If you were unable to watch Jagged Little Pill on Broadway, the musical based on AlanisMorissette‘s breakthrough album, you can now enjoy the compelling story in book form. The two-time Tony Award-winning musical is now a young adult novel.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, who co-wrote the musical with Alanis, told ABC Audio it “was just a pleasure” turning it into a YA novel. “It’s definitely new territory for me,” she added. Cody, along with Alanis, teamed with author Eric Smith to “expand these characters’ worlds” and flesh them out even more.
Smith says it was “wildly exciting” to work with Alanis and Cody, adding the latter told him to “take more risks” with the story. “I printed that [email],” he laughed.
The author said Jagged Little Pill, the musical, resonated with him. One reason is that one of the protagonists is “a transracial adoptee,” just like him, and the other being Alanis’ 1995 album had a strong impact on him.
Alanis’ album featured “this huge emotional swell of wanting to be heard and wanting people to listen to you and pay attention to you,” Smith explained, adding, “The musical brings that to the stage.”
Now that Jagged Little Pill has gone from musical to YA novel, what’s next?
“The book is sort of inspiring me to think about possibilities for the screen… Now I’m thinking, well, what else can we do?” Cody teased.
As for Smith, he hopes Jagged Little Pill‘s success story inspires more artists to make their own musicals. “I’d love to see a Ben Folds jukebox musical,” he offered. “I think Melissa Etheridge could do the same thing because her songs are so full of longing.”
(WASHINGTON) — Madison Cawthorn, a Republican congressman from North Carolina, was caught trying to go through security with a loaded gun at Charlotte Douglas International Airport Tuesday morning, according to multiple sources.
This was the second time the controversial congressman has been stopped trying to bring a weapon through airport security.
TSA officers spotted the gun at the checkpoint and called airport police.
Individuals can face fines up to $13,000 for a second offense, according to TSA.
It was not immediately clear if Cawthorn faces any charges. The congressman’s office did not immediately respond to an ABC News request for comment.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Viola Davis‘ portrayal of Michelle Obama in the Showtime series The FirstLady didn’t quite resonate well with some fans. And in response to the backlash she’s received — most of which was addressed at the “duck lip” face Davis made throughout the premiere episode — the actress is firing back at critics.
“Critics absolutely serve no purpose,” Davis said in a recent interview with BBC News. “And I’m not saying that to be nasty either.”
The Oscar winner said that while it is “incredibly hurtful when people say negative things about your work,” she’s reminded of her role as an actor and creative, which is to make necessary work decisions. “Ultimately I feel like it is my job as a leader to make bold choices. Win or fail it is my duty to do that,” Davis said.
After the FirstLady episode’s airing on April 17, the social media commentary poured in on Twitter.
“OMG trying to watch The First Lady and it’s just too hard. All your thinking is WTAF is Viola Davis doing with her damn lips, I couldn’t watch…” one of the many tweets read.
Davis acknowledged that criticism is an “occupational hazard” of acting but also stood firm in her decision to make “bold choices.”
“They always feel like they’re telling you something that you don’t know. Somehow that you’re living a life that you’re surrounded by people who lie to you and ‘I’m going to be the person that leans in and tells you the truth’. So it gives them an opportunity to be cruel to you,” Davis said.
The 56-year-old actress said it’s tough to move on from the “hurt” and “failure,” but declared, “You have to. Not everything is going to be an awards-worthy performance.”
Fans anxiously awaiting to see the Wicked musical turn into a Hollywood blockbuster will now enjoy double the fun after its director decided to split the film into two installments.
Director Jon M. Chu took to Twitter Tuesday to make the big announcement, saying it would be a disservice to cram the Broadway adaptation into a single film.
“As we prepared the production over the last year, it became impossible to wrestle the story of Wicked into a single film without doing some real damage to it,” he said in a statement. “As we tried to cut songs or trim characters, those decisions began to feel like fatal compromises to the source material that has entertained us all for so many years.”
“We decided to give ourselves a bigger canvas and make not just one Wicked movie but two! With more space, we can tell the story of Wicked as it was meant to be told while bringing even more depth,” the statement continued.
As previously reported, Ariana Grande will play Glinda while Tony Award-winning actress Cynthia Erivo has been cast as Elphaba, or the Wicked Witch of the West.
