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      in Theater

      ‘Into the Woods’ and a Missing Giant’s Boot

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      When the Stephen Sondheim musical opened in 1987, a huge boot hung over the theater’s facade. The producers of the current revival would love to get it back.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Scroll down for a look at when a plane smashed into the Empire State Building — 77 years ago today. But first, a Broadway mystery.From 1987 to 1989, a giant boot dangled over the theater where “Into the Woods” was playing.Ann SlavitThe producers of the revival of “Into the Woods,” the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, have a wish. It is to locate a something you might call a prop from the original production. It is missing.It is a giant inflatable boot with a long vinyl leg attached.The boot was a fixture when “Into the Woods” opened in 1987. It was anchored to what was then the Martin Beck Theater (now the Al Hirschfeld). “The boot was like a beacon,” said Jordan Roth, the lead producer of the current revival at the St. James, which is extending its run to Oct. 16. “It was literally the beacon that called us all to the theater. I think why it captured our imagination was the way it really physicalized this impossible balance of the show between whimsy and weight.”Michael David, the executive producer for the original run, said there was a more practical concern. The theater, an “outlier” west of Eighth Avenue, had not had a long-running show in some time when “Into the Woods” arrived, he said. The boot gave the theater an identity “to help people find us, not where they’d think ‘what is the address’ but ‘the one with the boot above it.’”A 1987 sketch of the boot for “Into the Woods.” Ann SlavitWhen “Into the Woods” closed in 1989, the boot went into storage. It came out for a revival in 2002, this time at the Broadhurst Theater.The mystery is what happened to the boot when that production closed after 18 previews and 279 performances.“It’s in storage — I just don’t know where in storage,” David said, adding that there were two facilities in New Jersey still to be checked.The boot, which conjured up the giant who creates mayhem in the story, was the work of Ann Slavit, who had done a 30-foot-tall pair of red shoes that hung on the Brooklyn Academy of Music as a tribute to the celebrated ballet movie “The Red Shoes.”“I don’t think Michael David said to me, ‘Oh, can you do a boot?’” she said. “Maybe we were talking about the giant and I thought, ‘You never see him in the show so we could have this ominous presence.’” There was a second shoe that looked as if it was coming over the parapet of the theater.She said she suspected it had been discarded after it was taken off the Broadhurst on a day with particularly bad winter weather.But Chic Silber, a special effects designer who was involved in installing and removing it at the Broadhurst in 2002, said it was “neither destroyed nor thrown out” when it came down. But it had been cut into at least a couple of pieces. “What happened to either half after that, I don’t know,” he said.Roth, the lead producer of the revival, put out an all-points bulletin for the boot almost as soon as the arrangements to move “Into the Woods” into the St. James were completed in late spring. He recalled seeing the boot the first time he saw “Into the Woods,” as a 12-year-old in 1988, with Phylicia Rashad in the cast. If it were found and mounted on the St. James, he said, “the knee would bend right above my office window.”But Silber had advice for Roth: Call off the search.“Even if it could be found,” he said, “there is no way it would inflate again and work on the roof of any building.” And making a new boot would cost far less, he said.WeatherPrepare for a chance of showers on a mostly sunny day near the mid-80s. At night, expect a chance of showers and thunderstorms, with temperatures dropping to the mid-70s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).The latest New York newsCathy Linh Che scrambled to find another apartment in the Two Bridges neighborhood in Manhattan after the rent on her pandemic-deal apartment increased by 65 percent.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesThe pandemicThe ‘Covid discount’: More than 40 percent of the available units in Manhattan currently come from tenants priced out of apartments they leased in 2020 and 2021, according to a new StreetEasy report.Your economic situation: The pandemic has drastically changed the global economy. We’re checking in with readers about their financial circumstances, and how they feel about the future.More local newsSchool budget cuts: More than $200 million in cuts to New York City public schools have been put on hold by a Manhattan judge, the latest move in an escalating fight over how to fund schools.Monkeypox vaccines: There were only 1,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine available. Within two hours, the only clinic offering the shots began turning people away. At that same moment, some 300,000 doses of a ready-to-use vaccine owned by the United States sat in a facility in Denmark.Do you know the ice cream man? Owning an ice cream truck in New York City used to be a lucrative proposition, but for some, the expenses have become untenable.Honoring a baseball legend: Jackie Robinson accomplished a great deal on the field, but a museum celebrating his life — which will have a ribbon-cutting this week — puts as much focus on his civil rights work.LOOK BACKThe day a plane hit the Empire State BuildingErnie Sisto/ The New York TimesFor the city that had been defined by skyscrapers — and even for a skyscraper that had been defined by a monster movie — what happened on a densely foggy morning 77 years ago today was unthinkable. An airplane crashed into the Empire State Building.Fourteen people were killed: The pilot, Lt. Col. William Smith Jr., and the two others aboard his Army B-25, and 11 in what was then the world’s tallest building. Burning fuel rained down an elevator shaft after the fuel tanks exploded. An engine and part of the landing gear tumbled into a subbasement.Smith had been scheduled to fly to La Guardia Airport, but as he approached, he said he wanted to land at Newark. The change sent Smith’s unarmed training plane over Manhattan and into the 78th and 79th floors of the Empire State Building. A government investigation later concluded that he had “erred in judgment” and should not have been cleared to proceed.Up in the Empire State Building, where clouds sometimes drifted into the not-yet air-conditioned offices, the roar of the two propeller-driven engines became louder as the B-25 cruised along. And then it hit.Soon office workers were rushing down the stairways to safety, and firefighters were rushing in. So were photographers lugging bulky 4-by-5 Speed Graphic cameras.One of them was Ernie Sisto of The New York Times, who talked his way past the police officers on the street and rode to the 67th floor in an elevator that was still in operation. He then took the stairs, finding a vantage point above the 79th floor.There, he dangled over the parapet after asking two competing photographers to hold his legs. He repaid the favor by snapping shots for them, along with the photograph above.Therese Fortier Willig, a secretary in the Catholic War Relief office on the 79th floor, huddled with co-workers. She recalled in 1995 that she was so upset that she yanked off the rings she was wearing and hurled them out the window. One was her high-school graduation ring, the other a friendship ring from her boyfriend, whom she never expected to see again.She eventually escaped, and firefighters not only discovered the rings in the debris on the street, they tracked her down and gave them back. She married the man who had given her the friendship ring and had a son — George Willig, who climbed the World Trade Center in the 1970s.“She hardly ever talked about it, kind of like I hardly ever talk about climbing the World Trade Center,” he said this week. “After a while your life goes on, it’s part of your history.”But sometimes he thinks about his mother’s association with one tall New York building and his association with another. “I have a hard time putting that all together and making sense of it,” he said.METROPOLITAN diaryPhones offDear Diary:As an original subscriber to City Center’s Encores! series, I was thrilled to attend the eagerly anticipated reopening after a two-year hiatus.Subscribers generally know all the audience members who sit near them, so there’s a bit of a buzz when someone new appears. And at a February performance of “The Tap Dance Kid,” everyone in my row noticed a new face in the row in front of us.As the standard announcement was made about the rules against taking photographs and videos and using phones, this woman took out her phone and appeared to start texting.The orchestra began to play, and the audience applauded. The light from the phone was still visible. I was about to tap her on her shoulder and ask her to turn off the phone, when the person beside her turned to her.“Please turn that phone off,” he said.“And by the way,” he added. “You’re way off track. The Wordle is ‘pleat.’”— Dennis BuonaguraIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Melissa Guerrero More

