Aurelia Butler

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    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial Draws Long Lines and Limited Seating

    Without any livestreaming of the often graphic testimony, securing space inside the federal courtroom has meant long lines and long waits.Hours before sunset, the line begins to form outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. By the time the sun has risen again, some 13 hours later, the sidewalk is quite full.Queue psychologists, who study things like how to keep the hordes happy in lines at Disney World, would have a field day at the trial of Sean Combs.Since the trial started two weeks ago, folks have been showing up at ungodly hours to wait for a seat in the room where the music mogul is facing racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.News reporters assigned to cover the trial are joined in equal numbers by vloggers who have made the case their subject of the moment and members of the public who are simply interested in hearing the courtroom testimony.During the first two days of the trial, when the crowds were bigger, one YouTuber, Mel Smith, said he would leave his house in Beacon, N.Y., at about 3:30 p.m. to get a seat for the next morning’s testimony. When he arrived at about 5 p.m., he said, there were already a half-dozen people waiting in front of him.“Everybody knows P. Diddy — he’s a household brand — and everybody’s clicking all day to see what’s the latest updates,” he said.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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    If You Want a Seat at the Trial of Sean Combs, Leave Yesterday

    Without any livestreaming of the often graphic testimony, securing space inside the federal courtroom has meant long lines and long waits.Hours before sunset, the line begins to form outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. By the time the sun has risen again, some 13 hours later, the sidewalk is quite full.Queue psychologists, who study things like how to keep the hordes happy in lines at Disney World, would have a field day at the trial of Sean Combs.Since the trial started two weeks ago, folks have been showing up at ungodly hours to wait for a seat in the room where the music mogul is facing racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.News reporters assigned to cover the trial are joined in equal numbers by vloggers who have made the case their subject of the moment and members of the public who are simply interested in hearing the courtroom testimony.During the first two days of the trial, when the crowds were bigger, one YouTuber, Mel Smith, said he would leave his house in Beacon, N.Y., at about 3:30 p.m. to get a seat for the next morning’s testimony. When he arrived at about 5 p.m., he said, there were already a half-dozen people waiting in front of him.“Everybody knows P. Diddy — he’s a household brand — and everybody’s clicking all day to see what’s the latest updates,” he said.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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    Ute Lemper Still Sings Songs of Rebellion. The Stakes Are Still High.

    The German-born cabaret performer’s latest album celebrates the 125th anniversary of Kurt Weill’s birth, yoking classics to the language of today’s music.“Welcome to Weimar — to the year 2025,” Ute Lemper announced.The German-born singer and actress was greeting friends and colleagues who had squeezed into the Birdsong Society’s small headquarters by Gramercy Park to hear her perform songs from her latest album, which celebrates Kurt Weill, a composer Lemper has championed for four decades.Sliding into the album’s title number, “Pirate Jenny,” Lemper got even closer to a listener who had been standing just a few feet away, fixing him with a snarling grin. Featured in “The Threepenny Opera,” the most celebrated of Weill’s noted collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the tune has been covered by artists from Nina Simone to Judy Collins. It’s also the only standard written from the perspective of a hotel maid waiting for a ship of pirates to arrive and, at her behest, murder all the guests.“It’s a song about revolution and rebellion,” Lemper explained in an interview before the event. The singer is less intimidating in conversation than she is when channeling bloodlust. She’ll turn 62 in July, and with her long, lean frame and impossibly high cheekbones, she still projects the cool beauty of a runway model.Lemper was perceived as something of a rebel herself, at least in her native country, when Decca Records released “Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill” in 1988. The album, which evolved from “a little fringe record I made in Berlin” a couple of years earlier, earned Lemper an international fan base — with one notable exception.“The Germans hated it,” Lemper recalled. “They weren’t interested in speaking about the past.” Decca’s chief executive at the time, Roland Kommerell, German himself, had started a project dedicated to bringing back music that had been banned under the Nazis, including classical symphonies and Weimar-era cabaret songs — music composed by Jews who were persecuted or, like Weill, forced into exile.“It was a huge chapter to rip open; it was still bleeding at the time,” Lemper said. “And suddenly, I was in the position to have to respond to hundreds of journalists about this music. I became almost the representative of my generation, the Cold War generation, in Germany.”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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    As George Lucas’s ‘Starship’ Museum Nears Landing, He Takes the Controls

