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      Régine, Whose Discotheque Gave Nightlife a New Dawn, Dies at 92

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      Credited with opening the first disco, she built an empire of glittering playgrounds for the Beautiful People in Paris, New York and beyond.She was born Rachelle Zylberberg in Belgium as the Great Depression struck: a Jewish child abandoned in infancy by her unwed mother and left alone at 12 when her father, a drunken Polish refugee, was arrested by the Nazis in France. She hid in a convent, where she was beaten. After the war, she sold bras in the streets of Paris and vowed to become rich and famous someday.In 1957, calling herself Régine, she borrowed money and opened a basement nightclub in a Paris backstreet. She could not afford live music, so the patrons danced to a jukebox. Business was bad, and the young proprietor, in a decision that would have social historians wagging for decades, concluded that the problem was the jukebox.“When the music stopped, you could hear snogging in the corners,” she told the BBC, using British slang for kissing and necking. “It killed the atmosphere. Instead, I installed two turntables so there was no gap in the music. I was barmaid, doorman, bathroom attendant, hostess, and I also put on the records. It was the first-ever discotheque, and I was the first-ever club disc jockey.”And so began Chez Régine, widely regarded as the world’s first discotheque. In the 1970s, its owner built a $500 million empire of 23 clubs in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, including Régine’s in Manhattan, the most famous nightspot of its era, catering to the stretch-limousine crowd of arts and entertainment stars, society celebs, princes, playboys and Beautiful People.Régine, whose chain of clubs peaked in the 1980s and faded in the ’90s, a victim of an open drug culture and radical changes in the club scene, died on Sunday. She was 92.Her death was announced on Instagram by her friend the French actor and comedian Pierre Palmade, who did not specify the cause or say where she died.A plump, effervescent empresaria with flaming red hair, Régine was known to everyone who was anyone as “the Queen of the Night.” With enormous fanfare, she opened her New York club in 1976 on the ground floor of Delmonico’s Hotel, at 59th Street and Park Avenue. She moved into the hotel’s penthouse suite. The city had just survived a fiscal crisis, but to her chic clientele that hardly mattered.Régine made exclusivity an art form. She attracted privileged classes by selling 2,000 club memberships for $600 each, and by requiring tuxedos and evening gowns to get in. She installed a flashing “disco full” sign outside to discourage the hoi polloi and a slide-back peephole at the door to inspect supplicants for admission to the pounding music and gold-plated glamour of her Valhalla.Brooke Shields, Régine and the French designer Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 in New York.PL Gould/Images/Getty ImagesShe embraced celebrities: Salvador Dalí, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Joan Collins, Andy Warhol, Milos Forman, Mick Jagger, Anthony Quinn, Brooke Shields. Nobodies were admitted for stiff cover charges after the New York State Liquor Authority threatened to sue her for “social discrimination.” She managed publicity masterfully. She once wore a live boa constrictor, a gift from Federico Fellini.On a given night, you might see Franςoise Sagan, Brigitte Bardot, Diane von Furstenberg, Ben Vereen, Hubert de Givenchy and Stevie Wonder in a crowd with Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardner and Robert Mitchum, with Jack Nicholson and John Gotti conspiring at a table. Régine was strict about enforcing her dress code. Her friend Mick Jagger was once refused entry for showing up in sneakers.Régine danced all night with Gene Kelly, then disappeared with him for 15 days. “Yes, we had private relations,” she told Elle in 2011.She recalled John Wayne’s awed face at their first meeting: “Are you the Régine?”And Robin Leach, chronicler of the rich and famous, told her that his reporting from Paris was a snap: “You’d just go to Régine’s every night and wait for the princesses to file in.”Régine juiced up evenings with “happenings.” One in Paris was a “Jean Harlow night.” Patrons in platinum wigs arrived in white limousines, stepped onto a white-carpeted sidewalk, and strolled up in white tuxedos and clingy white gowns with white feather boas.Saluting Bastille Day in New York, the patriots included Gov. Hugh L. Carey, Ethel Kennedy, Margaux Hemingway, Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner (at the time, the chairman of the United States Bicentennial Commission), and Senator George S. McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate.