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    Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Next Project: A ‘Warriors’ Album With Eisa Davis

    The recording, inspired by Walter Hill’s 1979 film about a gang making a perilous trek through New York City, will be available on Oct. 18.In the nine years since “Hamilton” opened on Broadway, Lin-Manuel Miranda has acted (in the film “Mary Poppins Returns” and the HBO series “His Dark Materials,” among others), composed (songs for “Encanto” and “Moana,” for example) and even tried his hand at movie directing (“Tick, Tick … Boom!”).Now he’s returning to his roots, sort of. Miranda, who rose to fame as a musical theater savant, has been working with the playwright Eisa Davis on a concept album inspired by a cult 1979 action film, “The Warriors.” And on Thursday, Miranda and Davis announced that Atlantic Records will release the album on Oct. 18.The album’s executive producer is the rapper Nas; the producer is Mike Elizondo. The album will have 26 songs; the names of the singers have not yet been announced.The album has been in the works for three years. It is unclear if it will lead to a stage production, but “Hamilton” was initially conceived as a concept album, and there is a history of concept albums evolving into stage productions, from “Jesus Christ Superstar” to “Hadestown.”“The Warriors,” based on a 1965 novel that in turn was based on an ancient Greek work, tells the story of a street gang facing a variety of challenges as it retreats from the Bronx to its home base on Coney Island. The novel, also called “The Warriors,” was written by Sol Yurick, and the ancient Greek text, “Anabasis,” by Xenophon; the film was directed by Walter Hill.Miranda, 44, is one of the few musical theater composers to become a celebrity based on his stage work. But “Hamilton,” about the nation’s first Treasury secretary, was a rare accomplishment, winning the Pulitzer Prize as well as 11 Tony Awards, including for best musical and Miranda’s book and score.His other best-known musical is “In the Heights,” for which he wrote the score and Quiara Alegría Hudes wrote the book. Since “Hamilton,” he contributed lyrics to the short-lived musical “New York, New York,” but has not written a new stage production.Davis, 53, is a longtime friend of Miranda and has worked as an actress, a playwright, a singer and a screenwriter. She performed on Broadway in “Passing Strange,” and has numerous credits as a performer Off Broadway and on television and film. Among her plays is “Bulrusher.” More

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    Arrest Warrant Issued for ‘Power Rangers’ Actor Hector David Rivera

    Mr. Rivera, whose stage name is Hector David Jr., was charged with battery in Idaho after a video showed him pushing an older man who used a walker, the police said.An arrest warrant was issued on Wednesday for an actor who appeared for years as the Green Ranger in “Power Rangers” films and television shows, after a video showed him pushing a man in his 60s who used a walker, the police in Idaho said.The actor, Hector David Rivera, 35, was charged with misdemeanor battery in Idaho after video surfaced on Friday showing him in a dispute with the older man, said Carmen Boeger, a spokeswoman for the Nampa Police Department. Nampa is a city west of Boise with over 100,000 people.The video, captured on Friday on a bystander’s dashboard camera, begins with a dispute over a parking spot between a man wearing a New England Patriots jersey and another who is using a walker. It ends with the first man shoving the other one to the ground before climbing into a black truck. He later drove away, the department said.The 14-second video has no audio and does not show the full interaction. But the truck appears to be parked in a space for people with disabilities, and Ms. Boeger said that the dispute began over a parking spot.Video released by the Nampa Police Department in Nampa, Idaho, showed Hector David Rivera, an actor in the “Power Rangers” franchise, pushing an older man to the ground in a parking lot.Nampa Police DepartmentThe Nampa police identified Mr. Rivera by posting the video on the department’s social media pages and asking the public for assistance, Ms. Boeger said. An arrest warrant was issued on Wednesday, and the victim’s name was not released.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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    Colin Jost Will Host the New ‘Jeopardy!’ Pop Culture Spinoff

