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Business Times
7 days ago
- Business
- Business Times
Warner Bros discovers it can't be everything
IN WHAT is quickly becoming a pattern, Warner Bros Discovery is making headlines for taking a mulligan. Less than a month after reversing its inexplicable 2023 decision to drop the valuable HBO branding from its streaming service, HBO Max, the entertainment conglomerate is following up on its three-year-old merger of two separate companies them into two separate companies. The specifics of this and similar recent shake-ups make clear a troubling trend: Media giants attempt to be every kind of entertainment company at once, and then struggle to do much of it particularly well. Ultimately, the audience is left with the short end of the stick. To be fair, the split isn't quite a full-blown reversal like the HBO Max to Max back to HBO Max branding backflip. The 2022 merger brought together WarnerMedia's assets (including Warner Bros, DC Entertainment HBO, CNN and TNT) with Discovery's holdings (Discovery Channel, TLC, Discovery+ to name a few). The new proposal will separate Warner Bros Discovery's offerings into two companies: one for its streaming assets and film studios, and another for its legacy cable TV channels. Or at least that's one way to delineate the divergence of its holdings. Another, more blunt, version would be: For the most part, the company has put its profitable pieces (streaming and film) in one pile and the non-profitable pieces (the TV networks) in another. Few who were paying attention to the 2022 deal would be surprised by its ultimate failure. Warner has a long and chequered history of ill-advised mergers. Its previous ownership, AT&T, is a noteworthy example. As part of the deal with Discovery, AT&T spun off WarnerMedia with tens of billions of dollars in debt, which Warner Bros Discovery then assumed. The resulting company has managed to pay down about US$20 billion, which would be impressive were it not for the remaining US$34 billion still owed (plus an estimated US$40 billion in lost value). Still, we're not talking about some fly-by-night operation – Warner Bros recently celebrated its 100th anniversary and has become shorthand for excellence in film and television. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Within that century, it released 1927's The Jazz Singer, an industry disrupter that was the starter pistol for the 'talkies' revolution. The studio was praised for its gritty, socially conscious Depression-era dramas and crime pictures and released legitimately iconic movies such as Casablanca, Rebel Without a Cause, Bonnie & Clyde, The Exorcist, Goodfellas, The Shawshank Redemption, the Harry Potter franchise and (of course) the Looney Tunes shorts and features. And let's not forget Warner Bros produced smash TV shows such as Friends and ER. All of which prompts the question: If a company with that kind of pedigree can't stay afloat in a media landscape that's perpetually hungry for entertainment (or, to put it less artfully, 'content'), who can? The bleak current outlook of the industry indicates that perhaps the answer is 'no one'. Even the Walt Disney Co, which has managed to couple a keen eye for valuable properties with a cultural influence and brand recognition that most other studios can only dream of, may not be infallible. Between the decreased dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the chinks in the armour of its Disney+ streaming service, it's seen better days. Universal Studios, America's oldest surviving film studio (founded in 1912) and still the go-to image of motion picture production thanks to its popular tours, is in the midst of its own sorting-and-separating process. Its parent company, Comcast, announced plans last year to split the oversized NBCUniversal into two groups. Like Warner Bros Discovery, it separated into profitable assets (such as NBC, Bravo, Peacock and theme parks) and less profitable ones (the likes of USA, Syfy, E!, Oxygen, MSNBC and CNBC). Only time will tell if the less lucrative group can survive on its own. The uncertainty is an unfortunate symptom of a fractured media landscape that has been saturated with more viewing options than audiences can (or want to) keep track of. One thing that is not a mystery is that if executives want to compete in a crowded field, they have to be willing to think outside the boxes they've so carefully constructed. Warner Bros did that in a big way at the end of the 1940s. When profits had fallen by more than 50 per cent (due to multiple factors, including the Paramount Decrees and the looming threat of television), Jack Warner tightened belts at the studio. He ended long-term contracts with several of its most expensive stars. It was painful and difficult, but it kept the doors open and the lights on, and the studio reconfigured how they made movies for the changing times and trickier landscape. One could argue that these spin-off solutions are roughly equivalent to Warner's cuts, but solving contemporary problems requires executives to fixate on more than mere numbers as measures of success. As in past moments when audience attention has wavered (in the face of such threats as radio, television and home video), the best solution lies not in bookkeeping but in creativity – empowering filmmakers, showrunners, writers and actors to produce entertainment that genuinely excites audiences and compels them to seek it out. BLOOMBERG The writer is a film critic and historian whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Vulture, The Playlist, Slate and Rolling Stone. He is the author, most recently, of Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend.
