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      in Music

      Olivia Rodrigo Guts World Tour: Testing Out Life After Girlhood

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      The opening night of the pop star’s Guts World Tour had sparkle and abandon, but making her songs feel big didn’t require much besides the songs themselves.As a pop star, Olivia Rodrigo wields a rather unusual arsenal of weapons. She is an acute writer and an un-self-conscious singer. She largely abhors artifice. She is modest, not salacious. In just three years, she has achieved something approaching stratospheric fame — a four-times platinum debut album and a Grammy for best new artist — while somehow remaining an underdog.But the weapon she returns to again and again is a very pointed and versatile curse word, one that she used to vivid effect on both her 2020 breakout hit, “Drivers License,” the first single from her debut album, “Sour,” and also on “Vampire,” the Grammy-nominated single from her second album, “Guts,” released last year. It’s in plenty of other places, too, giving her anguished entreaties an extra splash of zest. She wants to make it clear that underneath her composed exterior, she’s boiling over.On Friday night at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, Calif., during the opening performance of the Guts World Tour, Rodrigo couldn’t get enough of that word. She used it for emphasis, to connote dismissiveness and to demonstrate exasperation. But mostly she used it casually, in between-song banter, not because she needed to, but because using it felt like getting away with something.Much of Rodrigo’s music — especially “Guts,” with its detailed and delirious ruminations about new fame and its discontents — is about how it feels to act bad after being told how important it is to be good. It’s situated at the juncture where freedom is just about to give way to misbehavior.Over an hour and a half, Rodrigo alternately roared and pleaded, stomped and collapsed.OK McCausland for The New York TimesThis was true of her performance as well, which brought the perfection and order of musical theater to the pop-punk and piano balladry that her songs toggle between. Over an hour and a half, Rodrigo alternately roared and pleaded, stomped and collapsed. She led a reverent 11,000-person crowd — a sizable leap from the theaters she played on her first tour — in singalongs that were churchlike and raucous, but never rowdy.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

      Beyoncé Becomes First Black Woman to Top Billboard Country Chart

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      Her single “Texas Hold ’Em” debuted atop the country airplay chart after its release during the Super Bowl.Beyoncé’s new country single “Texas Hold ’Em” reached No. 1 on the Billboard country airplay chart this week, making her the first Black female artist to hold the top spot.Beyoncé’s other single, “16 Carriages,” released simultaneously on Feb. 11, also debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard country chart. The songs reached No. 2 and No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Texas Hold ’Em” has already drawn more than 19 million streams, and “16 Carriages” has 10.3 million streams.Historically, Black artists have struggled to gain recognition in the genre of country music, a field often dominated by white male singers. But the sudden success of Beyoncé’s country singles comes at a time when Black women have started to receive acclaim within that realm. At last year’s Country Music Awards, Tracy Chapman won song of the year for “Fast Car,” which topped country charts three decades after it was released, thanks to a cover by Luke Combs. Black female country artists like Mickey Guyton and Brittney Spencer have also gained popularity in recent years.Beyoncé is the first woman to top both the Hot Country Songs chart and the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart since they were established in 1958, according to Billboard. Both Beyoncé singles are part of her upcoming album, a country-themed follow-up to “Renaissance,” which she referred to as “Act II.” The full album, announced during a Verizon ad that aired during the Super Bowl, is expected to be released March 29. More

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      in Music

      Best and Worst Moments From the 2024 Grammys:

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      Young women brought the drama, Jay-Z surprised with a barbed speech and heroes long absent from the show’s stage made welcome returns at the 66th annual awards.The most awards at the 66th annual Grammys went to Phoebe Bridgers, who picked up three with her band boygenius and one for a feature on a SZA song. SZA, who came into the night with the most nominations, was shut out of the biggest honors — for album (which went to Taylor Swift’s “Midnights”), record (Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers”) and song (Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”) — but took home three trophies. Victoria Monét was named best new artist, and Swift’s album win broke a Grammy record for the category. The show was particularly joyous, slick and thoughtful, featuring several striking performances and a few raw acceptance speeches. All in all, it captured pop music as it actually is — centerless, and subject to change at any moment.Best Theatrical Pop Stars: Billie Eilish and Olivia RodrigoFrom left: Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo brought powerful vocals and a bit of theater to the Grammy stage. Photographs by Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTwo of the night’s strongest performances came from young women using pianos to accompany the wispy, stratospheric upper reaches of their registers — and to comment on the tyranny of fragility and prettiness. The first was Billie Eilish, stunning the crowd to silence with a sparse, deeply felt reading of “What Was I Made For?,” her “Barbie” ballad that later picked up song of the year. The second was Olivia Rodrigo, who nailed the vertiginous high notes that punctuate her rock-operatic smash “Vampire,” and then riffed on the song’s theme as she smeared herself with spurting fake blood. Each performance, in its own way, felt like a rebuttal to the constricting standards to which so many young women are held. Eilish’s was about the pain of being perceived as an object; Rodrigo’s reimagined the same kind of pressure as a horror movie. Both understood the power of a little theatricality. LINDSAY ZOLADZBest Debut Grammy Performance: Joni MitchellJoni Mitchell won a Grammy for best folk album, then performed with a group of musicians.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJoni Mitchell, 80, has been singing her prismatic folk ballad “Both Sides Now” since she was 23, and yet every time she performs it, she seems to be interpreting its infinitely wise lyrics anew. The rendition she performed at the Grammys — her first-ever performance on the award show, which makes sense given how underestimated and slighted by the industry Mitchell has felt throughout most of her career — was at once elegiac and nimble, backed by a loose jazz arrangement that allowed her to riff on its familiar melody. Showing off a resonant tone and impressive range that she has worked diligently to strengthen since suffering an aneurysm in 2015, Mitchell’s performance was like a brief, magical visitation from a musical deity. ZOLADZBest Surprise Roast: Jay-ZJay-Z brought his daughter Blue Ivy Carter onstage during his acceptance speech at the Grammys.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe 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

      Taylor Swift, SZA, Billie Eilish: Who Will Have a Big Grammys?

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      Taylor Swift and SZA could make history at the 66th annual awards on Sunday night, where young women dominate the nominations, and revered older artists will take the stage.The 66th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday are poised to be a celebration of a dominant year for women in pop music, with female stars like SZA, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish facing off in the major categories.SZA, whose “SOS” was a critical and chart smash, leads with nine nominations; the pop and R&B singer and songwriter Victoria Monét has seven; and Swift, Rodrigo, Eilish, Miley Cyrus and the indie-rock trio boygenius have six apiece. Swift and SZA each have the potential for landmark wins.For an award show that in the past has been criticized for its treatment of female stars, its lineup alone is being interpreted as a sign of progress. But the show this year is taking place in the shadow of lawsuits against two former Grammy leaders, accusing each of sexual assault. Neil Portnow, a former Recording Academy president, has denied the allegations against him; Michael Greene, his predecessor, has not commented.Never bet on the Grammys’ being too predictable. Industry politics, vote-splitting and a shifting membership have the potential, as always, to scramble outcomes, despite expectations about who may win or lose.Whoever wins, the night will have a roster of performers that mixes young and old, fresh faces and classics, including SZA, Eilish, Rodrigo, Joni Mitchell, Luke Combs, Dua Lipa, Travis Scott, Burna Boy, Billy Joel and U2. The host, for a fourth straight year, is the comedian Trevor Noah.Here is a look at some of the night’s major story lines.Will Taylor Swift Make History?Swift was a gale-force power in pop culture last year, and she has the potential to make a major mark at the Grammys.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?  More

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      in Music

      Study Tracking Women’s Music Credits Has a Surprise: Good News

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      The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s latest report finds that women’s involvement in the biggest hits of 2023 was greatly improved over previous years.Each year since 2018, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has tracked the number of women credited on the music industry’s biggest hits, and the numbers have usually been dismal — year after year, female artists, songwriters and producers have been crowded out by men, sometimes by extraordinary margins.In their latest report, however, the study’s researchers found some good news. Women’s involvement in the biggest hits of 2023 was greatly improved from previous years, and in some measurements reached higher proportions than the researchers have found in more than a decade of data.For example, of last year’s most popular tracks — as defined by Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 singles chart — 35 percent of the credited performing artists were women. That is a higher number than U.S.C.’s researchers have found for any year going back to 2012, and only the second time (after 2022) that the number has been over 30 percent.And for the first time in the study’s research window, a majority of the year’s 100 most popular songs — 56 percent of them — had at least one female songwriter.Stacy L. Smith, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the study’s lead author, was cautiously celebratory of the findings. While the latest numbers are up, she noted, women still represented an average of only about 23 percent of performer credits on all surveyed songs since 2012. (Some years that figure has been as low as 17 percent.)“For the second year in a row, the percentage of women artists on the popular charts has increased,” Dr. Smith said in a statement. “This is a notable milestone and worthy of celebration. However, it is still important to recognize that there is room to grow. Women filled less than one-quarter of artist roles across all 12 years examined, and these figures are still far from representing the 50 percent of women in the population and the music audience.”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?  More

