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      Hear the Weird Sounds of a Black Hole Singing

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      As part of an effort to “sonify” the cosmos, researchers have converted the pressure waves from a black hole into an audible … something.Sound waves of the Perseus galaxy cluster were resynthesized after boosting their frequency quadrillions of times, scaling them 57 to 58 octaves — or about seven piano-lengths — above their true pitch.NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand/SYSTEM SoundsIn space you can’t hear a black hole scream, but apparently you can hear it sing.In 2003 astrophysicists working with NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory detected a pattern of ripples in the X-ray glow of a giant cluster of galaxies in the constellation Perseus. They were pressure waves — that is to say, sound waves — 30,000 light-years across and radiating outward through the thin, ultrahot gas that suffuses galaxy clusters. They were caused by periodic explosions from a supermassive black hole at the center of the cluster, which is 250 million light-years away and contains thousands of galaxies.With a period of oscillation of 10 million years, the sound waves were acoustically equivalent to a B-flat 57 octaves below middle C, a tone that the black hole has apparently been holding for the last two billion years. Astronomers suspect that these waves act as a brake on star formation, keeping the gas in the cluster too hot to condense into new stars.The Chandra astronomers recently “sonified” these ripples by speeding up the signals to 57 or 58 octaves above their original pitch, boosting their frequency quadrillions of times to make them audible to the human ear. As a result, the rest of us can now hear the intergalactic sirens singing.Through these new cosmic headphones, the Perseus black hole makes eerie moans and rumbles that reminded this listener of the galumphing tones marking an alien radio signal that Jodie Foster hears through headphones in the science fiction film “Contact.”As part of an ongoing project to “sonify” the universe, NASA also released similarly generated sounds of the bright knots in a jet of energy shooting from a giant black hole at the center of the humongous galaxy known as M87. These sounds reach us across 53.5 million light-years as a stately succession of orchestral tones.The “sonification” of M87.NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM SoundsYet another sonification project has been undertaken by a group led by Erin Kara, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as part of an effort to use light echoes from X-ray bursts to map the environment around black holes, much as bats use sound to catch mosquitoes.All this is an outgrowth of “Black Hole Week,” an annual NASA social media extravaganza, May 2-6. As it happens this week provides a prelude to big news on May 12, when researchers with the Event Horizon Telescope, which in 2019 produced the first image of a black hole, are to announce their latest results.Black holes, as decreed by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, are objects with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, much less sound, can escape. Paradoxically, they can also be the brightest things in the universe. Before any sort of matter disappears forever into a black hole, theorists surmise, it would be accelerated to near-light speeds by the hole’s gravitational field and heated, swirling, to millions of degrees. This would spark X-ray flashes, generate interstellar shock waves and squeeze high-energy jets and particles across space like so much toothpaste from a tube.In one common scenario, a black hole exists in a binary system with a star and steals material from it, which accretes into a dense, bright disk — a visible doughnut of doom — that sporadically produces X-ray outbursts.Using data from a NASA instrument called the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer — NICER — a group led by Jingyi Wang, an M.I.T. graduate student, sought echoes or reflections of these X-ray blasts. The time delay between the original X-ray blasts and their echoes and distortions caused by their nearness to the weird gravity of black holes offered insight into the evolution of these violent bursts.Meanwhile, Dr. Kara has been working with education and music experts to convert the X-ray reflections into audible sound. In some simulations of this process, she said, the flashes go all the way around the black hole, generating a telltale shift in their wavelengths before being reflected.“I just love that we can ‘hear’ the general relativity in these simulations,” Dr. Kara said in an email.Eat your hearts out, Pink Floyd.Sync your calendar with the solar systemNever miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that’s out of this world.Exploring the Solar SystemA guide to the spacecraft beyond Earth’s orbit. More

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      The Deeper Meaning of Elvis in Australia

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      I went to the Parkes Elvis Festival thinking I’d learn something about what America used to be. I left thinking more about Australia.The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email.The first time I learned to love Elvis Presley, I was in my early 20s, and visiting Graceland during a cross-country trip with a few friends. I remember watching videos of his concerts in a dark theater there and being amazed at his energy and talent. Next, there was Baghdad Elvis.When I covered the war in Iraq in 2007, a photographer we worked with happened to have mastered a near-perfect rendition of “Suspicious Minds.” At one point, in our heavily fortified compound on the Tigris River, he showed up wearing a bespoke white jumpsuit, circa 1973, leading us all in a night of raucous karaoke — loud enough to drown out the sound of bullets in the distance.And then there was Parkes, the small town in rural New South Wales, which hosts the largest annual Elvis festival in the Southern Hemisphere (and possibly the world). I’d been hearing about it ever since I came to Australia but this year, I decided to go, and to bring my 11-year-old daughter with me.I was looking for more than just spectacle, though there was plenty of that. I was looking for heart. Why do 25,000 people come out to celebrate a dead American rocker in the middle of a continent where Elvis never played a concert?I thought maybe there was something to say about the America he seemed to represent, a country that had been more optimistic, carefree, effusive, and excessive than the more earnest and angry United States we’ve seen over the past few years. Perhaps Elvis nostalgia was also America nostalgia?But what I found — as you can see in my article, with amazing photos from Abigail Varney —was simpler and more local, if no less profound. America was really not the point. Small town Australia