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    15 Surprising Show-Tune Covers for Broadway’s Big Night

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    Get ready for the Tony Awards with songs from Sylvester, Diana Ross & the Supremes, Queensrÿche and more.“One Night Only” originated in “Dreamgirls” and was later covered by Sylvester.Richard Creamer/Michael Ochs, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,This is Scott Heller, the former theater editor (now I’m on The New York Times Book Review). With the Tony Awards this Sunday, I’m serving up show tunes to Amplifier readers — but not the usual fare.There are no deathless standards here, like Judy Collins singing “Send in the Clowns” or anything from Barbra Streisand’s “Broadway Album.” And if you’re the kind of person who saves your Playbills, you’ve already listened to the Pet Shop Boys version of “Losing My Mind” — a lot.Rather, I’m hoping this edition of The Amplifier is full of surprising covers, and covers of show tunes you may not know as theater songs in the first place. I’ve mostly stayed away from pop albums designed to market the shows themselves, though I couldn’t resist opening with one, from well before “Hamilton” got into that game. And, alas, one of my favorites — Jill Sobule’s “Sunrise, Sunset,” recorded for the “Fiddler” tribute compilation “Knitting on the Roof” — doesn’t seem to be streamable. But you can find it on her website.Laden with happiness and tears,ScottListen along while you read.1. Diana Ross & the Supremes: “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty”Who knew? This delightful curiosity comes from a 1968 Motown album on which the trio performed 11 songs from “Funny Girl,” a tie-in released just as the movie version reached theaters. Take away the ugly duckling story line and the Brooklynese and it doesn’t exactly add up. But who cares when greeted with brash horns, sunny vocals and a group cheer after the unforgettable rhyme, “When a girl’s incidentals / are no bigger than two lentils.”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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      Cissy Houston Saw Music’s Peaks and Life’s Valleys

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      If you’re the sort of person who remains locked in a private, perpetual tug of war over whether the greatest singer this country’s ever known is Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston, perhaps you’re also the sort of person who then spares a thought for Whitney’s mother, Cissy. Cissy Houston died at 91 on Monday, and she could sing, too. Let me try that again: Cissy Houston sang, first with the clarity of something just Windexed then, later, with a tone that acquired some protective, matured texture, some bark.This thought we “who’s the greatest” vacillators spare for Miss Cissy stems from outrageous misfortune: yes, the unimaginable tragedy of losing a daughter the way she lost Whitney and then losing her daughter’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, almost exactly the same way; but also being Whitney’s mother, plus Dionne Warwick’s aunt and a cousin of the opera legend Leontyne Price, in addition to one of Aretha’s homies. How could a member of that bloodline not be in pursuit of music that could garner the sort of acclaim and career they experienced? But Cissy never found it.Warwick cast her spells with a chardonnay glimmer, singing with low-pulse seduction that had some tooth. Whitney was a fighter jet who could dance Balanchine and Ailey. Miss Cissy had power and range and a knack for put-you-in-your-place phrasing, whether the subject was the Man Upstairs or the man in her bed. But what Cissy lacked was good luck — never had original songs as top-shelf as her niece’s or as humongous as her daughter’s.Houston, at left, with the Sweet Inspirations. The R&B group often supplied backup vocals for Aretha Franklin, as they did here at a 1968 concert in New York.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesAfter a few years of significant group work with the Sweet Inspirations and an underrated solo album in 1970, she was trying disco (the “Think It Over” album, from 1978) and, the year before, choir-robed R&B on “Cissy Houston,” an album studded with covers that for all its heat and arched eyebrows could easily have been titled “Mavis Staples,” too. But look: Cissy is really feeling the tunes on that LP, reshaping, reliving, husking them. There’s weariness and want, some funk. She sounds like a woman who just walked in the front door after nine hours on her feet, who faintly remembers what being swept off them was like.Her career began perched at an upper register whose uncanny inheritor is obviously her daughter — the soprano punch-ups and dessert-for-dinner runs. But by 1977, up there, Cissy was often at her ceiling. You can sometimes hear muscle in her climbs, the labor of singing. Some voices can’t wait to get to the skies of a chorus. The alto Miss Cissy embraced seemed to luxuriate in the verses. She always sounded as if the first-floor was as good as the penthouse.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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      Cissy Houston Dies at 91; Gospel Star Guided Daughter Whitney’s Rise

