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When it comes to performing, Miley Cyrus always goes big — and it looks like her appearance on Netflix‘s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman will be no exception. In a clip from her upcoming episode — premiering Wednesday on the streamer — Cyrus is holding court in a dimly lit performance […]
Music videos might not be getting the prime-time TV premieres or big TRL rollouts they did in past decades, but a pair of pop stars are making sure they’re still major events. Last week, Ariana Grande premiered a video for her latest Eternal Sunshine single “The Boy Is Mine,” which stars You actor Penn Badgley […]
When Aaron Tveit meets fans at a Broadway stage door, or at the concerts he’s performed at rock clubs and symphony halls alike, it’s always a surprise where they know the actor from.
They might have seen him in his career-making role in the acclaimed modern musical Next to Normal, or perhaps from his more recent Tony-winning turn in Moulin Rouge! They might remember him as Nate’s hot cousin Tripp van der Bilt on the original Gossip Girl, or as a hilarious send-up of numerous musical theater hero tropes on the late, great Apple TV+ comedy Schmigadoon! Or maybe they recall his scene-stealing turn as Enjolras, leading “Do You Hear the People Sing?” in the feature film of Les Misèrables.
Sufficed to say, Tveit has range – as he most recently proved when he replaced Josh Groban in the acclaimed Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece Sweeney Todd, playing the Demon Barber of Fleet Street opposite Sutton Foster’s Mrs. Lovett (the two just co-hosted the Drama Desk Awards together). Now, he’s moving to a smaller but no less prestigious stage as he kicks off his first Café Carlyle residency in New York City. The run of shows at the storied cabaret venue was extended practically as soon as it was announced (running through June 29). Prior to its kick-off Tuesday night (June 11), Tveit spoke to Billboard about his bucket-list Sondheim roles, the possible future of Schmigadoon!, and why his Carlyle audiences could hear a little Taylor Swift in his set.
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The degree of deafening audience screaming for both you and Sutton the night I went to see Sweeney was truly at boy-band hysteria levels. What was your experience on the other end of that?
Honestly, it was fascinating and very unexpected. I went back to Moulin Rouge! for 12 weeks about a year ago, and there were similar responses at that time, and I thought it was a product of that show and how it encourages the audience to be kind of participatory. But I really did not expect that type of audience to carry over at Sweeney. When it started, we looked around and said, “Well, this will go away,” but it didn’t. A lot of younger people seeing Sweeney take in Broadway shows in a different way – they like to feel like they’re a part of it and they get excited. But the thing we took away from it that I think was the most amazing was: What would Steve Sondheim think, to hear his material being appreciated and taken in in that way by a very young audience? I think a similar thing is happening at Merrily [We Roll Along, also on Broadway now], and I just felt so thrilled to be a small part of his material being taken in by this new audience.
When you were first announced for Sweeney, there was a lot of chatter about the idea of a tenor playing the role (which is traditionally sung by a baritone or bass-baritone). When you were offered the role, was it an immediate yes for you?
It was a role I’ve always looked at and said, “Wow, if I ever get the chance, I’ll jump at the challenge and also be terrified.” And when they did call, I was very surprised … and immediately terrified and excited. For me, vocally, I knew it would be a challenge – it’s definitely a different type of vocal part than I’ve traditionally done. But I started my training in classical voice before I switched to theater; I was confident that with enough work I could [do it], and I’m proud of where it landed.
And the little bit of backlash, if you want to call it that, I understand there are a lot of tenor roles in musical theater and I think for people who aren’t tenors, they might have thought [the role] would be changed in some way, but I tried to keep everything as is. That show is such an acting piece, to me, and I felt it more as a play, so once I realized I could do the singing, everything I was concerned about was acting the show.
Aaron Tveit during his first curtain call in Sweeney Todd on Broadway at The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Feb. 9, 2024 in New York City.
Bruce Glikas/WireImage
You’ve done some bucket-list Sondheim roles now, including Bobby in Company, Booth in Assassins and Sweeney. What’s next on your wish list?
