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    ‘Travels’ Review: A Sonic Flight From Heartbreak

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    In his new show, James Harrison Monaco blends storytelling and electronic beats in service of curiosity and escape.Some ride-share passengers are content to wear headphones and gaze out the window. But anywhere that James Harrison Monaco goes, including the back seat of a Lyft, presents an opportunity to zero in on someone else’s story.In the first segment of “Travels,” Monaco’s new autobiographical show that opened at Ars Nova in Manhattan on Monday, the playwright and performer tells the audience that he was itching to talk on a recent ride from the Los Angeles airport when the driver handed him an audio cable so he could put on music, opening the door to conversation. Their exchange, Monaco says breathlessly, peeled off like a speeding car.Monaco’s dogged curiosity, and affinity for electronic beats, propels much of this uneven 90-minute show, for which he also composed the Miami Beach-meets-Berlin underscore. Monaco’s opening anecdote, the first in a series of eight, introduces the sense of possibility he feels when he is in transit, the inquisitiveness he brings to bear on others and his amorphous concept of music as a medium for storytelling.Eager and bespectacled, Monaco is the first-person voice in each account, but he shares narrating duties with three performers — El Beh, Ashley De La Rosa and Mehry Eslaminia — who take turns recalling his encounters with a handful of people he’s found fascinating over the past several years, both at home and abroad. This layering effect in the performances is echoed in the backbeats and crescendos that a head-bobbing Monaco generates, in collaboration with the instrumentalist John Murchison, from behind an onstage table full of D.J. equipment (the set is by Diggle).Considering how often Monaco draws attention to his called-off marriage engagement, it would not be unfair to categorize “Travels” as a breakup album. (The project is also a departure for Monaco from his artistic partnership with Jerome Ellis, who contributed additional music.) Reeling from heartache, Monaco seems to search for meaning and solace in the far graver misfortunes of a friend referred to as “R,” a political prisoner turned asylum seeker and the show’s most revisited subject.“Perhaps all pain is comparable in the end,” Monaco recalls R telling him of their wholly incomparable struggles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘(pray),’ Nourish Thyself With Song and Dance

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      An exploration of how faith intersects with Black womanhood, through a mix of music, movement, ritual and poetry.“Is this a church?,” a character wonders in nicHi douglas’s “(pray).”The Greenwich House Theater, where this production by Ars Nova and National Black Theater recently opened, certainly looks like a church, complete with (fake) stained-glass windows rrffand seating arranged like rows of pews.But it would be reductive to say “(pray)” is any one thing, because this transcendent, paradoxical work — what douglas calls “a sacred offering” — exists both within a Christian tradition and outside any religious institution. It’s a holy communion of musical interludes, movement, poems, rituals and critical theory investigating how faith intersects with Black womanhood.Upon entering the theater, audience members are asked to don disposable shoe covers as nine Black women alternate between shuffling down the aisles in matching powder-blue church ensembles and fanning themselves while sitting among the audience.They are all called Sister Anna Bertha, because they are variations on the stereotype of the sassy, overdressed Black church lady (playful costume design by DeShon Elem).Over 75 minutes, these women run through a 17-part liturgy accompanied by a pianist (Darnell White) and singer (S T A R R Busby, whose resonant voice leads the joyous gospel numbers). At one corner of this church stands a partially obscured forest. A silent spirit in white occasionally dances out from this surreal fantasy space (scenic design by dots), flitting around in fluid swells of movement. This is the Ancestor (Satori Folkes-Stone, magnetic), who also performs offstage rituals as part of the service. Another young woman, called Free (a less graceful Amara Granderson), is the one wondering whether this is a church, and if she even belongs here.Like “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” by Aleshea Harris, “(pray),” which douglas has nimbly written, choreographed and directed, is theater that demands the audience step into a shared experience of Blackness. In these experimental works, theater begins and ends in community.Thus, douglas’s script aims to make faith more accessible via coy translations: “ghost” becomes “most,” for example, and “hallelujah” is “yahleloo.” The similar sounding words with the music (composed by Busby and JJJJJerome Ellis) trick the ear into fluency, so that a prayer that says “O, abundance! May I meet you. May I know you,” feels as true and traditional as, say, the Apostles’ Creed.The Sisters deliver improvised gossip and judgmental comments, sometimes, hilariously, at the audience’s expense. The cohesiveness of their vocals and group movements (a stunning mélange of styles, including hip-hop and Afro-Cuban) recalls the deft cast of performers in Ars Nova’s 2022 hit by Heather Christian, “Oratorio for Living Things.” Each Sister sings with her own textured affect, so the psalms they perform feel creased, pleated or smoothed over like fabric. Tina Fabrique’s elastic bellows electrify “A Song (For to Ease My Troubled Mind).” Another Sister Anna (Ariel Kayla Blackwood) spits Noname lyrics atop a muscular beat. (Mikaal Sulaiman’s ethereal sound design lifts the voices higher.)A whole syllabus of thinkers and artists have inspired (and are referenced in) douglas’s script, including the poets Tyehimba Jess and Raych Jackson. But douglas’s writing sometimes pales in comparison, lacking the same polish and panache. And there are some missed notes: “(pray)” feels more anchored within the distant and recent past, lacking firmer context in the present, and despite the production’s inclusive language around gender, queerness is only occasionally alluded to. The history of race-based attacks on Black churches, like the 1963 Birmingham bombing and the 2015 Charleston shooting, is artfully hinted at with the haunting sound of a helicopter overhead, but feels like a footnote.So the question remains: Is this a church? Well, “(pray)” offers a congregation of believers in God but, more essentially, in the sanctity of Black women. So, let’s call this a house of song and praise — yahleloo.(pray)Through Oct. 28 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan. arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Born of Grief, a Couple’s Off Broadway Incubator Marks 20 Years

