowned groups — including New York City Ballet and the Royal Ballet in London — several years ago made adjustments to the Tea scene, eliminating elements like Fu Manchu-type mustaches for male dancers.The sharp rise in reports of anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic, as well as a recent focus on the legacy of discrimination in dance, opera and classical music, have brought fresh urgency to the effort.Performers and activists have called on cultural institutions to feature more prominently Asian singers, dancers, choreographers and composers. Some opera companies are re-examining staples of the repertoire like “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot,” which contain racist caricatures. Others, such as Boston Lyric Opera, are hosting public discussions of the works and their stereotypes.“Folks are finally connecting the dots between the idea that what we put onstage actually has an impact on the people offstage,” said Phil Chan, an arts administrator and former dancer who has led the push to rethink “The Nutcracker.”In 2018, Chan began circulating a pledge titled “Final Bow for Yellowface,” which calls for eliminating outdated and offensive stereotypes in ballet. He has gathered about 1,000 signatures from dancers, choreographers, educators and administrators.The move to excise racist elements in dance has not been without controversy, especially in Europe.Annie Au, center, a traditional Chinese dance specialist, works with Alice Kawalek, left, and Kayla-Maree Tarantolo for the Scottish Ballet’s production.Andy RossScottish Ballet this year eliminated caricatures like head-bobbing and ponytails from its “Nutcracker.” The production also breaks with tradition by having both male and female dancers play the role of the magician Drosselmeyer.“We ended up in a place where we can celebrate what we’re putting onstage rather than trying to defend it,” said Christopher Hampson, artistic director of the Scottish Ballet.But some observers were not happy.“In what way is it racist to portray a culture’s most recognizable attributes?” said a commentary about the new production, which aired in November on Russian state television. “In 2021, not even ballet is safe from the P.C. police.”The decision by the Berlin State Ballet to skip “Nutcracker” this year angered some cultural critics, who cited concerns about freedom of expression.“People are not stupid,” Roger Köppel, a former editor of Die Welt, a German newspaper, said in an email. “They can think for themselves and do not have to be shielded and protected from art that is declared politically incorrect by people who want to force their worldview on all of us.”The stakes are high. For many ballet companies, “The Nutcracker” is the biggest show of the year — a financial lifeline that generates a large percentage of annual ticket sales.Dancers and artistic leaders said that reimagining “Nutcracker” was essential to attracting diverse audiences. But some said there was still room for improvement.KJ Takahashi, a City Ballet dancer who stars in the Tea scene in this year’s “Nutcracker,” which opened the day after Thanksgiving, said he welcomed the changes. Takahashi, who is Japanese American, said the revisions made him feel more included. Still, he said, there was more that could be done, noting that he finds the costumes dated and inauthentic.“The little things make a big difference,” he said. “We can go even deeper into accuracy.”Colorado Ballet staged a “Nutcracker” this month with new costumes, including in the Tea scene. The rainbow colors of a dragon that appears onstage were inspired by Asian street food.Some companies are reworking the Tea scene entirely, believing more can be done to make it resonate with modern audiences.Peter Boal, artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, has been experimenting with ways to tone down Asian stereotypes in its “Nutcracker” since 2015. But as Boal saw the rise of anti-Asian hate this year, he set out to make further changes in time for opening night, on Nov. 26.He had long wanted to add a cricket, a symbol of good luck in China, to “Nutcracker.” He gained permission from the Balanchine Trust, which owns the rights to the version the company performs, just a few weeks ago. (The trust had found early sketches too buglike, Boal said.)During the visit to the Land of Sweets, the cricket now emerges from a box rolled onstage and performs a series of acrobatic moves, much like the choreography in the original, in which a man dressed in stereotypical Chinese clothes came out of the box.“The importance of change really came home this year,” Boal said, noting the spread of anti-Asian hate. He said he wanted a production that was “in line with our sensibilities today and our respect for other people and audience members and the community.”Smaller dance groups are making changes as well.At Butler University in Indianapolis, professors and students found themselves increasingly uncomfortable with the national dances, which they felt reduced cultures to caricatures. This year, they have renamed the Tea scene “Dragon Beard Candy,” after a favorite Chinese sweet. The choreography for the scene was partly inspired by the Monkey King, a mythical animal warrior in Chinese classical literature.