Aurelia Butler

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    Review: SZA’s ‘SOS’ Revels in Mixed Emotions

    On her second album, the singer with an unpredictable and emotionally charged flow expands her sound as she ponders all her conflicting impulses.“I just want what’s mine,” SZA announces in “SOS,” the title song and opener of her second studio album. She spends the rest of the album wrestling with exactly what that means. Does she want casual sex or lasting love, relationships or independence, revenge or forgiveness, self-questioning or self-respect, familiar problems or a new start, power or trust? SZA’s music melts down styles — singing, rapping, rock, R&B, pop, folk, indie-rock, electronica — to ponder and interrogate her conflicting impulses. And she juggles them all against the backdrop of her career and the demands of celebrity and of social media, where she regularly galvanizes her fans with teasers and snippets.Solána Rowe, who records as SZA, has only two official studio albums in a decade-long career. “SOS” was preceded by “Ctrl,” which she originally released in 2017 but expanded by seven new songs in June 2022. Yet albums are only part of SZA’s sprawling output; she has been releasing singles and EPs since 2012 and racked up guest spots with, among many others, Kendrick Lamar, Summer Walker, Lorde, Megan Thee Stallion and Maroon 5. Even in collaborations, SZA’s voice always leaps out: pungent and plaintive, sometimes brazen and sometimes forlorn, easily demanding attention.Along the way, SZA, 33, has moved from the left-field electronic experiments of her early EPs to savvy but still probing pop, as the mainstream bends toward her ideas. “Ctrl” has been certified multiplatinum; “All the Stars,” her duet with Lamar on the “Black Panther” soundtrack, was nominated for an Academy Award, and she won a Grammy singing with Doja Cat on “Kiss Me More.”SZA’s gift is her unpredictable and emotionally charged flow, the complex craftsmanship she puts behind songs that sound like spontaneous confessions. Her vocal lines flaunt quirks and asymmetries that are simultaneously conversational and strategic. SZA can race through syllables like a rapper, then land on a melodic phrase that soon turns into a hook. Her melodies are casually acrobatic, like the syncopated, ever-widening leaps she tosses off in “Notice Me.”With 23 songs, “SOS” arrives as a long, nuanced argument SZA is having with her companions and with herself. It’s not a narrative concept album, but the songs are connected by recurring threads: a roundelay of infidelities and reunions, betrayals and connections, self-doubt and self-affirmation.The songs leap from personal beefs to universal quandaries, while SZA challenges herself as both musician and persona. She presents herself not as a heroine but as a work in progress who knows she’ll make more mistakes. “Now that I ruined everything I’m so [expletive] free,” SZA exults in “Seek & Destroy,” even as the slow, minor-key track tries to drag her down.“SOS” draws on multiple producers and collaborators, invoking old styles and seizing recent ones. In “Kill Bill,” SZA fantasizes about killing her ex and his new girlfriend, sounding both lighthearted and dangerous as the production spoofs a plush R&B ballad. In “F2F,” she starts with earnest folk-pop and blasts into rock as she insists that she’s only cheating with someone “because I miss you.”In “Gone Girl,” she warns a partner about getting too clingy — “I need your touch, not your scrutiny,” she sings, “Squeezing too tight, boy you’re losing me” — on the way to a chorus that echoes “She’s Gone” by Hall & Oates. And in the delicate ballad “Special,” she chides herself for letting someone destroy her self-esteem using melodic hints of “Creep” by Radiohead and “The Scientist” by Coldplay. She sounds natural, even unguarded, in every setting.“SOS” leans into every shade of SZA’s mixed feelings. Slow-grind ballads like “I Hate U,” “Used,” “Love Language,” “Open Arms” and “Blind” detail her anger at boyfriends’ bad behavior, yet admit she’s still drawn to them. But in the quietly resolute “Far,” she insists she’s “done being used, done playing stupid,” and in “Conceited,” she bounces assertive vocal lines off hooting keyboard chords and crisp programmed drum sounds as she declares, “I been burnin’ bridges, I’d do it over again/’Cause I’m bettin’ on me, me, me.” And she should. There’s bravery and beauty in admitting to uncertainty.SZA“SOS”(TDE/RCA) More

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    Angelo Badalamenti, Composer for ‘Twin Peaks,’ Is Dead at 85

