#Paul Wiz Johnson Artist | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ulkaralakbarova · 4 months ago

Text

Chris is the top brain who just wants to party, Mitch is the 15-year-old college wiz kid. Supposedly hard at work on a lab project with a mysterious deadline, they still find time to use their genius to discover new ways to have fun. Credits: TheMovieDb. Film Cast: Chris Knight: Val Kilmer Mitch Taylor: Gabriel Jarret Jordan: Michelle Meyrink Professor Hathaway: William Atherton Kent: Robert Prescott Major Carnagle: Louis Giambalvo Lazlo Hollyfeld: Jon Gries CIA Man Decker: Ed Lauter Shuttle Pilot: Stacy Peralta Laser Ray Victim: Daniel Ades Bartender: Andres Aybar Air Force General: Charles Shull George: Beau Billingslea Larry: Charles Parks Boy at Science Fair: Sean Frye Girl at Science Fair: JoAnn Willette Old Lady: Ina Gould Student at Science Fair: Nadine Vix Mr. Taylor: Paul Tulley Mrs. Taylor: Joanne Baron Darlington Recruiter: Harry Johnson Sherry Nugil: Patti D’Arbanville Dr. Dodd: Monte Landis Mrs. Meredith: Sandy Martin Dr. Meredith: Severn Darden Cornell: Randy Lowell Carter: John Shepherd Reid Bodie: Tommy Swerdlow ‘Ick’ Ikagami: Mark Kamiyama Math Professor: Martin Gundersen Carpet Man: Brett Miller Milton: Dean Devlin Fenton: Yuji Okumoto Chris’ Girl at Party: Lynda Wiesmeier Ick’s Girl at Party: Penny Baker Cornell’s Girl at Party: Marcia Karr Girl at Party: Isabelle Walker Girl at Party: Marii Mak Girl at Party: Cheri Wells Girl at Party: Catherine MacNamara Student: Johnny Vasily TV Makeup Man: Ed Garrabrandt TV Stage Manager: Isabel Cooley Waitress: Robin Stober Susan: Deborah Foreman Student in Hall: David Marvit Air Force Gate Guard: Michael Crabtree Air Force Gate Guard: Charles Sweigart Air Force Gate Guard: Peter Parros Computer Technician: Ronald Taylor Air Force Major: James Carrington Air Force Controller: Michael Backes Air Force Sergeant: Corki Grazer Laser Technician: Jeanne Mori Engineer: David Ursin Congressman: Joe Dorsey Laser Specialist: Will Knox Air Force Technician: Kevin Hurley Girl in Popcorn (uncredited): Kimberly Spak Film Crew: Director: Martha Coolidge Set Decoration: Phil Abramson Camera Operator: John J. Connor Producer: Brian Grazer Casting: Jane Jenkins Production Design: Josan F. Russo Hairstylist: Edie Panda Visual Effects Supervisor: Richard L. Bennett Casting: Janet Hirshenson Screenplay: Neal Israel Screenplay: Pat Proft Editor: Richard Chew Makeup Artist: Zoltan Elek Original Music Composer: Thomas Newman Art Direction: Jack G. Taylor Jr. Special Effects Coordinator: Phil Cory Executive Producer: Robert Daley Director of Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond Screenplay: PJ Torokvei Associate Producer: Sam Crespi-Horowitz Music Supervisor: Becky Mancuso-Winding Music Supervisor: Michael Papale Supervising Sound Editor: Julia Evershade Sound Designer: George Budd Music Editor: Ted Whitfield Costume Supervisor: Marla Denise Schlom Costumer: Joseph Roveto Costumer: Michael F. Hamer Visual Effects Supervisor: David Stipes Stunts: Kenny Alexander Stunts: Shane Dixon Stunts: Kenny Ferrugiaro Stunts: Linda Lee Franklin Stunts: Allan Graf Stunts: Marian Green Stunts: Debby Porter Stunts: Bernie Pock Stunts: Spiro Razatos Stunts: Edward J. Ulrich Stunts: David M. Graves Unit Production Manager: Billy Ray Smith First Assistant Director: Stephen McEveety Second Assistant Director: Joseph P. Moore Set Designer: Erin M. Cummings Set Designer: Steven Wolff Other: Alex Tavoularis First Assistant Camera: Ken Nishino Second Assistant Camera: Robert Samuels Second Unit Director of Photography: Frederick Elmes Key Grip: Richard W. Deats Grip: Jerry D. Deats Best Boy Electric: Robert Jason Additional Editing: Arthur Coburn First Assistant Editor: Albert Coleman Other: Alexandra Leviloff Other: Deborah Cichocki Other: Bill Wilner Sound Editor: Anna Boorstin Sound Editor: Virginia Cook-McGowan Sound Editor: Cari Lewis Sound Editor: Marshall Winn Sound Editor: Roxanne Jones McCarthy Supervising ADR Editor: Beth Bergeron ADR Editor: Lauren Palmer Assistant Sound Editor: Paul C. Warschilka Assistant Sound Editor: Christy Richmond Sound Effects: John P. Fasal Sound Effects: Doug Hemp...

#boy genius #computer cracker #ego #Genius #laser #teen comedy #Top Rated Movies #usaf #woman director

0 notes

ravenkult · 7 years ago

Photo

Starwars- R2D2 - Kenny Baker by Paul Wiz Johnson https://www.artstation.com/artwork/W04y2

#Starwars- R2D2 - Kenny Baker by Paul Wiz Johnson #art #illustration #concept art #artist #fantasy

1 note · View note

blackkudos · 5 years ago

Text

Lena Horne

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist. Horne's career spanned over 70 years, appearing in film, television, and theater. Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of 16 and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood.

Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington in August 1963 and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway. She then toured the country in the show, earning numerous awards and accolades. Horne continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000. Horne died of congestive heart failure on May 9, 2010, at the age of 92.

Early life

Lena Horne was born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She was reportedly descended from the John C. Calhoun family, and both sides of her family were through a mixture of African, Native American, and European descent and belonged to the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated people. Her father, Edwin Fletcher "Teddy" Horne Jr. (1893–1970), a numbers kingpin in the gambling trade, left the family when she was three and moved to an upper-middle-class African American community in the Hill District community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Edna Louise Scottron (1894–1976), was a granddaughter of inventor Samuel R. Scottron; she was an actress with a black theatre troupe and traveled extensively. Edna's maternal grandmother, Amelie Louise Ashton, was a Senegalese slave. Horne was raised mainly by her grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne.

When Horne was five, she was sent to live in Georgia. For several years, she traveled with her mother. From 1927 to 1929, she lived with her uncle, Frank S. Horne, dean of students at Fort Valley Junior Industrial Institute (now part of Fort Valley State University) in Fort Valley, Georgia, who later served as an adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From Fort Valley, southwest of Macon, Horne briefly moved to Atlanta with her mother; they returned to New York when Horne was 12 years old. She then attended Girls High School, an all-girls public high school in Brooklyn that has since become Boys and Girls High School; she dropped out without earning a diploma. Aged 18, she moved to her father's home in Pittsburgh, staying in the city's Little Harlem for almost five years and learning from native Pittsburghers Billy Strayhorn and Billy Eckstine, among others.

