concerts

Dolly Parton announced Sunday that she would be delaying six concerts at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas that were slated for December due to “health challenges.”

In a message posted on social media, the country superstar shared that she’s been dealing with some health issues and her doctors have advised her to undergo some procedures to manage it, though she did not provide specifics. The concerts were set for Dec. 4 through 13.

“I want the fans and the public to hear directly from me that, unfortunately, I will need to postpone my upcoming Las Vegas concerts,” the 79-year-old singer and songwriter wrote in a cheeky statement posted to her Instagram and X accounts. “As many of you know, I have been dealing with some health challenges, and my doctors tell me that I must have a few procedures. “As I joked with them, it must be for my 100,000-mile check-up, although it’s not the usual trip to see my plastic surgeon.”

Parton said she needs time to “get show ready” to be back on stage and put on a performance that fans “deserve to see.” She also tried to ease any concern that her situation is serious. “Don’t worry about me quittin’ the business because God hasn’t said anything about stopping yet,” she continued. “But, I believe He is telling me to slow down right now so I can be ready for more big adventures in life.”

“I love you and thank you for understanding,” she signed the note. Earlier this year, Parton’s husband Carl Dean died at 82. The pair were married for nearly 60 years.

Tickets purchased for the original dates will be honored when rescheduled dates are announced. Refunds are also available.

The Skirball Cultural Center, an institution dedicated to exploring the shared ideals of American democracy and Jewish heritage, will kick off its 28th annual free Sunset Concerts series on July 17 with Latin music.

The courtyard stage will host the music of singer-songwriter Rodrigo Amarante from Brazil and the electronic sounds of Ecuadorian American musician Helado Negro.

“These [musicians] that we have invited to participate … present a return to tradition and elements of hope and discovery and creating new opportunities that reflect the American democratic ideals grounded in pluralism,” said Marlene Braga, vice president of public programming.

“Many diverse artists coming together from different parts of the world to celebrate the great [American] experiment and looking to create a more perfect union through lifting their voices and their identities through music,” she added.

The Skirball Cultural Center will kick off its free 28th annual Sunset Concerts series on July 17 with musical performances in its courtyard from Rodrigo Amarante and Helado Negro.

(Skirball Cultural Center)

In previous years, the series staged other Latinx artists like the Marías and were a stop during the U.S. debut tour of the Cuban son conjunto Chappottín y sus Estrellas.

Amarante, who has been a member of bands Los Hermanos, Orquestra Imperial and Little Joy, and who wrote and performs the theme song to Netflix’s critically acclaimed series “Narcos,” will open the series with his rock tunes infused with bossa nova and folk. His latest project, “Drama,” was released in 2021. On the 11-track album, Amarante sings both in his native language Portuguese and in English.

“[Music] is one of the most powerful political acts,” Brazilian singer-songwriter Rodrigo Amarante told The Times.

(Courtesy of Rodrigo Amarante)

“[Music] is one of the most powerful political acts,” Amarante told The Times. “Because when you are dancing … you’re opening up and moving your body and pretty much loving everyone that’s around you.”

Playing on the same bill will be the musician Roberto Carlos Lange, the artist better known as Helado Negro. Known for songs like “Gemini and Leo” and “Lotta Love,” Helado Negro released the critically acclaimed LP “Phasor” in early 2024.

Helado Negro, known for songs like “Gemini and Leo” and “Lotta Love,” released the critically acclaimed LP “Phasor” in early 2024.

(Sadie Culberson Studio / Sadie Culberson)

The first show of the series will also include a special DJ performance from KCRW’s DJ Jason Bentley.

The series will continue every Thursday through Aug. 17, and its lineup includes Latin musicians like La Perla, Frente Cumbiero and Mula.

BERLIN — In a country that saw its democracy die in 1933, the more than 170,000 people crowding into three of Germany’s biggest soccer stadiums for Bruce Springsteen’s rock concerts in recent weeks have been especially receptive to his message and dire warnings about a politically perilous moment in the United States, one that has reminded some of Adolf Hitler’s power grab in the ’30s.

