Music

Seemingly sweet yet insistently ominous, this opera installation turns a sandy beach into a spectacle of a changing climate.In May 2019, as the art world raced through the first preview day of the Venice Biennale, a tiny number of us set off for a naval base in the northeast corner of the city.There, inside a damp storehouse commandeered as an ad hoc pavilion for Lithuania, we ascended a scaffold and looked down on a startling sight: a large sandy beach. Beneath us, children played with buckets and shovels; dogs dozed and yapped; and a cast of more than a dozen sang of delayed flights and exploding volcanoes to a spare, insistently catchy electronic score.No one had pegged this as a highlight of the biennial. But it quickly became clear that it was a masterpiece of culture in a changing climate: a dismayingly rare subject for art, given its urgency. Three days later “Sun & Sea” (the title, like the music, is only superficially benign) won the show’s top prize, the Golden Lion, even as its three young Lithuanian creators — the director Rugile Barzdziukaite, the librettist Vaiva Grainyte and the composer Lina Lapelyte, working with the Italian curator Lucia Pietroiusti — hustled to secure funding to finish the run.Looking down from a mezzanine, you see the beachgoers sing solos or duets of a few minutes apiece, interrupted sometimes by errant children or a flying beach ball.George Etheredge for The New York Times“Sun & Sea” is now on tour, though the pandemic has not made it easy. The beach re-emerged earlier this summer in an empty Bauhaus swimming pool outside Berlin; in a warehouse in Piraeus, Greece; and in the orchestra level of an 18th-century Roman theater. It arrived this week at the BAM Fisher in Brooklyn, where its largely Lithuanian cast (some of whom have been with “Sun & Sea” since its first presentation at the national gallery in Vilnius in 2017) has been beefed up with New York-area supernumeraries who have substantially upped the beach’s tattoo quotient.Compressed into the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s black box theater, the opera has lost some of its vertiginous impact. And its reveries of carefree international travel have the slight feel of a prepandemic time capsule. But “Sun & Sea” remains one of the greatest achievements in performance of the last 10 years: wry, seductive and cunning in ways that reveal themselves days or years later. This is a performance that makes the extinction of the species feel as agreeable as a perfect pop song, and as unforgettable, too.The New York run is sold out, though standby tickets are available, and tickets are going fast for subsequent stops in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Bentonville, Ark. Here it’s being performed for five hours each day, and ticket holders can enter at half-hour intervals and stay as long as they wish. (The score runs in a loop of a bit over an hour.)“Sun & Sea” looks at climate change nondirectionally, immersively, with the same casual unconcern as most holidaymakers (or, frankly, most legislators).George Etheredge for The New York TimesLooking down from a mezzanine, you see the beachgoers sing solos or duets of a few minutes apiece, interrupted sometimes by errant children or a flying beach ball. Two lovers debate what time to wake up to get to the airport the next day. An older woman reads the multilingual label on her sunscreen tube. A nouveau riche mother (the soprano Kalliopi Petrou, on a chaise longue) extols her recent Australian family vacation, the free piña coladas and the coral with its “bleached, pallid whiteness.”Only gently, distantly, do these characters perceive that the summers are a little hotter than before, that the waves are a little scarier. A young woman with a yoga mat and a self-help book (Nabila Dandara Vieira Santos, lying on a beach towel) marvels at the red sundresses, the green plastic bags, the fish-killing algal blooms: “O the sea never had so much color!”This episodic structure, as well as its repetition over hours, is central to the force of “Sun & Sea” — which looks at climate change nondirectionally, immersively, with the same casual unconcern as most holidaymakers (or, frankly, most legislators). Soloists often sing the same melody two times, once with banal lyrics about their day at the beach, and once tending toward the poetic, the cosmic, the climatic.George Etheredge for The New York TimesGeorge Etheredge for The New York TimesOne perpetually irritated beachgoer (the mezzo-soprano Egle Paskeviciene) sings an aria about tourists who won’t clean up after their dogs; later, to the same octave-leaping melody, she marvels that last Christmas “it felt like it could be Easter!” A corporate workaholic (the tender bass Vytautas Pastarnokas, in maroon swim trunks) sings steadily on the beat with the score’s pulsing monotone — first about the difficulties of relaxing, and then, later, about the “suppressed negativity” that pours out “like lava, like lava, like lava, like lava.”The whole cast sings an adagio Vacationers’ Chorus — “You should not leave your children unobserved!” — that’s reset, at the tail of the opera’s hourlong cycle, with Grainyte’s most poetic invocation of habitat change. “Eutrophication!” the beachgoers sing. “Our bodies are covered with a slippery green fleece; our swimsuits are filling up with algae.”Then the first chorus repeats. Fun follows on fear, fear follows on fun, neither with any great impact on the other. The world heats up, and the singers slather on more sunscreen. The forests burn on the other coast, and we queue for brunch with smoke in our eyes. Barzdziukaite, Grainyte and Lapelyte are among the few artists ready to engage with climate change at this scale, with this seriousness: not as a single coming disaster, but an entire epoch in which pleasures and disasters will bump up against one another and the end never comes.Through the audience’s omnipresent cameraphones, our critic writes, “this episodic opera gets further chopped into shareable snippets.”Jason FaragoGrainyte’s lyrics still invoke “our northern flatland,” a Schengen area idyll reached by discount European air carriers, though the beach at BAM has been New Yorkified in places: nestled in the sand, alongside a Lithuanian word-search booklet, are bodega takeout trays and a tote bag from the Park Slope Food Co-op. Not that the translation to New York has been seamless. BAM Fisher is the wrong venue for “Sun & Sea,” with the singers and supernumeraries crammed on too small a sandbar, pinned up against ugly gray walls.And the mezzanine is low, placing us too