Career

Road to Hollywood

In the fall of 1933, Horne joined the chorus line of the Cotton Club in New York City. In the spring of 1934, she had a featured role in the Cotton Club Parade starring Adelaide Hall, who took Lena under her wing. Horne made her first screen appearance as a dancer in the musical short Cab Calloway's Jitterbug Party (1935). A few years later, Horne joined Noble Sissle's Orchestra, with which she toured and with whom she made her first records, issued by Decca. After she separated from her first husband, Horne toured with bandleader Charlie Barnet in 1940–41, but disliked the travel and left the band to work at the Cafe Society in New York. She replaced Dinah Shore as the featured vocalist on NBC's popular jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. The show's resident maestros, Henry Levine and Paul Laval, recorded with Horne in June 1941 for RCA Victor. Horne left the show after only six months when she was hired by former Cafe Trocadero (Los Angeles) manager Felix Young to perform in a Cotton Club-style revue on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

Horne already had two low-budget movies to her credit: a 1938 musical feature called The Duke is Tops (later reissued with Horne's name above the title as The Bronze Venus); and a 1941 two-reel short subject, Boogie Woogie Dream, featuring pianists Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. Horne's songs from Boogie Woogie Dream were later released individually as soundies. Horne made her Hollywood nightclub debut at Felix Young's Little Troc on the Sunset Strip in January 1942. A few weeks later, she was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In November 1944, she was featured in an episode of the popular radio series Suspense, as a fictional nightclub singer, with a large speaking role along with her singing. In 1945 and 1946, she sang with Billy Eckstine's Orchestra.

She made her debut at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Panama Hattie (1942) and performed the title song of Stormy Weather based loosely on the life of Adelaide Hall, (1943), at 20th Century Fox, while on loan from MGM. She appeared in a number of MGM musicals, most notably Cabin in the Sky (1943), but was never featured in a leading role because of her race and the fact that her films had to be re-edited for showing in cities where theaters would not show films with black performers. As a result, most of Horne's film appearances were stand-alone sequences that had no bearing on the rest of the film, so editing caused no disruption to the storyline. A notable exception was the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, although one number from that film was cut before release because it was considered too suggestive by the censors: Horne singing "Ain't It the Truth" while taking a bubble bath. This scene and song are featured in the film That's Entertainment! III (1994) which also featured commentary from Horne on why the scene was deleted prior to the film's release. Lena Horne was the first African-American elected to serve on the Screen Actors Guild board of directors.

In Ziegfeld Follies (1946), she performed "Love" by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. Horne lobbied for the role of Julie LaVerne in MGM's 1951 version of Show Boat (having already played the role when a segment of Show Boat was performed in Till the Clouds Roll By, 1946) but lost the part to Ava Gardner, a personal friend in real life. Horne claimed this was due to the Production Code's ban on interracial relationships in films, but MGM sources state she was never considered for the role in the first place. In the documentary That's Entertainment! III, Horne stated that MGM executives required Gardner to practice her singing using Horne's recordings, which offended both actresses. Ultimately, Gardner's voice was overdubbed by actress Annette Warren (Smith) for the theatrical release.

Changes of direction

By the mid-1950s, Horne was disenchanted with Hollywood and increasingly focused on her nightclub career. She made only two major appearances for MGM during the 1950s: Duchess of Idaho (which was also Eleanor Powell's final film); and the 1956 musical Meet Me in Las Vegas. She was blacklisted during the 1950s for her affiliations in the 1940s with communist-backed groups. She would subsequently disavow communism. She returned to the screen three more times, playing chanteuse Claire Quintana in the 1969 film Death of a Gunfighter, Glinda in The Wiz (1978), which was directed by her then son-in-law Sidney Lumet, and co-hosting the MGM retrospective That's Entertainment! III (1994), in which she was candid about her unkind treatment by the studio.

After leaving Hollywood, Horne established herself as one of the premier nightclub performers of the post-war era. She headlined at clubs and hotels throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. In 1957, a live album entitled, Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria, became the biggest-selling record by a female artist in the history of the RCA Victor label at that time. In 1958, Horne became the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Tony Award for "Best Actress in a Musical" (for her part in the "Calypso" musical Jamaica) which, at Lena's request featured her longtime friend Adelaide Hall.

From the late 1950s through to the 1960s, Horne was a staple of TV variety shows, appearing multiple times on Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dean Martin Show, and The Bell Telephone Hour. Other programs she appeared on included The Judy Garland Show, The Hollywood Palace, and The Andy Williams Show. Besides two television specials for the BBC (later syndicated in the U.S.), Horne starred in her own U.S. television special in 1969, Monsanto Night Presents Lena Horne. During this decade, the artist Pete Hawley painted her portrait for RCA Victor, capturing the mood of her performance style.

In 1970, she co-starred with Harry Belafonte in the hour-long Harry & Lena special for ABC; in 1973, she co-starred with Tony Bennett in Tony and Lena. Horne and Bennett subsequently toured the U.S. and U.K. in a show together. In the 1976 program America Salutes Richard Rodgers, she sang a lengthy medley of Rodgers songs with Peggy Lee and Vic Damone. Horne also made several appearances on The Flip Wilson Show. Additionally, Horne played herself on television programs such as The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and Sanford and Son in the 1970s, as well as a 1985 performance on The Cosby Show and a 1993 appearance on A Different World. In the summer of 1980, Horne, 63 years old and intent on retiring from show business, embarked on a two-month series of benefit concerts sponsored by the sorority Delta Sigma Theta. These concerts were represented as Horne's farewell tour, yet her retirement lasted less than a year.

On April 13, 1980, Horne, Luciano Pavarotti, and host Gene Kelly were all scheduled to appear at a Gala performance at the Metropolitan Opera House to salute the NY City Center's Joffrey Ballet Company. However, Pavarotti's plane was diverted over the Atlantic and he was unable to appear. James Nederlander was an invited Honored Guest and noted that only three people at the sold-out Metropolitan Opera House asked for their money back. He asked to be introduced to Lena following her performance. In May 1981, The Nederlander Organization, Michael Frazier, and Fred Walker went on to book Horne for a four-week engagement at the newly named Nederlander Theatre on West 41st Street in New York City. The show was an instant success and was extended to a full year run, garnering Horne a special Tony award, and two Grammy Awards for the cast recording of her show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music. The 333-performance Broadway run closed on Horne's 65th birthday, June 30, 1982. Later that same week, she performed the entire show again to record it for television broadcast and home video release. Horne began a tour a few days later at Tanglewood (Massachusetts) during the weekend of July 4, 1982. The Lady and Her Music toured 41 cities in the U.S. and Canada until June 17, 1984. It played in London for a month in August and ended its run in Stockholm, Sweden, September 14, 1984. In 1981, she received a Special Tony Award for the show, which also played to acclaim at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1984. Despite the show's considerable success (Horne still holds the record for the longest-running solo performance in Broadway history), she did not capitalize on the renewed interest in her career by undertaking many new musical projects. A proposed 1983 joint recording project between Horne and Frank Sinatra (to be produced by Quincy Jones) was ultimately abandoned, and her sole studio recording of the decade was 1988's The Men in My Life, featuring duets with Sammy Davis Jr. and Joe Williams. In 1989, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1995, a "live" album capturing Horne's Supper Club performance was released (subsequently winning a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album). In 1998, Horne released another studio album, entitled Being Myself. Thereafter, Horne retired from performing and largely retreated from public view, though she did return to the recording studio in 2000 to contribute vocal tracks on Simon Rattle's Classic Ellington album.

