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      A Pandemic, Then a Hurricane, Brings New Orleans Musicians ‘to Their Knees’

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      When Hurricane Ida swept through New Orleans late last month, it took a piece of history with it. The Karnofsky Tailor Shop and Residence, a decrepit red brick building that had served as a kind of second home for Louis Armstrong during his boyhood in the early 1900s, was reduced to rubble.At the Little Gem Saloon next door, where some of the first jazz gigs were played, a three-story-tall mural paying homage to the pioneering cornetist Buddy Bolden was also ruined.Most of the city’s active music venues fared far better, suffering minor roof and water damage. But the storm was only the latest in a series of blows to the people and places that make up the jazz scene, in a city that stakes its identity on live music.“We’ve been without work for over 18 months now,” Big Sam Williams, a trombonist and bandleader, said in a phone interview from his home in the Gentilly neighborhood. “It’s a struggle and we’re just barely making it.”Doug Trager, who manages the Maple Leaf Bar in the Carrollton neighborhood, said that after 446 days of shutdown because of Covid-19, “we were just getting going” again before Ida hit. Now that the storm has created another setback, he said, “we’ll just try to keep waiting it out.”The Little Gem Saloon days after the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesLittle Gem Saloon and the Karnofsky Shop sit on the same block.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesIt has now been a year and a half since the pandemic first prompted a citywide moratorium on indoor performances. On Aug. 16, the city imposed a mandate requiring all patrons at bars and clubs to be vaccinated or recently tested for Covid-19, seeming to open the door to a new phase of reopening.But as the Delta variant surged, the city’s two major jazz festivals, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and French Quarter Fest, both already pushed back from their usual springtime schedule, were called off. That meant that, for the second year in a row, musicians would have to do without the most active period of their work year, when hordes of tourists arrive for the festivals and spillover gigs at clubs often provide enough work for area performers to pay the rent for months.A week and a half after the storm, many in the city’s live-music business say they will not be resting easy, even after things come back online.In interviews, local advocates said that zoning laws had long made small venue operators’ lives difficult, and that neighborhood clubs have run into needless red tape during the pandemic as the city has sometimes enforced strict permitting regulations around outdoor entertainment.“They’re counting on the continued presence of the culture bearers and the musicians, and they’re mistaken this time,” said Ashlye Keaton, a co-founder of the Ella Project, which provides legal assistance to and agitates on behalf of New Orleans artists. “The storm, coupled with Covid, has brought musicians to their knees.”While some venues have survived since March 2020 with substantial help from federal grants, including the $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, other small and vulnerable clubs, particularly those nestled in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, often lacked the capacity or the wherewithal to apply. Many have held on largely thanks to fund-raisers and whatever performances they can safely pull off without raising the hackles of regulators and neighbors.In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city will continue to enforce permitting for outdoor live entertainment events on a temporary basis, pointing out that the mayor had lifted its usual cap on those permits during the pandemic.“The Department of Safety & Permits fully supports and is actively working with partners in the City Council to enact legislation which balances the desire for outdoor entertainment, supports local artists and venues as well as preserves the quality of life for the neighbors and residents of each community,” the statement says.Preservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesTipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, will require some repairs to its roof.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMany of the city’s active venues were spared serious damage in the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesPreservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida, and is slated to reopen once power is restored. Tipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, located closer to the water, will require some repairs to its roof.The New Orleans Jazz Market, a stately performance center in Central City, appears to have held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming nonetheless — just days after what was supposed to have been a triumphant reopening for its fall 2021 season.“This is very reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, and what we went through during that time, and I know a lot of New Orleans musicians are displaced,” said the drummer Adonis Rose, the artistic director of the Jazz Market and leader of its resident big band, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. He called the storm a “tragedy, when we were just starting to see some glimmer of hope.”The New Orleans Jazz Market held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming after the hurricane.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, turned his club into a community gathering space during the pandemic.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a renowned trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, said in an interview on Monday that the electricity had just come back on at the popular neighborhood club, and he planned to get the place ready to rock.During the pandemic, Ruffins’s club served as a gathering spot and a kind of improvised community cafeteria. He moved concerts outside to the club’s patio, and cooked free meals of red beans and rice for residents of the surrounding Tremé neighborhood, and for musicians who were out of work.“I figured if I cooked for myself, I’d cook for the neighborhood,” Ruffins said.Howie Kaplan, the proprietor of the Howlin’ Wolf, a venue in downtown New Orleans, also began providing meals and other services to musicians in the early days of the pandemic. The program was subsumed into the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic earlier this year; he restarted it at the Howlin’ Wolf last month, in response to Hurricane Ida.“We’ve got a James Beard Award-winning chef on the grill right now, making these fantastic steaks that came from who knows where,” Kaplan said in a phone interview, adding that restaurants had come to donate food that they wouldn’t be able to prepare because of the power outage.Shortly after Hurricane Ida passed over the city, Jordan Hirsch — the editor of the online resource A Closer Walk, which provides detailed information on New Orleans’s heritage sites — set out to determine how the city’s most vulnerable music landmarks had held up.The program providing meals returned to the Howlin’ Wolf after Hurricane Ida.Jillian Marie PhotographyWhen he got to the Karnofsky shop, on South Rampart Street downtown, he saw that the building had become wreckage and the Bolden mural nearby had crumbled. But other equally old jazz landmarks along the block, the former Eagle Saloon and the Iroquois Theater, had miraculously pulled through. All four structures are on the national historic register; it’s safe to say that no single block in the United States today houses more early jazz history.A Cleveland-based developer, GBX Group, recently bought out most of the addresses on the street, and plans to rebuild it into a center of commerce that will also trumpet its role in jazz history. After the storm, GBX hired workers to collect the Karnofsky shop’s bricks, said its C.E.O., Drew Sparacia, hoping to at least partially rebuild the structure using the original materials.But Hirsch asked why the city had not done more to demand that the owners of these historic places, which to the outside observer appear to be mostly abandoned, keep them protected from the elements.“Tropical storms and hurricanes were sort of a constant threat for those buildings,” Hirsch said. “People have been sounding that alarm for 30 years.”Some other sites that made it through Hurricane Ida remain deeply endangered, according to preservationists. John McCusker, a jazz historian and photojournalist who has worked to preserve historic buildings in the city, said that Bolden’s former home in Central City and the old Dew Drop Inn — a midcentury music venue, hotel and community hub — were both in states of relative disrepair.McCusker lamented that the sites’ landlords hadn’t been compelled to restore and preserve the buildings.“We have this wealth of these buildings connected to the birth of this music, and the mechanisms of government have just proven maladroit at protecting them with the same vigor that they would enforce an inappropriate shutter in the French Quarter,” he said. More

