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      An Orchestra Supports Ukraine, and Reunites a Couple Parted by War

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      “I don’t have a gun, but I have my cello,” a musician says as he joins the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which is made up of refugees who fled the war and artists who stayed behind.WARSAW — After years of struggling to make a living as musicians in Ukraine, Yevgen Dovbysh and Anna Vikhrova felt they had finally built a stable life. They were husband-and-wife artists in the Odessa Philharmonic — he plays the cello, she the violin — sharing a love for Bach partitas and the music from “Star Wars.” They lived in an apartment on the banks of the Black Sea with their 8-year-old daughter, Daryna.Then Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Vikhrova fled for the Czech Republic with her daughter and mother, bringing a few hundred dollars in savings, some clothes and her violin. Dovbysh, 39, who was not allowed to leave because he is of military age, stayed behind and assisted in efforts to defend the city, gathering sand from beaches to reinforce barriers and protect monuments and playing Ukrainian music on videos honoring the country’s soldiers. “We spent every day together,” Vikhrova, 38, said. “We did everything together. And suddenly our beautiful life was taken away.”Dovbysh was granted special permission to leave the country last month to join the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, a new ensemble of 74 musicians that was gathering in Warsaw, the first stop on an international tour aimed at promoting Ukrainian culture and denouncing Russia’s invasion. Carrying his cello, and wearing a small golden cross around his neck, he boarded a bus for Poland, looking forward to playing for the cause, and also to being reunited with another member of the fledgling ensemble: his wife.“I love my country so much,” he said as the bus passed ponds, churches and raspberry fields in Hrebenne, a Polish village near the border with Ukraine. “I don’t have a gun, but I have my cello.”The bus crossed the border and drove into Hrebenne, in Poland, on its way to Warsaw, where the newly formed orchestra would meet for the first time to rehearse.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesWhen his bus arrived in Warsaw, he rushed to meet Vikhrova. He knocked on the door of her hotel room, waited nervously, and then embraced her when she opened it. She teased him about his decision to wear shorts for the 768-mile journey, despite the cool weather, a legacy of his upbringing in balmy Odessa. She gave him a figurine of a “Star Wars” creature, Baby Yoda, a belated birthday present.“I’m so happy,” he said. “Finally, we are almost like a family again.”The next morning, they took their chairs in the new Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, led by the Canadian Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, to prepare for an 12-city tour to rally support for Ukraine. Beginning here in Warsaw, the tour has continued in London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Berlin and other cities, and will travel to the United States this week to play at Lincoln Center on Aug. 18 and 19 and at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Aug. 20.The tour has been organized with the support of the Ukrainian government. Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, said in a recent statement celebrating the founding of the orchestra that “artistic resistance” to Russia was paramount. The orchestra also has the backing of powerful figures in the music industry. Wilson’s husband, Peter Gelb, who runs the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has played a critical role, helping line up engagements and benefactors, and the Met has helped arrange the tour. Waldemar Dabrowski, the director of the Wielki Theater, Warsaw’s opera house, provided rehearsal space and helped secure financial support from the Polish government.CULTURE, DISPLACED A series exploring the lives and work of artists driven far from their homelands amid the growing global refugee crisis.At the first rehearsal, musicians filed into the Wielki Theater carrying blue and yellow bags; instrument cases covered in peace signs and hearts; and tattered volumes of Ukrainian poems and hymns.The orchestra was the idea of the Canadian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who is of Ukrainian descent. “For Ukraine!” she proclaimed at the first rehearsal.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesAs the musicians began to warm up at rehearsal, Wilson took her place at the podium, locked eyes with the players, and spoke about the need to stand up to Moscow.“For Ukraine!” she said, throwing her fist into the air. Then the orchestra began playing Dvorak.The musicians had arrived mostly as strangers to one another. But slowly they grew closer, sharing stories of neighborhoods pounded by bombs, while the refugees among them recounted their long, tense journeys across crowded borders this winter.Among the violins was Iryna Solovei, a member of the orchestra at the Kharkiv State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater, who fled for Warsaw at the start of the invasion along with her 14-year-old daughter. Since March, they have been among the more than 30 Ukrainian refugees living inside the Wielki Theater, in offices that were converted to dormitories.In March, Solovei, watched from a distance as her home in Kharkiv was destroyed by Russian missiles. She shared photos of her charred living room with her fellow players, telling them how much she missed Ukraine and worried about her husband, who still plays with the Kharkiv ensemble.Our Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine WarOn the Ground: A series of explosions that Ukraine took credit for rocked a key Russian air base in Kremlin-occupied Crimea. Russia played down the extent of the damage, but the evidence available told a different story.Heavy Losses: The staggeringly high rate of Russian casualties in the war means that Moscow may not be able to achieve one of his key objectives: seizing the entire eastern region of Ukraine.Nuclear Shelter: The Russian military is using а nuclear power station in southern Ukraine as a fortress, as fighting intensifies in the region. The risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident has led the United Nations to sound the alarm and plead for access to the site to assess the situation.Starting Over: Ukrainians forced from their hometowns by Russia’s invasion find some solace, and success setting up businesses in new cities.“Everyone has been hurt,” she said. “Some people have been hurt physically. Some people have lost their jobs. Some people have lost their homes.”She reminisced about her days as an orchestra musician in Ukraine, and the deep connections she felt with audiences there. To cope with the trauma of war, she takes walks in a park in Warsaw, where a Ukrainian guitarist plays folk songs at sunset.“The war is like a horrific dream,” she added. “We can forget about it for a moment, but we can never escape it.”Iryna Solovei, left, holding a violin, before the orchestra’s first performance at the Wielki Theater in Warsaw. She has been living in the theater since March.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesAt the back of the orchestra, in the percussion section, stood Yevhen Ulianov, a 33-year-old member of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine.His daughter was born on Feb. 24, the first day of the invasion. He told his fellow players how he and his wife, a singer, had gone to the hospital in Kyiv a few hours before the war started. As she went into labor, air-raid sirens sounded repeatedly, and at one point they were rushed from the maternity ward to the basement of the hospital.“I couldn’t understand what was happening,” he said. “I could only think, ‘How will we get out of here alive?’”Ulianov did not play for two months after the invasion, as concerts in Kyiv were canceled and theaters elsewhere were damaged. The orchestra reduced his salary by a third in April, and he relied on savings to pay his bills. Inside his apartment near the center of the city, he practiced on a vibraphone, taking shelter in a corridor when air-raid sirens sounded.“We didn’t know what to do — should we stay or should we leave?” he said. “What if the Russian army came to Kyiv? Would we ever be able to play again?”‘Half of me is in Ukraine, and half of me is outside.’Before the orchestra’s first concert, late last month in Warsaw, Vikhrova and Dovbysh were anxious.They had spent more than a week rehearsing the program, which included pieces by Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin and Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s most famous living composer. But they were unsure how the audience might react. And they were grappling with their fears about the war.Vikhrova had been trying to build a new life in the Czech Republic with their daughter, joining a local orchestra. But she worried about her husband’s safety “every second, every minute, every hour,” she said. She slept near her phone so that she would be woken up by warnings about air raids in Odessa. She grew anxious after one attack there before Easter, when her husband saw Russian missiles in the sky but had no time to take shelter. To take her mind off the war, she played Bach and traditional Ukrainian songs.On their first evening together in five months, Yevgen Dovbysh and Anna Vikhrova, a married couple who were parted by the war and reunited to play together in the orchestra, attended a welcoming party for the new ensemble at Warsaw’s opera house, the Wielki Theater. Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesHolding her husband’s hand backstage, Vikhrova said she longed for the day when they could return to Ukraine with their daughter, who was staying with her mother in the Czech Republic for the duration of the tour.“I feel like I’m leading a double life,” she said. “Half of me is in Ukraine, and half of me is outside.”Dovbysh remembered the fear in his daughter’s eyes when she and her mother left Odessa in February. He recalled taking time to explain the war and telling her she would be safe. He promised they would see each other again soon.When the tour ends this week and his military exemption expires, he is scheduled to return to Odessa. It is unclear when he will be able to see his family again.“Every day,” he said, “I dream of the moment when we can see each other again.”‘We live with a constant sense of worry.’As the war drags on, the musicians have at times struggled to keep their focus. They spend much of their free time checking their phones for news of Russian attacks, sending warnings to relatives.Marko Komonko, 46, the orchestra’s concertmaster, said it was agonizing to watch the war from a distance, likening the experience to a parent caring for an ill child. He fled Ukraine in March for Sweden, where he now plays in the orchestra at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm.“We live with a constant sense of worry,” he said.“We live with a constant sense of worry,” said Marko Komonko, the concert master, far right. Komonko, who now plays at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, was joined at a rehearsal by Ustym Zhuk, who plays the viola, far left, and Adrian Bodnar a violinist, center. Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesFor more than two months after the invasion, he said, he felt nothing when he played his violin. Then, in early May, he began to feel a mix of sadness and hope when he performed a Ukrainian folk melody at a concert in Stockholm.For some, playing in the orchestra has strengthened a sense of Ukrainian identity. Alisa Kuznetsova, 30, was in Russia when the war began; since 2019, she had worked as a violinist in the Mariinsky Orchestra. In late March, she resigned from the orchestra in protest and moved to Tallinn, Estonia, where she began playing in the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra.When she joined the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, she initially felt guilty, she said, worried that the other players would see her as a traitor because of her work in Russia. But she said her colleagues had reassured her that she was welcome.“For my soul, for my heart,” she said, “this has been really important.”In European cultural capitals, the orchestra has been greeted with standing ovations and positive reviews from critics.“A stirring show of Ukrainian defiance,” a review in The Daily Telegraph said of the orchestra’s performance at the Proms, the BBC’s classical music festival. The Guardian wrote of “tears and roars of delight” for the new ensemble.The players got a standing ovation, their first of many on the tour, at their first performance in Warsaw. Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesBut the musicians say the measure of success will not be reviews, but their ability to shine a light on Ukraine and showcase a cultural identity that Russia has tried to erase.Nazarii Stets, 31, a double bass player from Kyiv, has been redoubling his efforts to build a digital library of scores by Ukrainian composers, so their music can be widely downloaded and performed. He plays in the Kyiv Kamerata, a national ensemble devoted to contemporary Ukrainian music.“If we are not fighting for culture,” he said, “then what is the point of fighting?”Wilson, who came up with the idea for the orchestra in March and plans to revive it next summer, said she made a point of featuring Silvestrov’s symphony as a way of promoting Ukrainian culture. Near the end of the piece, the composer wrote a series of breathing sounds for the brass, an effect meant to mimic the last breaths of his wife.Wilson, who dedicated the piece to Ukrainians killed in the war, said she instructed the orchestra to think of the sounds not as death, but as life.“It’s the breath of life, to show that their spirits go on,” she said in an interview.Vikhrova said the tour had brought her closer to her husband and her fellow players. She cries after each performance of the Silvestrov symphony, and when the orchestra plays an arrangement of the Ukrainian national anthem as an encore.“This has connected our hearts,” she said. “We feel part of something bigger than ourselves.”Anna Tsybko contributed reporting. More

