Aurelia Butler

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    Waiting for Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic Is Doing Fine

    Between music directors this season, the orchestra has been sounding fresh, engaged and more cohesive.The New York Philharmonic is flying free.Its former music director, Jaap van Zweden, left last summer. Its next, Gustavo Dudamel, is gradually deepening his commitment — including performances of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony at David Geffen Hall through Sunday — but doesn’t officially start until fall 2026.Those who follow orchestras tend to assume that their quality will dip without a devoted director to oversee things. Partly because of the myth of the indispensable, all-powerful maestro, it can be easy to fear that conductorless periods will be rudderless ones.That certainly hasn’t been the case this season at Geffen Hall. The Philharmonic has been sounding great: fresh, vital, engaged, more cohesive. The chilly blare that seemed to frost the hall’s acoustics when it reopened in 2022 after a renovation has warmed and softened.The most telling music-making of the year was in a program last month led by the Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer. The final hour of the concert was given over to a rare performance of Bartok’s fairy-tale ballet “The Wooden Prince,” a sprawling, instrument-packed score that swerves from candied to bombastic, from radiant expanses to driving dances. The orchestra rose to the occasion with playing that was nuanced and colorful, and in Mozart’s “Turkish” Violin Concerto, the ensemble matched Lisa Batiashvili’s sensual flair.But in a way, I was even more impressed by the opener: Mozart’s overture to “The Magic Flute,” a chestnut of the kind that is often passed over quickly in rehearsal. It glowed.The true test of a great orchestra — what reveals its base line standard — isn’t how it does in the big symphonies and premieres that steal the lion’s share of attention and applause. It’s how the group sounds in little repertory standards, and that “Magic Flute” overture may have been the most encouraging seven minutes of the season.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

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    Russell Brand Pleads Not Guilty to Rape and Sexual Assault Charges

    The comedian, actor and YouTuber is now scheduled to face a trial in June 2026.Russell Brand, the comedian, actor and conspiracy-minded YouTuber, appeared in a London courthouse on Friday and pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of rape and sexual assault.In a short hearing, Tony Baumgartner, the presiding judge, said that Mr. Brand would face a four-to-five-week trial starting on June 3, 2026. Britain’s judicial system has a backlog of cases, meaning there is often a delay between defendants entering a plea and standing trial.Mr. Brand, 49, is facing one charge of rape, one of oral rape, two counts of sexual assault and another of indecent assault.Those five charges involve four women. Prosecutors say the incidents occurred between 1999 and 2005, including one in which they claim Mr. Brand raped a woman in a hotel room during a political conference for the Labour Party.During the 10-minute hearing in a courthouse filled with tens of journalists, Mr. Brand, wearing a dark gray suit and striped shirt opened to reveal his chest, stood in a plexiglass box at the back of the courtroom and responded, “Not guilty,” when each of the charges was read out.Under British law, news media outlets are not allowed to identify anyone who makes sexual assault accusations unless the accuser chooses to waive the right to anonymity. Once criminal proceedings are underway, strict rules also prevent the reporting of information about the case that could prejudice a jury at trial.Before Friday’s hearing, Mr. Brand had strenuously denied all the charges. In April, he posted a video to his social media accounts in which he said that he had once been a “drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile,” but that he had “never engaged in nonconsensual activity.”Mr. Brand has been a star in Britain for decades and found fame with stand-up shows and as a TV and radio host for the BBC and MTV. After the period covered by the criminal charges, he gained a profile in the United States, too, when he starred in hit movies, including “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” in 2008. He was also briefly married to Katy Perry, the pop star.These days, Mr. Brand is best known as a politically charged YouTuber. He has over 6.7 million subscribers to his channel and over 11 million followers on X, where he posts videos that often touch on religion, conspiracy theories and conservative talking points. More

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    As ‘Pretty Little Baby’ Goes Viral, Connie Francis Is Joining TikTok

    With a forgotten song becoming an unlikely hit, the 87-year-old singer is happy to be back in the spotlight.Sixty-four years ago, Connie Francis recorded “Pretty Little Baby” as one of dozens of songs in a marathon recording session that yielded three albums within two weeks. It did not, at the time, feel like a song that had the makings of a hit, so it landed on the B-side of the 1962 single “I’m Gonna Be Warm This Winter” that was released in Britain. Since then, it was more or less overlooked.Then came TikTok and its canny ability to resurrect decades-old songs for a new generation.Over the last few weeks, “Pretty Little Baby” has been trending on the social media app — it has been featured as the sound in more than 600,000 TikTok posts and soared to top spots in Spotify’s Viral 50 global and U.S. lists — bolstered by celebrities and influencers, like Nara Smith, Kylie Jenner, and Kim Kardashian and her daughter North, who have posted videos of themselves lip-syncing to it.The ABBA singer Agnetha Fältskog used the song for a clip on TikTok in which she said Ms. Francis had long been her favorite singer. And the Broadway actress Gracie Lawrence, who is currently playing Ms. Francis in “Just in Time” — a play about Bobby Darin, Ms. Francis’s onetime romantic partner — also posted a video of herself lip-syncing to it, in her 1960s costume and hair.The song’s current popularity is an unexpected twist to Ms. Francis’s long and illustrious career. In 1960, she became the first female singer to top the Billboard Hot 100 and, by the time she was 26 years old, she had sold 42 million records and had two more singles top the Billboard charts. But this particular song, which she recorded in seven different languages, remained so obscure that Ms. Francis, 87, told People magazine that she had forgotten ever recording it.Amid the frenzy of the unexpected attention, Ms. Francis is trying to figure out how to turn this sudden attention into opportunities for herself. She and her publicist, Ron Roberts, enlisted Mr. Roberts’s son to help them set up a TikTok account for her and, in a phone interview on Thursday, she said she had been mulling the idea of emerging from retirement to do some kind of show in the next few months.This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.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

