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      in Theater

      18 Arts Organizations of Color Selected for National Initiative

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      The Wallace Foundation will fund up to $3.75 million in support for each organization, spread across the country, over the next five years.In the 1970s, a series of fires — set as arson for profit — rocked the Bronx. This story, acted out against a soundtrack of salsa and hip-hop, is currently being told by Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater at Pregones Theater in the Bronx.These are the types of stories and organizations that the Wallace Foundation, which aims to foster equity and improvements in the arts, will support in its new initiative. Eighteen arts organizations of color across the country, including Pregones/PRTT, will each receive up to $3.75 million over the next five years.“One of the things that distinguishes this opportunity is the acknowledgment that organizations of color have a certain history of undercapitalization,” said Arnaldo López, the managing director of Pregones/PRTT. “And that means that, for many years — compared to primarily white-serving organizations in the arts and culture — we worked with a fraction of the money.”The 18 grantees were selected from over 250 applicants and include 1Hood Media in Pittsburgh, Chicago Sinfonietta, the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project in San Francisco, the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich., and the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Neb.This marks the first phase — aimed at organizations with budgets between $500,000 and $5 million — of a broader national arts initiative by the Wallace Foundation. A future phase will focus on a second, larger group of grantees with budgets below $500,000. In total, the foundation has committed to providing funding of up to $100 million.This iteration, though, was designed around a specific guiding question: How can arts organizations of color use their experience working closely with their communities to stay resilient and relevant?“It’s about: What are the aspirations for their future?” said Bahia Ramos, the director of arts at the Wallace Foundation. “And how might these resources — time and space to breathe and learn together — give them the wherewithal to meet those aspirations?”The first year of the initiative will focus on planning before the next four years of project implementation. Over the next year, grantees will map out their funding in partnership with advisers and consultants, including researchers, ethnographers and financial management planners.One recipient, the Laundromat Project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, hopes to dig deeper into its work: Helping artists and neighbors become agents of change in their own communities. The Laundromat Project was founded 17 years ago by a Black woman, Risë Wilson, at her kitchen table in Bed-Stuy, said the project’s executive director, Kemi Ilesanmi.“We have residencies with artists, we do community engagement, we have a professional development fellowship,” Ilesanmi said. “And all of this is allowing us to figure out how to do that citywide — and do it in the context of Bed-Stuy.”Grantees will also work with a research team from Arizona State University and the University of Virginia to refine their research questions and approaches. Researchers from the Social Science Research Council will develop “deep-dive” ethnographies of each organization to document their histories and practices.“All of us have a great deal to learn from organizations founded by and with communities of color,” Ramos said, “who have deep legacies of working with and on behalf of their communities.” More