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      Climate Change Threatens Summer Stages and Outdoor Performances

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      ASHLAND, Ore. — Smoke from a raging wildfire in California prompted the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to cancel a recent performance of “The Tempest” at its open-air theater. Record flooding in St. Louis forced the cancellation of an outdoor performance of “Legally Blonde.” And after heat and smoke at an outdoor Pearl Jam concert in France damaged the throat of its lead singer, Eddie Vedder, the band canceled several shows.Around the world, rising temperatures, raging wildfires and extreme weather are imperiling whole communities. This summer, climate change is also endangering a treasured pastime: outdoor performance.Here in the Rogue Valley, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is seeing an existential threat from ever-more-common wildfires. In 2018 it canceled 25 performances because of wildfire smoke. In 2020, while the theater was shut down by the pandemic, a massive fire destroyed 2,600 local homes, including those of several staffers. When the festival reopened last year with a one-woman show about the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, wildfire smoke forced it to cancel almost every performance in August.“The problem is that in recent years there have been fires in British Columbia and in the mountains in Washington State and fires as far as Los Angeles,” said Nataki Garrett, the festival’s artistic director. “You have fire up and down the West Coast, and all of that is seeping into the valley.”Even before this year’s fire season began, the festival moved the nightly start time of its outdoor performances later because of extreme heat.Wildfires, which generate smoke that pollute air quality over long distances, have already begun burning this year in parts of Europe and the United States. In July, the Oak fire raged near Yosemite National Park.David McNew/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRecord rainfall in the St. Louis area caused flash flooding. Among the effects: The Muny, a major outdoor musical theater, had to cancel a performance of “Legally Blonde” because of flooding on its campus.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressAshland is not the only outdoor theater canceling performances because of wildfires. Smoke or fire conditions have also prompted cancellations in recent years at the Butterfly Effect Theater of Colorado; the California Shakespeare Theater, known as Cal Shakes; the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival in Nevada and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., among others.“We are one giant ecosystem, and what happens in one place affects everywhere,” said Robert K. Meya, the general director of the Santa Fe Opera, which stages open-air productions against a striking desert backdrop each summer, and which, in an era of massive wildfires near and far, has installed sensors to gauge whether it is safe to perform.The reports of worsening conditions come from wide swaths of the country. “Last summer was the hardest summer I’ve experienced out here, because fires came early, and coupled with that were pretty severe heat indexes,” said Kevin Asselin, executive artistic director of Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, which stages free performances in rural communities in five Rocky Mountain West states, and has increasingly been forced indoors. “And the hailstorms this year have been out of control.”Road signs in Ashland, Ore., guide drivers along wildfire evacuation routes.Kristina Barker for The New York TimesIn southern Ohio, a growing number of performances of an annual history play called “Tecumseh!” have been canceled because of heavy rain. In northwest Arkansas, rising heat is afflicting “The Great Passion Play,” an annual re-enactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In Texas, record heat forced the Austin Symphony Orchestra to cancel several outdoor chamber concerts. And in western Massachusetts, at Tanglewood, the bucolic summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, more shade trees have been planted on the sweeping lawn to provide relief on hot days.“Changing weather patterns with more frequent and severe storms have altered the Tanglewood landscape on a scale not previously experienced,” the orchestra said in a statement.On Sunday, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of the nation’s first major climate law, which, if enacted into law, would seek to bring about major reductions in greenhouse pollution. Arts presenters, meanwhile, are grappling with how to preserve outdoor productions, both short-term and long-term, as the planet warms.“We’re in a world that we have never been in as a species, and we’re going into a world that is completely foreign and new and will be challenging us in ways we can only dimly see right now,” said Kim Cobb, the director of the environment and society institute at Brown University.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is an important driver of the local economy, but smoke and heat associated with climate change have become a growing challenge.Kristina Barker for The New York TimesSome venues are taking elaborate precautions. The American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wis., now requires performers to wear wicking undergarments when the heat and humidity rise, encourages actors to consume second act sports drinks, and asks costume designers to eliminate wigs, jackets and other heavy outerwear on hot days.Many outdoor performing venues say that, even as they are bracing for the effects of climate change, they are also trying to limit the ways that they contribute to it. The Santa Fe Opera is investing in solar energy; the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is planting native meadows; and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is using electric vehicles.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which before the pandemic had been one of the largest nonprofit theaters in the country, is, in many ways, patient zero. The theater is central to the local economy — the downtown features establishments with names like the Bard’s Inn and Salon Juliet. But the theater’s location, in the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon, has repeatedly been subject to high levels of wildfire smoke in recent years.At the Santa Fe Opera, which offers majestic desert views at sunset, concern about wildfire smoke prompted officials to install air quality sensors. Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesThe theater, like many, has installed air quality monitors — there’s one in a niche in the wall that encircles the audience in the open-air Allen Elizabethan Theater, where this summer “The Tempest” is alternating with a new musical called “Revenge Song.” The device is visible only to the keenest of eyes: a small cylindrical white gadget with lasers that count particles in the passing breeze.The theater also has a smoke team that holds a daily meeting during fire season, assessing whether to cancel or proceed. The theater’s director of production, Alys E. Holden, said that, ever since the time she opposed canceling a performance mid-show and later learned a technician had thrown up because of the air pollution, she has replaced her “show must go on” ethos with “If it’s too unsafe to play, you don’t play.”This year the festival reduced the number of outdoor performances scheduled in August — generally, but not always, the smokiest month.Air quality monitors, now in use at many Western venues including the Santa Fe Opera, can help presenters protect not only audience members but also performers. The opera is particularly concerned about its singers.Ramsay de Give for The New York Times“Actors are breathing in huge amounts of air to project out for hours — it’s not a trivial event to breathe this stuff in, and their voices are blown the next day if we blow the call,” Holden said. “So we are canceling to preserve everyone’s health, and to preserve the next show.”Wildfire-related air quality has become an issue for venues throughout the West. “It’s constantly on our mind, especially as fire season seems to start earlier and earlier,” said Ralph Flores, the senior program manager for theater and performance at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which has a 500-seat outdoor theater at the Getty Villa.Air quality concerns sometimes surprise patrons on days when pollution is present, but can’t be readily smelled or seen.“The idea that outdoor performance would be affected or disrupted by what’s happening with the Air Quality Index is still a fairly new and forward concept to a lot of people,” said Stephen Weitz, the producing artistic director at the Butterfly Effect Theater of Colorado, which stages free shows in parks and parking lots. Last summer the theater had to cancel a performance because of poor air quality caused by a faraway fire.The coronavirus pandemic also remains a concern, prompting crew members in Santa Fe to wear masks as they met before a performance of Bizet’s “Carmen.”Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesAnother theater there, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, is now working with scientists at the affiliated University of Colorado Boulder on monitoring and health protocols after a fire more than a thousand miles away in Oregon polluted the local air badly enough to force a show cancellation last summer. Tim Orr, the festival’s producing artistic director, recalled breaking the news to the audience.“The looks on their faces were surprise, and shock, but a lot of people came up and said ‘Thank you for making the right choice,’” he said. “And when I stepped offstage, I thought, ‘Is this going to be a regular part of our future?’”Planning for the future, for venues that present out of doors, now invariably means thinking about climate change.The Santa Fe Opera’s stunning outdoor location is one of its great attributes, but also makes it vulnerable to climate change.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesOskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which produces Free Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park, said that the 2021 summer season, when the theater reopened after the pandemic shutdown, was the rainiest in his two decades there. “I could imagine performing more in the fall and spring, and less in the summer,” he said.In some places, theater leaders are already envisioning a future in which performances all move indoors.“We’re not going to have outdoor theater in Boise forever — I don’t think there’s a chance of that,” said Charles Fee, who is the producing artistic director of three collaborating nonprofits: the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland. Fee has asked the Idaho board to plan for an indoor theater in Boise.“Once it’s 110 degrees at 6 o’clock at night, and we have these occasionally already, people are sick,” he said. “You can’t do the big Shakespeare fight, you can’t do the dances in ‘Mamma Mia.’ And you can’t do that to an audience.” More

