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NBCUniversal is cutting “Access Hollywood” and several other of its daytime talk shows, effectively ending its first-run syndication business as daytime television atrophies.

The company confirmed that “Access Hollywood,” and its counterpart “Access Live,” will be coming to an end in September. The shows, produced in Los Angeles, are currently hosted by Mario Lopez, Kit Hoover, Scott Evans and Zuri Hall.

Talk shows “Karamo” and “The Steve Wilkos Show,” produced out of NBC’s facility in Stamford, Conn., are also shutting down. The programs have already completed their production for the season and will run through the summer.

NBC previously announced that “The Kelly Clarkson Show” is also ending later this year after seven seasons.

“The Steve Wilkos Show” ran for 19 seasons. The host is a former bouncer for “The Jerry Springer Show.”

Francis Berwick, chairman of Bravo and Peacock unscripted, said in a statement that the company will continue to distribute library episodes of its talk programs and network shows such as “Law & Order.” But NBCU’s days of launching series for daytime and the hour before prime time are over.

“NBCUniversal is making changes to our first-run syndication division to better align with the programming preferences of local stations,” Berwick said. “The company will remain active in the distribution of our existing program library and other off-network titles, while winding down production of our first-run shows.”

“Access Hollywood” was first launched by NBC in 1996 as a competitor to CBS Media Ventures’ “Entertainment Tonight.”

First-run syndication allows producers to sell TV shows to stations on a market-by-market basis, instead of distributing them through a single network. This model was a major success for talk show staples such as Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres.

But streaming has pulled viewers away from traditional television, as viewers can watch their favorite shows and movies anytime on demand. The audience levels needed to generate enough ad revenue to support first-run programming in daytime no longer exists.

Many TV stations are filling their hours with more local news as daytime talk goes away.

By my count, Philip Glass has written 28 operas, the same number as Verdi. The count is iffy because Glass pushes the boundaries between what we tend to call opera and the fuzzier idea of music theater. His first, “Einstein on the Beach” in 1976 — a collaboration between the composer and the late, innovative theater maker Robert Wilson — is a non-narrative effusion of imagery, movement, music and text, each a brilliantly independent entity that somehow excites a hard-to-pin-down purpose.

His latest (and probably his last, Glass turns 90 this year) is “Circus Days and Nights” — a touching and thrilling opera for a circus and staged at a circus in Mälmo, Sweden, in 2021 — caps a wondrous 45 years of operatic advancement. You would have to go back to Handel’s 42 operas, Mozart’s 22 or Verdi’s oeuvre for operatic equivalence.

Glass’ subject matter varies widely in epochs and ethoses, from ancient Egypt to Walt Disney’s Hollywood. Taken as a whole, these 28 operas reveal how we got to be who we are historically, artistically, spiritually, politically and fancifully, often including more than one of those categories, as in his third opera, “Akhnaten,” which Los Angeles Opera has now remounted at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The instantly recognizable musical style has remained, over the years, consistently abstract and refreshing. It doesn’t tell you how to think, how to feel, even how to understand. It simply grabs your attention; you do the interpreting.

Still, America knows little of Glass’ operatic enormity. The early “portrait” operas — “Einstein,” “Satyagraha” (about Gandhi) and “Akhnaten” (the 14th century BC Egyptian pharaoh) — appear in repertory here and there (meaning mostly in Europe) as do a trio of operas based on Jean Cocteau films. The rest remain little mounted, while several but not all have been recorded. The Metropolitan Opera, for instance, commissioned “The Voyage” in 1992 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, but the epic opera is nowhere to be found in our semisesquicentennial year. It is sadly no longer even thinkable that “Appomattox,” Glass’ revelatory reminder of an America that once honored goodwill negotiation over political self-interest, return to the Kennedy Center, where its final version had its premiere 11 years ago.

L.A. Opera has been better than most American companies in its attention to Glass. It has excellently presented the three portrait operas on its main stage, beginning with “Einstein” in the final and most brilliant revival of the original Wilson staging. The “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten” revivals have been the designed-to-dazzle inventions of quirky director Phelim McDermott, a co-founder of Impossible, an eccentric British theater company. When new in the last decade, they felt the most arresting productions of these operas since Achim Freyer’s in Stuttgart, Germany, in the early 1980s. Almost every performance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion has sold out.

John Holiday as the titular ruler in Philip Glass’ “Akhnaten” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

McDermott’s “Akhnaten” got the most attention thanks to breathtaking jugglers and lavish costumes, along with a touch of full-frontal novelty as Akhnaten gets clothed in his kitschy, glittery getup for his inauguration. Glass had chosen the pharaoh because he is thought to have been the first monotheistic ruler.