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      in Music

      As Eyes Are on Eurovision, Europe Has Another Song Contest

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      The Liet International, a competition for minority and regional languages, lacks the glitz of Eurovision. But its organizers say it helps keep endangered tongues alive.Follow live updates on the Eurovision grand final.TONDER, Denmark — The folk musician Billy Fumey strode onstage on Friday night in this quaint market town in rural Denmark and launched into an intense love song in the endangered language of Franco-Provençal. As he belted out a lyrical description of hair blowing in the wind — “Kma tsèkion de tèt frissons da l’oura lèdzira” — few in the 500-strong audience had any idea what he was singing about, but it didn’t seem to matter. When the yodeling-heavy track came to an end, the crowd clapped wildly, anyway.A few moments later, Carolina Rubirosa, a Spanish rock musician who sings in Galician, got a similar reaction. As did Jimi Henndreck, a psychedelic rock band from Italy who sang a raucous number in South Tyrolean, a German dialect. So, too, did Inga-Maret Gaup-Juuso, an electronic artist singing in a language of the Sami Indigenous people of Northern Europe.All were taking part in Liet International, a European song contest for regional and minority languages. After finishing her entry, Rubirosa switched to English to address the beer-swigging crowd. “This is a dream to be here today,” she said, “with my language, outside my country.” Minority languages are vital, Rubirosa added. “We don’t have to let them die.”The audience for the Liet International song contest at the Culture House in Tonder.Klaus Bo for The New York TimesDoria Ousset, a singer from the French island of Corsica, getting ready backstage. Performers have do their own makeup and hair.Klaus Bo for The New York TimesOusset on Friday sang an epic rock lament for a 17th-century Corsican soldier facing execution by French forces.Klaus Bo for The New York TimesAdri de Boer, a Dutch troubadour, appeared on the show, which was livestreamed on YouTube and will be broadcast on Dutch TV.Klaus Bo for The New York TimesAround 200 million people will tune into the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday to hear music from around the continent. The 25 pop stars who will compete in the final include those performing in Italian, Spanish and Ukrainian. Yet the millions of people in Europe who speak one of its many regional and minority languages are unlikely to find themselves represented on the Eurovision stage, let alone in their country’s pop charts.Since 2002, Liet International has been offering a platform to musicians from these communities — though it is a world away from the showy spectacle of a Eurovision final. Friday’s event occurred in the Culture House, a small hall next to a care facility for older adults in Tonder, which is in a German-speaking region of Denmark. The 13 acts shared tiny dressing rooms and applied their own makeup. The evening’s hosts, Stefi Wright and Niklas Nissen, have day jobs as a teacher and builder.The event, which was livestreamed on the contest’s YouTube page, attracted just 944 views, though a recording will soon be broadcast on television in the Netherlands.Uffe Iwersen, one of the event’s organizers, said its budget was around 100,000 euros, or about $104,000, so the organizers could not afford spectacular stage sets or pyrotechnics. He insisted that didn’t matter. “The languages are more important than explosions and the biggest light show on earth,” Iwersen said.Tjallien Kalsbeek, one of the competition’s organizers, said that Liet International had its roots in a contest started by a Dutch television station in the 1990s. That competition aimed to find new pop music in West Frisian, a language spoken by about 450,000 people in the north of the Netherlands.That contest was a hit, Kalsbeek said, and it became an annual event, expanding over time to include rap and techno entries. For its 10th anniversary, the organizers held a special edition that featured acts in other minority languages including Basque, Occitan and Welsh. This was the first Liet International; Friday’s was the 13th edition.About 500 people watched in the Culture House on Friday.Klaus Bo for The New York TimesMartin Horlock, right, performing in South Jutlandic, a Danish dialect.Klaus Bo for The New York TimesInga-Maret Gaup-Juuso, left, singing in a language of the Sami Indigenous people of Northern Europe.Klaus Bo for The New York TimesRoger Argemí, a singer from the Catalonia region of Spain, performing on Friday night. “When I want to express my real feelings, I use Catalan,” he said.Klaus Bo for The New York TimesThe status of Europe’s minority languages varies wildly. Some, like Catalan, are spoken by millions of people, yet others, like North Frisian, native to northern Germany, have just a few thousand speakers left and are at risk of extinction, according to UNESCO.Elin Jones, a professor of linguistic diversity at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, said by phone that regional languages that were protected by national governments and taught in schools like Welsh were thriving. But in countries including France, Greece and Russia, minority languages were more at risk, because children are usually educated in the national language only.Jones said that all minority languages should be supported. “They are an integral part of people’s identity, like sexuality or ethnicity,” she said.Several of the people participating in Liet International on Friday came from areas where speaking a minority language could be seen as a political act, including Sardinia, where some activists want more autonomy from Italy, and Corsica, the Mediterranean island where this year clashes broke out after a Corsican activist was beaten up inside a French jail.Onstage on Friday, Doria Ousset, a Corsican singer with a six-piece band, sung an epic rock lament for a 17th-century Corsican soldier facing execution by French forces. Afterward, in an onstage interview, the hosts asked about her inspiration. “The French state does not want us to know out history, so we have to sing it,” Ousset said. “It is our mission.”Yet in interviews with The New York Times, four other acts said they sang in regional languages for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Roger Argemí, a young pop singer from the Catalonia region of Spain, said he wrote music mainly in English or Spanish, “but when I want to express my real feelings, I use Catalan” — the language of his childhood. Catalan sounded “much sweeter, and more melodic” than Spanish, he added.As removed as Liet International seemed from the glitz of Eurovision, there was at least one element it shared with its better-known rival on Friday: a tense voting process. Shortly after 10 p.m., the night’s acts walked onstage to listen as the members of a jury read out their scores one by one.As a leaderboard reshuffled with each new score, it became clear that this was a three-horse race between Ousset, the Corsican singer; Yourdaughters, two sisters from north Germany’s Danish-speaking minority who sang a dreamy R&B track; and Rubirosa, the Galician songwriter.Ousset, the Corsican singer, reacting after she was announced as the winner.Klaus Bo for The New York TimesWith one judge’s scores left to reveal, there were just a couple of points between those three acts. But as the judge read out the points, Ousset edged to the front. When she was announced as the winner, she collapsed into her bandmates’ arms in shock, then rushed to the front of the stage waving Corsica’s flag.“How do you feel?” asked Nissen, one of the hosts, in English. Ousset replied in Corsican with a lengthy, tearful, speech. Very few people in the audience understood a word she said. But they clapped and cheered anyway. More

