A revival of the classic musical offers a fresh twist on the founding for the post-“Hamilton” era.“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” Crystal Lucas-Perry said of the Broadway revival of “1776,” and its cast of female, nonbinary and trans actors. Clockwise from top left: Sav Souza, Lucas-Perry, Elizabeth A. Davis, Carolee Carmello, Patrena Murray and Oneika Phillips.Camila Falquez for The New York TimesHow do you solve a problem like America?For the creators of the musical “1776,” the answer was to wrap it in jaunty tunes, 18th-century double entendres and enough twisty dialogue to make a dramatization of the debate over the Declaration of Independence feel like a thriller.Premiering on Broadway in 1969, the musical ran for 1,217 performances, won the Tony Award for best musical and, over the last 50-plus years, has left more than a few critics scratching their heads over how such a resolutely square show won over Vietnam-era America.But 1776 isn’t what it used to be. In 2022, a touchstone of national identity has become a culture-war hot potato. And “1776,” which arrives this month on Broadway in a new revival for Roundabout Theater Company, isn’t the same either.The revival, directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus, has the familiar rousing melodies (in new, rock-infused arrangements), star-spangled color scheme and corny dad jokes. But they’re delivered by a racially diverse cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors, whose embodiment, Paulus said, wakes the language up.“I want the audience to hold that dual reality, of what the founders were, but also a company of actors in 2022, who never would have been allowed inside Independence Hall,” Paulus said in a video interview last month, after the show concluded its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where she is artistic director.The idea, she said, using a phrase that has become something of a mantra for the show, “is to hold history as a predicament, rather than an affirming myth.”Announced in 2019, the revival may initially have seemed to be riding the post-“Hamilton” vogue for all things Founders, while doing that show’s inclusive casting one better. But the two-year pandemic delay — which saw nationwide racial-justice protests, a bitterly contested presidential election and the Jan. 6 insurrection — have only heightened the stakes.“The deeper you get into it, the more poetry, the more stuff, exists inside of it,” Page said, in a separate video interview.At bottom, “1776,” he said, is “about a clandestine meeting of people who desperately want to change the world.”Then again, “1776” was never the whitewashed retro-patriotic celebration it is often remembered as. For all its traditionalist guys-in-powdered-wigs look, the show — with songs by Sherman Edwards, a history teacher turned Brill Building tunesmith, and a book by the playwright Peter Stone — was as politically pointed in its time as “Hamilton” (and perhaps, some argue, more so).Written ahead of the Bicentennial, it was meant to humanize the founders — “Demigods? We’re men, no more, no less,” Benjamin Franklin declares — while also challenging what the authors described as the “jingoistic” history they had learned in school.Sara Porkalob, center left, Lucas-Perry and Davis in the production during its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.Evan Zimmerman for Murphy MadeThere was the bite of songs like “Momma, Look Sharp,” a denunciation of the carnage of war that might have been sung by a G.I. on Hamburger Hill. And there was “Molasses to Rum,” a chilling call-out of freedom-espousing New England’s complicity in the profits of slavery.The production even stirred its own mini-controversy: When cast members were invited to perform the show at the Nixon White House, they were asked to cut “Cool, Cool Considerate Men,” a satirical minuet of money-loving conservatives who move “ever to the right, never to the left.” (They refused.)“I continue to be surprised when I meet people who say, ‘Oh, 1776! It’s my favorite musical. It’s just what our country needs!” Paulus said. “I keep thinking, what are they talking about?”But then, when the touring production company NETworks first suggested the show to her in February 2019 as a possible revival, she knew little about it, except that it had beaten out “Hair” (which she had directed a Broadway revival of in 2009) for the Tony. “I had a vague assumption it was a kind of a celebratory look at American history,” she said.When she read the book, on a long plane ride, she said, she “almost fell out of the airplane.”In particular, she was struck by the dramatic climax: the debate over Thomas Jefferson’s fiery denunciation of the slave trade, which was ultimately cut from the Declaration, to secure unanimous approval.Even talking about it now, Paulus still sounds incredulous. “I was unaware of that crossing out,” she said. “How could I not know?”