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      in Music

      Study Tracking Women’s Music Credits Has a Surprise: Good News

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      The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s latest report finds that women’s involvement in the biggest hits of 2023 was greatly improved over previous years.Each year since 2018, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has tracked the number of women credited on the music industry’s biggest hits, and the numbers have usually been dismal — year after year, female artists, songwriters and producers have been crowded out by men, sometimes by extraordinary margins.In their latest report, however, the study’s researchers found some good news. Women’s involvement in the biggest hits of 2023 was greatly improved from previous years, and in some measurements reached higher proportions than the researchers have found in more than a decade of data.For example, of last year’s most popular tracks — as defined by Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 singles chart — 35 percent of the credited performing artists were women. That is a higher number than U.S.C.’s researchers have found for any year going back to 2012, and only the second time (after 2022) that the number has been over 30 percent.And for the first time in the study’s research window, a majority of the year’s 100 most popular songs — 56 percent of them — had at least one female songwriter.Stacy L. Smith, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the study’s lead author, was cautiously celebratory of the findings. While the latest numbers are up, she noted, women still represented an average of only about 23 percent of performer credits on all surveyed songs since 2012. (Some years that figure has been as low as 17 percent.)“For the second year in a row, the percentage of women artists on the popular charts has increased,” Dr. Smith said in a statement. “This is a notable milestone and worthy of celebration. However, it is still important to recognize that there is room to grow. Women filled less than one-quarter of artist roles across all 12 years examined, and these figures are still far from representing the 50 percent of women in the population and the music audience.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Television

      Japanese Talk Show Host Blazed Trails for Her Gender, and Now, for Her Longevity

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      Tetsuko Kuroyanagi has been one of Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven decades. At 90, she’s still going strong.Pushing a walker through a television studio in central Tokyo earlier this week, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi slowly climbed three steps onto a sound stage with the help of an assistant who settled her into a creamy beige Empire armchair.A stylist removed the custom-made sturdy boots on her feet and slipped on a pair of high-heeled mules. A makeup artist brushed her cheeks and touched up her blazing red lipstick. A hairdresser tamed a few stray wisps from her trademark onion-shaped hairstyle as another assistant ran a lint roller over her embroidered black jacket. With that, Ms. Kuroyanagi, 90, was ready to record the 12,193rd episode of her show.As one of Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven decades, Ms. Kuroyanagi has interviewed guests on her talk show, “Tetsuko’s Room,” since 1976, earning a Guinness World Record last fall for most episodes hosted by the same presenter. Generations of Japanese celebrities across film, television, music, theater and sports have visited Ms. Kuroyanagi’s couch, along with American stars like Meryl Streep and Lady Gaga; Prince Philip of England; and Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union. Ms. Kuroyanagi said Gorbachev remains one of her all-time favorite guests.Ms. Kuroyanagi, who jokes that she wants to keep going until she turns 100, is known for her rapid-fire chatter and knack for drawing out guests on topics like dating, divorce and, now, increasingly, death. Even as she works to woo a younger generation — the Korean-Canadian actor and singer Ahn Hyo-seop, 28, appeared on the show this month — many of her guests these days speak about the ailments of aging and the demise of their industry peers.Ms. Kuroyanagi with a guest, Kankuro Nakamura VI, a sixth-generation Kabuki actor, as seen on a screen.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesHaving survived World War II, she broke out as an early actor on Japanese television and then carved out a niche as a feel-good interviewer with a distinctive style that is still instantly recognized almost everywhere in Japan. By fashioning herself into a character, rather than simply being the person who interviewed the characters, she helped establish a genre of Japanese performers known as “tarento” — a Japanized version of the English word “talent” — who are ubiquitous on television today.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Cosmos,’ Female Astronauts Dance Toward the Stars

