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One of the most musical shows on Broadway right now isn’t, in fact, a musical. Pop music has a tangible presence in, and is intrinsic to the fabric of, Kimberly Belflower’s play John Proctor Is the Villain. The story follows a group of girls from small-town Georgia who, amid the #MeToo era, are reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and starting to doubt that the titular protagonist is as morally upstanding as he’s often portrayed to be — just as a classmate and friend (played by Stranger Things star, and now Tony nominee, Sadie Sink) returns to town after a much gossiped-about absence. Concurrently, they decide to form a feminism club in an attempt to learn more about a subject the adults around them don’t seem to love addressing head-on. And from the bop-filled pre-show playlist (constructed meticulously by sound designer and composer Palmer Hefferan) to Hefferan’s original music woven throughout to the references to seminal female pop singer/songwriters like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Selena Gomez and Lorde written into (and crucial to) the plot, the pop music the girls love might as well be another character in the play.
“There’s something about music that is so connective — there’s just this language there that everyone understands,” says actor Fina Strazza, a Tony nominee for her portrayal of passionate overachiever and club founder Beth. “Even if you don’t know the song we’re referencing, you can see what it’s about and what it means to them.”
Chief among those songs is Lorde’s “Green Light,” which is referenced throughout the play before finally being played at its most cathartic moment (no further spoilers here!). Belflower — who calls it “a perfect song” — never considered any other in its place, which made its somewhat complex journey to approval especially anxiety-inducing. Songs are usually cleared off-Broadway on a production-by-production basis, but once John Proctor moved into wider publication and was clearly headed for Broadway, “We were like, ‘OK, we need to clear this song, like, forever,’” she explains, which entailed approaching Lorde’s publisher, UMPG. Belflower wrote an impassioned letter to Lorde, asking that it be passed to her personally — only to get a “no” as the first response from her team.
Sadie Sink and Amalia Yoo onstage.
Julieta Cervantes
“I had, like, a panic attack in the Whole Foods parking lot when my agent called to tell me,” she recalls now with a laugh. But two weeks later, a “yes” came through from the artist herself, saying she loved the letter (and that the initial “no” had just been due to a miscommunication between teams; while Lorde hasn’t seen the show yet, Belflower is hopeful that will change whenever she’s next in the city).
John Proctor Is the Villain — at the Booth Theater through Aug. 31 — is now the most Tony-nominated play on Broadway currently, with seven nods. In advance of the awards ceremony on Sunday (June 8), Belflower, Hefferan and Strazza spoke to Billboard about a few of its most prominent music moments and how they came to be.
Dayna Taymor and Kimberly Belflower on the first day of rehearsals for “John Proctor is the Villain.”
Jenny Anderson
Selena Gomez, “Bad Liar”
Ed Sheeran‘s love for India sparkles on his new song “Sapphire,” which dropped alongside an adventurous music video Thursday (June 5).
On the effervescent dance track, the British pop star mixes percussion elements of traditional Indian music with his signature absurdly catchy melodies, singing about never wanting to stop dancing with a lover whose aura shimmers just like the blue diamond for which the song is named.
“We are surrounded but I can only see/ The lights, your face, your eyes/ Exploding like fireworks in the sky,” Sheeran sings on the song.
Adding flair to the recording are vocals and sitar provided by Indian artist Arijit Singh, who also appears with the four-time Grammy winner in the “Sapphire” music video. Filmed across various locations in India during Sheeran’s tour through the country earlier this year, the visual keeps the English musician in the center of the frame as he walks through bustling streets, explores beaches, visits tourist spots, hangs out with locals and sings with a team of youth soccer players.
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His companion in those sites is often Singh, with whom Sheeran sings in Punjabi, “ਚਮ-ਚਮ ਚਮਕੇ ਸਿਤਾਰੇ ਵਰਗੀ” — which translates to “They sparkle just like stars,” according to YouTube’s captions.
“‘Sapphire’ was the first song I finished for Play that made me know where the album was heading,” wrote the “A Team” singer in a statement, referring to his September-slated LP. “It’s why I finished the recording process in Goa surrounded by some of the best musicians in India.”