    “Pop Culture Jeopardy!” is expected to begin production in August and will stream only on Amazon Prime Video.If you have enjoyed Colin Jost’s dispatches from Tahiti for the Olympics surfing events and are hoping to see more of him, you’re in luck: On Wednesday, Sony Pictures Television announced that he will be host of the new game show “Pop Culture Jeopardy!”Jost, 42, is a veteran writer for “Saturday Night Live” and has anchored its Weekend Update segment since 2014 alongside Michael Che. “Pop Culture Jeopardy!” — a spinoff of the juggernaut “Jeopardy!,” which has run for decades on broadcast TV and in syndication — will stream only on Amazon Prime Video.Jost was selected for his “sharp wit and intelligence,” Suzanne Prete, president for game shows at Sony Pictures Television, which produces the show, said in a news release. “He’s smart and quick, like our contestants, and we know he’ll be able to keep up with them while making this new series his own.”“What is: I’m excited,” Jost said in the statement, riffing on the “Jeopardy!” answer format.In the pop culture version of the show, contestants will play in teams of three in tournament-style events, racing to answer questions in a variety of categories like alternative rock, the Avengers and Broadway. Production of the show is expected to begin in August.The spinoff is part of a yearslong expansion of the “Jeopardy!”-verse, as the show’s producers have called it, which will also include special tournaments. The flagship show also has seen plenty of change since Alex Trebek, who had hosted “Jeopardy!” for 37 years, died in 2020. A lengthy, revolving host audition resulted in Mike Richards, then the show’s executive producer, being chosen to host, only to be pushed aside after revelations that he had made offensive comments on a podcast. Then the role was shared between the actor Mayim Bialik and the former “Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings until last year, when Bialik announced that she had been removed from the show. Jennings has since settled in as the sole host. More

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    Review: In ‘Pamela Palmer,’ a Blonde, a Gumshoe and an Existential Mystery

    David Ives’s new play at the Williamstown Theater Festival is less a whodunit than a who done what.This Pamela Palmer dame. Elegant blonde in powder blue and pearls. Nose way up in the air and legs way down to the ground. Lives in Connecticut in a house called Wishwood, with a rich husband in the study, two Degas ballerinas in the salon and an existential problem everywhere else.The problem is: She doesn’t know what the problem is. She thinks she’s done something inexcusable but can’t remember what. Whenever she grabs a sliver of recall, it melts in her mind like déjà vu.Same with “Pamela Palmer,” the play named for her, running through Aug. 10 at the Williamstown Theater Festival. It’s smart, elusive and trapped in its own construction.The author being David Ives, creator of plots that can make you plotz, the construction is exceedingly clever. Seeking an explanation for her dread, Pamela (Tina Benko) begs a private detective, who goes by Jack Skelton, to pay a call at Wishwood. Jack (Clark Gregg) detects nothing, diagnosing Pamela as “a saint with memory issues.” In the process, he falls for her like a lead sinker on a flimsy line.Indeed, “Pamela Palmer” abounds with flimsy lines, labored and unlikely, pulpy as overripe peaches.“Name your price,” Pamela says. “I’ll pay it.”“Isn’t pain what married people eat for breakfast?” Jack asks.That’s all deliberate: Among the things Ives is playing with here are the clichés of the country house mystery, as filtered through film noir and his own restless intellect. Jack, despite his hard-bitten exterior and gumshoe patois, speaks French perfectly and name-checks T.S. Eliot — perhaps as payback for the play’s debt to Eliot’s “The Family Reunion.”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 Salzburg Festival Tradition Deserves a Wider Audience

