Marc Malkin-Senior Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone will not be attending the closing night of this year’s Outfest LA, where they were set to receive the James Schamus Ally Award. The couple was expected to be on hand for the July 23 event at The Montalbán Theatre in Hollywood, but their rep tells Variety that will not make an appearance due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. “We understand that Melissa and Ben are unable to join us for our closing night due to the strike,” Outfest executive director Damien S. Navarro said in a statement Thursday afternoon. “We will miss them, as our closing night will be a wonderful celebration of our community.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Bethenny Frankel says reality stars should take a page out of the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes and unionize. She says she believes reality stars should be earning residual-like payments when their series become hits and are replayed by networks and streamers across multiple platforms. Frankel shot to fame on the original “Real Housewives of New York.” She says she was paid $7,250 for the first season, but has never received any compensation based on the show’s massive success. She has a starred in a variety of reality series since “RHONY,” including “Bethenny Getting Married,” “Bethenny and Frederick” and “Bethenny Every After.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Sabrina Wu’s family and friends didn’t really comprehend that they were starring in the raunchy comedy “Joy Ride” alongside Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu and Sherry Colauntil until the movie hit theaters. Before then, the stand-up comic’s only Hollywood job was as a writer on Disney+’s “Doogie Kameāloha, M.D.” “I remember calling my dad and telling him I got the part,” Wu tells me. “This is verbatim what he said: ‘Sabrina, I can’t wait to show you my new car.’ It went right over his head because it was too bizarre.” Like their character Deadeye, the 25-year-old Wu uses “they/them” pronouns. They asked that Deadeye not have a big coming-out scene about their gender identity. “I definitely begged them to do it that way because I don’t think this R-rated comedy needed a moment where I’m like, ‘Hey, guys, I’m nonbinary.’ The level of care that kind of scene needs is not one that is for this genre,” Wu recalls.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Darren Criss will host and perform at the MPTF’s 2023 NextGen Summer Party on Aug. 6. MPTF NextGen Board also announced Tuesday that the host committee for the evening includes Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Camilla Belle, Matt Bomer, Yvette Nicole Brown, Sherry Cola, Lana Condor, Colman Domingo, Janina Gavankar, Jason George, Max Greenfield, Harvey Guillén, Olivia Holt, Glen Powell, Harry Shum Jr., Michael Rooker, Reid Scott and Tiffany Smith. “MPTF has proven time and time again that they are a necessary and invaluable resource to those in our industry. With the ongoing strikes and subsequent production shutdowns impacting so many, the services that MPTF provides are even more critical,” NextGen co-chair Jeffrey R. Epstein said in statement. “Funds raised during the Summer Party will help those who are directly affected as we weather these challenging times.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Salma Hayek Pinault, François-Henri Pinault, Zoë Kravitz, Cindy Sherman, Christy Turlington Burns, Olivia Wilde, Oprah Winfrey and Malala Yousafza will co-chair The Kering Foundation’s second annual Caring for Women Dinner. This year’s event, taking place Sept. 12 at The Pool in New York City, will benefit the Malala Fund, National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) and New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault. Journalist Lisa Ling will host the evening, which will include guests representing Kering’s fashion houses, including Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Brioni, and Pomellato, as wells Christie’s, Ginori 1735, Cartier, Caruso, Hearst and the Neiman Marcus Group.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor SAG-AFTRA held an informational meeting for about 500 people over Zoom on Monday afternoon. Among those who signed on were actors Lupita Nyong’o, Vanessa Kirby, Melissa McCarthy, Vanessa Hudgens, Lucy Liu,  Laverne Cox, Michael Stuhlbarg, Paul Walter Hauser, Jon Huertas and Josh Pence, according to a source. CAA’s Bryan Lourd, Faith France and Ryan Abboushi also attended, as did UTA’s Kristen Saig and Kris Heller of APA Agency. Publicists included Mara Buxbaum, Jill Fritzo, Luke Windsor, Brianna Smith and Cheryl Maisel. The meeting was led by SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. The guild shared a one-sheet of talking points for participants. Among the bulleted items on revenue sharing, health care and retirement, online casting platforms and artificial intelligence, the memo states, “Without a transformative change in SAG-AFTRA’s current contract with the AMPTP, the acting profession will no longer be an option for future generations of performers, and actors already working in the industry will need to pursue other careers in order to survive.