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      in Theater

      Alicia Keys, LaChanze and Billy Porter Celebrate Black Theater

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      The stage stars were among more than 600 people who turned out for an evening of dinner and performances to benefit Black Theater United.LaChanze was in the mood to celebrate.“I am so ready to party,” the actress, wearing a sequined red gown with a bold red lip, said on the red carpet before the second annual Black Theater United gala at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan on Monday night.LaChanze is the president and a founding member of Black Theater United, a nonprofit that aims to combat racism in the theater community. She was one of more than 600 people — including the singer Alicia Keys, the actor Billy Porter, the actress Kristin Chenoweth and the pop-classical musician Josh Groban — who gathered at the grand event space for a live auction, dinner and performance on a night when most Broadway shows were dark.The gala raised money for the nonprofit founded by an all-star team of Black theater artists, including the Tony Award winners Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Phylicia Rashad and LaChanze in the summer of 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis.Mr. Mitchell remembered a call at the time with Ms. McDonald, the director Schele Williams and LaChanze. “They just started saying, ‘We’ve got to do something,’” he said.The organization now offers programs for aspiring young Black theater artists including student internships, a panel and discussion series, a musical theater scholarship and a program that aims to educate artists of color about designing for the theater.From left: Nichelle Lewis, Stephanie Mills and Sydney Terry performing “Home” from “The Wiz.” Ms. Mills was the original Dorothy in the 1975 production of the musical, a retelling of the classic “Wizard of Oz” story.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      5 Halloween Film Festivals Worth Traveling For

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      It’s October, and horror movie festivals scratch both the weekend getaway and scare-the-bejesus-out-of-you itch. A guide to some worth checking out.Watching weird indie horror movies at home on Tubi can be a bunch of fun. So can going to the local multiplex to see the latest scary Hollywood blockbuster with other shrieking fans.Horror film festivals offer the best of both worlds, with twists. The programming is heavy on premieres and small-budget indies, and the more ambitious festivals host events like costume contests and offer themed food and drinks to keep the party going. Some of the festivals are very kid-friendly, and others are better suited for blood-and-guts lovers.With Halloween around the corner and fall getaways calling, here’s a look at some of the noteworthy scary (and not-that-scary) film festivals happening this October.The Eerie Horror Fest is held at the Warner Theater, in Erie, Pa., an ornate movie palace that opened in 1931 and seats 2,250.Paul GibbensEerie Horror FestErie, Pa., Oct. 4 and 5Presented by the Film Society of Northwestern Pennsylvania, this festival is known for showing classic and new films along with a hearty roster of panel discussions and events. A highlight takes place on Oct. 5, when the festival presents a screening of the 1995 horror film “Tales From the Hood,” an influential horror anthology and a seminal work in both horror and Black cinema, followed by a Q. and A. with the director, Rusty Cundieff.The frosting on the cake at this festival is its home: The Warner Theater, an ornate Art Deco and French Renaissance space first opened in 1931, with 2,250 seats, a grand proscenium stage and crushed velour and gold leaf accents — the kind of elegance more associated with the likes of Cannes than “Carrie.” This year, the festival has teamed up with two local coffee purveyors — Purrista Cat Café and North Edge Craft Coffee, a roaster — for a special drink menu featuring themed concoctions like the Frankenstein’s Matcha and Killer Klownz, a blueberry cheesecake latte. There will also be displays of adoptable cats — black ones, perhaps — at the theater.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      How The Times’s Fall Culture Preview Comes Together

