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      Martin Bookspan, Cultured Voice of Lincoln Center Telecasts, Dies at 94

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      The longtime announcer for “Live From Lincoln Center,” he said he wanted his audience “to become involved, to love what they’re hearing.”Martin Bookspan, who parlayed a childhood grounding in classical music into a career as the announcer for the “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts and the radio broadcasts of the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, died on April 29 at his home in Aventura, Fla. He was 94.The cause was congestive heart failure, his daughter Rachel Sobel said.Mr. Bookspan started violin lessons when he was 6, but he realized by the time he entered college that he would never be the next Fritz Kreisler or Jascha Heifetz. After an early career behind the scenes at radio stations in Boston and New York, he established himself as a stalwart of “Live From Lincoln Center,” the PBS program that became America’s premier source of classical music on broadcast television. He joined the program when it went on the air in 1976.“Live From Lincoln Center” was, for him, not that different from radio — he was heard but not seen. He would open the broadcast, then hand off to on-camera hosts like Beverly Sills, Dick Cavett or Hugh Downs.“The camera was never on Marty,” said John Goberman, the program’s longtime executive producer. But, he added, Mr. Bookspan “was more than just the announcer. The comfortable and familiar part of every broadcast was Marty Bookspan.”Mr. Bookspan’s voice “didn’t sound like a lion,” Mr. Goberman said. “He spoke in a very straightforward, friendly, conversational way.” The Palm Beach Post, describing Mr. Bookspan’s voice after an interview in 1994, said: “Even on the telephone, it’s a voice that resonates with the rarefied air of high culture, the sort of voice you might hear on a public-television pledge drive. But it’s not so stuffy that you couldn’t imagine it delivering the play-by-play of your favorite team.”Mr. Bookspan himself said, “If I have a technique, it’s the technique of the sportscaster.”“As sportscasters make the game come alive, I hope I have made concerts come alive,” he explained in 2006, as he prepared to leave “Live From Lincoln Center” after 30 years. “I want the audience to become involved, to love what they’re hearing.”By then, the “Live From Lincoln Center” audience was accustomed to hearing his preconcert warm-ups and his postconcert signoffs. With a well-dressed crowd in the audience and big-name performers on the stage, the proceedings had a touch of glamour, but not necessarily for Mr. Bookspan. He and his microphone were sometimes installed in dressing rooms, closets — even, at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, in what had been a women’s restroom. He was connected to the stage through his headphones and a video monitor.The soprano Renée Fleming and the conductor Louis Langrée on opening night of the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2005, which was broadcast on “Live From Lincoln Center.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesMartin Bookspan was born on July 30, 1926, in Boston. His father, Simon, was a dry goods salesman who later switched to selling insurance; his mother, Martha (Schwartz) Bookspan was a homemaker. Simon Bookspan was passionate about Jewish liturgical music and took his son to hear prominent cantors.At Harvard, Martin majored not in music but in German literature. He graduated cum laude in 1947.He was also heard on the campus radio station, where he conducted his first important interview in 1944. His guest was the composer Aaron Copland, who revealed that he was considering writing a piece for the choreographer