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Thursday, December 31, 2020
Justice Dept. Asks Judge to Toss Election Lawsuit Against Pence
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New top story from Time: New Year’s Revelries Are Muted by Coronavirus as the Curtain Draws on 2020
This New Year’s Eve is being celebrated like no other in most of the world, with many bidding farewell to a year they’d prefer to forget.
From the South Pacific to New York City, pandemic restrictions on open air gatherings saw people turning to made-for-TV fireworks displays or packing it in early since they could not toast the end of 2020 in the presence of friends or carousing strangers.
As midnight rolled from Asia to the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Americas, the New Year’s experience mirrored national responses to the virus itself. Some countries and cities canceled or scaled back their festivities, while others without active outbreaks carried on like any other year.
Australia was among the first to ring in 2021. In past years, 1 million people crowded Sydney’s harbor to watch fireworks. This time, most watched on television as authorities urged residents to stay home to see the seven minutes of pyrotechnics that lit up the Sydney Harbor Bridge and its surroundings.
Melbourne, Australia’s second-most populated city, called off its annual fireworks show to discourage crowds. Officials in London made the same decision. And while the ball was set to drop in New York’s Times Square like always, police fenced off the site synonymous with New Year’s Eve.
Another of the world’s most popular places to be on December 31, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, pressed ahead with its revelry despite a surge of infections. Images of masked health care workers briefly lit up Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower, before fireworks exploded in the sky over the building. Tens of thousands of people flooded the streets and squares marked out for social distancing were largely ignored.
Still, the pandemic robbed the night of its freewheeling spirit. Authorities implemented a raft of anti-virus measures to control rowdy crowds in downtown Dubai. At luxury bars and restaurants, music blared and people drank, but dancing was strictly prohibited.
For some, the restrictions spoiled the fun.
“People come to Dubai because it’s open, but there are so many rules,” said Bashir Shehu, 50, who was visiting from Nigeria with his family. “We pray that next year we can celebrate with some real freedom.”
South Africans were urged to cancel parties and light candles to honor health workers and people who have died in the COVID-19 pandemic.
In many European countries, authorities warned they were ready to clamp down on revelers breaching public health rules, including nightly curfews in France, Italy, Turkey, Latvia, the Czech Republic, and Greece.
“No one will be on the streets after 10 p.m. (Athens) will be a dead city to make sure no more restrictions are imposed,” said Greece’s public order minister, Michalis Chrisohoidis.
France’s government flooded the streets with 100,000 law enforcement officers to enforce the nationwide curfew.
A few families gathered in Madrid’s sunny central Puerta de Sol square to listen to the rehearsal of the traditional ringing of the bells that is held at midnight. They followed the Spanish custom of eating 12 grapes with each stroke of the bells before police cleared the area that normally hosts thousands of revelers.
As the clock struck midnight, fireworks erupted over Moscow’s Red Square and the Acropolis in Athens, but the explosions echoed across largely empty streets as people obeyed orders to stay home.
From Berlin to Brussels, normally raucous celebrations were muted by the pandemic.
Even the British government, keen to celebrate the U.K.’s definitive split from the EU, ran ads imploring the public to “see in the New Year safely at home” amid a record number of newly confirmed cases.
In Scotland, which prides itself on Dec. 31 Hogmanay celebrations, the government detailed what it expected not to see.
“No gatherings, no house parties, no first-footing. Instead, we should bring in 2021 in our own homes with just our own households,” Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said.
Many around the world looked toward 2021 with hope, partly due to the arrival of vaccines that offer a chance of beating the pandemic.
“Goodbye, 2020. Here comes something better: 2021,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
While there won’t be crowds in Times Square, the mayor pledged that the city, which has recorded over 25,000 deaths from the virus, would rebound next year.
More than 1.8 million deaths worldwide have been linked to the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
Some leaders, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, used their New Year’s address to thank citizens for enduring hardship during the lockdown and critize those who defied the rules. Others, like Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella, flew the flag for science, urging citizens to discard their fears about getting immunized against COVID-19.
“Faced with an illness so highly contagious, which causes so many deaths, it’s necessary to protect one’s own health and it’s dutiful to protect those of the others – family members, friends, colleagues,’’’ said Mattarella, 79.
In Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, where official fireworks and celebrations also were canceled to limit the rapid spread of the virus, police officers braced for what promised to be a long night.
