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      Traci Braxton, Television Personality and Singer, Dies at 50

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      She was perhaps best known for her appearances on the reality show “Braxton Family Values” with her siblings and their families.Traci Braxton, a television personality and singer, died on Saturday. She was 50.One of Ms. Braxton’s sisters, the singer Toni Braxton, confirmed her death in a statement from the Braxton family on Instagram. A cause of her death was not immediately available.“Needless to say, she was a bright light, a wonderful daughter, an amazing sister, a loving mother, wife, grandmother and a respected performer,” the statement said.The Braxton sisters, Toni, Traci, Tamar, Towanda and Trina, in “Braxton Family Values.”Chris Ragazzo/WE TVTraci Braxton was perhaps best known for her appearances on the reality television show “Braxton Family Values” with her sisters Tamar, Toni, Towanda and Trina and her brother, Michael, and their families.Ms. Braxton was referred to as the Wild Card on the show, which premiered on the WE tv network in 2011 and ran until late 2020. Ms. Braxton also appeared on “Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars” with her husband, Kevin Surratt.Traci Renee Braxton was born on April 2, 1971, the third child of Michael and Evelyn.The Braxton children were raised in a religious household in Severn, Md. Their father was a part-time preacher who forbade the family to play secular music.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Braxton sang with her sisters as a teenager and a young adult, and the five together formed the Braxtons and released the single “Good Life” in 1990.Toni Braxton was plucked from the group to become a solo artist, and her debut album was met with acclaim when it was released in 1993.The other sisters continued as a group, except for Traci Braxton, who stepped away from the music industry in the 1990s to raise her son. She worked as a social worker before the sisters reunited for “Braxton Family Values.”On the show, she explored her decision to step away from music and the unresolved feelings she had about leaving it behind, setting her on a path to return to the industry. She released her solo debut album, “Crash & Burn,” in 2014, and a follow-up album, “On Earth,” in 2018.In February 2016, Ms. Braxton came forward as the voice behind a memorable moment in which a nameless person can be heard at a White House event yelling “Hey, Michelle,” at Michelle and Barack Obama.Mr. Obama responded, “We know it is Black History Month when you hear somebody say: ‘Hey, Michelle. Girl!’”Ms. Braxton acknowledged being the voice during an appearance on the talk show “The Real,” of which her sister, Tamar Braxton, was a host. More

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      Hollywood’s First Family of Putting It Out There

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      On the first page of Will Smith’s recent memoir “Will,” the global superstar recounts a gruesome story of watching his father strike his mother in the side of the head so hard that she spit up blood. The early chapters of the book continue in much the same way — a young Will, naturally charismatic and eccentric, takes on the role of family entertainer to save his mother, himself and everyone else.“I would be the golden child,” he writes. “My mother’s savior. My father’s usurper. It was going to be the performance of a lifetime. And over the next 40 years, I would never break character. Not once.”That he became a perpetual conqueror in his films starting in the mid-1990s — an alien-defeater in “Men in Black,” a robot-defeater in “I, Robot,” a mutant-defeater in “I Am Legend,” a druglord-defeater in “Bad Boys,” a George Foreman-defeater in “Ali” — might have been a trauma response, but it also turned him into one of the world’s most bankable actors. Off camera, he behaved much as he did on camera, revealing little: an unknowable person beloved by millions.Over the last couple of years, Smith’s muscles have slackened somewhat. He’s become a loose and only semi-rehearsed presence on Instagram and TikTok. In addition to his uncommonly vulnerable autobiography, he also recently appeared in a six-part YouTube Originals series, “Best Shape of My Life,” ostensibly about losing weight but more about the deepening fissures in the outer shell of his public-facing character. For decades, he became one with his hardened facade; now he’s melting it down.This pivot to transparency makes him the patriarch of a family that has lately made intimacy its stock in trade. The Smiths — Will, 53; his wife, Jada, 50; their children, Jaden, 23, and Willow, 21 — have become the first family of putting it all out there. Between Will’s newfound chill, Jada and Willow’s cut-to-the-quick chat show “Red Table Talk” and Willow and Jaden’s music, the Smiths have remade an elite old Hollywood unit for the new era of reality-driven celebrity.From left: Adrienne Banfield-Norris, Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Will Smith in an episode of “Red Table Talk.”Facebook WatchTheir path has been the opposite of, say, the Kardashians’, the platonic ideal of the reality-TV clan that willed itself into more traditional stardom (forever blurring the lines between old and new fame along the way). The Smiths, by contrast, have downshifted from a conventional style of celebrity into the more fraught and garish one, and, crucially, have done so with a kind of grace — shocking, especially given the intensity of some of the revelations at play.Inside Will Smith’s WorldFor decades, the global superstar has won over audiences with his charm and charisma. Now, he is showing his more vulnerable side.A Commanding Presence: In a Times interview, the movie star reflects on his career, being a parent and learning to let go of perfectionism. ‘King Richard’: Here is what Smith said after he was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the father of Venus and Serena Williams. His Memoir: “Will” is a fairy tale of dazzling good fortune told by an admittedly unreliable narrator, our book critic writes. Hollywood’s First Family: Among his various roles, Smith is also the patriarch of a family that has made intimacy its stock in trade.Theirs is a perfectly timed reframing for the age of online confessional and trauma-based personal brands, especially