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      Taylor Swift’s Second-Week Sales Are Still Among the Year’s Biggest

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      The singer’s blockbuster new album, “Midnights,” holds strong atop the Billboard 200 chart, and her single “Anti-Hero” is No. 1 on the Hot 100.Following the expectation-shattering blockbuster debut of her new album, “Midnights,” Taylor Swift has coasted to a second week atop the charts, earning the equivalent of another 342,000 album sales, according to the tracking service Luminate.Although “Midnights” experienced a 78 percent drop in its second week of release — down from 1,578,000 in sales the week prior — Swift’s follow-up performance was still good enough for the third-largest total of the year so far, topping even the debut of Beyoncé’s “Renaissance.” (Other than “Midnights” last week, only Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” sold more.)Swift managed to move more than one million copies of “Midnights” in its first week largely on the strength of physical merchandise, including vinyl, CDs and even cassettes. But the album lingers at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this week thanks to its consistency on streaming services, where it totaled 294 million plays (down from 549 million).Combining digital plays, downloads and purchases of the complete album, the second-week sales of “Midnight” were the largest for any album in its second week since Adele’s “25” in 2015, Billboard said.Swift also maintains a healthy standing on the singles chart, the Hot 100, where she had previously occupied all of the Top 10 — a first in the chart’s history. This week, the single “Anti-Hero” holds at No. 1, with Swift songs also landing at No. 6, 7 and 9.Rihanna’s new single, “Lift Me Up,” a ballad from the “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” soundtrack, debuts at No. 2.Rounding out the Top 5 on the album chart are Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me” at No. 2, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” at No. 3, the special edition reissue of the Beatles’ “Revolver” at No. 4 and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” at No. 5.In its 95 weeks on the chart, Wallen’s album has only fallen from the Top 10 once. More

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      Who Are All Those Celebrities at the Weird Al Pool Party? A Guide

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      We break down that star-studded scene from “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” the sorta kinda true portrait of the pop star’s life, now on the Roku Channel.Here’s how Weird Al Yankovic, the accordian-playing king of parody, would like you to think “Another One Rides the Bus” was written: At a pool party, the radio personality Wolfman Jack challenged him to devise a sendup of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” on the spot.In a scene from “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” the true-except-when-it’s-not biopic now streaming on the Roku Channel, the title character (played by Daniel Radcliffe in a big curly wig) proceeds to knock out Jack’s challenge swiftly, then grabs his accordion to serenade 1970s and ’80s counterculture names like Andy Warhol (Conan O’Brien) and Divine (Nina West) with a fully formed rendition of the tune. (Probably the real story of the comedian carrying around a big, blue loose-leaf notebook to write down ideas, followed by hourslong trips to the library to research topics like ducks, wasn’t quite as exciting.)How did all those starry cameos came together? Yankovic revealed at a New York Comic Con panel in October that he extended invitations to celebrities on his “holiday card mailing list.”“I went through my address book, emailed a bunch of my friends, and said, ‘Hey, we’re shooting this crazy pool party in the Valley. Do you want to come out and spend half a day doing it?’” he said. “Thankfully a bunch of people showed up and we were able to pull it off!”You probably spotted Jack Black’s Wolfman Jack at the front of the crowd — he’s hard to miss in a neon-pink-and-cheetah-print scarf and lusciously thick beard — and Salvador Dalí (that mustache!), but did you catch Pee-wee Herman and Tiny Tim?Here’s a guide to nine of the famous faces at the fictional party, held by Yankovic’s real mentor, the radio host Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson).Wolfman JackPlayed by Jack BlackThe Weird World of Weird AlThe musician has cracked the Top 40 for decades with his song parodies. With the sham biopic “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” he makes a joke of his own life.Review: “Like Yankovic’s music, ‘Weird’ is a note-for-note parody of a genre,” our critic writes of the movie. “Here, the target is the prestige biography.”Face to Face: The actor Daniel Radcliffe, an enthusiastic Yankovic fan, plays Weird Al in the film, while Yankovic himself is a co-writer. When the two met, they found themselves on the same wavelength.Getting