Boston Globe
13-06-2025
- Boston Globe
First light to last light: The arc of a perfect summer day in Gloucester
There's no shame in settling down on either beach for the morning, then packing up your beach chairs and following the sun. But if you're feeling more ambitious, Gloucester has plenty to fill the day. By the time you've walked the length of Good Harbor Beach, Cape Ann Coffees will be opening at 6 a.m. At the other end of the harbor, Mom's Kitchen starts dishing pancakes and eggs at 5 a.m. What can we say? Fisherfolk start early. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up A trail map to Dogtown stands at the parking lot on Dogtown Road. David Lyon While the rest of Gloucester is waking up, walk off the breakfast carbs by hiking the trails in Dogtown. Every town deserves a mysterious, spooky wood, and Dogtown is Gloucester's. Site of the 17th-century settlement, the ghost town sits atop a glacial moraine. Trees and shrubs have overgrown the vast boulder field since this inland village was abandoned about 200 years ago as Gloucester sought its living from the sea. Yet cellar holes and patches of ornamental flowering plants and fruit trees persist as silent witnesses to lives once lived here. The 'Babson Boulder Trail″ is the most popular way to explore Dogtown. Look for massive stones inscribed with inspirational words — 'Truth,″ 'Kindness,″ 'Prosperity,″ and so on. They are the work of Depression-era unemployed stone cutters hired by Gloucester native Roger Babson. Advertisement This contemporary wetu sits next to the 1710 White-Ellery saltbox on the Cape Ann Museum Green campus in Gloucester. David Lyon Gloucester may be one of America's oldest European settlements, but the English were hardly the first to live here. At the Cape Ann Museum Green campus, located between Dogtown and the Route 128 traffic circle, a contemporary art wetu (a traditional Indigenous dwelling) and a stone mush8n (a stone version of an Indigenous dugout canoe) nod to earlier occupants of the land. The brightly painted wetu contrasts with the weathered clapboards of the adjacent 1710 White-Ellery saltbox house. Although the downtown location of the museum remains closed for renovation until 2026, CAM Green offers tours of the White-Ellery House and mounts changing exhibitions in its soaring, light-filled gallery building. Carvings on the "Babson boulders" in Dogtown exhort passersby to admirable actions. David Lyon By now you've probably caught on that Gloucester is a pretty special place. So it's no surprise that the glorious light has long drawn artists to town. Starting in the mid-19th century, artists have flocked to Rocky Neck, a small peninsula poking out into Gloucester Harbor. It claims to be 'one of America's oldest working art colonies.″ Rocky Neck in Gloucester is a well-established art colony. David Lyon Rocky Neck is a compact spit, easily walked from the municipal parking lot on Rocky Neck Avenue. Check out the former studio of Marsden Hartley at 9 Rocky Neck Ave., now a private home. He spent summers here in the 1930s and often painted the glacial moraine of Dogtown. The former studio of A.W. Buhler at 17 Rocky Neck Ave. is now a gallery. Buhler is best remembered for his painting 'Man at the Wheel,″ the inspiration for Gloucester's iconic Fisherman's Memorial statue. Take a short detour to 2 Clarendon St. to see the house that Edward Hopper painted as 'The Mansard Roof.″ Or just wander the galleries and shops, including the sleek gallery and wine bar called Salted Cod Arthouse, and pop into any open studios. You will see a lot of paintings of boats, harbors, and broader seascapes. Gloucester is, after all, also America's oldest working fishing port. Advertisement Edward Hopper modeled the image in "The Mansard Roof″ on this Rocky Neck home. David Lyon Downtown knits together Gloucester's maritime and artistic histories. As you wrap around the head of the inner harbor, you'll pass the site where Hopper painted 'Tall Masts″ in 1912. Hopper was hardly the first artist to be entranced by Gloucester's waterfront. One of your first stops on a walking tour along the harbor will be a three-story Gothic Revival stone house on a high hill above the working port. Looking almost like a waterfront watchtower, it was designed by Fitz Henry Lane, the Gloucester-born artist whose radiant images of glowing sky and restless seas first drew other painters to the seaport. He lived and worked here from 1849 until his death in 1865. Just feet away, Alfred Duca's evocative 1996 bronze statue shows the painter perched on a rock, sketchbook in hand, looking out on the harbor. Advertisement The Fisherman's Memorial, often called ‶Man at the Wheel,″ stands on Western Avenue in Gloucester. David Lyon Also on Harbor Loop, just below the Lane House, Maritime Gloucester is a living museum of the city's saltwater history. In the Dory Shop, Geno Mondello continues to build historic Gloucester fishing dories when he's not tending his 200 lobster traps. One of the founders of Maritime Gloucester, Mondello says it takes five to six weeks to build a boat. Just below the shop, the oldest operating marine railway in the country still hauls ships out of the water for repairs, just as it has since 1849. At an adjacent pier, the pinky schooner Ardelle offers daily public sails until October. The Ardelle offers daily harbor sails from the Maritime Gloucester wharf. David Lyon A little farther west along the harbor, Seven Seas Wharf has served the fishing industry for more than 350 years. It's still used to stow and repair nets, fuel up for offshore trips, and unload lobsters and fish. The Gloucester House Restaurant dominates the wharf. Enjoy seafood in the rough from the takeout window of Blue Collar Lobster Company while looking out at the fishing vessels and Cape Pond Ice. Poignant tributes are cut into the blocks at the base of the Fishermen's Wives Memorial. David Lyon Continue west to 18 Western Ave., the building that Hopper painted in watercolors in 1926 as 'Anderson's House″ (owned by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston). The dwelling sits just above the Town Landing at the end of Pavilion Beach. It's