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      A Cheat Sheet for Moonbug Shows

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      Getting to know four Moonbug shows your kids may already know all too well.Here’s a cheat sheet for perplexed adults to some of the most popular children’s programs on earth, created and marketed by the London-based Moonbug Entertainment.CoComelonThe company’s monster ratings flagship features cartoon tykes singing and dancing while they take improbable joy in tasks not typically considered joyful, like brushing your teeth, eating vegetables or learning about colors. Plus nursery rhymes.Target audience 1 to 3 years oldSample lyric “We’ll find every color when we look around/This is red! This is orange! Look at what we found!” (from “Learning Colors Song.”)Little Baby BumLife lessons and musical adventures built around a cartoon girl named Mia and her friends, which include anthropomorphized farm animals. Plus nursery rhymes.Target audience Infancy to 2 years oldSample lyric “When you’re sick in bed and feeling oh so blue/I will help you get to feeling better soon,” Mia sings to the melody from “If You’re Happy and You Know It” as she brings food to a bedridden cow in “The “Kindness Song!”The title character in “Blippi,” one of Moonbug’s few live-action shows.Moonbug EntertainmentBlippiA rare live-action Moonbug offering, Blippi is a grinning, endlessly enthusiastic fellow played by two actors, one of whom is the character’s creator, Stevin John. Blippi has orange glasses, orange suspenders, an orange bow tie and a gleeful fascination with raspberries, dental hygiene, aquariums, the color blue and countless other subjects. Occasional nursery rhymes.Target audience 2 to 6 years oldSample lyric “Colorful balloons are all around/Don’t pop ‘em, they’ll make a loud sound.” (from “Colorful Balloons Song.”)A cast of characters help keep things growing on an “urban micro farm” in “Lellobee City Farm.” Moonbug EntertainmentLellobee City FarmSet on Grandma Mei’s “urban micro farm,” as it says on the Moonbug website, “Lellobee” stars a recurring cast of kids and animals. This time the singing and dancing celebrates slightly more grown up pleasures, like riding a bike, and slightly more evolved lessons, like the inevitability of accidents. And yes, there are nursery rhymes.Target audience 2 to 5 years oldSample lyric “Yeah, I love to ride my bike/I can ride whenever I like.” (from “You Can Ride a Bike!”) More

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      Judy Henske, a Distinctive Voice on the Folk Scene, Dies at 85

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      Her versatile vocals were a trademark, as was her comic stage patter. The character Annie Hall owed her a debt.Judy Henske, who made a splash on the folk scene of the early 1960s with a versatile voice that could conjure Billie Holiday or foreshadow Janis Joplin, and performances full of offbeat stage patter, died on April 27 in hospice care in Los Angeles. She was 85.The death was announced by her husband, the keyboardist Craig Doerge.Ms. Henske played in clubs and coffee houses on the West Coast in the late 1950s and early ’60s — she opened for Lenny Bruce at the Los Angeles club the Unicorn — before heading east to be part of the vibrant Greenwich Village scene. By 1963, when Robert Shelton of The New York Times sampled the up-and-coming talent in those clubs, she had made a strong impression.“Standing head and shoulders above the new contenders,” Mr. Shelton wrote, “is Judy Henske, a six-foot hollyhock who is blooming with talent.”“She is praiseworthy for her singing of blues, folk ballads and popular songs,” he added, “as well as for her freely improvised patter, which has been called ‘cafe of the absurd.’”That same year, her debut album, called simply “Judy Henske,” was released, and she appeared in a feature film, “Hootenanny Hoot,” playing herself, alongside Johnny Cash, the Brothers Four and other musical acts.“I was the only folk singer who looked good in a swimsuit,” she told The Santa Cruz Sentinel of California in 2000, explaining her presence in that forgotten movie.In 1964 her second album, “High Flying Bird,” was released. Its title track, written by Billy Edd Wheeler, was among her better-known songs, and the record also included a bluesy version of the standard “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” and a mournful cover of “God Bless the Child.”“The Death-Defying Judy Henske,” recorded live in front of an audience in a studio in 1966, captured some of her trademark banter. One of that album’s tracks, “Betty and Dupree,” is almost 11 minutes long and begins with Ms. Henske telling an improbable yarn about two octogenarians looking for love that goes on for four minutes before she starts singing. But the record also included plenty of folk, soul and blues.“Henske’s ability to mark her territory in all of these genres, define it, and then burn it down is decidedly spellbinding,” Matthew Greenwald wrote on the website Analog Planet when the album was rereleased some 40 years later.Ms. Henske performing with Paul Butterfield at the Cafe au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1968. Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn 1969 Ms. Henske and her husband at the time, the musician and arranger Jerry Yester, released the album “Farewell Aldebaran,” which took her into even more uncharted territory with its use of synthesizers and psychedelic flourishes. In the early 1970s she recorded with a quintet called Rosebud, but then — after her first marriage ended in divorce and she married Mr. Doerge, a fellow member of Rosebud, in 1973 — came a long absence from recording.In the late 1990s, though, people began to rediscover her, thanks to an internet fan site and to her mentions in the crime novels of Andrew Vachss, whose main character, a private detective named Burke, was a Henske fan.In 1999 she released her first album in decades, “Loose in the World.” The next year found her back onstage in Manhattan, playing the Bottom Line with Dave Van Ronk. Another album, “She Sang California,” came out in 2004. Old fans were surprised, in a good way.“They say, ‘Oh, you’re doing so well. We wondered what happened to you,’” she told The Marin Independent Journal of California in 2005. “It’s like I’m some kind of relative that they liked, or some kind of acquaintance they only had a good time with. And now here’s that person again. And they’re so glad to see me.”Judith Anne Henske was born on Dec. 20, 1936, in Chippewa Falls, Wis. Her father, William, was a doctor, and her mother, Dorothy (Thornton) Henske, studied nursing and worked for a time at the local woolen mill.While growing up, Judy sang at local events, including weddings — but only if her mother was in attendance.“I went to more weddings of people I didn’t even know,” Dorothy Henske told The Chippewa Herald-Telegram in 1962.Judy also sang in her church choir.“She told me once she had such a powerful voice because one of the nuns in Chippewa Falls stood on her chest on a book to help her develop vocal power,” Mr. Doerge said by email. “Hard to know if that’s true, but no one questions the power of her voice.”Ms. Henske studied at Rosary College in Illinois and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. By 1959 she was in San Diego, performing at coffee houses; soon she made her way to Los Angeles.Ms. Henske with Jerry Yester at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2016, almost 50 years after they released “Farewell Aldebaran,” an album that took her into uncharted territory with use of synthesizers and psychedelic flourishes. Rebecca Sapp/WireImage for The Recording AcademyIn 1962 she was playing a club in Oklahoma City when Dave Guard, who had recently left the Kingston Trio, asked her to join a new group, the Whiskeyhill Singers. The group made two albums and increased Ms. Henske’s visibility, but it didn’t last long. After it broke up, she became a fixture in New York.Judy Collins, in her book “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music” (2011), wrote that Albert Grossman, the manager who had been instrumental in forming the group Peter, Paul and Mary, suggested that she, Ms. Henske and Jo Mapes form a trio, which he proposed to call the Brown-Eyed Girls. “You can get some brown contact lenses,” he told Ms. Collins.That idea fizzled, but Ms. Henske was doing fine on her own. Mr. Doerge said that he first met her when, home from college on Christmas break in 1964, he was asked to fill in as her backing pianist for a show she was doing at La Cave, a club in Cleveland.“Judy was already famous then,” he said, “and I was in awe.”That same year, Ms. Henske toured with a young comedian named Woody Allen, with whom she had sometimes shared the bill at the Village Gate and other New York clubs. In later years she was often said to have inspired Mr. Allen’s character Annie Hall (who like Ms. Henske was from Chippewa Falls), something she was asked about so often that, she said in the 2000 interview with the Santa Cruz newspaper, it irked her a bit.“Woody used a lot of people as models for his people in his movies,” she said. “Annie Hall was an amalgam of maybe three different people. I think it was Louise Lasser, me and what’s-her-name, the movie actress.”Diane Keaton? the interviewer prompted.“Yeah, Diane Keaton.”“So,” she added, “let’s move on from Woody.”In addition to her husband, Ms. Henske, who lived in Los Angeles, is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Kate DeLaPointe, and a granddaughter.Though Ms. Henske was best known as a performer, she also wrote or co-wrote numerous songs, many with Mr. Doerge. Their “Yellow Beach Umbrella” was covered by, among others, Bette Midler and Perry Como.Her witty shows, though, were something to savor — even when there were glitches. Mr. Doerge recalled a show they did in 2001 at Freight & Salvage, a performance spot in Berkeley, Calif.“At the last step up from the dressing room to the stage Judy tripped on her hem and fell flat on her face onto the floor while holding her banjo,” he said. The audience went silent.“She gets up and goes to the mic, pauses, and says, ‘Perfection is so lifeless,’” he recalled. “The crowd loved it, relaxed, and she had more or less won them over before we played one song.“Live, she was peerless.” More