Weird: The director Eric Appel discussed a scene in the movie featuring a college-age Yankovic as he comes up with his first parody.A Weirdly Enduring Appeal: National economies collapse, species go extinct, political movements rise and fizzle. But somehow, Weird Al keeps rocking.The rock ’n’ roll DJ was known for his gravelly radio voice and wolf howls. He was part of a group of disc jockeys in the early 1960s who pioneered the genre known as border radio, because it was broadcast from just over the border in Mexico. (He died in 1995.)This isn’t the first time Jack Black has shown up flamboyantly attired in close proximity to Yankovic. The actor previously appeared in the 2014 music video for Weird Al’s “Tacky,” a parody of Pharrell Williams’s smash “Happy” (in a tie-dye pants-and-sequin-fanny-pack ensemble that makes his Wolfman Jack garb look tame).John DeaconPlayed by David DastmalchianIt’s OK, we didn’t recognize his name, either. But his work speaks for itself: Deacon was the original bassist for Queen, seeing the British rock band through No. 1 singles like “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “Another One Bites the Dust” before leaving in 1997, six years after the death of the group’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury. Now retired, the 71-year-old, who has often been described as the quiet member of the band, has lived a low-key life out of the public eye, raising six children in the London home he bought with his first Queen paycheck.Andy WarholPlayed by Conan O’BrienIt wouldn’t be a party without the king of Pop Art, whose works featuring presidents, movie stars, soup cans and other cultural icons are themselves iconic. He died in 1987.It’s no surprise that Conan O’Brien, who portrays Warhol in a black turtleneck and white wig, is on Yankovic’s holiday card list — the two have been friends for years. Yankovic appeared during O’Brien’s weeklong Comic Con celebration in 2016 and was a guest on his “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast in 2021.)Salvador DalíPlayed by Emo PhillipsThe pioneering Spanish surrealist who explored subconscious imagery was the creator of the much-parodied 1931 painting “The Persistence of Memory” (think melting watches and swarming ants). By the time he died in 1989, he had become known as “an inveterate irritant, a tease who never gave up teasing and a prankster who made headlines for decades,” as his New York Times obituary characterized him.The standup Emo Phillips has been opening for Yankovic on his tour this year.DivinePlayed by Nina WestThe drag queen Divine became a cult favorite as the longtime muse of John Waters, who cast the star in “Pink Flamingos,” “Hairspray” and other films. Divine appears in “Weird” in — what else? — the red dress made famous in “Pink Flamingos.” (Divine died in 1988 at 42.)For Nina West, a “RuPaul’s Drag Race” queen, Divine is her first film role, and it’s a fitting choice: She grew up a Weird Al fan and has become known for performing as Edna Turnblad, the “Hairspray” character Divine originated in Waters’s 1988 film.Pee-wee HermanPlayed by Jorma TacconeThe ’80s-greats party wouldn’t be complete without Pee-wee Herman, lounging poolside in his too-small suit. He’s the comedic alter ego of the actor and comedian Paul Reubens, who started out with the Los Angeles improv troupe the Groundlings in the 1970s and made a career out of playing the man-child character, most notably in the hit 1985 comedy “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” More recently, Reubens, now 70, starred in “The Pee-wee Herman Show” on Broadway in 2010, as well as in the 2016 Netflix film “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” which he co-wrote.Alice CooperPlayed by Akiva SchafferEven though he’s at the back of the gaggle, we’d know those dripping, sad-panda eyes a mile away. Cooper, the godfather of shock rock who at 74 is still touring and regularly donning a full face of goth makeup, is known for his raspy voice and illusion-filled stage shows packed with pyrotechnics, fake blood, baby dolls, guillotines and reptiles.Cooper and Yankvoic have met in real life — they wound up singing a rendition of the Beatles’s “Come Together” with Steven Tyler in 2012 when the trio found themselves together in Hawaii on New Year’s Eve. (While Yankovic and Tyler held their own, Cooper had to read the lyrics off a cheat sheet.)Tiny TimPlayed by Demetri MartinYankovic has long been among the biggest fans of Tiny Tim, the falsetto-voice ukulele whiz whose “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” became a novelty hit in 1968. Yankovic even read aloud Tiny Tim’s letters and diary entries for a 2021 documentary about his life, “Tiny Tim: King for a Day.” (The musician died in 1996 at 64.)GallagherPlayed by Paul F. TompkinsIf there were a Guinness world record for the most times a human has smashed a watermelon, the comedian Gallagher — and his oversize Sledge-O-Matic mallet — would certainly be the person to beat. The standup, known for his prop comedy, has starred in more than a dozen specials, occasionally mixing up the melon-murdering by subbing apples or oranges but always promising a smashing ending. More