“That began my journey into the show,” she continued. “I had to reckon with my own experience of American history.”A 2016 Encores! concert staging in New York had already used some racially diverse casting. Paulus said she was told off the bat that the estate would be open to an all-female cast, but she emphasized that the production takes a less “binary” view of gender.There was a first reading in New York in August 2019, with the principal actors, including Crystal Lucas-Perry as the irascible and obstinate John Adams, leader of the “independency” faction. By early March 2020, the show was fully cast, with an opening in Cambridge set for that May, to be followed by a national tour and then a Broadway run.Instead, they retreated to Zoom, like the rest of American theater. Without the pressure to stage the show, Paulus said, they could go deep in American history, including meetings with various scholars like the political theorist Danielle Allen and the historians Vincent Brown, Jane Kamensky and Annette Gordon-Reed.With the approval of the creators’ estates, the show includes a (wordless) depiction of a 14-year-old Robert Hemings, Jefferson’s enslaved bodyservant (and brother to Sally Hemings), inspired by Gordon-Reed’s scholarship. It also adds a long excerpt from Abigail Adams’s famous letter advising John to “remember the ladies.”While the gender-flipped casting may be the show’s claim to “firstness,” the core of the production is a grappling with race.Even before the murder of George Floyd, Paulus said, discussions around race within the company were “very raw.” Then came the protests, and the roiling conversation on racism, representation and hierarchy in the theater set off by the “We See You, White American Theater” open letter.In September 2020, the American Repertory Theater announced a set of initial antiracism commitments. When it came to “1776,” she said, the conversations prompted by the protests “impacted everything about our process.”Paulus said she first met Page (whose long résumé as a choreographer includes extensive collaborations with Beyoncé) in 2017, when he was starting the M.F.A. program in directing at Columbia. He was initially hired as the show’s choreographer, in 2019. In the summer of 2020, he also became co-director.“I felt that the most powerful and honest reflection of our collaboration,” Paulus said, was to be “coequals.”Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus directed the production, which starts previews at the American Airlines Theater on Sept. 16 and opens Oct. 6.Matthew MurphyThe George Floyd moment, Page agreed, “changed everything” about the show. The team, including the set designer Scott Pask, had already started moving away from the original scenic designs, which Page described as attempting to land the show too much “in the world of realism.”“We came together and said, this doesn’t feel right anymore,” he said. “We started asking, when you break it all the way down to the core, what is this piece about?“These were men who were attempting to make a change inside the world,” he continued. “Who cares about the chair they sat in, and are we getting it right?”The production, with its spare, Brecht-influenced design, is set not in Independence Hall in 1776, but onstage in 2022, where it’s performed by a company of actors from the present who arrive in street clothes, with no fanfare, before putting on their 18th-century(ish) waistcoats and period-appropriate shoes.(One performer also puts on a beaded necklace — seemingly a nod at the fact, mentioned in Stone and Edward’s original authors note, that Native American leaders would often appear before the Continental Congress, as leaders of independent nations.)Page, whose other recent directing credits include this summer’s revival of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at Barrington Stage Company, also cited the importance of an “affinity space” for Black cast members, which helped guide the show’s exploration of race.“With the other cast members, the main thing we communicated was, ‘You’re going to feel some things,’” Page said. “What the Black cast members asked was to leave your fragility at the door.”In a group interview with four of the show’s founding “fathers,” Elizabeth A. Davis, who plays Jefferson, recalled a video meeting in which cast members presented their family trees, as part of an exploration of how personal and national history intersect. She said she could still remember exactly where she was sitting — “in my grandmother’s old room, in the middle of Texas” — as Black colleagues described hitting the so-called slavery wall, beyond which ancestry can be hard to trace.“It was a profound moment for me,” she said. “It was understanding something not just intellectually, but viscerally and cellularly.”Lucas-Perry nodded. “I remember saying, ‘I feel a little without,’” she said.The 2020 protests, Lucas-Perry said, contributed to a “hyper-awareness” of the way the casting altered the meaning of the text, and the importance of a production using diverse bodies “just because it can.”“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” she said. “We were looking for ways of taking advantage of moments where you can dig deeper into what it means to be other.”