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      In the Theater, Workers Are Demanding Better Conditions

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      Getting to play Cinderella in a Broadway revival of “Into the Woods” sounds like a young musical theater performer’s dream, until you break your neck doing the pratfalls built into the role.That’s what Laura Benanti says happened to her in 2002. “I was a 22-year-old girl who didn’t know how to say ‘this doesn’t feel safe to me,’” she wrote on her Instagram page nearly two decades later, after suffering “intense pain every single day for seven years,” two surgeries and much heartbreak.At the time, people bad-mouthed her for missing performances.Disastrous tumbles and physical danger are so much a part of theater history that they’ve become treasured backstage lore instead of causes for concern. I am ashamed to admit to laughing when I read about the dancer who fell into the “Anyone Can Whistle” orchestra pit in 1964, landing on a saxophone player, who promptly died. In 1991 we all gossiped merrily when the tempestuous Nicol Williamson ignored his fight choreography in “I Hate Hamlet” and struck his co-star Evan Handler with a sword. (Handler quit; Williamson got applause.) For much of the early 2010s, the mayhem of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” was an endless source of schadenfreude.Laura Benanti as Cinderella in the 2002 Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut concussions, broken ribs, a fractured skull, a crushed leg and an amputated foot — those are just the “Spider-Man” injuries — aren’t actually funny. And they are only the most visible part of the story of harm endured by theater workers onstage and off. In return for the privilege of scraping by in a field they love, they are commonly expected to endanger themselves physically and emotionally.They dance till they drop. They work punishing hours. They strip themselves, often literally, and enact trauma over and over. If they are parents and nevertheless insist on sleeping more than five hours a night, they may see their children — as Amber Gray, a star in the original cast of “Hadestown,” told me — barely more than 50 minutes a day.The pandemic put a temporary end to all that, reuniting families and helping injuries heal. The pause also gave theater workers, perhaps for the first time ever, plenty of time to consider the lives their profession requires them to lead. It’s no surprise that, as theaters reopened, calls for change therefore emerged with greater urgency. This summer I’ve been grappling with those demands, and in earlier parts of this series I’ve looked at ridding the art form of the “great man” inheritance that built cruelty into its DNA and the movement for fair pay.But getting back to business has also reminded show people of the specific weirdness of their work. In sync with the resurgence of labor activism nationwide, actors, dancers, stage managers, technicians and others have been questioning the nuts and bolts of their contracts — both the documents that detail their jobs and the wider assumptions about what they owe an audience. Can the theater, they ask, find a way to uphold them more holistically as humans, even as they continue to gut themselves every night?Some people will not even agree that it should. The idea that theater is a calling, not a job, and that the two categories are mutually exclusive, is so ingrained in the industry’s ethos — not to mention its business model — that demands for shorter working days, more understudies, intimacy coordinators, mental health stipends, child care reimbursements and other accommodations are often met with doubt or derision. Caring for actors, some say, is coddling. Suffering is a badge of honor, and the theater is properly a purple-heart club.Amber Gray received a Tony Award nomination in 2019 for playing Persephone in “Hadestown.” She said her schedule began to make her feel like “a deadbeat mom.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat indoctrination goes deep. Stanislavski saw his students as votaries in an ascetic cult. The men who created the dominant forms of American theater assembled their power by extorting it from others. Musicals have often romanticized the idea that a good artist is a starving one. And Broadway dancers, many trained in a system even more repressive than the theater’s, have traditionally been expected to perform like robots, retire early and shut up in between.Perhaps the most pervasive and pernicious maxim is the one that says the show must go on — no matter what. Work rules that would seem ludicrous in any other business are, in the theater, built into the contracts. Performers represented by Actors’ Equity Association, the national labor union for actors and stage managers, are typically engaged for eight-show weeks, but productions can increase that number under certain circumstances. During holiday seasons, many offer 10-show schedules, and nonunion gigs can exceed even that.Another rule, governing the number of hours a company can work during technical rehearsals, is so reviled it has been the subject of a 2015 backstage comedy. In Anne Washburn’s “10 out of 12” — named for the clause in Equity contracts that permits 12-hour days if there are two hours off — the under-slept and daylight-deprived company of an absurd plantation melodrama undergoes a kind of mass psychosis while the tech teams adjust lights and scenery.The ReformationThe world is changing, and so is the theater. Our chief critic looks at how.Sacred Monsters: Is it time to cut loose the “great men” who helped America create its classics and its institutions?Paying Dues: Poverty is part of the identity, even the glamour, of the theater. It’s not sustainable.The Hard-Knock Life: The physical risks of the theater have many demanding their basic needs as humans.It’s not fiction. Kate Shindle, the president of Equity, has lived it herself. As a working actor she spent part of 2018 at a regional theater having “an awesome creative experience,” she told me in an email. (She declined to name the theater.) “But the schedule was no joke. On the longest days, I left my apartment at 9 a.m. and didn’t return home until after 1 a.m. And to be clear, the employer wasn’t bending or breaking work rules. This is the intensity that the American theater has been relying on for generations. The workers have helped sustain a model that simply needs to be rewritten.”At its annual convention last year, Equity delegates endorsed the elimination of 10 out of 12s — along with five-show weekend-performance schedules and six-day workweeks. But while these were just recommendations for future contract negotiations, some theaters have already begun to experiment with the ideas.For Donya K. Washington, the festival producer at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the experiment has its roots in 2016. It was then, while working at a different theater, that a production department head told her how the 12-hour tech calls for actors were nothing compared to what he experienced. To manage his crew, implement changes and debrief later, he arrived at the theater well before the cast and stayed well after. As a result, he was working 16-hour days for days at a time.“That’s not sustainable,” Washington said in a recent Zoom conversation. “I didn’t know what to do about it, but it stuck in my head.”After arriving in Oregon in 2019, where she was drafted onto the team creating the intensely complicated schedule that allows a repertory company to function, she started looking for ways to eliminate the 10 out of 12s. It was then that a worker “began proselytizing” for another quality-of-life improvement: the five-day workweek. “We had just finished building the calendar for the 2021 season, and my brain broke,” Washington said.But the pandemic — which closed the festival’s theaters for 14 months — gave her time to think. Over the course of 50 calendar drafts, she played with the parameters. What if the company produced five shows instead of the usual 11? What if they mounted one show at a time instead of several in rep? In one of those passes, since the exercise “wasn’t real anyway,” she decided to see if “you could do a five-day, 40-hour week and still get a production up. And lo and behold you could.”On a spreadsheet, anyway. In reality, when the festival fully reopened this April, the five-day week was not quite attainable. (They got as low as five-and-a-half.) But Washington feels it will be possible in the future, by adding about two additional weeks of rehearsals per show to make up for the lost time. The cost, she said, “would not be ginormous.” Already 10 out of 12s have been eliminated without trouble, reduced to 8 out of 10s — a step in the right direction. “And even if just from a business perspective it makes sense,” Washington added, because happier, healthier, better-rested companies produce a better product.