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      You Hear the Musical Saw. These Mathematicians Heard Geometry.

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      A scientist who has studied falling playing cards, coiling rope and other phenomena has now analyzed what transforms a carpenter’s tool into a sonorous instrument.Early in the 19th century, an unknown musician somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains discovered that a steel handsaw, a tool previously used only for cutting wood, could also be used to produce full and sustained musical notes. The idea had undoubtedly occurred to many a musically-inclined carpenter at other times in other places.The key is that the saw must be bent in a shallow S-shape. Leaving it flat, or bending it in a J- or U-shape, will not do. And to resonate, it must be bowed at exactly the right sweet spot along the length of the saw. Bowed at any other point, the instrument reverts to being a useful, but unmusical, hand tool.The seated musician grips the handle of the saw between her legs, and holds the tip with either her fingers or a device called an end clamp, or “saw cheat.” She bends the saw into a shallow S-shape, and then draws the bow across the sweet spot at a 90-degree angle with the blade. The saw is then bent, changing the shape of the S to lower or raise the pitch, but always maintaining the S-shape, and always bowed at the moving sweet spot of the curve. The longer the saw, the greater the range of notes it can produce.Now L. Mahadevan, a professor of physics and applied mathematics at Harvard, along with two colleagues, Suraj Shankar and Petur Bryde, has studied the way the saw produces music and drawn some conclusions that help explain, mathematically, its beautiful sounds. The report was published April 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.Studying musical saws may seem an odd choice for a Harvard professor of mathematics, but Dr. Mahadevan’s interests are broad. He has published scientific papers explaining falling playing cards, tightrope walking, coiling rope, and how wet paper curls, among other phenomena that may appear at first glance unlikely subjects for mathematical analysis. In such a list, the musical saw seems no more than a logical next step.To understand the musical saw, imagine an S lying on its side, a line drawn through its center, positive above the line and negative below it. At the center of the S, he explained, the curvature switches its sign from negative to positive.“A simple change from a J- to an S-shape dramatically transforms the acoustic properties of the saw,” Dr. Mahadevan said, “and we can prove mathematically, show computationally, and finally hear experientially that the vibrations that produce the sound are localized to a zone where the curvature is almost zero.”That single location of sign-changing, he said, gives the saw a robust ability to sustain a note. The tone slightly resembles that of a violin and other bowed instruments, and some have compared it to the voice of a soprano singing without words.Dr. Mahadevan acknowledges that while he set out to understand the musical saw in mathematical terms, “Musicians have of course known this experientially for a long time, and scientists are only now beginning to understand why the saw can sing.”But he thinks research into the musical saw may also help scientists better understand other very thin devices.“The saw is a thin sheet,” he said, “and its thickness is very small compared to its other dimensions. The same phenomena can arise in a multitude of different systems, and might help design very high quality oscillators on small scales, and even perhaps with atomically thin materials such as sheets of graphene.” That could even be useful in perfecting devices that use oscillators, such as computers, watches, radios and metal detectors.For Natalia Paruz, a professional sawist who has played with orchestras worldwide, the mathematical details may be less significant than the quality of her saws. She began by playing her landlady’s saw when it wasn’t being used for other purposes. But now she uses saws specifically designed and manufactured to be used as musical instruments.There are several American companies that make them, and there are manufacturers in Sweden, England, France and Germany. Ms. Paruz said that while any flexible saw can be used to produce music, a thicker saw produces a “meatier, deeper, prettier” sound.But that pure tone, whatever its mathematical explanation, comes at a cost. “A thick blade,” she said, “is harder to bend.” More

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      Naomi Judd, of Grammy-Winning The Judds, Dies at 76