Civil rights activism

She was at an NAACP rally with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the weekend before Evers was assassinated. She also met President John F. Kennedy at the White House two days before he was assassinated. She was at the March on Washington and spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC, and the National Council of Negro Women. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws. Tom Lehrer mentions her in his song "National Brotherhood Week" in the line "Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to cheek" referring (wryly) to her and to Sheriff Jim Clark, of Selma, Alabama, who was responsible for a violent attack on civil rights marchers in 1965. In 1983, the NAACP awarded her the Spingarn Medal.

Horne was a registered Democrat and on November 20, 1963, she, along with Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman John Bailey, Carol Lawrence, Richard Adler, Sidney Salomon, Vice-Chairwoman of the DNC Margaret B. Price, and Secretary of the DNC Dorothy Vredenburgh Bush, visited John F. Kennedy at The White House, two days prior to his assassination.

Personal life

Horne married Louis Jordan Jones, a political operative, in January 1937 in Pittsburgh. On December 21, 1937, their daughter, Gail (later known as Gail Lumet Buckley, a writer) was born. They had a son, Edwin Jones (February 7, 1940 – September 12, 1970) who died of kidney disease. Horne and Jones separated in 1940 and divorced in 1944. Horne's second marriage was to Lennie Hayton, who was music director and one of the premier musical conductors and arrangers at MGM, in December 1947 in Paris. They separated in the early 1960s, but never divorced; he died in 1971. In her as-told-to autobiography Lena by Richard Schickel, Horne recounts the enormous pressures she and her husband faced as an interracial couple. She later admitted in an interview in Ebony (May 1980) that she had married Hayton to advance her career and cross the "color-line" in show business.

Horne had affairs with Artie Shaw, Orson Welles, Vincente Minnelli, and the boxer Joe Louis.

Horne also had a long and close relationship with Billy Strayhorn, whom she said she would have married if he had been heterosexual. He was also an important professional mentor to her. Screenwriter Jenny Lumet, known for her award-winning screenplay Rachel Getting Married, is Horne's granddaughter, the daughter of filmmaker Sidney Lumet and Horne's daughter Gail. Her other grandchildren include Gail's other daughter, Amy Lumet, and her son's four children, Thomas, William, Samadhi, and Lena. Her great-grandchildren include Jake Cannavale.

From 1946 to 1962, Horne resided in a St. Albans, Queens, New York, enclave of prosperous African Americans, where she counted among her neighbors Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and other jazz luminaries.

Death

Horne died of congestive heart failure on May 9, 2010. Her funeral took place at St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue in New York. Thousands gathered and attendees included Leontyne Price, Dionne Warwick, Liza Minnelli, Jessye Norman, Chita Rivera, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Leslie Uggams, Lauren Bacall, Robert Osborne, Audra McDonald, and Vanessa Williams. Her remains were cremated.

Legacy

In 2003, ABC announced that Janet Jackson would star as Horne in a television biographical film. In the weeks following Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" debacle during the 2004 Super Bowl, however, Variety reported that Horne had demanded Jackson be dropped from the project. "ABC executives resisted Horne's demand", according to the Associated Press report, "but Jackson representatives told the trade newspaper that she left willingly after Horne and her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, asked that she not take part." Oprah Winfrey stated to Alicia Keys during a 2005 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show that she might possibly consider producing the biopic herself, casting Keys as Horne.

In January 2005, Blue Note Records, her label for more than a decade, announced that "the finishing touches have been put on a collection of rare and unreleased recordings by the legendary Horne made during her time on Blue Note." Remixed by her longtime producer Rodney Jones, the recordings featured Horne with a remarkably secure voice for a woman of her years, and include versions of such signature songs as "Something to Live For", "Chelsea Bridge", and "Stormy Weather". The album, originally titled Soul but renamed Seasons of a Life, was released on January 24, 2006. In 2007, Horne was portrayed by Leslie Uggams as the older Lena and Nikki Crawford as the younger Lena in the stage musical Stormy Weather staged at the Pasadena Playhouse in California (January to March 2009). In 2011, Horne was also portrayed by actress Ryan Jillian in a one-woman show titled Notes from A Horne staged at the Susan Batson studio in New York City, from November 2011 to February 2012. The 83rd Academy Awards presented a tribute to Horne by actress Halle Berry at the ceremony held February 27, 2011.

In 2018, a forever stamp depicting Horne began to be issued; this made Horne the 41st honoree in the Black Heritage stamp series.

#06/30 #05/09

2 notes · View notes

newyorktheater · 5 years ago

Text

Paul McGill, a Broadway veteran since the age of 17, kicks up his heel on 45th Street, as part of a terrific video (see below) by the cast of “A Chorus Line” 2006 Broadway revival. This is just one of the many steps that members of the theater community are taking to raise morale, keep busy, and kick start a whole new era of theater-making in the face of devastating challenges.

Free Shakespeare in the Park has been canceled, for the first time in its 58 years – news that hits hard, and the sharpest sign that New York theater is unlikely to reopen until the Fall at the earliest.

The Public Works musical adaptation of “As You Like It,” one of the two productions planned for Shakespeare in the Park that the Public Theater has canceled. “This is something I mightily resisted,” said artistic director Oskar Eustis. But the timing just didn’t work.

This includes Broadway, which even the head of the Broadway League now concedes. In an interview this past week, the trade association’s Charlotte St. Martin said: “As late as two weeks ago we were thinking that with any luck we might be up by July and that a worst case scenario might be September. Now the best guesses are that unless there’s serious testing and information that we don’t currently have, we’re probably looking at September or later.”

Once theater officially returns, the question becomes: Will audiences?

A survey of DC-area theatergoers found that “around half (49 percent) suggest they will probably wait a few months or more before returning while only a quarter (25 percent) think they will attend right away.”

“Constraint Breeds Creativity”

In the meantime, theaters are responding in creative ways. A survey of 168 theaters across the country conducted by TCG, found that 67 percent are “exploring performance alternatives and virtual programming,” which helps explain the explosion of online theater. (See my Where To Get Your Theater Fix Online and Calendar of April “Openings”)

Other findings from the survey:

Cancellations: 88 percent had cancelled performances that had already been scheduled (It’s surprising that 12 percent had not; perhaps they didn’t have any scheduled in the Spring?)

Compensation: “56 percent had committed to some kind of compensation for artists, production staff, etc. involved with cancelled performances; 18 percent had committed to full compensation, and 38 percent had committed to partial compensation. Thirty percent of respondents expressed a desire to provide compensation but were not sure they would be able to do so in light of revenue losses, and 13 percent expressed a desire to provide compensation but knew they would not be able to do so.”

One of those answering the survey was quoted as saying: “There’s a strong feeling that we’re all in this together. And I do believe that some creative solutions for how we make and share art will emerge out of this. Constraint breeds creativity.”