for a family in which the parents are receding from the camera eye, and the children were famous before they ever had a choice to opt out. It is also a profound validation of the power of emotional directness and its destigmatization for the famous, turning the sorts of revelations that would have been relegated to salacious tabloids and unauthorized biographies in earlier eras into the stuff of self-empowerment.Will might be the Smith family member with the highest public profile, but it is Jada who helped draft the template of the family reinvention with “Red Table Talk.” The show, which appears on Facebook Watch, began in mid-2018, and quickly became known for unexpectedly vulnerable conversations, both with celebrity guests, and also between the hosts: Jada, Willow and Jada’s mother, Adrienne. Each woman holds her ground — take, for example, the episode about polyamory, in which Willow seems to baffle her co-hosts — but the inter-family good will prevents the show from ever erupting into true tension.Reality programming has only become an alternate safe space for the most famous in the last couple of decades. Previously, behind-the-scenes confessionals were more the purview of tabloids, an unsavory side effect of fame to be avoided at all costs. But beginning in the early 2000s, the era of “The Osbournes” on MTV, reality programming began to provide an escape hatch in which the famous could leverage their renown before being nudged toward the offramp of career irrelevance.It was novel then, and it ended up fomenting an entire cottage industry of second-chance grasps for attention, typically for C- and D-listers, both family docu-soaps and also shows like “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew” and “Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars.” Social media extended the available possibilities, granting new oxygen for the well known who were on their way to becoming less well known.For the Smith family, “Red Table Talk” provided proof of concept — it was acceptable, and even desirable, for the most prominent celebrities to make confessionals part of their brand.More than one episode delves into the challenges of Will and Jada’s marriage, offering small brushstrokes of revelation about an oft-gossiped-about couple. They insist they will never split, because after surmounting unspecified challenges, “We don’t have any dealbreakers.” (At the end of the chat, Will aims to dispel some frequent rumors: “We’ve never been Scientologists, we’ve never been swingers,” though Jada does point out that the second is a term for a “specific lifestyle.”)Watch enough “Red Table Talk” after reading Will’s book and absorbing his YouTube series and you might encounter the same tale told a few different ways — he’s been workshopping this unburdening for some time. Unlike Jada, who approaches the show and sharing her truths more casually, Will has fully embraced this shift and is treating it like he would a blockbuster film: rehearsal, polish, flawless delivery.Smith promoting “Will” with Queen Latifah last year. The actor’s memoir is surprisingly candid.Matt Rourke/Associated Press“Best Shape of My Life” begins as a weight-loss show — Will has a mild dad-bod paunch. To address it, he flies to Dubai to work with his personal trainer, as one does. He wants the process filmed, he says, because “the cameras act like my sponsor — they keep me accountable.” He partakes in intense physical challenges — walking to the top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on the planet, or navigating the Dubai Police Academy obstacle course — and is also working on his memoir.Soon, he begins to chafe at that accountability. Agonizing over the weight loss goal begins to feel like false tension. So does stress about the deadline for his book (underscored by what feel like staged voice mail messages from his assistant). Instead what unfolds is a tug of war between his compulsion to perform and his need to retreat. The fourth episode is titled “I Quit,” and then he continues for two more episodes — this is, after all, a Will Smith production. But seams are fraying: In the fifth episode, he crows, “[expletive] the budget, [expletive] the deadline — they’ll get what we give them.”Several segments of the show are given over to Will’s reading segments of his memoir to family members and friends. These moments limn vulnerability without ever detaching it from performance — Will cries about the challenges in his childhood home, and his onlookers, including his therapist, nod along. At least a few years past his box-office-domination peak, he has built a more scalable reward system.(And lest you forget that the family rebrand is in no small way a business venture, there are untold cross-promotional opportunities. On “Best Shape,” Will often wears clothes from his Bel-Air Athletics line. When the family gathers in Miami to hear Will read chapters about them, the table is stocked with the signature blue square bottles of Just Water, Jaden’s company.)Jaden Smith holding a bottle of his Just Water at a film premiere in New York.Noam Galai/Getty ImagesOnce the sort of superstar known for smooth maximalism, Will has experimented with this sort of behind-the-scenes content before: “Will Smith’s Bucket List,” a series on Facebook Watch, and “Will Smith: Off the Deep End,” a nature immersion doc. But the last year has constituted a multiplatform career rebrand in which Smith uses all the tools of celebrity in service of peeling back its layers.In his autobiography, he writes movingly of the tug of war he feels in regards to his father, who instilled in Will the discipline with which he would build his astronomically successful career but was also abusive. In one section, he suggests that he considered pushing his elderly father down a flight of stairs as retribution.But the real revelation about Will’s relationship to parental authority comes in “King Richard,” last year’s biopic about Richard Williams, father of Serena and Venus. Richard Williams was often maligned for the single-minded way he raised his daughters, but Will plays him empathetically as a stubborn hero, leaning into his doggedness but never making him an object of derision. (He was nominated for an Oscar for the performance.) No means are beyond bounds when the ends are so enviable.It’s likely the role has double meaning for Will — on the one hand, it’s a celebration of the