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      A new show in Paris by Maëlle Poésy tells the story of the Mercury 13 space program, with choreographed movement and acrobatic sequences.Early on in “Cosmos,” a new production by the French theater director Maëlle Poésy, three performers walk slowly onstage, their bodies hidden in full spacesuits. There are plenty of clues in the playbill. After all, “Cosmos” was inspired by the Mercury 13, a group of American women who took part in a ’60s program that proved their fitness for space travel, but who never blasted off.Yet when they took their helmets off to reveal three women, I caught myself feeling surprised. Subconsciously, I realized, I still expected astronauts to be men.“Cosmos,” presented at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, in Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb, brightly deconstructs this stereotype. The production belongs to an increasingly prominent theater genre: plays that center women’s stories as a form of historical or artistic redress, with the explicit aim of challenging conventional narratives.It’s a tricky exercise for writers and directors, as overly didactic productions quickly feel heavy-handed. Not here. Poésy and her co-writer, Kevin Keiss, delve into the space dream that fueled three of the Mercury 13 — Jerrie Cobb, Jane Briggs Hart and Wally Funk — in imaginative ways. There is upbeat dialogue and a few verbatim recreations of their public speeches, but “Cosmos” also makes use of movement to show the women striving toward the freedoms of space. The cast of five break open the large white wall that frames the action, and use dance and acrobatic sequences to express the intensity of Mercury 13’s training program and frustration at gender inequality.This allows Poésy to explore their trajectories without getting bogged down in the (eye-popping) details. As we learn, Cobb was just 18 when she got her commercial pilot’s license; later, she inaugurated new air routes across some of the most dangerous South American landscapes and flew humanitarian supplies on the continen for decades. Briggs Hart was a World War II veteran, the wife of Senator Philip A. Hart, a long-serving Michigan Democrat, and a mother of eight when she successfully passed the Mercury 13 tests.The play is based on stories from the Mercury 13, a group of American women who took part in a 1960s program designed to test their fitness to go into space.Jean-Louis Fernandez“Cosmos” isn’t the first attempt to reclaim the women’s place in the history of space travel. In 2018, Netflix released a documentary about this pioneering group and the sexist attitudes that ultimately shut down the test program, “Mercury 13”; the Apple TV show “For All Mankind” also imagined what might have happened if women had been selected for a moon landing. Books, articles and an American play, Laurel Ollstein’s “They Promised Her the Moon,” have been written about Cobb and her peers. Yet few will have heard of them in Europe.The Mercury 13’s program, privately funded and hidden from public view, was an initiative of William Randolph Lovelace II, a NASA physician. Lovelace had heard whispers that the Soviet Union was considering sending a woman into space (in 1963, it did: Valentina Tereshkova). But Lovelace doesn’t appear in “Cosmos,” which focuses on Cobb, Briggs Hart and Funk as they learn that they have been selected for the project.As they detail the medical and physical tests that followed — think frozen water injected into ears, extreme sports and isolation tanks — the cast of five women begins to perform staccato movements choreographed by Leïla Ka, a rising French dance-maker. They kneel, crouch, lie down, get up again.Later, when they learn via telegram that the program has been canceled, despite the fact that they outperformed men on a number of metrics, they return to dance — this time frantically. In ’60s-style dresses, they pretend to apply lipstick, and touch their faces and torsos, as if trapped by expectations of femininity. Caroline Arrouas is especially striking as Briggs Hart, at one point taking off her high heels and banging them against a portion of the wall until it collapses.Arrouas, right, as Jane Briggs Hart, the wife of Senator Philip Hart and one of the Mercury 13.Jean-Louis FernandezThe women’s disappointment, and subsequent attempts to get Congress and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to allow women into NASA’s space program, are interspersed with stories of women born after them. Dominique Joannon, playing an astrophysicist from Chile, talks movingly about a childhood fascination with the stars; and Elphège Kongombé Yamale, as an astrobiologist, explores what the 1969 moon landing meant to women in the Central African Republic.Space and flight are metaphors throughout. Two performers — Liza Lapert, who plays Funk, and Joannon — are experienced acrobats, and at one point they climb the wall, opening little traps to let warm orange light through. Joannon delivers a galactic monologue while hanging from a bar high above the stage.In the final scene, Lapert climbs a rope center stage. As she hovers above the cast, she talks about Cobb’s and Briggs Hart’s deaths, then explains that Funk’s dream finally came true in 2021, when she became the oldest person to go into space, at 82, on a Blue Origin flight.“When the rocket left the ground, I took you with me,” she tells the others below, before resuming her climb, all the way to the lights hanging above the stage. The symbolism was obvious, yet neat: Finally, one of the Mercury 13 had completed their mission.CosmosThrough Jan. 21 at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, in Saint-Denis, France; theatregerardphilipe.com. More