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Disney didn’t let the SAG-AFTRA strike get in the way of its “Haunted Mansion” world premiere. None of the stars of the movie were expected to be in attendance, including LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Chase W. Dillon, Daniel Levy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Hasan Minhaj, Marilu Henner and Lindsay Lamb all observing the SAG-AFTRA strike. The studio still rolled out the red carpet at Disneyland in Anaheim Saturday night. Director Justin Simien told Variety he was “sad” his cast couldn’t attend, but understands why and supports the actors walkout. Later in, he gave a shoutout to the cast while introducing the movie.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor The SAG-AFTRA strike didn’t officially start until just after midnight on Friday, but Amandla Stenberg skipped the opening night of Outfest L.A. on Thursday in support of the movement. The star of the upcoming “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte” was expected to be on hand to receive the Platinum Maverick Award from the LGBTQ film festival, but Jacqueline Castel, director of the actor’s new indie, “The Animal,” accepted it on her behalf. “Amandla is deeply honored and would love to be here to celebrate with you, but she cannot be here today due to her support of the actors strike,” Castel said.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor It’s good to know that Ben Platt and Molly Gordon’s failed childhood romance didn’t keep them from remaining life-long friends. The actors star in “Theater Camp,” a mockumentary about a performing arts summer camp co-directed by Gordon and Nick Lieberman. Said romance bloomed when Platt and Gordon were just 7 years old. “I gave her this charm bracelet as I-guess-we’re-going-to-date-now,” Platt remembers during an appearance on this week’s “Just for Variety” podcast. “She freaked out and told her mom, ‘I’m not ready,’ so I gave it to a different girl. Instead, I gave Molly a picture frame with a picture of me and Molly in it because I was like, ‘Here’s a friendship thing.’ Then she was devastated.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Universal is hoping the possible SAG-AFTRA strike doesn’t get in the way of the London premiere of “Oppenheimer” on Thursday evening. Variety has learned the studio is rolling out the red carpet an hour earlier than originally planned — moving from 5:45 p.m. to 4:45 p.m. local time — with the hope that the 60 minutes will allow the cast, which includes stars like Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr. Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh, to pose for photos and participate in interviews without going against SAG-AFTRA strike rules. Though the negotiations deadline comes on midnight Wednesday, the SAG-AFTRA board would still have to meet on Thursday to vote and confirm the call for the strike. Universal execs believe such an event may not happen before the premiere takes place.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Ashley Graham is looking back at her life as a Barbie doll. No, the supermodel isn’t in Greta Gerwig’s new “Barbie” movie, but Mattel made a doll in her likeness in 2016. “The first things that came to mind were thick thighs, lower belly fat, round arms [and] cellulite,” Graham recalls requesting of the toy company on this week’s episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast. “And I got to do everything except for the cellulite. … Maybe it was too hard to figure out how to do that with the computer.” But Graham was very happy with the final product: “It wasn’t like, ‘Hi, Curvy Barbie.’ It was just Barbie.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Nicole Avantwill release her memoir, “Think You’ll Be Happy: Moving Through Grief With Grit, Grace, and Gratitude,” in October, Variety can exclusively reveal. In the book, the philanthropist, filmmaker and diplomat writes candidly about coming to terms with the tragic death of her mother, Jacqueline, who was fatally shot during a robbery at her Beverly Hills home in 2021. “Getting out there and being creative helps me a lot,” Avant says. “I am grieving and I am crying and I am angry and I’m furious at what has happened — there is no denying that. But I’m going to put one foot forward because the greatest thing I can do for my mom is live my life. The greatest way to honor her soul is to live my life to the fullest.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Disney’s red carpet premiere for “Haunted Mansion,” held on July 15 at Disneyland, will take place even if there is a SAG-AFTRA strike. If the actors guild does call a strike, the premiere will pivot to a “fan event,” according to a source. It is the first major world premiere set to take place after the strike deadline. The stars of the movie, including LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Chase W. Dillon, Daniel Levy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Hasan Minhaj, Marilu Henner and Lindsay Lamb, would no longer be able to take part in the festivities in the case of a strike.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Lisa Vanderpump has left the building, as the reality show matriarch’s iconic West Hollywood restaurant Pump closed its doors after 10 years on July 5. “It was purely a business decision,” Vanderpump told me in May, shortly after announcing Pump was closing. “With rents being $80,000 a month now, there’s just no way. That’s why we walked away from Villa Blanca and didn’t renew that lease, too.” She also said that she’s not looking to relocate and open Pump somewhere else in Los Angeles. “I’m opening two more with Caesars Place [in Las Vegas], so that’s very exciting,” Vanderpump said. “I have two already that are going gangbusters. I have TomTom. I have Sur.