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      in Theater

      At BroadwayCon, Hillary Clinton Celebrates Women in the Theater

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      The former secretary of state moderated a discussion on Friday afternoon about successes and barriers for women working in the theater.“There’s a lot to worry about right now in our country and the world,” Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, told a packed room of about 500 people gathered at the grand ballroom at the Manhattan Center on Friday afternoon. “And I think we need theater and the arts more than ever.”Clinton was speaking at the seventh BroadwayCon — an annual haven for the most passionate theater fans — where she was moderating a panel celebrating women on Broadway. It was the first in-person edition of the three-day event, which continues through Sunday, since 2020. (The 2021 edition was virtual.)The event allows musical theater aficionados — many of them costumed as favorite characters like Elphaba from “Wicked” and Anne Boleyn from “Six” — to meet and take photographs with the stars of their favorite shows.Clinton led an hourlong panel titled “Here’s to the Ladies,” a riff on a Stephen Sondheim lyric from the song “The Ladies Who Lunch” from the musical “Company.” Participants included the actresses Vanessa Williams (who stars as the first lady in “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive”), Julie White (who plays the White House chief of staff in “POTUS”), Donna Murphy (the veteran stage actress who has recently appeared in the television series “The Gilded Age” and “Inventing Anna”) and LaChanze (“Trouble in Mind”).Clinton, a noted theater fan, recently saw “POTUS” and said she was “looking forward to seeing a lot more shows in the weeks to come.” Michael Loccisano/Getty ImagesThere was a burst of applause and a 20-second standing ovation after Clinton entered the room, taking a seat in a plush white chair backed by a glowing, Hollywood-style BroadwayCon sign. Clinton, a noted theater fan, said she had attended performances of “Plaza Suite” and “POTUS” in the past week, and that she was “looking forward to seeing a lot more shows in the weeks to come.” (She received a round of applause at “POTUS” on Wednesday night after the scene in which Lilli Cooper, who plays a White House reporter, reviews the accomplishments of the first lady, played by Williams, and asks, “Why aren’t you president?”)Then Clinton had LaChanze and Williams discuss their work with the nonprofit Black Theater United; the group, formed over six months of Zoom meetings during the pandemic, aims to combat racism in the theater community.“There’s so much you can be proud of,” Clinton told them, “with the changes and awareness and consciousness and most effectively in actually hiring and retaining and recruiting more diversity.”The discussion then turned to the women’s experiences of motherhood, including balancing life and work. White extended the conversation beyond the stage, noting that women who have careers have to sort out child care, relying on family when none is available. “It’s an ongoing problem,” she said, joking that she thought one of the two nursing mothers in “POTUS” — one of whom appears onstage — “actually pumped during her audition.”White and Williams also discussed what it was like to work with a mostly female creative team for “POTUS,” which was written by Selina Fillinger and directed by Susan Stroman.From left, LaChanze, Murphy, Clinton, Williams and Julie White spoke about inclusion, motherhood and more during their panel on Friday.Michael Loccisano/Getty Images“It’s a sense of ease — you walk into a room and there’s all females,” Williams said. “You can relax, and be funny, and ask questions, and probe, and know that there is no judgment because you’re a woman.”White added: “There was no right or wrong. There was none of that subtle patriarchy that’s always kind of there, like, ‘Get it right, lady’ — in other words, what my vision is” of what’s right.Clinton spoke to her own experience as an up-and-coming lawyer navigating the workaholic environment of Washington, sharing a story of an older male lawyer telling her to leave her door closed when she went out to dinner so everyone would think she was still working.“I said, ‘But don’t they eat?’” she said. “He said, ‘No, no, you don’t understand, it’s all perception. When you get back from dinner, walk around the office and loudly announce to people, “What are you all doing? Anything I can do to help?” Even if you’ve been at dinner for two hours, they’ll think you’re back. They think you never left.’”“My God,” Clinton said to applause. “That is exhausting — just get your work done, and then go home!”White noted that she had become more comfortable advocating for herself as she’d progressed in her career. When she was young, she said, “You’re always looking at the director like, ‘I hope he likes me,’” she said. “Then you grow up and evolve and you become more interested in what you want to tell.”She said she had become notorious for not taking notes from directors “because the power is in me, the creation is in me,” adding, “I’ve become really irritating now!”Clinton concluded the event by asking each of the women what they hadn’t yet done that they wanted to do.“Besides the show where you and I solve crimes?” White asked. “I want to play the president of the United States.”“Well, I can give you lots of notes on that,” Clinton said.“You know I won’t take them!” White responded to applause.Elexa Bancroft, a 35-year-old artist from Atlanta, attended the panel on a break from selling her mixed-media art at the marketplace downstairs. “I needed that female empowerment in my life so badly,” she said. “Being a young female entrepreneur myself and trying to get my art out into the world and seeing how far those women have come in their jobs, it’s really inspiring.”Other events set for the weekend include “When Broadway Was Black: Celebrating the Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way”; a presentation by the author and cultural historian Caseen Gaines on Saturday afternoon that celebrates the centennial of the 1921 musical comedy “Shuffle Along,” one of the first successful all-Black Broadway musicals; and “Dreaming the Queer Future: TGNC Representation and Playwrights in the American Theater,” a discussion on Sunday morning that includes the Tony-nominated actress L Morgan Lee of “A Strange Loop” and the playwright Roger Q. Mason and focuses on trans and gender nonconforming representation in theater.“It definitely feels more inclusive this year,” Bancroft said. More

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      in Music

      Girls Are Outnumbered in Jazz. At This Summer Camp, They Run the Show.

