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    Extra Extra! The End Times, Onscreen

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    Alien invasions, viruses, zombies, meteors, natural or human-caused catastrophes. When the end is nigh in apocalyptic, dystopian, disaster or horror films and television shows, there is often a distinct moment that offers audiences a glimpse of what was known in those last days before civilization was forever changed: the front pages of newspapers.Sometimes the camera lingers on the page, allowing us to read headlines that telegraph the scramble to make sense of unprecedented events. Other times, blink and you’ll miss it.In some instances, these front pages are the last ones printed in the before-times; in others, humanity endures in the end, though it is certainly transformed.The pivotal disaster might have been long past. Or perhaps it’s only the beginning of the end.‘Men in Black’ (1997)Alien threats endanger Earth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Lynda Obst, Producer, Dies at 74; Championed Women in Hollywood

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      She helped make films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact.” She also wrote widely about the industry, for The Times and other publications.Lynda Obst, a New York journalist turned Hollywood producer who promoted women in films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact” while writing incisive dispatches from Tinseltown for outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 74.Her brother Rick Rosen said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Known for her booming, raspy laugh and her startling candor, Ms. Obst was a colorful character even by the standards of a colorful industry.Even more unusual for Hollywood, she was at times an outspoken critic of the movie industry, especially its treatment of women.As a producer, she excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She helped shepherd Nora Ephron’s seminal “Sleepless in Seattle” as an executive producer in 1993 and the box-office hit “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” as a producer in 2003. But she also produced Robert Zemeckis’s “Contact” in 1997 and Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” in 2014.She was an advocate for stories focused on women, and often made by women, at a time when there weren’t many. She pushed, for example, for Jodie Foster to star as an astronomer in “Contact” when it was unusual for a major science fiction movie to have a female lead. An acolyte and admirer of Ms. Ephron, she produced her directorial debut, “This Is My Life” (1992).Ms. Obst excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She was an executive producer of the hit Nora Ephron comedy “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), which starred Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, seen here with Ross Malinger.TriStar PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Garfield’s Journey From Comic Strip to Weird Internet Incubator

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      He hates Mondays, he’s No. 1 at the box office and he’s been the subject of a lot of weirdness over the last 40-plus years.You may have noticed that “The Garfield Movie” was the No. 1 movie in America last week, earning $14 million and taking over the top spot from the infinitely more hyped “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” It has grossed $55 million in North America and $156 million globally in two weeks.“The Garfield Movie” found the top of the box office in its second week of release.Dneg Animation/Sony Pictures, via Associated PressAfter more than 45 years of daily strips (that still get made every day), three feature films, 76 books, three animated series, dozens of video games and a literal boatload of merchandise, we may ask, how did we get here?In an attempt to answer that question, we took a trip down the Garfield rabbit hole.So Much MerchandiseThe first thing you come across is the merchandise. There are T-shirts, phones, watches, furniture, clocks, slippers, tents, wallets, trading cards, eye shadow and roller skates with Garfield’s leering image.There was even a Garfield toilet seat cover. “It turned out to be a great product. It was real colorful,” Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis, told The New York Times in 2019. (There are, in fact, numerous Garfield toilet seat covers.)This is no accident. Davis released the three-panel newspaper comic strip in 1978 with an eye toward selling his creation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      How a Culture Editor Covers the Kids’ Entertainment Beat

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      Laurel Graeber, who has covered kids’ entertainment at The Times for nearly three decades, shared her favorite stories and interviews from the beat.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Laurel Graeber grew up loving the theater and museums. But she never thought she would write about them for The New York Times — or that she would do so for nearly three decades.“I was an editor, but I always wanted to write,” said Ms. Graeber, who helped lead the Culture desk’s copy department for more than 10 years before she retired from full-time work in 2017. “And when the freelance assignment of writing our weekend kids’ entertainment column became open, I said yes.”She has written regularly about culture for young people for nearly three decades, spotlighting the best activities that parents or caregivers can do with children each weekend in New York City. She also writes features on new television shows, movies, museum exhibitions and podcasts for kids.“What I find most enjoyable is stuff for adults that’s also good for kids, but not necessarily geared toward them,” Ms. Graeber said in a recent interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Television

