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      Ronnie Hawkins, Rockabilly Road Warrior, Is Dead at 87

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      Besides performing, he mentored other musicians, including stars like Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm and Rick Danko, who went on to form the Band.Ronnie Hawkins, who combined the gregarious stage presence of a natural showman and a commitment to turbocharged rockabilly music in a rowdy career that spanned more than a half-century, died on Sunday. He was 87.His daughter Leah confirmed his death. She did not specify where he died or the cause, though she said he had been quite ill.Mr. Hawkins started performing in his native Arkansas in the late 1950s and became a legendary roadhouse entertainer based in Canada in the 1960s, his music forever rooted in the primal rock ‘n’ roll rhythms of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.For all of his success, his biggest claim to fame was not the music he produced but the musicians he attracted and mentored. His backup musicians of the early 1960s, Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, went on to form the Band, which backed Bob Dylan and became one of the most admired and influential bands in rock history.But those musicians, like many of Mr. Hawkins’s fans, never lost their reverence for the man known as the Hawk.“Ronnie’s whole style,” Mr. Robertson once said, was for he and his band to play “faster and more violent and explosive than anyone had ever heard before.”Ronald Cornett Hawkins was born on Jan. 10, 1935, two days after Elvis Presley, in Huntsville, Ark. When he was 9, his family moved to nearby Fayetteville, where his father, Jasper, opened a barbershop and his mother, Flora, taught school. His musical education began at the barbershop where a shoeshine boy named Buddy Hayes had a blues band that rehearsed with a piano player named Little Joe.It was there that he began to imbibe the crazy quilt music of the South, with blues and jazz filtered through snatches of country and the minstrel and medicine shows that traveled through town. Before long, something new was added, the beginnings of rock ‘n’ roll, which was percolating out of Sam Phillips’s Sun Records studio in Memphis.Mr. Hawkins brought to all that an element of danger — as a teenager, he had driven a souped-up Model A Ford running bootleg whiskey from Missouri to the dry counties of Oklahoma, making as much as $300 a day.He put together bands, enrolled in and dropped out of the University of Arkansas, joined the Army in 1957 and then quit the same year, intent on making it in the music business. While in the Army, he fronted a rock ‘n’ roll band, the Black Hawks, made up of African American musicians, a daring and usually welcome effort in the segregated South.Demos he recorded at Sun after he left the Army fell flat, but he and the guitarist on his Sun session, Luke Paulman, put together a band with Mr. Hawkins as the athletic frontman given to backflips and handstands. Over the years, his trademark became the camel walk, an early version of what became Michael Jackson’s moonwalk decades later.In 1958, the country music singer Conway Twitty said American rock ‘n’ roll bands could make a killing in Canada. Heeding that advice, Mr. Hawkins moved to a place he once said was “as cold as an accountant’s heart.” Toronto and other places in Ontario turned into his home base for the rest of his career.Mr. Hawkins in the 1970s. While he was known for performing in roadhouses, he also appeared in movies, including the disastrous 1980 western “Heaven’s Gate.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Hawkins liked to talk, perhaps with some embellishment, about regular parties, brawling, sex and drinking that, as he put it, “Nero would have been ashamed of.” But there was nothing glamorous about being a rock ‘n’ roll musician playing nonstop in bars and roadhouses on a circuit centered on Ontario, Quebec and U.S. cities like Buffalo, Detroit and Cleveland.“When I started playing rock ‘n’ roll,” he said, “you were two pay grades below a prisoner of war.”He built up a loyal following based on his magnetic stage presence, the proficiency of his bands and the raw energy of his music. He had modest hits with “Forty Days,” his revised version of Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days,” and “Mary Lou,” a Top 30 hit on the U.S. charts.Later successful recordings include “Who Do You Love?” and “Hey Bo Diddley.”Morris Levy of Mr. Hawkins’s label, Roulette Records, billed him as someone who “moved better than Elvis, he looked better than Elvis and he sang better than Elvis.” He saw a vacuum he thought Mr. Hawkins could fill as the original rockabilly artists slowed down or flamed out. But Mr. Hawkins was not so sure, as he watched clean-cut teen idols like Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Bobby Rydell take over from their more rough-hewed progenitors.To Mr. Levy’s chagrin, Mr. Hawkins opted to own the road in Canada rather than to swing for the fences as a recording star in the U.S., building up a remunerative career working nonstop, even though he never built an epic recording career. He also became known as a one-of-a-kind character and raconteur.“The Hawk had been to college and could quote Shakespeare when he was in the mood,” Mr. Helm wrote in his autobiography, “This Wheel’s on Fire.” “He was also the most vulgar and outrageous rockabilly character I’ve ever met in my life. He’d say and do anything to shock you.”Mr. Hawkins was more than just the consummate rockabilly road warrior. In 1969, he hosted John Lennon and Yoko Ono at his ranch outside Toronto during their world tour to promote world peace as the Plastic Ono Band. Bob Dylan was a longtime fan who in 1975 cast Mr. Hawkins to play the role of “Bob Dylan” in his experimental and largely panned movie “Renaldo and Clara.”Mr. Hawkins in an undated photo. He started performing in his native Arkansas in the late 1950s before settling in Canada in the 1960s.Michael Ochs Archives / StringerHe also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s 1978 concert film “The Last Waltz,” as one of the invited stars who joined the Band in the final performance of the original group at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day in 1976. (The Band later reunited without Mr. Robertson.)Mr. Hawkins growled and hollered his way through a memorable performance of “Who Do You Love” with the Band, good-naturedly fanning Mr. Robertson’s guitar with his cowboy hat as if cooling it off after a particularly torrid solo.And he became a friend of his fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton when he was governor, as well as a conspicuous part of the Arkansas entourage during President Clinton’s Inaugural in 1992. Mr. Clinton also paid tribute to Mr. Hawkins in a 2004 documentary titled “Ronnie Hawkins Still Alive and Kickin’.’’Mr. Hawkins did other acting, including a supporting role in Michael Cimino’s disastrous 1980 western “Heaven’s Gate,” and he morphed into a respected elder statesman of Canadian music. He invested wisely, lived like a country squire in a sprawling lakefront estate and owned several businesses.Still, he was a master of honing his bad-boy image and playing to type, including in his 1989 autobiography, “Last of the Good Ol’ Boys.”“Ninety percent of what I made went to women, whiskey, drugs and cars,” he said. “I guess I just wasted the other 10 percent.”Besides his daughter Leah, survivors include his wife, Wanda, and two other children, Ronnie Jr. and Robin, and four grandchildren.Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting. More

