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    The Octagon Inside the Sphere: Bloody Fights and Soaring Films

    To amplify the first live athletic competition at the Las Vegas landmark, the Ultimate Fighting Championship turned to Hollywood.After an animated vignette of conquistadors ransacking Indigenous Mexican temples played on the Sphere’s enormous video screen and the venue’s haptic seats shook violently, two mixed martial arts fighters approached each other on Mexican Independence Day weekend. As they battled in the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s caged octagon, birds soared across a backdrop of temple ruins.The Sphere — a futuristic orb-like structure with more than 700,000 square feet of programmable screens inside and out — has primarily hosted musicians, keynote speakers and filmmakers since opening its radiant gaze upon the Las Vegas Strip in July 2023.It was one of those concerts last year, part of U2’s nearly six-month residency, that amazed and inspired Dana White, the U.F.C.’s chief executive. For months he has grandiosely proclaimed that he would hold the first live athletic competition at the Sphere, which can typically seat about 17,000 people.The company invested $20 million into Saturday night’s spectacle, called Noche U.F.C., as White challenged his staff to mesh a brutal, polarizing blood sport with pageantry and flair by working with award-winning Hollywood creators.“We showed everybody tonight what’s possible,” White said after the fight, which he said broke U.F.C. records for ticket and merchandise sales. “You can do more than just concerts here and pull them off and make them great. So who’s next?”The U.F.C. filled more than 700,000 square feet of programmable screens with tributes on Mexican Independence Day weekend.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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    Man Charged With Tupac Shakur’s Murder Loses Bid for Release

    A judge declined to release Duane Keith Davis, whose trial is scheduled for March, after a dispute over the source of the bail funds.A judge in Nevada declined on Tuesday to release a man who was charged with the murder of the rapper Tupac Shakur after expressing concern that the money provided to bail him out from jail could be connected to a possible deal to tell his story in a TV series.The man, Duane Keith Davis, known as Keffe D, has said for years that he was a critical player in the gang-orchestrated shooting of the rapper, drawing scrutiny from prosecutors nearly three decades after the killing. A grand jury indicted Mr. Davis on one count of murder with use of a deadly weapon last year.Mr. Davis has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer has said that those admissions of responsibility — which he made in a memoir and in videotaped interviews — were “for entertainment purposes” under the belief that he had been granted immunity from prosecution.Judge Carli Kierny of the Eighth Judicial District Court in Nevada declined to release Mr. Davis after a dispute over the source of the funds that would have been used for bail.Prosecutors had opposed his release, pointing to an interview on YouTube in which the man who posted the bail bond premium of about $112,000 said he would help out only if Mr. Davis agreed to do a TV series with him.“This is him getting paid from his retelling of his criminal past,” Binu Palal, one of the prosecutors overseeing the case, said at a court hearing in June.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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    ‘Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net’ Review: How the Magic Happens

    This documentary chronicles the reboot and reopening in Las Vegas of the acrobatic show “O,” which shutdown during the pandemic.Conventional wisdom once held, snootily, that circus folk were quirky, superstitious, given to idiosyncratic behavior. Whether that was ever really true or not, the members of the rather unconventional Cirque du Soleil, as portrayed in the new documentary “Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net,” happen to be rather remarkably levelheaded.In scenes of conception, rehearsal and more, nobody raises a voice, storms off, indulges in Machiavellian scheming or displays anything vaguely resembling diva or divo behavior. One acrobat expresses a hope to bring a new trick to a revived show. When she can’t make it work, she reverts to her rehearsed routine and resolves to come up with something some other time. No drama.The movie is not boring or dry, though, as “Without a Net,” directed by Dawn Porter, chronicles a critical period in the organization’s history: the remounting of a show after the pandemic shutdowns. (It had dozens of shows playing around the world before the pandemic. The virus shut them down within 48 hours in March 2020, and 95 percent of the company’s staff was laid off.) Over a year later, the company began remounting “O,” its popular Las Vegas show. The title is a pun: This spectacle features acrobats performing without a net above an ingeniously engineered pool of water — as in “eau,” the French word for water.Porter’s inquisitive camera gives the viewer enticing detail on how everything comes together — for instance, unbeknown to the audience, the pool is constantly monitored by rescue divers in scuba gear who also serve as prop people — while holding in suitable awe the actual magic all this work eventually yields.Cirque du Soleil: Without a NetRated PG-13 for some strong language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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    Usher Super Bowl Halftime Review: A Focus on Details With Alicia Keys, Lil Jon and More