      Tom Shales, TV Critic Both Respected and Feared, Dies at 79

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      An incisively funny Washington Post columnist, he earned nicknames like Terrible Tom and had the clout to make or break shows.Tom Shales, the Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post whose scalpel-sharp dissections of shows he deemed dead on arrival earned him nicknames like the Terror of the Tube, as well as a reputation for the power to make or break shows, died on Saturday in Alexandria, Va. He was 79.James Andrew Miller, a longtime collaborator and friend, said he died in a hospice facility from complications of Covid.Despite toiling in a political town far removed from the coastal capitals of the entertainment industry, Mr. Shales wielded enormous influence during his three-decade career, starting in 1977, as The Post’s chief television critic.Those whose fortunes were tied to the small screen considered him both a kingmaker and a high executioner in an era when network television’s hold on American culture was so tight as to be almost crushing.“He has been called brilliant, thoughtful, incisive and screamingly funny,” Time magazine observed in 1981, christening him “Terrible Tom, the TV Tiger.” “Also, vicious, infuriating, cruel and unfair. NBC president Fred Silverman no longer returns his calls. His thrice-weekly Washington Post TV column, ‘On the Air,’ syndicated in 59 other newspapers, causes teeth-gnashing in Hollywood and heartburn in Manhattan’s network headquarters.”To celebrate Mr. Shales’s 25th anniversary at the newspaper, The Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham, arranged a party at her house that was attended by the likes of Dan Rather, Connie Chung and Conan O’Brien. Ms. Graham explained the star-studded turnout in a single word, according to a report in Washingtonian magazine: “Fear.”No wonder. Delivering prose so colorful it seemed to be written in neon, he had the power to devastate.In a 1987 review of “The Morning Program,” CBS’s latest attempt to compete with the “Today” show, he wrote that “some TV shows seem to call less for a review than an exorcism.”“Watching it was like waking up and finding the house overrun with last night’s party guests,” he continued, “most of them stewed to the gills and gabby as all get-out.”In a 2005 column about ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” he wrote that it seemed like little more than an assemblage of “scenes from medical shows of the past already restaged ad infinitum and ad nauseam,” and that it was “a ‘new’ show only in the sense that Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was a new man.”After he teed off in 2003 on the Fox teenage drama “The O.C.” as a “moody, moon-faced trifle,” the show fired back with a hospital scene featuring a patient named Tom Shales, who is incontinent. “I consider it an honor,” Mr. Shales said in an interview with the Page Six gossip section of The New York Post. “It’s a TV critic’s only shot at immortality.”He was a magnet for furious phone calls from sitcom stars and network titans. “So-and-so would call, and he’d tell me, ‘Get on the other line, this is going to be good,’” Mr. Miller, who worked on the television team at the Post with Mr. Shales in the 1980s, said in a phone interview. “This person literally would be just cursing him out for 20 minutes, and he’d be sitting there trimming his fingernails. If you hooked him up to an EKG, there would be no movement whatsoever.”While Mr. Shales’s reviews could be acidic, his indignant salvos came from a place of passion. In a 1989 interview with the public radio host Terry Gross, he recalled his thoughts as a child when his family finally got a 14-inch RCA set in a mahogany console: “This was a miracle, this was the Second Coming and nirvana all rolled into one.”At 13, he wrote a school paper outlining the steps he planned to take to become a television columnist when he grew up. “He formed this bond with the medium so early,” Mr. Miller said. “It was the love of his life.”When Mr. Shales would do one of his brilliant takedowns, Mr. Miller said, “he wasn’t trying to destroy the show or the writers.”“He was just angry because he knew it could be better. He had no patience for people who were phoning it in or reaching for the lowest common denominator.”The shows he loved, he loved. In 1990, he called “Twin Peaks,” the director David Lynch’s eerie and unsettling small-town drama, “a captivating blend of the existential and the pulpy, the surreal and the neo-real, the grim and the farcical.” “Twin Peaks,” he added, “is new age music for the eyes.”In a 2006 column, he wrote that David Simon’s gritty HBO crime drama “The Wire” “might be the most authentic epic ever seen on television.” “You go to ‘The Wire’ not to escape,” he added, “but to be immersed in a world where madness and sanity can seem interchangeable.”As Mr. Shales told Time: “People who respect TV are the ones I respect. It’s the ones who wipe their feet on it whom I probably write nasty things about.”Thomas William Shales was born on Nov. 3, 1944, in Elgin, Ill., one of three children of Clyde Shales, who ran a towing service and body shop, and Hulda (Reko) Shales, who managed a clothing store.He served as co-editor of his high school newspaper and went on to become the editor in chief of the campus newspaper at American University in Washington, where he graduated with a degree in journalism in 1968.His first full-time job in journalism was at The D.C. Examiner, a free tabloid, where his verbal gymnastics caught the attention of editors at The Post, who hired him in 1972 as a general-assignment reporter. Focusing his sights on television and popular culture, he became the chief TV critic five years later.In addition to his Post columns, Mr. Shales published a number of books, including an oral history of “Saturday Night Live,” written with James Andrew Miller. He won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1988.The job landed him in the middle of swirling controversies about the toxic state of television, with its blood-soaked detective dramas, sensationalized news shows and sex-addled sitcoms — which, in the view of many pundits, were a source of cultural rot.Mr. Shales was all too happy to wade in up to his thighs. In response to a spate of leering television movies at the dawn of the 1980s involving torture, child molestation and teenage prostitution, he wrote that “watching prime-time TV is like being trapped in Sleaze City’s tackiest honky-tonk.”“One gets a warped and depressing view,” he added, “of what it means to be alive.”His sharp-eyed takes won him a Pulitzer for criticism in 1988.While his Post column never waned in influence, Mr. Shales, who was making more than $300,000 a year thanks to his Post salary and his syndication revenues, took a buyout from The Post in 2006 after a management transition. He continued to contribute columns under contract until 2010.In addition to his Post columns, he published a number of books, including two oral histories with Mr. Miller: “Live From New York,” a history of Saturday Night Live” (2002), and “Those Guys Have All the Fun,” about ESPN” (2011).Mr. Shales, who never married or had children, leaves no immediate survivors.Having spent years in his Washington Post office with three televisions flickering nonstop, and with another three televisions glowing at his home in McLean, Va., Mr. Shales told Time that sometimes even he tuned out on the programming at hand. “After all,” he said, “only about 2 percent of what’s on is worth really watching.” More

