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    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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      ‘Unsung Hero’ Review: Music Dedicated to the One They Love

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      In fact, there’s a lot of singing in the clan whose members inspired this movie and who have racked up five Grammy Awards for their Christian recordings.In the faith-based drama “Unsung Hero,” an Australian concert promoter trying to earn a living makes a last-ditch move to Nashville with his wife and six children. Based on an actual family of musicians, it mostly plays as a treacly tribute to the parents of Joel and Luke Smallbone — a.k.a. the Christian pop duo For King & Country — and their sister the singer Rebecca St. James.Viewer beware: Between the uplift and the cringe, this movie may cause whiplash. Joel Smallbone plays his own father, David, who faces financial and reputational ruin after booking a big concert and failing to pack the house. He resettles the family in the United States, but no job materializes. His pep-talking spouse, Helen (Daisy Betts), and their beatific children pull up bootstraps and practically whistle while they work, but it’s not enough.Community, humility, and the power of prayer are the lessons on offer in their story, set in the 1990s, bathed in warm light and interspersed with home video segments. Fellow churchgoers pitch in, and David gets over himself; he secures auditions for his teenage daughter, Rebecca (Kirrilee Berger), who keeps breaking into dulcet song about how everything is beautiful. The outcome of “Unsung Hero,” as written and directed by Richard L. Ramsey and Joel Smallbone, is never in doubt, though the climax has a kicker line that genuinely surprises with its laughable shamelessness.The family business has become a success: Rebecca, Joel and Luke have won five Grammys among them. But despite the fuzzy good intentions, it’s tough to make much of this making-of story.Unsung HeroRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. 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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      in Music

      Peter Gordon, Music’s Mr. Adjacent, Is Starting His Own Record Label

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      Peter Gordon, who studied with Terry Riley, has always made music that is surprising but accessible. Now he’s starting his own record label.For 45 years, Peter Gordon has held onto a reel-to-reel tape of a show he performed in 1979 at the Mudd Club in New York City with a trio called the Blue Horn File. Gordon, the violinist Laurie Anderson and the percussionist David Van Tieghem — a group of new music all-stars — did a short set with the playful and unshackled feel of cartoon music. It was one of only three shows the Blue Horn File played.Gordon, a saxophonist, composer and bandleader who has been a mainstay of downtown music for decades, has recorded for several different labels. But he decided to take a different path with these tapes: This week, he is releasing “The Blue Horn File at Mudd Club” as one of the first titles on Adjacent Records, his new digital-only label.“It eliminates the middleman,” he said. “With record companies, people second guess at every point what’s going to work or not work. It’s really about setting up artistic freedom, from creation to distribution.”In the course of his restless, mutable career, Gordon, 72, has written all kinds of music, from classical pieces for solo piano or chamber orchestra to dance scores and experimental operas. But he also has used his classical background to write disco-kissed rock music for the long-running group he formed in 1977, Love of Life Orchestra.He isn’t as well-known as some of the people he’s worked with, like Anderson, the novelist Kathy Acker, the choreographer Bill T. Jones, the singular cellist Arthur Russell, or David Byrne; or the people he’s studied with, including the founding Minimalists Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros, with whom he played in a klezmer band. “But he’s known by the right people,” said Tim Burgess, frontman of the Charlatans U.K. and another of Gordon’s many collaborators.Gordon is Mr. Adjacent: “Adjacent” is more than the name of his label, it’s a description of his music, which sits in a distinct Venn diagram of influences, including jazz, classical and rock, often with R&B at the center. The one constant is a kind of populist experimentation: He makes music that’s surprising but also accessible.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

      ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ Review: Alicia Keys’s Musical Finds Its Groove on Broadway

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      The retooled jukebox musical, with its top-notch performances and exciting choreography, “stands out as one of the rare must-sees” in a crowded season.There was never much doubt that the Alicia Keys musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” was going to be on Broadway. Keys spent 12 years developing a loosely autobiographical jukebox of her songs, incorporating such hits as “Girl on Fire,” “Fallin’” and “No One.”The problem is that while it played to sold-out crowds, the show that premiered at the Public Theater in November had herky-jerky pacing, a few too many groan-inducing scenes, and a second act that lost sight of whatever point the story was trying to make. (In his review for The New York Times, Jesse Green pointed out that, after the intermission, the show tumbled “directly into the potholes it spent its first half so smartly avoiding.”)Yet here we are now, with “Hell’s Kitchen” at the Shubert Theater, a few blocks from where the show’s action is set. Having seen the first version last fall, I had jitters. But “Hell’s Kitchen” has earned its place on Broadway: The revised show is thrilling from beginning to end, and easily stands out as one of the rare must-sees in a crowded season.All this happened without a major overhaul to Michael Greif’s production, which has a book by Kristoffer Diaz. The cast and creative teams are essentially the same, and there have been judicious tweaks and trims rather than radical changes. The main differences are further refined technical elements and, most important, a subtle but crucial change in focus.That adjustment is evident from the start, with a new line that kicks off the story: “Because I’m your mother, that’s why.” We are thrown in the middle of what is clearly a recurring argument between the Keys stand-in, 17-year-old Ali (the sensational Maleah Joi Moon), and her mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean, in top form). Jersey has been raising her daughter on her own, without much help from Ali’s father, Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon), and is very protective of her kid. Mother and daughter live just off Times Square, in the neighborhood of the show’s title, and Jersey is fearful that her daughter will fall prey to the streets’ many dangers — we are in the late 1990s, and Jersey is eager for Mayor Giuliani to “clean all of this right up.”The relationship between Ali (Moon) and her mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean), has been sharpened in the Broadway iteration of this coming-of-age show.Sara Krulwich/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 Theater

