Kenedi Anderson has dropped out of “American Idol” for “private causes.”
Anderson, who was seen as a frontrunner on the present, revealed the information on Instagram Monday. She had already pre-taped her Prime 24 efficiency.
“For private causes, I’m unable to proceed on American Idol. This has been one of many hardest choices I’ve ever needed to make, however I do know it’s crucial,” Anderson wrote. “I’m so grateful to American Idol, the judges, the producers, the superb contestants, and all of the followers who’ve supported me.”
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She added a thanks to individuals who helped her alongside the best way.
“Thanks for giving me such an incredible alternative to share my voice, chase my goals, really feel a lot pleasure and happiness doing what I like, and make lifelong associates alongside the best way,” she wrote.
Host Ryan Seacrest addressed Anderson’s departure, saying on Monday night time, “You might need observed that there was no voting info throughout Kenedi’s efficiency simply now. Since we taped these exhibits in Hawaii earlier, Kenedi has determined to withdraw from our present for private causes. We ship her effectively needs.”
Judges Katy Perry, Lionel Richie, and Luke Bryan gave Anderson a standing ovation throughout the competitors.
The rock hall of fame’s newest list of inductees would make for one crazy playlist.
Cyndi Lauper and Joe Cocker? The White Stripes and Chubby Checker? Those performers and more were announced Monday as the hall’s Class of 2025 by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which will honor them at a ceremony in November.
Bad Company, Outkast and Soundgarden round out the list of performers, joined by Salt-N-Pepa and Warren Zevon, who are both getting the musical influence award. Producer-songwriter Thom Bell, keyboardist Nicky Hopkins and bassist Carol Kaye will be honored for their musical excellence — Kaye was part of thousands of studio sessions. And music executive Lenny Waronker will be recognized with the lifetime achievement award for non-performers, named for rock hall co-founder Ahmet Ertegan, who also co-founded Atlantic Records.
To be considered for induction, a band or individual needs to have at least 25 years of commercial recording experience on their resume. Checker, Cocker, Outkast and Bad Company all got in this year on their first nomination, while the balance of the list had already been considered in the past.
“Each of these inductees created their own sound and attitude that had a profound impact on culture and helped to change the course of Rock & Roll forever,” Rock & Roll Hall of Fame chairman John Sykes said in a news release. “Their music gave a voice to generations and influenced countless artists that followed in their footsteps.”
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The ballot presented to voters in February also included Mariah Carey, Billy Idol, Joy Division/New Order, Maná, Oasis and Phish, who did not make the cut. The hall’s voter list comprises 1,200 artists, historians and music industry professionals.
Phish, unsurprisingly, won the fan balloting with almost 330,000 votes, Billboard reported last week, but the first-time nominees will have to wait at least another year to get into the hall of fame. Same for Billy Idol, who finished third with 260,000 fan votes. Bad Company, Lauper and Cocker made it in despite finishing second, fourth and fifth with fans, respectively.
Last year’s performer inductees were Mary J. Blige, Cher, the Dave Matthews Band, Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Kool & the Gang, Ozzy Osbourne and A Tribe Called Quest.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony will be held Nov. 8. It will stream live on Disney+ and a special will air on ABC on a date to be determined. Hulu subscribers can see that special the day after that broadcast.
As far as niche sub-genres are concerned, the “Summer When Everything Changed” film has certainly proved itself a reliable little lane for up-and-coming filmmakers to traverse, affording them the space to discover their own styles just as their subjects begin to discover themselves. Sometimes, the significant change depicted comes from a moment of subtly depicted life-altering trauma; sometimes it’s a moment of sexual awakening; oftentimes it’s both, but the power always comes from that synergy between art and artist—that feeling that the film exists as an inescapable piece of the filmmaker’s own past brought to the screen.
Perhaps this is where a film like Bonjour Tristesse deviates somewhat from expectations, for while the bones of this story could very well have spoken personally to debuting director (and writer) Durga Chew-Bose enough to send her towards this material in the first place, the material itself has been around since long before her own adolescent crossroads. An adaptation of a 1954 novel by Françoise Sagan—itself already adapted four years thereafter by none other than Otto Preminger—Chew-Bose’s film already has a steep hill to climb beyond the scope of her own memories (as is so often, though not always, the case with these films), and so the challenge becomes less one of recapturing subjectivity and more a challenge of creating it from scratch.