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      Alan White, Who Drummed With Yes and Ex-Beatles, Dies at 72

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      The invitation to perform with John Lennon, which he thought was a joke, led to almost 50 years with one of progressive rock’s foremost bands.Alan White, a seasoned rock drummer who had worked with two former Beatles by the time he turned 21, but who was best known for his long tenure with the pioneering British progressive-rock band Yes, died on Thursday at his home in the Seattle area. He was 72.His death was announced by his family. The announcement did not specify a cause, saying only that he died “after a brief illness.”News of Mr. White’s death came just days after Yes announced that he would not be taking part in the band’s upcoming tour of Britain, which begins on June 13. He had been a member of Yes since 1972, but, the band noted in a statement, “a number of health setbacks” had restricted his time onstage since 2016, with Jay Schellen doing most of the drumming and Mr. White joining the band late in each set.Alan White was born in Pelton, County Durham, England, on June 14, 1949, to Raymond and May (Thrower) White. He began playing the drums when he was 12. He first played professionally the next year, and went on to work with a number of British groups throughout the 1960s.In September 1969, John Lennon, who had heard him with one of those groups, called Mr. White and asked him to join the band he was putting together for a concert in Toronto.As Mr. White told interviewers over the years, he assumed the call was a prank and hung up. Lennon called back, Mr. White was convinced he was who he said he was and he was soon on his way to Canada as a member of the Plastic Ono Band, which also included Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann.The Toronto concert, one of only two that the band would play (the second was a charity concert in London that December), was a memorable one, marking Lennon’s return to the stage after a long absence and yielding the hit album “Live Peace in Toronto.” Mr. White subsequently recorded with Lennon on the single “Instant Karma” and on several tracks of the album “Imagine,” including the title cut, which, like “Instant Karma,” was a Top 10 hit.Mr. White also recorded with another former Beatle, George Harrison, on sessions for Harrison’s first solo album, “All Things Must Pass.”Following those recordings, as well as work backing Joe Cocker and others and a brief stint as one of several percussionists with his fellow drummer Ginger Baker’s band, he was invited in 1972 to join Yes after the band’s original drummer, Bill Bruford, left to join another leading progressive-rock band, King Crimson.Mr. White worked with two former Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison, before he was 21.Dean Rutz/The Seattle Times, via Associated PressYes’s music, like that of other bands in the so-called prog-rock movement, was more complex and challenging than standard rock ’n’ roll. But Mr. White had only three days to learn the band’s repertoire before a concert in Dallas — and, he later recalled, when he met with the band’s singer, Jon Anderson, and its bassist, Chris Squire, they told him that if he didn’t agree to join the band “they were going to throw me out the third-story window.” He agreed, he learned the music and his long association with Yes began.Yes underwent numerous changes in both personnel and style over the years, notably adopting a more straightforward pop sound for the album “90125” and the single “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” which became a No. 1 hit in 1983. Mr. White and Mr. Squire were the band’s only constant presences until Mr. Squire’s death in 2015.Mr. White performing with Yes at Madison Square Garden in 1978. He was on every one of the band’s albums from 1973 until last year.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesMr. White, who also helped write a number of the band’s songs, was first heard with Yes on a few tracks of the live album “Yessongs” (1973) and, a year later, on the studio album “Tales From Topographic Oceans.” He was on every subsequent album through “The Quest,” released last year.Yes was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.Mr. White is survived by his wife of 40 years, Rogena (Walberg) White; a son, Jesse; a daughter, Cassi; and two grandchildren. More

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      Andy Fletcher, a Founder of Depeche Mode, Dies at 60