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      Even as it celebrates with a gala, the Ars Nova family now faces another challenge as one of its founders confronts A.L.S.In 2002, Jenny and Jon Steingart founded the Off Broadway incubator Ars Nova as a way of honoring Jenny’s brother, Gabriel Wiener, who in 1997 died of a brain aneurysm at the age of 26. Now, as the nonprofit theater is marking its 20th anniversary, the couple is facing another wrenching struggle: Jon has A.L.S., the severe neurological disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.“Every painful experience in my life — if I have to live through it, I am going to come out on the other side with a lesson and a way to give back in some way,” Jenny Steingart said in a recent interview at their home on the Upper West Side. “Because a loss without some meaning behind it is really hard to live with.”So this anniversary, to be celebrated with a gala on Monday, also finds the Steingarts feeling great satisfaction, having created an institution that — in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — has played a crucial role in the professional development of so many artists.Among those who have worked at Ars Nova are Lin-Manuel Miranda, Thomas Kail, Christopher Jackson and Phillipa Soo of “Hamilton” fame; Bridget Everett, the actress and cabaret performer of the acclaimed HBO series “Somebody Somewhere”; and Dave Malloy, who created “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” at Ars Nova.More recently, Ars Nova presented Heather Christian’s widely-praised music-theater piece “Oratorio for Living Things,” after being delayed by the pandemic shutdown.“This theater has done the good work of incubating extraordinary artists,” said the “Hamilton” producer Jeffrey Seller, adding that Mimi Lien, the scenic designer for his current Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd” — who won a Tony for “Great Comet” — came out of Ars Nova. “Many people make things,” he added, “but few of them are vital 20 years later.”When Ars Nova offered Everett a creative home, she was performing in karaoke bars. With its support, she developed her brash 2007 solo show, “At Least It’s Pink” at Ars Nova. “I was taken aback by their enthusiasm for me because I wasn’t getting anything anywhere,” Everett said. “I would not have a career if it wasn’t for them seeing something in me.”The improvised rap evening “Freestyle Love Supreme” had its beginning at Ars Nova, which also helped birth the musical “KPOP.”The director Alex Timbers (“Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”) got his start at Ars Nova, with Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s doomsday comedy “Boom.” “It was the first time I’d been hired professionally to direct and given access to designers I would never have gotten to work with on my own,” he said. “It was not only a gift, but a leap of faith.”The cast of the 2017 Off Broadway production of “KPOP,” which occupied two floors of a building in Hell’s Kitchen.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesLucas Steele, left, and Denée Benton in the 2016 Broadway production of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” at the Imperial Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the gala, Ars Nova will announce a financial pledge from the Steingarts that will enable a more consistent presentation of comedy in addition to its current variety show, “Showgasm.” Citing, for example, Ars Nova’s “Creation Nation,” a popular live variety program that featured the comedian Billy Eichner, Jon Steingart said comedy — as well as music — taps into “where youth culture is right now.”Jenny Steingart, 55, a Manhattan native, said her parents — Michael A. Wiener, who helped found the Infinity Broadcasting chain of radio stations, and Zena, a music teacher and singer — encouraged her to follow her passion. “‘What are you aligned with?’” she recalled them asking. “‘What is the thing that sparks you?’”Jon, now 55, grew up in Southern California and was a producer of the Broadway show “Julia Sweeney’s ‘God Said “Ha!.”’” They married in 2002 and now have three children, ages 19, 16 and 13.After the death of her brother, who produced recordings of early music, Jenny said she and Jon “let his legacy inspire the creation of new art.”Jenny Steingart and Anthony Veneziale accepted a special Tony Award for “Freestyle Love Supreme” in 2021. Theo Wargo/Getty Images For Tony Awards ProIn the early years, the Steingarts, together with the theater’s founding artistic director, Jason Eagan, were out every night trolling for talent, an approach that continues to this day. “We’re looking at artists with potential,” Eagan said, “rather than artists with résumés.”Ars Nova, which planted its flag on West 54th Street, quickly established itself as a space where artists could take big chances, where “you can say, I want to make an electro pop opera about a slice of ‘War and Peace,’” said Renee Blinkwolt, the company’s producing executive director, referring to “Great Comet,” which won Tony Awards for lighting as well as scenic design. (In 2016, the show’s commercial producers agreed to revise how it credited Ars Nova’s contributions to “Great Comet” in Playbill.)Despite having cemented its status as a staple of the New York theatrical landscape, Ars Nova, which in 2019 opened a second theater at Greenwich House in the Village, remains relatively scrappy, with an annual operating budget of about $4 million and a staff of 14. A ticket subsidy program keeps prices low and this season offered pay-what-you-wish.During the pandemic, no employees were furloughed, thanks in part to the Paycheck Protection Program, which covered about 10 percent of the funds required to keep paying artists and staff.These days, the Steingarts are less involved in running the organization, but they continue to play a strong supporting role. Jon spends most of his time researching his disease — “I don’t quit,” he said — recognizing that he is fortunate to be alive five years after his diagnosis. Sitting in a wheelchair at his kitchen table, Jon also described himself as “pretty even keel about acceptance.”“I’m not a person who, win or lose, spends a lot of time asking why me,” he said.Jenny, however, is a little less accepting, although she is doing her best to keep it together.“I don’t want to be Debbie Downer, and I also don’t want to be Pollyanna,” she said. “It’s really important to me to lean into the gratitude I have and the blessings that have come from even the worst stuff.”Though Ars Nova’s close-knit extended family has had to adjust to the prospect of a future without one of its parents, the artists are trying to do what they’ve always done: stay positive and persevere.“The tragedy of losing her brother and what Jon is going through — it’s the brutality of life,” Everett said. “But I’m really glad that what Ars Nova has given does sustain. Putting people on course and giving them a chance — what better gift is that?” More

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      For ‘KPOP,’ a Broadway Transfer Is More Like a Reinvention