    The filmmaker David Lynch turned to his haunting work again and again, for “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive” and other neo-noir films.Angelo Badalamenti, an internationally sought-after composer who wrote the hypnotic theme to “Twin Peaks,” David Lynch’s 1990s television drama series, and the music for five Lynch films, including “Blue Velvet” (1986), died on Sunday at his home in Lincoln Park, N.J. He was 85.His niece Frances Badalamenti confirmed the death. She said she did not know the cause.Mr. Badalamenti was at the piano behind Isabella Rossellini when she sang “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club in Lumberton, N.C., a flower-filled, picket-fence kind of town with a very dark side. Aside from the title song, a Bobby Vinton hit from 1963, he had composed much of the film’s music.He also wrote the music for Mr. Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir mystery “Mulholland Drive” and had a small role in the film as one of two mobster brothers who spits out his espresso in a conference-room scene.His best-known work was the “Twin Peaks” theme, recognizable from its first three ominous, otherworldly notes. He won the 1990 Grammy for best instrumental pop performance for the number, which was, according to the Allmusic website, “dark, cloying and obsessive — and one of the best scores ever written for television.”In 2015, a Billboard writer described the theme as “gorgeous and gentle one second, eerie and unsettling the next.” It was, according to Rolling Stone, the “most influential soundtrack in TV history.”Mr. Badalamenti didn’t really disagree.“Music and composing — I almost feel a little guilty about it — come so easily for me,” he told the north New Jersey newspaper The Record in 2004. “It’s like the well doesn’t seem to run dry.”Angelo Daniel Badalamenti was born on March 22, 1937, in Brooklyn. A second-generation Italian-American, he was the second of four children of John Badalamenti, a fish market owner, and Leonora (Ferrari) Badalamenti, a seamstress.Growing up in the Bensonhurst section, he started piano lessons at 8 but quit because he preferred playing stickball outdoors with his friends. He took it up again at his older brother’s insistence and came to appreciate the piano when girls admired his playing. He was soon accompanying vocalists and other acts at Catskills resorts during summers off from high school and college.Mr. Badalamenti attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and earned a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music in 1960.His first job was teaching the seventh grade in a public school, but when he wrote a musical Christmas program for his students, members of the Board of Education saw the production and told the local public TV station Channel 13 about it. The station videotaped and broadcast the show, and the Monday after Christmas, Mr. Badalamenti got a call from a Manhattan music publisher with a job offer.Nina Simone recorded some of his first songs, including “I Hold No Grudge,” in 1965. Nancy Wilson sang “Face It, Girl, It’s Over” (1968).Mr. Badalamenti got started in films by writing music for “Gordon’s War,” a 1973 blaxploitation film. Ossie Davis, the director, wanted an all-black crew, all “brothers,” he said. Mr. Badalamenti pointed to Sicily on a world map. “You do seven strokes from Sicily, and you’re in Africa,” he said he told Mr. Davis. “I may not be your brother, but I’m certainly your cousin!”Mr. Badalamenti was at the piano when Isabella Rossellini sang “Blue Velvet” in the 1986 David Lynch movie of the same title. De Laurentis Group/Courtesy Everett CollectionHe and Mr. Lynch met when Mr. Badalamenti was called in as a vocal coach for Ms. Rossellini on the set of “Blue Velvet.”Jamie Stewart, whose band Xiu Xiu did an album of “Twin Peaks” music, saw Mr. Badalamenti’s Lynchian work in a historical midcentury context: a postwar world where everything appeared to be sunshine and pastels but where the evil unleashed by World War II still lurked.“It’s very romantic but can be terrifying,” Mr. Stewart said of the music, speaking to The Guardian in 2017. “It has a violence and a sincere sentimentality — sadness but not despair.”Mr. Lynch, who described Mr. Badalamenti’s work as having “a deep and powerful beauty,” said that he and the composer would be entirely in sync in expressing Mr. Lynch’s vision for a film. “I sit next to him and I talk to him, and he plays what I say,” he said in an interview with the American Film Institute.As Mr. Badalamenti explained on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” that’s how he wrote “Laura Palmer’s Theme” for “Twin Peaks.” Sitting beside him at his Fender Rhodes keyboard, Mr. Lynch began talking.“It’s the dead of night,” Mr. Badalamenti said. “We’re in a dark wood. There’s a full moon out. There are sycamore trees that are gently swaying in the wind. There’s an owl.”The words became notes that evoked the story of a murdered homecoming queen in the Pacific Northwest.They collaborated again and again, on the films “Wild at Heart” (1990), “Lost Highway” (1997) and “The Straight Story” (1999), in addition to “Mulholland Drive.” There were five iterations of “Twin Peaks,” including the film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (1992) and an 18-episode sequel series (2017).In between, Mr. Badalamenti wrote for a wide variety of movies, among them “Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” (1987), “The Comfort of Strangers” (1990), “Naked in New York” (1993), “The City of Lost Children” (1995), “A Very Long Engagement” (2004) and “The Wicker Man” (2006).He used what he called his “classical chops” to score “Stalingrad” (2013), a wartime love story set against that pivotal 1942 battle. It was an enormous box office success in Russia, where it was produced.One of his longest-running projects was the music for the PBS program “Inside the Actors Studio,” which was on the air from 1994 through 2019, hosted by James Lipton.Writer’s block was rarely a problem for Mr. Badalamenti, but composing a torch-lighting theme for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona had him stumped. The notes finally came to him in the shower, he recalled, and he hurried downstairs to his piano. “I wrote it in half an hour,” he said.He received the Henry Mancini Award from Ascap, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and a Lifetime Achievement honor from the World Soundtrack Awards.Mr. Badalamenti is survived by his wife, Lonny; his daughter, Danielle; and four grandchildren. His son, André, died in 2012.His niece Frances interviewed him for a magazine, The Believer, in 2019. He remembered being drawn to film noir in his youth, telling her, “The haunting sounds have been there, the off-center instrumentals, ever since I was a child.”Alex Traub More