Rio officials decided to seal off Copacabana, where millions of people dressed in white usually gather on the beach to marvel at fireworks and attend large concerts. This year, between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. on Jan. 1, only local residents will be able to access the city’s iconic shore, authorities said.
In South Korea, Seoul’s city government canceled its annual New Year’s Eve bell-ringing ceremony in the Jongno neighborhood for the first time since the event was first held in 1953, months after the end of the Korean War.
New Zealand, which is two hours ahead of Sydney, and several of its South Pacific island neighbors that also have no active COVID-19 cases held their usual New Year’s activities.
In Chinese societies, the virus ensured more muted celebrations of the solar New Year, which is less widely observed than the Lunar New Year that in 2021 will fall in February. Initial reports about a mystery respiratory illness sickening people in the Chinese city of Wuhan emerged exactly a year ago.
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Jordans reported from Bonn, Germany, and Gatopoulos from Athens, Greece. AP reporters around the world contributed to this report.
Resolving to live a lot better than in 2020.
By BY CONCEPCIÓN DE LEÓN from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2WWTRIZ
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For a grieving family, 2020 cannot end soon enough.
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The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Amazon, HBO Max, Hulu and More in January
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Wednesday, December 30, 2020
Over half of Ohio’s nursing home workers are refusing to get a Covid-19 vaccine, the governor says.
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New top story from Time: British Formula One Star Lewis Hamilton Knighted in Year-End Royal Honors
LONDON — Lewis Hamilton is now a “Sir” as well as a seven-time Formula One champion.
Hamilton received a knighthood Wednesday as part of Queen Elizabeth II’s New Year’s honors list, which also recognized British performers, politicians, public servants and people outside the limelight who worked to defeat the coronavirus and its devastating impacts.
Hamilton, who secured his seventh F1 title last month to equal Michael Schumacher’s record, has said his recent success was partly inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. The 35-year-old race car driver took the knee on the grid and wore anti-racism slogans during the season.
Hamilton told the BBC last week that “it was a different drive than what I’ve had in me in the past, to get to the end of those races first so that I could utilize that platform” against racism.
Supporters have suggested Hamilton would have been knighted sooner if not for his tax status. Hamilton’s knighthood was awarded in the “overseas” section of the honors list because he lives in low-tax Monaco.
His tax affairs made news in 2017 when the Paradise Papers leak showed he avoided paying more than $4 million in taxes on a private jet registered in the Isle of Man, a tax haven.
Motorsport U.K. Chairman David Richards said Hamilton’s tax status had been “totally misunderstood” and that the racing champion was among the 5,000 highest taxpayers in the U.K.
In other honors, veteran comic actress Sheila Hancock was made a dame, the female equivalent of a knight, in recognition of her six-decade career. Acclaimed makeup artist Pat McGrath, dubbed the “most influential makeup artist in the world” by Vogue, also received a damehood.
There was a knighthood for cinematographer Roger Deakins, a 15-time Academy Award nominee who has won Oscars for “Blade Runner 2049” and “1917.”
Actress Lesley Manville, an Oscar nominee for “Phantom Thread,” was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, or CBE. Actor Toby Jones, whose credits include voicing the character of Dobby in two “Harry Potter” movies, was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire or OBE, as was writer Jed Mercurio, creator of the TV detective series “Line of Duty.”
Veteran footballers Jimmy Greaves and Ron Flowers were made Members of the Order of the British Empire, or MBEs, after a long-running campaign to ensure every surviving member of the team that won England the 1966 World Cup receives an honor.
The queen’s honors are awarded twice a year, in late December and in June, when the monarch’s birthday is observed. The awards acknowledge hundreds of people for services to community or British national life. Recipients are selected by committees of civil servants from nominations made by the government and the public.
Greta Westwood, chief executive of nursing charity the Florence Nightingale Foundation, received a CBE for her work highlighting the mental-health toll of the pandemic on front-line workers. Others honored for their work during the pandemic include research scientists, statistical modelers, engineers and onesie manufacturer Katherine Dawson, who received an OBE for making scrubs for medics when supplies were short.
In descending order, the main honors are knighthoods, CBE, OBE and Member of the Order of the British Empire, or MBE. Knights are addressed as “sir” or “dame,” followed by their name. Recipients of the other honors have no title, but they can put the letters after their names.