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      Jazz Camp for Girls, a four-day program in Denmark, has expanded to Finland, Poland and Sweden this year, giving young musicians a space to play music and build friendships.COPENHAGEN — On a morning in late June, 16 girls arrived at an urban courtyard for the timeless summer ritual of camp drop-off. Some came clutching their parents’ hands; others raced ahead to greet old friends. One young teenager with strawberry-blond curls, who had come because her working parents told her she couldn’t sit home alone all day, stood nervously waiting for things to get underway. But it wasn’t long before the 13-year-old happily joined an ice-breaking game. “Hi, my name is Anna,” she chanted, as she clapped out a rhythm that the others repeated back to her: “Ba-BAH-ba-ba-BAH.”The campers, who ranged in age from 9 to 15, had just gotten their first lesson in jazz. Over the next four days, they would learn about the genre’s distinctive rhythms and melodies, and try their hands at improvising on a number of different instruments. But perhaps the most important lesson for the students at Jazz Camp for Girls is that there is a place for them in jazz at all.Plenty of art forms have a gender imbalance, but in jazz, where men heavily dominate the industry’s production, consumption and education, the inequality is especially pronounced. From 2007 to 2018, women musicians led or shared the lead on less than 20 percent or so of the 50 best albums in the NPR Jazz Critics Poll. One recent study found that just 4 percent of notable jazz musicians in the United Kingdom are women. And even in supposedly egalitarian Denmark, the proportions have been thoroughly uneven; a 2012 report found that women made up only 20 percent of the rhythmic music industry there.From left: Sarah Lilja Buch Callisen, Flora Aaris-Hoeg and Anna Kirkhoff Eriksen at jazz camp in Copenhagen. This year’s camp was held in 11 cities across Denmark.Betina Garcia for The New York Times“It was a shock,” said Agnete Seerup, deputy director of JazzDanmark, an organization that co-founded the girls’ camp in 2014 in response to that damning study, and today oversees the program alone. “So we created the project to encourage more girls to play rhythmic instruments. And hopefully change the gender balance down the road.”The jazz musician Johanna Sulkunen was thinking of the effects of that imbalance when she enrolled her daughter in the Copenhagen camp. “You’re not taken seriously,” she explained. “You don’t get solos. You’re not seen as a musician.” Saying goodbye to Alma, who is so small that she has to rest the bottom of her saxophone on a stool when she plays, Sulkunen said she hoped things would be easier for the 9-year-old. “I really hope that for her, it can just be about the joy of making music.”This year’s camp was held in 11 cities across Denmark from June 27 to 30. Grouped into eight-person bands, the girls were taught by instructors who are also working musicians. The four days culminated with a concert for family and friends.On the first day of the Copenhagen camp, held at the Rytmisk Center music school, the girls gravitated to instruments they knew — Lola Engell, a 10-year-old in a Rolling Stones T-shirt, tapped out a beat on drums while Flora Aaris-Hoeg, 11, strapped on an electric bass. Jazz Camp focuses on rhythmic instruments to counteract the historical relegation of women in jazz to singing, which was often cast as “entertainment” rather than the serious art practiced by men. And it makes a point of moving the girls through a number of them.Over the camp’s four days, the students are encouraged to rotate from instrument to instrument.Betina Garcia for The New York Times“Rotation is a big part of what we do,” said Cecilie Strange, an instructor and saxophonist. “We’ve had girls who have never sat behind a drum set, and when you ask them to play it, some of them will be like, ‘I don’t think so.’ But it’s really important to get everyone to try everything. And sometimes you see really fast that a girl has a knack for an instrument she had never tried before.”The emphasis on rotation is also intended to help the girls overcome the self-consciousness that sometimes limits them. “Girls naturally have almost the same interest in the instruments as boys,” Strange said. “But they need more control: they worry about how they look and don’t want to make mistakes. That can be a barrier.”Flora, the 11-year-old whose first instrument is bass, said she liked not having boys around: “It just makes you more comfortable.”Encouraging the girls to improvise — there is no sheet music at the camp — builds confidence while also introducing an important aspect of jazz performance. Strange taught the girls to play a few classics from the jazz repertoire, like Sonny Rollins’s “Sonnymoon for Two,” but the camp’s other instructor, the saxophonist and composer Carolyn Goodwin, took the girls in a more experimental direction. “I want these girls to feel like even if they don’t identify with the traditional approach, that they can still find themselves in the music in another way,” she said.On the camp’s second day, Goodwin got the girls started on their own improvisation by playing a selection from “Zodiac Suite,” and asking if anyone knew the composer. When none of the campers raised her hand, Goodwin told them that women composers were part of jazz’s story even if they weren’t well known. “This one is by Mary Lou Williams,” she said. “Can you say her name?”Viola Sisseck Rabenhoj, 10, had a knack for composition; even before camp, she and her fellow camper Alma had written a piece about Alma’s pet hamster, Vinny. Now, Goodwin took a melody that Viola had created, and asked the girls to follow Williams’s example and riff around a Zodiac sign both by playing and by writing a short text. They later put the elements together into a song with spoken-word lyrics. Practicing it on the final day of camp, Aya Knudsen Rein worked a flourish into her drum solo, then smiled proudly.Carolyn Goodwin, an instructor at the camp, helping Ella Hargreave with a guitar. Betina Garcia for The New York TimesYears after participating in the 2014 and 2015 Jazz Camps, Kathrine Stagsted Lund, now 23, remains grateful for the experience. “It most certainly had an impact on me,” she said. “I got introduced to the double bass, which I continue to play. I volunteer at a jazz club and always seek out the jazz concerts in Copenhagen.” More than anything, though, the experience helped her navigate playing in rhythmic ensembles: “As a young female instrumentalist always outnumbered, it gave me a sense of confidence and courage.”For the first time this year, Jazz Camp for Girls will also be held in Finland, Poland and Sweden. But for all their anecdotal success, the programs still have some ways to go before their impact is measurable. Last year, JazzDanmark studied why the needle hadn’t moved much on the 80/20 gender distribution. “We found out that private networks really matter in jazz,” Seerup said. “Many jobs in the music industry are given out one night at a bar, and if you’re not part of that private network, you’re less likely to get one. What we’re focusing on now is creating strong relations between girls now, so they might become networks later.”On the final day of Jazz Camp, those networks seemed to be off to a good start. Anna Kirkhoff Eriksen, the strawberry-blond drummer who hadn’t known anyone when she arrived at camp, had become fast friends with Sarah, who played keyboards, and Liva, who thrilled the audience at the final concert with her trumpet solo. And Flora, who was comfortable on the bass but had been nervous to be performing her first drum solo, was delighted with how it had all gone.“That was great!” she gushed, as she exchanged phone numbers with her new friends, Aya and Lola. “We should form a band!” More