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    Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ Returns to No. 1

    The singer’s holiday anthem, first released in 1994, ends Taylor Swift’s six-week run atop the Hot 100 singles chart.Back in 1994, Mariah Carey released the album “Merry Christmas,” with an anchor track, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” that mixed the R&B production style of the era with nostalgic touches reminiscent of Phil Spector. The song did well at radio, and the album reached No. 3 on Billboard’s chart, behind LPs from Kenny G and Boyz II Men.Flash forward a couple of decades and Carey’s song had become a modern classic, but chart domination had long eluded it. After a yearslong promotional push that included a concert residency at the Beacon Theater in New York, an animated film and a new music video — as well as the song’s annual ubiquity on streaming playlists — “All I Want” finally made it to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 2019, and repeated the feat in 2020 and 2021.Now Carey’s seasonal blockbuster has returned to No. 1 yet again, ending the six-week reign of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero.” Buoyed by streaming, “All I Want” leads a new Top 10 dominated by decades-old holiday hits, including Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (1958) at No. 2, Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957) at No. 3 and Burl Ives’s “A Holly Jolly Christmas” (1964) at No. 4.On the album chart, “Heroes & Villains,” the new LP by the rap super-producer Metro Boomin, opens at No. 1 with the equivalent of 185,000 sales in the United States, including 233 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Metro Boomin, whose real name is Leland Wayne, has produced hits for artists like Migos, Future, Gucci Mane and Post Malone, but “Heroes & Villains” is his third time at No. 1 with an album of his own.The release features a deep bench of guest stars, like the Weeknd, 21 Savage, Travis Scott, Future and Takeoff from Migos, who was shot and killed six weeks ago. The 85-year-old actor Morgan Freeman also contributed his familiar voice-of-God narration to a promotional short film and parts of the album, as he did on a joint LP by Metro Boomin and 21 Savage two years ago.Swift’s LP “Midnights” falls to second place in its seventh week out, five of those at No. 1. Drake and 21 Savage’s “Her Loss” is No. 3, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is in fourth place and Michael Bublé’s 11-year-old holiday favorite “Christmas” falls one spot to No. 5.Carey’s “Merry Christmas,” from 1994, lands at No. 10 on the album list. More

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    Samara Joy’s Voice (and Social Media) Is Helping Jazz Find Fresh Ears