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      With three others, he created the band in 1980 and rode its synthesizer-driven music to worldwide fame.Andy Fletcher, who played synthesizers in Depeche Mode, the electronics-heavy British band that developed a huge fan following and sold millions of records in the 1980s and ’90s, has died. He was 60.The band announced his death on Thursday on Twitter. The announcement did not specify where he died or give a cause. An unidentified source close to the band told The Associated Press that he died on Thursday at his home in Britain.Mr. Fletcher formed Depeche Mode in 1980 in Basildon, east of London, with his fellow synthesizer players Vince Clarke and Martin Gore and the vocalist Dave Gahan. Mr. Clarke left after the group’s first album, “Speak & Spell,” was released in 1981, Alan Wilder filled the spot, and Mr. Gore took over from Mr. Clarke as the group’s main songwriter. The band started to veer away from pop and toward the darker, more serious music that it rode to worldwide fame over the next two decades.Critics at first often didn’t fully appreciate the appeal of the synthesizer-dominated act.“Consisting of four young men, three synthesizers and a tape recorder playing prerecorded rhythm tracks, Depeche Mode makes gloomy merry-go-round music with a danceable beat,” Stephen Holden wrote in an unenthusiastic review in The New York Times of a 1982 performance at the Ritz in New York.Fans, though, latched on, and by the end of the 1990s the group had landed dozens of singles on the British charts — “People Are People” (1984) and “Personal Jesus” (1989) were among the more successful, also charting in the United States — and it was filling big arenas.Onstage, Mr. Fletcher was the least flashy member of the group. And he was self-deprecating about his role.“Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around,” he said in “Depeche Mode: 101,” a 1989 documentary.But Michael Pagnotta, a SiriusXM Volume host who for much of the 1990s was the band’s publicist, said that offstage, Mr. Fletcher was the glue that held the band together, eager to promote it, keeping track of business and financial matters and often serving as the first point of contact when a tour brought it to a new city.“Andy Fletcher was the heart of Depeche Mode,” Mr. Pagnotta said in a statement. “A true believer in the band and their music. His keen musical and business instincts helped Depeche become one of the most popular and influential bands of their generation and helped carry them all the way to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Not bad for a boy from Basildon.”Depeche Mode, with David Gahan on vocals and Mr. Fletcher on keyboards, at Madison Square Garden in New York in 2005. The least flashy member of the group, Mr. Fletcher once said on his three bandmates, “Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around.”Judith Levitt for The New York TimesThat Hall of Fame induction came in 2020, the band having first been nominated in 2017 — a nomination that Mr. Fletcher never expected, since an electronic band didn’t fit the guitar-and-drums model that traditionally defined rock ’n’ roll.“To be honest, we were surprised,” he said of the initial nomination in a 2017 interview with The Associated Press. “We never aimed to be in it. We think, ‘An electronic band in the rock ‘n’ roll hall?’”Andrew Fletcher was born on July 8, 1961, in Nottingham, England, and, like the band’s other founders, grew up in a working-class family in Basildon. He and Mr. Clarke met when both were in the Boys’ Brigade, a Christian youth organization. They formed a band, Composition of Sound, in 1980 and soon invited another acquaintance, Mr. Gore, to join because, as Mr. Gore put it later, he was “one of the few people in Basildon who had a synthesizer.”Later that year Mr. Gahan joined as featured vocalist, bringing a sense of style and a new name, Depeche Mode. Daniel Miller of Mute Records signed the group, and its popularity began to grow, not only in England but also in East and West Germany and other countries.“Violator,” one of the band’s most successful albums, came out in 1989, and, riding its popularity, Depeche Mode played Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan the next year.“The band’s music, made by synthesizers, is loud washes of sound driven by a dance beat,” Peter Watrous wrote in The Times. “Jet engines roar. Cliffs collapse, dams break. An occasional guitar peeps out from behind the wreckage. All is magnified, and the dance beat, occasionally influenced by house music and hip-hop, continues.“At Radio City, the audience stood during the whole show and constantly had to be kept from dancing in the aisles.”In 2017 the group released its 14th studio album, “Spirit.”Mr. Fletcher’s survivors include his wife, Gráinne Mullan, and their children, Megan and Joe. More

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      Abba Returns to the Stage in London. Sort Of.

