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Business Upturn
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Business Upturn
The Gilded Age season 3 premiere recap: Everything we know so far
HBO's The Gilded Age is back, and Season 3 is already stirring up drama in 1880s New York. Julian Fellowes's show about wealth, power, and scandal has fans buzzing with its mix of fancy costumes and messy family fights. The new season started airing on June 22, 2025, and here's everything you need to know about what's going down with the Russells, van Rhijns, and more. When and Where to Watch The Gilded Age Season 3 The third season hit HBO and Max on June 22, 2025, at 9 p.m. ET/PT. You'll get eight episodes total, dropping every Sunday, with the big finale set for August 10, 2025. If you're itching to see it early, the first episode screened at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 12, 2025, with the cast and Fellowes spilling some tea afterward. Want to catch up? Seasons 1 and 2 are streaming on Max, and Season 3 episodes are there too, ready for your weekend binge. What's the Story This Time? Season 3 picks up right after Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) won the Opera War in Season 2, snagging the Duke of Buckingham for her Metropolitan Opera opening. The show's all about the 1880s, a time when money and status ruled New York, but nobody got to the top without some serious sacrifices. Bertha's chasing an even bigger win to cement her family's spot in high society, while her husband, George (Morgan Spector), is betting it all on a wild plan to build a railroad from Chicago to Los Angeles. He's out in Arizona trying to buy mines in Morenci, but the local miners aren't making it easy, and it could cost him big. Over at the van Rhijn house, things are tense. Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) is not thrilled that her sister Ada Forte (Cynthia Nixon) is calling the shots now, thanks to a surprise inheritance. Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) and Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) are sneaking around, falling for each other behind everyone's backs. Meanwhile, Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) is catching feelings for Dr. William Kirkland (Jordan Donica), but his snooty family isn't exactly rolling out the welcome mat for a Black journalist. The season's got some heavy stuff too, like divorce—super scandalous back then. Aurora Fane's husband, Charles, wants out of their marriage, and there's talk it might be because he's hiding who he really is. Plus, expect some dark twists, like a freak accident and a violent moment that shakes things up. Who's in the Cast? The main crew is back: Carrie Coon as the fierce Bertha, Morgan Spector as George, Christine Baranski as the sharp-tongued Agnes, and Cynthia Nixon as the newly empowered Ada. Louisa Jacobson keeps Marian's story moving, and Denée Benton's Peggy is getting more to do this season. You'll also see Taissa Farmiga as Gladys Russell, Harry Richardson as Larry, Blake Ritson as Oscar van Rhijn, and Donna Murphy as the queen of society, Mrs. Astor. New faces are shaking things up. Phylicia Rashad plays Elizabeth Kirkland, a tough Newport socialite, with Brian Stokes Mitchell as her preacher husband, Frederick. Their son, Dr. William Kirkland (Jordan Donica), is Peggy's new love interest. Victoria Clark joins as Joan Carlton, an old-money type, and you've got Merritt Wever as Bertha's sister Monica O'Brien, plus Bill Camp as J.P. Morgan himself. Other newcomers like Leslie Uggams, Lisagay Hamilton, and Andrea Martin add more spice to the mix. Episode 1 Recap The season kicks off far from New York's fancy ballrooms, in dusty Morenci, Arizona. George is trying to lock down those mines for his railroad dream, but the miners want a union, and he's not having it. Back home, the van Rhijn house is a mess. Ada's leaning into the temperance movement after losing her husband, Luke, and Agnes is grumpy about playing second fiddle. Peggy gets sick with pneumonia, and a racist doctor refuses to help her, which hits hard and forces her family to step in. At the Russells', Bertha's pushing Gladys to marry the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb), but Gladys is sneaking off with Billy Carlton (Matt Walker) instead. When Bertha finds out, it's fireworks. Marian and Larry are keeping their romance quiet, but it's getting serious. Larry also ditches his business partner Jack on a clock project, which stirs up trouble. The episode sets up a season that's not afraid to get gritty while still delivering the glitz. Ahmedabad Plane Crash


San Francisco Chronicle
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Baritone Brian Mulligan on coming out with San Francisco Opera in style and song