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      Hailing from a musical family, she won Grammys, sang backup to Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin and helped shepherd Whitney Houston to superstardom.Cissy Houston, a Grammy Award-winning soul and gospel star who helped shepherd her daughter Whitney Houston to superstardom, died on Monday at her home in Newark. She was 91.Her family announced her death in a statement, which said she had been in hospice care for Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Houston was a gifted stylist whose powerful voice and deep faith made her an influential figure in gospel circles for decades. She won Grammy Awards in the traditional soul gospel category for the albums “Face to Face” in 1997 and “He Leadeth Me” in 1999.Before then, she had been among the busiest backup singers in the record business, providing vocal support for Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley and many others. And for more than a half-century she was the choir director for the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, where she got her start as a singer in the 1930s.Ms. Houston was the matriarch of a singing dynasty that included her daughter, her nieces Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick and a cousin, the opera star Leontyne Price. She endured the deaths of her daughter, who drowned in a hotel bathtub in 2012, and of Whitney Houston’s daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, who, in an eerily similar tragedy, was found unresponsive in a bathtub in her Georgia home in January 2015 and died six months later. Whitney Houston had struggled with addiction for many years despite her mother’s intervention.Ms. Houston with her daughter Whitney, right, and her niece Dionne Warwick during the annual American Music Awards ceremony in 1987. The opera star Leontyne Price is a cousin.Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      An Epic Summer Olympics Playlist

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      Hear triumphant tracks from John Williams, Whitney Houston and, of course, Celine Dion.Celine Dion performing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.Mike Hewitt/Getty ImagesDear listeners,I just got out my thermometer to confirm and, yep, it’s official: I have Olympic Fever.Like much of the world, I have been glued to my TV watching the Paris Olympics for the past few days. I confess that I am, at best, a fair-weather fan of most of the sports that take place during the Summer Games, but one symptom of Olympic Fever is suddenly caring deeply about things you recently knew next to nothing about. Several days ago, if you asked me to name a male gymnast who is currently competing at the elite level, I would have stared at you blankly. But after Monday, when the U.S. men’s gymnastics team won its first medal in 16 years thanks in part to the bespectacled pommel horse specialist Stephen Nedoroscik, everything has changed. Don’t even get me started on the U.S. women’s rugby team.Today’s playlist, naturally, is a soundtrack for Olympic Fever: A collection of past Summer Olympic songs from the likes of Whitney Houston, Gloria Estefan and Björk, among others — plus a certain Èdith Piaf song that took on new resonance at this year’s opening ceremony.Subtlety is not exactly a virtue when it comes to an Olympic song, so be warned that this playlist contains grandiosity, majesty and even a little schmaltz. But it also has the power to transform whatever you’re doing into an Olympic event, whether that’s running a 100-meter sprint, successfully flipping a pancake or — like Nedoroscik, man of many talents — trying to solve a Rubik’s cube in under 10 seconds. Use it wisely.I want one moment in time,LindsayListen along while you read.1. John Williams and the Berlin Philharmonic: “Olympic Fanfare and Theme”Let’s begin with some fanfare. The prolific composer John Williams — best known for his film scores — has written four different Olympic themes over the years. But his first, composed for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, is still probably the most widely recognizable. “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” is guaranteed to bring a sense of triumphant grandeur to whatever you’re doing. Put this on at the end of a run and you will be physically unable to slow down.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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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      12 Key Music Collections, From Future to the Who

