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      Citing Pandemic, This Year’s Obie Awards Will Include Streaming Theater

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      The Obie Awards, an annual ceremony honoring theater work performed Off and Off Off Broadway, this year for the first time will consider digital, audio and other virtual productions.The awards administrators decided to expand their scope in recognition of the adaptations made by many theater companies during the coronavirus pandemic, which prevented most New York theaters from staging in-person performances for at least a year, and in many cases considerably longer. Numerous theaters pivoted to streaming, and some experimented with audio.“We wanted to make sure that the work that did happen was eligible,” said Heather Hitchens, the president and chief executive of the American Theater Wing, which presents the awards. “The Obies respond to the season, and to the evolving nature and rhythms of theater.”This year’s Obie Awards are expected to take place in November, which would be 28 months after the last ceremony, reflecting the extraordinarily disruptive role the pandemic has played in theatermaking. The ceremony will consider productions presented by Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway theaters between July 1, 2020 and Aug. 31, 2022.The exact date for the ceremony has not been chosen, but Hitchens said she expects it to be in-person (the last one was streamed) and she expects it to have a host (or hosts).This year’s Obie Awards will be the first presented solely by the Wing, which also founded and copresents the Tony Awards. The Obies were created by The Village Voice and first presented in 1956; in 2014, as The Voice struggled, it entered a partnership with the Wing to preserve the ceremony, and now The Voice has granted the Obies trademark to the Wing, Hitchens said.The Obies, always a mixture of prestige and quirkiness, have long been distinguished by their lack of defined categories — each year, the judges decide what works to recognize, and for what reason. This year’s awards will be chaired by David Mendizábal, who is one of the leaders of the Movement Theater Company, and Melissa Rose Bernardo, a freelance theater critic. The judges will include David Anzuelo, an actor and fight choreographer; Becca Blackwell, an actor and writer; Wilson Chin, a set designer; Haruna Lee, a playwright; Soraya Nadia McDonald, the culture critic for The Undefeated; Lisa Peterson, a director and writer; Heather Alicia Simms, an actor; and Kaye Voyce, a costume designer. More

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      Los Angeles Is Changing. Can a Flagship Theater Keep Up?