    After years of delays, the mammoth Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is finally approaching completion in Exposition Park in Los Angeles.Despite its looming presence, though, the museum being built by George Lucas, creator of the “Star Wars” franchise, has long seemed to lack the sort of defining mission that would protect it from being dismissed as a vanity project.What is a museum of narrative art? And why is Lucas building one?Even now — 15 years since Lucas first proposed a museum, and eight years after ground was broken in Los Angeles — many questions remain about an ambitious but somewhat amorphous project that is now slated to be completed next year.There has also been turbulence as the museum nears its final approach. In recent weeks the museum has parted ways with its director and chief executive of the past five years and eliminated 15 full-time positions and seven part-time employees, including much of the education department. Lucas is now back in the director’s chair, installing himself as the head of “content direction” and naming Jim Gianopulos, a former movie studio executive and Lucas Museum trustee, as interim chief executive.The filmmaker George Lucas has appointed himself head of “content direction” at the museum he is creating in Los Angeles. Laurent Koffel/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesIts former director, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, had been hired five years ago from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her outsider’s eye and knowledge of the museum world had been expected to broaden the raison d’être for the institution so that it would do more than serve as a monument to things that Lucas has collected or produced. But as of April 1, Jackson-Dumont departed in a move that was framed as a resignation.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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    ‘Queen of Spades’ Review: A Fiery Soprano Breaks Through

    At the Metropolitan Opera’s season premiere of Elijah Moshinsky’s production, it was the women who led, while a strong cast carried the patchwork plot.Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” tells the story of an addict, Hermann, whose obsession with cards leaves a trail of destruction. Along the way, some of the opera’s female characters become collateral damage. But at the Metropolitan Opera’s season premiere of Elijah Moshinsky’s stenciled historical-dress production on Friday, it was the women who came into focus.In large part this was because of the fiery performance of the soprano Sonya Yoncheva, who made her role debut as the aristocratic Lisa who breaks off an illustrious engagement to throw in her lot with the wild-eyed Hermann, clinging to him even after he uses deadly force to extract a supernatural gambling secret from her grandmother.“Young women often fall in love with” bad guys, Yoncheva noted in an earlier interview with The New York Times. On Friday, she drew on a wide range of vocal shadings to evoke flickers of girlish curiosity, fatalism and raw erotic longing that lent uncommon depth and agency to her character.Her commitment helped make sense of an opera that, with its collage of pastiche, quotations and narrative devices, can feel like a Frankenstein creation. Here, amid the cold glitter of a rococo-obsessed imperial court with people rigidly gliding about under towering wigs, Hermann and Lisa’s search for intense emotions seemed both nihilistic and perfectly plausible.Yoncheva might not have dominated the proceedings quite as much if she had appeared alongside a Hermann of equal stature. But the tenor Arsen Soghomonyan was dramatically stiff and vocally uneven in his house debut. Much of those jitters must be because he stepped into the role at short notice after the successive withdrawals of the tenors Brian Jagde and Brandon Jovanovich this 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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    A ‘Mission: Impossible’ Fan Favorite Returns 3 Decades Later