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      Whitney Houston’s gospel music, Future’s prolific mixtape run, a chunk of Joni Mitchell’s archives and a soundtrack of Brooklyn’s early discos arrived in new packages this year.Artists were eager to revisit the past in 2023 — some tweaking recent albums (like Taylor Swift), others revisiting long-dormant work in the vaults (like the two surviving Beatles). Boxed sets and reissue collections serve a different purpose, helping put catalogs and musicians into context, and bringing fresh revelations to light. Here are a dozen of the best our critics encountered this year.Julee Cruise, ‘Floating Into the Night’(Sacred Bones; one LP, $22)The absorbing, unconventional debut album from the deep-exhale vocalist Julee Cruise, who died in 2022, was produced by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch; the three had previously collaborated on music for Lynch’s 1986 alt-noir film “Blue Velvet.” This batch of songs, released in 1989, plays as an extension of that fun-house mirror, lightly terrifying universe, with twisted 1950s melodies meeting destabilizing, plangent guitars meeting Dali-esque shimmers. “Falling” became the theme song for “Twin Peaks” in instrumental form, but its full vocal version is the essential one. Songs like that, “The Nightingale” and “Into the Night” feel, even now, sui generis — not exactly dream-pop or new age, but something utterly amniotic. And lightly harrowing, too. JON CARAMANICADeYarmond Edison, ‘Epoch’(Jagjaguwar; five LPs, four CDs, 120-page book, $130)Anna Powell Denton/JagjaguwarBon Iver didn’t come out of nowhere. Before he started that project, Justin Vernon was in DeYarmond Edison, a pensive, folky but exploratory band that made two albums before splitting up; other members formed Megafaun. DeYarmond Edison — Vernon’s middle names — delved into folk, rock, Minimalism and bluegrass, learning traditional songs but also experimenting with phase patterns. It made two studio albums and left behind other songs, including “Epoch.” This extensively annotated boxed set includes songs from Mount Vernon, DeYarmond Edison’s jammy predecessor, along with DeYarmond Edison’s full second studio album (though only part of its first), unreleased demos, intimate concerts, collaborations outside the band and Vernon’s 2006 solo recordings. It’s a chronicle that opens up the sources of a style getting forged. JON PARELESWe 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?  More

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      When Club Music Went Commercial, Remixes Kept It Real

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      Social justice, romance and gay pride are alive in a sound that would seduce the world.We gathered each Sunday. The place of worship: Tracks, a mammoth warehouse-turned-nightclub in Southeast Washington, D.C. We were a congregation of mostly Black gay men, there to celebrate one another, at a time — the early 1990s — when we were losing so many to AIDS. We danced — many vogued — to the music that endured after the anti-Black, anti-gay “Disco Sucks” movement of the late 1970s. This fledgling genre transformed dance music, through synthesizers, drum machines and the scrappiness of youth, into a sound that would seduce the world. Some would “call it house,” as the duo Mass Order sang on “Lift Every Voice (Take Me Away),” from 1991.So many songs reflected my values and interests: social injustice (CeCe Rogers, “Someday”), romance (MAW & Company featuring Xaviera Gold, “Gonna Get Back to You”), recovering from heartbreak (Ultra Naté, “It’s Over Now”) and gay pride (Carl Bean, “I Was Born This Way”). Other cuts I cherished weren’t songs written for the clubs, but remixes: R&B and pop songs reconfigured for the dance floor.Life is a remix. Or at least mine has been. Like many, I grew up exploring identity through pop culture. But being Black and gay, I felt most mainstream entertainment didn’t affirm my place in the world. I nevertheless sifted through mass media, embracing what served me, discarding what didn’t. This process of fashioning custom-fitted couture from cultural ready-to-wear is epitomized by the remix. “Remix” has a range of meanings, but in general it refers to a practice, with roots in Jamaican reggae, in which D.J.s and producers take a pre-existing song and tweak it for a specific audience. I also loved many remixes because they offered a choose-your-own-adventure approach to music.In the 1990s — when the advances from increased gay visibility bucked up against the backlash triggered by AIDS — remixes attested that the music cultivated in Black gay spaces had larger cultural value. It meant something to me