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The former ‘West Wing’ actress has recorded a song called ‘Little Pieces’ inspired by Netflix’s hit web television series ‘Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.’
Apr 12, 2020
AceShowbiz – Singer/actress Kristin Chenoweth has taken on the role of “Tiger King” ‘s Carole Baskin for a humorous new song.
“Big Fish” composer Andrew Lippa came up with the idea to turn Netflix’s hit docu-series, “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness”, into a musical and began tweeting about the proposed project in late March 2020.
“I’m making the musical of ‘Tiger King’,” he posted, after binge-watching the popular show. “Don’t try to stop me. Don’t tell me you have the rights. You don’t. I will crush it.”
Lippa had been joking at the time, but the viral tweet caught the attention of Kurt Deutsch of Ghostlight Records, who is now helping him bring the idea to fruition.
However, instead of a traditional show, the musician tells the New York Post he’s brought together around 42 different artists to write and create original tunes all inspired by true crime tale “Tiger King”, which focuses on incarcerated Oklahoma zoo boss Joe Exotic and his bitter rival Baskin, who runs a big cat rescue facility in the state.
The first song is “Little Pieces”, featuring Chenoweth as animal rights activist Baskin, who sings about chopping up her husband, multi-millionaire Jack ‘Don’ Lewis, and feeding him to her big cats – referencing one theory regarding his disappearance in August 1997. He was declared legally dead in 2002 although no one has ever been charged with his murder.
Lippa reveals Chenoweth jumped at the parody opportunity and she’s since recorded the song in isolation during the ongoing coronavirus lockdown, and has even filmed an accompanying music video on her iPhone.
Alerting fans to the track’s release on Friday, April 10, 2020, she tweeted, “Tiger cubs, the song is here! Find it on SoundCloud. Video coming next week! #LittlePieces @lippaofficial.”
Follow-up tunes are due to be released randomly over the coming weeks, with Lippa hoping to drop two promos next week.
And he may even have the chance to turn it into a TV feature.
He shared with the Post, “I’ve already had a producer friend from Hollywood call me and say, ‘Hey, I think Netflix would want to partner with you on this!'”
Netflix officials have yet to comment.
Chenoweth isn’t the only star obsessed with “Tiger King” and Baskin – “Saturday Night Live” comedienne Kate McKinnon is already attached to play the activist in an upcoming TV series based on the podcast which originally chronicled Exotic’s role in a murder-for-hire plot.
Meanwhile, Kevin Bacon and Wendi McLendon-Covey are odds makers’ favourites to play Exotic and Baskin in the inevitable film adaptation of the smash hit streaming show.You can share this post!
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Eleven years after her death, the disco legend’s family has combed through her possessions, deciding to sell many of her glittering dresses, manuscripts and paintings.For nearly a decade after Donna Summer’s death in 2012, her home in Nashville remained like a shrine to the Queen of Disco’s decades-long music career.Beaded gowns that she had worn onstage remained tucked away along with designer pumps in the upstairs closet; ephemera such as an annotated album cover design for “She Works Hard for the Money” were stored downstairs; and in the basement, there was an accumulation of brightly colored paintings, awards and gold records.Never eager to talk about death, Summer — who died of lung cancer at 63 — had not given directions for what should be done with her possessions, her husband, Bruce Sudano, said recently. It was only in the past few years that Summer’s family was ready to fully comb through her belongings at the Nashville home, many of which will go up for sale at Christie’s next month, the auction house announced Friday.“You’d go into these spaces and it would be almost a time capsule of your life,” said Brooklyn Sudano, one of Summer’s three daughters.One of the items up for sale is a silver goblet that Summer often had onstage with her, filled with caffeine-free Pepsi. Brooklyn Sudano remembered that when she and one of her sisters were on tour with their mother in the 1990s, one of their jobs would be to stir the soda inside the goblet to get rid of any bubbles. (“While she’s singing she can’t be burping,” she explained.)The singer drank flat, caffeine-free Pepsi from this silver goblet during performances, her family said. Christie’s estimates that the cup will sell for between $400 and $600.Courtesy of Christie’sA versatile singer-songwriter whose music spanned funk, dance, rock and gospel, Summer shot to fame in 1975 with the erotic extended cut of “Love to Love You Baby,” followed by the pioneering electronic song “I Feel Love,” whose pulsating club beat can be heard in Beyoncé’s “Summer Renaissance.”The announcement by Christie’s comes shortly before HBO’s release on Saturday of a new family-backed biographical documentary, directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano. Chronicling Summer’s rise from a cast member in a German production of “Hair” to an international superstar, the film, called “Love to Love You, Donna Summer,” is as much about her personal life as her career, discussing her struggles with depression, physical abuse by a boyfriend, and her chapter as a born-again Christian.The auction includes glamorous possessions and others that are more mundane. On the glamorous end: a glittering blue and green dress Summer wore in the music video for her 1983 song “Unconditional Love,” a rhinestone-studded dress and bolero jacket that she wore at a concert in 1995, and a collection of the diva’s sunglasses.As for the mundane — but perhaps intriguing to the most devoted of fans — the sale includes unworn shoes and a dozen unused Louis Vuitton towels.“There are people in the world who love her,” said Bruce Sudano, who is in charge of caring for her estate. “It felt like we can’t just hoard all of this stuff for ourselves.”An early draft of Donna Summer’s 1977 song “Now I Need You,” written by the singer on hotel stationery.Courtesy of Christie’sSummer’s rhinestone-spotted evening dress, worn onstage in 1995, is estimated to sell for between $1,500 and $2,500.Courtesy of Christie’sThe online sale, which Christie’s expects to garner about $200,000 to $300,000, begins on June 15. A portion of the proceeds from the sale will go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Save the Music Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation, the auction house said.One item, a poster for a 1998 concert supporting the nonprofit Gay Men’s Health Crisis, gestures to the history of Summer’s at times strained relationship with L.G.B.T.Q. fans, many of whom boycotted her music in the ’80s after they had helped to fuel its rise.The documentary briefly addresses that history, with Summer’s husband recounting how an off-the-cuff comment onstage — “God didn’t make Adam and Steve, he made Adam and Eve,” he recalled her saying — deeply hurt many gay fans. Summer worked to repair her relationship with the fan base, especially after New York magazine wrote that she had described the AIDS crisis as a “divine ruling” on gay people, a report she fiercely denied and ultimately sued over.The sale also includes about 15 paintings and manuscripts with scrawled lyrics, including for the 1977 song “Now I Need You,” written on stationery from a hotel in Munich, as well as edits in pencil to the lyrics for the hit “On the Radio.”Brooklyn Sudano scrutinized documents like those while piecing together the HBO film, which she said bolstered her belief that her mother was not a pop star engineered by outside forces, but rather an artist who was deeply involved in creating the hits that made her famous.“People just saw her as this persona,” she said. “I don’t think that they truly understood that she was an artist and had an active role in creating the Donna Summer that people knew.” More

“Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” which she sang with the Les Brown band, celebrated DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941. She also sang on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows.”Betty Bonney was already a veteran big-band vocalist at 17 when she joined Les Brown and His Orchestra in 1941 — in time to sing the praises of the New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio as he was racking up his major-league-record 56-game hitting streak.While performing that summer at a club in Armonk, N.Y., in Westchester County, the band “got caught up in the streak,” Mr. Brown told Newsday in 1990, and “would announce it from the bandstand every night if Joe had gotten another hit, or if he was coming to bat late in the game still without a hit.”As DiMaggio piled up hits — from mid-May to mid-July — a New York City disc jockey, Alan Courtney, and the band’s arranger, Ben Homer, wrote a jaunty tune, “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” which Ms. Bonney sang in her smooth, elegant style at the Armonk club while band members goofed around with baseball gloves, bats and caps, Mr. Brown said.The song was also heard regularly on the band’s radio show and released in September as a 78 r.p.m. record; according to Billboard magazine, it was the 93rd-best-selling single of 1941.The Les Brown band’s 78 r.p.m. recording of “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” was released in September 1941, two months after DiMaggio’s record-setting 56-game hitting streak ended.Diamond Images/Getty ImagesThe song starts off with Ms. Bonney asking, “Hello, Joe, whaddaya know?” to which the clarinetist Ben Most, playing the part of DiMaggio, replies, “We need a hit, so here I go.