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    At the Curtis Institute, Students Live Entirely for Music

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    James Estrin/The New York TimesStudents, some barely adolescent and some well into adulthood, come from all over the world to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.They study with nearly monastic focus, with the numbers and skill to operate as a world-class orchestra and opera company.But they’re still young people growing up, experiencing triumphs and struggles for the first time, just in an extraordinary environment.At This School, the Students Live Entirely for MusicDelfin Demiray had packed too much. She was leaving her home in Ankara, Turkey, for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. An 18-year-old who had never been to the United States, she didn’t know what to expect.As she prepared for her flight in August, loading her suitcases with clothes and books, she was still surprised at the turn her life had taken. Demiray had played piano since she was 8, and had a gift for reproducing music she heard on TV at the keyboard; she also liked to improvise with friends and write melodies of her own. But she didn’t think of herself as a composer until a year ago, when she applied to Curtis and, to her shock, was accepted.Her move to the United States would make her parents empty-nesters, but she tried not to think too much about the sadness of saying goodbye. “It’s just how life is,” said Demiray, now 19. “I feel like they are living their dreams through me.”Her story is not so rare at Curtis, an extremely selective school whose roughly 150 students come from around the world to study with almost monastic focus. Even among conservatories, it is exceptional, with a wide age range — from preadolescence to post-baccalaureate adulthood — and a personalized approach, of schedules and repertoire, for musicians who live almost entirely for their art.“We know what it feels like to have to go to bed early on a Saturday night because you have to wake up Sunday morning for a lesson,” said Dillon Scott, a viola student, “and we all know what it feels like to have a performance that was objectively good, but still could’ve been better.”Some of the students are already professionals who perform outside school, as well as on the campus of Curtis, which maintains a full orchestra, an opera program and chamber music groups. Many of the musicians form friendships that lead to collaborations that endure throughout their careers. The list of alumni reads like a musical hall of fame, with titans like Leonard Bernstein and current stars like Lang Lang and Hilary Hahn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Night to Remember at the Opera, Complete With a Phantom

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      In the pitch-dark auditorium of Rome’s Teatro Costanzi, a high-pitched lament floated from the top galleries. Dozens of flashlights snapped on, their beams crisscrossing crazily, seeking the source of the sound.The shafts of light homed in on a spectral figure — a slim, dark-haired woman dressed in white, moving at a funereal pace and plaintively singing. In the audience, 130-odd children, ages 8 to 10, let loose squeals, some gasps, and one “it’s not real.” Several called out “Emma, Emma.”The children had just been told that the Costanzi, the capital’s opera house, had a resident phantom. No, not that one. This was said to be the spirit of Emma Carelli, an Italian soprano who managed the theater a century ago, and loved it so much that she was loath to leave it, even in death.“The theater is a place where strange things happen, where what is impossible becomes possible,” Francesco Giambrone, the Costanzi’s general manager, told the children Saturday afternoon when they arrived to participate in a get-to-know-the-theater-sleepover.The children reading clues of a treasure hunt.Alessandro Penso for The New York TimesMusic education ranks as a low priority in Italy, the country that invented opera and gave the world some of its greatest composers. Many experts, including Mr. Giambrone, say their country has rested on its considerable laurels rather than cultivate a musical culture that encourages students to learn about their illustrious heritage.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Pennsylvania School Board Reinstates Gay Author’s Speech Amid Backlash

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      The Cumberland Valley School Board reversed its decision to cancel Maulik Pancholy’s speech at a middle school next month after many community members said the actor had been discriminated against because of his sexuality.Less than two weeks after a Pennsylvania school board unanimously voted to cancel a gay author’s anti-bullying speech at a middle school, the board voted Wednesday night to reverse its decision and reinstate the event amid pressure from parents, students and administrators.The 5-to-4 vote by the Cumberland Valley School District’s board came in front of scores of community members who packed a high school auditorium and, for several hours, chastised the board for having canceled the event featuring the actor and author Maulik Pancholy over what they said were homophobic concerns.Bud Shaffner, a board member who had come under fire for introducing the motion at the April 15 meeting to cancel the speech, apologized for his comments about Mr. Pancholy’s “lifestyle.” He later introduced the motion to reinstate the speech and voted for it.“I will accept the blame because of the insensitive word I spoke on April 15,” he said at the beginning of Wednesday’s meeting. “I fully understand the interpretation of my poor word choice.”Many community members who spoke during the public comment period of Wednesday’s meeting rejected the contention by some board members that Mr. Pancholy’s speech had been canceled over concerns about what they called his “political activism.”“To claim that Maulik Pancholy is a political activist and use that as a justification to cancel his event is an excuse that the public sees through,” one person told the board.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Many Easters Remain for This Century-Old Boys’ Choir School?

