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‘Mary Poppins’ Gets New Age Rating in Britain for Racist Language
The musical about a nanny with magical powers had been classified for all audiences since 1964, but the British Board of Film Classification has issued new guidance.The rating for “Mary Poppins,” the beloved children’s musical about a nanny with magical powers that was released 60 years ago, has been raised to PG in Britain because of the use of “discriminatory language,” the British Board of Film Classification said.The rating change follows a wave of recontextualizing and reclassifying of films from bygone eras for modern audiences amid shifting cultural norms and mores.“Mary Poppins” includes two uses of an offensive racial slur to describe an Indigenous group in South Africa. It is first heard when Admiral Boom asks Michael, a child, if he is going on an adventure to defeat said group. Admiral Boom repeats the slur during a chimney sweeps dance sequence when he shouts that he is being attacked. The dancing figures he spots in the distance are not Black Africans, but white dancers with blackened faces from soot.The film was originally rated “U,” for Universal, upon its release in 1964, and again in 2013 for a theatrical release, the B.B.F.C. said in a statement. When it was resubmitted in February for another theatrical release, it was reclassified as PG.PG is the second-least severe of six ratings in Britain. The strictest is 18, which prohibits anyone under that age from renting, buying or seeing the film in movie theaters.“We understand from our racism and discrimination research, and recent classification guidelines research, that a key concern for people, parents in particular, is the potential to expose children to discriminatory language” or behavior which they may find distressing or repeat without realizing the potential offense, a spokeswoman for the board said in a statement.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
- in Theater
Robert Macbeth, Founder of Harlem’s New Lafayette Theater, Dies at 89
He created a vibrant space for actors and playwrights that became a seedbed for the emerging Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s.Robert Macbeth, a rising Black actor in the New York theater scene, was sitting in a Greenwich Village bar in September 1963, getting a drink before going onstage for an Off Broadway improv show. The evening news played in the background.“I happened to look up and there was a flash, and the flash was about the four little girls getting killed in Birmingham,” he said in a 1967 interview, recalling the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. “And there I was, sitting in a Village bar, with a Scotch in my hand.”He went onstage that night, and, rather than following the show’s loose routine, he began shouting, walking up and down the aisles, getting in the faces of the mostly white crowd.“I must have scared the audience half to death,” he recalled in the interview. But rather than absorb his message, they seemed to take it as entertainment: “They loved it, but that wasn’t the idea.”Mr. Macbeth, distraught over his inability to convey his anger and sadness, stopped acting after that night in 1963 and, in his words, went into “exile” from the stage. He worked in a bookstore, taught acting classes and tried to process the violent changes rippling through Black America in the 1960s.Slowly, an idea took form: Black actors and playwrights could never be fully effective in white-dominated spaces. They needed their own. So, in 1967, he gathered together a troupe of more than 30 actors and artists to open the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem.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
- in Theater
‘The Ally,’ a Play About Israel and Free Speech, Tackles Big Issues
Itamar Moses wrote a drama of ideas about Israel and antisemitism. Then Oct. 7 happened.Before his audition for “The Ally,” a new play by Itamar Moses, the actor Michael Khalid Karadsheh printed out the monologue that his character, Farid, a Palestinian student at an American university, would give in the second act.The speech cites both the Mideast conflict’s specific history and Farid’s personal testimony of, he says, “the experience of moving through the world as the threat of violence incarnate.” Karadsheh — who booked the part — was bowled over.“I don’t think anyone has said these words about Palestine on a stage in New York in such a clear, concise, beautiful, poetic way,” said Karadsheh, whose parents are from Jordan and who has ancestors who were from Birzeit in the West Bank.Farid’s speech sits alongside others, though, in Moses’s play: one delivered by an observant Jew branding much criticism of Israel as antisemitic; another by a Black lawyer connecting Israel’s policies toward Palestinians to police brutality in the United States; another by a Korean American bemoaning the mainstream’s overlooking of East Asians. These speeches are invariably answered by rebuttals, which are answered by their own counter-rebuttals, all by characters who feel they have skin in the game.In other words, “The Ally,” which opens Tuesday at the Public Theater in a production directed by Lila Neugebauer and starring Josh Radnor (“How I Met Your Mother”), is a not abstract and none too brief chronicle of our times, a minestrone of hot-button issues: Israelis and Palestinians, racism and antisemitism, free speech and campus politics, housing and gentrification, the excesses of progressivism — even the tenuous employment of adjunct professors.“I don’t think anyone has said these words about Palestine on a stage in New York in such a clear, concise, beautiful, poetic way,” said Michael Khalid Karadsheh, who plays Farid.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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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‘The Space Race’ Review: Why Was NASA So White?