“If anyone had second thoughts about celebrating an event that theoretically ended the privileged class, in a room some 40 times as crowded as the Bastille dungeon on that fateful day, no one made them audible,” The New York Times reported. “To be fair, it was somewhat difficult to make anything other than isolated words audible.”By the late ’70s, Régine’s expansion was peaking. Besides flagships in Paris and New York, she had clubs in Monte Carlo, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Saint Tropez, London, Düsseldorf, Los Angeles, Miami, Cairo, Kuala Lumpur and many other cities. All were in prime locales. Her marketing analyses included lists of each city’s elite, to be cultivated as club-goers and financiers.Régine at the debut of her nightclub in Miami in the early 1980s.PL Gould/IMAGES/Getty ImagesAsked about financing her clubs, she insisted that all she invested was her name, never her money. Some of her clubs, she explained, were franchises owned by local entrepreneurs who paid up to $500,000 and gave her cuts of the action to use her name. She also owned restaurants, cafes and a magazine; sold lines of clothing and perfumes; and sponsored dance classes and ocean cruises.She was an entertainer on the side, with small roles in films, including “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (1976), a Sherlock Holmes tale with Nicol Williamson and Laurence Olivier, and was a moderately popular singer in Paris and New York. She had a hit with a French version of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” in 1978, and she made her singing debut at Carnegie Hall in 1970.“Although Régine has a strong, dark voice, she made little effort to use it as a flexible instrument,” Robert Sherman wrote in a review for The Times. “Régine’s pert appearance and vivacious stage manner cover a multitude of inflexibilities, and the sheer exuberance of her performance was, in itself, more than sufficient enticement.”The popularity of Régine’s in New York and around the world gradually faded in the 1980s, overtaken by trendier clubs like Studio 54, the Manhattan disco founded in 1977 by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. It, too, drew the celebrities but also a sex-and-drugs clientele and crowds of hangers-on surging for a glimpse of decadent chic.“By the end of the decade, the party began to wind down,” New York magazine reported in a retrospective on Régine’s in 1999. “A new generation of club-goers deemed her club staid and stuffy, and even Régine’s most faithful devotees found it hard to resist the sexy lure of Studio 54.”“You didn’t feel like you could start doing cocaine on the tables at Regine’s,” Bob Colacello, the author and social critic, told New York. “She wasn’t giving out quaaludes to movie stars. She didn’t have bartenders with their shirts off. She didn’t have what people wanted when the times changed.”Régine’s clubs drew celebrity clients likes Salvador Dalí, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Joan Collins, Andy Warhol, Milos Forman, Mick Jagger, Anthony Quinn and Brooke Shields. The woman behind Régine’s mystique was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, on Dec. 26, 1929, to emigrants from Poland, Joseph Zylberberg and Tauba Rodstein. In an unhappy, unstable childhood, she never knew her mother, who abandoned the family and went to Argentina, but recalled her father as a charming gambler and drinker who ran a small eatery in Paris. Rachelle, as she called herself in an interview with The Boston Globe, had a brother, Maurice, and a half sister, Evelyne.As a child, she waited on tables in her father’s restaurant near Montmartre. After the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, her father was arrested and sent to a prison camp. She hid for two years in a Catholic convent, where she said she was beaten by other girls because she was Jewish. Her father escaped, and by one account she was taken hostage briefly by the Gestapo.After the war, she dreamed of a glamorous life and occasionally glimpsed what it might be like. “When I saw Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan, the focus of all eyes at the best table in a chic Deauville restaurant, I vowed one day to sit where they were,” she told The New York Post in 1973.When she was 16, she married Leon Rothcage. They had a son, Lionel Rotcage, and were divorced after a few years. In 1969, she married Roger Choukroun, who helped manage her properties. They were divorced in 2004. Her son died in 2006.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.By the end of the 1990s, Régine’s international empire had dwindled to a handful of clubs in France, a place in Istanbul and a restaurant-lounge in New York called Rage.In recent years, she lived in Paris, managed her affairs, supported charities, gave occasional parties and saw old friends. In 2015, she published a book of photographs and reminiscences, “Mes Nuits, Mes Rencontres” (My Nights, My Encounters”). Pictures showed her with Charles Aznavour, Oscar de la Renta, Diana Vreeland, Michael Jackson and many others.“My son is the only thing I miss,” she told Women’s Wear Daily. “I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. That doesn’t interest me. I want them to laugh with me and to be happy.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      in Theater