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      The country music duo, made up of Naomi and Wynonna Judd, was to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame on Sunday.Naomi Judd, of the Grammy-winning duo The Judds and the mother of Wynonna and Ashley Judd, died on Saturday. She was 76.Ashley Judd, the actress, confirmed her mother’s death on Twitter. She did not specify a cause of death but said, “We lost our beautiful mother to the disease of mental illness.”Scott Adkins, a publicist, said Ms. Judd died on Saturday outside Nashville but did not give a more specific location.The country music duo The Judds, made up of Naomi and Wynonna Judd, was to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame on Sunday. They had just announced their final tour — and their first together in a decade. It was to begin in the fall.Naomi Judd, Ashley Judd and Wynonna Judd at a gala in Washington in 2005.Louis Myrie/WireImageThe mother-daughter duo had 14 No. 1 singles during a three-decade career.The Judds’ hits included “Mama He’s Crazy,” “Why Not Me,” (both in 1984); “Girls Night Out” (1985); “Rockin’ With the Rhythm of the Rain” and “Grandpa” (both in 1986); “Turn It Loose” (1988); and “Love Can Build a Bridge” (1990).They won nine Country Music Association Awards and seven awards from the Academy of Country Music. They also won five Grammy Awards for hits like “Why Not Me” and “Give A Little Love.”The pair stopped performing and recording in 1991, after Naomi Judd learned she had hepatitis.Ms. Judd is survived by her two daughters and her husband, Larry Strickland, who was a backup singer for Elvis Presley.In a news release this month announcing the upcoming tour, Ms. Judd said she was looking forward to reconnecting with fans and singing with her daughter Wynonna.Referring to Wynonna, Ms. Judd said: “She asked me if I was still going to twist, twirl and crack jokes. I answered, ‘Heck yeah! I’m too old to grow up now!’”This obituary will be updated. More

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      Klaus Schulze, Pioneering Electronic Composer, Is Dead at 74

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      In a prolific career spanning five decades, he helped pave the way for ambient, techno and trance music.Klaus Schulze, a German electronic musician whose hypnotic, pulsating, swirling compositions filled five decades of solo albums, collaborations and film scores, died on Tuesday. He was 74.His Facebook page announced the death. The announcement said he died “after a long illness” but did not provide any details.Mr. Schulze played drums, bass, guitar and keyboards. But he largely abandoned them in the early 1970s and turned to working with electric organs, tape recorders and echo effects, and later with early analog synthesizers. His music thrived on every technological advance.He played drums on the debut albums of the German bands Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before starting a prodigiously prolific solo career. In 2000, he released a 50-CD retrospective set of studio and live recordings, “The Ultimate Edition.” But he was far from finished.While he announced his retirement from performing in 2010, he continued to compose and record. A new album, “Deus Arrakis,” is due in June.Mr. Schulze’s music encompassed the psychedelic jams of early krautrock, orchestral works, song-length tracks with vocals, an electronic opera and brief soundtrack cues. Much of his music was extended and richly consonant, using drones, loops and echoes in ways that forecast — and then joined and expanded on — both immersive ambient music and beat-driven techno and trance music.He was habitually reluctant to describe or analyze the ideas or techniques of his music. “I am a musician, not a speaker,” he said in a 1998 interview. “What music only can do on its own is just one thing: to show emotions. Just emotions. Sadness, joy, silence, excitement, tension.”Klaus Schulze was born on Aug. 4, 1947, in Berlin. His mother was a ballet dancer, his father a writer.He played guitar and bass in bands as a teenager, and he studied literature, philosophy and modern classical composition at the University of Berlin. Drawn to the avant-garde scene around the Berlin nightclub Zodiac, he played drums in a psychedelic rock trio, Psy Free.He became Tangerine Dream’s drummer in 1969 and performed on the group’s debut album, “Electronic Meditation,” a collection of free-form improvisations released in 1970. He was also experimenting with recordings of his latest instrument, an electric organ. But Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream’s guitarist and leader, didn’t want to use Mr. Schulze’s organ tapes onstage and told him, “You either play drums or you leave,” Mr. Schulze said in a 2015 interview.Mr. Schulze left. He formed a new space-rock trio, Ash Ra Tempel, and played drums on the band’s 1971 debut album before starting his solo career. Instead of drumming, he recalled, “I wanted to play with harmonies and sounds.”He didn’t yet own a synthesizer in 1972 when he made his first solo album, “Irrlicht” (“Will-o’-the-Wisp”). Its three drone-centered, slowly evolving tracks were made with his electric organ and guitar and with manipulated cassette recordings of a student orchestra.Mr. Schulze began playing solo concerts in 1973 and amassed a growing collection of synthesizers. “By nature I am an ‘explorer’ type of musician,” he told Sound and Vision magazine in 2018. “When electronic musical instruments became available, the search was over. I had found the tool I had been looking for: endless opportunities, unlimited sound possibilities, and rhythm and melody at my complete disposal.”Mr. Schulze’s 1975 album “Timewind,” dedicated to Richard Wagner, is widely regarded as his early pinnacle.Made in Germany MusicUsing drum machines and sequencers, Mr. Schulze introduced propulsive electronic rhythms to his music. His vertiginous album “Timewind” (1975) is widely regarded as his early pinnacle. In France, it won the Grand Prix du Disque International award, boosting his record sales with compulsory orders from libraries across the country. He moved to Hambühren, Germany, and built the studio where he would record most of his music over the next decades.“Timewind” was dedicated to Richard Wagner; its two tracks were titled “Bayreuth Return,” named after the town where Wagner’s operas are presented in an annual festival, and “Wahnfried 1883,” named after Wagner’s villa there. Mr. Schulze would later record a series of albums under the names Richard Wahnfried and then Wahnfriet. “The way Wagner’s music introduced me to the use of dynamics, subtlety, drama, and the possible magnitudes of music in general remains unparalleled to me,” he said in 2018.Another acknowledged influence was Pink Floyd. From 1994 to 2008, Mr. Schulze and the German producer and composer Pete Namlook collaborated on “The Dark Side of the Moog,” a series of 11 albums drawing on Pink Floyd motifs.In the mid-1970s, Mr. Schulze visited Japan to produce and mix the Far East Family Band, whose members included the electronic musician who would later go solo and achieve fame as Kitaro. He also recorded and performed with Stomu Yamashta’s Go, a group that included the English multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Steve Winwood, the American guitarist Al Di Meola and the American drummer Michael Shrieve. And he continued to pump out solo projects, including the soundtrack for a pornographic film, “Body Love” (1977).He collaborated through the years with Ash Ra Tempel’s guitarist, Manuel Göttsching. In 2000 Mr. Schulze and Mr. Göttsching revived the name Ash Ra Tempel for a duo album, “Friendship,” and a concert recorded as “Gin Rosé at the Royal Festival Hall.”Mr. Schulze toured Europe extensively from the 1970s until 2010, though he did not tour the United States. In 1991, he performed for 10,000 people outside Cologne Cathedral.In 1979, the German division of Warner Bros. Records gave him his own imprint, Innovative Communication, which had one major hit with Ideal, a Berlin band. He started his own label for electronic music, Inteam, in 1984. But he abandoned it three years later after realizing that it was losing money on every act’s recordings except his.Mr. Schulze in concert in Berlin in 2009. He gave up performing the next year but continued to compose and record. Jakubaszek/Getty ImagesMr. Schulze announced his switch from analog to digital synthesizers with the 1979 album “Dig It.” As sampling technology improved in the 1980s and ’90s, he incorporated samples of voices, instruments and nature sounds into his music. In the 2000s, as faster computers fostered more complex sound processing, he turned to software synthesizers.In 1994, he released “Totentag” (“Day of the Dead”), an electronic opera; in 2008, he began recording and touring with Lisa Gerrard, the singer and lyricist of the band Dead Can Dance. By the 2010s, he was mixing his new compositions in surround sound.Mr. Schulze is survived by his wife, Elfi Schulze; his sons, Maximilian and Richard; and four grandchildren.Through his copious projects, Mr. Schulze’s music maintained a sense of timing: when to meditate, when to build, when to ease back, when to leap ahead, how to balance suspense and repose, dissonance and consonance.“I prefer beauty, I always did,” he told an interviewer in 1997. “Of course, I also use brutal or unpleasant sounds sometimes, but only to show the variety. Beauty is more beautiful to a listener if I also show him the ugliness that does exist. I use it as part of the drama of a composition. But I’m not interested in music that shows only ugliness.“Also,” he added, “I believe that ugliness in music is more easy to achieve than — excuse the expression — ‘real music.’” More