“Sometimes we have a mind-set of doing something for the sake of doing it, because that’s how it’s always been done,” she said. “But step by step we have to retrain ourselves. And not just actors. Even I have to remind myself I’m not supposed to work seven days a week!”When I pointed out that we were having this conversation on a Sunday afternoon, Washington smiled and shrugged.The theater is unlikely to become a model workplace anytime soon. It’s always going to be a very tough life choice for most people. But who gets to make that choice is one of the things at stake in the calls for bettering a work-life balance that more often presents itself as a work-nonwork nightmare. Those who can’t afford to be penniless must generally opt out of theatrical careers, and if they do get a job they can’t afford to complain.Among that group, traditionally, have been parents of young children. Even if you have a stay-at-home partner or the means to hire full-time care, the mismatched hours of a baby’s schedule and an actor’s can be unbearable. Gray, the “Hadestown” star, was horrified to find that her older son, now 6, at some point started to cry whenever she sang, having learned to associate the sound with her going away. “It’s brutal,” she said, “when your child hates what you do. I felt like a deadbeat mom.”From left, Satomi Blair, Tina Chilip and Maechi Aharanwa in Playwrights Realm’s 2019 production of “Mothers.” The company created a pilot program during the 2019-20 season to accommodate parents.Richard Termine for The New York TimesNot that working while pregnant was less worrisome. “We sign contracts that say we must always be able to fit the costume,” she told me, adding that she hid her second pregnancy “because there are so many stigmas.”But general acclaim for her performance in “Hadestown” — and a 2019 Tony Award nomination to cap it — emboldened her when her contract was up for renewal. “I asked for an alternate for the Sunday matinee and Tuesday night, so that I could be home at least one day when my kids are too.” Previously, like most actors, her only day off was a Monday.When the producers, to her surprise, said yes, Gray found that the block of three days off, Sunday through Tuesday, made a huge difference. Finally getting enough sleep, she could “bang out” her two-show Wednesday “like nothing.” Her partner felt supported, she could play with her children, she could see other people’s work and attend the galas where connections are made. And even though the pandemic soon shut down that arrangement, it remains a model. Elizabeth Stanley, the star of “Jagged Little Pill,” made a similar deal when she returned to that show from maternity leave, splitting the role of Mary Jane with her friend Heidi Blickenstaff.These are, so far, one-off solutions, available to women considered important to the commercial success of a show. To test whether the idea of supporting parents could work in the nonprofit sector, the Playwrights Realm, an Off Broadway company devoted to early-career playwrights, created a pilot program called the Radical Parent-Inclusion Project. Roberta Pereira, the Realm’s executive director, explained that during the 2019-20 season, which included a production of Anna Moench’s “Mothers,” the company basically tried every possible accommodation to make parents welcome not only onstage and backstage but also in the audience.Among those accommodations was a caretaker reimbursement of up to $750, available to anyone working on the theater’s programming that season. (The credit was good for any kind of caretaking, including eldercare.) Rehearsals were cut back to 30 hours over the course of five days from 36 hours in six, necessitating an extra week to make up the difference. Broadway Babysitters, an arts-focused child care company, was hired to mind children during open auditions and callbacks, and a 4 p.m. matinee was added to the schedule. “For children who are younger and take naps,” Pereira said, “that was a much better time than 2 p.m.”The free child care was not just for performers, by the way; audience members brought a total of 22 children, half of them less than a year old, to the matinee — which perhaps as a result sold out.“Not that every theater should try this at the level we did,” Pereira said, “but you could see which things work for you. Some cost nothing, some cost a lot.” In all, the season’s caretaking enhancements added about $38,000 to the company’s $1.3 million budget, most of it covered by increased grants from its usual funders. That’s in line with what PAAL, the Parent Artist Advocacy League for Performing Arts and Media, has found at other theaters experimenting with child care programs. For Elevator Repair Service, a New York-based company, the cost of those programs amounted to less than 2 percent of the budget, PAAL reported.As a result, Pereira said, actors who effectively used to pay to be in a show — or just to audition for it — may no longer have to make the choice between plays and parenting.For the 2019 Broadway production of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon worked with an intimacy director, who helped stage the nude scenes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAchieving a better work-life balance is something you might expect to read about in emails from the human relations departments of companies promoting Yoga Thursdays. And though by no means common in American business, child care stipends are at least a familiar concept. But some of the other changes happening in the theater are intensely specific to the needs of the stage.One is the growing presence of intimacy directors, who help shape moments of physical contact in ways that feel safe to the people performing them. Intimacy Directors & Coordinators, one of several organizations created to further the field, defines its aim as the creation of “a culture of consent” in storytelling. Though that culture was traditionally the responsibility of a show’s director, the history of abuse in rehearsal and production has led many actors to advocate for the hiring of dedicated professionals on every show where the subject may come up — which is to say, virtually all of them.“To not have someone in that position is asking for trouble,” Audra McDonald told me in a recent phone interview. She first worked with an intimacy director in 2019, when Claire Warden helped stage the nude scenes and other physical interactions between her and her co-star, Michael Shannon, in “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” Having been in previous situations where she felt she “didn’t have the right to speak up about what was happening,” McDonald found Warden’s presence “revelatory.”“Knowing what the boundaries and parameters were for what Michael and I had to go through on that stage, we could push up against them as hard as we possibly could while knowing what lines not to cross,” she said. “It’s about knowing where the bottom of the pool is, so you feel safer about diving all the way down and then swimming as fearlessly and fiercely as you want.”“Pass Over,” Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s harrowing play about the precarious lives of two young Black men, also had an intimacy coordinator, Ann James. But its producers offered the cast another protection against the potential trauma of the story: a mental health allowance.From left, Jon Michael Hill, Gabriel Ebert and Namir Smallwood in “Pass Over.” They had access to a “health and wellness” allowance during the play’s Broadway run last year.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe allowance permitted actors to seek reimbursements of up to $250 a week for expenses deemed beneficial to their “health and wellness as it relates to performing this show eight times a week,” the policy stated. Matt Ross, the lead producer, added that the definition of “health and wellness” was deliberately broad; it could mean, for instance, a therapist or a voice lesson or a massage.Cody Renard Richard, the production stage manager, said it was only fitting to offer that support. “From their first class, actors have been asked to bring their traumas into a certain space, been nagged to call up personal stuff so they can cry in a scene. To ask them to open their wounds like that and not give them the help to deal with the result is incredibly unfair.”The additional cost of the mental health stipend, along with the production’s intimacy coordinator and the equity, diversity and inclusion consultant, Nicole Johnson, was “minuscule,” Ross said. “Probably less than 1 percent of the overall weekly costs.”But low cost is not the main selling point for advocates of such changes; undoing the harm built into the system is. And one of the reasons there is so much resistance to what seem like obviously worthy goals is that the harm has never been evenly distributed. When I spoke to Wayne Cilento, who originated the song “I Can Do That” in the 1975 musical “A Chorus Line,” he seemed proud of his ability to work on that show despite what he described as constant back and knee injuries. Later, in Bob Fosse’s “Dancin’,” which earned Cilento a Tony Award nomination in 1978, he missed only two performances in one-and-a-half years “while other people who didn’t have my urgency were dropping all around,” he said. “Stepping out was not my way.”From left, Jovan Dansberrry, Khori Michelle Petinaud, Manuel Herrera, Dylis Croman, Ron Todorowski and Jacob Guzman in a revival of “Dancin’” at San Diego’s Old Globe this spring.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesStill, in preparing to direct and choreograph a revival of “Dancin’” for Broadway, he said he was more conscious of looking out for his dancers than Fosse was. (Fosse “never had a conversation about how’s your back or how’s your hamstring.”) For the tryout at San Diego’s Old Globe this spring, he cut the material from three acts to two and divvied up “his” track — the sequence of dances he’d done in the original production — among several men because it now seemed too much to ask of just one. For the planned 2023 Broadway production, he is rethinking the number of swings and covers to step into any role at any time so that injured dancers will feel less pressure to perform. And he is much more collaborative with the ensemble than Fosse was with him.“But it’s a fine line,” he said. “Incorporating the ensemble in the conversation makes them feel trusted and cared for, and it’s good for the show. But — this sounds awful — even though I want to hear your problems, at some point I don’t want to. The bottom line is: What you have to do for the show is what you have to do for the show. And the director, the choreographer, is the one who decides what that is.”Cilento is touching on a problem that underlies the uneasiness some people feel about the changes advocates are seeking. So much of what we are used to in the theater, so much of it thrilling, is ultimately the result of individual virtuosity being inspired by individual vision, even if the individual with the vision is a tyrant. When everyone is equally empowered what happens to it? If the theater ever does become a worker’s paradise, will it still produce heavenly art?Another source of unease is that those of us — I include myself — who grew up in the harsh, sometimes inhumane ways of thinking about the theater may have developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome. About the harshness we are blasé or even sentimental. When, in “A Chorus Line,” Cilento sang, with the rest of the ensemble, “What I Did for Love,” we understood the response to be: Everything. Anything. The gift was ours to borrow.Now I’m pretty sure that’s not the right answer. More