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      The Swedish superstars — or digital versions of them, at least — performed on Thursday to 3,000 enthusiastic fans with the help of 140 animators, four body doubles and $175 million.LONDON — Ecstatic cheers bounced around a specially built 3,000-capacity hexagonal arena Thursday night as the members of Abba — one of pop music’s behemoths — slowly emerged from beneath the stage, their classic ’70s hairstyles leading the way, to play their first concert in over 40 years.As a synthesizer blared and lights pulsed, the singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad twirled her arms skyward, unveiling a huge cape decorated with gold and fire red feathers, while she sang the slow-burn disco of “The Visitors.” Benny Andersson, poised at his synth, grinned like he couldn’t believe he was onstage again. Bjorn Ulvaeus, the band’s guitarist, focused on his instrument. Agnetha Faltskog swirled her arms as if in a hippie trance, adding her voice to the chorus.Soon, Andersson took the mic. “I’m really Benny,” he said. “I just look very good for my age.”The specially built Abba Arena holds the technology required to bring the Abbatars to life.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesThe audience — some already out of their seats dancing, glasses of rosé prosecco in hand — laughed because the comment went straight to the heart of the event. The members of Abba onstage weren’t real; they were meticulous digital re-creations made to look like the group in its 1979 heyday. The real Abba — whose members are all at least 72 years old — was watching from the stands.Thursday’s concert was the world premiere of Abba Voyage, a 90-minute spectacular that runs in London seven times a week until at least December, with potential to extend until April 2026, when the permission for the Abba Arena expires, with the land being designated for housing.During the show, the digital avatars — known as Abbatars — performed a set of hits with the help of a 10-piece live band and an array of lights, lasers and special effects. For the Spanish-tinged “Chiquitita,” the group sang in front of a solar eclipse. For the stadium disco of “Summer Night City,” it appeared in pyramids made of dazzling light, with the rings of Saturn twirling in the background. The avatars also appeared as 30-foot-tall figures on huge screens at the sides of the stage, as if being filmed at a real concert. At points, they started appearing in dozens of places onstage as if in a manic music video.Baillie Walsh, the show’s director, said the event was meant to be “a sensory overload.”The project, which Walsh said pushed digital concerts beyond the hologram performances that have made headlines in the past, is the result of years of secretive work, protected by hundreds of nondisclosure agreements. That included five weeks filming the real Abba in motion capture suits in Sweden; four body doubles; endless debates over the set list; and 140 animators from Industrial Light & Magic (known as I.L.M.), a visual effects firm founded by George Lucas that normally works on Hollywood blockbusters.Svana Gisla and Andersson’s son Ludvig Andersson, the event’s producers, said in an interview last Friday that they had to deal with a host of problems during the eight years they worked to develop the show, including fund-raising challenges and malfunctioning toilets.“It’s been stressful,” Andersson said, looking exhausted and sucking a mango-flavored vape pen. “But, make no mistake,” he added, “nothing has been more enjoyable than this.”Alex Beers, a member of the band’s fan club, traveled from Amsterdam for the concert.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesCarla Bento flew in from Portugal just to stand outside the show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesMerchandise for sale inside the arena included shirts, backpacks and a tea tray.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesThe idea started around 2014, Gisla said, when she was brought in to help make music videos for the band involving digital avatars, a process that was “a total nightmare,” she said. Around 2016, Simon Fuller, the producer behind the “Idol” franchise and the Spice Girls, suggested a show starring a 3-D version of the group “singing” while backed by a live band. (Fuller is no longer involved.)The group needed to get creative because Faltskog and Lyngstad had made it clear that they didn’t “want to go on the road,” Andersson told The New York Times in 2021. But the quartet did want to include fresh music in the show, so it reunited in secret to work up a few songs, which became something more: “Voyage,” Abba’s first new album in four decades, released last year.The team quickly realized that holograms were not up to scratch; nor were a host of other technologies. “We kissed a lot of frogs,” Gisla said. It was only when they met representatives of Industrial Light & Magic that she felt they had found a company capable of making “really convincing digital humans,” who could be “running, spinning, performing in floodlights.” The key, Ulvaeus said in a video interview, is “for them to emotionally connect