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      St. Thomas Church in New York is considering closing its renowned boarding school for choristers, one of only a few in the world, because of financial woes.At the St. Thomas Choir School in Manhattan the other morning, more than two dozen boys, dressed in matching white polo shirts and gray pants, gathered in a gymnasium to rehearse hymns for Holy Week services, as their predecessors have for more than a century.When Jeremy Filsell, the church’s organist and director of music, asked the boys for more precision when they sang the line about “the voice of an angel calling out” from “Sive Vigilem” by the Renaissance composer William Mundy, the boys tried again, their high, clear voices ringing out in Latin.“Lovely!” he said. “That’s it!”For 105 years, the St. Thomas Choir School has been something of an anomaly: a residential school that steeps boys in centuries-old choral traditions that are more generally associated with the great English cathedral towns than they are with Midtown Manhattan. The boys, between the ages of 8 and 14, live at the school and sing five services a week at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue.Now St. Thomas, an Episcopal church that is venerated for its music program, is considering closing the choir school, one of only a few remaining boarding schools for young choristers in the world. The church said that its endowment, annual fund-raising and tuition fees were no longer sufficient to cover the roughly $4 million a year it costs to operate the school — which accounts for about 29 percent of the church’s $14 million budget.The church will decide by October whether it will keep the school open beyond June 2025.The church will decide by October whether it will keep the school open beyond June 2025.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe Rev. Canon Carl F. Turner, the church’s rector, said that St. Thomas had run into trouble in part because of the misperception that it had ample resources, which has hurt fund-raising. The church, built from limestone in the French High Gothic style, stands 95 feet tall in the shadow of skyscrapers along Fifth Avenue, in one of New York’s most elegant neighborhoods.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      School Plays Are the Latest Cultural Battleground

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      At a time when lawmakers and parents are seeking to restrict what can and cannot be taught in classrooms, many teachers are seeing efforts to limit what can be staged in their auditoriums.Stevie Ray Dallimore, an actor and teacher, had been running the theater program for a private boys’ school in Chattanooga for a decade, but he never faced a school year like this one.A proposed production of “She Kills Monsters” at a neighboring girls’ school that would have included his students was rejected for gay content, he said. A “Shakespeare in Love” at the girls’ school that would have featured his boys was rejected because of cross-dressing. His school’s production of “Three Sisters,” the Chekhov classic, was rejected because it deals with adultery and there were concerns that some boys might play women, as they had in the past, he said.School plays — long an important element of arts education and a formative experience for creative adolescents — have become the latest battleground at a moment when America’s political and cultural divisions have led to a spike in book bans, conflicts over how race and sexuality are taught in schools, and efforts by some politicians to restrict drag performances and transgender health care for children and teenagers.For decades student productions have faced scrutiny over whether they are age-appropriate, and more recently left-leaning students and parents have pushed back against many shows over how they portray women and people of color. The latest wave of objections is coming largely from right-leaning parents and school officials.Stevie Ray Dallimore taught theater for a decade at a private boys’ school in Chattanooga, Tenn. After a year of tensions over the content of plays, the school eliminated his position.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesThe final act in Dallimore’s yearlong drama in Chattanooga? He learned that his position at McCallie School, along with that of his counterpart at the nearby Girls Preparatory School, was being eliminated. They were invited to apply for a single new position overseeing theater at both schools; both educators are now out of the jobs.“This is obviously a countrywide issue that we are a small part of,” Dallimore said. “It’s definitely part of a bigger movement — a strongly concerted effort of politics and religion going hand in hand, banning books and trying to erase history and villainizing otherness.”A McCallie spokeswoman, Jamie Baker, acknowledged that the two school theater positions had been eliminated so the programs could be combined but said that “implying or asserting in any way that the contract of McCallie’s theater director was not renewed because of content concerns would be inaccurate.” She noted that the school has a “Judeo-Christian heritage and commitment to Christian principles,” and added, “That we would and will continue to make decisions aligned with these commitments should be no surprise to anyone.”Drama teachers around the country say they are facing growing scrutiny of their show selections, and that titles that were acceptable just a few years ago can no longer be staged in some districts. The Educational Theater Association released a survey of teachers last month that found that 67 percent say censorship concerns are influencing their selections for the upcoming school year.“The Prom,” which opened on Broadway in 2018, has a school edition for use by students, but some schools are unwilling to produce it because the protagonist is a lesbian.