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    Fun Things to Do in NYC in February 2025

    Looking for something to do in New York? Enjoy laughs with Liza Treyger, learn about Clara Schumann, or see the Urban Bush Women in a Great Migration love story.ComedyLiza Treyger, above in her new Netflix comedy special, “Night Owl,” will host a “Show and Tell” at Union Hall on Friday.Netflix‘Show and Tell With Liza Treyger’Feb. 7 at 10 p.m. at Union Hall, 702 Union Street, Brooklyn; unionhallny.com.Hot off the heels of the debut of “Night Owl,” her hourlong comedy special on Netflix, Liza Treyger is presenting this showcase in which her funny friends joke about their most cherished possessions.Treyger, who was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up on the outskirts of Chicago, has made a name for herself in the New York City comedy scene over the past decade through her blunt appraisals of herself and society’s sexual politics. This reputation earned her an appearance on Netflix’s “Survival of the Thickest” and a consultant gig on “The Eric Andre Show.” She recently had a supporting role on an episode of the Amazon Prime Video series “Harlem.”Taking part in Treyger’s “Show and Tell” on Friday are Tommy McNamara, Drew Anderson, Marie Faustin and Molly Kearney. Tickets are $15 on Eventbrite. SEAN L. McCARTHYMusicFrom left, Why Bonnie’s Blair Howerton on guitar, Josh Malett on drums and Chance Williams on bass, in Boston in 2022. The band will be at Night Club 101 on Friday.Olivia LeonPop & RockWhy BonnieFeb. 7 at 8 p.m. at Night Club 101, 101 Avenue A, Manhattan; dice.fm.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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    ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ Wins Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album

    “Hell’s Kitchen,” a coming-of-age show inspired by the adolescent experiences of Alicia Keys and fueled by her music, won a Grammy Award on Sunday for best musical theater album.The album, produced by Keys along with Adam Blackstone and Tom Kitt, was released in June and features the original stars of the Broadway production, Maleah Joi Moon and Kecia Lewis, both of whom won Tony Awards for their performances, as well as Shoshana Bean and Brandon Victor Dixon.Keys was already a 16-time Grammy winner, and on Sunday she was also being honored with the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award presented by the Black Music Collective. She is both the composer and lyricist for the songs on the “Hell’s Kitchen” album.The show, which opened on Broadway last spring following an Off Broadway run at the Public Theater, is still running at the Shubert Theater and has been selling well, although its grosses softened last month. A North American tour is scheduled to begin at Playhouse Square in Cleveland in October.“Hell’s Kitchen” tells the story of a 17-year-old girl, Ali, being raised by a single mother in an apartment tower where most of the units are subsidized for performing artists; Ali, whose life has close parallels to that of Keys, is starting to find her way romantically and musically.This year’s six Grammy-nominated cast albums were all for musicals that opened on Broadway during the 2023-24 season.The other nominees were “Merrily We Roll Along,” a Tony-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1981 flop about the implosion of a three-way friendship; “The Notebook,” based on the much-loved 1996 Nicholas Sparks romance novel; “The Outsiders,” the Tony-winning musical based on the classic 1967 S.E. Hinton novel about two warring groups of adolescents in Tulsa, Okla.; “Suffs,” Shaina Taub’s exploration of the American women’s suffrage movement; and “The Wiz,” a revival of the 1975 show based on “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”“The Outsiders” won the Tony for best new musical, and “Merrily We Roll Along” won for best musical revival. Only “The Outsiders” and “Hell’s Kitchen” are still running on Broadway. More

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    Zakir Hussain, Peerless Indian Tabla Player, Dies at 73