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      Aaron Carter, Singer, Dies at 34

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      Mr. Carter, who released his first album at age 9 and “Aaron’s Party” at age 12, was the younger brother of Nick Carter, a member of the Backstreet Boys.Aaron Carter, the singer and actor who briefly became a teenage sensation in the early 2000s and who was known for the hit song “I Want Candy,” was found dead on Saturday at his home in Southern California. He was 34.Taylor Helgeson, a representative for Big Umbrella, an entertainment management company, confirmed Mr. Carter’s death but declined to comment on the cause.The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department responded to a call at Mr. Carter’s home in Lancaster, Calif., on Saturday and found a person dead at the residence, according to Deputy Alejandra Parra, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department. Officials said they could not yet confirm that it was Mr. Carter.Mr. Carter, who released his first album at age 9 and the popular album “Aaron’s Party (Come Get It)” at age 12, became a fixture of teenage programming and magazines and made appearances on shows like “Lizzie McGuire.”“Aaron’s Party” peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 list, selling some three million copies. He released five studio albums and was a contestant on the show “Dancing With the Stars.”His career later stalled, and in recent years he has been embroiled in legal trouble and has shared his struggles with addiction. In 2018, he released his first album in some 15 years, “Love,” to lukewarm reviews.Aaron Carter performing at the South Street Seaport in New York City in 2003.Stuart Ramson/Getty ImagesMr. Carter, who was described in The New York Times as a “tween heartthrob,” began performing at age 7, singing lead for the band Dead End for two years, according to an online biography.At 9, he was opening for the Backstreet Boys in Berlin for his first solo appearance. (His older brother, Nick Carter, was a member of the band.)The performance led to a record contract and then the release of his first single, “Crush on You.” He also opened for Britney Spears.Mr. Carter was also an actor, guest-starring in shows like “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and “7th Heaven.” He also performed on Broadway, appearing in “Seussical,” the Dr. Seuss-themed musical, and “The Fantasticks,” the world’s longest-running musical.On his sophomore album, Mr. Carter also released the song “That’s How I Beat Shaq,” with a music video featuring the basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, who has said that Mr. Carter once beat him in a game of HORSE and later asked if he could make a song about it.In 2019, Mr. Carter’s brother, Nick, and sister, Angel, said they had filed for a restraining order against him. In a statement at the time, Nick Carter said his brother had confessed to having violent thoughts about his wife and that family members “were left with no choice but to take away every measure possible to protect ourselves and our family.” Aaron Carter at the time denied the allegations. The news of the restraining order came one day after he canceled his 2019 tour, according to E! News, saying he needed to put his “health first.”Mr. Carter has been open over the years about his mental health struggles. He told People magazine in 2018 that he felt he had “hit a rock bottom personally and emotionally,” and that he had sought treatment at a wellness facility.Mr. Carter, who appeared on the Nov. 2 episode of the “No Jumper” podcast, said he was focusing on selling real estate and that he had been “Cali sober” for five years, though he said that he occasionally smoked marijuana and had been prescribed anti-anxiety medication. (“Cali sober,” short for “California sober,” is loosely taken to mean avoiding addictive substances with the exception of marijuana and alcohol.)Adam Grandmaison, the host of the podcast on YouTube, said that a close friend of Mr. Carter’s told him about his death.“I just interviewed him a couple weeks ago and it was pretty clear he wasn’t in a great place,” Mr. Gandmaison wrote on Twitter. “He was a good guy despite all the demons he was battling. I’m sad to see him go.”Throughout the interview, Mr. Carter said he considered himself a rapper, a singer, a producer, an artist and an actor, and that he was especially proud of his most recent album. He also said he hoped to make a new one soon.“I cover all bases,” he said. “It means so much more to me than the stuff I did growing up because I wrote and produced it all.”Mr. Carter said he was “never going to give up” on making music and that despite the turbulence, he had enjoyed his career. He also vowed to regain custody of his son, who Page Six reported was temporarily placed in the care of Mr. Carter’s fiancée’s mother amid domestic violence and drug use concerns.“I’m about to be 35 years old,” Mr. Carter said. “I’m a grown man and it’s time to start behaving that way and doing the right thing and focusing on myself, my career, my kid and my family.” More