There is growing criticism of the honors’ evocation of the British Empire, the legacy of which has been debated anew amid campaigns against racism and colonialism around the world.
The education spokeswoman for the opposition Labour Party, Kate Green, who has an OBE, recently called the titles of the honors “offensive and divisive.”
The British government said there are no plans to change the titles.
New top story from Time: California Has the Second Confirmed Case of the Coronavirus Variant in the U.S.
California on Wednesday announced the nation’s second confirmed case of the new and apparently more contagious variant of the coronavirus, offering a strong indication that the infection is spreading more widely in the United States.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the infection found in Southern California during an online conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“I don’t think Californians should think that this is odd. It’s to be expected,” Fauci said.
Newsom did not provide any details about the person who was infected.
The announcement came 24 hours after word of the first reported U.S. variant infection, which emerged in Colorado. That person was identified Wednesday as a Colorado National Guardsman who had been sent to help out at a nursing home struggling with an outbreak. Health officials said a second Guard member may have it too.
The cases triggered a host of questions about how the version circulating in England arrived in the U.S. and whether it is too late to stop it now, with top experts saying it is probably already spreading elsewhere in the United States.
“The virus is becoming more fit, and we’re like a deer in the headlights,” warned Dr. Eric Topol, head of Scripps Research Translational Institute. He noted that the U.S. does far less genetic sequencing of virus samples to discover variants than other developed nations, and thus was probably slow to detect this new mutation.
The two Guard members had been dispatched Dec. 23 to work at the Good Samaritan Society nursing home in the small town of Simla, in a mostly rural area about 90 miles outside Denver, said Dr. Rachel Herlihy, state epidemiologist. They were among six Guard members sent to the home.
Nasal swab samples taken from the two as part of the Guard’s routine coronavirus testing were sent to the state laboratory, which began looking for the variant after its spread was announced in Britain earlier this month, Herlihy said. Samples from staff and residents at the nursing home are also being screened for the variant at the lab, but so far no evidence of it has been found, she said.
The Colorado case announced Tuesday involves a man in his 20s who had not traveled recently, officials said. He has mild symptoms and is isolating at his home near Denver, while the person with the suspected case is isolating at a Colorado hotel while further genetic analysis is done on his sample, officials said.
The nursing home said it is working closely with the state and is also looking forward to beginning vaccinations next week.
Several states, including California, Massachusetts and Delaware, are also analyzing suspicious virus samples for the variant, said Dr. Greg Armstrong, who directs genetic sequencing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said the CDC is working with a national lab that gets samples from around the country to broaden that search, with results expected within days.
The discovery in Colorado has added urgency to the nation’s vaccination drive against COVID-19, which has killed more than 340,000 people in the U.S.
Britain is seeing infections soar and hospitalizations climb to their highest levels on record. The variant has also been found in several other countries.
Scientists have found no evidence that it is more lethal or causes more severe illness, and they believe the vaccines now being dispensed will be effective against it. But a faster-spreading virus could swamp hospitals with seriously ill patients.
The discovery overseas led the CDC to issue rules on Christmas Day requiring travelers arriving from Britain to show proof of a negative COVID-19 test. But U.S. health officials said the Colorado patient’s lack of travel history suggests the new variant is already spreading in this country.
Topol said it is too late for travel bans.
“We’re behind in finding it. Colorado is likely one of many places it’s landed here,” he said. “It’s all over the place. How can you ban travel from everywhere?”
Colorado public health officials are conducting contact tracing to determine its spread.
Researchers estimate the variant is 50% to 70% more contagious, said Dr. Eric France, Colorado’s chief medical officer.
“Instead of only making two or three other people sick, you might actually spread it to four or five people,” France said. “That means we’ll have more cases in our communities. Those number of cases will rise quickly and, of course, with more cases come more hospitalizations.”
London and southeast England were placed under strict lockdown measures earlier this month because of the variant, and dozens of countries banned flights from Britain. France also briefly barred trucks from Britain before allowing them back in, provided the drivers got tested for the virus.
New versions of the virus have been seen almost since it was first detected in China a year ago. It is common for viruses to undergo minor changes as they reproduce and move through a population. The fear is that mutations at some point will become significant enough to defeat the vaccines.
South Africa has also discovered a highly contagious COVID-19 variant that is driving the country’s latest spike of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
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Johnson reported from Washington state.