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      in Movies

      Helping Hollywood Avoid Claims of Bias Is Now a Growing Business

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      Studios are signing up consultants to help make sure their movies or shows don’t raise any cultural red flags.In the summer of 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd spurred a racial reckoning in America, Carri Twigg’s phone kept ringing.Ms. Twigg, a founding partner of a production company named Culture House, was asked over and over again if she could take a look at a television or movie script and raise any red flags, particularly on race.Culture House, which employs mostly women of color, had traditionally specialized in documentaries. But after a few months of fielding the requests about scripts, they decided to make a business of it: They opened a new division dedicated solely to consulting work.“The frequency of the check-ins was not slowing down,” Ms. Twigg said. “It was like, oh, we need to make this a real thing that we offer consistently — and get paid for.”Though the company has been consulting for a little more than a year — for clients like Paramount Pictures, MTV and Disney — that work now accounts for 30 percent of Culture House’s revenue.Culture House is hardly alone. In recent years, entertainment executives have vowed to make a genuine commitment to diversity, but are still routinely criticized for falling short. To signal that they are taking steps to address the issue, Hollywood studios have signed contracts with numerous companies and nonprofits to help them avoid the reputational damage that comes with having a movie or an episode of a TV show face accusations of bias.“When a great idea is there and then it’s only talked about because of the social implications, that must be heartbreaking for creators who spend years on something,” Ms. Twigg said. “To get it into the world and the only thing anyone wants to talk about are the ways it came up short. So we’re trying to help make that not happen.”On Being Transgender in AmericaElite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth. She shared some thoughts on what she saw.Remote Work: Remote work during the pandemic offered some people an opportunity to move forward with a transition. They are now preparing to return to the office.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.The consulting work runs the gamut of a production. The consulting companies sometimes are asked about casting decisions as well as marketing plans. And they may also read scripts to search for examples of bias and to scrutinize how characters are positioned in a story.“It’s not only about what characters say, it’s also about when they don’t speak,” Ms. Twigg said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s not enough agency for this character, you’re using this character as an ornament, you’re going to get dinged for that.’”When a consulting firm is on retainer, it can also come with a guaranteed check every month from a studio. And it’s a revenue stream developed only recently.Michelle K. Sugihara, the executive director of Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, a nonprofit.Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times“It really exploded in the last two years or so,” said Michelle K. Sugihara, the executive director of Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, a nonprofit. The group, called CAPE, is on retainer to some of the biggest Hollywood studios, including Netflix, Paramount, Warner Bros., Amazon, Sony and A24.Of the 100 projects that CAPE has consulted on, Ms. Sugihara said, roughly 80 percent have come since 2020, and they “really increased” after the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021. “That really ramped up attention on our community,” she said.Ms. Sugihara said her group could be actively involved throughout the production process. In one example, she said she told a studio that all of the actors playing the heroes in an upcoming scripted project appeared to be light-skinned East Asian people whereas the villains were portrayed by darker-skinned East Asian actors.“That’s a red flag,” she said. “And we should talk about how those images may be harmful. Sometimes it’s just things that people aren’t even conscious about until you point it out.”Ms. Sugihara would not mention the name of the project or the studio behind it. In interviews, many cited nondisclosure agreements with the studios and a reluctance to embarrass a filmmaker as reasons they could not divulge specifics.Studios such as Paramount Pictures have been hiring consulting firms like Culture House and CAPE.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesSarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization, said her group had been doing consulting work informally for years with the networks and studios. Finally, she decided to start charging the studios for their labor — work that she compared to “billable hours.”“Here we were consulting with all these content creators across Hollywood and not being compensated,” said Ms. Ellis, the organization’s president since 2013. “When I started at GLAAD we couldn’t pay our bills. And meanwhile here we are with the biggest studios and networks in the world, helping them tell stories that were hits. And I said this doesn’t make sense.”In 2018, she created the GLAAD Media Institute — if the networks or studios wanted any help in the future, they’d have to become a paying member of the institute.Initially, there was some pushback but the networks and studios would eventually come around. In 2018, there were zero members of the GLAAD Media Institute. By the end of 2021, that number had swelled to 58, with nearly every major studio and network in Hollywood now a paying member.Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, the advocacy organization, at its office in Manhattan.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesScott Turner Schofield, who has spent some time working as a consultant for GLAAD, has also been advising networks and studios on how to accurately depict transgender people for years. But he said the work had increased so significantly in recent years that he was brought on board as an executive producer for a forthcoming horror movie produced by Blumhouse.“I’ve gone from someone who was a part-time consultant — barely eking by — to being an executive producer,” he said.Those interviewed said that it was a win-win arrangement between the consultancies and the studios.“The studios at the end of the day, they want to produce content but they want to make money,” said Rashad Robinson, the president of the advocacy organization Color of Change. “Making money can be impeded because of poor decisions and not having the right people at the table. So the studios are going to want to seek that.”He did caution, however, that simply bringing on consultants was not an adequate substitute for the structural change that many advocates want to see in Hollywood.“This doesn’t change the rules with who gets to produce content and who gets to make the final decisions of what gets on the air,” he said. “It’s fine to bring folks in from the outside but that in the end is insufficient to the fact that across the entertainment industry there is still a problem in terms of not enough Black and brown people with power in the executive ranks.”Still, the burgeoning field of cultural consultancy work may be here to stay. Ms. Twigg, who helped found Culture House with Raeshem Nijhon and Nicole Galovski, said that the volume of requests she was getting was “illustrative of how seriously it’s being taken, and how comprehensively it’s being brought into the fabric of doing business.”“From a business standpoint, it’s a way for us to capitalize on the expertise that we have gathered as people of color who have been alive in America for 30 or 40 years,” she said. More