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      in Movies

      Mary Mara, Actress on ‘ER,’ ‘Dexter’ and ‘Nash Bridges,’ Dies at 61

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      She appeared in dozens of movies and television shows in a career of more than 30 years. The police said they believed she died in a drowning accident.Mary Mara, a character actress who appeared on television shows including “Nash Bridges,” “Dexter” and “ER” in a career that spanned more than 30 years, has died in upstate New York. She was 61.The death was announced by the New York State Police, who said that Ms. Mara’s body was found on Sunday morning in the St. Lawrence River near Cape Vincent, N.Y., near the Canadian border, and that a preliminary investigation suggested that she had drowned while swimming.She lived in Cape Vincent.Ms. Mara was born on Sept. 21, 1960, in Syracuse, N.Y., to Roger Mara, the former director of special events for the New York State Fair, and Lucille Mara, an accountant. Her brother, Roger, who was a puppeteer, told The San Francisco Examiner in 1996 that he and Mary were encouraged by their mother’s flair for the dramatic.After graduating from Corcoran High School in Syracuse, Ms. Mara studied at San Francisco State University and later earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the Yale School of Drama. Throughout her career she dabbled in theater, most notably in 1989 in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Twelfth Night,” alongside Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.That same year, she had her first onscreen credit, in the television movie “The Preppie Murder,” based on the true story of a young woman’s murder in New York. In 1992 she appeared in “Love Potion No. 9” and “Mr. Saturday Night,” in which Billy Crystal starred as a veteran stand-up comedian. Ms. Mara played his estranged daughter.Her other films included the 2008 horror movie “Prom Night.”She was perhaps best known for her recurring roles on “ER,” in which she played a patient, Loretta Sweet, from 1995-96, and on “Nash Bridges,” in which she played Inspector Bryn Carson from 1996-97.She once said she thought her character had been overshadowed by the male detectives played by Don Johnson and Cheech Marin on the latter show.“It is a male-dominated show with Don and Cheech the principals,” she told The Post-Standard of Syracuse in 1999. Although the show’s writers “started to write for me really well about halfway through the season,” she added, the producers “were afraid I would stand out too much.”Ms. Mara later appeared on “Dexter,” “Ray Donovan,” “Bones,” “Star Trek: Enterprise” and other shows. Her last credit was in the 2020 movie “Break Even.”In a statement, Ms. Mara’s manager, Craig Dorfman, described her as “electric, funny and a true individual.”Her survivors include a stepdaughter, Katie Mersola, and two sisters, Martha Mara and Susan Dailey, according to Variety.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      in Television

