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      Badal Roy, Who Fused Indian Rhythms With Jazz, Is Dead at 82

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      He collaborated across cultures, playing tabla with Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, John McLaughlin and others in the jazz world and beyond, including Yoko Ono.Badal Roy, an Indian tabla player whose drumming propelled East-West fusions for some of the most prominent musicians in and out of jazz, died on Tuesday in Wilmington, Del. He was 82.His son, Amitav Roy Chowdhury, said the cause was Covid-19.Mr. Roy was largely self-taught. He was not trained in the Indian classical apprentice tradition of gurus and disciples. Where classical tabla players use a pair of differently tuned drums, Mr. Roy sometimes used three or four. His improvisational flexibility and his skill at sharing a groove made him a prized collaborator for jazz, funk, rock and global musicians.He first became widely known for his work in the early 1970s with the English guitarist John McLaughlin and Miles Davis, appearing on Davis’s pivotal jazz-funk album “On the Corner” and its successors. He went on to many other collaborations,— recording with Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Mann, Yoko Ono, Bill Laswell and Richie Havens — and spent more than a decade as a member of Ornette Coleman’s electric band, Prime Time.Amarendra Roy Chowdhury was born on Oct. 16, 1939, in the Comilla District of what was then British India. (The area was later part of East Pakistan and is now in Bangladesh.) His father, Satyenda Nath Roy Chowdhury, was a government official in Pakistan; his mother, Sova Rani Roy Chowdhury, was a homemaker. “Badal,” which means “rain” in Bengali, was a childhood nickname.An uncle introduced him to the tabla and taught him its rudiments: the vocal syllables that denote specific drum sounds. Later, in New York, he took some lessons from Alla Rakha, Ravi Shankar’s longtime tabla player. While growing up, he was also a fan of Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. His introduction to jazz was hearing Duke Ellington perform in Pakistan in 1963.Mr. Roy wasn’t planning a career in music when he came to New York in 1968. He intended to earn a Ph.D. in statistics.To support himself, he worked as a waiter at the Pak India Curry House and found a weekend gig playing tabla with a sitarist at A Taste of India, a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Mr. McLaughlin was a regular there, and he sometimes sat in with the duo. After a few months of jamming, he asked Mr. Roy to join a recording session. The resulting album, “My Goals Beyond,” released in 1971, was an early landmark in Indian-influenced jazz.Mr. McLaughlin was also working with Miles Davis at the time, and he brought Mr. Roy to Davis’s attention; when Davis was appearing at the Village Gate in 1971, Mr. Roy’s duo auditioned for him during a break between sets at A Taste of India, carrying their instruments a few blocks down Bleecker Street. Davis called on Mr. Roy for a 1972 session that also included Mr. McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock on keyboards and Jack DeJohnette on drums.In an interview with an Indian newspaper, The Telegraph, Mr. Roy recalled: “All of a sudden, Miles tells me: ‘You start’ — no music, no nothing, just like that. Realizing I have to set the groove, I just start playing a ta-ka-na-ta-n-ka-tin rhythm. Herbie nods his head to the beat and, with a ‘Yeah!,’ starts playing. For a while, it’s just the two of us, and then John and Jack join in. Then all the others start and, to me at least, it’s pure chaos. I’m completely drowned out by the sound. I continue playing, but for the next half-hour, I can’t hear a single beat I play.”Those sessions yielded Davis’s “On the Corner.” Mr. Roy joined Davis for other 1972 sessions that contributed material for Davis’s “Big Fun” and “Get Up With It,” both released in 1974, and performed with him at Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at Lincoln Center for what became Davis’s 1973 album “In Concert.”Mr. Roy received a copy of “On the Corner” when it was released in 1972. But after his frustration at the sessions, he didn’t listen to it until the 1990s, when his son, then a graduate student, told him, “All the hip-hop guys are sampling it.”In 1974, Mr. Roy married Geeta Vashi. She survives him, along with their son and Mr. Roy’s sisters, Kalpana Chakraborty and Shibani Ray Chaudhury, and his brother, Samarendra Roy Chowdhury. He lived in Wilmington.Mr. Roy backed the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders on the albums “Wisdom Through Music” (1972), “Village of the Pharoahs” (1973) and “Love in Us All” (1974), and in later years performed with Mr. Sanders onstage. With the saxophonist Dave Liebman, who had been in Davis’s group, Mr. Roy appeared on “Lookout Farm” (1974), “Drum Ode” (1975) and “Sweet Hands” (1975). (“Sweet hands” is the translation of a Bengali term praising a virtuoso tabla player.)He released two albums as a leader in the mid-1970s, both featuring Mr. Liebman: “Ashirbad” (1975) and “Passing Dreams” (1976), which also included the Indian classical musician Sultan Khan on sarangi, a bowed string instrument.Mr. Roy performed and recorded widely, often as part of cross-cultural fusions. He had a longtime duo with the bansuri (wooden flute) player Steve Gorn, which appeared regularly at the Manhattan restaurant Raga. He shared the 1978 album “Kundalini” with the American jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson and the Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos. In the early 1980s, he was a member of the flutist Herbie Mann’s group and appeared on the 1981 Mann album “All Blues/Forest Rain.” He also recorded with the composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell; with the trombonist and conch-shell player Steve Turre; with Yoko Ono on her 1982 album, “It’s Alright (I See Rainbows)”; and with the Brazilian guitar duo Duofel, the Japanese bassist Stomu Takeishi, the bassist and producer Bill Laswell and the Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider.In 1988, he joined Ornette Coleman’s band Prime Time, and though the group rarely released studio albums, he appeared on its final one, “Tone Dialing,” in 1995. In the early 2000s he was a member of Impure Thoughts, a group led by the keyboardist Michael Wolff. Mr. Roy also recorded often as a leader, collaborating across idioms and styles.In an interview for All About Jazz, Mr. Roy emphasized that his solos were about “telling a story.” “I go with the groove,” he said, “and then go free.” More

