(theatrical music) - Production of "Applause" on WVIZ/PBS is made possible by grants from The John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation, The Stroud Family Trust, The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(theatrical music) - Hello I'm David C. Barnett and welcome to "Applause".

After a long intermission, Broadway theater is coming back to Cleveland.

Just announced is the lineup for the 2021 and 2022 Key Bank Broadway series at Playhouse Square.

Recently, I spoke with Playhouse Square president and CEO Gina Vernaci about the upcoming season, a season that's scheduled to open to full house seating.

Right now, the state will only allow 25% of indoor seating to be used.

- Saying you take away capacity but you still have to have social distancing.

- The same week that governor Mike DeWine eased some seating capacity restrictions on the outdoor venues, Playhouse Square announced plans to host full capacity shows starting in November.

- Well, we're talking about an event that's occurring six months from now.

The industry, the touring industry is feeling confident that with the trends and vaccinations the anticipation is that it's going to, you know, that we're coming back and we can come back in this fashion.

And if we need to make adjustments, we'll do that.

- Playhouse Square aims to fill those seats by presenting a season of established crowd pleasers.

Three of the five productions that are scheduled are based on popular films, "Pretty Woman" "Frozen" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" which was originally a bestselling novel by Harper Lee.

Rounding out the theatrical slate is the musical, "The Prom" which got its own film version last year and "Ain't Too Proud" focusing on the history and the hits of Motown favorites "The Temptations".

The goal is to take theater off of TV screens and put it back on stage.

- We are reopening the theaters coming out of the exact situation that had occurred when the theaters were built 100 years ago when we were coming out of a global pandemic, a world war on top of it, a financial collapse on top of that and people were lined up around the block to get together.

- But that was then.

Verneci said her organization has spent the past year refurbishing the physical plan of this century's old theaters and developing reopening plans based on the advice of university hospitals and the Cleveland clinic.

- We have updated our HPAC systems.

We are enhancing our cleaning protocols and you know, hand sanitizer.

Presently, you know, there was a mask mandate in place that will be strictly enforced.

- There are only five shows being offered this coming season.

There are more available to stage but Verneci says she's being strategic.

- You know, you just need to take it and spread it out a little bit longer because it will just take a while for-- also for Broadway to get up and running and to be producing the shows that are going to go out on the road.

What you don't wanna do is start out with seven shows and find out that you have burned through all the titles you know, in a season.

- So a number of previously booked fan favorites are being rescheduled a year or two down the line.

- And the question that I do often I'm asked is, you know will "Hamilton" return?

The answer is it will be coming back for the rest of our lives.

So the opportunity to see "Hamilton" again at Playhouse Square, of course is going to occur.

And again, we're just putting that all back in the schedule again strategically about how we run a center how we help create audiences and critical mass for downtown.

All of that is a part of our nonprofit mission as well.

- Verneci acknowledges that all of this could change but standing still and waiting isn't an option.

- We really do see light at the end of the tunnel.

We know that there may be some adjustments that we need to make along the way but for a long time, the light wasn't there.

But now it actually is.

(funky music) - Recently, the Cleveland Foundation announced the winners of the 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards that honor the works of authors who make important contributions to understanding racism and diversity.

The five members of the selection committee led by chairman Henry Louis Gates Jr made the announcement.

- My day job, I'm a professor at Harvard and I host the PBS series "Finding Your Roots" but I'm especially honored to be the chair of the jury for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

And here are my fellow jurors presenting this year's winners.

- My name is Rita Dove and I am the Henry Heinz professor of Creative Writing at the university of Virginia.

It is my great pleasure and honor to announce this year's winner in poetry for the Anisfield-Wolf Award, Victoria Chang for her book "Obit".

I find myself haunted by this book and I want to go back and read it over and over again.

It made me feel like a stronger person.

It made me want to be a stronger person.

And that to me is worth all the prizes in the world.

(mellow music) - I'm Joyce Carol Oates.

I'm a professor at Princeton University and I've also taught recently at NYU and at Rutgers.

I've been a juror with the wonderful, distinguished Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for several years.

And today I'm very happy to present our Fiction Award winner, James McBride's, "Deacon King Kong".

It's a brilliantly imagined larger than life tragic comic epic of intertwined lives in a vividly rendered neighborhood in Brooklyn in the 1960s.

Brash, riotous, hyper-energetic this spiritually entertaining novel is yet suffused with some of the tenderness of McBride's memoir, "The Color of Water" which received an Anisfield-Wolf Non-Fiction Award several years ago.

