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      Honey Dijon Steps Up From Dance Music’s Underground

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      The D.J. and producer has been a force in house music for over two decades. Tapped by Beyoncé and Madonna, and releasing her own LP, her career is kicking into another gear.Honey Dijon is easy to talk to — if you can get in touch with her. Nearly 25 years into a career as a D.J. and electronic music producer, she is seemingly everywhere at once. During just one November week that included Manchester, England (where she played the 10,000-capacity venue Depot Mayfield); London; New York (where she was honored at the L.G.B.T.Q.-focused Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art); her hometown Chicago; and Berlin, where she lives — at least for the moment.In a penthouse suite in a Lower East Side hotel, Dijon (legal name: Honey Redmond) took a rare moment to pause and reflect, while unsurprisingly multitasking, getting her hair and makeup done for a photo shoot in a white terry cloth robe. “I’d rather be exhausted from work than looking for it,” she said, pausing perhaps for effect.During her early days in nightlife, Dijon scraped by on $150 gigs. In 2022 alone, she estimates she’s played 180 shows between club nights, festivals, fashion events and “private corporate things” — almost a full return to prepandemic levels, when she was spinning some 200 times a year.This summer, she contributed to “Finally Enough Love,” the remix album from Madonna, who has called Dijon “my favorite D.J. in the whole world.” She curated the opening club night of Grace Jones’‌s Meltdown festival‌ in June‌, which brought artists including Sippin’ T and Josey Rebelle to London’s Southbank Centre. And she was a writer and producer on Beyoncé’s acclaimed “Renaissance,” receiving her first Grammy nomination this month as an album of the year contributor. Three days later, she released “Black Girl Magic,” her own collection of vocal-laden pure house songs.House music, known for its steady four-four thump and electronic essence, was born in Chicago — specifically at the Warehouse club, where Frankie Knuckles spun a mélange of dance music, including American and European disco, from 1977 to 1982. Soon after, some local producers attempted to replicate the suave and heavily orchestrated sounds of disco with drum machines and synthesizers. Eventually, house evolved into lusher forms while maintaining its insistent pulse.Dijon is a fastidious house-music griot, a musical historian who will not let anyone forget the form’s Black and queer roots, even as subgenres like EDM and tech house have strayed far from its origins. “Past, present, and future exist on a continuum,” she said. “And it’s just reintroducing things into now.”DIJON LIKES TO say that she was born in Chicago but grew up in New York, where she moved in the late ’90s. (She does not, however, like to say her age, calling the question “really sexist and horribly boring.”) As she does in her music, Dijon seeds her speech with references: During our two conversations, she quoted Laverne Cox, Marc Jacobs, Quincy Jones and Pepper LaBeija, best known for her wisdom-spouting turn in the 1990 ballroom documentary “Paris Is Burning.”In New York, she said, she found her people. From early on she was “a very effeminate child,” she said, in a video interview from her hotel room in Manchester, before her Depot Mayfield gig. She withstood bullying and assumed she was gay “because I was attracted to men and I really didn’t have any mirrors of affirmation of trans femme energy.”Clubland did not just provide a community and information — it was a lifeline. Dijon said that as a trans woman of color, she couldn’t just go and get a job with benefits, as her mother had encouraged: “So clubbing at that time was really a great place for you to make a quote-unquote honest living.”The trans women she met working in nightlife took her under their wing, filling her in on how to obtain black-market hormones and what doctors to see. “I’m Frankenstein,” Dijon said. “There’s a lot of different countries in this body.”Music was ever-present, she noted — even in utero: “I think that was really where I fell in love with the vibration of sound and music.” During our interview in New York, Dijon revealed that she sneaked into the legendary Chicago house nightclub the Music Box when she was 13.“When I talk about all of the things that I’ve gone through as a trans person, and as a queer person, and as an underground D.J., to be able to occupy these spaces with these artists, it’s still mind-blowing for me,” Dijon said.Myles Loftin for The New York TimesShe’s been a professional D.J. since 1998, consistently waving the banner for classic-sounding house even when it wasn’t in vogue. (This year, house music itself has been having a moment in pop, with Drake dropping a predominantly house-oriented album called “Honestly, Nevermind” ‌and Beyoncé releasing “Renaissance” about a month later.) A turning point came when Dijon accepted her first residency in 2008, at the now-shuttered venue Hiro in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district.Another major shift came 10 years later, ‌after her set recorded at Melbourne’s Sugar Mountain festival for the massively popular dance music broadcasting platform Boiler Room was uploaded to YouTube‌, where it now has nearly 10 million views‌. It’s an impassioned performance, in which Dijon remixes a cappella vocals from Stevie Wonder and the “I Have a Dream” speech from Martin Luther King, Jr. on the fly, her body perpetually vibrating to her endlessly pounding beats.