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      in Music

      Soul Told Black Musicians’ Stories. Its Archives Are Going Digital.

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      The newspaper, which started in 1966 with a focus on R&B, funk and disco, shut down in 1982. But one of its founders’ grandsons is devoted to finding it a new online audience.The rock ’n’ roll bible Rolling Stone was founded in 1967. The renegade music magazine Creem started in 1969. But another publication predated them both: Soul.Motown, Stax and Phil Spector’s Philles Records were busting out (and Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International label was on the horizon), but until Soul, no publication had been feeding the growing appetite for even the most basic information about Black artists like Marvin Gaye, Carla Thomas or the Isley Brothers. The world knew the names of the Beatles’ wives, but not of the Ikettes.With the smoke barely cleared from the Watts riots, two men saw an opening: Ken Jones, Los Angeles’s first Black television anchor, and Cecil Tuck, who revitalized KRLA Beat, an early rock title. But the face of Soul, the one who told record company bosses where to get off and had artists calling her at night with scoops, was Regina Jones, Ken’s wife. Fly, flinty and self-created, Regina was at one time both the paper’s publisher and editor in chief.Soul was groundbreaking, but it flamed out in 1982. Now Matt Jones, Ken and Regina’s grandson, is giving the publication a second life, creating an online archive of its issues for paying subscribers and uploading select audio from interviews. (Hard copies — dead stock — are also for sale.)“We have bound volumes of all the issues that have been in my grandmother’s home for as long as I can remember,” Jones, 39, said. He has digitalized 82 issues with 291 to go, and is leaning on Regina, now 80, for historical context. (The two talk every day; Ken died in 1993.)As the most granular source of news and images of soul, R&B, funk and disco artists in the Golden Age of those genres, Soul is a gold mine for Black history and pop culture scholars. It “documents an important turning point in U.S. race relations and the arts,” Susan D. Anderson, who stewarded Regina’s gift of Soul’s archive to the U.C.L.A. Library in 2010, wrote in an email.Few people, she added, know that Soul, “in its drive to document African Americans’ perspective in a self-representative way, was a pivotal vehicle” powering the shift from “race records” to America “becoming the locus of popular culture production,” with Black artists the prevailing force.Selling originally for 15 cents, the biweekly also covered jazz, television, Black Power, Hollywood and theater. Page Six-style columns delivered gossip in bites. Style was a de facto component: the Pointer Sisters in high-’40s drag, Al Green in hot pants and over-the-knee boots. A glossy sister was spawned, Soul! Illustrated.Soul threw down the gauntlet from the first issue. James Brown and Mick Jagger shared a split cover under the headline “White Artists Selling Negro ‘Soul.’” Daphne A. Brooks, professor of African American studies at Yale, singled it out for “the audacity of its critical focus,” stunned that in 1966 a music publication would lead with a piece on the politics of cultural appropriation. “Are you kidding me?!” she wrote over email. Other covers the first year featured Stevie Wonder, the Impressions and Sam Cooke. The website highlights major interviews with Aretha Franklin, Rick James and Bob Marley.Soul “helps to fill out and complicate our understanding of a seminal moment,” Gayle Wald, author of “It’s Been Beautiful: ‘Soul!’ and Black Power Television,” wrote in an email. “Soul!,” a variety show, was unrelated to the paper but had a similar mission. “Serious cultural journalism about pop music was just emerging,” Wald added.Regina and Ken bought