"Deacon King Kong" is a wild ride in which joy and terror are mixed as well as skepticism and optimism.

I particularly admire the authors refusal to end in disorder and tragedy to defiantly reverse expectations at the conclusion.

In all this is a novel that you will love and respect.

- My name is Steven Pinker.

I am a cognitive scientist and a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and a juror for the Anisfield-Wolf Book prizes in the Literature of Diversity.

And I am very pleased to announce one of the winners of the 2021 prize in non-fiction "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War" by Vincent Brown.

"Tacky's Revolt" has been called a geopolitical thriller.

It is about a remarkable and important event in the history of the world, largely unknown.

And I have to confess that I was completely ignorant of it until I picked up this book of a major slave revolt involved with enslaved peoples in Jamaica in 1760.

It is a lively and well-written book.

On behalf of my fellow jurors, I wanted to recognize Vincent Brown for this achievement and to also bring this event to the world's attention rather than allowing it to lie in obscurity.

- Hello, I'm Simon Scharma.

I'm professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, the author of far too many books and the presenter of far too many television programs and a bit of a journalist too.

But I'm also someone whose life can be transformed by a great book, which is the reason why I'm so thrilled to announce the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for non-fiction to Natasha Trethewey for her extraordinary book "Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir".

It has immense emotional power delivered economically.

When you read this book, you'll never forget the story and you'll come out differently.

I guarantee you that when you put the book down.

(mellow music) - I'm delighted that novelist and critic, Samuel R. Delaney is our new Lifetime Achievement winner.

The jury unanimously agreed that this groundbreaking science fiction writer belongs in the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards cannon.

Readers will know him from "Babel-17" "The Einstein Intersection" and "Dhalgren" not to mention his indelible East village based memoir, "The Motion of Light in Water".

Please join us in October to celebrate each of these towering authors.

Details to follow.

(mellow music) - Artists and gallerist, Asia Hamilton photographs the places and people that surround her.

Based in Detroit, Michigan with her camera, she observes and records her city.

- Every human beings, they have a uniqueness about them that you can grasp with a photograph.

Photography saved my life.

It was exactly what I needed to do and what I was born to do.

I grew up on the Northwest side of Detroit.

Photography has been a way of being my therapy.

One of the things that I wanna talk about specifically is how mindful photography is and how it requires for you to take your thoughts and focus on something else.

And it was a time where my mother, she had gotten ill. She had a stroke and I was, you know, in extreme panic.

And, you know, I needed to take a walk.

And I was just walking around and, you know I saw the way this light was hitting the building and the textures on the building.

And I was like, "Oh my God, it's so beautiful."

And I had to take out my camera and started just taking pictures.

And it literally took me out of that element and had me focus on something else.

The meaning for the textures is just the history behind it.

You know, how did those textures come about?

What did those places look like beforehand?

And a lot of the portraiture and stuff that I shoot is a documentary of history.

It is like a way of just remembering a time.

And so those textures are bits and pieces of a time that has passed.

I love to take post candid photos.

There's always those instances of a glimpse of a person.

And a lot of times when I start to shoot I'm looking for that in-between just so that I can capture the real essence of a person.

There's a photo called "West Side".

I literally pulled up on these people.

There was a father and a son standing outside and it was the golden hour in photography.

The sun was shining and they looked-- it just looked beautiful.

I took a picture of them in the midst of asking them, "Can I take a photo?"

And I continued to photograph them a little bit more but it was that first shot that got it.

For a long time, I photographed a lot of nude women Black women specifically.

And it was because there really wasn't enough Black women being shown in a way that was artistic.

And I wanted to present them as beautiful in their body.

And that was a learning process for me because I had to become comfortable with myself.

The series of mixed media photographs that I did with merging the textures and the portraiture together was really embracing our history, our lineage how we go through life from beginning to end you know, those textures, all of that information in there in our being and how we interact with each other.

So there is a photo of a man and a woman.

They're like my grandparents.

Starting there at that unit was pretty much the head of the family.

We look to them for our wisdom.

And then I have another exact photo of a younger generation of a young boy and a young girl because that's our beginning, that's where our start is.

There's this one picture, it's just a bunch of kids on the playground.

And I was like, "Hey, y'all come together, get together.

Let me get a photo of you."

And the pose that they gave me was so fierce.

That's one of my favorite pictures.

You wanna be able to educate people with your work.