“Beyoncé has Sasha Fierce, Honey Redmond has Honey Dijon,” she said of her musical persona.“She is performing these pieces of music,” said Nita Aviance, one half of the New York D.J. and production duo the Carry Nation, who recalled working alongside Dijon as far back as 2006. “She embodies the whole of everything that she’s playing.”Since 2019, Dijon has had her own Honey ____ Dijon clothing line for Comme des Garçons; much of the apparel has been printed with explicit references to disco and house, effectively creating merch for genres that never had much of it. For Dijon, clothing is a tool to communicate subculture. “It’s celebrating art by people of color that created culture and art from nothing,” she explained.Alyssa Nitchun, the executive director of the Leslie-Lohman museum, which honored Dijon at a gala in November, called her a “queer visionary.”“Every facet of her life is acting and moving forward new possibilities for living,” Nitchun said. “Queer people since the beginning of time, have been organizing, loving and living in ways that I think the whole world has a lot to learn from. And, you know, Honey is a woman for our time.”Dijon’s work ethic is rivaled only by her capacity for reference, and as a curator and broadcaster of existing sounds, these two skills are often one and the same. “Black Girl Magic,” her second album, was inspired by the 1989 debut full-length from the Chicago house auteur Lil Louis, “From the Mind of Lil Louis,” and the New York house producer Danny Tenaglia’s 1998 album, “Tourism.” Its cover depicts a 3-D digital sculpture of a nude Dijon, which she worked on with the artist Jam Sutton. It’s partly a reference to Grace Jones’s 1981 release “Nightclubbing,” but also a statement of self-determination: “I have a beautiful Black body, and I wanted to celebrate this,” she said, adding an expletive.“Magic” is rich in callbacks to the past, with egalitarian messaging at the heart of its invitations to the dance floor. Dijon worked on the album alongside the veteran producers Luke Solomon and Chris Penny. The three bonded about five years ago over their love of what Penny called “golden-era house,” which he places around ’88 to ’95. Solomon said he met Dijon in the early ’90s when he was D.J.ing at a friend’s house in Chicago, where Dijon danced in a plastic tube.Penny described their working relationship as “co-piloting a vision” that comes from Dijon. Summarizing the division of labor, Penny called Solomon, who programmed the beats, the “captain.” Penny’s work on the other musical elements, like keyboards, makes him “co-captain.” And Dijon? “She’s the ship,” Penny said. Dijon is responsible for conceptualizing, pulling in references, driving the grand vision, and working on the selection of guest vocalists. The album’s contributors include the rapper Eve (who sings on “In the Club”), the Chicago producer Mike Dunn (who adds vocals to “Work”) and the flamboyant Compton-based M.C. Channel Tres.“There’s not one way to be a producer or musician or singer or an artist,” Dijon said. “And so, I think we need to demystify what that looks like.” Likewise, she said, collaborating with two straight white men on the project shouldn’t diminish its house bona fides: “We need to stop limiting people on their gender identity or race.”AFTER MOVING BODIES underground for nearly two decades, Dijon’s work has entered the light of the mainstream. She hooked up with Madonna via Ricardo Gomes, who briefly managed Dijon’s touring before taking a role as Madonna’s documentarian/photographer. Dijon learned that Madonna was interested in a remix from her, then went rogue and picked “I Don’t Search I Find,” a throwback to the queen of pop’s early ’90s work with Shep Pettibone. Dijon dropped her remix, a collaboration with Sebastian Manuel, at a Pride party in 2019, and a video of the moment made its way to Madonna.“You have to create opportunities — you can’t wait for someone to give it to you,” Dijon said simply.Dijon at the decks at Moogfest 2018. She estimated that she spins nearly 200 dates a year.Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesWhen word came from Beyoncé’s company, Parkwood, that she was interested in making a dance album, Dijon recalled being “gagged” that the pop superstar turned to her as a primary source of Chicago house. Dijon, Penny and Solomon ultimately teamed up on two tracks that ended up on “Renaissance”: “Cozy” and “Alien Superstar.” Dijon said she sent Beyoncé a playlist of “iconic New York tracks” for potential reference (including a Kevin Aviance song that is sampled on “Pure/Honey”) and some literature on vogueing ball culture.Working on the songs involved months of back-and-forth with Beyoncé’s team, as the songs were tweaked and adjusted. Dijon and Co. had no idea which of the 20 or so pieces they’d been laboring over would end up on “Renaissance” until its track list dropped the week before the album’s release.Dijon finally met Beyoncé twice after the production work wrapped; in Paris, she spun at the Club Renaissance party celebrating the album’s release. While she described contributing to one of the year’s defining releases as “a good day at the office” she also said the experience was life changing.