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    Theater at Geffen Hall to Be Named for Two Key Donors

    The Wu Tsai Theater will honor a $50 million gift from Joseph Tsai, a founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, and Clara Wu Tsai, a philanthropist.In late 2020, as coronavirus infections surged and cultural institutions shuttered, the fate of the long-delayed renovation of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, was uncertain.Then came a $50 million gift from Joseph Tsai, a Taiwanese-born billionaire co-founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, and his wife, Clara Wu Tsai, a philanthropist. The donation moved the project forward, accelerating construction so the hall could reopen in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule.In a nod to role of the Tsai family, Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic announced on Wednesday that the main auditorium in the hall would be named the Wu Tsai Theater.“It really took courage,” Katherine Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center’s board, said of the gift in an interview. “And that courage inspired other people, and it made a big, big difference.”The gift represents one of the Tsai family’s biggest ventures so far into the performing arts. Joseph Tsai, who trained as a lawyer and serves as vice chairman of Alibaba, is more frequently associated with athletics. He is the primary owner of the Brooklyn Nets and has played an important role in helping the N.B.A. expand in China. The couple has previously contributed to universities, hospitals and social justice projects, among other gifts.Clara Wu Tsai, who is also a member of Lincoln Center’s board, said in an interview that she and her husband were moved by the opportunity to create jobs for New Yorkers and help make the performing arts more accessible. Also being named for the Tsais: a concert series aimed at increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the arts and bringing together performers of different genres.“My dream is that we have a full hall of diverse audiences and that we get programming in there that really showcases the versatility and flexibility that the hall was created to offer,” she said.Geffen Hall’s $550 million renovation will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and seats that wrap around the stage. Other additions meant to draw people in include a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public and a studio looking out onto Broadway.The hall is set to reopen on Oct. 7, with a concert featuring Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” among other pieces, before an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas and an open house weekend will follow later in the month.Clara Wu Tsai said she was confident that audiences would turn out, despite lingering concerns about the coronavirus and changing habits around going to live performances.“Everybody’s waiting to hear what will be one of the best concert halls in the world,” she said. “The timing is going to be good.” More

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    On Broadway, One Show Decides to Keep Masks. No, It’s Not ‘Phantom.’

    Three days after the Broadway League announced that all 41 theaters would make masks optional starting July 1, one of those theaters has decided to stick with mandatory face coverings.The producers of a starry revival of “American Buffalo,” which is a 1975 drama by David Mamet about three schemers in a junk shop, announced Friday that they would continue to require masks through the scheduled end of the show’s run at Circle in the Square Theater on July 10.That’s only 10 days beyond when Broadway plans to drop its industrywide masking requirement, and it’s just one show, but it suggests that the unanimity among producers and theater owners may not be rock solid.There are several factors that make the “American Buffalo” situation unusual.The play, starring Sam Rockwell, Laurence Fishburne and Darren Criss, is being staged at Broadway’s only theater-in-the-round (it’s actually almost-in-the-round, because the seating doesn’t entirely encircle the stage), which means there are more patrons seated within spitting distance of actors than at other theaters.Also, Circle in the Square, with 751 seats as it is currently configured, is the only remaining Broadway theater that is not operated by a large company or a nonprofit organization, so its decisions are not tied to those of a bigger entity.Rockwell expressed concerns about the end of the masking policy in an interview this week with the New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante.The show announced the change in policy in a news release, saying that it was “due to the close proximity of the audience to the actors as a result of the intimate size of the theater and the staging in the round.” The production and theater owner did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, said of the “American Buffalo” decision, “As the optional mask policy takes effect in July, there may be unique situations which would require the audience, or some of the audience, to be masked.”It is not clear whether the decision will affect other Broadway shows. The vast majority take place in theaters operated by a handful of big landlords who endorsed the mask-optional decision. Broadway’s four nonprofit theater operators, who have been more Covid-cautious, do not have any shows this summer. And summer fare on Broadway is dominated by big musicals, where the audience tends to skew toward tourists, many of whom come from places where masks are long gone; older New York playgoers are scarcer at this time of year (and the volume of shows is lower, too: there are only 27 shows now running on Broadway).After “American Buffalo” closes next month, Circle in the Square is scheduled to be vacant until October, when a new musical called “KPOP” begins previews.Actors’ Equity, the union representing performers and stage managers, has declined to comment on the audience safety protocols, but this week sent an email to its members, previously reported by Deadline, saying, “This decision was made unilaterally, without input from your union or any other, and the unions were only given advance notice a couple of hours before the announcement.”Although the decision was announced by the Broadway League, it was made by theater owners and operators, and they plan to reconsider the protocols monthly. More