    The 23-year-old singer had something rare in the genre — a viral moment — and will compete for best new artist at the Grammys in February.Samara Joy was kicking off an encore engagement at New York’s storied Blue Note club in November, just days before her 23rd birthday, when sparks began to fly.“It was my first set, and I was in the middle of telling a story,” she recounted a few weeks later. “I was building up this whole scenario that was going to get me into the song, and then I closed my eyes — and when I opened them, five seconds later, there was all this smoke coming up.” (A woman seated by the stage got a bit too close to a flickering candle; the fire was swiftly extinguished.)“Nothing like that had ever happened to me before,” Joy said, giggling softly. Just a week later, she had another, more traditional first, picking up two Grammy nominations for “Linger Awhile,” her second album and Verve Records debut. The album teams her with noted musicians — the guitarist Pasquale Grasso, the pianist Ben Paterson, the bassist David Wong and the drummer Kenny Washington — on standards including Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” and Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.”Joy, a Bronx native who’s currently based in Washington Heights, goes by her first and middle name (her surname is McLendon). She will compete in February for best jazz vocal album and best new artist — a field in which recent winners have included ubiquitous stars such as Olivia Rodrigo, Megan Thee Stallion and Billie Eilish.When she got the news, Joy was on a train heading home after a gig in Washington, D.C. “I felt like screaming,” she said, “but I was in the quiet car, so I couldn’t freak out.”Joy has grown accustomed to reaping honors. In 2019, as a student at the State University of New York at Purchase, she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition; she became an Ella Fitzgerald Memorial Scholar the following year. Joy’s singing, with its precocious depth, creamy tone and fluttery vibrato, continued to inspire comparisons to both of those legends after the release of several videos that went viral, something of a rarity in jazz — in one, she performed Duke Ellington’s “Take Love Easy,” a song recorded by Fitzgerald in the 1970s — and a self-titled album in 2021.While Joy said she wasn’t especially active on social media at first, it has grown into a natural tool for expression. Jamie Krents, the president of Verve Records, said Joy’s presence there “was one of the things that attracted us to her — seeing how genuine and intriguing she was, and how that could shine through on those channels. She’s a normal 23-year-old person who happens to be a world-class singer.”Regina King, Anita Baker, Chaka Khan and Don Cheadle have also expressed admiration. The celebrated bassist and composer Christian McBride, who judged Joy in the Sarah Vaughan competition, finds her vocals “full of wisdom.”“It’s spooky; she sounds and tells a story like an elder,” he said in a phone interview. “But I think what I love most about her — and I pray that the challenges in life don’t change this — is she’s always positive. She’s got such a fun, positive spirit.”That spirit was palpable during a conversation at a food court in her neighborhood, where Joy admitted her fast success has left her head spinning a bit. “Sometimes I honestly don’t believe this is happening,” she said. “I see pictures of this glammed-up girl, but I’m just me” — on that afternoon, a young woman wearing sensible glasses and no perceptible makeup, clad in sneakers and a down jacket she picked up at Marshalls.The singer, who is currently touring with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in “Big Band Holidays” — the show will arrive at the Rose Theater Wednesday through Sunday — has spent little time at home over the past six or seven months, juggling dates throughout the United States and Europe. “When there are people my age in the crowd, it’s mostly students,” she said. “Or you have younger audience members who have seen me on Instagram or TikTok” — Joy has more than 200,000 followers on the video platform — and tend to be less familiar with jazz.Joy can empathize: She sang with a jazz band in high school that tended toward “a lot of contemporary, fusion-y stuff,” and was largely unfamiliar with the repertoire until arriving at Purchase. And while she’s the paternal granddaughter of the noted gospel singers and preachers Elder Goldwire and Ruth McLendon, who performed with the Savettes of Philadelphia, that genre also held little appeal initially.Joy will compete for two Grammys in February, including one in an all-genre category: best new artist.Scott Rossi for The New York TimesInstead, Joy listened to the old-school R&B beloved by both her parents, “Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin and Stevie and Chaka,” she said, and sang in middle and high school musicals, making her theatrical debut as Erzulie (the goddess of love) in a sixth-grade production of “Once on This Island.” “I was scared about the acting part, because I was very shy — I still get that way sometimes,” she said. “But I wanted to sing, so I was like, ‘We’re going to learn these lines and try as best we can to get inside this character.’”Eventually, Joy did begin singing in church, where her father also performed frequently. (Antonio McLendon is a singer, songwriter and bassist who has toured with the gospel star Andraé Crouch.) “I started in the choir when I was 16, and then I started to sing lead, which was nerve-racking,” she said. “The church live-streamed the services, and I had all these eyes on me.” She nonetheless became “more serious about it, because I was there all the time. We had rehearsal, we had Bible study, we had services on Saturday and Sunday. That was my priority — whereas jazz band was just an after school thing, a couple of songs here and there.”When Joy won the Sarah Vaughan competition, “My grandfather was disappointed, I think” — Ruth McLendon had died in 2014 — “because he thought singing belonged in the church, that it should serve as worship to God,” she explained. “I don’t think he would ever come into a jazz club, because of his beliefs, which I respect and understand. I know that he still loves me, regardless of how he feels about the career decisions I’m making.”Joy’s ambitions include writing; she penned rhapsodic lyrics for “Nostalgia (The Day I Knew),” a sweetly breezy number on “Linger Awhile.” “Now I’m paying more attention to the melodies and harmonics of all these songs I’m singing,” she said. “I’m telling this composer’s story and this lyricist’s story, and it’s beautiful, but I hope I can be influenced enough to write content for myself.”Studying giants like Vaughan and Fitzgerald — Carmen McRae and Betty Carter are also favorites — has also made Joy eager to explore a range of styles: “Sarah Vaughan could sing anything; she could go incredibly deep and then she could sing operatically, and neither seemed like a struggle. I look at her, and at some opera singers, and I want that ease.”When Joy speaks specifically of jazz, of course, there is a particular sense of devotion. “I look at all these influences — like Charlie Parker, like Duke Ellington, like Betty Carter and Sarah Vaughan — and I think, these people were here,” she said, a measure of awe creeping into her quiet voice. “This is a young music, and they did so much in their lives to draw people to this type of music; it deserves to be talked about and shared. And as long as I’m passionate about it, that’s my goal — to share it.” More

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    Golden Globes Announce Nominees Ahead of a Return to TV