Akhnaten is revealed in episodes of his life that are not fleshed out but presented as ritual, including the ravishing love duet with his wife, Nefertiti. The revolutionary pharoah builds a great city and reduces spiritual chaos by focusing on a single-minded form of worship. He looks androgenous in portraits, which led Glass to create the role for countertenor.

The sung texts are in ancient languages, and there are no projected song titles. Instead, a narrator gives a somewhat notion of what’s what in the language of the audience, as is Akhnaten’s great aria, a hymn to Aten (god of the sun).

Ultimately, the pharaoh’s prescient spiritual optimism comes in conflict with the all-powerful establishment priests, who kill Akhnaten and Nefertiti. The opera ends with Akhnaten’s son, presumably Tutankhamun, restoring polytheism, and then, once the staging jumps millennia into the future, it’s rediscovered by modern-day tourists. The currency couldn’t be missed Saturday, the Shia cleric and Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei having just been assassinated along with his wife at the start of America’s and Israel’s Iran war.

Sun-Ly Pierce as Nefertiti and John Holiday as Akhnaten in Philip Glass’ “Akhnaten” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

In the opera, it so happens, the ghosts of Akhnaten, his wife and mother, have the last word in a glorious trio.

When first performed at L.A. Opera a decade ago, the lavish production, co-produced with English National Opera, helped recover a neglected opera. In the meantime, “Akhnaten” has gone practically mainstream. The Metropolitan Opera, which also mounted McDermott’s production, released it on CD and DVD, winning a Grammy for best opera recording.

Since then, the choreographer Lucinda Childs, veteran of “Einstein on the Beach,” has staged a stunningly chic “Akhnaten” in Nice, France, that is available on YouTube. Last year, director Barrie Kosky created a sensation with his staging at Komische Oper Berlin, which starred American countertenor John Holiday.

Holiday happens to be the Akhnaten in the L.A. Opera revival, and he is magnificent. McDermott had built his production around the gracefully emotive Anthony Roth Costanzo, slight and luminous in voice and build and game for nudity. If Costanzo’s disarming enthusiasm for the role has been significant in mainstreaming “Akhnaten,” Holiday, who is a very different presence, may be the next step.

Although he can be a popularly gregarious crossover performer, here he suggests a ruler of profound, unflappable dignity, rather than vulnerability. His hymn to Aten is an exercise in majesty, an ode not just to the sun but to the expanses in which our solar system circulates.

In general, the singers class up the production. Sun-Ly Pierce as Nefertiti and So Young Park as Queen Tye add allure. The large cast of smaller roles and chorus is excellent. Zachary James returns as both Amenhotep III, Akhnaten’s father, and the engaging narrator who occasionally threatens to get carried away. McDermott had perfectly employed James as the droll animatronic Disneyland Lincoln in his animation-friendly, slightly goofy production of “Perfect American” in Madrid, where the opera premiered. Here McDermott’s inspired staging demonstrated that Glass’ forgiving personal portrait of Walt Disney makes it the quintessential Hollywood opera that no one dares bring to squeamish Hollywood.

Zachary James as Amenhotep III in Philip Glass’ “Akhnaten” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

Hollywood, however, is hardly squeamish when it comes to synchronized jugglers. For McDermott, they suggest somber ritual and were, in fact, known in Akhnaten’s Egypt. For the audience, they are a thrill a minute. For Glass, they may take on deeper meaning now that the circus is where he landed 26 operas later.

As for Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska, making her L.A. opera debut, she keenly keeps score and bounding balls together with cinematic flair. Glass removed violins from the orchestra to achieve a dark, primordial orchestral sound along with pounding percussion. Stasevska finds light, color and action. She conducts for the moment. Picturesque wind instruments suddenly burst forth as if a flock of birds were flying over the pyramids. Solo brass can sound momentous. The percussion pounds like nobody’s business, opening the score up to all the implied emotion and glitter on an over-stuffed stage.

Childs’ exalted use of dance and Kosky’s dazzling theatrical imagination may have moved us into a sleeker, more sophisticated and paradisal Glassian realm, but the sheer passion McDermott and Stasevska bring continues its own attraction.

In the meantime, McDermott has worked with Glass on a theatrical show, “The Tao of Glass,” that has been seen in New York and will run throughout much of the summer in London. In a better world of Glass, it would be running alongside “Akhnaten” at the Ahmanson. But the Labèque sisters will be at Walt Disney Concert Hall at the end of the month with a two-piano program based on Glass’ operatic Cocteau trilogy. Also check out L.A. Opera’s several excellent podcasts on “Ahkhnaten” — the company has quietly become a leader in the medium.

