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    Broadway Grosses Fall, but Average Attendance Rises, as Shows Close

    The percentage of seats filled on Broadway was up last week, but overall box office grosses fell, as some of the industry’s softest shows closed and the survivors reduced prices.According to figures released Wednesday by the Broadway League, 75 percent of all seats on Broadway were occupied during the week that ended Jan. 23. That’s up from 66 percent the week ending Jan. 16, and 62 percent the week ending Jan. 9, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to take a toll on the industry and the rapid spread of the Omicron variant makes this winter especially challenging.Average attendance is still far below what it was in January 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic, when between 93 percent and 95 percent of seats were occupied.The overall number of people who saw a Broadway show last week (152,135) was down from the previous week (162,566), as shows continue to close — there were 21 shows open last week, down from 25 the previous week. Two more shows closed on Sunday (“Girl From the North Country,” which says it plans to return in the spring, and “Slave Play,” which is transferring to Los Angeles), leaving just 19 shows now running in the 41 Broadway houses.The rising capacity percentage is good news for an industry rattled by empty seats. But it’s coming at a cost, with fewer shows running and the average ticket price falling.Last week, the average ticket price on Broadway was $108, down from $114 the week ending Jan. 16 and $116 the week ending Jan. 9. (In 2020, average January ticket prices were as high as $123.)The falling average ticket price reflects both a lowering of premium prices (that’s the price for the best seats on the most popular nights), and a heavy use of discounts.At “Hamilton,” for example, the top price in January 2020 was $847; now it’s $299. (The priciest premium seat at the moment appears to be at “The Music Man,” which is asking $699 for some center orchestra seats on a Saturday night in February; “Six” is selling some tickets for $499.)But there are also multiple discounts available. The city’s tourism agency, NYC & Company, is now holding its annual Broadway Week (which, despite its name, will last 27 days this year), a popular program that offers two-for-one tickets to all but a handful of shows.And, although the Broadway League is no longer disclosing grosses for individual shows, there are indications that more are turning to discounting as a strategy to get through this winter, when the ordinary seasonal dip has been exacerbated by the pandemic. The TKTS ticket booth in Times Square, which sells tickets at 20 percent to 50 percent off, now periodically features “The Lion King,” which was almost never sold at the booth before the pandemic, as well as other big shows including “Moulin Rouge!,” “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” “Hadestown” and “MJ,” the new Michael Jackson musical. More

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    After 16 Years in ‘Hadestown,’ Anaïs Mitchell Emerges With a New Album

    The singer-songwriter fully plunged into her acclaimed theater project. Since then, her life changed wildly — and she recaptured the desire to record her own music.BRISTOL, Vt. — Eight years ago, shortly before the birth of her first child, the musician Anaïs Mitchell was instructed in a hypnobirthing class to envision her “happy place,” and was flooded with a sense memory from her rural Vermont childhood.She was in her grandparents’ house, which her father helped build, “laying on the carpeted floor in a sunbeam coming through the sliding glass door,” she recalled. Something fragrant was cooking on the stove. Her grandmother quilted while young Anaïs stenciled, crafted, or, later, scribbled lines that would become the basis of her earliest songs.In early January, a now 40-year-old Mitchell stood in that same living room, taking in the house’s rich history. Her wide blue eyes smudged with dark liner, she wore a flannel button-down and a Brooklyn Nets beanie, not an expression of fandom so much as a sartorial homage to the city she used to call home.In the decades since that childhood memory, she’s become an accomplished singer-songwriter and a force behind one of the most successful and celebrated Broadway musicals of the past few years, the eight-time Tony-winning hit “Hadestown.” By this time next year, Mitchell hopes to be living in this house with her husband and children, bringing up her two daughters on the very same family farm on which she was raised.“It’s intense to go home,” she said. “I know everyone; it’s a small town.” When she runs into people she has known her whole life, she admitted, it can be easy to revert to her childhood self. “I was a little scared to move back for that reason,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not the thing you should do.”In some sense, leaving Brooklyn for Vermont was a practical choice: Mitchell was nine months pregnant with her second child when Covid-19 hit New York. “One day I pulled our older kid out of school and the next day we bought a car,” she said. “And then the next day Broadway closed and I was like, we’re leaving. We drove to Vermont and the baby was born a week later at my parents’ farm.”It’s in many ways an ordinary story — how many city-dwellers fled to the country? — but her telling has the narrative beats of an epic myth. In that way, it feels like an Anaïs Mitchell song.Foreground from left, Eva Noblezada, Andre De Shields and Amber Gray in “Hadestown,” which opened on Broadway in 2019 and won eight Tonys.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“There’s something in the way her ideas connect and always come back around,” said Josh Kaufman, the musician and producer who plays with Mitchell in the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman. “She has a very lived-in knowledge of traditional music and folk songs. But as a human she’s also incredibly in-the-moment, which allows her to anchor everything in the present.”Once a prolific solo artist, it’s been nearly a decade since Mitchell released music under her own name. But on Jan. 28, she’s returning with a self-titled album, produced by Kaufman — a collection of the most personal songs she has ever released. She sometimes attempted to write her own music during those long, busy years of working on “Hadestown,” but she ultimately “felt like I was cheating on it if I did anything else.”