and participatory “have a go” Australia was what animated the event.According to Elvis tribute artists — and Elvis’s former tour manager, who made the trek from back home in the U.S. — Australians of all social classes, political persuasions and ages were more likely to dress up, sing, march in the parade, or play rugby, all while dressed up as Elvis, all while encouraging each other to get involved and have some fun.The Australian festival was unique because the lines between serious and silly were blurred. While Americans listened and admired Elvis, Australians made him their own.I’ve written a lot about that Australian penchant for pulling people into an activity — it’s a big part of the idea-driven memoir I published here, called “Into the Rip,” which will be out in the U.S. in the next few months with a different title. But in Parkes there was an extra layer of verve that only the combination of Elvis and small town Australia could possibly provide. My daughter loved it. So did I.Now here are our stories of the week.Australia and New ZealandA dutiful blue catfish dad, mouthbrooding eggs that he probably fertilized.Janine AbeciaMeet Mouth Almighty, a Different Kind of Fish Dad. A study of Australian fish that care for offspring through mouthbrooding shows that things underwater are not always as monogamous as they seem.Australian Gets 12 Years for Anti-Gay Killing of an American in 1988. Scott Johnson, a U.S. graduate student, was pushed off a cliff, in a case that was first ruled a suicide but that his brother refused to let go of.Helicopter Catches Booster Rocket Falling From Space. After sending a payload of 34 small satellites into orbit, the space company Rocket Lab used a helicopter to catch the 39-foot-long used-up booster stage of the rocket before it splashed into the Pacific Ocean.How the King of Rock ’n’ Roll Still Makes Australia Sing. Elvis never played a concert “down under,” but that hasn’t stopped tens of thousands of Australians from making him their own at an annual festival.Around the TimesInside the Apocalyptic Worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’. A New York Times analysis of 1,150 episodes reveals how Tucker Carlson pushes extremist ideas and conspiracy theories into millions of households, five nights a week.As Victory Day Looms in Russia, Guesswork Grows Over Putin’s Ukraine Goals. The Russian holiday celebrating the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany is viewed by Ukraine and NATO as a stage for the Russian president to proclaim a turn in the war.Abortion Pills Stand to Become the Next Battleground in a Post-Roe America. Medication abortion allows patients to terminate early pregnancies at home. Some states are moving to limit it, while others are working to expand access.Much Gilt, Little Guilt. The Met Gala 2022 celebrated themes of opulence, excess and fame.Enjoying the Australia Letter? Sign up here or forward to a friend.For more Australia coverage and discussion, start your day with your local Morning Briefing and join us in our Facebook group. More

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      How the King of Rock ’n’ Roll Still Makes Australia Sing

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      PARKES, Australia — The Elvis Presley from Japan bowed with quiet respect. Then he tore into a rendition of “Burning Love” that sounded straight out of Memphis, and that definitely stretched the crotch of his blue jumpsuit to the limit.Backstage, a few more “Elvi” — the plural of Elvis, at least at the largest Elvis festival in the Southern Hemisphere — were going over final song choices, sweating their options for a crowd that blurred the line between fans and impersonators. Thousands of Elvi were out there in the middle of Australia, aged 5 to 85, with more pompadours and leisure suits than anyone could count.“God, it’s so many people,” said Charles Stone, Elvis’s tour manager from 1971 until his death in 1977, surveying the scene with a gold chain peeking outside his T-shirt. “Look at this.”Parkes, a small town five hours’ drive from Sydney, now shines once a year with Elvis sequins and rhinestones. Around 25,000 people usually join the festival, which started out with a couple of restaurant owners trying to bring a little less conversation and a little more action into Parkes.That was back in 1993. Nearly 30 years later, the festival has become a national treasure that exemplifies how Australians tend to do a lot of things: all together, with self-deprecating humor and copious amounts of alcohol.An Elvis tribute contest during the festival.A street in Parkes blocked off during the Elvis festival to accommodate an array of vintage cars.A couple swing dancing in their matching Elvis-themed outfit at the Parkes Leagues Club restaurant.This year’s event — after Covid forced a cancellation in 2021 — felt somehow more Elvis-like than ever. A certain heaviness mixed with the thrill of rock ’n’ roll. From tiny pubs with first-time singers to golf courses and rugby pitches where games were played in matching Elvis gear — and, of course, to the main stages, where the world’s top tribute artists could be found — there was a craving for post-lockdown, post-pandemic release.What is life even for, many of them yelled over the music, if not for a dress-up-and-let-go, yank-each-other-up-on-stage-and-SING sense of abandon?“It lets us forget everything,” said Gina Vicar, 61, a small-business owner from Melbourne who had come to the festival with a dozen friends. “With all that we’ve gone through, and what the world is going through now, it’s great to see all this joy.”When we met, she had just shouted encouragement to an Elvis (real name, Deon Symo) who had announced that he was only 21 and from Adelaide, a city often joked about and rarely celebrated.He was wearing a white jumpsuit as he stood in front of a red curtain held up with rubber bands in a pub with sticky floors — and the crowd treated him like a Las Vegas superstar. Two women a decade or two his senior danced in front, mouthing the words to every song.A couple from Queensland, Australia, wearing “Blue Hawaii” themed t-shirts.Toki Toyokazu, a crowd favorite from Sendai, Japan, performing on the festival’s main stage.The annual match between the Elvis-inspired “Blue Suede Shoes” and the “Ready Teddys.”“He’s got a great voice,” Ms. Vicar said. “He just needs the confidence.”All over Parkes, from Wednesday to Sunday, Elvi won over the Elvis faithful.Toki Toyokazu, the singer from Sendai, Japan, was a crowd favorite; he won the festival’s formal competition in 2020, and his return seemed to signal a post-Covid milestone.Another performer, “Bollywood Elvis,” wearing a gold jumpsuit featuring faux gems the size of Waffle House biscuits, also seemed to pop up whenever energy flagged. His real name was Alfred Vaz. He moved to Australia from Bombay in 1981, when he was a manager for Air India, and he said he had been coming to Parkes since the festival began. This year, he brought his nephew, Callum Vincent, 24, a music teacher from Perth, who smiled as he took it all in.“There’s only one Elvis,” Mr. Vaz, 65, said on Saturday morning as the festival’s parade began. “There are a lot of pretenders and a lot of contenders, but there’s only one Elvis.””There are a lot of pretenders and a lot of contenders, but there’s only one Elvis.”Except in Parkes, a former mining town in a country where Elvis never actually played a concert.A few minutes earlier, the mayor and the area’s local member of Parliament had driven by, sitting on the back of a convertible wearing ’70s jumpsuits along with wigs and sunglasses. Ms. Vicar and her friends walked in the parade alongside, well, the full range of Elvi. More