“The final jigsaw piece for me was getting Arijit on the record,” he continued. “Me and him have done a full Punjabi version of the song that will come out in the next few weeks, which has a lot more of him on it. This is the album version of the song, and my favorite song on the album. Hope you guys love it.”
“Sapphire” follows previous Play singles “Azizam” and “Old Phone,” the latter of which dropped at the beginning of May. Arriving Sept. 12, the new album will serve as the first in Sheeran’s next series of LPs, marking a departure from his yearslong mathematics-themed saga.
“Play was an album that was made as a direct response to the darkest period of my life,” he recently wrote on Instagram. “Coming out of all of that I just wanted to create joy and technicolor, and explore cultures in the countries I was touring. It’s a real rollercoaster of emotions from start to finish, it encapsulates everything that I love about music, and the fun in it, but also where I am in life as a human, a partner, a father.”
Watch the “Sapphire” music video above.
This is partner content. This summer is packed with festivals, and we’re highlighting incredible stars such as Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Kim Petras and more, who will be bringing their hottest hits to the stage! Tetris Kelly: The festival season is far from over, and as we gear up for the rest of the year, we’re […]
1D has hit 1B — again. More than a decade after its release, the music video for One Direction‘s “Night Changes” has surpassed a billion views on YouTube, marking the band’s fourth visual to reach the milestone. Directed by Ben Winston and posted in November 2014, the “Night Changes” music video gave fans the chance […]
Arthur Fonzarelli could have had a way different vibe if the team behind beloved 1970s/early ’80s sitcom Happy Days had gone with their second choice. At least according to The Monkees drummer Micky Dolenz, who told People magazine that back in the day he auditioned for the role of the jukebox-smacking, shark-jumping bad boy with a heart of gold.
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After his run on The Monkees (1966-1968), the last surviving member of that American fab four said he was on the hunt for a role that would break him out of the mop top drummer cage, so in 1973 he auditioned for the role of Arthur “The Fonzie” Fonzarelli, the leather jacket-wearing greaser next door who became the break-out star of the show.
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“I almost got it,” Dolenz, 80, said. “Supposedly it was between me and Henry [Winkler]. He remembers it too. The story I heard is that he was in the waiting room, saw me come in, and thought, ‘Oh s–t, I’ll never get this — Micky Dolenz is here!’ So we laugh about it now. He’s a good friend and a brilliant talent.”
While Yale School of Drama grad Winkler came into his audition with plenty of stage experience and roles in the indie movies The Lords of Flatbush and Crazy Joe, Dolenz was already a seasoned TV pro by the time he auditioned for Happy Days. At 11, he got the lead role of Corky in the adventure series Circus Boy, which ran on NBC for one season before jumping to ABC for another short run in 1957. A young Dolenz then scored a few TV roles in the late 1950s and early 1960s — credited as Micky Braddock — before being cast as Micky on The Monkees alongside Michael Nesmith, Davy Jones and Peter Tork.
When that show ended, Dolenz decided to focus on directing and producing, realizing that his gig as the spacey, floppy-haired drummer would likely get him typecast like his father, George Dolenz, an actor he said got pegged as a “swashbuckling romantic lead in sword-fighting movies” such as The Purple Mask and Sign of the Pagan.
“After Circus Boy, I went to a few auditions as a 12-year-old, and the minute I walked in, they’d say, ‘Circus Boy’! That’s just typical in this business. I knew it was par for the course,” said Dolenz, who added that after the Monkees it was more of the same. “‘What are you doing here? We don’t need any drummers!’” he said casting directors would tell him.
Following his pivot to a number of small movie roles and voice work on dozens of cartoons in the 1970s, “I’m a Believer” singer Dolenz said he has no regrets about the one that got away. “Oh my God, he’s just so good,” he said of Winkler, who parlayed his iconic role into a fifty-plus year career on TV (Mork & Mindy, Arrested Development) and movies (Night Shift, The French Dispatch). “I was definitely not as good as he was. Come on — he was The Fonz! He had that New York, New Jersey thing down. I’m from Southern California. It wasn’t gonna happen!,” Dolenz said.
Dolenz is going on tour this summer with his Songs & Stories tour, which mixes his iconic hits with stories about fellow L.A. legends such as Joni Mitchell, David Crosby and Jim Morrison. The tour is slated to kick off on August 11 at the Ocean City Music Pier in Ocean City, NJ.
