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      City in Mexico Bans Performances of Songs With Misogynistic Lyrics

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      The city of Chihuahua said it would impose hefty fines on bands that perform songs with lyrics that “promote violence against women.”Fed up with persistent violence, officials in the city of Chihuahua in northern Mexico approved a ban last week forbidding musical acts from performing songs with lyrics that degrade women.Mayor Marco Bonilla of Chihuahua said in an video update last week that the law banned the performance of songs that “promote violence against women” or encourage their discrimination, marginalization or exclusion.Mr. Bonilla said that those who violate the ban could face fines ranging from 674,000 pesos to 1.2 million pesos, or between about $39,000 and $71,000.The City Council approved the ban unanimously on Wednesday amid a rise in killings of women across Mexico in recent years, and as Chihuahua, a city of about 940,000 residents, is struggling with its own cases of violence against women. Recently, Mr. Bonilla said, about seven out of 10 calls to 911 in Chihuahua have involved cases of domestic violence, particularly against women.“Violence against women has reached levels that we could consider like a pandemic,” he said. “We can’t allow this to happen, and we also can’t allow this to be normalized.”It was unclear from his message who would impose the fines or how the ban on misogynistic lyrics would be enforced. Money raised from the fines will be channeled to a women’s institute in Chihuahua and a confidential women’s shelter, said Blanca Patricia Ulate Bernal, a Chihuahua city councilwoman who proposed the ban.Ms. Ulate Bernal said in a post on Facebook last week that the law will apply to concerts and events in the city that require a municipal permit. She added that the ban would help ensure that women have the right “to enjoy a life free of violence.”Mr. Bonilla, Ms. Ulate Bernal and other council members did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The lyrics ban was passed about a month after Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, criticized songs known as corridos tumbados, or trap ballads, whose lyrics glorify drug smugglers and violence.“We’re never going to censor anyone,” Mr. López Obrador said at a news conference in June. “They can sing what they want, but we’re not going to stay quiet.”The approval of the ban is not the first time the city of Chihuahua has taken a strong stance against the performance of certain songs. Citing high levels of drug violence, Chihuahua banned the long-running band Los Tigres del Norte in 2012 after a concert during which the group performed three songs known as narcocorridos, which celebrate the exploits of drug traffickers. The city also fined the concert organizers 20,000 pesos, or about $1,600, at the time. More

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      Dancers Accuse Lizzo of Harassment and Hostile Work Environment in Lawsuit

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      In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, three dancers claim that touring with the Grammy winner meant working in an “overtly sexual atmosphere” that subjected them to harassment.Three of Lizzo’s former dancers filed a lawsuit against her on Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, accusing the Grammy-winning singer and the captain of her dance team of creating a hostile work environment while performing concerts on her Special Tour this year.The lawsuit, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times by the plaintiffs’ law firm, said the dancers had been “exposed to an overtly sexual atmosphere that permeated their workplace,” which included “outings where nudity and sexuality were a focal point,” it said. The suit was first reported by NBC.The defendants include Lizzo, using her full name Melissa Jefferson instead of her stage name; her production company, Big Grrrl Big Touring Inc.; and Shirlene Quigley, the tour’s dance captain. It does not specify whether the singer was aware of the plaintiffs’ allegations linked to Ms. Quigley.The suit alleges that Lizzo and Ms. Quigley were involved in several episodes that lawyers for the three dancers said amounted to sexual and religious harassment and weight shaming, among other allegations.The suit alleges that Ms. Quigley “made it her mission to preach” Christianity to the dancers, and fixated on virginity, while Lizzo sexually harassed them.On one occasion while at a nightclub in Amsterdam, the lawsuit says, Lizzo began inviting employees to touch nude performers and handle dildos and bananas used in their performances.Out of fear of retaliation, a dancer eventually “acquiesced” to touching the breast of a nude female performer despite repeatedly expressing no interest in doing so, the suit says.Representatives for Lizzo and her production company did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.Dancers on Lizzo’s “Watch Out for the Big Grrrls” reality show last year. Arianna Davis, bottom right, is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesTwo of the plaintiffs, Arianna Davis and Crystal Williams, began performing with Lizzo after competing on her reality television show on Amazon Prime, “Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” in 2021. The show was an opportunity to give plus-size dancers representation, Lizzo said at the time. Ms. Davis and Ms. Williams were fired in the spring of 2023, the lawsuit says.Separately, a third plaintiff, Noelle Rodriguez, was hired in May 2021 to perform in Lizzo’s “Rumors” music video and remained on as part of her dance team. According to the lawsuit, Ms. Rodriguez resigned shortly after Ms. Davis and Ms. Williams had been fired.Some of the allegations seemed to take aim at Lizzo’s reputation for championing body positivity and inclusivity.“The stunning nature of how Lizzo and her management team treated their performers seems to go against everything Lizzo stands for publicly,” a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Ron Zambrano, said in a statement on Monday. Privately, he said, Lizzo “weight-shames her dancers and demeans them in ways that are not only illegal but absolutely demoralizing.”Some of Lizzo’s statements to the dancers gave Ms. Davis, who was diagnosed with a binge eating disorder, the impression that she had to “explain her weight gain and disclose intimate personal details about her life in order to keep her job,” the suit says.Since her breakout hit “Truth Hurts” dominated charts in 2019, Lizzo has popularized “feel-good music” and self-love and has celebrated diversity in all forms by churning out empowerment anthems, introducing a size-inclusive shapewear line and racking up millions of views on social media.She won this year’s Grammy for record of the year for “About Damn Time.”Diana Reddy, an assistant professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, said that allegations that fall outside legally protected categories could undermine Lizzo’s body-positive message and “could certainly encourage a settlement.”Proving a hostile work environment in the unconventional entertainment industry is difficult, she said, so the plaintiffs’ lawyers could be hoping for a settlement. “Employment discrimination plaintiffs don’t fare particularly well in court,” Ms. Reddy said. More

