Aurelia Butler

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    Second City Expands to New York

    The improv comedy institution is under new ownership after missteps, and now it has a gleaming new home in Williamsburg. From the very beginning of the improv theater Second City, its name made clear that it wasn’t a New York institution and didn’t aspire to be.But after 65 years, the Chicago-based institution that has strongly influenced modern comedy is opening an outpost on Monday in Brooklyn, in what is the First City. It’s a seemingly counterintuitive time to expand. Improv, once a thriving part of the comedy scene in New York, is at an ebb, and the company itself has been through tough times.Two weeks before the lights were set to officially go up, Ed Wells, Second City’s chief executive, showed off its new 12,000-square-foot home on North Ninth Street in Williamsburg even as he acknowledged the headwinds facing the expansion.There is a 190-seat main stage theater with a wraparound mezzanine and a 50-seat black box theater for student shows. A training center with classes for amateurs as well as a career-track conservatory program. The Bentwood restaurant, named after the chair that Second City actors use onstage, sometimes as a prop.Wells said that the company was drawn to Williamsburg partly for its demographic mix. “You have a large local population that is looking for entertainment and nightlife and culinary experiences,” he said, noting that it is also popular with tourists. “You’re telling local New York stories that appeal to New Yorkers, but also appeal to the people that are coming to hear New York stories.”The city’s improv scene shrank during the pandemic when the Upright Citizens Brigade closed its New York theater and training center in 2020; the Magnet and the Pit also scaled back. Lockdowns were one culprit, but the financial model was also called into question. In 2020, Second City faced economic problems as well as new criticism about the company’s lack of diversity and inclusion. In an open letter, company leaders wrote, “We are prepared to tear it all down and begin again.”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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    Toby Keith’s ’35 Biggest Hits’ Tops the Billboard Album Chart

    A week after his death at 62, the country musician’s 16-year-old hits collection is No. 1.Toby Keith, the boisterous, unapologetically patriotic country star who died last week at 62, has a posthumous No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, as a 16-year-old hits collection narrowly edged out Morgan Wallen’s latest — and easily topped releases by the rapper 21 Savage and the Grammy winners Taylor Swift and SZA — to reach the top of the chart.Keith’s “35 Biggest Hits,” with tracks like “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” “Who’s Your Daddy?,” “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” and the Willie Nelson duet “Beer for My Horses” — all of them No. 1 country smashes — re-entered the Billboard 200 chart at No. 1. It had the equivalent of 66,000 sales in the United States, including 64 million streams and 11,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.“35 Biggest Hits,” which came out in 2008 on two CDs and previously reached as high as No. 2, becomes Keith’s fifth album to go to No. 1, and the first since “Bullets in the Gun” in 2010.“35 Biggest Hits” is the first posthumous No. 1 on the Billboard 200 since “Faith” by Pop Smoke, in early 2021, about a year after the Brooklyn rapper was killed in a shooting at age 20. Billboard notes that Keith’s collection is also the first retrospective album to hit No. 1 since “The Very Best of Prince,” shortly after Prince’s death in 2016.The 66,000 equivalent sales for “35 Biggest Hits” barely beat out Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time,” a streaming blockbuster for much of the last year that has logged a total of 18 weeks at No. 1 and had the equivalent of 65,000 sales in its most recent week, landing at No. 2.Also this week, SZA’s “SOS” is No. 3, 21 Savage’s “American Dream” is No. 4 and Swift’s “Midnights” — the album of the year winner at the Grammy Awards on Feb. 4 — rises four spots to No. 5. More

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    Movies to Watch Whether You Love or Hate Valentine’s Day

    ‘Love & Basketball’ (2000) Gina Prince-Bythewood’s brilliant directorial debut cares equally about the two nouns referenced in its title, which is one of the reasons it’s so special. A sprawling movie, it charts the years-long game of emotional one-on-one between Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps), childhood neighbors who both have dreams of hoops […] More

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    Kali Malone Studied Farming. Fate Brought Her to Avant-Garde Music.