Lorde revealed in a new interview that she has multiple favorite songs from her upcoming album, Virgin. But on the other side of the coin, there’s one that she can’t even listen to because of how raw it is — and it’s about a pretty NSFW topic.
Speaking to Jake Shane on an episode of his Therapuss podcast posted Wednesday (June 4), the New Zealand native shared that track seven — which is named after a popular pregnancy test brand — is particularly emotional for her. “There’s a song that I love so much called ‘Clearblue’ that is about unprotected sex,” she began, laughing.
“And just the experience of taking a pregnancy test, and like, this flood of emotions that goes through your body,” she continued, noting that the track is one of several “slammers” on the album. “Whatever you want to say — it’s such a moment.”
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“That whole song just destroys me,” Lorde added. “I can’t even really listen to it.”
According to the pop star, “Clearblue” is one of several songs on Virgin that features sexual content, despite the album’s contradicting name. She explained to Shane of the title, “It speaks to a sort of purity, but the album is quite sexual, so it wasn’t sexual purity … virgin steel, virgin hair, all of these things that denote purity, but I’m also kind of always trying to take me to my teen self.”
Arriving June 27, Virgin will mark Lorde’s first album in four years. In the weeks leading up to its release, she’s been open about how the confluence of stopping birth control, recovering from disordered eating habits and embracing her gender fluidity have shaped the project’s direction.
The album’s subject matter and percussive, electric sound are expected to mark a distinct shift from the Grammy winner’s last project, Solar Power, which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200. That LP found Lorde singing about her gravitation toward a more peaceful, unplugged lifestyle after years of living the pop-star life following the successes of 2013 debut album Pure Heroine and 2017 follow-up Melodrama. But on Therapuss, she revealed that the concept of Solar Power doesn’t really resonate with who she is today.
“I love Solar Power so much, and I truly needed to make it,” she told Shane. “I wouldn’t be here with another album if I hadn’t made Solar Power, but I think it showed me that you sort of just have no choice but to be what you’re supposed to be. Me sort of disappearing and being all wafty and on the beach, I was just like, ‘Actually, I don’t think this is me.’ I just am this person that’s meant to make bangers that f–k us all up … I love to vibe out. That is me to my core.”
Watch Lorde’s full Therapuss interview above.
Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” has become an anthem for the Edmonton Oilers, and the hit played throughout Rogers Place arena after the Oilers won game one of the Stanley Cup against the Florida Panthers in overtime on Wednesday night (June 4). NHL icon and former Edmonton Oiler Wayne Gretzky was in the building as […]
This May, only a handful of pop stars made major movement on the charts — including one with a historically huge Hot 100 album bomb, and one with a rare runaway breakout smash for 2025 — but we still saw some big names making big waves, with massive new tours and game-changing news announcements. And […]
Like David Lee Roth’s drum riser leaps or Pete Townshend’s windmill guitar arm swing, Benson Boone‘s backflips are seemingly going to be part of his stage show until his ortho, or insurance company, say otherwise. So it was no surprise that Boone’s acrobatic signature came up not once, but twice on The Tonight Show on Wednesday (June 4).
First, in the cold open, host Jimmy Fallon met Boone backstage and bragged that he can also pull off Benson’s signature trick. “You know, I can actually do a back flip too,” Fallon said. “Yeah, I just kind of jump and turn around all the way in the air. Just kind of always had a knack for it, if that makes sense. Flippity Floppities is what I call them.”
Boone appreciated the gesture, but warned Fallon that he doesn’t have to flip out to impress him, adding that he wouldn’t want the host to hurt himself. Fallon laughed it off and promised it was “very easy” for him, as the camera cut to a stunt double hurling himself backwards into a table covered with snacks and crashing out after zero rotations.
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Later in the show, Boone said “there’s no guaranteed flips” when Fallon asked if the iconic move would be part of Boone’s upcoming arena tour. When Fallon wondered if Boone practices and plans out his flips, the singer sighed and said he didn’t, since he’s been doing the trick his whole life. “I’ve been doing them forever,” he said. “Like, if you knew me growing up and you saw a video of me now and you hadn’t seen anything else — if you went to preschool with me and then you just had not heard the name Benson Boone since them — and then you see a video of me doing a backflip, you’d probably be like, ‘He’s still doing this?’”