      On the Scene: Hillary Clinton at ‘Suffs’

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      On the Scene: Hillary Clinton at ‘Suffs’Jennifer Schuessler�� Reporting from the Public TheaterSara Krulwich/The New York Times“Suffs,” written by Shaina Taub, covers the final years of the fight for the 19th Amendment, which passed in 1920. As the lights dimmed, the cast, costumed as jeering men, filed onstage for “Watch Out for the Suffragette!,” a vaudeville-style number inspired by real anti-suffrage songs. More

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      Booze, Biscuits and Bands: Musical Brunch Is Back in New York

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      Here are six brunches that, after a long pandemic pause, are entertaining and feeding weekend crowds in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley.The room was packed with tipsy party people when the drag queen Ginger Snap suddenly grabbed my wrist and planted my hand on her right falsy — and with exhilarated eyes gave me a look that passionately purred: Brunch is back, girl.That’s how I kicked off an afternoon at Broadway Drag Brunch, one of several live-entertainment brunches that, after a long pause caused by coronavirus restrictions, are feeding music-loving and hungry patrons in New York, where brunch is church.Some of these brunches are like intimate concerts with music as an atmospheric backdrop. At others, the star of the show is the show itself — with performers encouraging hands-in-the-air singalongs and servers nudging you to order pitchers of bottomless cocktails to drink with the prix fixe omelets and pancakes. The music ranges from boy-band ballads to chill jazz and lonesome bluegrass, and the locations include a below-ground club and an idyllic waterfront.Here are six weekend musical brunches that — barring coronavirus restrictions — will quench your thirst for tunes and toe-tapping to go with your booze and biscuits.Christopher Brasfield is part of a rotating cast that performs as the flirty Boy Band Project.Hunter Abrams for The New York TimesBoys Are the BandSweet seduction is on the menu at Boy Band Brunch, held every other Sunday afternoon at one of New York’s new kids on the block: Chelsea Table + Stage, a performance venue that opened in September inside the Hilton New York Fashion District hotel. It stars the Boy Band Project, a flirty quartet with members who belt, dance, thrust their pelvises and sing the “Please don’t go, girl” musical repertoires of ’NSync, Boyz II Men and other crush-inducing boy bands of the 1990s and 2000s.The cast rotates, but at a recent performance, the bandmates were played by Chris Messina (the sporty one), Sam Harvey (the not-that-bad boy), Christopher Brasfield (the boy next door) and Nic Metcalf (the sensitive one). The tables were filled with mostly millennials and Gen Xers brunching on smoked salmon avocado toast and singing along with every lyric, as if Justin Timberlake himself were on one knee pleading for their affections.If the vibe feels like Backstreet Boys meets Broadway, it’s no wonder: The Boy Band Project was created by Travis Nesbitt, a former cast member of “Altar Boyz,” a musical satire of a Christian boy band that had a hit Off Broadway run in the 2000s. (chelseatableandstage.com)Breakfast BebopEye-popping Hudson Valley vistas accompany the vamps at Sunday Jazz Brunch at Cove Castle, a lakeside restaurant in Greenwood Lake, N.Y. Located about a 45-minute drive from the George Washington Bridge (or a 10-minute drive from the Metro-North station in Tuxedo, N.Y.), the town doesn’t have the same weekend bustle and artistic cache as nearby Beacon or Hudson. But that’s a draw for brunchers, especially those who pull up in their boats to dock and dine in an 80-seat room with sweeping views of Greenwood Lake, as well as the hills and woodlands of Sterling Forest State Park.Along with Cove Castle, the Sunday brunch is hosted by the Hudson Valley Jazz Festival, which helps program the mostly local bands. The menu is brunch comfort food, including challah French toast and a trio of sausages served with Brazilian cheese bread. (covecastleny.com)Latin and Cuban are the musical styles you’re likely to hear during jazz brunch at 1803, a corner restaurant in TriBeCa. Named for the year of the Louisiana Purchase, the New Orleans-inspired venue features a rotating schedule of local ensembles. On a recent Saturday, a jazz trio — Eduardo Belo on bass, Rogério Boccato on drums and Vinicius Gomes on guitar — made the airy two-story dining room feel like the French Quarter by way of São Paulo, Brazil.The menu is heavy on bayou fare, including a crawfish-cake benedict, gumbo and jambalaya (a vegan option is made with a crispy tofu); and Southern favorites like chicken and waffles and a rosemary-forward macaroni and cheese. (1803nyc.com)A Glass of TwangBrunches with honest-to-goodness live country music are scarce in New York, and that surely makes country fans madder than a cat getting baptized.Filling that void is Spaghetti Tavern, an Upper West Side bar and restaurant that hosts bluegrass brunches on the weekends. Last Sunday, it was as if the 65-seat dining room were nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, thanks to Pickin’ Parm, a quartet made up of Kris Bauman (banjo), Ross Martin (guitar), Kells Nollenberger (bass) and Cesar Moreno (mandolin). “This is a song about picking up farm girls,” Moreno announced with a smile, to which diners responded with applause and a “yeehaw!” It was a cool spring day so the doors were open, giving passers-by a taste of honky-tonk.The menu features traditional brunch fare with Italian twists, including a spaghetti frittata wedge and baked cannellini beans and eggs. But the house specialty is Spaghetti in a Bag: pasta tossed in a sauce (pick among pesto, cacio e pepe and others) and served piping hot in an oversized parchment satchel. The bottomless mimosas come in a cute refillable ceramic donkey, because why not. (spaghettitavern.com)Curtain Up, Chow DownAnnie, Effie, Mimi: No Broadway diva is safe from sendup at the R-rated Broadway Drag Brunch, a raucous meal-and-a-show that plays twice on Sundays at Lips, a long-running drag club-restaurant that now lives on a quiet stretch of Midtown East, where it moved in 2010 after more than a dozen years at its original home in the West Village.On a recent afternoon, it was mostly young women in the audience, including brides-to-be and birthday revelers who, at one point in the show, lined up to sit on a throne and take a photo with the sharp-tongued Ginger Snap. (“I smell Long Island Railroad,” Miss Snap told one table.) The cast of drag queens lip-synced to numbers from Broadway musicals including “Dreamgirls,” “Rent” and “Jekyll & Hyde,” but the crowd became the most worked up when the D.J. cut show tunes with pop hits.The is the only brunch on this list that doesn’t include live music and singing, but give a queen a break: The performers double as servers (and work hard for tips). Thirty dollars gets you a musical-themed entree, like the Sweeney Todd steak and eggs, or the Mamma Mia mozzarella omelet — and a bloody mary or mimosa. Add $6 and the cocktails are unlimited. (nycdragshow.com)Strawberry Fields: Ultimate Beatles Brunch features songs from the Beatles catalog sung by costumed cast members. Deborah SableA Hard Night’s MorningPaul and Ringo meet pizza and ratatouille every Sunday for the nostalgic Strawberry Fields: Ultimate Beatles Brunch. The meal-meets-concert had an 18-year run at the former B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in Times Square; it’s now a weekend staple at City Winery’s 32,000-square-foot venue, which opened in October 2020 and overlooks the Hudson River at Pier 57 on Manhattan’s West Side. The show features vintage instrumentation and amplification of songs from the Beatles catalog sung by costumed cast members, many of whom performed with the Broadway and touring companies of the long-running musical “Beatlemania.”The $55 ticket includes the show and an unlimited breakfast buffet; bottomless drink packages are also available. It’s a great way to introduce children under 12 to the Fab Four: They get in at no cost, with brunch foods available for purchase. (citywinery.com) More