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      in Music

      Ukrainian D.J. Spins Rare Music in N.Y.C.

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      Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times“Support Ukraine means listen to some Ukrainian songs, buy some Ukrainian brands, talk about Ukraine one minute a day, just in conversation.” Recently, Daria played her music at Le Bain, a club in The Standard, High Line hotel. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Aftershock’ Review: A Moving Ode to the Black Family

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      Black mothers are dying from childbirth at alarming rates. A new documentary explains why.There’s no getting around just how terribly sad it feels watching “Aftershock,” the new documentary from the directors Paula Eiselt (“93Queen”) and Tonya Lewis Lee. After all, it spotlights the tragic deaths of two Black mothers in New York City who died from childbirth-related complications — Shamony Gibson, in 2019, and Amber Isaac, in 2020 — leaving behind young children, partners, families and communities gutted by grief.But alongside the despair, there is also light in this documentary. Gibson’s partner, Omari Maynard, and her mother, Shawnee Benton Gibson, a medical social worker with a background in reproductive justice activism, had been mourning their loss for a year and a half when Maynard reached out to the newly bereaved partner of Isaac, Bruce McIntyre. The two men soon banded together with Benton Gibson and others to organize for change.Eiselt and Lee successfully put a human face on the now widely reported crisis of Black maternal deaths, which allows them to unpack the underlying factors that have led to the crisis without bogging down the narrative in a deluge of statistics. Yet scenes with the main subjects sometimes feel more staged than vérité, and the audience walks away wishing we knew them better as people.Still, the images of Maynard and McIntyre parenting their children in the midst of grief and outrage, and expressing vulnerability as well as strength, act as a powerful counternarrative to pervasive stereotypes about absentee Black fathers. “Aftershock” is a moving ode to Black families in a society where too many forces work to tear them apart.AftershockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      in Television

