Latest news with #TheBigReveal
Business Upturn
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Business Upturn
Inside Taylor Swift's new album ‘The Life of a Showgirl': Everything you need to know
Taylor Swift has once again set the music world ablaze with the announcement of her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl , slated for release in October 2025. Revealed during a teaser for Travis and Jason Kelce's New Heights podcast on August 12, 2025, this highly anticipated project marks Swift's first new release since The Tortured Poets Department in April 2024. Here's everything you need to know about The Life of a Showgirl. The Big Reveal: How Taylor Swift Announced 'The Life of a Showgirl' Taylor Swift chose a personal and exciting platform to announce The Life of a Showgirl —her boyfriend Travis Kelce's podcast, New Heights . In a clip released at 12:12 a.m. ET on August 12, 2025, Swift unveiled the album title while sitting alongside Travis and his brother Jason Kelce. She dramatically pulled a vinyl from a mint green briefcase, though the cover art was blurred, keeping fans guessing about the album's aesthetic. The announcement coincided with a countdown on Swift's website, which expired at the same time, featuring an orange glitter background that hinted at the album's color scheme. The New Heights episode, set to air on August 13, 2025, at 7 p.m. ET, promises further details, including potential insights into the album's themes and release date. Swift's strategic reveal, paired with cryptic social media posts from her team and the podcast, sent fans into a frenzy, with many noting the significance of the number 12 (her 12th album, announced on August 12 at 12:12). Release Date and Pre-Order Details While the official release date for The Life of a Showgirl is yet to be confirmed, Swift's website states that pre-orders will ship before October 13, 2025, suggesting a fall release, with some reports pinpointing October 13 as the likely date. The album is available for pre-order in multiple formats, including: Portofino Orange Glitter Vinyl : A translucent orange vinyl with gold glitter, aligning with the album's speculated orange theme. CD with Double-Sided Poster : Featuring a 19' x 9.5' poster, with unique CD design details to be revealed later. Cassette: A nostalgic option for fans. The album artwork and track listing remain under wraps, with Swift's website promising more details soon. Fans can pre-order through the official Taylor Swift store, though the site experienced crashes due to overwhelming demand following the announcement. Production and Creative Team The Life of a Showgirl is being crafted at Electric Lady Studios in New York, where Swift was spotted multiple times in 2024. The album is produced by Swift's longtime collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, with Swedish conductor Erik Arvinder also contributing. Arvinder, known for his violin arrangements for artists like The Weeknd and Ariana Grande, hints at orchestral elements, potentially featuring prominent violin parts in at least one track. This project follows The Tortured Poets Department , which polarized critics but achieved massive commercial success, debuting with 2.6 million units sold and spending 15 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. With Swift now owning the masters of her entire catalog, including her first six albums acquired from Shamrock Capital in May 2025, The Life of a Showgirl represents a new chapter of creative control for the artist. Ahmedabad Plane Crash
San Francisco Chronicle
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Sasha Velour's ‘Big Reveal' redraws the boundaries of drag and theater
Other performers might dread glitches during shows. Sasha Velour makes them her co-stars. Her 'The Big Reveal Live Show!' offers no straightforward lip sync. Phone rings, TV static and vertical colored bars, smashed dishes, recording skips, computer viruses and flickering lights constantly interrupt her drag numbers, video art, autobiographical anecdotes and mini lectures on drag history and theory. But if these on-purpose mistakes rip the fabric of the mostly solo show, which opened Wednesday, June 4, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the 'RuPaul's Drag Race' champion, author and Berkeley native widens them into wormholes and crawls inside to do battle with them. As she tries to claw back control of her bit, she might wind up on the floor in tears, but she's the winner all the same. It's partly a clown show: the garish makeup, the padded body parts, the nightmarish facial expressions, the wordless physical theater fight against absurdist forces too large to understand. But in all those gaffes, larger ideas are also at work. Imperfection is key to understanding drag and camp more generally, Velour says at one point. The art form doesn't work if you don't have self-awareness — if you don't understand your flaws but 'press on' anyway. (The implied corollary: Someone like Trump couldn't do camp even if he wanted to.) In a tough time for theater locally and nationwide, with companies scaling back or closing as funding sources dwindle, 'The Big Reveal Live Show!' suggests that institutional theater programming more drag might be one way forward. Audience members certainly showed up on Wednesday, some even glammed up in drag as opposed to the standard Berkeley Rep audience uniform of earth tones and sensible shoes. And Velour's show itself is more daring, artistic and intellectual than a lot of straight plays. Some of her patter — 'After so many years of backlash,' 'Drag serves as a mirror,' 'We are here, and we are not going away' — is boilerplate; the points might be more effectively made without didacticism. But other bits of monologue evince the scholarly yet frisky understanding of drag that undergirds her book, also called 'The Big Reveal,' with the subtitle 'An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag.' 'Queerness isn't shocking or groundbreaking at all,' she says in the show. 'It's normal. It's boring.' Cultures throughout history have had some kind of drag performance, she points out — even the American military in World War II. It only becomes threatening, she says, when it's no longer performed by straight men. Her costumes — by Diego Montoya Studio, Pierretta Viktori, Jazzmint Dash, Gloria Swansong and Casey Caldwell — are celestial wonders. One skirt hem resembles the orbit of the sometime-planet Pluto, both elliptical and noncoplanar, forming part of an outfit that looks like a bottle of pink Champagne frozen right in the moment of exploding. Another piece blurs the boundary between human and furniture. In one heart-stopping moment, she lines herself up with an outline of a human form projected on a large screen behind her. Without any perceptible change in lighting, she seems to change color, blazing in the gold of a desert sunset. Graffiti gets written on her, and ropes wrap around her; body parts metamorphose and enlarge. Your eyes search for signs as to what's projected and what's tangible. She dissolves in flames. By the end, you half expect her to be able to step through the screen and get swallowed whole, the wormholes covering their tracks like magic. As Velour finds the deviant in the familiar — talk shows, Disney princesses having animal friends, audio montages of iconic phone calls in film, the pixelated desktop of 1990s-era Windows — she makes the case that drag is available to everyone, no matter how weird or normie you are. That thing that tickles you? That you find yourself returning to again and again? Drag is a way you can talk about it, and it belongs on every stage and in every sitting room in America.
