Aurelia Butler

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    Vanessa Williams Releases ‘Legs’ Music Video Featuring Edgy Ensembles

    Vanessa Williams’s many ensembles in a music video for her new song, “Legs (Keep Dancing),” evoke her knack for portraying a diva with style.It might not come as a surprise that Vanessa Williams, in the music video for her new single, “Legs (Keep Dancing),” can be seen showing off her legs.Some may remember her showing off a lot more in a 1984 issue of Penthouse, that, after being published, led Ms. Williams to become the first Miss America forced to give up her crown, a decision that the pageant’s leaders have since apologized for.Her legs in the “Legs” music video, unlike in the Penthouse photos, are for the most part clothed. Moschino shorts and fishnets, a spangly gold bodysuit and a pink feathered outfit are among the many items Ms. Williams, 61, wears while moving — mostly dancing — between locations that include a white-walled studio, a dimly lit limousine and a nightclub.For certain viewers, Ms. Williams’s colorful wardrobe in the video might evoke other aspects of her career as an actress and singer, say, her past role as fashion editor Wilhelmina Slater in the TV show “Ugly Betty,” or her upcoming role as Miranda Priestly, the Anna-Wintour-inspired fashion editor, in the musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” arriving in London’s West End later this year.Ms. Williams, speaking on a phone call on Tuesday after flying from Japan to New York, said that certain attire worn in the “Legs” video had connections to some of her past roles. For instance: A silky chartreuse corset and matching cargo pants by Adrienne Landau, a label she has worn since her days on “Ugly Betty.”Another ensemble of sheer black top and zipper-covered red pants came from Trash and Vaudeville, the punk emporium in Manhattan’s East Village.An ensemble of sheer black top and red zipper-covered pants came from the store Trash and Vaudeville in New York.WMGA spangly gold bodysuit worn beneath a sparkly fringed belt brought to mind Ms. Williams’s reputation as a diva who embraces fashion.WMGMs. Williams, who developed her wardrobe for the video with the stylist Alison Hernon, said the clothes they chose were pieces she feels comfortable in and “that feel comfortable on my body.”She added that her outfits in the video for “Legs,” her first non-holiday-related single in 15 years, were meant to not only highlight the song’s titular anatomy, but also what she described as its underlying message: That her decades-long career is ongoing and ever-expanding.“I’m still here, still standing, still kicking,” Ms. Williams sings on the dance-pop single. “In fact, I’m the best I’ve ever been.”“I’ve got a lot of stuff going on,” Ms. Williams said on the phone. Her to-do list includes plans to release a full-length album on a newly announced record label. She is also a producer of a new musical about the trumpeter Louis Armstrong, which is coming to Broadway around the same she starts performances of “The Devil Wears Prada” in London.Ms. Williams has followed a career path blazed by Black performers like Diana Ross and Diahann Carroll, both of whom also served as inspiration for “Legs” and its music video, which opens with Ms. Williams dropping a cream-colored Michael Kors coat and a Worth & Worth hat — attire nodding to clothes Ms. Ross wore in the 1975 film “Mahogany,” Ms. Hernon said.A line in the song’s chorus, “They say the legs are the last to go,” echoes the title of Ms. Carroll’s memoir, “The Legs Are the Last to Go,” released in 2008. Its cover featured a leggy portrait of Ms. Carroll, who died in 2019.Ms. Williams, who starred in the film “The Courage to Love” alongside Ms. Carroll, said that the title and cover of her memoir reflect how, “with age, comes wisdom.”“She’s realizing and accepting her body shape and all that comes with it,” Ms. Williams said. “And that’s what I think is reflected in what I wanted to say with this phase of my life and also in the music.” More

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    ‘The Fall Guy’ Review: Ryan Gosling Goes Pow! Splat! Ouch!

