Aurelia Butler

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    Some ‘Les Misérables’ Cast Members Plan to Skip Trump Kennedy Center Gala

    Several members of the “Les Misérables” cast are said to be planning to boycott a gala performance at the Kennedy Center, which President Trump took over as chairman.President Trump is planning to celebrate his takeover of the Kennedy Center by attending a gala fund-raiser for the center in June featuring a performance of “Les Misérables,” one of his favorite musicals.But the president’s night out at the theater is already drawing protests.Several members of the “Les Misérables” cast are planning to boycott the performance, according to a person familiar with the situation who was granted anonymity because the discussions were considered confidential. The cast was given the option not to perform as word spread that Mr. Trump planned to attend, the person said. The boycott was reported earlier by CNN.Richard Grenell, whom Mr. Trump appointed as president of the Kennedy Center, said the center had not heard of any boycott.“Any performer who isn’t professional enough to perform for patrons of all backgrounds, regardless of political affiliation, won’t be welcomed,” he said in a statement. “In fact, we think it would be important to out those vapid and intolerant artists to ensure producers know who they shouldn’t hire — and that the public knows which shows have political litmus tests to sit in the audience.”He added: “The Kennedy Center wants to be a place where people of all political stripes sit next to each other and never ask who someone voted for but instead enjoys a performance together.”The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Bond Theatrical, the agency overseeing the “Les Misérables” tour, issued a brief statement which did not address the question of performers opting out of the gala but said that the show would be performed “throughout our engagement at the Kennedy Center.”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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    Smokey Robinson’s Victory Lap Upended by Allegations of Sexual Assault

    The Motown legend, 85, was touring to support a new album when he was sued and accused of sexually assaulting four women who had worked as housekeepers for him.At 85, the Motown legend Smokey Robinson was on something of a celebratory tour. With a new album to promote, he shared the stage with Bruce Springsteen last month, performed last week on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and was in the midst of playing a series of live dates in the United States and the United Kingdom.“I feel wonderful,” he told Entertainment Tonight in a recent interview. “I pray every night before we go on that we can be entertaining and uplifting to the people who are there.”But on Tuesday, Mr. Robinson’s victory lap was upended when four women who had worked as housekeepers for him filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault, claiming in the suit that he abused them dozens of times over many years.The suit, filed in Los Angeles, identifies the women only as Jane Does 1 through 4. They each accuse Mr. Robinson of raping them repeatedly while they were employed cleaning his home in Chatsworth, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, as well as in his other homes in Ventura County, Calif., and Las Vegas.Multiple attempts to reach Mr. Robinson and his lawyers and representatives were unsuccessful on Wednesday. The Daily Mail said it had reached Mr. Robinson by telephone and reported that he had said, “I am appalled.”Mr. Robinson was Motown royalty, writing and performing some of the most beloved hits in the catalog with the Miracles.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWe 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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    Liam Payne Left a $32.3 Million Estate and No Will, Reports Say

    Mr. Payne, a former member of the boy band One Direction, died after falling from a third-story hotel balcony in October.Liam Payne, the former One Direction singer who died last year after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, left an estate worth 24.3 million pounds, or $32.3 million, but had not written a will before his death, according to British news outlets.Mr. Payne’s former partner, Cheryl Tweedy, will be an administrator of his wealth and property, the BBC and The Guardian reported on Wednesday. Ms. Tweedy, the mother of his 8-year-old son and a former member of the pop group Girls Aloud, shares oversight of the estate with a music industry lawyer but neither may distribute the wealth, the BBC said.Mr. Payne, 31, died in October, after falling from a third-floor hotel balcony while in Argentina, and a toxicology report found he had cocaine, alcohol and a prescription antidepressant in his system at the time of death. A statement from local prosecutors after the death suggested that it was not a suicide because of the determination that he fell in a state of unconsciousness.After an investigation, Argentine authorities charged three people with negligent homicide. Those charges, against a friend of Mr. Payne’s and two employees at the hotel where he died, were later dropped.A CasaSur Palermo Hotel employee and a local waiter are still accused of supplying narcotics to Mr. Payne in the days leading up to his death. The charge they face carries a sentence of four to 15 years in prison. More