transformative discipline he learned from his own father (in a non-abusive context), and on the other, it’s an argument for his own style of parenting. In both the memoir and at the Red Table, he speaks openly of how his heavy-handed fathering of Jaden and Willow exploded in his face on multiple occasions. When Willow’s first single, “Whip My Hair,” became a hit, she rebelled against the pressures of touring by shaving her head. The action film he made with Jaden, “After Earth,” was a colossal flop. (Will has another son, Trey, from his first marriage, who is a sometime D.J. and occasionally appears on “Red Table Talk.”)And yet the levelheadedness of the younger Smiths is somewhat remarkable. They are untethered thinkers in the way that children of privilege can often be, but they are also curious and empathetic and, all things considered, decidedly warm. (Listen to Jaden talk about learning how to navigate paying for dinner and you’ll melt.) Given their parents’s full-circle journey to untouchable celebrity and back, and given that they were born into a far more transparent generation, it’s easy to adapt to their family’s newfound visibility.Jaden has largely retreated from the spotlight, though he did release an album last year, “CTV3: Day Tripper’s Edition,” full of spacey dream-pop. When he shows up on “Red Table Talk” or in the “Best Shape of My Life” series, he appears almost impossibly wise.Willow has, relatively quietly, released five albums, recently homing in on a wiry pop-punk style that’s both tart and fashionable. Last year’s “Lately I Feel Everything” is her best album, and it includes the scarred anthem about duplicity “Transparentsoul” and raw songs like “Xtra,” in which she seeks space for a deep exhale: “I don’t mean to break so easily under the pressure/Need some time alone to breathe, I need some tree and fresh air.” And the album she released in 2020 as part of the duo called the Anxiety (which also includes Tyler Cole) features “Meet Me at Our Spot,” which became a huge hit on TikTok last year as a soundtrack for young creators to shamanistically lose themselves in dance.At the Red Table, Willow is a beacon of earnestness and humanity. Feeling deeply is the center of her public presentation; her conversation with Paris Jackson was less interview than sympathetic embrace. (At one point, Willow suggested that she’d cut herself in her younger years.) In her music and in her Red Table conversations, she grasps the futility of hiding her feelings, so she doesn’t bother.For Will and Jada, though, the high wire act of confession is, naturally, a reassertion of power. To be this vulnerable, effectively without fear of reprisal or public collapse, is perhaps the ultimate test of celebrity. The only question that remains is what secrets still lurk behind all this transparency. More

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      Li Yundi Is Detained in China on Suspicion of Prostitution

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      Li Yundi, a famous performer, was accused of soliciting a woman, state news outlets said. Officials often use such accusations against their enemies.A prominent Chinese pianist, Li Yundi, has been detained on prostitution suspicion in Beijing, state-run news outlets in China reported on Thursday.Mr. Li, 39, who had gained celebrity in China as a performer and a reality television personality, was accused of soliciting a 29-year-old woman, according to People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party.The authorities in Beijing did not provide many details of the incident, saying in a statement that a 39-year-old man with the last name Li had acknowledged wrongdoing and had been detained “in accordance with the law.”In an apparent reference to Mr. Li’s case, the Beijing authorities later posted a photo of piano keys alongside the text: “The world is not simply black and white, but one must distinguish between black and white. It must never be mistaken.”The Chinese government often uses accusations of prostitution to intimidate political enemies, and it was unclear why Mr. Li had been singled out and what punishment he might face. Mr. Li and his representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Reports of Mr. Li’s detention quickly became one of the most widely discussed topics on the Chinese internet, with hundreds of thousands of people weighing in. Many expressed shock at the detention of Mr. Li, who rose to fame after becoming one of the youngest people to win the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2000, when he was 18.“He has accumulated popularity for many years, and now it has been ruined after 20 or 30 years of hard work,” wrote one user on Weibo, a Twitterlike Chinese site.Under China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, the government has taken a tough line on artists and has led efforts to “purify” the country’s cultural environment, often in pursuit of political goals. The authorities have in recent months tried to rein in China’s raucous celebrity culture, warning about the perils of celebrity worship and fan clubs.Mr. Li, who has more than 20 million followers on Weibo, is a regular guest on the annual Lunar New Year gala on Chinese television, which is watched by hundreds of millions of people. This year, he performed “I Love You China,” a patriotic song.He rose to fame as a pianist and in the West is sometimes called only by his given name, Yundi. But in China he has become known more recently for his work on reality shows, including “Call Me By Fire,” in which male celebrities compete to form a performance group. Several episodes of the show were removed from the Chinese internet on Thursday after news of Mr. Li’s detention spread.Chinese commentators pointed to the case as an example of a lack of ethics among artists.“No matter how skilled he is, he will not be able to convey his sadness through performance once his image is damaged,” People’s Daily wrote in a social media post. “There can only be a future by advocating morality and abiding by the law.”The Chinese government has a history of using charges of prostitution to sideline political enemies, and experts said Mr. Li’s detention should be looked at critically.Jerome A. Cohen, a New York University law professor who specializes in the Chinese legal system, said the lack of transparency about his case was troubling.“Can one be confident that the facts alleged are true?” Professor Cohen said. “Prostitution is such a time-honored Communist Party claim against political opponents that one has to be suspicious of this case.”Claire Fu More