    The actor charms as a swaggering stunt man, alongside an underused Emily Blunt, in the latest skull-rattling action movie from David Leitch.Like a certain energized bunny, Ryan Gosling’s charmer in “The Fall Guy” takes a licking and keeps jauntily ticking as he runs and leaps, tumbles and punches and vaults through the air like a rocket. The actor has shed his “Barbie” pretty-in-pink look, if not his signature heat-seeking moves to play Colt Seavers, a stuntman with a long résumé, six-packs on his six-packs and a disregard for personal safety. Plunging 12 stories in a building atrium, though, is just another bruising day on the job for Colt until, oops, he nearly goes splat.Directed by David Leitch, “The Fall Guy” is divertingly slick, playful nonsense about a guy who lives to get brutalized again and again — soon after it starts, Colt suffers a catastrophic accident — which may be a metaphor for contemporary masculinity and its discontents, though perhaps not. More unambiguously, the movie is a feature-length stunt-highlight reel that’s been padded with romance, a minor mystery, winking jokes and the kind of unembarrassed self-regard for moviemaking that film people have indulged in for nearly as long as cinema has been in existence. For once, this swaggering pretense is largely justified.There’s a story, though it’s largely irrelevant given that the movie is essentially a vehicle for Gosling and a lot of stunt performers to strut their cool stuff. Written by Drew Pearce and based (marginally) on the 1980s TV series of the same title starring Lee Majors, it opens shortly before Colt’s 12-story plunge goes wrong. After some restorative time alone baring his torso, he resumes stunt work, drawn by the promise of a reunion with his ex, Jody (a welcome if underused Emily Blunt). She’s directing a science-fiction blowout that looks like the typical big-screen recycling bin, with bits from generic video games, the 2011 fantasy “Cowboys & Aliens,” and both the “Alien” and “Mad Max” franchises. Cue the flirting and the fighting.Leitch is a former stunt performer who has his own estimable résumé, which includes doubling for Brad Pitt, whom he later directed in “Bullet Train.” Leitch has a company with Chad Stahelski, yet another former stunt performer turned movie director who’s is best known for the “John Wick” series with Keanu Reeves. Working in tandem with physically expressive performers like Pitt, Reeves and Charlize Theron (Leitch directed “Atomic Blonde”), the two filmmakers have, in the post-John Woo era, put a distinctive stamp on American action cinema with a mix of martial-arts styles, witty fight choreography and, especially, a focus on the many ways a human body can move (or hurtle) through space.There are arsenals of guns and all manner of sharp objects that do gruesome damage in Leitch’s movies, “The Fall Guy” included. Yet what seizes your attention here, and in other Leitch and Stahelski productions, is the intense physicality of the action sequences, with their coordinated twisting, wrenching and straining bodies. A signature of both directors is that they emphasize the intense effort that goes into these physical acts, which is understandable given their backgrounds. (Like Fred Astaire, they show off the body, head to toe.) In their movies, you hear the panting and see the grimacing as fists and feet and whatever else happens to be around (a fridge door, a briefcase, a bottle) connect with soft tissue and hard heads.Like the impressively flamboyant practical effects in “The Fall Guy,” this focus on the body reads like a rebuke to the digital wizardry that now characterizes action movies. Each time Colt crashes to the ground in “The Fall Guy,” the moment announces his and the movie’s authenticity (however you want to define that). There’s a macho undertow to this — real men, real stunts — which dovetails with how his romance with Jody is, by turns, comically, sentimentally and, at times, irritatingly framed, including via split-screen mirroring à la “Pillow Talk.” Jody may be Colt’s boss, but he’s the one who has to save the day after some gnarly business with a star and producer (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Hannah Waddingham).The issue of authenticity is a thread that the story jokingly pulls with a scene in which Colt’s face is digitally scanned and in a subplot involving a deep fake. (It’s funnier if you don’t think too hard about the fact that A.I. was an existentially fraught issue in the 2023 actors’ strike.) Tapping into his inner Tom Cruise, Gosling makes love to the camera and performs some of his own showstopping moves, at one point while atop and almost under a speeding garbage truck. Given that “The Fall Guy” is an ode to stunt work, it’s only right to note that the actor’s stunt doubles were Ben Jenkin and Justin Eaton, his driving double was Logan Holladay while his double on that nosebleed of a plummet was Troy Brown. Kudos, gentlemen.The Fall GuyRated PG-13 for falls, fights, crashes and explosions. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Wildcat’ Review: Seeing Flannery O’Connor Through Her Stories