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      in Television

      Exploring the Diversity, and Precariousness, of French Stand-Up

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      Fanny Herrero, the creator of “Call My Agent!,” returns with a Netflix show called “Standing Up,” which follows four struggling Parisian comics.PARIS — In the opening scenes of “Standing Up,” Nezir (Younès Boucif) mines his life for stand-up material as he cycles across Paris on a food delivery shift.“I’m poor,” he says to himself, testing the sound of the words in French. “It’s not handy to be poor. I don’t recommend it.” On the way, he crosses paths with a friend, Aïssatou (Mariama Gueye), who is begging a shop owner to advertise her comedy show.“Standing Up” is the latest project from Fanny Herrero, who created the showbiz comedy “Call My Agent!” In this new show, which comes to Netflix on Friday, she again takes viewers behind the scenes to see how deals and careers are made, this time in a less prestigious corner of French cultural life: stand-up comedy.Aïssatou and Nezir head to the Drôle Comedy Club — the show’s title in French is “Drôle,” meaning “funny” — for that night’s performances. The club’s owner, Bling (Jean Siuen), has had success, but is now struggling to come up with material, as the next generation of comics come up in his own club.Over the course of six episodes, “Standing Up” explores what it takes — and means — to “make it” in comedy. Herrero conceived of the show after a dinner three years ago with the comedian Gad Elmaleh, who told her about Paris’s growing stand-up scene. On his recommendation, she went to the Paname, the city’s first stand-up comedy club. She was amazed by the diversity onstage, she said in a recent interview: People of different ethnicities and from various backgrounds — from the suburbs outside Paris, from other cities, from the countryside — were performing. “It’s the story of our country,” Herrero said.The show’s struggling stand-up comics reflect this diversity. Nezir, who is of Algerian descent, and Aïssatou, who is Black, have both been in the game for a while, and are trying to get more recognition. Bling’s real name is Étienne, a very French name he jokes his Vietnamese parents chose to help him assimilate.The show frequently addresses racism in French society, even as some of the country’s politicians and high-profile intellectuals have recently decried the spread of American “woke” ideas around identity.In one episode, the police stop Aïssatou after she has looked through large shopping bags for her sunglasses. She jokes about the incident that night, and is warned not to mention at her solo show by her white producer. In another, Nezir makes a joke about how the only Arabs well-to-do Frenchwomen encounter are Uber drivers or Saudi princes. “As an Arab in France, I’ve lived in a lot of situations as Nezir,” said Boucif, who is also a rapper and holds a master’s in environmental law from the prestigious Sorbonne University.The show’s title in French is “Drôle,” meaning “funny.”Mika Cotellon/NetflixApolline (Elsa Guedj) meets Nezir (Boucif) at the comedy club.Mika Cotellon/NetflixBling (Jean Siuen) has had success in the comedy world, but is struggling to come up with material when the show opens. Mika Cotellon/NetflixPeople of color were instrumental in establishing the French stand-up scene, which is far younger than in the United States or Britain. Between 2006 and 2015, “Jamel Comedy Club” aired on French television, hosted by Jamel Debbouze, one of the country’s top comedians. Himself of Moroccan heritage, Debbouze featured largely people of color on his show. This gave “a voice to ethnic minorities that they didn’t have on TV shows,” said the comedian Paul Taylor, who performs in a mix of English and French.Taylor said there are only four clubs in France that follow the English-speaking stand-up tradition, with a lineup of several comedians each night. Generally, solo shows are favored in France, a result of the country’s strong theatrical tradition. Besides Paname, the three other clubs only opened in the last three years: Madame Sarfati, Fridge and Barbès Comedy Club.The Drôle Comedy Club in “Standing Up” was a purpose-built set, just in case Paris went into lockdown because of the coronavirus. The actors practiced their sets at Barbès Comedy Club, which opened for clandestine nights during Paris’s second lockdown, with around 10 comedians performing for around 30 audience members. The audience didn’t know the “Standing Up” actors weren’t comics, or that they were practicing for a television show.When it came time to film the characters’s stand-up sets at Drôle, the audience was made up of nonactors, with a camera trained on the performing comedian, and another on the audience’s reactions. “There is nothing worse than fake laughs and fake reactions,” Herrero said.Well-respected French comedians — Jason Brokerss, Fanny Ruwet and Shirley Souagnon — wrote the characters’ sets. Like “Call My Agent!,” the show features cameos, in this case from other French comics, including Hakim Jemili and Panayotis Pascot, who perform snippets of sets throughout each episode. Unlike with the appearances by internationally famous actors in “Call My Agent!,” Herrero doesn’t expect the French public, let alone Netflix viewers from other countries, to recognize these performers.Netflix has had a significant impact on stand-up in France. Before the rise of streaming services, only dogged French stand-up fans dug around the internet to look for performances. Now, comedy specials hosted by the streaming service have made American comedy much more accessible in France.Boucif named Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. as comedians he liked from his research for playing Nezir. “I like stand-up when it’s subversive, when it’s not politically correct,” he said. When asked about Louis C.K.’s admitted sexual misconduct and the controversy surrounding Chappelle’s comments about transgender people, Boucif said he didn’t know about those issues.Nezir and Aïssatou (Mariama Gueye) are both trying to make it as stand-up comics.Mika Cotellon/NetflixBoucif’s response is similar to the way many French comedians approach American comedy, Taylor said. They gravitated to the same few names who got the big Netflix deals, he said, but don’t understand the surrounding context.One of the later episodes of “Standing Up” includes a translated Louis C.K. joke. Herrero, who is aware of the comic’s past sexual misconduct, said the writing staff chose him because they needed a name the French audience would know.In her career so far, Herrero has broken with French television norms. She was not only the screenwriter for “Call My Agent!” but also, following the first season, named its showrunner. Typically, French screenwriters conceive of shows, then hand their script and control to directors, she said. The role Herrero negotiated with network executives looks more like the American showrunner model, where she retained overall control.France 2, the broadcaster that aired “Call My Agent!,” hasn’t run anything like it since. “It was a miracle,” Herrero said. “Most [French studios] are doing cop shows and family comedies,” she added.“Standing Up” is unusual in the French TV landscape for being a dramedy. The show’s target audience is relatively young, and Herrero said she hopes it will help stand-up comedy continue to gain credibility in the French mainstream.“It’s because of Netflix this show can exist,” she added. More