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    Broadway Will Drop Mask Mandate Beginning July 1

    Broadway theaters will be allowed to drop their mask mandates starting July 1, the Broadway League announced Tuesday.The League described the new policy as “mask optional,” and said it would be re-evaluated monthly.“Our theater owners have been watching the protocols, watching admissions to hospitals, watching as we have no issues across the country where tours are mostly not masked, and they decided it was time to try,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League. “This is not an easy decision — there are more people that want masks off than on, but plenty still want them on — and we’re encouraging people that have any concerns to wear their masks.”St. Martin said the theater owners would continue to meet weekly to assess the health situation, and are open to reimposing the mandate if necessary. “We’re going to see how it goes,” she said.Broadway had maintained fairly restrictive audience policies since theaters reopened last summer. The theaters required patrons to show proof of vaccination until April 30, and have continued to require patrons to wear masks except while eating and drinking.Broadway’s public health protocols have taken on an outsize role in the performing arts, as many other institutions have taken their cues from the big theaters. Broadway theaters imposed a vaccine mandate before New York City did the same for restaurants, gyms and other indoor performances, and then maintained their rules long after the city stopped requiring them.Regular reminders to wear masks had been part of the theatergoing experience this season.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesMask wearing became part of the theatergoing experience this season: sign-wielding employees walked the aisles reminding patrons of the requirement, and reminders to wear masks were added to the usual preshow announcements about turning off mobile phones and banning photography. When theaters first reopened, some did not sell food and drink to avoid interfering with mask-wearing; the consumption of refreshments now provides a noticeable loophole for those who don’t like wearing masks.Some other performing arts venues, including many Off Broadway theaters, continue to ask for proof of vaccination and to mandate masks, and public transit in New York continues to require masks indoors, although compliance is dropping. But many other corners of society, including domestic air travel, have dropped mask mandates and conditions in the city seem to be improving: Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday that the city’s Covid-19 alert level had moved from high to medium.There are currently 27 shows running in Broadway’s 41 theaters.The four nonprofit organizations that operate six of the Broadway houses hung onto vaccine mandates longer than the commercial landlords who operate the majority of the theaters. But none of the nonprofits currently has a show running on Broadway, and none plans to resume producing on Broadway until after Labor Day.Roundabout Theater Company, which is scheduled to begin performances of a Broadway revival of “1776” in September, plans to evaluate its protocols monthly, according to a spokeswoman, Jessica Johnson, who said it is too soon to determine the rules for this fall. The nonprofit is continuing to maintain a mask mandate for its current Off Broadway shows.The other nonprofits operating on Broadway, which plan to start shows in the fall, said it was too soon to know what their safety protocols would be then.Public reaction to the mask-optional policy was, predictably, polarized, with some cheering what they saw as an overdue step, and others ruing a retreat they viewed as reckless.Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, a frequent Broadway theatergoer as a Tony voter and professor of theater studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said he would continue to wear a mask while seeing shows. “It’s important, when you have people packed that tightly together, to control the flow of airborne germs at a time when we don’t know what the long-term effect of Covid is going to be,” he said. More

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    Rolling Stones Concert Postponed After Mick Jagger Tests Positive for Virus