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      in Television

      Japanese Talk Show Host Blazed Trails for Her Gender, and Now, for Her Longevity

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      Tetsuko Kuroyanagi has been one of Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven decades. At 90, she’s still going strong.Pushing a walker through a television studio in central Tokyo earlier this week, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi slowly climbed three steps onto a sound stage with the help of an assistant who settled her into a creamy beige Empire armchair.A stylist removed the custom-made sturdy boots on her feet and slipped on a pair of high-heeled mules. A makeup artist brushed her cheeks and touched up her blazing red lipstick. A hairdresser tamed a few stray wisps from her trademark onion-shaped hairstyle as another assistant ran a lint roller over her embroidered black jacket. With that, Ms. Kuroyanagi, 90, was ready to record the 12,193rd episode of her show.As one of Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven decades, Ms. Kuroyanagi has interviewed guests on her talk show, “Tetsuko’s Room,” since 1976, earning a Guinness World Record last fall for most episodes hosted by the same presenter. Generations of Japanese celebrities across film, television, music, theater and sports have visited Ms. Kuroyanagi’s couch, along with American stars like Meryl Streep and Lady Gaga; Prince Philip of England; and Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union. Ms. Kuroyanagi said Gorbachev remains one of her all-time favorite guests.Ms. Kuroyanagi, who jokes that she wants to keep going until she turns 100, is known for her rapid-fire chatter and knack for drawing out guests on topics like dating, divorce and, now, increasingly, death. Even as she works to woo a younger generation — the Korean-Canadian actor and singer Ahn Hyo-seop, 28, appeared on the show this month — many of her guests these days speak about the ailments of aging and the demise of their industry peers.Ms. Kuroyanagi with a guest, Kankuro Nakamura VI, a sixth-generation Kabuki actor, as seen on a screen.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesHaving survived World War II, she broke out as an early actor on Japanese television and then carved out a niche as a feel-good interviewer with a distinctive style that is still instantly recognized almost everywhere in Japan. By fashioning herself into a character, rather than simply being the person who interviewed the characters, she helped establish a genre of Japanese performers known as “tarento” — a Japanized version of the English word “talent” — who are ubiquitous on television today.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?  More

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      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Cosmos,’ Female Astronauts Dance Toward the Stars