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      John Langley, a Creator of the TV Series ‘Cops,’ Dies at 78

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      “You can be entertained by it, you can be disgusted,” he said of the popular reality show that embedded film crews with police officers in the streets for 31 years.John Langley, a creator of “Cops,” the stark-looking reality television crime series that followed police officers on drug busts, domestic disputes and high-speed chases for more than 30 years, died on Saturday in Baja, Mexico. He was 78.Mr. Langley apparently had a heart attack while driving with a navigator in the Ensenada San Felipe 250 Coast to Coast off-road race, said Pam Golum, the spokeswoman for Langley Productions.“Cops,” which made its debut on Fox in 1989 and ran until last year, documented misdemeanors and felonies through the lenses of hand-held video cameras, its stories told without narration or music except for its reggae theme song, “Bad Boys.”From the start the show, created with Malcolm Barbour, was supposed to be an unbiased look at law enforcement, and Mr. Langley later saw it as a truer expression of reality TV than series that followed it, like “Survivor.”“You can be entertained by it, you can be disgusted, but it is what happened,” he told The New York Times in 2007. “It wasn’t staged, it wasn’t scripted. I didn’t put anyone on an island and tell them what to do.”Each episode told a different story shot by a crew embedded with one of various police departments. A drug sting at a pain management clinic. A Taser used to subdue a man called Lion. A woman found in a car with warrants for terroristic threats. A car pursuit into the woods. A man arrested in a car with fake license plates while holding 20 grams of crystal meth.Reviewing the first episode for The Times, John J. O’Connor wrote: “For purposes of the show, however, the court of law is the video camera, which is kept running even when the trapped suspect protests its presence. We are reminded several times that ‘this program shows an unpleasant reality’ and that ‘viewer discretion is advised.’ That should keep them from switching to another channel.”“Cops” began in Broward County, Fla., where in 1986 Mr. Langley and Mr. Barbour got the local police to cooperate in a nationally syndicated documentary, “American Vice: The Doping of a Nation,” hosted by Geraldo Rivera, who was also the executive producer.Mr. Langley recalled in a Television Academy interview in 2009 that the Broward County episodes became part of his successful pitch to other police departments.“We’re not the news,” he said he told them. “We’re not here to expose your department or look for dirt, but to show how difficult your job is on an everyday basis.”A scene from a 1998 episode of “Cops.” “We’re not the news,” Mr. Langley said he would tell local police departments. “We’re not here to expose your department or look for dirt, but to show how difficult your job is on an everyday basis.”FoxNick Navarro, the former sheriff of Broward County, said “Cops” had helped make police departments more transparent by combating negative stereotypes about officers.“I was sick and tired of seeing police officers portrayed in TV shows and movies as Dirty Harry and ‘Miami Vice,’ and just out there killing and maiming and doing extravagant things,” Mr. Navarro told The Miami Herald in 1999.In 2013, after Fox had aired several hundred episodes, a civil rights group, Color of Change, mounted a campaign to cancel “Cops.” The group said that the show’s producers and advertisers had built “a model around distorted and dehumanizing portrayals of Black Americans and the criminal justice system” and had created a reality “where the police are always competent, crime-solving heroes and where the bad boys always get caught.”In the Academy interview four years earlier, Mr. Langley addressed criticism about race in “Cops” by saying that while 60 to 70 percent of street crime was “caused by people of color,” he had made sure that most of the criminals seen on the show were white, to avoid “negative stereotyping,” he said, and because most of the show’s audience was white.Fox did cancel “Cops,” but it was swiftly resuscitated by Spike TV (now the Paramount Network). Last year, however, amid protests over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and calls for criminal justice reform and police accountability, Paramount dropped the show.John Russell Langley Jr. was born on June 1, 1943, in Oklahoma City and moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was a baby. His father was an oil wildcatter. His mother, Lurleen (Fox) Langley, was a homemaker.After serving in Army intelligence in the early 1960s — he was in Panama during the Cuban missile crisis — Mr. Langley earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature from California State University, Dominguez Hills, and studied for a Ph.D. in the philosophy of aesthetics at the University of California, Irvine, but did not complete his degree.He worked in marketing for Northwest Airlines, wrote short stories and a screenplay, and had a job with a company — where he met Mr. Barbour — that produced press kits and posters for movies. Forming their own company, the two men directed “Cocaine Blues” (1983), a documentary about the perils of cocaine abuse, which led them to make an antidrug music video, “Stop the Madness,” for Ronald Reagan’s White House in 1985. (Mr. Barbour retired from producing in 1994.)Mr. Langley received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in 2011.Michael Kovac/Getty ImagesMr. Langley produced several other documentaries, some with Mr. Rivera, while trying to pitch “Cops” to NBC, CBS and ABC, all of which rejected the idea. But Fox ordered a pilot.“Barry Diller watched it and said: ‘God, that’s powerful, too powerful,’” Mr. Langley said in the Academy interview, referring to a meeting with the Fox chairman at the time. Another executive worried that Fox’s stations would not accept such a raw program. (Mr. Langley had left in a lot of blood and guts, he said, knowing he could cut it.) But Rupert Murdoch, whose company controls Fox, said, “Order four episodes.”