close to the singers and denying us the bird’s-eye — or drone’s-eye — view of the beachgoers so important to Barzdziukaite’s staging. “Sun & Sea” is choreographed to be seen overhead, from a forensic distance, as if we were sun gods looking down on our wayward creation. Yet that protective distance gets intentionally negated by new conditions of performance spectatorship: above all, by the phones wielded by the majority of spectators. (We might say that one working definition of performance art, as distinct from opera or theater, is that audience members are allowed to use their phones.)By placing us over the singers, Barzdziukaite sets up the perfect shot; she is, after all, a film director, and has used the same perspective in documentaries about habitat decay. First in Venice, then in Rome, and now again here, I watched my fellow audience members cradle their phones in their hands throughout the performance, as if compelled by the aerial view. They held them parallel to the stage below, so that the screen filled entirely with sand.By placing us over the singers, the artists have set up the perfect cameraphone shot.George Etheredge for The New York TimesBy design, then, this episodic opera gets further chopped into shareable snippets, or else merely into pictures we can scroll through later, as if they were our own holiday snaps. Though it’s a bit diminished at BAM, this overwhelming achievement of “Sun & Sea” endures: It brings our ecological disquiet and our technological derangement into registration, turning the opera’s endless vacation into our own. We have become new people, with new eyes and ears, in a new climate, and we are still just lazing away the days.Sun & SeaThrough Sept. 26 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; 718-636-4100, bam.org. More

Pour sa mise en scène l’opéra de Georges Enescu, le libano-canadien Wajdi Mouawad sonde les traumatismes de la compagnie — et les siens. “Quand on est soi-même complètement fracturé, on construit”.The New York Times traduit en français une sélection de ses meilleurs articles. Retrouvez-les ici.PARIS — Peu avant le début des répétitions pour sa mise en scène de l’“Œdipe” d’Enesco à l’Opéra de Paris, Wajdi Mouawad a une idée qui s’avère insolite. Il rédige un lexique de toutes les références obscures du livret — comme “l’eau de Castalie”, une source sacrée de Delphes — et l’envoie au chœur.Wajdi Mouawad, qui a 52 ans et dirige le Théâtre national de la Colline à Paris, est alors stupéfait d’apprendre que c’est la première fois que les choristes reçoivent un tel document. Quand il rencontre les techniciens de l’Opéra pour leur expliquer l’histoire de cet “Œdipe”, une curiosité composée dans les années 30 qui s’inspire du mythe grec, leur réaction est la même, se souvient-il dans un entretien: les metteurs en scène prennent rarement la peine de leur accorder beaucoup d’attention.“C’est étrange, parce qu’on me dit : ‘c’est formidable, tu dis bonjour’, ” confirme-t-il. “J’ai l’impression d’arriver dans un monde traumatisé qui maintenant trouve que son traumatisme est la normalité.”Traumatisme : le mot pourrait résumer ces dernières années à l’Opéra de Paris,volontiers frondeur. Fin 2019 et début 2020, les grèves provoquées par la perspective d’une réforme des retraites ont creusé un déficit de 45 millions d’euros, sur un budget de près de 230 millions d’euros. Et encore, c’était avant que la pandémie n’oblige à annuler plus d’une année de productions. (Des spectacles ont eu lieu en septembre et en octobre de l’année dernière, mais la compagnie a dû attendre fin mai pour reprendre sa programmation régulière.)L’“Œdipe” qui débute lundi à l’Opéra Bastille, la plus vaste scène de la compagnie, inaugure une nouvelle ère. Il s’agit de la première production commandée par Alexander Neef, le nouveau directeur général de l’Opéra de Paris nommé il y a un an.Le choix de Wajdi Mouawad ne doit rien au hasard. Avant d’arriver à Paris, Neef a dirigeait la Compagnie nationale d’opéra de Toronto où il a co-produit les premiers pas de Mouawad dans l’univers de l’opéra. C’était “L’Enlèvement au sérail” de Mozart, en 2016, qu’Alexander Neef qualifie d’ “une des expériences les plus gratifiantes que j’aie connue avec un metteur en scène.”“Sa force en tant qu’artiste, c’est qu’il a vraiment à cœur de travailler avec les gens,” explique Alexander Neef lors d’un entretien dans son bureau. “Avec “Œdipe”, j’espérais qu’il arrive à ressouder la compagnie. Il faut presque lui demander de ne pas être trop gentil.”Le retour d’ “Œdipe” sur la scène parisienne s’est fait attendre. Unique opéra de Georges Enesco, l’œuvre a été créée en 1936 au Palais Garnier. Elle n’a jamais été reprise à l’Opéra de Paris depuis cette date, alors que d’autres compagnies d’opéra s’y sont récemment intéressées. La première production nord-américaine a eu lieu en 2005 à l’université d’Illinois. En Europe, Achim Freyer a offert une mise en scène applaudie au Festival de Salzbourg il y a deux ans, sous la baguette d’Ingo Metzmacher que l’on retrouve à Paris.Wajdi Mouawad, au centre, lors d’une répétition d’ “Oedipe” à l’Opéra de Paris.Eléna Bauer/Opéra national de ParisPlus que la qualité de l’oeuvre, Alexander Neef pense que ce sont les accidents de l’histoire qui expliquent le manque d’intérêt pour cet “Œdipe” en dépit de critiques élogieuses au moment de sa création. En 1936, le New York Times rapportait les propos du compositeur et critique français Reynaldo Hahn évoquant une œuvre “grandiose, élevée, minutieusement élaborée, toujours imposante et qui force l’admiration.”“Après 1945, sa musique est passée de mode,” avance Alexander Neef à propos de la partition d’Enesco. “Pour beaucoup de compositeurs après l’Holocauste, la musique tonale n’avait plus lieu d’être.”Quand Alexandre Neef lui a proposé le projet, Wajdi Mouawad s’est avant tout intéressé au livret. Le metteur en scène a beaucoup fréquenté la légende d’Œdipe: en trente ans de carrière, il a monté l’ “Œdipe roi” de Sophocle trois fois. Et en 2016, il a même écrit une pièce intitulée “Les Larmes d’Œdipe”, qui relie la tragédie à la situation politique actuelle de la Grèce.Edmond Fleg, le librettiste d’ “Œdipe”, a largement puisé dans “Œdipe roi” et “Œdipe à Colonne”, du même Sophocle, pour les troisième et quatrième actes de l’opéra. (Le premier et le deuxième explicitent le contexte de la pièce.) “C’est un peu résumé, mais ce sont les mêmes répliques,” confirme Wajdi Mouawad. “Je me suis dit que j’avais de la place pour raconter cette histoire.”Composer des histoires est une priorité de toujours pour Wajdi Mouawad, qui est né au Liban en 1968. Sa famille a fui la guerre civile quand il avait dix ans, s’installant d’abord en France puis au Québec.