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn emails and phone calls over the last several weeks, teachers and parents cited a litany of examples. From the right there have been objections to homosexuality in the musical “The Prom” and the play “Almost, Maine” and other oft-staged shows; from the left there have been concerns about depictions of race in “South Pacific” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and gender in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Grease.” And at individual schools there have been any number of unexpected complaints, about the presence of bullying in “Mean Girls” and the absence of white characters in “Fences,” about the words “damn” (in “Oklahoma”) and “bastards” (in “Newsies”) and “God” (in “The Little Mermaid”).Challenges to school productions, teachers say, carry far more weight than they once did because of the polarized political climate and the amplifying power of social media.“We’re seeing a lot of teachers self-censoring,” said Jennifer Katona, the executive director of the Educational Theater Association, an organization of theater teachers. “Even if it’s just a bunch of girls dressed as ‘Newsies’ boys, which would not have been a big deal a few years ago, that’s now a big deal.”Teachers now find themselves desperately looking for titles that are somehow both relevant to today’s teenagers and unlikely to land them in trouble.“There’s a lot of not wanting any controversy of any kind,” said Chris Hamilton, the drama director at a high school in Kennewick, Wash. Hamilton said this past year was the first time, in 10 years of teaching, that a play he proposed was banned by school administrators: “She Kills Monsters,” a comedy about a teenager who finds solace in Dungeons & Dragons that is the seventh most popular school play in the country, and which features gay characters. “The level of scrutiny has grown,” Hamilton said.Around the country, in blue states as well as red, theater teachers say it has become increasingly difficult to find plays and musicals that will escape the kind of criticism that, they fear, could cost them their jobs or result in a cutback in funding. “People are losing their jobs for booking the wrong musical,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs at the Dramatists Guild of America.“A polarized society is fighting out the culture wars in high schools,” he added.Stephen Gregg, a longtime playwright in the school market, said removing gay characters from plays, as he has been asked to do, “sends a terrible message.”Alex Welsh for The New York TimesStephen Gregg, a playwright who has successfully been writing for high school students for three decades, said he was startled this year when his publishing house forwarded him an email seeking “major edits” to his science fiction comedy “Crush,” seeking to replace an anecdote about a gay couple with a straight one and explaining, “As we are a public school in Florida, we can’t have gay characters.”Gregg turned down the request, thinking, he said, that “you probably have gay kids in your theater program, and it sends a terrible message to them.”Several school productions made news this year when they were canceled over content concerns. In Florida’s Duval County, a production of “Indecent” was killed because of its lesbian love story. In Pennsylvania, the North Lebanon School District barred “The Addams Family,” the most popular school musical in the country, citing its dark themes.“There was a very clear streak of teacher cancellations this whole school year, and it is happening in parallel to, and related to, the efforts to ban books,” said Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education programs at PEN America. “Sometimes it affects plays in production, and sometimes it affects the approval of plays in the future. The whole climate is impacted.”Some productions have overcome objections. In New Jersey, Cedar Grove High School canceled a production of “The Prom,” a musical whose protagonist is a lesbian, but then relented and staged it after public pressure. In Indiana, after Carroll High School in Fort Wayne canceled a production of “Marian, or The True Tale of Robin Hood,” which is marketed as “a gender-bending, patriarchy-smashing, hilarious new take on the classic tale,” students staged it anyway at a local outdoor theater.A Florida school district canceled a production of “Indecent,” shown here on Broadway in 2018, because it concerns a lesbian love affair.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAutumn Gonzales, a teacher at Scappoose High School in Oregon, faced objections over a production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a musical that has a character with two gay dads. She stuck with it — the show had been chosen by her students — and the production was allowed to proceed. But she is being extra cautious about next year. When her students expressed an interest in “Heathers,” which has suicide themes, she told them, “That is not going to happen.”“I’ve always tried to go for a middle ground,” she said.“We’re not going to do ‘Spring Awakening,’” she said, referring to the 2006 musical about young people and sexuality. “This just isn’t the community for that. But I’m also not going to deny the existence of gay people — that’s not any good for my student actors. I’m not going to be inflammatory for art’s sake, but I’m also not going to shy away from deeper messages.”The constraints, advocates say, are having an effect on the education of future artists and audience members.“Students deserve to have the opportunity to be exposed to a wide variety of work, not only the safest, most benign, most family-friendly material,” said Howard Sherman, the managing director of New York’s Baruch Performing Arts Center, who has been tracking the issue for years.In some areas, the contested plays cannot even be read: In Kansas, the Lansing school board, responding to objections from a parent, barred high school students from reading “The Laramie Project,” a widely staged and taught play about the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student in Wyoming.“Every year there have been a few schools that have banned a production, but this is the first time the play has been banned from being read,” said the play’s lead author, Moisés Kaufman, whose theater company offered to send its script to any Lansing student who asked. “I don’t want to be an alarmist, but it is alarming.” More

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      ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ at 50: Those Are Magic Numbers