      ‘Stereophonic’ Review: Hitmakers Rendered in Sublime Detail

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      In David Adjmi’s new play, with songs by Will Butler, a ’70s band’s success breeds tension, and punches up the volume on Broadway.Peering behind the mystique of rock ’n’ roll has undeniable voyeuristic appeal. So there is an immediate thrill to seeing the mahogany-paneled control room and glassed-in sound booth that fill the Golden Theater stage, where “Stereophonic” opened on Friday. But David Adjmi’s astonishing new play, with songs by the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler, delivers far more than a dishy glimpse inside the recording studio during rock’s golden age.A fly-on-the-wall study of how people both need and viciously destroy each other, “Stereophonic” is a fiery family drama, as electrifying as any since “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Its real-time dissection of making music — a collaboration between flawed, gifted artists wrangled into unison — is ingeniously entertaining and an incisive meta commentary on the nature of art. The play is a staggering achievement, and already feels like a must-see American classic.It’s 1976 in Sausalito, Calif., and a not-yet-famous band — at least not solely inspired by Fleetwood Mac — is laying down the record that will propel it to stardom and unravel the personal lives of its members (in much the same way that making “Rumours” did for Fleetwood Mac). The setting (a marvel by scenic designer David Zinn) is a pressure-cooker: The coffee machine is broken but there’s a gallon bag of cocaine, and tensions and affections — both creative and personal — are running hot.Stillness and silence are as expressive as Adjmi’s meticulously orchestrated dialogue, body language sometimes even more so, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDirected with a conductor’s precision by Daniel Aukin, “Stereophonic” is an epic canvas rendered in hyper-intimate detail: whispered confidences and technical adjustments, slouches and stares, lots of lying around and rolling joints. Stillness and silence are as expressive as Adjmi’s meticulously orchestrated dialogue, body language sometimes even more so. It’s possible to read the band’s ascension to fame beyond the confines of the studio, as its previous album creeps up the Billboard charts, in the swiveling hips of its lead singer alone (and in the progression of prints and flares in Enver Chakartash’s divine costumes).When the poetic and insecure Diana, played with stunning vulnerability by Sarah Pidgeon, sits down at the piano some 45 minutes into the three-hour show, the actor’s radiant voice delivers the first significant composition the audience hears: “Bright,” a folk-tinged rock ballad with sterling, ethereal vocals. Until then, notes trickle out in brief bursts. Often interrupted or doled out in riffs, the expressions of character and discord generated by Butler’s music are abstract — their fragmentation designed to make you want more. (Savor the early sessions when everyone can stand to be in the same room.)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

    • 138 Shares67 Views

      in Music

      Harvard’s Taylor Swift Scholars Have Thoughts on ‘The Tortured Poets Department’

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      The students taking Harvard University’s class on the singer are studying up. Their final papers are due at the end of the month.Fans of Taylor Swift often study up for a new album, revisiting the singer’s older works to prepare to analyze lyrics and song titles for secret messages and meanings.“The Tortured Poets Department” is getting much the same treatment, and perhaps no group of listeners was better prepared than the students at Harvard University currently studying Ms. Swift’s works in an English class devoted entirely to the artist. The undergraduate course, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” is taught by Stephanie Burt, who has her students comparing Ms. Swift’s songs to works by poets and writers including Willa Cather, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.On Thursday night, about 50 students from the class gathered in a lecture hall on campus to listen to Ms. Swift’s new album. Mary Pankowski, a 22-year-old senior studying history of art and architecture, wore a cream sweatshirt she bought at Ms. Swift’s Eras tour last year. The group made beaded friendship bracelets to celebrate the new album, she said.When the clock struck midnight, the classroom erupted into applause, and the analysis began. First, the group listened through the album once without discussing, just taking it all in.Certain lines, however, immediately caused a stir, said Samantha Wilhoit, a junior studying government — like a reference to the singer Charlie Puth and the scathing lyrics to the song “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” Ms. Wilhoit, 21, said.A line from the song “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” in which Ms. Swift sings, “I cry a lot but I am so productive,” also seemed to resonate, Ms. Wilhoit said, laughing.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 80 Artists, Musicians and Writers Are Starting Right Now

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      Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More

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      in Music

      Tracy Chapman, Stephen King and Chloë Sevigny on Their Debuts

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      Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More