Todd Meadows, a crewmember on one of the fishing vessels featured on the long-running reality series “Deadliest Catch,” has died. He was 25.

Rick Shelford, the captain of the Aleutian Lady, announced in a Monday post on Facebook and Instagram that Meadows died Feb. 25. He called it “the most tragic day in the history of the Aleutian Lady on the Bering Sea.”

“We lost our brother,” Shelford wrote in his lengthy tribute. “Todd was the newest member of our crew, he quickly became family. His love for fishing and his strong work ethic earned everyone’s respect right away. His smile was contagious, and the sound of his laughter coming up the wheelhouse stairs or over the deck hailer is something we will carry with us always.

“He worked hard, loved deeply, and brought joy to those around him,” he added. “Todd will forever be part of this boat, this crew, and this brotherhood. Though we lost him far too soon, his legacy will live on through his children and in every memory we carry of him.”

A fundraiser set up in Meadows’ name described the deckhand from Montesano, Wash., as a father to “three amazing little boys” who died “while doing what he loved — crabbing out on Alaskan waters.”

According to the Associated Press, Meadows died after he was reported to have fallen overboard around 170 miles north of Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

“He was recovered unresponsive by the crew approximately ten minutes later,” Chief Petty Officer Travis Magee, a spokesperson with the Coast Guard’s Arctic District, told the AP. The Coast Guard is investigating the incident.

Meadows was a first-year cast member of “Deadliest Catch,” the Discovery Channel reality series that follows crab fishermen navigating the perilous winds and waves of the Bering Sea during the Alaskan king crab and snow crab fishing seasons. The show debuted in 2005. No episodes from Meadows’ season has aired.

Deadline reported that the show was in production on its 22nd season when the incident occurred, with the Shelford-led Aleutian Lady being the last of the vessels still out at sea at the time. Production has subsequently concluded, per the outlet.

“We are deeply saddened by the tragic passing of Todd Meadows,” a Discovery Channel spokesperson said in a statement that has been widely circulated. “This is a devastating loss, and our hearts are with his loved ones, his crewmates, and the entire fishing community during this incredibly difficult time.”

Meadows is the latest among “Deadliest Catch” cast members who have died. Previous deaths include Phil Harris, a captain of one of the ships featured on the show, who died after suffering a stroke while filming the show’s sixth season in 2010. Todd Kochutin, a crew member of the Patricia Lee, died in 2021 from injuries he sustained while aboard the fishing vessel, according to an obituary. Other cast members have died from substance abuse or natural causes.

QatarEnergy has suspended liquefied natural gas (LNG) production following a drone attack, straining the global LNG market.

On Monday, Iranian drones struck two sites, according to Qatar’s Ministry of Defence: a water tank at a power plant in Mesaieed Industrial City and an energy facility in Ras Laffan belonging to QatarEnergy, the world’s largest LNG producer.

While no casualties were reported, QatarEnergy suspended the production of LNG and other products at the impacted sites for security reasons.

Why did QatarEnergy suspend operations?

The drone attacks hit the Ras Laffan complex, which is home to processing units for liquefied natural gas set to be exported.

The state-owned energy company was forced to declare what is known as force majeure, when a company is freed from contractual obligations in the event of extraordinary circumstances, such as a drone attack, according to Reuters and Bloomberg News, citing people familiar with the matter.

This comes at a time when intensifying sea battles between Iran and the United States, coupled with missiles flying over the region, have effectively choked the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic trade route. At least 150 vessels have dropped anchor, including those carrying LNG, in the strait and surrounding areas, according to Reuters.

Traffic in the strait for both LNG and oil has declined by 86 percent, with roughly 700 ships sitting idle on either side of the passage, according to the Anadolu news agency.

How will this impact the broader global LNG market?

Qatar’s LNG exports represent 20 percent of the global market. With fewer products reaching the market, LNG supply is down, causing prices to surge.

“Definitely an escalation overnight with pressure on energy infra in the Gulf,” said Rachel Ziemba, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank.

The countries hit the most directly are Asian markets, particularly Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

China is the world’s largest importer of natural gas, but it gets the majority of its imports from Australia, accounting for 34 percent of its imports, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Maksim Sonin, an energy expert at Stanford University’s Center for Fuels of the Future, however, said that while QatarEnergy’s decision would bring “volatility” to energy markets, he wouldn’t describe the situation as a “crisis” just yet.