    Robert Carsen’s take on “Jedermann,” a play staged at the festival every year, stands head and shoulders above other recent stagings of the work.The Salzburg Festival attracts an audience of music and theater lovers from around the world. Yet its oldest tradition is a surprisingly local one.In 1920, the director Max Reinhardt and the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal inaugurated the first Salzburg Festival with an outdoor production of “Jedermann,” an adaptation of a medieval morality play. The performance took place on the square in front of Salzburg’s imposing Baroque cathedral.“Jedermann” quickly became a festival fixture. Since the end of World War II, it has been performed here every summer, often with German-speaking acting luminaries tackling the title role of a wealthy and impious bon vivant who, in the prime of life, gets an unexpected visit from death. Faced with his mortality, the title character, whose name translates as Everyman, learns how fleeting fortune and fame are and undergoes a soul-saving conversion.This year, the play’s complete 14-performance run sold out well in advance — even though it is the only production at the festival that is performed without English supertitles.With this gripping new “Jedermann,” directed by Robert Carsen and starring the sensational Philipp Hochmair, it looks like it’s time for the festival to reverse that policy. This gutsy and moving production stands head and shoulders above Salzburg’s other recent stagings of the work, and deserves to be seen — and understood — by more than just the “Jedermann” die-hards.Every director who approaches “Jedermann” must contend with the play’s peculiarities, including the heightened dialogue, whose archaic touches and rhyming couplets make a naturalistic delivery all but impossible. Though a classic, “Jedermann” is not universally acknowledged as a masterpiece. The most successful “Jedermann” productions refrain from excavating subtle or hidden meanings and focus on bringing the play’s memorable episodes and characters to life.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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    In Chicago, 3 Shows That Keep the Audience in Mind and Engaged

    Musical adaptations of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “The Lord of the Rings” as well as a new Samuel D. Hunter play were on our critic’s itinerary.The musical adaptation of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” that’s playing at the Goodman Theater incorporates quite a bit of crowd work. In a final coup de théâtre that felt both radical and exhilarating, a character leads theatergoers in a communal use of their Playbills.While the three shows I saw during a recent weekend trip to Chicago were wildly different from one another, my mind kept returning to their relationship with their respective audience. Seeing “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” first set me off on that train of thought.Based on John Berendt’s best-selling retelling of a true crime in 1980s Savannah, Ga., the musical, which is running through Aug. 11, has edited out some colorful figures (goodbye, Joe Odom) and condensed the events (the legal wranglings taking up a good chunk of Berendt’s book whiz by in a few minutes). But the biggest move is a bold change in perspective for the show, which has a book by Taylor Mac and a score by Jason Robert Brown.Berendt’s omnipresent chronicler is now us, the theatergoers, whom the characters often address directly from the stage. This will particularly resonate with those familiar with Mac’s way of integrating the audience into a narrative (as Mac did most notably with the 2016 epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”). Another key Mac preoccupation is the haunting of America by its past, something particularly relevant when it comes to Savannah’s self-mythologizing of its lineage. “Get out of my head, dirty demons of historical pain!” the Lady Chablis (J. Harrison Ghee, a Tony Award winner for “Some Like It Hot”) says at one point. She’s referring to her own history, but it’s hard not to hear a wider reference.Chablis, an exuberant entertainer and insuppressible life force, has moved from the book’s periphery to the show’s center, and Ghee’s performance, languid yet sharply angled, is a delight. The nightclub number “Let There Be Light” could use a little more voltage, but then the director Rob Ashford and the choreographer Tanya Birl-Torres are overall too timid in the splashier scenes.The show’s other focal point is Jim Williams (Tom Hewitt), the wealthy antique dealer and furniture restorer who kills his younger lover, Danny Hansford (Austin Colby). In effect, Mac’s book is structured around two ways of being queer in the South 40 years ago. The outsider Chablis is Savannah’s very own Puck, spreading joyful bedlam and ladling out truths; Jim is both accepted and resented by the city’s elite — personified by the Ladies Preservation League, led by Emma Dawes (Sierra Boggess, revealing previously underused comedic chops).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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    At Home With – Kecia Lewis

    “I feel like with the kind of work we do as artists, we are literally giving ourselves — we’re giving our body and voice and spirit,” said Kecia Lewis, who recently won a Tony Award for her performance as the tough-minded but inspirational piano teacher Miss Liza Jane in the musical “Hell’s Kitchen.” What with […] More

