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      in Theater

      Tony Awards 2025: 13 Great Songs of the Season

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      Our critic listened to the cast recordings of all the nominated musicals and picked one of his favorite tracks from each.Great Broadway musicals must feature great songs, but not all the great songs are found in great musicals. That’s why I collect cast albums: There are obvious gems and hidden ones. To explore that range at the end of a generally fine and unusually eclectic Broadway season, I picked a song from every show that received a Tony Award nomination in any category. (The exception: “Pirates! The Penzance Musical,” which will record its New Orleans-inflected Gilbert and Sullivan score after the awards are doled out on CBS this Sunday.) Some of the songs are delicate, others brassy. Some jerk tears, others laughs. Some forward the show and others stop it cold. In any case, even if you never see them onstage, they all repay a deep listen.‘Up to the Stars’ from ‘Dead Outlaw’Thom Sesma crooning “Up to the Stars” as Thomas Noguchi, a.k.a. the “coroner to the stars,” in “Dead Outlaw,” the Broadway musical about a long-lived corpse.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThom Sesma as Thomas Noguchi (Audible and Yellow Sound Label)For most of its 100 minutes, “Dead Outlaw,” a death-dark comedy about a man who became a mummy, accompanies its posthumous picaresque with songs (by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna) in a genre you might call rockabilly grunge. But near the end, the palette radically changes, when a formerly secondary character emerges as the show’s perfect avatar. He is Thomas Noguchi, the real-life Los Angeles “coroner to the stars” from 1967 to 1982. In a hilarious yet philosophical number called “Up to the Stars,” filled with sparkling, macabre lyrics, he details his most famous cases and corpses in the finger-snapping Rat Pack style of Dean Martin. As Noguchi, Thom Sesma sells what may be the best number ever about buying the farm.‘With One Look’ from ‘Sunset Boulevard’Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of “Sunset Boulevard.” Songs like “With One Look” evoke the drama of Desmond’s contradictions.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond (The Other Songs)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

    • 125 Shares174 Views

      in Music

      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Ex-Girlfriend Will Continue Testimony About Unwanted Sex

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      Testifying under a pseudonym, “Jane,” the woman has described “hotel nights” involving drugs and encounters with escorts that she told the mogul she did not want to continue.The 18th day of testimony in the federal trial of Sean Combs will continue on Friday with a woman who described the encounters she had with a succession of men at the music mogul’s direction as a “Pandora’s box” of unwanted sex.The woman, who is testifying under the pseudonym “Jane,” is the second witness put forward by prosecutors as a victim of sex trafficking by Mr. Combs, who also faces charges of racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. Mr. Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual arrangements were nonconsensual.The first of those witnesses, Casandra Ventura — the singer known as Cassie, who was in an off-and-on relationship with Mr. Combs for 11 years — has played a prominent role in Mr. Combs’s legal troubles over the last year and a half. Her bombshell lawsuit, filed in November 2023, led to the government’s investigation, and a leaked hotel security video showing Mr. Combs brutally assaulting her has been a key piece of evidence, shown to jurors repeatedly since the trial began four weeks ago.Before Jane took the stand on Thursday afternoon — under strict conditions from the court to protect her privacy — little had been known about her. In filings before the trial began, prosecutors referred to her in filings only as “Victim-2,” saying that the “financial losses, dependency and social isolation” she experienced during her relationship with Mr. Combs from 2021 to 2024 “made her more vulnerable to his coercion.”At the start of her testimony, she described herself as a single mother who was earning her living through social media promotions when she met Mr. Combs in 2020 on a trip to Florida. They began flirting, and gave each other nicknames: She was Bert and he was Ernie, after the “Sesame Street” characters. By early 2021, she said, they were in a passionate, intimate relationship (though Mr. Combs was clear that he was seeing other women at the same time).What she says happened next parallels parts of Ms. Ventura’s testimony. Mr. Combs brought Jane to a Miami hotel suite where she said she saw “assistants” setting up with lights and beverages, and draping bedsheets over the furniture. Mr. Combs invited a male escort to the room and gave the two detailed sexual directions, she testified, while the famed music producer watched and masturbated.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

    • 63 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Everything Millennial Is Cool Again