Another way to look at it: “We’re all in intermission right now….everybody loves a second act,” Lin-Manuel Miranda says in a radio spot sponsored by the Broadway League. “If there’s one thing we can be sure of, Broadway will be back, and New York City will be back and the world will be back.”

In the meantime, to donate money, supplies or time — Coronavirus.health.ny.gov

To help theater people in need, Broadwaycares.org

https://www.theproducersperspective.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Only-Intermission-Video.mp4

Awards Season Begins

New York Drama Critics Circle Awards:Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Strange Loop. The entire theater community for perseveranceThe

Lucille Lortel Award Nominations 2020, Off-Broadway’s Best: “A Strange Loop” NS “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” lead nominations

The nominations for the 65th annual Drama Desk Award will be announced on Tuesday and for the Drama Leagues’ newly named Gratitude Awards on Thursday.

Despite a truncated season, more than half the major theater awards are going ahead in one form or another. Check out my guide to New York Theater Awards 2020

Fighting the Virus

Danny Burstein as the impresario Harold Zidler in Moulin Rouge

Broadway star Danny Burstein on his harrowing experience with COVID-19, which he recounts straightforwardly, and with lots of humor. (He’s now out of the hospital, recuperating) https://t.co/UR3YSPTGNE pic.twitter.com/BPh4IM76xv

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) April 13, 2020

Nick Cordero

Nick Cordero’s fight against COVID-19 has been more up and down, as his wife has recounted on her Instagram account over the last several weeks. More than 6,000 people have donated a total of more than $350,000 to the Cordero’ family‘s GoFundMe account.

Nick was without question the best thing about “Bullets Over Broadway.” Here is in 2014 re-creating “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” for Broadway in Bryant Park:

youtube

A Dissident Company Celebrates 15 Years Underground The Belarus Free Theater had ambitious plans for its anniversary. The coronavirus stopped them, but the troupe is used to finding ways to keep going in tough times.

For Kicks

A Chorus Line in Quarantine

youtube

Broadway Alphabet Series continues

Happy 150th birthday, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thanks for the 5,000 years of artwork about actors and the theater., by Picasso, Renoir, Degas, and by artists whose names are lost to history

Broadway Night 1929 by John Marin

Spanish Music Hall by Everett Shinn, 1902

Kabuki actor around 1849

The Old Actress 1926 by Max Beckmann

One World Together At Home Highlights: Watch Paul McCartney. Elton John. Stevie Wonder. Lizzo. Taylor Swift. Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello

Top 10 Pandemic Parody Song Videos

Rest in Peace

Dennehy, with Elizabeth Franz, in Death of A Salesman 1999

Dennehy in Long Day’s Journey Into Night on Broadway, 2003

Dennehy with Nathan Lane in The Iceman Cometh directed by Robert Falls at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre

Inherit the Wind in Chicago

with Mia Farrow in Love Letters

Brian Dennehy, 81, a versatile performer on stage and stage, winning Tony Awards for “Death of a Salesman” in 1999 and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 2003.

I saw four of the six productions in which Brian Dennehy performed on Broadway, the last “Love Letters” in 2014 with Mia Farrow. He was always so… solid is the word, I think.

Wynn Handman, 97, co-founder of the American Place Theatre, and revered acting teacher. “The list of theater artists who worked at the American Place or were students in Handman’s classes (or, more often, both) is a Who’s Who of the American theater. Actors in the company roster included Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Rául Juliá, Michael Douglas, Olympia Dukakis, Faye Dunaway, Mary Alice, Richard Gere, Marian Seldes, Robert de Niro, James Caan, Joanne Woodward and Joel Grey. Bill Irwin, Eric Bogosian, Cynthia Heimel, Roger Rosenblatt, Aasif Mandvi and John Leguizamo all developed and performed in early shows there… “A celebration of Handman’s life will take place when groups of people are again allowed to gather in theaters and other American places.”

Faith Dane, 96, who “starred for many years in a stage show that spanned burlesque, jazz, dance, calypso, comedy and performance art. She hit it big in the Broadway and film productions of “Gypsy,” for which the lyricist Stephen Sondheim created a role based on her long-standing cabaret act. She went on to run for mayor of D.C. nine times

Louis Johnson, 90, genre-crossing dancer and choreographer, whose career spanned Broadway (“Damn Yankees”), film (“The Wiz”), opera (“Aida”) and the stages of the Alvin Ailey and Dance Theater of Harlem companies.

Shakespeare in the Park Canceled. See You in September…or Later. Awards Season Kicks In. #Stageworthy News of the Week Free Shakespeare in the Park has been canceled, for the first time in its 58 years – news that hits hard, and the sharpest sign that New York theater is unlikely to reopen until the Fall at the earliest.

#A Chorus Line in Quarantine video #RIP Brian Dennehy

0 notes

anthonypaulh · 6 years ago

Text

39 Years On and still OFF the WALL

On this day, August 10th, 39 years ago, music fans were about to hear one of the greatest pop music albums ever to be released. The record remains one of the best loved albums ever made and has retained a place in the record collections of millions across the World. Whether or not you are a fan of the artist concerned it doesn’t prevent anyone who listens to music of any kind, from realising that this piece of work was special in so many ways. Whether on vinyl, cassette, CD, or any format for that matter the album has outlasted them all and still sells huge numbers.

The fifth solo album of Michael Jackson’s career, and his first on the EPIC label has so far sold over 20 million copies Worldwide, 8 million of those in the USA, 4 million in the UK and 4 million in Europe. ( Us Brits buy a lot of music, not surprising I suppose as we make so much of it) .

The album of course is “OFF THE WALL” and I would wager that most people will have heard of it even if they themselves have not listened to it. Now, to be honest, I’m not the biggest Michael Jackson fan but it is obvious that he was a major, major talent. I’d like to think that I recognise a good record when I hear it and in this case it wasn’t just good, it was great.

The record is just one of those albums that music fans know. It’s Like The Beatles - Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run, Bob Marley - Exodus, Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life, Marvin Gaye - What’s Going On, Bobby Womack- The Poet I and II, Curtis Mayfield- A New World Order and so many others. They are classics that will always be respected and acknowledged.

The album “Off the Wall”, was recorded in Los Angeles between December 1978 and June 1979, with a cast list which was practically a “who’s who “ of popular music. With the slickest of slick productions by music royalty Quincy Jones, it really couldn’t fail, although the story of the making of the record could have led to a very different outcome.

So, what was the background to the making of the album and why could “Off the Wall “ have actually fallen completely Off the Wall ?

To start with we need to look back at the history of The Jackson Five and their prolifically talented, boyish lead vocalist Michael Jackson. To fully understand what musical journey they undertook to end up with the Peter Pan of pop striking gold with “Off the Wall” you have to go back to Detroit via Philadelphia and New York.

The “Off the Wall “ story actually begins in Detroit when The Jackson Five were signed to MOTOWN, at the legendary “Hitsville USA” . The hit record factory established in 1959 by Berry Gordy after the encouragement of his friend and ally Smokey Robinson saw them sign the Jackson boys in 1969 and set them on the road to stardom.

They had numerous hits on the Motown label, such as their debut smash “I Want you Back”, followed by “ABC”, “I’ll be There” and “The Love you Save”. By 1970 The Jackson Five were the biggest selling Motown act and in his usual commercially savvy way Berry Gordy launched the Indiana boys into a television series and hundreds of products from colouring books to cereal boxes.