So, of course, at Fallon’s request, he stepped up onto the host’s desk and pulled off a perfect one to the studio audience’s delight.
The 22-year-old also singer sat on the couch and played a game where he gave one-word reactions to some of high highest highlights from his breakthrough last year. For instance: the Grammys (“whooo!” with crotch grab and a “wow, that’s tight”), Coachella (“crowd”), MTV VMAs (“it was very sparkly”), Eras tour (“whoa!”), Lollapalooza (“I still don’t think I can spell it”) and the American Music Awards (“… moonbeam ice cream…”).
He then joked about trying to gin up some buzz on the internet for “Mystical Magical,” the first single his upcoming sophomore album, American Heart (June 20) by attempting to make the confounding “moonbeam ice cream” lyric a meme. “Nobody knows [what it means], I don’t know,” he said of his hope to spark some interest in the album by teasing the intriguing phrase. “So it went downhill quick. People started doing ‘what is ‘moonbeam ice cream?’… I hate Benson Boone!’” he said, admitting that even with the hate it kind of worked out for him.
Boone returned later in the show to perform the American Heart single “Momma Song” accompanied by a string quartet, crooning the moving ballad on a sundown-colored stage with zero flips. He will play CMAC in Canadaigua, NY on Thursday night (June 5) and New York City’s Governor Ball on Friday (June 6).
Watch Boone on the Tonight Show below.
Miley Cyrus says she knew she was going to win her first Grammy last year for “Flowers” when she saw another “MC” in the crowd. “The reason that I never got a Grammy before was because it was never my compass. It was not my North Star,” the singer told Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday night’s (June 4) show.
That’s why she was so genuinely surprised when she did win, even though she almost didn’t make it because she got stuck in traffic in the rain on the way to the broadcast. “Once I saw Mariah Carey I knew I was going to win,” she said. “Because I had this whole idea in my mind of, like, the butterfly and that metamorphosis. And she is the butterfly. Her [1997] album Butterfly has been such a North Star for me. And so when I saw her I kind of knew I was going to win because that was… it was an M.C. to M.C. I knew I had to get it.”
The singer once again described how her new Something Beautiful album was almost a very different kind of project until her old pal Harrison Ford stepped in with some sage advice when they met up at the Disney Legends Awards ceremony last summer. He asked her what she was up to, so naturally Cyrus pulled out a PDF with her grand plan for Something Beautiful, which at that point included her dream tour of “magical places” for a project then called Somewhere Beautiful that would have had her playing shows in the forest or in front of the pyramids.
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“And he looked at it and goes, ‘Looks expensive… not sure if it’s worth it,’” she said, adding that she took the note to her management, who 100% agreed.
The pair talked about running into each other at the SNL 50 special earlier this year, with Cyrus, 32, admitting that she was a “little bit nervous” before the show “because everyone that I’ve ever looked up to or watched on TV or loved was there.” Cyrus performed a stunning cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” with Tonight Show house band the Roots and Brittany Howard on the show and she said Fallon looked “crazy” before his breathless opening musical bit.
“You got a little out of breath,” she teased him. “We’re working on that… I’m getting you snatched for the summer.”
Part of that work included Miley teaching Jimmy how to dance in stacked heels after he praised her for a video in which she rehearsed the choreo for her song “Easy Lover” in what he said were the highest heels he’s ever seen. “If I were rehearsing this show… I’m in sweatpants,” he said, as Miley warned, “Not once I get you that summer body.”
Admitting he needs help to get that beach ready, Miley busted out a little treat she brought for the host: a pair of black chunky boots with four-inch heels. “Stage one: a chunky booty,” she said as she presented the shoes. “Which by the way, is your new drag name. Here you go, Miss Booty.”
Fallon was game, so he slipped on the boots and came out from behind the desk to learn the steps to the “Easy Lover” dance, teetering on the heels and getting a lesson on why you need to rehearse in the shoes you’re going to perform in.
The companion Something Beautiful film will be in theaters for one night only on June 12.
Watch Cyrus on The Tonight Show below.