“Quand j’essayais de comprendre la guerre du Liban, soit on me disait qu’il n’y avait rien à comprendre, soit on me disait : ‘c’est à cause des autres’,” se souvient-il. “Je manque tellement de récits.”Après une formation d’acteur à l’École nationale de théâtre du Canada à Montréal, Wajdi Mouawad se fait remarquer avec une tétralogie épique intitulée “Le Sang des promesses”, qui fait le tour du monde. Composée de quatre volets, “Littoral” (1999), “Incendies” (2003), “Forêts” (2006) et “Ciels” (2009), la pièce joue sur les thèmes du traumatisme intergénérationnel, de la guerre et de l’exil.Son travail a fait découvrir le théâtre contemporain à nombre de milléniaux francophones. À son retour à Paris en 2016, à la direction du théâtre de la Colline, Wajdi Mouawad se démarque du goût européen actuel pour les productions non linéaires et très conceptuelles. Lisa Perrio, une actrice qui a travaillé plusieurs fois sous sa direction, le confirme : “Il aime le dramatique, le pathos, et ça marche.”“C’est la chose la plus dure de ma vie que j’aie eu à jouer,” ajoute-t-elle, “parce que ça te demande tellement d’émotion.”Pour Wajdi Mouawad, le postmodernisme est un luxe incompatibe avec certains traumatismes. “Je suis le post-modernisme,” dit-il. “La guerre du Liban, il n’y a pas plus post-moderne. La déconstruction, c’est un truc de riches. Quand tout va bien, on déconstruit. Quand on n’a pas les moyens – quand on est soi-même complètement fracturé – on construit.”“Quand tout va bien, on déconstruit,” dit Wajdi Mouawad. “Quand on n’a pas les moyens – quand on est soi-même complètement fracturé – on construit.”Julien Mignot pour The New York TimesEn mars, un an après le début des perturbations causées par la pandémie, la Colline est un des premiers théâtres français à être occupé par des manifestants. Les étudiants et les travailleurs de la culture exigeaient le soutien du gouvernement et le retrait de la réforme de l’assurance-chômage. Très vite, le mouvement s’est étendu à plus de cent théâtres.Contacté par téléphone, Sébastien Kheroufi, un des premiers élèves-comédiens à s’être installé à la Colline, dit que Wajdi Mouawad est un des rares metteurs en scène de renom à avoir réservé un accueil chaleureux aux occupants . “Un soir, il n’a pas hésité à rester avec nous plusieurs heures après ses répétitions parce qu’on avait besoin de parler,” se souvient-il.La levée de l’occupation fin mai reste toutefois une source de frustration pour Wajdi Mouawad. Avec son équipe, il a proposé aux étudiants de rester pour la réouverture et de prendre la parole avant les spectacles. Wajdi Mouawad espérait aussi créer une troupe permanente de jeunes comédiens à qui il offrirait des contrats à l’année.Christopher Maltman, center, in a rehearsal of “Oedipe” at the Paris Opera.Elisa Haberer/Opéra national de ParisIls ont fini par refuser “parce que l’idée venait de nous et qu’ils ne voulaient rien nous devoir,” juge-t-il aujourd’hui. Un coup dur pour cet homme qui a horreur de la hiérarchie et n’a pas hésité à rédiger une lettre ouverte dépitée dans laquelle il revient sur l’ “échec” de toutes les parties engagées dans l’occupation.Puis, début septembre, au beau milieu des répétitions d’ “Œdipe”, François Ismert, son dramaturge de longue date, est décédé. “C’était vraiment quelqu’un de solaire, d’atypique,” dit ce dernier. Ismert l’avait ouvert à Sophocle dans les années 1990, “et pas que”, se souvient-il. “À tout le reste, sans jamais être dans un rapport paternaliste.”À l’approche de la première, cette disparition continue de se faire sentir. Mais le metteur en scène tâche de donner un sens au chaos.“Je sais que tout est en ruines,” soupire-t-il avant de rejoindre le studio de répétition. “Mais il faut bien en faire quelque chose, de ces ruines.” More

Staged by the playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad, Enescu’s opera helps inaugurate a new era for the storied company.PARIS — Ahead of rehearsals for his staging of George Enescu’s “Oedipe” at the Paris Opera, the playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad did something unusual. He put together a glossary of all the obscure references in the libretto — like “the water of Castalia,” a sacred spring in Delphi — and sent it to the chorus.Mouawad, 52, who runs the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris, was taken aback to find the choristers had never received anything like it. When he approached the company’s technical crew to explain to them the story of “Oedipe,” a rarity from the 1930s based on the Greek myth, their reaction was similar, he said in an interview — few directors ever bothered to pay them much mind.“It’s odd, because I hear, ‘It’s wonderful, you say hello,”” Mouawad added. “I feel like I’m stepping into a traumatized world that now believes its trauma is the norm.”Trauma is not a bad way of describing the past few years at the fractious Paris Opera. In late 2019 and early 2020, labor strikes over a pension policy overhaul resulted in a 45 million euro deficit in a budget hovering around 230 million euros. And that was before the pandemic forced the cancellation of over a year’s worth of performances. (While some performances took place in September and October last year, the company didn’t resume its regular schedule until late May.)So “Oedipe,” which opens at the Opera Bastille, the company’s larger theater, on Monday, may just inaugurate a new era. It is the first production that was commissioned by Alexander Neef, who took over as the Opera’s general director last year.It is no coincidence that he turned to Mouawad. In his last job, leading the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, Neef co-produced Mouawad’s first stab at opera, a 2016 production of Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio,” that Neef calls “one of the most satisfying experiences that I’ve ever had with a director.”“His strength as an artist is that he really wants to work with humans,” Neef added in an interview in his office. “With ‘Oedipe,’ my hope was that he would pull the whole company together. Sometimes, you almost need to encourage him not to be too nice.”The return of “Oedipe” to the Paris stage has been a long time coming. Enescu’s only opera, it had its premiere at the company’s smaller, ornate Palais Garnier in 1936, but has never been revived there, even as other opera houses took a belated interest in it. The North American premiere took place at the University of Illinois in 2005, while Achim Freyer directed an acclaimed staging at the Salzburg Festival two years ago, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, who will return to the score in Paris.Mouawad, center, during a rehearsal for “Oedipe.”Eléna Bauer/Opéra national de ParisNeef believes the course of history, rather than quality, explains the long lack of appetite for “Oedipe,” which earned positive reviews upon its premiere. The New York Times reported in 1936 that the French composer and critic Reynaldo Hahn had described it as “imposing, lofty, minutely elaborated” and “always compelling admiration.”