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    When the Whole Country Watched a Nuclear War Movie at Once

    The 1983 ABC movie “The Day After” was a landmark moment that proved contentious even before it aired, as a new documentary shows.In 1980, the year the new documentary “Television Event” (in theaters) opens, researchers found that about three-quarters of Americans believed there would be nuclear war in the next 10 years. Schoolchildren participated in evacuation drills. There were enough nuclear weapons in America and the Soviet Union to wipe out the world’s population many times over. And yet, as participants in the film repeatedly point out, for the most part people couldn’t bear to think about it. We find it hard to live with our own imminent destruction and also remember to take out the trash regularly.That knowledge, though, gave rise to “The Day After,” the controversial TV movie that aired on ABC in 1983 and was watched by more than 100 million people, about 67 percent of the American viewing public that evening. The film, shot in Lawrence, Kan., depicts the very real-feeling aftermath of a nuclear attack.The production and release were fraught. Some executives felt that TV wasn’t the place to scare people; there was a lot of strife behind the scenes. To tell the story of “The Day After,” the director, Jeff Daniels, weaves together copious behind-the-scenes production footage with contemporary interviews. The “Day After” director, Nicholas Meyer, still seems a little scarred by the experience. Brandon Stoddard, then president of ABC Motion Pictures, talks about conceiving the idea for a movie that “has meaning, that has import.” The more skeptical, practical Stu Samuels, then vice president of ABC Motion Pictures, speaks at length about the many challenges of getting this kind of movie shot and on the air, including run-ins with the network’s standards department. Edward Hume, who wrote “The Day After,” and Stephanie Austin, an associate producer, talk about the film, as does Ellen Anthony, who lived in Lawrence and played the youthful Joleen, a girl who must live in an underground bunker with her family.“Television Event” makes a very compelling case that “The Day After” was a groundbreaking cinematic achievement, even if it was made for the small screen. There were plenty of difficulties, both on the ground and in the edit room; there was network skepticism and even, eventually, some disapproval by the federal government. One flaw in documentaries of this sort can be a chorus of interviewees who all echo one another and seem basically in agreement, but that is not the case here: The subjects of “Television Event” often express skepticism or outright animosity toward one another, giving different versions of events and opinions about the process. That not only makes it a fascinating glimpse into this production, but reminds the audience how tricky it is to get anything made, let alone a movie like “The Day After.”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

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    The Best True Crime to Stream: Dramatizations That Deliver

    Across television, film and podcast, here are four picks that successfully give well-known true-crime stories the scripted treatment.Not long ago, comically bad re-enactments were the cornerstone of true-crime movies and TV shows. Despite their cheesiness, these staged scenes served a purpose: to bring scenarios to life, of course, but also to offer some relief from talking-head interviews and still shots of photographs and documents.But in the last decade or so, the number of true-crime stories that have received scripted treatment, often casting A-list actors, has exploded. It’s a phenomenon due in part to Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology series “American Crime Story” — which debuted in 2016 and has taken on the O.J. Simpson saga and the assassination of Gianni Versace — and more recently “Monster.”Coming this summer is a Paramount+ mini-series about the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the child beauty queen who was found strangled to death in her family’s Colorado home in 1996. It will star Melissa McCarthy and Clive Owen as JonBenet’s parents. And over at Hulu, a scripted series about the Murdaugh family murders is being developed. Like their predecessors, these series will most likely aim to hew closely to their stranger-than-fiction origins while giving the creators artistic license in how the cases are brought to life onscreen.Ahead of those, check out these four offerings that give such stories the dramatized treatment to great effect.Mini-Series“The Staircase”Few true-crime stories have held my attention over the years as this one about Michael Peterson, a North Carolina novelist and aspiring politician who was charged with the death of his wife, the telecom executive Kathleen Peterson. She was found crumpled and bleeding at the base of the staircase in their upscale Durham home in 2001.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

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    How Mia Threapleton Created Her Deadpan Nun in ‘The Phoenician Scheme’