“I’m so proud of what we made and there was so much joy in the making of it,” she added, “but it was also an unsustainable way of living, that level of stress.”Adapted from a humble, low-budget community theater project she debuted in Montpelier in 2006, “Hadestown” brought the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into conversation with such modern phenomena as capitalism, climate change and New Orleans-style jazz.In 2010, Mitchell released a concept album called “Hadestown,” featuring songs from the initial Vermont theater production sung by some of her folk peers: Justin Vernon of Bon Iver voiced Orpheus, Ani DiFranco was Persephone. But Mitchell still dreamed of adapting a more ambitious stage production.“Anaïs is the most specific writer I’ve ever encountered,” the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin said in a phone interview. “So often the process of creating can seem really abstract,” she added. “What is very beautiful about Anaïs is that she lives very openly in the process of turning over words and images, feeling them around in her mouth and on her guitar.”When “Hadestown” opened at the Walter Kerr Theater in April 2019 (taking over for “Springsteen on Broadway”), Mitchell became just the fourth woman to compose the music, lyrics and book of a Broadway musical. The moment was a turning point in her journey with a project she’d been living with for 13 long years. But there comes a time in a show’s life when even the most involved writer must find a new space.“There was a funny moment that happened as soon as the show opened on Broadway, where suddenly I didn’t have a home in the theater anymore,” Mitchell said when we first met up in Manhattan in the courtyard of the Standard Hotel last November. “Literally: It used to be, this is my seat, this is where I go play guitar in the stairwell. And then suddenly the audience is there and there’s nowhere for me.”But this necessary step back from “Hadestown” finally gave her the opportunity to reconnect with the music world from which she’d long been absent, and return to her own, more intimate form of songwriting.“Hadestown” and her stirring 2012 album “Young Man in America” involved a lot of “dressing up in costumes, getting access to some kind of larger-than-life feelings and language, like, ‘I’m the king of the Underworld,’” she said, laughing for a moment as she did her best Hades impression. “I do really enjoy that. But these songs are all me, the stories are my stories. That feels very different.”“A songwriter is kind of a songwright,” Mitchell said. “It’s like building a house that other people will inhabit.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesTHOUGH SHE IS not quite at the level of Ben, Jerry or Bernie, Mitchell is certifiably Vermont Famous — the sort of New Englander who gets recognized in hushed tones at folk festivals and farmers’ markets. Her hair is shaggy and dyed darker than the blonde of her “Hadestown” days, and she speaks in a chiming voice that often sounds innocently wonder-struck, before a joke or a playful bit of profanity suddenly brings it back down to earth.Behind the wheel of her salt-kissed Chrysler Pacifica in January, she pointed out local landmarks on the 15-minute drive between the house she is renting in Bristol and her parents’ farm: her high school; a sign for a local “radical puppetry” company; a humorously and undeniably phallic-shaped headstone that has always made her laugh (“Who chose that?”).Mitchell describes her parents as “hippies, back-to-the-landers.” In the late 1960s, her father, Don, scored a book deal when he was still a Swarthmore undergraduate, for a semi-autobiographical hitchhiking novel he’d written called “Thumb Tripping.” He sold the movie rights, moved to Los Angeles with his young wife, Cheryl, and wrote the screenplay to a pulpy, “Easy Rider”-era film adaptation of his book. He cashed out in the early 1970s and used his Hollywood earnings to buy a 130-acre farm in Vermont’s Champlain Valley.For most of Anaïs’s childhood, her entire family lived on the property, including her grandparents in that wooden house her father helped build for them. Cheryl opposed television, so young Anaïs would sneak over to her grandparents’ place whenever she wanted to watch; she has fond and uncommonly subversive memories of the nightly news with Dan Rather. She rode horses, roamed the woods with her older brother and, like her namesake Anaïs Nin, journaled prolifically.She found those old diaries recently in a box in her grandparents’ house, and the experience inspired “Revenant,” a heartfelt, acoustic-guitar-driven song on the new album that finds her extending a mature grace to her younger self: “Suddenly I saw you there, runny-eyed in a wooden chair/Ran outside to hide your face in the wild Queen Anne’s lace,” she sings. “Come and let me hold you in my arms/Come and get my shoulder wet and warm.”Mitchell went to Middlebury College, and supported herself as a figure model for art classes. “I was always very comfortable nude because no one can see us here, so everyone would skinny-dip,” she said on the secluded farm. When she was 19, one of those gigs led to the sort of meet-cute that might appear in an R-rated comedy: Noah Hahn, a student in one of the classes, turned out to be the man she would marry.They were apart quite a bit in the early years of their relationship, as Mitchell was paying her dues on the road as an aspiring singer-songwriter. But — as she proposes on the new album’s ode to an artist’s muse, “Bright Star” — sometimes longing and distance can bear unexpected fruit. She was driving home alone from a show one night, hoping Noah was waiting up for her, when the melody and a few lyrics of what would become the first “Hadestown” song came to her out of the blue:“Wait for me, I’m coming, in my garters and pearls/With what melody did you barter me from the wicked underworld?”Mitchell and the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin. “Anaïs is the most specific writer I’ve ever encountered,” Chavkin said.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesLIKE THE LONG gestating “Hadestown” (Chavkin compares the pace at which Mitchell works to “watching a tree grow, because it’s so deep, so imperceptible”), one of the most affecting songs on Mitchell’s new album took years to finish writing.“Little Big Girl” is partially about the tension she experienced returning to her hometown, appearing to the outside world as a grown and accomplished woman while, internally, still feeling like that same scrappy little Anaïs she was years ago. But the song is roomy enough to tap into a more universal sentiment — how strange it is that we all “keep on getting older” while still feeling “just like a kid.” Or, more specifically, that the world treats you as an ever-aging woman when you sometimes feel as defenseless as a little girl.