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      Kenny Malone, Premier Drummer for Top Nashville Names, Dies at 83

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      He propelled hits by stars in country, folk and pop, including Dolly Parton, Crystal Gayle, Ray Charles, Waylon Jennings, Kenny Rogers and Bela Fleck.NASHVILLE — Kenny Malone, a prolific Nashville session drummer whose skittering snare rhythms haunted Dolly Parton’s No. 1 country hit “Jolene” in 1973 and whose cocktail-jazz groove anchored Crystal Gayle’s crossover smash “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” in 1977, died at a hospital here on Thursday. He was 83.A friend and collaborator, Dave Pomeroy, said the cause was Covid-19.A versatile and imaginative percussionist, Mr. Malone played on recordings by scores of country, folk, pop and rock artists, including John Prine and Charley Pride (both of whom also died of complications of Covid-19 during the pandemic) as well as Alison Krauss, Guy Clark, Kenny Rogers, Ray Charles, Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings and Bela Fleck, among many others.His impeccably timed cymbal work and rimshots particularly propelled Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” a Top 10 pop hit in 1973. And the stylistic reach he commanded was impressive, from the down-home atmospherics of Ms. Parton’s “Jolene” to the countrypolitan sophistication of Ms. Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”“I need versatility and the opportunity to play many different styles,” Mr. Malone said in a 1985 interview with Modern Drummer magazine. “In recording, if I’m not careful, I start to feel stale, or I feel that there isn’t much room for expansion and growth.”On two occasions, he said, he briefly stopped doing session work and played only live with a jazz quartet. (With Mr. Pomeroy, a bassist, he later established the quintet Tone Patrol, a respected Nashville ensemble that mixed jazz and world music.)To keep his approach fresh when he returned to the studio for good, Mr. Malone immersed himself in painting and began working no more than two recording sessions a day, as opposed to the usual three or four.He also devised a Conga-derived hand-drumming technique and invented a clay drum called an “og” and a hand-held shaker consisting of metal and wood.Something of a mystic, Mr. Malone heard music everywhere, and exulted in it. “Music is in everything, not just the instruments we play,” he told Modern Drummer. “The way that chords, melody and rhythm work together mirrors our emotions. Everything we hear forms a visual image or an attitude of a place, a time or an environment.”In a biography of Mr. Malone for allmusic.com, the musician Eugene Chadbourne elaborated on this philosophy, writing, “He is the drummer who, upon hearing that a song’s lyrics described a woman slitting a man’s throat, told the producer to hang tough a moment while he fetched a different cymbal from his van, one that had just the right ‘scream’ for the job.”Kenneth Morton Malone was born on Aug. 4, 1938, in Denver. His parents, Harry and Minnie (Springstun) Malone, owned a flower shop.Mr. Malone started playing the drums at age 5. “The day I decided I wanted to be a drummer was the day I heard Dixieland music,” he said in “Rhythm Makers: The Drumming Legends of Nashville in Their Own Words” (2005), by Tony Artimisi. “I think it was the Firehouse Five back in, like, 1943. My mom and dad got me a drum for Christmas. That started everything.”Four years later he was playing with a marching band sponsored by the police department and becoming conversant in jazz and classical music.“My first idol was Gene Krupa,” he said in “Rhythm Makers.” “I saw Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich do a drum battle in Denver with Jazz at the Philharmonic with Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz and all these wonderful players. I was just hooked forever.”Mr. Malone enlisted in the Navy at 17 and toured with bands there, eventually becoming director of the percussion department of the Naval School of Music in Virginia Beach, Va.He spent 14 years in the Navy before deciding to move to Nashville with his family in 1970 to make a go of it as a studio musician. His first recording session was with the rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins.Mr. Malone married Corena Quillen, who is known as Janie, in 1958. In addition to her, he is survived by two daughters, Teresa Rich and Karen Powers; a sister, Jeanette Scarpello; five grandsons; four granddaughters; and many great-grandchildren. (Another daughter, Laura Pugh, died in 2009, and a son, Kenneth Jr., died in 2018.)His musical gifts notwithstanding, Mr. Malone at first had to adjust to Nashville’s recording methods.“I was back there playing away, and the producer said, ‘What in the hell are you doing?’” he told Modern Drummer. “I didn’t know you could overdub, so I was playing all of it at once — tambourines, you name it. I literally had to come down to one hand and one foot. I had to unlearn everything as far as technical stuff. There was a whole different feel in recording.” More