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      in Theater

      Julia Jordan Set Aside Playwriting to Win Gender Parity in Theater

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      After years of fighting to win parity and recognition for women in theater, Julia Jordan said: “Everybody gets produced now. There’s much more competition. In a good way.”Ask the playwright Julia Jordan what the need was for the Lilly Awards, which she co-founded in 2010 to honor women in theater, and the answer is a mix of anecdote and statistic.Her mind goes straight to the years after she completed the playwriting program at the Juilliard School in 1996. As two men in her class, David Auburn and Stephen Belber, became some of the hottest young playwrights around, she struggled to get her work staged.“Very good friends of mine, no slam against them,” Jordan, 56, said on a December afternoon before she stepped down as executive director of the Lillys. “It was just odd.”The numbers bore out her perception. A report, published in 2002 by the New York State Council on the Arts Theater Program, found that only 17 percent of productions on U.S. stages in the 2001-02 season had been written by women.One day around 2003, she recalled, Auburn came over “because I was really depressed about it. And he said, ‘Why don’t you try switching the gender of your protagonists?’” (Auburn, reached by email, confirmed he was a good friend of Jordan, but said he does not remember this incident.) Writing male-focused narratives was, in any case, a conventional strategy for female playwrights at the time.“I literally took my most autobiographical play, and I made me male. And I called it ‘Boy,’” Jordan said. “Almost immediately people wanted to produce it.”To Jordan, a longtime leader in the fight for gender parity in theatrical production, all of this was context for the creation of the Lillys, which she started with the playwrights Marsha Norman and Theresa Rebeck. The catalyst, though, was their collective outrage, in the spring of 2010, that one of the season’s best-reviewed Off Broadway hits, Melissa James Gibson’s “This,” was ignored by the existing award-giving bodies.The new accolade was for “everybody who should be getting awards, and who should have been getting awards and didn’t,” said Jordan, who, with Juliana Nash, wrote the acclaimed musical “Murder Ballad.”At the 2023 Lilly Awards, held in late November on the “Stereophonic” set at Playwrights Horizons, the hair and wig designer Cookie Jordan and the actors Liza Colón-Zayas and Ruthie Ann Miles were among the honorees. The playwright Kirsten Greenidge and the composer Georgia Stitt each received $25,000 prizes, funded by the Broadway producer Stacey Mindich, meant to buy them time to write.Under Jordan, the Lillys organization — named for Lillian Hellman — blossomed to include the Count, which tracks theatrical production statistics by gender and race; an artist residency program with child care; the online publication 3Views on Theater; and the Lorraine Hansberry Initiative, which awards graduate school fellowships for female and nonbinary dramatic writers of color.Creating the Hansberry Initiative was one goal that Jordan felt she had to achieve before she could move on. The other was reaching gender parity for playwrights, which the Count’s preliminary figures indicate has happened this season on Off Broadway stages dedicated to new-play production.“We didn’t get 50/50 in 2020, but we have it now,” Jordan said.So on Dec. 31 she handed off her job to Sarah Rose Leonard and Brittani Samuel, the founders and editors of 3Views — though Jordan plans to share her connections and expertise as needed. (Samuel also contributes theater reviews to The New York Times.)Jordan is already at work on a few projects, including a family drama and a musical with the British singer-songwriter Emeli Sandé.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesLast month, with her tenure nearly finished, Jordan sat down to talk at a cafe in Flatbush, Brooklyn. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.At the awards in November, you said the Lillys are the thing in your career that you’re proudest of.I do feel like I had a little bit of a playwriting career happening, and then this was so time-consuming. But I got so much love for it, you know? I respond well to love [laughs], so it really started to kind of push my writing aside. That was always a little bit of a sadness, if I thought about it. At the same time, I feel like it’s kind of split my brain. I actually have to work at it to stay organized, you know? So between that and being a mom with young kids, that’s like three different brains, and I can only do two. I stopped teaching, which I loved, but that would have been four.So your work became being a champion?Yeah. Mostly I’m really proud of it. I meet young female writers, and they almost don’t know what happened, or they don’t know that it was so recent. Nobody has ever told them to write a play with a male lead. They’ve never been told that women’s plays are not very dramatic and are really poetic. They have never been told that the audience doesn’t really want to see plays by women. It’s just not on their radar. And that [progress] happened really quickly.How has doing this job changed you?Before this happened, I didn’t really ever think of myself as activist-y. I’m sort of surprised I was good at it.What are you going to do now?I have one project that I can’t talk about yet, kind of in my political, troublemaking world. But then I’m starting to write. I have a play that I’m working on, and I’m writing a musical with a pop star; she’s huge in Europe and England. Her name is Emeli Sandé. I get to go to London every few months and hang out in her studio. And then the play is a family drama.Do you think your activism will filter into your playwriting?I often wonder about that, because I don’t feel like I’m a super political writer. I always did write about girls, you know; I always did write about gender, in some sense. I really do like when people can write a political play really well. But I don’t know that if I went straight at it, I would be able to do a good job.As a playwright, do you feel like you’re going back into a theater that is changed from when you started the Lillys?A hundred percent. Everybody gets produced now. There’s much more competition. In a good way.The deck was really stacked when you started.It was stupid. And we had to sit through a lot of bad theater because of it. But yeah, I feel like it’s wildly different. I also feel like theater goes through these phases of what it’s interested in. What I write about, I don’t know anymore how that fits in.Your final Lilly Awards honored women over 40?Over 50. There were a couple [in their 40s]. Close enough.Why that focus?The women that were my level and a little bit older who got passed by when they weren’t producing women, nobody went back and read the Susan Smith Blackburn [Prize] lists [of plays by women] and went, “Hey, we should probably look at these again.” It’s a whole ecosystem problem because for the most part, literary managers and their assistants tend to be young — tend to be female, but tend to be young. So they’re not going back. The women over 50, they were the ones who really kind of made all this happen. And they didn’t benefit from it in the same way [as younger women]. They really didn’t. That’s why we wanted to start shining a light in that direction and just say, “Hey, not dead yet.”But I also think that those plays by those women would really speak to a piece of the audience that needs to be kept around during this sort of building the new audience. Instead of like, “Let’s just not have anybody go to the theater for a while while we build a new audience,” how about we do both? More