“There’s so much art made by people in their 20s about the ups and downs of your love life,” Mitchell said. “I’ve been there and I love that music. It’s very deep and real. But there’s also all these other elements of being the age I am now, and being a mom, and relocating myself in the world and in my family. I want to be able to write about that stuff, too.”Mitchell knows this kind of work can be too easily dismissed as “culturally irrelevant mom art,” as she put it. But the remarkable specificity of her songcraft and the expansive, almost mythic scope she brings to her human experience as a wife, mother and 40-something woman demand to be taken seriously.“On her other records, it’s someone else’s epic poem that she’s running through her own beautiful sense of language and harmony,” Kaufman said. “On this one, she’s looking back like, ‘I have my own epic poem here. There’s these people, these relatives, my kids, my long relationship with my husband, my long relationship with my songwriting.’ It’s a self-portrait, but like any compelling self-portrait it’s vulnerable enough that you almost feel like you’re looking in a mirror. It resonates deeply because it’s so honest.”Ideally, Mitchell said, “the song could live on without you.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesFOR ONE NIGHT in November 2021, Mitchell once again had a designated seat in the theater when she attended the reopening of “Hadestown” following its pandemic closure. “It just made me miss the process of working on that show so much,” she said later. “I spent the first act of the show spinning wheels in my head like, ‘What musical could I write next? I need another story!’” She is content for now to focus on her work as a solo artist and with Bonny Light Horseman, though the thought of never writing another stage show after “Hadestown” would be like if she “went to grad school and then didn’t use the degree.”Mitchell doesn’t see such a clear delineation between the two artistic worlds she straddles, though. “I do think there’s a common denominator with writing for the theater and writing songs,” she said. “Ideally, the song could live on without you. You don’t have to sing it, someone else could sing it. I love that. Someone singing it at their wedding, or at a funeral, or at a protest.”She reached for a bit of lingual antiquity and metaphor that tracks closely to her own move to Vermont. “You know how you spell playwright as playwright, like you’re building or constructing something?” she asked. “A songwriter is kind of a songwright. It’s like building a house that other people will inhabit.” More

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    Can CNN’s Hiring Spree Get People to Pay for Streaming News?

    The network’s boss, Jeff Zucker, tries to make up for lost time by signing Chris Wallace, Audie Cornish and Eva Longoria.A couple of months ago, CNN’s forthcoming streaming channel was perceived as little more than a curiosity in the television news business: just another cable dinosaur trying to make the uneasy transition into the digital future.In fact, the plan to start CNN+, which is expected to go live by late March, amounted to a late arrival to the subscription-based streaming party, more than three years after Fox News launched Fox Nation.Then the hirings began.In December, Chris Wallace, Fox News’s most decorated news anchor, said he was leaving his network home of 18 years for CNN+. Next came Audie Cornish, the popular co-host of “All Things Considered” on NPR, who said in January that she was leaving public radio to host a weekly streaming show.Alison Roman, the Instagram star and author of a popular cooking newsletter, will get her own cooking show. Eva Longoria will head to Mexico for a culinary travelogue documentary series. Rex Chapman, the sports podcaster and former basketball player with more than a million Twitter followers, signed on, too.Audie Cornish, the popular co-host of “All Things Considered” on NPR, is leaving public radio to join CNN+.Brad Barket/Getty ImagesThe prominent names represent a tier of talent that had previously been hesitant to commit to a news channel’s streaming service, especially an untested one. Agents and producers have taken notice, as much for the big salaries on offer as for the prospect of a news-based streamer with a range of nonfiction programming, relying on more than the usual political talking heads.“We do want a service that has a wider aperture and is broader than just today’s bleak news,” CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, said in an interview.Recent Developments at Fox NewsFauci Comments: The Fox News host Jesse Watters used notably violent language in urging a gathering of conservatives to publicly confront Dr. Anthony Fauci.Jan. 6 Texts: Three prominent Fox News hosts — Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Brian Kilmeade — texted Mark Meadows during the Jan. 6 riot urging him to tell Donald Trump to try to stop it.Chris Wallace Departs: The anchor’s announcement that he was leaving Fox News for CNN came as right-wing hosts have increasingly set the channel’s agenda.Contributors Quit: Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes quit the network in protest over Tucker Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” special.He is gambling that CNN+ can entice new viewers — and bring back some old ones. CNN’s traditional broadcast viewership has dropped significantly from a year ago, thanks to a post-Trump slump and waning audience interest, and the network recently fired its top-rated anchor, Chris Cuomo, amid an ethics scandal.Mr. Zucker is turning to a strategy honed during his days as the executive producer of NBC’s “Today” show in the 1990s, mixing hard news with a heavy dose of lifestyle coverage and tips on how to bake a pear cobbler. In marketing materials, CNN+ has urged viewers to “grab a coffee” while flipping on shows promoted as “never finicky” and “the silver lining beyond today’s toughest headlines.”It remains an open question if CNN+ can actually draw the interest — and monthly payments — of viewers already overwhelmed with streaming options. Heavyweight services like Netflix and Hulu have struggled to find success with shows that riff on current events. One Netflix executive conceded in 2019 that topical programming was “a challenge” when it came to on-demand, watch-at-your-own-pace streamers.The Instagram star Alison Roman will host a cooking show on CNN+.Michael Graydon & Nikole Herriott for The New York Times. Prop Stylist: Amy Elise Wilson.CNN and Fox