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      in Theater

      Virus Fears Prompt a Major New York Theater to Postpone Its Return

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      As the Delta variant spreads, Signature Theater delayed its planned October opening of “Infinite Life,” a new play by Annie Baker.Signature Theater, a prominent Off Broadway nonprofit, has postponed its return to the stage over concerns about the persistent coronavirus pandemic, becoming the first major New York theater to take such a step.The theater’s leadership announced the postponement Friday afternoon, just days before rehearsals were to begin for “Infinite Life,” a new play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, who was also planning to direct the work. The production was supposed to run from Oct. 5 to Nov. 7.“Due to ongoing health and safety concerns, Signature Theater and Annie Baker have decided to postpone the upcoming production of ‘Infinite Life,’” the theater said in a statement. “Signature will continue, in discussion with artists, to evaluate on a case-by-case basis how to proceed with other programming planned for this season. The company and artist agree that this is the best choice for this show at this time.”Around the country, there have been a number of cancellations and postponements of pop music tour dates and festivals because of the rise in coronavirus cases caused by the spread of the Delta variant. There have been several theater postponements in California, including at Berkeley Repertory Theater, which recently cited the Delta variant in delaying until next year a Christina Anderson play that had been scheduled to begin in October.It is unclear whether the postponement of “Infinite Life” is an outlier or a first indication that the theater industry is getting cold feet about the many reopenings planned in New York this fall, on Broadway and off. Two Broadway shows, “Springsteen on Broadway” and “Pass Over,” are already running, and 15 more plan to start next month; there are also some plays already running in commercial and nonprofit venues around the city, and many of the city’s larger nonprofits plan to resume presenting shows during the fall.Broadway theaters are requiring audience members to show proof of vaccination and wear masks. And Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared that all performing arts theaters must require proof of vaccination as part of a mandate that applies to indoor dining, entertainment, and fitness.Signature said it was still hoping to stage a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” in October. Although “Infinite Life” would have been its first stage production since the start of the pandemic, it would not have been the first use of its building: This summer, the nonprofit featured an installation called “The Watering Hole,” conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon, in its Frank Gehry-designed home, the Pershing Square Signature Center, a few blocks west of Times Square.Baker, who won a Pulitzer in 2014 for “The Flick,” writes plays that are sometimes hard to describe, and very little has been released about this one, but a spokesman said there was a six-person cast. In news releases, the theater has described “Infinite Life” as “a play about no end in sight” and “a new play that tackles persistent pain and desire.” More

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      A Starry Central Park Comeback Concert Is Silenced by Lightning