The big one I’d love to do still is Sunday in the Park With George — I’d really love to play George. That vocal part may fit me better on paper than this one did, but I think it’s equally such a complicated and wonderful story. I bow down to Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette [Peters, the original stars of the show] – she came to see Sweeney toward the end, which was really special for me. I also sometimes feel like I missed Tony in West Side Story in my professional life, and now maybe I’ve aged out, but that’s OK.
You can also be very funny, as we saw on Schmigadoon! What stood out about that experience for you?
When the first season of Schmigadoon! came up, I got to live out my Billy Bigelow [from Carousel] dreams as well as a bit of Annie Get Your Gun … and those are very traditional musical theater roles, which is not something I’ve gotten to do a lot of. I’d never done a revival at that point or a traditional musical, so I was very excited to jump in. We all felt so grateful to be part of that first season – it was 2020, Broadway was still a year out from being back. And then we got to go back [for season 2], and Cinco [Paul, the show’s composer] played “Doorway to Where” for me and I was like, “Oh, that’s ‘Corner of the Sky.’” And he was like, “Yeah, this season you’re gonna be a weird version of Pippin and Claude [from Hair] and Jesus from Godspell and Jesus and Judas from [Jesus Christ] Superstar.” And I thought well, I’ve not played any of those roles either!
The thing that was so fun was the tongue-in-cheek nature of it — but at the same time, we were never making fun of the musicals because we all love them so much. My friends know I’m a very silly person, so it was nice to bring a lot of aspects of myself to the work in a way I don’t ever get to.
It’s so tragic that it’s over!
We’ll see. I know Cinco has hopes; season 3 is completely written, so someone could pick it up. It’s available!
Aaron Tveit in Schmigadoon!
Courtesy of Apple TV+
Your upcoming shows at the Café Carlyle mark your debut there. How did you conceive of the setlist?
I’ve done a lot of concerts in the last 10 or so years, and I have running lists of the shows I’ve done, and a note in my Notes app of running lists of dream songs, and I’m always sending myself emails about songs I hear. But for this, it just feels very fancy, you know? [Laughs] I talked abut that a lot with my music director: how could we do our version of fancy? I’ve done pop-rock cover shows at lots of House of Blues across the country and Irving Plaza and Webster Hall, and a lot of more traditional cabaret sets, and the venue usually dictates the setlist. So it’s like, “OK, what does the Carlyle say to me?”
I immediately thought “old New York,” standards, jazz – but also, New York is my theater world and career, more contemporary and traditional musical theater. So the show seems to have three sections. I try to not take myself seriously, but I take the music seriously.
You’re a big pop fan too. Who are you listening to right now?
I’m very into Billie Eilish the last couple years. The songwriting she and her brother are doing is just incredible. Hozier is a really inspirational artist for me; he keeps having moments because the music he makes is just incredible and clearly meaningful to him. Same thing with Noah Kahan — I’ve listened to him a lot, and his songs are clearly really personal as well. This young guy Sam Fender is a great guitar player and songwriter and vocalist. And then there are the things I’m just always listening to, like Bon Iver and Donny Hathaway.
Years ago, you were very well known for covering Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” at your more pop-rock concerts. I have to ask if it’ll be part of the set – or if any other Taylor might be…
On New Year’s last year, I did a concert with a bit of a medley, and “Anti-Hero” made it in. We have our setlist, but I have an idea to have a rotating song that changes every night or couple nights, a slot for something. … I’d be remiss to say one of those wouldn’t slot in.
That’s a very Eras Tour move for you.
Exactly! I’m just taking cues from the greats.
Ariana Grande is officially a member of the Pink Pony Club. After Chappell Roan took the stage at New York City’s 2024 Gov Ball with her skin painted green in a full Statue of Liberty look, the 26-year-old musician inspired a litany of memes, including several referencing the upcoming Wicked films — which the franchise’s star later used as an opportunity to share her love for Roan.