    Ethan Hawke teams up with his daughter, Maya Hawke, for an unconventional and somewhat muddled portrait of a singular author.Bedridden and anguished, the writer Flannery O’Connor is visited by a priest (Liam Neeson in a cameo) in “Wildcat,” starring Maya Hawke. Tormented by spiritual agony and the systemic lupus that would kill her at 39, O’Connor, a lifelong Catholic, beseeches him: “I long for grace,” she cries. “I see it, I know it’s there, but I can’t touch it.”There’s the seed of a good film in this scene, but the filmmakers can’t quite latch onto it. These intriguing wisps of ideas — about O’Connor’s struggle with faith and purpose — never coalesce into a coherent portrait in the movie (directed by Maya Hawke’s father, Ethan), which is presented as being based on O’Connor’s short stories.The film is meant to animate her life through her work, with its observations about religion, violence and society’s hypocrisy, but that adventurous conceit can’t be fulfilled without some elements of a biopic. What we are left with is a movie that flits between incidents from the life of this National Book Award-winner, writing on the family farm in Georgia, among other places, and a distracted supercut of her particular, and often darkly comic, brand of Southern Gothic fiction. Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.Maya Hawke’s performance, in turn, is muddled; she can be strong as O’Connor, but in the fictional pieces, her portrayals are often reduced to clumsy caricatures. The period re-creation is striking and helps generate occasionally spellbinding imagery, but the enduring sense of the film is of a family project that is by turns frustrating and briefly enlightening.WildcatNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Review: How We Used to Escape

    An outstanding not-quite-horror film about being a fan just before the internet took over.We’ve forgotten how hard being a fan used to be. You had to labor at it in multiple media: scouring listings and keeping tabs on schedules, reading books of lore and compiling episode recaps. Pop culture was built around presence, real physical presence: To see the latest episode of “The X-Files” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” you had to show up at your TV when it aired. If you missed a key episode, you were out of luck, unless someone remembered to tape it for you, at least until it went into reruns or syndication. And if your taste ran to the niche, discovering that someone else loved the same thing you loved felt revelatory, like you’d stumbled upon a person who spoke a language only you could understand.The social internet, algorithms and streaming blew most of this up, shoving our favorites at us and making them available all the time. Some of the magic disappeared as well, the uncanny immersive quality. You can bury yourself in a binge-watch for a day or a week, but then it’s over, no long in-between stretches to hash out each episode. Sustaining a relationship with the world a show built is still possible; connecting with others over your shared love is preposterously easy. Something, however, has been lost.“I Saw the TV Glow” captures this obsessive, anticipatory submersion in a long-form weekly TV show, to the point where it ignites the same feeling. A lot of movies tell you stories, but the films of the writer and director Jane Schoenbrun evoke them; to borrow a term, they’re a vibe. Like “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” Schoenbrun’s previous film, this one isn’t quite horror, but it gives you the same kind of scalp crawl. In this case I think it’s the mark of recognition, of feeling a tug at your subconscious. It’s oddly hard to put into words.“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” was the tale of a lonely teenager living in the oddness of our internet era, where intimacy is free and plentiful and confusing and could be dangerous, or could be banal. “I Saw the TV Glow” dials that same tone back a generation, centering on a couple of lonely teenagers who find one another through a show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a mash-up show, instantly recognizable in its own way: It airs on something called the Young Adult Network (clearly a stand-in for The WB, the teen-focused TV network that turned into The CW) at 10:30 p.m. on Saturday nights, a time reserved for shows barely hanging on by a thread. The opening credits we glimpse suggest the show is “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-adjacent (it even uses the same typeface), but with elements reminiscent of “The X-Files” and “Twin Peaks” — in all these cases, not exactly horror, but not quite anything else. (There’s also a band in the show, one that apparently performs a song in every episode, which plays expertly tuned mid-90s teen-show music; the musicians are Phoebe Bridgers and Haley Dahl.)