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      The educational snippets are the ultimate font of Gen X nostalgia. But what is it we’re nostalgic for?When I was in second grade, my teacher held a contest: The first students to memorize their multiplication tables would get dinner at McDonald’s. I was one of them. I’d like to credit hard work or the motivation of those golden fries, but in truth it was easy. I learned it from “Schoolhouse Rock.”It was not the last time that watching too much TV would pay off for me, but it was perhaps the sweetest.If you were an American kid around when I was (nineteen-seventy-cough), you probably have “Schoolhouse Rock” hard-wired into your brain too. The musical shorts, which began airing on ABC in 1973, taught Generation X multiplication, grammar, history and, eventually, nostalgia.That last lesson stuck best. Winona Ryder and company crooned “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill” in the 1994 generational-statement film “Reality Bites.” De La Soul borrowed “Three Is a Magic Number” as the backbone for their buoyant self-introduction, “The Magic Number,” in 1989. Nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.On Wednesday, ABC will tap into that spirit with a prime time “50th Anniversary Singalong,” in which the Black Eyed Peas, the Muppets, Shaquille O’Neal and others will hook up the words, phrases and clauses of the Saturday-morning favorites.The Muppets are among the many guest stars who will appear in the ABC special “Schoolhouse Rock! 50th Anniversary Singalong.”Christopher Willard/ABCThe special promises wholesome family fun, and I can think of worse things to do on a weeknight than musically unpacking my adjectives in the judgment-free zone of my living room. But nostalgia is not just a fun emotion. Like some of the best “Schoolhouse Rock” songs, it carries a note of wistfulness.More on U.S. Schools and EducationHeavy Losses: A new global analysis suggests that children experienced learning deficits during the Covid-19 pandemic that amounted to about one-third of a school year’s worth of knowledge and skills.Police in Schools: Footage of a student’s violent arrest by a school resource officer has raised questions about the role of armed officers on campuses.Transgender Youth: Educators are facing new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students change their name, pronouns or gender expression at school.In Florida: The state will not allow a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies to be offered in its high schools, citing examples of what it calls “woke indoctrination.”In this case, it’s a reminder of a time when network TV gave us a common culture, language and lyrics, before we were sliced into subcultures and demographics. Pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-DVD — pre-VHS, even — “Schoolhouse Rock” convened a classroom of millions for three-minute servings of revolutionary art alongside installments of “The Great Grape Ape Show.”Like much classic kids’ TV, “Schoolhouse Rock” was brought to you by Madison Avenue. The ad executive David McCall, who noticed that his son could memorize pop songs but struggled with arithmetic, suggested to George Newall, a creative director, and Thomas Yohe, an art director, that they figure out how to set math to music.As Newell told the Times in 1994, they pitched the idea to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, who happened to be meeting with the legendary Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. “I think you should buy it right away,” Jones said.Unlike the dutiful news interstitials that vitamin-fortified other Saturday-morning cartoon lineups, “Schoolhouse Rock” harnessed the power of comedy and ear worms. The facts and figures made it educational. But they weren’t what made it art.That was the animation, psychedelically colorful and chock-full of rapid-fire slapstick gags. Above all, there was the sophisticated music. The jazz composer Bob Dorough wrote the banger-filled first season, “Multiplication Rock,” surveying a range of styles from the duodecimal prog-rock of “Little Twelvetoes” to the spiraling lullaby of “Figure Eight.”The lyrics were sly and funny but could also detour, like a fidgety schoolkid sitting by the window, into daydreams. The blissful “Three Is a Magic Number” isn’t just a primer on multiples; it’s a rumination on the triad foundations of the universe, from geometry to love. (If your voice does not break singing, “A man and a woman had a little baby,” you’re doing something wrong.)The following seasons, about grammar, American history and science, added other contributors, including Lynn Ahrens, the future Broadway songwriter thanks to whom an entire generation cannot recite the preamble to the Constitution without breaking into song.The short “Conjunction Junction” was referenced in the 1994 film “Reality Bites,” a sign that nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.ABC, via Everett CollectionThe words and numbers in “Schoolhouse Rock” were never just words and numbers. Like the early years of “Sesame Street,” the shorts had an anarchic spirit and a pluralistic sensibility. “I Got Six” is a funk explosion whose Afrocentric animation includes a dashiki-ed African prince with six rings on all 10 fingers. “Verb: That’s What’s Happening” — imagine if Curtis Mayfield taught your English class — depicts a Black superhero long before Black Panther made it to the movie screen.When my kids were school-aged, I got the full “Schoolhouse Rock” DVD set for them, which is to say, I got it for me. (You can now stream the ’70s seasons, plus a brief 1980s series about computers and a clunky 1990s revival, “Money Rock,” through Disney+.)Rewatching the series taught me about a new subject: Time.The songs are as catchy as ever. But to screen “Schoolhouse Rock” as an adult is to visit a different period in cultural history, and not just because of the bell-bottoms. The America of “Schoolhouse Rock” was divided by Vietnam and Watergate, but it could at least subscribe to basic common facts and civic principles.Consider Bill, the underdog paper hero of “I’m Just a Bill,” longing to become a law that would keep that cartoon school bus safe at railroad crossings. Now he’s a time