At these gigantic open-air concerts in Berlin, Frankfurt and Gelsenkirchen, which have been among the largest concerts to date in Springsteen’s two-month-long, 16-show Land of Hope & Dreams tour across Europe, the 75-year-old rock star from New Jersey has interspersed short but poignant political speeches into his exhausting, sweat-drenched performances to describe the dangers he sees in the United States under the Trump administration.

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll in dangerous times,” Springsteen says to cheers at the start of each concert. “In my home — the America I love, the America I have written about — the America that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring.”

Springsteen’s words have had special resonance in Germany, where memories of the Nazi past are never far from the surface and the cataclysmic demise of the Weimar Republic, which led directly to Hitler’s takeover, is studied in great detail in schools and universities. With that Nazi past embedded in their DNA, German fears of President Trump’s tactics probably run higher than anywhere else.

“Germans tend to have angst about a lot of things and they are really afraid of Trump,” said Michael Pilz, a music critic for the Welt newspaper, who agrees that the death of German democracy in 1933 is a contributing factor to the popularity of Springsteen’s anti-Trump concerts this summer. “A lot of Germans think Trump is a fool. It’s not only his politics but the way he is, just so completely over the top. Germans love to see Trump getting hit. And they admire Springsteen for standing up and taking it to him.”

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll in dangerous times,” Springsteen says to cheers at the start of each concert.

(Markus Schreiber / Associated Press)

The crowds in Germany have been as large as they are enthusiastic. More than 75,000 filled Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on June 11; 44,500 were in Frankfurt on June 18; and another 51,000 watched his concert in the faded Ruhr River industrial town of Gelsenkirchen on June 27. All told, more than 700,000 tickets have been sold for the 16 shows in Springsteen’s tour (for concerts that last three or more hours), which concludes on July 3 in Milan, Italy.

“The German aversion to Trump has now become more extreme in his second term — Germans just don’t understand how the Americans could elect someone like Trump,” said Jochen Staadt, a political science professor at the Free University in Berlin who is also a drummer in an amateur Berlin rock band. Staadt believes Springsteen’s 1988 concert may well have helped pave the way for the Berlin Wall to fall a little over a year later in 1989. “Germans are drawn to Springsteen as someone who played an important role in our history when Germany was still divided and as someone who may have helped overcome that division with rock music.”

Springsteen has been filling stadiums across Europe in the warm summertime evenings with his high-energy shows that not only entertain the tremendous crowds but also take on Trump’s policies on civil liberties, free speech, immigrants and universities in thoughtfully constructed messages. To ensure nothing is lost in translation, Springsteen’s brief forays into politics of about two to three minutes each are translated for local audiences in German, French, Spanish, Basque and Italian subtitles on the giant video walls onstage.

To ram the message home to more people, Springsteen also released a 30-minute recording from the first stop of the tour in Manchester, England, that contains three songs and three of his speeches onstage.

“I’ve always tried to be a good ambassador for America,” said Springsteen while introducing “My City of Ruins,” a song he wrote after the 9/11 terror attacks that has taken on a new meaning this summer. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we have succeeded and where we’ve come up short in living up to our civic ideals and our dreams. I always just thought that was my job. Things are happening right now in my home that are altering the very nature of our country’s democracy and they’re simply too important to ignore.”

Springsteen’s first speech during the tour’s Manchester show on May 17 prompted a sharp rebuke from Trump on his Truth Social platform. “Springsteen is ‘dumb as a rock’… and this dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare’. Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

Springsteen did not respond directly. Instead, he repeated his messages at every concert across Europe. He delivered more political commentary in introducing his song “House of a Thousand Guitars” by saying: “The last check on power, after the checks and balances of government have failed, are the people. You and me. It’s the union of people around a common set of values. That’s all that stands between democracy and authoritarianism. So at the end of the day, all we’ve really got is each other.” In the song, Springsteen sings about “the criminal clown has stolen the throne / He steals what he can never own.”