a short walk along Western Avenue to the 'Man at the Wheel″ statue based on Buhler's painting. It's the focus of the Fisherman's Memorial, where bronze plaques list the names of those lost at sea. Keep walking across Blynman Bridge (also painted by Hopper) to the more recent statue of the Fishermen's Wives Memorial, which notes the sacrifices of fishermen's wives and families. This side of the bridge is planted with striking flower beds that flourish in the diffuse seaside light. Advertisement The family depicted in the Fishermen's Wives Memorial looks out to sea, waiting. David Lyon Be sure to return to Pavilion Beach for sunset. It doesn't face perfectly west, but the setting sun illuminates the wet beach with a shimmering slick of color. Clouds above the city blaze with red and gold. The opposing horizon beyond the Eastern Point Light glows rosy pink. Suddenly, darkness falls. Then you can call it a day. Patricia Harris and David Lyon can be reached at . Sunset lights the sky and glistens on the sands of Gloucester's Pavilion Beach. David Lyon If you go … Cape Ann Motor Inn 33 Rockport Road 978-281-2900, Double room $295 Cape Ann Coffees 86 Bass Ave. 978-282-1717, Mon.-Sat. 6 a.m.-1 p.m. Baked goods, sandwiches $3.50-$10.75 Mom's Kitchen 29 Commercial Ave. 978-282-4444, Thu.-Tue. 5 a.m.-noon. Eggs, griddle fare, and sandwiches $4-$13 Salted Cod Arthouse 53 Rocky Neck Ave. 978-282-0917, Open daily 11:30 a.m-10 p.m. Wine bar menu of small plates, soups, flatbreads, and panini $6-$16 Blue Collar Lobster Company at Gloucester House Restaurant 63 Rogers St. 978-283-1812, Open daily 11:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Chowder, snacks, and seafood $8-$42, lobster market price Dogtown Park at access lot on Dogtown Road off Cherry Lane and follow Dogtown Babson Boulder Trail Map: Rocky Neck Art Trail map: CAM Green 13 Poplar St. 978-283-0455, Open Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., free Maritime Gloucester 23 Harbor Loop 978-281-0470, Gallery and aquarium open Fri.-Mon. 10 a.m.-4 p.m., adults $15; seniors, military, students, teachers $10 David Lyon can be reached at
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
‘I'm not the hero': At 99, one of America's few living D-Day vets would rather be fishing
How do you carry a shard of history everybody wants a glimpse of, a memory everyone craves? Edward Sandy and his friend Spero Mihilas shared one such memory but bore it differently. Friends since their Depression-era childhood in upstate New York, they enlisted together in the Navy in 1943, Sandy at just 17. A year later — June 6, 1944 — they found themselves on the same gunner boat off the coast of Normandy, France. Shells exploded around them. Nazi gunfire pounded from the shoreline. It was D-Day, one of the 20th century's most famous battles, history's largest amphibious invasion. With an assault wave of 160,000 Allied soldiers, the Battle of Normandy has been memorialized in countless books and movies. To the soldiers, it was a mess of sea spray, confusion and slaughter. Theirs seemed a suicidal mission — the two friends and their crew were assigned to run a converted landing craft up and down the shoreline, their job to draw enemy fire away from troops making landfall. Mihilas would later recall their commanding officers 'informed us we'd be slaughtered." But they survived unscathed. After the famous ground invasion broke through, marking the beginning of the end of the war, their role in the initial assault wave turned into a weeks-long rescue mission, one that left their decks drenched with the blood of wounded comrades they shuttled from shore. In the decades to come the two men would remain friends, each finding their way in later years to Florida. But they would treat their shared experience differently. Whereas Mihilas would aerate it with discussion and recollection, Sandy would keep it close, demurring on details, leaning into understatement. 'It didn't look too good, believe me,' he says now of the battlefield that day. That reluctance held true even when he and his friend would meet, Sandy traveling north from his home in Lantana to visit his old friend, now deceased, in Winter Park. 'That's all he'd talk about would be the war,' Sandy recalls now. 'He'd say, 'Sandy, we were lucky.' ' D-DAY: Veteran lost leg but not spirit on fateful 1944 day Lucky they certainly were. Sandy finished a three-year tour of duty, went home and started a life and family as nations rose and fell. Eighty-one years later, here he is on the cusp of a century of life, sitting in a Tex-Mex restaurant in Lantana waiting to place his order. The 99-year-old can do fewer things these days. He loves fishing but his balance isn't what it once was. That and swollen feet make getting in and out of boats difficult. Mostly he and his son watch fishing shows on TV. He doesn't talk much about the war now. Not that he ever did if he could avoid it. 'I don't know,' he says. 'It's just a feeling in me. I just don't like it.' But you can get him talking about fishing. About the snakehead fish and clown knifefish he caught last summer on Lake Ida in Delray Beach, an increasingly rare boating excursion to celebrate his 99th birthday. His son thinks he may now hold the record of oldest person to catch each one. Sandy's face brightens, too, when the conversation switches from war to what followed. When his three years in the Navy ended, he returned to his home in Amsterdam, New York, a small city 32 miles northwest of Albany. D-DAY: Palm Beach County remembers He doesn't hold back talking about how he met his wife, Barbara, now 90. It was a buddy who summoned him one day to come out and meet her. 'He says, 'Ed, you've got to come to the bowling alley,' " he recalls. " 'This girl, she's something. You gotta meet her.' ' 'Boy, he was right,' he says. 'She was nice. And we hit it off together.' WORLD WAR II: Christmas dinner 1943: WWII Navy vet cooked all night for 8,000 sailors ... 'A lot of guys weren't going to be around the next year' They married in 1959 and honeymooned in Miami. Thirteen years and three kids later, they moved to Palm Beach County. Sandy got a job with the county government's traffic engineering department, striping roadways. They bought a house with a pool on 57th Avenue in Greenacres. 