“When I talk about all of the things that I’ve gone through as a trans person, and as a queer person, and as an underground D.J., to be able to occupy these spaces with these artists, it’s still mind-blowing for me,” she said. She added, “And I’ve gotten to do it through my love of house music.”And her days of scrambling for $150 gigs are well in the past. “I’m good,” she said. “I can go to Cartier if I want to. Twice in one day.” More

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      New York Philharmonic Was Once All-Male. Now, Women Outnumber Men.

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      The New York Philharmonic, which was an all-male bastion for most of its 180 years of existence, currently has 45 women and 44 men.When the New York Philharmonic moved to Lincoln Center in 1962, its new hall had no women’s dressing rooms. That’s because there were no women in the orchestra.But this fall, as the Philharmonic opens its newly renovated home, David Geffen Hall, its players have returned not only to more equitable facilities backstage, but to a milestone onstage: For the first time in its 180-year history, the women in the Philharmonic outnumber the men, 45 to 44.“It’s a sea change,” said Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, who joined the orchestra in 1992. “This has been a hard-won, long battle, and it continues to be.”The orchestra’s new female majority could prove fleeting — it currently has 16 player vacancies to fill, in part because auditions were put on hold during the pandemic — but it still represents a profound shift for an ensemble that had only five women at the beginning of the 1970s. That was the decade it began holding blind auditions, with musicians trying out by playing behind screens.The pipeline now teems with female candidates: At the Philharmonic, 10 of the 12 most recent hires have been women.“This certainly shows tremendous strides,” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive and a pioneer in the field of orchestral management. “Women are winning these positions fair and square.”“All we seek is equity,” she said, “because society is 50-50.”Women now make up roughly half of orchestra players nationwide, but they are still substantially outnumbered by men in most elite ensembles, including in Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.Jaap van Zweden conducting the women and men of the Philharmonic this month at the newly-renovated David Geffen Hall. Fadi KheirThe Philharmonic still falls short by several measures. Women hold only about a third of its leadership positions, including its principal positions and assistant or associate principals, which are the best-paid positions for players. The orchestra has never had a female music director. Some sections remain noticeably divided by gender: 27 of its 30 violinists are now women, for example, while the percussion section is made up entirely of men. There is still a glaring lack of Black and Latino members.Still, many artists hailed the new prevalence of women in the Philharmonic as a significant development. Symphony orchestras were long seen as the dominion of men. And turnover is generally extremely slow at leading ensembles like the Philharmonic, whose players are tenured and can remain in their posts for many years. Meaningful demographic change can take decades.“It’s more of a family now,” said Sherry Sylar, associate principal oboe, who joined the orchestra in 1984. “There are moms and pops both.”For much of its history, the Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, was closed off to women. At the time of its founding in 1842, women were not only discouraged from pursuing careers in music — it was rare for them to attend evening concerts unless they were with men. (In “Philharmonic: A History of New York’s Orchestra,” Howard Shanet wrote that during the 19th century, the ensemble’s public rehearsals on Friday afternoons were popular with “unaccompanied ladies who could venture forth by day with more propriety than they could by night.”)It was not until 1922 that the Philharmonic hired its first female member, Stephanie Goldner, a 26-year-old harpist from Vienna. She departed in 1932, and the orchestra became an all-male bastion again for decades.Then, in 1966, Orin O’Brien, a double bassist, was hired as the Philharmonic’s first female section player. Often described as the first woman to become a permanent member of the orchestra, she was at the vanguard of a pioneering group of female artists who opened doors for other women to join. The orchestra’s move toward blind auditions in the 1970s was seen as making the process fairer. By 