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      LOS ANGELES — For 55 years, the Center Theater Group has showcased theater in a city that has always been known for the movies. Its three stages have championed important new works — “Angels in America,” “Zoot Suit” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” to name three of its most acclaimed offerings — while importing big-ticket crowd pleasers from Broadway (coming this spring: “The Lehman Trilogy”).But this Los Angeles cultural institution is at a crossroads as it goes through its first leadership change in 17 years, and confronts questions about its mission, programming and appeal in a changing city, all amid a debilitating pandemic.Michael Ritchie, the organization’s artistic director, announced last summer that he would retire nearly 18 months before his contract ended in June 2023; he stepped down at the end of the December, citing the need for the organization to move in a new direction in response to social changes and debate about the theater’s future. The organization, which is a nonprofit, is using the transition to consider how to adjust to what is sure to be a very different post-Covid era — a sweeping discussion that theater administrators said would involve some 300 people, including its board of directors, staff, actors, director and contributors.“At the age of 50, you start to think about the next chapter,” said Meghan Pressman, the managing director of the Center Theater Group. “There’s so much happening now. Coming out of a pandemic. Coming out of a period of a racial crisis. Years of inequity.”“We are no longer your mother’s C.T.G. anymore,” she said.The obstacles are considerable.The Ahmanson Theater, in downtown Los Angeles, had to cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” in December.Ryan MillerLike theaters everywhere, Center Theater Group — the Ahmanson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center downtown, and the Kirk Douglas Theater 10 miles to the west in Culver City — is grappling with empty seats, declining revenues and the coronavirus. The Ahmanson cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” with Bradley Whitford in December, canceling 22 performances after positive coronavirus tests in the cast and crew at the height of what in a normal year would have been a holiday rush.The cancellation cost the Center Theater Group $1.5 million in lost revenues, including ticket returns. That came after the organization was forced to make millions of dollars in spending cuts over the course of the pandemic, cutting its staff to 140 this season from 185 and reducing its annual budget to $47 million for this fiscal year, $10 million less than the budget for the fiscal year before the pandemic.And the theater group is struggling to adjust to sweeping reassessments of tradition that have emerged from social unrest across the country over the past two years. It was reminded of this new terrain by the uproar that greeted the announcement of a 2021-22 season for the Taper and the Douglas, 10 plays that included just one by a woman and one by a transgender playwright. Jeremy O. Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” which was on the schedule, announced that he would withdraw his play from the season before agreeing to go forward only after the Taper pledged to program only “women-identifying or nonbinary playwrights” next season.The Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture since the Mark Taper Forum, above, and the Ahmanson opened in 1967 at the Los Angeles Music Center.Tom BonnerThe Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture for decades.It “is still the flagship theater company of L.A.,” said Stephen Sachs, the co-artistic director of the Fountain Theater, an influential small theater on the East Side of the city. “I think it’s at a moment of reckoning, like everything that is theater in Los Angeles. The C.T.G. is the bar that we compare ourselves to. They set a standard for L.A., not only for ourselves but for the country.”The Music Center, the sprawling midcentury arts complex on top of Bunker Hill, across from Frank Gehry’s billowing Walt Disney Concert Hall, is at the center of cultural, arts and society life in Los Angeles. The project was driven by Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the cultural leader who was the wife and mother of publishers of the Los Angeles Times, and also houses the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which was the site of the Academy Awards off and on from 1969 to 1999. “Before the Music Center, it was really a cultural wasteland,” Marylouise Oates, who was the society columnist for the Los Angeles Times in the late 1980s, said, referring to the city.Theaters across the country are struggling to find the balance between pleasing and challenging their audience as they confront declining ticket sales and the threat of competition in the form of a screen in a living room. Theater here has also long existed in the shadow of Hollywood, to the annoyance of those involved in what is by any measure a vibrant theater community.“I don’t see how anyone can say it’s not a theater town,” said Charles Dillingham, who was the managing director of the Center Theater Group from 1991 through 2011.The Kirk Douglas Theater, in a former movie palace in Culver City, opened in 2004.Craig SchwartzFor its first 40 years, the theater group’s personality — adventurous and daring more often than not — was forged by Gordon Davidson, who was recruited by Chandler to be the first artistic director at the Taper. He was of a generation of force-of-nature theater impresarios, like Joseph Papp in New York and Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis.“I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper. “I’ll never forget Gordon sitting down, taking out his buck slip and saying, ‘What do you need?’”The Taper opened with the “The Devils,” by the British dramatist John Whiting, about a Catholic priest in France accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun. The subject matter caused a rustle, but Chandler, who died in 1997, stood by Davidson.“She wasn’t always happy,” said Judi Davidson, who was married to Gordon Davidson, who died in 2016. “She said, ‘I’ll make a deal with you. You tell which plays I should come to and which plays I shouldn’t come to.’ ”The Taper staged “Zoot Suit,” by Luis Valdez, in 1978, a rare production of a work by a Latino writer, which went on to Broadway; as well as a full production of both parts of “Angels in America,” by Tony Kushner, in 1992, before it moved to Broadway. “I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper.Jay Thompson In recent years, the theater has come under criticism for too often catering to an older audience hungry for the comfort of familiar works. Still, under Ritchie, who declined a request for an interview, it presented the premieres of acclaimed works, including “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” which had its world premiere at the Douglas before moving to the Taper.Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” said the Center Theater Group had responded quickly when he objected to the overwhelmingly male lineup of writers. “When I raised my issues and pulled my play, they didn’t act defensively,” Harris said. “They acted. Other places would have let the play move on and figure out a way to blame me.”The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

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      Lucy Rowan Mann, Doyenne of a Prime Classical Music Prize, Dies at 100