'It worked out perfect,' he said. 'Everything just clicked just like that. So I figured we moved at the right time.' He loved the warm weather, raised his family, retired from the county at 62 and never looked back. A long, rich life followed, but memories of D-Day are always there. D-DAY: The men on the beach remember Yet those frightening days along the Normandy beaches are what people push for a glimpse of. Not just the names and dates — the sensations, that brush with the sweep of history. It's not that he refuses to discuss it. In February he and the family drove down to Sunrise, where he was honored at a Florida Panthers hockey game. The stadium played a prerecorded interview with him on the Jumbotron, where he gamely summarized his experience. 'We were on a gunboat. We were patrolling the shore,' he said in the video. 'I helped protect the men on the beach.' 'A bomb went over our bow and another bomb went over our stern,' he recalled. 'We were very lucky we didn't get hit.' He brought down the house with his go-to line about confidence in victory that day: 'We knew we were going to do it. We're Americans.' 'I'm not the hero,' he was quick to add. 'The heroes are the ones that are left there.' From a seat in the arena, he waved to acknowledge the crowd's applause, all smiles. Sandy's son, Mark, a Navy veteran himself, said his father's reservedness is borne from his awareness that so many others paid such a steep price. It's estimated some 4,400 Allied soldiers died on D-Day, including 2,500 Americans. 'He's lucky that he's here, is the way that I think he looks at it,' he said. 'And he doesn't really want to talk about it because there were a lot of people lost during that time. He's just fortunate that he came back. And he's really humble about that.' There are fewer and fewer World War II veterans still living. Of the 16 million Americans who served during the war, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated in January that just 66,000 were still alive. Of the 73,000 American soldiers who fought in the Battle of Normandy, it's likely just a few hundred remain. Sandy's 100th birthday comes in July. To celebrate, his son Mark hopes to take him out boating again. If he can document his father catching another snakehead or clownknife fish, maybe he'll set a new record, on the day of his centennial no less. Now that would be something to talk about. Andrew Marra is a reporter at The Palm Beach Post. Reach him at amarra@ This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Navy vet Edward Sandy, 99, of Lantana, survived D-Day
Chicago Tribune
30-05-2025
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Penny for your thoughts as coin heads to the great piggy bank in the sky; ‘There's a certain nostalgia about it'
Check under the couch cushions and dig through your coat pockets because the era of America's one-cent coin, colloquially known as the penny, is coming to a close. The Treasury Department recently confirmed production of the penny will end next year, almost 240 years after the first U.S. pennies were minted. Few are decrying the move, perhaps a sign of its long overdue retirement. It turns out that pennies are more expensive to mint than they're actually worth, and there have been calls for their demise going back decades. The saying 'a penny for your thoughts,' which traces its origins to the 16th century — if adjusted for inflation from 1909 when the first modern American penny was minted — would be closer to two quarters, although no one is paying that kind of money for thoughts these days. The penny is not the first coin to go to the great piggy bank in the sky. Among the discontinued is the half-cent coin, which ended production in 1857, and the two- and three-cent coins were stopped in 1873 and 1889, respectively. There was even a 20-cent coin, although it was only produced from 1875 to 1878. While there aren't many penny defenders calling for its continuation, there's still some nostalgia for the diminutive coin. Dan Smith, president of the Wauconda Township historical society, recalled collecting pennies during the summers of his childhood. They were the easiest, or more accurately cheapest, coins to collect for a young boy, he said. Smith talked about his summers in the late '50s and early '60s, riding his bike to the bank, buying $50 worth of pennies and taking them home in a big bag. 'I could barely steer my bike holding the stupid thing,' he said. He'd go through the thousands of coins, pulling out the ones he wanted for his collection, replacing them with less-interesting pennies and returning the bag to the bank. Back then, Smith said, you could still find 'Indian head' pennies, which had been produced from 1858 to 1909 and featured Lady Liberty in a Native American headdress. Several of the Depression-era coins were also very rare, as was a variation of the 1960 penny with a small '6' that was later redesigned to avoid confusion with a zero. 'You could buy these little folders, and they would have a little slot for each year,' he said. 'The 1960 small-date penny, somewhere in this room, I probably have a roll of those.' But the rarest of all was the 1909-S VDB Abraham Lincoln penny, the first year the president's face appeared on the one-cent coin. 'S' was for San Francisco, where it was minted, and 'VDB' were the initials of the designer, Victor David Brenner. This specific design, with Brenner's initials on the back, was only produced for a few days, and relatively few of these pennies were minted. Carola Frydman, a professor of finance at Northwestern University, said the whole point of money is to more easily facilitate transactions, something the penny has increasingly failed to do. 'Civilizations before that were something close to barter, and that makes transactions really difficult,' Frydman said. At one point, even salt was used as currency. Gold, silver and other metal coins were used because their material was considered intrinsically valuable. But while metal coins were more convenient than bartering, they were limited by the ability to mine precious metals. 