“Momma, Look Sharp” lands differently sung by a Black woman (the big-voiced Salome B. Smith, as a courier bringing news from the front) to another Black woman, after the founding “fathers” have left the room. (The courier’s piercing “Momma!,” Page said, echoes Floyd’s cry as he gasped for air.)But the show’s dark heart is the silky and sinister “Molasses to Rum.” Traditionally, it’s presented as a vocal tour de force (see John Cullum’s stentorian baritone in the 1972 movie), and critics have often paid more attention to the singing than the chilling substance of the song.In their staging of the song (sung by Sara Porkalob), Page and Paulus force the audience to consider the enslaved people who form one corner of the Triangle Trade not as abstractions, but as real bodies, massed in a wordless chorus that includes the Black actors who play Adams, Franklin and John Hancock. (The sometimes defiant choreography, Page said, reprises some gestures from “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men.”)Carolee Carmello, who is joining the Broadway production as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania (one of the cool, conservative men), played Abigail Adams in the 1997 Broadway revival, which had a white cast. She had heard “Molasses” hundreds of times, but wasn’t prepared for seeing it in the new production.“The understanding of what they’re actually arguing about is extremely powerful,” she said.Lucas-Perry said the song “feels like it goes on forever” — “and it did go on forever,” she added, referring to slavery. “I’m not going to lie,” she said of the scene. “There’s not a night where it doesn’t hit me.”“Hamilton” was fundamentally celebratory, reflective of the liberal optimism of Obama-era America, and the feeling that the arc of history was bending its way. Page and Paulus’s “1776,” for all its humor and exuberance, is darker and more uncertain.But neither show is the last word on the founding, or on the Declaration, a document that might be seen as the ultimate American classic: time-bound and flawed, but also profound and visionary — and requiring continual revival and reinterpretation, by a perpetually changing cast of Americans, to stay alive.Page summed up the heart of 1776, and “1776,” crisply: “How do we self-proclaim our presence in the world?” More

Meanwhile, rapper Ty Dolla $ign scores his highest charting album ever and his first Top 10 album with ‘Featuring Ty Dolla $ign’ which debuts at No. 4 in this week’s chart for Billboard 200.

Nov 2, 2020
AceShowbiz – Luke Combs gets back on the top of Billboard 200 chart with his album “What You See Is What You Get”, marking its second week to rule the chart. The increase follows a reissue of its deluxe on October 23 as he also sets a new weekly streaming record to the country singer’s album.
“What You See Is What You Get” jumps 20 spots to No. 1 after earning 109,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in the week ending October 29, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. Of the number, 76,000 were SEA units with 22,000 comprising the album sales. Meanwhile, 11,000 of the number were in TEA units. The album also breaks its own record for the largest streaming week for a country album after gaining 102.26 million weekly streams.
Back to the chart, Bruce Springsteen’s new album “Letter to You” arrives at No. 2 with with 96,000 equivalent album units earned. Additionally, it marks the top selling album of the week, debuting at No. 1 on the Album Sales chart. Meanwhile, Pop Smoke’s “Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon” falls from No. 2 to No. 3 with 61,000 equivalent album units.

  See also…

As for Ty Dolla $ign, he gets his highest charting album ever and his first Top 10 album with “Featuring Ty Dolla $ign” which debuts at No. 4 with 44,000 equivalent album units. Occupying No. 5 is Juice WRLD’s “Legends Never Dies” which dips one spot after earning 42,000 equivalent album units.
This week’s chart also sees 21 Savage and Metro Boomin’s collaborative album “Savage Mode II” sinking from No. 3 to No. 6 with 36,000 equivalent album units. As for Lil Baby’s “My Turn”, the album is stationary at No. 7 with 35,000 units earned.
Also a non-mover at this week’s Billboard 200 chart is “Hamilton: An American Musical”, which still occupies No. 8 with 29,000 equivalent album units. Machine Gun Kelly’s former No. 1 “Tickets to My Downfall” is at No. 9 with 28,000 units. Rounding out the Top 10 is Harry Styles’s “Fine Line” which jumps back in to the Top 10 after earning 27,000 equivalent album units.
Top Ten Billboard 200:
“What You See Is What You Get” – Luke Combs (109,000 units)
“Letter to You” – Bruce Springsteen (96,000 units)
“Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon” – Pop Smoke (61,000 units)
“Featuring Ty Dolla $ign” – Ty Dolla $ign (44,000 units)
“Legends Never Die” – Juice WRLD (a little over 42,000 units)
“Savage Mode II” – 21 Savage and Metro Boomin (36,000 units)
“My Turn” – Lil Baby (35,000 units)
“Hamilton: An American Musical” – Various Artists (29,000 units)
“Tickets to My Downfall” – Machine Gun Kelly (28,000 units)
“Fine Line” – Harry Styles (27,000 units)

You can share this post!

