Aurelia Butler

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    in Music

    Barbra Streisand on the Duets That Define Her: ‘I Like Drama’

    With a new album due next week that pairs her with Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Laufey, Sam Smith and more, the singer looks back at her prized collaborations.To Barbra Streisand, a duet isn’t just a song. “It’s a dramatic process,” she said. “It’s wondering who is this guy in the song? Who is this girl? What’s happening with them?”Figuring that out plays straight into Streisand’s core identity as an artist. “I’m an actress first,” she added. “I like drama.”Small wonder she has performed character-driven duets so often, so creatively and with such commercial success. In October 1963, following the release of Streisand’s debut album, Judy Garland invited her to appear in an episode of her TV show; their joint performance all but anointed the younger as her vocal heir.In the decades since, many of her highest-charting songs have been duets, starting in 1978 with Neil Diamond on their death-of-a-love ballad, “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” followed the next year by her diva-off with Donna Summer on “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough).” Both shot straight to No. 1. In the early 1980s, she scored two Top 10 Billboard hits with Barry Gibb, chased by a dalliance with Bryan AdamsIn 2014, Streisand issued an entire album of double billings titled “Partners,” which teamed her with stars from the quick (John Mayer on “Come Rain or Come Shine”) to the dead (Elvis Presley via a vocal sample from the singer’s 1956 recording of “Love Me Tender”). Both that album, and its follow-up, “Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway,” scaled Billboard’s peak.Next week, Streisand, 83, will release a sequel, “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two,” featuring contemporaries of different musical sensibilities, like Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan, as well as younger voices including Hozier and Sam Smith.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

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Movies

    In a New Documentary, the Deaf Actress Marlee Matlin Talks About Prejudice

    In a new documentary, the actress talks about the prejudice and loneliness she faced after becoming the rare Hollywood star who is deaf.Actors in documentaries about their own lives rarely — perhaps never — speak with the kind of candor that Marlee Matlin brings to Shoshannah Stern’s new film “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” (in theaters). This kind of project all too often results in a cagey puff piece, lots of warmed-over memories accented by one mildly surprising revelation, which ensures the movie will make headlines.Not this film. From the start, Matlin speaks with an unvarnished frankness about the loneliness and prejudice she encountered when she burst into public consciousness in “Children of a Lesser God,” for which she won the best actress Oscar in 1987. For 35 years, she was the only deaf performer with an Academy Award — a record finally broken in 2022, when Troy Kotsur won for “CODA,” in which he co-starred with Matlin. Now, she says, she isn’t alone anymore.But the path to this point was littered with frustrations in a world that still treats deaf people as second-class citizens. Matlin talks about how solitary she often felt, set apart not just from the hearing world but at times from the deaf one, too. She speaks, with nuance but also pain, of her relationship with her “Children of a Lesser God” co-star William Hurt, who was 16 years older and, she says, abusive at times. (Hurt died in 2022. In 2009, he issued a public apology “for any pain I caused.”) She also addresses the clear anti-deaf bias that surfaces in the news media — demonstrated, pointedly, by archival clips of interviewers saying offensive things — and how it shaped her addiction struggles as well as the way she presented herself in the years following her Oscar win.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 ‘Boots on the Ground’ Two-Stepped Onto Everyone’s Summer Playlist

    Black Southern line dance culture, and a co-sign from Beyoncé, has helped to popularize the song and its fan-snapping moves.Wagener, S.C., is home to a population of 631, a proud history of asparagus crops and now an unlikely dance phenomenon.To write “Boots on the Ground,” the stomping, midtempo anthem with a wailing chorus, also known as “Where Them Fans At?,” the singer 803Fresh, born Douglas Furtick, lifted a bit of vernacular from the dancers who attend trail rides in the area. Those rides — part horsemanship display, part social gathering — frequently culminate in field parties, where line dancers and steppers show off choreographed moves to Southern soul and country anthems.“I heard a lot of the steppers: They were like, ‘Hey, we got boots on the ground tonight,’” 803Fresh said, describing how they would hype up a trail ride to friends and neighbors. The song’s central query was a genuine one. At one outing, he saw steppers wielding fans and tried to buy one — to no avail. Writing the lyrics, he said, he did not yet fully understand the significance of the fans that were ubiquitous.“It’s a functional piece that’s now being used as part of a cultural statement but it’s always been with us historically,” said DaLyah Jones, a historian and cultural critic who has studied Black Southern arts. She cited their use as a fashionable accessory carried to church, in queer and ballroom culture, and as a functional way to beat the heat at these outdoor gatherings. Items such as napkins and handkerchiefs have also been used as fans and an extension of the dancing.803Fresh performing “Boots on the Ground” at a Juneteenth event in Lancaster, S.C.Nora Williams for The New York TimesSince the release of “Boots on the Ground” in December, the song has steadily spread in an unusual way: Its accompanying line dance has made it a sensation both of social media and the I.R.L. gatherings where a community of Black Southerners could care less about outside trends. It has traveled beyond field dances to TikTok and back out into the world, most notably landing on the stage of Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” tour, where the pop superstar performs part of the line dance during a section of her show.