    Considered a national treasure in his homeland, the percussionist transcended genres and brought classical Indian music to a global audience.Zakir Hussain, a peerless Indian tabla player who transcended genres and brought classical Indian music to a global audience, died on Sunday. He was 73.He died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic lung disease, in San Francisco, where he lived, his family said in a statement.Considered a national treasure in his native India, Mr. Hussain won four Grammy Awards and collaborated with a range of superstar artists that included the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the jazz master Charles Lloyd, the sitarist Ravi Shankar and George Harrison of the Beatles.He was born Zakir Allaraka Qureshi on March 9, 1951, in Bombay, now Mumbai. His father was the tabla master Alla Rakha Qureshi, better known as Alla Rakha or sometimes Allarakha. Zakir’s mother, Bavi Begum, changed his surname to Hussain a few days after he was born, on the advice of a Muslim saint, he said.Mr. Hussain was a child prodigy who began performing concerts on the tabla by age 7 and was touring by age 12, according to the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, which gave him a fellowship.Both father and son were given the honorific Ustad, which means master. Together, they helped elevate the status of the tabla, a pair of Indian drums played by hand, from an accompanying instrument to one played by virtuosos. In 2009, Zakir Hussain performed four sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York.Earlier this year, he won Grammy Awards for contemporary instrumental album, global music album and global music performance. In 2009, he won the best contemporary world music album award.Mr. Hussain is survived by his wife, Antonia Minnecola; his daughters, Anisa Qureshi and Isabella Qureshi; his brothers, Taufiq Qureshi, and Fazal Qureshi, also tabla players; and his sister, Khurshid Aulia, according to his family.A complete obituary will follow.Alexandra E. Petri More

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    Book Review: ‘Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,’ by Michael Owen

    In “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” Michael Owen offers a sympathetic portrait of the lyricist, overshadowed in a life that had him tending the legacy of his younger sibling George.IRA GERSHWIN: A Life in Words, by Michael OwenThe lyricist Ira Gershwin once suggested his epitaph should be “Words Failed Me”: a joke tinged with ineffable sadness.Bespectacled and diminutive of stature, he was and will be forever overshadowed by his younger brother and collaborator George, the glamorous genius composer who died at 38 of a brain tumor many in his circle had dismissed as a nervous ailment.As has been told many times before, but not from the close P.O.V. that Michael Owen assumes in his new biography, “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” this seismic event in musical history left his subject both bereft and, for the rest of his own much longer life, sweeping up after a fallen star while trying, faintly, to keep emitting his own light.Ira spent plenty of time vetting George biographers, whose number could populate a healthy chorus line. But his own “potpourri of musical memories,” titled “Lyrics on Several Occasions,” sold so poorly he bought up the remaining copies. A decade after his own death at 86 in 1983 came Philip Furla’s “Ira Gershwin,” which also focused to its detriment on the lyrics, not the man.Now Owen, an archivist who has previously published a biography of the torch singer Julie London, has stepped up to give this perpetual supporting player an infusion of main-character energy. He succeeds. “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words” is dignified but not starchy, efficient but not shallow, and honest about grief’s unrelenting toll. It concerns family ups and downs as much as show business, and everyone — happy holidays! — has some of those.Ira was born Israel in 1896 to Russian Jewish immigrants to New York City, a name quickly switched to Isidore (Izzy or Iz) before he settled on one that, appropriately, can mean “watchful” in Hebrew. There would be four children, and their parents’ many business struggles and frequent moves left the oldest son cautious and introverted.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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    Timothée Chalamet Sings Live for the Bob Dylan Biopic, ‘A Complete Unknown’

    The actor’s vocals so impressed the film’s director that he used the live recordings, instead of those prerecorded in a studio. Here’s a look at other actors who have hit their own high notes in musical biopics.In one trailer for the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” a fan pleads with the musician, played by Timothée Chalamet, saying that she can’t hear the music at his sold-out concert.Chalamet, his eyes hidden behind Dylan’s trademark Ray Ban sunglasses, his hair a frizzy mop, responds: “I’ll sing louder.”Biopics have often relied on creative license to portray a star, but Chalamet’s words are not just blowin’ in the wind. The songs in “Unknown,” directed by James Mangold, have resonated through generations, and Chalamet’s voice was so impressive that his live vocals — sung while performing in character — were kept for the final cut.That is not the industry standard. Some films use an original artist’s track while an actor lip-syncs. When actors in biopics do sing, it is common for them to record the vocals in a studio and then overdub them onscreen. Singing live on camera can leave a performance falling flat, especially if the actor is not a trained vocalist.But when done well, live vocals can add a touch of realism.“The idea was to get a little bit different sound in each different venue by using practical microphones from the period,” Tod Maitland, the sound mixer for “Unknown,” said in an interview with Variety this month. “That helped create a nice tapestry of sounds. But Timmy went 100 percent live. It was pretty amazing.”It’s not Chalamet’s first time at the mic — he sang in the 2023 film “Wonka,” and attended LaGuardia High School, a performing arts school in New York City.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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    36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024