The subject of this well-worn tale of ennui is Cécile (McInerny), a teenage girl spending her summer in the south of France with her widowed father Raymond (Bang) and his French girlfriend Elsa (Nailila Harzoune). Cécile’s days are filled—as is the case with most films of this ilk—with meandering trips to the beach and cozy games of solitaire on the couch with a glass of wine, all in between courting her first love affair with a local boy, Cyril (Aliocha Schneider). It’s not until an old friend of the family, Anne (Sevigny), arrives to share in this vacation that the malaise of summertime gives way to more concentrated bouts of interpersonal horn-locking.
The first thing one may notice about Bonjour Tristesse, as is typically the case with films of this quietly crushing sabbatical nature—think Call Me By Your Name, Aftersun, Falcon Lake—is a concentrated emphasis on atmosphere. These films understand that to communicate what is so inarticulable to the child’s mind means communicating it, oftentimes, without words at all, instead letting the blistering heat of the sun or the invasive hum of cicadas fill the dead air that so often accompanies stolen glances. Chew-Bose is definitely privy to this notion, as her film makes a concerted effort to shoot the seaside of the day and the lofty trees of the night with equal emphasis to the words shared in their space.
It’s a concept that Drew-Bose understands, but not one that she executes all that effectively. This is mainly because Bonjour Tristesse, for all its emphasis on what can be communicated without words, seems entirely determined to undermine that notion at every turn with an endless stream of stilted, overworked dialogue exchanges. Nearly every line in the film feels written as though it was thought-up with the expressed intention of becoming an out-of-context pull-quote for teenagers unwilling to sit through a film this sparse to begin with—“Be wrong sometimes… it’s less lonely,” or “I love this time of day; there is so much possibility before lunch”—which may be an effective tool to make some characters appear more vapid or constructed than others, but doesn’t really serve a film of this tone when everybody speaks that way.
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This may very well be a byproduct of the film’s literary origins—not only is Bonjour Tristesse based on a book, but Chew-Bose’s own prior artistic experience comes from writing a book compiled of essays—in which sensory experiences and complicated, contradictory thoughts must, by necessity, be expressed in words. If anything, though, this further emphasizes the challenge that comes with adaptation, and the laudable efforts of those who manage to adapt to the work to the silver screen and make that sensory experience more… well, sensory. Even the presence of Sevigny (in an ironic twist, an actress who made her bones on independent films becomes the most recognizable name in this one) does little to elevate the film, controlled as she may be in her grasp of the film’s stilted aura. Chew-Bose may very well have found something viscerally relatable in Sagan’s source material to warrant yet another adaptation, but rarely has the feeling of a warm summer day felt so foreign and frigid.
In the end, Bonjour Tristesse never quite lives up to its interest in harnessing the malaise of a quiet and confused summer, mostly due to its over-reliance on fatigued dialogue and thin characterization.
Score: 47/100
*still courtesy of Elevation Pictures*
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NEW YORK — “Dead Outlaw,” the offbeat musical from the team behind the Tony-winning musical “The Band’s Visit,” isn’t mincing words with the title. The show, which had its official opening Sunday at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre, tells the story of the unsuccessful career of a real-life bandit, who achieved more fame as a corpse than as a man.
Born in 1880, Elmer McCurdy, a crook whose ambition exceeded his criminal skill, died in a shoot-out with the police after another botched train robbery in 1911. But his story didn’t end there. His preserved body had an eventful afterlife all its own.
“Dead Outlaw,” a critics’ darling when it premiered last year at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, may be the only musical to make the disposition of a body an occasion for singing and dancing.
David Yazbek, who conceived the idea of turning this stranger-than-fiction tale into a musical, wrote the score with Erik Della Penna. Itamar Moses, no stranger to unlikely dramatic subjects, compressed the epic saga into a compact yet labyrinthine book. Director David Cromer, whose sensibility gravitates between stark and dark, endows the staging with macabre elegance.
