TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2019 C1
NNEWS CRITICISM
3 ARTS, BRIEFLY
Lil Nas X breaks a Billboard
record at No. 1. BY BEN SISARIO
5 OPERA
A Korngold’s American debut,
at last.BY SETH COLTER WALLS
6 BOOK REVIEWFemale journalists
share experiences of
reporting in the Arab
world. BY DWIGHT GARNER
The pianist and composer, who helped UNESCO create International Jazz Day, is still making music at 79 and upholding
the spirit of jazz. He will perform at the Beacon Theater in New York on Thursday. PAGE 4.HERBIE HANCOCK: JAZZ AMBASSADOR
PHILIP CHEUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES‘I like to break rules.
I like to break convention.’WHEN IT COMESto joy in hip-hop, Chance
the Rapper has a stranglehold.
Rapping in a high-pitched ribbit, he has
become one of hip-hop’s signature stars of
the 2010s by enthusiastically following a
path others rarely even peek down: jubila-
tion, ecstasy, positivity, glee. It’s in his sub-
ject matter, and it’s in his delivery — an in-
defatigable belief in the power of positive
rapping.
Chance, 26, got married in March, and
large swaths of his new album, “The Big
Day,” are devoted to the joys of wedded life,
a topic that has made for very little worth-
while music. The pains of divorce, the
wounds of betrayal, the clouds of mistrust
— rich muses, all of them. But pure marital
bliss is challenging to render as richly tex-
tured.
In places here, Chance achieves that with
his musical selections; his palette is broad.
“I Got You (Always and Forever)” has the
swing of the early 1990s — Heavy D, the
“Living Single” theme song, and so on —
and Chance opens with an early Busta
JON CARAMANICA ALBUM REVIEW
Will Odes to Joy
Make Fans Happy?
Chance the Rapper
“The Big Day”CONTINUED ON PAGE C4
In a city that prides itself on both the
diversity of its population and its glob-
ally recognized cultural institutions,
there is a lopsided reality: While
about two-thirds of New Yorkers are
people of color, two-thirds of the peo-
ple who run its cultural institutions
are white.
This disparity is outlined in the re-
sults of a study, commissioned by the
administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio
and released Monday, that relies on a
survey of institutions that receive city
funding, including museums, the-
aters, zoos and botanical gardens.
The study, conducted from August
to October of 2018, looked at behe-
moths like Carnegie Hall and the Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art as well as
smaller organizations like the Staten
Island Historical Society. It found that
among the arts workers surveyed,
some groups historically discrimi-
nated against — including women (65
percent) and disabled people (8 per-
cent) — were actually overrepre-
sented. Gay, lesbian, bisexual or
queer individuals constituted 15 per-
cent of the work force.
But when it came to race, the study
found that people of color were signifi-
cantly underrepresented, especially
when looking at upper-level leader-
ship positions and board members.
After years spent measuring and
analyzing the problem, the city is now
asking organizations to work on fixing
it. In recent months, 33 cultural insti-
tutions on city-owned property sub-
mitted plans to boost diversity and in-
clusion among their staff and visitors;
if they failed to do so, the city warned,
their funding could be cut.
The plans were filled with organiza-
tional charts and multistep processes
for diversifying their employees and
making people of all backgrounds feel
comfortable visiting their sites.
“This is what our city looks like, and
this is what we should look like,” said
Shanta Thake, the senior director of
artistic programs at the Public The-
ater, which set a goal for its full-time
staff to be no more than 50 percent
white by 2023. (It’s currently 57 per-
cent white.)
But the question of accountability
remained: How far would the city go
to hold these groups to their plans?
The demographic survey, which
was completed by Southern Method-
ist University and largely funded by a
grant from Deutsche Bank, collected
information from employees and vol-
unteers at the 33 institutions on city-Seeking
Diversity,
Art World
Falls Short
A new study suggests New
York cultural organizations
must do much more.
By JULIA JACOBSCONTINUED ON PAGE C5STRATFORD, ONTARIO — The last time I saw
Dan Chameroy onstage, he was wearing
fishnet stockings, a backward bustier, a lacy
boa and not much else. That was a year ago,
when he played Frank N. Furter in the
Stratford Festival’s hit production of “The
Rocky Horror Show.”
This year I barely recognized him in two
new Stratford roles: Jackie Elliot, the coal
miner father of the title character in “Billy
Elliot,” and Orin Scrivello, the sadistic den-
tist in “Little Shop of Horrors.”
It may come as a surprise that Stratford
produces musicals; it was founded as the
Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Cana-
da in 1952 and still leans heavily bard-ward.
In a recent weeklong visit, I saw “Othello,”
“The Merry Wives of Windsor,” the rarely
performed “Henry VIII” and a new play,
“Mother’s Daughter,” in part inspired by the
stories of queens whom Shakespeare some-
how neglected.
But with “The Beggars Opera” in 1958
and “The Pirates of Penzance” in 1960, theJESSE GREEN CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Ballet and Bloodlust (And Shakespeare)
From left, Starr Domingue, André Morin and Vanessa Sears in “Little Shop of Horrors,”
one of the musicals being performed at the Stratford Festival.CHRIS YOUNG‘Billy Elliot’ and ‘Little Shop of
Horrors’ are the musicals atthe Stratford Festival.
CONTINUED ON PAGE C2