with an audience.”During test shoots in fall 2019, the group’s male members “leapt in with no qualms,” Ben Morris, I.L.M.’s creative director, said. (The musicians’ biggest concern? Shaving off their beards. “I was scared what I would find underneath,” Ulvaeus said.) Lyngstad had just had hip surgery and was using a cane. “But we started playing some songs and she slowly slid off the stool, stood up and said, ‘Take my stick away,’” Morris recalled.The following spring, the band was filmed for five weeks by about 200 cameras in Sweden, as it repeatedly played its hits. The British ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor and four body doubles selected from hundreds of hopefuls looked on, with the intention of learning the band’s every movement, stance and expression so they could mimic its members, then extend their movements to develop the show’s final choreography.Steve Aplin, I.L.M.’s motion director for the event, said they went through “literally hundreds” of iterations of each avatar to get them right, and also modeled clothes designed by the stylist B. Akerlund. The hardest to achieve was Andersson, he added, since “his personality is the twinkle in his eye.”From left: Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson in their motion-capture suits.Baillie WalshWhile the Abbatars were being developed, the 10-piece band was being formed and Gisla was fund-raising (the final budget was 140 million pounds, or about $175 million, she said), developing an arena capable of handling all the technology and trying to keep the massive project under wraps. A moment of potential jeopardy came in December 2019, when the team submitted a planning application to the London authorities that had the word “Logo” on technical drawings of the building instead of “Abba,” in the hope no one would investigate further.When the coronavirus pandemic hit, a project that “already seemed ludicrous before Covid” became “doubly ludicrous” Gisla said, since she was asking backers to trust the idea that 3,000 people would want to dance next to each other in the near future. Materials for the arena’s sound insulation almost got stuck outside Britain when a ship jammed in the Suez Canal; the wood for the building’s facade was meant to come from Russia, but was sourced from Germany at increased expense after Russia invaded Ukraine.Asked what he had gone through while making the project, Walsh replied, “A nervous breakdown,” then laughed.Abba Voyage is not the only Abba-themed event in London; the long-running “Mamma Mia!” musical in the West End also regularly attracts boozy bachelorette and birthday parties. Gisla said that like a West End show, Abba Voyage would have to sell about 80 percent of its seats to make a profit. Tickets start at £31, or $38, although few of those cheap seats appear available for the initial run. Attendees pay more — starting at $67 — for a spot on a dance floor in front of the stage.Andersson, the producer, said he obviously hoped Abba Voyage would be a commercial success — as do the members of Abba, who are investors — but he insisted he was happy the team had simply “created something beautiful” after so much toil. Ulvaeus said he wouldn’t be surprised if some of the group’s contemporaries consider a similar undertaking: “If they ask me for advice, of course, I would say, ‘It takes a long time and it’s very expensive.’”The Abba Voyage show features a 10-piece live band and an array of lights, lasers and special effects.Johan PerssonBrenton and Brenda Pfeiffer, from Australia, sharing a kiss after the show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesElla Vaday and Kitty Scott-Claus, competitors on “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK,” attending the opening-night show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesAt Thursday’s premiere, the audience was split between invited celebrities in the stands (including Sweden’s king and queen) and members of Abba’s fan club on the dance floor, yet in both sections people hugged in joy at the sound of beloved songs, and danced and sang along. The fact that the band onstage wasn’t the flesh-and-blood originals didn’t seem to matter. For “Waterloo,” the Abbatars simply introduced a huge video of their 1974 Eurovision performance and danced their way offstage as the crowd cheered wildly.Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp said he had been left in “a state of confusion” by the show. “I felt very emotional at certain times during that performance, which I’m calling a performance but it wasn’t — it was a projection,” he said. He added, “But I don’t know what it means for the future of mankind.” He suggested avatar shows featuring the Beatles and Elvis Presley wouldn’t be far behind.The fans outside were too overwhelmed to worry about the show’s implications for the live music industry. Teresa Harle, 55, a postal worker who attended with a friend and ran to the front of the arena to get the best view, said she found the avatars so convincing, she even waved at Faltskog when the show ended.“It was a once in a lifetime experience,” Harle said, “even though we’re coming again tomorrow, and Saturday.” More