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      in Movies

      Study Finds Sustained Progress for Female Directors and Filmmakers of Color

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      But women of color are still not getting feature directing jobs in Hollywood, the annual report on top-grossing movies finds.For the first time in a long time, Dr. Stacy L. Smith is feeling optimistic. The director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has been studying the gender and race breakdown of Hollywood’s top-grossing directors since 2007, and finally has some good news to report. For the first time since her work began, Smith has seen sustained progress for women and people of color working behind the camera.Over the 15 years of the study, which analyzed 1,542 directors, only 5.4 percent were women. In 2020, that percentage rose to 15 percent and in 2021, it stood at 12.7 percent. Despite that recent drop, and despite the fact that the proportion is nowhere close to reflecting the American population, which is 51 percent female, Smith is encouraged that the numbers have stayed in the double digits for a sustained period of time.“I think that the people that are running these large companies that are largely responsible for about 90 percent of the market share are finally starting to diversify,” Smith said in a phone interview. “And we’re not only seeing this with gender, we’re also seeing big gains with race/ethnicity in the second year of the pandemic. Despite the uncertainty around the box office, there seems to be a concerted effort to correct the biases of the past.”The news comes the day after “The Power of the Dog” director Jane Campion made history, becoming the first woman to be nominated twice in the best director category for the Academy Awards. (She was previously nominated in 1994 for “The Piano.”)When it comes to underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, which includes Black and Latino filmmakers, the percentage of directors reached a 15-year high: 27.3 percent. The group with the least amount of traction directing features are women of color, who still make up only 2 percent of the total.“When Hollywood thinks of a woman director, they’re thinking of a Caucasian woman, and when they think of a person of color directing, they’re thinking about a male,” Smith said, pointing to the fact that female directors of color earn the highest reviews according to Metacritic yet most often are given lower production budgets and fewer marketing dollars from their studio beneficiaries.To address this disparity head on, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative is starting a $25,000 scholarship program for a woman of color during her senior year at an American film school. In addition to the financial aid, the winning student will be advised by a group of Hollywood executives and talent, including Donna Langley, the chairman of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, and Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, among others.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      in Theater

      Los Angeles Is Changing. Can a Flagship Theater Keep Up?

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      LOS ANGELES — For 55 years, the Center Theater Group has showcased theater in a city that has always been known for the movies. Its three stages have championed important new works — “Angels in America,” “Zoot Suit” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” to name three of its most acclaimed offerings — while importing big-ticket crowd pleasers from Broadway (coming this spring: “The Lehman Trilogy”).But this Los Angeles cultural institution is at a crossroads as it goes through its first leadership change in 17 years, and confronts questions about its mission, programming and appeal in a changing city, all amid a debilitating pandemic.Michael Ritchie, the organization’s artistic director, announced last summer that he would retire nearly 18 months before his contract ended in June 2023; he stepped down at the end of the December, citing the need for the organization to move in a new direction in response to social changes and debate about the theater’s future. The organization, which is a nonprofit, is using the transition to consider how to adjust to what is sure to be a very different post-Covid era — a sweeping discussion that theater administrators said would involve some 300 people, including its board of directors, staff, actors, director and contributors.“At the age of 50, you start to think about the next chapter,” said Meghan Pressman, the managing director of the Center Theater Group. “There’s so much happening now. Coming out of a pandemic. Coming out of a period of a racial crisis. Years of inequity.”