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      Black Star’s First Album in 24 Years Arrives, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Sharon Van Etten, Carly Rae Jepsen, 070 Shake and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Black Star, ‘O.G.’Talib Kweli and Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) have reunited as Black Star — 24 years after their first and only previous full album together — with “No Fear of Time,” abetted by an ideal choice of producer: the crate-digging, funk-loving Madlib. Most of the new album is exclusive to the subscription podcast app Luminary, but the opening track, “O.G.” — “On God” — is on YouTube. Over an insistent bass line and swelling organ chords, the rapping is equal parts boasting and worship, insisting “the time is relative, ’cause the truth is everlasting.” Both rappers juggle mortality and persistence, rightfully flaunting their own “Encyclopaedia Britannica flow,” mixing Brooklyn pride and reggae references (and samples from “The Ruler” by Gregory Isaacs), sounding self-congratulatory but still determined to instruct. JON PARELESDoja Cat, ‘Vegas’The most soulful voice in “Vegas” — by far — is the sample from Big Mama Thornton, rasping “You ain’t nothin’ but a” from “Hound Dog,” the song that Elvis Presley would latch onto. “Hound Dog” was about a materialist masquerading as a sweetheart, and the rapping and multitracked vocal harmonies of Doja Cat’s “Vegas” — from the soundtrack to Baz Lurhmann’s “Elvis” — update it to the life of a 21st-century star: “Sittin’ courtside with your arm around me.” The underlying three chords are a classic blues structure; Doja Cat borrows their archetypal power. PARELESCarly Rae Jepsen, ‘Western Wind’Carly Rae Jepsen’s bright, bold pop takes an impressionistic turn on her new single “Western Wind,” thanks in part to production from Rostam Batmanglij. A hypnotic beat and Jepsen’s entranced, closed-eyes vocals make the whole thing sound like a pastoral reverie — an intriguing new direction for her. “First bloom, you know it’s spring/Reminding me love that it’s all connected,” Jepsen sings dreamily. The solar power is strong with this one. LINDSAY ZOLADZHolly Humberstone, ‘Sleep Tight’Holly Humberstone, 22, is the current opening act on Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour Tour, and the two share a penchant for emotionally resonant songwriting and music that sounds like whatever was on the radio shortly before they were born. “Sleep Tight,” which Humberstone co-wrote with the 1975 frontman Matty Healy and her longtime collaborator Rob Milton, is a tale of mixed emotions and that gray area between pals and lovers, set to rushing acoustic guitar chords that conjure ’90s pop-rock. “Oh my God, I’ve done it again, I almost killed our friendship,” Humberstone sings. Her delivery is at once as casually conversational as a text message and as shyly secret as an internal monologue. ZOLADZLady Gaga, ‘Hold My Hand’Lady Gaga is possibly the only contemporary pop star who could convincingly cover Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” and Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone,” so it’s fitting that her theme from the upcoming “Top Gun: Maverick” channels a little bit of both. “Hold My Hand” is as bombastic and romantic as any of her torch songs from the soundtrack for “A Star Is Born,” but it’s also punched up with soaring electric guitar and gigantic ’80s drums that sound like they were recorded in an airplane hangar. “So cry tonight, but don’t you let go of my hand,” she belts as if her life depended on it, pulling off gloriously earnest pastiche like only Gaga can. ZOLADZ070 Shake, ‘Web’Danielle Balbuena, the singer and rapper who records as 070 Shake, overdubs her voice into a cascading chorale in “Web,” a cryptic call for personal contact and honesty. “This thing isn’t working/Let’s be here in person,” she chants. “I want to get through to you.” Maybe the song is a reaction to too many Zoom meetings; it’s a gorgeous response. PARELESSharon Van Etten, ‘Come Back’Confessions of need and uncertainty lead to monumental choruses in the songs on Sharon Van Etten’s new album, “We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong,” which ponder how to reconcile the life of a performing artist with motherhood, relationships and self-realization. A humble acoustic guitar strum starts “Come Back,” as a tremulous-voiced Van Etten muses about “Subtle moments of past/What a wondering time.” But the chorus arrives in a giant wall of sound — drums, keyboards, guitars, vocal harmonies in cavernous reverb — as Van Etten longs for a return to being “wild and unsure/And naked and pure.” PARELESKathleen Hanna, Erica Dawn Lyle and Vice Cooler, ‘Mirrorball’With Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill exhorting, “Put your finger in the socket!,” “Mirrorball” is the first blast of post-punk mayhem from “Land Trust,” a benefit album for North East Farmers of Color, which is acquiring land for Indigenous and minority farmers. During the pandemic, Bikini Kill’s current guitarist, Erica Dawn Lyle, and drum tech, Vice Cooler, collaborated with multiple generations of feminist rockers; along with Hanna, the pioneering riot grrrl, the album — due June 3 — draws on members of the Raincoats, the Breeders, Deerhoof, Slant 6, Palberta and the Linda Lindas. While “Mirrorball” flings sarcastic late-capitalism advice like “Stay true to your personal brand,” stomping drums and cranked-up guitars brook no nonsense. PARELESLeyla McCalla, ‘Le Bal Est Fini’The songwriter Leyla McCalla played banjo, guitar and cello in the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Our Native Daughters; her parents were Haitian immigrants, and she spent time with her grandmother in Haiti. Her new album, “Breaking the Thermometer,” started as a music-theater work commissioned by Duke University, which acquired the archives of Radio Haiti and has placed them online. The album mingles Haitian songs and McCalla’s own songs with snippets of broadcasts and interviews, examining Haiti’s history of exploitation, revolution, dictatorship and turmoil. “Le Bal Est Fini” (“The Party Is Over”) is based on an editorial by a Radio Haiti journalist in 