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      JNCO Jeans, big hair, “Sex and the City” and recession pop: Peak Millennial is back and the era’s trends are taking on a new life.They trolled us for being old when we hit our 30s, old-fashioned for remembering a time before email and for being “cringe” as we kept wearing our skinny jeans and ankle socks.Oh, how the tables have turned.Gen Z and younger generations are picking up where we, their (slightly) older counterparts, left off in the 2000s.The Gen Z girlies are watching “Sex and the City” and living their best Carrie Bradshaw lifestyles. Those Facebook albums of blurry photos of a night out? They’re back, repackaged as an Instagram “photo dump.” Ditto for big hair and wired headphones.“I do like seeing how a younger generation interprets an older trend when it comes back around,” said Erin Miller, 35, a TikTok creator and self-proclaimed 1990s and 2000s historian. She wasn’t surprised that many trends loved by millennials were making a comeback. “Does it remind me of my age? Yes.”But that’s not to say everything is the same. Millennials (typically those born from the early 1980s to the late ’90s) had infomercials and mail-order. Gen Z and Alpha have TikTok makeup tutorials and fast fashion. Bradshaw’s cosmopolitan has been exchanged for an Aperol spritz.Members of generations Z and Alpha are putting their own mark on once-ubiquitous phenomena, and according to Ms. Miller, they’re the winners: “I think they are doing it better.”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 Shares91 Views

      in Movies

      Philippe Labro Dies at 88; Restless Chronicler of the French Condition

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      As an author (often blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction), a film director, a lyricist and a host of TV and radio shows, he sought to capture his epoch.Philippe Labro, a prolific journalist, author, movie director and songwriter whose lyrical prose, boundless curiosity and oft-repeated determination to “forage in deep waters” offered France a sweeping image of itself over several decades, died on Monday in Paris. He was 88.His death, in the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital, was caused by lymphoma of the brain, which was diagnosed in April, said Anne Boy, his longtime assistant. Mr. Labro lived in Paris.A restless spirit, notebook always at his side, convinced that journalism was an exercise in unrelenting observation, Mr. Labro pursued a lifelong quest to capture his epoch by any means. “He wrote our popular, French, and universal history,” President Emmanuel Macron said in a tribute on X, “from Algeria to America” and from Herman Melville to Johnny Hallyday, the French rock ’n’ roll superstar.In 24 books, including novels and essays; seven movies; lyrics to popular songs; and several television and radio shows, Mr. Labro probed the enigma of existence. No one medium sufficed. Truth, he believed, lurked between fact and fiction, and so he refused to be confined by one or the other. Quoting Einstein, he called life a “dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.” That piper was his muse.Mr. Labro arrived as a guest for an official state dinner with President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the first lady, Jill Biden, at the Élysée Palace in Paris in June 2024.Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Labro also liked Victor Hugo’s observation that “nothing is more imminent than the impossible.” He had good reason. It was in the United States, on Nov. 22, 1963, that Mr. Labro, then 27, achieved fame as the first French newspaper correspondent on the scene in the immediate aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.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

    • 150 Shares121 Views

      in Music

      Alf Clausen, Who Gave ‘The Simpsons’ Its Musical Identity, Dies at 84

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      He created the music for hundreds of episodes over 27 seasons, spanning jazz, rock, blues and musicals. He won two Emmys and was nominated for 28 more.Alf Clausen, a composer and arranger whose songs, interludes and closing credits for hundreds of episodes of “The Simpsons” were so central to the animated sitcom’s success that its creator, Matt Groening, often called him the show’s “secret weapon,” died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 84.His daughter, Kaarin Clausen, said the cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a brain disorder similar to Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Clausen worked on every episode of “The Simpsons” across 27 seasons, from 1990 to 2017.He did not compose the show’s memorable opening theme — that was Danny Elfman — but he was responsible for everything else, including classic musical numbers like “Who Needs the Kwik-E Mart,” “We Do (The Stonecutters’ Song),” “We Put the Spring in Springfield” and “You’re Checking In.”Mr. Clausen won Emmys for the last two songs, in 1997 and 1998. He was nominated for 19 more awards for “The Simpsons,” and was nominated nine other times for earlier work.When Mr. Groening first approached Mr. Clausen to work on the show, he demurred. He wanted to work on dramas; cartoons and comedy did not interest him.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

    • 125 Shares95 Views

      in Music

      At 85, Composer Annea Lockwood Is Far From Done Listening

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      Lockwood, a composer who spins music from the sounds of the natural world, is sharing with and learning from a new generation of artists.Outside Annea Lockwood’s house you could hear the sounds of a gentle breeze, rustling the leaves of her tree-lined driveway and swinging the wind chimes in her backyard. Every so often birds would interject with a bit of song over the rumble of a car down the road.“This neighborhood is a lovely, peaceful little place,” Lockwood said one morning last month. “But it has a very radical background.”Lockwood, 85, a composer of insatiable curiosity and a singular ear for the music of the natural world, lives about an hour north of Manhattan, on street named after Baron de Hirsch, a 19th-century philanthropist who sponsored the resettlement of persecuted Russian Jews. Her house was originally built for the Mohegan Colony, a community with anarchist roots. Not far away, toward the Hudson River, people attending a Paul Robeson concert were once attacked in what came to be known as the Peekskill Riots.“So this is an area with a right-wing town and a left-wing colony,” Lockwood said. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”For the last 50 years, Lockwood has lived and worked here in Crompond, N.Y., in a house that she shared with her partner, the composer Ruth Anderson, until her death in 2019. But Lockwood also spends a lot of time outdoors, especially in recent collaborations with a younger generation of musicians that have taken her on adventures along rivers like the Columbia and the Elwha.For Lockwood, listening is a way to connect with the nonhuman world. “I am seeking ways to recognize that we are part of that world, not dominant and not separate,” she said. Brian Karlsson for 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

