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      Caroline Rose Takes Her Indie Rock Show on the Road

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      On a chilly day in New England at the start of a 43-city tour, the indie singer kills time before falling into the arms of her fans.BURLINGTON, Vt. — “I don’t mind walking in the rain,” Caroline Rose said on a recent afternoon, looking through the window of Crow Bookshop.It was about 40 degrees outside and pouring. Ms. Rose wasn’t dressed for the weather, but at least she was wearing a hat, with a camouflage pattern and the words “Buck Fever” across the front. Burlington, she said, was much nicer in the summer.Ms. Rose, an indie rocker who grew up on Long Island and lives mostly in Austin, Texas, had spent about seven months in this city writing the songs that appear on her new album, “The Art of Forgetting,” which chronicles a difficult breakup. She was back in Burlington to play the fourth show of an international tour that will keep her on the road into August.Standing in the “Psychology” section of the bookstore, Ms. Rose, 33, referred to the breakup that had inspired her new record. “I didn’t even really plan on splitting with my partner,” she said. “I thought we were going to work on it. But at a certain point I was like, I have so much I need to work on myself. It just felt irreconcilable for me. It makes me emotional to think about.”Her manager, Ari Fouriezos, whose hair had recently been bleached blond like Ms. Rose’s, lingered by the door.Crow Bookshop was one of the spots Ms. Rose frequented when she was living in Burlington early in the pandemic. Oliver Parini for The New York Times“I hadn’t done a kind thing for myself in a long time,” Ms. Rose continued, her voice wobbling. “Investing time in myself, it felt like the first nice thing I had done for myself in a really long time. And then, after that, it was like a deeper and deeper dive into my own head.”“The Art of Forgetting” is a departure from her previous albums, in which the singer, leaning into her theater-kid background, had often assumed alternate Caroline Rose-like personas. This time around she is simply, frighteningly, herself.She pulled down a book from a shelf: “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk, a 2014 New York Times best seller about the physical and mental effects of trauma.“It changed my life, reading this,” she said. “It has to do with memory and the way our bodies might hold onto memories, even though our brain might forget. After reading this book, I realized there was a lot of stuff in my own life that my mind has just buried.”Outside the store, in the cold rain, Ms. Rose said she wanted to see if her favorite Burlington bar, Light Club Lamp Shop, was open. True to its name, lamp shades were strewn on the windowsill, but inside it was dark was empty.We kept walking — away from the restaurants and outdoor gear shops of the town center and onto the tree-lined streets of a residential neighborhood, dodging puddles and enduring several comically dreary splashes from passing cars.Ms. Rose onstage for soundcheck, practicing the song “Miami.”Oliver Parini for The New York TimesOutside a drab Victorian-style house with Halloween decorations on one of the front doors, Ms. Rose pointed to a window on the first floor.“That was my little room,” she said. Ms. Rose’s sound engineer, Jon Januhowski, had invited her to crash with him when her relationship in Austin was coming undone. It was April 2020, and Ms. Rose spent the quiet lockdown days messing around on her guitar and recording snippets of songs on her phone. A black and white cat named Rosie kept her company.“I felt very honored, because I didn’t learn how to pet a cat until I was 26,” she said.Someone else was living in the house now. Warm yellow light peeked through a gap in the curtains.Ms. Rose walked back to the town center, checking once more to see if Light Club Lamp Shop had opened. No luck, although it was after 4 p.m. The owners kept odd hours, she said, adding that it seemed like a nice way to live, to come and go as you please.Ms. Rose drinks a hot toddy with mezcal every night before she goes onstage. Her bandmate Lena Simon is on the sofa.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesTo some, it may seem as if the life of an itinerant musician assumes this shape. But Ms. Rose said she often longs for a simpler way of life. While making “The Art of Forgetting,” she said she unexpectedly fell in love with a woman whom she had met through mutual friends. She added that they’ll probably settle down in Los Angeles for a bit after the tour, which will take her to more than two dozen cities in the North America before stops in Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands.“I want to live my life and take a break after this,” she said. “I don’t know what that will look like. But it’s the not-knowing part that excites me the most.”Ms. Fouriezos, her manager, reminded her that she was due at the club for soundcheck in about an hour. Ms. Rose suggested a quick bite first and started heading toward a small cafe, Stone Soup. Earlier that day, she said, she’d had breakfast there with her parents, who had driven up from Center Moriches, N.Y., with their dog, Paco, an 11-year-old mutt.At this hour, only Stone Soup’s buffet was available. We piled our plates with rice, sweet potatoes, salad and tofu. There was a silence as we ate. We were damp and cold.“So, how’s everyone feeling?” Ms. Rose said cheerily.Ms. Rose played the songs from “The Art of Forgetting” in the order in which they appear on the album. Before she went on, she talked through the transitions with her bandmates.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesShowtimeMs. Fouriezos was behind the wheel of a 2015 Subaru Forester, with Ms. Rose riding shotgun, as they pulled up to Higher Ground, a onetime movie theater that had been gutted and made into a music venue. A few people were sweeping rainwater off the roof. In the parking lot, Mark Balderston, Ms. Rose’s affable tour manager, told her that the club had sprung a leak.“It’s not dangerous or anything,” he added.Inside, a table had been laid with merch, including a pack of tissues that read, “I cried at the Caroline Rose show.” During soundcheck, she played two songs: “Miami,” which starts softly before building into an edgy power ballad, and “Jill Says,” which is named for her therapist. Then Ms. Rose stepped down from the stage and practiced getting up and down from a trunk in the middle of the concert floor for a stunt that was meant to be a high point of the show.“Caroline loves antics,” Ms. Fouriezos said.In a narrow hallway backstage, a table wedged into a corner was laden with chili and cookies. Ms. Rose’s bandmates Riley Geare, Michael Dondero, Glenn Van Dyke and Lena Simon fixed tea, made drinks with the tequila and seltzer on the dressing table, and changed their outfits. Ms. Rose put on a red and white two-piece set with a spear-point collar.For her performance, Ms. Rose wore a two-piece set wit a spear-point collar created by Peter Heon and based on a design she drew on a napkin.