1980, the year the government shut the station down. The music is upbeat, with syncopated undercurrents of rara carnival rhythms. Meanwhile the lyrics, in Haitian Creole, lash out at anti-democratic forces: “Arbitrary, illegal, anti-Constitutional.” PARELESASAP Rocky, ‘D.M.B.’For ASAP Rocky, “bitch” is an endearment. “D.M.B.” — “Dat’s my bitch” — is a love song; the video clip features glimpses of Rihanna, his girlfriend. “Bitch” is also a usefully percussive syllable in a multilayered production that constantly warps itself with woozy crosscurrents of pride, defensiveness, affection and machismo. Rocky raps and sings through “D.M.B.” with a shifting flow, and for all his aggression, he sounds genuinely affectionate. PARELESTirzah, ‘Ribs’The London-based artist Tirzah makes love songs in the abstract: free-flowing and amorphous meditations on intimacy and interconnection. As on her 2021 album “Colourgrade,” the first record she made since becoming a mother, the unconditional relationship she’s singing about on her hazy new single, “Ribs,” could be between a parent and child, though it has a welcoming universality about it too. “You see things I can’t see, you see love and in between,” Tirzah sings openheartedly. “Hold onto me.” ZOLADZGlasser, ‘New Scars’“New Scars” is an eerie, enveloping benediction from Glasser, a.k.a. the songwriter, singer and producer Cameron Mesirow. It begins with sparse, bell-like, electronically altered and harmonically ambiguous piano notes, a counterpoint as Glasser sustains and repeats a kind of mantra: “Try to remain with the love/there’s no room for shame.” Eventually, orchestral strings swell around her and her vocals grow into a choir as she moves on to a terse but somehow encouraging thought: “We carry through life.” PARELES More

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      ‘Into the Woods’ Review: Some Enchanted Evening

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      Sara Bareilles and Neil Patrick Harris lead a starry Encores! revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s sweet-sour musical.For nearly three decades, the Encores! concert series at New York City Center has upheld a specific mission — excavating the hidden gems of American musical theater, burnishing them to a fully orchestrated shine. Which makes the fractured fairy tales of “Into the Woods,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s sweet-sour 1986 musical, a peculiar choice. (Let’s just say that when Rob Marshall has directed a star-crammed film version of a show within the last decade, it is no longer a hidden gem.)But that mission has expanded, unearthing something as glorious as Lear deBessonet’s revival. Her “Into the Woods” runs through May 15; only a few tickets remain. So if you know a spell to charm the secondary market, cast it now.The show, as ever, collides characters drawn from a half-dozen tales in the European folk tradition — Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, a prince or two. At its whirling center are a humble baker (Neil Patrick Harris, with down-to-the-millisecond comic timing) and his wife (the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter and recent Broadway baby Sara Bareilles, no slouch). Desperate for a child, they heed the witch next door (Heather Headley, a diva in a frowzy wig and claws) and head into the forest — here, a bare stage ornamented with the set designer David Rockwell’s elegant birch trunks. Within three nights they must obtain a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn and a slipper as pure as gold.This color-blocked quest overlaps with those of Little Red (Julia Lester, pert and twinkling), waylaid by a seductive wolf (Gavin Creel, sleazy and flawless), and the moony Jack (Cole Thompson, sweet and dreamy), forced by his mother (the comic genius Ann Harada) to sell the cow that he loves too much. Separated in the woods, the baker and his wife have other encounters. The baker meets a mysterious man (the downtown stalwart David Patrick Kelly, who doubles as the narrator). His wife befriends Cinderella (Denée Benton, luminous, with a crystalline soprano), on the run from a pursuing prince (Creel again).From left, Gavin Creel, David Turner, Ann Harada, Bareilles and Harris in Lear deBessonet’s revival of the Sondheim-Lapine musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen tales have circulated since the premodern era, it’s no spoiler to say that they all end happily. Cinderella gets her prince. Rapunzel (Shereen Pimentel, mellow in an underwritten role) gets hers (Jason Forbach, in for Jordan Donica). Little Red and her grandmother (Annie Golden) are released from the wolf’s stomach. Jack, now rich, reunites with his cow (expertly puppeteered by Kennedy Kanagawa). But that only brings us to intermission. And unease already glimmers, firefly-like, among the trees.In “Maybe They’re Magic,” the baker’s wife interrogates the ethics of ambition. Characters weigh personal desire against the needs of the greater community. And as in Sondheim shows like “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Gypsy” and “Sweeney Todd,” they wrestle with the question of whether getting what you want is actually good for you. What if you get what you wish and you still want more? What if the wish come true isn’t really worth what it cost you?The second act darkens and destabilizes these tales. It’s a truism that a happy ending depends on stopping a story at just the right moment. “Into the Woods” insists on continuing straight past happily ever after, exploring the repercussions of those Act I choices and offering new and somewhat more abstract conflicts. The priority shifts from the individual to the collective as characters band together to save the kingdom and themselves. That should feel at least as propulsive as gathering potion ingredients. Instead it feels theoretical, a filigreed representation of the classic trolley problem. Should the characters deliberately sacrifice one person — Jack — or do nothing and allow many others to die?This more philosophical turn has bothered many critics. If I’m honest, it bothers me. But I can still remember myself 30 years ago, wearing out the VHS tape of the original Broadway version, which PBS aired as part of its “American Playhouse” series. The conflicts didn’t feel abstract to me then. Keying into the emotional force underlying them — the wanting, the regret — I understood the musical’s questions of right and wrong, and the very murky moral territory in between, the way children do: intuitively and very personally.From left, Heather Headley, Julia Lester, Cole Thompson, Denée Benton and Harris in the show’s second act, which darkens and destabilizes the fairy tales.