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Recently engaged couple Ben Platt and Noah Galvin are reacting to Friday’s Supreme Court ruling that favors a Colorado web designer refusing to make a wedding website for LGBTQ couples because she is against same-sex marriage. “I think it’s a distraction from things that are actually important, like the planet melting,” Platt told me Friday morning during an interview for on an upcoming episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast. “I also think it’s the people who are losing clout, it’s like the last rageful fiery, ‘This is not how it should be!’ before they go away forever. “It’s my only hope. That’s the only way to stay any kind of optimistic about it because otherwise it’s just fully going back in time and harming people for no reason,” he continued. “It feels so backwards, so directly backwards.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor SPOILER ALERT: This story includes minor spoilers for the upcoming R-rated comedy, “Joy Ride.” Stephanie Hsu wants people to know that her big naked reveal in “Joy Ride” is hilarious, but it’s not her. “It’s a body double. Let me be clear and let my mother know,” the Oscar-nominated actor told me Monday at the film’s Los Angeles premiere. “Joy Ride” is a raunchy R-rated comedy that stars Ashley Park as Audrey, a high-powered attorney who travels to China on business. Joining her on the trip are friends Lolo (Sherry Cola) and Deadeye (Sabrina Wu). Hsu plays Audrey’s college friend, Kat, who is now a Chinese soap opera star. The four find themselves in various bonker scenarios that include drugs, sex and even basketball star Baron Davis.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Jennifer Lawrence may be an Oscar-winning actor, but she hasn’t let all that fame and fortune go to her head. “You immediately forget she’s a movie star when you meet her,” says Laura Benanti, who appears opposite Lawrence in the new R-rated comedy “No Hard Feelings.” “She’s so down to earth.” Lawrence stars in “No Hard Feelings” as an Uber driver who agrees to date a wealthy couple’s (Benanti and Matthew Broderick) socially awkward 19-year-old son (Andrew Barth Feldman) in exchange for a car. “Sure, at first I was nervous because it’s like, ‘How are you so beautiful?’” Benanti said of Lawrence. “But then I was immediately laughing with her. She’s so funny, silly and a hard worker. She’s not a princess. She is comfortable being uncomfortable.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Kevin Aviance never saw his career resurgence coming. The drag superstar singer of New York’s club scene in the ’80s and ’90s reemerged almost a year ago when Beyoncé sampled his 1996 dance hit, “Cunty,” on “Pure/Honey,” the fifteenth track on her album “Renaissance.” “Life is like upside down, turned around, flip it around back, and then back it up again right-side up,” Aviance says. “It’s been amazing.” Since being Beyoncé-certified, Aviance signed with a new management company and has had a steady flow of offers to perform and deejay. Aviance, who turned 55 on Thursday, said this new phase of his career hits differently than the success he had so many decades ago.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor SPOILER ALERT: This story contains descriptions of specific scenes in “No Hard Feelings,” in theaters now. In “No Hard Feelings,” Jennifer Lawrence plays a 32-year-old Uber driver in the Hamptons whose car has been repossessed because she failed to pay her property taxes. She ends up answering a Craigslist ad posted by a wealthy couple (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick), offering a car in return for a woman to date their socially awkward 19-year-old son (Andrew Barth Feldman) to prepare him for college life. The movie is a raunchy R-rated comedy that sees Lawrence’s character, Maddie, fully naked on a beach.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Avid car collector Robert Downey Jr. isn’t sure how many cars he actually owns. “About 20,” the Marvel actor said at the Los Angeles premiere of his new Max series, “Downey’s Dream Cars. “The fact that I don’t know the exact number speaks to the fact that I need to convert more of my cars.” “Downey’s Dream Cars” chronicles a team of auto experts who convert traditional gas-powered cars into electric vehicles. The program was inspired by RDJ’s Footprint Coalition, his 4-year-old environmental organization that works to mitigate climate change.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor While “The Bear” captures the grittiness and intensity of working in a restaurant kitchen, it doesn’t shy away from showcasing the dreamy stares of Jeremy Allen White and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. “They both have insane eyes,” Ayo Edebiri, who plays Sydney on the hit FX series, told me Wednesday at a tastemaker screening of Searchlight Pictures’ upcoming comedy “Theater Camp.” “Ebon once told me, ‘I could turn them on.’ And I’m like, ‘No, you can’t.’ And he was like, ‘I know how to face the light in a certain way that will turn them on’. I was like, ‘You literally sound insane,’ but then he turned them on in front of me. It was the craziest thing I had ever witnessed.