Aurelia Butler

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    Review: The Tragic Story of ‘An American Soldier’ Comes Home

    An opera about Danny Chen, an Army private who died by suicide after experiencing racist hazing while serving, was performed in New York, his hometown.Thirteen years have passed since Danny Chen, an Army private from New York, killed himself while serving in Afghanistan after experiencing brutal hazing and racist taunts from fellow soldiers. “An American Soldier,” the opera based on his story, has been seen in Washington, D.C., and St. Louis.But when the work had its run in Missouri, in 2018, Huang Ruo, its composer, and David Henry Hwang, its librettist, promised Private Chen’s family that they would try to bring it home to the city where he was born and raised. This week, they succeeded, as “An American Soldier” was produced at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center — just a mile or so from Chinatown, where Private Chen grew up and where a stretch of Elizabeth Street was renamed Private Danny Chen Way in 2014.In Chay Yew’s clearheaded production, with an excellent cast, the touching opera had little trouble making its impact at the performance on Saturday evening. Huang and Hwang’s piece is a straightforward Chinese American family drama, but one with obvious, shameful resonances about the treatment of Asian people and other minorities in this country, and the limits on American ideals of the embrace of difference and easy assimilation.The piece opens on the court-martial of a brutal sergeant who was Private Chen’s chief antagonist. It then alternates between the courtroom and the chronological unfolding of Private Chen’s story, from the first glimmers of his idea to join the Army — an effort to prove that he was a “real American” — through the camaraderie of basic training, his endurance of racism at his next post and his nightmarish treatment once he reaches Afghanistan. His mother is a tender presence in her scenes at home with her beloved son, and a figure of fury and hurt during the court-martial, which resulted in the sergeant’s being found not guilty of the most serious charges.The version of “An American Soldier” that premiered at Washington National Opera in 2014 was a single act of just an hour. By 2018, at Opera Theater of Saint Louis, the piece had added an act and doubled in length, delving more deeply into Private Chen’s life beyond the account of the sergeant’s trial. With some tweaks, this is the work that was performed at the Perelman Center, in a version it commissioned with Boston Lyric Opera.Whether calmly undulating under an impassioned duet or anxiously sputtering as the plot darkens, Huang’s music tends to simmer out of the spotlight, allowing the storytelling to come to the fore. But there are some idiosyncratic touches in the score, like the almost ritualistic percussion hovering under some passages and the fractured trumpet — a kind of stifled fanfare — near the end, when there is an ironic choral paean to the American motto “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”).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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    Phil Wiggins, Virtuoso of the Blues Harmonica, Dies at 69

    First as half of the duo Cephas and Wiggins and later on his own, he was one of the best-known musicians playing the style known as the Piedmont blues.Phil Wiggins, a harmonica player of such range that he could make his instrument sound like a clarinet one minute, an accordion the next and then an entire percussion section — all in the service of the complex melodies and steady rhythms of the style known as the Piedmont blues — died on May 7 at his home in Takoma Park, Md. He was 69.His daughter Martha Wiggins said the cause was cancer.For much of his career, Mr. Wiggins was best known as half of the duo Cephas and Wiggins, in which he performed and recorded with the guitarist and singer John Cephas. The two were considered one of the country’s top Piedmont blues acts, and they toured regularly at home and abroad for over 30 years, until Mr. Cephas’s death in 2009.The Piedmont blues is distinct from its Delta and Chicago cousins in its relaxed yet complicated melodies and its insistent rhythms. Its influences include gospel, Appalachian folk and early country music.Mr. Cephas played his instrument with the sophisticated fingerpicking typical of Piedmont blues. Mr. Wiggins would wrap all manner of counterpoints around it, then burst out in a solo that could be aggressive or restrained, tight or relaxed.“The harmonica works the same way as your voice,” he told Blues Blast magazine in 2021. “You have an idea in your mind that you want to express, and it just comes out, the same way speaking happens. In a lot of ways, it still feels that intuitive to me, except that, for me, the harmonica works better than my voice!”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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    At the Cannes Film Festival, Discoveries From Andrea Arnold and Rungano Nyoni