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      Tony Bennett’s Commitment to Civil Rights

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      The singer witnessed racism in the military and in the music industry, experiences that informed his decision to join the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965.In explaining the roots of his commitment to civil rights, Tony Bennett often told a story from his Army days, when he brought a Black soldier as his guest to Thanksgiving dinner, prompting a furious reprimand and a demotion.It was 1945, three years before the end of segregation in the U.S. military, and Bennett, who had been drafted into World War II shortly after he had turned 18, happened to run into a high school friend and fellow serviceman in occupied Germany. As he brought the friend, Frank Smith, to the holiday meal in the white servicemen’s mess hall, an officer intercepted them in a rage, Bennett recalled in his 1998 autobiography.“It was actually more acceptable to fraternize with the German troops than it was to be friendly with a fellow Black American soldier!” Bennett recalled in the book, “The Good Life.”Bennett recalled that in that moment, the officer took out a razor blade and cut the corporal stripes from his uniform, spitting on them and throwing them to the floor. He was then assigned to dig up the bodies of soldiers in mass graves so that they could be reburied with more dignity.“For a while the whole affair soured me on the human race,” Bennett remembered in the autobiography.It was a pivotal moment for the young singer, who returned from the war focused on developing his music career. Twenty years and a whirlwind of fame later, Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, performing for marchers alongside other musicians such as Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone and Joan Baez.As his death on Friday at 96 unearthed memories of Bennett’s suave affability and charm as one of the foremost purveyors of the American songbook, it also prompted recollections of Bennett as a steadfast advocate for civil rights.Bennett’s career took off in the 1950s and ’60s, and as he joined jazz circles that included greats such as Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington, he came to witness the blatant racism that had been ingrained in the American entertainment industry. Cole, for example, could not sit down in the dining room of the club where he had been performing, Bennett recalled, and Ellington wasn’t allowed to attend the party at the hotel where he and Bennett were top billing.“I’d never been politically inclined, but these things went beyond politics,” Bennett said in his autobiography. “Nat and Duke were geniuses, brilliant human beings who gave the world some of the most beautiful music it’s ever heard, and yet they were treated like second-class citizens.”In 1965, Belafonte asked him to attend the march to Montgomery, explaining that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. hoped that entertainers could help rally media attention, he recalled in the book. Bennett agreed, traveling with the singer and bandleader Billy Eckstine. He said in his autobiography that the march reminded him of fighting his way into Germany at the end of the war, comparing the hostility of the Germans to that of the white state troopers.The day before the marchers reached the Alabama State Capitol, Bennett was among the performers at a rally in a field where the marchers were camping for the night, singing from a makeshift stage built from coffin crates and plywood.When Bennett and Eckstine left the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove them to the airport. She was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan.In a 2007 documentary about Bennett, Belafonte recalled that his friend brought the “spirit of the Second World War into our vision of the America of the future.”The singer’s commitment to the cause persisted. According to the 2011 biography of Bennett, “All the Things You Are,” the singer also refused to perform in apartheid-era South Africa. Coretta Scott King has said that he remained committed to the King Center, the organization she created after her husband’s assassination. In Atlanta, Bennett has a spot on the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame.In his later years, Bennett dedicated much of his charitable contributions to arts education, establishing a public high school in Queens called Frank Sinatra School of the Arts with Susan Benedetto, whom he married in 2007, and a nonprofit that funds arts programming at schools in need of support.In his final years, when discussing social justice, Bennett would often quote the singer Ella Fitzgerald, who attended the Selma-to-Montgomery march as well: “Tony, we are all here,” he said she told him.“All the tribulations, the wars, the prejudice — and everything that divides us — simply melt away,” he told Vanity Fair in 2016, “when you realize that we’re all together on one planet and that every problem should have a solution.” More

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      Steve Pieters, Pastor Who Spoke of AIDS in Famed Interview, Dies at 70