traveler, from a pre-Reagan age when government activism, however imperfect, was considered a force for good.Today, with culture-warring politicians like the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, red-penciling school curriculums, weaponizing pronouns and hammering history teachers for “indoctrination,” the potential land mines add up. “The Great American Melting Pot” did not imagine a future president telling asylum seekers, “Our country is full.” When “Interjections” depicted a doctor giving a child a shot, it did not anticipate legislators denouncing Big Bird for advocating childhood vaccination.A scene from the anniversary special. Whatever its flaws, “Schoolhouse Rock” told children that they counted with the same numbers and were entitled to the same rights.Christopher Willard/ABC(Likewise, when “Elementary, My Dear” taught counting by twos with a gospel-style Noah’s Ark song, it didn’t fear repercussions for bringing religion into kids’ TV.)And that’s before you even get to “Science Rock.” “The Energy Blues” makes a matter-of-fact pitch for conservation that would cause smoke eruptions today. (In 2009, a climate-focused season, “Earth Rock” went straight to DVD.) When “Schoolhouse Rock” showed kids a three-minute video on how the body worked, there was no internet algorithm to suggest a rebuttal by someone who “did his own research.”That said, I wouldn’t romanticize the “Schoolhouse Rock” era as a paradise of educational consensus. In 1974, the year before the “America Rock” season began, protesters against desegregation in Boston threw rocks at buses carrying Black students. And the series had its own blind spots, which historians and educators have since pointed out.In particular, “America Rock,” an upbeat celebration of the bicentennial, covers the American Revolution and women’s suffrage but skips over the Civil War and slavery. (The Roots filled in this hole in a 2017 episode of “black-ish” with “I Am a Slave,” about Juneteenth.) “Elbow Room” is a jaunty story of westward expansion from the point of view of white settlers, with little note of who got elbowed out. (One scene shows a settler taking a toy arrow through his hat.) America’s unflattering history didn’t make the cut because mass broadcasting meant not alienating the masses.But whatever its limits, “Schoolhouse Rock” at least told us we were equal: We counted with the same numbers, our hearts pumped the same blood, we were entitled to the same inalienable rights.And it operated in a period when people saw the same media and accepted the same facts. Months after its premiere, the Watergate hearings also aired on national TV. They were able eventually to turn even many Republicans against President Nixon, in part because Americans watched the same story together, without a partisan cable and internet ecosystem to spin the investigation as a witch hunt.It’s tempting to say that you couldn’t make “Schoolhouse Rock” again today. But I’m sure you could, even if it would be slightly different. Current kids’ shows like Netflix’s “We the People” are in a way exactly that. What you couldn’t create again today is the mass audience, or the context in which we assembled, one nation, sitting cross-legged in front of our cathode-ray teacher.Instead, we have “Schoolhouse Rock” binge-watches and sing-alongs, which, like all exercises in nostalgia, offer the tantalizing pleasure of stretching to touch yesterday, though we know we can’t. The past is like infinity, a concept that “Schoolhouse Rock” also introduced to my generation. “No one ever gets there,” as “My Hero, Zero” taught us. “But you could try.” More

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      in Television

      Lloyd Morrisett, a Founder of ‘Sesame Street,’ Dies at 93

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      His observations about his 3-year-old daughter’s viewing habits led him to join Joan Ganz Cooney in creating a program that revolutionized children’s television.Lloyd Morrisett, a psychologist whose young daughter’s viewing habits inspired the creation of the revolutionary children’s educational television program “Sesame Street,” and whose fund-raising helped get it off the ground, died on Jan. 15 at his home in San Diego. He was 93.His daughter Julie Morrisett confirmed the death.Mr. Morrisett was a vice president of the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation in 1966 when he attended a dinner party in Manhattan hosted by his friends Joan Ganz Cooney and her husband, Tim. During the evening, Mr. Morrisett told the guests that his daughter Sarah was so mesmerized by TV that she would watch the test pattern on weekend mornings until cartoons began.Sarah had also memorized advertising jingles, which suggested to Mr. Morrisett that youngsters might more easily learn reading, writing and arithmetic if they were delivered in an entertaining way.“I said at one point in the conversation, ‘Joan, do you think television can be used to teach young children?’” he said in an interview on “BackStory,” a podcast about history, in 2019, “and her answer was, “I don’t know, but I’d like to talk about it.’”The idea was intriguing enough for Mr. Morrisett, along with Ms. Ganz Cooney, then a producer of public affairs television programming, and others to begin brainstorming about creating a program for preschoolers, particularly poor children who were likely to fall behind in the early grades, that would educate and amuse them.