    Though the history-inflected “Furiosa” and “Megalopolis” were the hottest tickets, films by Andrea Arnold and Rungano Nyoni proved to be discoveries.It must say something about the anxious state of the movie world that two of the hottest tickets at this year’s Cannes Film Festival draw inspiration from ancient Rome. In George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” Chris Hemsworth zips around a wasteland like a heavy-metal charioteer, while in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” Adam Driver plays a guy named Cesar. That each movie offers a vision of a culture in decline seems too on the nose for this festival, where attendees celebrate the art amid nervous chatter about the state of the industry.This year’s festival opened Tuesday under gray skies, as if nature itself were mirroring all the gloom and doom. Yet while the opening-night movie, the unfunny French comedy “The Second Act,” was a dud, the hourlong ceremony that preceded it was unexpectedly touching. The show’s focus on women that night was instructive, and it suggested that Cannes, a festival that has long promoted the cult of the male auteur, is trying to do a better job of righting a historical gender imbalance. Mind you, the number of female filmmakers who get a chance to strut the red carpet remains low: There are only four in the main competition.Louis Garrel, left, and Vincent Lindon in “The Second Act,” from Quentin Dupieux.Chi-Fou-Mi/Arte France CinémaYet things do seem better here, and at least the festival is keen to show its support for women filmmakers. During the ceremony, which was hosted by the French actress Camille Cottin (“Call My Agent”), an emotional Juliette Binoche presented Meryl Streep with an honorary Palme d’Or, and the festival went bonkers over Greta Gerwig. She’s heading this year’s competition jury, which includes two other women filmmakers: the Turkish screenwriter Ebru Ceylan and the Lebanese director Nadine Labaki. When it came time for Gerwig to appear, the festival played a highlight reel of her work and, in giant letters beamed on an even more giant screen, announced that she had “conquered the world in three films.”It was corny, but, reader, I teared up. Among other things, the love for Streep and Gerwig was a break from the drumbeat of bad news about the American movie business. Heading into 2023, Variety had predicted an “extremely bumpy” year for Hollywood; 12 months later, it changed the diagnosis to “rocky” and a conveniently concise headline explained why. “Strikes, Box-Office Bombs and ‘Huge Leadership Vacuum’: Hollywood Says Goodbye to Worst Year in a Generation.” Even Jerry Seinfeld, in an interview with GQ, said “the movie business is over.” I’d already booked my Cannes hotel and flight, so I went anyway.That’s because while the American entertainment business is in the midst of another of its recurrent crises, this hasn’t stopped artists around the world from making movies. The festival as well as several other programs outside the official selection are presenting more than 100 new movies this year from celebrated veterans and untested directors alike, some who may soon dazzle us. In other rooms in and around the Palais — the hulking center where I spend most of my time here sitting in the dark — an estimated 14,000 industry representatives, including buyers and sellers, have some 4,000 finished movies and projects on the table in what is the world’s biggest international film market.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 Man Who Made Roulette Into New York’s Music Lab

    Jim Staley has led the experimental venue since it began as a concert in his TriBeCa loft. After 45 years, he’s stepping down and looking back.Saturated in sunlight on a recent afternoon, the spacious TriBeCa loft that once housed Roulette somehow feels smaller than it looms in memory. For nearly 25 years, a stellar array of established and emerging composers, improvisers, electronic producers and choreographers held court in the long, tall main room. Visitors had to pass through a kitchen: a reminder that the loft was also the home of Jim Staley, the trombonist and composer who was a founder of Roulette.Unlike many similar experimental arts venues now lost to time, Roulette has thrived and grown, now occupying a 14,000-square-foot space in Downtown Brooklyn. But Staley, 73, who still lives in the TriBeCa loft, has decided that after 45 years of leading Roulette, the time has come to step away. When this season ends in June, he will give up his role as artistic director.It’s another evolution for a vital institution that has seen many. Roulette was established in Chicago in 1978 as a way for five recent University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduates, including Staley, to produce their own work. But the collaborative changed course after Staley, a well-traveled Army veteran, moved to New York.Joined by two other Roulette founders, the graphic artist Laurie Szujewska and the composer David Weinstein, Staley hosted a modest five-concert series at his loft in 1980. After that, “We got a lot of proposals,” Staley said. “And we just decided, let’s do ’em all. We ended up doing about 30 concerts in the fall.”Pursuing an aesthetic guided as much by John Coltrane as by John Cage, Roulette became a crucial laboratory for the downtown-music scene, providing artists like John Zorn, Shelley Hirsch, George Lewis, Ikue Mori and many more with space, resources and recorded documentation of their work. Those artists still perform at Roulette, forming an enduring community with newer generations whose development they helped to nurture.Zeena Parkins, the estimable harpist and composer, recalled starting there as a fledgling sound engineer in 1986, soaking up all the sounds on offer.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 a Tale of Migration Is Not Just Fiction

    The two teenagers on the screen trudging through the endless dunes of the Sahara on their way to Europe were actors. So were the fellow migrants tortured in a bloodstained Libyan prison.But to the young man watching the movie one recent evening in a suburb of Dakar, Senegal’s capital, the cinematic ordeal felt all too real. His two brothers had undertaken the same journey years ago.“This is why they refused to send me money to take that route,” said Ahmadou Diallo, 18, a street cleaner. “Because they had seen firsthand how dangerous it is.”Critics in the West have praised the film “Io Capitano” — nominated for the 2024 Academy Award for best international feature film — noting its visceral yet tender look at migration to Europe from Africa. It is now showing in African countries, and is hitting close to home in Senegal. That’s where the two main characters in the movie embark on an odyssey that epitomizes the dreams and hardships of countless more hoping to make it abroad.Last month, the film’s crew and its director, Matteo Garrone, took “Io Capitano” to a dozen places in Senegal where migration isn’t fiction. They screened it in youth centers, in schools, even on a basketball court turned outdoor movie theater in Guédiawaye, a suburb of Dakar, where Mr. Diallo and hundreds of others watched it at sunset on a big screen.Seydou Sarr, left, and Moustapha Fall, who play the lead roles in “Io Capitano,” in Guédiawaye, last month.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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    Dabney Coleman, Actor Audiences Loved to Hate, Is Dead at 92