out Tuck in 1967, producing Soul from their home near Watts while raising five children. Regina said she did not view Rolling Stone as competition but did “resent” it covering Black artists: her territory. In 1975, both publications printed Labelle covers; Jones enjoyed a measure of satisfaction when she beat Jann Wenner’s magazine to the newsstands by four months. Nona Hendryx, a member of Labelle, purveyors of a landmark mash-up of funk, rock, R&B and gospel, said that “for an African-American artist, Soul was definitely more important than Rolling Stone.” Fans approached her in public: “Hey, I saw you in Soul.”“You got your feedback directly from the people,” Hendryx added. “It had more weight than Rolling Stone because it kept us in the community.”In a novel marketing gambit, Soul partnered with 30 Black radio stations across the country, printing a different edition for each. Stations had their call letters on the cover and a spread inside for rotation charts and advertisers. Bruce W. Talamon, Soul’s star photographer, said that in turn, “D.J.s gave us on-air promotion — ‘Buy your Soul newspaper!’”Regina’s unfiltered access to artists could mean fielding a call from David Ruffin announcing he’d just been fired from the Temptations — and wanted to tell his story. “That speaks to how highly he felt about Soul,” she said. “It was almost like going to your parents.” Diana Ross kissed the Supremes goodbye in 1970 during their final performance at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, then slipped into a booth beside Berry Gordy, still in her Bob Mackie stage velvets, to spill tea with Soul.Sublime talent showed up on Regina’s doorstep unbidden, including Leonard Pitts Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and Talamon, whose book, “Soul. R&B. Funk. Photographs 1972-1982,” is a definitive visual record of artists in the idioms and period it covers.Before freelancing for Soul in 1976, Pitts said in a video interview from the 2000s, “I was there every day on the day” Soul came out, waiting for it to go on sale, to learn that the Temptations had suffered yet another personnel change, that King had been assassinated. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening? My world is crumbling.’”Pitts, who later held the top editorial position, said in the video that he admired Soul because it didn’t pander, printing that there was no love lost between Rick James and George Clinton. Nobody else, he noted, thought Black music warranted that kind of attention: “No one else was telling you, you know, ‘This is why Philippé Wynne left the Spinners.’ It wasn’t what the press releases say. It’s because they had a fight.”Nichelle Gainer, author of “Vintage Black Glamour,” noted in an email that Soul’s “coverage of hot-button topics” like the Motown star Tammi Terrell’s illness was “steadier,” with “consistent updates,” compared with general interest Black publications. But the paper’s quality was not always how alumni and scholars remember it. The writing could be crude; handout images were sometimes accepted as cover photos. And as the ’70s wound down, Soul lost its teeth. The Joneses’ marriage was unraveling. Regina admitted she was no longer minding the store. In 1980, ‌J. Randy Taraborrelli, who followed Pitts as editor in chief and would go on to write “Call Her Miss Ross,” a biography of the supreme Supreme, pushed successfully for a cover the publication’s readership could not abide: Barry Manilow.Matt Jones will dutifully digitalize the issue. But he won’t be sad if it goes unnoticed among firebombs like the Brown/Jagger story. Before Soul, he said, Jet and Ebony talked about soul music “as this weird kind of niche thing — they had trouble describing it. The press packets of many Black musicians in the ’60s consisted of a single one-page write-up: ‘Here’s who I am. Here’s this great interview on me in Soul newspaper.’” More