“There could be a chance that you’re not concerned with these issues because you don’t have to be,” said Ramon Flowers, an assistant professor at Butler who is choreographing parts of the production. “But by highlighting and putting this out there as often as possible, we can inspire change.”Dancers and choreographers of Asian descent say the revisions to “Nutcracker” are long overdue.Ma Cong, resident choreographer of Tulsa Ballet, said he was confused when he first saw “Nutcracker” productions featuring exaggerated makeup and stereotypical costumes. Ma, who grew up in China, recalled thinking, “That is not Chinese.”Tulsa Ballet will premiere a production of “The Nutcracker” on Dec. 10 choreographed by Ma and Val Caniparoli. For the Tea scene, Ma is incorporating elements of tai chi and classical Chinese dance.Ma said the rise in anti-Asian violence and the spread of terms like “China virus” had emboldened him to bring more elements of Chinese culture to the production.“It’s one simple word: respect,” he said. “It’s truly important to have respect for all cultures, and to be as authentic as possible.” More

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      Joaquina Kalukango and Amanda Williams on Creative Freedom

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      The “Slave Play” actress and the Chicago-based artist discuss generational gaps, success and the art that brought them each acclaim.What does it mean for an artist to be free? And what does that freedom look like for a contemporary Black artist? Amanda Williams has recently been asking herself these very questions. A Chicago-based visual artist who trained as an architect, Williams, 47, is known for her pieces exploring the nuances of color, both racial and aesthetic. Her breakout work was “Color(ed) Theory,” a 2014-16 series in which she painted eight condemned houses on Chicago’s South Side in vivid, culturally coded shades, such as “Ultrasheen,” a dark turquoise that matches the hue of a Black hair-care product, and “Crown Royal Bag,” a purplish pigment that mirrors the packaging of a popular whisky.In a 2018 TED Talk, Williams discussed how we perceive color — specifically, how our perceptions are determined by context. One example, she said, was redlining — federal housing maps from the 1930s marked neighborhoods inhabited by Black Chicagoans as red, contributing to policies that prevented many residents from securing loans — which weaponized color and resulted in underinvestment. When the actress Joaquina Kalukango, 32, heard the speech, she was awe-struck. Kalukango is no stranger to powerful works of art: Last year, she received a Tony nomination for best leading actress in a play for her work in Jeremy O. Harris’s searing, passionately debated drama “Slave Play,” which is set on a plantation and follows a trio of modern-day interracial couples whose relationships are stymied by conflicting views on race.One rainy morning in October, Kalukango met Williams at the latter’s studio in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Kalukango was days away from starting a Chicago run of “Paradise Square,” a musical about the 1863 Manhattan draft riots, in which Irish immigrants turned on the Black neighbors with whom they’d previously peacefully coexisted. (It’s headed to Broadway early next year.) Meanwhile, Williams is expanding on “What Black Is This, You Say?,” an ongoing, multiplatform series of abstract paintings inspired by cultural touchstones and observations related to the Black experience that she showed at Art Basel in Miami Beach this month.Amid laughter, Williams and Kalukango talked generational differences, the desire to be “regular” and the blurry line between artistic genius and madness.AMANDA WILLIAMS: Twenty twenty was a mess. I was contemplating Kool-Aid [the subject of one of her latest paintings] and laughing about it, and then the whole world was like, “How are you feeling about being Black, segregation and systemic racism?” People were like, “I want to help, right this minute.” I thought, “I don’t know how I feel right now. I was actually doing something else, and now I’m going to cry.” It’s a little easier now. We’re farther away from it. How did that feel for you?JOAQUINA KALUKANGO: It’s interesting, because “Slave Play” opened [on Broadway in October 2019] before the country had its racial awakening. There was a lot of aggression toward our production. There was a lot of pushback, specifically within the Black community. [Some who had seen the play, and many others who hadn’t, found it offensive in its use of antebellum role play and inappropriately sexually graphic; one online petition calling for the show’s shutdown referred to it as “anti-Black sentiment disguised as art.”] But after audiences saw the show, there was so much conversation. On the streets, people would come up to me and talk about it. That was affirming. It was also exhausting. The greatest thing that helped me was when