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      He had the disease and was interviewed on the PTL network in 1985 by Tammy Faye Bakker, a broadcast that was said to have changed minds and hearts.In 1985, when fear and homophobia were still driving much of the conversation surrounding AIDS, the Rev. A. Stephen Pieters, a gay pastor who had the disease, was a decidedly different voice.That May, at the St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica, Calif., presiding at a mass for people with AIDS attended by hundreds, he declared: “Rather than feel deserted by God, I have never been more sure of God’s love for me. God did not give me this disease. God is with me in this disease.”That September, he spoke to The Los Angeles Times about the ostracism people with AIDS were encountering.“Some people ask, ‘How is it different from cancer?’” he said. “Well, most people with cancer aren’t asked not to use the bathroom in a friend’s house or served dinner on paper plates. I’ve had more meals on paper plates in the last year than I’ve had in my whole life.”One appearance he made that year had a particularly profound impact: In November 1985 he was interviewed by Tammy Faye Bakker on the PTL (Praise the Lord) television network, which reached millions of Christian viewers, most of them conservative.It was a sympathetic interview in which Mr. Pieters spoke forthrightly about being gay and about his illness, and Ms. Bakker (who was then married to the televangelist Jim Bakker) urged her audience to be governed by compassion rather than intolerance and fear.“How sad,” she said, “that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, and we who are supposed to be able to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care.”The PTL network had an audience of millions, and in the years since, that interview has been credited with helping to change at least some viewers’ perceptions of gay people, AIDS and faith. Some televangelists had been implying or stating outright that AIDS was divine retribution for homosexuality. Ms. Bakker (who after a divorce and remarriage was later known as Tammy Faye Messner) called on Christians to instead show empathy.Among those impressed with her stand, many years later, was the actress Jessica Chastain, who won an Oscar last year for her role as Ms. Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” in which the interview with Mr. Pieters, portrayed by Randy Havens, was a pivotal scene. (A stage musical, “Tammy Faye,” which opened last year in London, also incorporated the 1985 interview.)“That interview was why I needed to make the movie,” Ms. Chastain told Variety at the movie’s New York premiere in 2021. “It was rebellious and brave and courageous and badass. I’m 100 percent convinced that there were people — conservative Christians watching at home — who realized that they had judged their family members unlovingly. I’m convinced that that interview saved families and saved lives.”If Ms. Bakker defied expectations with that interview, Mr. Pieters long defied AIDS, surviving for decades despite repeated health struggles. He died on July 8 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif., near Los Angeles. He was 70.His spokesman, Harlan Boll, said the cause was a sepsis infection.Mr. Pieters, who had continued his ministry and since 1994 had performed with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, was looking forward to the publication next year of his book, “Love Is Greater Than AIDS: A Memoir of Survival, Healing, and Hope.” In it, he said he was often asked why he thought he survived AIDS when so many others didn’t.“Whatever the reason,” he wrote, “I feel deeply grateful to be alive. So many gay men of my generation did not get to grow old. What a privilege to have reached the age of 70, still dancing with joy.”Albert Stephen Pieters was born on Aug. 2, 1952, in Lawrence, Mass. His father, Richard, was a mathematics teacher and wrestling coach at Phillips Academy, and his mother, Norma (Kenfield) Pieters, was a tax accountant and homemaker.“I knew that I was different from the time that I was about 3,” Mr. Pieters told Ms. Bakker in the 1985 interview, “and I grew up feeling like I didn’t quite fit in.”When he was a teenager, he said, he recognized that he was gay and talked to his pastor at a Congregational church about it.“He was freaked out,” he said. “He told me, ‘Don’t tell anybody; never say anything to anybody about it.’”He said that after graduating from Northwestern University in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in speech, he joined the Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago and felt called to a ministry focused on gay people, that church’s main audience. He earned a master of divinity degree at McCormick Theological Seminary in 1979, then became pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Hartford, Conn., before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1980s. There he took a post at the Metropolitan Community Church of North Hollywood and, in 1984, received a diagnosis of AIDS, although he had been showing symptoms as early as 1982.He faced numerous health problems over the years, but just being around to face them was something of a victory: He said he’d been told in 1984 that he wouldn’t live out that year. The next year he spoke before a task force on AIDS in Los Angeles convened by Mayor Tom Bradley and Ed Edelman, a county supervisor, urging officials not to write off those who had already been diagnosed.“If I had succumbed to the hopelessness I constantly hear about AIDS,” he said, “I might have given up and not lived to see 1985.”Mr. Pieters is survived by a brother.At the 2021 opening of “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” Mr. Pieters commented on the impact of his 1985 interview.“I’ve had so many people over the years come up to me and say, ‘I saw your interview live, because my mother always had PTL on, and it changed my life because I realized I could be gay and Christian at the same time,’” he said. “Or, ‘It changed my life because I realized that AIDS was a reality, and I had to start taking care of myself.’”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

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      One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color.His own arrival in the spotlight was auspicious. In 1963, when he was 16, he won an audition to appear with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic as part of the maestro’s nationally televised series of Young People’s Concerts.Mr. Bernstein was effusive as he introduced the young pianist to the crowd at Philharmonic Hall. “He sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto in such a way that we simply flipped,” Mr. Bernstein said, recounting the young pianist’s audition.Mr. Watts was then living in relative obscurity in Philadelphia, practicing on a beat-up piano with 26 missing strings. But he emerged from his performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 a bona fide star.A couple weeks later, Mr. Bernstein invited him to make his formal Philharmonic debut, substituting for the eminent pianist Glenn Gould. He later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”“It was like being God Almighty at 16,” he told The Times.André Watts was born on June 20, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of Herman Watts, a noncommissioned officer stationed overseas for the U.S. Army, and Maria (Gusmits) Watts, an amateur pianist from Hungary.His mother, who was fond of playing Strauss waltzes on the family’s Blüthner piano, encouraged André’s musical studies, and as a 6-year-old he took up the piano after a flirtation with the violin.