    The Rolling Stones postponed a stadium concert in Amsterdam on Monday, after Mick Jagger tested positive for the coronavirus.According to a statement from the band, Jagger — who has said in interviews that he was vaccinated, and urged fans to get their shots — tested positive “after experiencing symptoms” upon arriving at the Johan Cruijff Arena. The announcement came shortly before the show was to begin, and The Associated Press reported that some fans were already in the stadium when the announcement went out. Jagger, 78, had posted a short video to Twitter on Sunday saying he was looking forward to the show.The band said the Amsterdam show would be rescheduled. The next date on its 60th anniversary tour is set for Friday in Bern, Switzerland.The music industry has been moving forward at full steam for the return of concerts and festivals, after two years when live events were shut down entirely or held in reduced numbers. While new tours are being announced regularly, artists as varied as the Strokes, Ringo Starr, J Balvin and Haim have canceled individual shows and even entire tours.Broadway has also rebounded. And at least one show will go on despite the news that its star has been infected: Hugh Jackman, who plays Professor Harold Hill in a strong-selling revival of “The Music Man,” on Monday said he had tested positive for the coronavirus, one day after he attended and performed at the Tony Awards. The producers of “The Music Man” said that the actor Max Clayton, who is Jackman’s standby, would play Harold Hill, the character ordinarily played by Jackman, through June 21.This is the second time he has tested positive; he previously did so in late December, when the show was forced to cancel several dates, just after its opening. More

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    New York Philharmonic Agrees to Restore Pay for Musicians

    After a stronger-than-expected season, the orchestra said it would reverse pay cuts imposed at the height of the pandemic.When the coronavirus pandemic erupted in 2020, battering the cultural sector and forcing the New York Philharmonic to cancel a season, the orchestra worked to cut costs, slashing its musicians’ pay by 25 percent.The Philharmonic promised at the time to reverse those cuts, which provided more than $20 million in savings, once its financial outlook brightened. And on Monday, the orchestra announced it would do so in September, much earlier than expected.The decision to restore pay is a milestone in the Philharmonic’s recovery, and it offered some hope that the worst of the pandemic, which cost the orchestra more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue, had passed.“There’s nothing more important than our musicians,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “It was just a very important act to make.”Borda said government grants and loans, an increase in donations and better-than-expected ticket sales during the 2021-22 season made the decision possible. The orchestra is on track to finish its season without missing a performance, and it just concluded a series of concerts in Europe, at a time when many ensembles have been unable to tour.“We’re in a different phase of life now,” she said.Geffen Hall, seen here in March, will reopen in fall.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe Philharmonic is at a pivotal moment. The $550 million renovation of its home, David Geffen Hall, is to be completed in the fall. And the orchestra is searching for a music director to replace its departing leader, Jaap van Zweden, who steps down in 2024.The pay cuts had been a source of distress among players as the Philharmonic prepared for its new chapter.In December 2020, the Philharmonic and its musicians agreed to a four-year contract that included 25 percent cuts to base pay, which was then around $2,900 per week, through August 2023. Under the deal, pay was set to gradually increase until the expiration of the contract in September 2024, though musicians would have been paid less at the end than they were before the pandemic.But as coronavirus cases fell last year and audiences returned, the Philharmonic’s fiscal outlook brightened. Ticket sales in the 2021-22 season have been better than expected: Attendance at subscription concerts was 90 percent, though the orchestra was playing in smaller halls with Geffen being renovated. Donations have been strong, rising by 11 percent to $31.5 million in 2020, the last year for which data is available. The Philharmonic also received grants and loans of more than $16 million from the federal government.In October, the Philharmonic began making payments to musicians to offset the pay cuts. But it was not until Monday that the orchestra vowed to fully restore musicians’ pay for the remainder of the contract.The trombonist Colin Williams, the head of the players’ negotiating committee, said the decision would help reassure musicians who have grappled with the uncertainties of the pandemic.“We’re feeling much more confident about our institution again — our place in it and our place in the city,” he said in an interview. “We somehow weathered this incredibly traumatic time and have come out of it stronger and more cohesive than we were before.”Borda said the Philharmonic still faced financial risks, including the possible emergence of new variants of the coronavirus. While the orchestra remains in what she called “a state of suspended fluidity,” she said it was important to stay focused on the future, including the opening of Geffen Hall, which she described as “light at the end of the tunnel.”“We improvise, we move forward,” she said. “We are placing our money on the fact that we are moving ahead.” More

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    ‘A Strange Loop’ Wins Best Musical as Tonys Celebrate Broadway’s Return