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      The show’s creative team talks about revamping the immersive Off Broadway hit so that it moves “around the audience” at Circle in the Square Theater.Back in 2017, the musical “KPOP” had the kind of Off Broadway premiere that showbiz dreams are made of. The buzz around the production — which had the rare distinction of being about a specifically Asian pop-music style and having a largely Asian creative team — was so intense that desperate New Yorkers were pleading for tickets to its sold-out run at the small A.R.T./New York Theaters in Midtown Manhattan.Talk of a Broadway transfer started quickly thereafter, but, for a variety of reasons including the pandemic, it took five years for “KPOP” to finally make the jump. Now, at long last, the show is in previews, with an opening night set for Nov. 20.The musical Broadway audiences will see, however, is a very different beast from the one that opened in 2017: This is not so much a transfer as a reinvention.The original Ars Nova production, presented with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective, was an immersive spectacle in which audience members followed a bunch of artists from room to room on two floors, and discovered how the Korean music industry relentlessly drills its stars (called idols) into poptastic precision.None of the 41 Broadway theaters could accommodate this sort of staging. But at least the one the show finally grabbed, Circle in the Square Theater, has a unique asset: It’s in the round.“I like to say it’s the world’s smallest arena — it’s a postage stamp of Madison Square Garden,” the director, Teddy Bergman, said. “For a show that traffics in pop, that collective energy and that collective effervescence felt like something we could capture like lightning in a bottle.”To preserve the sense that the audience is getting behind-the-scenes insights, the book writer, Jason Kim, altered the framing device: The show is now set up like a mockumentary about an upcoming American tour for a K-pop entertainment company’s roster — the boy band F8, the girl group RTMIS and the solo singer MwE.“At Ars Nova, the audience moved around and in this production we’re very much trying to move the piece around the audience,” Kim said. “I think the spirit of the show has been preserved, although it is a different format, and we are trying to engage the audience in very much a different way. We loved that the new theater casts an extra member, which is the audience.”The show is now set up like a mockumentary about a K-pop label’s roster, which includes the boy band F8, the girl group RTMIS and the solo singer MwEF8.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKevin Woo, center, in “KPOP,” now in previews at Circle in the Square Theater. There’s a “whole new appreciation and understanding and reception of this music in the States,” the show’s director said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother reason for the transformation is the fact that the moment “KPOP” originally aimed to capture has changed dramatically. In 2017, most Americans had no knowledge of K-pop, save perhaps for the song “Gangnam Style,” by Psy. Nowadays, Korean acts like Stray Kids routinely top the U.S. music charts and in May a K-pop artist, AleXa, won NBC’s “American Song Contest” on behalf of Oklahoma, where she was raised.Over the past five years, Bergman said, “BTS happened and ushered in a whole new appreciation and understanding and reception of this music in the States.”He added: “We wanted to focus on what is the journey, the cost, the joy, the exhilaration, the sacrifice of these pathbreakers who are journeying into new territories and spreading this music. I didn’t have to come from a position of having to explain much, or really anything to the audience. It really freed us up to be able to dig deeper psychologically, emotionally.” (The show’s close relationship with South Korea means the deadly crowd surge in Seoul was deeply felt; the Broadway production made a curtain speech last weekend and had a moment of silence, and posted a statement on social media.)One beneficiary of this change in focus has been the character of MwE, played Off Broadway by Ashley Park and now portrayed by Luna, a South Korea-based actress and former member of the K-pop girl group f(x).“What I’m very excited about in this version is the examination of the female characters,” said Helen Park, who wrote the bilingual score with Max Vernon, and orchestrated and produced it for Broadway. “They all have different ambitions, different journeys, different histories, different characteristics. As an Asian woman, that’s something so special.”While MwE, only in her mid-20s, is already a battle-hardened music-industry vet, the new character of Brad is at the start of his idol career and struggling because he is being shunned by his F8 bandmates. Not only was he the last to join the band, but his being mixed race becomes a factor as well. The role had resonance for the actor playing him, Zachary Noah Piser, who has Chinese and Jewish roots: This spring he became the first Asian American actor to play the title role of “Dear Evan Hansen” full time on Broadway.“Brad’s whole situation is very kind of meta because it was very me — I was a newcomer to the Broadway production of ‘KPOP’ and he is the Asian white boy from Connecticut who gets plucked up and placed in this group,” Piser said in a video chat. Brad acts as an entry point into issues centering on identity — which were already present in the first version, but have since been retooled.“When we first started writing, the main idea behind the show was ‘How could K-pop cross over in America?’ — it’s what these Korean artists have to sacrifice in their authenticity in order to be palatable to an American market,” Vernon said on the phone. “Obviously K-pop crossed over, so we asked different questions, like, ‘What’s going on in these artists’ mental state behind the scenes? What kind of pressure is that exerting on their psyche, on their relationships with other people in their band?’”Luna, who got her start in K-pop before turning to musical theater in South Korea (starring in shows like “Legally Blonde,” for example), pointed out that “KPOP” nails the genre’s emphasis on rigorous training.“There are such detailed scenes that are really rooted in the reality of that world,” Luna said via an interpreter in a video conversation. “I feel that people who are actually K-pop singers or who are trainees will really relate. It also gives a sense of consolation for the immense amount of effort and hard work put into creating K-pop.”From left: Park, Kim, Weber, Bergman and Vernon.