“After 1945, I think the music had fallen out of fashion,” Neef said of Enescu’s lush score. “For a lot of composers writing after the Holocaust, it couldn’t be tonal music anymore, for a long time.”When Neef first approached him, Mouawad was less concerned with the score than with the libretto. The legend of Oedipus was familiar to him: In his 30-year career, Mouawad has staged Sophocles’s “Oedipus the King” three times. In 2016, he also wrote a play, “The Tears of Oedipus,” that tied the character’s plight to modern Greek politics.The librettist of “Oedipe,” Edmond Fleg, closely based the third and fourth acts on “Oedipus the King” and another play by Sophocles, “Oedipus at Colonus.” (The first and second acts flesh out the plays’ background.) “It’s slightly summarized, but the dialogue is essentially the same,” Mouawad said. “I thought I would have space to tell this story.”Storytelling has long driven Mouawad, who was born in Lebanon in 1968. When he was 10, his family fled the civil war, moving first to France, then to French-speaking Quebec.“When I tried to understand the Lebanese civil war, I was either told that there was nothing to understand, or that it was the fault of others,” Mouawad said. “There was a gaping lack of stories in my life.”After training as an actor at the National Theater School in Montreal, Mouawad rose to prominence with an epic tetralogy, “The Blood of Promises,” that has been produced all over the world. Composed of “Littoral” (1999), “Scorched” (2003), “Forests” (2006) and “Skies” (2009), it delved into intergenerational trauma, war and displacement.His work has served as an introduction to contemporary theater for many French-speaking millennials. Even after he moved back to Paris in 2016 to direct the Théâtre de la Colline, Mouawad steered clear of the prevailing European taste for nonlinear, highly conceptual productions. Lisa Perrio, an actress who has worked with Mouawad several times in recent years, said that “he loves drama, pathos, and it works.”“When everything is fine, you deconstruct,” Mouawad said. “When you can’t afford it — when you yourself are completely fractured — you build.”Julien Mignot for The New York Times“His work is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to perform,” she added, “because it requires so much emotion.”To Mouawad, postmodernism is a luxury beyond the means of those who have experienced deep trauma. “I myself am postmodernism,” he said “There is nothing more postmodern than the Lebanese war. Deconstruction is a rich person’s thing. When everything is fine, you deconstruct. When you can’t afford it — when you yourself are completely fractured — you build.”In March, a year into the disruption caused by the pandemic, the Théâtre de la Colline was one of the first French theaters to be occupied by protesters. Students and arts workers demanded government support and the withdrawal of changes to unemployment benefits. The movement soon spread to over 100 playhouses.Sébastien Kheroufi, who was among the drama students who first entered La Colline, said in a phone interview that Mouawad was one of the few high-profile directors to extend the occupiers a warm welcome. “One night, he even stayed with us for several hours after his rehearsals because we needed to talk,” Kheroufi said.Yet the end of the occupation, in late May, left Mouawad frustrated. He and his team offered the students the opportunity to stay on for the reopening and speak before shows; Mouawad also hoped to start a permanent youth company, offering year-round contracts to young actors.Christopher Maltman, center, plays the title role in “Oedipe.”Elisa Haberer/Opéra national de ParisThey ultimately said no, Mouawad now speculates, “because the idea had come from us, and they didn’t want to owe us anything.” It was a blow for the hierarchy-averse Mouawad, who reflected on the “failure” of all parties of the occupation movement in a despondent open letter.Then, in early September, just as rehearsals for “Oedipe” were in full swing, Mouawad’s longtime dramaturg François Ismert passed away. “He was such a luminous, atypical person,” Mouawad said. Ismert had introduced him to Sophocles in the 1990s — “and not just that,” he said. “To everything else, without ever being paternalistic.”The loss loomed over the approaching premiere. Days before, though, Mouawad remained intent on sifting through the chaos.“I know everything is in ruins,” he said, before returning to the rehearsal room. “But we have to make something of those ruins.” More

Here are our picks for the most memorable performances with the biggest age gaps between star and character. Did they pull it off?Can a mop of curly hair, a backpack and an outfit that looks like a mother’s choice for school picture day send a 27-year-old actor back to his senior year of high school?That will be the question facing filmgoers when Ben Platt reprises his performance as the titular awkward teenager in the film adaptation of the heartbreaking Broadway musical “Dear Evan Hansen,” due Sept. 24 in theaters.When the first trailer was released in May, initial reactions to Platt’s attempt to shave off a decade were, well, less than rosy.“Raise your hand if you felt personally victimized by Ben Platt’s wig this morning,” the writer Jorge Molina tweeted, prompting comparisons to the scene-stealing wig Sarah Paulson wore in “The People v. O.J. Simpson.”But that part of his look, at least, was the real thing. Platt set the record straight in a now-deleted Twitter post. “I’m v flattered that ppl think my locks are a wig and I hate to burst bubbles,” he wrote. “But sadly those are my own.”Platt is hardly the first full-grown adult to return to his locker and letterman jacket days for a film, and nowhere near the oldest, though some of them — *cough* Tobey Maguire — look like they should be carrying briefcases instead of backpacks. (Child labor laws make it easier to cast actors over 18 as high school students than to work around regulations for younger actors.)Here are some of the most memorable attempts by 20- and 30- somethings to pass as teenagers. Who makes the grade, and who should have dropped out?John Travolta as Danny Zuko in ‘Grease’John Travolta with, from left, fellow adults Michael Tucci, Barry Pearl and Kelly Ward.