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      An all-star show to celebrate the city’s emergence after the hardships of the pandemic, even as the spread of the Delta variant has driven up cases again, was stopped halfway through.It was supposed to be a glorious celebration of the re-emergence of New York City after more than a year of pandemic hardship — a concert bringing thousands of vaccinated fans on Saturday evening to the Great Lawn of Central Park to hear an all-star lineup.And for the first couple of hours it was, with messages of New York’s resilience sandwiched between performances by the New York Philharmonic, Jennifer Hudson, Carlos Santana, LL Cool J, and Earth, Wind and Fire, among others.But shortly after 7:30 p.m., as Barry Manilow was performing “Can’t Smile Without You,” lightning brought the concert to a halt. “Please seek shelter for your safety,” an announcer intoned, stopping the music, as people began filing out of the park.The concert had begun with a ray of sunshine, breaking through the clouds just before it got underway at 5 p.m. Gayle King, a co-host of “CBS This Morning,” began the evening by thanking the essential workers who had pulled the city through the darkest days of the pandemic.“We were once the epicenter of this virus, and now we’ve moved to being the epicenter of the recovery,” she said. “We gather for a common purpose: to say, ‘Welcome back, New York City!’”She then introduced the New York Philharmonic, which kicked off the concert with the overture to Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide,” conducted by Marin Alsop, a Bernstein protégée. The orchestra then played a medley of New York-themed music, including bits of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” and “Theme from ‘New York, New York,’” the anthem made famous by Frank Sinatra, among others.The concert, “We Love NYC: The Homecoming Concert,” which was broadcast live on CNN, was part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to celebrate the city’s comeback after the pain and suffering of the pandemic.When the concert was announced by Mr. de Blasio in June, plunging coronavirus case numbers and rising vaccination figures had filled the city with hope.But circumstances have shifted considerably over the past two months. The spread of the highly contagious Delta variant has led some city businesses to postpone the return to their offices, prompted the city to institute vaccine mandates for indoor dining and entertainment and threatened to destabilize the wider concert business.On June 7, the day the concert was announced, the city was averaging 242 cases a day; the daily average is now more than 2,000 cases a day.With the Philharmonic still onstage, the concert continued with Andrea Bocelli, the star Italian tenor, singing “O Sole Mio,” and Jennifer Hudson, the star of the new Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect,” singing Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” — a beloved aria that became associated with Franklin after she sang it at the Grammy Awards in 1998.As the crowd streamed in, the idea of New York’s return — whether a two-fisted vanquishing of a viral enemy or a premature declaration of victory — was on seemingly everyone’s mind.“This is our reopening — this is our invitation to get back to real life,” said Dean Dunagan, 52, of the Lower East Side, who had come to see Mr. Springsteen and had been waiting outside the park for four and a half hours before the gates were opened.“New York has been punched in the face every other decade, or whatever,” Mr. Dunagan said, “and we get right back up.”Just a few feet from him was Alexandra Gudaitis, a 24-year-old Paul Simon fan from the Upper West Side. “I’m scared this is going to be a mass spreader event, with the Delta,” she said.Still, she was one of the first fans through the door and rushed to the very front of the general-admission section with a few friends. They wore masks, and Ms. Gudaitis said they had chosen their spot because it seemed to have better access to fresh air.Some of the acts had only tenuous connections to New York. But the rap pioneer LL Cool J led a New York-centric ode to old-school hip-hop with Busta Rhymes, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, French Montana, Melle Mel and Rev. Run of Run-DMC.Amid concerns about the spread of the Delta variant, the show required everyone 12 years old and older to show proof that they had had at least one dose of a vaccine. Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThe homecoming show required everyone 12 years old and up to show proof that they had had at least one dose of a vaccine; children younger than that, who are still ineligible for the vaccines, were required to wear masks.“When it comes to the concerts, they are outdoors — they are for vaccinated folks only,” the mayor had said on Wednesday. “We are definitely encouraging mask use. But I really want to emphasize the whole key here is vaccination.”The Central Park show came after the city had hosted a week of free hip-hop shows, with local heroes including Raekwon and Ghostface Killah in Staten Island, and KRS-One, Kool Moe Dee and Slick Rick in the Bronx. Tickets were required to attend the concert on the Great Lawn — most were free, but V.I.P. packages cost up to $5,000 — and the show was broadcast on television by CNN and on satellite radio by SiriusXM.The concert was programmed by Clive Davis, the 89-year-old music eminence, who, in an interview this week, stressed the role that music could play in shaping society.“It’s vital and important that New York be back,” he said.From the stage on Saturday night, Mr. Davis, a Brooklyn native, made a plea to the audience: “Tonight, I only ask one thing: When you’re having a great time, cheer loud — loud enough so they can hear you all the way in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights.”The concert ended before many of the headliners, including Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon, got to perform. Mr. Davis said in the interview that after Mr. de Blasio asked him in May to put together the show, his first call had been to Mr. Springsteen.“I picked up the phone and told him we were going to celebrate New York City,” Mr. Davis recalled. “He said he would show up and wanted to do a duet.” That duet was to have been with Patti Smith, on “Because the Night,” a 1978 song they wrote together.The abbreviated concert came at an uncertain moment for the music industry. While some high-profile artists, including Garth Brooks, BTS and Nine Inch Nails, have canceled tour dates recently, the show is largely going on in the live-music business — but it hasn’t been easy. Concert protocols, in New York and elsewhere, have been in flux for months, as the federal authorities, local governments and businesses have adjusted to the changing realities of the virus.Broadway is requiring masks and proof of vaccinations as its theaters reopen, and Los Angeles County recently announced that it would require masks at large outdoor events such as baseball games at Dodger Stadium and concerts at the Hollywood Bowl.Mr. de Blasio has defended going ahead with the concert, noting that it was being held outdoors and for vaccinated people, even as some other events have been canceled. This year’s West Indian American Day parade in Brooklyn, for example, planned for Labor Day Weekend, has been canceled.The eyes of the concert industry have been on Chicago, where the Lollapalooza festival drew 400,000 over four days in late July and early August, amid concerns that it could turn into a “superspreader” event. The festival, which was held outdoors, required that attendees show proof of vaccination or a negative test. Last week, the city said that 203 people attending the show had tested positive afterward and that no hospitalizations or deaths had been reported. More

