News flash: Drake’s music is not dead. Although the Canadian rapper, the longtime prince of streaming, was badly pummeled in a diss-track war with Kendrick Lamar last year, and two weeks ago Lamar performed Exhibit A of that fight — the vicious “Not Like Us” — at the Super Bowl halftime show, Drake’s latest album … Read more
The renowned conductor Michael Tilson Thomas announced on Monday that he would scale back his engagements because of a recurrence of brain cancer. Thomas, 80, who has been grappling since 2021 with glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive form of the disease, said in a statement that his doctors recently told him the cancer had returned. Thomas, … Read more
‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’ (1971) By the time Flack released her cover of this Shirelles’ classic, in late 1971, Carole King (who wrote the song with Gerry Goffin) had already done her own slowed-down version on her megaselling LP “Tapestry.” But Flack’s performance is still striking, a haunting showcase for her voice as … Read more
“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Ms. Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.” Preternaturally gifted … Read more
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on books with a sharp comic edge that were adapted for the screen. Just tap or click your answers to … Read more
In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new “Hamlet,” the Danish royal court is all at sea — quite literally. The set is a ship’s deck that tilts and creaks ominously while a screen plays eerily textured footage of a roiling ocean. At several points, the action pauses and an ensemble of actors in Edwardian dress scatters … Read more
In the 1990s, as her career was on the rise, a 20-something Posey told an interviewer that she was working on a screenplay. She was interested, she said, in writing roles for older women. “I love that I said that,” Posey said when I brought it up. “I’ve always known, or felt, that I would … Read more
One of the most significant innovations in recorded music took place a century ago in New York City. On Feb. 25, 1925, Art Gillham, a musician known as “the Whispering Pianist” for his gentle croon, entered Columbia Phonograph Company’s studio to test out a newly installed electrical system. Its totem was positioned in front of … Read more
In 1990, Amelia Rudolph was hiking through Tuolumne Meadows, a stunning mountain pass in Yosemite National Park, when she had an epiphany on a shiny granite bluff: “Could you make a performance here?” she wondered. “Could you dance on a cliff?” Rudolph, a dancer in the Bay Area who trained with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, … Read more
The filmmaking itself is more grounded. Conspiracy and paranoia have their own aesthetic designed to make the viewer feel powerless, as if some all-seeing eye is always on the job. Lesli Linka Glatter, an executive producer who also directed all six episodes of “Zero Day,” sought to create a sense of anxiety within scenes by … Read more