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      A Reimagined ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ for the Covid Era

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      Robert O’Hara directs a trimmed-down revival of Eugene O’Neill’s classic, with a colorblind cast and a weary eye on the pandemic and the opioid crisis.Of the time-honored classics of American theater, Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is one that usually takes its own concept of time seriously. A four-act work based on the playwright’s own dysfunctional parents, it follows the disintegration of the Tyrone family — by disease, ego, addiction and codependency — through the course of a claustrophobic August day at their seaside home in Connecticut. Widely considered O’Neill’s masterpiece, it typically runs just under four hours.The writer and director Robert O’Hara, a Tony nominee for his direction of “Slave Play,” is doing it in under two.Presented without an intermission by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” has reunited O’Hara with fellow “Slave Play” alums, the actor Ato Blankson-Wood and the designer Clint Ramos, for a shortened production that confronts the play’s themes head on and brings them into 2022.“There is so much velocity in the writing that it moves at a fast clip, and with so much richness,” O’Hara said after a rehearsal last week. “The family doesn’t get an intermission throughout this one long day, so it’s quite interesting to get to sit with them in real time.”The decision to trim the material happened early and organically, O’Hara explained. “Once you put the knife in, you’re just like, ‘Are we going to pretend that we’re not editing this?’” he quipped. It was then bolstered by his wariness of having people gather for too long, given the latest Covid-19 variant.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“For me, it feels like a Covid production of ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ built for right now,” he said. “We didn’t want to ask an audience to sit for four hours in a theater, just because that’s the way it’s usually done. If anyone’s coming in looking for that experience, they should know that it’s not this.”He began conceiving the production, now in previews and opening Jan. 25, before the pandemic. Initially he was hesitant to tackle the play because of the demands placed upon producing classics.“It’s difficult to get these big chestnuts if you’re going to do it Off Broadway,” he said, referring to the challenges of securing production rights. “You can ask, but someone’s usually holding them in order to bring them back in a big way.”O’Hara credits the actress Elizabeth Marvel, who portrays the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, as instrumental to getting the production off the ground.“We started just talking about this play, but then the world made its urgency all the greater,” Marvel said. “I’ve seen probably 11 or 12 productions in my lifetime, and it’s always the same: in the same drawing room with billowing curtains, and with period corsets.“But there’s absolutely no reason,” she continued, “it can’t be right here, right now. It very much speaks to this moment, when a lot of people are having to return home to their families, dealing with addiction and codependency during a crisis, while not being able to get out.”In addition to contemporary allusions to the opioid crisis, reflecting Mary’s own addiction, the production is set amid the coronavirus pandemic. The youngest Tyrone son, Edmund (Blankson-Wood), afflicted by what is traditionally hinted to be tuberculosis, now wears a face mask. Projections at the beginning of the play display C.D.C. announcements and news footage from the early days of the pandemic, including surreal revelations like the Bronx Zoo tiger testing positive for the virus.“We wanted projections to be a dreamlike window into Mary’s psychological space, especially when she succumbs to her addiction,” Ramos said on a video call. “The visual landscape, through Yee Eun Nam’s projections, gets very dreamy and dense to directly represent that.”Marvel, left, as the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, and Blankson-Wood as her sickly son Edmund.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMarvel’s husband, the actor Bill Camp, plays the family’s patriarch, James, and he was cast as the eldest son, Jamie, in a 1996 production at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. The edited script, he said, “became about distilling the story’s actions rather than experiencing the longness of the situation.”“The family’s desires and dysfunctions are streamlined in a way that is already in the writing; we just hit it really fast,” he added. “It’s in your face, just like everything that is happening is in our faces now, and we don’t have time to sit around and meander our way into those things; they’re immediate.”Jason Bowen rounds out the Tyrone clan as Jamie: a colorblind casting choice (Bowen and Blankson-Wood are Black, Camp and Marvel are white) that O’Hara said is intentional, though not one he wanted to factor into the DNA of the production.“I was never going to do this play with all white people; it wasn’t anything that I had to think about,” O’Hara said. “Elizabeth had mentioned Ato, being a fan of his, so we only held auditions for Jamie, and Jason killed it. There was no manufacturing of the cast’s racial dynamics for any reason other than wanting the best actors we could find.”Bowen notes that the heft of the story’s themes, as written, override any possible racial interpretation the cast could’ve envisioned.“It’s a play about a family as they navigate addiction, and that’s something that transcends any racial aspect that we could even attempt to investigate,” Bowen said. “The play’s not about that. Robert could’ve come in with some conceptual idea he wanted to introduce, but it’s still going to boil down to these relationships.”Blankson-Wood, who was performing a return engagement of his Tony-nominated role in “Slave Play” while rehearsals for “Long Day’s Journey” took place during the day, said that being able to act in a production that did not take his own race into account was “liberating.”“The fact that I do not have to carry how I, as a Black person, fit into this family is just pure acting to me, because it focuses only on the imaginative truth of the work,” he said. “From an outsider’s perspective, I get the impulse to want to understand the racial dynamic, but that’s something I’m excited for the audience to do; that’s their job.”O’Hara, who directed an audio production of another American classic, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” as part of Williamstown Theater Festival’s Audible season in 2020, will direct an audio presentation of the production once the Minetta Lane run closes Feb. 20. He said Audible’s expansive reach helped in securing the rights to the radically altered production, which might have been denied to a regional theater.“What’s amazing about this turn to streaming and digital is the democratization of theater, so more people will be able to access it,” Blankson-Wood said. “Though I do feel pretty strongly about sitting in a dark room with other human beings. But, with an audio production like this, when you take all the scenery and stuff away, and there’s only talking and listening, it deepens the work.” More

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      Singing Will Return to Tanglewood This Summer