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      in Theater

      Michael Feingold, Forceful Drama Critic, Dies at 77

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      For decades he wrote about theater in The Village Voice, but he also was a dramaturge and a Tony-nominated translator.Michael Feingold, whose learned writing about the theater was a fixture of The Village Voice for decades, and who was also a dramaturge, a translator and a Tony Award-nominated lyricist and adapter, died on Nov. 21 in Manhattan. He was 77.Daniel Pardo, one of his executors, confirmed the death, in a hospital. He said Mr. Feingold had had a longstanding heart condition.Mr. Feingold had an encyclopedic knowledge of plays and musicals, which he drew upon as he sized up productions, beginning in the early 1970s and continuing until recently. He did not pull punches, even if his target was a venerable veteran.He once dismissed Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose music is often said to be derivative, with this line: “Webber’s music isn’t so painful to hear, if you don’t mind its being so soiled from previous use.”In 2003 he assessed Neil Simon’s last produced play, “Rose’s Dilemma,” saying that it “doesn’t mean anything to anybody and doesn’t reveal any understanding, on its author’s part, of how plays are written.” Mr. Simon at that point had won multiple Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Theatrical trends did not impress Mr. Feingold either, especially Broadway’s late-20th-century fixation on big-budget musicals that, as he once put it, were about “large, mechanized objects” rather than characters. His 1991 takedown of Cameron Mackintosh’s production of “Miss Saigon,” which ran on Broadway for 10 years and was famed for its onstage helicopter, was part of theatrical lore.“Every civilization gets the theater it deserves, and we get ‘Miss Saigon,’ which means we can now say definitively that our civilization is over,” Mr. Feingold wrote. “After this, I see no way out but an aggressive clearance program: All the Broadway theaters must be demolished, without regard for their size, history or landmark status.”He went on to list other things that needed to be done away with, including the staff of The New York Times (where the critic Frank Rich had praised the show). Also, he said, “Cameron Mackintosh and his production staff should be slowly beaten to death with blunt instruments; this year’s Pulitzer Prize judges in drama could be used for the job.” Those judges had, weeks earlier, given the drama Pulitzer to Mr. Simon for “Lost in Yonkers.”But Mr. Feingold was not a critic who would just sit and snipe. He was active in creating for the theater himself, even while writing criticism for The Voice.He translated numerous European works for the American stage, especially those of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His adaptation of the Brecht-Weill collaboration “Happy End” even made Broadway in 1977, with Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd in the cast. He shared Tony nominations for the book and for the score. He earned another Broadway credit in 1989 for his translation of another Brecht-Weill work, “Threepenny Opera.” His translation earned some favorable comments, but critics trashed the show, which featured the rock star Sting.Mr. Feingold spent time as literary manager for the Yale Repertory Theater, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., roles in which he would read scripts and often help shape ones that were accepted for production. The theater historian Jeffrey Sweet, in his book “The O’Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater” (2014), recounted the role played by Mr. Feingold in propelling the career of August Wilson.In 1982, when Mr. Wilson was still largely unknown, he brought his play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” to the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., where Mr. Feingold was doing dramaturgy. The first reading of the piece, directed by William Partlan, lasted more than four hours. Mr. Partlan and Mr. Feingold talked Mr. Wilson through the necessary trimming.