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Al Hassan, who had a 40-year-plus career as a road manager for the likes of Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormé, Tony Danza and Jim Stafford, died April 12 in Washington, his family announced. He was 87.

Hassan’s job took him across the U.S. and to Canada, Africa, Asia and Europe as he also supported Leif Garrett, Susan Anton and Nana Mouskouri, among many other entertainers.

The fifth of six children, Albert LeRoy Hassan was born on Dec. 2, 1936, and raised in the steel town of New Castle, Pennsylvania. After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served for three years, then graduated from the University of Maryland with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theater.

In college, Hassan worked with football coach Tom Nugent and was involved in the effort to recruit Joe Namath, a star high school quarterback and fellow Pennsylvanian from Beaver Falls. Namath did sign with...

Beyoncé headlined her first concert in four years, and it was an extravagant affair.

Queen B hit the stage Saturday for what was billed as the unofficial opening of the Atlantis the Royal Hotel in Dubai. Her production company, Parkwood Entertainment, released a short clip of the fireworks that went off before Beyonce belted out her first tune, which was rendition of Etta James’ 1960 classic “At Last.”

According to a news release following the performance, Beyoncé was accompanied by Firdaus, a 48-person all-female orchestra, mentored by Academy Award-winning composer, A.R. Rahman. “America’s Got Talent” winners, The Mayyas, an all-female precision dance group from Lebanon, were also featured on stage, with stunning choreography by Emmy-nominated Fatima Robinson.

At one point, Beyonce was raised 16 feet into the air “amidst one of the world’s unique performance fountains, Skyblaze. Surrounded by a field of water and fire, a powerful rendition of “Drunk in...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Karim Aïnouz's Central Airport Thf (2018), which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from February 8 – March 9, 2019 as a Special Discovery.There is something genuinely disturbing in watching Berliners bask in the sun around Templehofer’s park, only a few meters and a fence away from the refugees stashed inside the former Berlin Central Airport. Brazilian-born, Berlin-based Karim Aïnouz’s engrossing documentary Central Airport Thf thrives on the strident contrast between two worlds that almost touch, but never quite come together. It is an observational piece that reads like a two-part tribute: a testament to the singular beauty of a long-destitute place, and to the people who’ve unwillingly come to call it home. “Always obsessed with airports,” as he candidly admitted in a Notebook interview last May, Aïnouz had originally envisaged his latest film...

It’s a chilly October night, yet Jain has packed the mid-sized Brooklyn venue Warsaw with a mix of New Yorkers and visitors from her native France. Over there, she’s a phenomenon: Her 2015 debut, Zanaka, which blends pop with Afrobeat, is certified diamond, and her follow-up, this year’s Souldier, hit Number One on the country’s albums chart. The 26-year-old regularly plays multiple nights at venues like Paris’ historic Olympia and Marseilles’ Le Moulin, and she’s opened for Seal and Christine and the Queens. Here, though, it...

“I’m very sweet,” Shirin Neshat tells me, “but I’m also very domineering when it comes to my work.” Few who meet Neshat can doubt either part of that sentence. By turns fragile and forceful, Neshat operates these days out of Bushwick, Brooklyn, where she lives in self-imposed exile from her home country of Iran. Her new film, Looking for Oum Kulthum, debuted at the 2017 Venice Film Festival and begins its theatrical run in New York this week.

Oum Kulthum is Neshat’s first film since Women Without Men, which won the Silver Lion at Venice in 2009. Since then, she’s continued to work as a visual artist in photo, video, and film. Among other projects, she received her first major retrospective at the Detroit Institute of Art in 2013 and directed a trailer for the 2013 Vienna International Film Festival starring Natalie Portman. Neshat’s work has long explored issues...