First and foremost Berry Gordy was a businessman, who wanted hits. He realised that to have hits he needed to appeal to a racially mixed audience and in so doing he accepted that he needed to make records that were unthreatening, simple pop.

What the Jacksons and their management team didn’t know was that Motown had signed them to a contract which gave them only 2.8per cent of the royalties . As if that were not bad enough, they were severely restricted artistically and had little control over the musical content of their records. Just as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder would defy the Berry Gordy requirement for simple, easy listening , unthreatening pop records, The Jackson Five knew that they had to escape the stifling, stranglehold that the Detroit label had over them.

So in 1975, The Jackson Five by now known as the “First family of Soul “ were more than happy to escape the Motown label. They could not take their brother Jermaine with them as he was married to the sister of Berry Gordy ( as an aside Marvin Gaye was wedded to another of Berry Gordy’s sisters too) but they signed with Philadelphia International Records a division of EPIC. The lure of working with the supreme production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff on the Philadelphia label proved to be a major draw.

The Gamble and Huff team had been responsible for creating the “Philly “ sound in the early 1970’s, producing huge hits for The O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Billy Paul and MFSB. They were the 1970’s equivalent of the Jam and Lewis production team of the 1980’s, who ironically made huge hits with Janet Jackson.

Working with Gamble and Huff was a breath of fresh air for the Jacksons ( Motown refused to let them use the name The Jackson 5 after they left the Detroit label). Musically they could be more adventurous and they had full control over their material. The best of their work at Philadelphia International was probably “Show You the Way to Go”, “Can You feel It” and the huge disco hit “Shake Your Body down to the Ground”. It all formed a part of Michael Jackson throwing off the Motown shackles and changing his musical taste and direction. It was an education.

Working with Gamble and Huff was just a part of Michael Jackson’s musical transformation. In early 1978 he starred in the hit movie “The Wiz” as the Scarecrow, directed by Sidney Lumet. He studied the New York disco scene at the famous venue “Club 54” and realised that the music and dance he was witnessing would play a large part in his work going forward. Perhaps more importantly it was on “The Wiz” project that Quincy Jones who was arranging the score for the movie, promised Michael Jackson that he would produce his next album.

The musical transformation, the confidence gained in his role in “The Wiz” and the promise made by the most regal of music producers to direct his next record, meant that all of the stars were aligning for the Michael Jackson solo album that was coming. All the ducks were getting in a row and it was increasingly likely that the end product would be something special. For Michael himself, he was brimming with ideas and it was his good fortune that Quincy Jones could pull them all together into a coherent piece of work.

Had all these steps not been made it is doubtful whether Off The Wall would have ever got off the ground. There was many a battle ahead in producing the final album but the list of contributors for the project was incredibly impressive. Even so, some of the songs which were eventually included could easily have slipped away.

The track “Out of my Life “ was actually written for Frank Sinatra and the track “Rock with You” had previously been offered to Karen Carpenter albeit she declined to use it. The Paul McCartney track “Girlfriend” had originally been included in the 1978 Paul McCartney and Wings album “London Town”, so it was a big gamble whether it would work on a Michael Jackson record.

Even the employment of Quincy Jones as producer was very heavily resisted by EPIC records. They thought that “Q” was a bit too much of a musical heavyweight, rather too “jazzy” to produce a mainstream hit album. But Michael Jackson personally insisted on Quincy Jones. The record label actually preferred Gamble and Huff or Maurice White from Earth Wind and Fire. Both teams would have done a terrific job no doubt and they had incredible CV’s but “Q” it was.

The Quincy Jones production turned out of course to be sparkling but his cast of contributors were as good as anyone could call upon to make any record. High calibre musicians like Patti Austin and Jim Gilstrap on vocals, George Duke on synthesisers, Paulinho da Costa on percussion, Jerry Hey arranging the horn section, Louis Johnson ( from the Brothers Johnson who would also have a huge hit album “Light up the Night” including the massive single “STOMP”produced by Quincy Jones), Stevie Wonder and Rod Temperton as arrangers were huge stars in their own right. The record was literally an immaculate conception.

The biggest songs from the album were the title track “Off the Wall” , “Rock with You” and “Don’t Stop till you Get Enough”. The first two were both written by Rod Temperton the Englishman from the unlikeliest of places Cleethorpes (no disrespect to Cleethorpes but saying that it hasn’t borne too many superstars is putting it kindly). He had been responsible for numerous hits with his British soul /R and B band “Heatwave” in the early to mid 1970”s but working on the “Off the Wall” project was going up another level. It opened the path for him to work with Quincy Jones many times after that, including the next two Michael Jackson albums (He wrote the title track for “Thriller”) and then with George Benson (He wrote the title track “Give me the Night”) and The Brothers Johnson (“Light up the Night”).

The final version of “Off the Wall” became one of the most iconic pop records ever made. It is just about the perfect blend of disco, funk, soft rock, Broadway ballad and pop song. Like all great albums it has something for everyone and all of the tracks are strong. There are no weak links and of course the production, arranging and playing are faultless.

It is my humble opinion that the subsequent 2 Michael Jackson albums “Thriller” and “Bad” almost tried too hard. Of course they sold in absolute bucket loads and had their classic tracks but they somehow didn’t feel as exuberant as “Off the Wall”. Perhaps they were overproduced and after the “Bad” album Quincy Jones himself confirmed that he wouldn’t work on any other Michael Jackson projects. He probably realised that it was time to move on and he had seen the best of a truly great artist. As for Michael Jackson he seemed to become more and more troubled as the years passed and sadly the innocence and energy of “Off the Wall” faded.

The album has stood the test of time really well. If you give it a spin now it is still difficult to avoid moving or tapping a toe to the uptempo numbers or humming and whistling the ballads. It’s infectious. Music moves people, and this is an album that does that to this day. It is the best album that Michael Jackson ever recorded. “Thriller” sold 110 million records and “Bad” sold 45 million but in my opinion they lost the innocence and sheer fun that “Off the Wall” captured.

For me “Off the Wall” reflects a Michael Jackson who had finally found his musical freedom and revelled in it. Having left the suffocating Motown fluffy pop records behind him he had finally found his own musical path. He had absorbed the magnificence of the Gamble and Huff string filled, Philly sound. Via New York’s Studio 54 he had completed a musical and personal journey which Quincy Jones, assisted by a stellar cast of A list musicians and songwriters, finally turned into a masterpiece.

Rolling Stone magazine rated “Off the Wall” as number 68 in a 500 list of the greatest albums ever produced. As we celebrate the 39th anniversary of its’ release it is undoubtedly one of the most influential records of my lifetime. It transformed the Peter Pan of Indiana into the King of Pop. Sadly at just 50 years of age Michael Jackson died in tragic circumstances following a number of years of drug dependency and unhappiness. We can only reflect on a huge talent who lived a troubled life and died way too young.

His very best album “Off the Wall” was him at his exuberant, most joyful, energetic best. He appeared to be having fun and really enjoying his music. It is the best way to remember his incredible talent and recall that not only was he the voice of some of the greatest popular songs ever made but he was also the man that Fred Astaire said was the greatest dancer of his time.