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow I understand them differently: as conjectures and hypotheticals. But that doesn’t make them any less urgent. The last two years, maybe the last six years, maybe more, have emphasized the stark divisions in American life, isolating us in our individual experiences of suffering and perceived injustice. But these same years have offered galvanizing examples of mutual care and aid, a mode echoed in the ballad “No One Is Alone,” which argues for support and understanding despite differences.If I were a betting woman, I would hazard that’s the aspect of “Into the Woods” that appealed to deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores! and an artist with a long history of community engagement and activism. Unlike the other Encores! shows of the season — “The Tap Dance Kid” and “The Life,” both of which received contested updates — “Into the Woods” arrives largely unchanged. And no longueur or flubbed cue breaks the spell of her compassionate, witty production. She has cast wonderful comedians, many of whom are also wonderful singers, and has encouraged them to deliver rich and very human performances, accented by Lorin Lattaro’s friendly, organic choreography and Rob Berman’s splendid music direction.The show ends with a musical combo punch — “No One Is Alone,” “Children Will Listen” — an absolute T.K.O. to anyone who argues that Sondheim’s pleasures are intellectual alone. (It’s a deeper cut, but the preceding song, “No More,” an existential body blow, prepares the way, too.) For “Children Will Listen,” led by Headley, with superb, sinuous phrasing, deBessonet suddenly swells the cast with 70 or so supernumeraries, children and seniors singing along.The night I saw it, not all of that singing was precisely on key, and the child nearest me overacted wretchedly. But I found myself crying without really knowing why. For the child I was, I suppose. And the child I am. And the mother now, also. I listened. I am still listening. You should, too.Into the WoodsThrough May 15 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Making Up for Lost Time as Ibiza’s Clubs Reopen

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      IBIZA, Spain — As the sun was setting over Ibiza last Saturday, the party at Ushuaïa was just hitting its stride. Nearly 8,000 people had gathered at the outdoor mega-club for the beginning of the island’s first clubbing season in three years, and the crowd — including many women in tasseled bikinis and tanned, musclebound men — seemed intent on making up for lost time.While Artbat, a Ukrainian D.J. duo, played a high-octane blend of house and techno, the dancers heaved around the club’s large pool, cheered on by guests from the overlooking hotel balconies. In the V.I.P. section, a parade of staff carrying sparklers announced that a high-paying guest had just purchased another pricey bottle of champagne.Sipping a drink at the bar, Mina Mallet, a heavily tattooed 25-year-old finance worker from Zurich, said that the reopening of Ibiza’s clubs marked the end of a difficult and tedious period in Europe. “It means a new beginning: for enjoying life, enjoying our freedom and getting wasted,” she said. “I actually think people are going harder than before.”After more than two years of uncertainty for nightclubs, governments across Europe have gradually dropped many of their pandemic restrictions over the last few months, allowing clubs to reopen with a sense of relative stability for the first time in two years.On the dance floor at Amnesia, one of Ibiza’s mega-clubs. Roughly 30,000 people traveled to Ibiza this past weekend to go to the clubs, according to a local nightlife association.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesIn many countries, including Spain, Germany and Britain, governments now allow clubs to welcome visitors without any vaccine checks, masks or distancing requirements. And although the pandemic is not yet over, and a new variant could appear anytime to spoil the fun, Europe’s clubbers seem ready to relive the days when nobody had ever heard of Covid-19.The return of the clubs has come as a relief to many workers in the nightlife sector, which has been especially hard-hit. Before the pandemic, 45 percent of the gross domestic product in the Balearic Islands, which include Ibiza, came from tourism, for which clubbing is a major draw. In the first half of last year, tourist spending in Ibiza and the nearby island of Formentera was less than one-third of prepandemic levels, according to the Statistical Institute of the Balearic Islands.Ocio de Ibiza, a local nightlife association, estimates that 30,000 people traveled to Ibiza this past weekend to go to the clubs, a number on par with a prepandemic opening weekend. Sanjay Nandi, the chief executive of the group that runs the large Pacha nightclub, said in an interview before the opening that advance ticket sales had surpassed those of previous years. Of the island’s major clubs, only one, Privilege, does not yet have plans to reopen this summer.“I know we are very lucky,” Nandi said, explaining that, like other clubs, Pacha had received help from Spain’s government in the form of a furlough program for staff. The company also received a loan of 18 million euros, about $19 million, from the government’s Recapitalization Fund for pandemic-hit businesses, and it was able to get some revenue through its constellation of restaurants and other venues. Nandi said that the size of Ibiza’s major clubs — whose capacities range from around 3,000 to 7,800 — and their associated political clout allowed them to weather the pandemic better than smaller venues. “Being bigger helps,” he said.Nearly 8,000 people gathered at the outdoor mega-club Ushuaïa on Saturday.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesA professional dancer getting ready for the opening party at Pacha, another Ibiza club.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesOther clubs in Europe have been less fortunate. According to France24, the French broadcaster, 200 clubbing venues in the country had permanently closed because of the pandemic as of last fall. A survey released in October by the Night Time Industries Association, a British lobbying group, found that 22 percent of the city’s clubs had shuttered since the pandemic’s start.Amy Lamé, London’s “night czar,” a city hall official charged with liaising between nightlife businesses and city authorities, said in an interview that the city was still doing its own assessment of the damage done. Although the British government gave relief grants to venues, she said, the country’s unpredictable public health measures, “which sometimes changed from one day to the next,” had posed a particular challenge.Lamé added that the city had also provided targeted aid to what she described as the most “vulnerable” venues, including L.G.B.T.Q. clubs. Those grants meant that all of London’s L.G.B.T.Q. clubs survived the pandemic, she said. “If we lose those kinds of venues, we lose part of the essence of London,” said Lamé.Perhaps the most ambitious measures to protect the clubbing sector were taken in Berlin, another European clubbing capital where nightlife is recognized as a key driver of the city economy. According to a 2018 study by the Berlin Club Commission, tourists visiting the German capital for its club scene contributed approximately $1.7 billion to the city’s economy.Partygoers at Ushuaïa. Before the pandemic, 45 percent of the gross domestic product in the Balearic Islands, which include Ibiza, came from tourism, for which clubbing is a major draw. Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesAs well as offering financial aid for small and large businesses during the pandemic, German officials classified clubs as cultural venues, allowing them to access a 2-billion-euro fund meant for institutions such as museums and theaters. In Berlin, extra emergency funding was also made available for shuttered clubs. Kyle Van Horn, the managing director of Trauma Bar und Kino, a Berlin club and arts venue, said the pandemic was a turning point in the way officials have treated clubs. “I think there was a change from the side of the government; they are finally seeing us as relevant contributors to society,” he said.In an interview, Lutz Leichsenring, a Club Commission spokesman, said that thanks to the support, no Berlin clubs had closed as a direct result of pandemic restrictions. “The aid money was done in a very well-targeted way,” he said by phone. He explained that the pandemic had vindicated yearslong efforts by Berlin’s clubbing industry to mobilize as a political force. “We were very well networked as a sector,” he said.And perhaps inevitably, the social changes of the past two years are also making themselves felt on the dance floor. Steven Braines, a co-founder of He.She.They, a London-based record label and event company organizing L.G.B.T.Q.-inclusive parties at Ibiza’s Amnesia mega-club this season, said club organizers were now more focused on expanding gender and racial diversity among the acts they booked, which he said was partly a result of the heightened international visibility of movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter during the pandemic.Braines added that he sensed that men “maybe aren’t as predatorial anymore on the dance floor.” Club culture would now be reshaped, he said, by a cohort of 18- to 20-year-olds who were now visiting clubs for the first time, and who had less experience with drugs and alcohol. “This will be a new breed,” he said.The dance floor at Amnesia on Friday night.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesUshuaïa on Saturday.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesOn Friday night, some of these newcomers were gathering outside Amnesia, on a highway outside Ibiza’s largest town. “I had just turned 18 when the pandemic happened, and everyone told me that I had lost the best years of going out,” said Sebastian Ochoa, 20, who works in social media in Madrid. “When I go out at home, there’s a limit, but here there’s the party, the after-party, the after-after-party. I’m here to make up for lost time.”A few feet away, Richard Stone, 58, said he had been coming to the club for 30 years, often four times a season, so he felt he couldn’t miss the reopening. “This is a milestone,” he said.A few minutes away by car, at Pacha, near Ibiza’s main yacht marina, a more glamorous party was taking place. A line of several hundred snaked around the exterior of the hulking white club, which includes a rooftop terrace, garden, restaurant and gift shop, where visitors could buy a scooter helmet bearing the club’s logo ($221) or a Pacha-branded game of Monopoly.The upstairs area of the V.I.P. section, where guests paid up to 25,000 euros for a table, was filled with groups of men in white dinner jackets and women in sparkly minidresses dancing to a set by Solomun, a German-Bosnian D.J. At one of the tables, Arthur Coutis, a 20-year-old visitor from Paris, said he had the feeling that the pandemic had led clubbers to shift their priorities.“Before it was much more about money and drinking — now it’s much more about freedom, and enjoying the music,” he said, looking out over the crowd. As the music reached a new climax, a nearby group raised a bottle of champagne, and screamed with joy.Opening weekend celebrations at Pacha.The club received about $19 million from the Spanish government’s Recapitalization Fund for pandemic-hit businesses.Samuel Aranda for The New York Times More

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      New York’s Dancehall Parties Are ‘A Different Type of Turn Up’

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      This story is part of an occasional series exploring nightlife in New York.CJ Milan was racing around a yacht just after midnight on Sunday, handing out hundreds of foam glow sticks.“When the boat starts moving, we play soca music,” she said with a mischievous smile as she paused for a moment to watch the dance floor. “It gets everybody turned up.”Ms. Milan was running Yacht Fete, a 1,000-person reggae, dancehall, soca and afrobeats party that takes place monthly on the Hudson River.The yacht is just one of the venues that she uses to host her recurring Reggae Fest dance parties, which she started organizing in New York in 2015.The dance floor at Yacht Fete, a monthly party held on a yacht on the Hudson River.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesDancehall, a party-friendly byproduct of reggae music with faster tempos and the cadence of hip-hop, came out of Jamaica in the late 1970s.And New York’s dancehall parties, which are often thrown by and for the city’s large Caribbean communities, bring people together on flamboyant dance floors where they can whine, dagger, line dance and drop into full splits.Ms. Milan, who estimates that she has drawn more than 170,000 people to Reggae Fest events in New York over the last seven years, has since expanded the parties to Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Los Angeles.But even as she broadens her reach, she’s still figuring out how to keep picky New York crowds happy.“New York is a different type of turn up,” she said. “We just have so much more to cover music-wise because our city is so diverse.”Partygoers held up foam glowsticks as the yacht left Pier 40 in Lower Manhattan.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesShe said that at each of her parties, she tries to have a team of D.J.s ready to play whatever type of music the crowd is responding to most vividly that night.Marvin Smith, who’s known at Reggae Fest as D.J. Legend, said that he plays anything from reggaeton to dancehall to keep people moving.“When I see the hairdos sweated out, when I see people who are looking around like, ‘Where are my keys? Who has my phone?’” Mr. Smith said. “When we see that, we know it’s mission accomplished.”And Ms. Milan said they try to throw something in the mix for every kind of listener.