when, say, Diana Ross reached out to a younger generation with “Workin’ Overtime (House Mix),” Jody Watley transformed into a sinister cyborg on “I’m the One You Need (Dead Zone Mix)” and Mariah Carey went on a historical Black music journey, evoking jazz, gospel and soul on “Anytime You Need a Friend (Dave’s Empty Pass).”I also loved many remixes because they offered a choose-your-own-adventure approach to music. Remixes can free a song from the dictates of radio trends, marketability and the pop conventions of boy-meets-girl. For example, Watley’s song “When a Man Loves a Woman” was released with the remixes “When a Woman Loves a Woman” and “When a Man Loves a Man.” One of my favorite remixes is Quincy Jones’s “Listen Up (Chakapella Dub Mix),” by Arthur Baker. Baker uses Chaka Khan’s vocals to create a narcotic soundscape. The mix opens with a low bass rumble, the way a storm signals its arrival. An uncharacteristically raspy Khan starts wailing. Her vocals bring to mind sounds Frederick Douglass describes in his autobiography, music made by enslaved people: “They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone.” She roars, “I’m in love,” over and over and over again. The wildness of the repeated phrase suggests madness, but a relatable kind. It makes me think about what, on the surface, seems so irrational: a Black queer person risking alienation from the larger Black community to shape a distinct identity around the inexplicable wants of the heart.Other remixes form narratives. On the “Every Woman’s Beat” remix of Whitney Houston’s 1993 cover of Khan’s signature song, “I’m Every Woman,” the producers David Cole and Robert Clivillés of C+C Music Factory use Houston’s vocals to create an impressionistic tale that charts the journey from external desire to inner fulfillment, similar to the theme of “The Wizard of Oz.” At the start of the track, Houston repeats, “anything you want” as if she’s compelled by craving. Then she yells, “I got it,” before proclaiming, “I’m the one.” It feels as if a glittery Glinda had just whispered to her: “You’ve always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself.”There is another function of the remixes I cherish most: They instigate precious memories. As James Baldwin wrote: “Music is our witness and our ally. The beat is the confession, which recognizes, changes, and conquers time.” Some remixes remind me of the 1980s and ’90s, when music forged in Black queer spaces began reaching the mainstream. Remixes were one way of preserving Black queer aesthetics amid economic incentives to make club music more commercial.The “FBI Dub” of Janet Jackson’s 1997 hit “Together Again,” by Zanzibar DJ Tony Humphries, takes me back to those days. It’s a reminder of the ferocity of many lost to AIDS. Humphries jackhammers a classic M.F.S.B. groove, breaking it into rhythmic slabs that are the perfect accompaniment to an exquisitely executed pose. It’s house music as hoodoo, conjuring angular apparitions trapped in a fierce dance battle. I listen to these and other remixes from the era to help me cope with a phantom past, the feeling I survived a plague that often seems forgotten. Remixes bring me hope because, by definition, they represent the possibility of change. I’m thinking about a line from Indeep’s 1982 club burner “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”: “There’s not a problem that I can’t fix/’Cause I can do it in the mix.”Craig Seymour is a music critic and the author of “Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross.” More

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      13 (Great) Songs With Parenthetical Titles

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      How Radiohead, Whitney Houston, Meat Loaf and others made a point with punctuation.Radiohead’s Thom Yorke: (Nice pic.)Mario Ruiz/EPA, via ShutterstockDear listeners,Today’s playlist is devoted to one of my absolute favorite musical conventions: the parenthetical song title.Why use parenthesis when naming a song? There are so many reasons. Sometimes it’s a rather brazen way to remind a listener of the song’s hook, in case the title itself was too obscure: “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” “Doo Wop (That Thing),” “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).”But sometimes (and these are my favorite times) the motives are a bit more inscrutable. Does “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” really need that parenthesis? Would we not know what the Quad City DJs are singing about without the clarification “C’Mon ’N Ride It (The Train)”? Are the Kinks making fun of this whole convention with “(A) Face in the Crowd”?Plus, when we’re saying these song titles aloud, are we supposed to pause between title and subtitle, or just say the whole thing like a run-on sentence? Will you know which song I’m talking about when I say “Movin’ Out” or must I specify, “(Anthony’s Song)”? The mind boggles.This playlist is here to help you through all that confusion, and to celebrate some of the best and most inventive uses of the parenthetical song title. It features some of the obvious ones, from the likes of Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Talking Heads, alongside a few of my lesser-known personal favorites from Charli XCX, Sonic Youth and more. I hope it provides at least one opportunity for you to (shake, shake, shake) shake your booty.