      Immersed in ‘Stranger Things,’ Then Strolling to Beckett

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      Our writer checked out two very different experiences in New York. In Netflix’s TV re-creation, you fight Demogorgons. In “Cascando,” you walk off your existential angst.Before the pizza parlor, before the arcade games, before the ice cream shop and the merch kiosks (so many merch kiosks!) and the photo op with a fiberglass-and-silicone Demogorgon, “Stranger Things: The Experience,” at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, puts on a show.Netflix, which has created other immersive entertainments based on its “Bridgerton” and “Money Heist” properties, co-produced this 45-minute experience with Fever. Based on the teen-horror pastiche “Stranger Things,” it plunks participants, many of them dressed in 1980s finery, into tens of thousands of square feet of Hawkins, Ind. Some rooms have an unfinished feel (did the budget not include ceilings?); others suggest a theme-park-quality buildout. The most fully realized ones are nestled inside Hawkins’s cheery state-of-the-art lab. Ostensibly, ticket holders have signed up for a sleep study. An interdimensional rift soon complicates study protocols. Will these test subjects survive? Of course. They have tote bags to buy afterward.“Stranger Things: The Experience” is a piece of fan service that adopts the vocabulary of immersive theater. While legible, barely, for those unfamiliar with the series, this story has been built for devotees, allowing them to enter into the fictional world. Enterprises like this used to be lower-budget affairs of the do-it-yourself variety, the province of live-action role-players and tabletop gamers. Now for about $58 — less for gutsy under-17s, more if you book on a weekend — Netflix and its partners will do the doing for you.“We look at live experiences as providing fans another way to see themselves more in the stories they love,” Greg Lombardo, the head of live experiences at Netflix, told me in an interview a couple of days after my visit.This show, which runs for about 45 minutes, chugs along like a reasonably well-oiled machine. What eldritch fluids comprise that oil? Best not ask. The cast members who circulate are trained improvisers, skilled at eliciting responses, practiced at batting those responses back. At one point I was harangued by a journalist character — sweaty, anxious, overconfident. Ow.The Upside-Down World of ‘Stranger Things’After a three-year wait, Netflix’s sci-fi series returns with a fourth season.Season 4 Guide: As in seasons past, this go-round is full of nods and Easter eggs to 1970s and ’80s pop culture. Here are the major highlights.Review: “Stranger Things” has gone from lovingly echoing 1980s touchstones to industriously copying itself, our critic writes of the show’s fourth installment.The Duffer Brothers: The “Stranger Things” creators seem to share a brain. But they could never lock themselves in a writing cabin together.David Harbour: While “Stranger Things” was on hiatus, the actor tackled a string of strangely compelling deadbeat characters.While immersive, “The Experience” doesn’t really depend on you. The Demogorgons will eventually explode, whether or not you deploy your extrasensory powers. Which is a letdown. Because there is a fantasy that many of us entertain about the art we love — that we might matter to the art as much as it matters to us. Still, the teenagers and young adults in the room gasped and screamed and unleashed their psychic abilities with apparent delight.“We’re trying to give fans a chance to be the hero of their stories,” Lombardo said. This is pushing it. Eleven, the psychokinetic phenom played by Millie Bobby Brown, who appears via hologram, is the real hero here. The motivating factors of “The Experience” owe less to art than to marketing, and its ultimate goal suggests a branding ouroboros: devotion to the show encourages consumption of the experience, consumption of the experience urges re-engagement with the show.After “The Experience,” with the rift safely sealed, you can consume without the distractions of a plot — which is when “Stranger Things: The Experience” achieves its final and ideal form. There is pizza to be eaten and ice cream to be licked and cocktails to be drunk. Bertolt Brecht used to rail against the culinary theater, a theater that delivered only emotion and sensation, rather than intellectual engagement. Brecht probably never had a drink with a stroopwafel as garnish. I didn’t buy a tote bag, but I did play through the “Stranger Things”-branded pinball game. I think I did pretty well.“Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play, comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater. Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTo wander the streets of Manhattan dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNo amusement genius has yet made a Samuel Beckett pinball machine — I imagine a gloomy palette, defective flippers and a high-score list that reads GODOT GODOT GODOT. But those eager for a Beckett brand extension can instead arrive at New York University’s Skirball Center for “Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play from the early 1960s. It comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater, an Irish company with an insouciant approach to the classics.Originally created in conjunction with the composer Marcel Mihalovici, “Cascando” is intended as a passive audio experience. But this “Cascando,” directed by Gavin Quinn and designed by Aedin Cosgrove, adds a participatory element.Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones. Loosed onto La Guardia Place, a quiet street adjacent to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, participants begin a single-file walk around and through the neighboring blocks. As they stroll, they listen to the text, prerecorded here by Andrew Bennett and Daniel Reardon.To wander the Village dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind. But there are no stops along the way, no interactions, no activations. The choreography — a sharp turn here and there — is minimal. At one point, I wondered, with almost breathless excitement, if we would sit. We did not sit.While it makes sense to encounter Beckett’s text via headphones — there are references throughout to a story existing only in someone’s head — the alone-together walk doesn’t illuminate or galvanize the text, which is, like so much of Beckett’s work, heavy on repetition and ellipses. On the rainy sidewalk, meaning slid away.In another city, at another moment, a show like “Cascando” might at least have ornamented the street life. But New York’s typical street life is already a variety of theater, druids or no. As we re-entered the park, I saw a clump of skateboarders look us up and down. We had become part of their story, I thought for a moment, part of their experience. Then they shrugged and returned to their conversation. Just another Wednesday in the Village, bro.Stranger Things: The ExperienceThrough Aug. 21 at Duggal Greenhouse, Brooklyn; strangerthings-experience.com. Running time: 45 minutes for the show, then mingling.CascandoThrough July 3 at N.Y.U. Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 30 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Beba’ Review: Learning From Ancestors

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      An Afro-Latina filmmaker explores her identity and generational trauma growing up in New York City and attending a predominantly white college.What’s most striking about the autobiographical documentary “Beba,” aside from the intimate lens and stunning cinematography, are its moments of vulnerability, which plunge the viewer into the Afro-Latina filmmaker’s familial and personal traumas, including heated arguments with her mother and her white friends.The film, written, directed and produced by Rebeca Huntt, traces her family’s migration to New York City, through her years at Bard College upstate, and then her move back to her parents’ place on Central Park West.“Beba,” which refers to Huntt’s childhood nickname, is not a glossed-over immigrant redemption story. Through poetry, narration — featuring the voices of writers like James Baldwin and Audre Lorde — and interviews with family and friends, Huntt, the daughter of a Black Dominican father and a Venezuelan mother, pieces together painful parts of her family and social history, extracting her own identity out of the remnants of her trauma. “Every one of us inherits the curses of our ancestors,” Huntt states. A focus is on her adversarial relationship with her mother and the tension that unfolds between them on and off camera. Huntt also interrogates her relationships to white friends amid rising racial and political tensions.Underexplored are the dynamics with and between the men in the family. Huntt’s father, who seems to be an idealized figure, is interviewed, but shies away from difficult questions. One gets the sense that he is let off the hook, perhaps because Huntt’s relationship with her mother takes up so much space. Though Huntt’s brother is a large part of the narrated story, the two are estranged, and his absence in the film is palpable. Still, “Beba” is profound. The filmmaker delves into all of who she is, including darker or more destructive aspects of her identity, pushing viewers to see Huntt’s complexity — and perhaps their own.BebaRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Theater