“I liked the sound,” he recalled in a 1993 television appearance. “I would hold the pedal down for pages and pages of music and just let this mushroom sound go.”When he was 8, the family moved to the United States for his father’s work, ultimately settling in Philadelphia. But his parents’ relationship grew strained, and they divorced when he was 13. He rarely saw his father in the following decades.His mother, who worked as a receptionist at an art gallery to help pay for his piano lessons, became a dominant influence. When he was young, she served as teacher, coach and manager, and she enforced a strict practice regimen.Mr. Watts with Leonard Bernstein in 1963 after he performed a Liszt piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic as a last-minute substitute for Glenn Gould. Mr. Watts later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”Associated PressAndré struggled to fit in at school, quarreling with teachers and classmates (he taught himself judo to deter bullies). He sometimes felt isolated, he recalled in interviews, because he identified as neither Black nor white.When he went to Florida as a teenager to perform, his manager, invoking the state’s history of discrimination against interracial couples, warned that he could be viewed suspiciously.But his mother told him that he should not blame racism for his troubles. “If someone is not nice to you,” Mr. Watts recalled her saying when he was interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor in 1982, “it doesn’t have to be automatically because of your color.”“These kinds of advice have taught me that when I’m in a complex personal situation, I don’t have to conclude it is a racial thing,” he said. “The more subtle things in interpersonal exchange are, first of all, never provable as racist anyway. So it’s a waste of time.”He later credited Mr. Bernstein with helping him gain acceptance in the classical music industry, which had long been seen as the dominion of the white and wealthy. In introducing Mr. Watts at the Young People’s Concert, Mr. Bernstein described his international heritage and said, “I love that kind of story.”In 1964, the year after his debut with Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Watts won a Grammy Award for most promising new classical recording artist. Despite his early success, he tried to remain grounded, adopting a motto, “Even this shall pass away,” taken from a poem by the 19th-century poet and abolitionist Theodore Tilton. (His mother had the phrase inscribed on a gold medallion that he wore around his neck.)He graduated in 1972 from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he studied with the pedagogue and performer Leon Fleisher. He was already a regular on the global concert circuit by the time he graduated, playing the Liszt concerto for which he was known, as well as works by Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and others, before sold-out crowds in Boston, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere.Mr. Watts in performance with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 2005.Richard Termine for The New York TimesMr. Watts earned mixed reviews early in his career; critics said that while he had flair and confidence, he could sometimes get carried away. But they agreed that he possessed a special ability to communicate from the keyboard.“He has that kind of personal magic that makes an Event of a concert, and Philharmonic Hall had the electric feeling that occurs only when an important artist is at work,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in 1970. “It cannot be taught, this mysterious transmission from stage to audience, and Mr. Watts has it in very large measure.”While Mr. Watts thrived on the stage, recording was more of a challenge; he said he was prone to clam up without an audience. And at times he suffered financial and management difficulties, including in 1992, when he was ordered by a New York State appellate court to pay Columbia Artists Management nearly $300,000 in disputed commissions.But he maintained his popularity, performing at White House state dinners, making frequent appearances on television and becoming one of classical music’s most bankable stars. His success brought new luxuries and curiosities. He grew fond of Montecristo cigars, fine wines and caviar, and he began to study Zen Buddhism.In 1987, Mr. Watts was featured in an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” about learning from mistakes.“When I’m feeling unhappy,” he said on the program, “going to the piano and just playing gently and listening to sounds makes everything slowly seem all right.”His collaborators described him as a musician of preternatural talent who was always looking to improve. The conductor Robert Spano said that Mr. Watts never performed a piece the same way twice, intent on finding fresh meaning each time.“Every night was a new adventure,” Mr. Spano said. “He radiated love to people and to the music, and it was unmistakable. That’s why he was so loved as a performer, because of the generosity of his music making.”He was also a role model for many Black musicians. The conductor Thomas Wilkins, a colleague of Mr. Watts’s at Indiana University, where Mr. Watts had taught since 2004, recalled him as a devoted teacher who was eager to “hand down this ferociousness about trying to become better.”“Whenever we were onstage together, there was this unspoken acknowledgment that we were in a world where a lot of people think we shouldn’t be,” said Mr. Wilkins, who is Black. “It was an affirmation.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Watts is survived by a stepson, William Dalton; a stepdaughter, Amanda Rees; and seven step-grandchildren.At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Mr. Watts, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer in 2016, had been planning a feat: He would play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in a version that he had reworked for the right hand (his left was recovering from a nerve injury). As he practiced on his twin Yamaha pianos, he got daily inspiration from a one-legged starling that emerged outside his home in Bloomington.Ultimately, Mr. Watts was unable to perform the concerto because of health problems and the pandemic. He mostly stopped playing the piano after the concerts were canceled, instead spending time with students.His wife said that music had sustained him throughout his life, beginning with his demanding childhood and through his health struggles.“Music was how he endured and how he survived,” she said. “When he actually played, then he was happy. It just really lifted up his soul.”He described music as a sacred space in which he felt he could breathe and flourish.“Your relationship with your music is the most important thing that you have, and it is, in the sense of private and sacred, something that you need to protect,” he said before a concert in Baltimore in 2012. “The dross of everyday life is very, very powerful and very strong. So you need to protect your special relationship with your music.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      ‘The Five Demands’ Review: Occupying a College for Racial Justice