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      José Luis Cortés, Trailblazing Cuban Bandleader, Dies at 70

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      He was trained in the classics and jazz, but he helped popularize a new, danceable genre known as timba.José Luis Cortés, a Cuban musician who with his popular band, NG La Banda, helped establish the lively genre of music known as timba and spread the sound with well-regarded albums and rollicking shows that had concertgoers dancing in the arenas and afterward in the streets, died on April 18 in Havana. He was 70.The Instituto Cubano de la Música posted news of his death on its Facebook page and said the cause was “a hemorrhagic encephalic accident.” The post called him “one of the most important figures in contemporary Cuban music.”Mr. Cortés, a flutist who graduated from the National School of Art, was an admired figure in Cuban music for decades, although he had recently been the subject of abuse allegations by a former vocalist with his band. He brought a combination of serious musicianship and showmanship to the street music of Cuba when he founded NG La Banda in 1988. He had earlier played in Los Van Van, the famed dance band of Juan Formell, and Irakere, the pianist Chucho Valdés’s genre-straddling group of virtuoso players.He drew on those influences as the leader of NG La Banda, a large ensemble partial to danceable songs.“The best way to understand his style is that he brought to dance music the complexity of big-band jazz,” Raul A. Fernandez, emeritus professor of Chicano and Latin studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of books including “From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz” (2006), said by email.The “NG” stood for Nueva Generación, and the band aimed for a young audience, with driving percussion, streetwise lyrics and a brass section known as “los metales del terror.”“There’s raw power in those terrifying horns, and in the forceful, nasal singing, but sophistication in the arrangements and rhythmic adventurousness,” The Miami Herald wrote in 1992, assessing “En La Calle” (“On the Street”), an album that solidified the group’s reputation. “Dense, driving, dance party music.”NG La Banda’s 1992 album “En La Calle” (“On the Street”) solidified the group’s reputation.That album included “La Expresiva,” a song that, as Professor Fernandez put it, “paid homage to the barrios of Havana,” which is where the band’s music particularly resonated. That sound was first called salsa cubana but soon had its own name, timba. Professor Fernandez and Anita Casavantes Bradford described the music in an academic paper, “Cuba’s Second Golden Age of Popular Music, 1989-2005.”“Fast, loud, and characterized by its multiple overlapping rhythms and deep booming bass lines,” they wrote, “timba was also recognizable for its insistent percussion and dense, rushing-note horn patterns.”It is, they added, “a highly technical style of music, and holding one’s own in a timba orquesta, especially in the horns, or ‘metales,’ section, remains an accomplishment boasted by only the most rigorously trained and disciplined musicians.”The sound Mr. Cortés and his players perfected, the Spanish-language Florida newspaper El Nuevo Herald wrote in 1994, “has breathed new life into dance music, stimulating the listener’s senses while challenging those who venture onto the dance floor.”José Luis Cortés was born on Oct. 5, 1951, in Villa Clara, Cuba. His musical education, he said, emphasized classical and jazz.“You couldn’t play popular Cuban music in school,” he said in a 1998 interview with The Miami Herald.He spent the 1970s in Los Van Van, which was breaking new ground by incorporating elements of funk and rock into mainstream Cuban dance music. For much of the 1980s he was in Irakere, an influential group whose aim was, as Mr. Valdés once put it, “bringing together jazz and the ancestral forms.”Mr. Cortés’s nickname was El Tosco, “the Rough One.” Certainly the lyrics in NG La Banda’s songs could be rough, with vulgarity and what some listeners construed as misogyny. He defended those choices.“Popular music comes from the people,” he told The Observer of Britain in 1993. “I test my songs in the streets; if they like it, it’s a hit.”He also defended timba as a genre.“The intellectuals say that timba is crap,” he told The Miami Herald in 1998. “But this is a racist concept. Cuban popular music has always been the music of the people, of the poor barrios, where there are very few whites.”Some scholars linked the emergence of timba to the difficult economic times Cuba experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union, a time often referred to as the “special period.” The genre’s energy and blunt lyrics, they suggested, spoke to a generation that came of age during the hardships of the 1990s.The group was popular enough that when it made its New York debut, in 1997, it played Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.“When the band did what it does best,” Peter Watrous wrote in a review in The New York Times, “playing long, structurally complicated tunes that mixed funk, stop-time parts, drum sections and Afro-Cuban dance music, all with wild choreography, the audience was up on its feet and screaming.”Mr. Cortés’s career, though, ended under a cloud. In 2019 Dianelys Alfonso, who had been a singer in the band and had had a romantic relationship with him for a time, said he had repeatedly assaulted her. That year The Associated Press reported that Mr. Cortés had not responded to the accusations, but that Ms. Alfonso had received both widespread support for coming forward and abusive messages from Mr. Cortés’s admirers.Information on Mr. Cortés’s survivors was not immediately available. More