      In ‘Downtown Stories,’ Theater That Uses New York as Its Stage

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      “Mic check 1, 2, 1, 2. Welcome to the official unofficial unauthorized ‘Hamilton!’ walking tour,” the actress Michelle J. Rodriguez called out into her portable voice amplifier, a headset with a microphone and speaker, worn like a fanny pack. “Just kidding, it’s authorized. I just like to say that.”So begins “Uncovering Downtown: A Magical Expedition of Unrecorded Dreams,” one of two walking tours in “Downtown Stories,” a series of interactive theater being staged through June 25 in downtown Manhattan. Presented by Downtown Alliance, a nonprofit organization that manages Lower Manhattan’s business improvement district, and En Garde Arts, an experimental theater company, the three productions — two guided tours and one “docu-theater” play — weave New York City’s landmarks into the storytelling.The actress Michelle J. Rodriguez leads a fictional walking tour about Alexander Hamilton. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“Who wore it better, Lin-Manuel or Alexander?” Rodriguez continued with the enthusiasm of a college tour guide, drawing from her days as an actual campus tour guide at Williams College. Fun facts are delivered like a history lesson until you remember that you’re on a fictional walking tour. Were Hamilton’s gold epaulets really sold at auction for $1.15 million? (They were.)The play takes its audience members through crowds of rushed New Yorkers and unhurried tourists, perhaps some on their own “Hamilton & Washington” history tours, meandering from Bowling Green Park to the back alley of Marketfield Street — stopping for a moment north of Bowling Green Park to observe tourists gawking at the bronze “Charging Bull” sculpture. (“Boy, do people really like to take pictures with an ass,” Rodriguez says.)Anne Hamburger, the artistic director of En Garde Arts, said the inspiration for the work came from “theater being ingrained with the city at large.”Rodriguez is enthusiastic, drawing from her days as a college tour guide. Calla Kessler for The New York TimesShe added, “That’s what I’m excited by, coming together with a group of artists and saying, ‘How would you use this city as a stage?’”All three productions tell the tales of what the company calls “dreams from New York’s oldest streets.” In “Uncovering Downtown,” directed by Jessica Holt and co-written by Holt and Mona Mansour (“The Vagrant Trilogy”), audiences follow an out-of-work Puerto Rican performance artist who takes a job leading a “Hamilton!” walking tour. “We the People (Not the Bots),” written by Eric Lockley and directed by Morgan Green, introduces a man visiting from the future. He’s here to teach lessons about the past in hopes of stopping the world from becoming a robot-controlled society. The time traveler, played by Lockley, takes his audience to the Soldiers’ Monument at Trinity Church, where he embodies a prisoner of war in 1777, and to the Department of Motor Vehicles at 11 Greenwich Street, where he tells the story of a young Jean-Michel Basquiat tagging Lower Manhattan with graffiti art.In an afrofuturistic guided tour written by Lockley, he plays a time traveler who teaches lessons about the past to protect against a possible robot-controlled society.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesIn writing a sci-fi production heavy on rendering historical moments, Lockley said he wanted to think about how Black people might “use ancestry in the future to arm ourselves.”“I want to remind people that we are more than what we see,” he said. “There’s a spiritual element to it.”In the documentary-theater piece “Sidewalk Echoes,” performed at the John Street United Methodist Church, the playwright Rogelio Martinez and the director Johanna McKeon tell the stories of working immigrants. An Irish immigrant lands a job at an Italian restaurant but can’t pronounce orecchiette. A Catholic man from India begins working as a gas station attendant but quits after three days when the owner asks him if he wears a diaper on his head. An Uzbeki immigrant by way of Israel earns his barber’s license by demonstrating a haircut on a homeless man.The production “Sidewalk Echoes” blends fact, fiction and history. The story draws from real interviews with local business owners in New York City. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“When you see someone sleeping on the subway it’s not because they don’t want to work,” the barber says. “Maybe they just work too hard.”These are the stories of the people working in downtown Manhattan’s businesses. To write the script, Martinez listened to hours of interviews that Hamburger had conducted with local business owners. He then created narratives about immigrants building their lives in New York City. Some of the lines in the play were taken verbatim from their conversations, others are composites of multiple characters, blending together history, fact and fiction.“As an immigrant myself, I’m always interested in reinventing yourself and changing the pattern of one’s stories,” said Martinez, who is from Cuba. “This is my chance to listen to a community reflect. And from there, I could craft my story.”In the show, a banker turned food and wellness advocate tells a friend back in her native Australia that here, “people are really restless.”“We reinvent ourselves,” she tells the audience, sitting in the church pews. “Body cells replace themselves every seven years or so. And that’s in our DNA. And it just so happens it’s in New York’s DNA, too.”Each 45-minute walking tour concludes at neighborhood restaurants where audience members can use their $20 ticket as a meal voucher to support a local eatery. “Sidewalk Echoes” is free. More