That doesn't always have to be in the form of, you know, a protest.

It can be in the form of just healing the people as is.

That's what I do.

I use it as a way to heal myself and whomever else that comes in contact with it.

Another thing that I've done is open up the Norwest Gallery of Art.

This is an opportunity for me to create a platform for artists who are emerging all the way up until strong professional artists that's been doing it for years.

It was really a matter of wanting to create a platform and space for people to exhibit and show their work, express themselves in a way that it's a safe space to just be yourself.

I love curating shows.

I like to get people to feel so it's a big part of my art.

You know, I come up with a concept or an idea and just push it to the limit.

I select the artists that I think would be able to convey that message in their medium.

And it's super exciting to me.

The gallery has definitely taken on its own life, you know and it is a necessary place for this neighborhood.

I show Detroit how Detroit performs.

When people come in here, they're smiling and they're like, "Oh my God, the energy here is so good."

And that's because I want you to know that I'm sharing a part of my love with you.

You know, this is my passion, this is my home so it's like me opening up my home to you.

- Coming up on the next "Applause" we're joined by Northeast Ohio, guitarist, Bobby Ferrazza who leads one of the top jazz schools in the world.

Also, we'll introduce you to an artist whose work expresses both the beauty and destruction of the environment.

And we'll explore the rich colors, shapes and textures of abstract artist, Brendan Spivey.

All this and more on the next round of "Applause".

Right now, we take a trip South to Florida to meet Arlo Haskell author of the book "The Jews of Key West".

We learn about his experience as a writer and listen to stories about the Jewish community in the Florida Keys.

- Jews headed many of the smuggling networks that emerged.

To the migrants whose lives were saved and families restored, these criminal organizations served a humanitarian purpose.

A migrant who followed this route later told his story under the fictitious name, Louis Kurland.

"We lay in the boat like herring in a barrel", Kurland said.

"It was very hot and the heat from our bodies made it hotter.

I am ready to go to hell if I have to.

It can not be any worse than that day in the boat."

(guitar playing) - We're here in Key West with the author, Arlo Haskell.

So tell us a little bit about how you evolved as a writer.

- I really came up as a poet and then about 10 years ago I had started to do a little bit of historical research looking into the kind of literary histories of writers who had spent time in Key West and learned that I kind of loved getting into archives.

In addition to being a writer, historian I'm the executive director of the Key West Literary Seminar.

I get to make sure that literary Key West is not just part of the past.

I also, I run a small press, Sand Paper Press and we publish poetry, a little bit of fiction.

I'm sort of always working on one book or another.

- Your latest book is called "The Jews of Key West: Smugglers, Cigar Makers and Revolutionaries".

Jews have thrived in this climate since the 1820s.

Even where they have been forgotten or where anonymity was essential to their survival Jews have shaped the island we know today.

Their history is the history of Key West.

I'm fascinated by untold histories and this book is full of that.

My first phase of research was kind of trying to fact check family stories like that.

- One of the things I found surprising and had no idea about was that Jews were part of the industry of cigars done here.

- The cigar industry is one of the more popular components of Key West history and it's always told as a Cuban story.

You know, it's certainly a big Cuban story but actually, in fact, the cigar industry in Key West was pioneered by Jewish manufacturers particularly a guy named Samuel Seidenberg who capitalized on a tariff structure that made it financially advantageous to produce cigars domestically in the United States rather than on the Island of Cuba.

- So, one of the main characters that features in your book is named Louis Fine.

- Louis Fine was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant.

And he was a real-- was a catalyst for the community.

He was not an ordained rabbi but he was the defacto rabbi for the community.

- So we're here in the Jewish section of the cemetery at Key West.

And this place sort of is one of the beginnings of organized Jewish life down here.

- This is the place that brings you the furthest back in time as far as a physical place you can visit.

- And in your research did you see a lot of these names popping up?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I would sometimes come here to-- as a research visit.

I found that it would help me, you know thinking about the people I was writing about.

- So around the same time as this was established was around when the first synagogue was established, right?

- That's right.

Yeah.

The cemetery was established in the 1890s and then in the first decade of the 1900s Louis Fine and others purchased a wood-frame building and established the first formal synagogue.

There's a restaurant there today called Sarabeth's and B'nai Zion is the temple that continues in Key West today on United States.

- And that's the one that opened in the late sixties.

