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      in Music

      Coming Soon to Little Island: An Arts Festival With Powerful Backers

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      The mogul Barry Diller, who paid for the park, will finance a summer season of music, dance, theater and more, shaped in part by the Broadway producer Scott Rudin.Little Island, the $260 million park on the Hudson River that opened in 2021, was imagined as a haven for innovation in the performing arts. But the park’s cultural offerings — mostly sporadic, one-off works — have so far fallen short of those ambitions.Now Barry Diller, the billionaire media mogul who paid for the park, is setting out to deliver on the original vision, financing a robust, four-month annual performing arts festival on Little Island, the park announced on Monday. He is doing so with the guidance of Scott Rudin, the film, television and theater producer who retreated from public view in 2021 amid accusations of bullying by workers in his office.Diller said in an interview that he and his family foundation were prepared to spend more than $100 million over the next two decades on programming. The festival, one of the most ambitious artistic undertakings in New York City in recent years, will promote new work in music, dance, theater and opera. Nine premieres are planned this year for June through September, including a full-length work by the choreographer Twyla Tharp, and an adaptation of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” in which the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo will sing all of the leading roles.“I want people to enjoy the originality and adventure of Little Island,” Diller said. “I want it to produce a smile.”Rudin, a friend of Diller’s and a longtime adviser to Little Island, was not mentioned in a news release on Monday announcing the creation of the festival, but Diller said he was intimately involved in its planning.“He’s engaged in almost every discussion we have about the programming,” Diller said. “It started with him. It was his project.”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 Television

      India’s Master of Nostalgia Takes His Sweeping Vision to Netflix

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      In the small Bombay theater that showed big films, his father brought him — over and over again — to see the biggest of them all.With every one of his 18 viewings of “Mughal-e-Azam,” a hit 1960 musical about a forbidden romance between a prince and a courtesan, the young boy fell more in love. The rays of light, beamed in black and white, opened to him a world at once majestic and lost. The dialogue, crisp and poetic, lingered in his thoughts. The music swept him to places that only later in life would he fully understand.Bombay would eventually change, to Mumbai. India, cinema and music — they would all change, too. But more than half a century later, Sanjay Leela Bhansali — now 61 and a rare remaining master of the grand old style of Indian filmmaking — has not let go of his seat at that small cinema, Alankar Talkies, on the hem of the city’s red-light district.His mind remains rooted there even as his work moves beyond the theater walls. His latest project, released on Wednesday, is an eight-episode musical drama on Netflix that gives a “Game of Thrones” treatment to an exalted milieu of courtesans in pre-independence India.Sanjay Leela Bhansali, a rare remaining master of the grand old style of Indian filmmaking, directing “Heeramandi” for Netflix.Actors waiting between scenes on the set of the eight-episode musical drama in Mumbai.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 Theater

      The Culture Desk: Alicia Keys on Reimagining “Fallin” for Broadway

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      Alicia Keys was only 20 years old when her 2001 single “Fallin’” became an international sensation, topping the Billboard charts, winning multiple Grammys and helping propel her to stardom. Now, more than two decades later, the song appears in the new Broadway musical “Hell’s Kitchen.”The show — which draws from Keys’s life story and her discography — presents ”Fallin’” in a totally new way: as a song of seduction sung by a middle-aged man. Keys joins our theater reporter, Michael Paulson, to discuss the history of “Fallin’” and what she has learned from adapting the song for the stage.On today’s episodeMichael Paulson, a theater reporter for The Times. More

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      in Music

      At SFMOMA, Music is More than Just Sound

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      This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.The flute music was, you know, good flute music. But for the hushed audience at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s kickoff event in February of its “Art of Noise” exhibition, the breathy scales constituted only part of the experience.The colorful outfit belonging to the flutist (who was André 3000, by the way) was the experience, too. The crisp speakers were the experience, the smoke machine was the experience. And the two lasers passing through a glass of water balanced atop a traffic cone center stage — André 3000 has a growing interest in traffic cones, he had announced earlier — was the experience.Music is music. But music is also the stuff surrounding the music.From May 4 through Aug. 18, SFMOMA will illustrate this truism with an exhibition of visual and technological artifacts, plucked from music’s low orbit. “Art of Noise” comprises more than 800 pieces — among them early listening devices, cutting-edge speakers and iconic album covers — loosely grouped under the heading of design. Four more sound installations generate some artful noise all their own. But the show’s true subject might be our very relationship to music.Mathieu Lehanneur’s music player Power of Love, 2009 at SFMOMA.Mathieu Lehanneur; Photo by Don RossBeethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “The White Album,” Coltrane live at Birdland: On their own, these are but air molecules vibrating across our eardrums. Music becomes sacred partly through the material culture it inspires.And just as music shapes design — think jazz album cover versus metal album cover — design also codes how we hear music. In an old Xeroxed flyer for a punk show was information on how to absorb those songs; in an iconic ad for Maxell cassette tapes lurked signals about the spirit of rock.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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      Lincoln Center’s Summer Festival to Focus on Civic Bonds