    In a halftime set that touched on more than a dozen songs, the R&B star delivered a raucous Atlanta party and a lesson in intimate showmanship.A few minutes into Usher’s dynamic and sly Super Bowl LVIII halftime show performance Sunday night at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas came a moment of uncommon, almost startling calm.Alicia Keys had just appeared, in a sequined red jumpsuit and matching encrusted gown, and rather gratuitously flubbed the opening note of her hit piano ballad “If I Ain’t Got You.”She recovered, and as she approached the end of the chorus, you could hear Usher singing in quiet harmony as the camera panned back, settling on the two of them at opposite ends of Keys’s piano. Usher picked up the final line of the chorus — alone, smooth and confident, almost whispered — before Keys returned to share the last note.Allegiant Stadium holds approximately 65,000 people, but in that instant, there were only two. It was one of the quietest sequences in halftime history, a remarkable testament to the gifts of Usher, a performer of precise detail who is enjoyed best with rapt attention.Usher was joined by Alicia Keys on Sunday.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesAnd H.E.R. played guitar during his halftime set.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMost of the rest of the performance — which touched on more than a dozen songs — was grander in scale, designed to fill a football field: A small-bore, granular-gestured showcase gave way to an explosive party. But what this set did so well was make plain that Usher’s commitment to minutiae and his capacity for grandeur are fired in the same cauldron. He can control the stage when it is packed to the gills, and he can do it alone. More

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    A Super Bowl Broadcaster With Slime and Swagger

    Nate Burleson spent 11 seasons playing in the N.F.L. He now balances several TV assignments, and will announce the Super Bowl with SpongeBob SquarePants.Nate Burleson, far removed from the 11 seasons he spent toiling in the National Football League, pulled up his shirt to wipe sweat from his forehead during a well-deserved break.Burleson was in a buzzing laboratory with green slime-filled industrial containers, recording Nickelodeon’s “NFL Slimetime” days after explaining the challenge of overcoming turnovers on “The NFL Today,” the CBS football show that was in Baltimore for the A.F.C. Championship Game. Hours before the Nickelodeon taping, he had provided updates about the widening conflict in the Middle East on “CBS Mornings,” the network’s flagship morning newscast.After a productive but unglamorous football career, Burleson, 42, has found high-profile success in the television industry. Now he faces a daunting schedule this week in Las Vegas, where the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers will face off in the Super Bowl.Burleson is setting 1:30 a.m. alarms to anchor “CBS Mornings” from the Las Vegas Strip throughout the week. And on Sunday, he will announce Nickelodeon’s first alternate Super Bowl telecast for children, changing into a suit and racing down Allegiant Stadium’s elevator with help from security to join his “NFL Today” colleagues for halftime analysis.“I never played in a Super Bowl, so I feel like this is my Super Bowl,” Burleson said.Tony Dokoupil, left, Gayle King and Burleson on “CBS Mornings.” Burleson impressed producers with the energy he brought to segments while guest hosting.Mary Kouw/CBSNickelodeon’s alternate telecasts are an attempt to attract younger viewers by infusing N.F.L. games with augmented-reality animations on the field — yes, there will be plenty of virtual slime — and incorporating popular cartoon characters. Burleson will call the Super Bowl with the voice actors for SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick Star. (Jim Nantz and Tony Romo are announcing the traditional broadcast on CBS.)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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    Taylor Swift Prop Bets Dominate Super Bowl Action