      What Judy Huth Said Happened at the Playboy Mansion

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      Judy Huth, who is now 64, and a friend, Donna Samuelson, testified that in 1975 when they were teenagers they were invited by Mr. Cosby to join him at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles several days after meeting him on a film set in a park near their homes, where he was making a film, “Let’s Do It Again.”According to them, he invited them to his tennis club days later, and then took them to a house where he was staying, where they played a game in which they had to drink beer every time they lost at billiards. He then asked them to follow him in their car to the Playboy Mansion.“Are you girls ready for your surprise?” he said, according to Ms. Huth. “I had no clue what it could be,” Ms. Huth testified in court at the trial.During the trial, her lawyers showed the jury a photograph of Ms. Huth standing with Mr. Cosby in the game room at the mansion where they played arcade games and pinball, they said. It was taken by Ms. Samuelson, Ms. Huth told the court, 15 minutes before, she said, Mr. Cosby molested her.Mr. Cosby first put his hands on Ms. Samuelson’s shoulders, but she squirmed away, Ms. Samuelson said.Ms. Huth asked to use a bathroom, she said, and when she came out Mr. Cosby was sitting on a bed in an adjoining bedroom.“He patted the seat next to him,” she said. “I sat down. He tried to lean me back, he tried to kiss me, he tried to put his hands underneath my belly button where my high-waisted pants were.”To deflect him, Ms. Huth said, she told Mr. Cosby she was on her period. But then, she said, “he pulled his sweats down, grabbed my hand, put it over his hand, closed it” and forced her to perform a sex act on him.Mr. Cosby has denied that he sexually assaulted Ms. Huth, or any of the other women who have come forward in recent years to accuse him of sexual misconduct. In a video deposition taken in 2015, Mr. Cosby denied having any sexual contact with Ms. Huth, said that he didn’t know her and could not recall taking her to the Playboy Mansion.Mr. Cosby’s lawyer noted that Ms. Huth’s recollection of when the encounter took place had changed: While she initially said it happened in 1974, when she was 15, she more recently concluded it was in 1975, when she was 16.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers had argued that she had in fact been a willing visitor to the Playboy Mansion and noted that she did not flee after what she had described as a distressing encounter with Mr. Cosby but rather stayed on at the mansion for hours, swimming in the pool, ordering cocktails and mixing with celebrities.“Boy, did Judy and Donna enjoy themselves,” a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, Jennifer Bonjean, said, referring to Ms. Huth and her friend.Ms. Huth testified that she had been angry afterward and wanted to leave. Ms. Samuelson testified that she had persuaded Ms. Huth to stay to calm down. Ms. Huth agreed, she said, because Ms. Samuelson was the one who was driving.But even though they stayed, Ms. Huth said she was preoccupied, only going through the motions and thinking about what had happened in the bedroom. The two friends said that they left the mansion at about midnight and agreed to keep what had happened secret. More

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      in Music

      U.S. Orchestras Playing More Works by Women and Minorities, Report Says

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      The recent discussions over racial justice and gender disparities appear to have accelerated efforts to bring more diversity to classical music.American orchestras have long fallen short when it comes to performing compositions by women and people of color, sticking to a canon of music dominated by white, largely male composers.But the protests over racial justice and gender disparities in the United States appear to have prompted some change.Compositions by women and people of color now make up about 23 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, up from only about 5 percent in 2015, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Institute for Composer Diversity at the State University of New York at Fredonia.The increase comes amid a concerted effort in the performing arts to promote music by women and people of color, prompted in part by the #MeToo movement and the death of George Floyd.“The change that has been talked about for a very long time has suddenly been tremendously accelerated,” Simon Woods, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras, which helped produce the report, said in an interview.The coronavirus pandemic, which posed a threat to many institutions, seems to have also contributed to the change. Before the pandemic started, many ensembles took a more traditional approach to programming, planning their seasons years in advance. The virus has appeared to have led to experimentation.“The pandemic has been kind of a jolt to the patterns that we’ve known for so long,” Woods said, allowing orchestras “to be much more responsive.”Over all, ensembles seem to be embracing more music written by contemporary artists. This season, works by living composers made up about 22 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, compared with 12 percent in 2015. The report was based on data from hundreds of orchestras across the United States.Many ensembles in recent years have taken steps to nurture the composing careers of women and people of color. The New York Philharmonic, for example, in 2020 started Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which brought women the right to vote.While orchestras have shown a greater willingness to program works by living composers in recent years, several obstacles remain, including that some new music is performed only once.The League of American Orchestras, aiming to make works by living composers a more permanent part of the orchestral landscape, announced an initiative last month to enlist 30 ensembles in the next several years to perform new pieces by six composers, all of them women. More