we had a “Black Out” night — the audience was all Black. I heard the show in a different way: It was funny. There was this release of Black people finally being able to feel like this show was for them, as opposed to sitting next to someone and wondering, “Why are you laughing at this?” How can we get Black people to feel free regardless of who’s sitting next to them? How can we fully enjoy ourselves in situations and experience art without feeling like other people are watching us? It’s always a struggle.Kalukango in “Slave Play” at the Golden Theater in New York City, in September 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA.W.: I’ve thought a lot about the freedom question. Take Kanye West. He’s obviously experiencing some mental health issues. But also, he has a level of mastery and talent that borders on complete freedom. He says inappropriate things, and maybe he doesn’t even understand what freedom is. But if you’ve ascended beyond practically any other brown human you’ve ever met, and you can buy Wyoming, isn’t that free? [West has purchased two huge ranches there.] He just does what he wants. [For the listening party for “Donda,” his recent album named after his mother, who died in 2007,] Kanye was like, “I’m going to recreate my mom’s house in [the Chicago Bears stadium] Soldier Field.” Everybody was confused. But I thought, “This could be a mental moment, but it’s also pure creativity.” Every artist who you might say is the most free, in terms of pushing their craft to the edge, is always called crazy.J.K.: Did anyone tell you, early in your career, that you had to work within certain boundaries? Did you feel pressure to be a certain type of artist?A.W.: I trained as an architect [at Cornell University]. My parents were in a panic that I might be an artist. They were like, “Artists who make money are called architects.” In a sense, that was a boundary. Then, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area right at the height of the dot-com boom. The economy was great. Projects were bountiful; jobs were plentiful. I was able to live out this architectural career that I thought would take 30 years in five or six. Then I had a boss who said, “If you could be doing anything in the world right now, what would it be?” She thought I was going to say, “Taking over your company.” And I said, “Painting.” She encouraged me to try it. And the Bay Area lent itself to that. Everybody had an idea. Google was born when I lived in the Bay. That kind of environment helped me take the leap.If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t. I’d be like, “What if it doesn’t work? How am I going to eat?” But back then, I was just like, “Oh, I’ll eat some avocados, it’s California.” There’s no moment I remember when somebody said I couldn’t do it. Well, I’m sure there was, but I blocked it out. My friend and I were just talking about how our generation tended to dismiss racist comments or sexual advances. We just kept moving. Your generation does not tolerate nonsense. Is that how it feels?J.K.: Definitely. The new show I’m in, “Paradise Square,” is a musical that has been in development for a long time. There was always a struggle to figure out whose lens the story should be told through. Now, it finally centers around this free Black woman in New York who owned a bar in 1863 [Nelly Freeman, the role Kalukango is playing]. We have an E.D.I. [equity, diversity and inclusion] person who talks about terminology. One day in rehearsal, an assistant said, “Joaquina, we’re not going to say the L-word in this sentence.” I was like, “ ‘Let’? ‘Listen’? ”A.W.: Which “L”?J.K.: It was “lynch.” I said, “What? We’re just not going to say this?” But the idea was, we don’t have to say that word until it’s absolutely necessary. I thought, “Well, this is a whole new way of being, even for me. That word doesn’t bother my spirit, but it’s bothering other people’s spirits.” It’s a different world from when I was growing up in Atlanta.Loren ToneyA.W.: How does that impact your craft? Does it trip you up to have to be mindful of words in a way that maybe you hadn’t been before?J.K.: We’re all more careful. Everyone’s fragile. We’re still in the midst of a pandemic, and so many issues have come up for so many people. We’re all giving each other a lot of care and grace in this new era that we’re trying to build, this new era of theater we’re trying to make. But it’s a bit of a struggle, I’ll be honest. When you do work that’s specifically about a very troublesome time — and if you look at the Jan. 6 riot [at the U.S. Capitol], it’s similar to the draft riots — you can’t sugarcoat it. You can’t run away from it. It’s always a balance of, how do you tell a story without traumatizing our community?T: When did you first encounter each other’s work?J.K.: I first saw Amanda’s work in her TED Talk.A.W.: Oh my God. I had wondered, how did you find out about me? How do you know who I am?J.K.: I had such a visceral reaction to “Color(ed) Theory.” All of it was so much a part of my life, my childhood. Plus, I just love colors. How did you get that concept? What inspired