Not bad for a boy from Gary, Indiana.

RIP Michael Jackson RIP Rod Temperton

Thank You for the music

0 notes

sharma39999-blog · 8 years ago

Text

'Destiny of the Livid' Director on Tough Cuba Shoot and Film's "Hell Yeah" Moment

After bringing the story of N.W.A. to the massive display in the industrial hit and awards contender Straight Outta Compton, director F. Gary Grey took over the eighth installment of one of Hollywood's most profitable franchises, Quick and Livid. The Quick movies have a cumulative $four billion in complete international field workplace returns, with James Wan's 2015 movie Livid 7 bringing in $1.5 billion alone.Including to the stress, Grey could be directing the first main studio manufacturing to movie in Cuba since the embargo lifted. Destiny of the Livid, which hits theaters Friday, sees the return of Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Tyrese Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez and Ludacris, in addition to franchise patriarch Vin Diesel as Dom. The film facilities on Dom's choice to go rogue, aligning himself with hacker Cypher (Charlize Theron) for causes unbeknownst to his household, who now should work to take him down.Grey says that Quick followers could also be stunned by the extra dramatic tone of this installment, however he hopes that he was capable of counterbalance that with humor and a tank of fuel or two. He explains, "You by no means need the viewers to say, ‘I don’t know what film I used to be watching. Was it My Dinner with Andre or was it The Terminator with vehicles?’"The director spoke with Warmth Imaginative and prescient about making the transfer from Compton to Cuba, his private favourite Quick eight race sequence and the impact of a well-placed Bassnectar observe.Destiny of the Livid was the first main studio manufacturing to movie in Cuba since the embargo lifted. What was the largest problem you encountered?It was huge enterprise to deliver a whole lot of folks from the U.S. to Cuba, even one thing so simple as placing them up in a lodge. Or sending out emails — we had very restricted to no web service. It is one factor to deliver a film to Cuba, nevertheless it's one other to deliver a film of this dimension, the place you're racing classic vehicles 100 miles per hour down streets the place there are tens of 1000's of folks simply watching. When you've gotten actors and stuntmen driving at these speeds in these outdated vehicles, being chased by helicopters in a metropolis that had by no means seen a helicopter like that earlier than, it was actually robust. However value it.That opening race set in Cuba regarded completely deliberate and choreographed, particularly when mixed with music from the rating. Music has at all times performed an enormous function in Quick movies — Charlie Puth and Wiz Khalifa's "See You Once more" even bought a Gold Globe nomination — and this film appears to proceed that development.I had labored earlier than with Brian Tyler, who's the composer for the film. We labored collectively on Regulation Abiding Citizen, however he has been a component of the Quick franchise for some time so it was considerably of a coincidence that we got here collectively and our lives intersected at Destiny of the Livid. The method with the music was to ensure you felt prefer it was enjoyable, inviting and heat, nevertheless it additionally framed and balanced the tone, as a result of there is a bit more drama on this film than you're used to with a Quick film with perhaps a bit extra humor to counter that drama. So the music needed to tie all of it collectively. It grew to become the glue.A private favourite is the backing observe to the jail struggle sequence between Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.There have been decisions I made with the music simply to pump up the viewers. In the jail sequence, you've gotten this Bassnectar observe that simply made you scream out "Hell yeah! I am right here for this."Somebody in my screening did yell out 'Hell sure.’Actually?! And that was the level. It’s like you've gotten The Rock and you've gotten Jason Statham and they're in jail kicking ass in methods you've gotten by no means seen earlier than on the massive display, and you need the viewers to leap into that have. And the music helps put the viewers proper there in the scene, like, “I’m right here and I’m in it.”The tone of Quick films is so distinctive. It's equal elements enjoyable kitsch and intense motion and earnest sentiment. So, as the director, how did you stroll this very slender line?Most individuals are conscience of the incontrovertible fact that you need to stroll this high quality line and be hyper conscious of the tone as a result of 1 / 4 flip a method or the different may throw off the stability. I’m conscious of what the followers need and anticipate. They need this huge, over-the-top motion that sends them dwelling stimulated and freaking out and makes them need to see it once more. However when you've gotten these dramatic parts, which is the motivation for Dom going rogue, the humor is created as a counterbalance. The one factor I didn’t need it to really feel like is a film with motion and then exposition. Tentpole films have a tendency to do this. Its spectacle and then story.How essential was the enhancing to find that stability? We've been enhancing since late August. We've been pounding the AVID for months now. Chris and Paul, my editors, had been wonderful. It was a really difficult film throughout the board to shoot it, to provide it and particularly to chop it. But it surely’s a trip. Somebody likened it to Magic Mountain.Did you've gotten a private favourite race sequence?Effectively, I’ll give the filmmaker reply: I liked all of them.However I'll say that the New York sequence actually stands out to me as a result of for Charlize Theron’s character to remotely management a thousand automobiles from a billion greenback jet above Manhattan, weaponize these vehicles, and have them flying out buildings and utilizing them as vehicular torpedoes that was very artistic and authentic and well timed. With all the hacking stuff that’s going on, it’s variety of the lighter facet of hacking. . If there's a lighter facet to hacking.At CinemaCon if you screened the film in full, Vin Deisel described it as a begin of a brand new trilogy. How do you see these films progressing ahead from right here?It’s undoubtedly a brand new starting. I don’t need to quit something and I don’t need to get forward of myself, however I believe that there's a lot life on this franchise particularly after this film. Ultimate, crucial, query: Did you've gotten a favourite automotive?Sure. Then 1966 Corvette Stingray. It’s so scorching.Destiny of the LividLet's block adverts! (Why?) Supply: THRComicCon Click to Post

#'American

0 notes

blackkudos · 6 years ago

Text

Lena Horne

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American jazz and pop music singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist. Horne's career spanned over 70 years appearing in film, television, and theater. Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of 16 and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood, where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the 1943 films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. Because of the Red Scare and her political activism, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood.

Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington in August 1963 and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway. She then toured the country in the show, earning numerous awards and accolades. Horne continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000. Horne died of congestive heart failure on May 9, 2010, at the age of 92.

Early life

Lena Horne was born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Reportedly descended from the John C. Calhoun family, both sides of her family were a mixture of African-American, Native American, and European American descent, and belonged to the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated people. Her father, Edwin Fletcher "Teddy" Horne, Jr. (1893–1970), a numbers kingpin in the gambling trade, left the family when she was three and moved to an upper-middle-class black community in the Hill District community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Edna Louise Scottron (1894–1976), was a granddaughter of inventor Samuel R. Scottron; she was an actress with a black theatre troupe and traveled extensively. Edna's maternal grandmother, Amelie Louise Ashton, was a Senegalese slave. Horne was mainly raised by her grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne.

When Horne was five, she was sent to live in Georgia. For several years, she traveled with her mother. From 1927 to 1929, she lived with her uncle, Frank S. Horne, dean of students at Fort Valley Junior Industrial Institute (now part of Fort Valley State University) in Fort Valley, Georgia, who later served as an adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From Fort Valley, southwest of Macon, Horne briefly moved to Atlanta with her mother; they returned to New York when Horne was 12 years old. She then attended Girls High School, an all-girls public high school in Brooklyn that has since become Boys and Girls High School; she dropped out without earning a diploma. Aged 18, she moved in with her father in Pittsburgh, staying in the city's Little Harlem for almost five years and learning from native Pittsburghers Billy Strayhorn and Billy Eckstine, among others.