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor When Shea Whigham signed on for “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” he was sure he’d learn that some of Tom Cruise’s death-defying stunt work involved “smoke and mirrors.” How wrong he was. “He does everything himself. He really does,” Whigham told me at the “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” premiere. Whigham had to get in on the action too – although nothing was as drastic as Cruise’s already iconic motorcycle drive off a mountain in Iceland. “I do all my own driving in it,” he said. “There’s no stunt driving. We went hard in Rome. We also chased Tom on foot a lot in Venice. I pulled muscles left and right. I’m still recovering.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor As if Pride Month couldn’t get any gayer, “And Just Like That” Season 2 and Kim Cattrall’s new Netflix series, “Glamorous,” are premiering on the same day, June 22. “Isn’t that incredible?” says Cattrall’s co-star, actor and musician Miss Benny. “That is the gay stuff that I love. I’m excited for our show. I’m excited for that show. I’m excited for the spectacle of it all.” In “Glamorous,” Miss Benny plays Marco, a gender-nonconforming wannabe influencer who lands a job working for a beauty mogul (Cattrall). Miss Benny says Cattrall signed on to “Glamorous” after watching a clip of them playing a “sexual, raunchy and queer” character on “American Horror Stories.” “That blows my mind because I did that whole part saying, ‘What if I do it with a little bit of Samantha?’” they say. “I mimic her portrayal of Samantha a lot in my campier work.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Rose Byrne is getting ready to say goodbye to “Physical,” as the series ends with its upcoming third season. “It’s all very bittersweet,” she says on this week’s episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast. Byrne stars on the Apple TV+ show as Sheila Rubin, an aerobics entrepreneur in the 1980s whose business is booming just as her marriage is falling apart and she secretly suffers from an eating disorder. “It’s challenging,” Byrne said in depicting the illness on a dark comedy. “I did a lot of research. I spoke to people in recovery. I spoke to a wonderful young woman who worked in an ED recovery center who was every day with people in recovery and all of the behaviors.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone have boarded “Relighting Candles: The Tim Sullivan Story” as executive producers. The documentary short, co-directed by Zeberiah Newman (“Unexpected”) and Michiel Thomas (“Game Face”), is a portrait of West Hollywood candlemaker Tim Sullivan. It chronicles the 82-year-old Bronx native’s journey coming out as a gay man, how he got sober more than 40 years ago and his tradition of hiring homeless and newly sober people at his company, Timothy Jay Candles. McCarthy and Falcone tell me in a statement, “Once we heard the lovely story of Tim Sullivan and began to understand how many people he’s helped in his life through the making of beautiful candles, we realized these filmmakers were telling exactly the kind of story we want to help get out into the world.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Bel Powley stars in the National Geographic series “A Small Light” as Miep Gies, the woman who helped hide Otto Frank and his family during WWII. During a reception for the show Thursday at the San Vicente Bungalows in West Hollywood, the actor recalled being on set when she first heard about Kanye West’s antisemitic comments in October 2022. “We were filming the show when all of the Kanye stuff was happening,” Powley told me. “I was obviously living in the world of the show, which has a lot of Nazi rhetoric because we’re making a show about the Nazi occupation in 1942, but then suddenly seeing and hearing that same rhetoric spoken now by a world-famous celebrity with huge influence was so freaky and unsettling and saddening.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor The new Max dating series “Swiping America,” from “We’re Here” creators Stephen Warren and Johnnie Ingram, follows a diverse group of New Yorkers who try dating in other cities throughout the U.S. “The beautiful thing about this show is we are the most inclusive, nonjudgmental dating show out there,” Warren told me Tuesday night at the show’s premiere at NeueHouse in Hollywood. “We have queer people, lesbians, we have trans, we have nonbinary. There are no judgments because love is love.” Calling the show a “rom-doc,” Ingram explained during his intro to the screening that “Swiping America” is not a competition show and “is not about manufactured drama.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Eva Longoria jokes that she’s taking an extended vacation to get some rest after her whirlwind promotion of “Flamin’ Hot,” her feature film directorial debut. “I am going to sleep for about three months,” Longoria told me Thursday morning. “When I come up for air, I hopefully will know what I’m doing next.” Joking aside, she said, “I will tell you it’s been very difficult. I’ve been sent many scripts already. I’ve been reading so much, but there’s nothing so far that has sparked in me the intense passion that I had for telling this particular story. “I was asking my agent, ‘Do I have to feel this way about every story I want to direct? Because I haven’t felt it yet,'” Longoria continued. “He said that should be the bar.