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    ‘Dead Man Walking’ Makes Its Way to the Met Opera

    When the composer Jake Heggie wrote his first opera, “Dead Man Walking,” in the late 1990s, he never thought it would appear onstage at the Metropolitan Opera.“The Met was not doing new opera, particularly; it was not featuring or focusing them,” he said. “It just seemed a distant dream.”But next week, 23 years after its premiere at San Francisco Opera, “Dead Man Walking,” with a score by Heggie and a libretto by Terrence McNally, will finally come to the Met — opening a season in which contemporary works are front and center as the company tries to attract new audiences.Ryan McKinny, center, as Joseph De Rocher.Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe Met, which is grappling with weak ticket revenues and other financial problems, is placing a big bet on modern opera: Works by living composers, which recently have outsold the classics, make up about a third of the coming season. And although it’s still early, ticket sales for the first three weeks of the season are so far about 12 percent higher compared with the same period last year, the company said.DiDonato, center, will be singing the role of Sister Helen Prejean for the fourth time.Lila Barth for The New York TimesPeter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said he was drawn to “Dead Man Walking,” one of the few contemporary operas to have found a place in the repertory worldwide, in part because of its record of success.“Bringing it to the Met was overdue,” Gelb said. “It symbolizes the efforts that we’re making to really transform the art form and to appeal to a much broader audience base that we have to appeal to for opera to succeed and ultimately survive.”The opera — based on the 1993 memoir by Sister Helen Prejean, which was also adapted into the 1995 movie starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn — portrays Sister Helen’s struggle to save the soul of a convicted murderer.Van Hove, second from right, rehearsing his production, which features a spare set by Jan Versweyveld.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIvo van Hove’s austere staging for the Met opens with a short film depicting the attack by Joseph De Rocher and his brother on a teenage boy and girl in Louisiana. The focus shifts to Sister Helen, who has been corresponding with De Rocher, now a death-row inmate, and sets out to meet him at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.The Met has assembled a starry cast, including the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who is singing the role of Sister Helen for the fourth time, and the bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, who performed the role of De Rocher at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2019. The mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who originated the role of Sister Helen in the premiere, makes a cameo as De Rocher’s mother, and the soprano Latonia Moore plays Sister Rose, while the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducts.Van Hove’s production includes live video projected on a large screen above the stage.Lila Barth for The New York TimesDiDonato said that the opera resonated not because of its discussion of the death penalty but because it was a “love story.”“It’s an opera about looking at the dark side of who we are, or who others are, and asking, ‘And now how do we relate?’” she said. “Now how do we connect with each other? Do I dismiss you outright because of who you are or what you did or what you stand for? Or is there a way I can still open my heart and connect to you?”“It becomes,” she added, “a question of ultimately who is worthy of love and redemption.”McKinny, right, described the production as “a more emotional and psychological space” than previous ones he has performed in.Lila Barth for The New York TimesVan Hove, who made his Met debut last season with Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” said he was drawn to direct “Dead Man Walking” because it was a “very American story,” combining individual struggles with broader societal questions. In preparation for the opera, which was originally scheduled for the 2020-21 season but was delayed by the pandemic, he said he had read Sister Helen’s book but did not watch the movie.He stripped “Dead Man Walking” of many of its traditional elements, including partitions, steel bars and shackles. In his production, Sister Helen and De Rocher sometimes roam freely around the set, designed by Jan Versweyveld, with no barriers between them. Live video, a van Hove hallmark, is widely used, with onstage cameramen following around singers, whose faces are projected onto a large screen.That approach, van Hove said, is meant to highlight the story’s emotion. “A lot of the opera is situated in the minds of the people,” he added. “This mental space became, for us, like a prison.”Some of the singers initially struggled with the minimalist style, including McKinny, who had been accustomed to wearing shackles throughout the opera.“In the beginning it was like, wow, it’s hard for me to understand the isolation of death row if we don’t have death-row elements,” he said. “But actually, this stage is so open and so nothing, that it feels isolating on its own, in a more emotional and psychological space.”DiDonato said that this opera is “about looking at the dark side of who we are, or who others are, and asking, ‘And now how do we relate?’”Lila Barth for The New York TimesVan Hove has reworked other elements of the opera, including a scene in which fighting erupts as Sister Helen enters the prison. That moment is typically portrayed as a scuffle, but in this production, it unfolds as part of a basketball game, with cameramen moving among the inmates.On a recent morning, male members of the Met chorus took their places onstage and prepared to rehearse at half-speed — stretching, doing squats and jumping up and down. In performance, the scene lasts only 50 seconds but is pivotal, van Hove said.“For Helen, when she enters that prison, she enters hell,” he said. “We feel in the audience the visceral aggressiveness and the visceral violence that is in the prison there all the time.”Graham, who plays De Rocher’s mother, singing an emotional plea before the pardon board, said that the opera “really got into my DNA” after she sang the role of Sister Helen in 2000. She avoided the work in the years that followed because she found it too painful; her father died during the original run. But more recently, she has taken up the role of the mother, seeing it is a way for her to reconnect with the piece.“Dead Man Walking” is among the contemporary works that make up about a third of the Met’s season.Lila Barth for The New York Times“Getting into it from this role is almost like the other side of the coin,” she said. “Sister Helen has to keep it together and be strong for everybody. But Mama gets to wail and cry and holler. She gets to let it all hang out. In that way, it’s very cathartic.”Even though the opera, with more than 75 productions, has been performed in many of the world’s leading opera houses, Heggie said he still got emotional going to the Met for rehearsals.“I couldn’t have imagined when we wrote the piece that it would have this kind of life or power,” he said. “And so to be in the room with these literally genius creators was a real jolt. I just felt electricity in the room. I felt nervousness. I felt great power and I felt a lot of ideas vibrating.” More