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      Reconsidering the Spice Girls: How Manufactured Girl Power Became Real

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      In a scene from the 1997 film “Spice World,” the Spice Girls are rehearsing for the movie’s climactic performance at the Royal Albert Hall. Dressed in their signature looks, they sway their way through one of their hits, “Say You’ll Be There,” playfully poking each other and bopping along as they perform the R&B-infused track.“That was absolutely perfect,” the music director declares when they finish, “without being actually any good.” The Girls kind of agree, and kind of don’t care.It is a fleeting, self-deprecating punchline in the movie but one that encapsulates how the pop group has been perceived ever since it zig-a-zig-ah-ed its way onto the music scene in the mid-1990s. To a mostly young and female audience drawn to their messaging of self-empowerment, individuality and friendship, the Spice Girls were absolutely perfect. But to critics and commentators who wrote them off as “duds,” “manufactured” phonies and “shrill” bimbos, they were not actually any good.Twenty-five years after the release of the film, as some of the band’s most fervent fans have themselves grown up to be pop titans, the role of the Spice Girls in music history is still being rewritten.To be sure, criticism of the Spice Girls — most notably, that they were a superficial, manufactured, disposable pop confection — was not unique to them. Many pop acts, including the Beatles, the Monkees and Abba, initially encountered the same derision. But from the beginning of their ascent to superstardom, the fact that the five Girls — Victoria Adams (now Beckham), a.k.a. Posh Spice; Melanie Brown, a.k.a. Scary Spice; Emma Bunton, a.k.a. Baby Spice; Melanie Chisholm, a.k.a. Sporty Spice; and Geri Halliwell (now Horner), a.k.a. Ginger Spice — were outspoken young women seemed to bring an added layer of skepticism.Perhaps nothing illustrates the conundrum of the Spice Girls more starkly than the reception to “Spice World,” their madcap mockumentary, which earned more than $70 million worldwide but received memorably withering reviews. Desson Howe in The Washington Post said it was “about as awful and shamelessly pandering as a fanzine movie could dare to be.” In The Orlando Sentinel, the critic Jay Boyar described the movie as akin to “being kicked to death by a pack of wild Barbies.” Roger Ebert compared it very unfavorably to the film that inspired it, “A Hard Day’s Night,” writing, “The huge difference, of course, is that the Beatles were talented while, let’s face it, the Spice Girls could be duplicated by any five women under the age of 30 standing in line at Dunkin’ Donuts.”Horner, Brown, Beckham, Bunton and Chisholm arriving — aboard a double-decker bus — at a 1998 screening of their film “Spice World” in New York.Henny Ray Abrams/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat’s become clear in the decades since the film’s release is that these five particular women could not, in fact, be duplicated. While all-female groups — from the Supremes to Destiny’s Child — have long been a celebrated part of pop music, Posh, Scary, Baby, Sporty and Ginger offered a specific combination of self-expression and brazen ambition that inspired a generation of artists. Contemporary performers such as Sam Smith, Little Mix and Haim have all been effusive in their praise for the Spice Girls.“I remember hearing ‘Wannabe’ on the radio and immediately falling in love with it,” the singer Rita Ora, who performed the Girls’ hit “Wannabe” in a 2018 appearance on “Lip Sync Battle,” said in a recent email. “To see women uplifting women who were doing it just as good as the guys, if not better, was incredibly inspiring as a young girl.”“They probably inspired me to pick up a hairbrush when I was like five and sing into it,” the British pop star Charli XCX, who remixed “Wannabe” for her 2019 single “Spicy,” has said of the group.The Spice Girls inspired a generation of fans that, decades later, still identify as a Scary or a Baby. Tens of thousands of fans came to Wembley Stadium in London for the group’s 2019 reunion tour.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesThe 15-time Grammy Award-winning artist Adele is also an avowed Spice Girls superfan. When the group announced its 2019 reunion tour, she shared a photo on Instagram of herself as a young girl, the wall behind her plastered with Spice Girls posters and photos.On an episode of “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” as part of the segment “Carpool Karaoke,” Adele enthusiastically declared her love for the band. “It was genuine,” she insisted of her admiration, to an incredulous Corden. “It was a huge moment in my life when they came out — it was ‘girl power’ and these five ordinary girls who just did so well.”At their peak, the Spice Girls were a global sensation, and they remain, to this day, the most successful girl group of all time: Their first single, “Wannabe,” released in 1996, was a No. 1 hit in 37 countries, and their debut album, “Spice,” is still one of the best-selling albums by any female group. And even the Girls themselves are still coming to terms with just how much their brief stint at the apex of pop music affected a generation of fans and other artists.“At the time, in the ’90s, we were probably too busy, too young and too exhausted to fully realize what was happening,” Chisholm said in a recent interview with The New York Times. But, she added, “it’s really quite overwhelming, but brilliant, to process that we really did make a difference, in so many people’s lives. It was such a joyful thing to be able to do.”‘R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated’Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times; Photographs by Getty ImagesOf the many criticisms leveled at the Spice Girls, perhaps the most potent was that they were not “real” musicians. This critique has often been used to belittle pop groups. Even the Beatles weren’t spared: When the band first crossed over to the United States in 1964, they were described as “a press agent’s dream combo,” “appallingly unmusical” and “a gigantic put-on.”But this line of criticism carried particular weight in the 1990s in Britain, where male, guitar-forward Britpop bands such as Oasis and Blur, who preached a gospel of authenticity, dominated the music scene.So let’s get something out of the way: Yes, the Spice Girls were manufactured. In 1994, Bob and Chris Herbert, a father-and-son music-management team based in Surrey, England, came up with the idea of creating a female version of Take That, the successful British boy band. The Herberts’ notion of injecting more femininity into the prevailing “lad culture” of ’90s Britain was “the one unarguable stroke of genius in their vision,” the music critic David Sinclair wrote in his book “Wannabe: How the Spice Girls Reinvented Pop Fame.”The Herberts placed an ad in a newspaper: “R.U. 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated.” After weeks of auditions, they selected five girls — Brown, Chisholm, Beckham, Horner and Michelle Stephenson (who was replaced a few months later by Bunton) — and moved them into a house in the English town of Maidenhead, paying for their voice coaching, dance lessons, songwriting sessions, media training and demo recording sessions.However, as the Girls worked together, Sinclair explained, they concocted an ambitious vision for their band that clashed with the Herberts’ approach. The Herberts wanted them to stick to the usual lead-singer-with-backup model, while the Girls distributed lines equally among themselves so that no single leader emerged. The Herberts imagined five girls with a uniform look; the Girls wanted to remain distinct.