News are the two major news networks betting that viewers will pay an extra monthly fee for their digital content.Fox News introduced Fox Nation, a subscription-only streaming service, in November 2018. Like CNN+, it features a mix of shows hosted by familiar hosts (“Tucker Carlson Presents” and Brian Kilmeade’s history program, “What Made America Great”) along with programming from outside the parent network, including a revival of the police show “Cops” and a new program hosted by Piers Morgan.Still, paid services like Fox Nation ($6 a month) and CNN+ (which has not revealed its pricing) carry a higher barrier of entry for TV news content, which is available free of charge elsewhere. Fox Nation has not disclosed its number of subscribers, making its success hard to gauge, though Lachlan Murdoch, the executive chairman of the Fox Corporation, has touted the service to investors.NBC, ABC and CBS are pursuing a different strategy: free streaming news platforms supported by paid advertising. Their digital options predominantly focus on news, not lifestyle programming, and the networks have only recently taken more aggressive steps to expand the programming on offer.On Monday, CBS rebranded its platform as the CBS News Streaming Network and announced new shows inspired by the network’s history, including a program hosted by the anchor Norah O’Donnell with “a 2022 take on the classic Edward R. Murrow interview series.”The Choice From MSNBC, a channel on NBC’s Peacock streaming app, debuted in 2020. Its hosts include Mehdi Hasan, Zerlina Maxwell and, starting later this year, Symone D. Sanders, a former adviser to President Biden. (NBC News also has separate digital offerings for hard news and lifestyle coverage.)Eva Longoria is developing a culinary travelogue documentary series for CNN’s streaming service.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesFor news executives, finding a winning formula in the streaming game is now an urgent priority.Streaming has supplanted cable as the main home delivery system for entertainment, often on the strength of addictive series like “Squid Game.” For a while, though, old-fashioned cable news clung on, with CNN, MSNBC and Fox News attracting record audiences in recent years. In case of emergency — a pandemic, civil unrest, a presidential election, a Capitol riot — viewers still tuned in en masse.After former President Donald J. Trump left office, news ratings nose-dived and cable subscriptions continued to plummet — an estimated four million households dropped their paid TV subscriptions last year, according to the research firm MoffettNathanson.Fox Nation and CNN+ both rely on a business model dependent on paid subscriptions, hence the efforts by both to generate a wide variety of programming.“A subscriber every month only has to find one thing that they want,” Mr. Zucker said in the interview. “We don’t need the subscriber to be interested in everything we’re offering, but they need to be interested in something.”Mr. Zucker said CNN+ was aiming at three buckets of potential subscribers. He is seeking to entice loyal CNN viewers into paying for streaming programs featuring hosts familiar from the cable channel: Anderson Cooper will have two, including one on parenting; Fareed Zakaria is helming a show examining historical events; and Jake Tapper will host “Jake Tapper’s Book Club,” in which he interviews authors.The other would-be subscribers, Mr. Zucker said, are news and documentary fans who want more nonfiction television, as well as younger people who don’t pay for cable.CNN, though, is not ignoring the needs of its flagship cable network, which ranked third last year behind Fox News and MSNBC in total audience.Mr. Zucker recently reached out to representatives for Gayle King, the star CBS News anchor, about the prospect of her taking over the weekday 9 p.m. hour on CNN, said two people with knowledge of the approach. CNN has not named a permanent anchor for the prime-time slot since Mr. Cuomo was fired in December after revelations that he assisted with the efforts of his brother, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, to fend off sexual harassment allegations.CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, is gambling that the network can entice new viewers and bring back some old ones with its streaming platform.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesCNN+ is also expected to include the breaking news and political coverage that CNN viewers are accustomed to — a feature that could pose difficulties for the network down the road. CNN commands a high price from cable distributors, who may cry foul if CNN+ includes too much news programming that potentially competes with the cable offering. For instance, Wolf Blitzer, the host of “The Situation Room” on CNN at 6 p.m., will also appear on CNN+ to anchor a “traditional evening news show with a sleek, modern twist.”CNN’s parent company, WarnerMedia, which is on the verge of a megamerger with Discovery Inc., appears willing to take the risk. The company is placing a significant financial bet on CNN+, budgeting for 500 additional employees, including producers, reporters, engineers and programmers, said Andrew Morse, CNN’s chief digital officer. The company is also renting an additional floor of its headquarters in Midtown Manhattan to accommodate the hires.“What we’re building at CNN+ is not a side hustle,” Mr. Morse said. More

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    Trevor Noah Weighs In on Biden’s Hot Mic Drop

    “You see? This is what happens when you have been on Zoom calls for two years — you forget that real life doesn’t have a mute button,” Noah said of the president’s comments about a Fox News reporter.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Tell Me How You Really FeelAt the White House on Monday, President Biden referred to Peter Doocy, a Fox News reporter, as a “stupid son of a bitch” in a hot-mic moment.“Like most presidents, Biden has a complicated relationship with the media, which I get it, you know?” Trevor Noah said on Tuesday. “They nitpick everything he says, they challenge all of his decisions and they even get their own room in his house, which is insane. Nobody else has to set aside a guest room for their haters.”Biden’s comment was in reference to Doocy’s asking if he believed inflation would be a political liability in the midterm elections.“I mean if you get to ask the president a question, you should ask him real questions, like ‘Why can’t the C.D.C. get its messaging straight on Covid?’ or ‘Can you ask your dog to stop chewing my arm?’” — TREVOR NOAH“You see? This is what happens when you have been on Zoom calls for two years — you forget that real life doesn’t have a mute button.” — TREVOR NOAH“A lot of people online are dunking on the reporter, saying he deserved this because he’s just some Fox News guy asking a dumb question, and they’re right. You know, ‘Do you think inflation is a political liability’ is a very stupid question. I mean, what’s Biden supposed to say? ‘No, I think people like spending more money to buy the same [expletive].’”— TREVOR NOAH“Biden dropped one off-handed diss on a reporter — he’s no legend. Attacking the press was Donald Trump’s whole thing.” — TREVOR NOAH“First of all, he wouldn’t mumble that into a hot mic — no, he would scream that [expletive] in your face, he would be like [imitating Trump] ‘Get that son of a bitch out of here. So rude. So rude. My crimes are my business.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Hot Mic Edition)“When your age is almost 80 and your approval rating’s almost 30, you can pretty much say whatever you want, I think.” — JIMMY FALLON“Said Biden, ‘I’m so sorry. That was supposed to be into the main mic.’” — SETH MEYERS“You can tell that felt good for Biden, because today he was fielding questions like, ‘Yeah, the moron in the back. How about Dopey in the corner, you got something to say?’” — JIMMY FALLON“Hey, listen, if Biden’s next three years are going to be grandpa at Thanksgiving, sign me up.” — JIMMY FALLON“[imitating Biden] That’s right, Old Joey’s back. I’ve reached peak old man, givin’ zero malarkeys.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Later that night, Biden did something I forgot presidents could do — he apologized.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingSeth Meyers skewered his writers for some of their worst monologue jokes.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightSydney Sweeney, the star of “Euphoria,” will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutHilary Duff, second from left, with Tom Ainsley and Francia Raisa, in “How I Met Your Father.”Patrick Wymore/HuluHilary Duff, the star of “How I Met Your Father,” is already tired of people asking who the father is. More

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    Review: A Shorter ‘Long Day’s Journey,’ Now With N95s

    The Eugene O’Neill classic, set in 1912, is just as powerful in Robert O’Hara’s revival, set in our own age of disease and lockdown.Eugene O’Neill, whose insanely detailed stage directions for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” specify even the titles of the books on the shelves, somehow forgot to mention the Purell. Also the N95s.Yet there they are, prominent props in Robert O’Hara’s warp-speed Covid-era revival, which opened on Tuesday at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Far from cheapening a classic work with random relevance, they help define (or at any rate don’t get in the way of) a beautifully acted and affecting interpretation for a new age of disease and lockdown.In the Tyrone family, closely based on O’Neill’s, disease and lockdown are already a way of life. For James (Bill Camp) the disease is spiritual; a could-have-been Shakespearean who (like the playwright’s father) got trapped in an immensely popular melodrama, he is embittered by success and a skinflint by nature. His older son, Jamie (Jason Bowen), has just the opposite problem: A failure at everything, he beggars himself by carousing as if he weren’t.For the other two members of the household, the disease is literal. Partway through the play, the younger son, Edmund (Ato Blankson-Wood), receives a diagnosis of tuberculosis from which he believes he will never recover. His mother, Mary (Elizabeth Marvel), having been improperly treated by a cheap doctor after Edmund’s difficult birth, is addicted to morphine. Her most recent rehabilitation miserably collapses over the course of the long day of the title.That day, according to O’Neill, is in August 1912; the setting is the family’s fog-infested waterfront home on the Connecticut coast. There, James estivates sourly between tours, talking big and doing little, watching helplessly (or unwilling to help) as Mary’s fear for Edmund undoes her.Her relapse is all the more painful because of the hypocrisy that informs it; it began, after all, as a result of James’s stinginess. And though the three men drink at least as insatiably as Mary drugs, only her addiction is seen as a character flaw: an elective humiliation that has turned them all into emotional — and nearly literal — hermits.From left, Jason Bowen, Bill Camp and Ato Blankson-Wood in the play, which is being performed at the Minetta Lane Theater and will be released later as an audio play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn O’Hara’s production, though, the Tyrone lockdown is only partly about shame; it is also about precaution. When Mary tells James that “this will soon be over,” and that his theater season — another tour of his tired old play — “will open again,” we hear it differently with our pandemic-primed expectations. How many productions have recently had to reassure us they will open again?And all it takes to turn Edmund’s tuberculosis into Covid is the discreet suppression of the word “consumption” from Jamie’s question after his brother visits the doctor: “He thinks it’s … doesn’t he, Papa?” We fill in the blank as we please; the coughing is the same either way.That’s successful if relatively minor surgery. But can a revision that cuts about half the text, reducing its running time from nearly four hours to slightly less than two, still be “Long Day’s Journey”? Certainly the O’Neill estate, which permitted the changes, thinks so, in part because O’Hara, as he writes in a program note, has not added “a single word” in the process of imagining “this glorious play into the future that we are all currently living through.” The contemporization is achieved entirely by suggestive or visual means.At first, the effect is humorous, as when James shows up in cargo shorts bearing Starbucks and Mary, demonstrating her improved health, does yoga. Soon, though, the jokes deepen, creating a feeling of double vision as we notice both our time and O’Neill’s at once. The density makes a four-person play feel crowded; Clint Ramos’s living room set, littered with discarded Amazon delivery boxes, nails the relentless clutter of a self-indulgent family trapped together for months with no maid. (She too was cut.)Nor do the house’s upper stories, as revealed through voids in the living room wall, offer relief from the creeping claustrophobia; in one of the openings we see Mary repeatedly shooting up. (To judge from the spoon and flame, she’s using heroin now instead of morphine.) If this, let alone her vomiting, feels too literal, the astonishing projections by Yee Eun Nam are almost phantasmagoric in their abstraction. They vividly suggest the solace that blossoms from the needle, a solace that is at least in part a dissociation from reality.Marvel in the upper level of Clint Ramos’s set, with abstract projections by Yee Eun Nam.