“We are no longer your mother’s C.T.G. anymore,” she said.The obstacles are considerable.The Ahmanson Theater, in downtown Los Angeles, had to cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” in December.Ryan MillerLike theaters everywhere, Center Theater Group — the Ahmanson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center downtown, and the Kirk Douglas Theater 10 miles to the west in Culver City — is grappling with empty seats, declining revenues and the coronavirus. The Ahmanson cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” with Bradley Whitford in December, canceling 22 performances after positive coronavirus tests in the cast and crew at the height of what in a normal year would have been a holiday rush.The cancellation cost the Center Theater Group $1.5 million in lost revenues, including ticket returns. That came after the organization was forced to make millions of dollars in spending cuts over the course of the pandemic, cutting its staff to 140 this season from 185 and reducing its annual budget to $47 million for this fiscal year, $10 million less than the budget for the fiscal year before the pandemic.And the theater group is struggling to adjust to sweeping reassessments of tradition that have emerged from social unrest across the country over the past two years. It was reminded of this new terrain by the uproar that greeted the announcement of a 2021-22 season for the Taper and the Douglas, 10 plays that included just one by a woman and one by a transgender playwright. Jeremy O. Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” which was on the schedule, announced that he would withdraw his play from the season before agreeing to go forward only after the Taper pledged to program only “women-identifying or nonbinary playwrights” next season.The Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture since the Mark Taper Forum, above, and the Ahmanson opened in 1967 at the Los Angeles Music Center.Tom BonnerThe Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture for decades.It “is still the flagship theater company of L.A.,” said Stephen Sachs, the co-artistic director of the Fountain Theater, an influential small theater on the East Side of the city. “I think it’s at a moment of reckoning, like everything that is theater in Los Angeles. The C.T.G. is the bar that we compare ourselves to. They set a standard for L.A., not only for ourselves but for the country.”The Music Center, the sprawling midcentury arts complex on top of Bunker Hill, across from Frank Gehry’s billowing Walt Disney Concert Hall, is at the center of cultural, arts and society life in Los Angeles. The project was driven by Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the cultural leader who was the wife and mother of publishers of the Los Angeles Times, and also houses the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which was the site of the Academy Awards off and on from 1969 to 1999. “Before the Music Center, it was really a cultural wasteland,” Marylouise Oates, who was the society columnist for the Los Angeles Times in the late 1980s, said, referring to the city.Theaters across the country are struggling to find the balance between pleasing and challenging their audience as they confront declining ticket sales and the threat of competition in the form of a screen in a living room. Theater here has also long existed in the shadow of Hollywood, to the annoyance of those involved in what is by any measure a vibrant theater community.“I don’t see how anyone can say it’s not a theater town,” said Charles Dillingham, who was the managing director of the Center Theater Group from 1991 through 2011.The Kirk Douglas Theater, in a former movie palace in Culver City, opened in 2004.Craig SchwartzFor its first 40 years, the theater group’s personality — adventurous and daring more often than not — was forged by Gordon Davidson, who was recruited by Chandler to be the first artistic director at the Taper. He was of a generation of force-of-nature theater impresarios, like Joseph Papp in New York and Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis.“I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper. “I’ll never forget Gordon sitting down, taking out his buck slip and saying, ‘What do you need?’”The Taper opened with the “The Devils,” by the British dramatist John Whiting, about a Catholic priest in France accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun. The subject matter caused a rustle, but Chandler, who died in 1997, stood by Davidson.“She wasn’t always happy,” said Judi Davidson, who was married to Gordon Davidson, who died in 2016. “She said, ‘I’ll make a deal with you. You tell which plays I should come to and which plays I shouldn’t come to.’ ”The Taper staged “Zoot Suit,” by Luis Valdez, in 1978, a rare production of a work by a Latino writer, which went on to Broadway; as well as a full production of both parts of “Angels in America,” by Tony Kushner, in 1992, before it moved to Broadway. “I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper.Jay Thompson In recent years, the theater has come under criticism for too often catering to an older audience hungry for the comfort of familiar works. Still, under Ritchie, who declined a request for an interview, it presented the premieres of acclaimed works, including “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” which had its world premiere at the Douglas before moving to the Taper.Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” said the Center Theater Group had responded quickly when he objected to the overwhelmingly male lineup of writers. “When I raised my issues and pulled my play, they didn’t act defensively,” Harris said. “They acted. Other places would have let the play move on and figure out a way to blame me.”The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

