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      The Great Experiment That Is ‘The Color Purple’

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      A new adaptation shows how rich Alice Walker’s novel is and how the source material can lend itself to unconventional storytelling.Last month, I saw something I hadn’t seen in two decades of moviegoing: three Black-directed films in one week.I watched Blitz Bazawule’s adaptation of “The Color Purple,” a musical about a female survivor overcoming sexual assault and domestic abuse; the concert film “Renaissance,” directed by and starring Beyoncé; and “Origin,” Ava DuVernay’s dramatization of Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book “Caste.” Though each is starkly different in everything from story to aesthetic vision, my happenstance of seeing all three so close together revealed their shared interest in telling stories about African American history in new ways.Beyoncé remembers the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s; DuVernay recognizes early African American researchers of race relations, like Allison Davis, Elizabeth Stubbs Davis and Alfred L. Bright; and Bazawule looks at a 40-year period in the life of a Black woman living through Jim Crow and the Jazz Age.That chance week of movies also allowed me to reflect on the unprecedented journey and ultimate cinematic triumph of “The Color Purple.” Starting in rural Georgia in the early 20th century, the story follows Celie, an orphaned girl who is repeatedly violated and twice impregnated by her Pa, a man she considers her father. She is forced to leave her younger sister, Nettie, when Pa marries her off to a much older widow, Albert, whom she knows only as Mister.Beyoncé on a Toronto tour stop. “Renaissance,” which she also directed, arrives in an ecosystem partly created by the first adaptation of “The Color Purple.”The New York TimesCentered on Celie’s finding her voice, discovering her sexuality in her relationship with the blues singer, Shug Avery and journeying to forgiveness, selfhood and community with other women, like her daughter-in-law, Sofia, Walker’s novel earned her the National Book Award and made her the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The movie earned 11 Oscar nominations; then came a Tony Award for the 2005 Broadway show and two for the 2015 revival, making this one of the most prized narratives in American history.Nowadays, it is hard to believe that when Steven Spielberg released his adaptation in 1985, he and Walker had to cross a picket line of protesters to attend the premiere. But his drama was met with great controversy. While researching my book “In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece,” I discovered that many critics, the majority of whom were Black male writers or political leaders, had accused the filmmakers of reinforcing stereotypes of Black men as hyperviolent through the characterizations of Pa, Albert and Harpo (Albert’s oldest son) and the abuse they inflicted on Celie and Sofia. Other critics took umbrage at Celie’s lesbian relationship as undermining traditional Black family values.Led by Black organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., the Nation of Islam and the now defunct Coalition Against Black Exploitation, the campaign against that movie was bitter and divisive. In turn, its defenders, including many Black women who saw themselves in Walker’s characters, felt pitted against others in their own community. The pushback was so effective that the film won no Academy Awards. (It lost the top Oscar to “Out of Africa.”)“Without a doubt the controversy is the reason we didn’t take home a single award that night,” Oprah Winfrey, who starred as Sofia in the original and later served as a producer of both the stage and movie musicals, told me in an interview in 2018. “I was puzzled and frustrated by the N.A.A.C.P.”And yet the film was groundbreaking, changing our understanding of what was possible for Black actors and stories in Hollywood. Ultimately, it paved the way for these new works by Beyoncé, DuVernay and Bazawule. And unlike its predecessor, Bazawule’s musical version, opening in theaters on Christmas Day, premieres alongside other films with predominantly Black casts, and so his “Color Purple” is free to reimagine and experiment with form and conventional musical conceit.Through Celie’s vivid inner life, the dynamic songs and choreography, and playful cinematic references, this version honors its literary, Broadway and Hollywood forerunners while successfully updating how we see Alice Walker’s characters and, even more surprisingly, innovating how we can experience the movie musical genre itself.Arriving in a different feminist moment, Bazawule is not bedeviled by the sexist and homophobic concerns that plagued the first movie. And yet, his most memorable scenes subtly take on those past critiques while adding new cinematic layers to Celie’s story. Early in the film, Celie’s active imagination — depicted in the novel through her letter-writing — is shown as both a coping mechanism and a surrealistic narrative detour. When the teenage Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) discovers that her children are alive after Pa convinced her that they had died, she dreams of avoiding the