Chu said of the leading ladies’ commitment to making the film, “[We] pledge to create nothing less than an experience that honors its foundation for all fans who’ve waited for this movie.” He then unveiled the first film’s release date, saying the first installment arrives in December 2024.
Wicked, a musical retelling of The Wizard of Oz originally starring Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel as Glinda and Elphaba, respectively, made its Broadway debut in 2003.
Aerosmith has announced a new concert that will be part of the band’s 50th anniversary celebrations this year, a September 4 performance in Bangor, Maine, at Maine Savings Amphitheater.
Tickets for the show go on sale to the general public this Friday, April 29, at 10 a.m. ET, while an Aerosmith fan club pre-sale begins on Wednesday, April 27, at 9 a.m. local time.
Not including Aerosmith’s recently announced 2022 Las Vegas residency dates, the Bangor, Maine, concert is only the second show that the band has scheduled this year. The other is the long-delayed September 8 hometown performance at Boston’s Fenway Park that will feature Extreme as the opening act.
As previously reported, Aerosmith has scheduled a total 24 Las Vegas residency dates at at the Dolby Live at Park MGM. The performances are broken up into three eight-show engagements running from June 17 to July 8, from September 14 to October 5, and from November 19 to December 11.
To buy tickets and for more info about the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers’ tour plans, visit Aerosmith.com and Ticketmaster.com.
In other news, 1971: The Road Starts Here got its official release on CD and digital formats earlier this month. It’s a collection of seven recently rediscovered rare early live Aerosmith performances that was first issued as a limited-edition vinyl disc and cassette for the 2021 Record Store Day Black Friday event.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office on Monday released a trove of information related to the investigation into the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Alec Baldwin‘s Western, Rust.
The Colt-style revolver Baldwin brandished on the set contained a live round, which discharged when the actor and producer of the film pointed it at Hutchins on October 21 of last year.
Included in the information release are not only hundreds of pages of documents, but also police interviews with Baldwin; the movie’s armorer, Hanna Gutierrez Reed; injured director Joel Souza from his hospital bed; and even footage of the ultimately futile efforts to save Hutchins’ life.
Hauntingly, also included is some of the last footage the cinematographer shot — including a rehearsal of Baldwin in costume, finger on the trigger as he whips out the pistol and points it toward Hutchins, who was behind the camera. The move he was practicing was the same he performed before the fatal round discharged.
Footage also shows a frantic Gutierrez Reed tearfully trying to explain how a live round could have ended up in the firearm, and her insisting to cops that she checked the firearm ahead of time.
Baldwin insists he was assured the firearm he was handed was “cold,” or safe to handle.
Last Wednesday, The New Mexico Environment Department’s Occupational Health and Safety Bureau issued a “maximum fine” of more than $136,000 to the Rust production, citing numerous gun safety violations.
A criminal investigation into the matter is ongoing, with its findings reportedly months away.
(NEW YORK) — While Democrats raise alarms and Republicans celebrate Twitter’s announcement Monday that Elon Musk was buying the platform for $44 billion, experts weigh what political impact the world’s richest man will have on the social media giant and whether his private ownership once the sale completes later this year could include clearing the way for Donald Trump’s return.
Some Democrats are already painting a dire picture of the platform’s future, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., calling the sale “dangerous for our democracy,” while Republicans have declared it a victory for “free speech” — with Musk having described himself as a “free speech absolutist.”
The Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur has long been critical of how Twitter manages its content, pushing for looser moderation, and Republicans have blasted the platform for booting former President Donald Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, arguing it’s become too heavy-handed against conservatives voices.
“This is a great day to be conservative on Twitter,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., tweeted Monday. “Elon Musk buying Twitter terrifies the left because they don’t want their power to censor conservatives threatened,” she added.
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., also touted the news, tweeting, “Elon Musk now literally owns the libs,” and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, tweeted, “Free speech is making a comeback.”
Since Musk announced his proposal to buy Twitter via a tweet just 11 days ago, Republicans have largely rallied behind him. He told a TED conference one day after submitting his bid that his takeover plan is about free speech.
“If in doubt, let the speech exist,” he said. “If it’s a gray area, I would say, let the tweet exist. But obviously, in the case where there’s perhaps a lot of controversy, you would not necessarily want to promote that tweet.”
Musk has argued that Twitter’s content moderators intervene too much on the platform, calling it the internet’s “de facto town square.”