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Whitney Houston: “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)”In the chorus of one of the most jubilant pop songs ever, Whitney Houston qualifies her initial demand — hey, I didn’t mean just anybody — and lays her heart on the line. Good on her for having high standards on the dance floor. (Listen on YouTube)2. R.E.M.: “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”Michael Stipe learns to stop worrying and love (or at least feel fine about) the bomb in this cheerily apocalyptic hit from R.E.M.’s 1987 album “Document.” There are already so many words in this song, the parentheses seem to shrug, what’s a few more in the title? (Listen on YouTube)3. My Chemical Romance: “I’m Not OK (I Promise)”Gerard Way is (really, really, really) not OK in this 2004 emo-pop anthem, which asks listeners to imagine a sonic alternate universe in which Freddie Mercury fronted the Misfits. Though the parenthetical promise doesn’t appear in the song’s lyrics, it appropriately kicks up the overall feeling of excess and garrulous melodrama. (Listen on YouTube)4. Charli XCX: “You (Ha Ha Ha)”This title is poetry to me. From “True Romance,” the 2013 album by one of my favorite “middle class” pop stars, “You (Ha Ha Ha)” is a beautifully scathing kiss-off — as if the very mention of this person’s existence were an inside joke not even worth explaining. Savage. (Listen on YouTube)5. Bob Dylan: “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Have Never Met)”When it comes to parenthetical titles — as with just about every other element of songwriting — Bob Dylan is an expert. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” is an all-timer; “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” is a classic; “Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)” is a clever co-mingling of the sacred and profane. But this one, from his 1964 album “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” is probably my favorite. I love the way the title switches from second to third person inside the parenthesis, as if he’s turning to the audience in the middle of a conversation and mouthing, “Can you believe her?!” It mimics a similar perspective shift in the song itself, when, in the penultimate verse, Dylan goes from singing about this woman to suddenly singing to her: “If you want me to, I can be just like you,” he sings, “and pretend that we never have touched.” (Listen on YouTube)6. Otis Redding: “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay”Recorded days before his untimely death, the parenthetical prefix of Otis Redding’s enduring swan song not only specifies what he’s doing on the dock of the bay, but it gives that titular setting a human character — eyes through which this languid bayside scene is witnessed. (Listen on YouTube)7. Talking Heads: “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)”When the members of the recently (sort of?) reconciled Talking Heads recorded the instrumental tracks for their 1983 album “Speaking in Tongues,” they gave the demos unofficial titles. But even after David Byrne wrote lyrics to what would become the luminous “This Must Be the Place,” they wanted to honor the track’s original nickname, which expressed both its compositional simplicity and its childlike innocence. (Listen on YouTube)8. Janet Jackson: “Love Will Never Do (Without You)”I’m a big fan of parenthetical song titles that complete an internal rhyme — see also: Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” — and an even bigger fan of this ecstatic tune from Ms. Jackson’s 1989 opus “Rhythm Nation 1814.” That key change gets me every time! (Listen on YouTube)9. Radiohead: “(Nice Dream)”The members of Radiohead are such fans of parentheses that every single track on their 2003 album “Hail to the Thief” has a subtitle — which is honestly a bit much to keep track of. I prefer this early song from “The Bends,” which has its title entirely encased in parentheses, adding to the song’s liminal, somnambulant feel. (Listen on YouTube)10. Sonic Youth: “Brave Men Run (in My Family)”Off “Bad Moon Rising,” a strange and eerie early Sonic Youth album of which I am quite partial, this ferocious squall of a song finds Kim Gordon meditating on masculinity, turning it inside out with her sly wordplay, and bellowing