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      in Music

      The Fall of Kidd Creole: Inside a Rap Pioneer’s Tragic Descent

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      The video is grainy, the sound raw, but it’s hard to look away. A small, nervous man is describing the previous night’s commute to a police detective. In his telling, he has exited Grand Central Terminal onto East 43rd Street, heading to a midnight shift at a copy shop.“I cross the street on Lexington Avenue — I notice him standing on the side right there,” he says.The detective interrupts. “When you say him, who are you referring to?”“The guy that I stabbed,” the man says.The interview continues, and the nervous man explains why he stopped to talk to the man he stabbed: He did not want to alienate a potential fan. “I have a social status,” he says. “I’m part of this rap group called Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.”The fatal encounter came on the first day of August 2017. The following day, Nathaniel Glover, better known as Kidd Creole, who helped create the blueprint for rap music, was under arrest for the murder of John Jolly, 55. He spent the next four and a half years in jail awaiting trial, was convicted of manslaughter in April and, last month, at the age of 62, was sentenced to 16 years in prison.“I didn’t mean to kill him,” he told the detective the night after the stabbing. “I wish that I would just have stayed home. I didn’t even want to hurt him. He just made me so afraid, that’s all. And I just didn’t want him to hurt me.”South Bronx RisingKidd Creole, right, with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in 1984.Anthony Barboza/Getty ImagesThe saga of Kidd Creole, from the pinnacle of hip-hop stardom to a Bronx rooming house and a series of menial temp jobs, is a parable of rap’s first generation. It is a story of extravagant creativity, an industry that took advantage of its very young creators and a man who never stopped dreaming of a way back into stardom.“This entire music genre was founded by us,” said Grandmaster Caz, a contemporary of Kidd Creole. “And how much is it worth? How much do we own?”The answer, for most of the genre’s pioneers, is not much.Nathaniel Glover Jr. was born Feb. 19, 1960, the third of five children in a working-class Bronx family. His father, Nathaniel Sr., was a handyman who would repair floors; his mother, Sarah, took care of the home.“We basically were sheltered,” said his sister, Glander, one year older. “We weren’t allowed to hang out late at night, be outside, be late.”Nathaniel was a shy, undersized adolescent who favored soft rock and Motown. He and his younger brother Melvin would sneak away with their sister’s poetry notebooks, enchanted by the rhymes. In the Bronx, at that time, it was a useful interest to cultivate.By the mid-1970s, neighborhood D.J.s started holding parties in parks and community centers. In July 1977 — the month of a blackout that left New York City dark — the brothers met a D.J. named Joseph Saddler, who called himself Grandmaster Flash.Flash worked with a bowlegged teenager named Keef Cowboy, who energized the crowds with simple rhymes and exhortations. When a friend enlisted in the military, Cowboy teased him on the microphone: “Hip, hop, hip, hop!”The new culture would soon have a name.Nathaniel and Melvin were the next to join. Nathaniel became Kidd Creole, from the Elvis Presley movie “King Creole”; Melvin became Melle Mel.The Great ReadMore fascinating tales you can’t help but read all the way to the end.Using the Vatican’s own archives, a soft-spoken scholar has become arguably the most effective excavator of the church’s hidden sins.TikTok choreography, dancing umpires, a ballet-trained first-base coach: The Savannah Bananas, a collegiate summer league baseball team, has amassed a following by leaning into entertainment.There is growing evidence that MDMA — the illegal drug known as Ecstasy or Molly — can significantly lessen or even eliminate symptoms of PTSD when the treatment is paired with talk therapy.They were the Three M.C.s — later the Furious Four, and finally, Five — giving shape to what hip-hop would become. Their parties were epic, and they were stars — untrained, disrespected by mainstream artists and creating the music that would define much of Black culture for the next 50 years.“We didn’t have any idea that it would be an original form of American music,” Mr. Glover said last month, speaking from the floating jail barge where he spent years waiting for his trial. “We was just trying to have fun, make a couple of dollars, meet some women. It wasn’t that we had in our head, ‘Oh, this is going to be the start of something big.’”Creole was not as lyrically deft as the other group members, but he had a way of connecting with audiences, said MC Sha-Rock, a member of the Funky Four Plus 1, the Furious Five’s chief rivals in the early days. “Every rhyme, every word made you feel like he was talking to you,” she said. “It was strange: being a teenager, how did you just know that this is what you had to do to engage a crowd?”From another D.J.’s party, Creole picked up a phrase and made it a hip-hop fundamental: “Yes, yes, y’all.”Major record companies saw the music as a fad, leaving it to independents: Enjoy, Sugar Hill, Tommy Boy, Tuff City. When Sugar Hill offered the group a contract in 1980, the rappers signed the papers on the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car at the Englewood, N.J., home of the label’s owners, Sylvia and Joe Robinson, according to Guy Todd Williams, better known as Rahiem, another member of the Furious Five. He was under 18, the others just over. Like the other performers on the label, they knew nothing about the music business.The gloss of the studio and the authority of the engineers made Mr. Glover feel like he was a member of the Motown groups he looked up to, one of the Temptations, maybe.