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      in Music

      Overlooked No More: Cordell Jackson, Elder Stateswoman of Rock ’n’ Roll

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      This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Cordell Jackson’s long and mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture in the early 1990s (coinciding with her appearance in a popular beer commercial, in which she showed the guitarist Brian Setzer a few tricks), it was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream: grandma, resplendent in a shiny ball gown and bouffant, peering through her old-lady glasses while ferociously rocking out on a cherry red electric guitar, amp cranked up to 10.Even if we had never seen or heard Jackson before, she seemed to reside in the dusty bric-a-brac of our country’s collective unconscious: one of rock ’n’ roll’s forgotten pioneers, Cordell Jackson had been making music for more than half a century.Cordell Miller was born on July 15, 1923, to William and Stella Miller in Pontotoc, Miss., a small city once known as a hide-out for Jesse James’s gang of outlaws in the 19th century. She took an early interest in music-making, learning to play banjo, piano, upright bass and harmonica.By age 12, she was sitting in with her father’s string band, the Pontotoc Ridge Runners. “When I picked up the guitar, I could see it in their eyes: ‘Little girls don’t play guitar,’” she later recalled. “I looked right at ’em and said, ‘I do.’”Jackson moved through a variety of jobs, including interior decorator and D.J. on an all-female radio station, while waiting for her music career to take off.Jackson always claimed that she had been rocking out well before the men who would make rock ‘n’ roll famous. “If what I’m doing now is rock ‘n’ roll or rockabilly or whatever,” she told the newspaper The Tulsa World in 1992, “then I was doing it when Elvis was a 1-year-old. That’s just a fact.”Or, as she told Cornfed magazine: “Whatever song it was, I always creamed it, so to speak. I play fast. I have always gyrated it up.”In 1943, she married William Jackson, moved to Memphis and began trying to scratch her way into the male-dominated music scene. She eventually befriended and recorded demos with the producer Sam Phillips, who would go on to start Sun Records. But she grew impatient with Phillips, who saw her gender as an obstacle, and created Moon Records, becoming one of the first women in America to record and produce their own music (some say the first) and securing her place in history.“Cordell was immune to being told ‘no.’ It was almost like that was her art,” the country singer and songwriter Laura Cantrell said by phone. “A lot of artists are told ‘no’ — that what we want to do is not possible, but Cordell was absolutely determined to be an artist. That was not typical for a woman, especially in the South.”Recording sessions for Moon Records were held in Jackson’s living room, where she engineered, produced and released music by regional artists like Allen Page, Earl Patterson and Johnny Tate. Though Jackson initially hewed mostly to the production end of things, she also released some of her own performances, including 1958’s “Rock and Roll Christmas” and “Beboppers’ Christmas.”In 1958, Jackson released her own performances of “Rock and Roll Christmas” and “Beboppers’ Christmas” on her own label, Moon Records.But neither she nor her roster of artists hit the big time, and the 1960s and ’70s saw Jackson moving through a peripatetic series of other kinds of work: at a printing company; as an interior decorator with a real estate agency; as a D.J. on the all-female Memphis station WHER; running a junk shop. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, when she happened to cross paths with the musician, performance artist and filmmaker Tav Falco, that things really changed for her.The two first met at a Western Sizzlin steakhouse in Memphis, at a benefit for Don Ezell, the longtime gofer at Sun Records. “Every guitar player in Memphis was there,” Falco said in a video interview. That included Jackson, who approached him after hearing his band, the Panther Burns (featuring Alex Chilton), cover one of her originals, “Dateless Night.” The two became fast friends. He invited her to appear on bills with him and his band, and she accepted, despite the fact that, at almost 60, she had yet to play her first professional live gig.This marked the beginning of the startling second act of Jackson’s musical career, as she became — among a certain set — an elder stateswoman of grungy thrash guitar. During a 1988 appearance on the WFMU radio show “The Hound,” Jackson plugged in her guitar and let it rip; the result sounds less like a performance than a wild animal turned loose in the studio. In an interview, Jim Marshall, the show’s host, described Jackson’s playing as “some of the most vicious, nasty rock ’n’ roll guitar I’ve ever heard in my life.”Jackson in 1992 with the country singer Marty Brown, center, and the radio host Charlie Chase.Everett Collection, via ImagoJackson with members of the band the New Duncan Imperials in an undated photo.Ken CozzaShe headlined at colorful, now-vanished rock clubs in New York City, like CBGB, the Lone Star and the Lakeside Lounge, as well as at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, N.J. She mostly played solo, but occasionally local musicians backed her up, including the Brooklyn band the A-Bones. “There were no rehearsals,” Miriam Linna, the band’s drummer, recalled in an interview. “It was just, ‘Let’s go!’”Susan M. Clarke, editor and publisher of Cornfed magazine, added: “I can’t imagine anyone knew what to do with her. I’m surprised they didn’t have her committed.”Offstage, Jackson was down to earth but proper, and deeply religious. She did not curse, and she did not drink “anything but milk or water,” she told Roctober magazine in 1993. Falco recalled her saying that doctors had put her on “an all-meat diet,” and Kenn Goodman — whose Pravda Records released her album “Live in Chicago” in 1997 — said in an interview that whenever Jackson traveled (always in her yellow Cadillac; she disliked planes), it was with “her own steak, her own milk, and giant jugs of tap water from Memphis,” because she didn’t trust any other kind.Nancy Apple, a close friend and acolyte, said that when Jackson went grocery shopping, “she would wear white old-lady gloves — not for fashion; she’d just always say, ‘I don’t want to touch all that money!’” When she got home, Jackson would take any bills she had received as change, wash them in the sink and hang them from clothespins to dry.Eccentricities aside, it was what Jackson did onstage that was truly astonishing. Watching archival footage of her performances is a jolting experience. Speaking from the stage at a 1995 concert in Memphis, Jackson described her music as “anywhere from a barnyard disaster to classical.”There was an unbridled ferocity to Jackson’s playing, almost as though she were fighting with her guitar to give her what she wanted. Her compositions — most of them instrumentals — may not be terribly unusual, but what she did with them, in her urgent, raw and unapologetically abrasive way, was. Jackson didn’t just break guitar strings when she played. She broke picks. Jackson at her home in Memphis in 1992, when her mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture.John Focht/Associated PressIntonation didn’t seem to matter a whit to her. Neither did keeping time: In one interview, she said, “I’ve found that the faster I play, the more accurate I become.” Form and melody, too, seemed mostly beside the point. Instead, it was all attitude, attack, rhythm, speed and noise.She “was comfortable in her own skin,” said the bassist Marcus Natale of the A-Bones — she didn’t put on airs, made no concessions, and seems to have never been anything less (or more) than exactly who she was, her performances a testament to the exhilarating power of ragged, unmanicured music.“This is not a masterpiece,” she wrote on the sleeve of one of her records, “but it could be so bad you’ll like it.”Jackson died of pancreatic cancer on Oct. 14, 2004, in Memphis. She was 81.In her music, and in everything she set her mind to, Jackson was nothing if not determined. “I’ve never been confused about what I was supposed to do while I was down here,” she said in 1999. “If I think of it, I do it.”Howard Fishman is a musician and composer and the author of “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.” More