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      in Television

      Av Westin, Newsman Behind ABC’s ‘20/20,’ Dies at 92

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      After nearly 20 years at CBS News, he went to a rival network and helped turn its answer to “60 Minutes” into a frequent Emmy Award winner.Av Westin, an influential television producer who rose from copy boy at CBS News for Edward R. Murrow in the 1940s to help make ABC’s “20/20” newsmagazine a perennial winner of Emmy Awards, died on March 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92.His wife, Ellen Rossen, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Mr. Westin had spent a year as the executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight” when he took over at “20/20” in 1979. Over the next seven years, the program won more than 30 news and documentary Emmy Awards, including 11 in 1981.Looking to differentiate “20/20” from the entertainment shows it competed with in prime-time, as well as from CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Mr. Westin mixed ambitious investigative reports with celebrity profiles, lifestyle features and “process pieces” about artistic endeavors like the making of a new album of standards by Linda Ronstadt.A documentarian at heart, Mr. Westin also ordered a series of features called “Moment of Crisis,” which looked back at news events like the disastrous explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and the efforts to save President Ronald Reagan’s life after he was wounded in an assassination attempt.“20/20,” which was hosted by Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs in the 1980s, had an A-list group of correspondents that included Sylvia Chase, Lynn Sherr, Geraldo Rivera, Tom Jarriel, Bob Brown and Sander Vanocur.Mr. Brown recalled that Mr. Westin gave correspondents and producers considerable leeway to cover a story as they chose.“But when the piece was screened, Av took over and was at his best,” Mr. Brown said in a phone interview. “He could break apart a story and make you see everything you’d done wrong and let you know what you had to do to fix it. He had a genius for going straight to a problem.”Mr. Westin’s time at “20/20” came to an end in February 1987, when he circulated an 18-page memo within ABC News and to its top executives at its parent company, Capital Cities/ABC, criticizing news-gathering procedures and calling the division inefficient and in need of a new focus.He said that he had been quietly asked by a Capital Cities executive to critique ABC News, whose president was Roone Arledge.“Cap Cities had essentially decided that Roone was not their guy anymore,” Mr. Westin said in an interview with the Television Academy in 2011. The executive told him that “Roone’s tenure was going to end, and I was likely to be the preferred candidate of management.”“What I wrote was accurate,” Mr. Westin added, “but obviously it was inflammatory.”The memo led Mr. Arledge to suspend him and take him off “20/20.” But the suspension did not last long, and Mr. Westin went on to work on projects like “The Blessings of Liberty,” about the U.S. Constitution at its centennial, until he left the network in 1989.It was not the first time the two men clashed. In 1985, Mr. Arledge killed a “20/20” segment about the death of Marilyn Monroe and her ties to the Kennedys, calling it “gossip-column stuff.” Mr. Westin objected, and Mr. Rivera angrily told the gossip columnist Liz Smith that he and others at “20/20” were appalled that Mr. Arledge “would overturn a respected, honorable, great newsman like Av.”Mr. Westin with the “20/20” host Hugh Downs in 1981. He recruited an A-list group of correspondents for the program.Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesAvram Robert Westin was born on July 29, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, Elliot, was a vice president of a commercial baking company. His mother, Harriet (Radin) Westin, was a homemaker. Av Westin graduated from New York University in 1949. He had begun his studies as a pre-med student, but an experience during a summer job as a copy boy at CBS in 1947 altered his direction, to English and history.“A bulletin moved that a ship was sinking off Newfoundland,” he told the Television Academy, and he promptly carried the teletype copy to an editor. “I was the only person at CBS News headquarters who knew that information,” he said. “I was the ultimate insider. That’s the epiphany.”Mr. Westin was a writer, director, reporter and producer for 18 years at CBS, during which he earned a master’s degree in Russian and East European studies at Columbia University in 1958. He won an Emmy in 1960 as a writer for the documentary “The Population Explosion,” and in 1963 created and produced “CBS Morning News” with Mike Wallace.He left CBS in 1967, spent two years as executive director of the noncommercial Public Broadcasting Laboratory and joined ABC News in 1969 as the executive producer of its evening newscast, then anchored by Frank Reynolds. It was an era when “ABC Evening News” trailed CBS and NBC’s nightly news operations in prestige, ratings and financial resources.“My target is ‘H and B,’” Mr. Westin told The Indianapolis News in 1969, referring to NBC’s co-anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. “I think people are getting tired of them, and if they’re shopping around, I want them to look at us before they automatically turn to Walter” Cronkite.The broadcast journalist Ted Koppel, who was a correspondent on the evening news program, said of Mr. Westin in a phone interview, “He probably elevated the ‘ABC Evening News’ as much as anyone until Roone Arledge,” adding, “Av was a very ambitious man, who thought he should have been ABC News president.”While at ABC News, Mr. Westin ran its “Close-Up” documentary unit, for which he won a Peabody Award in 1973. He won another Peabody the next year, for producing and directing the documentary “Sadat: Action Biography,” about the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat.He left ABC News in 1976 in a dispute with Bill Sheehan, the president of the division, but returned two years later at Mr. Arledge’s request “to get rid of” the incompatible, feuding “Evening News” anchor team of Ms. Walters and Harry Reasoner.“The day I arrived back at ABC, one of the producers who was in the Reasoner camp came up to me and said, ‘You know, she owes us 5 minutes and 25 seconds,’” Mr. Westin told the Television Academy, referring to how much more Ms. Walters had been on the air than Mr. Reasoner over the past year.After returning as the executive producer of “Evening News,” Mr. Westin collaborated with Mr. Arledge on an overhaul in 1978 that transformed the show into the faster-paced, graphics-oriented “World News Tonight,” with three anchors: Mr. Reynolds in Washington, Max Robinson in Chicago and Peter Jennings in London.A year later, Mr. Arledge moved Mr. Westin to “20/20.”After leaving ABC News, Mr. Westin was an executive at King World Productions, Time Warner and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’s foundation.In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Mark. His previous marriages to Sandra Glick and Kathleen Lingo ended in divorce. He lived in Manhattan.To Mr. Westin, evening news programs, which cannot provide much depth in 22 minutes of airtime, have a clear mandate.“I believe the audience at dinner time wants to know the answers to three very important questions,” he said, explaining a rule he had at ABC News. “Is the world safe? Is my hometown and my home safe? If my wife and children are safe, what has happened in the past 24 hours to make them better off or to amuse them?” More