“‘What if?’ became their operative phrase,” Michael Davis wrote in “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street” (2008). “What if you could create content for television that was both entertaining and instructive? What if it went down more like ice cream than spinach?”At Mr. Morrisett’s request, and with money from the Carnegie Corporation, Ms. Ganz Cooney traveled the country interviewing educators, animators, puppeteers, psychologists, filmmakers and television producers to produce a study, “The Potential Uses of Television for Pre-School Education.” That study became the blueprint for “Sesame Street.”Mr. Morrisett focused on raising $8 million to start “Sesame Street,” with about half coming from the United States Office of Education and the rest in the form of grants from Carnegie, the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.Mr. Morrisett had “magnificent political skills” that helped him raise money, Mr. Davis said in a phone interview. “He lived in that rarefied world and had connections. He was so believable and so clear and made so much damn sense.”In a statement, Ms. Ganz Cooney said, “Without Lloyd Morrisett, there is no ‘Sesame Street.’”The series made its debut on public television on Nov. 10, 1969, introducing children to a fantasy world where they could learn numbers and letters with help from a multiracial cast and a corps of Jim Henson’s Muppets that would include Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster and Elmo.Mr. Morrisett recalled that “Sesame Street” had a curriculum based on continuing research, designed to help children who watched the show succeed in school.“We were spending maybe a third of our budget on that research,” he told WBUR Radio in 2019, “and that was something that commercial television just couldn’t do.”Mr. Morrisett in 2009 with Joan Ganz Cooney at a benefit in New York for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company that produces “Sesame Street.”Bryan Bedder/Getty ImagesMr. Morrisett was born on Nov. 2, 1929, in Oklahoma City, and grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., and Los Angeles. His father, also named Lloyd, was an assistant schools superintendent in Yonkers, N.Y., and later a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles. His mother, Jessie (Watson) Morrisett, was a homemaker.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1951, Mr. Morrisett studied for two years at U.C.L.A, then earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale in 1956. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, but left after two years to work at the Social Science Research Council. He then joined the Carnegie Corporation as the executive assistant to its president, John Gardner. He later became a vice president.Mr. Morrisett never took an operational role at the Children’s Television Workshop, now Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces “Sesame Street” and other programs, but he was an active chairman of its board until 2000. During that time he was instrumental in the creation and funding of “The Electric Company,” a series that taught language skills to children ages 6 to 10, which was broadcast in the 1970s and rebooted from 2009 to 2011.“He had this wonderful combination of being a child psychologist who was also a champion of media and technology and was research-based, which is the DNA of the company,” Sherrie Westin, the president of Sesame Workshop, said in a phone interview. She added, “He was a pioneer who believed that television could be an educational force.”When “Sesame Street” received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2019, a gaggle of Muppets onstage shouted “We love you” to Mr. Morrisett and Ms. Ganz Cooney, who were seated in the balcony.In addition to his daughters, Julie Morrisett and Sarah Morrisett Otley, Mr. Morrisett is survived by his wife, Mary (Pierre) Morrisett, and two grandchildren.Julie Morrisett said that, unlike her sister, she didn’t like television. “There’d be no ‘Sesame Street,’” she joked, “if I were the older daughter.”While chairman of Sesame Workshop, Mr. Morrisett was also president from 1969 to 1998 of the Markle Foundation and shifted its focus from medical research and education to supporting the study of mass communication and information technology.In an essay published in Markle’s annual report in 1981, Mr. Morrisett looked at the state of children’s television and advocated for a cable TV network devoted to younger viewers. (He did not mention Nickelodeon, which had started in 1979.)He argued that such a channel had to compete effectively for viewers’ attention, but that “the key for a new children’s television service will be to provide cultural and educational values widely believed necessary for leading a productive and satisfying life in our society.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘My Old School’ Review: An Impostor Makes the Honor Roll

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      A documentary uses animation and professional actors to tell the story of a once-notorious hoax.“What is a person?” It’s a profound and complicated philosophical question, posed by a man named Stefen during an interview in “My Old School.” Like most of the other people who appear on camera in this brisk, slippery documentary, Stefen has a particular person in mind, a student at Bearsden Academy in the early ’90s known to his classmates as Brandon Lee.Stefen, who is one of the few Black pupils at Bearsden, a school in an affluent section of Glasgow, remembers Brandon fondly as a friend who invited him to parties and protected him from racist bullying. Other Bearsden alums have more ambivalent memories, but they all describe a curly-haired young man who impressed his teachers, charmed his peers and wanted more than anything else to become a doctor.They also agree that their classmate, who showed up as a fifth-year student (roughly the equivalent of a high school junior) after the start of the academic year, could seem a little odd. He looked older than 16 — “he had old skin,” one of them recalls — and alluded to a mysterious and tragic family history. He also had a car and a fondness for ’80s pop music, neither of which was typical among Glaswegian teenagers in 1993.As it turned out, Brandon wasn’t a teenager at all. When Stefen and the others first met him, he was 32 years old, and the name he used was borrowed from a recently deceased celebrity. This isn’t a spoiler, even though “My Old School,” directed by Jono McLeod — a television journalist who was one of Brandon’s classmates — arranges the case into a teasingly suspenseful narrative. The hoax was widely reported in Scotland and beyond, and the news reports and talk-show interviews that McLeod folds into the story may jog dim recollections of a faded media frenzy. There have been so many other grifters and impostors to keep track of in the intervening years.