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    ‘The Origin of Evil’ Review: Daddy Issues

    “Succession” meets Brian De Palma in this delicious family-fortune thriller from France, directed by Sébastien Marnier.Think “Clue” by the French seaside, add a splash of sleaze, crank up the queerness, and you get “The Origin of Evil,” a catty family-fortune thriller by the writer and director Sébastien Marnier.When her landlady gives her the boot, Stéphane (Laure Calamy), a worker at a sardine-tinning factory, contacts her estranged father, Serge (Jacques Weber), an extravagantly wealthy restaurateur in the vein of Logan Roy from “Succession.” Like Logan, Serge is fed up with his parasitic kin, and behind his ailing, burly grandpa look, there’s old-fashioned alpha-dog savagery.Serge’s relatives, however, are nothing like the inept Roy offspring: There’s his ice-queen daughter George (Doria Tillier), who manages his businesses; his wife, Louise (Dominique Blanc), an impeccably coiffured, Gloria Swanson-type; and the stony maid, Agnès (Véronique Ruggia Saura).These ladies aren’t fooled when mousy Stéphane arrives at the family’s island mansion claiming to want nothing but bonding time with dad. Stéphane may be angling for a cut of Serge’s fortune, but so is everyone else. Marnier captures these power plays by framing the characters in playful split-screens à la Brian De Palma.On the mainland, Stéphane pays routine visits to her incarcerated girlfriend, whom she keeps spellbound with sexual favors. Her loyalty, touching at first, grows increasingly questionable.Marnier shakes up the balance of sympathy as Serge’s misogynistic mean streak becomes apparent. Foul as they are, Stéphane’s evil stepmother and sister may be worth rooting for. A tremendous Calamy (of “Full Time” and the TV series “Call My Agent!”) is central to the film’s gripping uncertainty.Abounding with nasty women, “The Origin of Evil” could have easily been flattened by the weight of a feminist objective. Untethered from such neat messaging, this decadent murder-movie takes the online credo, “be gay, do crimes,” and runs with it — to delicious results.The Origin of EvilNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Expend4bles’ Review: Band of Meatheads

    Sylvester Stallone leads an all-star mercenary squadron composed of ’80s-to-aughts brutes in the fourth installment of this franchise.The tone of “Expend4bles” can be summarized in a single close-up: a corpse’s severed hand flipping the bird. To its director, Scott Waugh, and all those responsible for resurrecting this dormant action franchise, the middle finger gestures toward this fourth installment’s intended style: macho, smirky and defiant. At its best, the film is all three. This all-star mercenary squadron composed of ’80s-to-aughts brutes is the cinematic equivalent to Slash’s Snakepit, a supergroup throwback to an era when men were meatheads and we in the audience merrily cheered them on.I’ll admit I still did, at least for some of this swaggering inanity. Why resist the impossible physics of Curtis Jackson (better known as 50 Cent) body-slamming a baddie back and forth like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum with his dolly? Or Dolph Lundgren lampooning his aging vision by screwing a prescription lens onto his sniper rifle? Or Sylvester Stallone grumbling about a thumb-wrestling injury that he’s chosen to nurse with a tiny custom leather sling? Or Jason Statham, the comically gifted bruiser now promoted to the series’ lead, doing, well, pretty much anything?In an even earlier era, Statham’s nimble skills would have awarded him a career like Jimmy Cagney’s. But he’s stuck working in ours, with a script that offers a few enjoyable quips — he calls an enemy “a sneaky little sausage” — but mostly lets him down. The screenwriters Kurt Wimmer, Tad Daggerhart and Max Adams seem to share a mutual disinterest in the plot, intoning the words “detonator” and “World War 3” until the threats become background static.These high jinks would be more fun if the actors didn’t look so unflappable. Nothing breaks their composure. Not explosions or blood spatters, not beheadings or nuclear bombs, not even the sight of a warship careening in the Sea of Japan. (Perhaps because all of the above have been cheaply rendered in post.) Even a back-flipping, insult-slinging seduction scene between Statham and a new teammate, played by Megan Fox, climaxes without a lip-gloss smudge. It’s just one more artificial palpitation.The energy sputters along on throwaway gags, like when Jacob Scipio, as a motor-mouthed young Expendable, sips a cocktail with a pink umbrella at a wake. There’s an absurdly enjoyable detour with a lecherous internet influencer (Samuel Black) and a shootout interrupted by a stereo blasting 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.,” which is just plain absurd. Is Jackson the rapper in the same universe as Jackson the assassin? Does he moonlight in carnage?Andy Garcia, Randy Couture, Levy Tran and the great martial artist Tony Jaa round out our cast of protagonists while Iko Uwais heads up a generic goon squad, giving all the intensity he can to a villain written with no identifiable traits other than a scar. When things get dull, there’s always Lundgren in the background, playing up his character’s nearsightedness with the daffy charm of Marilyn Monroe. But the film’s last reel is so awful — so sneeringly contemptuous of our good-faith efforts to play along with these shenanigans — that we leave the theater still thinking of that middle finger. It sure seemed pointed at us.Expend4blesRated R for curses and extravagantly digitalized carnage. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Designer Files New Lawsuit Against Lizzo and Her Wardrobe Manager