“We will see near-term volatility in the LNG market, especially if infrastructure in Qatar and other hubs is damaged,” Sonin told Al Jazeera. However, he added, “I do not expect the 2022 gas crisis to repeat in Europe,” referring to the period following Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, when many European nations tried to dramatically scale back their dependence on Russian oil and gas.

Which are the world’s largest LNG exporters?

Until 2022, Russia was the world’s biggest exporter of LNG, but its sales have plummeted since its war on Ukraine began.

Now, the US is the world’s largest exporter of LNG, followed by Qatar and Australia.

Will this add pressure on Europe?

While 82 percent of QatarEnergy’s sales are to Asian countries, the halt puts increased pressure on other markets across the globe, too, particularly in Europe.

In effect, a smaller supply of gas will need to meet the same global demand. As a result, gas prices have already started soaring: Benchmark Dutch and British wholesale gas prices soared by almost 50 percent, while benchmark Asian LNG prices jumped almost 39 percent, on Monday after the QatarEnergy announcement.

“Not good if Qatar stays offline for long, of course,” said Ziemba. The only silver lining for Europe: “At least the worst of the winter in Europe may be behind,” Ziemba pointed out.

The European Union’s gas coordination group will meet on Wednesday to assess the impact of the widening conflict in the Middle East, a European Commission spokesperson told Reuters on Monday. The group includes representatives from member state governments. It monitors gas storage and security of supply in the EU, and coordinates response measures during crises.

“This is the very lifeblood of the Qatari economy.” Qatar has announced it is halting liquid natural gas (LNG) production because of Iranian attacks on key facilities. Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi explains the impact in Doha.

The benchmark European gas price, traded on the Dutch TTF hub, rose by as much as 45% to around €46 per megawatt-hour in early afternoon trading.

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UK natural gas prices also surged, with the NBP benchmark climbing sharply in tandem with continental markets.

High market volatility has driven sharp minute-by-minute swings.

The sharp increase follows US and Israeli strikes on Iran, which have heightened tensions in a region critical to global energy flows.

QatarEnergy announced early Monday afternoon that it had halted liquefied natural gas production linked to the giant North Field gas reservoir following an attack on its facilities, but gave no further details as to the extent of the impact on operations.

Strait of Hormuz disruption raises global concerns

A large proportion of the world’s energy supply comes from the Middle East, and before the announcement from Qatar, the seaborne oil and gas transport was at the centre of market fears.

The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow maritime passage largely controlled by Iran, is one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints for oil and LNG, including exports from Qatar.

Iran has moved to block traffic through the strait following the strikes, raising concerns about supply interruptions.

“In modern history, the Strait of Hormuz has never been actually closed, albeit a temporary slowing of traffic has occurred,” said Maurizio Carulli, global energy analyst at Quilter Cheviot.

He added that “about 20% of global oil supply transits through the Strait of Hormuz and 38% of seaborne crude oil trade.”

Carulli does not expect oil shipping companies to send through their vessels until “the military situation de-escalates”, due to the risk of ship damage or seizures, as well as temporary unavailability of insurance cover.

“Satellite data shows that oil tanker transit had virtually halted over the weekend, a precautionary measure by shipping companies,” he added.

Any sustained disruption could affect LNG shipments from Qatar, which supplies around 12% to 14% of Europe’s LNG imports.

Europe exposed to global competition

While Europe does not rely primarily on Qatari gas, analysts say the indirect impact could still be significant.

If supplies to Asia are disrupted, buyers there may seek alternative cargoes, increasing global competition for LNG.

This would likely push prices higher worldwide, including in Europe.

Qatar, the world’s third-largest LNG exporter after the United States and Australia, has become an increasingly important supplier to Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 forced European countries to reduce their dependence on Russian pipeline gas.

Low storage levels increase vulnerability

Europe’s relatively low gas storage levels have added to market anxiety.

Storage across the European Union is currently below 30% capacity as the winter heating season draws to a close, compared with around 40% at the same point last year.

Germany and France, the bloc’s two largest economies, are among the most vulnerable.

Germany’s gas storage facilities were 20.5% full as of Saturday, while France’s stood at 21%, according to data from Gas Infrastructure Europe.

Lower reserves leave countries more vulnerable to supply disruptions and price volatility, particularly if global LNG markets tighten further.

Qatar’s state-run energy firm says it has halted liquefied natural gas production after Iranian attacks, sending gas prices soaring in Europe, as Saudi Arabia announced it was temporarily shutting down some units of the Ras Tanura oil refinery located near the country’s eastern region after a fire broke out following a drone attack.