“We kind of felt like we were walking in their footsteps,” he said.What followed was music history and decades of litigation.Sugar Hill became the group’s managers, publishers, producers and recording company. Tension grew when the record label selected Melle Mel as a de facto frontman, alienating the others. Mel was the only member who participated in the Furious Five’s highest charting hit, “The Message” — it is his voice reciting the song’s familiar refrain: “Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head.”The invention, the crowds, the concerts, made the six members of the group into celebrities. But it wouldn’t last. Even as the group recorded songs that defined the new genre, they never received any royalty payments, Rahiem said. (Flash, Melle Mel and Scorpio all declined to be interviewed for this article; Cowboy died in 1989.) Eventually, Grandmaster Flash had to sue just for the right to use his own stage name.It was a familiar story, said Rocky Bucano, executive director of the Universal Hip Hop Museum, which is scheduled to open in the Bronx in 2024.“This goes not just for the guys in hip-hop, but the guys in R&B, soul and every other music genre,” Mr. Bucano said. “The early guys who started as teenagers got taken advantage of and ended up with the short end of the stick.”The band ultimately made some money when the label paid the performers to settle two lawsuits in 2002 and 2007; another is still ongoing.Leland Robinson, son of the label founders, said that Sugar Hill paid the performers all royalties due them, and that any lingering litigation would soon be resolved. “We are one,” he said, claiming close relationships with Scorpio and Melle Mel. “I’m just tired of bad press.”Styles ChangeKidd Creole, right, and his group became stars, helping to create the genre that would define much of Black culture for the next 50 years.Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesOnstage, the group was dynamic and seamless. They toured the world. But offstage there were problems: egos, drugs, friction over loyalty to the Robinsons, which helped seed a rift between the Glover brothers that persists to this day.Styles were also changing. In 1983, the group Run-DMC. from Queens, came out with a stripped-down sound and look that made the Furious Five, with their flashy hair and designer leathers, seem dated. They still performed, but the hits stopped coming and the audiences were smaller. Mr. Glover was just 23, and his star turn was ending. The first generation of hip-hop pioneers — the oldest of the old school — were disappearing from view.“There was never a Plan B for them,” said Sha-Rock. As her career waned, she went on to become a corrections officer in Texas. (She couldn’t do it in New York, she said, “because I would know all the people coming through.”)Mr. Glover spoke candidly about the pain of losing his star status. “It was disappointing to stand on the sideline and watch people achieve,” he said.After a last brief turn in New York’s spotlight in 1994, hosting a call-in radio show on Hot 97 that was canceled the next year, Mr. Glover began to take on temporary jobs — security guard, maintenance, office work — which gave him flexibility for occasional gigs or short tours. In 1997, he moved into a modest rooming house in the West Bronx, still believing the group had the talent to get back on top.He bought himself a beat-making machine and an eight-track recorder so he could produce his own songs, but he could never get anyone to take much of an interest. In 2012, he posted a series of videos of himself rapping, hoping to drum up a following on YouTube. Five years earlier, the group had been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but now his videos rarely got more than a few hundred views.“You went from having everything to having almost nothing,” his sister said. “That’s a deep dive.”And in the rooming house, he was essentially anonymous.“Hardly anybody knew I was part of the recording industry,” he said. “I kept that to myself.”It was a life he never quite got used to.“Ain’t like nobody was walking up to him, ‘Ain’t you so-and-so from Grandmaster Flash?’” said Van Silk, a promoter who worked with the group. “Because the time has passed.”A Fatal ConfrontationInduction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Mr. Glover, center right, went from “having everything to having almost nothing,” his sister said. “That’s a deep dive.”Peter Kramer/Getty ImagesIn the summer of 2017, Mr. Glover thought he had finally caught a break. Capitalizing on growing nostalgia for old school hip-hop, the surviving Furious Five MCs were booked to perform at the 6,000-seat Dell Music Center in Philadelphia, on a bill with other veteran hip-hop acts. It would be Mr. Glover’s first time in front of an audience in more than five years, and he hoped it might lead to a full tour.“I always enjoyed being out on the road performing,” he said in a call from jail. “It’s in my blood. I can’t get away from it.”On Aug. 1, three weeks before the Philadelphia gig, Mr. Glover rode the subway to Grand Central Terminal for his midnight shift in Manhattan. Since being robbed after a trip to the store for milk and beer a dozen years prior, he had begun carrying a steak knife attached to his forearm with a rubber band.“I went across Lexington Avenue, that’s when I noticed the guy,” he would tell Mark Dahl, a prosecutor from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the next night. He said that seeing a man standing alone was “a red flag for me.”But Cheryl Horry, John Jolly’s cousin, doubted there was anything unusual going on: “Most likely my cousin was standing there drinking a beer,” she said. “When he’s drinking his beer, he’ll lean against the wall, and he’ll speak to everybody.”According to Ms. Horry, Mr. Jolly was born in Charleston, S.C., but moved to New York with an uncle after his parents died. As an adolescent, he left school for a series of jobs, Ms. Horry said, including a stint at White Castle. He had a habit of distancing himself from his family, and this became more pronounced as an adult, particularly after he’d been drinking heavily. Ms. Horry and others lost touch with Mr. Jolly, seeing him only occasionally, often during the holidays.