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      Ford and Mellon Foundations Announce 2022 Disability Futures Fellows

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      A Broadway actress, documentary filmmaker and DC comic artist are among this year’s recipients. They were selected by fellow disabled artists from a pool of about 60 nominees.Nasreen Alkhateeb, a filmmaker who has documented Kamala Harris on the campaign trail; Antoine Hunter, also known as Purple Fire Crow, a Deaf, Indigenous choreographer whose work has been performed around the world; and Tee Franklin, who is writing new Harley Quinn comics for DC, are among the second class of disability futures fellows, the Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations announced on Wednesday.The fellowship provides 20 disabled U.S. artists, filmmakers and journalists with unrestricted $50,000 grants administered by the arts funding group United States Artists. They are chosen by peer advisers who are themselves disabled artists. The fellowship supports people at all stages of their careers, and the class includes emerging and established artists.One grant recipient, Corbett Joan O’Toole, 70, an activist and historian who was featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Crip Camp,” said, “I’m really shocked.”“I do a lot of good work, but it’s not necessarily the prominent stuff,” she said. “It’s networking, providing resources for people, filling in the gaps.”This is the second class of fellows in the program, which was established in 2020 as part of an effort to increase the visibility and elevate the voices of disabled artists. Originally conceived as an 18-month initiative, the foundations announced last year that they would commit an additional $5 million to support the program through 2025.About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Dickie Hearts, a Deaf, gay and BIPOC actor and filmmaker known for his recurring role in Netflix’s San Francisco-set series “Tales of the City,” said he hoped to use the funding to produce a live version of an original concept musical in American Sign Language that he had directed remotely on Zoom during the pandemic.“I would love to see more deaf people behind the scenes, as well as onscreen,” he said in a video interview this week, which was conducted with the assistance of an ASL interpreter. “I want to see more creative executives, deaf directors,” executive producers and writers.The grants offer flexible compensation options. The money can be distributed in a lump sum, in payments or even be deferred, depending on what works best for the artist.Also among the recipients are Alexandria Wailes, a deaf actor who recently portrayed the Lady in Purple in the Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf”; JJJJJerome Ellis, a composer and poet who has a stutter (the reason for the repeated J’s in his name) and produces work about stuttering and Blackness; and Wendy Lu, a journalist and disability rights advocate who was recently hired as an editor by The New York Times.“I’m working on a book that’s coming out next year, playing concerts again, dancing more — it’s so exciting to be back working live,” said Ellis, 33, who about a year and a half ago moved back to Virginia, where he grew up, from New York.The inaugural class of fellows included the choreographer Alice Sheppard, the filmmaker Jim LeBrecht and the journalist Alice Wong.The Ford and Mellon Foundations are planning to invite people in the philanthropy and cultural sectors to learn from fellows and disability arts leaders at a symposium in New York in 2025, and fellows will be invited to a networking retreat in 2024. More

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      Far From Kabul, Building a New Life, With Music and Hope