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      Selena Gomez’s Boldly Revealing Ballad, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Yves Tumor, Yo La Tengo, Sipho and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Selena Gomez, ‘My Mind & Me’Selena Gomez has spoken openly of her mental-health struggles — bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis — in recent years. Her new song, “My Mind & Me,” arrives as the title track of a documentary that reveals some of her low points. The music moves from fragility to determination, from lone, echoey piano notes to a supportive march and a mission statement, as she sings, “All of the crashing and burning and breaking I know now/If somebody sees me like this then they won’t feel alone.” It’s self-exposure in service of empathy, and it tapers back to the hesitant solitude of those piano notes. But the video squanders some of its good will by ending with a product endorsement. JON PARELESLucius, ‘Muse’“Muse,” a one-off single from the indie-pop group Lucius, pairs a cool, clarion arrangement with Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig’s impassioned vocals — a tension of opposites that gives the song its spark. “I’m calling out your name, a desert that needs the rain,” they sing together on the chorus, a kind of prayer for divine inspiration and, as they put it, “the wild and holy window to the truth.” LINDSAY ZOLADZTiësto featuring Tate McRae, ‘10:35’On the sleek “10:35,” the rising Canadian pop star Tate McRae teams up with longtime EDM mainstay Tiësto (the D.J. whose remix of Calum Scott’s “Dancing on My Own” cover has turned into the Philadelphia Phillies’ victory anthem). McRae’s crystalline vocals are a fitting match for Tiësto’s gleaming, synthesized production, and the song is propelled by an effective push and pull between the anxieties of daily life and the blissful comforts of love. “The TV make you think the whole world’s about to end,” McRae sighs, before a lover’s embrace causes time to stop: “All I know, it’s 10:35 and I can feel your arms around me.” ZOLADZIbrahim Maalouf featuring De La Soul: ‘Quiet Culture’Ibrahim Maalouf, a Lebanese-French trumpeter, composer and producer, surrounds himself with guests — the Cuban musician Cimafunk, the New Orleans band Tank and the Bangas, the jazz singer Gregory Porter — on his new album, “Capacity to Love.” De La Soul makes its latest reappearance on “Quiet Culture,” counseling perseverance and relief from noise: “The quieter we become, the more that we can hear.” Maalouf’s track eases between a jazz ballad and unhurried funk, framing and counterpointing the rhymes with his Arab-inflected melodies. PARELESYves Tumor, ‘God Is a Circle’“Sometimes it feels like there’s places in my mind that I can’t go,” Sean Bowie, who records as the gothic glam-rocker Yves Tumor, begins on the haunting single “God Is a Circle.” Rhythmic, shallow breathing provides the percussive backbone of the track and adds a visceral chill to its nightmarish atmospherics. The song suddenly turns revealing, though, when it dredges up memories of a repressive past: “My mama said that God sees everything/My daddy always taught me to say ‘thank you,’ ‘yes ma’am,’ ’no, sir,’ ‘yes, please.’” The whole thing sounds like an exorcism, or maybe the antic, demonic moment just before one is deemed necessary. ZOLADZAlgiers featuring Zack de la Rocha, ‘Irreversible Damage’Irreversible Damage” is an exercise in seething, sputtering tension from the Atlanta-based rock-hip-hop-electro group Algiers. With a nagging electric guitar loop, a pullulating electronic bass, ominous synthesizer chords and programmed drums that keep disrupting their own beat, the song is an onslaught of abstract lyrics — “No rehab for my jihad/A rapture in a grief storm,” Zack de la Rocha (from Rage Against the Machine) raps — hurtling toward some dire but unknown outcome. When the words are done, the song shifts into a six-beat furor that feels both tribal and apocalyptic. PARELESYo La Tengo, ‘Fallout’In February, the New Jersey indie-rock legends Yo La Tengo will release their 16th album, “This Stupid World,” a place from which the calming, immersive first single “Fallout” offers a brief escape. “I wanna fall out of time,” Ira Kaplan sings on the chorus. “Reach back, unwind.” The band self-produced “This Stupid World” and recorded much of it while jamming together live; as a result, “Fallout” sounds as sumptuously shaggy and comfortingly loose as a favorite autumn sweater. This is the sort of timeless Yo La Tengo song that could have reasonably appeared on any of their albums across the last three decades, but something about its combination of prickly frustration and hard-won serenity feels especially appropriate right now. ZOLADZSipho, ‘Arms’The English songwriter and