    “A Strange Loop,” a scalding story about a gay, Black theater artist confronting self-doubt and societal disapproval, won the Tony Award for best new musical Sunday night, giving another huge accolade to a challenging contemporary production that had already won a Pulitzer Prize.The soul-baring show, nurtured by nonprofits and developed over many years, triumphed over two flashy pop musicals, “MJ,” a jukebox musical about the entertainer Michael Jackson, and “Six,” an irreverent reconsideration of Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives, in a six-way race.“A Strange Loop” garnered widespread praise from critics; on Sunday night, Michael R. Jackson, the writer who spent nearly two decades working on it, acknowledged how personal the project was as he collected his first Tony Award, for best book of a musical.“I wrote it at a time when I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” he said. “I didn’t know how I was going to move forward. I felt unseen. I felt unheard. I felt misunderstood, and I just wanted to create a little bit of a life raft for myself as a Black gay man.”The ceremony — the 75th Tony Awards presentation — provided an opportunity for Broadway to celebrate its return and its perseverance, hoping that a dash of razzle-dazzle, a dollop of contemporary creativity and a sprinkling of nostalgia will help lure theatergoers back to a pandemic-scarred industry now in full swing but still craving more customers.The season that just ended was a tough one: It started late (most theaters remained closed until September), and was repeatedly disrupted (coronavirus cases obliterated its old show-must-go-on ethos, prompting cancellations and performer absences). With tourism still down, it was also short on audience.Patti LuPone won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for “Company.” It was her third Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Our industry has been through so much,” Marianne Elliott, who won a Tony Award for directing a gender-reversed revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical comedy “Company,” said in her acceptance speech. “It felt at times that live theater was endangered.”But in the glittering ceremony at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, a parade of performers celebrated all that went well: Theaters reopened, long-running shows returned, and an unusually diverse array of plays and musicals arrived to entertain, provoke and inspire theatergoers.The best play Tony went to “The Lehman Trilogy,” a sweeping saga about the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers banking business. Using three shape-shifting actors, contained within a spinning glass box of a set, the play journeyed all the way from the Wall Street giant’s humble origins in 1844 to its ignominious collapse in 2008. The show, written by Stefano Massini and Ben Power, picked up not only the Tony for best play, but also for the play’s director, Sam Mendes; its set designer, Es Devlin; and the great British actor, Simon Russell Beale, who thanked audiences for showing up, despite pandemic protocols and public health concerns.“You trusted us,” he said. “You came with open arms. It wasn’t easy at that point to come to the theater because of all those regulations. But you welcomed us.”“The Lehman Trilogy” won out against four other contenders, “Clyde’s,” “Hangmen,” “The Minutes” and “Skeleton Crew.”“Take Me Out” emerged victorious in the best play revival category, a particularly strong field that included productions of “American Buffalo,” “How I Learned to Drive,” “Trouble in Mind” and “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”Written by Richard Greenberg, “Take Me Out” first ran on Broadway in 2003 and won the best play Tony that year; this year’s revival, presented by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, was directed by Scott Ellis. It is about what happens when a baseball player, portrayed in this production by Jesse Williams, comes out as gay; Jesse Tyler Ferguson picked up his first Tony for his portrayal of the player’s investment adviser, who is also gay.“Company,” a musical first staged in 1970 that wittily and sometimes bitterly examines married life, won the Tony for musical revival, besting a much-praised revival of “Caroline, or Change,” as well as a starry revival of “The Music Man” that, thanks to the appeal of leading man Hugh Jackman, has been the top-selling show on Broadway since it opened.The award for “Company” reflected not only admiration for the reimagined production but also respect for Sondheim, its composer and lyricist, who is revered as one of the most important figures in American musical theater, and who died in November. The “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was mentored by Sondheim, introduced a tribute to him, saying, “I stand here on behalf of generations of artists he took the time to encourage.”The ceremony was hosted by Ariana DeBose.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Tonys, hosted by Ariana DeBose and broadcast on CBS, honored not only shows, performers, writers and designers, but also the understudies who saved so many performances this season. And DeBose, who this year won an Academy Award as Anita in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story,” paid tribute to the season’s extraordinary diversity, saying, “I feel like the phrase Great White Way is becoming more of a nickname as opposed to a how-to guide.”She noted the season’s high volume of work by Black writers, which came about as producers and theater owners scrambled to respond to demands for more representation and opportunity for Black artists after the national unrest over racism during the summer of 2020. This year’s class of Tony nominees featured a large number of Black artists, reflecting the fact that work by Black writers led to more jobs for Black performers, designers, directors, and more.The season being honored — the first since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close in March of 2020 — featured 56 productions, including 34 eligible for Tony Awards because they opened between Feb. 20, 2020 and May 4, 2022. (The others were returning productions, many of them long-running hits.)The Covid challenges were costly: 6.7 million people attended a Broadway show during the 2021-22 season, down from 14.8 million during the 2018-19 season, which was the last full season before the pandemic; total grosses were $845 million, down from $1.8 billion.The Tonys served as a chance for Broadway to try to entice television viewers to become Times Square visitors. But one challenge: Viewership for all televised awards shows has been steadily falling. The Tonys audience had a recent peak in 2016, at 8.7 million viewers, when “Hamilton” was a contender; in 2019, there were 5.4 million viewers, and last year, when the Tonys held a ceremony in September to coincide with the reopening of theaters, just 2.6 million tuned in.Michael R. Jackson won the Tony for best book of a musical for “A Strange Loop.