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesDanny’s age: 18John Travolta’s age: 23Travolta’s not-so-malevolent gang leader might look a few years older than the “he was sweet, just turned 18” Sandy pegs him for, but it works because he’s a youngster compared with the fellow “high schoolers” around him. Olivia Newton-John was 29; the show-stealing Stockard Channing, at 33, was old enough to play Rizzo’s mother. “Grease” (1978) became the highest-grossing musical film up to that point, so audiences clearly weren’t too concerned — and Travolta’s schoolboy rhapsodizing over Newton-John in that skintight black bodysuit seemed all too real.Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood in ‘Sense and Sensibility’Emma Thompson, left, with her (much) younger screen sister, Kate Winslet, and Gemma Jones.Clive Coote/Columbia PicturesElinor’s age: 19Emma Thompson’s age: 36If you remember that Thompson’s character is supposed to be 19 in the Jane Austen novel on which the 1995 film is based, her matriarchal, self-possessed Elinor won’t fool you for a second. Kate Winslet, who was 20 when she played Elinor’s 16-year-old sister, Marianne, emphasizes the gulf. But if it’s been a while since you’ve read the novel and just assume that Elinor is in her late 20s or early 30s, you might give Thompson a passing grade. After all, her intellect and frequent apologies on behalf of the impassioned, though imprudent, Marianne make her closer to a mother than a sister.Alan Ruck as Cameron Frye in ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’Alan Ruck, left, and Matthew Broderick are high school seniors. We’ll buy it.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesCameron’s age: 17Alan Ruck’s age: 29Actors pushing 30 don’t have a great track record of pulling off 17-year-olds, and Ruck, despite imbuing Cameron with pitch-perfect humor and sensitivity as Ferris’s wingman, is no exception. Matthew Broderick, who plays Ferris, helped distract from the true discrepancy — he was 24 when the 1986 film was released — but not enough to sell the subterfuge. Luckily, this was one case where the movie was so good that nobody seemed to care.Shirley Henderson as Moaning Myrtle in ‘Harry Potter’Shirley Henderson as a ghost isn’t as spooky as the 23-year difference between her and her character.Warner Bros.Myrtle’s age: 14Shirley Henderson’s age: 37All hail the power of pigtails! (And a 5-foot stature.) Is it creepy, in retrospect, for a fully grown woman to play a giggly 14-year-old ghost flirting with a prepubescent Daniel Radcliffe in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” (2002)? Sure. (It would be weird enough to have an actual 14-year-old playing Myrtle, who would have been in her 60s had she not had a fateful encounter with a basilisk.) But honestly, watching the film when I was growing up, I’d never have guessed she was old enough to be Harry’s mother.Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker in ‘Spider-Man’An adult Tobey Maguire climbing the walls as a teenage Peter Parker.Zade Rosenthal/Columbia PicturesPeter’s age: 17Tobey Maguire’s age: 27Maguire, unfortunately, is about as successful at passing for a teenager as Peter Parker is at concealing his identity as the title character in “Spider-Man” (2002). When his character is bitten by a radioactive spider during a class field trip to Columbia University, the actor looks more like he should be a teaching assistant in the lab than a high school student. But he’s far from the only (relatively) over-the-hill Peter Parker, though things turned around in 2015 when a 19-year-old Tom Holland was cast as Marvel’s new Spider-Man.Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’Audrey Hepburn, opposite George Peppard and Patricia Neal, doesn’t look like a recent high schooler, but who cares?Paramount PicturesHolly’s age: 19Audrey Hepburn’s age: 31Sure, Hepburn’s doe eyes and elflike features shaved years off her appearance, but she was clearly a woman in the 1961 film based on the Truman Capote novel. (Though Capote’s first choice for Holly, Marilyn Monroe, then 35, was even older.) Yet Hepburn embodies the novel’s striking, self-sufficient young bohemian, and Holly’s free spirit is as alive in her as in a recent high school grad — even if she never looks like one in her sleek, sophisticated black gown.Jennifer Grey as Baby in ‘Dirty Dancing’Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze are both years apart from their characters.LionsgateBaby’s age: 17Jennifer Grey’s age: 27No one puts Baby in a corner, and no one was about to tell Grey she was a decade too old to play the doctor’s daughter who gets tangled up with Patrick Swayze’s bad-boy dance instructor in “Dirty Dancing” (1987). It helped that Swayze, who played 25-year-old Johnny Castle, was 34 at the time, but Grey’s small stature (she’s 5-foot-3), wild curls and big brown eyes made it entirely believable that she was 17.Rachel McAdams as Regina George in ‘Mean Girls’Rachel McAdams, left, Lacey Chabert and Amanda Seyfried as the title trio with more pressing concerns than age.Michael Gibson/Paramount PicturesRegina’s age: 16 or 17Rachel McAdams’s age: 26Do you want to call McAdams’s Regina George an impostor to her face? Mark Waters, the director of “Mean Girls” (2004), initially passed over McAdams for the part because he didn’t think she could pull off a teenager, but then he decided it would make sense if Regina grew up a little too fast. Our take: Even if Regina looks more like she should be gatekeeping for a sorority than a school-lunch table, it works for a conniving character who’s always a few steps ahead of her classmates. More