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      The Boston Symphony Orchestra plans to go back to full-scale programming at its bucolic warm-weather home in the Berkshires.After three years, the “Ode to Joy” will be sung again at Tanglewood.In 2020 there was only silence at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s annual warm-weather retreat in the Berkshires. And last year, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and its grand choral finale — the traditional ending of the summer there — weren’t heard. During a shortened 2021 season, with limited crowds and distancing requirements, no vocal music was programmed, to reduce the risk of aerosol transmission of the coronavirus.But with a surge of virus cases, driven by the Omicron variant, seeming to ebb in Massachusetts, Tanglewood is set to return this summer — at full length and in full cry, the Boston Symphony announced on Thursday.So Beethoven’s Ninth will be there on the official closing night, Aug. 28. And the main season, which opens July 8, will also feature concert performances of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and George Benjamin’s “Lessons in Love and Violence,” in that 2018 opera’s American premiere. Among the singers appearing over the summer will be Susan Graham, Christine Goerke, Nicole Cabell, Julia Bullock, Ying Fang, Shenyang, Ryan McKinny, Will Liverman and Paul Appleby — along with the return of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.The Boston Symphony said it would announce health protocols closer to the start of the season, when the state of the pandemic will be clearer.Andris Nelsons, the orchestra’s music director, is scheduled for frequent presences on the podium. John Williams, who turns 90 this year and served as director of the Boston Pops, will be feted with a gala performance on Aug. 20. Garrick Ohlsson plays Brahms’s complete works for solo piano over four programs; Paul Lewis joins the orchestra for all five Beethoven piano concertos. There will be a host of free concerts featuring the young fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center.Familiar guests like Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma and Michael Tilson Thomas will be joined by debuting artists such as the conductors JoAnn Falletta, Cristian Macelaru and Earl Lee, the pianist Alexander Malofeev and the violist Antoine Tamestit. Classics by Rachmaninoff and Ravel will be served alongside new music from composers including Helen Grime, Fazil Say, Richard Danielpour, Jessie Montgomery, Julia Adolphe, Caroline Shaw and Elizabeth Ogonek.Beginning on June 17 with Ringo Starr and ending on Sept. 3 with Judy Collins, pop artists return for the first time since 2019 — also including the Tanglewood favorite James Taylor, Brandi Carlile and Earth, Wind & Fire.The absence of Tanglewood, a regional staple and huge moneymaker for the Boston Symphony, which has summered there since 1937, was keenly felt in 2020, even by an orchestra with secure finances and the largest endowment in its field.The thinned-out 2021 season drew a respectable attendance of 148,000, versus more than 340,000 in 2019. But it is hoped that the bucolic campus will be altogether more alive this year. Ozawa Hall will reopen, joining the main concert space, the Shed. So will the Linde Center, which was inaugurated in 2019 as a site for master classes, lectures, rehearsals and recitals — among them, this summer, the pianist Stephen Drury playing the mighty set of variations on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” by Frederic Rzewski, who died in June.Full programming information is available at bso.org/tanglewood. More

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      As Broadway Struggles, Governor Hochul Proposes Expanded Tax Credit

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      With Omicron complicating Broadway’s return, Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed more assistance for commercial theater, which her budget director called “critical for the economy.”As Broadway continues to reel from the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing to expand and extend a pandemic tax credit intended to help the commercial theater industry rebound.Ms. Hochul on Tuesday proposed budgeting $200 million for the New York City Musical and Theatrical Production Tax Credit, which provides up to $3 million per show to help defray production costs.“They were starting to recover before Omicron, and then, as you have all seen, a lot of these performance venues had to shut down again, and those venues are critical for the economy,” the state budget director, Robert Mujica, told reporters.The tax credit program, which began last year under Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was initially capped at $100 million. Early indications are that interest is high: Nearly three dozen productions have told the state they expect to apply, said Matthew Gorton, a spokesman for Empire State Development, the state’s economic development agency.The Hochul administration decided to seek to expand the tax credit program — and to extend the initial application deadline, from Dec. 31, 2022 to June 30, 2023 — as it became clear that Broadway’s recovery from its lengthy pandemic shutdown would be bumpier than expected.Shows began resuming performances last summer, and many were drawing good audiences — Ms. Hochul visited “Chicago” and “Six” in October, while Mr. Gorton saw “The Lehman Trilogy” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”But the industry is now struggling after a spike in coronavirus cases prompted multiple cancellations over the ordinarily lucrative holiday season, and then attendance plunged. Last week, 66 percent of Broadway seats were occupied, according to the Broadway League; that’s up from 62 percent the previous week, but down from 95 percent during the comparable week before the pandemic.“Clearly, we’re not out of the woods yet,” said Jeff Daniel, who is the chairman of the Broadway League’s Government Relations Committee, as well as co-chief executive of Broadway Across America, which presents touring shows in regional markets. Mr. Daniel, still recovering from his own recent bout of Covid, welcomed the governor’s proposal, and said the League would work to urge the Legislature to approve it.“Every show we can open drives jobs and economic impact,” said Mr. Daniel, who noted the close economic relationship between Broadway and other businesses, including hotels and restaurants. “If we can maximize Broadway, we maximize tourism.”Under the program, shows can receive tax credits to cover up to 25 percent of many production expenditures, including labor. As a condition of the credit, shows must have a state-approved diversity and arts job training program, and take steps to make their productions accessible to low-income New Yorkers. More