producer Sipho Ndhlovu revels in drama and desperation, with a voice that regularly leaps between grainy declamation and a tearful falsetto. “Arms” is one long crescendo of regrets overwhelmed by desire. He admits to being “led astray” and implores, “Can’t we share the blame?,” but by the end he’s unconditionally enthralled, brought to his knees by lust. Nearly the entire song uses just two chords but brings in massive reinforcements: strings, drums, voices, electronics and an arena-rock lead guitar, all pushing him closer to the brink. PARELESquinnie, ‘Itch’The 21-year-old songwriter Quinn Barnitt, who records as quinnie, has picked up the mixture of tentativeness and bold declaration, bedroom-pop intimacy and multitrack craftsmanship, that has paid off for Clairo and Olivia Rodrigo. In “Itch,” she juggles desire and fidelity, wondering, “What if I never scratched another itch for the rest of my life?/Would I die satisfied, knowing it can always get better than this?” The production often harks back to Simon and Garfunkel’s pristine guitars and the Beatles’ string ensembles, but her frank self-questioning is new. PARELESOld Fire featuring Bill Callahan, ‘Corpus’John Mark Lapham, a composer from Texas who records as Old Fire, called his 2016 album “Songs From the Haunted South,” a succinct self-description for his suspended-time blends of electronics and roots-rock instruments; his new album is “Voids.” On “Corpus.” he has the songwriter Bill Callahan, whose own extensive catalog is generally much folkier, intoning a few enigmatic lines — “I’ve got a child in Corpus/Hey Mac, can you bring that boat back” — in his somber baritone. Instruments and electronic tones gather around him like darkening storm clouds, and there’s no deliverance. PARELES More

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      ‘Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me’ Review: An Honest Portrait of Stardom

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      Sincere and soul-baring, the documentary, directed by Alek Keshishian, captures Gomez’s challenges with mental illness, lupus and fame.“My Mind & Me,” a new documentary about Selena Gomez, doesn’t feel like a publicity device. Sincere and soul-baring, the film captures Gomez’s challenges with mental illness, lupus and fame. Watching it is like eavesdropping on a 95-minute therapy session with the artist.It opens with Gomez out of sorts. “I have to stop living like this,” she says, as we jump from 2019 back to 2016. Backstage at one of her concerts, she cries, yearning to shed her child-star image and stand on her own as a solo artist. She fears she’s a disappointment.The documentary doesn’t show her forgetting her past as much as confronting it. A road trip to Grand Prairie, Texas, where she reunites with old neighbors and visits her childhood home, is a turning point for Gomez. In contrast is a scene where she’s answering interviewers whose flippant questions leave her feeling, she says, like “a product.” She craves genuine connection, something fame hasn’t yet afforded her.As a subject, Gomez is in the trustworthy hands of the veteran director Alek Keshishian. In 1991, he worked the same kind of magic on Madonna for “Truth or Dare.” Capturing an artist’s fearlessness, as he does in both films, isn’t just up to him, of course; like Madonna, Gomez is boldly unguarded. But “My Mind & Me” also looks outward, framing struggle as the human condition. An honest portrait study of stardom and mental illness, the film offers a hopeful catharsis: How, when we reveal our hardest truths, we can heal together.Selena Gomez: My Mind and MeRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      Taylor Swift to Bring Eras Tour to Stadiums Next Year

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      The singer-songwriter described her planned concerts as “a journey through all of my musical eras of my career.”For the first time in five years, Taylor Swift is going on tour.Following the blockbuster success of her latest album, “Midnights,” which sold over a million copies in its first week out and took over the entire Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, Swift said on Tuesday that she would be going on the road, starting in March.The Eras Tour will play stadiums across the United States through next August, with international dates to be announced. The opening acts on the American leg include Paramore, beabadoobee, Phoebe Bridgers, girl in red, Muna, Haim, Gayle, Gracie Abrams and Owenn.The “eras” theme — which she described in a taped appearance on “Good Morning America” as “a journey through all of my musical eras of my career” — solves one potential problem that had been facing Swift: picking what parts of her rapidly growing catalog to focus on. “Midnights” is her 10th studio album, and the last couple of years have been extraordinarily productive for her, with two indie-folk-style LPs recorded in the early stages of the pandemic (“Folklore” and “Evermore”) and two rerecorded versions of old albums (“Fearless” and “Red”).The last tour that Swift completed was in 2018, for her album “Reputation,” released the year before. She had planned a series of stadium shows and international festival dates in 2020, connected to her album “Lover,” but those were canceled amid the pandemic.“Midnights,” which broke streaming records on Spotify and Apple Music, opened on the latest Billboard album chart with the equivalent of 1,578,000 sales in the United States, including 549 million streams and a whopping 1,140,000 copies sold as a complete package — the biggest total for a new album in seven years, and the first time any album has sold more than a million copies since “Reputation.” More