'So, through time, we came to trust our government to issue 'fiat money,'' Frydman said. 'These are pieces of paper that don't really have any intrinsic value on their own, but we trust the U.S. government in keeping the value of these pieces of paper.' Coins are a 'remnant of that long history,' she said. Today, most people use credit and debit cards or digital wallets, and physical cash in general is experiencing a decline in use. Coins, and pennies especially, are bulky and can be 'annoying.' And, as inflation reduces their purchasing power, certain denominations of coins become more and more pointless to carry around. A receipt in the collection of the Raupp Museum in Buffalo Grove shows just how far the penny has fallen. On June 25, 1920, someone bought two packages of yeast from the general store, Firnbach & Raupp, for 6 cents. Debbie Fandrei, the museum's curator, said local farmers could even pay with eggs. It was 'a reminder that how we pay for things continues to change … even how we value some things continues to change.' Fandrei, who often works with young children at the museum, noted how even as times change and objects disappear from use, language can remain the same. 'Even the first, second and third graders I work with get what 'a penny for your thoughts' means, even if they've never had to count out pennies,' she said. 'It's kind of fascinating how something will stay in the language, even after the physical thing itself has left.' But the penny will likely go the way of other items that were once ubiquitous in American life, as Fandrei has seen in her line of work. She recalled a presentation showing an elementary class an old camera. When the kids asked how it worked, Fandrei explained by putting film into the camera. 'Twenty-six faces turned to me and said, 'What's film?'' Fandrei said. 'And I thought … 'Wow I feel old.'' Another example was bottle caps. Few of the children knew how to use a bottle opener, since they are used to screw-off caps. These were minor instances, she said, but still gave her pause. 'Nothing is the end of the world or anything,' Fandrei said. 'But … you stop for a moment when you have to explain something that used to not really be a thing you had to think about.' Although he still uses coins regularly, Smith wasn't particularly torn up by the news of the penny's upcoming demise. Billions have been minted every year, meaning they'll be around 'somewhere' for a long time, from old coin jars to piggy banks, he said. 'I've been thinking for years that it should go away,' Smith said. 'I probably regret when they stopped making the half-dollar more than I care about the penny.' It's a sentiment many today share. The penny can become 'just an annoyance' in the modern era, Smith said. But he still picks up every penny he sees on the ground. 'It's the coin collector in me,' Smit said. 'It might be valuable. It never is, but it might be. There's a certain nostalgia about it.'
Time Magazine
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Audra McDonald Is Our Greatest Living Stage Actor
If you happen to take your eyes off the stage during the first few minutes of Gypsy on Broadway, and turn instead to the aisle, you'll see a woman standing alone in the dark. She's in a velvet coat, holding a small dog, her face contorted into a grimace of ambition so fierce it looks something like rage, her eyes focused on the children dancing onstage as her hands twitch to the beat of the music. At first, nobody notices her, even though she is Audra McDonald, arguably the greatest living stage actor, even though she is already in character as Mama Rose, the most famous and reviled stage mother in musical theater. Then, she calls out her first line ('Sing out, Louise!') and every head turns in unison. She is the person they have come to see, and she had been standing there next to them all along. 'Rose snuck in,' she tells me, leaning back on a cushioned chair in her dressing room, four hours before curtain. Her hair, prepped for her wig, is tucked under a baseball cap, and she is wearing comfy clothes before getting into costume. 'When all the rest of the mothers have been kicked out, she snuck in, went in front, checked out what was going on. She's already miles ahead when the show starts.' The same could be said, in some sense, of McDonald. After rumors of her casting spread last year— 'You know, people talk, people talk,' she said —the announcement was met with excitement and anticipation. And since the show opened in December, she's been garnering widespread praise, with at least one critic having a 'spiritual epiphany.' 'When you talk about Greta Garbo, you think of that face. When you think about Ethel Merman, you hear that voice,' says Christine Baranski, who worked with McDonald on The Good Fight and The Gilded Age. 'With Audra, it's that lustrous presence.' Gypsy is a musical fable that follows Mama Rose's relentless pursuit of fame for her daughters throughout Depression-era America, resulting in her losing one, June, altogether and pushing the other, Louise, to become the burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee. It's a show about the American Dream, or, more precisely, it's a show about a mother's American Dream, one that for most of history could be expressed only through her children. The show, with its famed music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is frequently referred to as the King Lear of Broadway, and Mama Rose is one of the meatiest roles available to a performer. 'This is the Shakespeare of a musical theater woman's career,' says Norm Lewis, who co-starred with McDonald in The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, for which she won her fifth Tony. 