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      in Theater

      Control of New York’s Stages Remains in White Hands, a Study Finds

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      The Asian American Performers Action Coalition is hoping for a season of change when theaters reopen.As New York’s theaters prepare to reopen following the twin crises of a pandemic and rising discontent over racial inequity, a new study which found that both power and money in the theater world have been disproportionately controlled by white people is calling for “a fundamental paradigm shift.”The study, by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition, found that at the 18 major nonprofit theaters examined by the group, 100 percent of artistic directors were white, as were 88 percent of board members. On Broadway, 94 percent of producers were white, as were 100 percent of general managers.The study offers a direct challenge, not only to theater leaders, but also to those who fund the institutions, saying, “it remains to be seen whether or not the multitude of antiracist solidarity statements and pledges to diversity will result in real action and systemic change.”“Our expanded leadership stats confirm that almost every gatekeeper, employer and decision maker in the NYC theater industry is white,” the coalition declares in a letter introducing the study.They examined the 2018-19 New York theater season — the last full season before the pandemic — looking at every Broadway show, as well as the work of the nonprofits.The coalition called particular attention to a dearth of shows about Asian Americans. “Even as the industry has made small gains in diversity in recent years, particularly at the nonprofits, our work at AAPAC has shown that Asian-focused narratives remain consistently minimized and overlooked,” the report says.Among the other findings:Using publicly available tax forms, the coalition calculated the public and private contributions to nonprofit theaters, and said that $150 million went to the 18 big nonprofits in the city that it referred to as “predominantly white institutions,” compared with $12.6 million to 28 theaters of color.At the theaters studied, 59 percent of roles went to white actors, compared to 29 percent for Black actors, 6 percent for Asian American actors and 5 percent for Latinos (the coalition uses the gender-neutral term Latinx).Creative teams were less diverse, with 81 percent of writers being white, along with 81 percent of directors and 77 percent of designers.The report gave grades to individual theaters, and declared the Public Theater to be the most diverse, and the Irish Repertory Theater to be least diverse.The intense focus nationally on diversity issues has prompted an increase in research about race, gender and disability within the theater industry. A coalition of groups doing such research, called Counting Together, formed in 2019, and this month introduced the CountingTogether.org website, hosted by the Dramatists Guild and the American Theater Wing, to make the research more readily available. More