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a release announcing the deal Monday. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”
“Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it,” he added.
But experts warn against what the social media giant’s landscape would look like without current misinformation policies in place and if all users who have been kicked off were allowed back on — while voices to fact check them might leave the site in defiance.
Angelo Carusone, president of watchdog media nonprofit Media Matters, said to expect to see Trump’s account to be restored along with a host of other accounts that had previously violated Twitter’s rules.
“Elon Musk will unwind a whole range of very basic protections against harassment, abuse, and disinformation that Twitter has spent years putting into practice — effectively opening the floodgates of hate and lies and using Twitter’s position as a market leader to pressure other social media companies to backslide,” Carusone said in a statement Monday.
“The race to the bottom begins,” he added.
The American Civil Liberties Union raised concerns similar to Warren — with one person, Musk, in this case, also the world’s richest man, obtaining “so much control over the boundaries of our political speech online.”
Musk hasn’t said whether he will allow banned users back on, and Tump has claimed that even if he’s reinstated, he intends to stay off the platform in favor of his own platform.
“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told Fox News Monday. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH.”
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose personal Twitter account was permanently suspended in January for “repeated violations” of Twitter’s COVID misinformation policy, reactedto the sale from her government account, saying Twitter violated her freedom of speech “along with an unknown number of Americans.”
“I want everyone else to have theirs back too, if they choose it,” she said.
(CHICAGO) — Life expectancy in Chicago fell by nearly two years during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, in line with national trends, a new report finds.
The data, released Monday by Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the city’s Department of Public Health, showed Chicagoans had a life expectancy of 75.4 years in 2020, down from 77.3 years in 2019.
The figure is one of the steepest declines in life expectancy recorded in a single year for Chicago. What’s more, the sharpest drops were seen among communities of color, particularly Black and Hispanic residents.
“COVID has taken a terrible toll on the health and well-being of our city’s residents, particularly those who are Black and Latinx,” Lightfoot said in a statement. “Without formally acknowledging this detrimental impact, and its roots in structural racism, we will never be able to move forward as a city.”
The data showed that life expectancy for Black residents fell below 70 years for the first time in decades, with a drop from 71.8 years to 69.8 years. Additionally, the life expectancy gap between Black and white Chicagoans widened to 10 years, up from 8.8 years in 2017.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic was a significant driver of the Black-white life expectancy gap in 2020, it was only the second leading cause of death. According to officials, the main driver was chronic diseases, including heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
The city also saw sharp increases in deaths caused by homicides and accidents, including drug overdoses and car crashes.
Meanwhile, Hispanic residents saw the steepest drop of any racial/ethnic group from 79.1 years to 75.9 — a decrease of 3.2 years. The data also found that Asian/Pacific Islanders saw a life expectancy decline of two years while white residents saw a decrease of one year.
In addition, death rates increased from 2019 to 2020 for all races and ethnicities, with people of color making up a disproportionate number of deaths. Black residents only represent one-third of Chicago’s population but accounted for half of the city’s deaths.
Overall deaths in Chicago rose by 30%, according to the report. Officials recorded about 6,000 more deaths than predicted and approximately 4,000 of those were due to COVID-19.
CDPH said it is working to narrow the racial life expectancy gap through a program called Healthy Chicago 2025 to address the root causes of these disparities such as structural racism.
Among the top priorities is increasing access to health care. The department’s Health Chicago Survey found that in 2020, 35% of Black residents lost health care coverage compared to 19% of white residents and 27% of Hispanic residents were unable to access health care compared to 8% of white residents.
What’s more, 27% of Hispanic residents and 26% of Black residents said they missed urgent medical appointments while only 9% of white Chicagoans reported similar circumstances.
The action plan also includes investing money to increase access to housing, food and childcare for minorities.
“The life expectancy gap isn’t just about the causes that show up on the death certificate most often, but what drives those causes,” CDPH Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said in a statement. “There is no miracle cure, no shortcut to closing the life expectancy gap.”
The statement continued, “Collectively, the City and its partners must do the work to fundamentally transform the conditions in which people live — by ending the pandemic and by addressing its impacts on access to services, housing, education, and economic opportunities, as well as people’s mental health.”
Neither the mayor’s office nor the CDPH immediately replied to ABC News’ request for comment.