Martha Graham. It turned out to be the ballet “Appalachian Spring.”In his future broadcast career, Mr. Bookspan would interview more than 1,000 performers and composers, from the conductor Maurice Abravanel to the composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.After working as the music director at WBMS, a classical-music station in Boston, he joined the staff of the Boston Symphony in 1954 as its radio, television and recordings coordinator. In 1956, he moved to New York to become the director of recorded music at WQXR, then owned by The New York Times.At WQXR, he hired John Corigliano, at the time a fledgling composer, as an assistant. He proved to be a concerned boss.Mr. Corigliano called in sick one summer morning. “I should’ve known better, because Marty was so considerate, he called later in the afternoon,” Mr. Corigliano, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2001, said in an interview. “I went off to the beach. Marty called, and my roommate answered the phone. Marty said, ‘How is John feeling?’ My roommate said, ‘Oh, he’s great. He’s at the beach.’“The next day I walked in. There’s Marty. I approached him slowly and said, ‘I’ll never do it again.’”Mr. Bookspan left WQXR in 1967 and joined the music licensing agency ASCAP as coordinator of symphonic and concert activities. He was later vice president and director of artists and repertoire for the Moss Music Group, an artists’ management agency. He was also an adjunct professor of music at New York University.In the 1960s and ’70s, he was an arts critic for several television stations, including WABC and WPIX in New York and WNAC (now WHDH) in Boston. He was a host of “The Eternal Light,” an NBC program produced with the Jewish Theological Seminary, and, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the announcer for the CBS soap opera “The Guiding Light.”He also wrote reviews of recordings for The New York Times (on open-reel tapes in the 1960s and compact discs in the 1990s). He wrote several books, including “101 Masterpieces of Music and Their Composers” (1968) and, with Ross Yockey, biographies of the conductors André Previn and Zubin Mehta. He handled radio broadcasts for the Boston Symphony and later for the New York Philharmonic.His wife, Janet Bookspan, died in 2008. Besides Ms. Sobel, he is survived by a son, David; another daughter, Deborah Margol; six grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.The tenor Jan Peerce called Mr. Bookspan’s knowledge of music “encyclopedic,” and it served him well when he had to ad-lib.One night in 1959, he was the announcer for a Boston Symphony broadcast that featured the pianist Rudolf Serkin playing Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Mr. Bookspan did his usual introduction before Serkin and the conductor Charles Munch made their way across the stage. Mr. Bookspan told The Berkshire Eagle in March that once they plunged in, “I did the one thing that I learned I should never do again: I left my broadcast booth.”With Serkin “flailing away with a vengeance, pounding the pedals for all they were worth, caught up in the work and oblivious to all else” — as Mr. Bookspan recalled in a different interview — he headed to the green room to chat with Aaron Copland, who was on hand for the concert.Suddenly, in the second movement of the Brahms, there was silence.“I ran across the backstage and up the stairs, and en route picked up the news that there was a problem with the piano,” he told The Eagle. “I got to the microphone and huffed and puffed my way through, reporting, ‘There was a problem with the piano’ and that ‘as soon as I catch my breath, I’ll tell you what’s going on.’”Mr. Bookspan talked nonstop for more than 15 minutes until the piano had been fixed and Serkin and the orchestra started playing again. More