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      Now Is the Winter of Broadway’s Discontent

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      Curtains are rising again after the Omicron surge caused widespread cancellations, but attendance has fallen steeply. Nine shows are closing, at least temporarily.The reopening of Broadway last summer, following the longest shutdown in history, provided a jolt of energy to a city ready for a rebound: Bruce Springsteen and block parties, eager audiences and enthusiastic actors.But the Omicron variant that has barreled into the city, sending coronavirus case counts soaring, is now battering Broadway, leaving the industry facing an unexpected and enormous setback on its road back from the pandemic.In December, so many theater workers tested positive for the coronavirus that, on some nights, half of all shows were canceled — in a few troublesome instances after audiences were already in their seats.Now, producers have figured out how to keep shows running, thanks mainly to a small army of replacement workers filling in for infected colleagues. Heroic stories abound: When the two girls who alternate as the young lioness Nala in “The Lion King” were both out one night, a 10-year-old boy who usually plays the cub Simba went on in the role, saving the performance.Broadway shows have been using social media to remind potential ticket-buyers that performances are still happening. The revival of “Company” is among many using the hashtag #BroadwayIsOpen.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesBut there’s a new problem: Audiences are vanishing.During the week that ended Jan. 9, just 62 percent of seats were occupied. That’s the lowest attendance has been since a week in 2003 when musicians went on strike, and it’s a precipitous drop from the January before the pandemic, when 94 percent of seats were filled during the first week after the holidays.The casualty list is growing. Over the last month, nine shows have decided to close their doors, at least temporarily. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a huge hit before the pandemic, announced last week that it would close until June; on Sunday “Ain’t Too Proud,” a successful jukebox musical about the Temptations, closed for good.Box-office grosses are falling off a cliff. The all-important Christmas and New Year’s weeks, which producers count on each year to fatten their coffers in anticipation of the lean weeks that follow, generated just $40 million this season, down from $99 million before the pandemic. Requests for ticket refunds are now so high that on some days some shows have negative wraps, meaning they are giving back more money than they are taking in.“This is the worst I have ever experienced,” said Jack Viertel, a longtime executive at Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates five Broadway houses.Over the long run, industry leaders say, there is every reason to remain bullish about Broadway. Until the pandemic, the industry had been enjoying a sustained boom, fueled by a rebound in the popularity of musicals and by New York’s gargantuan growth as a tourist destination. And this downturn might not last long: There is some evidence that the Omicron surge may be peaking, at least in some parts of the country, including New York.The musical “Ain’t Too Proud,” about the Temptations, was a hit before the pandemic, but decided to close after coronavirus cases forced the show to cancel multiple performances over the holidays.  An Rong Xu for The New York TimesBut before it eases, the slump will cost investors tens of millions of dollars, and will push theater workers back into unemployment, as dwindling attendance forces productions without abundant reserves to close. And the distress is not just financial: Artists spend years developing shows before they get to Broadway, so a premature closing is a crushing blow.