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      in Theater

      Vinie Burrows, Acclaimed Actress Who Became an Activist, Dies at 99

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      She got her start on Broadway at 15. But after finding a dearth of roles for Black women, she ultimately turned to one-woman shows that addressed racism and sexism.Vinie Burrows, a Harlem-born stage actress who made her mark on Broadway in the 1950s, but who grew frustrated by how few choice roles were available for Black women and turned her focus to one-woman shows exploring the legacies of racism and sexism, died on Dec. 25 in Queens. She was 99.Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by her son, Gregory Harrison.Ms. Burrows made the first Broadway appearance of her seven-decade career in 1950 alongside Helen Hayes and Ossie Davis in “The Wisteria Trees,” a reimagining of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” by the writer and director Joshua Logan that shifted the drama from an aristocratic Russian estate to a 19th-century Louisiana plantation.Ms. Burrows in a scene from “The Wisteria Trees” (1950), in which she made her Broadway debut, with Ossie Davis, who is sitting beside her, and Maurice Edwards.Martin Beck Theater, via Performing Arts Legacy ProjectHer Broadway career continued to blossom into the mid-1950s. Among the high-profile productions in which she appeared was a 1951 revival of “The Green Pastures,” Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1930 retelling of Old Testament stories from an African American perspective. In the early 1960s, she appeared with Moses Gunn and Louis Gossett Jr. in a New York production of “The Blacks,” a searing and surrealistic examination of racial stereotypes and Black identity by the subversive white French author and playwright Jean Genet.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Movies