“Due to military attacks on QatarEnergy’s operating facilities in Ras Laffan Industrial City and Mesaieed Industrial City in the State of Qatar, QatarEnergy has ceased production of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and associated products,” the world’s largest LNG producer said in a statement on Monday.

Shortly after the announcement, natural gas prices in Europe soared by almost 50 percent.

Earlier, Qatar’s Defence Ministry said the country was attacked by two drones launched from Iran. “One drone targeted a water tank belonging to a power plant in Mesaieed, and the other targeted an energy facility in Ras Laffan Industrial City, belonging to QatarEnergy, without reporting any human casualties,” it said in a statement.

“All damages and losses resulting from the attack will be assessed by the relevant authorities, and an official statement will be issued later,” it added.

The Saudi Ministry of Defence, in reports carried by the state-run Saudi Press Agency (SPA), said two drones had “attempted to attack” the Ras Tanura refinery on Monday morning, and that a “small” fire had broken out after they were intercepted.

Footage verified by Al Jazeera showed plumes of smoke rising from the oil facility, located on Saudi Arabia’s Gulf coast. The ministry said the refinery “sustained limited damage”, but there were no casualties.

Ras Tanura oil refinery, one of the world’s largest oil processing facilities located near the eastern city of Dammam, has a capacity of 550,000 barrels per day. The facility is home to one of the largest refineries in the Middle East and is considered a cornerstone of the kingdom’s energy sector.

The attacks come as oil tankers have been piling up on either side of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and the bulk of Qatari gas flows.

The maritime disruptions and fears of a prolonged conflict have led to a sharp rise in global oil prices, which will have a significant impact on the global economy.

Iran has been launching retaliatory strikes, mainly targeting Israel and military facilities of the United States across the Middle East, after the US and Israel launched massive air strikes on the country.

In a statement published by SPA, the Saudi Ministry of Energy said some operations had been halted as a “precautionary measure” and that it did not foresee “any impact on the supply of petroleum products to local markets”.

Saudi Arabia had earlier said it would “take all necessary measures to defend its security and protect its territory, citizens, and residents, including the option of responding to the aggression” after Iran targeted the capital Riyadh and the country’s eastern region with strikes over the weekend.

The US, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates issued a joint statement on Sunday condemning Iranian attacks across the region and affirming their right to self-defence.

Rob Geist Pinfold, lecturer in defence studies at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that Iran “knows exactly what it’s doing” by attacking the Gulf countries.

“These countries have less of an appetite for a fight because, at the end of the day, this is not their war. So, Iran is banking that they will want a ceasefire as soon as possible, that they will be pressuring the Trump administration. But we have no signs of that whatsoever so far,” he said.

Pinfold added that there seems to be a “show of force” and “of unity” coming from the Gulf states, at least rhetorically.

“They’re trying to get the message across that they are one and that they are united and that they are resilient,” Pinfold said. “But under the surface, there are profound disagreements here about how to engage with Iran and whether to engage with Iran at all.”

The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.

Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.

Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.

Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.

The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”

As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)

As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.

When Dalia Stasevska heard opera music for the first time, it was a moment of profound self-revelation. She was 13, growing up in the factory town of Tampere in the south of Finland, and her school librarian gave her a CD of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” along with a translation of its Italian libretto.

“As a teenage girl, this dramatic story touched my soul,” Stasevska says, adding that she still remembers the experience and thinking, “ ‘This music understands me, this is exactly how I feel.’ And that was…when I knew that I wanted to become a musician.”

Stasevska is now chief conductor of Finland’s Lahti Symphony Orchestra and a prodigious conductor of orchestral music in all forms. A busy guest baton with companies around the globe, she will make her L.A. Opera debut this Saturday with a production of “Akhnaten” by Philip Glass, running through late March.

John Holiday in the title role of L.A. Opera’s 2026 production of “Akhnaten.”

(Cory Weaver)

The seminal work by Glass lands at L.A. Opera just a month after the world-famous composer abruptly canceled June’s world premiere of Symphony No. 15 “Lincoln” at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “While Philip Glass has pulled out of Kennedy Center, his music will be front and center at our production,” a rep for L.A. Opera wrote in an email.

Stasevska, with her razor-sharp appreciation of the power of Glass’ work, is the ideal conductor to bring it there.

Stasevska, 41, walks from the ornate foyer of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with its emerald green carpets and gleaming chandeliers, to the more ordinary hallways and cubicles of L.A. Opera’s offices. She’s been in town rehearsing for a few weeks and jokes with some of the show’s jugglers in a kitchenette, where she makes herself a machine pod coffee.