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      The third edition of Summer for the City will feature hip-hop, comedy, classical music and more, under the motto “life, liberty and happiness.”Lincoln Center said on Wednesday that it would devote its summer festival to themes of community and civic participation, with a mix of hip-hop, comedy, dance, classical music and more under the motto “life, liberty and happiness.”The festival, Summer for the City, will feature premieres of anthems about contemporary hopes and struggles. Classical music concerts will be more participatory than in the past; at one event, audience members will be asked to vote on the program. And civil rights will be prominent, with the New York premiere of an opera about Eric Garner, who died in 2014 at the hands of police officers on Staten Island.“We know the performing arts have a role in strengthening our community and strengthening our civic bonds,” Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said in an interview. “This is a time where we can really be together and celebrate the ideas and ideals that we all share.”The third edition of the festival, which will run from June 12 to Aug. 10, is part of the center’s efforts to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd, in part by promoting a broader array of genres, including pop music and social dance.Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the center has shifted its focus from classical music and international theater, prompting some criticism that it is not doing enough to promote traditional offerings. (Timms will depart his post in August; a search for his successor is in progress.)After eliminating the Mostly Mozart Festival, a summer fixture since the 1970s, Lincoln Center renamed the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, saying that it was time to reimagine the ensemble for a modern and more inclusive age. This season, the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, as the ensemble is now called, will convene for the first time under the rising conductor Jonathon Heyward.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

      Downtown Los Angeles Places Another Big Bet on the Arts

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      The pandemic was tough on city centers and cultural institutions. What does that mean for Los Angeles, whose downtown depends on the arts?For decades the effort to revitalize downtown Los Angeles has been tied to arts projects, from the construction of the midcentury modern Music Center in 1964 to the addition of Frank Gehry’s soaring stainless steel Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003.But the pandemic was tough on downtowns and cultural institutions around the country, and Los Angeles has been no exception.Its downtown office vacancy rates climbed above 25 percent. Storefronts are empty. Homelessness and crime remain concerns. Many arts organizations have yet to recover their prepandemic audiences. And there have been vivid displays of the area’s thwarted ambitions: Graffiti artists covered three abandoned skyscrapers just before the Grammy Awards were held across the street at the Crypto.com Arena, and some lights on the acclaimed new Sixth Street Viaduct were doused after thieves stole the copper wire.So it was a major vote of confidence in the area’s continuing promise when the Broad, the popular contemporary art museum that opened across the street from Disney Hall in 2015, announced last month that it was about to begin a $100 million expansion.A rendering of the expansion announced by the Broad, a contemporary art museum, in March, which it said would cost $100 million.Diller Scofidio + Renfro, via The BroadAnd it was very much a continuation of the vision of its founder, Eli Broad, the businessman and philanthropist who played a key role in the effort to create a center of gravity in a famously spread-out city by transforming Grand Avenue into a cultural hub. Broad, who died in 2021, helped to establish the Museum of Contemporary Art and get Disney Hall built before opening the Broad to house his own art collection.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

      Rebecca Hall on ‘Godzilla x Kong’ and Finding Her Way in Hollywood

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      Rebecca Hall stood in front of an easel, her face contemplative. She moved a paintbrush gently on a palette, then applied the paint to the canvas. This was in her studio, a converted barn next door to where Ms. Hall lives in upstate New York with her husband, the actor Morgan Spector, and their 5-year-old daughter, Ida.When she’s not acting, Ms. Hall paints as a way of channeling her creativity. Her father, Sir Peter Hall — who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company — once warned her about dividing her talents. “He said that it’s very hard to do more than one thing, which really haunted me for a really long time,” Ms. Hall said. “Increasingly, though, I refuse to stay in one lane.”This, in many ways, is Ms. Hall in a nutshell: unwilling to be boxed in, an artist at heart. At 41, Ms. Hall is considered by some to be one of her generation’s most talented actresses. She possesses an unnerving maturity and an unparalleled capacity for versatility. She can so thoroughly embody a character that, as the New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis once wrote, “she becomes your way into the movie as well as the reason you keep watching.” But her career choices reveal a circuitous route toward stardom, a push and pull between projects with famous directors and actors and those on a much smaller scale, including independent films and stage productions.Most recently, she appears in this month’s “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” a big-budget monster film. In it, she plays Dr. Ilene Andrews, an anthropological linguist, who serves as a maternal Jane Goodall-type figure for Kong. It’s the type of heavily marketed blockbuster that a younger Rebecca Hall might have objected to altogether. So why did she choose to do it?“The cynical answer is you don’t get to be an artist in this day and age without doing some of those,” she replied. “But I’m also a straight-up lover of cinema, and that involves all kinds of cinema. I don’t have the mentality of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do one for them, and then I can do one for me.’ There’s also a huge amount of fun in it, and I’m proud of the end result.”Ms. Hall in this month’s big-budget film “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.” She is “a straight-up lover of cinema, and that involves all kinds of cinema,” she said.Dan McFadden/Warner Bros. PicturesWe 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