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSUCH AN OVERHAUL of the show’s concept and characters also required a reshaping of the score, which The New York Times’s Ben Brantley described as being “as synthetically sweet and perversely addictive as the real thing” in his review. When asked about the balance between old and new songs, the creative team agreed that it was about half and half — “maybe more new than old,” Park said.She and Vernon also had to reflect the changes in the genre at large: The acts that were popular when they started working on the show, back in 2014, are different from the current ones, and fans were sure to notice dated references.“We were responding to Exo, 2NE1, Girls’ Generation, Psy, Big Bang, but K-pop music changes every three to four years so it would be like doing a show called ‘Pop’ and all the music sounds like Britney rather than Billie Eilish or whatever the great artists are that you’re listening to right now,” Vernon said on the phone. “Sometimes by the time musicals are on Broadway, it feels like they’re lagging 15 years behind the culture — we did not want that.”Similarly, the choreographer Jennifer Weber, who is also handling the Max Martin jukebox musical “& Juliet,” had to work within the specific parameters of K-pop dancing. Key elements are point moves, which are the visual answers to the songs’ hooks (one of the most famous remains Psy’s horse-riding gimmick in “Gangnam Style”).And because members of a group trade vocal lines at a quick pace, careful integration is needed to make the choreography work. “You have to almost break it down mathematically about who’s singing at what time,” Weber said on the phone. “You need to constantly be revealing who’s singing, so that person needs to pop out of the formation for their line — and that line could be as little as two bars.”Another way to assure that the show recreates the wondrous, kinetic excitement the best K-pop acts generate was to hire performers who had spent time in the trenches and could share their experience: In addition to Luna, the cast includes BoHyung, a former member of the girl group Spica; Min, formerly of Miss A; and Kevin Woo, once in U-KISS.“A lot of my questions in the first weeks were like, ‘How do you breathe? How do you execute this incredibly intricate choreography?’” Piser said. “The biggest response I got from the K-pop idols in our show was, ‘You’ve got to be patient, you’ve got to be good to yourself and you’ve got to trust the process.’”With “KPOP” now on Broadway, its creators are aware that the show is not just going up against other musicals but against actual K-pop artists — and this time again, the intimacy of Circle in the Square could come through.“We’re competing with Blackpink and BTS,” Bergman said, laughing, “but I don’t know where else you’re going to see BTS with 600 other people. Unless you’re Jeff Bezos or something.” More

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      ‘Hound Dog’ Review: A Soul-Searching Journey Strays Off Course

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      Melis Aker’s new play with music, presented by Ars Nova and PlayCo., follows a musical prodigy without drive or passion.The young woman nicknamed Hound Dog might have studied musicology at Harvard, but all the panel members at her Royal Academy of Music audition seem to care about is that she’s from Turkey.“It’s like if Joni Mitchell had a bit of an orgy with a few Turkish folk musicians, and then had a very confused baby,” one of the panelists says of Hound Dog’s song. Another detects an “Americana” influence, “which is … surprising.” The first one wishes that she’d use “the traditional Turkish instrument,” though it’s unclear what that would be.What’s jarring about this scene is not so much that educators at the Royal Academy of Music would have such clichéd assumptions, but that their phrasing would be so clunky and vague — they’re deciding on admission to a prestigious institution, not a neighborhood after-school program. Unfortunately, this lack of focus and attendant lack of bite are fairly representative of Melis Aker’s new play with music, “Hound Dog,” which is being jointly presented by Ars Nova and PlayCo.When we meet her, Hound Dog (Ellena Eshraghi) is back in her hometown, Ankara, pondering whether to attend the conservatory (yes, she ended up being admitted), though the reasons for her hesitation are unclear. Complicating matters is her fraught relationship with her widowed father (Laith Nakli), with whom she is staying.Intertwined with his frustration and impatience with Turkey as a whole, Baba is a big rock ’n’ roll fan, with a particular fixation on Elvis Presley. Hound Dog sniffs at his taste with the dismissiveness of the newly enlightened. “I took a class called ‘Sound in the Uncanny Valley’ with this crazy professor,” she informs her childhood bestie, Ayse (the crackerjack Olivia AbiAssi, making the most of an underwritten role), before deriding “the appropriation and commercial simplicity” of her dad’s favorite bands.The dogmatism is amusing and on point. It is also contradicted by what we hear from Hound Dog’s own music. Her folk-rock audition number, “Only in Time” (performed, like the others in the show, by a live band headed by the coolly composed singer Sahar Milani), does sound like a Joni Mitchell pastiche, complete with vocal mannerisms, so who’s appropriating what now?But it’s hard to tell why Hound Dog writes in any particular style or even what animates her in general: This supposed prodigy is portrayed as lacking drive and passion. Mostly Hound Dog gabs with Ayse over some joints, argues with Baba, visits her dopey high school music teacher, Mr. Callahan (Matt Magnusson), and mopes as she attempts to deal with her unresolved grief over her mother’s death a year earlier.Aker had a promising subject in a woman who is deeply ambivalent about her life’s calling, and, by extension, herself. Hound Dog tries to navigate notions of authenticity and identity as she looks for her place in her family and in the world. The last is evoked by brief references to the ways social, political and cultural forces have long hurled against one another in Turkey, including an encounter with a cop who asks Baba, “Your folks never tell you about playing foreign music outside ’round here?”Because Hound Dog’s soul-searching remains blurry, Aker and the director, Machel Ross, can never quite make her equivocations compelling to watch — an ambiguous situation since the character is partly autobiographical, with stage directions that use the first-person singular whenever Hound Dog (referred to as “Me” in the script) is involved.Yet more unfulfilled promise comes from the musical numbers, written by Aker and the brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, who are credited as the Lazours. One wonders, for example, whose feelings the band’s frontwoman is meant to voice. She could be Hound Dog’s siren-like alter ego, or perhaps she is a half-fantasized vision of her late mother. Or a mix of both. No matter: It’s hard not to feel that Hound Dog is stuck on the outside of her own story, listening in.Hound DogThrough Nov. 5 at Greenwich House, Manhattan; arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      How Much Would You Pay to Hear Great Music?