Next article
NBA YoungBoy’s Mom Claps Back at Floyd Mayweather for Criticizing Her Son’s Upbringing

Related Posts More

An appeals court in California determined that lawsuits by two men who say Jackson molested them as children can proceed.Two men who have accused Michael Jackson of sexually abusing them as children are able to resume their lawsuits against companies owned by the singer, who died in 2009, a California appeals court ruled on Friday.The men, Wade Robson, 40, and James Safechuck, 45, have alleged that Mr. Jackson sexually abused them for years and that employees of the two companies — MJJ Productions Inc. and MJJ Ventures Inc. — were complicit, acting as his “co-conspirators, collaborators, facilitators and alter egos” for the abuse. The suits say that employees of the companies owed a “duty of care” to the boys and failed to take steps to prevent abuse.Mr. Robson’s and Mr. Safechuck’s stories were featured in the 2019 HBO documentary “Leaving Neverland,” in which the men accused Mr. Jackson of molesting them and cultivating relationships with their families to access the boys’ bodies.“Everybody wanted to meet Michael or be with Michael,” Mr. Safechuck said in the film. “He was already larger than life. And then he likes you.”The two companies are now owned by Mr. Jackson’s estate, which has repeatedly denied that he abused the boys.“We remain fully confident that Michael is innocent of these allegations, which are contrary to all credible evidence and independent corroboration, and which were only first made years after Michael’s death by men motivated solely by money,” Jonathan Steinsapir, a lawyer for Mr. Jackson’s estate, said in a statement after the decision.Vince Finaldi, a lawyer for Mr. Safechuck and Mr. Robson, said in a statement that the court had overturned “incorrect rulings in these cases, which were against California law and would have set a dangerous precedent that endangered children.”Mr. Robson and Mr. Safechuck filed their suits against the companies in 2013 and 2014, respectively, but both cases were dismissed in 2017 because they exceeded California’s statute of limitations. They were reopened in 2020 after a new state law provided plaintiffs in child sex abuse cases an additional period to file lawsuits.In October 2020 and April 2021, the suits were again dismissed when a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled that the two corporations and their employees were not legally obligated to protect the men from Mr. Jackson.But on Friday, California’s Second District Court of Appeal ruled that “a corporation that facilitates the sexual abuse of children by one of its employees is not excused from an affirmative duty to protect those children merely because it is solely owned by the perpetrator of the abuse.”In a concurring opinion, Justice John Shepard Wiley Jr. said that for the purposes of civil liability, the corporations did the sole bidding of Mr. Jackson, who had a duty of care to Mr. Robson and Mr. Safechuck.“So did Jackson’s marionettes, because Jackson’s fingers held every string,” he said, adding, “These corporations could have taken cost-effective steps to reduce the risk of harm.”The cases, which were consolidated in the appeals court, will now go back to a trial court.In his lawsuit, Mr. Robson, who is now a choreographer and director, says that Mr. Jackson molested him from age 7 to 14. After meeting Mr. Jackson through a dance competition when he was 5, Mr. Robson performed in his music videos and released an album on his record label.According to his suit, the abuse started in 1990 when Mr. Jackson invited Mr. Robson and his family to stay at his Neverland Ranch in California. Mr. Robson and Mr. Jackson slept in the same bed and touched each other’s genitals, according to the suit. Over the next seven years, the suit said, they engaged in sexual acts including masturbation and oral sex.The suit says that employees of MJJ Productions witnessed the abuse and that employees of the two companies took steps to ensure that Mr. Jackson was alone with Mr. Robson and other children.Mr. Safechuck’s lawsuit says he was one of several children entrapped by the companies’ “child sexual abuse procurement and facilitation organization.” According to his suit, Mr. Safechuck met Mr. Jackson during filming for a Pepsi commercial in late 1986 or early 1987 and later became a dancer for Mr. Jackson.Mr. Jackson showed the 10-year-old boy how to masturbate while on tour in 1988, the suit alleges, and abused Mr. Safechuck hundreds of times over the next four years. The employees of MJJ Productions and MJJ Ventures coordinated the visits, according to the suit.Before these lawsuits, Mr. Jackson twice faced criminal investigations into the possible sexual abuse of children.In 1994, the district attorneys for Los Angeles and Santa Barbara Counties decided not to proceed with charges that Mr. Jackson had molested three boys because the “primary alleged victim” decided not to testify. Mr. Jackson, who denied any wrongdoing, had reached a $20 million civil settlement with the boy’s family.In 2003, a Santa Barbara County district attorney charged Mr. Jackson with several counts of child molesting and serving alcohol to minors. After a 14-week trial in 2005, he was acquitted by a jury. More

