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      in Theater

      Cynthia Nixon Knows What Poem She Wants Read at Her Funeral

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      “I love ‘I heard a Fly buzz — when I died,’” said the actress, currently performing Off Broadway in “The Seven Year Disappear.” “That one gets me every time.”Cynthia Nixon hadn’t been onstage since 2017, when she and Laura Linney alternated the roles of Regina and Birdie in “The Little Foxes.”She wasn’t expecting her comeback to be “The Seven Year Disappear,” playing an artist who also re-emerges after seven years.“It was really startling to me and a weird, uncanny echo of the play,” Nixon said. The Jordan Seavey production runs through March 31 at the New Group, and four performances, from March 29 to 31, will be live-streamed.Nixon is a two-time Tony Award winner, including one for “The Little Foxes,” but she is widely known for her work in television, including as Miranda Hobbes in “Sex and the City” and in “And Just Like That …” and as Ada Brook in “The Gilded Age.” This summer, she plans to begin shooting the third seasons of those latter two series, volleying from one to the other.“I can see in some ways it being fun,” she said. After all, she’s pulled off something like it before.“I did this thing when I was 18 where I was in two Broadway plays at the same time,” said Nixon, who ran back and forth between “The Real Thing” and “Hurlyburly,” both directed by Mike Nichols, and even made the curtain calls.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 Music

      Gylan Kain, a Founder of the Last Poets and a Progenitor of Rap, Dies at 81

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      He spun gripping portraits of the Black experience starting in the 1960s with the seminal Harlem spoken-word collective, laying a foundation for what was to come.Gylan Kain, a Harlem-born poet and performance artist who was a founder of the Last Poets, the spoken-word collective that laid a foundation for rap music starting in the late 1960s by delivering fiery poetic salvos about racism and oppression over pulsing drum beats, died on Feb. 7 in Lelystad, the Netherlands. He was 81.He died in a nursing home from complications of heart disease, his son Rufus Kain said. His death was not widely reported at the time.The Last Poets, which originally consisted of Mr. Kain, David Nelson and Abiodun Oyewole, were aligned with the Black Arts Movement — the cultural corollary to the broader Black Power movement of the 1960s and ’70s — of which the activist poet and playwright Amiri Baraka was a central figure.The Original Last Poets, as they were billed, in the 1970 film “Right On!” From left, Mr. Kain, Felipe Luciano and David Nelson. Herbert Danska, via Museum of Modern ArtWith their staccato wordplay and sinewy rhythms, the Last Poets were pioneers of performance poetry, spinning out portraits of Black street life that often bristled with the guerrilla spirit of revolution.They made their public debut on May 19, 1968, in Mount Morris Park, now Marcus Garvey Park, in Harlem, at a celebration of the slain civil rights leader Malcolm X. Less than two months after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, it was a fraught period in Black America, but also a time percolating with calls for dramatic change.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 Music

      Pankaj Udhas, Bollywood Singer and Maestro of the Ghazal, Dies at 72

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      His soulful renditions of ghazals, or traditional love poems, were featured on the soundtracks of hit Bollywood movies and moved generations of Indians.Pankaj Udhas, a singer from India whose soulful renditions of ghazals, or lyric love songs, were a cornerstone of many Bollywood films over his decades-long career, died in Mumbai on Monday. He was 72.His death was announced on social media by his daughter Nayaab Udhas. She did not specify the cause, saying only that he had died after a prolonged illness.Mr. Udhas moved generations of people in India and the Indian diaspora by singing ghazals, the lyric poems that have been written for centuries in Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Turkish and other languages. He also worked as a playback singer, the term for a vocalist who recorded tracks offscreen for actors to lip-sync over.Mr. Udhas became a stalwart in the Indian music industry through both his discography of more than 50 albums and the enormous success of the movies in which he sang.But his true passion, he said in a 2018 talk organized by Google, was the ancient lyric form.“My heart was always with ghazals,” he said. “Cinema, though it was an attraction,” he added, “it was never the first choice.”Padmashri Pankaj Udhas was born on May 17, 1951, in Jetpur, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, several Indian news media outlets reported. His father, Keshubhai Udhas, played the dilruba, a traditional Indian stringed instrument. His mother, Jeetuben Udhas, sang. And both of his brothers, Manhar and Nirmal, became professional singers.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 Music