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      in Movies

      At New York Children’s Film Festival, the Films Come First

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      The New York International Children’s Film Festival returns with a diverse, sophisticated slate, including Richard Linklater’s animated take on the 1969 moon landing.When Chloé Zhao won the Academy Awards for best director and best picture for “Nomadland” last year, some who felt special pride were neither her relatives nor her film industry collaborators. These delighted fans were the team behind the annual New York International Children’s Film Festival, which in 2011 showed one of Zhao’s earliest projects: “Daughters,” a 10-minute short about a 14-year-old Chinese girl being forced into an arranged marriage.The festival, whose 25th-anniversary edition begins on Friday evening at the SVA Theater in Manhattan, has long showcased filmmakers who either go on to distinguished careers or have already achieved them. This year’s opening-night titles include “Where Is Anne Frank,” a haunting animated feature about children affected by wars past and present, from the award-winning Israeli director Ari Folman (“Waltz With Bashir”). On March 19, the festival will close with “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood,” an animated examination of the 1969 moon landing by the acclaimed American filmmaker Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”), who will conduct a livestreamed Q. and A. with the audience.“We are a film festival first,” Nina Guralnick, the organization’s executive director, said in a video interview. In choosing sophisticated works, she added, “we want the program and the experience to be part of a continuum of film appreciation and film discovery, and not kind of segmented as something for kids.”This year, Guralnick and Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, are confronting the challenges of the pandemic by presenting both in-person screenings — almost all at the SVA Theater — and virtual offerings. Although the 20 features and more than 60 shorts make up a robust and global slate (this year includes the festival’s first film from Kyrgyzstan), the programmers will host fewer screenings, showing some titles in the theater only once, and others only online.“Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood” is an animated examination of the 1969 moon landing by Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”).NetflixThe streaming works, which will be available through April 3 — past the festival’s official end date — will include all those for children under 5, who are still too young to be vaccinated against Covid-19. This year, however, also gives children ages 3 to 5 a broader range of short films than in the past, as well as a feature: the Swedish director Michael Ekblad’s “Best Birthday Ever,” an animated tale about a kindergarten rabbit who must cope with a baby sister.“We really wanted to get back into the theater this year, if we could safely,” Guralnick said. And while circumstances won’t allow in-person award festivities, the festival will still feature its audience-choice and jury prizes. (It is one of the few Oscar-qualifying children’s festivals, meaning that its prizewinning shorts are eligible for Academy Award consideration.)This year, one of the programming highlights is animation, which Villaseñor described as a way to give young audiences “a different point of access” to subjects that might otherwise be too harsh.“Charlotte,” for instance, a feature by the Canadian directors Tahir Rana and Éric Warin, uses painterly animation to illuminate the life and work of Charlotte Salomon, a young German Jewish artist — voiced by Keira Knightley — who died at Auschwitz.Folman also chose intricate animation for “Where Is Anne Frank” because, he said in a phone interview, it offers “endless opportunity to do crosses between reality and imagination, between conscious and subconscious, between dreams and true stories.” Folman undertakes all of these in the film, which focuses not on Anne but on Kitty, the imaginary friend to whom Anne’s diary was addressed. Kitty emerges from the journal as a girl in contemporary Amsterdam, traveling across time to learn what happened to her friend. During her quest, she encounters refugee children who reflect Anne’s legacy.“I don’t look at it as a Holocaust movie,” Folman said. “I look at it as a coming-of-age movie.”The festival, however, does not neglect animation’s affinity for the wildly comic. In Domee Shi’s “Turning Red,” from Disney and Pixar, a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl transforms into a big red panda whenever she’s too excited.“Oink,” Mascha Halberstad’s stop-motion feature about a pet piglet.Viking Film/A Private ViewOther boisterous travails occur in “Oink,” the Dutch director Mascha Halberstad’s stop-motion feature about a little girl with an imperiled pet piglet. But this is no “Charlotte’s Web.” Oink, the piglet, makes an indelible mark in not always welcome ways — housebreaking is an issue — and Babs, his owner, has her hands full, especially with a visiting grandfather obsessed with a sausage-making contest. Halberstad, who will attend the festival with the producer Marleen Slot for a Q. and A. on Friday, explained in a video interview that she was aiming for a tone like that of Roald Dahl because “he doesn’t underestimate children.” Though the film ends happily, “it has a bit of an edge,” she said.The festival also offers titles that capture an interplay between art and science. “I wanted to eliminate the divide between them,” Villaseñor said, “and have people realize how vitally important the creativity in the arts is to innovating in the sciences.”“Gagarine,” for instance, a poignant, inspiring movie that was selected for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, mingles a teenager’s passion for space exploration with his desire to have a home. The first feature from the young French directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, the film was shot at the real Cité Gagarine, a housing project outside of Paris that was torn down in 2019.“We were really roommates with the demolition team,” Trouilh said as he sat next to Liatard in a video call from Paris. Their fictional protagonist, Youri (Alséni Bathily), refuses to leave, constructing for himself an elaborate kind of secret space capsule in the shadow of the wrecking ball.“Because of the empty space left by the absence of his parents,” Liatard said, “we imagine that space is the thing that is a refuge for Youri.”Alséni Bathily in “Gagarine,” about a teenager’s passion for space exploration. It was shot at a Paris housing project that was torn down in 2019.Cohen Media GroupMore technology-fueled dreams appear not only in Linklater’s “Apollo 10½,” in which another boy imagines himself lifting off, but also in the festival’s annual shorts program “Girls P.O.V.,” which this year features young female science pioneers, real and imagined. Still other budding innovators occupy the spotlight in Thomas Verrette’s documentary “Zero Gravity,” about diverse middle school students in a NASA coding competition.Such films capture the enduring principles of the festival, which was founded by Eric Beckman and Emily Shapiro, parents who in 1997 made a commitment to offering children more independent and less commercial fare.“We’ve wanted to help kids dream beyond the limitations of their own reality,” Guralnick said. Through the festival’s many iterations, she added, “we’ve been trying to be a gateway for children for 25 years to what they envision the future to be, to what they envision their world to be — should be, can be.”The New York International Children’s Film FestivalMarch 4-19; 212-349-0330; nyicff.org. More