“We didn’t dress similarly in everyday life, and when we tried to do that in a performance, it just didn’t work,” Chisholm said. “Quite early on, quite naturally, we wanted to be individuals, and the management weren’t really feeling that.”Like the Monkees before them — another manufactured band that seized control of its own destiny — the Girls decided they wanted out. So the five of them crammed into Horner’s Fiat Uno and drove off with their master recordings. That bold decision “was a measure of how determined they were,” Sinclair said. It was as though the Herberts had “invented Frankenstein’s monster,” he continued. “They were completely floored by what their creation then did to them.”The Spice Girls were assembled by a management team but took steps to seize control of their destiny.Tim Roney/Getty Images“It was all a bit of an adventure,” Chisholm said. “At that point, we didn’t really have much to lose, so we just went for it. And then the band became a very organic thing. We felt quite unstoppable.”The Girls were already generating enough buzz in the industry — thanks in part to a showcase they had done — that they were in a position to audition new managers. They decided on Simon Fuller, who at that time was managing the Scottish icon Annie Lennox. In March 1995, they met him at his office and started belting out “Wannabe.”“It was quite unusual,” Fuller recalled in a recent interview, “to have these five young girls come bounding in the office with confidence and say, ‘You have to manage us, and we’re not leaving until you agree.’ It was just very contagious, that energy.”From the Girls’ perspective, “it just clicked,” Chisholm said. “When we met him, it felt very much like he got it.”Instead of turning the Girls into clones of one another, as the Herberts had intended, Fuller told them to focus on who they genuinely were and just dial it up. “If you like pink and fluffy and your mum is your best friend, then be pink 24/7, have fluffy on you all the time. If you’re the rowdy northern girl who has no airs and graces, sexy and dominant and noisy, then be that,” Fuller explained. This idea, Fuller revealed in a 2014 BBC documentary, was inspired by Lennox, who, upon meeting the Girls, encouraged them to “ham up” their personalities.The approach fit the Spice Girls perfectly.The band’s “girl power” message, Chisholm said, also gave the group a focus: “At first, we wanted to make music and have fun and travel the world and do all those fun things. But the messaging gave us more motivation. We were expressing ourselves, as young women, in the mid-90s. It was giving fuel to this fire.”Their first single, “Wannabe,” was released in Britain on July 8, 1996, and by the end of that year it hit No. 1 in more than 20 countries. Their debut album, “Spice,” released in November 1996, also went to No. 1 and was shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Prize, awarded to the best British or Irish album of the year.“It was like, you know, the preparation, the waiting, the frustration,” Chisholm said. “And then ‘Wannabe’ is released and bam — just two years of mayhem.”‘Firing on all cylinders’“I don’t want to be emotional,” the South African president Nelson Mandela told reporters when he met the Spice Girls in 1997, “but it’s one of the greatest moments in my life.”Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile the primary fan base for the Spice Girls was young and female, others were not immune to their charms. In 1997, while in South Africa to perform at a charity concert, the band met Prince Charles and Nelson Mandela. Posing for photos outside the presidential residence in Pretoria, Mandela, the South African president, told reporters, “You know, these are my heroines.” (Horner quickly chimed in to affirm that the feeling was mutual.) The group’s extravagant self-expression, coupled with a straightforward message of empowerment, resonated with girls, who saw themselves reflected in the band members’ various personas, spawning a generation of fans who identified as a Sporty or Scary or Posh.“That’s kind of the beauty of the Spice Girls,” Ora said. “Each of them had their own voice and something different to offer.” (Those nicknames, by the way, were not coined by the group but imposed on them by a journalist at the British magazine Top of the Pops. The Girls, true to form, embraced the names.)The group’s theatrics and self-aware sense of kitsch also sparked an enthusiastic following among members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, which initially took the band by surprise, Chisholm said. “In our heads, it was like, right, we’ve got to do this for the girls! And then we very quickly realized that a huge part of this community was behind us as well,” she recalled. “I think it’s because people can feel lonely if they’re in an environment where they can’t fully be themselves, and the Spice Girls gave them something to belong to.” The band has since become a popular source of inspiration for drag acts and several of the Girls have appeared as guest judges on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”There was, however, one demographic that resisted them: the music media. “I think they were victims of their own success in the sense that, the more eyes are on you, the more critical people are going to be,” said Joe Stone, an editor at The Guardian who has written about the band.Traditional tastemakers often sniffed at the Girls’ music; one relatively charitable review characterized it as emblematic of “pop’s heart of lightness, a happy place filled not with music of good taste but with music that tastes good — at least to a substantial portion of the planet.” Others dismissed the Spice Girls themselves as Fuller’s pawns, earning him the nickname “Svengali Spice.” And much of the press, particularly the tabloids, picked apart not just the group’s work but their appearance and what they seemed to represent. “People were firing on all cylinders: They couldn’t sing, they couldn’t write music, they weren’t pretty enough, their feminism was hollow,” Stone said.When Beckham appeared on a British talk show eight weeks after she’d given birth, the host, Chris Evans, weighed her to see if she was back to her pre-baby weight. He subjected Horner to the same treatment when she appeared on his show; both women have since spoken about struggling with body image and eating disorders.