'This is the pinnacle.' She's been played by luminaries like Ethel Merman, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters, Angela Lansbury, and Patti LuPone in the past, but until now, Mama Rose had never been played on Broadway by a Black actor. If anybody was going to do it, it was going to be McDonald. (LuPone's representative said the actor was "going to pass" on commenting for this story.) McDonald is like the Meryl Streep of theater, except McDonald has more Tonys than Streep has Oscars. McDonald holds the record for most Tonys ever won by a performer, and is the only person to have a Tony in all four acting categories. And when her 11th nomination was announced on May 1, she officially became the most Tony-nominated performer in history, at just 54 years old. And yet McDonald's record-breaking performance comes at a unique moment for American theater. More and more audiences seem to be coming to Broadway to see shows and actors they recognize from their screens. The biggest shows are still the old standbys— Wicked, The Lion King —and some of the buzziest productions boast Hollywood names. Even as McDonald's Mama Rose puts theatergoers in seats— Gypsy took in a respectable $1,891,769 in its highest-grossing week in January—it's still the TV and movie stars who are bringing the big money to Broadway. Othello, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, raked in $2,818,297 during a week in previews, making it the top-grossing play in Broadway history, only to be topped by George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, which in May became the first Broadway show to exceed $4 million in a week. Glengarry Glen Ross, featuring Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk, also crossed the $2 million mark. All of this makes McDonald's dominance even more remarkable; at a time when theater seems like it's being consumed by celebrity, her career represents a commitment to the old-fashioned principles of artistry. 'She has some ability to access the rawest and most visceral emotional life and continue to sing,' says Diane Paulus, who directed her in The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess. 'That's what's mind-blowing.' McDonald can walk down the street without being recognized, and she's mostly able to live her life without being accosted by fans. When audiences arrive at the Majestic Theatre, they're not coming to see her because she's famous, they're not there to take a photo or breathe the same air as a movie star; they're there to witness her raw talent. 'It's not, Oh, let's look at this perfect object,' says Gypsy director George C. Wolfe, who also directed McDonald in Shuffle Along as well as the movie Rustin. Her talent 'makes an audience feel compelled to become vulnerable in the presence of her character's vulnerability.' Sitting in her dressing room surrounded by four different bouquets, including roses from Sunset Boulevard 's Nicole Scherzinger, widely assumed to be her main competition at the Tonys on June 8, I ask McDonald: What is talent? Is it inspiration? Is it 10,000 hours of practice? Is it, as entrepreneurs like to say, just hard work? She pauses for a second, thinking. 'I think it's an open channel connection to the divine, whatever the divine means to you,' she says quietly, preserving her voice. 'Something coming through, that energy, that source, God, whatever you call it. It's an open channel connection to that. Just a turnpike, no roads in the way.' Which is why this show has been marketed by only two words, telling you everything you need to know: 'Audra/Gypsy.' Musical theater's greatest performer taking on musical theater's greatest role. McDonald has been singing and dancing onstage since she was 9. She was born in West Germany, where her father was serving in the military, but raised in Fresno, Calif., in the 1970s. Her father had been a high school band director before becoming associate superintendent of the Fresno school district, and her mother, an administrator at California State University, sang in the church choir. Her childhood home had both a piano and a jazz organ. 'Being musical and having musicality was just what everybody did in my family,' she says. McDonald didn't realize she was special until her father noticed that she sang louder than the other kids in the junior choir. 'One day after church, my mom and my dad had me matching pitches,' she recalls. 'They were whispering to each other. I remember thinking, What is this all about?' McDonald had been diagnosed as a hyperactive kid, she says, 'and they were looking for ways to channel my energy.' Her parents had just seen a show at the Fresno Dinner Theater, which had a junior company that performed before the main show. Once she made the cut, she did Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, even Gypsy, playing one of the children in the little skit that opens the show (McDonald did not actually see the entire show when she was first in it as a child; the kids got to go home early). But when she was offered a role playing a servant girl, her parents forced her to decline. At the time, she was devastated; looking back, however, she thinks their insistence was a gift. They worried that playing that part would have taught her, 'Well, I can only play servants and I can only play enslaved people.' Instead, refusing that role set her up for a lifetime of auditioning for interesting parts, 'even though I didn't necessarily look the way people think I should look.' If she wasn't cast, it wouldn't be because she didn't try out. 'That was instilled in me at a very early age, to not be the one to cut myself off from these roles.' McDonald trained in classical music at Juilliard, which she recalls as an imperfect fit; in retrospect, she says, she should have studied drama. For a period after she graduated, McDonald struggled to get roles. She was told to make herself look as light as possible when she auditioned to play Julie in Show Boat, so 'I had all this white makeup on me, to try to lighten my face up.' She auditioned for the ensemble of Beauty and the Beast and didn't get the part. Her first big role was Carrie in the 1994 revival of Carousel. She was 23. It was one of the first times that a Black actor was cast in a classic musical-theater role that had traditionally been seen as white. 'It was just this huge thing, just mind-blowing for a lot of people,' she says. 'Some people thought it was wrong and historically incorrect. And everybody's always going to have an opinion, especially when it's classics.' She won her first Tony for that role. In the years since, colorblind casting has become far more normalized. 