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      Ben Platt on the Unfortunate Timeliness of His ‘Parade’ Revival

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      When Ben Platt was a kid, listening to show tunes in the family car, he developed a fondness for “This Is Not Over Yet,” an optimistic and upbeat Jason Robert Brown song from the short-lived musical “Parade.”It was only years later, as Platt grew up, that he encountered the rest of the show, and realized what it was actually about — the 20th-century lynching of a Jewish Southerner, fueled by antisemitism.Now Platt is starring in a seven-performance revival of the 1998 musical at New York City Center, and says the timing is sadly perfect, given the antisemitism once again coursing through the nation’s culture. “It’s felt urgent,” he said, “in a way that is shocking to all of us.”The musical, which won Tony Awards both for Brown’s score and Alfred Uhry’s book, tells the story of Leo Frank, an Atlanta factory manager who was convicted in 1913 of murdering a 13-year-old girl. A public outcry over whether Frank was actually guilty prompted the Georgia governor to commute Frank’s death sentence, at which point Frank was lynched by a mob.Laura Dreyfuss with Ben Platt as Evan in “Dear Evan Hansen.” “It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something,” he said in an interview, “and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe City Center revival, directed by Michael Arden, begins performances Tuesday and runs through Sunday; there is already talk of a possible Broadway transfer, but no firm plans.Platt, 29, vaulted to fame, and won a Tony, playing the title character in the 2016 musical “Dear Evan Hansen.” In the years since, he has been working onscreen, starring in “The Politician” for Netflix and a film adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen,” as well as the forthcoming “The People We Hate at the Wedding” for Amazon Prime Video and a movie called “Theater Camp,” which he wrote with a group of friends. He also created a new lane for himself as a performer: writing songs, recording albums and touring.In an interview, he talked about “Parade,” the ups and downs of “Dear Evan Hansen” (the stage version was a hit; the film adaptation was panned), and his decision to drop off Twitter. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me why you wanted to do “Parade.”This was a character I related to. I recognized this guy. And I realized how much modern application there is for it. It’s a lot harder to distance from than I was hoping it would be. This show is all about not only antisemitism, but the failure of the country to protect lots of marginalized groups, and we’re all feeling that really intensely right now.How do you connect to your character?The very obvious thing is that we’re both Jewish. He’s also, similar to other characters that I’ve played, not the best at expressing his emotions. Leo learns during his journey that vulnerability does not mean you’re any less strong, and I definitely relate to that journey. Being wrongly convicted of murder, I fortunately cannot relate to. I hope I never learn that.What does this show tell us about antisemitism?I don’t necessarily want to dictate what people feel when they come away from the show. There’s a lot of gray in the show. It doesn’t make any decisions for you. Hopefully, most of all, it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.“Hopefully, most of all,” Platt said of the show, “it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhat’s it like being back onstage after five years away?It’s just the best. I spent my whole life doing it, pretty much nonstop, from 6 years old to 24. It just feels like a homecoming.I never fully understand why actors want to do these short-run shows. You put in all this time for a few nights.Two reasons. One is the unselfish reason, which is it’s just a story worth telling, especially right now. The selfish reason is that I carry ulterior hopes that maybe we’ll have a longer opportunity in the future.You spent so many years working on “Dear Evan Hansen.” How are you feeling about that experience?I’m feeling really grateful for it. It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something, and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music. It will always be a piece of me. I feel a simultaneous