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      Nicole Kidman Skipped Quarantine in Hong Kong. Residents Were Angry.

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      The actress, in Hong Kong to film a series about wealthy expatriates, was allowed to skip a coronavirus quarantine. Residents saw the exemption as deeply unfair, and it became a point of debate among lawmakers.When Nicole Kidman flew into Hong Kong to film a television series about wealthy expatriates, residents could not help noticing some of the perks at hand: a private jet, a personal driver and, most important, a pass out of mandatory quarantine.Some of them saw a case of life imitating art, or the power of celebrity, or at least a public relations misstep amid a pandemic.But either way, many people in the Chinese territory regarded the Australian actress’s end-run around coronavirus rules — some of the strictest in the world — as a symbol of the unfairness that pervades a city known for its soaring inequalities. On Friday, the rare exemption was a point of debate on the floor of the city’s legislature.“Now that you have created a precedent, does that mean that all foreign movie stars will be exempted when they fly to Hong Kong to film movies?” Michael Tien, a pro-establishment lawmaker, asked Sophia Chan, the health secretary. “If not, can you explain why Nicole was superior to everyone else? Even though I like her a lot.”Ms. Kidman went shopping in central Hong Kong two days after she flew in from Sydney, Australia, on a private jet, The South China Morning Post reported. The government later confirmed that she and four crew members had been allowed to bypass a rule that required vaccinated travelers from Australia to quarantine in a hotel for a week. (The time was increased to two weeks on Friday.)A Hong Kong regulation allows a top city official to grant quarantine exemptions to people whose work is deemed “in the interest” of the city’s economic development. The Commerce and Economic Development Bureau said on Thursday that Ms. Kidman’s exemption allows her to carry out “designated professional work” that is seen as necessary to the local economy.But in a city where the borders have been closed to nonresidents for much of the pandemic — and where some inbound travelers are still required to quarantine in hotels for three weeks — Ms. Kidman’s exemption has not gone over well.A view of Hong Kong skyline from Tsim Sha Tsui. Severe inequality in the financial hub has long been a complaint for many residents.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesSeveral critics have noted that Ms. Kidman is in Hong Kong to film “Expats,” an Amazon Prime Video series based on “The Expatriates,” a 2016 novel by Janice Y.K. Lee that satirizes affluent Westerners in the financial hub. Others contrasted her freedom to travel with conditions in Australia, observing that she visited an upscale Hong Kong clothing boutique just as Sydney went back into lockdown. (One Hong Kong journalist reported that Ms. Kidman’s driver had parked a Range Rover illegally in a crosswalk while waiting for her to shop.)Spokespeople for Ms. Kidman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. Some of the photos of her Hong Kong trip show her wearing a mask in public, as most people there have been doing since Covid-19 first emerged in the neighboring Chinese mainland.Some Hong Kongers see the Amazon show as being produced at an unfortunate time, with some residents fleeing a crackdown on dissent that has ensnared opposition politicians, university students and others who supported the city’s widespread antigovernment protests of 2019.Many residents have long complained about Hong Kong’s inequalities, and territory leaders have faced other public backlashes for setting different Covid rules for the rich and the poor.In May, the government quietly announced a plan to exempt corporate executives from quarantine, but it later put the plan on pause.About the same time, officials backtracked on a contentious order that would have required migrant domestic workers to be vaccinated. But the government went ahead with a plan to subject those workers to a second round of compulsory coronavirus testing, even though the first round had turned up only three cases among 340,000 people. More