“We never knew why,” she said. “When he’d come around, we always used to tell him: ‘We’re family. Even if you don’t want to be around family, call us, let us know you’re all right.’”According to Mr. Glover and surveillance video of the confrontation, Mr. Jolly said something to Mr. Glover as he passed by that August night. But Mr. Glover had earbuds in, listening to a song by the Eagles. Take it easy, take it easy / Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.Mr. Glover said that he took out his earbuds, not wanting to be rude, in case the man was a fan — in which case, he would have apologized for initially ignoring Mr. Jolly and thanked him for the recognition. But when he realized that Mr. Jolly had only said, ‘What’s up?’ he responded in kind. “Nothing, bruh, nothing,” he said and put the buds back in.Surveillance video from a neighboring office building shows Mr. Glover then strolling out of the frame. After several seconds, Mr. Jolly is seen gesticulating in the direction that Mr. Glover has gone. He then walks purposefully toward him, still gesturing, until he is right in the face of Mr. Glover, who has walked back into the frame. Mr. Glover makes to leave, and Mr. Jolly follows him. Both men drift out of sight. What happened next was not caught on camera.Throughout his four and a half years in jail, Mr. Glover has never denied that he stabbed Mr. Jolly, even pantomiming for the prosecutor during the interview the following night the motion he used, two sharp jabs to Mr. Jolly’s chest. On the phone recently from the Vernon C. Bain jail barge, he was just as blunt.“I’m backing up, and he’s moving toward me,” he said. “He was sweating and his eyes was bulging.” Mr. Glover backed off, he said, and Mr. Jolly moved forward. “And then that’s when I stabbed him.”Rahiem, who stayed in touch with Mr. Glover as he awaited trial, said that the rapper never appeared broken. “He seemed determined, resilient, innocent, but disappointed in the way the justice system was working against him,” Rahiem said.But while he expressed deep remorse in his initial interviews with law enforcement, Mr. Glover became increasingly fixated on the surveillance video during his years in jail, telling family members, friends and reporters that it had been manipulated to make Mr. Jolly seem less aggressive. (The New York Times asked a video expert, Catalin Grigoras, the director of the National Center for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado, Denver, to analyze the video in question, and he said it bore no signs of manipulation.)Finally, this March, a trial commenced. Mr. Glover’s trademark long hair was shorn, his face creased by time. He looked small and uncomfortable in an oversize suit, and he did not testify, leaving it to Scottie Celestin, the fifth in a string of lawyers representing him over the years, to argue that Mr. Jolly died from mismanaged care at the hospital, not from his two stab wounds.Mr. Glover’s supporters were irate when the judge, Michele S. Rodney, told the jurors not to consider whether Mr. Glover acted in self-defense. New York law says that deadly physical force is permissible only in response to an aggressor who is also using deadly physical force; Mr. Jolly was unarmed.On April 6, the jury returned a verdict acquitting Mr. Glover of murder — which requires intent — but convicting him of manslaughter. On May 4, Mr. Glover was sentenced to 16 years. If he serves the full term, he will be 73 when he leaves prison. Asked to speak before the sentencing, he made no apology to anybody, as Cheryl Horry noted bitterly afterward.Mr. Glover said to the judge, “I’m very disappointed in the way that the whole situation has played out,” adding that he had been portrayed as a person with no remorse or humanity. “I also feel that at a certain point the truth of all this will be revealed and I will be exonerated,” he said. Mr. Celestin said he planned to appeal.The day of the sentencing, Sylvia Robinson, who had been the chief executive of Sugar Hill Records, was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The music that she, Mr. Glover and a small handful of others brought into the world is now almost 50 years old, and it is the dominant form of popular music today. Hip-hop’s legacy includes revolutions in fashion and language, lasting fame and enormous fortunes — but it left Mr. Glover working a midnight shift over a photocopier.The tragedy of Kidd Creole, the rapper, is that the culture he helped create had so little need for him. The tragedy of Nathaniel Glover and John Jolly was a random encounter of no more than seven minutes. Mr. Glover believed to the end that he was one break away from relaunching his music career.Sha-Rock, now 60, sees in Mr. Glover’s fall a legacy of neglect: first by the city, and then by the industry.“Sugar Hill Records created the space for people to hear us outside of New York City,” she said. “But we were supposed to be protected as young teenagers. He shouldn’t have had to be working at a copy shop, I shouldn’t have to be working as a corrections officer. We were supposed to have been protected. We gave you everything that was dear to our heart and dear to the culture of hip-hop. That’s real.“We gave you our blood, sweat and tears, and transformed rap records,” she continued. “You were supposed to protect us.”Mr. Glover agrees. “If I was doing anything that had any relation to the industry, I wouldn’t have been there,” he said. “I would have been home.”He protests the case against him, talking to anyone who will listen about his issues with the surveillance video. Though he has never stopped admitting to the stabbing, the contrition he displayed on the night after the killing has disappeared. “My conscience is clear,” he said.“He initiated this whole thing,” he said of Mr. Jolly. “I didn’t want anything to do with him.” He mentioned the show scheduled for later in the month. “The group was ready to get back together,” he said. “I was getting ready to go back to my life the way it was.”The concert in Philadelphia went on without him. More