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      This ‘Cats’ Adaptation Has the Kids Singing

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      Heather Biddle, the theater director at J.J. Pearce High School in Richardson, Texas, wanted to put on a production of “Cats” for so long it became something of a comedy bit.Back in August 2020, following months of the pandemic shutdown and facing a year of remote learning, her students made commemorative T-shirts that read “At least we didn’t do ‘Cats.’”That all changed this month, when Biddle finally got her wish.J.J. Pearce High School students during a rehearsal. Many of them mostly knew the show in the context of its ill-fated 2019 cinematic adaptation.Eli Durst for The New York TimesShe staged one of the country’s first productions of “Cats: Young Actors Edition,” a one-hour version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit 1981 musical, adapted by iTheatrics for Concord Theatricals, and released to schools across North America last fall. And as Biddle had expected, her students — many of whom mostly knew the show in the context of its ill-fated 2019 cinematic adaptation — came around to it.“I text Biddle all the time, ‘I’m no longer a ‘Cats’ hater!’” Ainsley Ross, a senior and the production’s musical director, said during a break from rehearsals on May 10. “Now that I’m working on it, I love it so much.”Ginger Johnson, as Munkustrap, during a break from the dress rehearsal.Eli Durst for The New York TimesAt a dress rehearsal inside the school’s auditorium three days before the show opened, the nervous energy was palpable. Dozens of teenagers ran about in scruffy bodysuits that had been hand painted by fellow students and Biddle.Spencer Van Goor, a sophomore who played Rum Tum Tugger, purred “Hello, gorgeous” to a teased out wig as he picked it up off the stage and put it on his head. “I’ve wanted to do this show for nine years now,” the 15-year-old said. “I really like the dance and the music; it’s exotic and weird.”Sophie Pong, a Dallas high school senior who was interning with Heather Biddle, applying makeup to Isabella Denissen, a junior who played Demeter.Eli Durst for The New York TimesAmelia Pinney, a junior who not only took on the dance-heavy role of Bombalurina but also choreographed the entire show, moved in tandem with Isabella Denissen, a junior who played Demeter. They were as attached at the hip as their two characters would be throughout the show.“It’s mesmerizing. It’s so different from any other show that’s been done,” Pinney said wistfully.Zoe Lehman was cast as Mr. Mistoffelees.Eli Durst for The New York TimesPinney, as Bombalurina, choreographed the show.Eli Durst for The New York TimesIn the greenroom, students paced excitedly as they waited to get made up as cats. “You look like a sleep paralysis demon,” one actor told another, which got a laugh from the larger group. The students practiced their dance moves, twirling their hands, spinning their bodies, and kicking up pointed toes. They manically discussed their other favorite musicals. They all agreed that Hailey Gibson, a sophomore cast as Grizabella, was going to blow everyone away with her rendition of “Memory.”Concord Theatricals, the licensing house that represents the stage licensing rights to the Andrew Lloyd Webber catalog in North America, has long made 60-minute, kid-friendly versions of other stage works in its collection, such as Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music” and Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes,” which J.J. Pearce students performed last fall.“I think people were shocked at how much they loved the show,” said Biddle, the theater director at J.J. Pearce High School in Richardson, Texas.Eli Durst for The New York Times“These editions do hundreds of performances a year; they are a gateway to theater,” said Imogen Lloyd Webber, a daughter of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Concord’s senior vice president of communications.When the company decided to adapt Lloyd Webber’s work for younger performers and audiences, “Cats” was an obvious first choice. “It’s an ensemble show,” Imogen Lloyd Webber said. “Everybody’s got a part. Everybody can do a number. You can go mad with the costumes and the sets and the choreography.”The students meditated before the dress rehearsal.Eli Durst for The New York Times“And if you think about it, T.S. Eliot’s ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’ was originally a children’s poem,” she said, referring to the playful collection of poetry that makes up most of the musical’s book. “It made sense. Obviously, internally we’ve been calling it ‘Kittens’.”Final adjustments: Ava Johnson, as Victoria the White Cat, helping Uzo Bender, as Admetus, with his wig.Eli Durst for The New York TimesVan Goor, who was one of 32 students to perform in the production (five others contributed technical support), also appreciated that “Cats” is a true ensemble. “Technically everyone gets their own little feature,” he said. Though largely a plotless extravaganza, the musical is set in a junkyard where a group of so-called Jellicle cats have gathered for an annual celebration.“Cats: Young Actors Edition,” which is transposed in higher keys that are better suited for younger voices, was made with middle-school performers in mind. But Biddle really wanted it for her high schoolers. Most of them have worked with Biddle since they were 12 or 13, participating in her popular all-ages school summer program.The students’ parents were allowed to watch the final dress rehearsal on May 12.Eli Durst for The New York TimesThe show was J.J. Pearce’s first production without any pandemic precautions, like limited seating, masked performers or a masked audience. Three days after the rehearsal, there was still a vibrant energy among the students at their 2 p.m. show on Friday, which had been arranged not only for the performers’ high school classmates but also for local middle schoolers who were bused over after taking their annual standardized tests. Preteens and teenagers may have a reputation for not paying close attention at school-sponsored events, but the auditorium was silent when the descending riff of the musical’s opening number, “Prologue: Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” began.As the show went on, Biddle’s performers were not the only ones coming around to the idea of “Cats.” The audience seemed just as entranced by the musical, which is equal parts spooky, silly and sentimental. Though some momentary loud shuffling occurred when the period bell rang, dozens of students remained rapt in their seats, cheering along to Van Goor’s provocative performance of “The Rum Tum Tugger” and when Pinney and others did back flips and handsprings onstage.Biddle said she was thrilled to have converted “a whole new group of ‘Cats’ lovers.”Eli Durst for The New York TimesWhen the house lights rose after the performance, the high school students who had been in the audience ran backstage to congratulate their friends.And the performers? They were basking in the moment, thrilled that they had pulled off the show. They’d done “Cats”! And they would do it again that evening and the next day.When asked if this production was everything she hoped it would be, Biddle replied, without a moment’s hesitation: “I think people were shocked at how much they loved the show. It was worth the wait and I love that we converted a whole new group of ‘Cats’ lovers. ‘Cats’ now and forever!” More

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      ‘I Would Love to Sing Lucia’: A Male Soprano Comes Into His Own