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      Arts & Leisure’s fall preview connects readers with the season’s noteworthy cultural works. And there are many.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In the spring, Andrew LaVallee starts planning for fall.As the editor of The New York Times’s Arts & Leisure section, he is constantly considering the cool, crisp season, when Broadway stages new performances, galleries open much-anticipated exhibitions and new TV series are released on streaming services, all shaping cultural conversation and impassioned debate.Months of planning culminate in the Arts & Leisure fall preview, an annual section that shares with readers the can’t-miss cultural works of the season.This year’s section, which appears in print on Sunday, includes the work of about 70 journalists. Across 92 pages, 45 articles, five covers and 11 art forms, including theater, film, dance, podcasts, books and video games, The Times shares the best of what fall has to offer.Planning begins in earnest in April. But for LaVallee, the content is “on my mind all year round.”“Really early in the year, or even the year before, you’re starting to hear about, say, Robert Downey Jr. is going to be in his first Broadway show in the fall,” LaVallee added. “I’m starting to bookmark things like that in my brain.”In this year’s preview, there’s an article on a Broadway revival of “Romeo and Juliet,” a discussion with the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and a piece on the actor Daniel Dae Kim and his long-anticipated return to the stage.Readers will also find music critics’ picks from pop (Chappell Roan) to classical (Wagner’s “Ring” cycle) to rap (Sexyy Red). There’s a panoply of exciting upcoming releases to write about, too, including art exhibitions, TV shows, even video games. (In the new Legend of Zelda, Princess Zelda is finally a playable protagonist.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Why You May Never See the Documentary on Prince by Ezra Edelman

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      Dig, if you will, a small slice of Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince — a cursed masterpiece that the public may never be allowed to see.Listen to this article, read by Janina EdwardsIt’s 1984, and Prince is about to release “Purple Rain,” the album that will make him a superstar and push pop music into distant realms we had no idea we were ready for. The sound engineer Peggy McCreary, one of many female engineers he worked with, describes witnessing a flash of genius during the creation of his song “When Doves Cry.” Over a two-day marathon recording session, she and Prince filled the studio with sound — wailing guitars, thrumming keyboards, an overdubbed choir of harmonizing Princes. It was the sort of maximalist stew possible only when someone is (as Prince was) a master of just about every musical instrument ever invented. But something wasn’t right. So at 5 or 6 in the morning, Prince found the solution: He started subtracting. He took out the guitar solo; he took out the keyboard. And then his boldest, most heterodox move: He took out the bass. McCreary remembers him saying, with satisfaction, “Ain’t nobody gonna believe I did that.” He knew what he had. The song became an anthem, a platinum megahit.The next sequence starts to probe the origins of Prince’s genius, how it grew alongside a gnawing desire for recognition. His sister, Tyka Nelson, a woman with owlish eyes and pink and purple streaks in her hair, appears onscreen. She describes the violence in their household growing up. How their musician father’s face changed when he hit their mother. The ire he directed at his son, on whom he bestowed his former stage name, Prince — a gift, but also a burden, a reminder that the demands of supporting his children had caused him to abandon his own musical career. Prince would risk lashings by sneaking over to the piano and plinking away at it — the son already embarked on his life’s work of besting his father, the father giving and withdrawing love, the son doing the same.Cut to Jill Jones, one in a long line of girlfriend-muses whom Prince anointed, styled, encouraged and criticized. Hers is one of the most anguished testimonies in the film, revealing a side of Prince many of his fans would rather not see. Late one night in 1984, she and a friend visited Prince at a hotel. He started kissing the friend, and in a fit of jealousy, Jones slapped him. She says he then looked at her and said, “Bitch, this ain’t no [expletive] movie.” They tussled, and he began to punch her in the face over and over. She wanted to press charges, but his manager told her it would ruin his career. So she backed off. Yet for a time, she still loved him and wanted to be with him, and stayed in his orbit for many more years. Recounting the incident three decades later, she is still furious, still processing the stress of being involved with him.In the next sequence, it’s the evening of the premiere of “Purple Rain,” the movie, which will go on to win the Academy Award for best original song score in 1985. Prince’s tour manager, Alan Leeds, was with him in the back of a limo on the way to the ceremony. He remembers one of Prince’s bodyguards turning to Prince and saying: “This is going to be the biggest day of your life! They say every star in town is there!” And Prince clutched Leeds’s hand, trembling in fear. But then, as Leeds tells it, some switch flipped, and “he caught himself.” Prince’s eyes turned hard. He was back in control. “That was it,” Leeds says. “But for maybe 10 seconds, he completely lost it. And I loved it. Because it showed he was human!” In the next shot, we see Prince emerging from the limo and walking down the red carpet in an iridescent purple trench coat over a creamy ruffled collar, his black curls piled high. He swaggers, twirling a flower, unbothered: a creature of regal remove.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      What if Orchestras Were More Like Netflix?