    When Rolf Saxon first auditioned to play William Donloe in Brian De Palma’s 1996 “Mission: Impossible,” he didn’t think he had gotten the role of the bumbling C.I.A. analyst who is outsmarted by Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt during a break-in at Langley headquarters.He waited an hour and a half for De Palma, who then saw him for just five minutes. Saxon figured that was it. But not only did he get the role, making him a crucial player in what would become an iconic scene, he’s now back playing that same character nearly 30 years later in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.” It’s a return that distinctly raises the profile of the self-described “jobbing actor,” who spent the past 10 years mostly doing theater in the Bay Area.“When this came along, it was like, ‘Wow, are you kidding?’” he said in a video interview. “This is fantastic. This is a nice little cherry on top.”In the first film, Donloe only has a few minutes of screen time. He’s a working stooge who is poisoned by Ethan’s team in its quest to steal a list of covert agents off his computer housed in a secure vault. While Donloe goes back and forth to the bathroom to throw up, Ethan drops down from a ceiling vent to pull off his caper. When Donloe returns to the vault, he finds a knife on his desk and realizes he messed up big time. His fate is sealed by Kittridge, the Impossible Mission Force official, who says, “I want him manning a radar tower in Alaska by the end of the day.” Donloe’s main role is collateral damage.But according to the “Final Reckoning” director Christopher McQuarrie, Donloe made a big impact. In fact, he said in an interview, fans frequently asked him when he was going to bring the character back. For a long time, he didn’t understand why Donloe engendered such love, until he heard the question framed in a different way: “When is the team going to do right by what they did to Donloe?”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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    ‘Un Simple Accident’ Wins Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival

    The film, “Un Simple Accident,” was directed by Jafar Panahi, a longtime festival favorite. The award capped a contest that was widely seen as the strongest in years.The sun was still shining when the 78th Cannes Film Festival came to an emotional, exhilarating close with the Palme d’Or going to “Un Simple Accident,” from the Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi.The announcement was met with cheers and a standing ovation in the Grand Lumière Theater. Accompanied by his actors, some who began weeping, an equally moved Panahi kept on his sunglasses as he accepted his award.A longtime festival favorite, Panahi had until recently been barred from making movies in Iran or traveling outside the country. Although the restriction has been lifted, he shot “Un Simple Accident” clandestinely.The movie tracks a group of men and women who join together after one of them kidnaps a man they believe tortured them in prison. Panahi, who has been imprisoned several times, drew his inspiration from stories he heard from other inmates while he was at Evin Prison in Tehran.The Palme for Panahi capped what was widely seen as one of the strongest festivals in years. For some, the selections offered reassuring evidence that the art would continue to endure — and thrive — despite the problems facing the industry. Certainly, President Trump’s recent threat to institute a 100 percent tariff on movies made in “foreign lands” had cast a shadow over the opening ceremony. By the close of the festival, however, the bounty of good and great work had palpably buoyed spirits.The Palme d’Or was decided upon by a nine-person jury led by the French actress Juliette Binoche. “My friends, this is the end — it was such a show,” she said, turning to her fellow jurists, who included the American actor Jeremy Strong and the Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia. Given Binoche’s auteur-rich résumé, it is perhaps unsurprising that this jury gave a special award to the Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan for “Resurrection,” a delirious, elegiac journey through cinema history.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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    Michael Roemer, Maker of Acclaimed but Little-Seen Films, Dies at 97

    His “Nothing but a Man” and “The Plot Against Harry” drew critical praise but never found an audience. He said he took “a certain pride in not having been a success.”Michael Roemer, an independent filmmaker who earned critical praise for his keen understanding of character and his sensitive exploration of relationships in a slender portfolio that included “Nothing but a Man” and “The Plot Against Harry,” died on Tuesday at his home in Townshend, Vt. He was 97. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Ruth Sanzari.Mr. Roemer’s interest in moviemaking began at Harvard in the late 1940s. In 1939, when he was 11 and living in Berlin, he and his sister had been among thousands of Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany and sent to England. There he would stay — writing plays to improve his English, he said — until he came to the United States in 1945, at the end of World War II.His career as a director began when NBC gave him the opportunity to make “Cortile Cascino,” a 46-minute documentary about slum life in Palermo, Sicily, that he made with Robert M. Young. It was also the start of a pattern in which his films would all but disappear for decades at a time.“Cortile Cascino” depicted a Sicilian life so grim that NBC executives balked at putting it on the air. It did not reappear until it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993.Long delay also befell “Nothing but a Man,” directed by Mr. Roemer and written by him and Mr. Young, a frequent collaborator. With Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln in central roles, it tells the story of a Black railroad worker married to a preacher’s daughter who struggles to maintain his dignity in the segregated Alabama of the early 1960s.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