“Cutting was a torment to him,” Mr. Feingold said in an interview for the book. “Cutting was always a terrible struggle for August because every word was blood.”Another reading was held, and this time the play was 90 minutes shorter. Mr. Rich, the Times critic, was in the audience and was impressed. His enthusiastic write-up in The Times jump-started Mr. Wilson’s career.“While there’s nothing novel about rich language in the theater,” Mr. Rich wrote, “it is quite unusual in 1982 to find a playwright who is willing to stake his claim to the stage not with stories or moral platitudes, but with the beauty and meaning of torrents of words.”Mr. Feingold wrote for The Voice from 1971 to 2013, when he became a victim of downsizing (though he would return later in a limited capacity). Robert Simonson, reporting on that dismissal in Playbill, said that Mr. Feingold’s writing was known for “erudition and understanding of theater history, both ancient and modern, and how current plays fit in with that continuum.”Mr. Feingold, right, in 2015 at the Obie Awards with, from left, the costume designer William Ivey Long, the performer Lea DeLaria and Heather Hitchens, the president of the American Theater Wing. Mr. Feingold was often a judge for the Obies, and he received one of his own in 2020.Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for American Theater WingMr. Feingold was born on May 5, 1945, in Chicago. His mother, Elsie (Silver) Feingold, taught piano, and his father, Bernard, managed a tannery.Michael grew up in Chicago and Highland Park, Ill., where the family moved when he was in high school. The Highland Park high school he attended had a drama club where, as he put it in an interview with the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project in 2018, “I did some inept acting and some slightly less inept directing.”He became further interested in theater at Columbia University, where he earned a degree in English and comparative literature in 1966. He had taken a senior seminar from Robert Brustein, who was then known primarily for his theater criticism, and in the fall of 1965 asked if Mr. Brustein would write him a recommendation to support his application to the Yale School of Drama. After Christmas break, he asked if Mr. Brustein had remembered to do so.“He smiled mysteriously and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’” Mr. Feingold said in the oral history. “And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Read The Times tomorrow.’”The next day the newspaper reported that Mr. Brustein had just been named dean of Yale Drama.“So he wrote the recommendation and then he accepted it,” Mr. Feingold said, “feeling that he should take his own advice.”Mr. Feingold had wanted to study playwriting at Yale, and he did, but Mr. Brustein steered him toward criticism as well. He began writing for The Voice, and in 1983 he was named its chief drama critic.Mr. Feingold, who lived in Manhattan and who leaves no immediate survivors, was often a judge for the Obie Awards, which recognize Off Broadway work. In 2020 he received one of his own, a special citation recognizing “his extraordinary service to the theater.”He was, above all, a champion of theater that is bold and challenging. In 1993 he was the editor of “Grove New American Theater,” a play collection that included work by Karen Finley, Mac Wellman and other cutting-edge writers.In the introduction to that book, he lamented the cyclical nature of American theater: a period of innovation, then stagnation, repeated endlessly, stunting growth.“If the theater doesn’t grow up, the American public doesn’t grow up either,” he wrote. “Instead, it gets hotted up, every 20 years or so, over the same issues — sex, politics and religion — the three matters that art, according to some strangely permanent lunatic fringe of American opinion, must never be allowed to deal with, at least not in any open manner.” More