“It’s harrowing, and there will be a lot of damage done,” Mr. Viertel said. “Some shows will be put out of business permanently, and this will be career ending for some individuals.”Dominique Morisseau, the playwright who wrote the book for “Ain’t Too Proud,” and whose new play, “Skeleton Crew,” is now in previews following two virus-related delays, called this moment “extremely painful.” “My play is about plants shutting down during the auto industry collapse, and factory workers wondering every day, ‘Is it shutting down?’” she said. “Now that’s how we’re coming to work.”The Broadway League, which represents producers, has asked labor unions to consider pay cuts to help shows survive this rough patch. At one point, in a step previously reported by The Daily Beast, the League asked workers to accept half-pay when Covid-19 forced performance cancellations; there have also been discussions about offering lower pay for scaled-back performance calendars.“We’re doing everything we can to keep as many shows open as possible,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, citing safety protocols and marketing efforts as well as labor discussions.The talks stalled as unions sought more financial information.A revival of “The Music Man” canceled multiple performances just days after starting previews when both of its stars tested positive for the coronavirus, but it is now up and running again.An Rong Xu for The New York Times“It’s fair to say that all the unions recognize that shows remaining open is important — that represents jobs for actors and stage managers and everyone else who makes a living in the live theater,” said Kate Shindle, the president of Actors’ Equity. But Ms. Shindle noted that Broadway shows had received tens of millions of dollars in federal aid last year, and that the industry is no longer even disclosing weekly box-office grosses for individual shows, as it did before the pandemic. “Pretty universally, the unions’ response has been that if you want us to make financial concessions, we need financial transparency,” she said.Meanwhile, shows are collapsing. There are always closings in January, a soft time of year for Broadway, but this season a crush of announcements started in December, usually one of the most lucrative months. The musicals “Ain’t Too Proud,” “Diana,” “Flying Over Sunset,” “Jagged Little Pill” and “Waitress,” as well as the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” all decided to close earlier than planned after Omicron hit. And three other shows, including “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Girl From the North Country” as well as “Mockingbird,” said they would close for a few months and then attempt to reopen.“If it means that shows get to come back, hooray,” said Jenn Gambatese, the lead actress in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” “The alternative was, run another week and buh-bye.”More and more theaters are now dark. By next Sunday, there will be only 19 shows running in the 41 Broadway theaters. Cast and crew members from shuttered productions are trying to figure out whether they even worked enough weeks to qualify for unemployment; those who do will get less assistance than they did earlier in the pandemic, because the maximum weekly benefit in New York is now $504, down from $1,104 when the federal government was offering a supplement.This is a good time for bargain hunters: Discounts are available for many shows at the TKTS booth, and NYC & Company’s annual Broadway Week, which offers 2-for-1 tickets to most shows, has been extended to 27 days. An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThe surviving shows seem to have figured out how to avert the cancellations that bedeviled the industry last month.One reason: So many workers have already tested positive, and are now back at work (and, notably, no performers are known to have been hospitalized during this latest round). More important: Productions have trained and hired additional replacement workers, including for crew members.Playbills are regularly stuffed with cast-change inserts. One night, Keenan Scott II, the playwright of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” kept his show afloat by going on to replace an actor who tested positive. “Come From Away” saved a performance by deploying eight swings, including alumni and a touring performer who had never worked on Broadway. At “Wicked,” a longtime understudy who had left Broadway to become a software engineer in Chicago returned and performed as Elphaba.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