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesIn the greenroom, Abbie Morin, the lead singer of the band opening, Hammydown, emphasized the importance of stretching before a performance to prevent a “bang-over” — a neck condition that can arise from headbanging during a show.Mr. Balderston, a tall man dressed in black, popped in and out of the room as the hall filled with about 450 people. Ms. Rose sipped from a hot toddy made with mezcal, her usual preshow drink. Then she dropped beads of various tinctures under her tongue. “Touring involves a lot of tinctures,” she said.At around 8, Mr. Balderston gave the two-minute warning, and the band pulled into a group hug, chanting, “Let’s have fun! Let’s have fun!”The crowd was rapt during the show, quiet for the quiet songs and loud for the loud ones. The concert was more stylized than the usual club show, with the singer separated from her bandmates by a scrim that cast their silhouettes against bright colors, creating a kind of Pop Art tableau.Ms. Rose had come up with the concept, and Ms. Van Dyke executed her vision with the help of a lighting director, John Foresman, who has worked with indie rock stalwarts like Car Seat Headrest and Mitski. The result, Ms. Rose said onstage, was “the most high-tech form of D.I.Y. you can imagine.”There were a few hitches. Ms. Rose asked to begin “Miami” again, after a false start; and there was an unplanned interlude before “Jill Says,” when her keyboard briefly stopped working. She made light of the snags, saying, “My ultimate goal for my career is to make music A.I. can’t reproduce. What you’re experiencing is a human performance.”Ms. Rose’s concert merch included a pack of tissues that read “I cried at the Caroline Rose show.” It looked like some of her fans did.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesWhen it came time for “The Kiss,” a song about yearning “for the kiss of someone new,” Ms. Rose descended from the stage and wandered into the crowd. Her voice seemed to be floating, and the audience members undulated to make way for her. She stepped up onto the trunk.“We’re going to do a trust fall,” Ms. Rose told the room. “Get close.”As the music shimmered, she let herself drop, closing her eyes. Audience members caught her and gingerly passed her to the front of the hall.“Send me around again!” she said. “Send me around again!” More

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      Super Mario Bros. and Daddy Yankee Added to Recording Registry

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      The Library of Congress has designated 25 recordings, including Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”Super Mario Bros. are currently ruling the box office. Now, they have also been designated an unlikely national treasure by no less than the Library of Congress.The composer Koji Kondo’s 1985 theme for the video game is among the 25 recordings just added to the National Recording Registry, joining Madonna’s 1984 album “Like a Virgin,” Daddy Yankee’s 2004 hit “Gasolina” and some of the earliest known mariachi recordings as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”The registry, created in 2000, designates recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” and are at least 10 years old. This year’s entries were selected from more than 1,100 nominees submitted by the public. They bring the total number of titles on the registry to 625 — a tiny but elite slice of the nearly 4 million songs, speeches, radio broadcasts, podcasts and other recorded sounds in the library’s collection.This is the first time a video game soundtrack has been selected, according to the library. In the decades since the game’s release, Kondo’s “jaunty, Latin-influenced melody” (as the library describes it, calling it “the perfect accompaniment to Mario and Luigi’s side scrolling hijinks”) may have been driven permanently, or perhaps annoyingly, into the collective brain.But its creator remains relatively unknown. Kondo, who was born and raised in Japan, wrote the ditty — officially known as “Ground Theme” — in the 1980s, after seeing a recruiting flyer from Nintendo on a university bulletin board in Osaka.In a statement, Kondo, 61, who still works for Nintendo, said he was delighted by the designation. “Having this music preserved alongside so many other classic songs is such a great honor,” he said. “It’s actually a little difficult to believe.”And its significance, according to the library, goes far beyond the song itself, which was inspired in part by the music of the Japanese jazz fusion band T-Square. According to the library, Kondo’s soundtrack “helped establish the game’s legendary status and proved that the five-channel Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sound chip was capable of a vast musical complexity and creativity.”This year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Madonna’s 1984 album, “Like a Virgin.”Library of CongressThis year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Led Zeppelin’s single “Stairway to Heaven,” Queen Latifah’s album “All Hail the Queen,” Mariah Carey’s single “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville,” and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”Many are deemed significant not just for their musical contribution, but for the broader cultural shifts they exemplify. With “Gasolina,” the first reggaeton recording on the registry, the library notes that its “aural dominance” ushered in “a full reggaeton explosion and even saw various radio stations switching their formats,” including some from English to Spanish.The earliest item added to the registry is “The Very First Mariachi Recordings,” a compilation of recordings (including “The Parakeet”) made in 1907-9 by a group from the rural state of Jalisco, Mexico. The four musicians, led by the vihuela player Justo Villa, are credited with having introduced the style of music to the capital city — and eventually the world — a few years earlier.The most recent is the Northwest Chamber Orchestra’s recording, released in 2012, of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s “Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra,” which was inspired by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.The registry also includes some spoken-word recordings. The journalist Dorothy Thompson’s radio commentaries on “the European situation,” made between Aug. 23 and Sept. 6, 1939, are cited as a “unique broadcast record” of the period right before the outbreak of World War II.The library’s list also recognizes Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot,” a short 1994 recording of him explaining the ideas behind his book of the same title. It was inspired by a famous photograph of the Earth taken by the space probe Voyager 1 during its final mission, which Sagan describes as revealing how the Earth was “a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos.” More

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      8 New Songs You Should Hear Now