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      LISBON — On some nights, when her dorm room here turns dark and the church bells stop ringing, the young trumpet player thinks about the distant afternoon when her uncle took her to the graveyard to gather stones.That was in Afghanistan, in the chaotic days after the United States withdrew last year and the Taliban reasserted control. Her uncle had insisted that they pay respects at the family cemetery before they packed their bags with walnuts and spices and books of poems by Rumi, before they began their lives as refugees.Standing by the graves, she watched as her uncle closed his eyes and listened to the wind. The ancestors, he said, were displeased with their decision to leave Afghanistan. Even the stones, he said, seemed to speak, urging them to stay.Zohra Ahmadi, 13, could not hear the voices her uncle described. But as she scooped rocks and soil from the cemetery into a plastic container, following her uncle’s instructions, she said she heeded his words, and vowed one day to return.CULTURE, DISPLACED A series exploring the lives and work of artists driven far from their homelands amid the growing global refugee crisis.On a sweltering May morning, when the sun had already melted buckets of ice at the seafood market and the priests at Nossa Senhora da Ajuda church were just beginning their morning verses, a series of unfamiliar sounds emanated from the top of a former military hospital in western Lisbon.The Afghanistan National Institute of MusicThe orchestra gathers for one of its first rehearsals since its members left Kabul for Lisbon.The strumming of a sitar, the pounding of tablas, the plucking of a violin — these were coming from the hospital, now the makeshift home of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. More than two dozen of its young musicians had gathered for one of their first rehearsals since arriving as refugees in December.Under the American-backed government in Kabul, the institute, which opened in 2010, had flourished, becoming a symbol of Afghanistan’s changing identity. It was a rare coeducational establishment in a country where boys and girls were often kept separate. While many programs focused exclusively on Afghan culture or Western music, it embraced both, preparing hundreds of young artists, many of them orphans and street hawkers, for careers in the performing arts.Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the school’s leader, on the compound’s roof.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesMusic students playing soccer at the compound.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe Taliban had long treated it as a threat. Fearing for their safety, more than 250 students and teachers as well as their relatives, fled Afghanistan and sought shelter abroad in the months after the American withdrawal, eventually arriving in Portugal, where they were all granted asylum. In their absence, the Taliban commandeered the institute, damaging instruments and turning classrooms into offices and dorms.As students prepared to make music that morning, Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the school’s leader, spoke about the role they could play in countering the Taliban, a presence even in the rehearsal room, with news of starvation, violence and persecution back home lighting up the students’ phones.“We can show the world a different Afghanistan,” said Sarmast, who was wounded by a Taliban suicide bomber who infiltrated a school play in 2014. “We will show how we can raise the voices of our people. We will show where we stand.”The orchestra rehearses in Lisbon. After the students fled Kabul, the Taliban commandeered their school and damaged instruments.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe students readied their instruments. First, they played a popular Afghan song, “Sarzamin-e Man,” or “My Homeland.” Then they turned to a new work, “A Land Out of Earth?” written by a conductor of the orchestra, Mohammad Qambar Nawshad. He explained the inspiration for his piece: Aug. 15, 2021, the day the Taliban seized Kabul. He had stayed home, scared and shaking.“That was the day everyone left us alone, and we were in the hands of evil,” he said. “There was no longer any guarantee that a team of Taliban would not come search for each of us and kill us.”Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.He lifted his arms, locked eyes with the students, and the room filled with the sounds of violin and sitar.‘My Homeland’The orchestra plays a passage of a popular Afghan song, “Sarzamin-e Man,” or “My Homeland.”First, it was the music of Tchaikovsky that captured Zohra’s imagination: the Neapolitan Dance from “Swan Lake,” which she liked to play on repeat as she danced around her room. Then she fell for more popular fare: big-band hits and standards by the singer Ahmad Zahir, the “Afghan Elvis.”By 9, Zohra was convinced: She wanted to be a professional musician — and a ballerina, a mathematician and a physicist. She decided to start with the trumpet. Her parents enrolled her at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, sending her from her native Ghazni Province, in southeastern Afghanistan, to Kabul to live with her uncle.She excelled at her music studies, mastering Afghan folk songs as well as classical works. But when the Taliban took power last year, her trumpet became a liability.Zohra was convinced from a young age that she wanted to be a professional musician.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe Taliban had banned nonreligious music when it last held power, from 1996 to 2001. In the weeks after the American withdrawal, Taliban fighters harassed and intimidated musicians, and pressured radio stations, wedding halls and karaoke parlors to stop playing nonreligious songs.Zohra’s relatives worried she would be punished if she were caught playing her trumpet. In August, her uncle sent the instrument back to Zohra’s mother in Ghazni, along with a violin, a flute and a harmonium.“We didn’t want to keep anything in Kabul that showed we were playing music,” Zohra said. “I didn’t know what could happen to me if I were caught.”The books and paintings inside their home were also a risk, her uncle had determined. One night, in the wood stove they used to keep warm in the winter, he burned the family’s most prized possessions: works by Freud, novels by Salman Rushdie and portraits that his brother had painted.Zohra tried not to watch, running from the fire. But from a distance, she caught glimpses of her favorite books being destroyed. “My heart,” she said, “was burning.”Juma Ahmadi, Zohra’s uncle, in his room at the former military hospital.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesIn Portugal, the Afghans enjoy newfound freedoms. The boys and girls can go swimming together. They can date. The girls can wear shorts and skirts without fear of judgment. The older students can drink alcohol.But life in Lisbon has also been a challenge. The students spend their days largely inside the military hospital, where they eat, sleep, rehearse, wash clothes and play table tennis, nervous about venturing too far or making new friends. Unaccustomed to Portuguese food, they keep bottles of curry, cardamom and peppercorn in their rooms to add familiar flavors to traditional dishes, like grilled sardines and scrambled eggs with smoked sausage.On weekdays, they go to a local school for special classes in Portuguese and history, practicing phrases like “Bom dia” and “Obrigado” and learning about the country’s Roman Catholic heritage.Some students, including Mohammad Sorosh Reka, 16, a sitar player, made the 5,000-mile journey to Portugal alone. He has watched from a distance as friends and family share news of bomb attacks, mass unemployment and corruption scandals.Sorosh Warms UpAt an afternoon sitar class, Sorosh plays a traditional Afghan song.In phone calls and WhatsApp messages, Sorosh tells his family to stay strong and to imagine a day when the Taliban loses power. Not wanting to add to his families’ troubles, he avoids speaking about the challenges he faces adapting to life in Portugal. He wears a golden ring that his mother gave him two days before he left Afghanistan, to remember his family.“Sometimes they’re giving me hope,” he said, “and sometimes I’m giving them hope.”Mohammad Sorosh Reka, 16, with his sitar at the compound. “Sometimes they’re giving me hope,” he said of his family in Afghanistan, “and sometimes I’m giving them hope.”Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesHe blames the United States and its allies, at least in part, for the turmoil in his home country.“They were our friends and helping us, telling us they were here to help us at any time,” Sorosh said. “When the Taliban took Afghanistan, they just left and disappeared. That’s why we are very hopeless and sad.”At night, the students often dream about Afghanistan. Amanullah Noori, 17, the concertmaster of the school orchestra, has recurring nightmares about Taliban attackers, armed with guns, descending on his parents’ home in Kabul. Sometimes he dreams about trying to return to Afghanistan, only to be blocked by the Taliban.He receives messages from friends back in Afghanistan, fellow musicians who have given up their careers because of Taliban restrictions on playing music. They tell him they have hidden their instruments inside closets and cellars, fearing they might be attacked for being artists.“The Taliban doesn’t want to hear music anymore,” Amanullah said. “They want a world that is silent.”Embracing Afghan IdentityStudents from a sitar ensemble play traditional songs, part of their effort to preserve Afghan culture.For months on end last fall, Zohra was trapped in Kabul, unable to get a passport to leave Afghanistan.She watched with envy as her classmates fled for Doha on special flights arranged by the government of Qatar. (A global network of philanthropists, artists, educators and officials helped the school get its students and staff, and their relatives, to safety.)As the weeks stretched on, Zohra began to doubt whether she would ever be able to join her friends and teachers. She remembered the days in Kabul when she and her classmates played music late into the night and sang together in the school choir.At her uncle’s home, Zohra passed the time by learning to weave handkerchiefs, bags and scarves. There were only a few books left in the home, which she read so many times, she said, that she could recite some passages by memory.Sometimes, when no one was watching, she said she put her hands in the air and pretended to play her trumpet.“I could hear it in my head,” she said, “just like when I was in the practice room.”Farida Ahmadi, left, and her cousin Zohra, in their room at the compound. When the Taliban took power last year back home, Zohra’s trumpet became a liability.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThen, in mid-November, nearly three months after the Taliban seized power, Zohra, her uncle, Juma Ahmadi, and her cousin, Farida, 13, who also studied at the institute, got their passports. They boarded a flight for Doha, where they were quarantined and awaited visas to enter Portugal.When they landed, Sarmast, the school’s leader, hugged them and cried as they rushed off the plane. They were the last three in the group to make it out of Afghanistan.“There was never a moment,” he told them, “when I doubted that I would get you out.”On her first day in Doha, Zohra started a journal. She wrote that she was heading to Europe to begin life as a refugee.“I am hopeful,” she wrote, “that the future in Portugal is bright for us all.”Sevinch Majidi, 18, and Shogufa Safi, 18, students at the institute, walking in the Lisbon neighborhood near the compound. Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesOver time, the girls — who make up about a quarter of the school’s 100 students — have begun to feel more at ease. They have learned to ride bicycles in the school’s courtyard. They occasionally join the boys for lunch at McDonald’s, teasing them about their stylish sunglasses. They go out on weekends, to the beach or shopping for clothes or chocolate chip cookies.Sevinch Majidi, 18, a violinist, said she felt she had the freedom to pursue her own education and interests in Portugal, free from expectations around marriage and child-rearing and the restrictions of Afghanistan’s patriarchal society.“When I was walking on the streets of Kabul, I was scared,” said Sevinch, who plays in an all-female ensemble at the school. “This is the first time I can walk without fear, without being scared.”The boys, too, are changing. While many of them felt pressure in Kabul to go to mosques regularly, some have taken a more relaxed approach to their faith in Portugal, choosing to sleep through services during the Eid holidays.Sami Haidari, 15, a cellist, enjoying a swim in the Tagus River. “We have water in Afghanistan,” he said, “but not like this.”Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesAfter rehearsal one day for upcoming concerts in Portugal and abroad, a group of boys went swimming in the Tagus River, on the edge of the Atlantic.Sami Haidari, a 15-year-old cellist, paused before he went into the water. He took in the ocean scene — men in fluorescent shorts stretched out on the sand next to women in bikinis — and wiggled his toes in the sand. Joining hands with his friends, he charged toward the water.“I feel free; the ocean brings us freedom,” he said after returning to shore, his teeth chattering. “We have water in Afghanistan, but not like this. Afghanistan’s water is very small. That’s not free.”Remembering HomeLife in Lisbon has at times been a challenge, but the students turn to music to remember Afghanistan and their families.In Lisbon, Zohra has embraced the strangeness of her new surroundings. She is a star student in Portuguese, she plays jazz in the wind ensemble, and she has learned to cook eggs and potatoes on her own.In her journal, she jots down her plans to lead a music school of her own one day, alongside reflections on music and a few short stories, including one about gamblers in New York City.“There are not any human beings without wishes and dreams,” she wrote in her journal. “I am one of these humans too. One can’t be without dreams because dreams give us hope.”“If you have a dream, follow it, even if it’s the worst of dreams,” she added. “One has to struggle for the best of dreams and for the worst of dreams.”Zohra at school. She is a star student in Portuguese.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesPortuguese vocabulary in Zohra’s room.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesInside Room 509 of the former military hospital, where she lives with her uncle and her cousin, she has hung drawings of ballerinas and horses. A poster lists the Portuguese words for family members: mãe, pai, irmão, irmã.There are reminders of Afghanistan: photos of her grandfather, decorated with hearts and butterflies; a book of poems; and a painting of her grandmother.Below a gold vase on the windowsill is the container of rocks and soil from the ancestral grave. Next to it, she keeps another container filled with the soil she collected from the campus of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul.Zohra said she still remembered peaceful days in Ghazni Province, when her family gathered near the mountains and made chicken soup and kebabs. She said she hopes that her parents can join her some day in Lisbon, too.Looking out at the Tagus River from her room, she said the people of Afghanistan needed music, just like residents of other countries.“I really want to go back to Afghanistan some day,” she said. “When the Taliban are not there.”Zohra’s room with a view. She would like to return to Afghanistan one day, she said, “when the Taliban are not there.”Isabella Lanave for The New York Times More