'Now I just don't think it's thought of as such a big deal,' she says. Even though this production of Gypsy stars not only a Black Mama Rose but also Black daughters—making this a show about a Black family seeking vaudeville fame in the 1930s—McDonald frequently points out that not a single line has been changed from the original show. Wolfe thinks that the 'boundary-breaking' nature of McDonald's performance is the least interesting thing about Gypsy. 'It shrinks the conversation,' he says. 'Because the wonder is the talent, the wonder is the gift, the wonder is how hard she works. To discuss her exclusively within a parameter of race, or how she's breaking through Broadway, that has more to say about Broadway than it has to say about Audra McDonald.' But 30 years after Carousel, the conversation has not entirely moved on. 'A talent as rare as Audra McDonald shouldn't play a Black Rose. She should just play Rose,' wrote columnist John McWhorter in the New York Times, adding that a Black woman seeking Shirley Temple–style stardom for her Black daughters would be 'a delusion so quixotic that it would have to be the story's central tragedy.' After seeing her performance, McWhorter wrote a whole new piece: 'I've Changed My Mind. Audra McDonald Was Right.' Let me tell you about the time I acted with Audra McDonald. Well, first let me clarify. I was a student intern on The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess in the summer of 2011, and McDonald was the star. One of the other actors twisted her ankle during blocking, so for a week of rehearsals, I stood onstage and did the injured cast member's physical movements while she sat in the wings, icing her ankle, saying her lines, and singing her songs. At one point, my character was supposed to give a drink of water to McDonald's Bess. We didn't have props yet, so I pretended to hand McDonald a glass the way a toddler might present an imaginary cup at a tea party. She took it, and drank. She drank the water as if it were a full gulp of cold water on a hot day, as if she could see the droplets spilling down the side of the non-glass that I sloppily handed her, the glass that she invented. Then she wiped her chin, where the imaginary water had spilled. To show up and work like this every rehearsal, every performance, every day, McDonald has become an emotional athlete. 'She's a marathon runner.' says Baranski. 'She's a Navy SEAL.' McDonald arrives at least three hours before every show. She gets into her wig and makeup, stretches, and does her vocal warm-ups. Then, a half hour before the show begins, she needs total quiet. She asks that nobody speak to her unless it's an emergency. 'It's almost like there's a bomb ... those things that implode before they explode? That's me,' she says. 'I'm clearing the way for me to go on her journey.' (In the middle of all this, she also has to rub a pepperoni stick all over her hands, which helps keep the little dog in check onstage.) Then, five minutes before curtain, 'I'm a little bit like a restless horse,' she says, banging on her knee in a galloping beat, like, 'Let's go.' And indeed McDonald's career has been nonstop, if not always a straight line. Two years after Carousel she won another Tony, for her performance in Master Class. A few years later she won her third, for Ragtime. By that point, she was one of only a handful of actors in history to win three Tonys in five years; she was 27. Five years later, she won again, for A Raisin in the Sun, and earned an Emmy nomination for her role in the 2008 TV adaptation. Still, she says, her onstage acclaim did not necessarily translate to roles beyond Broadway. 'People only see our successes,' she says. She was trying to break into television, but 'I was banging my head up against the wall.' There were 'years and years where I couldn't book a thing,' she says. 'I couldn't book a commercial.' Finally, in 2007, as she was in the middle of a divorce from her first husband, she was cast as fertility specialist Naomi Bennett in Private Practice, Shonda Rhimes' spin-off of Grey's Anatomy. She commuted to L.A. for years, not wanting to uproot her young daughter Zoe from her home in New York. But eventually it became too much; she asked Rhimes to write her gracefully out of the show, so she could be back east for Zoe's teenage years. It was soon after McDonald returned from L.A. that she took on the part of Bess. That role demonstrated the lengths she would go to to bring a character to life. She would repeatedly go back to the original texts, insisting her character have a scar on her face because that's how she was described in the novel that inspired the play that inspired the opera. She interviewed sex workers and drug addicts in order to inform her emotional understanding of the role. Even months after the critics had come and gone, she was still doing more research to deepen her connection to Bess. One day, well after the show had opened, Paulus visited her backstage. 'She was like, 'I just watched this documentary,'' Paulus recalls. 'We'd done a run at American Repertory Theater, we'd done a run on Broadway, and she's still searching, she's still learning.' Two years later, she played Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill (Tony No. 6) and was nominated for an Emmy for her performance in the TV broadcast. (She has one Emmy for hosting a PBS special as well as two Grammys, so she needs only an Oscar to complete her EGOT.) When she took a role in Shuffle Along in 2016, however, McDonald's physically taxing career crashed against her family life. By then McDonald was married again, to Broadway actor Will Swenson, but she was surprised to learn during rehearsals that she was pregnant again at 45. It was a complicated pregnancy, full of swelling and water in the knees at a moment when she had to do a lot of high-energy dancing. One night, while she was singing her big number, she started to hemorrhage onstage. 'I felt it happen. I felt that gush,' she told me when I interviewed her in 2023. 