constant pride and desire to keep it in my heart at all times, but also a real readiness and excitement at having moved forward and embracing my adulthood and playing characters that live in different worlds than that. I got to live in that world for a very long time, and it was not the easiest world to live in. So I look at it fondly but I’m also happy to be moving ahead.Your boyfriend is your successor in the role, Noah Galvin. Is that weird?I don’t think about him in that way, because I knew him for three or four years before we even had that experience. There’s this lore that that’s how we met, but it’s not. But it’s nice to have that detail of him understanding deeply what that experience was. And I feel very lucky to be with him — he’s changed my perspective, and made things, in a very positive way, feel a bit smaller and more manageable.You’ve been working on a film version of “Merrily We Roll Along,” to be shot over 20 years. What’s that like?There are so many variables. The only way I’ve found to approach it is that you have to treat [each shoot] like short films, let it go, and move on and live your life, and as the next one rolls around, find your way back into it. If I constantly have it in the back of my head, it just feels so unimaginable to get to the end, that I get scared about it in a way that’s not productive. So I’m just taking each of the little gifts along the way and hoping we make it to the end of the road.Platt in “Dear Evan Hansen.” After the film version of the musical was criticized, he left Twitter. “I wasn’t getting anything positive,” he said, “and it’s been really nice to be away.”Erika Doss/Universal PicturesOne of your closest friends, Beanie Feldstein, who is also starring with you in “Merrily,” had a bumpy ride with “Funny Girl” on Broadway. I wonder what you make of how her experience went.I know more than anything, she just wants everybody to move on. So I’ll just say that I love her and I admire her strength.You had your own rough ride with the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen.”It was definitely a disappointing experience, and difficult, and it definitely opened my eyes to the internet and how horrific it can be. You’d think, after doing “Dear Evan Hansen” onstage for four years, I would have already known that. I try my best to focus on people who tell me it was moving to them and they really felt seen by it. It is very easy for the good to get drowned out by the bad.I don’t know if this is connected, but I noticed that you’re no longer on Twitter. What’s that about?I find that Twitter is almost exclusively for tearing people down. I wasn’t getting anything positive, and it’s been really nice to be away.Since “Evan Hansen” you’ve become a pop performer, recording and touring.It’s a whole different animal because it’s been the only avenue in which to express my perspective. I find that in everything else — film and TV and especially theater — as much as you’re giving of yourself, you’re also doing your best to disappear, to serve somebody else’s mission or tell somebody else’s story. I love that experience, being a cog in a larger wheel. But I also think that being afforded the opportunity to do the opposite is a very liberating and freeing experience. One makes me really appreciate the other.Do you see yourself back on Broadway?I would love to, yes. I’m very much so hoping, whether it’s this or something else, to get back there as soon as I can. More

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      Taylor Swift’s Smash ‘Midnights’ Sells More Than 1 Million in a Week

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      The singer-songwriter’s latest album is a blockbuster, debuting with the biggest weekly total for any LP since Adele’s “25” in 2015.Taylor Swift’s latest album was always going to be a hit.She’s Taylor Swift, first of all. And “Midnights,” which was released on Oct. 21, is her first new pop album since 2019, after an extremely productive couple of years in which she released two indie-folk-style LPs and two rerecorded versions of old records.Yet even for a superstar like Swift, the scale of her latest success has stunned the music industry.In its first week out, “Midnights” had the equivalent of 1,578,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate — the biggest weekly take for any album in seven years, since Adele’s “25” arrived with a boom of nearly 3.5 million (and with the full album then absent from streaming).On the Hot 100 chart for songs, Swift benefits from her strong streaming numbers, currently occupying every spot in the Top 10, a Billboard first.Streaming has so rewritten the math of the music business that in recent years it had become practically an article of faith that no record would ever again cross a time-honored threshold of blockbuster sales: moving more than a million copies in a single week, as artists like ’N Sync, the Backstreet Boys and Eminem did multiple times in the old days. The last record to hit this mark was Swift’s “Reputation,” in 2017. Since then, both