“Brandon,” whose real identity comes out midway through the movie, is given the chance to explain himself, though it can’t quite be said that he reveals himself. The gray-haired, middle-aged man in a drab windbreaker who faces the camera is the actor Alan Cumming, who faultlessly lip-syncs a first-person tale, told in the “real” Brandon’s voice, that is by turns sad, strange and self-serving.The movie, in the end, doesn’t quite know what to make of it all, perhaps because of the director’s barely mentioned personal stake. In flashbacks, Brandon and his classmates are represented in brightly colored, simply drawn animation that evokes the MTV cartoons of the era. Some of their adolescent voices belong to actors and pop singers, emphasizing the gap between them and their grown-up, live-action selves.There’s a disjunction between the jaunty, can-you-believe-this tone of “My Old School” (which ends with a peppy cover of the Steely Dan song of the same name) and the darker implications of its story. The people who knew Brandon look back mostly with incredulity and amusement at his imposture and extend him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his motives. The film takes his words at face value — even though it doesn’t show his face — and takes for granted that his deceit was benign, motivated by his ambition to study medicine and overcome adversity.At the same time, surely there is something creepy about a grown man socializing with children half his age, not only in the halls of Bearsden but also at parties where he served them alcohol, and on a vacation he took with a few of them to Spain. The movie glances toward this moral gray area but mostly looks elsewhere, practicing a troubling kind of access journalism and falling back on a dubious epistemological relativism. Its fascination with Brandon becomes a kind of credulity, a willingness to accept uncritically the mystifications of a proven liar.My Old SchoolNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      The Explosive Ambitions of Kate the Chemist

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      The dream is Vegas.“Don’t make fun of me,” said Kate Biberdorf, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, “but it would be a live show in Vegas where it’s a science show.”That is not a typical aspiration of someone who teaches chemistry to undergraduates. For Dr. Biberdorf — better known as Kate the Chemist — that dream is part of her goal to capture the fun of scientific exploration and to entice children, especially girls, to consider science as their life’s calling.“When I’m happiest is when I’m onstage sharing what I love,” she said.She’s thinking of a big spectacle, like the long-running magic shows of David Copperfield at MGM Grand or Penn & Teller at Rio Las Vegas. “If we can convince people to go to science shows when on vacation,” she added, not entirely convinced herself.For now, her efforts have focused on television and publishing, not Vegas. Over the last few years, she has written two books of science experiments to try at home, a science book for adults and, with Hillary Homzie, a children’s book author, a series of novels starring a younger, fictional version of herself.On television, she has already become something of a contemporary update of science popularizers like Bill Nye the Science Guy or Donald “Mr. Wizard” Herbert.Perhaps you’ve seen her.Dr. Biberdorf, 36, has appeared on NBC’s “Today,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and other programs with demonstrations of color-changing chemicals, magnetic slime and, very often, chemical reactions accompanied by bright, loud bangs.During a “Today” show segment in 2019, she, along with Craig Melvin, the show’s news anchor, and Dylan Dreyer, the meteorologist, forcefully dumped buckets of hot water into liquid nitrogen, instantly engulfing them in eruptions of billowing white vapor.The three, wearing lab coats, safety goggles and protective mitts, emerged a bit frost-blasted.“You didn’t tell me it was going to blow up in my face,” Mr. Melvin exclaimed.“This is a thundercloud,” Dr. Biberdorf explained.Dr. Biberdorf has appeared on NBC’s “Today,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and other programs with color-changing chemicals, magnetic slime and bright, loud bangs.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThe TV appearances only last a few minutes — long enough to show off some chemistry “wow” but too brief to include more than passing mentions of the how and why of what is happening.For a deeper dive into science, Dr. Biberdorf is looking to star in a television show or two of her own.One of the ideas she and her collaborators are pitching is “Science Unfair.” Imagine a reality television competition along the lines of Food Network’s “Worst Cooks in America,” but with students who are bombing in their science classes.“It would be more like the kids who hate that and don’t want to do the science fair,” Dr. Biberdorf said. “We’re trying to get them together and make them do a little competition. At the end of each segment, hopefully they will now like science.”The other pitch, on the back burner for now, is “Blow My Stuff Up,” which would combine therapy and pyrotechnics to help people recovering from a failed relationship or other unhappy experiences.“There’s a therapist there as well, so they’re actually working on healing and moving forward in their lives.” Dr. Biberdorf said. Then, she would satisfyingly dispose of objects emblematic of the troubles that the people have put behind them.An episode might follow someone who had long suffered driving an unreliable, junker of a car. “They finally got a new car, they just want to blow up their old car,” Dr. Biberdorf said, “and we can do that with a bunch of pyrotechnics. So I am absolutely stoked about that.”Both of Dr. Biberdorf’s parents are psychologists, and her sister is a therapist. “It kind of brings the two worlds together,” she said.Sizzles — demo videos showing snippets of what the show might look like — have been shown to various networks.Growing up in Portage, Mich., just south of Kalamazoo, Dr. Biberdorf got hooked on chemistry because of an enthusiastic teacher in high school, Kelli Palsrok.