(ATLANTA) — A new CDC analysis estimates that at least three out of every five Americans have antibodies that indicate a prior COVID-19 infection. Prior to the omicron-fueled surge in cases from December 2021 to February 2022, only an estimated one-third of people in the U.S. were estimated to have a prior infection.
“This is the first time that population seroprevalence is over 50%,” Dr. Kristie Clarke, co-lead for the CDC’s COVID-19 Epidemiology & Surveillance Taskforce Seroprevalence Team, told reporters on a press call this afternoon.
Clarke said she had expected a post-omicron increase in seroprevalence — antibodies that show previous COVID-19 infection — but not this much of an increase.
About 58% of adults had detectable antibodies as of February — but that rose to nearly 75% among children and teens under 17.
“We had 43% in January and I did expect it to increase. I didn’t expect it to increase quite this much, but we follow the data and we look at the data and this is what the evidence is showing us and so this is why we want to get this message out to the U.S. population as soon as possible,” Clarke said.
The jump in antibody protection, both from infection and from vaccines and boosters, is part of the reason why the CDC went ahead with its recent decision to use new metrics for masking and community warnings, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said.
“We do believe that there’s a lot of protection in the community both from vaccination as well as from boosting and from prior infection,” she said.
But Walensky and Clarke repeatedly emphasized how important vaccination still is. There’s very little information on how long immunity from a case of COVID lasts, but a lot more data on how long immunity from vaccines and boosters lasts.
“I can’t underscore enough what Dr. Clark said, which is those who have detectable antibody from prior infection, we still continue to encourage them to get vaccinated,” Walensky said.
“We don’t know … when that infection was, we don’t know whether that protection has waned. We don’t know as much about that level of protection than we do about the protection we get from both vaccines and boosters,” Walensky said.
Clarke said this study cannot be interpreted to mean 60% of Americans have protection against reinfection.
“Reinfection happens and infection after vaccination can happen,” Clarke said.
Nor does the percentage mean we’ve reached some kind of herd immunity.
“There’s also no known threshold of the population where once you get above X percentage will completely stop community transmission of COVID. So all of that is really important to know,” Clarke said.
Still, there is continued good news on the BA.2 variant, which has yet to cause a significant jump in severe illness or death, Walensky said, though there are a few counties in the Northeast that the CDC now categorizes as orange.
“There are some areas of the country, particularly in the Northeast, where we’re seeing higher number of cases and we’re starting to see some hospitalizations tick up. You know, we’re watching this carefully,” Walensky said.
But she noted: “We haven’t seen them tick up as much as we might have expected in prior times during this pandemic, thanks to, I believe, a large amount of protection in the community both from disease and infection, as Dr. Clark has articulated, as well as vaccine protection.”
The hospital stays that the CDC is monitoring have also not been as severe as in the past, she said.
“We’re seeing less oxygen, use less ICU stays. And we haven’t, fortunately, seen any increase in deaths associated with them. So we are hopeful that positive trends will continue that we will not see as a result of these increasing cases, any further severity of disease,” Walensky said.
A new offer from the Travel + Leisure Club will soon let Star Wars fans step foot on two of the planets made famous by the movie series. Well, sort of.
To help fans celebrate Star Wars Day on May 4th, the club has cooked up two itineraries that will let fans visit Tozeur, Tunisia and Abu Dhabi, the two real-world locations that stood in for, respectively, Luke Skywalker’s desert planet Tatooine in Star Wars: A New Hope, and Jakuu, the planet on which Rey scavenged in The Force Awakens.
The Tunisia trip for two will set you back $1,120, excluding flights, and you can get to visit the still-preserved desert domiciles as seen in A New Hope and The Phantom Menace.
Seven days in Abu Dhabi will be just under $1,800 for two people. However, in both cases, “Prices will vary depending on occupancy, length of stay, itinerary options selected and date availability.”
Abu Dhabi’s trip will not only offer sightseeing opportunities from the film, but also the chance to ride a camel, go sandboarding, or jumping dunes in a 4×4. Or, you can always beat the heat at the United Arab Emirates capital’s man-made oasis, and its luxe St. Regis Saadiyat Island.
Members of the club can also opt for its concierges to set up an al fresco feast, or musicians “who will play music reminiscent of their favorite movie scores” during their stays.
Sure beats watching Star Wars on your couch for the umpteenth time.