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      With ticket prices for performing arts rising, could fresh approaches like pay-what-you-can increase access and foster more adventurous programming?“I’m a cellist, and I have played in orchestras my entire life,” Blake-Anthony Johnson, the president and chief executive of the Chicago Sinfonietta, said recently. “I used to ask the other musicians, ‘What is the most you would pay for your ideal concert?’ And it was nowhere near what our patrons actually pay.”Johnson was describing a slow-moving crisis in the performing arts: Ticket prices have risen far more precipitously than most Americans’ earnings — to say nothing of the seductively low cost of streaming services at home.This rise doesn’t just trouble short-term sales. It also affects the long-term health of arts organizations, which depend on the philanthropic support of patrons who have generally built close relationships with the objects of their giving.“I have long been concerned that ticket prices present a barrier to newcomers who are curious, and a barrier to inciting habitual attendance,” said Marc Scorca, the president and chief executive of the trade organization Opera America, noting that kind of habit can lead to later giving.“High ticket prices are a disincentive to experimentation, and they raise the level of expectation,” he added. “And the higher the price, the less likely that expectations will be met, leading to disappointment.”It’s axiomatic: High ticket prices are barriers at a time when organizations need their doors to be open ever more widely. And dependence on ticket sales also hobbles programming innovation. (In Europe, where arts institutions receive sometimes substantial public subsidies, ticket sales are a far smaller percentage of budgets, so artistic decisions don’t have to prioritize attendance.)But could new approaches to ticketing work to increase access and foster more adventurous programming?“Removing socioeconomic barriers is one of those things we have to be ahead of,” said Johnson, whose Chicago Sinfonietta introduced a pay-what-you-can ticketing approach last season. “I sleep really well at night, to have someone say, ‘I’m able to bring my family to these concerts.’”Experimentation in this area has been spreading in the theater world. Most recently Ars Nova, the prominent Off Broadway incubator, announced that it would move to a pay-what-you-want model for the coming season.In classical music, this kind of initiative has been far rarer, with the Sinfonietta leading the recent charge. But a much larger and more influential institution, Lincoln Center, threw down a gauntlet this summer, when it made the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s brief season choose-what-you-pay.The results were heartening. According to the center, 90.5 percent of tickets were sold for the concerts, which took place at Alice Tully Hall since the orchestra’s usual home, the larger David Geffen Hall, was being renovated.The suggested ticket price was $35, but the average paid was just over $19 — compared with almost $60 during the orchestra’s 2019 season, when face value ranged from $35 to $90. Sixty-three percent of Mostly Mozart ticket buyers this summer were first-timers to a Lincoln Center presentation (though not, perhaps, to the center’s constituents, like the Metropolitan Opera or New York Philharmonic).Of course, many institutions have reduced-price tickets available for students or seniors, or for last-minute buyers. And increasingly some have subscription-style programs that make cheaper tickets available for a monthly or annual fee. But those programs effectively penalize newcomers and occasional ticket buyers. And what about those who aren’t students or seniors, but are still challenged by rising prices?“I find it really odd that we subsidize tickets for youths and senior citizens,” Johnson said. “There is a very large group of people in between. What I’m suggesting is that we have the kind of relationship with the community in which we are a public service and want to be a part of your life regardless of whether you’re giving us money.”As Renee Blinkwolt, the producing executive director of Ars Nova, told The New York Times when that company’s new pricing policy was unveiled in August: “It’s not income based, it’s not age based, there’s no demographic basis. It’s just radically accessible — the doors are wide open to any and everyone to pay what they will.”The rise of dynamic pricing — in which ticket prices fluctuate based on demand — is spreading beyond the commercial theater world. This can help maximize revenue for institutions when they have a hit.But it can also do a disservice to audiences and the long-term fate of presenters. Aficionados are probably less likely to be purchasing tickets at the last minute, when in a dynamic pricing situation they’ll be most expensive. So relative newcomers will disproportionately be the ones stuck needing to pay a premium, when they should be most diligently targeted with discounts. (For this reason, the Metropolitan Opera did not employ dynamic pricing during its highly successful run of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” last season.)The obvious solution would be for institutions simply to systemically lower prices — without expecting patrons to comb through websites for special ticketing programs or know how to game the dynamic pricing system.One way to lower prices is to eliminate ticket revenue as a factor in budgeting. Yes, that sounds extreme: When Emilee Syrewicze, the executive director of Opera Grand Rapids in Michigan, told her board earlier this year that their company was going in that direction, there was a little freakout.“Their first thought was, We’re no longer selling tickets,” Syrewicze said.What she was envisioning, though, was something different. Syrewicze had realized that the company’s ticket sales, as at many small and midsize institutions, were bringing in only a small portion of the budget: in the case of Opera Grand Rapids, around 15 percent. She also saw that the company consistently lacked a steady source of income to direct toward new projects and new works.What if, she thought, the opera reorganized its finances — and juiced its fund-raising to compensate — so that all of the money from ticket sales would be devoted to creative programming? In other words, as she put it: “What if we had a couple hundred thousand laying around?”When she explained to the board that the company was not simply disappearing the ticket revenue, but was planning to put it into other programs — and that the change would happen gradually over a few years, starting this fall — the members calmed down.