For two decades, baritone Brian Mulligan has performed on many of the world's great stages, but his heart belongs to San Francisco. Now, in a full-circle moment, the internationally acclaimed singer returns to make history as one of the featured soloists in San Francisco Opera's first-ever Pride Concert, set for Friday, June 27, at the War Memorial Opera House. 'San Francisco Opera is unquestionably the most important opera company in my life,' Mulligan, 46, told the Chronicle by phone from his native town of Endicott in upstate New York. 'They have taken chances on me and given me opportunities that no place else in the world has done. I consider it my home opera company.' While the baritone snagged his first professional role at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 2003 when still a student at the Juilliard School, he's truly come into his own in San Francisco. Since making his debut at the War Memorial in 2008's ' La Bohème,' he's appeared there nearly two dozen times, singing everything from the title characters in ' Sweeney Todd ' and ' Nixon in China ' to a series of Wagner roles (mostly recently Telramund in 2023's ' Lohengrin '). He is set to return in October to sing the role of Amfortas in a new production of Wagner's 'Parsifal.' 'I've had so many firsts in San Francisco,' he recalled fondly, listing his first major Verdi role as Count Anckarström in 2014's 'Un Ballo in Maschera' among them. 'It's incredible to go back and see people, faces who know me and have helped me over the years to deliver performance after performance.' For the Pride Concert, Mulligan is slated to be joined by a few other San Francisco Opera favorites, mezzo-sopranos Jamie Barton and Nikola Printz, for a program featuring tunes by Harold Arlen and Jerry Herman, among others, as well as operatic fare by Tchaikovsky and Camille Saint-Saëns. Music Director Eun Sun Kim will share conducting duties with Robert Mollicone, while drag queen Sapphira Cristál serves as emcee. Mulligan spoke to the Chronicle about Pride and his passion for the Opera ahead of the upcoming concert. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Q: On the cusp of the city's 55th Pride Celebration, the San Francisco Opera is presenting its very first Pride Concert. What does that milestone mean to you? There was a long time (when) I felt my sexuality was a liability as an opera singer. Because almost all of the roles I play are straight people, being gay isn't exactly a good calling card. (But) over the years, I've proven myself as an actor. That's what being an opera singer is all about — portraying somebody else. Q: You've said that one of the reasons you leaned into opera growing up was because you were gay. Could you please elaborate on that? A: I started taking voice lessons when I was 17, and at that age, I didn't know or understand my sexuality. I knew that I was different, and (by) taking a step toward opera, which was also different, I was establishing my otherness — because most people don't know or understand anything about opera. Q: Fast-forward a few decades to this upcoming Pride Concert. Among the tunes you're preparing to sing are 'You Take My Breath Away,' Freddie Mercury's 1976 hit with Queen, as well as the aria 'I love you, dear' from Tchaikovsky's 'The Queen of Spades.' Did you make the selections? A: I had a hand in choosing the songs, but they were largely suggested by (the company). They explained that they were trying to highlight gay composers, iconic gay moments in opera and theater. (As) with any kind of recital program, it's about the order that you sing the pieces in. I'm starting with the Tchaikovsky; that will be most technically challenging because it's opera. After that, we'll move to the standard stuff. Q: Your 2022 solo CD, 'Alburnum,' features works by Mason Bates, Missy Mazzoli and Gregory Spears. You've also sung in contemporary operas, including John Adams' 'Nixon in China.' What is your attraction to new music? A: I often say to people, 'The greatest music may not have been composed yet.' There's a lot of phenomenal music that's been composed, but I have to believe that there's music that we don't know about yet. I really believe that one of the biggest draws for me in performing contemporary music is (that) often, it's written in English. I communicate best in English because it can (sometimes) be a struggle in other languages. No matter how good I get at German, French or Italian, I'm most powerful as a communicator in English. Q: As is the case with most successful opera singers today, your travel schedule is something akin to a rock star's. In the last few weeks, you were in Leipzig, Germany, before which you made your debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Where do you go to rejuvenate, and how do you keep it together on the road? A: Because I'm working more than 85% of the year, a few years ago I moved back to upstate New York, where my entire immediate and extended family lives — and I actually get to see them. So I come home to the absolute country. It's quiet. This morning, I opened the windows and I could hear all of the birds. It's incredible. I love living here. I have a small Norwich Terrier, Beauregard, who just turned 7, but he's still a puppy in many ways. He has a European passport, and he's been traveling with me everywhere — except Asia or the U.K. — since he was a baby, so he's completely used to it. I've found now that my life is centered around him, and wherever I go, I make sure it's near a place that's beautiful where we can walk. … He's improved my life, and since I need to (rest my voice) when I'm not performing, it's all silence with him. A: It's funny because I was thinking maybe I should wear some kind of glittery, sparkly, crazy Pride thing. But as time went on and I thought about it, Pride is actually more about being yourself and just owning who you are, and who I am is a simple tux kind of guy. I'm wearing a black tux with pink accessories — a pink tux shirt for part of the show and a pink pocket square.