    The tarnished awards ceremony will air on NBC in January in a one-year trial. But which stars will show up to collect their trophies?The companies behind the tarnished Golden Globe Awards are pushing forward with a rehabilitation effort on Monday, announcing nominations for a televised ceremony on Jan. 10.Who will show up to collect the trophies is another matter.NBC canceled the 2022 telecast amid an ethics, finance and diversity scandal involving the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the unorthodox organization that bestows the Globes. Citing extensive H.F.P.A. reforms, NBC in September agreed to return the ceremony to its air for an 80th installment — under a one-year trial. For the first time, the show will also be available simultaneously online, through Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service.Most movie studios view the Globes telecast and accompanying red carpet spectacle as crucial marketing opportunities for winter films, especially dramas, which have been struggling at the box office. But not everyone in Hollywood is eager for the Globes to return. Publicists and agents say that some stars (those with the most to gain from the exposure) have an open mind, while others want the Globes to be retired forever.Kelly Bush Novak, the chief executive of ID, a leading Hollywood publicity and marketing firm, said she would encourage clients to participate, in part because she expected Globe voters to recognize a diverse group of artists. “Many of us — in a truly collective effort — held the organization accountable, and many of us are encouraged by the strides and commitment that have resulted,” Novak said. (She added, however, that more work needed to be done.)Last year, after The Los Angeles Times enumerated the foreign press association’s well-known but long-overlooked lapses, Tom Cruise returned his Globe trophies. More recently, Brendan Fraser, who has received rave reviews for his performance as a morbidly obese man in “The Whale,” said that he would not attend the ceremony if nominated. In 2018, Fraser accused a then-member of the H.F.P.A. of groping him in 2003, which the member denied.The stand-up comedian Jerrod Carmichael will host the ceremony, which is being held on a Tuesday (as opposed to its accustomed Sunday spot) to avoid NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.”With a new interim chief executive, Todd Boehly, leading a turnaround effort, the H.F.P.A has overhauled membership eligibility, recruited new members with an emphasis on diversity, enacted a stricter code of conduct and has moved to end its tax-exempt status and transform into a for-profit company with a philanthropic arm. Boehly is awaiting final governmental approval for that plan. Once it comes, he is expected to disband the H.F.P.A. and rebrand the charitable division.The 96-member organization now has six Black voters — up from zero — and has added 103 nonmember voters, a dozen or so of whom are Black. One member was recently kicked out for conduct violations, including fabricating quotes, which leaders of the group have cited as proof of their reformed ways.Live awards shows, including the Oscars, have lost tens of millions of viewers over the past decade, but the biggest ceremonies still attract a larger audience than almost anything else on traditional television, aside from live sports. The most recent Golden Globes telecast, held without celebrity attendees in early 2021 because of the pandemic, attracted about seven million viewers, according to Nielsen. Prepandemic, the show was attracting about 18 million viewers annually. More

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    Review: In ‘Some Like It Hot,’ an Invitation to Liberation

    A Broadway musical version of the Billy Wilder film finds exhilarating new ways to make the gender comedy sing.Not for nothing is the 1959 Billy Wilder film “Some Like It Hot” a classic. A crime caper in which two musicians, having witnessed a mob wipeout, must flee Chicago for their lives, it ingeniously and delicately (though boldly for its time) opens the Pandora’s box of gender ambiguity by having them make their escape in drag. They join a traveling all-girl band.For the sax player Joe, the heels, the wig and the alias Josephine are just exigent props; for Wilder, they’re an opportunity to dress his worldliness in winky men-in-masquerade guffaws. But something unexpected happens when Jerry, the bass player, meaning to present himself as Geraldine, finds the name Daphne popping out of his mouth. What happens is: He likes it.That great moment — quiet, funny, revelatory — also occurs in the obviously-a-hit new musical “Some Like It Hot,” which opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theater on Sunday. As Jerry-cum-Daphne, J. Harrison Ghee plays the moment lightly yet fully, without losing the laugh. But it lands in a world so vastly different from Wilder’s, and in a version of the story so vastly retuned to address that world, that it seems like something much bigger. It’s an invitation, as is the show overall, to a new and intersectional stage of liberation.Not to put too much weight on what is in many ways a standard-issue Broadway musical comedy circa 1959: often silly, sometimes shaggy, but with entertainment always the top note. That’s a pretty high standard, after all, and in its staging (by Casey Nicholaw), its revamped plot (by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin) and especially its songs (by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman), “Some