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      ‘Mockingbird,’ Once a Broadway Smash, to Pause Production Amid Omicron

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      “Girl From the North Country,” a musical using the songs of Bob Dylan, also closed, with hopes of reopening in the spring, as the surge in virus cases continues to upend the theater industry.The producers of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a hit play that had been packing in audiences before the pandemic, announced Wednesday that they would shut down the show until June, lay off the cast and crew, downsize the production and then reopen in a smaller theater.At the same time, “Girl From the North Country,” a heart-tugging musical that uses the songs of Bob Dylan to consider the Depression-era plight of a group of down-on-their-luck Midwesterners in the town where Dylan was born, said it would end its Broadway run on Jan. 23, and would try to reopen in another theater this spring.They became the seventh and eighth Broadway shows to announce temporary or permanent closing dates since early December, when the Omicron variant sent coronavirus cases soaring in New York. Their plans for short-term layoffs follow an example set by the musical “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which recently said it would close for nine weeks.The “Mockingbird” move is dramatic, especially for a show that had been playing to capacity crowds before the pandemic. The show had been contemplating for some time whether a move to a smaller theater could make it more sustainable for a long-term run, and the decision to do so now allows it to avoid a period when attendance on Broadway is soft, and expected to remain so, because of the Omicron surge.“Mockingbird” plans to end its current run on Sunday and resume performances June 1 in the theater where “Girl” has been playing. “Mockingbird,” one of the rare nonmusical productions to realistically anticipate a long stay on Broadway, has been playing since late 2018 at the Shubert Theater, which has 1,435 seats. It plans to move to the Belasco Theater, where “Girl” has been running, and which has about 1,000 seats.“Mockingbird,” of course, is adapted from the novel by Harper Lee, which is one of the most popular in American history — just last month, New York Times readers chose it as the best book of the last 125 years. The play, with a script by Aaron Sorkin, had been selling strongly and is set to expand; a North American tour and a London production are both scheduled to begin in March.“Mockingbird,” which has long since recouped its $7.5 million capitalization costs, originally had Scott Rudin as its lead producer, but he stepped back from active producing after accusations of bullying, and the production is now overseen on a day-to-day basis by Orin Wolf as executive producer and Barry Diller as the lead producer.The show originally starred Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch; he returned to lead the cast when the Broadway shutdown ended, and the character is now played by Greg Kinnear, who is expected to return when the show does.“Girl From the North Country” has had a tough run on Broadway: It opened on March 5, 2020, just a week before the coronavirus pandemic forced all theaters to close. And then it was deemed ineligible to compete for that season’s Tony Awards, because too few voters had managed to see it before the industry shut down (it is eligible to compete this season).Caitlin Houlahan, left, and Colton Ryan in 2020 in the musical “Girl From the North Country.” The show is closing, but hopes to reopen in the spring. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe musical, with a book by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson, resumed performances Oct. 13, 2021, but, with its dark tone and small scale, never really found its footing, despite strong prepandemic reviews in outlets including The New York Times, in which critic Ben Brantley called the show “profoundly beautiful.”The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4The Omicron surge. More