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      Samuel Mariño, a singer with a rare voice type in opera, is making his Decca album debut with a glimpse at a more gender-fluid future.BERLIN — Samuel Mariño is a rarity in opera: a true male soprano.Rather than relying on falsetto as a countertenor would, Mariño, 28, is able to comfortably sing high notes with his chest voice. Now he is branching out from Baroque parts originally written for castrati. A big step in that direction: “Sopranista,” his debut album on the Decca label, which is out on Friday.He has his eye on a variety of roles, including Sophie, the ingénue of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” and Dvorak’s Rusalka, he said in an interview, with the aim of sending a message that classical music should be “open to all communities,” including a multiplicity of genders. And “Sopranista,” named after the Italian term for a male soprano, offers a glimpse at that more fluid future.The album opens with Cherubino’s aria “Voi che sapete,” from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” Cherubino, originally written for a female soprano, is now a signature trouser role — an often young male character performed by a mezzo-soprano. Mariño’s program includes more Mozart, as well as the world premiere recording of “Son amour, sa constance extrême,” an aria (again, originally for a woman) from Joseph Boulogne’s little-known chamber opera “L’ Amant Anonyme” (or, “The Anonymous Lover”).Mariño, who was born in Venezuela and is based here in Berlin, didn’t lose the boyish aspects of his voice at puberty; it only “partially broke,” he said. With a high speaking voice, life as a teenager — a gay one, at that — was difficult. “Everyone was making jokes, bullying me,” he said.So he sought help from his mother; she took him to doctors who offered surgery or vocal therapy. But one suggested he could be a singer. After studying at the Paris Conservatory, he took lessons with the soprano Barbara Bonney. He then spent his early career specializing in castrato roles.Mariño’s voice only “partially broke” during puberty, he said.Maria Sturm for The New York TimesUnlike castrati of the 17th and 18th centuries — always beardless, and typically tall and paunchy — Mariño is short and lithe, and was already sporting a five o’clock shadow on a recent afternoon walk with Leia, his Cavalier King Charles spaniel.At his apartment, Mariño spoke about his new album, his desire to go beyond castrati roles and his campaign to free himself — along with classical music generally — from the confines of traditional gender boundaries. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.When were you first exposed to classical music?We sang at home, and my family loved dancing. We did salsa, merengue, this kind of thing — but no classical music at all. My parents were both university teachers, and they worked from 7 a.m. until 9 in the evening. I finished school by 1 p.m., and they put me in a lot of things to fill the time. I did piano, karate, baseball, painting and sang in choirs, and I started doing ballet when I was 12 or 13. I finished high school at 16, and I wanted to study biology because I love animals and nature. I didn’t get a place for that at university, and I told my mom I wanted to be a ballet dancer. She said, “Why don’t you try singing?”When you started studying voice in Paris, were you training as a male soprano?The teachers were trying to treat me as a countertenor. I had to sing lower when I could sing much higher. Being a countertenor is an established thing, and they were trying to put me into that box. Then, in 2017, I met Barbara Bonney. A friend told me that I sing very much like her. I wrote to her and said: “Hi. I’m Samuel and I want to take lessons with you.” I went to Salzburg, Austria, and Barbara was like a fairy godmother. She told me to sing how I speak, to just put notes to my speaking voice. And that is what I do today.When did you start taking pride in how you speak?I did a lot of psychotherapy when I was a teenager, and I’m still working to respect myself and value who I am. Some people are bigger, some people are smaller; some people have dark eyes, some people have blue eyes. I have this voice. I don’t see it as special. I see it as part of my nature.“Cherubino is a young teenager, and I do him as a boy who is innocent and confused,” Mariño said. “It’s a totally different vision of how the role can be sung.”Maria Sturm for The New York TimesYour new album starts with a famous Mozart aria written for a woman who is playing a man. What do you bring to the role as a male singer?My voice is a light lyric soprano, with a bit of coloratura. In the score, Cherubino is a soprano role, but today it’s for mezzo-sopranos and their male-ish colors. If you talk to any mezzo, they will tell you it’s very hard to sing Cherubino, because it’s quite high — not super high notes, but sitting all the time in a high tessitura. Cherubino is a young teenager, and I do him as a boy who is innocent and confused. It’s a totally different vision of how the role can be sung.Offstage, you often mix and match traditional male and female clothes. Are you aiming for something similar as a singer?I am not transitioning; I’m just a man who likes to wear skirts. I have thousands of jeans, thousands of sneakers — and thousands of heels. On the cover of my new album, I’m wearing Vivienne Westwood. I’m trying to expand my bubble, change my technique, mix genders. I have sung male roles all my life, but I hope this is going to change. There are macho castrato roles — Handel’s Giulio Cesare or Teseo — but I don’t like them that much. I would love to sing Lucia di Lammermoor.How did you discover the aria by Joseph Boulogne?I first learned about him because of a scene in Sofia Coppola’s film “Marie Antoinette,” where Kirsten Dunst is sitting at the piano with this Afro-Caribbean teacher. Guadeloupe is just around the corner from Venezuela, and I got interested in him as a historical person. I found out about the opera online, and then I found the score online. My generation is lucky to have this; you make two clicks, and that’s it.Other than Lucia, are there other traditional female roles that you would like to try? What about the Queen of the Night or Carmen?Technically speaking, I can sing the Queen of the Night, but I don’t have the dramatic voice. So it would be like a kid singing. And I cannot sing Carmen, which is not about the voice, but the personality. I would love to sing a soprano part in a Mahler symphony. Barbara always told me: “Darling, you can sing that. You have a bigger voice than I do.” More

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      Review: Wilco’s Understated Magnum Opus ‘Cruel Country’