each lyric with a warrior’s intensity. (Listen on YouTube)11. The Rolling Stones: “It’s Only Rock’n’Roll (But I Like It)”Perhaps the spiritual inverse of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ later “Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It)”, this 1974 hit contains a truly shocking admission: The Rolling Stones … like rock ’n’ roll? I have to say, I didn’t see that one coming! (Listen on YouTube)12. Aretha Franklin: “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman”Oh, I could have written an entire women’s studies paper on this one in college. The proper title “A Natural Woman” proposes that there’s such a thing as authentic and essential femininity, but the parenthetical totally upends that notion — the singer doesn’t need to be a natural woman to feel like one. No wonder it’s a drag classic! (Listen on YouTube)13. Meat Loaf: “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”It’s the Alpha (and Omega) of parenthetical song titles. Thesis and antithesis. It prompts certainly the most profound mystery in all of rock opera, and perhaps in pop music writ large: What. Is. That? Meat Loaf claimed that the answer was hidden in the song itself, and in a 1998 episode of “VH1 Storytellers,” he pulled out a chalkboard and gave a grammar lesson proposing as much. (But I choose to believe the mystery … or maybe the explanation his character gave in “Spice World.”) (Listen on YouTube)Feelin’ pretty psyched,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“13 (Great) Songs With Parenthetical Titles” track listTrack 1: Whitney Houston, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)”Track 2: R.E.M., “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”Track 3: My Chemical Romance, “I’m Not OK (I Promise)”Track 4: Charli XCX, “You (Ha Ha Ha)”Track 5: Bob Dylan, “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Have Never Met)”Track 6: Otis Redding, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay”Track 7: Talking Heads, “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)”Track 8: Janet Jackson, “Love Will Never Do (Without You)”Track 9: Radiohead, “(Nice Dream)”Track 10: Sonic Youth, “Brave Men Run (in My Family)”Track 11: The Rolling Stones, “It’s Only Rock’n’Roll (But I Like It)”Track 12: Aretha Franklin, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”Track 13: Meat Loaf, “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”Bonus tracksOn Saturday night — one of the loveliest and most temperate New York evenings all summer — I witnessed something utterly enchanting in Prospect Park, as a part of the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! summer concert series: a free show headlined by the one and only John Cale. (Earlier this year, you may recall, I devoted an entire newsletter to Cale’s vast discography.) I’ve been trying ever since to recapture the magic of that night by listening to some of the songs he played: The serene “Hanky Panky Nohow,” the rollicking “Barracuda,” and, most haunting of all, his slow, mournful deconstruction of “Heartbreak Hotel.” More

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      Review: ‘The Whitney Album’ Looks to Theater to Remake a Painful Past

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      Eschewing a conventional narrative, Jillian Walker’s soulful show seeks to heal deep wounds through ritual and celebratory singalongs.In “The Whitney Album,” a heady and ritualistic new show that recently opened at Soho Rep, the playwright and actor Jillian Walker uses Whitney Houston as an object lesson: The pressures heaped on gifted and famous Black women, Walker suggests, are stifling, destructive and rooted in colonial subjugation.Unlike the pop-diva-inspired musicals proliferating uptown, “The Whitney Album” eschews a hit catalog for a soundtrack that’s sui generis, with percussive body movements, a cappella solos and, eventually, a group singalong. The director Jenny Koons’s production unfolds — on a mostly white stage (designed by Peiyi Wong), with a brass singing bowl gleaming down center — as a kind of happening, unconcerned with conventional narrative. The show assumes the style of what Walker might call “a vibe.”After offering a warm welcome, the playwright delivers a lecture about the power of theater to remake history (“the archive is the unsung silence,” she says). Dense with academic syntax and punctuated by elemental rites (like the pouring of water or sand from one vessel to another), “The Whitney Album” blends intellectual theory and ceremony to the point of abstraction. (Walker studied to become an Afro-Indigenous priest, she says, after being passed over for a prestigious full-time professorship.)The actor Stephanie Weeks joins Walker onstage, and the two trade off playing Houston and the women she was closest to — her mother and a longtime confidante — in