drudgery of her life.In the number “She Be Mine,” Celie imagines that she has left Pa’s store and walks through a Southern landscape that is paradoxically lush and marred by the exploitation of Black laborers. As she passes a group of Black men working on a chain gang and Black laundry women washing clothes by a waterfall, we recognize that her escape is limited and illusory and that she is as oppressed in her home as they are in their work.But when adult Celie (Fantasia Barrino-Taylor) tends to the bodacious blues singer Shug (Taraji P. Henson), her interiority takes over even more. As Shug falls asleep in the bathtub while listening to a record, Celie suddenly imagines a gramophone that’s larger than life, and standing on a spinning vinyl album that doubles as a concert stage, she belts an empowering song.Later, Bazawule expands his surreal aesthetic when Celie and Shug go to the movies. Sitting in the segregated balcony section as they watch “The Flying Ace,” Richard E. Norman’s 1926 silent with an all-Black cast, Celie imagines them in a different movie — one in color in which they are dressed in ball gowns and singing to each other in front a Duke Ellington-like jazz band. When we return to the present, they kiss, cementing their relationship and finally enabling Celie’s fantasy to come true. In 1985, that kiss was brief and the cause of much public debate. With access to her inner thoughts in 2023, Celie’s hopes and desires become our own: We recognize that her intimacy with Shug is long-awaited and fulfilling.Taraji P. Henson and Barrino-Taylor working on “The Color Purple” with Blitz Bazawule. Eli Ade/Warner Bros. PicturesAs Celie finds her voice, rejects the abuse from Albert and gains more and more agency, her flights of fancy seem to disappear. But, by the time we reach the showstopper “Miss Celie’s Pants,” in which she, Shug and other women celebrate Celie’s separation from Albert and her newfound entrepreneurialism, the bold color palette, uplifting music and lively dancing associated with her dreamlike sequences dominate.Unlike other movie musicals in which the songs distract from the dramatic action, the numbers and the composer Kris Bowers’s score are woven together in a way that makes the soundscape feel like the film’s true setting. This might be because Bazawule was one of several filmmakers who collaborated with Beyoncé on “Black Is King,” the visual companion to the soundtrack for the live-action “Lion King” (2021); he understands how to make an entire film sing rather than string together a series of scenes.And yet the original song Bazawule co-wrote for the movie, “Workin’,” for Celie’s stepson, Harpo (Corey Hawkins), stands apart for giving this man more multidimensionality than he had in the previous adaptations.In this scene, Harpo rejects Albert’s authority by building his own house, and it’s a harbinger of his evolution. He goes from being a sensitive young adult to an abusive husband to a man who finally breaks his family’s intergenerational cycle of violence against women. Walker’s novel partly shows this metamorphosis, but Bazawule fully realizes it here, nullifying any lingering controversies about Harpo’s fate or flaws in his representation.Growth, I suspect, was always the point. It took a while for Winfrey and Scott Sanders to convince their fellow producer Spielberg that the Broadway musical could lead to a new adaptation. “I didn’t really know if ‘Color Purple’ had another movie in it,” he told Variety. That Bazawule breathes new life into these characters reminds us of what a masterpiece Celie’s story remains for us today. More

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      Fantasia Barrino-Taylor on ‘The Color Purple’ and a Painful Role

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      Throughout the six months of production on the new film adaptation of “The Color Purple,” Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, who plays the protagonist Celie Johnson, often called on God for strength.“There were times that I just felt like I’m not going to make it. I cannot do it. I would cry going to set. I would cry leaving set,” she admitted sadly. “I would talk to God, and I would tell him, ‘You’ve got to make this make sense. Make it make sense. There’s got to be something out of this.’ It was so hard.”The film, based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, details the transformative journey of a rural Georgia woman in the early 20th century. First adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie in 1985 by Steven Spielberg, then reinterpreted for Broadway in 2005, it has once again been retrofitted as a musical, complete with dance. The role of Celie, however, remains consistent — one of inveterate trauma, stretched over decades of abuse by first her stepfather, then her husband, until she manufactures the strength to stand on her own. Onstage, when Barrino-Taylor took over the part in the original Broadway run, and then on film, that meant enduring endless verbal attacks, physical abuse and lovelessness, which was difficult to manage on a daily basis. Barrino-Taylor would often leave the set deflated and bruised from doing her own stunts.Before production began, she had “started traumatic therapy, where you tap into the younger person, the younger Fantasia, and you try to heal things that you either suppress or are literally forgotten,” she said in a video interview. A wife, mother of four, grandmother and owner of two dogs, Barrino-Taylor, now 39, was committed to being her best self to those around her. “I wanted to take this healing journey. So, I had to stop therapy, and I had to allow Celie to be my life coach. Girl, that wasn’t easy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Watch an Unusual Family Reunion in ‘All of Us Strangers’