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      As subscriptions face an uncertain future, classical music could look to the membership models of streaming services and gyms for inspiration.Perhaps you spend your mornings at the gym, working out with the help of a playlist on Spotify. In the evening, you wind down with Netflix or a movie on Max. As you go to bed, you might even open a meditation app to help you fall asleep. Then you wake up, and do it all again.A routine like that is built on memberships that provide unlimited access to something for a monthly fee, and are tightly woven into our lives in part because they’re convenient. (Dangerously so: I’m far from alone in having realized too late how many free trials have turned into valves quietly hoovering up money from my bank account.) Why, then, have they not caught on in classical music performances?The model could go something like this: You pay a monthly membership fee to your local symphony orchestra that entitles you to attend however much you’d like. As with a gym or a streaming service, some people may go often; some, not at all. Regardless, the orchestra receives steady revenue, and you have full control of your calendar, with the ability to make plans even the day of a performance.While a handful of orchestras have experimented with this model, it hasn’t become standard because most institutions already have a long-established ticketing program they prefer: subscriptions. In that system, people are sold packages for a season, which involves planning evenings out up to a year or more in advance. This works for those who like to go on the same night of the week, or sit in the same seat. Orchestras, in turn, are provided with financial security.According to the League of American Orchestras, subscriptions have bounced back from a pandemic slump strongly enough that they grew by 7 percent from 2019 to 2024. Administrators, however, have long been anxious about the future of the subscription model. Less than a decade ago, the League itself commissioned a study that revealed subscriptions were not only in decline, but also out of touch with how people plan and purchase entertainment today.The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, shown performing in April, was an early adapter of the member model. “There just aren’t that many people in April who want to commit to concerts from September to June,” the ensemble’s leader said.Claire Loes for the St. Paul Chamber OrchestraWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      7 Days in the Cultural Life of an Artistic Director

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      Violaine Huisman, who leads programming for the Crossing the Line festival, takes in dance on Little Island, a world premiere at Asia Society and “invigorating” translation projects.Bastille Day felt a little bit different this year than others, said Violaine Huisman, the artistic director of New York’s annual Crossing the Line festival. L’Alliance, the French cultural center in Midtown, throws a party every July 14, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. This year, the celebration took place just one week after a surprising snap election left President Emmanuel Macron — and France — in a state of flux.“I overheard onlookers wondering out loud whether it was a French tradition to demonstrate with blank signs on that day,” recalled Huisman, who had just been in the country to witness the upset in the streets. (Many participants in this year’s festival opted to carry blank placards in homage to a demonstration created by the choreographer Anna Halprin during the civil rights and antiwar protests of the 1960s.)During these times of uncertainty, many look to art for clarity and guidance. Huisman, 45, is certainly one of those people, as she has been hard at work curating programming for the next Crossing the Line, which kicks off several weeks of art, dance and theater on Sept. 5.Ahead of the festival, Huisman tracked a few days of her cultural life, noting some of the performances, books and music, mostly from her native France, that inspired her. Here are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.“I overheard onlookers wondering out loud whether it was a French tradition to demonstrate with blank signs on that day,” Huisman said.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesSunday: Placards for PeaceWe celebrated Bastille Day at L’Alliance with a street fair and an amazing piece of performance art, in which two dozen volunteers carrying blank placards engaged in a procession through Midtown, trailed by a marching band. It was a re-enactment by Anne Collod of Anna Halprin’s “Blank Placard Dance.” Volunteers asked audience members what they would march for. “Peace” was the overwhelming response.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      I ❤️ a Hate-Watch. Don’t You?