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      Seth Meyers Doesn’t Want to Have to Support Liz Cheney

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      Meyers made a “M*A*S*H” reference about the Republican who denounces Donald Trump: “I feel like B.J. Hunnicutt speaking up in support of Charles Winchester.” Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. More

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      Bob Abernethy, Longtime Host of PBS Show on Religion, Dies at 93

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      He conceived and produced “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and was its face for 20 years, after four decades as an NBC News correspondent.Bob Abernethy, who capped a four-decade career as an NBC News correspondent by injecting religion, one of the most under-covered subjects on television, into national programming with a weekly series that ran for 20 years on PBS, died on May 2 in Brunswick, Maine. He was 93.His death, at a heath care facility, was confirmed by his daughter Jane Montgomery Abernethy. The cause was Alzheimer’s dementia.The grandson of a Baptist minister in Washington whose congregation included President Warren G. Harding and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Mr. Abernethy had retired from NBC in 1994 after covering the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nascent space program and Congress.He was not ready to stop working, though. Armed with his deep faith, intellectual curiosity and a theology degree he had earned from Yale Divinity School during a one-year leave of absence in 1984, he persuaded WNET, the PBS station in New York, to produce “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” a half-hour nonsectarian series that Mr. Abernethy hosted and presided over as executive editor beginning in 1997.Within 10 years of its launch, the show — which Mr. Abernethy had described as “a news program, no preaching” — was airing on 250 public stations nationwide, winning some 200 industry awards. He and his collaborators went on to broadcast regularly until 2017, when he was 89.With the journalist William Bole, Mr. Abernethy edited “The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World,” (2007), an anthology of interview transcripts from the PBS program.“Nothing I have done has been as personally satisfying as founding and working on” the program, he wrote in the introduction to the book, adding, “The main reason for that is the many opportunities the show provides for sitting down with the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu — extraordinary men and women who speak as naturally about their faith and doubt and spiritual practices as they do about the weather.”Mr. Abernethy in an undated photo. He persuaded PBS to produce “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” becoming its host and executive producer.David HollowayOther guests included the Dalai Lama, President Jimmy Carter, the Rev. Billy Graham and Jonathan Sacks, at the time the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom.The series covered a wide range of topics, including atheism, abortion, assisted suicide, sexual abuse by clergy and organ transplants.“Finding this line between sensitivity to the spiritual dimensions of a story on the one hand and objective, traditional skepticism is a constant struggle and a very appropriate one, but I think we’ve got it right,” Mr. Abernethy told The Washington Post in 2000. “This is a matter of good reporting. Unless you get the spiritual element of the story, you’re missing something very important. It’s like interviewing Babe Ruth and not asking about hitting.”When “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” was approaching the end of its run, Jerome Socolovsky, the editor in chief of Religion News Service, was rueful, telling the news service Current in 2016, “The media landscape will miss this crucial provider of video stories about religion that didn’t favor one or the other but gave viewers a full perspective on religious news developments.”Robert Gordon Abernethy was born on Nov. 5, 1927, in Geneva to Robert and Lois May (Jones) Abernethy. His father worked for the Y.M.C.A.’s international newspaper. After Bob was born, the couple returned to the United States. His father began to teach religion at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa., but died of complications of appendicitis in 1930.Bob and his mother moved in with his paternal grandparents in Washington, where his grandfather was senior minister of Calvary Baptist Church. She taught piano at the National Cathedral School.After graduating from the Hill School, he enrolled in Princeton University but interrupted his studies to serve with the American occupying Army in postwar Japan, where he hosted a program for Armed Forces Radio. Returning to college, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from what is now the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.Coming from a family of pastors, he felt “a certain amount of pressure on me to become a minister, too,” he told the website Resources for Christianity in 2013, “but I never heard a call.”Mr. Abernethy married Jean Montgomery in 1951; she died in 1980. In addition to their daughter, Jane, he is survived by his second wife, Marie (Grove) Abernethy, whom he married in 1984; their daughter, Elizabeth C. Abernethy; and four children from Ms. Abernethy’s first marriage. He had homes in Brunswick as well as in Washington and Jaffrey, N.H.Mr. Abernethy was a member of the United Church of Christ. His wife is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church.He joined NBC News after receiving his master’s from Princeton in 1952. Early on he wrote and hosted “Update,” a program for young people, and was later a Washington interviewer for the “Today” show. He anchored the evening news for KNBC in Los Angeles among other assignments.One posting was to Moscow, after he had completed his leave from NBC News to study theology in 1984. Before he left, he recalled: “I ran into a guy I had known who asked me, ‘What’s new?’ I said, ‘I took a year’s leave from NBC and went to divinity school. I got married and we had a baby. What’s new with you?’”He never stopped working. At his death, he was hoping to document the lives of homeless people through video interviews, for a future broadcast. More

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      Could ‘Young Rock’ Be Dwayne Johnson’s ‘Apprentice’?