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      Shauneille Perry Ryder, Pioneering Theater Director, Dies at 92

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      As a Black woman, she blazed a path Off Broadway with an intuitive grasp of “how a story should be told, particularly a Black story,” Giancarlo Esposito said.Shauneille Perry Ryder, an actress, playwright and educator who was one of the first Black women to direct plays Off Broadway, most notably for the New Federal Theater, died on June 9 at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 92.Her daughter Lorraine Ryder confirmed the death.Ms. Perry Ryder, who was known professionally as Shauneille (pronounced shaw-NELL) Perry, directed 17 plays at the New Federal Theater from 1971 to 2006, each a part of the company’s mission to integrate artists of color and women into mainstream American theater. The theater, founded in 1970 by Woodie King Jr. in Lower Manhattan and now housed on West 42nd Street, has been a mecca for Black actors and directors.“She was personable with actors, but she put her foot down,” Mr. King said in a phone interview, referring to her attention to detail. “I’m so glad she worked with New Federal. She gave us a great reputation. In our first 10 years, we had a hit each year, and at least three or four were directed by Shauneille Perry.”In 1982, she directed Rob Penny’s “Who Loves the Dancer,” about a young Black man (played by Giancarlo Esposito) growing up in 1950s Philadelphia who dreams of becoming a dancer but who is trapped by his mother’s expectations, his environment and racism.In The New York Times, the critic Mel Gussow wrote that the play “has an inherent honesty, and in Shauneille Perry’s production, the evening is filled with conviction.”Mr. Esposito, who had been directed earlier that year by Ms. Perry Ryder in another play, “Keyboard,” at the New Federal, recalled her “very intuitive expression of how a story should be told, particularly a Black story.”“I was a young, green actor who had chops,” he added, in a phone interview, “but she taught me that acting is physical. The explosion that comes out of me in the second act came together under her direction.”Ms. Perry Ryder also directed Phillip Hayes Dean’s “Paul Robeson,” which traces the life of the titular singer and social crusader; “Jamimma,” by Martie Evans-Charles, about a young woman who changes her name because of its connection to servility and who is devoted to a man who she is told will never do much more than “wear rags or play instruments”; and “Black Girl,” by J.E. Franklin, about three generations of Black women, including a teenager who yearns to dance.“If you’re Black, you know about these people in any city,” Ms. Perry Ryder told The Times in 1971, referring to the characters in “Black Girl.” “We are all a part of each other.”She won at least two Audelco Awards from the Audience Development Committee, which honors Black theater and artists, and in 2019 received the Lloyd Richards Director’s Award from the National Black Theater Festival, in Winston-Salem, N.C., named after the Tony-winning director of many of August Wilson’s plays.Shauneille Gantt Perry was born on July 26, 1929, in Chicago. Her father, Graham, was one of the first Black assistant attorneys general in Illinois; her mother, Pearl (Gantt) Perry, was a pioneering Black court reporter in Chicago. Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote “A Raisin the Sun,” was one of Shauneille’s cousins.While attending Howard University — where she received a bachelor’s degree in drama in 1950 — Ms. Ryder Perry belonged to a student theater group, the Howard Players, which performed Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” on a tour of Scandinavia at the invitation of the Norwegian government. “We were the only Black company to tour those marvelous countries,” she told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1971.She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1952 at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago (now a part of DePaul University). As a Fulbright scholar in 1954, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Dissatisfied with the curriculum, however (“they were always doing ‘Cleopatra,’” she said), she transferred to the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art.Back in Chicago she began acting — she was in a summer stock play, “Mamba’s Daughters,” with Ethel Waters — while also writing for the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender. In 1959, while on a trip to Paris that she had won through an Ebony magazine essay contest, she met the author Richard Wright, who, she recalled, asked her, “They still lynching people back in the States?”“I remember telling him, ‘They do it a little differently there today,’” she told The Times in 1971. But the next day she read about a Black man who had been accused of rape and taken forcibly to a jail cell; his body was later found floating in a river. “I kept wondering to myself,” she said, “‘What is that man saying about my analysis of things?’”And she wondered what she would do when she got home.At first she continued acting. She appeared in various Off Broadway plays, including Josh Greenfeld’s “Clandestine on the Morning Line” (1961), with James Earl Jones, in which a pregnant young woman (Ms. Perry Ryder) from Alabama strolls into a restaurant looking for the father of her child.Edith Oliver, reviewing the play in The New Yorker, praised Ms. Perry Ryder’s “lovely performance,” writing that she gave her role “such quiet, innocent strength and apparent unawareness of the character’s pathos that we almost forget it, too.”Frustrated with the roles she was offered, Ms. Perry Ryder turned to directing, first at the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, with a workshop production of Ms. Franklin’s “Mau Mau Room.”“I got the feeling that maybe there’s a place for me,” she told The Times.Two years later, she directed “The Sty of the Blind Pig” for the Negro Ensemble Company. In the drama, a blind street singer in 1950s Chicago goes to a house on the South Side looking for a woman he once knew.Emory Lewis wrote in his review in The Record that Ms. Perry Ryder “had marshaled her actors with loving attention to period detail and nuance.”Ms. Perry Ryder, left, in 1971 while directing “Black Girl,” a play by J. E. Franklin, right, about three generations of Black women. Produced by the New Federal Theater, it was staged at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street in Lower Manhattan. Bert Andrews Her theater work continued for more than 40 years, including writing and directing “Things of the Heart: Marian Anderson’s Story,” about the brilliant Black contralto; directing and rewriting the book for a 1999 revival of “In Dahomey,” the first Broadway musical, originally staged in 1903, written by African Americans; and writing a soap opera for a Black radio station in New York City.In 1986, Ms. Perry Ryder joined the faculty of Lehman College in the Bronx, where she taught theater and ran the drama program. At Lehman, she staged “Looking Back: The Music of Micki Grant,” a revue based on Ms. Grant’s theatrical works, which include “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope.” She retired in 2001.In addition to Lorraine Ryder, Ms. Perry Ryder is survived by two other daughters, Gail Perry-Ryder Tigere and Natalie Ryder Redcross, and four grandchildren. Her husband, Donald Ryder, an architect, died in 2021. More