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      in Movies

      Emma Thompson and the Challenge of Baring All Onscreen at 63

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      It’s the shock of white hair you notice first on Emma Thompson, a hue far more chic than anything your average 63-year-old would dare choose but one that doesn’t ignore her age either. It’s accompanied by that big, wide smile and that knowing look, suggesting both a wry wit and a willingness to banter.And yet, Thompson begins our video call by MacGyvering her computer monitor with a piece of paper and some tape so she can’t see herself. “The one thing I can’t bear about Zoom is having to look at my face,” she said. “I’m just going to cover myself up.”We are here across two computer screens to discuss what is arguably her most revealing role yet. In the new movie “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” directed by Sophie Hyde, Thompson is emotionally wrought and physically naked, and not in a lowlight, sexy kind of way.Thompson plays Nancy, a recently widowed, former religious schoolteacher who has never had an orgasm. At once a devoted wife and a dutiful mother harboring volumes of regret for the life she didn’t live and the dull, needy children she raised, Nancy hires a sex worker — a much younger man played by relative newcomer Daryl McCormack (“Peaky Blinders”) — to bring her the pleasure she’s long craved. The audience gets to follow along as this very relatable woman — she could have been your teacher, your mother, you — who in Thompson’s words “has crossed every boundary she’s ever recognized in her life,” grapples with this monumental act of rebellion.“Yes, she’s made the most extraordinary decision to do something very unusual, brave and revolutionary,” Thompson said from her office in North London. “Then she makes at least two or three decisions not to do it. But she’s lucky because she has chosen someone who happens to be rather wise and instinctive, with an unusual level of insight into the human condition, and he understands her, what she’s going through, and is able gently to suggest that there might be a reason behind this.”Daryl McCormack and Thompson in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” which the screenwriter Katy Brand wrote with the actress in mind.Searchlight PicturesThompson met the challenge with what she calls “a healthy terror.” She knew this character at a cellular level — same age, same background, same drive to do the right thing. “Just a little sliver of paper and chance separates me from her,” she quipped.Yet the role required her to reveal an emotional and physical level of vulnerability she wasn’t accustomed to. (To ready themselves for this intimate, sex-positive two-hander that primarily takes place in a hotel room, Thompson, McCormack and Hyde have said they spent one of their rehearsal days working in the nude.) Despite a four-decade career that has been lauded for both its quality and its irreverence and has earned her two Academy Awards, one for acting (“Howards End”) and one for writing (“Sense and Sensibility”), Thompson has appeared naked on camera only once: in the 1990 comedy “The Tall Guy,” opposite Jeff Goldblum.She said she wasn’t thin enough to command those types of skin-baring roles, and though for a while she tried conquering the dieting industrial complex, starving herself like all the other young women clamoring for parts on the big screen, soon enough she realized it was “absurd.”“It’s not fair to say, ‘No, I’m just this shape naturally.’ It’s dishonest and it makes other women feel like [expletive],” she said. “So if you want the world to change, and you want the iconography of the female body to change, then you better be part of the change. You better be different.”For “Leo Grande,” the choice to disrobe was hers, and though she made it with trepidation, Thompson said she believes “the film would not be the same without it.” Still, the moment she had to stand stark naked in front of a mirror with a serene, accepting look on her face, as the scene called for, was the most difficult thing she’s ever done.“To be truly honest, I will never ever be happy with my body. It will never happen,” she said. “I was brainwashed too early on. I cannot undo those neural pathways.”She can, however, talk about sex. Both the absurdities of it and the intricacies of female pleasure. “I can’t just have an orgasm. I need time. I need affection. You can’t just rush to the clitoris and flap at it and hope for the best. That’s not going to work, guys. They think if I touch this little button, she’s going to go off like a Catherine wheel, and it will be marvelous.”Several women have written screenplays for Thompson. That’s because “she always somehow feels like she’s on your side,” Brand said.Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesThere is a moment in the movie when Nancy and Leo start dancing in the hotel room to “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes. The two are meeting for a second time — an encounter that comes with a checklist of sexual acts Nancy is determined to plow through (pun intended). The dance is supposed to relieve all her type-A, organized-teacher stress that’s threatening to derail the session. Leo has his arms around her neck, and he’s swaying with his eyes closed when a look crosses Nancy’s face, one of gratitude and wistfulness coupled with a dash of concern.To the screenwriter, Katy Brand, who acted opposite Thompson in the second “Nanny McPhee” movie and who imagined Thompson as Nancy while writing the first draft, that look is the point of the whole movie.“It’s just everything,” Brand said. “She feels her lost youth and the sort of organic, natural sexual development she might have had, if she hadn’t met her husband. There is a tingling sense, too, not only of what might have been but what could be from now on.”Brand is not the first young woman to pen a script specifically for Thompson. Mindy Kaling did it for her on “Late Night,” attesting that she had loved Thompson since she was 11. The writer Jemima Khan told Thompson that she had always wanted the actress to be her mother, so she wrote her a role in the upcoming film “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”“I think the thing that Emma gives everybody and what she does in person to people, and also via the screen, is that she always somehow feels like she’s on your side,” Brand said. “And I think people really respond to that. She will meet you at a very human level.”The producer Lindsay Doran has known Thompson for decades. Doran hired her to write “Sense and Sensibility” after watching her short-lived BBC television show “Thompson” that she wrote and starred in. The two collaborated on the “Nanny McPhee” movies, and are working on the musical version, with Thompson handling the book and co-writing the songs with Gary Clark (“Sing Street”).Thompson in “Nanny McPhee Returns.” She’s at work on a musical version of the franchise.Liam Daniel/Universal PicturesTo the producer, the film is the encapsulation of a writer really understanding her actress.“It felt to me like Katy knew the instrument, and she knew what the instrument was capable of within a few seconds,” Doran said. “It isn’t just, over here I’m going to be dramatic. And over here, I’m going to be funny, and over here I’m going to be emotional. It can all go over her face so quickly, and you can literally say there’s this feeling, there’s this emotion.”Reviewing “Leo Grande,” for The New York Times, Lisa Kennedy called Thompson “terrifically agile with the script’s zingers and revelations,” while Harper’s Bazaar said Thompson was “an ageless treasure urgently overdue for her next Oscar nomination.”The obvious trajectory for a film like this should be an awards circuit jaunt that would probably result in Thompson nabbing her fifth Oscar nomination. But the film, set to debut on Hulu on Friday, will not have a theatrical release in the United States.Thompson doesn’t mind. “​​It is a small film with no guns in it, so I don’t know how many people in America would actually want to come see it,” she said with a wink.That may be true. But more consequently, because of a rule change by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that reverts to prepandemic requirement of a seven-day theatrical release, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is not eligible for Oscar consideration, a reality that the director Sophie Hyde is not pleased with.“It’s really disappointing,” Hyde said. “I understand the desire to sort of protect cinema, but I also think the world has changed so much. Last year, a streaming film won best picture.” She argued that her film and others on streaming services aren’t made for TV. They are cinematic, she said, adding, “That’s what the academy should be protecting, not what screen it’s on.”Thompson, for one, seems rather sanguine about the whole matter. “I think that, given the fact that you might have a slightly more puritanical undercurrent to life where you are, that it might be easier for people to share something as intimate as this at home and then be able to turn it off and make themselves a nice cup of really bad tea,” said Thompson, laughing. “None of you Americans can make good tea.” More