1992, there were 29 women in the orchestra.Even as representation increased, however, female musicians often faced discrimination. Sexism was widespread in the industry (the maestro Zubin Mehta, who opined in 1970 that he still did not think women should be in orchestras because they “become men,” was named the orchestra’s music director six years later). Fewer women got the best-paid principal positions, and some who did found that they earned far less than their male counterparts. In 2019, the Boston Symphony settled a lawsuit in which the principal flutist of the orchestra said she was being paid less than a male colleague, the principal oboist.Judith LeClair became the first woman to take over a first chair at the Philharmonic when she joined as principal bassoon in 1981, at the age of 23. She described her early days in the orchestra, when she was one of 17 women, as lonely. She said she had to fight to be paid as much as her male colleagues, hiring a lawyer to help negotiate contracts. It took at least 20 years, she said, before she reached parity.Sheryl Staples, the orchestra’s principal associate concertmaster; Qianqian Li, its principal second violinist; and Lisa Eunsoo Kim, the associate principal second violinist, during a recent rehearsal. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“I did feel I was taken advantage of in the very beginning because I was a woman, and young and naïve,” she said. “It felt humiliating and demeaning.”Some male colleagues took to calling the women in the orchestra “the skirts.”“It minimized the role that we played in the orchestra,” said Sylar, the oboist. “It felt like you had to be better to gain the respect of the other musicians. It was just a constant struggle of always pushing myself to be better.”The nickname was not her only encounter with sexism. Shortly after she joined the orchestra, she recalled that Erich Leinsdorf, a frequent guest conductor, during a meeting in his dressing room, asked why she did not wear dresses during rehearsal (she preferred pants).“It just sort of floored me,” she said.It was not until 2018 that the Philharmonic changed its dress code to allow women to wear pants at its evening concerts. Before that they were required to wear floor-length black skirts or gowns.In recent years, as women have taken on more leadership roles in the orchestra, the climate has become more inclusive, several players said.“It’s so welcoming and warm and it feels just like a big family,” said Alison Fierst, who joined as associate principal flute in 2019, and had been moved by getting the chance to get to play alongside some of the pioneering women who had broken barriers in the orchestra.There are some outliers — the St. Louis Symphony, for example, has had a female majority for a decade — but men still outnumber women at most leading orchestras in the United States. Elsewhere, progress has been slower: The Vienna Philharmonic did not allow women to audition until 1997. It is now about 17 percent female.When the orchestra moved to Lincoln Center 60 years ago, it had no women in it. Now, it is majority female. Calla Kessler for The New York TimesThe lack of women in leadership roles in orchestras — the principal players in each section can earn much more than their colleagues — has also drawn criticism. The vast majority of principal positions still go to men, and the conducting field is overwhelmingly male: Only one of the 25 largest ensembles in the United States is led by a woman, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, whose new music director is Nathalie Stutzmann.Michelle Rofrano, a conductor who is a founder of Protestra, an orchestra and advocacy group focused on social justice, said that more needs to be done to ensure that women rise to leadership roles.“Diversity shouldn’t be just a box to check; it requires mentorship and support,” she said. “We’re missing out on perspectives and an array of people who bring their unique talent.”The Philharmonic has sought to play a role in promoting change, including by hiring more women as guest conductors in recent years and by commissioning works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred states from denying women the right to vote (one of the works it commissioned, “Stride,” by Tania León, won the Pulitzer Prize). Some of its players have privately urged the Philharmonic’s leaders to select a woman to replace the orchestra’s outgoing music director, Jaap van Zweden, who is set to step down in 2024.After spending decades in an industry in which men have been so dominant, some Philharmonic members say they are still getting used to the sight of so many women onstage. This fall, as the orchestra celebrates its remodeled home and the Philharmonic makes history with its female majority, some feel that a new chapter has begun.Sylar said she was struck by the artistry of the women who have recently joined the ensemble.“I’m not saying I want this to be an all-women orchestra either,” she said. “It just nice to see that women are being recognized for their talent.” More

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      ‘The Hours’ Becomes an Opera. Don’t Expect the Book or Film.