    When Mia Threapleton learned that Wes Anderson wanted her to star in his next film, she did what any normal person would: She asked her agent to call the casting director back to make sure there had been no mistake, and then found a quiet spot on the train she was riding in, curled up and sobbed.“I couldn’t believe it,” the 24-year-old British actress said. In Anderson’s latest, “The Phoenician Scheme,” Threapleton plays Sister Liesl, a nun who is estranged from her father, the eccentric businessman Zsa-zsa (Benicio Del Toro). He wants to reconnect and make her his heir.Chic in a white sleeveless top, her long blond hair falling in loose waves around piercing blue eyes, Threapleton was preparing to head to the Cannes Film Festival, where “The Phoenician Scheme” premiered this month. The movie is by far her most prominent role to date — not that you would recognize her in it even if she were a familiar face.“It was a lot,” she said of the I-did-my-makeup-in-a-closet-and-cut-my-hair-with-garden-shears look: blunt brunette bob, garish turquoise eye shadow, bold red lip. But she trusted Anderson because she had long admired his work. She grew up with the director’s stop-motion “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” and his coming-of-age romance, “Moonrise Kingdom,” is a personal favorite.“I remember watching it and thinking, ‘I’d love to be able to do that,’ so then having this opportunity to do that was such a surreal experience,” said Threapleton, who, unlike Sister Liesl, laughs readily and occasionally breaks into a smile that plays up the likeness to her mother, the actress Kate Winslet.Threapleton as Sister Liesl in “The Phoenician Scheme.”TPS Productions/Focus FeaturesWe 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

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    ‘This House’: An Intimate, Intergenerational Opera Is Also a Family Affair

    Ricky Ian Gordon and Lynn Nottage tell the story of three generations in a Harlem home. Enter a second Nottage generation, her daughter, on the creative team.During the Covid pandemic, lockdowns made our homes seem like leading characters in our daily lives; those familiar confines became as much a presence in our experiences as any living creature. For the creative trio of the composer Ricky Ian Gordon and the librettists Lynn Nottage and Ruby Aiyo Gerber, that experience fueled “This House,” a new opera having its world premiere on Saturday at the Opera Theater of St. Louis. (It runs through June 29.)This project reunites Nottage and Gordon, who previously worked together on the chamber opera “Intimate Apparel,” a Metropolitan Opera commission that ran at the Lincoln Center Theater in 2022 after a pandemic delay.Gordon and Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, found they had a deep rapport. “The hardest thing when you’re collaborating is when you see different things,” Nottage said in a Zoom interview with the three creators. “I’ve been in collaborations where I see red, and then I realize, ‘Oh, my collaborator sees blue.’ So then how do we get to purple? That was not the case with Ricky. We had a shared vocabulary.”That common language expanded with the addition of a second librettist: Gerber, Nottage’s daughter, a writer and multimedia artist. The mother-daughter pairing seems particularly suited to “This House,” which explores the bonds and struggles of three generations of the Walker family in Harlem.(This House) ((Brad Bickhardt (Glenn) and Briana Hunter (Zoe) )))Eric WoolseyJustin Austin, left, and Kearstin Piper Brown in Gordon and Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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

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    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Ex-Employee, ‘Mia,’ Set to Testify of Sex Abuse

    Testifying under a pseudonym, the mogul’s former assistant is expected to describe allegations of sexual assault that prosecutors say amounted to forced labor. Mr. Combs denies coercing anyone into sex.A former personal assistant of Sean Combs who, prosecutors say, was sexually assaulted by her boss, is set to take the stand on Thursday at the music mogul’s sex trafficking and racketeering trial.Throughout the trial, the woman has been referred to by the pseudonym “Mia.” Prosecutors have previewed her testimony for jurors by saying that she would “tell you about the times that the defendant forced himself on her sexually, putting his hand up her dress, unzipping his pants and forcing her to perform oral sex, and sneaking into her bed to penetrate her against her will.”Previous witnesses have described Mia as part of Mr. Combs’s entourage and a friend of Casandra Ventura, the music mogul’s on-and-off girlfriend of 11 years whom he is charged with sex trafficking.Mr. Combs is not accused of sex trafficking Mia but of subjecting her to forced labor — including sexual activity — through violence and threats of serious harm. The forced labor allegation is part of a broader racketeering conspiracy charge that accuses Mr. Combs of directing a criminal enterprise that helped him commit crimes and cover them up over two decades.Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges against him. His lawyers have acknowledged that he was responsible for domestic violence, but they vehemently denied the existence of a criminal conspiracy, asserting that he was the head of entirely lawful businesses that had nothing to do with his private sex life. They have argued that the sex at issue in the case was entirely consensual.In the defense’s opening statement, Teny Geragos, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, previewed the upcoming cross-examination of Mia, which will surface messages she wrote to Mr. Combs throughout her employment in which Ms. Geragos said she expressed “unbelievable love” for him.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