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      In the Documentaries of the Blackwood Brothers, Great Artists Are Explored

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      Several films from Michael and Christian Blackwood, grounded in the nitty-gritty of art-making, are available to watch through June 28.The collected documentaries of Michael and Christian Blackwood offer an extended studio visit with some of the 20th century’s leading artists. Here are artists at work and in conversation, with a minimum of frills: painters painting, sculptors sculpting and the jazz genius Thelonious Monk blazing away at the piano (and later telling a band member to drop in “any note you want”). If you’ve seen one too many art and music documentaries that resemble Wikipedia entries, then these back-to-basics films will be a genuine tonic, grounded in the nitty-gritty of art-making.Born in Berlin before World War II and later safely settled in the United States, the Blackwood brothers started making their films in the 1960s at the height of a revolution in nonfiction storytelling. Over the years, their mid-length films didn’t garner the high profile of direct cinema pioneers like Robert Drew (“Primary”) or D.A. Pennebaker (“Don’t Look Back”). But the Blackwoods’ art-friendly version of you-are-there filmmaking has a rarely rivaled scope of subjects, and a free sampling is now streaming online through Pioneer Works, the Brooklyn cultural center.“Monk”/”Monk in Europe” (1968) surely has one of the greatest opening shots in documentary: the jazz titan dancing in place in his inimitable style, spinning in the dark. From there the Blackwoods’ chronicle is off and running, leaning in to show Monk’s hands gliding across the piano in several lengthy performance excerpts, or hanging out backstage with him and a supporter (Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the Rothschild heir). The Blackwoods — Christian shooting, Michael directing and producing — skillfully set their documentary to Monk time, rather than cutting up his flow into bite-size pieces. He plays — he’s hustled to another gig across Europe — he chills — he waves away a producer’s request to record “something free-form,” preferring to play something easier “so people can dig it.”The artist Robert Motherwell, the subject of the documentary “Robert Motherwell: Summer of 1971.”Michael Blackwood ProductionsThe revealing offhand exchange is a signature moment of spontaneity for this style of documentary, and the Blackwoods are also strong when letting an artist hold forth at length. “Robert Motherwell: Summer of 1971” (1972) belongs to a subset of films about the New York School, and it’s a fascinating time capsule that’s part self-administered close reading, part art history lesson. The stately Robert Motherwell dabs another brush stroke on his latest elegy to the Spanish Republic, then reflects on how this recurring theme is like a lifelong relationship with a lover. We tag along for a visit to a genteel gallery opening in St. Gallen, Switzerland, but what sticks in the mind is Motherwell’s self-aware observations about the simultaneity of art movements. Picasso, Arp, Matisse and Degas were all alive and (mostly) kicking in the 1910s — the kind of insight that lights up other intersections all across history.“Christo: Wrapped Coast” (1969) might feel like a throwback with its voice-of-God narration: “Once Christo had decided to wrap part of a continental coastline …” But this 30-minute film of Christo’s project in Little Bay, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, yields shifting perspectives on the billowing fabric as workers drape it across crags on the shore. The white wrapping looks delicate, treacherous, glorious, and foolhardy; when gales cut it all to ribbons, art turns instantly into ruins. Christo has no shortage of chroniclers, but the film aptly shows off the Blackwoods’ mission of documentation. One of their favorite camera moves — in “Philip Guston: A Life Lived” (1981), for example — is an eager pan around a studio or gallery, as if to take it all in for posterity.A scene from “Wrapped Coast,” about the artist Christo.Michael Blackwood ProductionsMichael and Christian Blackwood began to work independently in the 1980s, but neither stinted on curiosity. “The Sensual Nature of Sound (1993),” covering the composers Laurie Anderson, Tania León, Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros, intersperses sit-down interviews with performances and rehearsals in a relatively routine way, but the bright vitality of the musicians is anything but. Their work rewires the brain, from Monk’s operatic, spoken-sung production of “Atlas” to the majestic Oliveros’s ethos of deep listening.A couple of times while watching these documentaries, the recent “Get Back” film on the Beatles’ recording sessions came to mind, because of its exhaustive attention to process. But that project’s thrill lies in seeing the very first fragments of pop songs that have played millions of times. The Blackwoods just as often take us deep into the abstract and the unknown. Listening to artists articulate their intentions and hazard guesses about reality opens up fresh conversations and musings for a viewer.The French artist Jean Dubuffet might have the best last word here. In “The Artist’s Studio: Jean Dubuffet” (2010), he responds to Michael Blackwood’s prompt by explaining that “culture is creation done” (that is, something already completed) and “art is creation in process.” It’s an intriguing and arguable distinction, but the sweeping terms neatly apply to the Blackwoods’ watchful art documentaries: they’re about art and culture, and delight in both. More

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      Little Amal, a Refugee Puppet Who Traveled Europe, Will Visit New York