In Paris, a moving and wistful performance installation by Lina Lapelyte gathers untrained singers for reflections on regret and inability.PARIS — The first time I sang, it was by ear. I imagine that’s often the case. Toddlers join their favorite characters in Disney movies or echo their parents with mumbled renditions of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” When children begin to sing in school, they usually learn not from scores, but from lyrics memorized through repetition.Then things change. The melodies become notated. Some people develop into disciplined singers and instrumentalists; others abandon musical study altogether. What of that last category, those for whom singing is simply something to be enjoyed, regardless of whether they can carry a tune in the car or at karaoke?Those types of performances — the ones just for pleasure — are typically treated as unfit for the hallowed spaces of musical expression. But “The Mutes,” Lina Lapelyte’s moving, wistful and immersive installation at Lafayette Anticipations here, elevates that amateur naïveté to high art.“The Mutes,” organized by Elsa Coustou, takes place in an airy environment designed to subvert expectations at every turn, and unfolds on a roughly 50-minute loop for six hours a day, five days a week until July 24. The durational performance setup is reminiscent of “Sun & Sea,” Lapelyte’s much-traveled opera created with her fellow Lithuanian artists Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite, which won the top prize at the Venice Biennale in 2019.That work and the team’s “Have a Good Day!” (2013), a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the inner lives of cashiers, were expansive in scope. “Sun & Sea,” one of the most effective and indelible operas of this century, hides a sickening portrait of climate inaction in catchy, sedative melodies sung from an artificial beach — a set that could one day serve as a natural history exhibition of the Anthropocene’s leisure and laziness.Here, Lapelyte is working on her own, and by comparison “The Mutes” is much smaller. Yet the intimate scale is also more relatable, and more heartbreaking. With a libretto assembled from Sean Ashton’s novel “Living in a Land,” it expresses only the things its characters haven’t done. This is music of regret, of inability, music that can underscore the feeling that “we live in time not place.”The small ensemble of performers were auditioned with something like anti-musicality in mind; people who had been told explicitly that they were bad singers were the most ideal candidates. On Wednesday, they delivered the libretto’s English lines with heavy French accents and imprecise intonation. Some were more extroverted than others. One man forgot a line halfway through.Surrounding the performance is an installation of clustered nettles and sculptures that deal in subverted expectations.Marc Domage“I’ve never had mumps,” the first performer, walking through the installation, sings coolly. More never-have-I-evers follow: had a pen pal, learned a language, ate tapas, cried in the cinema, bought and sold at the right time, or at any time. “It is unlikely, is it not, that I shall ever be given the keys to the city,” an ensemble member declares into a microphone. Someone else offers, “It is unlikely, is it not, that I shall ever be invited back to my old school, to show what I have done with my life, what I have made of myself.”All these lines are given simple melodies, the kind you could learn easily by ear. More complicated are choral passages, especially antiphonal ones, a challenge for untrained performers but a compelling study in building harmony. These moments have the appearance of a community choir rehearsal — perhaps the most widespread form that music-making takes, if one that exists outside what is traditionally thought of as mainstream performance.The spirit of that deliberate contradiction — of a formal space given over to seemingly informal performance, and of perceived disorder giving way to balance — pervades the installation. Nettles, medicinally beneficial but disliked as prickly weeds, are clustered throughout an earthy landscape indoors. Slanted stones form a precarious ramp; so do sculptural shoes with uneven soles. But with complementary shapes, they together create a flat surface to stand on with stability.Visitors can explore the environment at will — though they can’t try on the shoes — before any performers enter, and continue to do so as the music unfolds. The singers move as if unaware of the audience members, who can follow any and all of them, and are responsible for staying out of the way.That opening line, about mumps, is joined by mentions of other diseases: measles, chickenpox, syphilis. And beneath vocal writing is a Minimalist score typical of Lapelyte, ostinatos executed with electronics and built from a rising two- or three-note motif, or a single tone at a steady beat. But where that formula had an almost somnolent effect in “Sun & Sea,” here it is complicated by added layers of improvisatory playing by Lapelyte and Angharad Davies on violin, along with John Butcher on saxophone, and Rhodri Davies on harp.Their instrumental contributions, prerecorded and played through speakers with meticulous spatial design, betray the emotions behind the straightforward singing. Jazzy riffs and percussive string techniques add an element of unsettled agitation and worry. Realizing, too late, that you’ve never “been canoeing” or “cultivated a vegetable garden” can be both sad and exasperating.But mostly these statements are sad, as life inevitably is, because of the people conveying them. Their sound unrefined and their performance effortful, these singers were compelling in a way professionals couldn’t be. Everything about them — their feelings, characteristics, appearances — was familiar. They reminded me of so many friends and relatives, and for that were more touching than, say, the protagonist of a Schubert song cycle or a Verdi tragedy.I wonder whether it was more difficult for them to sing together as adults than as children. When we’re young, we take up choral music uncritically, as if by instinct; later, a closer, more attentive kind of listening is required to achieve harmony. It’s as though, in learning everything else, we forget exactly the thing we should always remember.The MutesThrough July 24 at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; lafayetteanticipations.com. More