    In movies like “9 to 5” and “Tootsie” and on TV shows like “Buffalo Bill,” he turned the portrayal of egomaniacal louts into a fine art.Dabney Coleman, an award-winning television and movie actor best known for his over-the-top portrayals of garrulous, egomaniacal characters, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 92.His daughter Quincy Coleman confirmed the death to The New York Times but did not cite the cause.Mr. Coleman was equally adept at comedy and drama, but he received his greatest acclaim for his comic work — notably in the 1980 movie “9 to 5,” in which he played a thoroughly despicable boss, and the 1983-84 NBC sitcom “Buffalo Bill,” in which he starred as the unscrupulous host of a television talk show in Buffalo.At a time when antiheroic leads, with the outsize exception of Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker, were a rarity on television comedies, Mr. Coleman’s distinctly unlikable Bill Bittinger on “Buffalo Bill” was an exception. A profile of Mr. Coleman in Rolling Stone called Bill “a rapscallion for our times, a playfully wicked combination of G. Gordon Liddy and Groucho Marx.” (“He has to do something terrible,” Bill’s station manager said of him in one episode. “It’s in his blood.”)Mr. Coleman’s manically acerbic performance was widely praised and gained him Emmy Award nominations as best actor in a comedy in 1983 and 1984. Reviewing “Buffalo Bill” in The Times, John J. O’Connor said Mr. Coleman “manages to bring an array of unexpected colors to his performance” and called him “the kind of gifted actor who always seems to be teetering on the verge of becoming a star.” But the ratings were disappointing, and “Buffalo Bill” ran for only 26 episodes.Mr. Coleman with his co-star Geena Davis in a scene from the 1983-84 NBC sitcom “Buffalo Bill,” in which he played the unscrupulous host of a television talk show in Buffalo.Frank Connor/Stampede Productions, via Everett CollectionMr. Coleman revisited the formula in 1987 with the ABC sitcom “The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story,” in which he played a similar character, this time an outspoken sportswriter for a struggling newspaper. He garnered another Emmy nomination for his performance and won a Golden Globe. But low ratings, this time combined with friction between Mr. Coleman and the producer Jay Tarses (who, with Tom Patchett, had created “Buffalo Bill”), led to its demise after just one 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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    How Big Is Taylor Swift?

    You might have heard: Taylor Swift cannot be stopped. Her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” sold 2.6 million copies in its opening week last month, earning Swift her eighth Billboard No. 1 album since 2020. At the Grammy Awards in February, she became the first artist to win album of the year for a […] More

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    Judge to Rule Next Week on Whether to Dismiss Alec Baldwin Case

    During a heated hearing, Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers claimed prosecutors had improperly presented evidence to the grand jury considering the fatal shooting on the set of “Rust.”A judge in New Mexico will rule next week on whether to dismiss the involuntary manslaughter indictment against Alec Baldwin in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the “Rust” film set, after she closely questioned the lead prosecutor on Friday about her handling of grand jury proceedings.Lawyers for Mr. Baldwin — who was rehearsing with an old-fashioned revolver on the set in 2021 when it fired a live bullet, killing the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins — had lodged numerous objections to how the case has been handled, calling the prosecution “an abuse of an innocent person whose rights have been trampled to the extreme.”The defense claimed at a hearing on Friday that the prosecution had not sufficiently shown the jurors evidence that could have supported Mr. Baldwin’s case. That included presenting witnesses who could have bolstered the defense’s contention that Mr. Baldwin had no reason to think that the gun was loaded with live ammunition and that actors are not responsible for gun safety on film sets.“The court can have no comfort in this indictment; it can have no comfort in the way it was procured,” a lawyer representing Mr. Baldwin, Alex Spiro, argued at the hearing, which took place virtually. “It cannot possibly believe it was fair and impartial.”Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers have assigned blame to the movie’s weapons specialist, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in a trial this year and sentenced to 18 months in prison, and to the movie’s first assistant director, Dave Halls, who has acknowledged that he failed to properly inspect the gun that day and took a plea deal.Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer of the First Judicial District Courthouse in Santa Fe, N.M., questioned the lead prosecutor in the case, Kari T. Morrissey, on the defense’s complaints about how she had presented the case to the grand jury. The judge pressed Ms. Morrissey on the defense’s claim that she had “steered grand jurors away” from their proposed witnesses.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