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      A new show in Paris by Maëlle Poésy tells the story of the Mercury 13 space program, with choreographed movement and acrobatic sequences.Early on in “Cosmos,” a new production by the French theater director Maëlle Poésy, three performers walk slowly onstage, their bodies hidden in full spacesuits. There are plenty of clues in the playbill. After all, “Cosmos” was inspired by the Mercury 13, a group of American women who took part in a ’60s program that proved their fitness for space travel, but who never blasted off.Yet when they took their helmets off to reveal three women, I caught myself feeling surprised. Subconsciously, I realized, I still expected astronauts to be men.“Cosmos,” presented at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, in Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb, brightly deconstructs this stereotype. The production belongs to an increasingly prominent theater genre: plays that center women’s stories as a form of historical or artistic redress, with the explicit aim of challenging conventional narratives.It’s a tricky exercise for writers and directors, as overly didactic productions quickly feel heavy-handed. Not here. Poésy and her co-writer, Kevin Keiss, delve into the space dream that fueled three of the Mercury 13 — Jerrie Cobb, Jane Briggs Hart and Wally Funk — in imaginative ways. There is upbeat dialogue and a few verbatim recreations of their public speeches, but “Cosmos” also makes use of movement to show the women striving toward the freedoms of space. The cast of five break open the large white wall that frames the action, and use dance and acrobatic sequences to express the intensity of Mercury 13’s training program and frustration at gender inequality.This allows Poésy to explore their trajectories without getting bogged down in the (eye-popping) details. As we learn, Cobb was just 18 when she got her commercial pilot’s license; later, she inaugurated new air routes across some of the most dangerous South American landscapes and flew humanitarian supplies on the continen for decades. Briggs Hart was a World War II veteran, the wife of Senator Philip A. Hart, a long-serving Michigan Democrat, and a mother of eight when she successfully passed the Mercury 13 tests.The play is based on stories from the Mercury 13, a group of American women who took part in a 1960s program designed to test their fitness to go into space.Jean-Louis Fernandez“Cosmos” isn’t the first attempt to reclaim the women’s place in the history of space travel. In 2018, Netflix released a documentary about this pioneering group and the sexist attitudes that ultimately shut down the test program, “Mercury 13”; the Apple TV show “For All Mankind” also imagined what might have happened if women had been selected for a moon landing. Books, articles and an American play, Laurel Ollstein’s “They Promised Her the Moon,” have been written about Cobb and her peers. Yet few will have heard of them in Europe.The Mercury 13’s program, privately funded and hidden from public view, was an initiative of William Randolph Lovelace II, a NASA physician. Lovelace had heard whispers that the Soviet Union was considering sending a woman into space (in 1963, it did: Valentina Tereshkova). But Lovelace doesn’t appear in “Cosmos,” which focuses on Cobb, Briggs Hart and Funk as they learn that they have been selected for the project.As they detail the medical and physical tests that followed — think frozen water injected into ears, extreme sports and isolation tanks — the cast of five women begins to perform staccato movements choreographed by Leïla Ka, a rising French dance-maker. They kneel, crouch, lie down, get up again.Later, when they learn via telegram that the program has been canceled, despite the fact that they outperformed men on a number of metrics, they return to dance — this time frantically. In ’60s-style dresses, they pretend to apply lipstick, and touch their faces and torsos, as if trapped by expectations of femininity. Caroline Arrouas is especially striking as Briggs Hart, at one point taking off her high heels and banging them against a portion of the wall until it collapses.Arrouas, right, as Jane Briggs Hart, the wife of Senator Philip Hart and one of the Mercury 13.Jean-Louis FernandezThe women’s disappointment, and subsequent attempts to get Congress and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to allow women into NASA’s space program, are interspersed with stories of women born after them. Dominique Joannon, playing an astrophysicist from Chile, talks movingly about a childhood fascination with the stars; and Elphège Kongombé Yamale, as an astrobiologist, explores what the 1969 moon landing meant to women in the Central African Republic.Space and flight are metaphors throughout. Two performers — Liza Lapert, who plays Funk, and Joannon — are experienced acrobats, and at one point they climb the wall, opening little traps to let warm orange light through. Joannon delivers a galactic monologue while hanging from a bar high above the stage.In the final scene, Lapert climbs a rope center stage. As she hovers above the cast, she talks about Cobb’s and Briggs Hart’s deaths, then explains that Funk’s dream finally came true in 2021, when she became the oldest person to go into space, at 82, on a Blue Origin flight.“When the rocket left the ground, I took you with me,” she tells the others below, before resuming her climb, all the way to the lights hanging above the stage. The symbolism was obvious, yet neat: Finally, one of the Mercury 13 had completed their mission.CosmosThrough Jan. 21 at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, in Saint-Denis, France; theatregerardphilipe.com. More