Like It Hot” clears the bar handily. At least in the first act, the show is an unstoppable train, blowing right past local stations where you might have a moment to wonder exactly where you’re headed.Instead, you soak in those songs, which, like the ones Shaiman and Wittman wrote for “Hairspray” and “Smash” and the underloved “Fame Becomes Me,” are pretty much all knockouts. To establish Joe (Christian Borle, inventively funny) and Jerry as “brothers” of different races, bonded by annoyance as much as affection, we get a nifty song-and-dance number called “You Can’t Have Me (if You Don’t Have Him)” in the Roger Edens MGM style. A long and delightful tap sequence midsong lets you know that Nicholaw is going to pummel you with pleasure before massaging you with message.NaTasha Yvette Williams, the leader of the band, introduces the show’s freedom-for-everyone philosophy.Marc J. Franklin/Polk & Co., via Associated PressLikewise Sweet Sue, the leader of the all-girl band, gets a brace of hot jazz numbers that NaTasha Yvette Williams, accompanied by the braying brass and dirty saxes of a fantastic 17-piece orchestra, knocks out of the park while incidentally introducing the show’s freedom-for-everyone philosophy. (The setting has been moved to 1933 from 1929 to coincide with the end of Prohibition.) Her tunestack includes a title song about the various temperatures of love that goes so far past being an earworm that it winds up drilling your amygdala.Best of all, for Sugar Kane, the band’s lead singer and Joe’s wolfish crush, the songwriters offer a clutch of sultry Harold Arlen-style blues. That’s smart for the newly conceived Sugar, who is Black, but also for Adrianna Hicks, who plays her. In dissipating the Marilyn Monroe aura that might otherwise cling to the material from her famous turn in the movie, they give Hicks — last seen as the Beyoncé-like Catherine of Aragon in “Six” — a completely compelling aura of her own.At the same time, López and Ruffin’s book is subtly building an argument that links the original story about gender to an aligned one about race. Jerry, who is Black, is not necessarily welcome in the same places his white “brother” Joe is. The vastly built-up character of Sue must likewise face down the bigotry of locals who try to cheat her, while also educating clueless allies. When one of the band members wonders whether they will be heading south from Chicago, Sue zings, “It’s 1933. Look at me and ask that again.”So instead of Florida, where the movie settles, the show heads to California. There the changes to the story pile up. If you know the bland musical “Sugar,” an earlier, more faithful adaptation of the same material, you may be glad of the liberties, even if they come with some unintended consequences.From left: Raena White on the trumpet, Ghee as Daphne on the bass and Adrianna Hicks as Sugar Kane, the band’s lead singer.Marc J. Franklin/Polk & Co., via Associated PressTake Osgood Fielding III, the millionaire who falls in love with Daphne. Now provided with a substantial back story — he’s Mexican American, justifying a detour to a south-of-the-border cantina — he’s less of a lecher than a case study in laissez-faire sexuality. On the upside, we thus get Kevin Del Aguila’s adorably goofy line readings and eccentric, wiggly dancing. On the downside, the movie’s killer last line, in which Osgood accepts Daphne with the phrase “Nobody’s perfect,” is now tucked into an earlier lyric and lost in the shuffle.And it’s quite a shuffle: Nicholaw has loaded the show to bursting with dance. By the time he delivers a five-minute chase sequence near the end of the second act, with gangsters and bellhops and nonstop tapping, you may feel that trading the darker comedy of the movie — literally darker, with its claustrophobic black-and-white cinematography — for the soufflé textures of Broadway entertainment was a Faustian bargain. Fabulous as the visual production is, with Art Deco sets by Scott Pask, Technicolor lights by Natasha Katz and eye-popping costumes by Gregg Barnes, it keeps squeezing out the story’s quirkier soul.Still, we get the message, mostly from Ghee, a nonbinary performer who carefully traces Jerry’s transformation into Daphne, and then the merging of the two identities into a third that takes us into territory that’s far more complex than jokey drag. All the while, Jerry maintains a sense of wonder about the changes happening within him that makes the journey feel welcoming for those of us watching. “You Could Have Knocked Me Over With a Feather,” a song summing up the character’s epiphanies, is a highlight of the show’s final quarter, which is otherwise somewhat overloaded with competing 11 o’clock numbers.Ultimately, it’s the epiphanies and insights that make it possible to enjoy, without too much guilt, the flat-out entertainment of “Some Like It Hot,” including its groaners, overemphasis and old-school gags. How smart it is, for instance, to have Daphne demonstrate the spectrum of gender by singing, simply, “I crossed a border.” (Smart too, to have it sung in the scene set in Mexico.) And how satisfying it is to have Osgood link his identity issues so succinctly with hers: “The world reacts to what it sees,” he says, “and in my experience the world doesn’t have very good eyesight.”Perhaps not, but some of its artists have a damn fine ear.Some Like It HotAt the Shubert Theater, Manhattan; somelikeithotmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    Review: Klaus Mäkelä, Rising Star of Conducting, Arrives in New York