The days of shooting for the stars, interpreted through the stories of people of color whose aspirations were repeatedly thwarted.The story of man’s foray into space is a thrilling one, encompassing war, technological innovation and the power of imagination. The story of the Black man’s foray into space — the subject of the documentary “The Space Race” — comprises a different set of milestones. For African Americans who dreamed of traveling beyond the earth’s atmosphere, the barriers weren’t just physical or scientific, but also social and political.Directed by Lisa Cortés and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, “The Space Race” offers an alternative history of American space travel through interviews with pioneering figures — including Ed Dwight, an Air Force captain who was the first Black trainee at the Aerospace Research Pilot School; and Guy Bluford, who became the first African American to go to space almost two decades later, in 1983.But the film’s most fascinating revelation is that the Soviets beat the Americans in sending a Black person to space in 1980 with Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, a Cuban pilot — an achievement that never got its due during the Cold War.This fact, mentioned only cursorily, reinforces the limitations of the movie (which also, it should be noted, features hardly any stories of Black women). A theme running through the interviews is that for the U.S. government, sending a Black astronaut to space was more a matter of propaganda than racial justice. Cortés and de Mendoza capture these contradictions through archival footage of Civil Rights leaders’ excoriating the nation for spending millions on space travel while poverty decimated communities on the ground.But for the most part, “The Space Race” doesn’t quite interrogate these tokenizing narratives, leaving the central question unaddressed: Can the glorified achievements of a few result in change for the many?The Space RaceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Disney+ and Hulu. More
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Clyde Taylor, Literary Scholar Who Elevated Black Cinema, Dies at 92
A leading figure in the field of Black studies in the 1970s, he identified work by Black filmmakers as worthy of serious intellectual attention.Clyde Taylor, a scholar who in the 1970s and ’80s played a leading role in identifying, defining and elevating Black cinema as an art form, died on Jan. 24 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 92.His daughter, Rahdi Taylor, a filmmaker, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.As a young professor in the Los Angeles area in the late 1960s — first at California State University, Long Beach, and then at the University of California, Los Angeles — Dr. Taylor was at the epicenter of a push to bring the study of Black culture into academia.Black culture was not merely an appendage to white culture, he argued, but had its own logic, history and dynamics that grew out of the Black Power and Pan-African movements. And filmmaking, he said, was just as important to Black culture as literature and art.Dr. Taylor in 1958 when he was a student at Howard University, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English.via Taylor familyHe was especially taken by the work of a circle of young Black filmmakers in the 1970s that he would later call the “L.A. Rebellion.” Among them were the directors Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima and Billy Woodberry, all of whom went on to have immense impact on Black directors like Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay.As Dr. Taylor documented, these directors created their own, stripped-down approach to narrative and form. They borrowed from French New Wave, Italian neorealism and Brazil’s Cinema Novo to offer an unblinkered look at everyday Black life, often filming in Watts and other Black neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles.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
- in Theater
Beverly Johnson, ‘the Model With the Big Mouth’
In her new one-woman show, she details her 50-year modeling career, her tumultuous relationships — and an unsettling encounter with Bill Cosby.She was 18, new to New York, a tenderfoot in an industry said to eat its young. But Beverly Johnson was not short on brass.She had been quick in the early 1970s to sign with the formidable model agent Eileen Ford — and just as swift, at 19, to inform her, “I want to be on the cover of American Vogue.” When Ms. Ford asked her curtly, “Who do you think you are, Cleopatra?” Ms. Johnson was as curt with a comeback, murmuring, audibly enough, “That’s exactly who I think I am.”Ms. Johnson revisits that moment in “In Vogue,” her one-woman show set to open in Manhattan on Sunday. The play, largely derived from her 2015 memoir, “Beverly Johnson: The Face That Changed It All,” and written with the playwright Josh Ravetch, is by turns an upbeat and cautionary account of Ms. Johnson’s adventures — and hairy misadventures — in the mannequin trade.Onstage she tells of defying expectations and defecting to a competing modeling agency, despite the warnings of peers that such a move would amount to professional ruin.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
- in Television
Reggie Wells, Makeup Artist for Oprah Winfrey and Other Black Stars, Dies at 76
At a time when cosmetic brands did not cater to Black women, Mr. Wells found a niche working with Black stars and models who had struggled to find makeup options for their skin tones.Reggie Wells, who parlayed a background in fine art into a trailblazing career as a makeup artist for Oprah Winfrey, Whitney Houston, Beyoncé, Michelle Obama and other Black celebrities, died on Monday in Baltimore. He was 76.His death was confirmed by his niece Kristina Conner, who did not specify a cause or say where he died.For Mr. Wells, every face was a canvas to explore. One of his most famous clients was Ms. Winfrey, for whom he worked as a personal makeup artist for more than 20 years at the height of her television career.“Reggie Wells was an artist who used his palette of talent to create beauty no matter the canvas,” Ms. Winfrey said in a statement. “He always made me feel beautiful. Ooo my, how we’d laugh and laugh during the process. He was an astute observer of human behavior and could see humor in the most unlikely experiences.”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