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    Review: English Concert Brings Handel’s ‘Cesare’ to Carnegie

    The English Concert, under the conductor Harry Bicket, returned to Carnegie Hall with one of Handel’s greatest hits.Less than 48 hours after a new production of “Giulio Cesare in Egitto” ended its run in the Hudson Valley, another “Cesare” took up the throne in New York City.The timing was purely coincidental but not that surprising. Handel composed over 70 music dramas, yet only a handful are still performed regularly, and “Cesare” remains his most popular.Each recent “Cesare,” though, had something distinct to offer its audiences. R.B. Schlather’s staging upstate was fashionably modern, with a liberal approach to the music. The concert performance in New York, presented by the English Concert at Carnegie Hall on Sunday, was made for faithful Baroque-ophiles: no risks, no frills, no excess.Almost every season since 2013, the English Concert, led by its artistic director, Harry Bicket, has brought Handel’s operas and oratorios to New York. This ensemble sets a standard for Handel performance in the 21st century, in large part because of Bicket’s musicality and attention to detail. Like a good wine, this music is savored, not gulped. No interlude is rushed, no aria taken for granted.Operas as concerts can be challenging, especially for a work with a four-hour running time, including two intermissions. Handel benefits from eye candy: flashy garb, elaborate scenery, routines with backup dancers — anything to keep hold of our attention. And yet if it’s not Baroque, don’t fix it. Carnegie was packed on Sunday, perhaps with people who just want good music performed well. The English Concert does that consistently.To write “Cesare,” Handel and the librettist Nicola Francesco Haym drew from fictionalized accounts of the end of Julius Caesar’s civil war. After defeating Pompeo, Cesare follows his rival to Egypt. Cesare intends to grant clemency to Pompeo, who is assassinated anyway at the behest of Tolomeo, the king of Egypt. Personal vengeance, romantic conceit and cunning tomfoolery ensue in narratives that weave among eight characters.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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    ‘Forbidden Games’: A War Orphan’s Sweet, Ultimately Shattering Story

    Hailed on its release as the most troubling French film made in the aftermath of World War II, it returns for a week at Film Forum.René Clément’s “Forbidden Games” (1952) uses a 5-year-old’s wartime ordeal as the basis for a remarkably unsentimental allegory of childhood innocence and adult ignorance. Straightforwardly simple but psychologically complex, the movie is sweet, sardonic, and ultimately shattering.Widely (if not universally) hailed on its release and periodically rediscovered as the most troubling French film made in the aftermath of World War II, it returns for a week at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration.Evoking multiple traumas, “Forbidden Games” unfolds on the eve of France’s surrender to Germany; the opening sequence depicts the panicky exodus of an estimated two million Parisians in June 1940. Crawling through open countryside, the caravan of cars and wagons is ruthlessly bombed by the Nazis. Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) bolts from the family auto to pursue a pet puppy. Her parents follow, the Germans strafe the road. The adults are killed, but not Paulette. Physically unharmed, she wanders off, cradling her dead dog, into fields as verdant as Eden.A beautiful, golden-haired child with a clear direct gaze, Paulette is discovered by an 11-year-old farm boy, Michel (Georges Poujouly), and brought home to his rustic family. They have their own issues, benignly ignoring Paulette. Unable to process what has befallen her parents, she focuses on burying her dog in the company of other small creatures found dead. Eager to join her obsessional play, Michel helps create a secret cemetery, stealing crosses to mark the graves.Denied the possibility of mourning her mother and father, Paulette creates her own ritual. That the child neither recognizes the farm family’s totemic “Good Lord” nor understands the symbolism of the crucifix suggests that she may be Jewish (or had freethinker parents). Be that as it may, her difficulty in comprehending her loss highlights the failure of French Catholic metaphysics. Indeed, Paulette’s naïveté renders the customs she observes all the more strange.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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    5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sonny Rollins