      America Ferrera and the ‘Barbie’ Monologue We All Talked About

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      Listing some of the many perils of womanhood in a still patriarchal society, the monologue that the actress America Ferrera delivers in “Barbie” with the intensity of a rallying cry, became one of the most talked-about movie moments of 2023.“I’ve never been a part of something so eagerly anticipated,” Ferrera said during an interview at a Beverly Hills hotel restaurant. Originally from Los Angeles but based in New York, she was back in her hometown for an awards-season screening of the smash hit.Relaxed in a cozy beige sweater, Ferrera, 39, was recalling a prerelease press stop in Mexico City where 20,000 frenzied people welcomed the filmmaker Greta Gerwig and the cast of her pink-soaked comedy. “It was like a presidential campaign,” she added.Ferrera plays Gloria, mother and Mattel employee whose self-doubt and unfulfilled aspirations in the real world prompt an existential crisis in Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) in Barbie Land. Ferrera’s plucky performance has landed her in the Oscar discussion this year.Though Gloria might be considered a supporting player in “Barbie,” Ferrera knows that it’s her flawed character who sets the adventure in motion. The performer, who broke through in “Real Women Have Curves” (2002) and went on to win an Emmy for her turn as the title character in “Ugly Betty” (2006-10), deeply admires how Gerwig dared to infuse a seemingly vacuous concept with plenty of meaning.“It’s huge for something that is both so commercially successful and culturally dominant to also be about many things at the same time, which is not easy to execute in the biggest movie of the year,” Ferrera noted.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Has the massive success of “Barbie” come as a surprise to you?I went into reading the script with really no attachment to Barbie at all. I didn’t grow up playing with Barbies. I was more curious about what Greta would do with it. It wasn’t just funny and subversive and delightfully weird. It was also about womanhood. When I was done reading the script, I was just giddy that this was the Barbie movie that no one asked for, but we were going to get. I felt it was going to be huge from the beginning.Why did you never play with Barbies as a child?We couldn’t afford Barbies. She was very expensive along with all of her stuff. [Laughs] I had a cousin who had Barbies, and I would play with them at her house, but they also seemed very far away from me. I didn’t necessarily feel represented in the Barbie narrative. It felt like a world that wasn’t accessible to me.Some critics took issue with her monologue as an oversimplification, but Ferrera countered, “We can know things and still need to hear them out loud.”Amy Harrity for The New York TimesSince you didn’t have a personal attachment to Barbie, how did you find your way into the character of Gloria and this world?One of the things that really gave me a glimpse into this character was the documentary called “Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie” that showed when Barbie expanded into many different sizes and shapes and colors. The woman [Kim Culmone] who led that as the head Barbie designer, a very cool feminist progressive woman, was getting backlash from all sides: From the legacy holders saying, “Barbie can’t change.” And from her progressive friends, angry that she cared about Barbie. “Why would you care about something that has been so bad for women?”But she had her own deep personal connection to playing with Barbies with her mother. She fought for this idea that she knew was imperfect but that still meant something to her. That gave me the insight I needed to play Gloria as a real adult woman and to understand why she plays with Barbie and wishes herself to Barbie Land.What did you think the first time you saw Gloria’s now incredibly popular speech?It definitely felt like an important moment, but Gloria was shining from the very beginning. She represents this quest for the permission to express yourself. She has to play the role of Mom and of responsible career woman, while hiding everything she loves underneath the corporate suit, being what she thought she needed to be. From the moment we meet her with her pink sneakers on to her getting to drive in that car chase, there was so much wish fulfillment and release for somebody who has been repressing so much.The monologue felt so right for Gloria. Yes, it breaks the Barbies out of their moment, but it’s also the natural breaking point for Gloria, where she has to say what she’s discovering on this journey. I recognized that it was a big moment and that it needed to work, but it also didn’t work independent of her entire search for more freedom for herself.Did the speech change at all?The text evolved a little bit. Greta asked me, “Why don’t you just tell me what you would say? Write it in your own words. What would you add?” Not every director starts out by inviting actors to rewrite their work. Some of what we talked about made it into the script. The line, “Always