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      A dive into tracks by Tyler, the Creator, Feist, Bully and more recent highlights.Tyler, the Creator released a new track as part of an expanded edition of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”Luis “Panch” PerezDear listeners,I have a constantly replenishing playlist on my phone called “Thursday Nights and Friday Mornings.” It’s named for the time I do some of my most focused new-music listening, in preparation for the publication of the Playlist, a weekly feature that I compile with my colleagues Jon Pareles and Jon Caramanica.* Each Friday, we recommend a handful of songs released in the past week, a task that helps me stay on top of all (well, most) of the new music that comes out in a given week, and often the Jons’ picks point me toward what I missed.Every few weeks, I’ll be sending out an Amplifier digest of recent Playlist highlights. Today, we’ve got a mix of some possibly familiar names (Lucinda Williams; Feist; Tyler, the Creator) and hopefully some new ones, too.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Jess Williamson: “Hunter”This is one of my favorite new songs right now. It’s from the Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson, whose music I’ve been following since her haunting 2014 debut, “Native State.” Last year, she teamed up with a fellow musician from the South, Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, and formed a country duo called Plains. Williamson’s contributions to Plains’ excellent record “I Walked With You a Ways” felt like a step forward for her as a songwriter, and I hear that growth on “Hunter,” the first single from her next solo album, “Time Ain’t Accidental,” out in June. It’s a bittersweet song about the spiritually exhausting process of looking for love, but on the chorus Williamson sounds hopeful and replenished, reminding herself, “I want a mirror, not a piece of glass.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Bully: “Days Move Slow”My former colleague at Vulture Jesse David Fox once compared an early song from Alicia Bognanno’s grungy power-pop band Bully to “Sugarhigh,” the fictional alt-rock hit that Renée Zellweger’s character sings at the end of “Empire Records” — and now I will never un-hear that similarity as long as I live. (It’s definitely a compliment.) I interviewed Bognanno over video chat in August 2020, and I remember a very sweet dog named Mezzi dozing behind her. (A dog lover myself, I always ask my interview subjects about their pups. Always.) Sadly, Mezzi has since passed on, but “Days Move Slow,” from the forthcoming Bully album “Lucky for You,” is both an ode to her memory and a chronicle of Bognanno trying to propel herself out of the muck of grief. That probably makes it sound like a downer, but the song has a resilient, upbeat energy about it — sort of like an excitable canine. Rest in power, Mezzi! (Listen on YouTube)3. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro: “Beso”Some couples announce their engagement with a ring pic on Instagram. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, two of the brightest Spanish-language stars in the current pop firmament, hinted at theirs in a music video. Their sweet and sultry duet “Beso” is a highlight from their recently released collaborative EP, “RR” — and proof of their musical chemistry. (Listen on YouTube)4. Tyler, the Creator: “Sorry Not Sorry”Fun fact: In 2021, only two albums made appearances on all three of our critics’ Top 10 lists — Olivia Rodrigo’s head-turning debut “Sour” and Tyler, the Creator’s sprawling rap odyssey “Call Me if You Get Lost.” Last week, Tyler released an expanded edition featuring a few new tracks, including this one, the gregarious “Sorry Not Sorry.” I really like this song’s Jekyll-and-Hyde energy, as a repentant Tyler apologizes for a number of personal and professional slights and then, occasionally, a brasher version of himself takes it right back: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed — ’cause I did.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Mahalia: “Terms and Conditions”I’m a total mark for any song that mines and cleverly updates the sounds of Y2K pop or “TRL”-era R&B. (See also: The entire output of the young British girl group Flo.) “Terms and Conditions,” from the 24-year-old singer Mahalia, does just that. It’s giving me hints of Mya, Destiny’s Child and a whole lot of J. Lo’s glimmering millennial time capsule “If You Had My Love.” But it’s also got a contemporary twist, as Mahalia tells a potential suitor what she won’t tolerate (“If you look at her, consider bridges burned”), flipping the dry language of contractual agreements into something confident, fun and flirty. (Listen on YouTube)6. Lucinda Chua featuring yeule: “Something Other Than Years”Like the Mahalia song, I have my colleague Jon Pareles to thank for this next Playlist pick, from the London-based songwriter Lucinda Chua. “Something Other Than Years” is a sparse, hypnotic duet with the Singaporean musician yeule, which finds Chua pleading in a glassy voice, “Show me how to live this life,” a request that seems to be answered by yeule’s celestial melody. Jon describes the rest of Chua’s new album “Yian” as a collection of “meditations seeking serenity — often just two alternating chords, set out slowly on keyboard and sustained by orchestral strings.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Feist: “Borrow Trouble”I love it when Feist — an artist often associated with calm and quietude — lets loose and makes a ruckus, as she does on this stomping tune from her upcoming album, “Multitudes.” Wait for her primal screams at the very end! (Listen on YouTube)Two Lucindas in a single playlist? Better believe it. The country-rock legend Lucinda Williams’s voice has sounded defiant since at least the 1980s, but since recovering from a 2020 stroke, her survivor’s rasp has taken on a whole new gravitas. “New York Comeback” — from the upcoming album “Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart” — has Williams’s characteristic grit and lack of sentiment (“No one’s brought the curtain down,” she sings wrly, “maybe you should stick around”) but there’s something poignant about hearing Amplifier fave Bruce Springsteen (along with his wife and bandmate Patti Scialfa) singing backing vocals to support her as if he’s just one more rock ’n’ roll lifer nodding to another. (Listen on YouTube)These are my terms and conditions,Lindsay*If the grammatically correct plural of “attorney general” is indeed “attorneys general,” maybe I should say “Jons Pareles and Caramanica.”The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“8 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Jess Williamson, “Hunter”Track 2: Bully, “Days Move Slow”Track 3: Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, “Beso”Track 4: Tyler, the Creator, “Sorry Not Sorry”Track 5: Mahalia, “Terms and Conditions”Track 6: Lucinda Chua featuring yeule, “Something Other Than Years”Track 7: Feist, “Borrow Trouble”Track 8: Lucinda Williams, “New York Comeback”Bonus TracksA few of you have written in to ask if we archive previous Amplifier playlists on Spotify. We do! The easiest way to find them is through our account page, where we also archive all the weekly Friday Playlists, too.And speaking of reader emails: Special thanks to Sharon Smith for — after I mentioned that Bob Dylan won his first Grammy nearly two decades into his career, for his 1979 song “Gotta Serve Somebody” — directing me to this blistering performance of Dylan playing the song live at the 1980 Grammys. (Kris Kristofferson, as you’ll see, was loving it.) Apparently the producers asked him to cut the song down to three or four minutes; he played for six and a half. Classic Bob! More

