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My agent was like, “There’s this woman, Mira. She’s looking for this girl to play one of the leads in Mississippi Masala.” I knew Mira’s work from film school. I’d seen her documentaries and obviously Salaam Bombay! I auditioned, and the whole process was odd only because I didn’t have any money. [The audition] was in Soho in London. I didn’t have money to get back home. At that age, you don’t think about it. You’re just so excited. I think I went in to read two or three times. On the third time, Mira asked me to stay. I was a bit confused because she said, “It was so nice meeting you. Thank you so much. By the way, do you wanna have a drink later?” But the “by the way” didn’t sound like I was going to get the role. That was the time when I couldn’t afford to go home, so I waited four hours and then met her for the drink, and she was so beautiful. We sat down, and she just stared at me and … [Read more...] about Sarita Choudhury Answers Every Question We Have About

The Apollo’s digital auditions are just one way they’re upholding the theater’s traditions during the pandemic. On Thursday, June 4, postponed from June 1 due to the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, the Apollo kicked off Black Music Month with an emergency-relief benefit concert, “Let’s Stay (in) Together” to help fund the theater, as well as a new micro-grant initiative to help small businesses impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. “We knew it was important as an institution to show solidarity on Blackout Tuesday with our artists and the global community, and to use our platform to continue to help foster important dialogue across the country,” Forbes said in an email of their decision to postpone. The venue foresees an estimated loss of $4 million for the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2020, according to president and CEO Jonolle Procope. While the Apollo is still working on a reopen date, a short train ride away, the Met Opera has … [Read more...] about For the Apollo Theater, the Show Must Go On

Crowning Adele would turn out to be the theme of the night, as she swept Record, Song, and Album of the Year, among others. But her performance of “Fastlove” and the unimaginatively staged show-opening trip through the ages-old “Hello” offered proof that she’s a bit of a bore as a pop star in 2017 while revealing her as catnip for an Academy membership that seems to run more musically conservative than the general public. Beyoncé, on the other hand, arrived very pregnant and took the show by siege with a ten-minute arrangement of poetry, special effects, back-up dancers, and Lemonade ballads that solidified her guiding hand in the new ways people absorb event pop albums … only to get shut out of all the major categories. Adele herself could barely stand to accept the Album of the Year nod over Lemonade, and sobbed through her speech while Beyoncé cried gracefully in the front row, having lost in all the music categories she was nominated in … [Read more...] about The Grammys Got It Wrong, Again

So wildly popular that it was sometimes “stripped” across schedules, with two episodes airing back-to-back, the cheaply produced series was one of the most profitable for Fox, delivering millions of eyeballs and untold numbers of ad dollars. Throughout the decades, Cops was also a key component of American law enforcement’s manicured self-image. The show presented itself as an apolitical documentary record of What It’s Like for Police, assembled in the spirit of Sgt. Joe Friday, the uber-cop hero of Dragnet. But this presentation was loaded with its own, unremarked-upon assumptions. Chief among them was the idea that police are innately decent, disinterested, caring people who are mostly great at what they do, and screw up only because of unrelenting pressure and threat of death or injury, as well as the public’s inability to understand and respect how tough the job is (downsides that Cops tried to refute by consistently presenting citizens as irresistible … [Read more...] about Good Riddance to

But much of what made journalism attractive to newcomers in the age of Almost Famous has been co-opted or destroyed by a bunch of greedy men hiding out in the Hamptons. Here are just a few things that happen in Almost Famous that are more fantastical now than the notion of running through an empty Times Square: A male music journalist is extremely kind. (I know, #NotAllMaleMusicJournalists.) That male journalist achieves his dreams via hard work and gumption and honesty, rather than by asking his finance-bro dad to email one of his friends in publishing. A big-time editor takes a chance on a young, unknown writer, sight unseen. That writer is provided with structural support and a significant amount of editorial freedom. He is allowed to spend many months writing a single story, instead of juggling several pieces at once because of a rapacious global audience’s expectation for more content, accessible and updated 24/7, and for far less money. A strong emphasis is placed on … [Read more...] about The Bittersweet Experience of Watching