“Dancehall has different levels — some of it is hardcore,” she said, which often appeals to a younger generation. “But then you get the older generation who want to hear Mr. Vegas or Sean Paul.”She added: “Then you got other ones that say, ‘I want that sexy stuff’ — they want to hear what the women have to say,” referring to artists like Spice.Sean Paul performed at Elsewhere, a venue in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, late last month.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesYet there are certain shows that bring out dancehall fans of all kinds. As Sean Paul performed at Elsewhere in Bushwick on April 25, the crowd reflected his fan base, spanning an international and intergenerational mix.Paul, 49, a mellow and singular figure who’s responsible for bringing dancehall to American radio stations in the early 2000s, said that his earliest memories of Jamaican dancehall parties are from when he was 14.He would sneak out with friends to a street party called Frontline, where they would often spot dancehall legends like Tiger and Shabba Ranks and dance under the open night sky.“That was the one thing I didn’t like about clubs here at first,” he said. “You can’t see the stars. You can’t feel the moon, there’s no island breeze blowing on your face while you’re listening to some real, authentic rumbling bass lines.”But when he started coming to New York in the late 1990s, he discovered a more “grimy” dancehall scene with audiences for every niche.One of his favorite spots in the early 2000s was a two-story warehouse in Brooklyn where the parquet floors moved “at least a foot” as people danced.Dancing by the bar to Sean Paul. “It’s the only city that I knew at the time where I was able to hit four clubs in one night,” he said of his early trips to New York.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times“It’s the only city that I knew at the time where I was able to hit four clubs in one night,” he said before rattling off a list of the places he would visit.“Two clubs in Jersey — one is a Jamaican club, and then one is a Guyanese club,” he said. “And then one in Brooklyn, which is a straight hardcore hip-hop type vibe, and the same thing back up in Manhattan.”But many of the clubs that Paul remembered are now long gone. And while smaller spaces that play Caribbean music are still sprinkled around the city, there are only a handful of parties and shows that consistently bring out thousands of people.Cathy Rodriguez, 25, who was at Ms. Milan’s yacht party last weekend, said that she’s been coming to Reggae Fest parties for years.Often traveling up from the Washington area, where she now lives, Ms. Rodriguez said that she’ll sometimes plan her trips around the parties.Tempest Williams, Aniquiana Kurtz, Christina Mejia, Cathy Rodriguez and Maria Traore posed for a photo on the top deck at Yacht Fete.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times“I will legit just go out of town for Reggae Fest,” she said. “Like, don’t get me wrong, I will go see my family, of course. But I will be like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to New York and we’re going to Reggae Fest.’”Ms. Rodriguez said that one of the main pulls of the event was the chance to hear her favorite music.“Dancehall will always be my first baby,” she said. “Growing up in New York City, particularly in the Bronx, dancehall has always been a huge part of my life. Like my mom listens to dancehall on Sunday morning when she’s cleaning.”And even beyond her favorite songs, what keeps Ms. Rodriguez showing up again and again is the lively dance floor.“In the Caribbean community, we say ‘stush’ a lot, and stush basically means like, standing still,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a regular nightclub in New York City, but people are like standing still, smoking hookah — you know, they’re not really enjoying themselves to the music.”“CJ’s vision when it comes to Reggae Fest is like, ‘I want people to come, I want people to turn up, but I want people to dance,’” she continued. “That’s why I keep going to her events, because it’s guaranteed I’m going to dance my ass off the whole night.” More

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      ‘To Be or Not to Be’: Is It the Question or the Point?

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      At the Metropolitan Opera, Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn’s adaptation of “Hamlet” nods to different, surprising versions of Shakespeare’s text.“Hamlet” is our culture’s supreme emblem of a great artist’s freedom to create something radically new. Shakespeare found a way to represent the inner life as it had never been represented before: the pressure of compulsive, involuntary memories; the haunting presence of a dead father; a son’s angst in the wake of his mother’s remarriage; the suicidal thoughts of a young person forced to make impossible choices in a corrupt world. It is here, if anywhere, that Jorge Luis Borges could claim with a straight face that Shakespeare was God.In fact, the creation of “Hamlet,” which was first written and performed in late 1599 or 1600, took place within severe, all-too-human constraints. A part owner of his theater company, Shakespeare was almost certainly urged by his fellow shareholders to write a play about the Danish prince. They would have noted the success of at least one earlier stage version of an old revenge tale that was already well-known (and that continues to be recycled, as in the new film “The Northman”). In addition to writing for a commercial enterprise in a cutthroat mass-entertainment industry, he was working with an all-male cast of 12 that performed in the afternoons on a stage without scenery or lighting; he had to keep a wary eye on the government censors; and he had to please a large audience that ranged from the educated elite to the illiterate.Given these constraints, his achievement is all the more stunning. To see the originality of “Hamlet,” simply consider the astonishing number of words in the script that are used for the first time in print (and, in some instances, never again): fanged, fret, pander, compulsive, unnerved, unpolluted, besmirch, self-slaughter, blastment, chop-fallen, down-gyved, implorator, mobled, pajock, and many, many more. It is as if Shakespeare were driven to invent a whole new idiom to express what he had discovered in a familiar story.And it was not only a matter of unusual words. The play, written in characteristically supple iambic pentameter, has an unforgettable music of its own, a set of rhythmic surprises sprung in the opening spondee — “Who’s there?” — and developed in a thousand different ways. It is a music epitomized, even for those who have no idea that “Hamlet” is composed in verse, by the cadence of the most famous line in its most famous soliloquy: “To be, or not to be: that is the question.”Clayton, right, as Hamlet during a recent rehearsal at the Met.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow imagine the challenge of trying to write an opera based on this of all plays — as Brett Dean has done with his “Hamlet,” which had its premiere at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2017 and arrives at the Metropolitan Opera on May 13.