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      Last year, the 12-foot-tall Syrian girl trekked from Turkey to Britain to find her mother. This fall, she’ll visit all five boroughs.Little Amal, a 12-foot-tall puppet depicting a 10-year-old Syrian refugee, has seen about a dozen countries, visited London’s Royal Opera House and other sightseeing destinations, and even met the Pope.But this fall, Amal will embark on an entirely new adventure, crossing the Atlantic for the first time in a trip to New York intended to promote an open embrace of refugees and immigrants.Amal is scheduled to arrive at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Sept. 14, with plans to travel to all five boroughs, visiting with children, artists, politicians and community leaders along the way, according to an announcement on Thursday from the Walk Productions, which is co-producing the visit with St. Ann’s Warehouse.Her original 5,000-mile journey from Turkey to England last year — which included visits to migrant camps — was designed to highlight the plight of millions of Syrian refugees in Europe who traveled long distances across the continent to flee the country’s civil war. The project was supposed to end there, said its artistic director, Amir Nizar Zuabi, but about two-thirds of the way through the journey, the creative team realized that Amal could have a future beyond those specific geopolitical circumstances.“She became an excuse for communities to come together and be kind to a foreigner,” Zuabi said, “and by doing that, understand something about themselves — understand what there is to celebrate in their communities.”The towering puppet — which is operated by three people, including one person on stilts — will visit St. Ann’s, and several other New York cultural institutions will be involved in her trip, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center and the Classical Theater of Harlem. The visit, which has a budget of over $1 million, is planned to conclude in early October with a trip to the Statue of Liberty.In 2018, St. Ann’s presented an Off Broadway play, “The Jungle,” that inspired the character of Amal. First staged at the Young Vic Theater before transferring to the West End, “The Jungle” is based on what its writers, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, observed when they set up an interactive arts center in a migrant camp in Calais, France. The play will be returning to St. Ann’s next February.Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s, said she first saw Amal’s effect on the public during a trip last year to an elementary school in a Paris suburb, where the students started screaming and following her around as soon as they laid eyes on her.“She became a bit of a Pied Piper,” Feldman said. “It was very magical.”Although Amal’s presence is not overtly political, Feldman said she felt that the visit to the United States would send an important message in a country where immigration has become a “political football” and migrant children have faced perilous living conditions.To Feldman, Amal’s visits in Europe felt like a parade of innocence and hope. “To have that in the streets in a very visible way could be very beautiful,” she said.Designed by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, Amal is quite delicate — her arms and upper body are made of bamboo canes — and has needed plenty of maintenance over her months of travel, Zuabi said. Earlier this year, she visited young Ukrainian refugees in Poland.But New York is not likely to be her last journey: Amal has had requests to visit countries around the world, he said, and there are plans in the works for trips elsewhere in the U.S. next year. More

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      in Music

      Broadway’s Beloved Basement Club, Feinstein’s/54 Below, Turns 10

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      The venue beneath what was once Studio 54 will pick up a Tony Award for excellence in the theater as it marks its anniversary with a pair of concerts.On June 5, 2012, shortly after noon, a bevy of cabaret and theater artists and insiders gathered in a space beneath what had been the storied West 54th Street nightclub Studio 54. The occasion was a dress rehearsal for a show that evening that would open a new venue called, reasonably enough, 54 Below. Patti LuPone was the featured act, with other Broadway and nightlife luminaries, including Ben Vereen and Justin Vivian Bond, slated to appear soon afterward.Joe Iconis, a young composer, lyricist and performer who was part of that initial lineup, recalled the event as “a coming out for the room itself.” The bar was separated from the stage and dining tables by a curtain, which was later opened, “so there was this dramatic reveal of the room, to the people who would soon be playing it.”It was a fittingly theatrical debut for a spot that, 10 years later, still bills itself as “Broadway’s living room.” (The venue is now known as Feinstein’s/54 Below, acknowledging a creative partnership with the veteran performer and American songbook champion Michael Feinstein that began in 2015.) On June 12, it will receive an honor at the Tony Awards for excellence in the theater.“To me, Feinstein’s is not only about the American songbook; in some ways it’s become a sensibility, a lifestyle brand,” Michael Feinstein said.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesAt the time of 54 Below’s start, the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room, one of New York’s most established cabaret venues, had just announced its closure; Feinstein’s own namesake at the Regency Hotel shut down not long after. Don’t Tell Mama and the West Bank Cafe’s Laurie Beechman Theater still offered show tunes and standards, as did the jazz club Birdland. But as Richard Frankel, one of the four Broadway producers who started and still own 54 Below, remembered, “There was nothing geared towards the huge resource of the Broadway talent pool, and the continual renewal of new music that Broadway provided.”Today, 54 Below occupies a rare perch as a free-standing club offering just that. But it faces more competition. In 2017, the Green Room 42 arrived, which, like 54 Below, features name acts, rising stars and cult favorites alongside theme shows and special events. The following year, Birdland unveiled Birdland Theater, a space that has accommodated longer runs by Broadway performers and emerging jazz artists as well as freewheeling variety shows. Other venues have continued to pop up downtown, like the East Village spots Pangea and Club Cumming, where artists generally less associated with Broadway can wax theatrical in their own fashion.But Don’t Tell Mama’s longtime booking manager, the cabaret doyen Sidney Myer, conceded that 54 Below still “draws the best and the brightest” and called its team “creative and proactive.”The 2022 Tony AwardsThis year’s awards, the first to recognize shows that opened after a long Broadway shutdown during the pandemic, will be given out on June 12.Lifetime Achievement: Angela Lansbury, an acclaimed and beloved star of stage, film and television, will be honored with a special award during this year’s ceremony.Hugh Jackman: The actor may potentially win his third Tony Award for his role in “The Music Man.” He shared some thoughts on his life between film and theater.A New Star: Myles Frost is drawing ovations nightly on Broadway with his performance in “MJ,” a musical about Michael Jackson’s creative process.Frankel and fellow owners Steven Baruch, Marc Routh and Tom Viertel — who have produced “The Producers,” “Hairspray” and the 2018 revival of “Angels in America” — recruited the Broadway mainstays John Lee Beatty, Ken Billington and Peter Hylenski to design the restaurant and its lighting and sound. Beatty even requested a story for inspiration; Viertel spun one about Jewish hustlers who, as Frankel relayed it, sold stolen car parts during World War I, “then started bootlegging when Prohibition came, and invited showgirls and opened a speakeasy. John said, ‘Fine—I’m good.’”On June 12, the venue will receive an honor at the Tony Awards for excellence in the theater.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesFor a pair of anniversary concerts on Sunday and Thursday, the club will spotlight young and emerging performers, composers and playwrights — among them the “Dear Evan Hansen” and “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” alumnus Andrew Barth Feldman, 20, who grew up “binging YouTube videos of people at 54 Below” before starting to visit the club in his early teens. (Minors are welcome but aren’t permitted at the bar without parental supervision.)When the coronavirus pandemic shut down live performances in March 2020, there was no guarantee the venue would make it to this milestone. Two rounds of government loans “really saved us from the abyss,” Frankel said, though he estimated that business was still down between 20 and 25 percent from 2019.54 Below inherited its first director of programming, Phil Geoffrey Bond, from the Beechman. When Jennifer Ashley Tepper joined the venue as creative and programming director a little less than nine years ago, she took a cue from Bond’s popular “Sondheim Unplugged” series. One of her first projects was “New Musicals at 54,” which has delivered concert versions of shows such as Iconis and Joe Tracz’s “Be More Chill” and Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize winner “A Strange Loop,” now up for 11 Tony Awards, both showcased before they were produced in New York. An eclectic assortment of additional series have come to include “New Writers at 54!” and “54 Sings …,” which mostly celebrates pop music. “A lot of these shows are done on the fly,” noted the composer Stephen Flaherty, whose musicals “My Favorite Year” and “Seussical” have been showcased at the club, which also features cast reunions and concerts of classic and underappreciated works. “You’ll have people dropping out and others replacing them, so you never know what you’re going to get, which is part of the excitement.”Slotting such vehicles and novelty acts alongside headliners like Chita Rivera, Ariana DeBose and Charles Busch into at least two shows per night, seven nights a week, can pose a challenge, Tepper says: “A big part of my job is making sure that the crowd is different at different performances.” 54 Below has drawn what the jazz singer Nicole Henry, one of several artists brought on board by Feinstein, calls “an informed, intelligent audience. They often know more about the music than I do.”Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More