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      in Television

      A Duchess Brought Low by ‘A Very British Scandal’

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      In a new show on Prime Video, Claire Foy plays a British aristocrat whose sex life became the subject of salacious tabloid stories in the 1960s.LONDON — Everybody loves a sex scandal, and a posh one is even better. The great and the good brought down in disgrace: That’s a story people want to hear.In “A Very British Scandal,” a three-part series streaming on Prime Video from April 22, Claire Foy plays the Duchess of Argyll, a real-life aristocrat whose sex life was pored over in a 1960s court case that created a media frenzy and riveted the nation. When the BBC aired “A Very British Scandal” this past December, nearly 7 million people tuned in.The show is a companion to “A Very English Scandal,” another hugely popular Amazon-BBC coproduction in which Hugh Grant played an upper-crust politician who suffered a similar fate.These stories, Foy said in a recent interview, appealed to elements of Britain’s national character. “We’re perverts, aren’t we?” Foy said. “Deep down, all British people love it: We love gossip and love the titillating things other people are getting up to,” she added. “Anything that happens behind closed doors, we’re all completely obsessed with.”In the show’s final episode, one of the duchess’s aristocratic friends bemoans the British public’s desire to know what the upper classes are up to. “The little people in their grubby pits look up to us, because we are not them,” says the friend, played by Julia Davis. But stories about the duchess’s sex life, she says, “are dragging us down so we look just like them.”Foy’s character was never one of “the little people,” but she wasn’t always an aristocrat, either. She was born Margaret Whigham, in Scotland, in 1912. Her father, a self-made textiles millionaire, moved the family to New York when she was a child, and she lived there until she was 14. Back in Britain, she became a much-photographed debutante with a fancy trans-Atlantic sheen, and a fixture of newspaper society pages. After a string of high-profile relationships and a first marriage that ended in divorce, she became the Duchess of Argyll in 1951 when she married the duke, Ian Campbell (played by Paul Bettany in the show), whose family had been part of the Scottish aristocracy since the 1400s.A glamorous A-lister who counted society columnists as her friends, the duchess cultivated a chic media image. And she realized early on she could make money from what we would now call her “personal brand,” taking cash from tabloid newspapers to appear in fawning articles. (“Beautiful! Rich! Distinguished!” read a teaser for a 1961 Daily Mirror splash. “This is the Duchess of Argyll the world knows.”)The duchess, photographed in 1955 for magazine coverage of the London social season. She initially had a symbiotic relationship with the British press. Bert Hardy/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBut when her marriage to the duke broke down, she lost control of the story. The couple’s nasty divorce case — in which the duchess’s intimate photos were presented in court — made her the subject of salacious newspaper articles and gossipy anecdotes, and later, “A Very British Scandal” and even an opera.During the trial, the duke submitted a list of 88 men he said the duchess had slept with during their marriage, as well as Polaroids he had stolen from her that showed the duchess performing oral sex on an unknown man whose head was not in the frame.Ruling in the duke’s favor to grant the divorce in 1963, the judge said the duchess was a “completely promiscuous woman” who had indulged “in disgusting sexual activities to gratify a debased sexual appetite.” The details of the “headless man” photos were gleefully written up in British newspapers, which raked over the case for months. Margaret the glittering socialite became Margaret “the dirty duchess.”Over the rest of her life, she frittered away the fortune she inherited from her father on a series of unsuccessful law suits and dubious investments. Her personal relations didn’t fare much better: She fell out with a daughter from her first marriage, and many of her friends. The duchess died in penury, at 80, in a London retirement home. The first hymn at her funeral, in 1993, began, “Dear Lord and father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.”Sarah