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      In London Theaters, the Show (Sometimes) Goes On

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      A surge in coronavirus infections toppled production after production, but two stage adaptations — of a movie and a blockbuster novel — recovered and endure.LONDON — The show goes on, or these days maybe not. The uptick of coronavirus infections in the last month has upended live performances as severely here as on Broadway. During the holiday season, productions toppled one after another, unable to continue because of outbreaks in their casts or crews. Barely had Rebecca Frecknall’s revelatory revival of “Cabaret,” starring Eddie Redmayne, opened to rave reviews before it lost a spate of performances, a scenario repeated on and off the West End.Shutdowns affected big productions like “Moulin Rouge!,” the epic Tony-winning musical whose much-delayed London opening is now scheduled for Jan. 20. But they also occurred at fringe theaters like the Bush, where a two-hander called “Fair Play” closed within days of its premiere. (The run has since resumed.) Elsewhere, the organizers of the VAULT festival decided “with broken hearts,” they said in a statement, to cancel what would have been the 10th anniversary edition of that important showcase for new work.The Royal Court and the National Theater, two prominent state-funded playhouses, shut their doors altogether during the lucrative holiday period, and, over in the commercial sphere, Andrew Lloyd Webber closed his new musical, “Cinderella,” until February. “I am absolutely devastated,” the composer wrote on Twitter on Dec. 21.So you can imagine my delight this week to find the Donmar Warehouse back in business after being caught up in the closures, presenting the stage premiere of “Force Majeure,” adapted from the 2014 movie. (The play is scheduled to run through Feb. 5.) The audience at the 251-seat theater had to show proof of vaccination or a negative antigen test before entry, and we remained masked throughout — something that, until recently, has been an all too rare sight here. (At “Cinderella” back in August, I clocked scarcely a single mask.)I’m not sure that the playwright Tim Price’s adaptation, alas, is worth all the protocol. Those who know the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Cannes Grand Jury prize-winner will recall its portrait of a marriage in free fall, which is sometimes bitterly funny but, more often than not, disturbing and even eerie. Set during five days in the French Alps, “Force Majeure” tells of a husband and wife and their two young children whose ski holiday doesn’t quite go as planned.Caught up in a controlled avalanche that appears to be out of control, Tomas abandons his family in the moment of crisis — or so claims his wife, Ebba, who is shaken by his behavior. Before long, Tomas’s ready smile turns to howls of grief and an awareness that their relationship has been altered for keeps.The theatrical version’s director, Michael Longhurst, has turned the Donmar stage into a miniature ski slope, and the backdrop of Jon Bausor’s clever design shows off the snow-capped mountains essential to the action. What transfers less well is the darkening, ambiguous tone of a film that, in Price’s stage iteration, seems both more literal and more vulgar: Much is made of one character’s priapic tendencies. The couple’s stage children are sullen brats who would have been better off left at home, and the film’s extraordinary ending aboard a wayward bus has been discarded in favor of silly shenanigans in an overcrowded elevator.As the hapless couple, Rory Kinnear and Lyndsey Marshal, both fine actors, slalom their way between affection and recrimination in what plays for the most part as a routine domestic comedy. Tomas’s breakdown — harrowing to watch onscreen — elicited laughs from some spectators the other night.Hiran Abeysekera, left, as Pi and Tom Larkin as Tiger Head in “Life of Pi,” directed by Max Webster, at Wyndham’s Theater.Johan PerssonThe stagecraft is more of an occasion at another play whose performances were interrupted late last year: “Life of Pi,” at Wyndham’s Theater, improbably brings to theatrical life the 2001 novel by Yann Martel that inspired the acclaimed 2012 film for which the director Ang Lee won an Oscar.In that version, 3-D plunges the moviegoer directly into the turbulent waters of a tale told largely at sea, as the teenage Pi, a zookeeper’s son, finds himself cast adrift on a lifeboat with only animals for company — chief among them a Bengal tiger known as Richard Parker. Not to be outdone, the play brings together veterans from the world of video and puppetry who work alongside the director Max Webster and the designer Tim Hatley in conjuring an array of beasts before a rapt audience. The cast list includes six puppeteers for the tiger alone, overseen by the puppetry and movement director Finn Caldwell, who also designed the puppets with Nick Barnes.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4The latest Covid data in the U.S. More