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      ‘The Opposite of Airlines’: When Larger Audiences Require Fewer Seats

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      Yes, the comfy chair. The War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco put in roomier seats just in time to try to lure audiences back from the couches they got used to during the shutdown.SAN FRANCISCO — Wagner was the worst. Five hours — sometimes more — of squirming in 1932-era seats at the War Memorial Opera House here, sinking into lumpy, dusty cushions, suffering the bulge of the springs and the pinch of the wide armrests, craning for a glimpse of the stage around the head of the tall person one row ahead.“Particularly on a long opera — oh my God,” said Tapan Bhat, a tech executive and a season-ticket holder at the San Francisco Opera since 1996.When the San Francisco Opera opens Saturday, starting its scaled-back 99th season with Puccini’s “Tosca” after a shutdown of more than a year, those punishing seats will be gone. The opera has used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace all 3,128 seats with more comfortable, roomier ones. The opera used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace its 3,128 seats. Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesAnd San Francisco is not alone. Theaters, concert halls and sports arenas around the country have been increasingly investing in comfort in recent years — with wider and plusher seats — to try to accommodate audiences that have grown in breadth, if not in numbers. In the early 1960s, when the War Memorial Opera House was only a few decades old, the average weight of adult men in the United States was 168 pounds, according to federal data; it is now 199.8 pounds.Since the pandemic struck, the owners of theaters and live venues have come to see such investments as more urgent than ever. As coronavirus restrictions are dropped, presenters face the challenge of luring back patrons who, during more than a year without theaters, have grown accustomed to consuming home entertainment from the sprawling comfort of their own couches and recliners.“The entire patron experience has really been under a lot of scrutiny,” said Gary F. Martinez, a partner with OTJ Architects, a Washington-based firm. “Venues are working diligently to improve that experience. We’ve never spent so much time on seats.”The Lyric Opera of Chicago put in wider seats in the summer of 2020, following the example of the Music Hall in Cincinnati and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. On Broadway, where older theaters have been notorious for cramped quarters, the Hudson Theater added wider seats during a recent renovation. The seats in the new Yankee Stadium are wider than those in the old one, and venues including the Daytona Speedway and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore added wider seats during recent renovations.The old seats were thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, and had wide armrests that made them feel narrower.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesEven before the shutdown, audience members of all sizes were growing accustomed to ever-larger, ever-sharper television screens with an ever-broader array of streaming options. And when people did go out, many had seen the what-could-be potential in movie theaters that had installed wide, comfortable stadium-style seats, which recline and have slots for drinks and, sometimes, trays for snacks. Why pay as much as 20 times the cost of a movie — tickets at the San Francisco Opera go for up to $398 a seat — to be scrunched up in a cramped holdover from the last century?“I think anything we can do to break down barriers and improve the experience we should be doing,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “If someone is having an uncomfortable evening at the opera that is an experience they should not be having.”“The seats have historically been patrons’ No. 1 concern for the building,” he said. “Letters to me. Letters to the box office. Letters to the city. And with some justification. We had springs coming through some of the seats.”San Francisco put in its new seats just in time for the reopening of the opera and the San Francisco Ballet, which share the stage of the War Memorial. The new seats have wooden backs, which could improve the acoustics, and cup holders. (No clinky ice cubes will be allowed, though.)Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesThe new, ergonomically tuned chairs are slightly higher, roomier and firmer than the old ones. There is 2.5 inches more leg room, and the chairs have been staggered to improve sightlines, giving even the shortest operagoers and balletomanes a better shot at seeing what is taking place onstage. The seat widths are about the same as before, ranging from 19 inches to 23 inches, but the new armrests are narrower, making seats feel roomier. And there are cup holders for those who want to bring a drink to their seat. (Ice, though, with all its clinking distractions, is not permitted).Comfort comes at a cost: This will mean a loss of 114 seats, and the revenue they bring.The situation in Chicago was not quite as dire as in San Francisco — its seats were at least renovated in 1993 — but they were decidedly in need of replacement. The widths of Lyric seats ranged from 18 to 22 inches before the renovation; now they range from 19 to 23 inches. The number of seats there was reduced from 2,564 to 2,274.“We are doing the opposite of airlines,” said Michael Smallwood, the technical director at the Lyric Opera, referring to the practice of cramming more narrow seats onto planes. “Now you can sit at home and watch Netflix. People want to be comfortable. Operas want to be long. People expect different things.”“To put it bluntly, it takes a lot more effort to sell a ticket these days,” Smallwood said. “You want it to be comfortable so they’ll be here again.”Many of the seats in the New York Philharmonic’s Lincoln Center home, David Geffen Hall, will be a bit wider as well when its current renovation is complete. While most of the seats in its old hall were 20 inches wide or less, more than three-quarters of the new seats will be 21 inches wide or wider.The San Francisco Opera will return to the opera house on Saturday with “Tosca.” Alfred Walker, left, and Michael Fabiano sang at a recent rehearsal.Cory WeaverThe seat backs in San Francisco were once covered with cushioning. The back of each seat is now wood; doing away with that cushioning means more leg room for those sitting behind. “I am 6-foot-1 without shoes,” said Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the interim executive director of the San Francisco Ballet. “And I have very long legs. They were the type of seats that when I sat in them, my knees came up to my belly button.”The old seats at the War Memorial had become vintage relics, thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, a particular concern to the opera crowd, which tends to skew older.“Like those seats you saw when you went to your grandma’s,” said Jennifer E. Norris, the assistant managing director of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, who oversaw the project. “You know, when your grandma had her favorite chair and it sits a little too low, and was a little too worn.”With uncushioned seat backs, the sound in the hall should be crisper. “Applause won’t die in the room, so you’ll have a great sense of enthusiasm around you,” Norris said. “It’s also possible the lady with the candy wrapper will annoy us more. I am hoping that peer pressure will remind her to unwrap her candy before the performance begins.”The renovation began in 2013 with replacement of seats on the box level, and it includes 12 bariatric seats, designed to hold weights of up to 300 pounds, that will be 28 inches wide, as well as 38 spaces for wheelchairs, an increase of six from before the renovation. The project was funded by a ticket fee ranging from $1 to $3.The new seats were designed by Ducharme Seating of Montreal, which also installed seats at the renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, as well as halls in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Toronto. The historical nature of the Beaux-Arts building near San Francisco City Hall — it opened in 1932 — and the exacting demands of its high-end opera house and ballet made this project particularly complicated.“This is the most extensive design we have ever done on a seat,” said Eric Rocheleau, the president of Ducharme Seating. “The opera houses are always the most stringent customers.”Germain-Gordon said that theaters probably have little choice but to invest this kind of money as the world slowly returns to normal after the pandemic. “People can have in their home a beautiful media room,” she said. “Back in the olden days, if you wanted to see something you had to go see it. Nobody had TVs the size of movie screens, or La-Z-Boys. But people are investing in their comfort and they want to see it when they go out.”Bhat, the tech executive, said anything would be better than the seats he had suffered over 25 years of long nights at the opera.“They were creaky,” he said. “The upholstery would be fraying. So if you’re sitting in an opera in less than comfortable seats, something that’s going on for four and a half hours, or the first act of ‘Götterdämmerung,’ which is like 90 minutes long — it’s torture.” More