“I Saw the TV Glow” is set in 1996, right at the moment when entertainment was about to dive over the cliff and become what media theorists sometimes refer to as convergence culture. Back then, TV was still a few years away from being participatory for most youthful viewers. The internet wasn’t mature enough yet for the majority of teens to really haunt it, and those who did were posting on the kinds of message boards and websites that would eventually come to define both the TV and the fan-driven internet of the early aughts. (“The X-Files,” for instance, which premiered in 1993, was one of the first shows with a developed online fandom; they communicated through a Usenet newsgroup.) If you knew how to find message boards and chat rooms, you might have bonded with other fans. But if you were just a kid at home in the suburbs, you were most likely planning your schedule around episodes.The story of “I Saw the TV Glow” mostly belongs to Owen (played as a seventh grader by Ian Foreman, and then from high school up by Justice Smith). He is nervous and anxious and sheltered, but he catches an ad for an episode of “The Pink Opaque.” He doesn’t know what it is, but he’s obsessed. One day, waiting for his parents to finish voting in the school cafeteria, he wanders into a room and finds Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) reading a book that recaps episodes of the show. Maddy explains the show to Owen: It’s about two girls, Tara (Lindsey Jordan, the musician Snail Mail) and Isabel (Helena Howard), who meet at camp and discover they share a connection that enables them to fight that most stalwart trope of ’90s TV dramas: the Monster of the Week. There’s a Big Bad in their world, too — the mysterious Man in the Moon named Mr. Melancholy. Owen is even more consumed.Owen’s father won’t let him stay up to watch the show, but Maddy and Owen concoct a way to make it happen. This is where “I Saw the TV Glow” starts to leave the realm of straightforward plot and slip-slide into some nether region at the intersection of fantasy, nostalgia, fear and longing. Escapism has always belonged to children’s literature, fantastical other worlds into which we might leave the ordinary behind and discover ourselves special. Owen and Maddy are trapped in their own worlds, but “The Pink Opaque” gives them the sense that a parallel dimension might be where they really belong.There’s a heartbreak at the center of this film that made me gasp to see it, an acknowledgment that sometimes it’s better not to go back to what we once loved because now, in the cold light of adulthood, it all looks very different. There are other layers, too: implications that awakenings around gender dysphoria and sexuality are tied up in the teens’ obsession with the show, though they barely understand. Even more broadly, the immense pain of pushing down your true self, and the brittle breaking of that shell, is woven throughout.But what’s most effective, and staggering, is Schoenbrun’s storytelling, which weaves together half-remembered childhood elements in the way they might turn up in a nightmare, weaving in sounds and lights and colors and the gloriously inexplicable. Teenage malaise, untreated, can sour into an adult psychic prison; the TV is just one way that we escape.I Saw the TV GlowRated PG-13 for some really trippy stuff. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Turtles All the Way Down’ Review: 10 Things I Hate About Germs

    Hannah Marks’s adaptation of John Green’s blockbuster young-adult novel builds a dynamic depiction of a teenager with obsessive-compulsive disorder.The assured coming-of-age film “Turtles All the Way Down,” based on John Green’s blockbuster young-adult novel of the same name, takes its title from an apocryphal story: An older woman at a science lecture posits that the Earth rests on the shell of a tortoise, which in turn sits on the back of a larger tortoise, and so on, to infinity.A never-ending stack of reptiles is an evocative image and an expressive paradox. It’s especially fitting for “Turtles,” a movie based on a book propped up by an ever-expanding young-adult canon that traffics in the romance of pain and the pain of romance. (Which came first in that sequence of romance and pain? It’s turtles all the way down.)Directed by Hannah Marks (“Don’t Make Me Go”), the movie centers on Aza (Isabela Merced), a teenager with obsessive-compulsive disorder whose contamination anxieties are impeding her ability to build intimacy with others. These struggles grow urgent once Aza reconnects with Davis (Felix Mallard), a childhood friend who wants to be more than that. She likes him back, but panics at the thought of kissing him; brushing lips would mean swapping bacteria.Aza squirms through this dilemma in sessions with her therapist (Poorna