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    How the Music Industry Learned to Love Piracy

    A recent documentary has industry bigwigs telling a galling story about the file-sharing era: Everything worked out for the best.How do you disassemble a decades-long, multibillion-dollar industry in just a few short years? This was the question at the heart of this summer’s two-part Paramount+ documentary, “How Music Got Free,” which examines the greed and myopia of the music business in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when an assortment of otherwise feckless teenagers and tech enthusiasts finally figured out how to trade songs over the internet. Depending on your perspective, it is either a delightful yarn about the money-changers in the temple getting their due or a long, sad narrative about corporations and consumers banding together to deprive artists of a fair wage.Far from demonizing the innovators of online music piracy, “How Music Got Free” regards them as digital Robin Hood figures, visionaries whose passion for technology and music leveled the economic playing field. One montage contrasts the Croesus-like wealth of artists like Master P with the hardscrabble lives of residents of Shelby, N.C., as if seeking to justify piracy in one persuasive sweep of social-realist juxtaposition. Shelby is the home of Bennie Lydell Glover, a computer wizard and CD-manufacturing-plant employee who smuggled countless embargoed records onto the internet — a pipeline of prerelease material large enough to affect the sales of artists as big as Kanye West and 50 Cent. The documentary is also quick to point out the orgiastic profits reaped by record labels during the ’80s and ’90s, when CDs could be manufactured for around $2 and sold for $20, a practice that proved doubly lucrative as the new format induced consumers to buy their record collections all over again. The old expression goes: Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered. When the damage was done — from 2006 to 2016, CD sales dropped 84 percent — an entire generation had internalized the notion that they should never expect to pay anything for the music they cherished. The carnage could scarcely be calculated.“How Music Got Free” offers a sympathetic look back at the early days of this paradigm shift, but it’s worth remembering how music moguls and corporations actually responded to piracy at the time. Their reaction might best be described as a Keystone Kops-style combination of outrage, threats and litigation that mirrored the general stages of grief. Their indignant protests had a plaintive message: “You’re stealing from your favorite artists!” The unspoken second half of that was: “That’s our job!”This is worth remembering specifically because “How Music Got Free” was produced by Eminem, among others, and features a parade of industry bigwigs including Jimmy Iovine, 50 Cent, Timbaland and Marshall Mathers himself. Today the documentary treats the rise of online file-sharing services as first an astonishment, then a nuisance, then an existential threat and then, amazingly, a panacea. The original pirates are judged to be “pioneers” who lit the only clear path forward for the music industry. That path turns out to be streaming, a neat compromise between letting consumers listen to whatever they want online and collecting just enough money for it that big record labels are satisfied with their cut. A highly weird coda praises the contemporary streaming economy as a populist breakthrough, wherein, per the documentary’s narration, “we are one step closer to an artist being able to chart their own course.” Also: “Fans can experience music in their own ways.” Also, per one Panglossian talking head: “If you like music, you have more opportunities.” Also: “The artists themselves are just having more direct relationships with the consumers,” which — what does this even mean?History is written by the winners, and Eminem, Iovine and the rest of the plutocrats involved with “How Music Got Free” are clear victors in the aftermath of the piracy wars. What is left unmentioned, of course, is the surrounding blast crater, which has functionally erased a once-thriving ecosystem of middle-class musicians. Those artists survived on the old model of physical sales and mechanical royalties; now they have been almost completely excised from the profit pool of the streaming economy. Perhaps you have read the numbers and wrangled with their penurious abstractions. Per the Recording Industry Association of America, streaming currently accounts for 84 percent of revenue from recorded music. One estimate had streaming platforms paying an average of $0.00173 per stream; more recent numbers have it as $0.0046. Either way, a majority of that princely sum is typically captured by record labels, while the artist is left to make do with the remainder. I will save you the trouble of getting out your calculator. What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings.All turned out well, and music was solved forever.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