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      When it premiered in 2017, I quite liked “The Bold Type,” a television series about three 20-something women working at a fictional magazine called Scarlet. Although the show could tend toward after-school special, with the characters learning important lessons about speaking your truth, facing your sexuality or getting regular gynecological examinations, its heartwarming conventions — young women living their editorial dreams in the big city — worked their magic on me.My love began to curdle during the third season. That’s when a new guy is brought into the office to spearhead Scarlet’s weirdly late foray into online publishing (it was set roughly in 2019). For reasons I couldn’t fathom, he referred to the magazine’s website as “The Dot Com.” Over and over and over again.To someone who’s spent her career in digital media, this was a bridge too far. It suggested that the show’s writers hadn’t ever worked in this world, hadn’t talked to anyone who did, maybe had never read a magazine. My annoyance grew in the fourth season, as the star columnist (a fount of bad ideas) got “her own vertical,” by which the show meant “a blog.” What was going on?I found myself declaiming to friends and colleagues about how deranged this turn of events was. I kept watching, but only to get annoyed at the things that I used to excuse as creative license: plot holes, improbable couplings, messed-up New York City geography. What I’d once enjoyed, I now hate-watched.Hate-watching is a weird thing. There is so much to see, do, hear, read: Why spend precious time, in an age of nearly infinite media, plopped in front of a bad show to pick it apart? It’s like gorging yourself on a disgusting meal not because you’re hungry, but because you want to gripe about it later. Or taking a vacation with someone you find excruciating, not because you don’t have any actual friends, but because you want to bellyache afterward about all the stupid things they said and did.Yet hate-watching is now part of the cultural conversation and arguably contemporary life. Chalk it up to morbid curiosity: We start watching a show because it looks appealing, but we keep watching because we want to complain about it at happy hour. It’s fun to be the person who describes a particularly terrible story arc or performance to our friends’ disbelief. Besides, it’s better than whatever is on the news.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Monet, Taylor Swift, ‘Moana’: What Got Readers Through Their Grief

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      After our series on how artists have been affected by loss, we asked readers what helped them when they experienced it. These are 15 of their answers.Over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, we published The Grief Project, a series of interviews with artists who discussed the ways that loss affected their work and creativity. We also asked readers about the art and culture — whether it was a book, a movie, a song or anything else — that helped them remember or cope with losing a loved one. Hundreds responded. Here is what some of them said.Music‘As’ by Stevie WonderLike Stevie Wonder, Nancy Hanks wrote, her mother “was soulful and full of spirit, enriching the lives of all she came in contact with.”Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesI’m not sure if it’s the melody or lyrics, but this song deeply captures the deep feelings of love and profound grief that I feel for the loss of my mother. Throughout the song Stevie Wonder professes all the ways and lengths that the depth of his love reaches. He notes “did you know true love asks for nothing / her acceptance is the way we pay.” I often am reminded of this. The grief that I carry is a tax on the lifetime of unconditional love I’ve experienced from my mother. Like Stevie, she was soulful and full of spirit, enriching the lives of all she came in contact with. We couldn’t have the proper celebration we wanted for her because of Covid, but I imagine if we did, we would have played this song along with so many more of her favorites and danced all night. I can’t hear the song anymore without feeling a deep sense of longing for her. I’m so grateful for her life and legacy, and I miss her terribly. —Nancy Hanks, AtlantaFilm‘School of Rock’It was less than a week after we lost our 4-year-old daughter Laila to cancer, in 2004. A neighboring couple, who had been supportive throughout Laila’s illness, brought over a VHS tape of “School of Rock.” In those very early days of bereavement, as far as I knew, I would never laugh again. But we popped in the videocassette, and before long I found myself laughing out loud, along with the family and friends gathered with us. Although my sadness filled my entire soul, there was somehow still room for humor. The wondrous physics of hope, in a lesson delivered by Jack Black with his electric guitar. As a family, we rewatch “School of Rock” every now and then, and it never fails to uplift. To me, it will always be a symbol of resilience. —Mary Janevic, Ann Arbor, Mich.SportsThe New York RangersWatching the Rangers “offered tremendous comfort to my family,” wrote Pam Poling, whose sister was a fellow fan.Joel Auerbach/Getty Images/Getty ImagesOur sister died in December after an incredibly brief illness. She was our go-to person for all things hockey, especially our beloved Rangers. Watching them skate so beautifully this season offered tremendous comfort to my family. Whether they win or lose, we often text each other, “Joanie would have loved this.” It really helps. —Pam Poling, Fairfield, Conn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More