“There is a real culture here in the U.K. that they really like to drag people down. We celebrate success to a point, and then it’s time to attack — kind of, ‘Don’t get above your station,’” Chisholm said. “But we always felt that the numbers don’t lie. We were breaking records.”Another frequent target of criticism was the group’s message of “girl power,” which was promoted not just in their music but also through their many marketing deals with brands like Pepsi and Chupa Chups lollipops. Activists raised concerns that the band was exploiting feminism for commercial ends. Many commentators were “very conscious of how feminism and pro-women sentiment was manipulated and weaponized, particularly by the media,” said Andi Zeisler, who co-founded the feminist pop culture magazine Bitch in 1996, the same year the Spice Girls made their debut.Against a backdrop of the punk riot grrrl movement and the women-centric Lilith Fair — both of which used music as a platform to advocate specifically feminist political and social changes — “the Spice Girls perhaps felt like a step back,” Zeisler said.But the notion that the Girls’ message was, by virtue of being broadcast commercially, inherently hollow now seems shortsighted. “I think it’s possible to say, on the one hand, the Spice Girls and girl power were this very contrived marketing technique. And that’s true,” Zeisler explained. “But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t very real for the Girls themselves, or for the audience. I grew up with feminism as an irredeemably dirty word. No one wanted to be associated with it. So just the optics of having a group of women talking about feminism in a different language, making it accessible — that’s really important.”‘That sounds like a hoot’The Girls at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, where they announced their movie, “Spice World.”Dave Hogan/Getty ImagesThe idea of a Spice Girls movie was first floated by Fuller and the band during their early publicity trips to the United States. The movie would be “a parody of ourselves,” Horner explained in a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival. “We are basically taking the mickey out of ourselves.”The Girls shot the movie in the summer of 1997 while also writing and recording their sophomore album, “Spiceworld.” Such was the allure of the band at the time that many renowned actors and musicians readily agreed to take part: The movie’s list of cameos reads like a who’s who of British pop culture, including Roger Moore, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Elton John and Elvis Costello (as well as Meat Loaf, an American).Richard E. Grant, who played the band’s manager in the movie, explained his decision to join the cast. “My then 7-year-old daughter, Olivia, was and remains a massive Spice Girls fan and begged me to take the role, so it was a slam dunk decision,” he said.Alan Cumming, whose character spends the film trying to make a behind-the-scenes documentary about the band, was similarly won over. “My agent called and, first of all, he asked me, did I know the Spice Girls? I was like, ‘Well, I am alive,’” he said. “I was really keen — I thought, that sounds like a hoot.”But when “Spice World” came out, it followed the same path as the Spice Girls’ music — commercial success on the one hand and critical derision on the other.“Half of the critics, especially the higher-brow ones, they’d already made up their minds before they watched the movie,” Naoko Mori, who played the group’s friend Nicola, said.For years, Chisholm said, she couldn’t bring herself to watch the film. But when her now 13-year-old daughter asked to watch it for her fifth birthday, they put it on and she was delighted. “I just adored it — I mean, it was hilarious,” she said. “We do take the piss out of ourselves and each other all the time.”The movie ended up being one of the band’s final acts as a fivesome. By the time it premiered on Dec. 15, 1997, the Girls and Fuller had already parted ways. A few months later, Horner also abruptly left the band.The rest of the Girls continued to perform as a foursome, including on a 1998 world tour, and released a third album, “Forever,” in 2000. They’ve appeared together in different configurations for various reunion performances, including two tours, over the last two decades. But the particular magic of their ascent had dissipated.The Spice Girls generation comes of ageThe reunited Spice Girls performed a rendition of “Spice Up Your Life” at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.Hannah Peters/Getty ImagesIn 2012, the organizers of the London Olympics crafted the opening and closing ceremonies to celebrate the best of British culture. There were odes to James Bond, the queen and Mary Poppins, but perhaps no act drew more cheers, and tears, from the crowds than the members of the Spice Girls — all five of them — reunited atop a fleet of tricked-out black cabs as the stadium sang along raucously to their greatest hits.Nearly three decades after their peak, critics have started to reconsider the ways in which the Spice Girls reshaped the pop-music landscape, in Britain and beyond.In 2019, Pitchfork revisited the band’s debut, “Spice,” for a series on significant albums the publication had overlooked. While the outlet still rated the record a 6.8 out of 10, it wrote that “the album was a meticulously crafted pop product, front-loaded with surefire radio hits,” concluding: “‘Spice’ remains an audacious achievement.”As for “Spice World,” the movie is now championed by some as a cult classic, with its campy, self-aware humor entertaining those viewers who can get their hands on a DVD. (The movie is not currently available for streaming.) “I think it’s really funny, and I’m really glad I did it,” Cumming said. “When people ask me for my favorite of all the movies I’ve made, I always answer ‘Spice World.’”Perhaps the most remarkable thing the Spice Girls achieved, however, was their empowerment of a generation of fans. These listeners first encountered them as children and responded positively to the band and what they represented — five women who remained true to what they wanted and how they were going to get it and had a lot of fun together along the way.In an industry teeming with stories of artists — particularly young female ones — being manipulated or taken advantage of, the Spice Girls can now be remembered as a rare example of an all-female band that took a strong hand in charting its own success. “A lot of times, it’s the management that holds all the cards, makes all the money, decides what happens, and the artist that goes away shortchanged if not totally screwed over,” Sinclair said. The Spice Girls, he noted, “actually kept a grip on everything, from Day 1.”Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times; Photographs by Getty ImagesChisholm and the band have embraced their status as role models, both for women and for the L.G.B.T.Q. community. “It’s so humbling to have the opportunity to give people strength to just be who they are. That should be everybody’s human right,” Chisholm said. “Maybe we’re misfits, maybe we’re oddballs — we’re all different. But we come together, and our unity is our strength.”When, in 2019, the Spice Girls (minus Beckham) reunited for a tour, Adele — the fangirl whose childhood wall was once plastered with Spice Girls posters — visited them on the day of their final performance, at Wembley Stadium.“We went into the bar to see our friends and family after the show,” Chisholm recalled. “Adele had gotten everybody ready, and they all started singing ‘Wannabe’ when we walked in. She was leading the chorus!”It was a powerful, full-circle moment for the band, she said.“There’s so much talent out there, and if the Spice Girls had any part in inspiring and empowering these brilliant artists, then that is only a good thing,” said Chisholm, who is now a solo artist, with a self-titled album out now and a memoir coming later this year.For Ora, the band’s girl-power message has always been “about standing up and advocating for the women around you, because, at the end of the day, we have to look out for each other,” she said. “Who better to teach us that lesson than the Spice Girls?” More