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      On “Cruel Country,” the Chicago band ponders a genre and a nation.Wilco’s “Cruel Country” makes a modest first impression for a magnum opus. Its tone is naturalistic and understated; the album was recorded largely with Wilco playing live in the studio as a six-man band, quietly savoring the chance to make music together after pandemic isolation.Most of the songs have a quietly strummed acoustic guitar at their core, basic and folky. The sonic experimentation that Wilco has enjoyed since its 2001 masterpiece, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” — which it recently performed at concerts in New York and its longtime hometown, Chicago, and plans to reissue in vastly expanded form in September — has been temporarily, though not entirely, cut back on “Cruel Country,” as if to set artifice aside.“Talk to me/I don’t want to hear poetry,” Jeff Tweedy sings in “The Universe,” continuing, “Say it plain/I want to hear you speak.”But “Cruel Country” is also a double album, a full 21 songs, that sets out to engage the notion of “country” as both a musical style and a nation. Tweedy’s songs ponder history, politics, mortality, ambivalence and the utility — or futility — of art in 21st-century America. They also, at times, blur distinctions between patriotism and romance. Yet in the album’s title song, Tweedy sets ambiguity aside as he sings, “I love my country like a little boy/Red, white and blue,” only to follow it with “I love my country, stupid and cruel.”Wilco was a musical throwback when it got started in 1994. In a decade of grunge and hip-hop, it drew instead on a boomer trinity of the Band, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. And now that the group itself has decades of its catalog behind it, “Cruel Country” also circles back to Wilco’s own past; the band used a similar hand-played, live-in-the-studio approach on its 2007 album, “Sky Blue Sky.” The country music that Wilco embraced on that album, and returns to through most of “Cruel Country,” has a particular vintage: the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were pushing country toward rock while bands like the Grateful Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers were connecting three-chord country to psychedelia.Half a century later on “Cruel Country,” the sound is even more nostalgic, though it still leaves room for exploration, especially in a handful of songs that open up into the kind of jams that Wilco extrapolates onstage. Trudging or shuffling along in mid-tempo, the songs can often sound serenely resigned. But there’s an underlying tension in the lyrics and in Tweedy’s scratchy, subdued, openly imperfect voice. He sounds weary but dogged, hanging in there like the music he clings to.The album opens with “I Am My Mother,” a waltz about an immigrant’s hopes and roots: “Dangerous dreams have been detected at the southern border,” Tweedy sings. And in “Hints,” he contemplates a bitterly divided nation, urging, “Keep your hand in mine” but noting, “There is no middle when the other side/Would rather kill than compromise.”The album juggles despair and persistence, gravity and humor. Wilco comes up with twangy, jaunty, chicken-pluck country in “Falling Apart (Right Now),” where Tweedy complains, to a partner or a populace, “Don’t you fall apart while I’m falling apart,” and in “A Lifetime to Find” — a conversation with Death, who arrives suddenly: “Here to collect.” And amid tinkly keyboard tones and teasing slide-guitar lines in “All Across the World,” Tweedy admits to the mixed emotions of being comfortable while others suffer — “I can barely stand knowing what’s true” — as he wonders, “What’s a song going to do?”A song can only do so much, and on “Cruel Country” Wilco offers no grand lesson or master plan, only observations, feelings and enigmas. Many of the album’s best moments are wordless ones. “Bird Without a Tail/Base of My Skull” offers a free-associative string of nonsense couplets that’s like a nursery rhyme until it ends in a fatal stabbing; it turns into an intricately picked two-chord jam, with Glenn Kotche’s drumming providing whispery momentum as Tweedy and Nels Cline toss guitar ideas back and forth, then interlace them. It’s a brief stretch of communion and consolation in doleful times.Wilco“Cruel Country”(dBpm) More

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      New Effort Aims to Bring More Contemporary Music to Orchestras

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      An initiative by the League of American Orchestras will enlist 30 ensembles to perform works by six living composers, all of them women.Many orchestras, eager to demonstrate a commitment to contemporary music, have taken pride in programming works by living composers in recent years. But when the glamour of the premiere fades, many of those works all but disappear from the standard repertoire, rarely to be performed again.Now a group of nonprofit leaders is working to make new music a more permanent part of the artistic landscape. The League of American Orchestras on Thursday announced an initiative that will enlist 30 ensembles over the next several years to perform new pieces by six composers, all of them women.“There’s too much great music that gets lost and is never heard after its premiere,” Simon Woods, the league’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We thought, ‘We need to solve that.’”While many orchestras are eager for the prestige of commissioning new works, Woods said they are not as focused on playing pieces that have premiered elsewhere.“Orchestras should be patrons of new work,” he said. “But still, the second performance and the third performance are really important. Because it’s only when one hears a work a few times that it sort of snowballs and it has a chance of getting a toehold in the repertoire. Building that momentum is really important.”The League, in partnership with the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation and American Composers Orchestra, has been working since 2014 to bring more diversity to orchestral programming, including awarding commissions to female and nonbinary composers.The initiative announced on Thursday will build on those efforts, pairing each of the six composers with five ensembles. The program, which will cost at least $360,000, will be financed by the Toulmin foundation.The six composers are the British-born Anna Clyne, who works in the United States; Sarah Gibson, who is also a pianist; the Hong Kong-born Angel Lam; Gity Razaz, an Iranian American; Arlene Sierra, an American based in London; and Wang Lu, a China-born composer and pianist, who lives in Providence, R.I.Wang said in an interview that it was often difficult for contemporary composers to find orchestras interested in playing new works after they have premiered.“As a composer, I can’t just like knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, this is my music, why don’t you play it?’” she said.Wang, who is working on a new piece that the New York Philharmonic is to premiere in January, said the league’s initiative would give artists more opportunities to develop. “You can only get better by working with orchestras,” she said in an interview. “Only by listening can you improve.”The initial group of orchestras taking part are the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Kansas City Symphony and the Sarasota Orchestra. Those ensembles will begin to premiere and perform the works by the composers next season.In the coming months, the league will choose the remaining 24 ensembles that will take part in the program. More