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      With her husband, the violinist Robert Mann, she mentored young classical musicians and administered the Naumburg Foundation’s storied annual awards.Lucy Rowan Mann, whose guidance of the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation and its influential awards helped propel a raft of major classical music careers for 50 years, died on Jan. 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.The cause was Covid-19, her daughter, Lisa Mann Marotta, said.Ms. Mann was the executive director of the foundation, which she ran with her husband, Robert Mann, who was its president and the founding first violinist of the renowned Juilliard String Quartet. She handled administration and fund-raising, while Mr. Mann, who died in 2018 at 97, focused on the musical aspects of the competition and on the judging.But Ms. Mann, who started at the Naumburg Foundation in 1972 and continued until this year, did more than office work. She scheduled performances for the young Naumburg winners, did publicity for them and even arranged travel. The couple were a well-oiled machine; Carol Wincenc, who in 1978 won the inaugural Naumburg Competition for flute, said in an interview that the Manns exhibited “teamwork of the highest order.”Naumburg winners who have gone on to prominent careers include, in addition to Ms. Wincenc, the violin soloists Leonidas Kavakos and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg; Frank Huang, the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic; the pianists Andre-Michel Schub, Stephen Hough and Anton Nel; the clarinetist Charles Neidich; and the cellist Colin Carr. Singers who have won include Julia Bullock, Dawn Upshaw and Lucy Shelton.Music competitions are often key pieces in building a career, offering prize money, concert dates and public validation, but they can be rife with pressure and are often criticized for valuing technical brilliance over personality.But, as Mr. Mann wrote in The New York Times in 1985, “a competition is as musical, humane and culturally meaningful as it wants to be.” Ms. Mann’s administration and care for the competitors lent that humanity, colleagues and musicians said.The Naumburg Foundation, established in 1925, started administering annual awards in 1926. Robert Mann himself won a Naumburg Award for violin in 1941.The awards categories rotate among instruments each year. Initially, they included pianists, cellists and violinists, but the competition has expanded to include vocalists, chamber ensembles and flutists, and it also features other instruments on a rotating basis. The 2022 Naumburg Competition will be for saxophonists.First-prize winners receive $25,000 and two New York recitals and have a work commissioned for them.Ms. Mann made it part of her mission to push for greater awareness of 20th-century American composers. In her office at the Manhattan School of Music, where the Naumburg Foundation is based, she was known to stage birthday celebrations for contemporary composers, bribing students with candy to encourage them to attend and learn more about musical history.Lucille Ida Zeitlin was born on June 20, 1921, in Brooklyn. She and her two siblings were raised by their mother, Rose Kuschner. Their father, Irving Allen Zeitlin, was a nightclub manager. “My father was a scoundrel and a womanizer,” Ms. Mann told The Times in 2013. “He was never around.”She attended public high school in Brooklyn and went on to Brooklyn College to study acting, but dropped out and moved to Washington. There, she studied drama under Walter Kerr, who was teaching at the Catholic University of America and later become a theater critic for The Times. During World War II, Ms. Mann worked in secretarial roles at the War Department and elsewhere.Her marriage to Mark Rowan, who served in the Army and later became an English professor, ended in divorce after eight years.She returned to New York and in 1947 and became the manager for concerts at the Juilliard School. She met Mr. Mann while also managing the Juilliard String Quartet. They married in 1949.In addition to their work at the Naumburg Foundation, the Manns performed together in the Lyric Trio: Ms. Mann narrated folk stories from Rudyard Kipling and Hans Christian Andersen over music played by Mr. Mann and the pianist Leonid Hambro. Eric Salzman, reviewing a Lyric Trio concert at Carnegie Hall for The Times in 1962, called their performance “witty, pointed and delightful.”Their son, Nicholas Mann, who is also a violinist, occasionally performed with them as part of the Mann family-centered Baca Ensemble, for which Robert Mann composed. In a 1986 Times review of a performance by the group at Carnegie Hall, Allen Hughes wrote, “Miss Rowan is a persuasive reader, Mr. Mann’s scores are serious and well-wrought, and words and music coexisted amiably in these performances.”Ms. Mann was also an artist: She began painting as a hobby but became more serious about it later in life, culminating in retrospectives of her bright abstract works at the Tenri Cultural Institute in Manhattan in 2017 and 2019.In addition to her two children, she is survived by five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. More