    @demkuntryfolks Okayyy okayyy, I can get Jiggy with this 🪭🪭🪭🐎 #trailridersoftiktok #linedance #backyard #cowgirls #newlinedance #georgia #linedancing #southcarolina #northcarolina ♬ original sound – Djpayme 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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    in Movies

    William Cran, ‘Frontline’ Documentarian, Is Dead at 79

    Producing or directing, he made more than 50 films over 50 years, including a series on the English language and an exploration of J. Edgar Hoover’s secret life.William Cran, an Emmy-winning master of the television documentary whose expansive body of work, primarily for the BBC and the PBS program “Frontline,” delved into complex subjects like the history of the English language and the private life of the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, died on June 4 in London. He was 79.His wife, Vicki Barker-Cran, said cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease. He died in a hospital.Mr. Cran produced more than 50 documentaries over 50 years and directed many of them.He began his career with the BBC, but he mostly worked as an independent producer, toggling between jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.He was most closely associated with “Frontline,” for which he produced 20 documentaries on a wide range of subjects — some historical, like the four-part series “From Jesus to Christ” (1998) and “The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover” (1993), and some focused on current events, like “Who’s Afraid of Rupert Murdoch” (1995).Some of Mr. Cran’s documentaries were historical, like the four-part series “From Jesus to Christ” (1998).PBSHe won a slew of honors, including four Emmys, four duPont-Columbia University awards, two Peabodys and an Overseas Press Club Award.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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    ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Review: Singing, Slinging and Slashing

    Beyond the somewhat silly premise of this Netflix animated film is a charming, funny and artfully punchy original universe.Lest you roll your eyes and think of it as a four-quadrant-friendlier version of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” “KPop Demon Hunters” immediately establishes its premise, getting any prospective scoffing out of the way.For generations, a voice-over intro explains, girl groups have used their popular songs to secretly trap hordes of demons underground and keep the world safe. The latest group on their trail? Huntrix, a K-pop girl band that, in its fight against the sinister Gwi-ma (Lee Byung-hun) and his demons, is close to completing the Golden Honmoon, a protective barrier that will permanently keep evil forces at bay. But the girl group soon faces its toughest challenge yet: a demon boy band.With that somewhat silly logline behind us, what we’ll find in this Netflix animated film, directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, is an original universe that is charming, funny and artfully punchy.It’s a Sony Pictures Animation film that shares a kind of lineage with the studio’s recent hit “Spider-Verse” franchise that is most apparent in the similar visual style. But otherwise what it borrows mostly is a more holistic and technical sense of the cinematic, a philosophy of approach that is rare in big-budget animation films. The action sequences are fluid and immersive, the art is frequently striking and the music (catchy, if formulaic earworms) is a properly wielded and dynamic storytelling tool.And as for the cheesy girl group vs. boy band story, Kang and Appelhans have a sly sense of humor about it all, too; the movie is funniest when it pokes at pop culture that is highly manufactured, from K-pop to K-dramas to mass-produced singing competitions — the very things the film itself would never stoop to.Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Review: ‘The Comet/Poppea’ Merges Opera’s Past and Present

    A Monteverdi masterpiece and a new work by George Lewis are played simultaneously in an American Modern Opera Company production at Lincoln Center.When you enter the David H. Koch Theater for “The Comet/Poppea,” you are directed not into the auditorium but through some passageways and onto the stage. It’s a rare perspective to be facing a hall full of empty seats, with the delightful, rebellious undercurrent of being where you’re not supposed to be.Being where you’re not supposed to be is one of the few threads tying together the two operas that are played more or less simultaneously over the following 90 minutes. Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” (1643) charts the improbable climb of Nero’s mistress to the throne of the Roman Empire. George Lewis’s “The Comet” (2024), set about a century ago, imagines a Black man who finds himself in a once segregated, now abandoned space after an apocalyptic event.The idea of intermingling these very different works came from the director Yuval Sharon, who is always cooking up half-mad ideas like this, and the American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC, a collective exploring its capacious vision of the art form over the next month during a residency at Lincoln Center.The audience for “The Comet/Poppea,” which opened on Wednesday and runs through Saturday, sits in two sections facing each other across the stage. Between them is a large circular platform that has been divided in two. One side is the realistic, amber-lit restaurant of “The Comet”; the other, where “Poppea” plays, is a heavenly vision of a pristinely white Roman bath, the walls encrusted with white plaster flowers.This turntable is constantly rotating, in an effort to convey a sense of “a visual and aural spiral,” as Sharon writes in a program note. But while “The Comet/Poppea” tries to conjure a cyclone, whipping together past and present, Black and white, high class and low, naturalism and stylization, it ends up feeling more like a trudge.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