    The 29-year-old musician grew up in Colorado and ended up in Sweden, where she fell in love with the organ. Her latest album, “All Life Long,” is out now.At the close of an organ concert in early February, Kali Malone, performing at Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, did something unusual: She turned off the instrument’s motor while she and Stephen O’Malley of the doom-metal group Sunn 0))) held down the keys. For nearly three minutes, as the air drained from the organ’s 5,000-odd pipes, the pair’s rich chords turned spectral as they faded to silence, wheezing and wavering, like a chorus of sleepy ghosts.The finale was a striking example of the way that Malone, 29, is rethinking the pipe organ for a contemporary context. Born in Colorado but based for more than a decade in Stockholm and Paris, she has emerged as an unusually versatile star of the avant-garde.In a video interview last month, Malone reflected on the path that led to her new album, “All Life Long,” a contemplative 78-minute suite for organ, brass quintet and chamber choir. She thinks of her early work — microtonal software creations that could run for hours — “as my cave man music,” she said. “It’s still exactly what I’m doing now, just my tools have become more sophisticated.”Malone’s fondness for drones hardly makes her a one-note composer. Before her 2019 breakout album, “The Sacrificial Code” — nearly two hours of minimalist, minutely textured organ studies — she was part of a shoegaze trio, conducted an ensemble playing the work of the “deep listening” pioneer Pauline Oliveros, and recorded strings and gongs in a decommissioned nuclear reactor. She flexed her compositional muscles on “Living Torch,” an electroacoustic work created for the Acousmonium, a multichannel setup developed in the 1970s at Groupe de Recherche Musicales, or GRM, in Paris.“There is something both spiritual and almost tactile in the way that she creates music,” François J. Bonnet, director of GRM, said in an email. “She charts her own personal and inspired path — a path influenced by almost nothing, and not the product of cultural trends or zeitgeist.”Malone began blazing her own trail early. Her parents split when she was a child; her father lived in the High Rockies, while Malone moved with her mother to Denver, where she was shuttled to and from choir practice by her grandparents. “I became a teenager when I was 10,” she said. “I grew up so fast, and didn’t have a lot of supervision.”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 GKids Became the A24 of Animation

    The small distributor has outsize influence because it handles Studio Ghibli films in the United States. Its titles have earned 13 Oscar nods.When the Irish animated film “The Secret of Kells” received a surprise Oscar nomination in 2010, GKids, the boutique distribution company that mounted a stealthy but mighty grass roots campaign on its behalf, had been around for only a little over a year.Back then, the company’s entire operation consisted of two full-time employees and one part-timer. But this year, Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” became GKids’s 13th release in their 15-year history to receive a nomination from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for best animated feature. The hand-drawn movie has a real shot at winning and becoming the first GKids release to do so.How has a small outfit focused on animation managed to have such an outsized effect in Hollywood?Eric Beckman, a former music industry executive, founded GKids with the intent of redefining American audiences’ perception of animation as more than a children’s medium. At the time, family-friendly, computer-generated and stylistically similar studio productions had an even tighter stronghold on animation in the United States than they do today.GKids has since filled a precious gap by consistently releasing bold animated work from around the world. For more than a decade now, it has also been entrusted with the North American distribution of titles in the catalog of the revered Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, maker of “The Boy and the Heron.”Beckman started in animation in a roundabout way. He co-founded the New York International Children’s Film Festival in 1997 with Emily Shapiro, his wife at the time. While the festival was not strictly an animation showcase, it allowed Beckman to develop meaningful relationships with numerous animation companies, including Studio Ghibli.“The Secret of Kells” landed a surprise Oscar nomination in 2010 thanks to a stealthy GKids campaign.GKidsWe 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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    Usher Super Bowl Halftime Review: A Focus on Details With Alicia Keys, Lil Jon and More

    In a halftime set that touched on more than a dozen songs, the R&B star delivered a raucous Atlanta party and a lesson in intimate showmanship.A few minutes into Usher’s dynamic and sly Super Bowl LVIII halftime show performance Sunday night at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas came a moment of uncommon, almost startling calm.Alicia Keys had just appeared, in a sequined red jumpsuit and matching encrusted gown, and rather gratuitously flubbed the opening note of her hit piano ballad “If I Ain’t Got You.”She recovered, and as she approached the end of the chorus, you could hear Usher singing in quiet harmony as the camera panned back, settling on the two of them at opposite ends of Keys’s piano. Usher picked up the final line of the chorus — alone, smooth and confident, almost whispered — before Keys returned to share the last note.Allegiant Stadium holds approximately 65,000 people, but in that instant, there were only two. It was one of the quietest sequences in halftime history, a remarkable testament to the gifts of Usher, a performer of precise detail who is enjoyed best with rapt attention.Usher was joined by Alicia Keys on Sunday.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesAnd H.E.R. played guitar during his halftime set.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMost of the rest of the performance — which touched on more than a dozen songs — was grander in scale, designed to fill a football field: A small-bore, granular-gestured showcase gave way to an explosive party. But what this set did so well was make plain that Usher’s commitment to minutiae and his capacity for grandeur are fired in the same cauldron. He can control the stage when it is packed to the gills, and he can do it alone. More

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    Beyoncé Announces New Country Album, ‘Act II,’ After Super Bowl Commercial