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s winners featured some Broadway veterans, including Patti LuPone, picking up her third Tony Award for her ferocious turn as an alcohol-addled married friend of the chronically single protagonist in “Company”; and Phylicia Rashad, winning her second Tony for playing a factory worker in “Skeleton Crew.” Among the other performers who collected Tony Awards: Joaquina Kalukango, for her starring role as a 19th-century New York City tavern owner in “Paradise Square”; Matt Doyle, who played a groom with a zany case of wedding day jitters in “Company,” and Deirdre O’Connell, who won for her remarkable lip-synced performance as a kidnapping victim in the play “Dana H.”“I would love for this little prize to be a token for every person who is wondering, ‘Should I be trying to make something that could work on Broadway or that could win me a Tony Award, or should I be making the weird art that is haunting me, that frightens me, that I don’t know how to make, that I don’t know if anyone in the whole world will understand?’” O’Connell said. “Please let me, standing here, be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”“A Strange Loop” tells the story of a Broadway usher, named Usher, who is trying to write a musical about a Broadway usher trying to write a musical; his thoughts, many of them self-critical, are portrayed by six performers, who each appear in multiple guises. The musical began its life Off Broadway, with a 2019 production at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions. After winning the Pulitzer, it had another pre-Broadway production at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C. It had support throughout those nonprofit runs from the producer Barbara Whitman, who is now the lead producer of the commercial run on Broadway; she was also a lead producer of the Tony-winning “Fun Home.”The Broadway production, which opened in April, has seen an uptick at the box office since being nominated for 11 Tony Awards (it won two), but has room for growth: During the week that ended June 5, it filled 89 percent of the 912 seats at the Lyceum Theater, grossing $685,772, with an average ticket price of $105.“Six” and “MJ,” although unsuccessful in the six-way race for best new musical, are doing substantially better at the box office, and did notch some big victories at the awards ceremony.“Six” picked up the Tony Award for best score during the first minutes of the ceremony. Its music and lyrics were written by two young British artists, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, who came up with the idea while undergraduates at Cambridge University, and who were discovered by a commercial producer following a buzz-building first run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The musical’s costume designer, Gabriella Slade, also won a Tony for her Tudor-style-meets-contemporary-clubwear outfits.“MJ” also landed key prizes, including for the lead performance by Myles Frost, a 22-year-old in his first professional stage role, and for the crowd-pleasing choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, who also directed the musical.The other contenders, “Girl From the North Country,” featuring the songs of Bob Dylan; “Mr. Saturday Night,” starring Billy Crystal as a washed-up comedian; and “Paradise Square,” about race relations in Civil War-era New York, appeared to be less of a factor in the competition.Simon Russell Beale won the Tony Award for best actor for his work in “The Lehman Trilogy,” which won best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat first hour of the awards ceremony, viewable only on the streaming channel Paramount+, was hosted by Darren Criss and Julianne Hough, both of whom are currently starring in Broadway plays — he in a revival of “American Buffalo,” and she in a new farce called “POTUS.” They began the evening with a Broadway-is-back tribute, written by Criss, extolling the virtues and challenges of theater (the song included a plea for no slapping, in a dig at the Oscars).A lifetime achievement award was given to Angela Lansbury, a beloved star of stage, film and television who was also a five-time host of the Tony Awards, more than any other person. Lansbury, who is 96, was not able to attend in person, or even to accept by video; instead the actor Len Cariou, who starred with Lansbury in the original production of “Sweeney Todd,” for which they both won Tony Awards, paid tribute to her and introduced a video of career highlights. Then the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus performed the title song from “Mame,” which was the show in which she won the first of her five competitive Tony Awards.The Tony Awards, named for actress Antoinette Perry, are presented by the Broadway League, a trade association that represents theater owners and producers, and the American Theater Wing, a theater advocacy organization. The awards have been presented since 1947; there was no ceremony in 2020, and last year’s September ceremony honored shows from the truncated prepandemic season.This year’s awards were spread among 11 shows, with none coming anywhere near the record 12 prizes picked up by “The Producers” in 2001. The biggest hauls went to “Company” and “The Lehman Trilogy,” each of which won five awards; “MJ” won four, and “A Strange Loop,” “Dana H.,” “Six” and “Take Me Out” each won two. Taking home one prize each were “Girl From the North Country,” “Paradise Square,” “Skeleton Crew” and “The Skin of Our Teeth.” More