Swift’s “Lover” (2019) and Adele’s “30” (2021) failed to reach the magic seven digits.But “Midnights” has easily crossed that line, and not only in “equivalent sales,” a composite number used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile the various ways fans consume music now, counting streaming, sales and track downloads. Of the 1,578,000 “equivalents” for “Midnights,” 1,140,000 were copies sold as a complete package — in other words, purchases of the album as a whole. It is Swift’s fifth album to sell at least a million copies in a single week, and no album by any artist has had better weekly sales since “Reputation” opened with 1,216,000.The Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s MusicNew LP: “Midnight,” Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Here is what our critic thought of it.Millennial Anti-Hero: On her latest album, Swift probes the realizations and reckonings of many 30-something women around relationships, motherhood and ambition.Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings of her older albums: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun.Pandemic Records: In 2020, Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music.How did she do it?That is always the question for Swift, who is not only one of the most vital creative forces in 21st-century pop but also perhaps its greatest marketer. In a year of many disappointing releases, with albums by Drake, Post Malone, Kendrick Lamar and other big names posting surprisingly low numbers, Swift promoted her release cleverly online, with cheeky TikTok videos and drip-drip revelations, and advertised an array of product variations that got fans reaching for their credit cards.“She can create an event record,” said Keith Caulfield, Billboard’s senior director of charts. “She’s done that with ‘Midnights.’”The biggest factor ended up being physical media. Those formats, like CD, vinyl and cassette, now make up just 10 percent of all recorded music revenue in the United States — streaming is 84 percent — but they are often embraced by fans eager to own something tangible by their favorite artists, and can play an important role in a new record’s chart position.The standard CD and LP versions of “Midnights” came in four forms, with variant artwork, and Target sold additional variations, with lavender-colored vinyl or three extra tracks on its CD. Swift also sold autographed versions through her website, and three hours after “Midnights” came out she released an expanded “3am Edition,” with seven extra tracks. In the most commented-upon gimmick, the back covers of the four vinyl versions, when arranged in a grid, form the numbers of a clock, and, for $49, Swift’s website even sold the parts of a wall clock to bring it all together. “Collect all 4 editions!” Swift’s website said when promoting the releases.It worked. “Midnights” sold 575,000 copies on vinyl, along with 395,000 on CD and even 10,000 on cassette. There were also 161,000 copies of the album sold as a digital download.Collectible CD and vinyl versions are nothing new. K-pop groups like BTS and Blackpink have been releasing new albums with elaborate CD packaging for years. Two weeks ago, the Red Hot Chili Peppers released a new album, “Return of the Dream Canteen,” in 10 vinyl variations.Yet Swift’s success with the strategy is as extraordinary as you might expect. Her 575,000 vinyl sales are the most any album has sold on that format since at least 1991, when SoundScan, a predecessor of Luminate, began keeping reliable data on music sales. It is more than three times as many as the previous record, when Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” notched 182,000 vinyl copies in May.The success of “Midnights” is not just a vinyl or CD phenomenon. It also had 549 million streams, the third-best weekly total for any album. Drake has the two best showings in that metric, with “Scorpion” (746 million in 2018) and “Certified Lover Boy” (744 million, 2021). So far this year, the only other album to come close was Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which opened with 357 million streams back in May. (For now, “Un Verano” is still the year’s biggest album, with the equivalent of 2.9 million sales, largely from streaming.)“Midnights,” of course, opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s latest album chart. It is Swift’s 11th album to reach the peak, tying her with Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand and Drake. Only Jay-Z (with 14) and the Beatles (with 19) have had more titles at No. 1.Also this week, Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me,” last week’s chart-topper, falls to No. 2, and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano” slips to No. 3 in its 25th week out — its first time dipping lower than second place, including 13 times at No. 1.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” now in its 94th week out — all but one in the Top 10 — holds at No. 4, and “The Highlights,” a hits compilation by the Weeknd, is No. 5. More