“Cops” spawned several other unscripted crime series by Mr. Langley, including “Las Vegas Jailhouse,” “Jail,” “Street Patrol,” “Undercover Stings” and “Vegas Strip,” which he produced with his son Morgan, the executive vice president of development at Langley Productions.Mr. Langley was a producer of feature films as well, including Antoine Fuqua’s “Brooklyn’s Finest” and Tim Blake Nelson’s “Leaves of Grass,” both released in 2009.In addition to his son, Mr. Langley is survived by his wife, Maggie (Foster) Langley; their daughter, Sarah Langley Dews; another son, Zak, who is the senior vice president of music at Langley Productions; a daughter, Jennifer Blair, from a previous marriage to Judith Knudson, which ended in divorce, and seven grandchildren.Mr. Langley understood the power of a police department’s cooperation when, while shooting “American Vice,” he asked the Broward police if he could shoot a drug raid live.“I said, ‘If you’re going to do this bust anyway, can you do it on this date, and maybe do it in this two-hour window?’” he told the Television Academy. “They said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ and that’s how we did it.” More

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      Raja Feather Kelly and 'The Kill One Race': TV and Theater

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      Raja Feather Kelly’s “The Kill One Race” and “This American Wife” exist in a realm between, changing our relationship with what we witness.There’s reality and there’s fiction: an easy distinction to make, right? Well things aren’t always so cut and dried, especially when we consider the performances we undertake in our real lives and the fictional stories that borrow from reality — the boundaries between what’s true and what’s false often get blurred.In Playwrights Horizons’ new series, “The Kill One Race,” reality TV meets theater for an examination of the ways we shape our values, form relationships and bounce between the realms of reality and fiction in both our entertainment and our daily lives. This streaming production, and another recent digital theater hybrid, “This American Wife,” reflects how the peculiar combination of theater and reality TV may complicate the viewers’ contract with the art form and their understanding of what is artifice and what is truth.“The Kill One Race,” conceived by the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly and his company Feath3r Theory, brings us to a dystopia where 24-year-olds become contestants in a reality competition full of social experiments. The most ethical person in the group is granted the honor of dying and ascending to the Empire, a vague Xanadu of eternal comfort and righteousness.Seven characters compete over seven days that are rife with challenges and schemes and manipulations. You may be thinking of “The Hunger Games” or any of the countless other dystopian works of fiction that involve monitored competitions. Despite the proliferation of these stories, I was still surprised by the variation theater brought to the theme. Filmed at Playwrights Horizons and released over the course of eight overly lengthy episodes, “The Kill One Race” so closely mimics the style of “Big Brother,” “The Real World” and other classic reality series that “theater” feels like a terribly insufficient way to describe it.Kelly, who also directs, borrows the filming conventions of the genre, with many split screens, confessionals and voyeuristic close-ups. He uses the techniques so well, in fact, that the naturalism is jarring — confusing, even. The performances of the cast, too, are so exact and understated, with each actor having such a clear understanding of his or her character’s disposition and way of thinking that the ethical discussions feel uncannily real.Jamen Nanthakumar, left, and Raja Feather Kelly, who created and performs in the production. Kate EnmanThis is what tripped me up (other than the production’s long run time and the fascinating though similarly overlong Ethics 101 discussions): Was I actually watching some kind of social experiment, featuring real people responding in real ways within the scaffolding of a fictional world?It reminded me of the discomfort I felt watching “This American Wife,” with its meta play on the Bravo “Real Housewives” franchise that reproduced actual scenes and dialogue from the shows alongside scripted and improvised material. In my review I wondered what was improvised, what was borrowed from the franchise and what was real.My problem has to do with the question of artifice and honesty — fitting for a show about ethics. I avoid watching reality TV dramas because the performances of these supposedly “real-life” scenarios are too transparent. They feel disingenuous, parodies of reality despite the shows’ claims to the contrary. And this extends beyond the frames of the TV screen — the carefully curated fiction of characters’ stories and their relationships with one another become part of those individuals’ celebrity. It’s profitable.Though theater isn’t an art form of total honesty either, it is its own kind of artifice; the difference is in the presentation of that fiction. In theater there is the expectation of fantasy — we sit in an audience and wait for the curtains to open. When we step into a theater we agree to suspend our disbelief for the duration of a show. Reality TV, however, depicts lives that continue without intermissions and characters who actually exist in the world.When these two realms collide, then, as they do in “The Kill One Race” and “This American Wife,” it warrants a renegotiation of terms between the theatrical production and the audience — a redefinition of the art form and what is generally known and expected of it in its most traditional forms.I’ve stated my unease with this collision between reality TV and the “honest” fiction of theater, but that’s not to say that this is an aberration — or even an error — that productions ought to avoid. In fact, such contortions and hybridizations of theater and other media allow art to confront audiences with their preconceived notions about which stories should be told in which ways. In the end, perhaps the truest sentiments lie somewhere in the space between reality and theater.The KILL ONE RaceThrough July 4; thekillonerace.com More

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      Lance Loud Was an Early Reality Star. He Was Also a Gay Punk Pioneer.