He brought jazz (and later folk music) to Rhode Island, and made festivals as important as nightclubs and concert halls on jazz musicians’ itineraries.George Wein, the impresario who almost single-handedly turned the jazz festival into a worldwide phenomenon, died on Monday at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 95. His death was announced by a spokeswoman, Carolyn McClair.Jazz festivals were not an entirely new idea when Mr. Wein (pronounced ween) was approached about presenting a weekend of jazz in the open air in Newport, R.I., in 1954. There had been sporadic attempts at such events, notably in both Paris and Nice in 1948. But there had been nothing as ambitious as the festival Mr. Wein staged that July on the grounds of the Newport Casino, an athletic complex near the historic mansions of Bellevue Avenue.With a lineup including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and other stars, the inaugural Newport Jazz Festival drew thousands of paying customers over two days and attracted the attention of the news media. It barely broke even; Mr. Wein later recalled that it made a profit of $142.50, and that it ended up in the black only because he waived his $5,000 producer’s fee.But it was successful enough to merit a return engagement, and before long the Newport festival had established itself as a jazz institution — and as a template for how to present music in the open air on a grand scale.By the middle 1960s, festivals had become as important as nightclubs and concert halls on the itinerary of virtually every major jazz performer, and Mr. Wein had come to dominate the festival landscape.He did not have the field to himself: Major events like the Monterey Jazz Festival in California, which began in 1958, and the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, which began in 1967, were the work of other promoters. But for half a century, if there was a significant jazz festival anywhere in the world, there was a better than even chance it was a George Wein production.At the height of his success, Mr. Wein was producing events in Warsaw, Paris, Seoul and elsewhere overseas, as well as all over the United States.Where Jazz History Was MadeNewport remained his flagship, and it quickly became known as a place where jazz history was made. Miles Davis was signed to Columbia Records on the strength of his inspired playing at the 1955 festival. Duke Ellington’s career, which had been in decline, was reinvigorated a year later when his rousing performance at Newport landed him on the cover of Time magazine. The 1958 festival was captured on film by the photographer Bert Stern in the documentary “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” one of the most celebrated jazz movies ever made.Mr. Wein’s empire extended beyond jazz. It included the Newport Folk Festival, which played a vital role in the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many other performers. (It was at Newport that Mr. Dylan sent shock waves through the folk world by performing with an electric band in 1965.) He also produced the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which showcased a broad range of vernacular music as well as the culture and cuisine of New Orleans, and staged festivals devoted to blues, soul, country and even comedy.The Newport Folk Festival, which Mr. Wein also produced, played a vital role in the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many others; it was at Newport that Mr. Dylan sent shock waves through the folk world by performing with an electric band in 1965. But jazz was always Mr. Wein’s first love.Alice Ochs/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesHis one venture into the world of rock was not a happy experience. Gate-crashers disrupted the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival, whose bill for the first time included rock bands, among them Led Zeppelin and Sly and the Family Stone. The Newport city fathers issued a ban on such acts the next summer; when both rock (the Allman Brothers) and the gate-crashers returned in 1971, Mr. Wein was not invited back. (The Newport Folk Festival, which had not been held in 1970 but was scheduled for later in the summer of 1971, was canceled.)He was not discouraged. In 1972 he moved the Newport Jazz Festival to New York City, where it became a less bucolic but more grandiose affair, with concerts at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall and other locations around town. Under various names and corporate sponsors, the New York event continued to thrive for almost 40 years. In addition, the jazz festival returned to Newport in 1981 and the folk festival in 1985, both once again under Mr. Wein’s auspices. Mr. Wein’s success in presenting jazz and folk at Newport helped pave the way for the phenomenon of Woodstock and the profusion of rock festivals in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But jazz was always his first love.Playing and PromotingHe was a jazz musician before he was a jazz entrepreneur. He began playing piano professionally as a teenager and continued into his 80s, leading small groups, usually billed as the Newport All-Stars, at his festivals and elsewhere. (He performed in public for the first time in several years at Newport in 2019. It was, he announced, “my last performance as a jazz musician.”) He was a good player, in the relaxed, melodic vein of the great swing pianist Teddy Wilson, with whom he briefly studied. But he determined early on that playing jazz would be a precarious way for him to make a living, and he became more focused on presenting it.The success of Mr. Wein’s Boston nightclub, Storyville, named after the red-light district of New Orleans where legend has it jazz was born, led Elaine Lorillard, a wealthy Newport resident, to approach him about producing what became the first Newport Jazz Festival, which she and her husband, Louis, financed. And the success of that festival determined the direction his career would take.The crowd at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1967. The festival became known as a place where jazz history was made.Associated PressGeorge Theodore Wein was born on Oct. 3, 1925, in Lynn, Mass., near Boston, and grew up in the nearby town of Newton. His father, Barnet, was a doctor. His mother, Ruth, was an amateur pianist. Both his parents, he recalled, loved show business and encouraged his interest in music, although they did not necessarily see it as a career option.Mr. Wein took his first piano lessons at age 8 and discovered jazz while in high school. By the time he entered Northeastern University in Boston, he was beginning to think seriously about a career in jazz.He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, spending some time overseas but not seeing combat, and enrolled in Boston University after being discharged. Before graduating with a degree in history in 1950, he was working steadily as a jazz pianist around Boston.In his autobiography, “Myself Among Others: A Life in Music” (2003), written with Nate Chinen, he said that he knew by then that “music was a crucial part of my being,” but that he also knew that he “had neither the confidence nor the desire to devote my life to being a professional jazz musician.” By the