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet we know that anyway; the play as typically performed demonstrates it over and over. Mary’s addiction is part of a closed system in which each of the Tyrones victimizes and is victimized by the rest, all the while explaining and apologizing and defending. (That’s part of what justifies its usual unusual length.) What O’Hara gets so right, regardless of the apparent setting, is the relentless rhythm of placation and perturbation. These are people who can’t help pulling one another’s scabs off, then trying to stick them back on.If you want to think about our own recent lockdown in those terms, this production, even in its relative brevity, certainly allows you to. And if you want to think about what O’Hara meant by casting white actors as the Tyrone parents and Black actors as the sons — he says he meant nothing — you are welcome to do that too, though you probably won’t get very far beyond merit.But if you aren’t interested in a contemporary medical or racial gloss, the great thing about this “Long Day’s Journey” is that you need only close your eyes. Indeed, because the revival has been produced by Audible, the Amazon company that creates spoken audio content, once the stage production closes on Feb. 20 that will be the only way you can experience it.What I think you will find with the visual information stripped away is a very accomplished, and surprisingly faithful, reading of the play. If it loses some of its cumulative power in the abridgment, its moment-by-moment power often increases in recompense. Bowen and Blankson-Wood get the alternating current of the brothers’ connection just right. Camp, unlike many Jameses, plays the real man, not his melodramatic stage incarnation. These are performances that are not only stageworthy but streamworthy.And certainly Marvel’s vocal characterization of the deteriorating Mary — lilting then wheedling then ratlike then hollow — is one you will not soon get out of your head. You may even feel infected by it. Do they make Purell for the ears?Long Day’s Journey Into NightThrough Feb. 20 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; audible.com/ep/minettalane. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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    Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’ Ends Run Early Because of Coronavirus Cases

    The Classic Stage Company’s production of “Assassins,” the Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman musical, became the latest show to cut its run short because of the coronavirus, announcing Tuesday that it would cancel its remaining performances.The Off Broadway musical, which began previews in November and had been running for roughly 12 weeks, had been scheduled to continue through Jan. 30. In a brief statement, Classic Stage Company said the handful of remaining performances this week had been scrapped because of “positive COVID-19 tests within the company.”Sondheim, who wrote the music and lyrics for “Assassins,” died on Nov. 26, adding resonance to the timing of the revival and creating a spike in demand that made the show one of the toughest tickets in New York this winter. On the evening Sondheim died theatergoers flocked to the Lynn F. Angelson Theater — where “Assassins” was playing — and to other Sondheim sites, including the Broadway theater where a revival of “Company” was playing, saying they felt drawn to the venues and sought a way to memorialize the songwriting titan.The production, directed by John Doyle, had been fully sold out before Sondheim’s death; in the aftermath, the number of people regularly entering a digital lottery hoping to score $15 tickets ballooned, with roughly 5,000 people entering on some days in the hopes of nabbing one of the small theater’s 196 seats.All ticket holders will be refunded for the cancellations, the company said. More

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    Touring Through Omicron: Broadway Shows Hit Bumps on the Road

    The “Mean Girls” tour made it to Oklahoma before it was knocked out by the coronavirus. At first, the production had been able to keep going by flying in alumni from its Broadway run, but ultimately the number of company members testing positive was just too high, so earlier this month the show decided to cancel its remaining shows in Tulsa, and then postponed the runs that would have followed in two Wisconsin cities, Madison and Appleton.When the show hit the pause button, Jonalyn Saxer, the actress playing Karen Smith, found herself with two weeks off and no home of her own — like many actors, she gave up her New York apartment and put her stuff in storage when she signed on to tour. The show offered to fly her wherever she wanted to go, and she chose her parents’ house in Los Angeles.“I was home over Christmas, and when I left I said, ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back,’ ” she said. “Two weeks later, I was like, ‘Hi Mom and Dad!’”The lucrative touring market for Broadway shows is being jolted by the Omicron surge, as coronavirus cases increase in parts of the country even as they have begun to fall in the nation as a whole.This past weekend, productions of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” in San Francisco and “The Prom” in Baltimore were canceled because of positive tests in their companies.“Hamilton” has been particularly hard hit: This month it halted all four of its American touring productions, in Buffalo, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and San Antonio, because of positive coronavirus tests.The phenomenon is in some ways similar to what happened on Broadway, where so many theater workers tested positive in December that half of all shows canceled performances on some nights. But there is a key difference: Whereas on Broadway, there has also been a damaging drop in ticket sales, elsewhere in the country, producers say, attendance has generally remained steady.Gabrielle Bappert checked the vaccine cards of ticket holders at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis before a performance of “Come From Away.”Tim Gruber for The New York Times“Touring, when we can perform, is going great — the audiences are showing up, and the audiences are enthusiastic,” said Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton.” “Touring is not going great when Covid sweeps through our company, which has happened to every one of our tours.”For actors, touring now involves less sightseeing, and more risk management, than it once did.