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      Sean Hayes Returns to the Piano in Broadway’s ‘Good Night, Oscar’

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      The version of Sean Hayes who arrived at a Midtown Manhattan rehearsal space on a Wednesday morning last month was the one everyone knows from his years as a television star on the series “Will & Grace” and as an entertainer. The effervescent Hayes tossed off a quip about the perceived snobbishness of the Hamptons. (“It’s like Shake Shack,” he said. “Anybody can go. It’s not that fancy.”) With similar ease, he sat at a piano and played a few measures of “Rhapsody in Blue.”But the Hayes who a short while later entered through the door of a set made to look like a 1950s-era TV dressing room was markedly different. His eyes were squinted and his posture was hunched. He occasionally twitched his head or shook his hands. He spoke with the defeated voice of a jowly man, sometimes dropping a one-liner (“Gee, I wonder who died,” he said, contemplating the flowers in his room) and sometimes becoming so vehement that his face turned red and a vein bulged from his neck.This is how Hayes alters himself to play Oscar Levant, the pianist and raconteur, in the new Broadway play “Good Night, Oscar,” which opens on April 24 at the Belasco Theater. Levant, who died in 1972, was as renowned for his interpretations of George Gershwin’s music and his roles in films like “An American in Paris” as he was for his dyspeptic appearances on TV game shows and talk shows, jesting ruefully about his struggles with mental health and prescription drug addiction.The play, written by Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson, imagines Levant on a fateful day in 1958 when he has finagled his way out of a psychiatric hospital to be interviewed on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”Beneath its Eisenhower-era period details, “Good Night, Oscar” sets out to comment on enduring ideas about the burdens of celebrity and creative genius. Whether it succeeds will depend largely on Hayes’s ability to embody the dour Levant, a sort of public neurotic who may no longer be familiar to contemporary audiences.Oscar Levant circa 1947. He’d crack wise about the fragile state of his mental health, and once said, in answering a question about what he did for exercise, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”FPG/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesBut as Hayes explained, these kinds of challenges are exactly what makes the play compelling to him.“If you’re not scaring yourself as an actor, what are you doing?” he said. “If everything’s safe, then the results will show that.” With this play, he added, “I’m going to swing for the fences. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I’m still alive, right?”Hayes, 52, was sitting in a small room at the rehearsal space. He wore a zip-up sweatshirt and playfully shook his hair, a mixture of copper and silver strands, which he has grown out so it can be styled like Levant’s wavy coif.Though he rose to fame in his Emmy Award-winning role as Jack McFarland, the irrepressible “Will & Grace” sidekick, Hayes has his own complicated history as a pianist. When people in the industry are surprised to discover his musical roots, Hayes reminds them — with mock chagrin — that he played piano when he hosted the 2010 Tony Awards. “I’m like, did you not watch the Tonys?” he said. “I thought we all watched them together.”The youngest child of a mother who raised him on her own, Hayes started receiving piano training at age 5 from a neighbor in Glen Ellyn, Ill. (When his mother asked if he wanted lessons, Hayes said he replied, “I’m not doing anything else.”)By his teens, Hayes was playing Mozart sonatas and performing in competitions. But during high school and college (and a stint as music director at a dinner theater), he could feel himself being pulled away by the allure of acting — and weighed down by the pressure of classical performance.During concerts, Hayes said he found himself thinking: “The notes are the notes. These are the notes Beethoven wrote. These are the notes Chopin wrote. These are the notes Rachmaninoff wrote. And if you miss one of those notes, everybody notices.”With acting, he said, “I released myself of that pressure — and found a new pressure of always having to deliver on good material.”Similar anxieties — though amplified — prey upon the Levant depicted in “Good Night, Oscar.” Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “I Am My Own Wife,” described his incarnation of Levant as a Jazz Age Salieri, in thrall to George Gershwin and crushed by a self-imposed perception that he never measured up to his idol.Levant’s interviews with Paar are their own little sliver of TV history — shocking to audiences in their day and still potent for their candor. Levant would crack wise to Paar about his hospitalizations, the prescriptions he was taking or abusing, and the fragile state of his mental health. In a 1963 appearance, Paar asked him what he did for exercise. Levant answered, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”When Levant returned to the program a few months later, the host opened the show by telling his audience that Levant was “much better now” and that he would never “use or bring somebody out on this stage who was not completely well.”During that interview, Levant said his recent behavior had been “impeccable”: “I’ve been unconscious for the past six months,” he explained. “I’ve been doing extensive research in inertia.”Hayes starred with Debra Messing, left, and Eric McCormack, center, in “Will & Grace,” playing the irrepressible Jack McFarland.THOUGH FRIENDS HAD SUGGESTED he consider playing Levant, Hayes was not especially familiar with the pianist. As it emerged in 2009 that DreamWorks was developing a possible Gershwin biopic, intended for the director Steven Spielberg, in which Levant was a minor character, Hayes said he went so far as to commission his own hair and makeup test to see if he could at least look like Levant. (The film was not produced.)As he learned more about Levant, Hayes said he began to feel an affinity for him. “The mental health issues are in my family,” Hayes said. “Addictions are in my family. I thought, maybe I can wrap my head around this thing. As an actor, that’s what we do.”After Hayes’s Tony-nominated run in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises,” he and the show’s executive producer, Beth Williams, began discussing a possible Levant project for the stage. They later brought in Wright, who had been the screenwriter