Career

Road to Hollywood

In the fall of 1933, Horne joined the chorus line of the Cotton Club in New York City. In the spring of 1934, she had a featured role in the Cotton Club Parade starring Adelaide Hall, who took Lena under her wing. A few years later, Horne joined Noble Sissle's Orchestra, with which she toured and with whom she made her first records, issued by Decca. After she separated from her first husband, Horne toured with bandleader Charlie Barnet in 1940–41, but disliked the travel and left the band to work at the Cafe Society in New York. She replaced Dinah Shore as the featured vocalist on NBC's popular jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. The show's resident maestros, Henry Levine and Paul Laval, recorded with Horne in June 1941 for RCA Victor. Horne left the show after only six months when she was hired by former Cafe Trocadero (Los Angeles) manager Felix Young to perform in a Cotton Club-style revue on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, and was replaced by actress Betty Keene of the Keene sisters.

She made her debut at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Panama Hattie (1942) and performed the title song of Stormy Weather based loosely on the life of Adelaide Hall, (1943), which she made at 20th Century Fox, on loan from MGM. She appeared in a number of MGM musicals, most notably Cabin in the Sky (1943), but was never featured in a leading role because of her race and the fact that her films had to be re-edited for showing in cities where theaters would not show films with black performers. As a result, most of Horne's film appearances were stand-alone sequences that had no bearing on the rest of the film, so editing caused no disruption to the storyline. A notable exception was the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, although one number from that film was cut before release because it was considered too suggestive by the censors: Horne singing "Ain't It the Truth" while taking a bubble bath. This scene and song are featured in the film That's Entertainment! III (1994) which also featured commentary from Horne on why the scene was deleted prior to the film's release. Lena Horne was the first African-American elected to serve on the Screen Actors Guild board of directors.

In Ziegfeld Follies (1946), she performed "Love" by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. Horne lobbied for the role of Julie LaVerne in MGM's 1951 version of Show Boat (having already played the role when a segment of Show Boat was performed in Till the Clouds Roll By) but lost the part to Ava Gardner, a personal friend in real life. Horne claimed this was due to the Production Code's ban on interracial relationships in films, but MGM sources state she was never considered for the role in the first place. In the documentary That's Entertainment! III, Horne stated that MGM executives required Gardner to practice her singing using Horne's recordings, which offended both actresses. Ultimately, Gardner's voice was overdubbed by actress Annette Warren (Smith) for the theatrical release.

Changes of direction

By the mid-1950s, Horne was disenchanted with Hollywood and increasingly focused on her nightclub career. She only made two major appearances for MGM during the 1950s: Duchess of Idaho (which was also Eleanor Powell's final film); and the 1956 musical Meet Me in Las Vegas. She was blacklisted during the 1950s for her affiliations in the 1940s with communist-backed groups. She would subsequently disavow communism. She returned to the screen three more times, playing chanteuse Claire Quintana in the 1969 film Death of a Gunfighter, Glinda in The Wiz (1978), which was directed by her then son-in-law Sidney Lumet, and co-hosting the MGM retrospective That's Entertainment! III (1994), in which she was candid about her unkind treatment by the studio.

On April 13, 1980, Horne, Luciano Pavarotti, and host Gene Kelly were all scheduled to appear at a Gala performance at the Metropolitan Opera House to salute the NY City Center's Joffrey Ballet Company. However, Pavarotti's plane was diverted over the Atlantic and he was unable to appear. James Nederlander was an invited Honored Guest and noted that only three people at the sold-out Metropolitan Opera House asked for their money back. He asked to be introduced to Lena following her performance. In May 1981, The Nederlander Organization, Michael Frazier, and Fred Walker went on to book Horne for a four-week engagement at the newly named Nederlander Theatre (formerly the Trafalgar, the Billy Rose, and the National) on West 41st Street in New York City. The show was an instant success and was extended to a full year run, garnering Horne a special Tony award, and two Grammy Awards for the cast recording of her show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music. The 333-performance Broadway run closed on Horne's 65th birthday, June 30, 1982. Later that same week, the entire show was performed again and videotaped for television broadcast and home video release. The tour began a few days later at Tanglewood (Massachusetts) during the weekend of July 4, 1982. The Lady and Her Music toured 41 cities in the U.S. and Canada until June 17, 1984. It played in London for a month in August and ended its run in Stockholm, Sweden, September 14, 1984. In 1981, she received a Special Tony Award for her one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which also played to acclaim at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1984. Despite the show's considerable success (Horne still holds the record for the longest-running solo performance in Broadway history), she did not capitalize on the renewed interest in her career by undertaking many new musical projects. A proposed 1983 joint recording project between Horne and Frank Sinatra (to be produced by Quincy Jones) was ultimately abandoned, and her sole studio recording of the decade was 1988's The Men in My Life, featuring duets with Sammy Davis Jr. and Joe Williams. In 1989, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

The 1990s found Horne considerably more active in the recording studio. Following her 1993 performance at a tribute to the musical legacy of her good friend Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington's longtime collaborator), she decided to record an album composed largely of Strayhorn's and Ellington's songs the following year, We'll Be Together Again. To coincide with the release of the album, Horne made what would be her final concert performances at New York's Supper Club and Carnegie Hall. That same year, Horne also lent her vocals to a recording of "Embraceable You" on Sinatra's Duets II album. Though the album was largely derided by critics, the Sinatra-Horne pairing was generally regarded as its highlight. In 1995, a "live" album capturing her Supper Club performance was released (subsequently winning a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album). In 1998, Horne released another studio album, entitled Being Myself. Thereafter, Horne essentially retired from performing and largely retreated from public view, though she did return to the recording studio in 2000 to contribute vocal tracks on Simon Rattle's Classic Ellington album.

Civil rights activism

Horne was long involved with the Civil Rights Movement. In 1941, she sang at Cafe Society and worked with Paul Robeson. During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of African American servicemen", according to her Kennedy Center biography. Because the U.S. Army refused to allow integrated audiences, she wound up putting on a show for a mixed audience of black U.S. soldiers and white German POWs. Seeing the black soldiers had been forced to sit in the back seats, she walked off the stage to the first row where the black troops were seated and performed with the Germans behind her. She was at an NAACP rally with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the weekend before Evers was assassinated. She also met President John F. Kennedy at the White House two days before he was assassinated. She was at the March on Washington and spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC, and the National Council of Negro Women. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws. Tom Lehrer mentions her in his song "National Brotherhood Week" in the line "Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to cheek" referring (wryly) to her and to Sheriff Jim Clark, of Selma, Alabama, who was responsible for a violent attack on civil rights marchers in 1965. In 1983, she was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.