    The singer, who already faces one lawsuit alleging a hostile work environment, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.A former wardrobe designer who worked briefly on Lizzo’s 2023 tour before being dismissed filed a lawsuit on Thursday alleging that the tour’s wardrobe manager had created a hostile work environment that tour management and Lizzo failed to address.In the complaint the plaintiff, Asha Daniels, who worked on the tour for less than a month, names Lizzo as a defendant, but does not accuse her directly of harassing behavior. In a news release accompanying the lawsuit, Ron Zambrano, her lawyer, said, “Lizzo is the boss so the buck stops with her.”The filing comes more than a month after three of Lizzo’s former dancers, who are also represented by Zambrano, sued the singer and her production company, accusing them of creating a hostile work environment. Lizzo has denied the allegations, and her lawyer has said she plans to countersue. On Thursday, a spokesman for Lizzo called the latest suit an “absurd publicity stunt” and noted that the singer had never met the plaintiff.In the court papers submitted on Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Daniels said she was asked to join the tour in early 2023 by the wardrobe manager, Amanda Nomura. The lawsuit alleges that throughout Daniels’s employment, Nomura had made “racist and fatphobic” comments and mocked both Lizzo and Lizzo’s background dancers “by doing an offensive stereotypical impression of a Black woman.”The lawsuit also alleged that a backstage manager on the tour sent a photo “graphically depicting male genitalia” to a group text message that included the plaintiff, tour management and other crew members; the lawsuit said the singer’s management failed to properly address the message, responding to it with humor in a way that encouraged an “unsafe, sexually charged workplace culture.”The plaintiff also said she was subjected to long hours and frequently denied breaks, alleging that Nomura required her to be on her feet all day despite an ankle injury.Attempts to reach Nomura on Thursday were not immediately successful.In response to the lawsuit, a spokesman for Lizzo, Stefan Friedman, said that Daniels never had any contact with the pop star during her time with the tour.“As Lizzo receives a humanitarian award tonight from the Black Music Action Coalition for the incredible charitable work she has done to lift up all people, an ambulance-chasing lawyer tries to sully this honor by recruiting someone to file a bogus, absurd publicity-stunt lawsuit,” Friedman said.He went on, “We will pay this as much attention as it deserves. None.” More

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    Remembering Jimmy Buffett, Beach Bum Bard

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicJimmy Buffett, who died this month at 76, was best known for one thing: making an island-friendly country-rock concoction that millions of listeners found to be a balm. He turned that balm into big business — “Margaritaville,” the song, was his lone Top 10 hit, and Margaritaville, the business he built atop it, became a licensing juggernaut and netted countless millions in revenue.But Buffett was other things as well — a clever, cheeky songwriter; a musician who fused styles from various regions; someone who held firm to his political values even if he only sometimes infused his songs with them.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Buffett’s unlikely rise to niche stardom; how he turned a way of life into a song, and that song back into a very profitable way of life; and the way in which his music sometimes extends beyond lifestyle soundtrack and into knottier emotional (and sometimes) political territory.Guest:Jon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    ‘The Trial’ Review: Seeking Justice for Argentina