On Monday (June 10), one day after the “Good Luck, Babe!” artist’s festival set, Grande shared a meme that replaced Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba with a photo of Roan — similarly jade-skinned as she performs on stage — in a scene from the Wicked trailer. “You’re green!” exclaims the R.E.M. Beauty founder’s character Glinda in the shot, to which the Wicked Witch/Roan simply says, “I am.”
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“I really ♡ @chappellroan,” Grande captioned the meme on her Instagram Story.
The “Thank U, Next” singer wasn’t the only one who loved Roan’s Gov Ball set. The “Red Wine Supernova” artist set the internet ablaze with her creative Lady Liberty look, as well as her live debut of an unreleased song titled “Subway” and her revelation that she turned down the White House’s invitation to perform for Pride this year.
“We want liberty, freedom and justice for all,” Roan said during her set, staring directly into the festival’s cameras before dedicating “My Kink Is Karma” to the Biden Administration. “When you do that, that’s when I’ll come.”
Still months away from the Thanksgiving premiere of the first Wicked film, Grande dropped the music video for “The Boy Is Mine” Friday (June 7). A few days later, she shared a clip of her doing her own makeup for the visual using products from her R.E.M. Beauty line.
In the clip, Grande also spoke about the characters she’s created as part of her Eternal Sunshine universe. In the “We Can’t Be Friends” music video, for instance, she played Peaches, a likeness inspired by Kate Winslet’s Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
In “Boy Is Mine,” Peaches appears once again — but this time, she transforms herself into a Catwoman-esque femme fatale in an attempt to seduce Penn Badgley’s character in the video. “When your alter-ego has its own alter-ego, that’s when you know it’s time to see a therapist,” Grande quipped in her makeup tutorial.
Watch below.
SEVENTEEN can add another honor to their long list of accomplishments after UNESCO announced on Tuesday (June 11) that the 13-man South Korean band will be appointed as the international group’s Goodwill Ambassador for Youth by UNESCO general director Audrey Azoulay at a June 26 ceremony at the organization’s Paris headquarters.
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“SEVENTEEN and UNESCO share the same commitment to empowering young people to drive change and address the challenges of our century. They continue to inspire and support young people around the world with their music and positive energy,” Azoulay said in a statement. “Following several successful joint actions, I wanted our partnership to take on even greater strategic importance. On June 26, I will be delighted to welcome the 13 members of the group into the family of UNESCO Goodwill Ambassadors.”
The appointment comes after SEVENTEEN participated in the 13th UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris in November, where they talked about the importance of young people pursuing their dreams at the first-ever session at the forum dedicated to a musical artist. More than 1,300 people from 194 member states attended that event, including 170 youth delegates. UNESCO — short for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — is a specialized United Nations agency that works to promote, “world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture.”
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In addition to their speech about positivity and hope, the group also performed a medley of their hits, including “_WORLD,” “Darl+ing,” “Headliner,” “God of Music” and “Together.”
In 2022, SEVENTEEN also launched the #GoingTogether initiative with the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, establishing new educational centers in Timor-Leste and educational aid to Malawi. According to the statement, by working as Goodwill Ambassador For Youth, the group will commit to “putting their talent and voice at the service of the Organization’s values and mandate.”
At the June 26 ceremony, the group will unveil their SEVENTEEN x UNESCO partnership, which will be dedicated to supporting youth projects around the globe. The ceremony will be livestreamed on UNESCO’s YouTube channel.
Check out a teaser for the June 26 UNESCO event below.
Steve Carell loves Taylor Swift, and he isn’t just a bandwagon fan, either. In an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show Monday (June 10), the actor opened up about meeting the pop star for the first time many years ago, revealing the moment he knew he was going to be a lifelong Swiftie.