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      The director and screenwriter Andrew Haigh narrates a sequence from his film, starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.In this scene from “All of Us Strangers,” a man goes back to his childhood home and meets with his parents. The only wrinkle is that the two have been dead for 30 years.The sequence features Andrew Scott as Adam, as well as Jamie Bell and Claire Foy playing the long lost parents.In his narration of the moment, the film’s screenwriter and director, Andrew Haigh, noted that he filmed it in his childhood home and that it was a magical experience to get to shoot there. “It felt like a haunted house,” he said.While Haigh said he wanted to play the scene with tenderness, he also “wanted the audience to be unsure of what we were seeing. Are they ghosts? Are they manifestations of his subconscious? Is it a fantasy? And I wanted to play with those different elements, so it felt like it could be all of those things, and sort of keep making you ask questions about what is real and what is not real.”Read the “All of Us Strangers” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Sofia Boutella Talks ‘Rebel Moon’ and Madonna

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      Sofia Boutella knows what it’s like to lose a home.Born and raised in Algeria, Boutella was 10 when she and her family fled to Paris after Algeria descended into civil war.Now 41, she drew on that formative experience for Zack Snyder’s sci-fi epic “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire” as Kora, a mysterious woman who has been uprooted from her former life and must create a new one in a village on a distant moon. Like Kora, Boutella understands what such a journey takes from you and what it gives in return.“There is something that happens when you remove yourself from your country of origin that is very powerful,” Boutella said. “I don’t feel a sense of belonging to a territory. But at the same time, I feel such a strong sense of being part of this earth and a connection to it as a whole.”Before turning to acting, Boutella danced — attending ballet class in Algiers when she was a girl and, finding a semblance of stability when she continued with ballet as well as jazz, contemporary and hip-hop in France. She also tried rhythmic gymnastics and spent a year on her new country’s national team.When she was 19, she became a dancer for a Nike Women’s campaign, crisscrossing the globe, and soon landed a gig as a stage dancer for Madonna, a life-changing experience that opened the door for work with Rihanna and Usher.“I was a tomboy when she met me,” Boutella said of Madonna. “She gave me my first pair of heels.”Boutella as Kora, the mysterious woman at the heart of “Rebel Moon.”Clay Enos/NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Bradley Cooper’s ‘Maestro’ Won’t Let Leonard Bernstein Fail

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      Bradley Cooper’s movie has an unrelenting focus on Bernstein’s marriage. What’s missing are his struggles as a musician.Three society women in cocktail dresses stare up at the camera, each with her right fist raised in the Black Panther salute. The cover line: “Free Leonard Bernstein!”This was New York Magazine’s issue of June 8, 1970, which led with Tom Wolfe’s gleeful 25,000-word evisceration of a party that had been held at Bernstein’s Park Avenue apartment that January. The purpose was to raise awareness of — and money for — the 21 Panthers in jail awaiting trial on charges of planning political violence.Their incarceration had become a cause célèbre among a certain set of well-off white liberals, of whom Bernstein and his wife, Felicia — the subjects of “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s movie about their troubled marriage, now streaming — were prime examples.The backlash to the party’s “elegant slumming,” as The New York Times put it in an editorial, was swift and brutal. Wolfe’s story, months later, was only the most expansive piece of anti-Bernstein criticism. Jewish groups incensed at some of the Panthers’ positions picketed his apartment building and booed him when he led the New York Philharmonic. “Radical Chic,” as the article was titled inside the magazine, was one of the loudest, bitterest scandals Bernstein ever experienced.It is also one of the many things that go unmentioned in “Maestro,” a depiction of a peerlessly multifaceted musician who was among the great cultural personalities of the 20th century. Bernstein (1918-90) was a composer, conductor, arranger, pianist, best-selling author and TV educator to millions. It can be hard today to imagine a classical musician being a glamorous mainstream celebrity, but that was Lenny. His tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s — which began as his “West Side Story” star was gleaming — is still considered the orchestra’s modern heyday.Absolutely digging: Donald Lee Cox, the field marshal of the Black Panther Party, speaking at the party at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Park Avenue apartment in 1970.Associated PressEvery biopic is a selective version of a life, and Bernstein’s wide-ranging and eventful life is more in need of selectivity than most. But “Maestro” is unblinkingly focused on Leonard and Felicia’s marriage, its ups and downs caused in large part by his romantic desires toward men.For Cooper, Bernstein’s consistent struggle in his marriage is countered by just-as-consistent success in his art and career. The movie bursts open with the 25-year-old Lenny’s triumphant, last-minute debut with the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1943. Broadcast nationally over the radio, it jump-started a half-century of renown.From there, it’s a parade of acclaim: the bright-toned early ballets and musicals, the stirring final chorus of “Candide,” a soul-shaking performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, packed parties (not the political ones), broadcast interviews.There are some flies in the ointment. Bernstein long grumbled that he wished he could compose when all the world wanted was more of his conducting, and “West Side Story” burdened him as he sought fame for his more “serious” music. The film briefly alludes to this, with Bernstein’s manager trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of podium work. But on the whole, “Maestro” shows Bernstein the artist as perfectly satisfied (and perfectly acclaimed), while Bernstein the man is fatally flawed.His relationships with men after his marriage are portrayed as more glancing and casual than they were in reality. And his separation from Felicia in 1976 and ’77, when he tried to live openly as gay, is treated in “Maestro” as a selfish mistake. The most indelible showcase for Bernstein’s sexuality in the film is a late-in-life, almost Mephistophelean dance party — as sweaty as his calisthenic conducting, bathed in lurid red light — as he seduces a student.There’s lots of the man’s defects in “Maestro”; the artist’s are nowhere to be found. Missing entirely is “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” his flop of a musical with Alan Jay Lerner that closed after seven performances on Broadway in 1976. And missing are his three grimly unsuccessful symphonies, the kind of high-minded music he wanted to be remembered for instead of “On the Town.”Cooper-as-Bernstein conducting, with the singers Isabel Leonard, left, and Rosa Feola. Jason McDonald/NetflixBernstein plays a bit of it on the piano at the beginning of the film, but otherwise missing, too, is “A Quiet Place,” the serious opera he longed to write his whole career — and which some 40 years later is still being futzed with by his estate to try and make it work onstage. While a scene in “Maestro” is set at the premiere of his “Mass,” which helped open the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971, we aren’t made aware of its mixed reception.And from that smash debut at Carnegie on, the film treats Bernstein as unimpeachable on the podium. But though he is today widely revered as a conductor of the music of others, that was hardly a universal opinion at the time. A 1967 Times review by Harold Schonberg, a longtime Bernstein skeptic, describes “an overblown and rather vulgar performance” of Mahler’s Second: “He took a terribly slow tempo, and that made his heavy-handed expressive devices — those pauses! those rubatos! — all but wrapped up in comic-strip balloons: Pow! Wham! Sigh!”But no one in “Maestro” nay-says Bernstein’s music making. This artificially heightens the contrast of his career with his marriage, distorting the viewer’s sense of him and his legacy. As an admirer of Bernstein’s work, warts and all, I was disappointed to find his life as an artist depicted as less complex — and less interesting — than his life as a husband.Cooper doesn’t pay much attention to Bernstein’s personal stumbles, either, if they don’t relate to the marriage. Most glaring is the “Radical Chic” affair, in which his critics seized on the contrast between Upper East Side progressivism and open radicalism, with Bernstein being quoted in The Times (unfairly, he said) as answering a Panther’s call to seize the means of production with “I dig absolutely.”It would have been an intriguing episode to include in “Maestro” since both Bernsteins were implicated in the blowback, which served to unite them in fiasco. But that would have been jarring because it’s so unlike the scenes preferred by Cooper, in which Lenny is the perpetrator and Felicia the victim. Omitting the whole scandal contributes to the film’s flattening not just of Bernstein’s life but also of Felicia’s, which was full outside the marriage, too. (She was active in the American Civil Liberties Union, the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War.)