    Ulises de la Orden carves a documentary from film of the 1985 prosecution of the military leaders who had seized control of the government.Crafted entirely out of the televised 1985 trial of Argentina’s military junta, “The Trial” lays bare horrific crimes while showing the courage of victims, survivors and their families. Ulises de la Orden’s conscientious documentary is a necessary act of memory — for such is the only way justice truly endures — and it reminds viewers of the Dante-esque extent of the abuses beyond the stories of “the disappeared,” the thousands who were snatched and killed because they were labeled left-wing opponents or on other pretexts.De la Orden’s respectful, smartly abridged account draws on the 530 hours recorded by public television to compile a kind of oral history, rather than tracking the legal arguments. The testimony by dignified witnesses from all walks of life is gripping, even when viewed obliquely because of the camera placement. Cutaway shots show the smug-looking military brass who are on trial, the judges watching as impassively as they can manage and a rapt crowd in the courtroom.The director rightly recognizes that nothing is to be gained by smoothing over the facts. The military junta that seized power (from President Isabel Perón) in 1976, and its cronies and followers raped, murdered, tortured and kidnapped. They trafficked orphans of “subversives,” and stole (real estate and cash, while also raiding homes for everything from cookbooks to women’s underwear). We hear all about their mafialike behavior — throwing their victims out of airplanes into the sea — and how they made a grisly mockery of the rule of law.The 177-minute film concludes with the dramatic sentencing of the regime’s de facto president, Jorge Rafael Videla, and others. The document might resemble an artifact from another era. But it offers a stirring universal example of justice served, at a time when so many American voters fear the prospect of an authoritarian president already impeached once for inciting an insurrection.The TrialNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Storms of Jeremy Thomas’ Review: A Transgressive Producer

    Thomas’s dedication to pushing the envelope of big-screen entertainment is the focus of Mark Cousins’s latest documentary.If you’re familiar with a certain streak of transgressive independent cinema, you’re likely familiar with the films of the producer Jeremy Thomas, even if you don’t know his name: Jonathan Glazer’s “Sexy Beast,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” Nagisa Oshima’s “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” with David Bowie, and several works byDavid Cronenberg and Nicolas Roeg, including Cronenberg’s controversial adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel “Crash.”Thomas is, by all accounts, a filmmaker’s producer, and his dedication to pushing the envelope of big-screen entertainment is the focus of Mark Cousins’s latest documentary, “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas.”Cousins, the man behind the behemoth documentary series on the history of cinema, “The Story of Film,: An Odyssey,” seems more than determined to make Thomas into a household name.Presented as a road movie, “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas” follows the two men as they wind their way through France toward the Cannes Film Festival, where Thomas is promoting his latest project, Takashi Miike’s 2019 crime thriller “First Love.” Cousins presents the audio of his interviews with Thomas over footage of their travels — in subject-focused chapters titled “Sex,” “Politics,” and the like — edited together with clips from the films Thomas has produced and a plethora of other cinematic references and influences.The whole effort comes across more as an advertisement for Thomas’s genius — and Cousins’s obsession with him — than a true portrait of a discerning producer of outsider cinema. Even Tilda Swinton, a star of the Thomas-produced Jim Jarmusch film “Only Lovers Left Alive,” can only offer platitudes, characterizing Thomas as a “storm” within the industry.You may come away from “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas” thinking of him as a fascinating man, but perhaps not as the cinematic prince that Cousins insists on crowning him.The Storms of Jeremy ThomasNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ Review: Exhumation at Sea

    A 1970s submarine recovery operation by the C.I.A. is the subject of this documentary, which prioritizes the excitement of undercover work over any serious consideration of the agency’s legacy.The C.I.A. mission recalled in “Neither Confirm Nor Deny,” Philip Carter’s neat and steadily paced documentary, sounds like the stuff of a Tom Clancy Cold War thriller. In the film, C.I.A. veterans and journalists recount a 1974 U.S. operation to recover a Soviet nuclear submarine that had sunk in the Pacific six years earlier. It’s a high-risk mission made more suspenseful by technical challenges, the looming specter of Watergate and a need for secrecy in the face of scrutiny from Russia and the press.The story assembles before our eyes like an illustration in a manual for superspies. The goal: obtain valuable nuke data. The tool for the job: a big ship with the ability to snatch the sub and sneak it away to American shores. The cover story: an undersea mining operation fronted by Howard Hughes.David Sharp, who directed the mission and wrote a book about it, is the most prominently featured of the wonky talking heads here. He relates amazing details — like what the U.S. did with bodies of Soviet sailors that were discovered — in the understated manner of a kind science teacher. The Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour M. Hersh, who wrote about the operation for The New York Times in the 1970s, offers a salty insider perspective.Almost in passing, we hear of the C.I.A.’s role in the bloody 1973 overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende, who was then the democratically elected leader of Chile. In that light, the documentary, with its triumphant account, feels a little too selective in presenting the agency’s legacy, and its title — which seems to celebrate the government’s concealment of its actions from the public — comes across as misjudged.Neither Confirm Nor DenyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More