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    At the Met This Season, Opera Was Icing on the Cake

    Amid a labor battle, the continuing pandemic and war in Ukraine, it often felt as though the real drama was in simply putting on a show.Has there ever been a Metropolitan Opera season like the one that just ended? In which the stuff onstage — the homicidal brides, mystical pharaohs and longing stepsons — felt so anticlimactic? Over the past eight months, amid a labor battle, a pandemic that surged again and again, and a war, it was as if the real drama was in simply getting the doors open. Once that was achieved, what followed was almost beside the point.Or, to put it more accurately, what followed was like icing on the cake. Rarely has it felt so sweet to be inside the gilded Met, has opera seemed — whatever you thought of a given work, singer or production — so much a gift. A groundswell of gratitude was palpable throughout the season, which finished on Saturday evening with Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”You felt it in the explosive ovation that greeted a virtuosic step-dance sequence in Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the season as a double milestone: the first production since the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, and the first work at the Met by a Black composer since its founding in 1883.You felt it in the cheers for Lise Davidsen’s vast, star-making Ariadne; Nadine Sierra’s sensual Lucia di Lammermoor; Matthew Polenzani’s earnestly agonized Don Carlos; Allan Clayton’s quivering Hamlet; and the chorus’s shimmering “Prayer for Ukraine” at a benefit concert in March.The soprano Lise Davidsen in the title role of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”Marty Sohl/Met OperaYou felt it in the roaring curtain calls at the revival of “Akhnaten,” which proved once again that Philip Glass’s idiom has been welcomed by the Met audience as wholeheartedly as those of Mozart or Puccini.Around this time a year ago, it seemed like the great battle would be returning after a canceled 2020-21 season. Bad blood was in the air: The Met’s unions were furious at the company’s general manager, Peter Gelb, for his insistence that unpaid furloughs were the only way it could survive the long lockdown. The situation grew so bitter that it seemed possible a strike or lockout would keep the Met closed past the planned opening night.But the promise of coming back after 18 months proved too strong to resist, and the unions and management came — warily — to terms. No one who was at the outdoor performances of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony over Labor Day weekend, or, especially, at the return indoors for Verdi’s Requiem on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, will forget the relief and joy of the Met once again making live music at Lincoln Center.The Met returned to indoor performance with a concert of Verdi’s Requiem for the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.Richard Termine/Met OperaThe opening months of the season had an air of triumph. There was the sold-out success of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”; a series of ambitious revivals, including the Met’s first performances of the brooding original version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” and Wagner’s six-hour “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” the longest opera in its repertory; and Matthew Aucoin’s recent “Eurydice,” in which a sprawling orchestra thrashed Sarah Ruhl’s winsome version of the Orpheus myth.Then the rise of the Omicron variant in late fall began to claim performances, festivals and concerts. The Vienna State Opera was closed for almost a week. But the Met buckled down, strengthening its already stringent health protocols and dipping into a broad pool of covers to fill in for sick artists. With luck on its side, it stayed open through the winter — and into yet another rise in cases this spring.Broadway shows kept canceling at the last minute or closing entirely, but the Met, America’s largest performing arts institution, never did. That will be Gelb’s legacy from this troubled period, along with the landmark “Fire” and the unrelenting position he took after the invasion of Ukraine, when he declared that the Met would sever ties with artists who supported President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. That ultimatum had one singer in mind: the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, the company’s leading diva, who criticized the war but remained silent about Putin. In a coup, Gelb replaced her as Puccini’s Turandot with the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, who drove the audience wild when she wrapped herself in a Ukrainian flag to take her bow.The Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska wrapped herself in her country’s flag to take her bow after “Turandot.