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      in Theater

      Shauneille Perry Ryder, Pioneering Theater Director, Dies at 92

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      As a Black woman, she blazed a path Off Broadway with an intuitive grasp of “how a story should be told, particularly a Black story,” Giancarlo Esposito said.Shauneille Perry Ryder, an actress, playwright and educator who was one of the first Black women to direct plays Off Broadway, most notably for the New Federal Theater, died on June 9 at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 92.Her daughter Lorraine Ryder confirmed the death.Ms. Perry Ryder, who was known professionally as Shauneille (pronounced shaw-NELL) Perry, directed 17 plays at the New Federal Theater from 1971 to 2006, each a part of the company’s mission to integrate artists of color and women into mainstream American theater. The theater, founded in 1970 by Woodie King Jr. in Lower Manhattan and now housed on West 42nd Street, has been a mecca for Black actors and directors.“She was personable with actors, but she put her foot down,” Mr. King said in a phone interview, referring to her attention to detail. “I’m so glad she worked with New Federal. She gave us a great reputation. In our first 10 years, we had a hit each year, and at least three or four were directed by Shauneille Perry.”In 1982, she directed Rob Penny’s “Who Loves the Dancer,” about a young Black man (played by Giancarlo Esposito) growing up in 1950s Philadelphia who dreams of becoming a dancer but who is trapped by his mother’s expectations, his environment and racism.In The New York Times, the critic Mel Gussow wrote that the play “has an inherent honesty, and in Shauneille Perry’s production, the evening is filled with conviction.”Mr. Esposito, who had been directed earlier that year by Ms. Perry Ryder in another play, “Keyboard,” at the New Federal, recalled her “very intuitive expression of how a story should be told, particularly a Black story.”“I was a young, green actor who had chops,” he added, in a phone interview, “but she taught me that acting is physical. The explosion that comes out of me in the second act came together under her direction.”Ms. Perry Ryder also directed Phillip Hayes Dean’s “Paul Robeson,” which traces the life of the titular singer and social crusader; “Jamimma,” by Martie Evans-Charles, about a young woman who changes her name because of its connection to servility and who is devoted to a man who she is told will never do much more than “wear rags or play instruments”; and “Black Girl,” by J.E. Franklin, about three generations of Black women, including a teenager who yearns to dance.“If you’re Black, you know about these people in any city,” Ms. Perry Ryder told The Times in 1971, referring to the characters in “Black Girl.” “We are all a part of each other.”She won at least two Audelco Awards from the Audience Development Committee, which honors Black theater and artists, and in 2019 received the Lloyd Richards Director’s Award from the National Black Theater Festival, in Winston-Salem, N.C., named after the Tony-winning director of many of August Wilson’s plays.Shauneille Gantt Perry was born on July 26, 1929, in Chicago. Her father, Graham, was one of the first Black assistant attorneys general in Illinois; her mother, Pearl (Gantt) Perry, was a pioneering Black court reporter in Chicago. Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote “A Raisin the Sun,” was one of Shauneille’s cousins.While attending Howard University — where she received a bachelor’s degree in drama in 1950 — Ms. Ryder Perry belonged to a student theater group, the Howard Players, which performed Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” on a tour of Scandinavia at the invitation of the Norwegian government. “We were the only Black company to tour those marvelous countries,” she told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1971.She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1952 at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago (now a part of DePaul University). As a Fulbright scholar in 1954, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Dissatisfied with the curriculum, however (“they were always doing ‘Cleopatra,’” she said), she transferred to the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art.Back in Chicago she began acting — she was in a summer stock play, “Mamba’s Daughters,” with Ethel Waters — while also writing for the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender. In 1959, while on a trip to Paris that she had won through an Ebony magazine essay contest, she met the author Richard Wright, who, she recalled, asked her, “They still lynching people back in the States?”“I remember telling him, ‘They do it a little differently there today,’” she told The Times in 1971. But the next day she read about a Black man who had been accused of rape and taken forcibly to a jail cell; his body was later found floating in a river. “I kept wondering to myself,” she said, “‘What is that man saying about my analysis of things?’”And she wondered what she would do when she got home.At first she continued acting. She appeared in various Off Broadway plays, including Josh Greenfeld’s “Clandestine on the Morning Line” (1961), with James Earl Jones, in which a pregnant young woman (Ms. Perry Ryder) from Alabama strolls into a restaurant looking for the father of her child.Edith Oliver, reviewing the play in The New Yorker, praised Ms. Perry Ryder’s “lovely performance,” writing that she gave her role “such quiet, innocent strength and apparent unawareness of the character’s pathos that we almost forget it, too.”Frustrated with the roles she was offered, Ms. Perry Ryder turned to directing, first at the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, with a workshop production of Ms. Franklin’s “Mau Mau Room.”“I got the feeling that maybe there’s a place for me,” she told The Times.Two years later, she directed “The Sty of the Blind Pig” for the Negro Ensemble Company. In the drama, a blind street singer in 1950s Chicago goes to a house on the South Side looking for a woman he once knew.Emory Lewis wrote in his review in The Record that Ms. Perry Ryder “had marshaled her actors with loving attention to period detail and nuance.”Ms. Perry Ryder, left, in 1971 while directing “Black Girl,” a play by J. E. Franklin, right, about three generations of Black women. Produced by the New Federal Theater, it was staged at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street in Lower Manhattan. Bert Andrews Her theater work continued for more than 40 years, including writing and directing “Things of the Heart: Marian Anderson’s Story,” about the brilliant Black contralto; directing and rewriting the book for a 1999 revival of “In Dahomey,” the first Broadway musical, originally staged in 1903, written by African Americans; and writing a soap opera for a Black radio station in New York City.In 1986, Ms. Perry Ryder joined the faculty of Lehman College in the Bronx, where she taught theater and ran the drama program. At Lehman, she staged “Looking Back: The Music of Micki Grant,” a revue based on Ms. Grant’s theatrical works, which include “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope.” She retired in 2001.In addition to Lorraine Ryder, Ms. Perry Ryder is survived by two other daughters, Gail Perry-Ryder Tigere and Natalie Ryder Redcross, and four grandchildren. Her husband, Donald Ryder, an architect, died in 2021. More

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      Woman Testifies That Bill Cosby Kissed Her When She Was 14