    Walter Theodore Rollins: the “saxophone colossus.” Jazz’s Prometheus, its Siddhartha and its heavyweight champ. Or, as Nate Chinen once put it in a New York Times review of one of Rollins’s marathon-like concerts, “the great unflagging sovereign of the tenor saxophone.”Growing up in 1940s Harlem, Sonny Rollins idolized swing-era heavyweights like Coleman Hawkins and jump-blues saxophonists like Louis Jordan. But when he heard Charlie Parker and the torrid improvisations of Parker’s bebop revolution, which was overtaking Harlem’s clubs, Rollins’s world changed. “He was going against the grain,” Rollins is quoted saying of Parker in “Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins,” Aidan Levy’s authoritative biography. “Highly intricate, involved, complicated, intellectual.”Sonny Rollins at the Detroit Jazz Festival in 2012.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesFor Rollins, bebop’s emphasis on physical tenacity and fast-paced intellect became a personal religion. Many of the tunes he wrote have become jazz standards — including some on the list below, like “St. Thomas,” “Oleo” and “Airegin” — but as soon as he composed them, he invariably set about tearing them apart, recasting them, allowing the substance to push against the limits of its own form until it burst, and then to see how that bursting could be multiplied.Sonny Rollins’s sound is as uncapturable as it is memorable, so you’re left with nothing to do except to keep on listening. In the same way that, over his seven-decade career and across more than 60 albums, Rollins wanted nothing more than to simply keep playing. Rollins, who will turn 95 this summer, has not performed publicly since 2012, for health reasons. But he remains indefatigable as a listener. Interviews with him are still liable to veer toward his favorite contemporary saxophonists — some of whom weigh in on the list below.Read on for a ride through Rollins’s catalog, guided by a team of musicians, scholars and critics. Find playlists embedded below, and don’t forget to leave your own favorites in the comments.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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    ‘Sinners’ and Beyoncé Battle the Vampires. And the Gatekeepers, Too.