of the Gershwin film.Wright said he, too, was fascinated by Levant, having grown up with “a really entertaining, outrageous, brilliant father who was severely bipolar and refused medication, so Oscar’s mood swings were really familiar to me.”After a lunch meeting where Hayes demonstrated how he would play Levant, Wright said, he left “more passionate about it than ever before.”Asked how he gets himself into character, Hayes told a story of himself as a novice actor, playing an elf in a Kenny Rogers Christmas stage show. As the director increasingly asked the elf-actors to take on more of the duties of stagehands, Hayes said he told her, “You know we’re not really elves — we’re just playing elves.”In similar fashion, Hayes said, “I’m not really Oscar Levant. I’m playing Oscar Levant. This is my interpretation of Oscar Levant.”Long before the play’s 2022 debut at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, Hayes said he had been working on Levant’s voice, mannerisms, tics and physical bearing. He continues to refresh himself on those elements even now, though Hayes said he is not one of those actors who remains in character outside of rehearsals and performances.Reviewing that production for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones wrote that Hayes “displays talents here most of his fans will have no idea he had at his disposal,” adding that he delivers “a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.”The announcement last year of the play’s Broadway transfer drew a rebuke from the playwright David Adjmi, who wrote in a Facebook post that he had persuaded Hayes to take on Levant and was commissioned by Williams to write a play for the actor.When Adjmi refused to “lighten the material,” he said Williams and Hayes replaced him with Wright while using their option on Adjmi to prevent him from further developing his play.At that time, the “Good Night, Oscar” producers said Hayes and Adjmi had parted ways over “different creative visions.” Hayes, in his interview, declined to revisit the matter. “We’ve already responded to that,” he said.Wright said that he had spoken with Adjmi “to ensure that it would not be awkward if I proceeded with the project, and he couldn’t have been more generous.”“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” Hayes said of playing the piano onstage. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesAdjmi wrote in an email that though he felt Hayes and Williams’s actions were “morally objectionable,” he told Wright that “it was not my place to tell him or any writer what job to take.” Adjmi said he later learned from his agents that Wright had taken the job.THERE REMAINS THE QUESTION of whether Hayes felt a personal connection to Levant that made him want to play him, but the actor seemed comfortable cultivating this air of ambiguity.Jason Bateman, a longtime friend of Hayes’s and a co-host of their popular SmartLess podcast, said he did not necessarily notice that Hayes was striving to play damaged dramatic figures.“If you’re asking, have I sensed a darker, more mysterious side of him, I would say no,” Bateman said. “Being able to sincerely be in a place of joy, openness and honesty already takes a great deal of emotional and spiritual intelligence.”Having made his own transition from comedies like “Arrested Development” to thrillers like “Ozark,” Bateman said it can be sufficiently satisfying for an actor “just sticking around long enough to show audiences the rest of what’s in your trick trunk.”Wright proposed an explanation rooted in a connection he felt he shared with Hayes. “We both have cultivated some pretty affable, convivial exteriors,” Wright explained. “But I think that’s a survival mechanism, being gay men in a hostile world and needing to be liked, to keep ourselves safe a lot of times. That conviviality conceals some darker waters, and that’s how he accesses Oscar.”Hayes remained coy. “In order to play the darker side of Oscar, I do tap into certain aspects and experiences of my life,” he said, “but those are between me and Oscar.”In the rehearsal studio, Hayes said he found it fitting and illuminating that, having set aside his musical career so long ago, he should choose a role that requires him to play piano in the guise of someone filled with self-doubt about his own proficiency with the instrument.“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” he said. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”If Hayes makes a mistake, he can always say that he was doing it in character. “It’s organic to the material in the play,” he said. “And I’ve finally realized, nobody’s perfect.” More

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      Taylor Swift Fans Grapple With Joe Alwyn Breakup Reports

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      After “Entertainment Tonight” and People published stories reporting that the singer’s relationship with Joe Alwyn was over, many Swifties went online to vent their feelings.To quote Taylor Swift’s own lyrics, “The rumors are terrible and cruel, but honey most of them are true.”Fans of Ms. Swift spent much of the weekend grappling with the possibility that the “Midnights” singer and her longtime boyfriend, the British actor Joe Alwyn, had broken up, after reports from “Entertainment Tonight” and People magazine said the couple was through.“ET” was vague about how it had come by the information, saying in its story on Friday afternoon only that it had “learned” that Ms. Swift and Mr. Alwyn had split. A few hours later, People matched the report with a story of its own citing an unnamed person close to the pair as its source. Both outlets said the breakup had occurred weeks ago.With no comment from Ms. Swift, Mr. Alwyn or their representatives, fans of the singer were not sure whether to trust what they had read. Ms. Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this article.“I think it’s a poorly written, unconfirmed article,” Brittany Browning, a 30-year-old writer who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., said of the “ET” story.She added that she didn’t believe the pair had really split up and predicted that Mr. Alwyn would make an appearance at Ms. Swift’s next concert stop, in Tampa, Fla., “out of spite.” (Mr. Alwyn has not been sighted at any of Ms. Swift’s tour stops thus far.)Another fan, Tiffany Hammer, a tarot card reader from Puyallup, Wash., was also skeptical. “I won’t believe it’s true until I hear something officially affiliated with Swift, whether that’s Tree or whether that’s her mom mentioning it casually in an interview a year from now,” Ms. Hammer, 37, said, referring to Ms. Swift’s longtime publicist, who has become a celebrity in her own right among fans. “As respectfully as possible, it’s none of our business until we know what she wants us to know.”Ms. Hammer noted that some Swifties have gone into an online frenzy as they try to digest the unconfirmed report.“On Reddit, people are combing through her lyrics about this supposed breakup and grieving something that’s not even confirmed yet,” she said. “It’s like, your poor parasympathetic nervous system. Give yourself a breather until you know everything.”Other fans accepted the reports as truth, albeit with caution.