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      Loud was part of “An American Family” in 1973, but his wild band, Mumps, never signed a record deal. Now their songs are being released on the 20th anniversary of his death.On February 20, 1973, Lance Loud earned a place in musical history that, at the time, nearly stopped his career cold.That night, he appeared with his band, Loud!, on “The Dick Cavett Show” as part of an evening devoted to “An American Family,” the PBS program credited as TV’s first reality show. The cinéma vérité series, which featured the entire Loud clan, both riveted and appalled the nation with two revelations: the collapse of the parents’ marriage right on camera, and their eldest son, 20-year-old Lance, making his gay identity extravagantly clear. It was a profoundly rare declaration in that era of television, and by performing on Cavett, Lance led what was likely the first rock group with openly gay members to appear on a major commercial network.“We never considered ourselves a ‘gay band,’” said Kristian Hoffman, Lance’s best friend, who wrote most of the group’s music. “We were a band.” But Loud! did have a broader identity challenge. “They saw us as this joke band from television,” Hoffman recalled from his home in Los Angeles. “No one took us seriously.”At least, not at the start. But once the punk scene began, and Loud! morphed into the band Mumps, the group dovetailed perfectly with “the new culture of shock,” as Hoffman put it. Fans clamored for its Technicolor mix of glam-rock and operatic pop, which smashed together influences from Sparks, Roxy Music and the Kinks, crowned by Loud’s hyperbolic singing.The Loud family, the subject of the PBS reality show “An American Family.” Clockwise from top: Kevin, Lance, Michele, Pat, Delilah, Grant and Bill.John Dominis/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty ImagesIn 1975, Mumps became one of the first bands to play CBGB, opening for Television. They went on to become staples at that club, as well as at Max’s Kansas City, and toured the United States, even opening some shows for Cheap Trick and Van Halen. “They were one of the most interesting bands ever to perform at CBGBs,” the Talking Heads’ drummer Chris Frantz wrote in an email. “Their music was a unique mix of sweet and naughty.”Yet, in their six years together (with a lineup that shifted a few times), Mumps never earned an album deal, managing to issue just two indie singles.Now, nearly five decades later, in a music industry teeming with out L.G.B.T.Q. acts, Mumps are getting another shot. On Friday, the label Omnivore Recordings, known for releasing rare material from artists like Buck Owens and Alex Chilton, is releasing “Rock & Roll This, Rock & Roll That,” a 23-song compilation of the band’s work that’s the first to feature material from Loud! The release also marks a sad milestone: the 20th anniversary of Lance’s death of complications from hepatitis C.The roots of Loud! began at Santa Barbara High School, where Hoffman first met Loud in art class. “I was the teacher’s pet, and Lance was the funniest guy in the room,” said Hoffman, who played keyboards in the band.He cited Pat Loud — the family’s matriarch, who died in January at 94 — as the group’s first cheerleader: “The family had all these musical instruments laying around in the garage, and she encouraged everyone to get in there and play.” Two bands came out of the Loud household: the one seen on the PBS show featuring sons Grant and Kevin, the other led by Lance. “They had the skill,” Hoffman quipped. “We had the will.”(They also had the chutzpah. After Hoffman and Loud attended the notorious Altamont festival in 1969, where they saw the Rolling Stones perform the not-yet-recorded song “Brown Sugar,” they not only started playing it in their sets, they took credit for writing it.)Lance Loud, left, with his parents on “The Dick Cavett Show.”ABC Photo Archives/ABC, via Getty ImagesOnce “An American Family” became a sensation and the invitation came from Cavett, Pat agreed only if her children’s bands could play. But as Hoffman recalled, the performance was met by the studio audience “with a profound silence.”To complicate matters, Loud was still reeling from bruising press, including a lengthy New York Times article published two days earlier that referred to his “flamboyant, leechlike homosexuality,” and went on to call him “the evil flower of the Loud family,” who lives in a world of “backward genders.” Hoffman said that the unflagging support of both men’s families made them both fully confident in their sexuality and gave them strength to persevere.The band was buoyed by its nascent talent, including the drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, who went on to play in the Patti Smith Group; and an agile guitarist, Rob Duprey, who later worked with Iggy Pop. As their frontman, Loud proved so energetic, his sweat became a feature of their show. “He could actually aim it at someone,” Hoffman said. “And because CBGBs was so crowded, they couldn’t get away.”The hip label Bomp Records released their debut single, “I Like to Be Clean,” a wry anti-sex anthem, and Mumps snagged Sparks’ manager, Joseph Fleury. Yet, when Fleury pitched A&M Records on both Mumps and another band he handled, the Dickies, the label snapped up only one, telling the manager, “We don’t want ‘the gay band.’”