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      She testified at a civil trial in Los Angeles brought by another woman accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault. A spokesman for Mr. Cosby denied all the accusations against him.Kimberly Burr testified Friday that she was 14 years old when Bill Cosby invited her into his trailer on a film set in Los Angeles in 1975 and started kissing her.Ms. Burr was testifying in the civil trial in Los Angeles where Mr. Cosby has been sued by another woman, Judy Huth, who has accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting her that same year, when she was also a teenager.Ms. Burr, who is now 61, said that she had met Mr. Cosby at a tennis tournament in Palm Desert that year, where he had invited her to the set of the film “Let’s Do It Again” in Los Angeles with the promise of being an extra. While her mother and other members of her family waited outside, she said, he led her into his trailer to help him fix his bow tie, where he grabbed both her arms and started kissing her.“I was stuck,” Ms. Burr told the court. “I was struggling, trying to get away.”When he let go, she said, she “walked right out of the trailer down the steps” and didn’t tell her family because she didn’t want to ruin the day for them.During cross-examination, Jennifer Bonjean, a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, challenged her account, asking how, after such a traumatic experience, she could have kept photographs in the family home of the meeting showing Ms. Burr and her brother with Mr. Cosby. “Did it bother you that they were there?” she said.A spokesman for Mr. Cosby, Andrew Wyatt, dismissed the testimony. “These are just allegations made up to support Judy Huth, whose claims are not factual at all,” he said in an interview.Ms. Huth’s case is the first civil suit accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial. In her lawsuit, Ms. Huth says that she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Cosby at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in 1975, when she was 16, after she and a friend met him in a park where he was filming “Let’s Do It Again,” the same movie he was working on when he met Ms. Burr.The Sexual Assault Cases Against Bill CosbyAfter Bill Cosby’s 2018 criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned, the first civil case accusing him of sexual misconduct has reached trial.The Civil Trial: Judy Huth has accused Mr. Cosby of assaulting her as a teenager. She sued in 2014, but the case had been on hold while he was criminally prosecuted.Criminal Conviction: In 2018, a jury found the disgraced entertainer guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home near 14 years earlier,His Release From Prison: After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction, Mr. Cosby was released from prison on June 30, 2021.The Ruling: The conviction was overturned on the grounds that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on a promise not to charge him.Days after their meeting, Mr. Cosby invited Ms. Huth and her friend to his tennis club, Ms. Huth’s lawyers have said, where Ms. Huth played a game where she had to drink alcohol every time he won at billiards, and then they both followed him in their car to the Playboy Mansion. Once there, Ms. Huth has said, Mr. Cosby forced her to perform a sex act on him in a bedroom.Mr. Cosby has denied he sexually assaulted Ms. Huth, or any of the other women who have come forward in recent years to accuse him of sexual misconduct.More than 50 women have accused Mr. Cosby of sexually abusing them. This was the first time Ms. Burr has spoken publicly.As Ms. Huth’s lawyers have sought to demonstrate a pattern of behavior and abuse by Mr. Cosby, they called another witness, Margie Shapiro, 65, who had already come forward with accusations in 2015.Ms. Shapiro testified that she was 19 in 1975 when Mr. Cosby met her at the doughnut shop where she was working and invited her to the set of another movie he was filming in Los Angeles. Later that day, they went to the Playboy Mansion, where, she said, he drugged and assaulted her. She said that they had played pinball together in the game room at the mansion, and that he had offered her a pill after she lost. She said she remembered waking up: “My next memory was foggy, but I was in a bed naked and Bill Cosby was naked, inside me,” she said.She said she told a friend what had happened but never went to the police. “I felt I went there consensually, I took a pill and he’s him and I am me,” she said. “I felt stupid because I felt at the time I put myself in that situation.”Mr. Cosby’s spokesman, Mr. Wyatt, issued a statement Friday afternoon which said that the accusers were “discrediting themselves” and questioned their accounts. “Since we stand on the foundation of truth and facts,” he said in the statement, “we believe that Mr. Cosby will be vindicated of ALL allegations in order to move forward with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”In challenging Ms. Shapiro’s account in court, Mr. Cosby’s legal team questioned whether she was working at the doughnut shop on the morning she said she met Mr. Cosby, and whether she went to the Playboy Mansion. They acknowledged that Ms. Shapiro went to Mr. Cosby’s house, but they insisted that the relationship was consensual. Ms. Shapiro said she stood by her account.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have noted in court proceedings that Ms. Huth’s recollection of when her encounter took place has changed: While she initially said it happened in 1974, when she was 15, she more recently concluded it was in 1975, when she was 16. The law in California classified a 16-year-old as a minor. In disputing Ms. Huth’s account, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have suggested they met years after the time she said they did, when she was no longer a minor.In their opening remarks, his lawyers sought to discredit Ms. Huth’s account by pointing out that she and the friend who accompanied her to the Playboy Mansion stayed for hours after the alleged encounter with Mr. Cosby, swimming in the outdoor pool and watching a movie.The friend, Donna Samuelson, has testified that Ms. Huth was distraught and wanted to leave but Ms. Samuelson persuaded her to stay.Ms. Huth’s lawsuit, which she filed in 2014, had largely been put on hold while prosecutors in Pennsylvania pursued Mr. Cosby criminally on charges that he sexually assaulted Andrea Constand.Mr. Cosby’s 2018 conviction in that case was overturned last year by an appellate court, which ruled that a non-prosecution agreement he made with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case. Mr. Cosby walked free after serving nearly three years of a three- to 10-year sentence.Mr. Cosby, 84, is not scheduled to testify and has not attended the opening days of testimony, but his deposition testimony is expected to be played in court.Ms. Huth, 64, who has been in attendance, is intending to give her account to the jury. More