His concerts also included the live debut of “Rainmaker,” about a con man, from his 2020 “Letter to You” album. At the concerts in Europe, Springsteen dedicates the song to “our dear leader,” with a line that goes: “Rainmaker says white’s black and black’s white / Says night’s day and day’s night.”

More than 75,000 filled Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on June 11, 44,500 were in Frankfurt on June 18, and another 51,000 watched his concert in the faded Ruhr River industrial town of Gelsenkirchen on June 27.

(Markus Schreiber / Associated Press)

He also changed one line in the song from “they don’t care or understand what it really takes for the sky to open up the land,” to “they don’t care or understand how easy it is to let freedom slip through your hands.”

Springsteen’s enormous popularity across Europe has long been on a different level than in the United States, and that gap could grow even wider in the future. Springsteen’s close friend and the band’s lead guitarist, Steve Van Zandt, recently observed in an interview with the German edition of Playboy magazine that the E Street Band may have lost half of its audience back home because of the group’s unabashed opposition to Trump. (The band’s concerts in the United States are often held in smaller indoor arenas.)

Bruce Springsteen, left, performs with Steven Van Zandt: at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, June 11, 2025.

(Markus Schreiber / Associated Press)

But in Europe, Springsteen and his band have been reliably filling cavernous stadiums during the long, daylight-filled summertime evenings for decades with improbably enthusiastic crowds that sing along to the lyrics of his songs and spent most of the concerts on their feet dancing and cheering. There are also large numbers of hearty Springsteen fans from scores of countries who use their entire yearly allotment of vacation to follow him from show to show across the continent. This summer, Springsteen’s message has been amplified even more, sending many in the boomer-dominated crowds into states of near-ecstasy and attracting considerable media attention in countries across Europe.

“The message of his music always touched a deep nerve in Europe and especially Germany, but ever since Trump was elected president, Springsteen’s voice has been incredibly important for us,” said Katrin Schlemmer, a 56-year-old IT analyst from Zwickau who saw five Springsteen concerts in June — from Berlin to Prague to Frankfurt and two in San Sebastián, Spain. All told, Schlemmer has seen 60 Springsteen concerts in 11 countries around the world since her first in East Berlin in 1988 — a record-breaking, history-changing concert with more than 300,000 spectators that some historians believe may have contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall just 16 months later.

“A lot of Germans can’t fathom why the Americans elected someone like Trump,” said Schlemmer, who had the chance to thank Springsteen for the 1988 East Berlin concert at a chance meeting after a 2014 concert in Cape Town, South Africa. “We saw for ourselves how quickly a democracy was destroyed by an authoritarian. The alarm bells are ringing about what a danger Trump is. People love [Springsteen] here because he tells it like it is and because he is standing up to Trump.”

Stephan Cyrus, a 56-year-old manager from Hamburg, said Germans view Springsteen as a trustworthy American voice during a period of uncertainty.

“When Germans hear Springsteen speaking about his worries about the United States, they listen, because so many of us have so much admiration and longing for the United States and are worried about the country’s direction too,” said Cyrus, who saw the June 11 concert in Berlin. “He definitely touched us with his words.”

In one of his concert speeches, Springsteen goes after Trump without mentioning his name.

Spectators watch Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform at the Olympic Stadium, in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, June 11, 2025.

(Markus Schreiber / Associated Press)

“There is some very weird, strange and dangerous s— going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now. In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.”

Springsteen then adds: “In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they are inflicting on loyal American workers. They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society. They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t back down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now. A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government.”

He tells the audiences that those in the administration “have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.”

But Springsteen ends on a hopeful note, promising his audiences: “We’ll survive this moment.”

Kou Mariya hasn’t shown her work to her family. That’s because Mariya, not her real name, is living a dual identity, and to protect her privacy, only the most sacred of confidants — or business partners — can know her true persona.

Mariya, to her more than 84,000 followers on YouTube, is a friendly, flirtatious vampire singer, as excited to chat about her digitized outfits and accessories as she is to sing a late ’90s pop song. She performs as an animated avatar using motion capture technology, which matches her facial expressions and body movements to the drawn figure.