      Poets React to Taylor Swift’s New ‘Tortured Poets Department’ Album

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      The title of Taylor Swift’s next album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” spurred strong responses from a typically quiet bunch.When Taylor Swift announced the title of her next album during an acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards on Sunday, she spurred a reaction from a typically quiet bunch: the poets.The album, slated to come out April 19, she said, is called “The Tortured Poets Department.” (Sans apostrophe.)As the name caught fire on social media, questions abounded. Who were these poets? Did Ms. Swift count herself among them? Was the pop singer stealing something precious from those who write verse?“As a tortured poet, I approve,” said Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013. “Or is she making fun of us? I guess I kind of approve of that, too.”Immediately after the album announcement, a post on Ms. Swift’s Instagram and X accounts revealed what appeared to be the album’s Lord Byron-esque artwork: a gray-scale photo of Ms. Swift, spread across a bed in luxurious anguish.The title calls to mind the Robin Williams film “Dead Poets Society” — also sans apostrophe — said Adrienne Raphel, a poet and the author of “Our Dark Academia,” who noted that the film was released in 1989, Ms. Swift’s birth year.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 Music

      Toni Stern, Who Wrote Songs With Carole King, Dies at 79

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      A sunny California poet, she provided the words to songs on “Tapestry” and other albums, including the enduring hit “It’s Too Late.”Toni Stern, a breezy young Californian who became a trusted lyricist for Carole King, providing the words for the enduring standard “It’s Too Late” and many other songs during Ms. King’s flowering as a chart-topping solo artist, died on Jan. 17 at her home in Santa Ynez, Calif., near Santa Barbara. She was 79.Her husband and only immediate survivor, Jerry Rounds, confirmed the death. He did not specify the cause.Ms. Stern, a Los Angeles native, was an aspiring painter and poet living in Laurel Canyon, an enclave popular with the Los Angeles rock elite, in the late 1960s. It was there that she met Ms. King, who had moved west from New Jersey after a painful breakup with her husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, with whom she had formed one of the decade’s powerhouse hit-making duos.The two hit it off immediately. “When I moved to California in 1968, she was the epitome of a free-spirited Laurel Canyon woman,” Ms. King wrote in a Facebook post after Ms. Stern’s death. “She lived in a hillside house with her dog, Arf, surrounded by books, record albums, plants and macramé.”The two would soon share songwriting credits. When Ms. King stepped into the limelight as a solo performer, Ms. Stern provided lyrics to the songs “What Have You Got to Lose” and “Raspberry Jam” on her first solo album, “Writer,” released in 1970.Their partnership continued on the follow-up, “Tapestry” (1971), a pop music colossus that topped the Billboard 200 for 15 weeks and went on to become one of the best-selling albums of all time. Ms. Stern provided the words for “It’s Too Late,” which was No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart for five weeks, and “Where You Lead.”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 Music