“The freakout was only momentary,” Syrewicze said with a laugh.In Grand Rapids, the goal is not to lower prices, which are already cheap and addressed by several accessibility programs. But other organizations could use the same strategy as a model for price reductions: If ticket revenue doesn’t matter, tickets can be cheaper.Small or midsize institutions may well have an easier time experimenting, because if changes to ticket strategy are going to work without cutting budgets, donations will need to rise to fill the gap. That said, smaller organizations also tend to have less fund-raising prowess; the Stavros Niarchos Foundation supported the Mostly Mozart pilot program this summer, and Syrewicze and her new development director are confident that their city — which has a notably strong philanthropic record — will support their experiment.But it is still a gamble, and it requires a rethinking of the entire organization around a goal of lowering prices.For larger companies that sell more tickets, and those that still look to ticket sales as a bigger percentage of their budgets, the losses — and increased pressure on fund-raising — might not be workable. And as Johnson pointed out, the very configuration of most concert halls, in hierarchical tiers, resists truly democratic approaches to pricing.But Lincoln Center has shown that even the biggest organizations can at least experiment in this area, embracing the radical accessibility espoused by Ars Nova and opening the door to broader audiences of their own while providing inspiration for the rest of the field.There is still work to do. Syrewicze said she didn’t know of other organizations doing truly creative thinking in the pricing area, though a couple of her colleagues approached her to learn more after she had presented what she was working on in Grand Rapids at an Opera America meeting.“They liked the sound of it, but we like the sound of a lot of things,” she said. “How things translate to a budget is totally different. Because of our size and because we keep ourselves lean, we’re comfortable experimenting with this.”Of course, even if ticket prices came down, it wouldn’t solve all of the problems faced by orchestras and opera companies seeking to build their audiences and secure their donor bases.“When we’re talking about folks who have not come to the opera generally, price is not the only barrier,” Scorca said. “We should not kid ourselves that lower ticket prices will make people feel totally comfortable. But it is a potent, tangible, identifiable barrier.”Just the same, it would be unfortunate if the fact that lowering prices won’t solve everything keeps it from solving anything.“Let’s see what happens,” Scorca added. “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing in an experimental mind-set.” More

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      Ars Nova Introduces a Name Your Price Ticketing Model

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      For its upcoming season, audiences can pay what they wish. Tickets will start at $5 and increase in $5 increments up to $100 per ticket.The Off Broadway incubator Ars Nova will allow audience members to pay what they wish for theater tickets in a new initiative called “What’s Ars Is Yours: Name Your Price,” the company announced on Wednesday.“It’s not income based, it’s not age based, there’s no demographic basis,” said Renee Blinkwolt, the producing executive director of Ars Nova. “It’s just radically accessible — the doors are wide open to any and everyone to pay what they will.”Beginning on Oct. 6, theatergoers can choose their ticket price for any Ars Nova show at its base on West 54th Street in Hell’s Kitchen — as well as the company’s two productions at Greenwich House — for its 2022-23 season. Tickets will start at $5 and increase in $5 increments up to $100 per ticket.Ars Nova’s Off Broadway season includes the world premiere of “Hound Dog” (Oct. 6-Nov. 5), in which a young musician returns to her hometown, Ankara, Turkey, to look after her widowed father, and the world premiere of “(pray)” (March 9-April 15), a choreopoem that follows the form of a Sunday Baptist Church service while transporting audiences to an ancestral forest.Tickets to Ars Nova’s most recent production, “Oratorio for Living Things,” started at $35 and went up to $95 for premium seats. In a time of persistent drops in attendance, removing the financial barrier could be the extra incentive that gets people to the theater.Talks around a name-your-own price model started around this time last year, Blinkwolt said, knowing that audiences might feel nervous returning to in-person performances. After a year of planning and debating, the company is introducing the initiative for its 20th-anniversary season — and second in-person season since the start of the pandemic — during “a time of great change and transition,” Blinkwolt said.The pay-what-you-wish tickets idea is, of course, nothing new. For instance, in 2013, the Forum Theater in Silver Spring, Md., instituted “Forum for All,” under which patrons could attend performances for as little as 25 cents. And in 2017, the Off Broadway play “Afterglow” offered 10 pay-what-you-wish tickets to some performances at the Loft at the Davenport Theater.Still, having that ticketing for an entire season could signal a new standard in arts accessibility in New York City. Ars Nova says it will treat the effort as a learning experiment, with plans to assess the financial impact at the end of the year along with evaluating if the model succeeded in motivating attendance and diversifying the demographics of the audience.“My hope is that people are curious about it, they’re excited about it, and they build back that habit of getting together with friends, enjoying each other’s company in real time and space and taking in a show,” Blinkwolt said. More

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      Review: In ‘Oratorio for Living Things,’ the Song Is You