Mariya spends a significant portion of her days as this cartoon character, at once wholly real while being completely artificial. She is a professional performer, although her stage is virtual. Instead of a glimpse into a room or a home, her surroundings are fully drawn — she could be in a beach setting one day and an ornate office the next.

As a VTuber — that is, virtual YouTuber — Mariya is part of a movement, one led by those weaned on Japanese animation who are now finding ways to make fantasy world-building feel individualized and personal. We connect via video conferencing software, her location in the U.S. a secret, and Mariya appears in her anime form, her silver-white hair occasionally obscuring her welcoming oval eyes, which blink often as she speaks. Her voice is friendly and warm, and it ever-so-slightly dips into an upper register when she laughs or needs to emphasize a point. She nervously chuckles that she’ll be aged “so bad” when she admits the first anime she fell in love with was “Speed Racer.” Whether I’m talking to Mariya the vampire character or Mariya the performer is never quite clear.

Kou Mariya, hosting a Thursday night concert in Hollywood, is a friendly vampire VTuber.

(Kou Mariya)

This weekend Mariya will be hosting a concert in Hollywood with other popular VTubers. There will be live musicians, but the VTubers will be virtual. Mariya says she’ll be performing from an off-site location to protect her identity.

Those in Los Angeles will have multiple opportunities to take part in a VTuber crash course over the Fourth of July holiday. Mariya on Thursday will host the Fantastic Reality concert at the Vermont Hollywood, a performance that makes virtual and real musicians and features Ironmouse, a horned, operatic demon who was briefly the most subscribed streamer on Twitch.

Even more mainstream, a host of VTubers associated with Japanese firm Hololive will invade Dodger Stadium for the second year in a row. Saturday evening’s Hololive Night will feature three of company’s English-speaking talents — Ninomae Ina’nis, IRyS and Koseki Bijou — virtually cheering on the team, singing the seventh-inning stretch and then leading a post-game dance party on the field. A special event ticket will include playing cards of the VTubers.

Hololive, a division of Cover Corp., is one of the largest VTuber talent agencies in the world, with almost 90 active performers across its various divisions. The company’s U.S. office is based in L.A., and its partnership with the Dodgers is to recognize, in part, that the team has a large Japanese fanbase, thanks to megastar Shohei Ohtani. Cover CEO Motoaki Tanigo, however, has a broader goal, and that’s to further bring VTubers to the masses.

“There are two reasons,” Tanigo says, via a translator, for why Cover has targeted L.A. as one of its key markets. The first, he notes, is due to the fact that a large part of the company’s fanbase resides in the L.A. region. The second, he stresses, relates to his business goals, especially the video game firms Cover hopes to partner with. “Doing events in the Los Angeles area is not only important for our user engagement, but it’s a great opportunity to show to our business clients that we have a strong following.”

VTubers have averaged 50 billion YouTube views annually over the past three years, according to a recent YouTube Culture & Trends report. A YouTube sample of 300 virtual creators found that they drove 15 billion views across the site, with 1 billion coming from the U.S. alone. Almost all of these VTubers are steeped deeply in anime lore, culture and tone. And while there are popular male VTubers, a number of the most famous are female-facing. Cover’s roster, for instance, is more than three-quarters female.

Hololive characters on the Dodger Stadium scoreboard at last year’s event. Hololive Night returns on July 5.

(Cover Corp.)

“It’s very exciting,” says Susan Napier, author of “Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art” and professor at Tufts University who specializes in Japanese culture. “It allows for an enormous amount of creativity, and a real sense of ownership over your creation, and a way of playing and melding with your creation. People have been fans and identifying with favorite stories, anime and manga for years. This is, in a way, a very old phenomena. It’s people wanting to participate in a fantasy world that they love.”

Mariya notes she decided to become a VTuber during the worst days of the global pandemic of 2020. “Everyone was in front of their computers and had a sense of loneliness,” she says. “And VTubers [had] that sense of, ‘I’m not alone. I’m not trapped. There’s a whole world out there for me.’ Being a big fan of that, I wanted to try that myself. I did not expect to be able to make this into a career, but somehow people liked me, and I thought I could keep going with this.”