“It’s the highest of highs, because we’ve been waiting for a year and a half to be back doing what we love to do, but it’s not the same,” said Saxer, who tested positive for the virus in November when her tour was in Spokane, Wash., and recovered while quarantining there.“It’s not like we can say ‘Let’s go check out this cool bar,’ because actors all around are losing their jobs because someone tests positive,” she added. “It does raise the stakes.”Christine Toy Johnson, an actor in the “Come From Away” tour, said she had not eaten inside a restaurant since July.“In some cities, we’re in hotels and we’re the only people wearing masks,” she said. “It’s very stressful — I’m not going to lie. But it’s also been an exciting time to be back in the theater, making art again.”There are currently about three dozen shows moving from venue to venue, stopping at a mix of nonprofit performing arts centers and for-profit theaters in nearly 300 North American cities, according to Meredith Blair, the president and chief executive of the Booking Group, an agency that arranges touring shows. The shows bring in a lot of money: those featuring union actors (there are also tours with nonunion casts) grossed $1.6 billion at the box office in 2018-2019, which was the last full season before the pandemic; that’s just slightly less than the $1.8 billion spent by theatergoers attending Broadway shows in New York City during the same period, according to the Broadway League.While there has been a damaging drop in ticket sales on Broadway, producers say that attendance has generally remained steady elsewhere in the country.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesThere appear to be several reasons the touring audience has remained more stable than the Broadway audience. Most of the venues that present touring productions depend on locals, rather than visitors, so they are less vulnerable to the drop in tourism that has walloped Broadway. Many of the touring venues have large numbers of subscribers who, remarkably, retained their subscriptions throughout the pandemic. And some venues are in parts of the country where residents have been less inclined to make changes to their routines because of Covid.“There’s a huge difference between New York and the audience on the road,” said Rich Jaffe, a co-chief executive of Broadway Across America, which presents Broadway tours in 48 North American markets. “On the road, they consider these venues their theaters — it’s a big part of their communities, supporting jobs and creating economic ripple effects for local downtowns that are quite significant. If we have a show, the audience is there.”Many North American tours are bypassing Canada because of government-mandated capacity restrictions there. But in the United States, where there are generally no capacity limits, venue operators seem pleased with how things are going, despite the bumpiness of Omicron.“We’ve already presented five weeks of touring Broadway, and we’ve had great attendance — our audiences are showing up enthusiastically,” said Joan H. Squires, the president of Omaha Performing Arts, which hosted touring productions of “Cats” and “Hamilton” in the fall and then “Dear Evan Hansen” in the days before and after the New Year’s holiday. Squires wound up scanning tickets at the door for “Dear Evan Hansen” because too few volunteer ushers were available, but she attributed that more to winter weather than Covid concerns.Most shows are requiring that audiences wear masks, except where such requirements are barred, and vaccination rules are up to local jurisdictions.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesThe biggest brand names, as always, are selling the strongest. And “Hadestown,” which won the Tony Award for best musical in 2019 and began its tour in October, is starting strong. “‘Hadestown’ arrived just as we were starting to see Omicron spike, and it far exceeded our targets for attendance and sales,” said Maria Van Laanen, the president and chief executive of Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in Appleton.Presenters in some cities describe a softening of sales as Omicron hit. “We certainly noticed a slower pattern of buying over the holidays — in any other year, we would have been completely sold out, but that obviously wasn’t the case because there was some hesitancy,” said Jeffrey Finn, the vice president of theater producing and programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. “That said, I’m watching a big upturn as we head toward the spring with the hope and expectation that Omicron won’t be as present.”Safety precautions vary across the country. Most shows are requiring that audiences wear masks, except in cities where such requirements are barred; vaccination rules for audiences follow local government protocols (actors and other theater workers are required to be vaccinated).Keeping tours going has required shows to add staff members. “Hamilton” now employs seven “universal swings,” who are versatile performers ready to travel anywhere they are needed to fill in, up from four before the pandemic; “The Lion King” has brought in three additional swings.After canceling three performances, “Come From Away” returned thanks to a blended cast that included veterans of every production, including Broadway, Australia, Canada and Britain. Tim Gruber for The New York Times“Come From Away” offers a particularly vivid case study in the creativity also required to keep shows afloat. The company got hit by Covid earlier this month as it arrived in Minneapolis, where it was scheduled to spend two weeks.“We went 15 weeks without any problems, but then Omicron came and started to wreak havoc,” said Johnson, who has been with the tour since 2018. “At one point half the cast was sidelined.”The producers canceled three performances, which bought them enough time to bring in actors from California, New York and Toronto, and the show then resumed with a blended cast that included alumni not only from Broadway but also from productions in Australia, Canada and Britain.