The conductor is petite with large, expressive eyes and a Cheshire cat’s smile. Her mouth often pulls to the right when she speaks, her admirable non-native English tugged easterly in a Finnish accent.

Opera remains her great love, and it seems a perfect twist of fate that Stasevska was tapped to conduct “Akhnaten.” She saw it for the first time in 2019 at a Helsinki cinema, in a global broadcast of a production by the Met. She couldn’t believe her friend dozed off.

“I was like, ‘How could you fall asleep? This was the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I would do anything to conduct this opera,’ ” she recalls saying.

Stasevska was born in 1984, the same year that Glass’ hypnotic, ritualistic opera, about an Egyptian pharaoh who dared to push monotheism onto his polytheistic culture, debuted in Stuttgart, Germany. Eight months later, Stasevska entered the world in the Soviet-controlled city of Kyiv, the child of a Ukrainian father and Finnish mother.

Conductor Dalia Stasevska, who is making her L.A. Opera debut with Philip Glass’ “Akhnaten,” says that opera is her first great love.

(David Butow / For the Times)

It was a fluke that she was born in Ukraine. Her parents, both painters, were living in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, also under Soviet rule, but found themselves in a Kyiv hospital close to family when Stasevska arrived. She’s never lived in Ukraine — she spent her first few years in Tallinn before moving to Finland at age 5— but her life has been infused with its heritage.

Her father, who as a teenager in Tallinn began to rebel against Sovietization, insisted on teaching Stasevska and her two younger brothers to speak Ukrainian at home. Her grandmother, Iryna, lived with the family and was an important caretaker for much of her childhood. Stasevska grew up hearing fantastic stories filled with dreamlike imagery of the homeland.

“She was such a civilized, cultural person,” Stasevska says of her grandmother, adding that she taught her grandkids everything she knew about her home country. That’s why, even though Stasevska was raised in Finland, she grew up eating Ukrainian food and hearing Ukrainian folk tunes. “I know the language and understand the culture,” she says.

Stasevska grew up poor, but music education was mandatory for her and her brothers: “My father said, ‘This is going to be your profession.’ It was no question that this is not a hobby. So we started practicing immediately, very determined. There was maybe some forcing involved,” she says, laughing.

She played the violin from age 8, but it was only after she heard Puccini at 13 that she fell in love with classical music. She became obsessed with the opera and orchestral repertoires and was immediately determined to play in an orchestra. She approached the headmaster at her conservatory who placed her in a string ensemble before advancing her to the symphony orchestra as a violinist.

At 18, Stasevska entered the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, which is named after Finland’s most famous composer, Jean Sibelius. She couldn’t stop herself from stealing a peek at the school conductor’s score, copying bowings and poring over the details, but she didn’t indulge any dreams of taking the podium herself. “I was going every week to the concerts,” she says, “but it took me so long to see somebody that looked like me.”

She was 20 when she saw a female conductor for the first time, calling it “the second big moment in my life.” When Stasevska expressed interest in trying it herself, she was referred to Jorma Panula, a legendary conductor and teacher in Finland. Panula invited her to attend one of his masterclasses, and on the first downbeat of her first experience conducting, “I knew immediately that this was beyond anything I’ve experienced in my life,” she says. “It became this kind of madness moment.”

She loved the sheer physicality of it, she says, but also “that I can affect the music, and that I can affect the interpretation, because I had so much in my heart that I felt about the music.”

After completing her conducting studies in 2012, Stasevska assisted Panula — who emphasized discovering unique “gestures in such a way that the orchestral musicians know what you mean,” she says. She also worked with her fellow Finn, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Stasevska became principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2019 and chief of the Lahti Symphony in 2020.

When she’s not globetrotting, Stasevska lives in Helsinki with her young daughter and her husband, Lauri Porra — a heavy metal bassist who is also the great-grandson of Sibelius.

She likes to champion new music — her 2024 album, “Dalia’s Mixtape,” featured works by Anna Meredith, Caroline Shaw and other contemporary composers. She is also a vocal supporter of the land where she was born and has spoken out against Russia’s war in Ukraine.

John Holiday as Akhnaten, with So Young Park, at right, as Queen Tye, in L.A. Opera’s 2026 production of “Akhnaten.”

(Cory Weaver)

Stasevska’s L.A. Opera debut arrives on the same week as the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion. Both of her brothers — one a film director, the other a journalist — moved to Ukraine and have borne witness to the war, which has given her “another level of experiencing this horror,” she says.

Stasevska has made it her mission to raise funds — more than 250,000 euros to date — to provide basic supplies particularly for children and elders who are without power and huddling in freezing cold homes. She has even driven in supplies herself by truck.