According to Carell, he and Swift first crossed paths when they both appeared on MTV’s TRL, hosted by Carson Daly. “[It was] early on in my career and hers, too,” the Despicable Me star said. “I met her sort of in passing, and I thought, ‘Boy, she seems special.’ Even back then. Very sweet, very nice, just had a really nice first impression.”
A few years later, Carell said he came across a sweet video of the “Anti-Hero” singer performing for a pediatric care patient in a hospital. “I remember seeing some video of her — and it wasn’t like a big, viral thing, it was just something I found in the recesses of the internet — it was her in a hospital, playing an acoustic guitar for a patient there,” he told Fallon.
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“It was no big crew, it was, like, a really low-key, handheld thing she did on the sly,” Carell added. “I thought, ‘That’s so cool.’ Not publicized, leading with her heart. I thought, ‘OK, I’m a fan. I am going to root for that person.’”
It’s not the first time the actor — who is currently starring in Uncle Vanya on Broadway — has expressed his admiration for Swift. In a viral moment from a 2014 interview, Carell burst into a spontaneous performance of “Shake It Off,” after which he gushed, “I love it. I actually love Taylor Swift. I think she’s great.”
A couple years prior, Swift seemingly paid tribute to Carell and his The Office castmates by parodying the show behind the scenes of her “Ours” music video shoot.
Watch Steve Carell discuss his love for Taylor Swift on The Tonight Show above.
Are you ready for Normani‘s debut album to drop this week? Because she definitely is.
Dopamine is set to arrive this Friday, June 14, via RCA Records. Normani knows her fanbase has been clamoring for her first full-length album for the last few years, which obviously came with “pressure. Everybody not necessarily knowing what is going on within the process or within my personal life. … I’m just grateful that everybody is just really excited still for this album and for this body of work. They’ve waited on me, which I don’t really take for granted,” she tells Billboard‘s Tetris Kelly.
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Dopamine is meant to reflect Normani “finally stepping into who I’ve been called to be. There’s been so much adversity and so many roadblocks just in the process of putting this body of work out, you have no idea. I could actually probably write a book,” she claims, adding that “shifting teams… has honestly been one of the greatest blessings.” The former Fifth Harmony member parted ways with her former management company, Brandon Silverstein‘s S10 Entertainment, and signed a new management deal to Brandon Creed and Lydia Asrat through his Good World Management and her Q10 in August 2023.
Ahead of Dopamine‘s release, Normani has dropped two singles: “1:59,” featuring Gunna, and the hotly-anticipated “Candy Paint.” After she dropped the Cardi B-assisted “Wild Side” single three years ago, “1:59” “bridged the gap from ‘Wild Side’ to where I am now. It feels cohesive, it felt like it made sense but it felt like an evolved version of me,” Normani says in her Billboard News interview, adding that working with Gunna felt “organic”. “We met at a football game, and we just talked about working together. And management was just like, ‘Yo, what about “1:59″?’ ‘Cause we wanted to do a record together, and he loved it. It was just immediate. I remember playing it for him, and then I also have a record on his project.” Gunna also featured Normani on “$$$” from his latest album One of Wun.
As for “Candy Paint,” fans had been eating it up since Normani teased it more than a year ago and then featured a snippet of it during a Bose commercial. “As soon as it comes on, it’s infectious. It doesn’t sound like, to me, anything that’s out right now, but it kind of has that nostalgia,” she explains. “Any record that I’m creating or whether it’s even a visual, I love the early 2000s. Everybody knows that, like late ’90s, early 2000s. I’m heavily influenced and inspired by artists during that time. And even the sonics and the production, so you’re gonna hear that a lot throughout the album.”
Specifically, she named Janet Jackson as one of the “most influential artists” in her life, which she’s made very clear in the past: She performed “The Pleasure Principle” at the 2018 BMI R&B/Hip-Hop Awards, when Jackson received the BMI Icon award, and she paid tribute to Jackson’s iconic “Would You Mind” performance during her All For You tour during her “Wild Side” performance at the 2021 MTV Video Music Awards. “She’s definitely paved the way, and when I think of the women that I aspire to follow the footsteps of, she’s definitely up there. And she’s had so much impact on me, so sonically, you’ll be able to hear the inspiration,” Normani adds.