New York will allow in-person fans at Buffalo Bills home playoff game.
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After Breonna Taylor Case, Louisville Police Face Precarious Next Chapter
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New top story from Time: How the Ratatouille Musical Went From TikTok Sensation to All-Star Broadway Production
The chef’s hats were never going to arrive at the actors’ houses on time. In early December, Seaview Productions announced that they would transform a viral TikTok phenomenon into Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, a professional production featuring veteran performers like Wayne Brady and Tituss Burgess, in just under a month. Musicals, even virtual ones, typically take months, if not years, to produce. And with the holidays looming, Seaview couldn’t ship microphones, green screens or tiny rat ears to the cast in time to record their scenes.
“Our costume consultant, Tilly Grimes, looked through the actors’ closets over video chat,” says producer Greg Nobile, who produced Jeremy O. Harris’ Tony-nominated Slave Play and the Jake Gyllenhaal starrer Sea Wall/A Life. “We just asked, ‘Do you have gray?’ ‘Do you have makeup so you can put whiskers on your face?’ ‘Can you make those mittens look like rat’s feet?’ The point was to really lean into the aesthetic of TikTok which is totally frenetic and DIY.”
Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, which audiences will be able to stream through TodayTix on Jan. 1 for anywhere from $5 to $50 to benefit the Actors Fund, represents a merger between two stratified creative spheres: The New York establishment and digital upstarts. As theaters closed around the world this spring due to COVID-19, professionals and theater kids alike turned to TikTok as a creative outlet. The Gen Z-centric social media platform, which lets users create one-minute videos, proved a more accessible arena than the Great White Way.
@e_jaccs A love ballad #remy #rat #ratatoille #disney #wdw #disneyworld #ratlove #ratlife #rats #Alphets #StanleyCup #CanYouWorkIt
It started when Emily Jacobsen, a 26-year-old schoolteacher from Hartsdale, N.Y., posted a squeaky-voiced a capella ode to Pixar character Remy the Rat to TikTok in October. The ballad, which Jacobsen composed while cleaning her apartment, went viral. Other users employed the platform’s “duet” feature to add new background music or melodies, choreograph dances, and build panoramas of a moving stage. One even designed a fake Playbill. “TikTok is uniquely suited for collaborations,” says RJ Christian, a 21-year-old New York University student and composer. “A video can be re-contextualized and repurposed and passed around, die and come back to life in a different way.” TikTok had laid out all the pieces for a Ratatouille musical. Someone just had to put them together.
@danieljmertzlufft Remy: The Musical OG Song @e_jaccs add. Vocals @cjaskier #remy #ratatouille #musicaltheatre #broadway #singer #musical #disney #fyp #disneymusicals
One of the West End’s most promising young directors, Lucy Moss, 26—who will become the youngest woman ever to direct a Broadway show when Six, her smash hit pop musical about the Tudor queens, migrates from London to New York next year—stepped up. She will stitch together 10 songs adapted from TikTok creations and two new numbers written by the show’s music director Daniel Mertzlufft, who has previously written music for The Late Late Show with James Cordon. The formidable cast and crew includes Adam Lambert, Tony-winner André De Shields, Ashley Park from Emily in Paris and Dear Evan Hanson’s Andrew Barth Feldman, as well as a choir and a 20-piece all-female, primarily-POC orchestra called the Broadway Symphonetta. Moss describes the first-ever TikTok musical as “a Zoom reading that drank 20 Red Bulls.” Here’s how it all came together.
@siswij The #ratatouillemusical marketing department is brainstorming visuals #playbill #musicaltheatre #remytheratatouille #photoshop #graphicdesign
Anyone Can Cook
Ratatouille wasn’t obvious source material for a 2020 viral hit. The movie came out 13 years ago. And even then, the story of a plucky young rat who dreams of becoming a Michelin-star chef wasn’t a guaranteed success. Rats in a kitchen are a tough sell, even if they’re animated to be fluffy and adorable. The movie earned the adoration of film critics for its heartwarming story and foodies for its fidelity to the restaurant kitchen experience. (Thomas Keller served as a consultant on the film, and Anthony Bourdain declared it the best movie ever made about the food world.) Still, in the history of Pixar content, franchises like Toy Story and existential dramas like Inside Out tend to overshadow Ratatouille.