“Those were the exact words,” Hoffman said, noting the irony that at a time when ostensibly straight rock stars were rewarded for gay affectations, actual gay people were punished for them. “Freddie Mercury had to pretend to be straight to be a rock star,” Hoffman said incredulously. “Freddie Mercury!”Loud executing a headstand onstage at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco with Mumps in 1979.Ruby Ray/Getty ImagesMumps songs never featured gay love scenarios, preferring sardonic observations and satirical exaggerations. Their second single, “Rock & Roll This, Rock & Roll That,” sent up the slogan-like salutes to the genre in song titles that, by then, had become a groaning cliché. “That was specifically written when Lou Reed titled his album ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Animal,’” Hoffman said. “How desperate must he have been to align himself with some trope in its death throes to sell a record?”An intrigued Sire Records commissioned some demos from Mumps but ultimately passed. At the same time, other artists recognized Mumps’ rarity and worth. “The caliber of their musicianship was high,” said Clem Burke, the drummer for Blondie, who shared many bills with Mumps. “They were energetic and fun and probably smarter than most of the other bands on the scene. In fact, they may have been too smart for their own good.”What impressed Rufus Wainwright most was that Mumps “followed no creed,” he said. “It wasn’t exactly punk or musical theater, but it had aspects of both. And they managed to put the dramatic flair of opera into a rock band. Plus, Lance was so sexy.”Still, the eccentricity of the music, with its fitful chord progressions and askew melodies, could be daunting for audiences to fathom and for Loud to sing. “I wrote songs that didn’t always play to Lance’s strength,” Hoffman admitted. “But he was one of the greatest frontmen of all time.”Mumps’ lack of success led to their 1979 split, after which Hoffman worked with artists including Klaus Nomi and James Chance, while Loud sustained a successful career in music journalism. (He contributed regularly to the magazines Details and Interview.) The two stayed best friends until Loud’s 2001 death. Now Hoffman is proud their music may finally reach a wider audience.“We were out of our time back then,” he said. “If we came up now, who knows?” More

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      Space Station May Host Wave of TV Shows and Films

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      A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year.Who wants to be an astronaut?If the answer is you, there’s a reality TV show, appropriately titled “Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?,” that you ought to apply for.The Discovery Channel is seeking to cast about 10 would-be astronauts to compete during the series’s eight-episode run next year for a seat on a real-life trip to the International Space Station, followed by live coverage of the launch of the winner on a SpaceX rocket.“We’d like a diverse group of people that each have their own story, why they want to go to space, why they’re worthy of going to space, what their back story is,” said Jay Peterson, president of Boat Rocker Studios, Unscripted, one of the companies producing the show for Discovery.That person will not be the only amateur astronaut destined for the space station next year. So many tourism and entertainment efforts are preparing trips there that it could begin to look more like a soundstage for television shows and a hotel for the wealthy than an orbiting research laboratory.Many who work in the business of space believe that is a good thing, even if trips to orbit will remain out of reach of all but the wealthiest passengers in the near term.“This is a real inflection point, I think, with human spaceflight,” Phil McAlister, NASA’s director of commercial spaceflight development, said during a news conference this month announcing that the agency had signed an agreement with Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, to fly the first mission of private astronauts to the space station.“I’m very bullish on the tourism market and the tourism activity,” Mr. McAlister said. “I think more people that are going to fly, they’re going to want to do more things in space.”Although the International Space Station may stay up in orbit at least until 2028, in the future it will not be the only space station. Russian space authorities last month declared their intention to leave the I.S.S. in the coming years and build a station of their own. A Chinese orbital outpost is expected to come online in the next year or two.Even NASA is looking for what comes next, promising support for commercial alternatives. Axiom, for one, is building a commercial segment, which will first be added to the International Space Station and later serve as a core piece of an Axiom station.“By the end of the decade I believe we will have at least five, possibly 10 private stations,” said Jeffrey Manber, chief executive of NanoRacks, a company that arranges commercial use of I.S.S. and is also planning its own orbital outposts. “Some for entertainment, some for research, some for in-space manufacturing, some for preparing the way for our journey to Mars. At long last, our more pragmatic aspirations are becoming reality.”TV and film projects in orbit are attracting the greatest attention so far. In the year ahead, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, and a Russian broadcaster, Channel One, are behind a project in the year ahead to send Yulia Peresild, an actress, and Klim Shipenko, a filmmaker, to the space station to make the movie “Challenge.” Ms. Peresild will play a surgeon sent to orbit to save the life of a Russian astronaut.The Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa expects to spend 12 days in space starting in December, and hopes eventually to circle the moon.David Mcnew/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA Soyuz rocket taking off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, Russia, last month.Roscosmos/EPA, via ShutterstockThey will be flying on a Russian Soyuz rocket. So will a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, Yusaku Maezawa, and Yozo Hirano, a production assistant. Their 12-day trip, scheduled to launch in December, is a prelude for a more ambitious around-the-moon trip Mr. Maezawa hopes to embark on in a few years in the giant SpaceX Starship rocket currently in development. His trip to the space station is being arranged by Space Adventures, a company that arranged eight similar visits for private citizens between 2001 and 2009.There is still the possibility of Tom Cruise going to space, too.A year ago, Deadline reported that NASA was in discussions with the megamovie star on shooting an action-adventure film on the station. Since then, nothing more of Mr. Cruise’s out-of-this-world movie project has been revealed publicly.There will also be other trips to space going places other than the space station. Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, has bought an orbital trip from SpaceX, the rocket company started by Elon Musk.A bit closer to Earth, two companies, Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, and Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, are getting closer to flying tourists on short, suborbital flights that will offer a few minutes of weightlessness.On Saturday, Virgin Galactic conducted a successful test flight of its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane. And Blue Origin has announced that its New Shepard spacecraft will have people aboard its next flight, scheduled for July 20, and it is auctioning one seat. As of Wednesday, the high bid was $2.8 million.Axiom Space, the Houston company, is central to some coming trips to the space station. Its first flight to the International Space Station, which is to launch aboard a SpaceX rocket as early as January, will carry three passengers, who are spending $55 million each for their eight days or so in orbit. Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut who is now a vice president at Axiom, will accompany them, serving as commander of the mission.Film director Klim Shipenko, left, and actor Yulia Pereslid, third from left, at the cosmonaut training center in Star City, Russia. They will attempt to make a film aboard the International Space Station in the coming year.ITAR-TASS News Agency/AlamyVirgin Galactic’s VSS Unity being released from its mothership, VMS Eve, on the way to its first spaceflight after launch from Spaceport America in New Mexico this month.Virgin Galactic, via ReutersThis month’s announcement was the first time NASA acknowledged that the Axiom mission was officially on the space station schedule.“We’re finally able to open our doors to private citizens and allow others to experience the magic of living and working in space,” said Dana Weigel, deputy manager for the space station at NASA. “The dream is really to allow everyone access to space, and this is a pretty exciting starting point here.”Producers of Discovery’s “Who Wants to Be an Astronaut” expect the winner to be on board for the second Axiom mission to the space station, which might take off six or seven months after the first one. For now, an agreement between the Discovery team and Axiom has not been finalized, and NASA has yet to choose Axiom to conduct the second private space tourism flight.The NASA-led part of the station could accommodate two private astronaut missions a year, space agency officials have said, and other companies are also interested in participating.“We are seeing a lot of interest in private astronaut missions, even outside of Axiom,” Ms. Weigel said. “At this point, the demand exceeds what we actually believe the opportunities on station will be.”Still, on Tuesday, Axiom announced two people who would be in the seats for that second mission: Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who now works for Axiom, will be the commander, and John Shoffner, a paying passenger who made his fortune as head of a company that manufactures conduits for fiber optic cables, will serve as pilot for the mission.Dr. Whitson, who holds the record for the most cumulative time in space by a NASA astronaut — 665 days — joined Axiom as a consultant a year ago, in hopes of getting to space again and adding to her record. “Yes, most definitely,” she said. “That was the carrot.”Mr. Peterson said plans for the Discovery show grew out of discussions with Axiom early in 2020 and that it would be “a premium documentary” and less like “Survivor” or other ruthless reality television competitions.“There’s real stakes here, unlike those kinds of comparisons,” Mr. Peterson said. “We want to create an interest in somebody, so that everyone can feel like they maybe someday have the ability to do this.”The astronaut Peggy Whitson in the cupola of the International Space Station in 2016. She will chaperone a tourist to the I.S.S., as will astronaut Michael López-Alegría, who is now president of Axiom.NASA, via Associated PressMr. López-Alegría in the Quest Airlock of the I.S.S. in 2002.NASAPaul Ricci, a founder of BoomTown Content Company and also involved in the show, said the competition will be based on what astronauts and others who have worked in human spaceflight have said was needed to succeed.“If these are the qualities that astronauts need to have,” Mr. Ricci said, “then we can model challenges that test those qualities. Things like problem solving, teamwork, precision and focus, grace under pressure, handling the unexpected.”The idea of staging competitions to get to space is not new. In 1990, Toyohiro Akiyama, a Japanese television journalist, went to the Russian space station Mir. The Tokyo Broadcasting Service bought the seat on the Soyuz and Mr. Akiyama was selected from 163 candidates. A year later, Helen Sharman, an English chemist, also flew to Mir, selected from among 13,000 British applicants in a privately financed campaign.A space-based reality television show is not a new idea either. In 2000, NBC signed a deal for a show developed by Mark Burnett, who had also produced “The Apprentice” and “Survivor.” The winner of that competition would have also traveled to Mir, but NASA pressed Russia to abandon Mir and shift its focus to the International Space Station, which was in the early stages of construction.Russia relented, Mir was nudged to a watery crash in the Pacific in 2001, and the reality television show never came to fruition.As for Mr. Cruise, it is a guessing game when he and the movie director he is working with, Doug Liman, might head to the space station, and Axiom has never commented on whether it is involved in Mr. Cruise’s movie.Asked on Monday if there were any developments that could be shared, Amanda Lundberg, Mr. Cruise’s publicist, replied, “Thanks but this is not possible.” More