    While casino gambling focuses on the Super Bowl itself, online sports books are flooded with options on what Ms. Swift will wear, how she’ll celebrate and more.The Super Bowl always draws crowds to betting windows and online sports books, but some of the most talked about action this year will leave a blank space in Las Vegas.With in-person sports books limited to action on the field, Adam Burns, the sports book manager for BetOnline.ag, found himself capitalizing on the moment by preparing odds for a flood of unusual wagers: What sort of outfit will Taylor Swift wear to the game on Sunday? Will the CBS broadcast show her holding a beverage or giving high-fives? Will she cry if the Kansas City Chiefs lose to the San Francisco 49ers?For some much-needed assistance, Mr. Burns turned to a reliable source: his teenage daughter.“Friends are like, ‘Come on over and watch the game with us,’” Mr. Burns said in a telephone interview from his home in Montreal. “I can’t. I have to watch Taylor Swift. You can ask me the next day who won the game, and I won’t even know. But I’ll know how many times Taylor Swift was shown on TV.”Ms. Swift, who won two Grammys on Sunday night and announced the release date for her next album, was a phenomenon long before she started dating Travis Kelce, Kansas City’s star tight end. But her regular appearances at his team’s games this season — clad in red, celebrating Mr. Kelce’s touchdowns, and even sharing a luxury box with his bare-chested, beer-swilling brother — have produced crossover magic with the N.F.L.BetOnline.ag, which is based in Panama, has so many Swift-related Super Bowl prop bets — 89, a reference to her album “1989” — that Mr. Burns had to plumb the depths of the absurd, including: What shade of lipstick will Ms. Swift choose for the game? (Red, a signature color for Ms. Swift, is favored, followed by “any other color.”)Bet U.S., an online casino based in Costa Rica, also has a smorgasbord of Swift-related bets.“If it’s something that’s going to attract some attention and we can make legitimate odds on it, there’s a good chance that we’re going to do it,” said Tim Williams, the director of public affairs for Bet U.S. He added: “We expect to see as much interest, if not more interest, in all of these Taylor Swift bets compared to bets related to the halftime show, and that’s really unprecedented.”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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    Shecky Greene, High-Energy Comedy Star, Is Dead at 97