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      “I think it needs to be more surreal,” the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin said from the orchestra pit of the Metropolitan Opera on a recent afternoon.The scene onstage was nothing but surreal — fragmented light beams suggesting a proscenium; towering, billowing curtains lit in dreamy shades of blue, their translucence revealing the impression of a building facade beyond. Yet Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, was more interested in another element: the chorus, offstage and coloristic, an otherworldly fixture of an otherworldly environment.None of that is reminiscent of “The Hours” in its earlier iterations: Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel; or the 2002 Stephen Daldry film, which was defined as much by its tensely churning Philip Glass score as by its Oscar-bait trio of leading stars, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep.But this is “The Hours” as adapted from both the book and the film by the writer Greg Pierce and the composer Kevin Puts. It is rendered as only opera can be: with an interplay of divas — Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato — who are enveloped by a restless and lush orchestra, and share a dream space with an ensemble of dancers who guide and observe them in Phelim McDermott’s staged premiere of the work, which opens at the Met on Tuesday.Renée Fleming — joined here by chorus members, the stage manager Scott Moon, kneeling, and the actress Drea Lucaciu — said she “loved, loved, loved” Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film adaptation of “The Hours.”Dina Litovsky for The New York Times“When I met Michael Cunningham,” Nézet-Séguin recalled, “he said that as a writer, words for him have to be sequential. You can’t superimpose words. But that’s where opera can melt and create parallels with the stories in real time.”AS A NOVEL, “The Hours” contains three interwoven stories, each unfolding for the most part quietly, over the course of a single day: Virginia Woolf struggles with depression while writing “Mrs. Dalloway”; Laura Brown, a homemaker in Southern California in 1949, feels oppressed by small tasks like baking a cake while just wanting to read that novel; and Clarissa Vaughan, an editor living in New York City half a century later, seems to embody “Mrs. Dalloway” as she prepares a party for her friend and former love Richard, a poet ravaged by AIDS.Fleming “loved, loved, loved” the Daldry film, she said in an interview over the summer. Some had thought she had made her farewell to staged opera in 2017, as the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” one of her signature roles. But she was quickly looking for a new project at the Met, and her right-hand man, Paul Batsel, suggested an adaptation of the story by Puts. Fleming was into the idea; so was Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.The work would require three singers on the level of the film’s stars. Fleming took on Streep’s role, as Clarissa; then came DiDonato as Virginia Woolf (played by Kidman in the movie); and, Kelli O’Hara as Laura (Moore). O’Hara has made a career as a decorated Broadway star but is such an opera natural that she was the highlight of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018.O’Hara has made a career as a decorated Broadway star.Dina Litovsky for The New York Times“I remember reading the book so hungrily,” she said. “The commentary on this time period, the survival, mental health, which I think is so appropriate right now. It just spoke to me so deeply.”In writing the opera, Pierce and Puts exploited what previous forms of the story couldn’t. “Some films have tried simultaneity,” Puts said. “But because of the nature of harmony and rhythmic notation, you can have things overlap here, and that’s very exciting. What you have to decide on is one sort of primary backdrop, musically, that unifies them. And that became interesting for me.”Puts’s score — which is written through, eclectic and soaringly lyrical — contains dreamy touches befitting the fluid nature of Pierce’s text, which has nearly 30 scenes that dissolve in and out of one another. A countertenor role, sung at the Met by John Holiday, in which the singer appears in different guises, can be seen as something like an angel of death or ferryman. A children’s chorus that Richard, the dying poet, hears in his head turns out to be the nieces and nephews of Virginia Woolf, holding a funeral for a bird. Other recursive phrases include music associated with Virginia that Clarissa overhears from a church choir.“What’s the meaning of that?” Puts said. “I’m not even sure what the answer is, but I think that’s what can be interesting.”From left, William Burden, Fleming and Kyle Ketelsen in rehearsal.