'And I thought, 'I just lost my baby, and I'm still singing.'' It turned out McDonald did not lose her pregnancy that night; her younger daughter Sally is now 8. But after experiencing a second medical event onstage and leaving mid-performance to go to the hospital, she did have to back out of Shuffle Along. When the show closed shortly afterward, her pregnancy was blamed. That experience, she says, taught her about the pressures women face while trying to balance motherhood with a career in the theater. 'It was very interesting to have people in the business come up to me afterwards and say things like, 'Oh, wow, your baby literally stopped that show,'' she recalls. 'That was really difficult and unnecessary.' 'It's so hard to have the kind of career Audra had and to have a marriage and a family,' says Baranski. 'She's the total human being and the total performer. Often one thing suffers because of the other, but she brings it all together.' In many ways, McDonald has lived Mama Rose's dream. Rose is a woman who swallowed her own aspirations and put them into her girls, trying to save her daughters from a life where they 'cook and clean and sit and die,' as Rose puts it. 'People were always referring to Rose as some monster,' McDonald says. 'I think she's not a monster.' McDonald doesn't need her audiences to like Rose, but she needs them to understand her. 'I think she's a woman with very few options, big ambitions, big dreams, big trauma that she's trying to run from,' she says. 'She is trying, and she's not succeeding.' I ask McDonald if the show had made her think differently about her own girls. 'So interesting having one that's 8 and one that's 24,' she says. 'And when I started this show, it was before the election, and where are we now?' She does what can only be described as a full-body shudder. Sally wants to be a veterinarian or an astronaut or a tennis star, depending on the day. Zoe works at a theater and is playing bass for a new musical. 'I want happiness and fulfillment and health for them. I want them to be able to be free, to be who they are, to express that without fear of persecution,' she says. 'Then the other dream is to recognize and respect all people and all different cultures and ways of being and ways of expressing and ways of living and ways of existing, and they do.' Then she exhales a long breath. 'It's a weird time.' Performances of Gypsy began less than three weeks after the 2024 election, which not only dashed the dreams of those who hoped to elect the first Black woman President but also marked a culmination of a cultural backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion. Since then, President Trump has taken over as chair of the Kennedy Center, where McDonald has performed on multiple occasions, and his Administration has slashed millions of dollars of arts funding, with National Endowment for the Arts grants being summarily canceled. I ask McDonald how she's staying sane through all of this. 'I don't know that I am,' she says. She flexes her fingers as if she's making and unmaking a fist. It's clear she has thoughts—a lot of them—but she's weighing what to share. After a long silence, she says there's only one way through the madness: 'Let art bring people back to their humanity.' McDonald has been deliberate about using her stature to create more opportunities for other Black performers; she co-founded Black Theatre United after George Floyd's murder to combat systemic racism in commercial theater. But now, she's using her politics to fuel her performance. 'Night after night, the show has to feel fresh. So sometimes you have to find new veins to open,' she says. 'Post-election, I didn't have to search as hard for the veins. They were raw and coming right up.' There's a moment at the end of the show when Rose, rejected by her children, finally comes to terms with her thwarted ambitions for herself. She is the stage mother, and not the star, because she 'was born too soon and started too late.' She sings in a frenzy, her face streaked with tears, as her lips quiver and her hands reach up spread-fingered toward a future she never got a chance to grasp: 'When is it my turn?' And you can see it, in this sweating, crying, grasping moment: the clear turnpike, the open channel to the divine. Normally, McDonald doesn't like to know who is in the audience. But on the night former Vice President Kamala Harris came to see the show in February, somebody let it slip. That night, when she sang those words—'When is it my turn?'—it was about so much more than one stage mother's vaudeville ambitions. McDonald has based her Rose on her aunts, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, and whenever she sings this final song, 'I always feel them coming up.' But the night Harris was in the audience was different. 'I felt like I had roots shooting all the way down to the center of the earth, and then just shooting all the way up through my head,' as if she were channeling 'every Black woman that's ever lived,' she says. 'That's what it felt like to me that night that she was there.' Given all of her accomplishments, it's reasonable to wonder where she goes from here. How does one push past the pinnacle? For McDonald, though, it's hard to look beyond Gypsy. She will return on the third season of The Gilded Age in late June, and is thinking of starting a concert tour soon, but the Broadway run was recently extended through October, and she has no plans to leave. And if she breaks her own record at the Tonys? McDonald would be honored, she says, but the awards are not the point. 'They don't change your life per se,' she says. 'They change people's perception of you, people's expectations of you.' When I ask her what she means, her face starts to transform into a Greek chorus of envy and concern. ''Well, you've got a Tony, you must be something!' Or: 'You've got a Tony, and you didn't get nominated this time, so now you're a loser!' Or: 'Are you OK? Oh, God, you didn't win, oh God!'' Her face returns to normal. 'That's all being thrown on you: it's perception and expectation,' she says. 'It's an incredible honor, but it's almost like you have nothing to do with you actually winning a Tony. You can do your work, and that's it. All I can do is do my work.'