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      in Theater

      Julia Jordan Set Aside Playwriting to Win Gender Parity in Theater

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      After years of fighting to win parity and recognition for women in theater, Julia Jordan said: “Everybody gets produced now. There’s much more competition. In a good way.”Ask the playwright Julia Jordan what the need was for the Lilly Awards, which she co-founded in 2010 to honor women in theater, and the answer is a mix of anecdote and statistic.Her mind goes straight to the years after she completed the playwriting program at the Juilliard School in 1996. As two men in her class, David Auburn and Stephen Belber, became some of the hottest young playwrights around, she struggled to get her work staged.“Very good friends of mine, no slam against them,” Jordan, 56, said on a December afternoon before she stepped down as executive director of the Lillys. “It was just odd.”The numbers bore out her perception. A report, published in 2002 by the New York State Council on the Arts Theater Program, found that only 17 percent of productions on U.S. stages in the 2001-02 season had been written by women.One day around 2003, she recalled, Auburn came over “because I was really depressed about it. And he said, ‘Why don’t you try switching the gender of your protagonists?’” (Auburn, reached by email, confirmed he was a good friend of Jordan, but said he does not remember this incident.) Writing male-focused narratives was, in any case, a conventional strategy for female playwrights at the time.“I literally took my most autobiographical play, and I made me male. And I called it ‘Boy,’” Jordan said. “Almost immediately people wanted to produce it.”To Jordan, a longtime leader in the fight for gender parity in theatrical production, all of this was context for the creation of the Lillys, which she started with the playwrights Marsha Norman and Theresa Rebeck. The catalyst, though, was their collective outrage, in the spring of 2010, that one of the season’s best-reviewed Off Broadway hits, Melissa James Gibson’s “This,” was ignored by the existing award-giving bodies.The new accolade was for “everybody who should be getting awards, and who should have been getting awards and didn’t,” said Jordan, who, with Juliana Nash, wrote the acclaimed musical “Murder Ballad.”At the 2023 Lilly Awards, held in late November on the “Stereophonic” set at Playwrights Horizons, the hair and wig designer Cookie Jordan and the actors Liza Colón-Zayas and Ruthie Ann Miles were among the honorees. The playwright Kirsten Greenidge and the composer Georgia Stitt each received $25,000 prizes, funded by the Broadway producer Stacey Mindich, meant to buy them time to write.Under Jordan, the Lillys organization — named for Lillian Hellman — blossomed to include the Count, which tracks theatrical production statistics by gender and race; an artist residency program with child care; the online publication 3Views on Theater; and the Lorraine Hansberry Initiative, which awards graduate school fellowships for female and nonbinary dramatic writers of color.Creating the Hansberry Initiative was one goal that Jordan felt she had to achieve before she could move on. The other was reaching gender parity for playwrights, which the Count’s preliminary figures indicate has happened this season on Off Broadway stages dedicated to new-play production.“We didn’t get 50/50 in 2020, but we have it now,” Jordan said.So on Dec. 31 she handed off her job to Sarah Rose Leonard and Brittani Samuel, the founders and editors of 3Views — though Jordan plans to share her connections and expertise as needed. (Samuel also contributes theater reviews to The New York Times.)Jordan is already at work on a few projects, including a family drama and a musical with the British singer-songwriter Emeli Sandé.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesLast month, with her tenure nearly finished, Jordan sat down to talk at a cafe in Flatbush, Brooklyn. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.At the awards in November, you said the Lillys are the thing in your career that you’re proudest of.I do feel like I had a little bit of a playwriting career happening, and then this was so time-consuming. But I got so much love for it, you know? I respond well to love [laughs], so it really started to kind of push my writing aside. That was always a little bit of a sadness, if I thought about it. At the same time, I feel like it’s kind of split my brain. I actually have to work at it to stay organized, you know? So between that and being a mom with young kids, that’s like three different brains, and I can only do two. I stopped teaching, which I loved, but that would have been four.So your work became being a champion?Yeah. Mostly I’m really proud of it. I meet young female writers, and they almost don’t know what happened, or they don’t know that it was so recent. Nobody has ever told them to write a play with a male lead. They’ve never been told that women’s plays are not very dramatic and are really poetic. They have never been told that the audience doesn’t really want to see plays by women. It’s just not on their radar. And that [progress] happened really quickly.How has doing this job changed you?Before this happened, I didn’t really ever think of myself as activist-y. I’m sort of surprised I was good at it.What are you going to do now?I have one project that I can’t talk about yet, kind of in my political, troublemaking world. But then I’m starting to write. I have a play that I’m working on, and I’m writing a musical with a pop star; she’s huge in Europe and England. Her name is Emeli Sandé. I get to go to London every few months and hang out in her studio. And then the play is a family drama.Do you think your activism will filter into your playwriting?I often wonder about that, because I don’t feel like I’m a super political writer. I always did write about girls, you know; I always did write about gender, in some sense. I really do like when people can write a political play really well. But I don’t know that if I went straight at it, I would be able to do a good job.As a playwright, do you feel like you’re going back into a theater that is changed from when you started the Lillys?A hundred percent. Everybody gets produced now. There’s much more competition. In a good way.The deck was really stacked when you started.It was stupid. And we had to sit through a lot of bad theater because of it. But yeah, I feel like it’s wildly different. I also feel like theater goes through these phases of what it’s interested in. What I write about, I don’t know anymore how that fits in.Your final Lilly Awards honored women over 40?Over 50. There were a couple [in their 40s]. Close enough.Why that focus?The women that were my level and a little bit older who got passed by when they weren’t producing women, nobody went back and read the Susan Smith Blackburn [Prize] lists [of plays by women] and went, “Hey, we should probably look at these again.” It’s a whole ecosystem problem because for the most part, literary managers and their assistants tend to be young — tend to be female, but tend to be young. So they’re not going back. The women over 50, they were the ones who really kind of made all this happen. And they didn’t benefit from it in the same way [as younger women]. They really didn’t. That’s why we wanted to start shining a light in that direction and just say, “Hey, not dead yet.”But I also think that those plays by those women would really speak to a piece of the audience that needs to be kept around during this sort of building the new audience. Instead of like, “Let’s just not have anybody go to the theater for a while while we build a new audience,” how about we do both? More