But the film debuted in 2007, just when Gen Z was at peak Disney content consumption. Ratatouille holds a nostalgic sway over the same generation that’s now addicted to TikTok. The story has also found a foothold this year among a new crop of home cooks whose ranks have been growing over the course of the pandemic. At the beginning of quarantine, people stuck at home began producing cooking videos on TikTok—sometimes beautiful montages, sometimes ironically staged videos of kitchen mishaps—to the tune of “Le Festin” from the movie’s soundtrack.
@evankaplump POV youre remy the RAT #FYP #foodporn #pasta #ratatoullie #chef #ragu
And its themes have resonated specifically with the theater kid subsection of TikTok. “To be honest, when I saw it as a kid, I wasn’t a big fan,” says Jacobsen. “It was only as an adult when the story’s themes about creativity and collaboration really began to click for me.”
Remi the Rat is gifted with a perfect palette, but his family is content to nibble on garbage. Worse still, whenever he enters a restaurant kitchen in his hometown of Paris, cooks leap onto their stations screaming “rat!” The culinary world seems utterly inaccessible to him simply because of his station in life. He eventually teams up with Linguini, a hopeless line cook in desperate need of Remi’s direction. Remi crawls under Linguini’s chef’s hat and puppeteers him to great fame.
Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, who run a Brooklyn-based theater company called Fake Friends and made a splash with their critically-acclaimed virtual production of their play Circle Jerk this fall, co-wrote the book for Ratatouille: The Musical. They connect Remi’s struggle to that of young creatives trying to earn fame on TikTok. “It’s a great marriage of form and content,” Breslin says. “Ratatouille is about a young chef or artist who wants to make a name for himself in the world and only has a few tools to do that. But he has a great amount of ambition and talent and succeeds in the face of the establishment. He forges a new path, which makes a lot of sense with what’s going on with TikTok right now.”
@shoeboxmusicals Drafting out some set ideas! REMY: The Ratatouille Musical! #ratatouillethemusical #stagemodel #setdesign #lightingdesign #HolidayCountdown #setmodel
“You Only Need One Good Idea”
Jacobsen, a die-hard Disney fan, read obsessively about the new attractions planned for the company’s theme parks, including a Ratatouille ride. She dreamed of wandering through a crowd once again and sitting next to strangers on a rollercoaster. Caught up in that flight of fancy, she began to write: “Remy, the Ratatouille, the rat of all my dreams / I praise you, oh Ratatouille, may the world remember your name.”
Composer Mertzlufft had come to TikTok for distraction too. He first created his account back in February but rarely opened the app until the pandemic hit. “Those first few days of quarantine, all the news was just so bad everywhere,” he says. “I would open Facebook, and it would be upsetting. I would open Twitter, and it would be upsetting. I found TikTok was the only place where I could actually find some escapism and not think about how terrible the world is for a little bit.” After finding Internet fame composing Avatar the Last Airbender: The TikTok Musical and Grocery Store: The Musical for TikTok, Mertzlufft ran across Jacobsen’s song. He gave it “the full Broadway treatment,” adding an orchestration and what sounded like a choir to accompany Jacobsen’s song: In fact, it was just Mertzlufft and his friend recorded 15 times over.
Other songs written for various scenes and characters in the movie flooded the platform, including several from Christian, the NYU student, who initially started creating content for TikTok in hopes of pulling himself out of a pandemic-induced rut. He felt that because there was a one-minute limit on the videos, creations for TikTok were low stakes. “For full length songs, for them to be good, you need about three good ideas,” he says. “But with a TikTok song, you really only need one.”
As his following grew into the tens of thousands, he began to invest more time and effort into his songs, particularly a series of ballads he wrote for the imagined Ratatouille musical. Christian would sing in character, wielding pots and pans if he was playing one of the chefs or donning a scarf to mimic the pretentious food critic from the film Anton Ego: “Creators I really admire started following me back, and I was like, oh hello! And the songs started succeeding outside of TikTok. At that point, I started calling myself a TikTok creator.”