(funky music) - Into this thriving, multicultural, multilingual community of Key West in the late 19th century comes a very pivotal figure in Cuban history, Jose Marti who was the one to kind of successfully crystallize the decades' long struggle for Cuban independence.

Jews like Louis Fine, they lent their support to the cause.

He carried this family legacy of having been-- his family having been persecuted by the Spanish during the acquisition.

What surprised me is how much that story and others had disappeared, even from oral history in Key West.

- Where can people find out more about "The Jews of Key West"?

- There's a website, jewsofkeywest.com.

And if you're interested in this history and interested in the book, you know, I would say go to your local bookstore or your local library and ask for a copy.

(funky music) - The exhibit, Anime Architecture presents Japanese animation before the digital era.

The show features drawings and paintings used to create remarkable animated films.

- I'm Carla Stansifer.

I'm the curator of Japanese art at The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens.

This is Anime Architecture.

(upbeat music) This exhibit features four films that came out between 1988 and 2004.

These films are all anime which is the Japanese animation process and they are all sci-fi and they all also encapsulate a realistic style.

So that's what each of the films have in common.

And, you know, anime is a multi-billion dollar business today.

(upbeat music) The original curator of the exhibition, Stefan Riekeles from Berlin, he started this project back in 2008 and he was fortunate enough to go into studios meet with the animators and look at some of their work.

And he was really interested in the process of anime making.

It's amazing.

You have hundreds of artists working together to create one film.

And he talks about how a lot of the artists were hesitant to put their art in frames and on the wall.

They didn't see it as art.

They saw it as just a small part of this whole production.

(upbeat music) The curator went with the backgrounds and not just the characters.

For example, in the Japanese anime process the voiceovers come last.

You know, in a Disney production, they come first but in Japan it's the opposite.

They have a much greater emphasis on the environment and movement.

"Ghost in the Shell" came out in 1995 and it's based on a very popular Manga series.

We really can't underestimate the importance of this film.

The people who created the matrix say flat out that this film inspired them.

And the entire film is about artificial intelligence in the future, about how this artificial intelligence interacts with the technology, with the machinery and really they're talking about what it means to be human.

For this film, we featured some of the hand drawings by Takeuchi Atsushi and then we have the paintings of Ogura Hiromasa, which actually appear in the film.

So you can see that development process how they go from the raw images and ideas into the more technical details and drawings and then the final product and the feel and the emotion that comes out.

It's almost as if the background and the environment is its own character in the film.

They really wanna emphasize that.

(upbeat music) We do have some photography as well.

And location photography was very important.

Remember, these artists were going for realism and the director, Oshii Mamoru, not only worked on anime but he also worked on live actions.

And he thought, "Well, why don't we do that for anime?"

And I love to point out this piece right here.

He'd snap this picture in a shop.

After he had gone in, his lens sort of clouded over it.

And then this is what his art team did with it.

And I love it because we're not just seeing a copy.

They're not copying what they saw.

They were inspired by this.

And you could see they added some signage, they added a building over here.

I also like to point out in this piece, again, it's a watercolor on paper by Ogura Hiromasa.

And this one would have been captured on film for the final product.

You see these dark colors here, it has this nice broody tone to it.

But when that transfers to film, a lot of that gets washed out but Ogura was a master at finding just the right mix to create these darker tones and still keep them vibrant.

This piece here is from the film "Patlabor" which came out in 1989.

And if you look very closely at this piece you'll see a few little bits of tape across the top and that's because there are actually three layers here.

Why would they do that?

Why would they go to all that trouble?

Well, in this particular scene, we have a flock of birds that flies through the frame and so we had to have space in between those buildings.

And they were moving at different camera speeds and how complicated it gets just for a flock of birds to fly across screen.

Around 1997, the anime industry moved to entirely digital productions from concept design through to the final piece was all digital.

And it was this great way, this great change that took over the studios, especially throughout Tokyo.

And today, there are only five studios left who can do hand drawn backgrounds.

- And that's it for today's show.

For more arts and culture programming go to arts.ideastream.com where you can check out our latest installation of "Equity and Art".

It's a series about the diverse community of artists working and making a living in Northeast Ohio, including photographer and Oberlin college Art professor Pipo Nguyen-duypeople and film casting director, Lillian Pyles.

I'm David C. Barnett.

Thanks for watching.

And I hope to see you next week for another round of "Applause".

(mellow music) (theatrical music) - Production of "Applause" on WVIZ/PBS is made possible by grants from The John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation, The Stroud Family Trust, The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.