Jagannathan) and on hangouts with her gregarious best friend, Daisy (Cree, a scene stealer). But other than Aza’s daily dose of anxiety, which often prompts her to prick at her finger until it bleeds, much of the movie wants for conflict. When the story begins, Davis’s ultrarich father has gone missing, but even that great mystery is less a source of forward momentum than an excuse for our teenage lovebirds to frolic without supervision.The movie’s ambling, novelistic rhythms might have passed muster had the movie filled its empty spaces with strongly delineated characters. As is, only Aza emerges fully formed; the handsome Davis is more statuette than human, and Daisy mostly suffers a bad case of Sidekick syndrome: pluck without complexity. A hasty third act tries to frame the movie as a friendship love story, redirecting attention from the trials of smooching to the value of mutual support. But the efforts feel like too little, too late.What “Turtles” does offer in surplus is texture, thanks to Marks’s springy, stylish direction. Any time Aza confronts a thought spiral about germs, Marks pairs voice-over of Aza’s frantic inner monologue with images of neon-colored microbes writhing in a petri dish. These moments are intrusive and unsettling, and together form one of the more dynamically authentic on-screen depictions of O.C.D. that I’ve seen.Like many adolescent stories of this subgenre, the movie’s central question hangs on identity and its enigmas. Among Aza’s deepest worries — and this brings us back to the turtles — is that her personhood is like a Russian doll: a series of empty casings with nothing at the core. What makes Aza Aza? Is O.C.D. an essential part of who she is, or is it holding her back from her true self? “Turtles,” to its credit, never locates a specious source of Aza’s troubles, nor does it try to unveil a solution to her suffering.Turtles All the Way DownRated PG-13 for debilitating anxiety and other adolescent woes. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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    ‘The Idea of You’ Review: Surviving Celebrity

    Anne Hathaway headlines a movie that’s got a lot to say about the perils of fame.Women of a certain age (that is, my age) feel like they grew up alongside Anne Hathaway, because, well, we did. We were awkward teens together when she made “The Princess Diaries” in 2001. We felt ourselves to be put-upon entry-level hirelings right when “The Devil Wears Prada” came out in 2006. We understood her broken-down narcissistic addict in “Rachel Getting Married,” because who couldn’t? And we watched the Hathaway backlash, pegged to public perception that she was trying too hard, and worried that people saw us the same way.Now we’re 40-ish. We know for sure that Gen Z considers millennials to be cringe, and, thankfully, we no longer feel the need to care. The greatest gift of reaching middle age is having settled into yourself, and that is apparently what Hathaway, age 41, has done. She has been through the celebrity wringer (and more) and come out the other side looking radiant, with a long list of credits in movies that swing from standard commercial fare to auteurist masterpieces.This is perhaps why it’s so satisfying to see her name come first — alone, before the title credit — in “The Idea of You,” which is on its surface a relatively fluffy little film. Based on the sleeper hit novel by Robinne Lee, “The Idea of You” is plainly fantasy, in the fan fiction mold, that poses the question: What if Harry Styles, the British megastar and former frontman of One Direction, fell madly in love with a hot 40-year-old mom? In this universe, the Styles character is Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), the British frontman of a five-member boy band called August Moon.Hathaway plays Solène Marchand, an art gallery owner whose arrogantly useless ex-husband, Daniel (Reid Scott), buys v.i.p. meet-and-greet tickets for their 16-year-old daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), and her two best friends, all of whom were huge August Moon fans … in the seventh grade. The event is at Coachella, and Daniel is set to take the teenagers but backs out at the last second, citing a work emergency. Solène reluctantly agrees to take them, and while at the festival, mistakes Hayes’s trailer for the bathroom. They meet, it’s cute, and you can guess what happens next.Or can you? It was clear about 10 minutes into the movie that what was required for enjoyment was to surrender to the daydreaming, and so, with very little internal protest, I did. How could I resist? Solène is smart, competent, kind and secure; she has great hair and a great wardrobe; and most important, she seems like a real person, even if the situation in which she finds herself greatly stretches the bonds of credibility. More than once, I was struck by how authentically 40 Solène seemed to me — a woman capable of making