be grateful” came out of that conversation with Greta. She expounded on it adding, “But never forget that the system is rigged.” There were many versions that we did. We ended in tears. It ended in laughter, it got big, it got small, and I was able to do that because I really trusted Greta to know what would be right for the film.What are your thoughts on the discourse that some people believe Gloria’s speech oversimplifies feminism?We can know things and still need to hear them out loud. It can still be a cathartic. There are a lot of people who need Feminism 101, whole generations of girls who are just coming up now and who don’t have words for the culture that they’re being raised in. Also, boys and men who may have never spent any time thinking about feminist theory.If you are well-versed in feminism, then it might seem like an oversimplification, but there are entire countries that banned this film for a reason. To say that something that is maybe foundational, or, in some people’s view, basic feminism isn’t needed is an oversimplification. Assuming that everybody is on the same level of knowing and understanding the experience of womanhood is an oversimplification.From left, America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt, who plays her daughter, and Margot Robbie.Warner Bros.Gloria’s story is deeply intertwined with that of Barbie. How do think the two help each other overcome their struggles?Greta, Margot and I talked about Gloria and Barbie’s relationship as a love story. Not necessarily a romantic one, which some people on the internet have pushed for that reading of it, but we talked about it as Barbie and Gloria needing each other to be complete and to be the pieces of a puzzle that’s missing for each of them. The journey releases Gloria of the impossible assignment of being the kind of woman that she thinks she needs to be in the real world. And Barbie releases her herself from having to be an idea that is never going to satisfy all the things she’s meant to satisfy by choosing to be a human.What was your reaction when you first saw the doll made in your image for the Barbie collection inspired by the movie?Surreal. There were actually some similarities to me in the facial features. She’s the first Barbie doll fashioned after a Honduran American woman to ever exist. That’s really special, to know that no one had a Honduran Barbie doll to play with until now.Do you feel like your career has always been marked by firsts, like being the first Latina to win a lead acting Emmy? There’s a lot of pressure in being the first.I just took any single opportunity in front of me to do the best possible work that I could do in the hopes that there would be another opportunity after that. Looking backward, it’s much clearer to see that my career has been shaped by how the culture saw somebody like me. The opportunities that came my way were ones that kept me in very specific boxes. What I saw as my job as an actor was to inject those characters with as much complexity as I could, and not just play characters that were a foil to an expectation.Have things improved for Latinas in Hollywood since “Real Women Have Curves”?It took Josefina López, who wrote it, 11 years to get that movie made. And when the movie was successful, it didn’t result in a watershed moment for Latina writers and directors and actresses being given tons of opportunities. As you stated, I’m the first Latina to win an Emmy in a lead category. I’m still the only one and that brings me no joy. While I would love to think that things are different today than they were 22 years ago when “Real Women Have Curves” was made, the data shows that in large part, it hasn’t changed.That makes me think of Lupe Ontiveros, who played your mother in “Real Woman Have Curves,” and who made a career out tiny roles she managed to turn into screen gold.Ferrera in her breakthrough role in “Real Women Have Curves,” opposite Lupe Ontiveros.HBO FilmsShe was such a force, an incredible talent. [Ontiveros died in 2012.] I often think about all the incredible performances we were robbed of, that Lupe never got to give because those opportunities didn’t exist for somebody like her. And she still did her work. She took whatever scraps would come to her and she would fill them with humor and make them memorable. I think about her often, and all the Latino actors who’ve come before me, who did whatever they could with whatever they got.What does the ideal future for Latinos in the industry look like to you?The hope is that we get to actually have outlets for the immense talent that exists among Latinos. And that we can move beyond fighting just to be visible and that we can actually create and exist as full humans, as artists, with things to say beyond, “We’re here.” But it’s hard to find those opportunities. There’s a lot out there that is very transactional in terms of checking boxes to claim diversity. One of the most exciting things to me about this movie was, as a Latina woman, being invited to be a part of something so adventurous and joyful and fun. Gloria is Latina, but being Latina was not her reason for being in this story. More