@rjthecomposer Anton Ego’s chilling solo, when he is served the title dish #ratatouille #ratatouillemusical
In the two-and-a-half months since Jacobsen, Mertzlufft, and Christian posted their Ratatouille videos, more than 250 million people have engaged with Ratatouille Musical content on TikTok. That caught the attention of Broadway. With theaters closed and the Tony Awards postponed, Jeremy O. Harris was biding his time by falling down the rabbit hole of theater TikTok when he saw the viral “Ratatousical” and alerted Nobile. Nobile jumped on it, recruiting all three creators and dozens more professionals and young TikTok content creators to all collaborate on the production.
Now New York and London theater veterans have largely taken over the work of creating a cohesive performance from the disparate contributions on TikTok, but Jacobsen says Seaview has been in constant consultation with her and the original creators to make sure the play stays true to their original vision. In the meantime, the TikTok creators have started up a group chat to keep one another updated on the musical’s progress and toss around various rat-related puns. “Honestly I was surprised Disney gave the greenlight,” says Jacobsen. “Everything has gone way better than I could have ever imagined. I’ve left most of the work to the true professionals but you may see me pop up in a few surprise special ways.”
@brandon.hardy.art YES I’ve got ideas for the Ratatouiile Musical! #Ratatouille #RatatouilleTheMusical #RatatouilleMusical #Puppetry #FYP @ratatouillemusical
Recording Scenes With a Stuffed Rat
Disney has a storied history on Broadway. Adaptations of movies like The Lion King, Frozen and Aladdin make billions of dollars in ticket sales, even more than the original films earn in cinemas. The company drove the “Disney-fication” of Times Square, spurring the transformation of the once seedy neighborhood into a technicolor tourist trap, for better or worse. Nobile , who works outside the Disney machine, believed that transforming an already-popular TikTok musical into a real production, would be an obvious win: The show would have a built-in audience of hundreds of millions of people.
Nobile has long worried that Broadway will become hamstrung by its own financial and geographical restrictions: The audience is limited, and so is the talent pool. “How do we make radical inclusion more sustainable? Our office has been working on how to develop new audiences and how to find new creative voices beyond just the students at Juilliard,” he says. “A viral musical on TikTok was doing both without even trying.”
He called up Thomas Schumacher, the longtime head of Disney Theatrical, for permission to put on a performance if Disney didn’t have anything in the works. “From my vantage point, we’re in this horrible moment when Broadway has been shut down longer than it ever has in the course of history,” Nobile says, “and we need to be innovative about the ways we create on the other side of this.” Disney has historically been precious about its IP, but Schumacher gave his blessing.
@jessierosso shout out to all my music assistants/copyists/transcribers 😩 #ratatouillemusical #broadway #musicaltheatre #copyist #transcriber #musicassistant
Nobile immediately called Breslin and Foley who, coming off Circle Jerk, were better equipped than most playwrights to navigate the virtual stage. One week later, they sent him a treatment of the material which turned into the musical’s book. Mertzlufft, who is acting as music supervisor, was writing background music for dialogue he hadn’t seen yet. Within two weeks of Seaview’s announcement, an orchestra was recording in various studios. “I would argue that’s the fastest a Broadway-quality show has ever been put together,” says Mertzlufft. He was up until 3 a.m. on Christmas morning with the orchestrator, music director and mixer for the production, mixing the sound over a Zoom call. They sent the final edition of the finale song—a mashup that brings all the undercurrents from songs throughout the show—to Jacobsen soon after. “I don’t know if it’s exhaustion or joy or both, but the tears started rolling when I heard all these different disparate pieces coming together,” she says.
Casting went quickly given how few productions there are to occupy actors’ time. The play will be live-action, and the actors recorded their performances in isolation in their homes. Andrew Barth Feldman, who has been told all his life he “looks like that guy from Ratatouille,” will play the role of Linguini to Titus Burgess’ Remy. It can be unsettling to film scenes alone.
“I actually have this Remy stuffed animal that I must have bought when I was a kid on a trip to Disney World in 2007 or 2008,” says Barth Feldman. “I was having trouble connecting with the dialogue, so I put him on the ground and delivered the whole scene to him.”