She has also conducted concerts there — and her next album will celebrate the country’s composers in a meaningful way. “Ukrainian Mixtape,” which she recorded with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London, features works by five composers who range from the 19th century to the 1960s. Three are premiere recordings of artists who have been completely forgotten, which required a year of searching for materials.

“I think that it will not leave anybody cold,” Staveska says, “and I hope that it will inspire everybody to discover Ukrainian music more, and that we will hear it more on main stages of the world — where it deserves to be.”

For now, though, her focus is on ancient Egypt and Philip Glass — and opera. She says her goal, in every concert, is to give audiences the same experience she had when she was 13, that remarkable feeling that the music uniquely understands them.

Feb. 24 (Asia Today) — South Korea will invest 19.8 billion won ($15 million) this year to support artificial intelligence-based content production, marking the largest government-backed funding initiative in the sector to date, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism said Monday.

The program, administered by the Korea Creative Content Agency, is designed to foster AI as a key growth engine for the content industry, offering support from early-stage development through global expansion.

Funding will be divided into three tracks – entry-level, leading-edge and collaborative – based on a company’s growth stage.

Under the entry-level track, small and medium-sized enterprises will be eligible for up to 200 million won ($150,000) per project. About 24 projects will be selected, focusing on genre convergence, extended reality and interactive content, as well as AI-based production platforms.

The leading-edge track will provide up to 700 million won ($530,000) per project for roughly 10 projects aimed at developing globally competitive AI-powered content. Officials said projects with strong overseas potential will receive priority.

The collaborative track will support partnerships between large or mid-sized companies and smaller firms, with up to 400 million won ($300,000) per project. Around 16 projects will be selected, a sharp increase from four last year.

Beyond financial aid, selected companies will receive legal, copyright and commercialization consulting, along with business matching and expert networking support.

An AI Content Festival will be held in the second half of the year to showcase supported projects and facilitate exchanges with domestic and international industry experts.

Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism said the initiative is part of broader efforts to strengthen the country’s digital content ecosystem, while Korea Creative Content Agency said it aims to help companies translate production experience into sustainable business growth.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260224010007202

Imelda Marcos’ fetish for fiendishly expensive shoes was a running gag in the 1980s. But did you know that she was also something of a disco queen?

The image of a jet-setting Marcos in her Beltrami pumps boogieing with arms dealers at fashionable New York nightspots is one of the inspirations of David Byrne’s musical about the notorious former first lady of the Philippines, who sang on the campaign trail for her husband, Ferdinand E. Marcos, and ruled with an iron fist alongside him after he declared martial law and plunged his nation into a brutal dictatorship.

“Here Lies Love,” which is having its Los Angeles premiere at the Mark Taper Forum, traces the political power couple’s rise and fall through a series of dance cuts that capture the irrational hold charismatic leaders can have on a public — at least while the music is blasting.

Byrne, the ingenious Talking Heads co-founder, conceived the show and wrote the music and lyrics. Fatboy Slim, a Grammy Award-winning DJ, musician and record producer, contributed to the music. The score, a mix of lush disco and synth pop with hints of island breezes and karaoke camp, brings a club-like energy to the stage.

Aura Mayari and the company of “Here Lies Love” at the Mark Taper Forum.

(Jeff Lorch)

I first saw “Here Lies Love” at New York’s Public Theater in 2013, when the production, directed by Alex Timbers, was staged as an immersive dance party. Audience members moved along a shifting dance floor as the love story between Imelda, a beauty queen from the provinces, and Ferdinand, an ambitious senator accustomed to getting what he wants, sourly played out amid the backdrop of a traumatic national story.

This sung-through musical pulled off something of a coup of its own. As Ferdinand, now president and philandering husband, and Imelda, his embittered wife dripping in compensatory luxury, shore up their “conjugal dictatorship,” theatergoers discovered that, while partying to the seductive beat, a political dystopia was solidifying around them.

Imagine if, in “Evita,” audience members were invited to sing back up on the balcony as Eva Perón belts out “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” accompanying her in her last manipulative hurrah. “Here Lies Love” seemed to want its audience to leave with an aftertaste of cognitive dissonance.

Audiences don’t usually like being duped. But voters need to be continually reminded that when they go to bed with a strongman, they’ll likely wake up without healthcare or voting rights.

“Here Lies Love” at the Taper doesn’t follow the Public Theater’s staging or the similarly immersive Broadway production by Timbers that followed in 2023. It’s a more straightforward presentation that keeps audience members in their seats, except for a moment when uprising is in the air and a few theatergoers are conscripted to join the ecstatic rebellion.