An American soprano who sang when the United States rejoined UNESCO weighed in on the agency’s addition of Italian opera singing to a heritage list.Is opera an endangered art form that needs to be protected and preserved for the generations to come?For a group of about 30,000 Italian music professionals and practitioners, the answer was yes. Consisting of singers, musicians, scholars, composers, conductors and directors, the group formed a committee supported by Italy’s leading opera houses and musical institutions, then persuaded UNESCO to add “the practice of opera singing in Italy” to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The inscription was made official in December.The list identifies what UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, calls “fragile” nonphysical elements that play a crucial role in “maintaining cultural diversity in the face of growing globalization.”Five months earlier, UNESCO celebrated the U.S. rejoining of the organization in a ceremony in Paris attended by the first lady, Jill Biden. (The United States had withdrawn from UNESCO during the Trump administration.)Pool photo by Bertrand Guay At the ceremony, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung by a leading American soprano, Lisette Oropesa. In a recent phone interview, Ms. Oropesa discussed the UNESCO inscription (which she played no part in) and what is special about opera. The conversation has been edited and condensed.How do you feel about this UNESCO inscription?Delighted. Any opportunity where opera and classical music are brought into the limelight is important.What’s significant about opera, and what I love about it, is that it’s the last truly human art form. It’s sung by voices, unamplified, and created by human beings who compose the music and play an instrument in an orchestra. The costumes are designed and made by people. Opera is directed by people, and is meant to resonate in an acoustic and natural space built by people. That’s what’s special about it.Will this UNESCO distinction help protect it in the future?I certainly hope so. Opera can often be stereotyped as this archaic museum piece. We think of it as very elitist nowadays. But it was originally a people’s art form. Just a few generations ago, it was in cartoons: The youngest of the young were learning about characters such as the Barber of Seville.Nowadays, a lot of young people when first exposed to opera say, “This is so pompous and old-fashioned, and it doesn’t speak to me.” What is your response?I believe opera doesn’t get marketed properly. I don’t think there has ever been a generation that wasn’t interested in history. If history is presented well, and interestingly, everybody wants to know. People watch “The Crown,” “Downton Abbey.” People want to be transported. What alienates young people is how opera can often be presented. If you just say, “Opera is about romance and beauty and passion and fabulous costumes,” you take all the meat off the bone. There are plenty of extremely forward-looking pieces that have been written about women, power struggle, class struggle, race.Opera is all narrative. The stories are there: You’re reading lines, and you’re following what’s going on. It’s like reading a book. And the sound of the voice is simply the sound of the trained voice.Now, it’s not to everybody’s taste. I get that not everybody likes it. But not everybody likes the sound of rock singers, or the sound of country singers. There is an ear for everything. Ultimately, nine times out of 10, the music sells people on opera, because the music is simply divine.Are you personally concerned about opera’s future?During the pandemic, I was really concerned about it. I thought that gathering in theaters would be the last thing to come back — that people would say: “This is so unnecessary. Let’s drop it. We’re going to put everything online, and stream it, and it’ll be the same thing.” We learned that it’s not the same thing, that you don’t have the same experience.What concerns me nowadays is that we have to compete for people’s time.The committee that applied for UNESCO inscription felt that opera was in danger.In Europe, opera and the arts are generally funded by the government. So there’s an assurance that the art form will go on, because there’s funding for it. In the United States, there’s very little state funding for high art. You have to ask people to give money to it. And it often operates on a flimsy budget. So the business model of opera in the United States is very unsustainable.When it comes to the arts in general, people feel like there are more important things to spend time and money on. They’re not wrong. But I can also tell you that without a safe emotional outlet for pain and negativity and suffering, all you will have is more pain, negativity and suffering.If you take music away from your everyday person — going to work, coming home, and taking care of their family — all they will be left with is politics, war, pain, suffering, disease and poverty. If you take away music and drama and theater and movies, you rob people of their ability to process and cope with the more important things. More