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesHaunting the music is Glass’s Minimalist soundtrack for the “Hours” film. Puts called it “a beautiful score,” and recognized the danger in putting up his own work against it. “It’s almost like, would you write a ‘Star Wars’ opera?” he said, referring to John Williams’s famous music for that franchise. “No, I wouldn’t. It would be the dumbest thing in the world because it’s so iconic.”But, Puts added, while there are suggestions of a Minimalist style in the “Hours” opera — not for the first time in his compositional career — the work organically developed into something else. “The opera is so different that it’s its own thing,” he said. Nézet-Séguin described the score as having “just enough Minimalism,” but bringing “it to another, more lyrical, approach.”With the cast in place early, Puts tailored the score to Fleming, DiDonato and O’Hara. “I imagine if you’re writing a screenplay and you know Robert De Niro is going to play this character,” he said, “then every line you write, you imagine him delivering it.” And, he added, he is happy to reflect the specificity of their sounds and revise accordingly during rehearsals rather than plan for later productions and casts: “In a case like this, I’m not as concerned about the future.”All three stars have responded positively to the way their roles sit in their voices. This summer, DiDonato said that while reading through the score, she would tell herself, “Oh, Kevin, that’s the money note.” And Fleming, who has worked with Puts before — “He knows my voice really well” — said that his writing was singer friendly, with phrases separated, “so you’re not really stuck in a high register or a challenging tessitura consistently.”Kelli O’Hara, who sings the role of Laura, said: “I remember reading the book so hungrily, The commentary on this time period, the survival, mental health, which I think is so appropriate right now.”Dina LitovskyPuts developed a sound world for each woman. Clarissa’s, he said, is quintessentially American. Virginia’s draws on piano and an ornamental language befitting an earlier time in the English countryside, but with a winding harmony that, he hopes, evokes Woolf’s writing. Laura’s music, however, is more like that of her husband — of darkly cheery post-World War II domesticity that becomes something of a prison for her to escape from. All three come together in the finale, in a succession and layering of style.Nézet-Séguin conducted the world premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra in March, and felt, hearing it for the first time, that “Kevin got so much right.” A few things have changed between then and now: the tessitura of the chorus, for instance, and some cuts along with additions. Crucially, the Met’s presentation is different simply for being staged.McDERMOTT, whose Met credits include blockbuster productions of Glass’s “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten,” had been told that the opera’s constant shifting of time and place would make it “impossible” to direct. Yet he took it on, joined by the choreographer Annie-B Parson, the mind behind the infectiously exuberant movement in David Byrne’s “American Utopia.”“It’s like directing three operas on top of each other,” McDermott said. “There are so many scenes, and it’s filmic, so you need to get from place to place in a way that’s enjoyable rather than holding weight.”All three stars have responded positively to the way their roles sit in their voices. This summer, DiDonato, right, said that while reading through the score, she would tell herself, “Oh, Kevin, that’s the money note.” Dina LitovskyMcDermott and Parson have long been at work on “The Hours,” including a workshop over the summer, months before the singers arrived for rehearsals. “I was given time with the dancers first,” Parson said, “which was very luxurious.” She didn’t end up using everything but experimented with having them “defy the weight of the architecture” in magical ways that included blowing sets with their breath to move them, or occupying the set like cats — observational and impossible to read.Parson said she has been guided in part by Woolf herself. “Experimentation was the heart of work,” she said. “That was always on my mind — gender fluidity, feminism — and I wanted to start with her.”The dancers, McDermott said, “set the atmosphere of the scenes.” They are involved with maintaining the action’s momentum, but they also move with a vocabulary that is sometimes in harmony with scenes across time, like spirits. The choreography, Parson said, is “an embroidery of these worlds.”A week before opening night, the opera’s many moving parts were still finding their places. There was talk of many tears during rehearsals, but there has also been laughter. An emotional high point — Richard’s suicide by falling out a window — was a clunky comedy of errors that had DiDonato, who was watching from a seat in the auditorium, joking, “Guffman called.”McDermott referred to this as the moment that comes in any rehearsal process when it’s difficult to avoid thinking, “Oh my God, we’ve taken on too much.”Then, he added, something tends to happen. “You want all the performers and musicians to be resonating with each other in a perfect, beautiful way,” he said. “Then the piece begins to speak to itself. But what I’ve noticed is, it doesn’t really turn up until the audiences comes. That’s when you’ll see how strong the atmosphere can be.” More