Boston Globe
21-06-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Nathan Silver, who chronicled a vanished New York, dies at 89
'By 1963, it seemed urgent to make some sort of plea for architectural preservation in New York City,' he wrote. 'It had been announced that Pennsylvania Station would be razed, a final solution seemed likely for the 39th Street Metropolitan Opera' -- it was destroyed in 1967 -- 'and the commercial buildings of Worth Street were being pounded into landfill for a parking lot.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up He added, 'While cities must adapt if they are to remain responsive to the needs and wishes of their inhabitants, they need not change in a heedless and suicidal fashion.' Advertisement He found images in archives of 'first-rate architecture' that no longer existed, including a post office near City Hall; Madison Square Garden, at Madison Avenue and 26th Street; art collector Richard Canfield's gambling house, on 44th Street near Fifth Avenue; the 47-story Singer Tower, at Broadway and Liberty Street; the Produce Exchange, at Beaver Street and Bowling Green; and the Ziegfeld Theater, at 54th Street and Sixth Avenue. Advertisement A haunting photo of the interior of Penn Station adorns the book's cover. 'The book was a cri de coeur about the losses the city was experiencing,' Anthony C. Wood, the founder of the nonprofit New York Preservation Archive Project, said in an interview. 'It gave comfort to those trying to push back against that, and provided solace to people who cared about preservation and opened the eyes of a wider public.' The city passed the landmarks preservation law in 1965. But, Wood said, 'Out of the gate, it was tentatively administered; it wasn't like once the law passed, preservation was unleashed.' Roberta Brandes Gratz, a journalist who was a member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission from 2003 to 2010, wrote in an email that Silver's book 'added pressure on the relatively new Landmarks Commission to act.' By the time the book was published, Silver had left for Britain to teach architecture at the University of Cambridge. He remained in Britain for the rest of his career. 'Lost New York,' which Silver said sold more than 100,000 copies, was a finalist for the National Book Award in history and biography in 1968. Silver was also a Guggenheim fellow in architecture, planning and design that year. Silver expanded and updated his book in 2000 to include his pantheon of preservation villains: A.J. Greenough, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 'who wantonly engineered' Penn Station's destruction; Anthony A. Bliss, who took the Metropolitan Opera from 39th Street and Broadway to its new home at Lincoln Center in 1966, which 'ensured smithereens for the old building'; and Robert Moses, New York's midcentury planning czar, 'for his recurrent terminations of any place he autonomously decided upon.' Advertisement In 2014, when Silver made a rare trip to New York City, David Dunlap of The New York Times wrote that Silver believed landmarks 'were vessels of human history,' adding, 'How a building was used, and by whom, were almost as important to him as what the structure looked like.' Nathan Silver was born on March 11, 1936, in Manhattan and grew up in the borough's Inwood section and in the Bronx. His father, Isaac, taught mechanical drawing at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and was also an architect. His mother, Libby (Nachimowsky) Silver, taught Hebrew school when her three children were young, then became a public-school teacher. Silver, a fan of opera and theater, originally wanted to be a set designer. But he could not find an academic program in that specialty, so he chose to study architecture -- first at the Cooper Union, where he earned a certificate in 1955, and then at Columbia University, graduating in 1958 with a bachelor's degree. After traveling through Europe on a fellowship, he worked at the architecture firm Kramer & Kramer, where he helped design a new location for the Argosy Book Store in Manhattan in 1963. Janet Malcolm of The New Yorker wrote in 2014 that the store had been transformed 'into a room of great charm, a vision of cultivation and gentility as filtered through a mid-20th-century aesthetic.' In 1961, he started teaching at Columbia, where he mounted the exhibition that would become 'Lost New York.' 'He was surprised by the number and quality of buildings that had been torn down and pretty much forgotten,' his brother said. Advertisement He began lecturing at Cambridge in 1965 and earned a master's degree there a year later. He was a partner in a large architectural firm and also ran his own practice; headed the architecture department at the University of East London; edited the newsletter of the Westminster Society, a conservation advocacy group in London; and was the architecture critic of The New Statesman magazine. He also wrote a book about the Pompidou Center in Paris, and another, about improvisation in architecture and other fields, with his fellow architect Charles Jencks. And he designed renovations to the Seven Stars, a 17th-century pub in London owned by his wife, Roxy Beaujolais. In addition to his brother, she survives him, as do a daughter, Liberty Silver, and a son, Gabriel Silver, from his marriage to Helen McNeil-Ashton, which ended in divorce; and four grandchildren. His first marriage, to Caroline Green, also ended in divorce. ( This article originally appeared in


New York Times
21-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
Nathan Silver, Who Chronicled a Vanished New York, Dies at 89
Nathan Silver, an architect whose elegiac 1967 book, 'Lost New York,' offered a history lesson about the many buildings that were demolished before the city passed a landmarks preservation law that might have offered protection from the wrecking ball, died on May 19 in London. He was 89. His brother, Robert, who is also an architect, said that he died in a hospital after a fall and subsequent surgery to repair a torn knee ligament. Mr. Silver's book — an outgrowth of an exhibition that he curated in 1964 while he was teaching at Columbia University's architecture school — was an indispensable photographic guide to what had vanished over many decades. It was published as the city's long-percolating preservation movement was working to prevent other worthy structures from being destroyed. 'By 1963, it seemed urgent to make some sort of plea for architectural preservation in New York City,' he wrote. 'It had been announced that Pennsylvania Station would be razed, a final solution seemed likely for the 39th Street Metropolitan Opera' — it was destroyed in 1967 — 'and the commercial buildings of Worth Street were being pounded into landfill for a parking lot.' He added, 'While cities must adapt if they are to remain responsive to the needs and wishes of their inhabitants, they need not change in a heedless and suicidal fashion.' He found images in archives of 'first-rate architecture' that no longer existed, including a post office near City Hall; Madison Square Garden, at Madison Avenue and 26th Street; the art collector Richard Canfield's gambling house, on 44th Street near Fifth Avenue; the 47-story Singer Tower, at Broadway and Liberty Street; the Produce Exchange, at Beaver Street and Bowling Green; and the Ziegfeld Theater, at 54th Street and Sixth Avenue. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'The Gilded Age' Season 3 premiere: Release date, trailer, new cast members and how to watch. Plus, what fans can expect.