      A Harvard Professor Prepares to Teach a New Subject: Taylor Swift

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      Swift-inspired classes are sweeping colleges across the country.The syllabus is much like what one might expect from an undergraduate English course, with texts by William Wordsworth, Willa Cather and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But there is one name on the list that might surprise budding scholars.Taylor Swift.In the spring semester, Stephanie Burt, an English professor at Harvard University, will teach a new class, “Taylor Swift and Her World.” Nearly 300 students have enrolled.The class is part of a wave at academic institutions around the country, including New York University and the University of Texas at Austin. Stanford has invoked the Swift song “All Too Well (Ten Minute Version)” with a course planned for next year titled “All Too Well (Ten Week Version),” and Arizona State University offered a psychology class on Ms. Swift’s work.Next year, the University of California, Berkeley plans to offer “Artistry and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,” and the University of Florida will school undergraduates in Ms. Swift’s storytelling. The Florida course’s description begins with the words “ … Ready for it?” — an allusion to the song from the album “Reputation.”In a conversation with The New York Times, Professor Burt, 52, discussed her love of Ms. Swift’s music and what exactly her students will be studying. This interview has been edited and condensed.Let’s start with the big question. Are you a Swiftie?Ten or 12 years ago, I noticed that of all of the songs that one would hear in, you know, drugstores and airports and bus stations and public places, there was one that was better than all the other songs. I wanted to know who wrote it. It was just a more compelling song lyrically and musically, just a perfect piece of construction. It was “You Belong With Me.”“Fearless” got you!It turned out she had a lot of other great songs. The thing that made me really think about her as an artist whose process and career I wanted to learn more about and thought about a lot was when I saw “Miss Americana,” the documentary.What about it?It really does such a great job of showing both how much support she’s had — she’s someone who’s come from a good deal of privilege and had parents who really wanted to help her realize her dreams, which, you know, honestly, I have, too — but also how she worked to become herself, and how she has become someone who makes her own decisions in a way that brings people along with her and doesn’t alienate people. I realize that she could probably take fewer private jet flights.The Harvard campus.David Degner for The New York TimesMs. Swift during an August concert in Inglewood, Calif.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDo you have a favorite era?It bounces between “Red” and “Folklore”-slash-“Evermore.”Let’s talk a little bit about the coursework. What is on the syllabus?Each week pairs some body of her work with some body of work by other people. We are reading two different Willa Cather novels. We’re reading a novel by James Weldon Johnson about a performing artist who’s got a very different relationship to his own career in his hands. We are reading a contemporary novel by Zan Romanoff about One Direction fandom.We’re going to read some Wordsworth, Wordsworth being a Lake District poet. She sings about the poets of the Lake District in England. Wordsworth also writes about some of the same feelings that Taylor sings about: disappointment in retrospect, and looking back and realizing that you’re not the child you were, even though you might want to be.What songs are going to be paired with those texts?We are reading Coleridge’s “Work Without Hope.” “Work Without Hope,” of course, being Coleridge’s version of “You’re on Your Own, Kid.”Of course. How about homework?The written work will include a couple of conventionally argued academic essays, where the student needs to make a well-supported argument with clearly framed evidence in easy-to-follow prose. One of them has to be on a Taylor topic. One of them has to be about something else that we read for the course. So you can’t write about nothing but Taylor Swift and get a good grade.Is there a final?The third of the three papers is the final assignment. I have such mixed feelings about final exams because they stress people out. They’re a pain to give and they’re no fun. On the other hand, Harvard students are also often taking other classes that absolutely demand a lot of time from them, especially if they’re, for example, future doctors. Or they have other commitments that eat up a lot of the time. If you don’t do something to make sure they feel like they have to do the reading, they will sometimes, regretfully, blow off reading.Any chance of a guest lecture by (the honorary) Dr. Swift?I have tweeted at her, and I would welcome her presence if she would like to pop in, but she is quite busy.A Harvard class about Taylor Swift feels ripe for detractors. What would you say to people who might criticize such a subject as unserious or not worthy of rigorous study?This is a course that includes plenty of traditionally admired dead people who’ve been taught in English departments for a long time, who I not only admire but am teaching in this course. Taylor’s work is the spine. If you don’t appreciate this body of songwriting and of performance, that’s not my problem. But they should remember literally everything that takes up a lot of time in a modern English department was at one point a low-prestige popular art form that you wouldn’t bother to study, like Shakespeare’s sonnets and, in particular, the rise of the novel. Can I quote Wordsworth?Please.Others shall love what we have loved and we will teach them how. If you’re going to teach people to love something that they see as obscure or distant or difficult or unfamiliar, your best shot at doing that honestly and effectively is to connect it to something that people already like. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project’ Review: An Afrofuturist Space Odyssey

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      The experimental documentary is punctuated by Giovanni’s poetry, read both by her and the actress Taraji P. Henson. But the film offers only what the poet is willing to give.Nikki Giovanni wants to die in zero gravity.“We don’t have any poets in space,” she says in a speech featured in “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” a documentary about the elusive artist, directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson.Giovanni would like to travel to the space station to record what she sees, adding that, when it’s time for her to go, she can simply be released into the ether. This desire — part jest, part genuine — drives the biographical project, in which the directors try to capture Giovanni’s legacy and her Afrofuturist vision for Black women.“Going to Mars” combines archival footage of Giovanni and moments in Black history, images of space and present-day interviews and speeches to paint an expansive picture of the poet’s evolution from young firebrand to elder. Giovanni posits that viewers should turn to Black women to learn about surviving in space because of our ability to survive all the hardships thrown at us on Earth. Throughout, the scenes are punctuated by her poetry, read by both Giovanni herself and the actress Taraji P. Henson.The documentary offers only what the poet is willing to give. And Giovanni is a challenging subject: She has firm boundaries, and there are questions she refuses to answer. “You want me to go to someplace that I’m not going to go, because it will make me unhappy,” she says in response to a question about her childhood. “I refuse to be unhappy about something I can do nothing about.”Yet other times Giovanni’s work speaks for itself. She won’t discuss how she felt after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, for instance, but what follows is a powerful rendering of her poem “Reflections on April 4, 1968,” in which she expresses anger over the injustice. Here, and in general, viewers must fill in their own blanks.Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni ProjectNot rated. Running time: 1 hours 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      Jamila Woods Puts Herself at the Center of “Water Made Us”