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      in Theater

      Ned Eisenberg, New York Actor Known for ‘Law & Order,’ Dies at 65

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      Eisenberg performed in several Broadway productions between appearances as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler on NBC’s long-running police drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Ned Eisenberg, a character actor known for his work on popular shows including “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Mare of Easttown,” died at his home in the Jackson Heights section of Queens on Sunday. He was 65.The cause was cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile duct, and ocular melanoma, according to a statement from his agent, Jeanne Nicolosi, issued on his family’s behalf.Eisenberg was a New York character actor whose roles in film, theater and television spanned the past four decades on Broadway and in Hollywood.Fans of the NBC police procedural “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” may best remember him as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler, a recurring character on the long-running drama. From 1999 to 2019, he appeared in two dozen episodes of the show — mostly as Kressler, but twice early on in other roles, according to IMDb. He also appeared in other series in the “Law & Order” franchise, playing different roles.Ned Eisenberg was born on Jan. 13, 1957, in the Bronx. He grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he attended Riverdale Junior High School.In 1975, he graduated from what is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, in Manhattan, where he studied acting.He began his professional theater career in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and appeared on Broadway as Truffaldino in Julie Taymor’s “The Green Bird” (2000) and as Uncle Morty in Bartlett Sher’s “Awake and Sing!” (2006), according to Nicolosi.In a New York Times review of “The Green Bird,” Eisenberg and other cast members were credited with bringing “a balletic grace” and “antic shtick” to the performance, in which he and Didi Conn played “a Punch-and-Judy pair of sausage makers.”He performed in lead roles in theaters around the Northeast including the Theater for a New Audience, New York City Center and the Williamstown Theater Festival.He was an early member of the Naked Angels Theater Company along with Kenneth Lonergan, Frank Pugliese and Joe Mantello. The actors Rob Morrow, Mary Stuart Masterson, Nancy Travis and Gina Gershon were also among the founding members of the group, which was started in 1986 to serve as a “creative home for new voices.”In 2009, he played Iago in a Theater for a New Audience production of “Othello.” In a review for The Times, Charles Isherwood wrote that Eisenberg’s performance was “decked out in small, witty flourishes,” noting that “the bitter half-smile with which Iago looks on at the waste he has wrought in the final scene says everything about his shriveled soul.”In supporting roles throughout his career, Eisenberg worked with Academy Award-winning directors and filmmakers.In 2004, he played the boxing manager Sally Mendoza in Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby,” which starred Hilary Swank and won the Oscar for best picture. Eisenberg played the photographer, Joe Rosenthal, in “Flags of Our Fathers,” another film by Eastwood, about the six men who raised the flag at the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.Eisenberg also acted in “World Trade Center,” a 2006 Oliver Stone drama about police officers who responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the 2011 thriller “Limitless,” starring Bradley Cooper.Last year, he appeared in the Emmy Award-winning HBO drama “Mare of Easttown” as Detective Hauser.He is expected to return as the manager Lou Rabinowitz in a coming episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” on Amazon Prime.He is survived by his wife, the actress Patricia Dunnock, and a son, Lino Eisenberg. More