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      Heather Christian’s rapturous new music-theater work turns a tiny amphitheater into a vast cathedral of sound.At the Academy of Music, where the Philadelphia Orchestra used to play, longtime subscribers were sometimes rewarded with a chance to move from floor-level seats to raised gilded boxes at the back of the horseshoe. After my parents took that step, my mother soon regretted the change. It’s true she saw the players better from above, but she’d felt them better from below, where the buzz of bassoons and the blast of tubas came through the wood directly to her feet, turning symphonies into seismic events.I thought of her vibrating metatarsals — and so much else about the rapture of intimate art — while sitting in the wooden amphitheater housing “Oratorio for Living Things,” Heather Christian’s profoundly strange and overwhelmingly beautiful new music-theater piece at Ars Nova’s Greenwich House theater. Tightly packed in the small, steep, egg-shaped bowl designed for the space by Kristen Robinson, six instrumentalists and 12 singers make music there that shakes the 100 audience members like a 90-minute earthquake.That seems appropriate for a work about profound human issues: our place in history, our place in the universe. At least that’s what I think it’s about, judging from lyrics I snatched from the sweep of sound and from reading the libretto later. Even then, I was not always sure I could pass a test on its content; though an author’s note in the program explains that the subject is time at three scales — quantum, human and cosmic — much of what was billed as quantum or cosmic felt distinctly human to me.Foreground from left: Divya Maus, Quentin Oliver Lee and Barrie Lobo McLain. Much of the text in Christian’s work is sung in Latin.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesNo matter. If the text is sometimes baffling and hermetic, it is confident enough in its oddness that you do not worry about crashing when it flies close to the twee line. Though I apparently didn’t recognize the “ballet of Chloroplasts and Mitochondria” that forms a part of an early section called “Oxygen + Photosynthesis,” I enjoyed it anyway. For Christian, ideas are fuel; it’s not that “these words mean nothing,” as one lyric coyly suggests, but that their meaning is not apprehensible through our usual interpretive circuitry. Unknowability, being part of the message, is necessarily part of the medium.As if to emphasize that, and draw parallels to traditional oratorios, much of the text is sung in Latin — but in this case translated backward, by Greg Taubman, from Christian’s English originals. Even when the words are contemporary, they are often drawn from unusual sources, including an accounting of how we spend our lives (13 days sneezing, 10 minutes giving bad directions to strangers) and a phone line Christian set up to solicit “memory mail”:“I was like 5 years old and both my parents were working late all the time,” one starts.“It’s 1964 or 1965, Beatles time, and I’m carrying a plate of spaghetti,” starts another.Kirstyn Cae Ballard, foreground, in the music-theater piece, which consists of several centuries of musical styles.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesWhat’s haunting is how the oratorio form and Christian’s private cosmology elevate such banal statements to an almost sacred plane. Alternating in the classical manner between massed choral singing and solo arias — all exquisitely performed under the music direction of Ben Moss — she throws several centuries of musical styles into the pot and swirls them around. The ear passes through currents of plainchant and gospel, blues and electronica; you may catch wisps of Orff and Reich, Holst and Massenet, in much the way you spot faces in a crowd scene.Yet this is not concert music. The production, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, highlights thematic cohesion and theatricality even without a traditional story. Both the set and the performers are draped in varieties of deep-space blue, as if to suggest a shared chemistry between people and their environment. (The beautiful costumes are by Márion Talán de la Rosa.) The sound (by Nick Kourtides) and lighting design (by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) are likewise saturated, picking out voices and faces — great ones to begin with — to emphasize the shifting dynamic of individuals and groups.Even better, Evans has found a way of working with the singers so that every syllable sung, even the seemingly meaningless ones, feels as if it were informed by specific emotion.From left, Ballard, Ben Moss and Carla Duren in the 90-minute production.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesBut what is that emotion? Traditional theater often tries to bind audiences by pushing them toward a shared response, whether horror or hilarity. Christian is not working in that vein. As in earlier pieces like the requiem “Animal Wisdom” and the Mother Teresa cantata “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” she focuses on personal expression instead of story, content to let the formal elements shape the larger experience and leaving listeners free to make their own connections.In less skilled hands this could result in chaos or camp, but even her Mother Teresa, played by a man in drag with a ring light for a halo, avoided that trap. “Oratorio for Living Things,” which was shut down by the pandemic after two preview performances in March 2020, takes similar risks to get as close to spirituality as a contemporary theater piece dares. Near the end, after some sort of cataclysm brings the music to a halt, we are asked to stand in silence for a while, “feeling where we are on this New Year’s Eve of the cosmic year.” The performers admit that we may find this embarrassing: “We’re all embarrassed,” they say.But I — who usually slide under my seat when dragooned into acts of audience participation — was not embarrassed at all. I felt instead the kind of awe I feel in cathedrals, where the architecture itself forces one’s thoughts upward and outward. Or perhaps I felt more as my mother did when beautiful music came through her soles. Just so, in “Oratorio for Living Things,” Christian provides the notes but your body is the song.Oratorio for Living ThingsThrough April 17 at Greenwich House, Manhattan; arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Heather Christian’s Choral Work Is a Study of Time. Patience, Too.