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      “Water Made Us,” a new album due Oct. 13, achieves the musician’s greatest synthesis yet between her voices as a poet and as a songwriter.For many artists, the weeks leading up to a new album are a hectic flurry of promotional obligations, relentless tour rehearsals and omnipresent anxiety. But two months before the Oct. 13 release of Jamila Woods’s “Water Made Us,” the Chicago-based writer and musician was far from the music industry’s antic churn: at a six-week writing residency at a remote castle in Umbria, Italy.“I’m just grateful for the time to chill,” Woods, 34, said, video chatting from her sparse room in the 15th-century fortress. Half of her chin-length hair was twisted up in pigtailed buns, and seven of her 10 fingers were adorned with chunky, artful rings.Woods’s music has always been imbued with a literary sensibility — “I’m such a poet in the way that I do everything,” she said, defining poetry as “a way of being and looking at the world” — but on “Water Made Us,” she achieves her greatest synthesis yet between her voices as a poet and as a songwriter. The opening track “Bugs” moves fluidly between laid-back, neo-soul melodicism and precision-cut spoken-word (“Someone will jump fully clothed in the moat you dug outside,” she declares. “It’s not that deep”), while the strikingly compassionate “I Miss All My Exes” is essentially taboo-shattering free-verse set to a serene composition that features her frequent collaborator, the trumpeter Nico Segal.“She has an amazing sense of language and a way with words,” said the musician and producer Chris McClenney, who co-executive produced “Water Made Us” with Woods. “Every lyric on the album has so much weight.”And nearly every one of those lyrics is focused on Woods herself, which is a departure for an artist who has so far made her name as a skillful observer of character, history and social issues. Most people first heard Woods’s voice — warm, heartfelt and sincere — when she was featured on gospel-tinged tracks by Chance the Rapper (“Blessings”) and Segal (“Sunday Candy”). Her 2016 solo debut, “Heavn,” was a confident assertion of Black womanhood in a time of political unrest (“Yeah she scares the government,” she sang on the trenchant “Blk Girl Soldier,” “déjà vu of Tubman”), while her 2019 breakout “Legacy! Legacy!” was an ambitious ode to artists of color who came before her. Each song took the name of a different pioneer: “Zora,” “Miles,” “Octavia.”That’s not to say there wasn’t any Jamila in them. “With ‘Legacy!,’ there’s a lot of songs where I was actually writing a lot about myself, but I’m like, ‘I’ll call it ‘Sonia!’” she said and laughed. “Water Made Us,” which she considers her most personal and vulnerable album to date, found her “shedding” armor. She decided, she said, to “write with myself as the source material. I don’t need to put that layer on top of it anymore.”“Water Made Us” is all about Woods’s own search for love. She said she and McClenney sequenced its 17 tracks so it would feel “like the cycle of a relationship.” The first few songs have the fluttery apprehension of a new connection. Then comes conflict, in the form of the soulful, keyboard-driven ballad “Wreckage Room” and the heartbroken but hopeful “Thermostat.” The final stretch contains a few of what Woods calls “mantra songs,” for their expressions of accumulated wisdom.A conversation with Woods is full of such mantras. She has collected the insight of her poetry mentors and writerly inspirations and pocketed them like talismans, ready to be quoted at the opportune moment. One advised her, “Your relationship to your art is the most precious thing, so you have to be protective of it and gentle with it.” Another, listening to some of her early music, offered an observation that rings especially true to “Water Made Us”: “He said, ‘You have so many specific loves,’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘That feels so accurate. I think the way that each person loves and is able to love is so specific, and the attachment styles or lessons we carry into what it means to love someone are so personal.”Most songs about love fall at two poles: “I love you” and “I hate you.” The refreshing thing about “Water Made Us” is how many variations along the spectrum between them Woods captures — how many specific loves these songs have. “It’s not butterflies and fireworks,” she sings on the gorgeous leadoff single “Tiny Garden,” finding an apt lyrical image of the everyday work that goes into a relationship in the steady care of a green space: “Said it’s gonna be a tiny garden, but I feed it every day.”She knew water would have to play a part in the album’s cover, and via YouTube she discovered the work of Birdee, an underwater portrait photographer. While finishing the album, they set up a shoot, “and then somewhere along the way I realized I can’t really swim,” Woods said with a laugh. An artist less committed to growth would have returned to the drawing board. Instead, she committed to a week and a half of intensive swim classes in Chicago, passing the requirement to enter the deepwater course shortly before the photo shoot.The experience provided another apt metaphor for the creative process. Woods recalled Birdee explaining in an interview she’d watched how shooting underwater is unpredictable and challenging. “You can’t control anything, so you have to go into it with an attitude of surrender,” she said. “And that’s how making this whole album has felt.” More