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      A wrestler’s job is to sell an absurd fiction, and make it reality — maybe it’s not so different from politics.Listen to This ArticleThe eighth episode of “Young Rock” finds the show’s protagonist, a 15-year-old Dwayne Johnson, in a classic sitcom predicament. He has pretended to be rich to impress a classmate named Karen, who has the blond hair and movie-grade makeup that teenage boys dream of. Now she is coming over for dinner and expecting to see a palace; in reality, Young Rock is squeezed into a small apartment with his parents, who struggle to pay the rent. The show, which just finished its first season on NBC, follows the actor’s childhood growing up around the professional wrestling business, back when his father, Rocky Johnson, was a star. In a bind, Young Rock turns to his father for the sort of advice only he can provide.“I understand,” Rocky says with paternal knowingness and a roguish smile that implies he has been here before. “You were working a gimmick, and you cornered yourself.” In pro wrestling, working a gimmick is the tapestry of untruths you speak and act into reality — the commitment to character that propels the most gifted fabulists into superstardom. The all-American Hulk Hogan persuaded children to eat their vitamins; the Undertaker somehow made people think he really was an undead mortician; Rocky, who dressed fantastically and went by “Soulman,” was the coolest guy around. (It wasn’t more complicated than that.) It’s why, on the show, he leaves the wrestling arena in a fancy Lincoln Continental, only to check into a run-down motel for the night — he has created a high-rolling persona for the fans, and he must keep it intact. And it’s why he dismisses Young Dwayne’s concerns that maybe he should just come clean with Karen. “Wrong, son,” he says. “What you gotta do is work the gimmick even harder.”Professional wrestling is a form of entertainment that invites viewers to understand its fictive properties but nevertheless still buy into its dramas; in fact, the knowledge that it’s all constructed quickly gives way to a form of meta-appreciation. And unlike actors in a conventional TV drama, wrestlers are their characters, even in real life. This informal contract between performer and audience to never break character means that no matter where Rocky Johnson goes, he’s still recognizable as himself and must behave accordingly.With “Young Rock,” Johnson may very well be trying to find out if this alchemy can be performed for real: if a fiction can be created in front of an audience and then imposed on reality. The framing device for the show, the reason we’re learning about Young Rock’s life, is that Johnson is on the campaign trail for the 2032 presidential race, where he has a real shot to win. Like all coming-of-age stories — and most instantly remaindered political memoirs — “Young Rock” purports to trace how Johnson’s upbringing turned him into the man he is today: wrestling champion, the highest-paid actor on the planet, maybe a future president. Roll your eyes, but accept the possibility. Ever since Donald Trump was elected, plenty of charismatic celebrities have been floated as potential candidates. More than the other contenders — Oprah, Mark Cuban — Johnson has gained real traction, even going so far as to publicly state that he wouldn’t run in 2020 but that it was something he “seriously considered.”Johnson passes every cosmetic test: handsome, tall, voice like a strong handshake. He’s the star of several film franchises that future voters will have grown up watching. And while a different show might play all this for laughs, “Young Rock” frequently lapses into what messaging for Johnson’s actual campaign might sound like. It’s never specified whether he’s running as a Democrat or a Republican; he presents as a third-way politician who just wants America to push past its divisions. Candidate Rock is a little like Michael Bloomberg, but with more convincing platitudes and even better delts. One episode shows Young Rock watching his grandmother’s wrestling company struggle to adjust to contemporary trends, something that leads candidate Rock to sympathize with everyday Americans concerned about their jobs being replaced by automation. Another ties his childhood friendship with Andre the Giant to his selection of a female general (played by Rosario Dawson) as his running mate — because, just like Andre, the general will “always push me to consider other points of view.” (She had previously endorsed his opponent.) Celebrity politicians, like Trump or Arnold Schwarzenegger, can usually skip this self-mythologizing process; the reason they’re running is that people already know who they are. But on “Young Rock,” Johnson runs a fairly conventional campaign; he even engenders a small controversy when he eats a Philly cheesesteak improperly. The insistence that his candidacy would be in any way conventional only heightens the sense that the show is a road map for an actual run.Back in 1987, Young Rock takes his father’s advice to double down on the gimmick in order to impress Karen. It backfires when she sees through the ruse, because for most people charisma can transform reality only so far — and even wrestlers run into this barrier, once their stars fade a little, or their addictions take root, or they simply grow older. Wrestling history is littered with ignoble ends and performers who couldn’t quite accept that the show was over. But there’s one — the only one who has ever lived, actually — who has kept doubling down and seen his star ascend accordingly. For most people, charisma can only transform reality so far — and even wrestlers run into this barrier. Johnson followed his father into professional wrestling, then left the W.W.E. at the apex of his success to get started in Hollywood; he latched himself to the “Fast & Furious” franchise, always playing some version of his stentorian, trash-talking wrestling persona, until he became a movie star in his own right; when his name started coming up as a potential presidential candidate, he indulged the rumors rather than say, “Wait a minute, I’m the guy who says, ‘Can you smell what the Rock is cooking?’” And here he is now, maybe sort-of speaking his fictional presidential campaign into reality, a compelling “will he or won’t he” drama that’s up there with any of his best wrestling or Hollywood stories.“Young Rock” has been modestly successful, averaging more than four million viewers per episode. It’s not Trump’s “The Apprentice,” which was a genuine hit for a decade. But Johnson has many other concurrent efforts to expand his fame across American life: A new “Fast & Furious” movie comes out in June; his relaunch of the much-maligned X.F.L., which he purchased last year, is still in the works; there are rumors that he’ll return to the W.W.E. for a final match. Nobody has ever taken this path to the Oval Office, but you could have said that about Trump, who also understood the importance of committing to character. When your supporters want to believe what you’re saying, there’s no limit to how far the gimmick can go.Source photographs: Mark Taylor/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty Images; David M. Benett/WireImage, via Getty Images; PM Images, via Getty Images. More