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      The composer’s “Oratorio for Living Things,” forced to shut down because of the pandemic, returns to the Ars Nova stage in Manhattan.On a strangely comforting morning in early March, the composer Heather Christian made her way to Ars Nova’s space in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, for the first time in two years. The bright sun, radiating the warmth of a spring day, was enough to momentarily make her forget she was freezing. Once inside, she re-encountered the set for her delicately epic choral piece “Oratorio for Living Things,” which had two preview performances before the pandemic hit, and is back, running through April 17.“I felt the weight of time,” she said during a recent conversation over Zoom, reflecting on her return to the theater. “It was the weight of expectation or even the grief of the last time I was in that space.”It was only fitting that time felt like Christian’s companion, since “Oratorio for Living Things,” in the words of its creator, is a study of time “in three different scales: the quantum scale, the human scale and the cosmic scale.”To achieve this, she said she tried to find parallels between the ways in which particles move, for example, and the way in which a fugue is structured, or by examining cosmic violence (the Big Bang) and linking it to human trauma.Gerianne Pérez, center, in “Oratorio for Living Things” at Greenwich House Theater in March 2020, shortly before the premiere run shut down.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThen, to explain these concepts on an emotional level, she collected hundreds of voice mail messages that she had solicited from strangers, inviting them to share a memory anonymously. (“I left business cards everywhere!” she said with a laugh.) These delicious recollections — of transporting bags of groceries on a sleigh in Moscow, or knowing that someone’s mother “will bring my baby brother with her” when she leaves the hospital — make up the second act.As for the musical composition, performed by an orchestra of six, “Oratorio” layers myriad genres — gospel, jazz, Baroque and a range of pop styles — to create harmony where cacophony might otherwise exist.“The more we sing these songs and say these words,” said Onyie Nwachukwu, one of the 12 singers who bring the piece to life, “the more I’m acutely aware of the almost fantastic nature of humans and everything that’s around us.”The show’s director, Lee Sunday Evans, envisioned the production as if set in a Quaker meeting house “where there’s no pulpit or proscenium and so the music wants to be amongst us.” Performers move throughout the space gently interacting with audience members, almost inviting them to sing along.“I knew I wanted to do a piece about time,” Christian, 40, explained. “Music itself is a study of time, a dissertation on how time moves in a specific way.” She tried dissecting Carl Orff’s cantata “Carmina Burana,” a celebration of earthly passions that she describes as “spaghetti exploding out of the bowl.” It has been a favorite of hers since high school because of its mysteriousness — it asks big questions without offering an answer.A self-described cultural omnivore who finds as much wisdom in “The Golden Girls” as Bach’s compositions, Christian revisited Orff while reading Carlo Rovelli’s “The Order of Time,” about time in physics, and rewatched old episodes of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.” Her fascination with how they all explained complex subjects in digestible ways eventually resulted in an eureka moment: She would do the same with a musical piece. And that’s when she started working on “Oratorio.” (The libretto is dedicated to the three Carls.)Christian composes by ear. “Things come to me all at once,” she said. But lacking a consistent practice for transcribing her work, she found a priceless collaborator in the music director Ben Moss, who also performs in “Oratorio.” Moss came in during an early workshop of the piece in 2018 and offered to help with the transcription. At the time, Christian had the skeleton of the work, Moss added the minutiae. He said it felt as if he were “crawling inside of her mind and her musical and poetic imagination.”Using voice notes and memos, Christian conveys her intentions to her collaborators, making them an essential part of the process. “I wish we recorded some of the sessions of her explaining things and her whys and hows because it in and of itself is artistry,” said Nwachukwu, who also appeared in a 2019 workshop of Christian’s “Annie Salem: An American Tale” at Vassar’s Powerhouse Theater. She said she found herself approaching theater from a new perspective: “less restrictive and structured” than what she was accustomed to in opera and more traditional musicals. “What Heather asked of me was to go to a place that was somewhat uncomfortable,” she recalled, “where the first thing I had to do was throw away convention.”From left, Amber Gray, Christian at the piano and Libby King and Brian Hastert embracing in “Mission Drift” at the Connelly Theater in Manhattan.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesRachel Chavkin, the Tony-winning director of “Hadestown” who oversaw the workshop of “Salem,” described Christian’s music as “somewhere between a creature howling at the moon and the sound of the moon itself.” Her music, she continued, “isn’t about furthering story, each song is a bit more like a spiritual or emotional happening than a story beat.”Chavkin began collaborating with Christian in 2008 when they created a musical called “Mission Drift,” a show about the recession and America’s rapacious brand of capitalism. Every time they work together, Chavkin said, “I can see my own experience with the possibilities of these forms.” She added: “Heather is inventing the wheel for herself.”FOUR DAYS BEFORE theaters in New York shut down, I attended the last dress rehearsal for “Oratorio.” I distinctly remember leaving the theater feeling as if I had witnessed a work that successfully established a dialogue between the sacred and the mundane, between the invisible and what we grasp with our senses. In many ways, it left me open to viewing the pandemic as an opportunity to find wonder and solace in the things we often take for granted.During that forced break in 2020, Christian herself found and made music out of things she’d never tried before. “I was swimming in a sea of first drafts,” she said, laughing, “but I also got chickens and decided to learn how to garden in a serious way.” Spending time with her husband at home in Beacon, N.Y., she also took to self-reflection. “I tried to investigate my relationship to ambition and slow down, especially because all my shows are about exactly those things,” she added.Born in New Orleans, Christian was raised in what she called “avant-garde Catholicism.” At 11, she became a cantor in Natchez, Miss., where her family had moved when she was 3. But soon “the functional magic of religion lost its mysticism,” she explained. She recalled being behind the scenes and a time when she saw “a priest pick a wedgie in the middle of the consecration of the host.” Suddenly, it was all theater, a new kind of sacred space.“I honestly think it’s going to take a little bit of work for me, and for people, to reimagine the performance space as a womb and a safe space,” Christian said.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesShe sought formal education in musical theater at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where her acting teacher observed she was quite complex and wisely encouraged her to join the experimental theater wing.Christian describes herself as someone who “would go insane if you took away my pens and microphones.” During lockdown, she found new channels for her creativity in projects like “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” a one-person musical about Mother Teresa in collaboration with Joshua William Gelb, and even became a foley artist in order to adapt her show “Animal Wisdom,” an autobiographical cabaret, for film, which she hopes will be picked up by distributors. “I’m incredibly prolific, and I don’t say that as a brag,” she confessed, “it’s just how I function.”She explained that she needs to find functionality in her art, returning to work in “Oratorio” presents a new set of challenges. “Initially I made a Rorschach test for whatever people brought into it,” she said, but now she wants to “provide people with some optimism.”“I honestly think it’s going to take a little bit of work for me, and for people, to reimagine the performance space as a womb and a safe space,” Christian said. “The lucky thing is that with theater all it takes is lighting and sound and bodies to completely transform a space.”She added: “I forgot how much I love people, how much I thrive around people.” More