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesGelb’s Netrebko decision wasn’t universally praised, and other major opera houses now seem to be inclined to welcome her back, classifying her as merely a prominent Russian, not a hardcore Putinist. But within the Met, the moral clarity of the war proved a unifying force: At the benefit concert for Ukraine, some players in the orchestra even applauded Gelb, their nemesis during the grueling furlough, as he declared from the stage that they were “soldiers of music.”Somewhere in the midst of politics and the virus was opera. Under the focused baton of Sebastian Weigle, “Boris Godunov” was memorably grim in the concentrated form Mussorgsky gave it before a hodgepodge of revisions; “Meistersinger,” expansive enough that it really does seem to convey a whole world, was relaxed and sunny, and gently comic as led by Antonio Pappano.Simon Stone’s technically savvy staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia,” set amid the malaise of a contemporary postindustrial American town, didn’t translate its bold concept into a convincing portrayal of its pathetically suffering title character. The Met’s de facto house director these days, David McVicar, offered a grayly old-fashioned production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.”Simon Stone’s new staging of “Lucia di Lammermoor” had a bold concept but little grasp of its title character.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavidsen, in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” a mythic creation of flooding tone, also lavished her soaring soprano on Eva in “Meistersinger” and Chrysothemis in Strauss’s “Elektra,” her voice almost palpable against your skin. The mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard brought silvery elegance to Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” and the Composer in “Ariadne.”There were sympathetic soprano star turns from Ailyn Pérez as a fiery soloist in the Sept. 11 Requiem and a girlish Tatiana in “Eugene Onegin,” Eleonora Buratto as a reserved Madama Butterfly and Elena Stikhina as a kindly Tosca — as well as from Sonya Yoncheva, in a solo recital of shadowy sensitivity.While Blanchard’s score moved comfortably between bars, college parties and fraught, tender nocturnes, “Fire” was fairly turgid as drama, its individual sequences clear but the broader conflicts driving its characters obscure. (It was telling that the most dazzling sequences in this opera were Camille A. Brown’s dances.)Perhaps most remarkable about the offerings this season were the three — count ’em — works from the past five years: “Fire,” “Eurydice” and Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” which set to seething music Matthew Jocelyn’s moodily distilled version of Shakespeare. The Met has not had so many recent operas on a single year’s lineup since the early 1930s, even if that number is notable only in the context of the stubbornly backward-looking world of opera.Not long ago, the idea of three contemporary operas in a Met season would have been preposterous. This was largely because the company’s longtime music director, James Levine — while he expanded the repertory significantly and presided over a handful of premieres — didn’t prioritize newer work.Among the Met’s contemporary offerings this season was “Hamlet,” featuring, from left at front, Allan Clayton in the title role and Brenda Rae as Ophelia.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut his successor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, agrees with Gelb that contemporary operas are crucial, both artistically and for expanding the company’s audience. And Nézet-Séguin is putting his money where his mouth is: He conducted both “Fire” and “Eurydice,” and leads Kevin Puts’s “The Hours” in the fall and Blanchard’s “Champion” next spring. (The early months of this season, though, were an exhausting workload when coupled with his duties as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra: He dropped out of a run of “Le Nozze di Figaro” to take a four-week sabbatical around the new year.)The continuing transition out of the Levine era has been obvious not just in the repertory, but also in the orchestra’s sound — which was noticeably lighter and lither in three works closely associated with Levine: “Meistersinger”; Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” led by Susanna Mälkki; and “Don Carlos,” which Nézet-Séguin brought to the Met for the first time in its original French.This change is for better and worse. The ensemble played these pieces with brisker transparency and perhaps more varied colors; Nézet-Séguin’s textures in “Don Carlos,” airier than Levine’s, felt of a piece with the elegant nasality of French. In “Hamlet,” conducted by Nicholas Carter, the orchestra was ferocious. But a certain grandeur is now missing, more often than not: the weight of Levine’s “Meistersinger” prelude, for one thing, and the gleefully straight-faced bombast of Baba the Turk’s entrance in his performances of “The Rake’s Progress.”Even a frequent operagoer or critic can’t see everything or everyone. I missed a new, family-friendly abridgment of Massenet’s fairy-dust “Cendrillon.” And after opening a new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” on New Year’s Eve, the baritone Quinn Kelsey — acclaimed in the title role — came down with Covid-19 and missed a few performances, including the one I attended. But I got to see his credible replacement: the baritone Michael Chioldi, finally getting his first big role at the Met after years as a stalwart of the New York opera scene.That was one of four performances at the opera house that I watched in a single weekend in early January, during the first Omicron wave. Such a marathon was an extraordinary exclamation point on the Met’s achievement in merely keeping the lights on.It wasn’t enough to taste opera after a year-and-a-half fast. I wanted to gorge. More