    • 113 Shares152 Views

      in Music

      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ella Fitzgerald

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      Ella Fitzgerald, “the First Lady of Song,” had a voice so nuanced that it conveyed vast emotions within the contexts of jazz and soul with unparalleled grace and dignity.Born April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Va., she grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., working odd jobs — including one as a runner for local gamblers — then, as a teenager, she’d go to Harlem and catch shows at the Apollo. There, in 1934, she won a chance to compete in Amateur Night, and only decided to sing (she was going to dance initially) after a dance group, the Edwards Sisters, did such a great job that she needed to switch gears. Fitzgerald wowed the crowd, and from that moment, her career was set. “I knew I wanted to sing before people the rest of my life,” she once said.Ella Fitzgerald’s masterful use of scatting has been copied by vocalists the world over.National Jazz Archive/Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesBy the mid-1930s, as the frontwoman of Chick Webb’s big band, Fitzgerald started experimenting with her voice, using it as an additional horn in the group in the emerging style that became known as scatting. To this day, her masterful use of it is copied by vocalists the world over. At 21, Fitzgerald became a star with her sprightly version of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” which sold more than one million copies. Over the next decades, she was a fixture in jazz and entertainment, touring and performing with pretty much everyone of note while cementing her own status as a cornerstone in music.Fitzgerald’s stature has only grown since then. Here are 16 songs chosen by musicians, authors, curators and scholars who admire the singer’s contributions to art and culture. Find playlists embedded below, and don’t forget to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’Valerie June, musician and authorOnce Cupid’s arrow strikes, falling in love is the easy part. Staying in love is where we get one chance in a lifetime to conjure the best of ourselves with the only true love of our lives. I write this with joy in my soul and sadness in my heart as I dedicate this Ella Fitzgerald song, “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” to my brother and his wife, Rae Marie Hockett. You see, Rae Marie and Jason were high school sweethearts. I wasn’t initially sure if they were a fling or forever. But until death do us part was truly their love story. Last month, Rae passed away suddenly from heart issues at 45. Her life was short but full of love and sweetness. It was like a dream, and their passion tells the tale of longevity and beauty, as we never know how long we get to spend with those we love. Artists like Ella and Count Basie are the forces that hold us together with songs. Once the curtain closes, it might feel like a dream, but every time we hear the song, it reminds us that every moment is real. While my heart beautifully breaks with grief and loss, “Dream a Little Dream of Me” is from Ella to Rae Marie. Love true, love hard, love and let go — it will come back to you.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

    • 113 Shares177 Views

      in Music

      Guy Klucevsek, Multi-Genre Accordion Virtuoso, Is Dead at 78

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      He elevated his instrument’s often-maligned reputation with deft musicianship, and by writing and commissioning a wide range of music.Guy Klucevsek, a masterly accordion player who developed an eclectic body of work for his beloved, if sometimes mocked, instrument that expanded its repertoire well beyond polkas and other traditional fare, died on May 22 at his home on Staten Island. He was 78.His wife and only immediate survivor, Jan (Gibson) Klucevsek, said the cause was pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer.Praise for Mr. Klucevsek (pronounced kloo-SEV-ek) typically noted that he had elevated the profile of the accordion beyond the realms of beer halls and “The Lawrence Welk Show.”Writing in The Village Voice in 2015 about a series of performances by Mr. Klucevsek in the East Village, Richard Gehr noted that, “having mastered the instrument in virtually all of its classical, modern, jazz and international manifestations,” Mr. Klucevsek “has extended it into another dimension altogether.”Mr. Klucevsek performed with the dancer Claire Porter at the Kitchen in Manhattan in 2000.Hiroyuki Ito/Getty ImagesHe recorded more than 20 albums, composed dozens of pieces and commissioned others, in multiple genres. He accompanied the performance artist Laurie Anderson on her 1994 album, “Bright Red,” and collaborated with the dancer Maureen Fleming on “B. Madonna,” a 2013 multimedia piece based on the myth of Persephone.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