fall of 1950 he was a full-time nightclub owner; by the summer of 1954 he was a festival promoter.Rough PatchesMr. Wein encountered some rough times in the early years of the Newport Jazz Festival. In 1960 the bassist Charles Mingus and the drummer Max Roach, protesting what they called Mr. Wein’s overly commercial booking policy, staged a smaller “rebel” festival in another part of Newport in direct competition. But both events were overshadowed when throngs of drunken youths, unable to get tickets to Mr. Wein’s festival, descended on the city, throwing rocks and breaking store windows. City officials shut the Newport Jazz Festival down, although the Mingus-Roach event was allowed to continue.As a result of the rioting, Mr. Wein’s permit was revoked, and he did not return to Newport in 1961. A festival billed as Music at Newport, staged by another promoter and featuring a range of music including some jazz, was presented in its place but was not successful. Mr. Wein was allowed back the next year, and the festival continued without incident until the end of the decade.Coverage of Mr. Wein in the jazz press grew more negative over time, and the criticism would persist for the rest of his career. In 1959, the critic Nat Hentoff called the Newport Jazz Festival a “sideshow” that had “nothing to do with the future of jazz.” (Mr. Hentoff later changed his tune: In 2001 he wrote that Mr. Wein had “expanded the audience for jazz more than any other promoter in the music’s history.”)Mr. Wein was sometimes attacked as exploitive, money-hungry, unimaginative in his programming and too willing to present non-jazz artists at his jazz festivals — criticism first heard when he booked Chuck Berry at Newport in 1958, and heard again when he booked the likes of Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and even the folk group the Kingston Trio (who performed at both the folk and jazz festivals in 1959). He professed to take the criticism in stride, but in his autobiography he left no doubt that he had forgotten none of it, quoting many of his worst notices and patiently explaining why they were wrong.Mr. Wein in 1970. For half a century, if there was a significant jazz festival anywhere in the world, there was a better than even chance it was a George Wein production.David Redfern/Getty ImageThe two Newport festivals had been established as nonprofit ventures, but in 1960 Mr. Wein formed a corporation, Festival Productions, to run what soon became a worldwide empire. At the company’s height it was producing festivals and tours in some 50 cities worldwide. Over the years he also tried his hand at personal management and record production.After years of, by his account, struggling to break even, Mr. Wein became a pioneer in corporate sponsorship in the late 1960s and ’70s, enlisting beer, tobacco and audio equipment companies to underwrite his festivals and tours. There was the Schlitz Salute to Jazz, the Kool Jazz Festival and, most enduringly, a partnership with the Japanese electronics giant JVC, which began in 1984 and lasted until 2008.“I never realized that you could make money until sponsors came along,” he told The New York Times in 2004. “The credibility we’d been working on all those years always brought media notice. And then the opportunity for media notice was picked up by sponsors.”In 1959, Mr. Wein married Joyce Alexander, who worked alongside him as a vice president of Festival Productions for four decades. She died in 2005. He is survived. by his partner, Dr. Glory Van Scott.Presidential HonorsOver the years Mr. Wein received numerous honors and accolades. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2005 and inducted into the French Legion of Honor in 1991. He was honored by two presidents, Jimmy Carter in 1978 and Bill Clinton in 1993, at all-star White House jazz concerts celebrating the anniversary of the first Newport Jazz Festival. In 2015, the Recording Academy gave him a Trustees Award for lifetime achievement.In 2007, nine years after a deal to sell 80 percent of Festival Productions to Black Entertainment Television fell through, the company was acquired by a newly formed company, the Festival Network. Mr. Wein remained involved, but as an employee — a kind of producer emeritus — and not the boss.Things changed again in 2009, when the Festival Network ran into financial problems and Mr. Wein regained control of the handful of festivals left in what had once been a vast empire. (At first he was legally prevented from using the names Newport Jazz Festival and Newport Folk Festival because they belonged to the Festival Network, but he reacquired the rights in 2010.)He also found new sponsors for the Newport Jazz Festival — first a medical equipment company and later an asset management firm, Natixis — to replace his longtime corporate partner, JVC. The folk festival, whose sponsors in recent years had included Ben & Jerry’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, had by then been without sponsorship for several years; both festivals were later partly sponsored by the jewelry company Alex and Ani.Mr. Wein at his home in 2004, the year the Newport Jazz Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary. He knew from an early age, he said, that “music was a crucial part of my being,” but he also knew that he “had neither the confidence nor the desire to devote my life to being a professional jazz musician.” Associated PressIn 2011 Mr. Wein announced that both Newport festivals, the only events he was still producing, would become part of a new nonprofit organization, the Newport Festivals Foundation.He eventually handed over the reins of both festivals, although he remained involved until the end. Jay Sweet became producer of the folk festival in 2009 and six years later was named executive producer of the Newport Festivals Foundation. In 2016 Danny Melnick was promoted from associate producer to producer of the jazz festival, and the jazz bassist and bandleader Christian McBride, who had performed at Newport numerous times since 1991, was named artistic director. (Mr. Melnick left the company in 2017.)The coronavirus pandemic caused the cancellation of both festivals in 2020, but they were back the next year. Mr. Wein had planned to attend the 2021 jazz festival, but on July 28, just two days before it was scheduled to begin, he announced on social media that he would not be there. (He did participate remotely, introducing the singers Mavis Staples, by phone, and Andra Day, via FaceTime.)“At my age of 95, making the trip will be too difficult for me,” he wrote. “I am heartbroken to miss seeing all my friends.” But, he added, with a new team in place to run both festivals, “I can see that my legacy is in good hands.” More

Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” just had this year’s biggest debut week, a testament to his immense staying power more than a decade into his career. But this album also reflects a slowdown in the Drake Industrial Complex: He’s pulled back on sonic innovation, and his story tropes are becoming familiar.Is the age of Drake nearing its conclusion? He has been the most influential pop star — in any genre — of the past decade, but his ideas have been widely disseminated and copied.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Drake’s habits and tics, his relationship to social media, and the long arc of the era he shaped — and whether it will ever truly come to an end.Guests:Charles Holmes, a writer and podcaster at The RingerJeff Ihaza, a senior editor at Rolling Stone More

The rapper’s latest album debuted with the equivalent of 613,000 sales in the United States, easily beating Kanye West’s total of 309,000 just one week ago.All year long, Drake has teased his fans with a new album, which he said early on would be called “Certified Lover Boy.” It was sure to be a hit, but how big? For Drake, a titan of the streaming era — who over the last week has been facing off against Kanye West — the stakes were high.Now the answer is clear: “Certified Lover Boy” is a blockbuster, eclipsing everything else released this year, although as a streaming phenomenon it fell slightly short of Drake’s own record.In its first week out, Drake’s album opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s chart with the equivalent of 613,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data. That is more than any title since Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” had 846,000 in July 2020, before a change in Billboard’s chart rules disqualified most retail bundles, like giving fans a download with the sale of a T-shirt — a highly effective but contested sales strategy.Drake’s great strength is streaming, and “Certified Lover Boy” did not disappoint. In its first week out, the album’s 21 songs racked up 744 million streams in the United States — about 74,000 per minute — far more than any other title. It broke Spotify’s record for the most streams in a single day. (West’s “Donda” opened with the equivalent of 309,000 sales, including 357 million streams.)Drake also dominates Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, which incorporates streams, radio play and song downloads. Nine of the chart’s Top 10 songs are by Drake, with “Way 2 Sexy,” featuring Future and Young Thug, at No. 1. (The only non-Drake song is “Stay,” by the Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber, which fell four spots to No. 6.)But “Certified Lover Boy” did not quite match the streaming performance of Drake’s last proper studio album, “Scorpion,” in 2018. In its first week out, “Scorpion” had 746 million clicks. The minutiae of chart composition shows that “Certified Lover Boy” is not as close to that record as it might seem. When “Scorpion” came out, Billboard counted only audio streams; in 2020, it began incorporating both audio and video clicks. According to Billboard, the 744 million total streams for “Certified Lover Boy” include nearly 29 million for videos.West’s “Donda,” last week’s chart-topper, fell to second place with the equivalent of 141,000 sales, a drop of 54 percent.Also this week, the veteran British heavy metal band Iron Maiden scored its highest chart position ever with “Senjutsu,” which opens at No. 3 — with just 3.6 million streams, but 61,000 copies sold as a full package. The band’s last two studio albums, “The Book of Souls” (2015) and “The Final Frontier” (2010), each went to No. 4. (And 1980s classics like “Powerslave” and “Somewhere in Time”? They never cracked the Top 10.)Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 4 and Doja Cat’s “Planet Her” is No. 5. More

In the wake of recent developments in the battle over her conservatorship, the singer announced plans to wed for the third time.Britney Spears announced on Sunday that she was engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Sam Asghari, three months after she told a Los Angeles judge that the conservatorship that has governed her life since 2008 was robbing her of the ability to make personal decisions.Brandon Cohen, a talent manager for Mr. Asghari, confirmed the engagement on Sunday night.“The couple made their longstanding relationship official today and are deeply touched by the support, dedication and love expressed to them,” Mr. Cohen said.Ms. Spears and Mr. Asghari each shared posts on Instagram to announce the engagement and to show off Ms. Spears’s ring.Mr. Cohen said a New York City jeweler, Roman Malayev, designed the ring.The engagement came just days after lawyers for Ms. Spears’s father, James P. Spears, wrote in a filing, “If Ms. Spears wants to terminate the conservatorship and believes that she can handle her own life, Mr. Spears believes that she should get that chance.”Ms. Spears gave a statement in her case in June, sharing that she had been drugged, forced to work and prevented from removing her birth control device.“I just want my life back,” Ms. Spears said. “I truly believe this conservatorship is abusive. I don’t feel like I can live a full life.”In her statement, Ms. Spears said that under the conservatorship she was not able to marry or have a child.“I want to be able to get married and have a baby,” the singer said. “I was told right now in the conservatorship I am not able to get married or have a baby.”In a highly contested legal battle, Ms. Spears in July filed to have her father removed from his role as conservator of her estate. Mr. Spears initially pushed back on the request, but announced last month that he would step aside and work with the court to assure “an orderly transition to a new conservator.”The next hearing in the case is set for Sept. 29.Mr. Asghari is an actor who has worked on a number of movies and TV shows, including the Showtime series “Black Monday.” He also works as a fitness trainer.Mr. Asghari told Men’s Health in 2018 that he met Ms. Spears in 2016 while working on a music video for her song “Slumber Party.”Ms. Spears has been married twice before. In 2004 she married Jason Alexander, a childhood friend, for 55 hours.Later that year, Ms. Spears married Kevin Federline, a backup dancer, actor and rapper; they have two sons. Ms. Spears filed for divorce from Mr. Federline in 2006. More