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      Coachella Lineup: Kanye West, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles

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      The California festival and Bonnaroo, in Tennessee, both announced lineups this week as the live-music industry looks ahead after two years of events scuttled by the pandemic.Billie Eilish, Harry Styles and Kanye West will headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April, as the music industry takes hopeful steps toward the return of festivals and touring in 2022.Coachella, set for its usual two-weekend format, April 15-17 and April 22-24, at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif., will be returning after two years mothballed by the pandemic. On Wednesday, after weeks of speculation and leaks in the music press, the festival announced its complete 2022 lineup, which will also feature performances by Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Baby, Doja Cat, Phoebe Bridgers, the reunited electronic dance group Swedish House Mafia and dozens of others. (West is billed on the official festival poster as simply Ye.)The event is expected to run at its full capacity of up to 125,000 concertgoers a day.Coachella has long been the country’s most influential festival, hosting viral moments like Tupac Shakur’s hologram in 2012 and Beyoncé’s 2018 tribute to the marching bands of historically Black colleges and universities.It has usually been the first big festival to announce its lineup each year, ushering in the touring season. But this week Coachella was scooped by the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn., which on Tuesday said that it would return in June with Tool, J. Cole, Stevie Nicks, the Chicks, Machine Gun Kelly, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and others.Coachella was one of entertainment’s first major casualties of the coronavirus. Its 2020 edition — which was to have featured Rage Against the Machine, Travis Scott and Frank Ocean — was shut down by health officials on March 10 of that year, two days before Broadway and the concert business at large went dark.Goldenvoice, the promoter that puts on Coachella in partnership with the corporate concert giant AEG Presents, had hoped to bring the festival back that fall, then in spring 2021. But each time the pandemic forced the plans to be kicked further down the road. Bonnaroo, which is presented by Live Nation, AEG’s corporate rival, had scheduled a full-scale return last September, but it was canceled after heavy rains flooded the festival grounds.About half of the ticket holders to Coachella’s 2020 edition requested refunds, Paul Tollett, one of the festival’s founders, said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in August. Tickets cost $449 and up, not counting fees.Despite a slew of recent cancellations related to the coronavirus, like Dead & Company’s Playing in the Sand festival in Cancún, Mexico, the music world is viewing Coachella with hope as a bellwether for the full-throttle return of the multibillion-dollar touring industry. Major tours by Dua Lipa, the Weeknd, Elton John, Bon Jovi and Justin Bieber are expected this year.As recently as last summer, Goldenvoice had hoped to bring back most of the headliners planned for 2020. But while Rage Against the Machine has an extensive tour planned this year — with five dates booked at Madison Square Garden in August — it is not playing Coachella. Ocean will return to Coachella in 2023.And since the disaster at Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston in November that left 10 people dead, the rapper has largely withdrawn from public appearances, canceling his performance as a headliner at the Day N Vegas festival, which is also presented by Goldenvoice. More