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      in Music

      New Report Paints Bleak Picture of Diversity in the Music Industry

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      The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative examined 4,060 executives at six types of companies, and found 19.8 percent were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.A year ago, as protests spread across the country following the murder of George Floyd, the music industry promised to change.Major record labels, streaming platforms and broadcasters pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable donations. The diversity of the music industry itself — a business that relies heavily on the creative labor of Black artists — came under scrutiny, with calls to hire more people of color and to elevate women and minorities into management and decision-making positions.But how diverse is the music business? The answer, according to a new study: not very.A report by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, released Tuesday, examined the makeup of 4,060 executives, at the vice president level and above, at 119 companies of six types: corporate music groups, record labels, music publishers, radio broadcasters, streaming services and live music companies.Among those executives, 19.8 percent were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, including 7.5 percent who were Black. Women made up 35.3 percent of the total.Delving deeper into the numbers, the authors of the 25-page report, led by Stacy L. Smith and Carmen Lee, found that the representation of women and minorities seemed to shrink as they looked higher up music companies’ organization charts.After filtering out subsidiaries, the researchers looked at the uppermost leadership positions — chief executives, chairmen and presidents — in a subset of 70 major and independent companies, and found that 86.1 percent of those people were both white and male. The 10 people of color who held those positions were all at independents, and just two were women: Desiree Perez, a longtime associate of Jay-Z who leads his company Roc Nation, and Golnar Khosrowshahi, the founder of Reservoir, which owns music rights.The report includes some stark findings. For example, among the 4,060 people in the study’s sample, the researchers found 17.7 white male executives for every Black female one.“Underrepresented and Black artists are dominating the charts, but the C-suite is a ‘diversity desert,’” Dr. Smith said in a statement. “The profile of top artists may give some in the industry the illusion that music is an inclusive business, but the numbers at the top tell a different story.”Each year since 2018, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has tracked the artists, songwriters and producers behind the biggest hits. Again and again, it has found that women are far outnumbered by men, yet revealed some encouraging numbers for underrepresented groups: People of color have made up about 47 percent of the credited artists behind 900 top pop songs since 2012.Yet the group’s new report, called “Inclusion in the Music Business: Gender & Race/Ethnicity Across Executives, Artists & Talent Teams,” and sponsored by Universal Music Group, shows that women and people of color are poorly represented in the power structure of the industry itself.The variation across different job levels and industry sectors is notable. Black executives fared best within record labels, making up 14.4 percent of all positions, and 21.2 percent of artist-and-repertoire, or A&R, roles, which tend to work most closely with artists. Black people hold just 4 percent of executive jobs in radio, and 3.3 percent in live music.According to U.S. census data, 13.4 percent of Americans identify as Black.Women posted their highest executive numbers in the live music business, holding 39.1 percent of positions. But drilling down, the study found, most of those women were white. Even at record labels, where Black executives were best represented, Black women held only 5.3 percent of executive jobs.The U.S.C. report is one of a number of efforts underway to examine the music industry and evaluate its progress in reaching stated goals of diversity and inclusion. This week, the Black Music Action Coalition, a group of artist managers, lawyers and other insiders, is expected to release a “report card” on how well the industry has met its own commitments to change.Much of the data used in the U.S.C. report, the researchers said, came from publicly available sources, like company websites. The report suggests that a lack of participation in the study by music companies was a reason.“Companies were given the opportunity to participate and confirm information, especially of senior management teams,” the report says. “Roughly a dozen companies did so. The vast majority did not.”The authors of the report, who also include Marc Choueiti, Katherine Pieper, Zoe Moore, Dana Dinh and Artur Tofan, said they want to spur the industry toward change. The report recommends a number of steps that companies can take to make their executive ranks more diverse, including making career pathways more flexible and “fast tracking” leaders with support and mentoring.“Our hope,” Dr. Lee said, “is that the industry will come together to tackle this problem in a way that creates meaningful progress.” More