‘American Star’ Review: Armed and Vacationing

Joe Locke was so moved when he saw “Next to Normal” at the Donmar Warehouse in London last fall that he called his agent with a request. “I was like, ‘I want to do a musical so bad,’” said Locke, 20, who for two seasons has played the sensitive teenager Charlie Spring in Netflix’s L.G.B.T.Q….

The New York Public Library’s grand research library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street is home to Virginia Woolf’s walking stick, Charles Dickens’s desk chair and the original Winnie-the-Pooh. But one evening last week, a crowd in one of the library’s elegant public rooms was milling around a goofier treasure: an Abraham Lincoln-themed pie safe….

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” a young Langston Hughes proclaimed in an essay nearly 100 years ago. “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.” Seeking to establish his autonomy as a Black writer, he…

To watch the singer-rapper Lil Nas X in the documentary “Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero” is to witness a Black queer man embody a power that still feels very new. Directed by Carlos López Estrada (“Raya and the Last Dragon”) and Zac Manuel, this film, streaming on Max, is historically important given its subject’s…

Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega fight pheromones and cliché in this eye-rolling duel between a teacher and his student.

He earned his fifth Grammy, for best classical crossover album, for “Hornsmoke” (1998), which includes his “Horse Opera for Brass Quintet,” Piano Concerto No. 2 and other serious compositions. Mr. Schickele’s classical recordings also include Quartet No. 1, “American Dreams,” by the Audubon Quartet; “Schickele on a Lark,” by the Lark Quartet; and “The American…