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      in Television

      Kathryn Kates, Actress of ‘Seinfeld’ Babka Fame, Dies at 73

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      She had a long screen career but may be best remembered as the counterwoman who tells Jerry and Elaine the bad news that her bakery was out of chocolate babkas.Kathryn Kates, who appeared as a counterwoman in two memorable scenes from “Seinfeld” involving baked goods in short supply — chocolate babkas and marble rye bread — and racked up numerous screen credits over nearly 50 years, died on Jan. 22 at her brother’s home in Lake Worth, Fla. She was 73.The cause was lung cancer, the brother, Josh Kates, said.Ms. Kates, who lived in Manhattan, had roles in dozens of television shows and movies, including the recent series “Shades of Blue” on NBC, “Friends From College” on Netflix and “The Good Fight” on CBS.She appeared in five episodes of “Law and Order” — a fixture on the résumé of most New York working actors — as Judge Marlene Simmons. She also had a recurring role in Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” as the mother of Jason Biggs’s character, Larry Bloom. And she was cast as Angie DeCarlo, an Italian beauty shop owner, in “The Many Saints of Newark” (2021), the prequel movie to “The Sopranos.”But it was in two episodes of “Seinfeld” (1990-1998) that she made an indelible mark.Sporting a yellow apron and a New York attitude, Ms. Kates appeared in Season Five’s “The Dinner Party” as the bakery clerk who announces to Jerry and Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) that the store’s last treasured chocolate babka had been sold just ahead of them. Offered a cinnamon babka instead, Elaine calls it a “lesser” babka, to which Jerry objects, intoning, “Cinnamon takes a back seat to no babka.”The scene includes a memorable coughing fit by Ms. Kates’s character next to a wall of baked goods and her closing lines to a loitering Jerry and Elaine: “Can I get you anything else? How about a nice box of ‘scram’?”The episode also features Jerry’s exaltation of another New York bakery mainstay, the black and white cookie, as something of a model for better race relations. “Look to the cookie!” he declares.In an interview last year with “This Podcast Is Making Me Thirsty,” a podcast about “Seinfeld,” Ms. Kates recalled getting the part for which people would recognize her on Manhattan streets for decades.The whole writing staff, including Mr. Seinfeld and the show’s co-creator, Larry David, watched as she read her lines and delivered her cough in an audition. She had earlier auditioned for other small parts on “Seinfeld,” but the brassy counterwoman was her lucky break.Two seasons later, Ms. Kates, again in her yellow apron, reprised the role in the episode “The Rye.” This time she tells a crestfallen Jerry that the bakery’s last loaf of marble rye has been sold, complicating a plot to restore George into the good graces of his future in-laws.Ms. Kates devoted much of her time to running The Colony Theater in Burbank, Calif., of which she was a founding member. There, she and the actress Barbara Beckley were co-general managers from 1975 to 1981. She appeared in numerous Colony productions.“Kathy was New York through and through,” Ms Beckley said. “She did some wonderful roles with us.” But she added: “She was not a leading lady. She was much more of a young character actress, and not a Hollywood type at all.”Kathryn Jane Kates was born Jan. 29, 1948, in Queens. Her father, Louis Kates, was an electronics engineer. Her mother, Sylvia (Fagan) Kates, was an actress who, under the stage name Madelyn Cates, appeared on television in the hospital drama “St. Elsewhere” and the series “Fame” and played the eccentric concierge confronting Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) in the 1967 film version of “The Producers.”Ms. Kates grew up in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, and graduated from Great Neck North Senior High. She studied acting at New York University.After graduating in 1971, she moved to Los Angeles in 1974 and focused on theater. Her early television credits included appearances on the legal drama “Matlock” in 1991 and other cameo roles in “Rachel Gunn, R.N.” and “Hudson Street.”In 1993, she married Joseph Pershes, an executive at a video distribution company. They divorced in 2006. In addition to her brother, she is survived by a sister, Mallory Kates.When asked in the podcast interview about appearing on “Seinfeld,” Ms. Kates responded that she was always grateful to have work. “I have loved every job I’ve ever had,” she said.And as for her babka preference? She favored chocolate. More