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      In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, a documentary recalls the occupation of City College 50 years ago.Among the wave of student protests that occurred across American university campuses in the late 1960s, the student occupation of The City College of New York in April 1969 was a highly local yet pivotal act of civil disobedience. The more than 200 Black and Puerto Rican students who occupied the buildings on South Campus for two weeks did so in protest of the school’s admissions policy and the lack of diversity in its student body. At a time when 40 percent of New York City’s high school graduates were Black or Latino, the film reports, only 9 percent of City College attendees were part of those communities. “The Five Demands,” a new documentary from Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, returns to the campus 50 years later alongside former students, now in their late 60s and 70s, who participated in the protests.In interviews, City College alumni who were recruited through the college’s SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) recall being underprepared in their education and made to feel like tokens who didn’t belong there by their white peers. And indeed, the “five demands” central to the occupation largely revolved not only around making efforts to admit more students of color, but also to provide them with adequate support once they were enrolled — a commitment that many elite colleges and universities still struggle with to this day.In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision that rejected affirmative action, the film feels eerily timely. Schiller and Weiss’s direction is utilitarian, cutting together talking-head interviews with montages of the occupation set to era-appropriate protest songs. But to its credit, the lack of flashiness puts the students’ struggles for racial justice front and center, and ultimately serves to highlight a less-remembered aspect of the countercultural student movement.The Five DemandsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films

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      A new edit of ‘The French Connection’ removes a racial slur. But nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture.The remarkable thing about the censored scene is how ordinary it feels if you’ve watched a police procedural made before, say, 2010. It’s in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection,” from 1971. Two narcotics cops — Jimmy (Popeye) Doyle, played by Gene Hackman, and Buddy (Cloudy) Russo, played by Roy Scheider — are at the precinct, following an undercover operation during which a drug dealer ended up slashing Russo with a knife. The injury has left Russo struggling to put on his coat. “Need a little help there?” Doyle chuckles, then adds an ethnic jab: “You dumb guinea.” Russo: “How the hell did I know he had a knife?” Here Doyle points a slur at the Black dealer: “Never trust a nigger.” Russo: “He could have been white.” Doyle: “Never trust anyone.” Then he invites Russo out for a drink, and they trade masturbation jokes as they head through the door.But perhaps you should forget I mentioned any of this, because you’re now a lot less likely to see it in the film. In June, viewers of the Criterion Channel’s streaming version noticed that much of the scene had been edited out, without announcement or comment; people viewing via Apple TV and Amazon found the same. It was reported that the version available on Disney+ in Britain and Canada remains unedited, suggesting that whoever authorized the cut imagined the moment to be unfit for American audiences in particular. (Disney owns the rights to the film, having acquired Fox, its original distributor, in 2019.) The domestic market now sees a slapdash sequence that has Russo entering the room, clutching his forearm, followed by a jerky jump to the door, where Doyle waits. The disparaging exchange is, of course, omitted. What remains is a glitch, a bit of hesitation, the suggestion of something amiss. “Never trust anyone,” indeed.Bad jump cuts create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play.The conversation that has surrounded this edit — a belated alteration to the winner of an Academy Award for best picture — is just the latest of many such controversies. In 2011, one publisher prepared an edition of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” that replaced instances of that same racial slur with “slave.” In February, Roald Dahl’s British publisher, Puffin Books, and the Roald Dahl Story Company confirmed that new editions of the author’s works, published in 2022, had been tweaked to substitute language that might offend contemporary readers, including descriptors like “fat” and “ugly.” (After a backlash, Puffin said it would keep the original versions for sale, too.) Then, of course, there are the right-wing campaigns to excise passages from instructional texts or simply remove books from public schools and libraries.This particular change to “The French Connection” came unexplained and unannounced, so we can only guess at the precise reasoning behind it. But we can imagine why the language was there in the first place. “The French Connection” was adapted from a nonfiction book about two real detectives, both of whom appear in the film, and the scene clearly wants to situate the viewer within a certain gritty milieu: a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor. We see a bit of banter between two policemen working in what was then called the “inner city,” dialogue underlining their “good cop, bad cop” dynamic; in certain ways, it’s not so different from the set pieces you would find in Blaxploitation films of the era. Doyle’s eagerness to get to the bar hints at