    This moment might call for excessive, imaginative Black art that wants to be gobbled up. That’s Ryan Coogler’s new movie. That’s “Cowboy Carter.” Let’s throw in some Kendrick, too.When Beyoncé wails, in the opening moments of her “Cowboy Carter” album, that “them big ideas are buried here,” I’ve imagined “big” standing in for “racist” but have never hit pause to wonder about the GPS coordinates. That song’s called “Ameriican Requiem,” so the cemetery is everywhere. And yet partway through Ryan Coogler’s hit “Sinners,” I thought, Oh, this is where ‘here’ is, inside a movie about a 1932 juke joint whose music is so soulful that vampires, who are also a white minstrel trio, want to suck its blood.She’s envisioning utopia — a place where a Black woman feels free to make any kind of music she wants, including country. He’s imagined a nightmare in which Black art is doomed to be coveted before it’s ever just simply enjoyed. She’s defying the gatekeepers. He’s arguing that some gates definitely need to be kept. To that end, the movie keeps a gag running wherein vampire etiquette requires a verbal invitation to enter the club, leading to comic scenes of clearly possessed, increasingly itchy soul junkies standing in a doorway begging to be let in. People have been calling certain white performers interested in Black music vampires for years. Here’s a movie that literalizes the metaphor with an audacity that’s thrilling in its obviousness and redundancy.There’s never a bad time for good pop art. There’s never a bad time for Black artists to provide it. But these here times? Times of hatchet work and so-called wood-chipping; of chain saws, as both metaphor and dispiriting political prop; a time of vandalistic racial gaslighting. These times might call for an excessive pop art that takes on too much, that wants to be gobbled up and dug into, an art that isn’t afraid to boast I am this country, while also doing some thinking about what this country is. These here times might call for Black artists to provide that, too, to offer an American education that feels increasingly verboten. That’s not art’s strong suit, pointing at chalkboards. But if school systems are being bullied into coddling snowflakes, then perhaps, on occasion, art should be hitting you upside the head and dancing on your nose.Beyoncé on the opening night of her “Cowboy Carter” tour in Los Angeles last month.The New York TimesNow, it’s true that the knobbiest moments on “Cowboy Carter” and in “Sinners” are the equivalent of diagramed sentences. The album uses elders to do its explaining. Before “Spaghettii” gets underway, the singer and songwriter Linda Martell stops by to dissertate on the limitation of genres; Dolly Parton connects her “Jolene” to the home-wrecker in Beyoncé’s now nine-year-old “Sorry”; and Willie Nelson, as the D.J. on KNTRY, Beyoncé’s fictional broadcast network, turns his dial past some real chestnuts to tee up “Texas Hold ’Em.” They’re vouching for the validity of her project’s scope and sincerity, while, especially in Martell’s case, spelling everything out.The spelling in “Sinners” happens right in the middle of its young protagonist’s first big blues number. Earlier, we’d gotten a taste of what Sammie (Miles Caton), a preacher’s boy, could do. Caton’s molasses baritone and impaling guitar work were really doing it for me when the sound muffles, and in come not one but two micro lectures about this music’s power to “pierce the veil between the present and the past.” And as these explanations of Black music tumble forth, I was surprised to find a very Funkadelic fellow making love to an electric guitar right next to Sammie. Over by the kitchen twerks a woman arguably conjured from some extremely City Girls place. The temperature of instruments changes from live drums to what sound like drum machines. And I soon spy dashikied tribesmen, b-boys, a ballerina and, I’m pretty sure, a decked-out Chinese folk singer, and they’re all gettin’ in the way of the blues.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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    Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Vaccaro, Talia Shire and Susan Sarandon Talk ‘Nonnas’

    Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Vaccaro, Talia Shire and Susan Sarandon discuss playing cooks in a new film, aging in Hollywood and the movies that their grandchildren cannot yet watch.When I signed onto a video interview with the stars of the new Netflix release “Nonnas,” the conversation was already in progress. Brenda Vaccaro, best known for her work in “Midnight Cowboy” and “Once Is Not Enough,” was raving about the film, directed by Stephen Chbosky, based on the true story of Enoteca Maria, a restaurant in Staten Island where the kitchen is run by older women.“This is my Jimmy Stewart movie,” Vaccaro said in between effusive praise.I wondered if I was ever going to get a word in edgewise.Eventually, I was able to greet the group, which includes Vaccaro, Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire and Susan Sarandon. The veteran actresses, whose credits include “The Godfather,” “Goodfellas” and “Thelma & Louise,” all play the movie’s nonnas, who are recruited to cook Italian American delicacies by Joe Scaravella (Vince Vaughn), an M.T.A. worker mourning his own mother. Bracco is a brash Sicilian named Roberta whose specialty is a stuffed lamb’s head called capuzzelle. She fights with Vaccaro’s Antonella, loyal to her Bolognese heritage, over which region has the better traditions. Sarandon is the glamorous pastry guru and hair stylist Gia, while Shire is a nun who left the convent to pursue her dreams. (Not all the nonnas here have grandchildren.)With the women, who have nine Oscar nominations between them, gathered on a call, they riffed on their history with one another, their cooking skills, aging in Hollywood and the movies that their grandchildren cannot yet watch. Below are edited excerpts.From left, Sarandon, Vaccaro, Bracco and Talia Shire in “Nonnas.”Jeong Park/NetflixDid you know each other before getting cast?LORRAINE BRACCO: Oh, yes. I knew Brenda. I knew Susan. Talia was the newbie.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