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      in Theater

      How a Broadway Producer Spends His Sundays

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      Theater may be struggling, but Ron Simons is committed to opening his next show, “For Colored Girls,” this spring.Ron Simons, one of a handful of Black Broadway producers in New York, has won Tony Awards for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” “Porgy & Bess,” “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” and “Jitney.” Not to be outdone by the pandemic, he recently produced “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which closed last month, and his next show, “For Colored Girls,” is scheduled to open this spring.“Recent events have allowed us to be fully expressed,” said Mr. Simons, alluding to the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and the unrest and conversations about race that followed. “If done correctly, through storytelling, shows like ‘Thoughts of a Colored Man’ and others will help dispel ignorance and hatred.”Even though Broadway attendance is down and casts and crews are struggling to evade the Omicron variant, Mr. Simons remains optimistic. “People forget how long Broadway has been around,” he said. “Broadway is an institution that is not going away. It’s still strong and becoming more inclusive.”Mr. Simons, 61, lives with his partner, Jbya Clarke, 53, a personal trainer and wellness professional, on West 54th Street.THEATER HOURS Depending upon what time I got to bed the night before, Alexa wakes me with an obnoxious beeping sound around 10 or 11 a.m. When I’m raising money for a show, like I am with “For Colored Girls,” I tend to work into the wee hours of the night on Saturdays. I pick up the phone to see if there are any fires with the shows and if they need to be put out.“I tend to work into the wee hours of the night on Saturdays,” said Mr. Simons, who likes to sleep in on Sundays. Laila Stevens for The New York TimesPURGE Jbya is already up and has made coffee. Right now we’re drinking two coffees from Café Britt, one that’s Hawaiian and another that’s Costa Rican. I’ll drink it in whatever mug is available with cream and Stevia. That’s followed by a green juice made with spinach, pineapple, mango, collagen and MCT oil. It’s very cleansing. I have an addiction to fast food, it’s cheap, fast and easy. This helps the detox process. Every year I do an 11-day purge in mid-January. All I have is green drinks with protein powder. I like to start the year off with a healthy disposition. The purge makes me feel lighter and makes my brain clearer.SPIRITUAL STREAM I’m a member of The R.O.C.K. church in Houston. My cousin is married to the pastor. She preaches and oversees operations, so I watch the morning service on my computer. I find her inspiring. I’m always looking for inspiration and beauty. That’s how I counteract the news that’s been spreading over the country. I might meditate as well.He likes to tune in to services from a Houston church whose pastor is married to his cousin. “I’m always looking for inspiration and beauty.”Laila Stevens for The New York TimesBRUNCH By noon we are thinking about places to have brunch. Our favorite is Cookshop. I always say I won’t get a cinnamon roll, which come out warm and delicious, so I order wheat toast. I end up getting the cinnamon roll, too. And French fries. They’re my nemesis. We have one or two friends join. Sometimes we make brunch at our house, or we do it potluck, which is a good way to reconnect with some important people in our lives.MATINEE I’m a Tony voter, so I have to see all the new shows. If we don’t eat brunch we see theater instead. Because I’m so exhausted from the week, I tend to fall asleep at night, so Sunday makes me more of an alert audience member.Socializing in Chelsea, the Manhattan neighborhood where Mr. Simons and Mr. Clarke will often go for brunch. Laila Stevens for The New York TimesLUNCH WITH LIGHTING After theater Jbya and I walk around Hell’s Kitchen. I’m on a mission to have dinner at all the Hell’s Kitchen restaurants. Eating out is a different energy than eating in front of the TV. I look at the menus, what they’re serving and how are they rated. If there are a number of dishes that appeal to me I’ll consider going in. And it has to be clean with nice lighting. I’m a man of the theater. I always talk to people about the mood that lighting brings. Then we walk home because I’ve gained 20 pounds since Covid.PILES OF THINGS From 5 to 7 p.m., Jbya and I split up. He goes into his man cave, which is our media room, closes the door, turns off the lights and draws the shades. Then he watches something about the royal family, RuPaul or the Kardashians. I talk myself into opening mail, which I have let pile up for a month so that my box is so full it has to be given to our doorman to hold. Mail creates action items — like responding to an invite, paying a bill or cashing checks, all of which I hate doing. Or I try to organize my office, which usually looks like a hurricane hit it. Everything ends up sitting on my desk. Even though I create piles of things I need to do, it still looks like a mess. I’m a borderline hoarder. I love tchotchkes.The terrace of their home in Midtown Manhattan is one of their favorite places. Laila Stevens for The New York TimesTRAYS, TALK By 7 we’re deciding where to order in from, Seamless or Uber Eats. We might do Chinese food or Burger King. Jbya is a vegetarian and loves their Impossible Whopper; I usually order a Whopper, French fries and Diet Coke if I don’t have any at home. I finally bought TV trays, which makes me feel retro, which we bring into the media room. This is the best time for us to spend together. Evenings during the week are hard. We’ve both had very different days. He’s ready to talk and I’m all talked out from doing it all day. I’m still trying to navigate that so Sunday is a real coming together time for us.ACTION-PACKED ESCAPE We just finished “Tales of the City.” We like thrillers and science fiction, which is what we look for. I’m finishing the casting for “For Colored Girls” and am still in the capital-raising phase, so all week I’m dialing for dollars. Nights like this, I want something thrilling to wash over me like “The Bourne Identity” series, which we can watch over and over again, or “The Matrix” or “The Lord of the Rings.”Sunday evenings are for dinner and light viewing. “This is the best time for us to spend together.”Laila Stevens for The New York TimesGAMES PEOPLE PLAY By 1 or 2 a.m. we’re back in the bedroom. I call Alexa and she glows. I ask for a reminder about something or I’ll set the alarm. Then I tell her to play thunderstorm noise. It’s our version of white noise. Jbya falls asleep first. If I can’t, I play games for 45 minutes on my phone. I take West Game very seriously. It’s a fighting game where you build your town and battle against other players, and Toy Blast, which is a pattern-matching puzzle game. My lids get heavy and I fall asleep.Sunday Routine readers can follow Ron Simons on Instagram @ronaldksimons More