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      ‘Priscilla,’ Olivia Rodrigo and the Year of Girlhood and Longing

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      When she was just 14, Priscilla Beaulieu, an Air Force brat stationed with her family in Germany, met one of the planet’s biggest pop stars. The pair formed a connection, and when it was time to temporarily part ways, he left her with a keepsake.That gift, an Army issue jacket from Elvis Presley, is an important symbol in the movie “Priscilla,” hanging from her bedroom wall like a poster ripped from a magazine. The film’s director, Sofia Coppola, seems to be making a point about the gaping age gap between teenager and heartthrob (24 and a year-plus into military service), but also about the universality of a girl’s crush — relatable, all-consuming.In class soon after, in a scene that reminded me of Britney Spears anxiously counting down the seconds until the bell in the “ … Baby One More Time” video, a daydreaming Priscilla fidgets at her desk. You can almost see the cartoon hearts floating above her head as Coppola offers this unsettling portrait of an adolescent drawn into an age-inappropriate relationship. But her knowing depiction of girlhood longing stayed with me, too. Because whether you were a teenage girl in 1959 or in 2023, that specific ache — in love, or what you think is love — will probably feel familiar.I noticed that pang — the kind that comes from badly wanting something seemingly just out of reach — surfacing in our entertainments this year: full-throated and kicking down doors on “Guts,” Olivia Rodrigo’s hilarious, if wrenching, relationship album; simmering to a boil in “Swarm,” the series about an obsessed fan with a gnawing hunger; and yearning for validation in “Don’t Think, Dear,” a dancer’s devastating memoir of a ballet career that stalled at the barre. Girls giving voice to their pain even when they couldn’t fully make sense of it. Girls spilling their guts.The Cruel Tutelage of Alice Robb“Ballet had given me a way to be girl,” a “specific template,” Alice Robb writes in “Don’t Think, Dear.”To middle school, she wears her hair scraped into a bun, a leotard instead of a bra. She trains at the New York City Ballet’s prestigious school. At 12, though, struggling to keep up, she’s expelled after three years of study. The rejection is unshakable, and the sting goes on for decades. Desperate for a do-over that never comes, she enrolls in less prominent dance academies, where she’s heartbroken to encounter girls with flat feet and messy buns. She stalks old classmates on social media, and for 15 years, keeps up a dutiful stretching routine that she hopes will maintain the outlines of a ballet body, one that telegraphs her as “special.”“The dream of being a ballerina begins with the dream of being beautiful,” Robb writes. Anyone who has ever pulled on a tutu, this pink puff of fabric imbued with something indescribably feminine, is probably nodding at this assessment of ballet’s initial pull. American girlhood is practically wrapped in blush tones, with ballet as a kind of shared rite. It’s there at every stage: in the aspirant of the popular “Angelina Ballerina” children’s books and in the nostalgic young enthusiasts who’ve recently given the art form’s aesthetics a name, balletcore, playing dress-up with the uniform. But for those like Robb who see ballet not as a phase, but a pursuit, letting go is hard. To fail at ballet is to fail at being a girl.That’s not true, of course. But wounds sustained in girlhood, when you’re not yet emotionally equipped to mend them, tend to linger. With each page, I rooted for Robb, now a journalist in her 30s, to find the position that would let her plant her feet back on the ground.Alice Robb at Steps in Manhattan.Laurel Golio for The New York TimesAnd I thought of an Olivia Rodrigo lyric: “I bought all the clothes that they told me to buy/I chased some dumb ideal my whole [expletive] life.” That’s how Rodrigo, the 20-year-old pop supernova, deals with the anguish of rejection on her sophomore album, “Guts”: She thrashes.Rodrigo realizes that, in its first throes, “Love Is Embarrassing.” (It is.) On that throbbing track, she admits the hold “some weird second-string loser” has on her. On another, “Get Him Back,” she jokingly lays out a conflicted revenge plot as the bridge drops to a whisper: “I wanna kiss his face, with an uppercut,” she confesses. “I wanna meet his mom — just to tell her her son sucks.” She’s cataloging her humiliations, but she’s laughing at them, too.She refuses to wallow for long, and I’m convinced this is partly what gives the album its buoyancy. (It’s an approach that, in hindsight, would have given me more relief than the semester I spent writing love-stricken poetry on tiny notecards at my university’s performing arts library after a brutal breakup.)Headfirst Into HeartbreakGirlhood, strictly marked in years, comes to a close in the waning years of adolescence. But for some, I think this period calls for a less tidy metric, one that makes room for a soft transition into late girlhood, or adolescence — with all of its intensifying feeling — and then post-girlhood, with its own round of heartbreaks. Lauryn Hill was 23 in 1998 when she released a relationship album for the ages. “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” multiplatinum and Grammy-winning, tracked her recovery from a series of rumored breaks: with her hip-hop trio, the Fugees, and one of her bandmates, Wyclef Jean, with whom she was said to have shared a stormy romance. For a generation of us, it was as if she’d found our own love letters and read each one out loud.This fall, reunited with her bandmates, the girl from South Orange, N.J., returned to the stage to breathe new life into that indelible collection. On opening night of a short-lived tour, I watched from the Prudential Center in nearby Newark as Hill wailed the exasperated plea from “Ex-Factor”: “No matter how I think we grow, you always seem to let me know it ain’t working.” It had been 25 years since Hill’s “Miseducation”; a quarter-century for perspective, love and motherhood to right-size once outsize feelings. She sang the words she’d written all those years ago, but this time her voice was tinged with unmistakable joy.Lauryn Hill on the 25th anniversary of “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” tour.Mathew Tsang/Getty ImagesThere is longing in the fictional world of “Swarm,” but little joy. Dre (Dominique Fishback), a socially awkward 20-something, spends her days posting online tributes dedicated to her favorite artist, a Beyoncé stand-in named Ni’Jah.“I think the second she sees me, she’d know how we’re connected,” Dre tells her roommate.Dre is a “Killer Bee,” one of a hive of obsessive fans, and she will live up to the name: She soon sets off on a violent cross-country spree, picking off Ni’Jah’s unsuspecting online critics. After each kill, famished, Dre devours anything she can get her hands on — a leftover apple pie, a sandwich. It becomes clear that she’s not hungry at all; what she’s starved for — longing for — is connection. In that sense, she’s not so different from the scores of women and girls who packed concert stadiums this past summer, adorned in sparkling silver or baring arms stacked with friendship bracelets.A Girl Walks Into Her KitchenWhile I contemplated girlhood and longing this year, I was also cheered by how girls have prioritized their own delight. My favorite entry in that category was Girl Dinner, a TikTok trend that transformed a simple meal, meant to be enjoyed solo, into a satisfying feast — “a bag of popcorn, a glass of wine, some bread, some cheese and a hunk of chocolate,” as Jessica Roy put it in The New York Times this summer.The idea was to put convenience first, ostensibly leaving more time and space for the pleasures that elaborate meal prep and cleanup might not. The concept of Girl Dinner, which also embraces the internet appetite for giving ordinary things a fresh polish by renaming them, felt like an antidote to longing. A reminder that sometimes being full, all on your own, can be just as fulfilling. More