    The pop superstar used a Verizon ad to tell fans fresh music is on the way. A country-themed follow-up to “Renaissance,” which she referred to as “Act II,” will arrive on March 29.After days of speculation and online sleuthing by fans — just another week, in other words — Beyoncé used her appearance in a Super Bowl commercial on Sunday to announce that she would soon be releasing new music.In a Verizon ad that ran shortly after halftime, Beyoncé joked with the comedian Tony Hale about doing something that would “break the internet” (i.e. Verizon’s 5G network). She ran through a few riffs, like “Beyonc-A.I.,” a Barbie-like “Bar-bey” and a presidential “BOTUS.”Then she said, “Drop the new music,” before the commercial ended. Soon after, Beyoncé’s website updated with the announcement that a new album, identified as “Act II,” would be released on March 29.It appeared to be the second part of Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” album project, and perhaps one with a country-rock theme, given the sound and look of two new songs, “Texas Hold ’Em” and “16 Carriages,” that quickly appeared online.“Texas Hold ’Em” begins with rapid-plucked guitar and moves into a stomping beat, with Beyoncé rhyming “Texas” and “Lexus” and singing lines like, “It’s a real live boogie and a real live hoedown.” On “16 Carriages,” an epic ballad, the guitars swell with organ-loud percussion as Beyoncé sings about looking back at a life after losing innocence “at an early age.”The visuals for both picture Beyoncé in cowboy hats — a feature of last year’s Renaissance World Tour and Beyoncé’s continued style signature, as seen last week at the Grammy Awards.As with the first “Renaissance,” the new album announcement represents a kind of shift in communication for Beyoncé. She released her 2013 album, “Beyoncé,” with no warning — instantly grabbing global attention and setting off a music industry craze for surprise “drops.” Its follow-up, “Lemonade,” in 2016, was teased by a Super Bowl appearance but still made an instantaneous splash. In the “Renaissance” era, Beyoncé’s revelations have been more like conventional advertisements.When Beyoncé unveiled “Renaissance” in July 2022, she posted a statement on Instagram that explained it was merely part one of a “three act project” that she recorded during the pandemic. She referred to that album as “Act I,” and described it as “a place to dream and to find escape during a scary time for the world.” That album, with a 1990s retro dance theme, went to No. 1 and was the centerpiece of her tour last year, which sold $580 million in tickets, according to the trade publication Pollstar — second only to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.Beyoncé dabbled in country music on “Daddy Lessons” on her 2016 album “Lemonade,” and a remix featured the Chicks. She teamed with the Nashville group for a performance on the Country Music Association Awards that November, which received a mixed reception from country fans online but was vigorously defended by the singer’s loyal fans. More

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    Ad Nods to Taylor Swift and Football, Drawing Cheers and Criticism

    A Cetaphil commercial showed a father and daughter connecting over football and the music superstar. But a social media influencer said the idea was stolen from her.When an advertisement for Cetaphil lotion was released online days before the Super Bowl, it drew rave reviews for a narrative that evoked a familiar story for parents, football fans and followers of Taylor Swift.In the commercial, a father unsuccessfully tries to interest his teenage daughter, who’s distracted by something on her phone, in a football game. She goes to her bedroom to complete her skin-care routine — using Cetaphil on her face. She then walks downstairs to see her father watching a football game while wearing a white jersey bearing the No. 89. The announcer can be heard saying, “Well folks, there she is, the most famous fan at the game,” drawing a smile from the daughter.The father, sensing an opportunity, later walks into her room with a red No. 13 jersey for her and jokingly applies cream to his face before imploring her to come and watch the game. She goes downstairs, lays her phone on the coffee table and curls up next to her father. The ad ends with them wearing their jerseys on the couch and laughing. An on-screen message reads, “This season, dads and daughters found a new way to connect.”Though it does not directly mention Taylor Swift, the ad is a nod to how the music superstar’s relationship with the Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce was said to have gotten more fathers and daughters watching N.F.L. games together this season. The No. 13 and No. 89 jerseys were implicit references to Ms. Swift’s “lucky number,” 13, and her (and Mr. Kelce’s) birth year, 1989. And the father in the ad wore friendship bracelets, as do many of Ms. Swift’s fans.Users on social media reacted positively to the ad, drawing connections to their own lives. One TikTok user who posted the ad said it “has me in tears.” On X, fan accounts for Ms. Swift lauded the commercial, and one user said, “as the daughter of a football coach and a die-hard Swiftie, I adore this.”But on Friday night, a woman who has a popular TikTok account, Sharon Mbabazi, said the company had stolen the idea for the ad from her. On her social media accounts, she shared a TikTok post from September in which she is doing her makeup when her stepfather walks in and tells her about Mr. Kelce’s surge in Instagram followers, jersey sales and popularity since his relationship with Ms. Swift became public.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