the long-running “alcoholic cop” trope, and his homoerotic jokes are offset by his womanizing — another ongoing genre cliché. His racist barbs give a sense of his misdirected frustration. Doyle is presented as flawed, reckless, obsessive, vulgar, “rough around the edges” — but, of course, we’re ultimately meant to find him charming and heroic. He is one in a long line of characters that would stretch forward into shows like “The Shield” and “The Wire”: figures built on the idea that “good cop, bad cop” can describe not just an interrogation style or a buddy-film formula but also a single officer.Attempting to edit out just one of a character’s flaws inevitably produces a sense of inconsistent standards. We get that true heroes shouldn’t be using racial epithets. But they’re probably supposed to avoid a lot of the other things Popeye Doyle does too — like racing (and crashing) a car through a residential neighborhood or shooting a suspect in the back. This selective editing feels like a project for risk-averse stakeholders, so anxious about a film’s legacy and lasting economic value that they end up diminishing the work itself. The point of the edit isn’t to turn Doyle into a noble guy, just one whose movie modern viewers can watch without any jolts of discomfort or offense. If Gene Hackman is American cinema’s great avatar of paranoia — a star in three of this country’s most prophetic and indelible surveillance thrillers, “The French Connection,” “The Conversation” and “Enemy of the State” — then his turn here might anticipate the intensity with which entities from police departments to megacorporations will try to mitigate risks like that. This is a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor.Artful jump cuts can illuminate all kinds of interesting associations between images. Bad ones just create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play. The one newly smuggled into “The French Connection” reveals, to use a period term, the hand of the Man, even if it’s unclear from which direction it’s reaching. (Is it Disney, treating adult audiences like the children it’s used to serving? Did Friedkin, who once modified the color of the film, approve the change?) Censors, like overzealous cops, can be too aggressive, or too simplistic, in their attempts to neutralize perceived threats. Whoever made the cut in the precinct scene, sparing the hero from saying unpleasant things, did nothing to remove other ethnic insults, from references to Italian Americans to the cops’ code names for their French targets: “Frog One” and “Frog Two.” It also becomes hilarious, in this sanitized context, to watch the film’s frequent nonlinguistic violence: A guy is shot in the face; a train conductor is blasted in the chest; a sniper misses Doyle and clips a woman pushing a stroller.Surveillance, as the movie teaches us, is a game of dogged attention; focus too much on one thing and you miss a world of detail encircling it. Nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture, the full context; we become, instead, obsessed with obscure metrics, legalistic violations of current sensibilities. And actively changing those works — continually remolding them into a shape that suits today’s market — eventually compromises the entire archival record of our culture; we’re left only with evidence of the present, not a document of the past. This is, in a way, the same spirit that leads obdurate politicians to try and purge reams of uncomfortable American history from textbooks, leaving students learning — and living — in a state of confusion, with something always out of order, always unexplained. You can, of course, find the unedited precinct scene on YouTube. (Just as you can find altered scenes from other films, from “Fantasia” to “Star Wars.”) It’s just packaged inside an interview with Hackman about his approach to portraying Doyle, whom he disliked. “The character was a bigot and antisemitic and whatever else you want to call him,” the actor says. “That’s who he was. It was difficult for me to say the N-word; I protested somewhat, but there was a part of me that also said, ‘That’s who the guy is.’ I mean, you like him or not, that’s who he was. You couldn’t really whitewash him.” Turns out you can.Opening illustration: Source photographs from 20th Century Fox, via Getty ImagesNiela Orr is a story editor for the magazine. Her recent work includes a profile of the actress Keke Palmer, an essay about the end of “Atlanta” and a feature on the metamusical “A Strange Loop.” More

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      What Opera Singers Gained, and Lost, Performing While Pregnant

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      “It’s adjustable, yes?” Standing in a dressing room in the opera house in Montpellier, France, in May, the soprano Maya Kherani tugged at the waistband of her tiered skirt. A draper kneeling behind her shook out the hem while the costume designer looked on with satisfaction.“We’re lucky,” she said, cupping her hands around the smooth orb of her belly. “It works for the character.”Kherani considered herself fortunate not because she had landed the role of Autonoe, a lead in “Orfeo,” by the Baroque composer Antonio Sartorio. Instead, Kherani, who gave birth on Sunday, was relieved to discover that her costumes in this modern-dress production came with elasticated waists and flat shoes that would make it bearable to sing and act while 32 weeks pregnant.Better yet: The stage director Benjamin Lazar decided to incorporate her pregnancy into the staging, making it the driving force behind her character’s quest to win back her errant lover.“It works dramaturgically really well for my character,” Kherani said in a FaceTime interview from Montpellier. “In my gestures and in the staging, I am referencing the pregnancy. Everyone’s really supportive, which is not always the case.”In most musical professions, pregnant women — not their employers — determine how long they continue to work. When opera singers want to perform pregnant, however, they rely on the good will and skill of a creative team: drapers who add strategic ruching to costumes; stage directors who might change a risky piece of stage business or adapt their concept to include the pregnancy.All too often, though, pregnant singers lose work. And yet opera is a rare business in which pregnancy and childbirth can directly and positively affect the core product — the voice. The science behind the phenomenon is still poorly understood, but it is such a noticeable and common occurrence that it has become something of a truism in opera: After childbirth, the voice seems enriched with warmth, creaminess and depth of color.Kherani found her voice improved after becoming pregnant. “You learn to use a wider base of breath support including the back muscles,” she said, “which I think every singer is trying to access, but I have been forced to.