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    ‘Come From Away’ to Close, the Latest Broadway Show to End Run

    “Come From Away,” the inspirational musical about a remote Canadian community that rallied to support thousands of stranded air travelers after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, will end its run on Broadway in October.The musical, which has been a hit on Broadway and has been successfully staged around the world, is the third show to announce a plan to close in the last two days, as it becomes clear that with New York City still attracting fewer tourists than it did before the pandemic, there are not enough patrons to support all the productions now running.On Tuesday “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Tina,” two musicals that had been selling strongly before the pandemic, both announced that they would close late this summer.“Come From Away” will close on Oct. 2. It began performances Feb. 18, 2017, and opened March 12, 2017; at the time of its closing it will have had 25 preview performances and 1,670 regular performances at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.The musical continues to tour in North America and Australia and to run in London. A filmed version of the stage production is streaming on Apple TV+.The show was an unlikely hit — before it arrived in New York, the conventional wisdom was that locals would never embrace a musical about Sept. 11 because the subject was too potentially upsetting. The producers, seeking to build word-of-mouth first, took a roundabout path to Broadway, staging it in San Diego, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Toronto before coming to New York.But the show, arriving early in the Trump administration, quickly became a success, seen as a parable about welcoming strangers and building community.The musical, which won a Tony Award for Christopher Ashley’s direction, is based on true events that took place in Gander, Newfoundland, where 38 commercial planes were diverted. The musical’s writers, a married couple named Irene Sankoff and David Hein, went to Gander a decade after Sept. 11 to interview locals, and created the musical based on those interviews; the show was first staged at Sheridan College in Ontario, where a school dean, Michael Rubinoff, had been trying to persuade someone that the subject would make a good musical.The show’s original star, Jenn Colella, who portrayed an airline pilot, will rejoin the cast from June 21 to Aug. 7.“Come From Away” is produced by Junkyard Dog Productions, which is led by Randy Adams, Marleen and Kenny Alhadeff, and Sue Frost, who spotted an early workshop of the show at a festival held by the National Alliance for Musical Theater.The show’s grosses have dropped significantly since the pandemic shutdown of theaters. Last week it grossed $461,760; during a comparable early June week in 2019 it grossed $897,186.On Tuesday, “Tina” said it would close Aug. 14, and “Dear Evan Hansen” said it would close Sept. 18. More