her own decisions, even ones she thinks might be ill-advised — and how weirdly rare it is to see that kind of character in a movie. She has a kid, and friends, and a career. She reads books and looks at art, and she is flattered by this 24-year-old superstar’s attention but takes a long time to come around to the idea that it may not be a joke.Solène also feels real shame and real resolve in the course of the winding fairy tale story, which predictably has to go south. But most of all, she’s in a movie that doesn’t try to shame her, or patronize her, or make her appear ridiculous for having desires and fantasies of her own. She’s just who she is, and it’s simple to understand her appeal to someone whose life has never been his own.Directed by Michael Showalter, who wrote the adapted screenplay with Jennifer Westfeldt, “The Idea of You” succeeds mostly because of Hathaway’s performance, though she and Galitzine spark and banter pleasurably (and he can dance and sing, too). It tweaks the novel in a number of ways — Hayes is older than the book’s character, for one thing — and also seems to implicitly know it’s a movie, and that movies have a strange relationship with age-gap romances.In fact, that’s one of its strengths. Several times, characters remark on the double standard attached to people’s judgment of Solène and Hayes’s relationship, hypothesizing that in a gender-swapped situation, people would be high-fiving the older man who landed the hot younger star. Sixteen years looks like a lot on paper, but in the movies, at least, it is barely a blip.That musing is interesting enough, if a familiar one. More fascinating in “The Idea of You” is its treatment of the cage of celebrity. Hayes seems mature compared with his bandmates and the girls who follow them around, but he’s also clearly stuck in some kind of arrested development. And I do mean stuck: He is self-aware enough to tell Solène, plaintively, that he auditioned for the band when he was 14 and not much has changed beyond his level of fame. He wants a life beyond the spotlight, badly.And that’s just what he can’t get. Neither can Solène, nor, eventually, anyone around her. The idea of living a quiet life might obviously be out of reach, but the added elements of tabloid news and rabid fans unafraid to treat Hayes as if they know him make things far worse. The film starts to feel a little like the tale of a monster, but the monster is parasociality, encouraged by the illusion of intimacy that the modern superstar machine relies on to keep selling tickets and merch and albums and whatever else keeps the star in the spotlight.It’s probably coincidental that “The Idea of You” comes on the heels of Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” on which she strongly implies that her carefully cultivated fandom has made her love life a nightmare. But spiritually, at least, they’re of a piece — even if the origins of the film’s plot seem as much borne of parasociality as a critique of it. And that makes Hathaway’s performance extra poignant. She’s been dragged into that buzz saw before. And somehow, she’s figured out how to make a life on the other side of it.The Idea of YouRated R for getting hot and heavy, plus some language. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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    Richard Tandy, Keyboardist for Electric Light Orchestra, Dies at 76

    He helped shape the band’s futuristic sound, which blended Beatles-esque pop with orchestral arrangements.Richard Tandy, the keyboardist for the British rock band Electric Light Orchestra, whose riffs helped define the futuristic blend of Beatles-esque pop and orchestral arrangements that catapulted the group to global fame in the 1970s, has died. He was 76.His death was announced by Jeff Lynne, the band’s frontman and leader, in a social media post. Mr. Lynne, who called Mr. Tandy his “longtime collaborator,” did not specify when Mr. Tandy had died or the cause of death.Born on March 26, 1948, in Birmingham, England, Mr. Tandy first entered the orbit of E.L.O. by playing the harpsichord in a band with Bev Bevan, who would later become E.L.O.’s drummer.He joined E.L.O. after the release of its first album in 1972, initially playing bass guitar but later becoming the group’s keyboardist after another founding member left.Through ever-changing lineups, Mr. Tandy remained a core band member alongside Mr. Lynne and Mr. Bevan, until it disbanded in 1986. The band went on to sell over 50 million albums, with five reaching Billboard’s top 10.Playing a range of keyboard instruments including the clavinet — an electric clavichord — and the Minimoog synthesizer, Mr. Tandy’s riffs provided the foundations for some of E.L.O.’s most famous songs.On “Evil Woman,” one of the group’s best known songs, it was Mr. Tandy’s “funky clavinet riff that duels with the group’s vocals during the chorus,” in addition to gospel-styled female backing vocals, that made the song “a multi-textured feast of pop hooks,” Donald A. Guarisco wrote for the All Music Guide. Another of the band’s biggest hits, “Mr. Blue Sky,” featured Mr. Tandy’s riff and synthesized vocals.While Mr. Lynne, the frontman, was the driving force behind E.L.O., Mr. Tandy was his key collaborator, co-arranging many of the string parts of the group’s songs.“Tandy was crucial in ELO’s creation of a realm where rock and classical music could exist together,” the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, into which E.L.O. was inducted in 2017, said on social media on Tuesday.Mr. Tandy’s surviving family include his wife Sheila, Mr. Lynne said. More