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesChanging bodies, of course, go along with the changing voices. A growing number of women in the industry are speaking out about what they feel are cancellations motivated by their appearance rather than sound. Officially, opera houses say they are concerned about safety. Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of Washington National Opera, said, “As a general rule we are interested in the safety and well-being of all artists working for us.” The Metropolitan Opera said in a statement that “if a pregnant singer wishes to perform, we make sure it is safe for them to do so.”But not all cancellations reflect the wishes of the pregnant singer. The mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke said in a video interview she was removed from a production weeks before opening when the company learned she was pregnant, and that she lost a role at another opera house after her management told the company she would be in her second trimester during the performances. A fellow singer later told her the production would have required Cooke to go down a slide, but Cooke said safety was not mentioned in the cancellation, nor was she consulted.“The industry still views you as their property,” Cooke said. “Your choices are their choices.”Like other singers who were eager to speak about pregnancy and motherhood in opera, Cooke asked me not to name the companies that canceled her contracts. In part, this was because of fear of retribution. But also, as the soprano Kathryn Lewek told me before her last performance in the Met’s recent run of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” the goal was not to shame or remove certain administrators or directors. “We want to help bring about change,” she said.More than five years after the #MeToo movement sparked an overdue investigation of sexual harassment and misconduct in classical music, the field is buzzing with voices calling for more equity around pregnancy and parenthood. The soprano Julia Bullock, who gave birth to her first child last year, has taken to Instagram to post about performing as a lactating mother. The mezzo J’Nai Bridges publicly shared her decision to freeze her eggs at a time in her career when she is a sought-after Carmen — a notably physical role. Social media is especially vital for singers because so many are freelancers, lacking the organized lobbying power of unions and working much of the year on the road.After a singer gives birth, Kherani said, “All the support and alignment creates a stronger foundation for the breath, and that can result in a richer tone.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesOn Facebook, the Momology private discussion groups for mothers in the performing arts are bursting at the seams. The classically trained Broadway singer Andrea Jones-Sojola, who created the first group in 2010, caps membership at 500 for each group to create a cohesive support network. This year, she opened a fifth. Jones said pregnancy-related cancellations are an important thread. “A lot of women were afraid to make it known publicly,” she said. “They were afraid to fight for themselves.”Singers also turn to each other for advice on how to navigate technical challenges during pregnancy. Many report doing their best work in their second and sometimes third trimesters, after symptoms like nausea and fatigue have abated and other physiological changes enhance their vocal power. Much of that power comes from the muscles and tissue singers learn to activate for what is known as appoggio, the internal support they lean on to control the breath flow. For some women, the presence of the unborn baby is like a corset they can push against.Dr. Paul Kwak, an ENT specialist who works with opera singers, said voices are affected by the hypervascular state the body enters in pregnancy as it creates more blood vessels and increases blood flow through tissue. Because the tissue and muscle in the vocal folds can become engorged with that extra blood, he said, “it can change the ways the vocal folds themselves oscillate.” At the same time, changes to the abdominal cavity create pressure on the bottom of the diaphragm. “Some women like it,” Dr. Kwak said, “they feel they have a support there, a shelf to push against.”Lewek, who sang the role of Queen of the Night in “The Magic Flute” through two pregnancies, described the experience as one of adjusting “to the fact that a human is taking up square footage in this very delicate part of my anatomy where I work.” By the second trimester, she said she felt as if she were performing “on steroids.” “Everything was so easy,” she said, “high notes just came shooting out of me.”Many singers said the improvement of the voice after childbirth may be the result of integrating tools used during pregnancy into their vocal technique. “You learn to use a wider base of breath support including the back muscles,” Kherani said, “which I think every singer is trying to access, but I have been forced to.” The changes in her body’s center of gravity also made her hyperaware of her posture, another important factor in singing. After a singer gives birth, she said, “All the support and alignment creates a stronger foundation for the breath, and that can result in a richer tone.”Dr. Kwak said richness was a difficult factor to study scientifically. A singer’s vocal tone, or timbre, is shaped by the tissue in her mouth, tongue, pharynx and face, he said, adding that it was possible this tissue became more supple after pregnancy. But studying its changes during and after pregnancy isn’t easy. “That’s why it’s such a mystery,” he said.Many female singers report doing their best work in their second and sometimes third trimesters, after symptoms like nausea and fatigue have abated and other physiological changes enhance their vocal power.