“Radical Chic” was big news. But what I missed most in “Maestro” was a minor bit of Bernstein: the 1952 one-act “Trouble in Tahiti,” a deceptively peppy, stealthily devastating piece about a prosperous, unhappily married suburban couple.This was an autobiographically charged work; the main characters were originally named Sam and Jennie, the names of Bernstein’s parents, who fought bitterly through his childhood. (The wife’s was eventually changed to the more singable Dinah, the name of Bernstein’s paternal grandmother.)But the movie presents Bernstein as a fully formed genius, without an evident childhood or parents beyond a passing mention of his father’s cruelty. It would have made sense for Sam and Jennie to have been more present in “Maestro,” if only to offer some context for Bernstein’s own difficult marriage. The sense of history repeating itself might have relieved some of Cooper’s insistence on Bernstein and his sexuality bearing sole responsibility for his problems with Felicia.All these omissions lead to a rigid, either-or, black-and-white atmosphere. And for all Cooper’s well-practiced facsimiles of Bernstein’s galvanizing, perspiring, emotionally all-in style on the podium, that gives the film a stilted, brittle quality at its core. More

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      The World Has Finally Caught Up to Colman Domingo

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      Colman Domingo was at the Equinox on 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue when his agent called. A rush of hope overtook him: After a week spent auditioning for eight film and television roles, finally he was about to get something.This was in 2014, which Domingo experienced as a year of incredible highs and dangerously low lows. He had just come off a successful, soul-enriching transfer of the stage musical “The Scottsboro Boys” in London, but upon returning to New York, he felt quickly cut down to size. Despite his Tony nomination for the Kander and Ebb musical, Domingo was stuck auditioning for “under-fives,” screen roles that had little more to offer than a line or two. Still, he felt backed into a corner, praying that one of them would hit.The most promising was a callback for HBO’s Prohibition-era drama “Boardwalk Empire”: To audition for a maître d’ at a Black-owned nightclub, Domingo had donned a tuxedo to sing and tap dance for the producers. You can imagine how he felt, then, when his agent began that call at the gym by saying that everyone on “Boardwalk Empire” had loved his audition. This is the one that’s going to change it up for me, Domingo thought. This is the one that’s going to finally be my big break.There was just one problem, his agent said. After the callback, a historical researcher on the show reminded producers that the maître d’s in those nightclubs were typically light-skinned, and Domingo was not. “Boardwalk Empire” had passed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      What to Know About ‘Maestro’: A Guide to Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein Biopic

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      Now on Netflix, the movie tracks the life of the American conductor and composer and his wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre, played by Carey Mulligan.Pop quiz: Who wrote the score for Bradley Cooper’s new Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro”?Trick question: Bernstein. But you might not realize it, or learn of some of his more lasting accomplishments (“West Side Story” erasure!), even after watching the entire film, which focuses on the personal life of the prodigiously talented musician.Which is to say, the film — which Cooper directed and starred in, and which is now streaming on Netflix — does not hand-hold. It assumes some basic familiarity with one of America’s most storied conductors and composers. Here’s a guide to help you get up to speed.His careerWhat is Bernstein best known for?One of the rare virtuosos to compose for musical theater, write classical music and conduct august bodies like the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein is probably best remembered as the composer of the 1957 musical “West Side Story.”The Manhattan-set tale of urban gang warfare in New York City, based on “Romeo & Juliet,” includes standards like “Tonight,” “I Feel Pretty” and the aching, wistful “Maria.” The classic show, a collaboration with Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, and Stephen Sondheim, who penned the lyrics, won two Tony Awards in its original incarnation.In his day, Bernstein was known first and foremost as an animated, passionate conductor. After his spectacular fill-in debut at the Philharmonic at age 25 in 1943 — on just a few hours’ notice, because the scheduled guest conductor fell ill — Bernstein would be affiliated with the orchestra for four decades and conduct symphonies around the world.He also wrote classical music, including three symphonies, “Jeremiah,” “The Age of Anxiety” and “Kaddish,” and made the classical realm accessible to ordinary Americans through his Young People’s Concerts. Those televised lectures, which ran on CBS for 14 years, covered a broad range of subjects including humor in music, and the composers Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky.What is Tanglewood?Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its training academy in the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts, is where Bernstein studied with Serge Koussevitzky, then the director of the ensemble. The two met in 1940, when Koussevitzky selected a 22-year-old Bernstein as one of three inaugural conducting fellows for the Berkshire Music Center, now known as the Tanglewood Music Center.Bernstein went on to teach and perform there nearly every summer for 50 years, becoming the head of orchestral conducting at Tanglewood after Koussevitzky died in 1951. In 1990, Bernstein led the final performance of his life there — a gripping account of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.How much of the film’s score is Bernstein’s music?That cue you hear when Bernstein finds out he’ll be making his conducting debut at the New York Philharmonic? That’s from “On the Waterfront,” the 1954 Marlon Brando drama for which Bernstein wrote the music. That spiky, horn-filled composition that signals tension when Bernstein and a male lover arrive at the family’s Connecticut home? That’s the prologue from “West Side Story.”In fact, most of the music you hear was written by Bernstein. (Also see if you can spot classical excerpts from his ballets “Facsimile” and “Fancy Free,” his opera “A Quiet Place,” and parts of his second and third symphonies.)His personal lifeWas Bernstein gay or bisexual?Though he was married to his wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), for 26 years, he had numerous relationships — with both men and women — before and during their marriage, and after her death in 1978.The film focuses on two of them — his dalliance with the clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), whose bottom Bernstein slaps at the beginning of the film, and the musician Tom Cothran (Gideon Glick), whom he steals kisses with at a party and brings to his Connecticut home.What was society’s attitude toward gay people at the time?Anti-gay prejudice was rampant in America in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Lavender Scare — a fear that homosexual people had infiltrated the federal government and were a threat to national security — led to the dismissal of gay and lesbian employees, and those assumed to be, en masse. Gay, lesbian and transgender people — particularly public figures — faced intense pressure to conceal their identities, and Bernstein worried that the public revelation of his sexual orientation would hurt his conducting prospects.Did Montealegre know Bernstein was gay or bisexual when she married him?Yes, according to a letter she wrote to him the year after they were married, which the couple’s children discovered after her death. “You are a homosexual and may never change,” she wrote, adding later, “I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr.” She went on to tell him, “Let’s try and see what happens if you are free to do as you like, but without guilt and confession.”Was Bernstein open about his affairs with men?At first, he was discreet, heeding Montealegre’s request to not embarrass her publicly. But, as “Maestro” shows, he became “sloppy” later or, rather, decided that he no longer wanted to hide what he viewed as a fundamental part of himself amid society’s changing attitudes.In 1976, he briefly left Montealegre to live openly with his boyfriend, Cothran, though he returned to her a year later when she learned she had lung cancer and cared for her until she died at age 56.What did Bernstein say about his sexuality?Nothing, at least, publicly. But privately, he suffered through years of therapy, apparently in the hope that he could be “cured” of his attraction to men. That desire lasted a lifetime: “I have been engaged in an imaginary life with Felicia,” he wrote in a letter to his sister, Shirley, from Israel in 1950, “having her by my side on the beach as a shockingly beautiful Yemenite boy passes.”Did Bernstein love his wife?Bernstein was “a gay man who got married,” his “West Side Story” collaborator Arthur Laurents once said in response to the assumption that Bernstein, who had three children with Montealegre, was bisexual. “He wasn’t conflicted about his sexual orientation at all. He was just gay.”But what is clear, from their children’s memories and from Bernstein’s own letters, is that he and Montealegre had an abiding affection for one another, and that their relationship was built on tenderness and mutual respect.“Bernstein absolutely loved her — there was no question about that,” Paul R. Laird, the author of “Leonard Bernstein,” a 2018 biography, recently told Time magazine. “It was as sincere a marriage as you’re going to get between a male homosexual and a woman at a time when a lot of male homosexuals married women.”Bernstein’s oldest daughter, Jamie, has spoken about her parents’ friendship. “They were really great friends, and probably that counts for the most in the long run, that they could still make each other laugh,” she said in a 1997 PBS interview.How did Bernstein die?He had received an emphysema diagnosis in his mid-20s — he would struggle with addiction to cigarettes and alcohol for most of his life — and died on Oct. 14, 1990, at 72, of a heart attack caused by lung failure.He was often depressed in his later years, intimidated that he would be best remembered as a conductor, resigned to the fact that he could never live up to the success of “West Side Story,” and guilty about his wife’s death from cancer, which he held himself responsible for. More