“Hamlet” is a musical challenge before which even Giuseppe Verdi hesitated. In 1887, in what is for me the greatest of all transformations of Shakespeare into opera, Verdi miraculously captured the music of “Othello.” With the help of the librettist Arrigo Boito, who radically cut the tragedy, the composer found a way to give the three protagonists sublime melodic expressions of their ardent, anxious desire, steadfast love and fathomless hatred.To make this transformation work successfully, of course, many things in Shakespeare’s text had to be jettisoned, and the motivations of the characters had above all to be clarified. In the play, for example, Iago’s rationale for destroying Othello is famously unclear; in the opera, “Otello,” Verdi gives Iago a stupendous, full-throated credo: “I believe in a cruel God who has created me in His image.”Small wonder that Verdi — who also adapted “Macbeth” and fashioned “Falstaff” out of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and “Henry IV” — contemplated taking on “Hamlet” but ultimately changed his mind. What would he have done with a plot whose every action is plagued by uncertainty, and with characters whose every motivation is ambivalent?A handful of composers, most notably Ambroise Thomas in the mid-19th century, ventured into this territory, but none of them managed to penetrate very far into its forbidding depths. That is, until Dean wrote his adaptation, which captures something of the authentic “Hamlet” music — in all its strangeness, dissonance and haunting beauty.But the word “authentic,” in relation to “Hamlet,” is misleading. The opera’s gifted librettist, Matthew Jocelyn, grasped what Shakespeare scholars have come to understand, that there is no single definitive text of the play. It survives in three early printings that have at least some claim to authority: the brief version (Q1), published in 1603 in the small-format size known as a quarto; the much longer quarto version (Q2), published the following year; and the version included in the celebrated First Folio (F) of 1623.Each text differs from the others in crucial ways, and almost all modern editions of the play adopt elements from more than one of them. (Even editors who dismiss Q1 as hopelessly defective usually follow it in having the ghost appear in the famous closet scene not in armor, but in his nightgown.) Moreover, the texts of Q2 and F are each too long to fit comfortably into what Shakespeare called “the two hours’ traffic of our stage.” From the beginning, the playwright seems to have expected any given production to pick and choose, shaping “Hamlet” for its particular time and occasion. All versions are the result of choices, cuts, alterations.All of this clearly lies behind Jocelyn’s evident sense of freedom in refashioning the text, which in any case would have had to be reduced in length to serve as the libretto. Only about 20 percent of the lines in the full-length play make it into the opera, leaving room for the music, as Dean has said, to be the protagonist.What is striking, given the drastic cuts, is how much of what has obsessed the readers and audiences of “Hamlet” over the past several hundred years powerfully resonates in this operatic reimagining. Hamlet’s voice reaches the edge of desperation then swoops into bitter comedy before veering toward tenderness and back to manic grief. The murderer Claudius has a gift for smoothness and authority that lightly conceals something like false notes. The countertenors, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, thinly flatter and echo both each other and their interlocutors. Ophelia’s descent into madness releases in her an erotic aggression that astonishes and alarms Gertrude. Chords in the orchestra and chorus are extended, drawn out and dispersed, as if they were searching for a resolution that eludes them.John Tomlinson, above, as the Ghost of Old Hamlet, and Clayton in the Glyndebourne production.Glyndebourne Productions Ltd.; Richard Hubert SmithJocelyn also cunningly reweaves the text, an intervention apparent from the opera’s first moments. An offstage chorus sings a funeral chant for the old king made up of words and phrases — “noble dust,” “quintessence of dust,” and the like — that come from very different places in the play. Hamlet enters alone and, half-singing, half-speaking, intones the words “or not to be … or not to be … or not to be.” The fragment from the celebrated Act III soliloquy is followed in this opening aria by fragments taken from his other soliloquies, along with a line — “What ceremony else?” — lifted from a different character, Laertes, who speaks it in Act V, at Ophelia’s grave.From the start, then, it is made clear that we are not to expect that the opera will work its way dutifully through the text or develop individual characters in the way that Shakespeare’s play does, most famously through soliloquies. Rather, we have entered what we might call “The Hamlet Zone.” Here, words do not stay in their place or belong only to the character who speaks them. In his death throes, Polonius sings the lines about the play-within-the-play that both he and the chorus have earlier sung.When Hamlet asks the visiting players to give him a passionate speech from their very best play, they begin to sing “To be or not to be.” And in Ophelia’s madness, she sings not her words alone but words that Hamlet has spoken to her, words that weigh like rocks dragging her down to a muddy death. “The Hamlet Zone” is a place in which words are broken up, transferred and shared, and in which the voice of one character is woven together, in both harmony and dissonance, with that of another.Such, after all, is the special power of opera.Dean does eventually give us one of Hamlet’s soliloquies more or less in its entirety, and it is the soliloquy we have been waiting for since the opening fragment “or not to be.” But there is a surprise in store. Not only does Hamlet drop the opening “To be” — as if he were already too far along toward not being — but the speech also takes an unexpected turn:… or not to be… or not to be… or not to beTo be … ay, there’s the point.Is this faithful to Shakespeare? Yes, in a way. Jocelyn has chosen the version of the soliloquy that appears in Q1. Scholars typically cite this to demonstrate why they call this text of the play the “Bad Quarto.” My students at Harvard usually laugh when I show it onscreen. But it is not the least bit funny here. As Hamlet sings it, the monosyllabic “point” works perfectly, in a way that “question” would not. A play and an opera, however deeply bound up with each other, are not the same. Ay, there’s the point.Stephen Greenblatt is the author, among other books, of “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” and “Hamlet in Purgatory.” He is the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard and the general editor “The Norton Shakespeare.” More