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      in Movies

      Sonny Chiba, Japanese Star With a ‘Kill Bill’ Connection, Dies at 82

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      His martial arts movies appalled some with their extreme violence, but the director Quentin Tarantino was a fan and gave him a late-career boost.Sonny Chiba, a Japanese action star who was known for ultraviolent martial arts movies and then, in 2003, was elevated to a whole new level of cinematic trendiness when one of his superfans, the director Quentin Tarantino, gave him a role in “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” died on Wednesday. He was 82.His manager and friend, Timothy Beal, said the cause was Covid-19. Oricon, the Japanese news service, said he died at a hospital in Kimitsu, Japan.Mr. Chiba, who was trained in karate and other martial arts, began turning up on Japanese television in his early 20s. He was soon making movies as well, amassing more than 50 TV and film credits in Japan before the end of the 1960s. In the ’70s, with martial arts movies enjoying broad popularity thanks to the American-born Chinese star Bruce Lee, Mr. Chiba became widely known in Japan and beyond, especially because of “The Street Fighter” (1974) and its sequels.“The Street Fighter,” in which his character battled gangsters, was so violent that when it was released in the United States it was said to have been the first movie given an X rating for violence alone.“If nothing else,” A.H. Weiler wrote in a brief review in The New York Times in 1975, when the movie played in New York, “this Japanese-made, English-dubbed import illustrates that its inane violence deserves the X rating with which it has been labeled.” In 1996, when a DVD of the film was released, The Los Angeles Times said it was being “presented complete and uncut in all its eye-gouging, testicle-ripping, skull-pounding glory.”“The Street Fighter” and other Chiba movies made an impression on Mr. Tarantino. In the homage-filled “Kill Bill, Vol. 1,” he cast Mr. Chiba as the sword maker Hattori Hanzo, who provides Uma Thurman’s vengeful character with her weapon. A.O. Scott, reviewing the movie in The New York Times, got the reference but wasn’t enamored of it.“Check it out, Mr. Tarantino seems to be saying, Sonny Chiba’s in my movie,” he wrote. “How cool is that? Way too cool? Not cool enough? As I said, it depends. The movie-geek in-jokes are sometimes amusing and sometimes annoying.”In any case, Mr. Tarantino brought Mr. Chiba back the next year for “Kill Bill: Vol. 2,” and he enjoyed a late-career resurgence.He was a Yakuza boss in “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” in 2006 and a sushi chef in the noir thriller “Sushi Girl” in 2012, among other roles. Mr. Beal said that before the pandemic, Mr. Chiba had been lined up for a role in a zombie movie called “Outbreak Z.”Mr. Chiba, who also acted under the name Shinichi Chiba, was born Sadaho Maeda on Jan. 23, 1939, in Fukuoka, Japan. His acting career received a boost when he was signed by Japan’s Toei studio in the early 1960s.Mr. Chiba made numerous movies, mostly samurai dramas, with the Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku, who gave him some of his earliest roles. He came to distance himself from the violence-drenched “Street Fighter” films — “That sort of performance is not the performance I am particularly proud of as an actor,” he told The Times in 2003 — but he looked more kindly on his work with Mr. Fukasaku.“Mr. Fukasaku was very sensitive to violence,” Mr. Chiba said. “His constant question was, ‘What is violence? What is authority? What is power?’ Ultimately, he denied violence, and always sided with the weak.”Martial arts, Mr. Chiba said, was not that different from acting.“Martial arts is part of the drama — it’s performance,” he said, “It’s a way of expressing emotions.”Information on Mr. Chiba’s survivors was not immediately available. More

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      in Music

      Garth Brooks Cancels Five Stadium Concerts as Covid-19 Cases Rise

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      The country star said he hoped to resume his tour by the end of the year, if he could do so safely.The country superstar Garth Brooks has canceled his next five stadium tour dates, the latest and biggest concerts to be pulled as the touring industry scrambles in response to rising coronavirus infection rates.“In July, I sincerely thought the pandemic was falling behind us,” Brooks said in a statement on Wednesday, four days after performing for about 90,000 fans in Lincoln, Neb. “Now, watching this new wave, I realize we are still in the fight and I must do my part.”The tour, which had already played five cities over the last month, is canceling dates in Cincinnati, which had been scheduled for Sept. 18; Charlotte, N.C., on Sept. 25; Baltimore, on Oct. 2; Foxborough, Mass., on Oct. 9; and one makeup date for a rained-out show in Nashville that had not been scheduled yet. Tickets will be refunded automatically, according to the statement.Brooks’s announcement came after a slew of cancellations by artists including Stevie Nicks, Limp Bizkit, Korn and Lynyrd Skynyrd; the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, planned for October, was also shut down. The Detroit Jazz Festival, planned as an in-person event from Sept. 3 to 6, announced this week that it would “pivot to a virtual format” of livestreams.For now, much of the concert industry is keeping its touring plans intact, and setting a variety of safety protocols for attendees as well as for the workers who run concert venues and manage touring productions. Live Nation and AEG Presents, the two corporations that dominate most of the touring and festival business, have each announced that their venues will require proof of vaccination or a negative test for attendees and staff, although that still leaves uncertainty about much of the business beyond their control.Los Angeles County will require masks at large outdoor concerts and sporting events that attract more than 10,000 people starting Thursday.Among the big American festivals still planned for the coming weeks are Bonnaroo, in Manchester, Tenn. (Sept. 2-5); Jay-Z’s Made in America, in Philadelphia (Sept. 4-5); Governors Ball, in New York (Sept. 24-26); Austin City Limits, in Austin, Texas (Oct. 1-3 and 8-10); and Outside Lands, in San Francisco (Oct. 29-31).In his announcement, Brooks told his fans that he hoped to resume his tour by the end of the year, as long as he can make sure that “the environment these people are trading their time and money to put themselves into is not only the best experience ever, but also the safest one we can provide.” More