    A Las Vegas institution, he would do just about anything for a laugh, including physical comedy so broad that it sometimes left him black and blue.Shecky Greene, a high-energy stand-up comedian who for many years was one of the biggest stars in Las Vegas, died on Sunday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 97.His daughter Alison Greene confirmed his death. Mr. Greene was a frequent guest of Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson and other television hosts, and had acting roles in movies and on television. But he never reached as wide an audience as many of his fellow comedians, probably because his humor was best experienced in full flower on a nightclub stage rather than in small doses on the small screen. In Las Vegas, though, he was an institution. A versatile entertainer of the old school — he told stories, he made faces, he ad-libbed, he did impressions, he sang — he would do just about anything for a laugh, including physical comedy so broad that it sometimes left him black and blue.He was not one to stick to a set routine. “I wasn’t an A-B-C-D comic. ‘Hello, ladies and gentlemen’ and then the next line,” he told the comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff in 2011. Audiences who went to see Shecky Greene never knew quite what to expect.“One of the greatest I ever saw in a nightclub,” his fellow comedian Pat Cooper told Mr. Nesteroff. “I saw him climb the curtain and do 20 minutes on top of the curtain! He destroyed an audience.”Some said he was at his funniest when he was angry, which was often. “He’s got to be somewhere where he hates the owner, hates the hotel,” the comedian Jack Carter once said, “so that he’s got something to go on.”He was at least as unpredictable off the stage as he was on it. He became famous not just for his act but also for his drinking binges, gambling sprees and erratic, often self-destructive behavior.“I should have been fired maybe 150 times in Las Vegas,” Mr. Greene told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996. “I was only fired 130 times.”Probably the most famous Shecky Greene story involved the time he drove his car into the fountain in front of Caesars Palace. In a 2005 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he confirmed the story, but admitted that the way he told it in his act was slightly embellished: He did not really greet the police officers who rushed to the scene with the words “No spray wax, please.” That line, he said, was suggested to him after the fact by his friend and fellow comedian Buddy Hackett.Another of his best-known jokes was also, he insisted, based on a true story. Frank Sinatra, the joke went, once saved his life. Five men were beating Mr. Greene, but they stopped when Sinatra said, “OK, boys, that’s enough.” Onstage, Mr. Greene told stories, made faces, ad-libbed, did impressions and sang. He also appeared on various television shows.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesAs amusing as the stories of Mr. Greene’s behavior were, the truth is that he had severe mental health problems, including bipolar disorder and panic attacks, which were apparently exacerbated when he developed a dependence on his prescription medication. He had other ailments as well, including cancer, and by the mid-1980s he had stopped performing.Mr. Greene, who had a family history of mental illness, went public with his condition in the 1990s and, with the help of a new therapist and new medication, gradually resumed his career. He even incorporated his illness into his shtick.“I’m bipolar,” he told a Las Vegas television interviewer in 2010. “I’m more than bipolar. I’m South Polar, North Polar. I’m every kind of polar there is. I even lived with a polar bear for about a year.”By 2005, although he was happily describing himself as retired, he could be persuaded to perform at private parties. In 2009 he made his first Las Vegas appearance in many years, at the Suncoast Casino, and he continued to perform occasionally in Las Vegas. As early as 1996, Mr. Greene was performing, he said, for one reason only. “I’m not in it for a career anymore,” he told The Sun. “I had my career. I’m in it to enjoy myself.”Although never known as the most decorous of comedians, Mr. Greene made news in the comedy world in 2014 when he stormed out of a Friars Club event in Manhattan and announced that he was resigning from the club after his fellow comedian Gilbert Gottfried did material that Mr. Greene, who had been scheduled to speak, found offensive. “He got dirtier and dirtier,” Mr. Greene told a radio interviewer, without providing details, “so I got up and I said, ‘That’s it.’”Fred Sheldon Greenfield was born on April 8, 1926, in Chicago. (In 2004 he legally changed his name to Shecky Greene, long after his professional first name had come to connote a certain kind of brash, aggressive, old-school comedian even to people who had never seen him perform.) His parents were Carl and Bessie (Harris) Greenfield. His father was a shoe salesman and his mother sold hosiery at a department store before quitting to focus on raising their three children. Mr. Greene performing on “The Hollywood Palace” television show in 1965.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesAfter serving in the Navy during World War II, he enrolled at Wright Junior College (now Wilbur Wright College) in Chicago with plans of becoming a gym teacher. But he was sidetracked by his interest in performing.He took a summer job at a resort near Milwaukee, where, he once recalled, “They paid me $20 a week and gave me a fancy title, ‘social director.’” He became a performer, he said, because the resort couldn’t afford to hire big-name acts. “I wasn’t Red Skelton,” he recalled, “but I got a few laughs.”He returned to college that September but also continued developing a comedy act and occasionally performed in nightclubs. It would be a few years before his commitment to show business became full time.He left college to accept a two-week engagement in New Orleans; that booking stretched into three years, and ended only when the nightclub burned down. Unsure of his next move, he returned to Chicago and went back to college, but left for good when the comedian Martha Raye offered him a job as her opening act in Miami.“This time,” he said in an interview for his website, sheckygreene.com, “I made up my mind: I would stick with show business. I was only 25 years old and making $500 a week. Besides, I had a silent partner to support — I had discovered how to bet the horses.”He first ventured into Nevada, then in its early days as an entertainment mecca, when the Golden Hotel in Reno hired him for four weeks in 1953. His opening-night performance so impressed the hotel’s owners that they held him over for 18 weeks and offered him a new contract, for a guaranteed $20,000 a year (the equivalent of more than $200,000 today). He was soon headlining in Las Vegas, where for one week in 1956 Elvis Presley was his opening act.Mr. Greene on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson in 1975.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesBy 1975 he was making $150,000 a week (more than $800,000 in today’s money), one of only a handful of comedians in that salary range at the time. He liked to say that he gambled most of it away, but that it didn’t matter because he had more money than God — whose weekly salary, he happened to know, was only $35,000.He was also gaining a reputation for his sometimes violent offstage behavior. A decade later, his mental health problems had brought his career to a halt.He eventually overcame those problems, for which he gave much of the credit to the support of his wife, Marie (Musso) Greene, whom he married in 1985.His first two marriages, to Jeri Drurey and Nalani Kele, ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Alison, he is survived by another daughter, Dorian Hoffman — Mr. Greene and his first wife adopted both of them at birth — and by his wife. He moved to Las Vegas several years ago; previously, he had lived in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, Calif.Although destined to be remembered primarily as a Las Vegas performer, Mr. Greene had a considerable television résumé, as both a comedian and an actor.He had a recurring role on the World War II series “Combat!” in 1962 and 1963 and appeared on “The Love Boat,” “Laverne & Shirley” and “Mad About You,” as well as variety and talk shows. (He was an occasional “Tonight Show” guest host in the 1970s.) He appeared in a few movies as well, including “Splash” (1984) and Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part I” (1981).Interviewed by The Washington Times in 2017, Mr. Greene looked back on his career philosophically:“Why did I do this and that? At 90 I still don’t know. Once in a while I’ll have a nice sleep. Most nights I wake up yelling, ‘Why did I do that?’“Life is strange, but if you’ve had a mixture of a life like I had, it’s all right.”Alex Traub More