@fozzyforman108 @danieljmertzlufft @e_jaccs @ratatouillemusical My contribution to #ratatouillemusical ft. Mister #evanhansen #musicals #broadway #dearevanhansen
Moss, who lives in England, works until odd hours of the night to communicate with her largely American-based team and pull all these disparate parts together into a cohesive piece of art. The process has been one of trial and error. “We spent loads of time coming up with zany ways to solve the perspective problem,” says Moss, referring the a conundrum that has puzzled TikTok and old Broadway hats alike. Ratatouille the movie stars a rat-sized rat and human-sized human. On the stage, it’s difficult to imagine how to convey that scale, especially considering Remi spends much of the movie under Linguini’s chef’s hat. Moss and her team considered some of the suggestions offered up by TikTok’s creatives: puppets, multi-level stages with rats above and humans below, gigantic props that could be carried on the stage whenever the story shifted to Remi’s perspective. “And after all that we realized that we didn’t have time to film on a stage and besides a bit of camera angle stuff, we don’t really have to deal with that problem,” Moss says.
Fans shouldn’t get their hopes up for Ratatouille to find its way to an actual stage once the pandemic is over. Disney and Seaview have made it abundantly clear that this is a one-time project designed to raise enough money to keep Broadway afloat during the COVID-19 crisis. Disney has no plans to officially adapt it. Perhaps it would be too challenging to create a musical from a narrative film rather than one with songs already built-in, like Frozen. Maybe the irony of showcasing singing rats in the middle of Times Square doesn’t fit with the Disney brand.
@tristanmichaelmcintyre cookin’ up some choreo for #ratatouillemusical 👨🍳 @rawalton4 @ratatouillemusical #foryoupage #fyp
But TikTok musicals may still have a place on Broadway. Nobile, a powerful Broadway producer, considers this musical a new pipeline of talent. “We’re now in conversations with a 17-year-old artist in Colorado who is writing songs for this and a young girl in New Zealand who is working on the production—people we probably never would have been able to find otherwise,” he says. “Now we have the opportunity to ask them, ‘What else do you want to make? How can we do stuff together beyond this?’”
And while Moss herself will have her hands full when Broadway reopens and her musical Six bids for a Tony. But she and the others working on Ratatouille: The Musical don’t think that the end of the pandemic means the end of Broadway’s collaboration with TikTok. “Just from conversations I have been having in the last month, some producers are getting excited by the idea of a TikTok musical because it creates its own audience in a sense,” says Moss. “People have a stake in it and want to see it happen.”
Critics Say Nashville Police Could Have Done More With Tip About Bomber
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The Small Colorado Town Shrugged Off the Pandemic. Then Came the Coronavirus Variant.
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A Dallas-Fort Worth air traffic control center was closed for disinfection, and big flight delays soon followed.
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Closing of Air Traffic Control Center for Virus Cleaning Halts Flights in Dallas
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The Bomb That Struck the Heart of Nashville
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Life went on as it always had in Simla, Colo., until the virus came to town. And then the variant.
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‘No Realistic Path’ for Quick Vote on $2,000 Stimulus Checks, McConnell Says
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To get young students back in classrooms, California plans to offer a financial incentive to districts to reopen.
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This New Year’s Eve, Times Square Will Be Filled With Hope. But Not People.
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Death Transformed a Year, and What May Lie Ahead
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Rita Houston, WFUV D.J. Who Lifted Music Careers, Dies at 59
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Stimulus, Virus Variant, Georgia: Your Wednesday Evening Briefing
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Tuesday, December 29, 2020
Chicago Blackhawks’ Jonathan Toews Is Out Indefinitely Because of Illness
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New top story from Time: Justice Department Declines to Charge Officer Who Killed 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice
(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department announced Tuesday that it would not bring federal criminal charges against two Cleveland police officers in the 2014 killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, saying video of the shooting was of too poor a quality for prosecutors to conclusively establish what had happened.
In closing the case, the department brought to an end a long-running investigation into a high-profile shooting that helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement and that became part of the national dialogue about police use of force against minorities, including children. The decision, revealed in a lengthy statement, does not condone the officers’ actions but rather says the cumulative evidence was not enough to support a federal criminal civil rights prosecution.
Tamir was playing with a pellet gun outside a recreation center in Cleveland on Nov. 22, 2014, when he was shot and killed by Officer Timothy Loehmann, who is white, seconds after Loehmann and his partner, Officer Frank Garmback, arrived at the scene. The officers were called to the recreation center after a man drinking beer and waiting for a bus had called 911 to report that a “guy” was pointing a gun at people. The caller told a 911 dispatcher that it was probably a juvenile and the gun might be “fake,” though that information was never relayed to the officers.