    Klaus Mäkelä, a young yet already accomplished maestro, made his New York Philharmonic debut with a performance that prioritized clarity.Now New Yorkers know what the hype is all about.The hype, that is, around the 26-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He’s the fastest-rising maestro of his generation, a darling of fellow musicians and orchestra administrators alike. It seems that every time I meet with someone in the industry lately, there comes a moment in the conversation when I’m asked, “Have you heard Klaus Mäkelä?”Outside New York, it’s been hard not to. He has collected podium appointments so quickly, an ensemble as prestigious as the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam was willing to create a title, artistic partner, to keep him in reserve until he officially becomes its chief conductor in 2027. That’s when his contracts will be up at the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic; already, there are whispers about where he could go next.Chances are, he will not go to the New York Philharmonic, where he made his debut on Thursday. (For those keeping track, Leonard Bernstein was just a year younger when he got his unexpected big break.) This orchestra — whose music director, Jaap van Zweden, will depart at the end of next season — needs a new conductor much sooner than Mäkelä is available. But perhaps he has a future as a frequent guest; his first outing with the Philharmonic was a promising one, under an even bigger spotlight than planned, with a program of only symphonic works after the concerto soloist, Truls Mork, withdrew because of an injury.The Philharmonic, at its most exasperating, can be a brash and unbalanced ensemble. Under Mäkelä’s baton on Friday morning, however, it was largely measured in delivering what has become, to mixed results, his trademark clarity. He brought a transparent, levelheaded approach to the emotional extremes of two Russian, B-minor symphonies premiered nearly a half-century apart — the Sixths of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich — as well as to a contemporary work, Jimmy López Bellido’s “Perú Negro.”López Bellido is a favorite of Mäkelä’s among living composers. It’s easy to hear why; this is music that, on the surface, sounds like a successor to other works in Mäkelä’s repertoire that employ enormous orchestral forces, such as the Ballets Russes scores of Stravinsky that he will take to the Aix-en-Provence Festival next summer, or the post-Romantic symphonies of Mahler that he has toured.Unlike those, however, “Perú Negro” — premiered in 2013 as part of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra’s centennial and originally conducted by López Bellido’s friend Miguel Harth-Bedoya — thrills and entertains, but reveals itself all too readily.This piece has the hallmarks of López Bellido’s style, such as rich orchestration and maximal gesture, along with homages to the folk songs and rhythms of the Black Peruvian music that the title hints at. Although Mäkelä was up against the newly renovated David Geffen Hall’s bright acoustics in taming the Philharmonic’s sound, he led a lively account, which was met with a standing ovation.But the memory of it was quickly swept aside by the Shostakovich that followed — in particular the similarly grand, breakneck finale. There, you could hear what was lacking in “Perú Negro”: ambiguous exuberance, Janus-faced passages that misdirect and provoke, both inviting and impenetrable, forever irreconcilable. López Bellido could take a lesson from that, as someone who clearly knows how an orchestra can sound, but not necessarily what it can say.The Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky symphonies were studies in letting a score speak for itself. Whether that works is largely a matter of taste, and ensemble. I heard a similar touch in a Mahler Four that Mäkelä conducted last year in Munich; there, the cool performance didn’t deliver on the symphony’s heavenly climax. But his Mahler Six in Amsterdam this summer was a revelation of terror directly expressed.At the Philharmonic, Mäkelä kept some of the orchestra’s characteristic imbalances in check — such as the outsize sounds that rendered the winds section virtually invisible in the Beethoven Nine led by van Zweden in October — but hadn’t quite rewired the players. He did, though, manage to lend both symphonies a legible, compelling shape, if at a bit of a remove. The most evocative moments came not from the entire group but from soloists: Frank Huang’s violin fleetly galloping in the Shostakovich; Judith LeClair’s bassoon dolefully opening the Tchaikovsky; and Anthony McGill’s clarinet reprising that work’s second theme with rending sweetness.The third movement of the Tchaikovsky, a perennial audience favorite, especially benefited from Mäkelä’s lucid reading, whose transparency brought equal attention to the itinerant melodic line and the dense orchestrations surrounding it. There was a sense of what the composer might have been thinking when he wrote to his publisher, Pyotr Jurgenson, that he was “happy in the knowledge that I have written a good piece.”I found myself, though, wanting to know more than how Tchaikovsky viewed his own music. Mäkelä’s conducting was so deferential to the score, it was tempting to shake him and ask, “But what do you really think?” Classics like this symphony warrant not just recitation, but also repeated examination.Then again, it’s helpful to remember that we are talking about a 26-year-old. Who hasn’t changed drastically throughout their 20s — in life, in work, in worldview? It will be interesting, and worthwhile, to see where that growth takes Mäkelä. He has proved that he can wrangle the war horses. Now it’s time to see what else he can do.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Friday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan. More