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      'Peter Grimes' Review: Opera Stars Take On an Omicron-Battered Vienna

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      The tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the soprano Lise Davidsen are leading a luxuriously cast revival of Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”VIENNA — Whenever I open Instagram these days, it seems, I’m served an ad for “Hamilton.” Once a destination musical that took months of planning or deep pockets to see, it is now algorithmically spreading the word that last-minute tickets are up for grabs, no #Ham4Ham lottery required.Such is the state of live performance as the Omicron variant upends shows and keeps wary audiences at home.Take the Vienna State Opera, one of the world’s great companies and a major tourist attraction. Forced to close for nearly a week in December because of the coronavirus, it is only now returning to full capacity. Nearly 450 seats (in a house with just over 1,700) were still unsold on Wednesday morning, with mere hours to go until the opening of a luxuriously cast revival of Britten’s “Peter Grimes” — ostensibly one of the hottest tickets in Europe, featuring the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the fast-rising soprano Lise Davidsen.By curtain time, the house appeared much fuller, but hundreds of tickets remain available for each future performance. It’s easy to see why people might be discouraged, and why the company is practically begging for attendance: Visitors to the State Opera, who are required to wear N95-quality masks inside the building, must also be fully vaccinated and boosted, as well as tested (by P.C.R., pointedly not antigen) for the virus.I wasn’t alone in scrambling to produce all the necessary documents as I entered: an ID, a nontransferable ticket, a certificate of vaccination and a negative test result — which came with a 70-euro price tag because I had traveled from Berlin, where rapid tests are widely available and free, but P.C.R. ones are not.The things we do for opera.And, in this case, for the opportunity to hear Kaufmann in his debut as Peter Grimes, as well as Davidsen in her first staged performance as Ellen Orford — initial impressions of roles these artists are rumored to be taking elsewhere in future seasons, including the Metropolitan Opera.In this production, Kaufmann’s Grimes is literally burdened by ropes.Wiener Staatsoper/Michael PoehnOften stranded by Christine Mielitz’s neon-streaked staging of the opera — a psychologically complex tragedy of provincial cruelty and loneliness — Kaufmann and Davidsen seemed forced to rely on their dramatic instincts rather than a cohesive vision. Although the evening was far from a disaster and was warmly received, neither singer appears to have found a new signature role.Kaufmann, in particular, struggled to trace clearly his character’s decline from social isolation to volatility and suicidal delirium. A fisherman who is believed by mobbish villagers to have killed his apprentices, Grimes carries the weight of perception; in this production, he is literally burdened by ropes and the bodies of the boys who died under his watch. Sounding likewise weighed, Kaufmann mostly sang in shades of weariness, with an overreliance on floated pianissimos punctuated by outbursts more heroic than pained or violent.If this approach — steadfastly resigned rather than mercurial — made for static storytelling, it paid off in Grimes’s climactic mad scene. Having long sulked under a halo of anguish, Kaufmann was all the more moving in this hushed monologue, lending an inevitability to his character’s death.But in this scene, as throughout the opera, Britten scatters spiky marcato and staccato articulation. Kaufmann opted instead for a consistent legato, sometimes at odds with the orchestra and, in extreme cases, slurring phrases into unintelligibility.Ellen Orford requires more modesty than the mighty Wagner and Strauss roles that have swiftly made Davidsen famous.Wiener Staatsoper/Michael PoehnDavidsen’s Ellen is a departure from the mighty Wagner and Strauss roles that have swiftly made her famous. “Grimes” requires comparative modesty, a challenge she met on Wednesday with graceful control — judiciously deploying the reverberation she is capable of when needed to illustrate her iron will in the face of a small town’s rushed judgments, and dropping to a glassy pianissimo in moments of convincing despair. She matched the score’s precise indications with crisp delivery and diction, but also, in Act II, wove a delicately doleful quartet with Noa Beinart as Auntie and Ileana Tonca and Aurora Marthens as the two Nieces.The other star onstage was the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, as Balstrode — who is, aside from Ellen, the only resident of “the Borough” (as the town is called) who treats Grimes with some sympathy. But that was difficult to discern in this performance; Terfel’s robust voice had a touch of wickedness, with smirks here and there that made it seem as though he were encouraging Grimes’s destructive path. It came as no surprise when Balstrode, at last, told the poor Grimes to sink with his boat at sea.Other cast members stood out, for better and worse: the affecting textures of Martin Hässler’s Ned Keene and the dark comedy of Thomas Ebenstein’s Bob Boles; but also the shouty cries of Stephanie Houtzeel’s Mrs. Sedley, an interpretation better fit for Brecht than Britten.The conductor Simone Young shaped enormous peaks and valleys of sound in the orchestra. The great interludes were distinct narratives: the first setting a tone with its chilling thinness, the third angular and balletic, the fifth gently rocking yet tense. And the chorus, monochromatically costumed and often moving in unison, sang with as much richly defined character as any single performer onstage. In Act III, its members truly embodied the destructive power of a determined mob.That scene is one of the most horrifying in opera, a grand climax in a work that, when performed at this level, makes any onerous safety protocol worthwhile. If you can get over that hurdle, there are several opportunities — and many, many tickets — left to hear it for yourself.Peter GrimesThrough Feb. 8 at the Vienna State Opera; wiener-staatsoper.at. More