Marriage proposals, robber baron business deals and new characters — oh my! You're cordially invited to the unfolding of juicy melodrama among high society in 1800s New York with the Season 3 premiere of HBO's Emmy-nominated show, The Gilded Age. So pull up an opulent velvet chair and grab your opera glasses as we take a closer look at what's to come in this period drama from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. Season 3 of The Gilded Age drops this Sunday, June 22, at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and will also be available to stream on HBO Max. There will be a total of eight episodes this season, with a new episode airing every Sunday through Aug. 10. The battle between old and new money families continued… Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), whose family is considered 'new money' because of her railroad tycoon husband's fortune, was still shut out by old money elites like Mrs. Astor (Donna Murphy), an influential patron at the well-established Academy of Music. Bertha was fed up with Mrs. Astor denying her family an opera box, which was seen as a symbol of status and power. Hell-bent on climbing the social ladder, Bertha started an opera war and used her family's wealth to support the newly built Metropolitan Opera. The new venue threatened audience attendance on opening night at the Academy of Music. Bertha won the opera war when the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb) ultimately decided to attend the Met opening, which was met with high societal fanfare. But Bertha's victory came at a cost, it seems, which is implied at the end of the season that she promised her daughter Gladys's (Taissa Farmiga) hand to the Duke. The Russell family patriarch, George Russell (Morgan Spector), faced backlash from the steelworkers who manufactured his railroads and demanded fair pay and better working conditions. Tensions reached a boiling point when armed militia were ready to shoot the protesting laborers. George called off his men before things turned violent and granted some of the laborers' demands. Meanwhile, Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) found out that her son Oscar (Blake Ritson) had lost the family fortune. Ada Forte (Cynthia Nixon), Agnes's sister, learns that her late husband left her a substantial fortune, and the power dynamic Agnes had with Ada has started to shift. The period melodrama included juicy romances in the love lives of Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) and Peggy Scott (Denée Benton). Marian realized she's in love with Larry Russell (Harry Richardson), while Peggy shut down her affair with T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones), a married man. According to a media release from HBO, the Russell family is poised to take their place at the head of high society, following Bertha's victory in the opera wars. 'Bertha sets her sights on a prize that would elevate the family to unimaginable heights, while George risks everything on a gambit that could revolutionize the railroad industry — if it doesn't ruin him first,' HBO says. Bertha has high hopes for a marriage between her daughter Gladys and the Duke, despite her daughter's interest in another young man, Billy Carlton (Matt Walker). In Season 2, George had also promised Gladys she could marry for love, even if it went against Bertha's wishes. This leads to greater conflict between George and Bertha in the new season. Across 61st Street from the Russell household on the Upper East Side, Agnes struggles to accept Ada's new position as lady of the house with her newfound wealth. Peggy meets a new love interest from Newport, R.I., whose family isn't keen on her career as a writer and journalist. The Gilded Age features a big cast of show regulars, including: Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell, Christine Baranski as Agnes Van Rhijn, Cynthia Nixon as Ada Forte, Morgan Spector as George Russell, Louisa Jacobson as Marian Brook, Denée Benton as Peggy Scott, Taissa Farmiga as Gladys Russell, Harry Richardson as Larry Russell, Blake Ritson as Oscar Van Rhijn and Ben Ahlers as Jack Trotter. New additions to the cast in Season 3 include: Jordan Donica, Andrea Martin, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Hattie Morahan, Leslie Uggams, Merritt Wever, Bill Camp and Phylicia Rashad.