“I think that media literacy is really important, and I have the benefit of having a few more years on some of these newer Swifties or younger Swifties,” said Katherine Mohr, a 31-year-old project manager from Madison, Wis. “I’ve been through the wringer on celebrity gossip before and know who you can trust and who you can’t.”Ms. Mohr said she had not been quick to believe earlier gossip items concerning Ms. Swift, including those about marriage, pregnancy and some recent online speculation on why the singer had made a change in her set list, replacing “Invisible String,” a love song believed to be about her relationship with Mr. Alwyn, with a different number. But the articles from “Entertainment Tonight” and People were enough to persuade her that the breakup news was legit.“There is a seriousness factor to this that there wasn’t with any of those rumors, and we need to be able to tell the difference,” Ms. Mohr said. “Otherwise, we’re never going to be able to survive in celebrity culture knowing what’s true and what’s not.”Morgan Chadwick, 27, recalled meeting Ms. Swift at an event years ago and chatting with her about how the two women had been dating their boyfriends for the same amount of time. Ms. Chadwick, a graphic designer in Chicago, said she would often joke to her boyfriend, who is now her husband, that each new love song Ms. Swift wrote was about them.“He would always roll his eyes,” she said.“It’s sad, but also I’m an adult,” Ms. Chadwick added.She said she wasn’t sure what to make of the breakup reports. “They’ve been so private in their relationship that I don’t know that there’s going to be any sort of confirmation other than, like, she might make some comment at a show, or he’s going to show up at a show,” Ms. Chadwick said.Katie Devin Orenstein, 23, a recent college graduate living in New York, said she is counting down the days until she gets to see Ms. Swift at one of her concerts in New Jersey in May. She is, however, rethinking her outfit, which she had planned to wear as a nod to “Invisible String”: a teal shirt and yogurt shop employee uniform in homage to the line “teal was the color of your shirt when you were 16 at the yogurt shop.”She added that she’ll be looking to Ms. Swift for the final word on her relationship status.“Every single thing she does onstage, especially those surprise songs, everyone’s going to analyze it like it’s the damn Torah,” Ms. Orenstein said. More

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      Solange Curates Powerful Performances of Black Joy and Pain at BAM

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      Through Saint Heron, the musician brought Angélla Christie and the Clark Sisters for a night exploring Black religious music, and Linda Sharrock and Archie Shepp for a show that felt anything but safe.When the alto saxophonist Angélla Christie strode onstage on Friday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she was joined only by a piano player. But Christie, one of the more prominent instrumentalists in contemporary gospel, was at full throttle from the very first note — playing in high-gloss, reverb-drenched ostinatos — and within moments, the crowd had become her rhythm section, clapping along on every off-beat.An usher got swept up while walking a couple to their seats, and on her way back up the aisle she shimmied a bit, her right hand flying into the air in a testifying motion. A woman sitting at the end of Row H reached out for a high five, and their palms gripped each other for a moment.It was just a few minutes into “Glory to Glory (A Revival for Devotional Art)” — part of BAM’s multidimensional “Eldorado Ballroom” series, brilliantly curated by Solange via her Saint Heron agency — and already something was hitting different.After Christie, the concert continued with two more sets: selections from Mary Lou Williams’s religious suites, delivered by the 14-person Voices of Harlem choir and a pair of virtuoso pianists, Artina McCain and Cyrus Chestnut; and a roof-raising show from the indomitable Clark Sisters, the best-selling band in gospel history and a fixture of Black radio since the 1980s.The Clark Sisters onstage at BAM on Friday, as part of a bill celebrating Black American religious music.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat’s a lot already: a stylistic tour of Black American religious music, mostly in the hands of women, going back more than 50 years. But “Eldorado Ballroom” was aiming for even more. Rarely does a single series pull together so many strands — not just of Black music, but of Black creativity writ large — into an open-ended statement, speaking to what might be possible as well as making a comment on how Black creative histories ought to be remembered.“Eldorado Ballroom” is an extension of the work Solange has been doing for the past 10 years under the auspices of Saint Heron. As she told New York magazine’s Craig Jenkins recently, her aim with Saint Heron — whether you call it an agency, a studio, a brand or simply a creative clearinghouse — is “to centralize and build a really strong archive that in 20 years or 30 years can be accessible by future generations to be a guiding light in the same way that so many of my blueprints guided me.”Thanks to Saint Heron, Solange has managed to put her cultural capital to use while keeping her own celebrity mostly out of view. On Friday, the singer and songwriter sat beaming from an opera box near the stage while the Clark Sisters motored through a 40-plus-year catalog of danceable gospel hits, but she never took a bow.Saint Heron surfaced in 2013 with the release of a mixtape that helped set the standard for a new wave of outsider R&B. Some of its contributors, like Kelela and Sampha, became stars. Since then, Saint Heron has served as a flexible play space for Solange and her creative community, crossing lines between fashion and design, visual art, publishing, music and dance. Mid-pandemic, Saint Heron released a free digital library of books by Black writers and artists.Solange, middle, attends “Glory to Glory (A Revival for Devotional Art)” at BAM on Friday night. The singer and her Saint Heron agency curated the series, “Eldorado Ballroom.