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The Beach Boys mastermind has been the subject of pop scholarship and major boxed sets, but some corners of his oeuvre remain unreleased.Though Brian Wilson was one of pop’s most studied artists, he largely remained an enigma. The Beach Boys leader, whose death at 82 was announced this week, made music for the masses with an artisan’s eye for detail. While his biography was well known, questions about what drove him to the top of the charts — and ultimately deep into darkness — could never definitively be answered.Since the start of the CD era, Wilson’s legacy has been burnished by a series of deep-dive archival efforts, including the 1993 “Good Vibrations” boxed set, the revelatory “Pet Sounds Sessions” collection from 1996, a series of early 2000s reissues focused on the band’s Brother label years, and ultimately the holy grail: the release of his abandoned mid-60s masterwork, “Smile,” in 2011.“Everything Brian created is worth hearing and it all has a kind of historical value in terms of understanding his life,” said David Leaf, the Beach Boys historian who published “Smile: The Rise, Fall & Resurrection of Brian Wilson” this spring.In more recent years, that effort has continued with sets focused on the Beach Boys’ overlooked and often deceptively strange 1970s work. “These projects continue to come out with all this new and unheard material,” said the author Peter Ames Carlin, who wrote a 2006 biography of Wilson, “Catch a Wave.” “It’s a testament to just how creative and prolific Brian was — despite the many ups and downs of his life.”Even with the consistent release of music from the vaults, there are fascinating corners of Wilson’s oeuvre that have yet to see the light of day. Here’s a rundown.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The rapper’s “Utopia,” his first album since his Astroworld Festival in Houston turned tragic in 2021, opens with the equivalent of 496,000 sales in the United States.Almost two years ago, the career of the rap star Travis Scott had seemed in doubt after the catastrophe of his Astroworld Festival in Houston, where 10 people were crushed to death and hundreds more were injured.The authorities investigated Scott’s role, but in June prosecutors announced that a grand jury had declined to indict Scott and two festival officials. A number of civil lawsuits against Scott and festival organizers, however, remain pending.That cloud was no deterrent to Scott’s fans, who have sent the rapper’s latest album, “Utopia,” straight to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. It had the equivalent of 496,000 sales in the United States, including 331 million streams and 252,000 copies sold as complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. That was by far the biggest opening for any hip-hop album this year.Scott gave an album-release concert on Monday at the Circus Maximus in Rome, which featured a surprise guest: Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who was making his first live appearance after he made a series of antisemitic remarks last fall. Those incidents resulted in his being largely exiled from the music business, and his lucrative fashion partnerships with Adidas and Balenciaga were canceled.When Scott released his last album, “Astroworld,” in 2018, he was one of the music world’s kings of “bundling” — selling fans an album that came with concert tickets or, particularly in Scott’s case, merchandise like T-shirts, key chains and hats. Industry complaints that the practice was distorting the charts grew loud enough that in 2020 Billboard largely ceased counting bundles on its charts. But fans kept buying music-plus-collectibles packages, and three months ago Billboard tweaked its rules once again, allowing what it calls “fan packs”: physical copies of an album with a single merchandise item.Scott’s “Utopia” was released in a variety of collectible CD and vinyl variants, including 15 deluxe boxed sets and what Billboard deemed two compliant fan packs (a CD or vinyl LP that came with a single item of branded merchandise). Of the 252,000 copies “Utopia” sold in album form, 111,000 were digital downloads, 63,000 were CDs and 79,000 were vinyl LPs, which Billboard said is the biggest week of vinyl sales for any R&B or hip-hop album since at least 1991.Also this week, Post Malone opens at No. 2 with “Austin,” which had the equivalent of 113,000 sales, including 101 million streams. Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” holds at No. 3, the “Barbie” soundtrack is No. 4 and Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” is No. 5.On the Hot 100 singles chart, Wallen’s “Last Night” returns to No. 1 for a 15th time, while Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which rode a wave of controversy and media coverage to the top spot for a single week, falls to No. 21 with big drops in streaming and download sales. More
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