Phelps, who wrote the script for “A Very British Scandal,” said that the duchess’s case and the media furor around it represented “the end of an era.” It was “the birth of a different kind of journalism, and a way of writing about sex and scandal in a very, very prurient way,” she said. And it paved the way for later media depictions of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Meghan Markle — “that viciousness and anger that is directed at women in the public eye,” she said.When the initial outrage faded, the duchess remained the subject of snickering innuendos for decades. Grinning men would pose for photos beside the boarding sign for a Scottish boat that shared her name: “Queue here for the Duchess of Argyll.” Today’s TV audiences will have more sympathy for the duchess, who now looks like a victim of “slut-shaming,” and the nonconsensual sharing of her photos like “revenge porn.” It’s unlikely many viewers will judge her for a sex act that some women’s magazines now offer tips on performing. Yet they might still find it hard to warm to the duchess, who Foy plays as an arrogant, scheming snob.“She lied and she cheated, and she did all sorts of really awful things,” Foy said. “In her defense, they were also done to her.”As a person in the public eye, she sympathized with the duchess and her treatment by the press. “She was one thing, and then they decided she was something else,” Foy said. “Journalists dictate the public perception of you in my industry,” she added. “You are completely in the hands of the people who write the story.”Allison Cook portrayed the duchess in a 2013 production of the opera “Powder Her Face,” staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara krulwich/The New York TimesAnother author of the duchess’s story is the British composer Thomas Adès, whose 1995 opera “Powder Her Face” casts her as its antiheroine. First presented at the Cheltenham Festival in England, when Adès was just 24, “Powder Her Face” has since been performed over 300 times across Europe and the United States, according to Faber, its publisher.Adès said he started out by looking for a classic operatic plot: “someone in a grand position, who’s outwardly very strong and impressive, who is dismantled and brought low by forces from the outside.” Philip Hensher, the opera’s librettist, remembered the Argyll divorce case, Adès said: The duchess fit the bill perfectly.Whereas “A Very British Scandal” ends with the courtroom judgment, “Powder Her Face” picks up at the end of the duchess’s life, when she was broke and holed up in a hotel she couldn’t afford. In a series of dreamy flashbacks, Adès recreates some key vignettes from the story of her life, including the liaison with “the headless man” as an aria from the duchess that begins with words and ends with humming.“You can’t really pretend that she’s an entirely sympathetic character, that she’s Mimì,” said Adès, referring to the fragile seamstress who dies of tuberculosis in Puccini’s “La Bohème,” “as much as I think she’s such a tragic figure.” The duchess, he added, was “formidable, and did plenty of things that were pretty questionable.”Paul Bettany, center left, plays the duke in “A Very British Scandal,” alongside Foy’s duchess.Alan Peebles/Amazon Prime VideoDespite a persistent whiff of scandal, the duchess continued to lead an active life in London high society for most of the rest of her life, said Lady Colin Campbell, a relative by marriage. “She was certainly a notoriety, but she was never a pariah. People would gossip and say, ‘Oh, look who’s here: Margaret Argyll,’” said Lady Campbell, 72. “But she rose above it, as simple as that. She simply ignored it,” she added.In her later years, when money was running low, the duchess tried again “to convert her fame into income,” Lady Campbell said. In 1986, Margaret published “My Dinner Party Book,” a guide to entertaining, aimed at housewives, that nonetheless included advice like “never invite the Lord Chancellor and two ambassadors to your dinner party at the same time.” (The book did not sell well, Lady Campbell said.)Two years later, at 76, the duchess appeared on “Wogan,” the BBC’s flagship chat show. The presenter, Terry Wogan, trod carefully around the incident that had made her most famous, gently asking, “What about your own story? Your own story was extremely colorful — do you think it would make a good plot?”“Oh, let’s pray not,” the duchess replied. “Let’s not even think about that.” More