“Honestly, ever since I was 15, I knew I wanted to be a chemist because of her,” Dr. Biberdorf said. “My dream, truthfully, is to be her for the next generation of kids.”Ms. Palsrok remembers the young Kate as “pretty much the same as she is now,” she said. “Always enthusiastic about chemistry and science. Very well-rounded student. Loved the hands-on stuff.”But the field of chemistry has not always been welcoming to Dr. Biberdorf. “You are judged on your appearance,” she said. “And I look a certain way, and I dress a certain way.”Which is to say, she wears heels, skirts and lipstick.“I lean into my feminine side,” she said. “But that’s just because I like it, and I feel like I’m at my best when I present that image.”She added, “It’s also very important for me that younger girls can see that side of a scientist.” She said women taking her college class have expressed appreciation for that.“You can look however you want and still be into science as much as possible,” Dr. Biberdorf said.But that does not fit the stereotype that many scientists have of women as scientists.“I don’t think people look at me and go, ‘Well, that’s a smart lady,’” Dr. Biberdorf said. “So I know when I’m in faculty meetings or conferences or anything like that, my first three sentences need to be articulate, accurate.”Dr. Biberdorf said she owed her passion for chemistry to her high school chemistry teacher. “My dream, truthfully, is to be her for the next generation of kids,” she said.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAs a graduate student at the University of Texas, she studied catalysts for potentially speeding up Suzuki-Miyaura coupling, a reaction commonly used in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals.There, she found that she did not like laboratory work. In addition, pure academia was a difficult place for her. “I didn’t want to be in that environment,” she said. “I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.”Her current job at the university is as a professor of instruction — all teaching and no lab research. In 2014, when she started, she was teaching two undergraduate chemistry classes, and she went to her boss asking if she could do more.“We created an outreach program called ‘Fun with Chemistry,’” she said. “I was supposed to go to two elementary schools a semester. That was the deal.”The program turned into something much more popular, with many more schools asking her to visit. “I interacted with something like 16,000 students that first year,” she said. “It was nuts, in my opinion.”That in turn led to monthly appearances on “We Are Austin,” a morning show on the local CBS station.A few years later, a thousand miles away in Los Angeles, Glenn Schwartz, noticed. He had been Bill Nye’s publicist, but the two went their separate business ways about five years ago. Mr. Schwartz wondered: Is there another Bill Nye out there?He searched for about a year before coming across Dr. Biberdorf.“I found Kate’s website, and I looked at some video, and I simply contacted her,” Mr. Schwartz said. “Really, it was me looking around and looking for somebody like her. And then I was lucky enough to actually find her.”Mr. Schwartz, who is now Dr. Biberdorf’s manager, said she possessed a winning mix of credentials and personality. Although there are many people posting science videos on YouTube, “Kate was obviously different,” he said.He added, “The thing about being on TV is that you can’t teach somebody to be likable.”Bill Nye the Science Guy does not mind sharing the science television spotlight. “Kate is going to be Kate, and Bill is going to be Bill,” he said in an interview.Mr. Nye said their goals were the same: to intrigue children in science. “It’s the people who are watching us that we want to succeed and change the world,” he said.(Mr. Nye is still on television, too. His latest series, “The End Is Nye,” , premieres on the Peacock streaming service on Aug. 25.)Though she does not have her Vegas shows yet, Dr. Biberdorf is planning to take a road tour of chemistry demonstrations across the country next year.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesScience on television has required a sort of research very different from the Suzuki-Miyaura coupling experiments Dr. Biberdorf used to undertake. For example, she had to figure out how to blow up a cake on “The Wendy Williams Show” last year to celebrate the host’s birthday.For safety, fire, the usual sorts of explosives and toxic chemicals were not allowed in the studio.“So what did I do?” she said. “I took liquid nitrogen, put it in a soda bottle and put it in a thing, and it exploded that way. Which is a bomb. But they don’t know that. So we just didn’t use that terminology. I said it’s vapor pressure. But it’s a way to spin that, right? You have to figure out how to say things so you don’t scare people.”After a year and a half of remote teaching because of the pandemic, she returned to the lecture hall in the spring semester. “We’re able to talk a little bit about how Covid tests work,” she said. “There’s a lot of real-world applications.”She is planning a road tour of chemistry shows next year, conducting her experiments and science entertainment at performing arts centers across the country.“We’re just trying to figure out the logistics right now,” she said. For a demonstration like the exploding birthday cake, “How do I get that from place to place?” she wondered. “Am I rebuilding my exploding birthday cake every time, or what can I reuse?”If the whiz-bang of the shows can intrigue audiences, she hopes people might delve into her books, where she can provide more detailed explanations and still make chemistry interesting to people not yet familiar with the jargon.“I use as many analogies as I possibly can,” she said. “I talked about Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively’s marriage as a way to explain double replacement reactions. And so that’s something that works for my age group. Maybe there are people that don’t know what I’m talking about, but it’s a way to hook the millennials and then Gen Z hopefully, because we need more scientists.”She does not have her Vegas show yet, she said, but, “we have some connections with Penn & Teller.” (The magician duo, Penn Jillette and Teller, are also clients of Mr. Schwartz.)“Maybe,” Dr. Biberdorf mused, “I can kind of sneak in there somehow and do something fun with them.” More