To bring federal civil rights charges in cases like these, the Justice Department must prove that an officer’s actions willfully broke the law rather than being the result of a mistake, negligence or bad judgment. It has been a consistently tough burden for federal prosecutors to meet across both Democratic and Republican administrations, with the Justice Department declining criminal charges against police officers in other high-profile cases in recent years, including in the deaths of Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
In a statement, Subodh Chandra, an attorney for the boy’s family, said the Justice Department’s “process was tainted” and the family has demanded prosecutors provide additional information about recommendations made during the probe.
“It’s beyond comprehension that the Department couldn’t recognize that an officer who claims he shouted commands when the patrol car’s window was closed and it was a winter day is lying,” Chandra said. “The Rice family has been cheated of a fair process yet again.”
In this case, the Justice Department said poor-quality surveillance video recorded in the area where the shooting took place prevented prosecutors from being able to conclusively determine whether Rice was or was not reaching for his toy gun just prior to being shot. The two officers who were investigated told authorities soon after the shooting that Rice was reaching for his toy weapon prior to being shot and was given multiple commands to show his hands.
But the video reviewed by federal prosecutors makes the sequence of events less clear. The grainy time-lapse video, which has no audio, “does not show detail or perspective” and the camera’s view is obstructed by a police patrol car, prosecutors said. In addition, they said, though the positioning of the boy’s arms suggests they were in the vicinity of his waist, “his hands are not visible in the video and it cannot be determined from the video what he was doing.”
The Justice Department says seven use-of-force experts — three retained by the family, four by local authorities — reviewed the recording, but the poor quality of the video on which they relied and their “conflicting opinions added little to the case.” The experts used by the family said the shooting was unreasonable while the four others said that it was reasonable.
The New York Times reported in October that the department had effectively shut down the investigation, but Tuesday’s announcement makes it official.
Inconsistent witness statements also complicated any prosecution, and neither person said they saw exactly what Rice was doing just before the shooting, according to the Justice Department.
In a statement at the scene to three other law enforcement officers, Loehmann “repeatedly and consistently stated” that Tamir was reaching for a gun before he shot him, prosecutors said.
Both Loehmann and Garmback also said in statements after the shooting that Loehmann had given Tamir “multiple commands to show his hands before shooting” and both officers saw him reaching for the weapon. Prosecutors said Loehmann and Garmback were the only two witnesses in the “near vicinity of the shooting.”
A state grand jury had declined to indict Loehmann, though he was later fired after it was discovered he was previously deemed “unfit for duty.”
The Justice Department also investigated whether the officers obstructed justice in statements they made to other investigators soon after the shooting. Prosecutors concluded that though the statements included some different language, they were generally consistent. And since there was not enough evidence to prove the statements were untrue, there was also not enough evidence to prove that the officers sought to misled investigators or to obstruct a probe into their actions.
__
Associated Press writer Mark Gillispie in Cleveland contributed to this report.
New top story from Time: Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Release First Podcast to Cap 2020
(LOS ANGELES) — The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have dropped their first podcast.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and guests from Elton John to their son, Archie, appear on the royal couple’s first audio release Tuesday for Spotify, a 34-minute special featuring reflections on 2020.
The couple who stepped down from their royal duties in spring invited friends and people they admire to record audio diaries that were excerpted for the show.
“It’s been a year, and we really we want to honor the compassion and kindness that has helped so many people get through it,” the Duke of Sussex says to introduce the podcast.
“And, at the same time, to honor those who’ve experienced uncertainty and unthinkable loss,” the Duchess of Sussex adds.
John, 73, was among the many musical artists who was in the middle of a tour when the pandemic struck. “All of the sudden we ground to a halt,” he says in his audio diary.
Other contributors include tennis player Naomi Osaka, who won the U.S. Open in 2020 and calls it “the year that I became more grateful for the things and the people around me.”
Stacey Abrams, whose push for voter registration helped put Georgia at the political center of the United States, calls 2020 a year that “saw horror and meanness surge, and justice fight back.”
Despite the coronavirus pandemic dominating headlines, Meghan and Harry managed to make major news at the end of March when they stepped down from their royal duties and soon moved to California, settling in the coastal community of Montecito.
Tuesday’s podcast is their first under a multi-year deal between their production company Archewell Audio and Spotify.
With some coaching from his parents, 1-year old Archie ends the podcast with a “Happy new year!”
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