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      Spotify Removes Neil Young's Music After Complaints About Joe Rogan

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      Neil Young wasn’t bluffing.Spotify said on Wednesday that it had begun removing the singer’s music from the streaming service, two days after he briefly posted a public letter calling on Spotify to choose between him and Joe Rogan, the star podcast host who has been accused of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.Young’s challenge to Spotify has become a high-profile, if unexpected, flash point in the battle over misinformation and free speech online. It also raised questions about the power of performing artists to control where their work is heard.In a statement posted to his website on Wednesday, Young called Spotify “the home of life threatening Covid misinformation.” He added: “Lies being sold for money.”His criticism of Rogan — a comedian and actor who has become Spotify’s most popular podcast host, sometimes speaking at great length with controversial figures — came after a group of hundreds of scientists, professors and public health experts asked Spotify to take down an episode of Rogan’s show from Dec. 31. That episode, featuring Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious-disease expert, promoted “several falsehoods about Covid-19 vaccines,” according to the group’s public letter, which was issued on Jan. 10.Spotify said in a statement on Wednesday: “We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to Covid since the start of the pandemic.”“We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify,” the service added, “but hope to welcome him back soon.”Young’s most popular songs, like “Heart of Gold,” “Harvest Moon” and “Old Man,” have been radio staples for decades, and have attracted hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify. In his statement on Wednesday, Young said that Spotify represented 60 percent of the streams of his music around the world.Young’s music was expected to be fully removed from Spotify within hours. The news that the service was removing his songs was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.In his original letter, which Young addressed to his label, Warner Records, and his manager, he said: “Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform. I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform.”He added: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”That letter was removed from Young’s website soon after it was posted, though it drew wide news media attention.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

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

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

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

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

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      Elton John Shows Postponed After He Tests Positive for the Coronavirus

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      The American Airlines Center in Dallas announced Tuesday afternoon that a pair of Elton John concerts at the venue have been postponed because the singer recently tested positive for the coronavirus.The announcement came just hours before the planned start of a show, which was to begin at 8 p.m. on Tuesday. The second concert had been scheduled for Wednesday.In a brief statement on its website, the American Airlines Center said, “Elton is fully vaccinated and boosted, and is experiencing only mild symptoms.”The shows are part of his “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour. The American Airlines Center did not give new dates for the concerts. More