Personal life

Horne married Louis Jordan Jones in January 1937 in Pittsburgh. On December 21, 1937, their daughter, Gail (later known as Gail Lumet Buckley, a writer) was born there. They had a son, Edwin Jones (February 7, 1940 – September 12, 1970) who died of kidney disease. Horne and Jones separated in 1940 and divorced in 1944. Horne's second marriage was to Lennie Hayton, who was Music Director and one of the premier musical conductors and arrangers at MGM, in December 1947 in Paris. They separated in the early 1960s, but never divorced; he died in 1971. In her as-told-to autobiography Lena by Richard Schickel, Horne recounts the enormous pressures she and her husband faced as an interracial couple. She later admitted in an interview in Ebony (May 1980), she had married Hayton to advance her career and cross the "color-line" in show business.

Death

Horne died on May 9, 2010, and was cremated in New York City The funeral took place at St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue in New York. Thousands gathered and attendees included Leontyne Price, Dionne Warwick, Liza Minnelli, Jessye Norman, Chita Rivera, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Leslie Uggams, Lauren Bacall, Robert Osborne, Audra McDonald, and Vanessa Williams.

Legacy

In January 2005, Blue Note Records, her label for more than a decade, announced that "the finishing touches have been put on a collection of rare and unreleased recordings by the legendary Horne made during her time on Blue Note." Remixed by her longtime producer Rodney Jones, the recordings featured Horne in remarkably secure voice for a woman of her years, and include versions of such signature songs as "Something to Live For", "Chelsea Bridge", and "Stormy Weather". The album, originally titled Soul but renamed Seasons of a Life, was released on January 24, 2006. In 2007, Horne was portrayed by Leslie Uggams as the older Lena and Nikki Crawford as the younger Lena in the stage musical Stormy Weather staged at the Pasadena Playhouse in California (January to March 2009). In 2011, Horne was also portrayed by actress Ryan Jillian in a one-woman show titled Notes from A Horne staged at the Susan Batson studio in New York City, from November 2011 to February 2012. The 83rd Academy Awards presented a tribute to Horne by actress Halle Berry at the ceremony held February 27, 2011.

Wikipedia

#lena horne #06-30 #05-09

3 notes · View notes

blackkudos · 8 years ago

Text

Lena Horne

Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington in August 1963 and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway. She then toured the country in the show, earning numerous awards and accolades. Horne continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000. Horne died of congestive heart failure on May 9, 2010, at the age of 92.

Early life

When Horne was five, she was sent to live in Georgia. For several years, she traveled with her mother. From 1927 to 1929, she lived with her uncle, Frank S. Horne, dean of students at Fort Valley Junior Industrial Institute (now part of Fort Valley State University) in Fort Valley, Georgia, who later served as an adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From Fort Valley, southwest of Macon, Horne briefly moved to Atlanta with her mother; they returned to New York when Horne was 12 years old. She then attended Girls High School, an all-girls public high school in Brooklyn that has since become Boys and Girls High School; she dropped out without earning a diploma. Aged 18, she moved in with her father in Pittsburgh, staying in the city's Little Harlem for almost five years and learning from native Pittsburghers Billy Strayhorn and Billy Eckstine, among others.

Career

Road to Hollywood

In the fall of 1933, Horne joined the chorus line of the Cotton Club in New York City. In the spring of 1934, she had a featured role in the Cotton Club Parade starring Adelaide Hall, who took Lena under her wing. A few years later, Horne joined Noble Sissle's Orchestra, with which she toured and with whom she made her first records, issued by Decca. After she separated from her first husband, Horne toured with bandleader Charlie Barnet in 1940–41, but disliked the travel and left the band to work at the Cafe Society in New York. She replaced Dinah Shore as the featured vocalist on NBC's popular jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. The show's resident maestros, Henry Levine and Paul Laval, recorded with Horne in June 1941 for RCA Victor. Horne left the show after only six months when she was hired by former Cafe Trocadero (Los Angeles) manager Felix Young to perform in a Cotton Club-style revue on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, and was replaced by actress Betty Keene of the Keene sisters.

In Ziegfeld Follies (1946), she performed "Love" by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. Horne lobbied for the role of Julie LaVerne in MGM's 1951 version of Show Boat (having already played the role when a segment of Show Boat was performed in Till the Clouds Roll By) but lost the part to Ava Gardner, a personal friend in real life. Horne claimed this was due to the Production Code's ban on interracial relationships in films, but MGM sources state she was never considered for the role in the first place. In the documentary That's Entertainment! III, Horne stated that MGM executives required Gardner to practice her singing using Horne's recordings, which offended both actresses. Ultimately, Gardner's voice was overdubbed by actress Annette Warren (Smith) for the theatrical release.

Changes of direction

On April 13, 1980, Horne, Luciano Pavarotti, and host Gene Kelly were all scheduled to appear at a Gala performance at the Metropolitan Opera House to salute the NY City Center's Joffrey Ballet Company. However, Pavarotti's plane was diverted over the Atlantic and he was unable to appear. James Nederlander was an invited Honored Guest and noted that only three people at the sold-out Metropolitan Opera House asked for their money back. He asked to be introduced to Lena following her performance. In May 1981, The Nederlander Organization, Michael Frazier, and Fred Walker went on to book Horne for a four-week engagement at the newly named Nederlander Theatre (formerly the Trafalgar, the Billy Rose, and the National) on West 41st Street in New York City. The show was an instant success and was extended to a full year run, garnering Horne a special Tony award, and two Grammy Awards for the cast recording of her show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music. The 333-performance Broadway run closed on Horne's 65th birthday, June 30, 1982. Later that same week, the entire show was performed again and videotaped for television broadcast and home video release. The tour began a few days later at Tanglewood (Massachusetts) during the weekend of July 4, 1982. The Lady and Her Music toured 41 cities in the U.S. and Canada until June 17, 1984. It played in London for a month in August and ended its run in Stockholm, Sweden, September 14, 1984. In 1981, she received a Special Tony Award for her one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which also played to acclaim at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1984. Despite the show's considerable success (Horne still holds the record for the longest-running solo performance in Broadway history), she did not capitalize on the renewed interest in her career by undertaking many new musical projects. A proposed 1983 joint recording project between Horne and Frank Sinatra (to be produced by Quincy Jones) was ultimately abandoned, and her sole studio recording of the decade was 1988's The Men in My Life, featuring duets with Sammy Davis Jr. and Joe Williams. In 1989, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Civil rights activism

Personal life

Death

Legacy

In January 2005, Blue Note Records, her label for more than a decade, announced that "the finishing touches have been put on a collection of rare and unreleased recordings by the legendary Horne made during her time on Blue Note." Remixed by her longtime producer Rodney Jones, the recordings featured Horne in remarkably secure voice for a woman of her years, and include versions of such signature songs as "Something to Live For", "Chelsea Bridge", and "Stormy Weather". The album, originally titled Soul but renamed Seasons of a Life, was released on January 24, 2006. In 2007, Horne was portrayed by Leslie Uggams as the older Lena and Nikki Crawford as the younger Lena in the stage musical Stormy Weather staged at the Pasadena Playhouse in California (January to March 2009). In 2011, Horne was also portrayed by actress Ryan Jillian in a one-woman show titled Notes from A Horne staged at the Susan Batson studio in New York City, from November 2011 to February 2012. The 83rd Academy Awards presented a tribute to Horne by actress Halle Berry at the ceremony held February 27, 2011.

Wikipedia

#Lena Horne #06-30 #05-09

2 notes · View notes