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAnd clearly, Solange has gained the attention of a broad, young, literary community of color. The capacity crowd at “Glory to Glory” on Friday was — unlike at most events in such spaces — about 90 percent Black, and as diverse in age and attire as Flatbush Avenue on any spring afternoon. Twenty-somethings in custom streetwear stood cheering next to older women in their Sunday finest.On Saturday, the crowd again skewed under 50 and majority Black for “The Cry of My People,” a night devoted to poetry and experimental jazz. If “Glory to Glory” was a celebration of how “triumphant and safe” gospel music can make a person feel, as Solange put it to Jenkins — a night devoted to joy, basically — then “The Cry of My People” was a confrontation of pain.The show began with a reading from the poet Claudia Rankine, who stood at center stage as the curtain came up, then read two poems: “Quotidian (1),” about inner turmoil, and “What If,” about a kind of exhausted rage. The second included the line: “in the clarity of consciousness, what if nothing changes?”Rankine had put words to something that the next performer, the vocalist Linda Sharrock, would express without them. Sharrock has been heavily respected in jazz circles since the 1960s for her raw and riveting use of extended vocal techniques: Moans, breaths and cries have been her musical units. But like so many women in jazz, she spent the peak years of her career in the shadow of a more famous husband, the guitarist Sonny Sharrock, and ultimately quit the scene. Before Saturday, her last show in New York City had been in 1979. In more recent years she has suffered health setbacks including a stroke that left her aphasic, and has performed only rarely.Linda Sharrock sang as part of “The Cry of My People” on Saturday night at BAM. Her last show in New York City before this past weekend was in 1979; she has suffered health setbacks including a stroke.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAt BAM, backed by a signal-scrambling, free-improvising, eight-piece band, Sharrock sat in a wheelchair beside an upright piano (that she often touched but hardly played) and sang in big, open vowel sounds. They felt confounding, yet clear. Most of the time, the sounds came in wide, billowing arcs; when she held a single, steady note — sometimes spiked with a growl — it brought the urgency to an almost unbearable level. Often there were hints at a secondary feeling (surprise? anger? wonder? all possible) but the main message was consistent: pain.The backstage crew seemed to have difficulty following the band’s cues, and after the curtain had been down for a solid three minutes following Sharrock’s set, it came back up. The band was still playing. Sharrock performed another mini-set before an awkwardly long wait for the curtain to come down once again. Maybe a clean ending wouldn’t have fit. The crowd — dazed, moved — gave Sharrock a warm response, but there was little that felt “triumphant and safe” about this night.It concluded with a set from Archie Shepp, the luminary tenor saxophonist, composer, vocalist and writer. A disciple of John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, Shepp became a leading advocate for Black musicians’ right to self-determination in the 1960s and has hardly quieted his voice ever since. At 85, his saxophone chops have faded, and he needed help from other band members to bring the instrument into playing position, but the whispered notes he did get out of the horn carried fabulous amounts of weight.Archie Shepp, center, performs at “The Cry of My People,” backed by a nine-piece ensemble.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBacked by a nine-piece ensemble featuring three excellent vocalists (Amina Claudine Myers, Sarah Elizabeth Charles and Pyeng Threadgill) and a pithy, three-man horn section, Shepp pulled from across his broad repertoire. He revisited his classic cover of Calvin Massey’s stout, dirgelike “Cry of My People,” and the swiveling rock beat of “Blues for Brother George Jackson” from the “Attica Blues” LP. On Duke Ellington’s gospel standard “Come Sunday,” Shepp sang in an earnest baritone while Myers, who briefly took over the piano chair from Jason Moran, splashed him with generous harmonies. As Shepp sang the line, “God of love, please look down and see my people through,” the house erupted in a wave of support.His set, like his six-decade-long career, was a reminder that the walls that divide spiritual music, popular music and art music can often be arbitrary. “Where did they come from, anyway?” he seemed to ask. This, you could say, was the message of “Eldorado Ballroom” writ large.The series takes its name from a once-legendary venue in Houston’s Third Ward neighborhood, where Solange grew up. At the ’Rado, as it was known, jazz, gospel and soul — art, spiritual and popular — all appeared on the same stage, until an economic downturn and a pattern of police repression forced the venue to close in 1972.The night that Solange’s series kicked off — March 30, with a show featuring the outsider-R&B trifecta of Kelela, keiyaA and Res — the actual Eldorado Ballroom was celebrating its grand reopening in Houston, after a nearly $10 million restoration project. With a little luck, Houston may have its own “Eldorado Ballroom” soon, too. More

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      Stephen Hough Revisits His Youth, in Playful Fragments

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      In his new memoir, “Enough: Scenes From Childhood,” Stephen Hough recalls his artistic and sexual coming-of-age with a light touch.On the cover of the book “Enough: Scenes From Childhood,” out this week from Faber & Faber, a young Stephen Hough sits at the piano, wearing a velvet jacket stitched with sequins and fake pearls. He’s dressed as Liberace.“Obviously, there’s a gay subtext to that costume,” Hough said in a recent video interview. “Even then, I loved the outrageousness of it, even though I was quite shy.” There’s a hint of subversion, something Hough maintains today with a twinkle permanently in his eye.Hough, an English pianist and composer, has carried his lifelong love of creative writing into two previous books: “Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More,” and a novel, “The Final Retreat.” Where Hough described his novel as “Sibelian” in form, “Enough,” a collection of vignettes on childhood and Hough’s troubled adolescence, is, in his words, more Debussyan: “In the ‘Préludes,’ the way he writes the piece titles at the end of the preludes, not at the beginning, with dots — I love this idea of hinting at things, suggesting things.”Playful suggestion abounds in Hough’s memoir, from the cover onward. (The first part of the title is a play on his regularly mispronounced surname, the second on Robert Schumann’s “Kinderszenen.”) “I do like shocking people, and I think that’s part of what keeps me onstage,” he said.The critic Alexandra Coghlan said that there is a lightness of touch in both Hough’s playing and writing, “allowing him to explore some big topics on the page — his Catholic faith, his homosexuality, life as an artist — without becoming po-faced or preachy.” Among stories of “chucky” eggs (boiled hard, then mashed with seasoning) and his family’s tenuous Beatles connection, Hough recalls the time, at age 4, when he inserted his third finger up a neighborhood boy’s rectum. “Later, I would use it to trill long at the top of the keyboard in the Liszt First Concerto,” he writes, nonchalantly.Despite a scrapbook style, “Enough” retains a loose chronology, beginning with his family’s first piano, a “pretty bad one” with yellowed keys and a rosewood frame, bought for £5 in an antique shop near his home, in an area between Liverpool and Manchester; and ending after the Hough won the Naumburg International Piano Competition in 1983, at 21.In lieu of descriptions of pianos he’s loved — “It’s like meeting someone on holiday and having a romance: You know that you can’t see them again so best not to be too involved,” he said — Hough focuses on relationships with family and teachers, and an early musical life of hymns, nursery rhymes and “sweet, teeth-rotting tunes” from the world of light music.Hough performing with the New York Philharmonic in 2019. In his memoir, he describes an early musical life of hymns, nursery rhymes and “sweet, teeth-rotting tunes” from the world of light music.