scenes fraught with the stress of celebrity. (The sound designer Ben Jalosa Williams, who operates an onstage board, briefly plays the role of an impatient white interviewer.) Walker likens Houston’s prodigious perspiration to the sweat, tears and saltwater graves of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, tracing the consumption and disposal of Black women over three centuries. It’s a powerful argument, at once persuasive and oversimplified. (“The Whitney Album” does not extend to consider today’s Black female pop stars, like Beyoncé, for example, who maintain a high degree of control over their labor and publicity.)The show’s shuffle of forms — including direct address, re-enactment, live and recorded vocals — can feel like an especially soulful, high-concept record that’s more evocative than linear. But its piled-up ideas, many of them couched in esoteric language that’s not easy to parse in a 90-minute performance, ultimately don’t cohere into a moving or insightful whole.Walker’s passion and intellect seem to place her along the continuum of artists and scholars she calls out by first name — like Saidiya, Lauryn and bell, among others. But how can Walker avoid participating in the cycle of consumption she aims to critique? It’s a question that she proves has no easy answers.The Whitney AlbumThrough July 2 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Alex Newell From ‘Shucked’ Sings Their Favorite Whitney Houston Song

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      After growing up listening to powerhouse voices, the actor brings their own back to Broadway.Amid the sweet, folksy ballads (and many, many corn jokes) of “Shucked,” the new Broadway musical opening April 4, comes a soulful, commanding number performed by Alex Newell that provides the show some unexpected heft — a song full of riffs and modulations and belted notes that seem to reach both ends of the actor’s expansive range.Roles that showcase the breadth and power of Newell’s voice are familiar territory: The actor made their Broadway debut in 2017 as the maternal goddess Asaka in the revival of “Once on This Island” (1990) and may be most recognizable for their time on “Glee,” from 2012 to 2015, as the transgender teenager Unique Adams. But their character in “Shucked” — Lulu, a whiskey entrepreneur — and that song, “Independently Owned,” offer the chance to inhabit something new: “The expectation of plus-size people is that they cannot be sexy; all my life, I’ve heard you’re either fat and jolly or fat and a bitch,” says Newell, 30. “So to have this dimension of this person, to just exude sex, is so much fun for me because it doesn’t happen often — especially on the Broadway stage.”“Shucked” is set in a small farming town with a thriving corn crop — until the stalks start dying, spurring a local woman (Lulu’s cousin and confidante, Maizy, played by Caroline Innerbichler) to leave home in search of a solution. Newell heard about the piece through a friend, who did an early reading before the pandemic. But they didn’t see the script, written by Robert Horn, until the show’s musical director and orchestrator, Jason Howland, texted Newell about the role. They were immediately drawn to the show’s humor — nearly every line is a pun or punchline or both, the laughs offset by a warm score from the country songwriting duo Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark.Newell grew up singing in church in Lynn, Mass., and listening to other big voices, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Patti LaBelle, Jennifer Holliday among them. They had early aspirations of becoming a gospel artist, but performing in a choir proved challenging — “I mean, I never fit in. I was always loud.” After seeing a local production of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” when they were 11, Newell began thinking about a career in musical theater.When Fox held an open call for “Glee” hopefuls to audition online in 2011, Newell, then a sophomore in high school, submitted a self-taped clip performing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” from “Dreamgirls.” (Starring as Effie, a role in the musical originated by Holliday, has long been a goal.) Newell later started making pop music, including the queer anthems “Kill the Lights” and “All Cried Out,” and in 2020 eventually returned to TV as Mo, a gender-nonconforming D.J. on the musical series “Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist.” But for now, Newell says, they’re content to stay onstage: “The endorphins that are released after you’ve sung and everyone is standing and screaming and that wall of sound is pushing right back at you: It’s beautiful.”Ahead of opening night, T asked Newell to sing and discuss their favorite song by one of their idols: Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” (1985). More