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor In Jennifer Coolidge’s Variety Actors on Actors conversation with Jeremy Allen White, she proposes that Tanya return to “The White Lotus” as a seagull, so she can poke out the eyes of her evil husband Greg (Jon Gries). Haley Lu Richardson, who played Tanya’s assistant, Portia, weighs in on killing off Greg during this week’s “Just for Variety” podcast. “Jon and I worked together in the first movie I ever did — when I was 17 — called ‘The Last Survivors,’” she recalls, adding, “I was the hero and he was the villain. I killed him at the end of the movie with a samurai sword.” She says she’d like to re-create that moment in Season 3 of “The White Lotus,” which takes place in Thailand. “Portia is somewhere in Asia with a samurai sword and kills Greg,” she says, laughing.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Amy Pascal will never forget the world premiere of the first “Spider-Man” movie in 2002. She was the head of Sony at the time, and was so worried that the film wouldn’t succeed she “spent the entire time in the ladies’ room crying,” Pascal recalled at the “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” premiere in Los Angeles. “I sure did,” she continued. “I was terrified. “How do you know? You never know!” But, she said, her fears disappeared on opening day: “It was one of the greatest days of my life.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor I’m on the phone with J. Harrison Ghee when they walk into their dressing room at the Shubert Theatre before Tuesday night’s performance of “Some Like It Hot.” It’s their first show since winning the Tony about 48 hours earlier, taking home the prize for leading actor in a musical for their work as Jerry/Daphne.  “Oh, my God,” Ghee says. “There are a lot of flowers here.” Then they sigh and choke up. “I can’t believe this,” says Ghee, who identifies as nonbinary. “Flowers from Billy Porter!” The card reads, “Welcome to the club, bitch.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Jennifer Lawrence is ready to play the girl on fire again. The Oscar winner says she is open to returning to the “Hunger Games” franchise after she became a household name for her work as Katniss in the four movies. “Oh, my God – totally!” Lawrence told me Friday morning during a Zoom video interview while promoting her new coming-of-age comedy, “No Hard Feelings.” “If Katniss ever could ever come back into my life, 100 percent.” Looking off camera, she added, “My producing partner just clutched her heart.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Leslie Grace has a very personal reason for deciding to become what she calls an “ambassador” for “Translators,” a new documentary short about bilingual Latino children in the U.S. who become translators for their Spanish-speaking parents. “I’m first generation Dominican American,” the “In the Heights” star tells me. “My grandmother relied on her kids — my mom and her siblings — and then her grandkids. It’s a very common thing when I see my grandmother that my sister or I or my cousins, we take turns sharing the mail and translating for her.” The doc, directed by Emmy winner Rudy Valdez, highlights several families in which the children help navigate their parents’ lives, from explaining bills that need to be paid to the tremendous worry of having to translate proper medical care for their siblings. “I’m really excited for people that haven’t had this experience to be able to witness it through the doc,” Grace says. “Also there may be some assumptions and misconceptions that you might have about someone who doesn’t speak a language or even speaks English with an accent.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Laura Benanti has left Amazon’s upcoming TV adaptation of “Cruel Intentions.” The Tony-winner was set to appear in the recurring guest star role of Caroline’s (Sarah Catherine Hook) mother, Claudia. “Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict, I’m no longer able to participate in ‘Cruel Intentions,’” Benanti told me Thursday afternoon. “I’m sure they’ll find a wonderful actress to play this role.” Benanti co-stars in the upcoming “No Hard Feelings,” the raunchy coming-of-age movie headlined by Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman. She’s also currently sharing the stage with Matthew Broderick in an off-Broadway production of A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters.”

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Spotify has announced its plans for Cannes Lions, the world’s largest celebration of the advertising and creative communications industry. Running June 19-22, Spotify Beach will include masterclasses with appearances by Emma Chamberlain, “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper and soccer star Cesc Fàbregas. Daily programming will also include sound bath meditation sessions, an immersive Songs of Summer soundscape, a Football Club Barcelona play zone, a coffee and juice bar and a custom sunglasses gifting station. The full calendar of events is below.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor ‘Shucked’ co-composer Brandy Clark says the ultimate goal of the Tony-nominated musical is to provide audiences with pure joy. Mixed in is also a big serving of queer representation. “I always think it’s hard to hate something that you know and love, and it’s a lot easier to hate something that’s just an idea or something you’ve heard about that you should be scared of,” Clark told me during a phone conversation from the Drama Desk Awards in New York City, where she and co-composer Shane McAnally were presented with the award for outstanding music. “So I think if you walk out of ‘Shucked’ with any hate in your heart, I don’t know if I can help you. You’re probably a descendant of Hitler.”