“It’s the never-ending Rubik’s Cube of trying to keep a show up and running,” said Sue Frost, a lead producer of “Come From Away.”Among those who flew in was Happy McPartlin, a standby in the Broadway cast, who had just recovered from her own case of Covid. “I said, ‘Of course,’ because that’s what we do here,” she said. “I knew the state we were in. We had a couple of bad weeks where the numbers were not in our favor, and one of the people from the tour came in and saved us. I said, ‘If you guys need me, I’ll do the same for you.’”Not all of the cancellations have been short-lived. In December, “Ain’t Too Proud” canceled two weeks in Washington; “The Lion King” missed 12 performances in Denver, while “Wicked” canceled six performances in Cleveland. “Hamilton” shut down for a month in Los Angeles, and upon its reopening next month, it is now scheduled to stay just six more weeks, rather than running into the spring as initially anticipated.“I almost forgot about Covid for a little bit because we got so used to it, and it was so much fun to do the show, but then Christmas Eve we had so many positive tests we couldn’t do the show, and we canceled a half-hour after it was supposed to start,” said Nicholas Christopher, who plays Aaron Burr in the Los Angeles production of “Hamilton.” Christopher had moved from New York to Los Angeles for “Hamilton”; he, his wife, and their new baby all tested positive in December, and then he found out the show’s Los Angeles run was ending.“It’s very eye-opening, and very humbling, and makes me appreciate what we do even more, because it’s been taken away so many times,” he said. “It’s almost like PTSD, having the show be shut down again. It still feels like a dream that I’m ready to wake up from.” More

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    Mahershala Ali Finally Gets the Leading Role He Deserves

    In a more just world, Mahershala Ali, one of America’s most gifted actors, would have played the lead in at least a dozen films by now.He’s certainly paid his dues and then some. Over the past two decades, the 47-year-old actor has starred or played key roles in prestige series (HBO’s “True Detective”), sci-fi franchises (“The Hunger Games”) and network-defining political thrillers (Netflix’s “House of Cards”). In 2017, he won his first Academy Award for his performance in “Moonlight,” a master class in what you can do with just 20 minutes or so of screen time, and a second Oscar two years later, for his performance in “Green Book.”So it may come as a shock to learn that Ali has never played the lead role in a feature film before, not until his star turn in the sci-fi drama “Swan Song,” now streaming on Apple TV+.“I always felt like a bit of a late bloomer,” Ali said.On a recent morning, in a wide-ranging video interview from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ali, dressed in a black jacket over a crisp white Team Ikuzawa T-shirt, talked about “Swan Song,” the debut feature from the Irish director Benjamin Cleary.In “Swan Song,” Ali plays both a dying man and his clone.Apple TV+As if to make up for lost time, Ali plays not just one main character in the sci-fi drama, but two: Cameron, a terminally ill husband and father of a 5-year-old son; and Jack, the perfect clone of himself — complete with every one of his memories — who, unbeknown to Cameron’s wife and child, will soon replace him in order to spare them the grief and pain of having to watch him die. In several scenes, Ali shares the stage with Ali, with only himself to play against. “It was fun after it was hard,” he said with a laugh. “Fun after you move through the hard.”It was a winding life journey that took him to “Swan Song,” with stops and starts and moments of doubt along the way. Like the time he was in his second year of New York University’s prestigious graduate acting program and considered ditching it all to go back to working as a deckhand in San Francisco. “I was still in the union,” he said, “and it’s good money.”Or another time, in the middle of his acting career, when he took off a year and a half to care for his ailing grandfather. “He had a stroke in 2010, and I kind of dropped everything,” he said. “I was living in Las Vegas and taking care of him, just me and my grandma.”And there were other reasons that the actor is only now playing his first film lead. The industry was a lot different back when he was coming up, he explained — more stratified between movies and series, which made feature film roles, let alone feature film leads, tougher for TV actors like himself to come by. Those who started in TV were seen as TV actors only, and so his aim was just to be the best TV actor he could be. He was well into the third season of his third series, “The 4400,” before he was finally called on to “step on Brad Pitt’s character” (a monstrous child whom Ali’s character literally stumbles upon at a nursing home) in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”Ali is “a really powerful actor, but he also has a really calming energy as a scene partner,” said Awkwafina, his “Swan Song” co-star. “It was probably one of the best experiences I’ve had on a set.”Chanell Stone for The New York TimesOther film roles followed — in “The Place Beyond the Pines,” “The Hunger Games” and, in 2016, “Moonlight” — but no leads.Around the time “Moonlight” was released, a writer for The New York Times conceded that Ali’s rise, unlike those of some of his peers, “has not been meteoric.”“When I look at my trajectory, my start was a little slow, if you think about where I am at the moment,” Ali said.Even so, many of the supporting roles he was getting were ones any actor would kill for, like Juan in “Moonlight,” a hard-on-the-surface dope dealer bursting with love for his young charge. “I hadn’t seen that character,” he said. Or Don Shirley, the African American pianist in the biopic “Green Book” who hired an Italian American bouncer, played by Viggo Mortensen, to serve as his valet in the Deep South. “He was the most gracious type of rebellious you could be,” Ali said of the musician. “Somebody who was so smart and cunning and found a way to buck the system by hiring a white guy to carry his bags in and out of a hotel, and be his bodyguard, in 1962? I thought that was genius.”Ali won his first Oscar for his supporting turn in “Moonlight” (2016),  opposite Alex Hibbert.David Bornfriend/A24Two years later, he won best supporting actor again, this time for “Green Book,” alongside Viggo Mortensen.Patti Perret/Universal Pictures“Swan Song” came to Ali in 2019, after he read the script and asked to meet with Cleary, its writer. Cleary had won an Oscar for his 2015 short film, “Stutterer,” but had never directed a feature film before. After a single “really great conversation” between the two, Ali said yes to the project. “It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life,” Cleary recalled.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More