    The movie scenes, TV episodes, song lyrics and other moments that reporters, critics, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.The Last Scene in a Film‘Challengers’Mike Faist in “Challengers.”MGMReal tennis, like real dancing, happens when the body is rapt and alive, where visceral sensation takes over and the only thing left is the crystallization of every nerve and muscle, both aligned and on edge. That last match was a dance.— More

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    YoungBoy Never Broke Again Sentenced to 23 Months in Prison For Gun Possession

    The rapper, whose real name is Kentrell Gaulden, admitted to possessing guns as a felon in Louisiana. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years.YoungBoy Never Broke Again, one of the most-streamed hip-hop artists in the United States, has been sentenced to nearly two years in prison by a federal judge in Utah for possessing weapons as a felon.The rapper, whose real name is Kentrell D. Gaulden, was sentenced on Tuesday to 23 months in prison on gun charges related to a case in Louisiana. Mr. Gaulden, 25, was also sentenced to five years of probation and fined $200,000 for a gun charge in a separate Utah case.Federal law bars gun ownership by felons. In 2017, Mr. Gaulden was convicted of aggravated assault with a firearm, a felony, in a Louisiana court. Details of that case could not be independently confirmed early Wednesday.In a plea agreement filed in the United States District Court in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Mr. Gaulden said that he had been in possession of three guns since his earlier felony conviction.In the first instance, Mr. Gaulden admitted to possessing two guns while filming a music video in Baton Rouge, La., in September 2020. In the second, a semiautomatic pistol was found in the master bedroom of his Utah home during a search, according to the plea agreement.He faced a maximum prison sentence of 10 years in the Louisiana case and 15 years in the Utah case.“This has been a long road that involved extensive litigation and ultimately extensive negotiation,” Mr. Gaulden’s lawyers said in a statement on Wednesday night. “Kentrell’s defense team is very happy for Kentrell and we look forward to his many future successes.”Mr. Gaulden, who is best known as NBA YoungBoy, has legions of dedicated fans. Many of his songs receive hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify and YouTube.But he has a history of legal problems.In 2022, Mr. Gaulden was found not guilty in a similar gun possession case in California. Police in the Los Angeles area had found a pistol and ammunition in the car he was driving. His lawyers argued that he did not know that the weapon was in the car at the time, and that his fingerprints were not found on the gun. More

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    ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Score, a Noisy Gem, Will Arrive at Last

    Fifty-one years after the smash horror movie, its groundbreaking and unconventional music — long a “holy grail” — will arrive on vinyl.In 1996, years before helping to found the experimental rock institution Animal Collective, David Portner and Brian Weitz were Baltimore high school pals who diligently hunted for the soundtrack album that perfectly meshed their love of the unorthodox sound worlds of musique concrète and the thrills of horror movies: “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” “It wasn’t really till years later that I found out that it had never been released,” Portner said.“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” changed the horror business when it splattered out in 1974, turning a spartan budget into a $30 million juggernaut and laying groundwork for the blood-soaked slasher genre that dominated the 1980s. Among its many innovations was its unconventional score, an abstract suite of bone-chilling scrapes, metallic clanks, ominous drones and mysterious stingers.This symphony of discordance, recorded by the film’s director Tobe Hooper and the sound man Wayne Bell, emerged three full years before the first commercially available industrial music from Throbbing Gristle. It anticipated the tape-traded noise music underground that flourished in places like Japan in the 1990s and the American Midwest in the ’00s. But with the master tapes ostensibly lost and Hooper seemingly uninterested in an official release, the “Chain Saw” score survived mostly as a bootleg, often just the entire 83-minute film dubbed to audio cassette from a VHS or Laserdisc.That half-century of tape hiss and YouTube rips will end in March with a vinyl release on the boutique soundtrack label Waxwork Records. (Pre-orders start this week.)The movie was created on a spartan budget but turned into a $30 million juggernaut.Bryanston Distributing“It was kind of like a holy grail. Was it even possible to do it?” said the Waxwork co-founder Kevin Bergeron, who had been doggedly pursuing the release for more than a decade. “Everyone has asked. Literally every label from Sony to Waxwork. Major labels to independents to randos living with their parents. Everyone wanted to release it. What would it take to make it happen? No one had any sort of intel, like what would it cost or what would it take.”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