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      Johnny Crawford, a Western Hero’s Son on ‘The Rifleman,’ Dies at 75

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      For five TV seasons he was at the side of Chuck Connors’s widowed sharpshooter. He also had some success as a pop singer, film actor and bandleader.Johnny Crawford in 1997 with a photo of himself as a boy and Chuck Connors, who played his father on the TV show “The Rifleman.” As a teenager, Mr. Crawford received piles of fan mail.Steve KaganJohnny Crawford, the soulful young actor who became a child star on the western “The Rifleman” in the late 1950s and had some success as a pop singer, died on April 29 in Los Angeles. He was 75.The death, at an assisted-living home, was announced on the website johnnycrawfordlegacy.com by his wife, Charlotte McKenna-Crawford. It was revealed in 2019 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and he had been in failing health since his hospitalization last year with Covid-19 and pneumonia.“The Rifleman,” which ran from 1958 to 1963, was a low-key half-hour series on ABC about Luke McCain (Chuck Connors), a widowed Civil War veteran and sharpshooter raising his son on their ranch in the New Mexico territory. The boy, Mark, was always identifiable by his Stetson hat and always had an intense expression — usually one of earnest concern or unabashed hero worship. When he asked his father why people are cruel to others who look or dress differently from them, his father explained simply: It’s fear.John Ernest Crawford was born on March 26, 1946, in Los Angeles, the son of Robert Lawrence Crawford Sr., a film editor, and Betty (Megerlin) Crawford, a concert pianist. His maternal grandfather was Alfred Eugene Megerlin, the Belgian violinist who became concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.On Emmy Awards night in 1959, three contemporary Crawfords were nominees: Johnny, 13, for “The Rifleman”; his older brother, Robert Jr., for a role as a child in wartime Europe on “Playhouse 90”; and their father for editing the comedy series “The Bob Cummings Show.”Decades later, Mr. Crawford liked to tell interviewers that he was “a has-been at 9.”He’d been on television twice — singing on “The Pinky Lee Show” and “The Steve Allen Show” — when he was hired in 1955 as one of the original 24 Mouseketeers on Walt Disney’s “The Mickey Mouse Club.” The Mouseketeers, perky children in matching white mock-turtle short-sleeve shirts, sang, danced, appeared in serials like “Spin and Marty” and opened and closed the show with a paean to M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e. But after one season, producers decided to feature only 12 Mouseketeers, and Johnny was cut.“The Rifleman” came along two years later.Johnny was 17 and receiving piles of fan mail when the series ended. He became something of a teenage pop-music idol as well, with four Top 40 hits. The most successful, “Cindy’s Birthday,” reached No. 8 on the Billboard pop singles chart in 1962.Between the 1960s and the ’80s Mr. Crawford made more than a half-dozen feature films, including the western “El Dorado” (1966), starring John Wayne, and appeared in other television westerns. He spent two years in the Army, appeared at rodeos (the “Rifleman” crew had taught him rope tricks) and began doing live theater across the country.“I think I’m most happy when I’m doing a play somewhere and having the opportunity of doing the same play over and over again and getting to really develop the character,” he told TV Collector magazine in 1982, after he had finished a run in “I Love My Wife” in Canada.But he found an even more satisfying career later in life. He had loved early-20th-century popular music since childhood and was reminded of that when his friend Hugh Hefner — who had been an executive producer of “The Naked Ape,” a 1973 film starring Mr. Crawford and Victoria Principal — played a Bing Crosby album for him.In 1992 he formed the Johnny Crawford Dance Orchestra. Sometimes wearing top hat and tails, he conducted the band and sang, period style in a high baritone, hits of the 1920s and ’30s like “After You’re Gone” and “Happy Feet.”Mr. Crawford and Charlotte Samco McKenna, who were high school sweethearts in the 1960s, reconnected years later and married in 1995. In addition to his wife, his survivors include his brother Robert; a sister, Nance Crawford; and two stepdaughters, Brenda Westenhaver and Jamie Pierce.Mr. Crawford’s final screen appearance was in “Bill Tilghman and the Outlaws” (2019), also known as “The Marshal.” But, as he told The Wall Street Journal in 2000, he considered his orchestra “the best acting assignment” he’d ever had.“These songs have wonderful dialogue,” he said. “It’s like getting to do Shakespeare.” More