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      Review: Billy Crystal Carries the Tune in ‘Mr. Saturday Night’

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      In a mishmash new musical based on his 1992 movie, he charms the audience as a has-been comic reconnecting with family.On the heels of “City Slickers,” just a few years after “When Harry Met Sally,” Billy Crystal was at the apex of his film stardom when he made the 1992 movie “Mr. Saturday Night.” If you watch it now, you can see why it flopped, not least because Crystal was playing against type as Buddy Young Jr., a ruthlessly selfish has-been comic with a vicious streak.At the time, Crystal was in his 40s; for much of the film, Buddy is in his 70s. And Crystal embodied him with a middle-aged comedian’s idea of that later phase of life: under old-guy makeup so egregious that viewers couldn’t possibly suspend disbelief, and with the physical mannerisms of an ancient — like Miracle Max, Crystal’s indelible elder from “The Princess Bride,” but without the charm.Three decades later, Crystal too is in his 70s, and in the new musical comedy “Mr. Saturday Night,” which opened on Wednesday night, he slips much more naturally into Buddy’s skin. As a piece of theater, the show is a bit of a mess; the jokes, even some of the hoary ones, work better than the storytelling, and the acting styles are all over the place. Still, it makes for a diverting evening — because it will almost surely make you laugh, and because of how acutely tuned into the audience Crystal is.Ad-libbing his way through the script, fine-tuning the funniness, he feeds off the energy of the crowd at the Nederlander Theater. Like Buddy, who mopes around his New York apartment in a tragic cardigan, lamenting the gigs he’s been reduced to taking — the morning slot at a retirement center is, after all, no comedian’s dream — Crystal is utterly in his element performing live. If you are a fan of his, or simply someone who has missed that kind of symbiosis between actor and audience, it’s a pleasure to watch.The musical, though, is an ungainly beast, by turns zany and sentimental. Directed by John Rando, with a mood-setting score by Jason Robert Brown (music) and Amanda Green (lyrics) that goes vocally easy on its star, it has a book by the film’s screenwriters, Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. Less cynical and more hopeful than the movie, it gives us a Buddy who is still cruel but not so callous, and thus a better candidate for our sympathy.That’s despite the myriad ways in which he has failed his brother, Stan (the immensely likable David Paymer, an Academy Award nominee for the same role in the film), who has sacrificed his own ambitions to be Buddy’s manager; his wife, Elaine (Randy Graff, stymied by an almost total lack of chemistry with Crystal), who has put Buddy first for half a century; and their daughter, Susan (Shoshana Bean, in a beautifully calibrated performance), who at 40 has been justifiably angry with her father since she was 5.David Paymer, left, as Buddy’s brother and Randy Graff, right, as his wife.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Mr. Saturday Night” traces Buddy’s second chance at life and fame, set creakily in motion one night in 1994, when he catches the in memoriam montage on the Emmy Awards broadcast and sees his own face and name appear right after John Candy’s. Buddy gets booked on the “Today” show to crack wise about the error.As his career wobbles toward possible resuscitation, he gradually notices that he’s been a schmuck to the people who love him. “Hurt them” is the command he has always used to psych himself up before he goes onstage, but however many audiences he’s killed, he’s done lasting harm at home.In the film, the brothers’ relationship is paramount. In the musical, the father-daughter fracture comes to the fore, while Elaine — whose only solo, a fantasy about going to Tahiti, is the show’s most cuttable song — is again strikingly under-imagined. (The six-piece orchestra, which sounds terrific, is conducted by David O.)“Mr. Saturday Night” means to be a valentine to both the bonds of family and the comedians of a bygone age — pros like Buddy, who got his big break in the 1940s at a Catskills resort and hosted a hit TV show on Saturday nights in the ’50s, before he blew a hole in his career with his loose-cannon arrogance.The costume designers, Paul Tazewell and Sky Switser, have their silliest fun dressing Buddy’s wacky sidekicks — Joey (Jordan Gelber), Bobby (Brian Gonzales) and Lorraine (Mylinda Hull) — for the musical’s ’50s flashbacks. A singing, dancing pack of cigarettes, anyone? (The choreography is by Ellenore Scott.)As for Crystal’s singing, he doesn’t have the range to play Fanny Brice, but he doesn’t need to. He does OK. Paymer, in Stan’s one emotional outburst set to music, kind of, sort of, almost approaches singing but doesn’t have those chops. Which works on a meta level, because Buddy is the brother who’s at ease onstage.What’s surprising is how unpersuasive the show is when the principals play decades-younger versions of their characters — a transformation that in theater, so much less literal a medium than film, can require no more than an altered demeanor. Bean is the only one to tap into that simplicity.Shoshana Bean as Susan, Buddy’s estranged daughter, in the musical, which is based on a 1992 film.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut most of the show unfolds in 1994. By then, Buddy’s old sidekicks are fixtures at the Friars Club, and so is he. Though if Lorraine is a member, she must be a relatively recent one; in the real world, the Friars Club of New York admitted its first female member, Liza Minnelli, in 1988.This is where nostalgia gets tricky. That boys’ club territoriality is the backdrop to an encounter at the Friars that the authors have kept largely, and unwisely, unchanged from the movie: when Buddy, expecting a powerful male agent to join him for lunch, is met instead by a smart young female agent, Annie (a sunny Chasten Harmon, who has a fizzy chemistry with Crystal).Annie, who will prove to be a godsend for Buddy, handles comics for a major agency. Yet she has never heard of any of the comedy greats whose names he fires off at her in a bullying pop quiz, or even, apparently, of the Friars Club — implausible for an industry professional, and almost impossible so soon after the Friars’ infamous 1993 roast of Whoopi Goldberg. Annie is written as ignorant just so that Buddy can school her, which carries a strong whiff of dinosaur on the authors’ part.Of course, Buddy himself is a caveman. When his old pals called him and Elaine “Fred and Wilma” — as they did, affectionately, at the performance I saw, Crystal not being the only one enlivening the script with variations — it was funny because it’s true.But Buddy does want to evolve, at least a little. If his epiphany about his need to change seems to arrive out of nowhere, buoyed by piano and brass in a lovely, impassioned solo, we root for his redemption anyway.This is a musical that wants its guy to get a happy ending. Despite all of the show’s faults, and all of Buddy’s, it turns out that so do we.Mr. Saturday NightAt the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; mrsaturdaynightonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More