And how, of course, did she land on her character, a vampire with a bat clip in her hair and an open-chested cocktail server-style outfit? “That one is tricky because technically I was born a vampire,” Mariya says. “We’re not scary. We ask permission before entering doors, which is better than a lot of people. We do bite. That’s the only downside.” Right.

The Japan-led VTtuber trend predates the pandemic. The first proper virtual artist to gain fame is widely credited as Kizuna AI in 2016, but VTubers have grown alongside other similar developments. See, for instance, virtual concert artist Hatsune Miku, who performed at Coachella in 2024. VTubers are also closely aligned with video games, often streaming them for their fans. The game medium, of course, has long been associated with virtual avatars, be it Nintendo Mii figures, the personas of “Second Life” or today’s platforms of “Fortnite,” “Roblox” and “Minecraft.” And this summer, in one of the biggest releases of 2025, VTuber Usada Pekora has a role in the PlayStation 5 game “Death Stranding 2,” with famed director and auteur Hideo Kojima admitting he is a fan.

For creator, voice-over actor and Anime Expo attendee AmaLee, the rare VTuber who, while using a stage name, does show her face, anime’s fantastical yet mature storylines reached her as a young teen when she was exploring her creativity. “It’s bridging a gap,” she says of VTubing. “Ever since I was a teenager I loved anime. It’s music, beautiful animation and acting all in one. VTubing brings it into the real world. You can do so much with your VTuber lore story. You’re kind of creating your own anime.”

VTuber Ironmouse will perform at the Fantastic Reality concert on Thursday.

(Ironmouse)

The most appealing VTubers bring a level of real-life authenticity into their work. “If you go back and watch my very first streams, I’m very cemented in this cleanly elegant actor [persona],” AmaLee says. “My voice is different. I dropped it to be cooler. I realized quickly how hard that was to keep, and I didn’t like not being authentically me. I’m a little clumsy, a little blond and I have major tech issues.”

Mariya describes herself as introvert, saying she wouldn’t be streaming — or likely even performing — if it weren’t for VTubing.

“With VTubing, there’s a sense of anonymity that I think is really good for the audience as well,” Mariya says. “Some people don’t want to see a physical person in front of a screen. They want to see anime girls. I think people latch onto the idea that it’s something that is different and bigger than me and bigger than them. It’s a new world.”

Last year’s Hololive Night at Dodger Stadium featured a drone show. Look for an on-field dance party led by the VTubers this year.

(Cover Corp. )

Author and professor Napier says it’s a modern, digitized Renaissance faire, if you will, reflecting basic human desires to dress up and play. As for why it just so happens to be so connected to anime, Napier theorizes the medium fosters the idea of fantasy creation.

“Fantasy and science fiction are very popular culture artistic venues to play and to cosplay,” Napier says. “Anime is really good at presenting you with these — it’s brilliantly expansive. Whatever you’re into, you’ll find it in anime. So if you’re looking to VTube, there’s all this anime material sitting in front of you. You can pick and choose and start playing.”

The dream for the Cover corporation, says Tanigo, is to expand VTubers beyond the world of streaming sites such as YouTube and Twitch — hence, the Dodgers collaboration. In August, Hololive will stage another U.S. concert, this time at Radio City Musical Hall in New York. Music, says Tanigo, is a gateway. “I believe that’s a way of reaching new people,” he says. “It’s an interesting thing to go see. There are also people who may not be interested in VTubing or anime at all, but they can listen to the song that’s released and enjoy it as a piece of music on its own.”

For the performers, with VTubing comes a sense of safety — and even comfort — that isn’t always present in more traditional streaming.

“I did a lot of on-camera streaming in the beginning of my streaming career, but I hated having to get ready, do my makeup, wear something nice,” AmaLee says. “Even after an hour of getting ready to do a stream, someone was still [commenting], ‘You look tired today.’ I hated that. There would be days I would cancel streams because I didn’t want to get ready. Now I have my VTuber model and can be a little gremlin in my pajamas and no one has to know because Monarch is always perfect.”

An anime character, after all, is always ready to go.