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    2 Players Sue Philharmonic, Saying They Were Wrongfully Suspended

    Matthew Muckey and Liang Wang said they were sidelined without cause by the New York Philharmonic after a recent magazine article detailed allegations of misconduct against them.Two New York Philharmonic players sued the orchestra on Wednesday, saying they had been wrongfully suspended after a recent magazine article revived allegations of misconduct against them.The players, Matthew Muckey and Liang Wang, filed separate lawsuits in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The men claimed that the Philharmonic had removed them without cause and in violation of an arbitrator’s ruling, which had ordered the orchestra to reinstate them in 2020 after an earlier attempt to fire them. The players also sued their union, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, accusing the organization of failing to provide them fair representation.The Philharmonic, which recently said it would commission an outside investigation into the orchestra’s culture in response to the uproar over the article, said that it could not comment on active litigation. Local 802 declined to comment.The lawsuits came after a report last month in New York magazine detailed accusations of misconduct made in 2010 against Mr. Muckey, the associate principal trumpet, and Mr. Wang, the principal oboist. After the story’s publication the Philharmonic moved quickly to remove Mr. Muckey and Mr. Wang from rehearsals and performances and suspend the players with pay for an indefinite period.In the article Cara Kizer, a former Philharmonic horn player, came forward for the first time to publicly discuss an encounter that she said occurred while she was on tour with the Philharmonic in Vail, Colo., in 2010. She told the Vail Police Department at the time that she had been sexually assaulted after spending the evening with the two players and was given a drink she came to believe was drugged, according to police records. No charges were filed against the men, and both have denied wrongdoing. In 2018 the Philharmonic, under new leadership, commissioned an investigation and moved to dismiss Mr. Muckey and Mr. Wang. But the players’ union challenged their dismissals, and an independent arbitrator forced the orchestra to reinstate them in 2020.Mr. Muckey’s lawsuit accused the Philharmonic of backtracking on that agreement. The suit said that the orchestra had “violated an indisputably final and binding award which has determined that Mr. Muckey could not be removed based upon such allegations and specifically ordered his reinstatement with back pay and seniority.”Mr. Wang accused the Philharmonic of suspending him “without cause or explanation, and in clear violation of the terms of his employment, which expressly require that he be given opportunities to perform and excel as a musician.” His suit claims that a lawyer for the Philharmonic said in 2019 that the ensemble had not accused Mr. Wang of misconduct related to the incident in Colorado.Both men claimed that Local 802, which fought for their reinstatement in 2018, had failed to respond to their requests for assistance in contesting their new suspensions. The union has struck a different tone on the case since the publication of the article. Sara Cutler, Local 802’s new president and executive director, said last month that the decision to keep Mr. Wang and Mr. Muckey offstage “are good first steps, but they can’t be the last.” She also said that she was “horrified” by the accusations, “as a woman, a musician and a new union president.”Mr. Wang’s suit accused Ms. Cutler of making “duplicitous and injurious statements.” Mr. Muckey’s suit said that Local 802 had “failed and refused to perform its duty of fair representation.” Mr. Muckey and Mr. Wang, who are seeking an unspecified amount in damages, said that the Philharmonic’s decision to suspend them had harmed their careers. Mr. Muckey lost engagements with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and other ensembles. Mr. Wang was placed on leave from the Manhattan School of Music, where he teaches, and he lost work with the Taipei Music Academy and Festival and other groups. More