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    ‘The Fabelmans’ Is Judd Hirsch’s Latest Great Story

    The veteran actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in Steven Spielberg’s drama. It’s the latest chapter in a long career full of anecdotes.“Have we met before?” Judd Hirsch asked enthusiastically as he strode into a French bistro last month. “I’ve met everybody before. Maybe we met when you were a baby and I said, ‘I’ll see you when you’re older.’”When you invite Hirsch, the veteran actor and raconteur, on a lunch date, you’re going to hear stories on top of stories — stories you knew you wanted and stories you didn’t know you were going to get.The instant he took his seat, Hirsch spun a tale about the afternoon’s dining spot, Boucherie West Village, whose building once housed the Off Broadway theater where he co-starred in the original 1979 production of “Talley’s Folly” by Lanford Wilson.As the actor told it, an agent affiliated with the play wanted to replace Hirsch because his role in the hit sitcom “Taxi” was going to conflict with a planned Broadway transfer for “Talley’s Folly.”Instead, Hirsch helped bring the play to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where he performed it that summer and fall during his downtime from “Taxi.” The following winter, Hirsch said proudly, “I came back and did it on Broadway, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.”Riding on similar waves of showbiz know-how and sheer bravado, Hirsch can currently be seen barnstorming his way through a crucial portion of “The Fabelmans,” the director Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama.Hirsch has only a few minutes of screen time, playing Boris, the cantankerous great-uncle of its adolescent protagonist, Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle). But the 87-year-old actor makes every frame count as he delivers a galvanic speech to the young Spielberg stand-in, exhorting him to commit to his artistic aspirations while warning that they will be in perpetual conflict with the needs of his family.Hirsch opposite Gabriel LaBelle in “The Fabelmans.” He’s not on the screen for long but he makes every frame count.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressHirsch’s unexpectedly intense performance in “The Fabelmans” — the latest in a decades-long career spanning stage, screen and a 1972 commercial for JCPenney polyester slacks — would seem to be a testament to his endurance in a singularly fickle industry.But while he is happy for the plum opportunity in a prestigious year-end film, Hirsch could not quite point to any particular reason he should be enjoying another moment in the spotlight right now.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.“I have no idea why I get any part that somebody else can play,” he said. “Or why I don’t get one when I do want to play it. But I’m old enough to know that’s OK.”Approval is always nice, but Hirsch suggested that an actor’s temperament was forged in far more frequent instances of rejection. When you don’t land a role, he explained, “you can say, ‘What the hell did they see in me that made them turn me down?’ Or you can say, ‘They don’t know what the hell they’re missing.’”Though he’s long split his time between Los Angeles and New York, Hirsch was born and raised in New York, and didn’t expect much for himself after studying acting at HB Studio in the early 1960s. “I never thought I’d play anything more than a construction worker, criminal or some schlubby guy,” he said.Instead he went on to play a variety of prominent roles on television (“Taxi,” “Dear John,” “Numbers”), in film (“Ordinary People,” “Independence Day,” “Uncut Gems”) and onstage (“I’m Not Rappaport”).Presently, when Hirsch wasn’t kibitzing playfully with a waiter (“You don’t mind if I don’t speak French?” the actor said, looking over his menu. “I could say some of those words with a French accent”), he was just as fond of sharing anecdotes from an era when he wasn’t well established.There was, for instance, the fateful introduction he received while visiting Universal to audition for a TV movie in the early 1970s.Hirsch has been an awards contender before. He was up for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony for work he did in 1980, and didn’t win any of the prizes.Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesA woman working there began to show him around to other people in the office: “This is so-and-so,” Hirsch recounted. “And this is so-and-so. This is Mr. Spielberg, and he’s sitting behind a desk, and on his desk is ‘Jaws,’ which I had no idea was anything. And she said” — his voice dropped to a stage whisper — “‘He’s going to be very big.’”“He would not have known of me,” Hirsch said of the fleeting encounter. “Look at all the Spielberg movies since — and I’m not in any of them.”But their trajectories intersected again a half-century later on “The Fabelmans.” The dramatist Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”), who wrote the screenplay with Spielberg, said that the Boris character was based on an actual member of the director’s extended family.The real-life Uncle Boris “had worked in some animal handling in the early days of Hollywood and he had been in the circus,” said Kushner, who has collaborated with Spielberg on “Munich,” “Lincoln” and “West Side Story.” Kushner added that the actual Boris “had lived a wild, itinerant life, and that had made him a fearsome figure to his sister, and to his nieces and nephews.”The scene written for the fictional Boris was intended to impart a lesson about the cost of pursuing an artistic life, Kushner said: “Art has a power that one only imagines one controls. When you access it, if you’re really practicing it, it’s going to take you to the truth. And the truth is sometimes going to be very dangerous.”Hirsch, who was cast after a video conversation with Spielberg, said his preparation was far less weighty.“He said you can play it with an accent or not,” Hirsch recalled. “After I read it, I said, what schmuck would not? He’s going to have to like it this way because I’m not going to do it any other way.”Hirsch said he could channel the frantic passion of the film’s Boris, who feels frustrated that his message is not reaching young Sammy. But the actor said there was only one moment he was “truly scared to do,” when the scene required him to get physical with LaBelle.“I line the kid up against the wall and I say, ‘Look at me — look at me,’” Hirsch said. “After all that, I want him to see what I had to go through.”LaBelle said he encouraged Hirsch to “beat the [expletive] out of me.”“The moment where he pinches my face, I was like, ‘No, no, hurt me. Come on, let’s do it,’” LaBelle recalled.He added, “It’s not like I’m hanging on the side of a plane. I’m just getting my face pinched.”Whether his “Fabelmans” performance garners any attention for a year-end film award, Hirsch noted that he had been down this road before.Hirsch said the only “Fabelmans” scene that gave him pause was one requiring him to get physical with LaBelle. But the younger actor wasn’t fazed. “I was like, ‘No, no, hurt me,’” LaBelle said.Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesHe pointed out that for work he did in 1980 alone, he was nominated for an Oscar (for “Ordinary People”), an Emmy (“Taxi”) and a Tony (“Talley’s Folly”) — and won none of them. Though Hirsch didn’t mention this, he did go on to win Emmys for “Taxi” in 1981 and 1983.Hirsch said he was actually relieved he didn’t win for “Ordinary People,” in which he played a psychiatrist treating a traumatized teenager (Timothy Hutton). Both men were nominated as supporting actors, and Hirsch suggested that Hutton — who ultimately won — was more deserving of the honor.“I said, what’s the worst thing that could happen to me?” Hirsch explained. “I win this damn thing and then have to look at him and make excuse, excuse, excuse — ‘They made a terrible mistake, it should have been you.’”After a server asked him if he would like some black coffee (“That’s the usual color, isn’t it?” Hirsch replied without missing a beat), the actor resumed delving into his trove of stories from projects that did not earn him any trophies or recognition.He spoke of his performance in the 1978 drama “King of the Gypsies,” in which his character is shot by Eric Roberts and falls out an apartment window to his death.“So I said who’s going to do that?” Hirsch recalled. “They said, ‘You.’ I said, ‘OK.’ I arrive at the set and there’s one of those enormous air mattresses in the street.”Hirsch said he filmed three takes of his fatal fall, but while the finished sequence in the movie shows him taking gunfire and toppling out the window, the part where his character lands on a car was performed by a stuntman.“Luckily I didn’t have to hit a car,” he said. “Otherwise, you and I would not be talking here.” More