Jeff Lorenz Garrido, from left, Joshua Dela Cruz, and Garrick Goce Macatangay in “Here Lies Love” at the Mark Taper Forum.

(Jeff Lorch)

Snehal Desai’s direction is politically clear-eyed and scrupulous. Corruption, authoritarianism and censorship, as we’re learning firsthand, scandal after constitutional scandal, are no laughing matter. The question is whether “Here Lies Love” can bear the scrutiny of a more traditional musical.

There’s not a traditional libretto, so the story is transmitted mostly through song lyrics. But stump speeches, rallying cries and the theatrical guidance of Imeldific (Aura Mayari, alum of Season 15 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”) help flesh out the chronicle.

This emcee figure, a Taper innovation, replaces the DJ role of previous productions and establishes the show’s metatheatrical frame. The opening number, “American Troglodyte,” underscores the American imperial role in the story and provides Imdeldific with a satiric banner that doesn’t let a smiling superpower off the hook.

William Carlos Angulo’s choreography is unfailingly kinetic, but participating in a party is more energizing than watching one at a remove. Yet the political case of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, a tale of celebrity and tyranny marching in lockstep, speaks so directly to our own time that I found myself gripped by the object lesson of this public saga, even if it’s not always easy to connect all the fragments, never mind distinguish between hard fact and fictional license.

I was particularly fascinated by the portrayal of Imelda (Reanne Acasio), whose political character seems to be shaped by personal disappointments and run-of-the-mill humiliations. Imelda is wounded not only by the philandering of Ferdinand (Chris Renfro) but by an even more painful injury inflicted by her first love, Ninoy Aquino (Joshua Dela Cruz), a politician determined to become the voice of his people.

Ninoy recognizes an essential incompatibility between them. Imelda lives for love while he has political work to do. He bids her adieu in the song “Opposite Attraction,” though fate will bring them together after Imelda and her husband gain power and Ninoy, as the leading opposition figure, becomes their prisoner and eventual victim of the chaos unleashed by their regime.

Joan Almedilla and the company of “Here Lies Love” at the Mark Taper Forum.

(Jeff Lorch)

Unfolding under the theatrical auspices of Imeldific, “Here Lies Love” retells the history of the Marcos years as a musical pageant. Imelda’s transformation, from shy, lowly country girl to “Iron Butterfly,” covering up her shame with jewelry from Tiffany and revealing a will every bit as hard as the diamonds she flaunts, is presented with music so catchy and compulsive that it has the force of historical inevitability

The grooves supplied by Byrne and Slim take not just the characters but the audience on a ride through a brutal anti-democratic period. Does the disco spectacle aesthetic treat this history too lightly?

The production seems wary of this criticism. A program note from dramaturg Ely Sonny Orquiza, attuned to the sensitivities of the large Filipino diaspora in Los Angeles, notes that the production, “featuring an all-Filipino cast and majority-AAPI creative team, is not intended as a definitive or comprehensive history, but as an entry point for dialogue and inquiry.”

The scale of damage perpetrated by the regime is still being collectively processed. One victim, Estrella Cumpas (Carol Angeli), makes the mistake of confronting Imelda, a childhood friend, and is taken into custody. She will have to stand in for thousands of others.

The design scheme certainly doesn’t want to spoil anyone’s good time. Arnel Sancianco’s sets, Marcella Barbeau’s lighting and the more glittering of Jaymee Ngernwichit’s costumes seem to place us in a retro Euro-style disco world, where fun is typically a function of the strength of the cocktails consumed.

But there’s a countermovement in the show, the People Power Revolution that gains momentum after the assassination of Nimoy. The funeral speech of his mother (Joan Almedilla) is turned into the galvanizing protest song, “Just Ask the Flowers,” in which something as basic as maternal love wakes the country to the madness around them. Desai, whose directorial work at the Taper thus far has brought together rave and rebellion, smoothly merges the Dionysian frenzy of the music with the nonviolent revolution that ended Ferdinand Marcos’ protracted dictatorship in 1986.

Dela Cruz’s stirring Ninoy standing tall against the patriarchal savagery of Renfro’s Ferdinand and the petty vindictiveness of Acasio’s well-drawn Imelda is a powerful call to action. Byrne and Slim’s score insists that not even death can stop the beat of this democratic spirit.

The production points out at the end that another Marcos, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., Ferdinand and Imelda’s son, is now president. Perhaps the show’s final number can shed light: “God draws straight, but with crooked lines.”