Watch Normani’s full Billboard News interview above.
Celine Dion was diagnosed with the rare autoimmune and neurological disorder Stiff-Person Syndrome in 2022, six years after she lost the love of her life, husband René Angélil, to throat cancer. Now, in an People magazine cover story, the singer reveals that her three sons with Angélil are the driving force behind her relentless fight against the disease that can cause painful muscle spasms and difficulty breathing and walking.
“I barely could walk at one point, and I was missing very much living. My kids started to notice. I was like, ‘Okay, they already lost a parent. I don’t want them to be scared,’” said Dion, 56, of the reactions from René-Charles (23) and 13-year-old twins Nelson and Eddy. “I let them know, ‘You lost your dad, [but] mom has a condition and it’s different. I’m not going to die. It’s something that I’m going to learn to live with.”
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While the symptoms of the chronic disorder began appearing in the mid-2000s, they got progressively worse, until Dion made the announcement in Dec. 2022 that she’d been diagnosed with the incurable ailment that caused her to cancel a planned tour that year. Dion talks about the difficult road to recovery in the upcoming Prime Video documentary I Am: Celine Dion (June 25) in which she vows to find a way to make it back on stage for her fans. “If I can’t run, I’ll walk,” she says in the film. “If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl… I won’t stop.”
NBC has been previewing tonight’s (June 11) one-hour primetime special sit-down with Dion in which the powerhouse Canadian vocalist described the decision to come clean with her fans, saying, “the burden was like too much.” In a previous preview, Dion described the agonizing pain she’s endured, saying it feels like “somebody is strangling you… It’s like somebody is pushing your larynx/pharynx this way [raises voice]. It was like talking like that, and you cannot go high or lower. It gets into a spasm,” adding that she’s broken ribs as a result of the powerful spasms caused by the disorder.
In the latest teaser, Dion said she’s spent her entire life in the industry being a performer and “loving every moment of it,” pointedly adding, “this passion will never go away.” Speaking to the Today Show‘s Hoda Kotb, Dion says she began to feel like something was off when her body was getting “more rigid” during a show in Germany on her 2008-2009 Taking Chances tour when her vocal cords began to spasm and she described being “very, very, very scared.”
The panic led to more spasms and she immediately noticed her vocals were getting more nasal, so she lowered the keys on the songs in order to gain a measure of control over a situation she could tell she could not control. In the documentary, Dion admits to lying to her precious fans at the time and blaming her issues on a sinus infection, but in hindsight, she tells Kotb, she should have taken the time to figure out what was actually going on at a time when husband Angélil was fighting for his life.
“Lying for me… the burden was too much,” Dion tells Kotb. After a decade of testing and treatment Dion got her answer, which she shared with her fans in a 2022 statement. Now, after years of intense physical therapy, vocal rehab and medication, Dion vows to Kotb that she will be back on stage some day, “even if I have to crawl… even if I have to talk with my hands. I will. I will.” Kotb hints that Dion has already planned her return to stage, but has not yet announced when that will be.
The full interview will air during a one-hour primetime special on NBC on Tuesday (June 11) at 10 p.m. ET.
Watch a preview of tonight’s NBC special below.
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Ed Sheeran knows a thing or two about writing popular songs thanks to his more than two dozen top 10 singles on the Billboard Hot 100. He also knows a great song by another artist when he hears it, which might explain why during a recent visit to the Therapuss with Jake Shane podcast Sheeran […]
Billie Eilish unwrapped the live debut of the soaring ballad “The Greatest” on The Late Show on Monday night (June 10), performing the Hit Me Hard and Soft album track accompanied by her brother/producer Finneas on acoustic guitar. The moodily lit performance opened with the singer shrouded in darkness sitting on a stool as Finneas […]