you?A.W.: I grew up on Chicago’s South Side and crossed town every day to go to school. Chicago segregation, coupled with the city’s grid, is perfect for systemic oppression because it sets boundaries, and then we mentally reinforce them. I was hyperaware of color all the time, as in race, thinking, “That’s a Mexican neighborhood.” “Chinese people are there.” “White folks do this.” Things like that. And I’ve loved [chromatic] color since birth. Then I learned about color in an academic setting.One summer, while [I was] teaching color theory, a friend joked, “They pay you money to teach people what? Red and blue is green?” I said, “No, color theory is a whole science.” She said, “You know colored theory.” We laughed and I left it alone. A week or two later, I thought, “I do know colored theory.” I spent another few years making sense of it. It seemed so juicy. I started to think, “What things make you think of the color first?” There’s a story I told in the TED Talk: I met a gentleman who grew up near the “Crown Royal Bag” house. He thought the purple house meant Prince was coming. Even after I told him about my art, he said, “You wait and see. Prince might show up and perform right here.” Suddenly, he had hope for that vacant lot, in a way that maybe he didn’t before. To me, that was success.J.K.: It was brilliant.A.W.: At first, I wasn’t as familiar with your work, but when I started to look into it, I was like, “How could I have missed all of this? These are the exact same things I’m thinking and talking about.” I’m excited about how we translate these thoughts across mediums — theater, performance, music, architecture, sculpture, writing.Williams’s “Color(ed) Theory: Pink Oil Moisturizer” (2014-16).Amanda WilliamsWilliams’s “Color(ed) Theory: Crown Royal Bag” (2014-16).Amanda WilliamsT: You both have long been working artists, but your breakout pieces — “Slave Play” and “Color(ed) Theory” — made you famous. Has that affected your work? Do you feel an added responsibility now?J.K.: An actor starts off auditioning for nearly everything. We’re told “no” 99 out of 100 times. Initially, the roles I took were just what ended up coming to me. But I also believe that what’s for you is for you. When you’re on a path that you’re aligned with, more things start coming your way. Now I am adamant that Black women see many facets of ourselves, that we are depicted with a wide gamut of emotions: the unflattering and unraveling parts but also joyful and loving, peaceful and gentle. I want it all for us, at every possible moment. I’m trying to ensure I show Black women as full human beings — not stereotypes, not archetypes. We’re not strong all the time. Yes, our ancestors had to survive, but there was always joy in the midst of all that pain.A.W.: You also have to give yourself permission to be an artist. That’s hard because there is a burden. You know how few people have the same opportunities, so you always want to make sure you’ve done justice. At the same time, you have to take the pressure off. Our society thinks about the home run, the slam dunk — the idea that each thing you do must be better than the last. But if you look at any creative being’s full oeuvre, there are ups and downs. Artists have to continue to understand themselves and improve their craft for themselves. It makes me think of this great artist Raymond Saunders, who lives in the Bay Area. He taught an advanced painting class, and I was teaching at the same school, so he invited me to his class. I went — and the students were eating handmade pastries from this beautiful boutique in Berkeley or something. I’m like, “What is this?” And they’re like, “He told us he can’t teach us how to paint, he can teach us how to live.” It was mind-blowing. Maybe we don’t have to nail it every single week of every year. Maybe we just nail it every five years. Maybe we can sleep one of those years.J.K.: I always think, “Do we ever have the space to be mediocre and figure things out?” I don’t want to be Black girl magic every day. Sometimes I want to be regular. Just regular Black. [All laugh]A.W.: Regular Black. I’m going to make a painting based on that.T: How do you two define success right now?A.W.: Just being the best me. I don’t worry so much if my work is well received or if it garners accolades. That sounds so cheesy. My husband jokes, “Well, that’s nice to say after you’ve gotten the accolades.” [All laugh]J.K.: I love originating and creating new roles. For me, success is knowing that there are girls coming up who can use work I’ve done as audition pieces for colleges. In “Slave Play,” my character, Kaneisha, has a 10- or 15-minute monologue. She takes up space for almost the entire last act. I’d never seen anything like it onstage before. For a long time, it was hard to find material or scene work that included multiple Black characters. It was hard finding those plays [when I studied at the Juilliard School]. It’s all about the next generation for me. If at any point I can make someone feel more free, more confident in their abilities, that’s the win.This interview has been edited and condensed. More