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    Wu-Tang Clan Announces Las Vegas Residency

    The first four concert dates will begin with Super Bowl weekend in February.Wu-Tang Clan will begin a Las Vegas residency in February as the city hosts its first Super Bowl, the Grammy-nominated rap collective announced on Tuesday.Though rap stars frequently perform in Las Vegas for concerts and appearances at nightclubs, it is unclear if a hip-hop group has held a traditional residency, which became popular in the city around the 1940s.“Wu-Tang Clan: The Saga Continues … The Las Vegas Residency” will begin next year at the Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, starting with concerts on Feb. 9-10, Super Bowl weekend, and March 22-23, when fans flock to the city to bet on the N.C.A.A. college basketball tournaments. Tickets go on sale on Friday, and more dates will be released in the coming months.Known for hits like “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)” and “Protect Ya Neck,” Wu-Tang Clan recently concluded a tour with the rapper Nas. The group’s leader, Robert Diggs, known as RZA, said the residency had been in the works for about five years and was meant in part to elevate the genre, which has been celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.“Hip-hop is rich in its content and what it offers creatively to an audience,” he said, adding that the nine-member group, which was founded in New York in the early 1990s, wants “to put it on flagpoles to show that hip-hop can go where any other art form has gone before.”“I think the art form has evolved,” he added.Residencies in Las Vegas this year included the pop artists Adele and Katy Perry. The band U2 will conclude its residency at the Sphere, the video-screen-wrapped orb-like venue built by the Knicks owner James Dolan, in March. Usher Raymond, the R&B star who will headline the Super Bowl halftime show, recently completed a residency in the city.Las Vegas, which has long been known for hosting boxing and mixed martial arts fights, has also expanded its reputation as a destination for other top-caliber sporting events. In addition to hosting the upcoming Super Bowl, the city held its first Formula 1 race in November and saw its professional hockey and women’s basketball teams win championships this past season.RZA said he was hopeful that Wu-Tang Clan’s residency would inspire other rap artists to inject themselves into Las Vegas’s entertainment scene.“I’m in that spirit of loving where there’s a hub of art and then loving that I — in my talent and the Wu-Tang brothers — can add to that hub and of course eventually invite more hip-hop artists to come and play in this sandbox with us,” RZA said. More