Yet Yazbek, Moses and Cromer aren’t repeating themselves. If anything, they’ve set themselves a steeper challenge. “Dead Outlaw” is more unyielding as a musical subject than “The Band’s Visit,” which is to say it’s less emotionally accessible.
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Andrew Durand stars in “Dead Outlaw.”
(Matthew Murphy)
It’s not easy to make a musical about a crook with a volatile temper, an unslakable thirst for booze and a record of fumbled heists. It’s even harder to make one out of a dead body that went on exhibition at traveling carnivals and freak shows before ending up on display in a Long Beach fun house, where the mummified remains were accidentally discovered by a prop man while working on an episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man” in 1976.
Stephen Sondheim might have enjoyed the challenge of creating a musical from such an outlandish premise. “Dead Outlaw” evokes at moments the droll perversity of “Sweeney Todd,” the cold-hearted glee of “Assassins” and the Brechtian skewering of “Road Show” — Sondheim musicals that fly in the face of conventional musical theater wisdom.
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As tight as a well thought-out jam-session,”Dead Outlaw” also recalls “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” the Michael Friedman-Alex Timbers musical that created a satiric historical rock show around a most problematic president. And the show’s unabashed quirkiness had my theater companion drawing comparisons with “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”
Andrew Durand, who plays Elmer, has just the right bad-boy frontman vibe. The hard-driving presence of bandleader and narrator Jeb Brown suffuses the production with Americana authenticity, vibrantly maintained by music director Rebekah Bruce and music supervisor Dean Sharenow.
Elmer moves through the world like an open razor, as the title character of Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck” is aptly described in that play. A précis of Elmer’s early life in Maine is run through by members of the eight-person cast in the bouncy, no-nonsense manner of a graphic novel.
The character’s criminal path is tracked with similar briskness — a fateful series of colorful encounters and escapades as Elmer, a turbulent young man on the move, looks for his big opportunity in Kansas and Oklahoma. Destined for trouble, he finds it unfailingly wherever he goes.
Elmer routinely overestimates himself. Having acquired some training with nitroglycerin in the Army, he wrongly convinces himself that he has the know-how to effectively blow up a safe. He’s like a broke gambler who believes his next risky bet will bring him that long-awaited jackpot. One advantage of dying young is that he never has to confront his abject ineptitude.
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Arnulfo Maldonado’s scenic design turns the production into a fun-house exhibit. The band is prominently arrayed on the box-like set, pounding out country-rock numbers that know a thing or two about hard living. The music can sneak up on you, especially when a character gives voice to feelings that they can’t quite get a handle on.
Thom Sesma in “Dead Outlaw.”
(Matthew Murphy)
Durand can’t communicate emotions that Elmer doesn’t possess, but he’s able to sharply convey the disquiet rumbling through the character’s short life. There’s a gruff lyricism to the performance that’s entrancing even when Elmer is standing up in a coffin. But I wish there were more intriguing depth to the character.
Elmer is a historical curiosity, to be sure. And he reveals something about the American moneymaking ethos, which holds not even a dead body sacred. But as a man he’s flat and a bit of a bore. And the creators are perhaps too enthralled by the oddity of his tale. The show is an eccentric wallow through the morgue of history. It’s exhilarating stylistically, less so as a critique of the dark side of the American dream.
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Julia Knitel has a voice that breaks up the monochromatic maleness of the score. As Maggie, Elmer’s love interest for a brief moment, she returns later in the show to reflect on the stranger with the “broken disposition” who left her life with the same defiant mystery that he entered it. I wish Knitel had more opportunity to interweave Maggie’s ruminations. The unassuming beauty of her singing adds much needed tonal variety.
The musical takes an amusing leap into Vegas parody when coroner Thomas Noguchi (an electric Thom Sesma) is allowed to strut his medical examiner stuff. Ani Taj’s choreography, like every element of the production, makes the most of its minimalist means.
Wanderingly weird, “Dead Outlaw” retains its off-Broadway cred at the Longacre. It’s a small show that creeps up on you, like a bizarre dream that’s hard to shake.