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesRecovering from childbirth can be traumatic for many singers, who have to reacquaint themselves with a body that has changed most radically in the very area that is the powerhouse of their art. The soprano Erin Morley said she lost 30 pounds in the first week after each of her three deliveries. “I found it much easier to sing during my second and third trimesters than I did during the fourth trimester,” she said, echoing many mothers I asked about their recovery following childbirth.Six weeks after delivering her first child by cesarean, Lewek performed the Queen of the Night at the Met. (Morley sang the role of Pamina, the Queen’s daughter, having just given birth to her third, and the two singers spent their breaks breastfeeding in the same dressing room.) The week before rehearsals started, with her “entire support system slashed in half” by surgery, Lewek was still able to sing only up to a high G, a full octave below what Mozart’s music required.With the help of a physical therapist, she devised a workaround. “I found a diaphragmatic rather than muscular way of supporting staccati in Queen of the Night,” she said, “that, overall, I would never want to sustain my entire singing career. But it got me through that gig and it opened up a new set of skills.” Her tone, too, opened up, after the births of each of her children, when she said she noticed “a blossoming of the tone quality of my voice that now has lent itself to bigger repertoire.”She wondered: “Was it the pregnancies that really changed my voice, or was it the recovery?”Lewek said she was fortunate that she was able to perform her star role in the “Magic Flute” up until being eight and a half months pregnant with her first child. But during that same pregnancy, she was abruptly removed from a different role, shortly after she had shown up to rehearsals with a visible baby bump. Citing safety concerns involving the set, the company urged her to withdraw, she said, even though she felt comfortable with what the production required of her. When the company added financial incentives and promises of a future role, she relented.“It wasn’t my decision,” Lewek said, “but my agent said I should grab the offer and run.”Morley said she lost a major role because of concerns she wouldn’t fit through a trap door in the set. And during a later pregnancy she lost a role because it required singing an aria standing on a chair in what would have been her second trimester. “I was really considering making a statement,” she said, “but these were companies I wanted to work with again, and I was very worried that there would be repercussions.” Besides, her contract was paid, which she knew was not always the case in such situations. “It felt kind of like dirty money,” she said. “Like they were paying me so I would not talk.”One singer who went public was Julie Fuchs, after she was booted from a production of “The Magic Flute” two years ago at Hamburg State Opera, where she would have sung the role of Pamina four months into her first pregnancy. When Fuchs announced on social media that she was out of the production, her feed lit up with outrage. Many commentators suggested misogyny was to blame for the company’s decision, although the director, Jette Steckel, was a woman. After arbitration, Fuchs settled with the company under terms that do not allow her to speak about the case.The company said the production’s flight scenes made it unsafe for a pregnant Pamina. “The legal situation for the protection of the expectant mother is clear,” its director of artistic management, Tillmann Wiegand, said in a statement at the time, “and we will never take a health risk, even if only a risky scenic action could take place on the stage.”Kherani at home with her daughter Eila and husband Zaafir.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesInnovations in set design and technology can make opera stages a risky work environment. Wagnerians are especially likely to find themselves airborne. Morley said she came to an agreement with the Met to bow out of a planned Ring Cycle during her first pregnancy because as one of the Rhinemaidens she would have had to fly in a harness. But when Zambello learned of the pregnancy of a Valkyrie in a Washington National Opera production, she adapted her concept. While the other Valkyries made their entrance by parachute, she had this singer run onstage trailing hers. “I said, ‘OK, you are the nonflying Valkyrie,’” Zambello said. “They were all wearing flight jumpsuits and I said, ‘we’ll just make yours baggier.’”The mezzo Isabel Leonard was in her first trimester when she sang Cherubino in “Marriage of Figaro” at the Met, a trouser role — a male character sung by a woman. A dancer from childhood, she said she wasn’t showing at the time and told no one.Leonard said reconciling the rights of pregnant singers and theatrical standards required a more honest and open conversation. “We are storytellers,” she said. “How far into realism are we going? There has to be a bigger discussion within companies, production by production.”Those channels of communication may open up as more singers enter the administrative suites of opera houses. Bullock, a founding member of American Modern Opera Company, said her organization was looking into formalizing financial support for artists who needed to travel with young children. For a recent tour in Europe, her contract included a per diem, accommodations and travel fare for her infant and designated caregivers.“I can’t really expect that from every arts institution where I work,” Bullock said. “But if you want my presence fully, so that I can really do the job that you’ve hired me to do, this is a part of it.”The soprano Christine Goerke joined Detroit Opera as associate artistic director in 2021. She credits motherhood with propelling her into the dramatic lead roles in Wagner and Strauss she is now known for. “It allowed me to reach into these bigger roles in a way that suddenly felt like that’s where I belonged,” she said of the changes to her voice postpartum.A vocal champion of parents’ rights in opera, she said she recognized the complexity of the situation. “Now that I am on both sides of the desk, I can see the different sides of this. It is difficult to have a pregnant Octavian,” she said, referring to a trouser role in Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier.” However, she continued, “before a snap decision is made, I would like to see conversations between the artist who is pregnant and the director and bring in other people. It may be that you can come up with a different solution.”Many singers said opera houses were beginning to be more attuned to the needs of singers who are traveling with children. They might provide information on local nanny services and playgrounds or retain the services of a pediatrician along with the ENT who is on call in every theater. Lewek said together with other mothers she was preparing a list of best practices to improve equity for pregnant artists and parents in opera houses. She would like to see unilateral cancellations become a thing of the past.“This is not Hollywood. There is another priority why we’re hired to do the job,” she said. “It’s the voice.” More