Barry Manilow announced in an Instagram post that he has lung cancer.
“As many of you know, I recently went through six weeks of bronchitis followed by a relapse of another five weeks,” wrote the 82-year-old singer-songwriter. “Even though I was over the bronchitis and back on stage at the Westgate Las Vegas, my wonderful doctor ordered an MRI just to make sure that everything was OK. The MRI discovered a cancerous spot on my left lung that needs to be removed.
“It’s pure luck (and a great doctor) that it was found so early,” Manilow continued. “That’s the good news.”
The “Copacabana” singer, who married his husband, Gary Kief, in 2014, added that he will undergo surgery to “have the spot removed” and will need to take about a month off from touring to recover at his Palm Springs home.
“The doctors do not believe it has spread, and I’m taking tests to confirm their diagnosis,” Manilow wrote. “So, that’s it. No chemo. No radiation. Just chicken soup and I Love Lucy reruns.”
Manilow said he will reschedule the January shows that are part of his “Christmas: A Gift of Love” concert series. His revised schedule will begin after his Valentine’s weekend concerts in Las Vegas and run from late February through April, according to NBC News.
The Grammy, Tony, and Emmy Award-winning pop star urged fans to be proactive about their health, telling them, “[I]f you have even the slightest symptom, get tested!”
Manilow was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2020. The cancer was treated at an early stage and did not compromise his singing career.
In May 2024, he was forced to cancel a concert in London for health reasons. He performed at the London Palladium the next day and rescheduled the canceled date for the following month.
Manilow previously touted his “The Last Concerts” series, originally scheduled to run from January through April 2026, as his farewell tour in an interview with Billboard, reflecting on the status of some of his contemporaries in the music world.
“It’s like, ‘What? Am I the only one left?'” he said. “It’s Billy Joel, and Elton [John] is not well and Rod [Stewart] and Neil [Diamond]. Diana Ross is still in great shape, I think. There must be only a handful of people in my world that are still there.
“I’m still healthy,” he added. “I’m strong and I’ve still got my voice and my energy. The night I can’t hit the F natural on ‘Even Now,’ that’s the night I throw in the towel. But I can still do it.”
Ladies might still love Cool James, but they've found a place in their hearts for their girl Cardi B. Single ladies, married ladies, ladies who love ladies, all kinds of grown-and-sexy ladies were at Capital One Arena for the D.C. date of the Grammy-winning rap diva's "Little Miss Drama Tour."
Yes, plenty of guys, and gays, pulled up, too, but it was "the ladies!" that Cardi addressed most often once she took the stage a Madonna-like ninety minutes past the advertised start time (said with love, no shade, from one who's seen Madonna on tour four times).
Pre-show, the Cap One crowd got a good warmup from the track-suited DJ spinning hip-hop and R&B. Although, based on my section -- and the lady in super-short schoolgirl attire twerking on her man while strangers shouted, "Work, bitch!" -- people came already warmed up by other means.
By the grace of good timing, both Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel have better movies out this season than David Lowery's tiresome drama Mother Mary.
Those talented actresses, their fans, and certainly their agents, should be glad if audiences catch their work in The Christophers or The Devil Wears Prada 2, and not just this pretentious, if lushly designed, go-nowhere glimpse behind the curtain of pop superstardom.
Hathaway and Coel aren't the problem. They are fully committed to whatever it is that The Green Knight writer-director Lowery intends in depicting the emotionally fraught reunion between Mother Mary (Hathaway), a Lady Gaga-Dua Lipa-coded pop diva, and Sam Anselm (Coel), the fashion and costume designer whose eye-popping looks helped define Mary's image earlier in her career.
In an already storied career on stage and screen, Claybourne Elder has earned Grammy, SAG, and Drama Desk Award nominations, sung with symphony orchestras and Broadway divas, and soloed at Carnegie Hall.
Yet, the performer, known for theater roles on and off Broadway, and as the ill-fated John Adams on HBO's The Gilded Age, had never released a solo album, until now, with his sparkling debut If the Stars Were Mine. The question for some might be, if not necessarily what took so long, why now?
"I think that there have been several times I'd thought about doing it," Elder tells me during a relaxed chat over Zoom. "And I was like, 'Oh, no. I mean, who wants to listen to it?' The kind of imposter syndrome gets to you, and you're like, 'Well, I don't want to.'" There's also the challenge, he acknowledges, of working out what you might want to say over an album's worth of songs.
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