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesHough’s writing is deeply sensual, “because I had such a lack of it in my childhood,” he said. The post-World War II period that saw colorful developments in art and music — he turned to David Bowie and Marc Bolan in his teens — coincided, in Hough’s world at least, with “horrible food”: his grandmother’s “desiccated baking,” or overboiled sprouts that “looked like comatose slugs.” That peculiarly British trait of blandness, Hough said, “comes right through from the Victorian suspicion of pleasure.”“Only in our literature have we allowed ourselves to enjoy words in a sensual way,” he added. “You think of the great poets right through the era, that’s the only place where we have let go of the tight corsets and collars.”Before he had any idea of the concept, Hough knew that he was gay. Later, he learned what the word “homosexual” meant: “I thought, ‘How disgusting is that!’ And then two seconds later, I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute, that’s me!’”His adolescence was full with contradictions about sexuality, particularly as he converted to Catholicism. Later, his route to self-acceptance came through celibacy. A busy professional life after his Naumberg win helped distract him, though he was tormented by the constant possibility of guilt — mainly through unconscious thoughts, like sex dreams. “This was my scrupulous theological line on overdrive, really,” he said, ”but it was distressing, I have to say, many times in my life.”Hough’s parents — loving of him, but not especially of each other — contained similar conflicting multitudes. His father, a member of the now-defunct Liberal Party, was anti-Europe but not aligned with the political right’s position on the issue, was prudish and chivalrous around women yet also a serial adulterer. “He was just outside of every box that you could imagine,” Hough said, “in the most interesting way.”His mother was irrepressible. Despite saying that she was solely attracted to men before her death, “there were so many clues along the way,” Hough said. “Maybe she was part of a kind of sexual fluidity before it was known as that; maybe she enjoyed physical affection with women without feeling the need to say, ‘I’m a lesbian.’”At 10, Hough enrolled at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester. What followed was a dark period for him (he suffered a nervous breakdown) and the school (some of his teachers would later go to prison for child abuse), before he moved to the Royal Northern College of Music, where “something sparked into life.”Three life-changing moments came in a short period: the inaugural BBC Young Musician of the Year competition; his first Catholic Mass; and his discovery of Edward Elgar’s setting of the John Henry Newman poem “The Dream of Gerontius.”“It turned me around in every way: musically, religiously, personally,” Hough said of the Elgar. “You can taste it really: that era of late Victorian camp, high-church life.”Hough had been interested in composing, but was forced to stop studying it as he focused on piano while at the Royal Northern College of Music. (John Corigliano encouraged him to restart in the 1990s.) In contrast to his many piano teachers — including “Miss Felicity Riley,” an orange-lipped teacher from the next village, the avuncular Gordon Green and the fearsome Adele Marcus — Hough didn’t feel the need to return to composition lessons.“I think it’s a little bit like writing words,” he said. “I don’t think Henry James had creative writing lessons, but he read and he knew the grammar, and so he set off on a journey with it.” That method — of writing music by absorbing musical grammar — informs his compositions, which “are always felicitous, viz., most recently his delicately allusive first string quartet,” the music critic Michael Church wrote in an email, referring to “Les Six Recontres” (2021), which evokes flavors of the French neo-Classical set Les Six.“Enough” concludes in New York: Hough gained a scholarship to the Juilliard School, and fell in love with a city slowly coming to terms with what would become the AIDS crisis.“As the 1980s moved on, it was like a cloud in the sky on a sunny day,” Hough said. “Gradually it began to be darker and darker, and this extraordinary life of clubbing, fun and parties became very different in flavor.”But while the book ends with Hough’s life in turmoil, there’s one final suggestion: that better things are coming. 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      Morgan Wallen Spends a Fifth Straight Week at No. 1

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      The country superstar, on his latest chart streak, holds off challenges from the sardonic pop singer Melanie Martinez and a deluxe reissue from Tyler, the Creator.For the fifth time in a row, the country superstar Morgan Wallen tops the Billboard album chart with his latest extra-long LP, “One Thing at a Time,” easily holding off challenges from new releases by the singer Melanie Martinez and the indie-rock supergroup boygenius.In its latest week, the 36-track “One Thing,” Wallen’s third studio album, had the equivalent of 173,000 sales in the United States, including 216 million streams and 8,000 copies sold as a full album, according to the tracking service Luminate.It is Wallen’s latest streak atop the chart. At the beginning of 2021, he released “Dangerous: The Double Album” — which had 30 tracks — and held the No. 1 spot for 10 weeks straight, despite a temporary ban on country radio after he had been caught on video using a racial slur.Martinez, a teenage contestant on “The Voice” a decade ago who has since explored a sardonic form of art-pop as a recording artist, lands at No. 2 with her latest release, “Portals.” It had the equivalent of 142,000 sales, including 61 million streams and 99,000 copies sold as a complete album; in its physical form, “Portals” came in 21 versions, including 14 CDs in a rainbow of collectible variations — autographed, with “puzzle” or lenticular covers, with a tank top — along with six vinyl LPs and a cassette.Tyler, the Creator, jumped 134 spots to No. 3 with the deluxe version of his 2021 album “Call Me if You Get Lost,” which had 78 million streams and 11,000 copies sold as a complete package.Boygenius, featuring three acclaimed singer-songwriters — Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus — opens at No. 4 with its first full album, “The Record,” after an EP released five years ago. “The Record” had the equivalent of 67,000 sales, including 18 million streams and 53,000 copies sold of the full album.SZA’s “SOS” holds at No. 5 in its 17th week out. More