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    Juilliard’s President Is Challenged but Retains Support of Board

    The school’s chairman and biggest benefactor, Bruce Kovner, had wanted its president, Damian Woetzel, to leave after a negative evaluation. He marshaled support and stayed.When the charismatic former New York City Ballet star Damian Woetzel was named president of the prestigious Juilliard School in 2017, the school’s powerful chairman, Bruce Kovner, praised his “unusual mix” of intellectual and artistic qualities.But earlier this year Kovner told Woetzel that an internal evaluation had found a lack of confidence in his leadership and asked him to resign by the end of June, a year before the end of his contract, according to a letter Woetzel sent to the school’s trustees that was obtained by The New York Times.Woetzel fought back and succeeded in rallying support behind him, getting testimonials from several eminent artists including the trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, who directs Juilliard’s jazz program, and the pianist Emanuel Ax, a leading member of the faculty. And he wrote in his letter to trustees that the performance review “was extraordinary and highly inconsistent with best practice in nonprofit governance — it was conceived, initiated and managed by our board chairman.”Things came to a head at a board meeting last month. The trustees were informed of the evaluation and Kovner’s recommendation that he leave, but declined to take steps to ease Woetzel out. Kovner, long the school’s biggest benefactor, is planning to step down this June after 22 years as its chairman, a move that one associate said had long been planned.Kovner declined to comment, and Juilliard provided a statement from the board to The New York Times in which it said that “at its most recent meeting, the board strongly reaffirmed its support for President Damian Woetzel” and the 10-year strategic plan that the school created in 2019.The statement said that the board was “unwavering in its focus on the best interests of the students of the Juilliard School, and remains committed to supporting the school’s exceptional faculty, staff and management.”Some saw the conflict as a rare power struggle between two prominent figures in the cultural world, a showdown between old guard and new blood.Given Kovner’s immense influence as Juilliard’s biggest patron — and as an important figure at Lincoln Center, Juilliard’s home, where he serves on the board and has given large sums — some were surprised to see Woetzel prevail. One trustee likened it to a David and Goliath story.Woetzel, 54 — who earned a master’s degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard while still dancing — has built a national reputation, having directed the Aspen Institute Arts Program and the Vail International Dance Festival and served on President Barack Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.Kovner, 75, whose net worth Forbes estimates at $6.2 billion, has been something of a permanent government at Juilliard, having served as chairman for an unusually long time. With his wife, Suzie, Kovner’s gifts have included $25 million toward a new wing and scholarships in 2005; a trove of precious music manuscripts in 2006; $20 million for the early music program in 2012; and $60 million for a new scholarship program in 2013.At Lincoln Center, Kovner was one of the biggest donors to the redevelopment of the performing arts complex, serves on the board of the Metropolitan Opera and was formerly a trustee of the New York Philharmonic.The standoff posed a challenge for the board and the school, given that Kovner’s ongoing support of Juilliard remains crucial.Bruce Kovner, the chairman of Juilliard, and his wife, Suzie, are the school’s biggest benefactors. He sought to ease Woetzel out after a negative evaluation. Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images For Lincoln CenterWoetzel’s evaluation was sent to 49 members of the faculty and staff — including every department head and 18 direct reports — 43 of whom responded to it anonymously. There are about 700 full-time and part-time members of Juilliard’s faculty and staff.The review was designed and conducted by Kovner and J. Christopher Kojima, a vice chairman, Woetzel’s letter to the board said. His letter said that it was “not conducted at an arm’s length distance by an independent party as is best practice for nonprofit institutions of our scale.”The responses included 143 comments, more than three-quarters of which were negative, according to someone privy to a summary of the report who was granted anonymity to describe this sensitive personnel matter.The feedback amounted to several key criticisms, according to the summary, which was described to The Times: that Woetzel focused on performance instead of education; had weak administrative leadership; failed to consult faculty members on key decisions; and created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.A question about confidence in Juilliard’s future met with a negative response from more than half of those who responded, according to the person familiar with the summary.On Jan. 27, Woetzel was asked to leave, according to his letter to the board.“Bruce Kovner communicated — on behalf of the Executive Committee — that my service as president would be terminated prior to the end of my contract, and that the decision was ‘irrevocable,’” Woetzel wrote in the letter to trustees.“Having communicated to me this intent to terminate,” the letter said, “Bruce then emailed me an offer of a severance package that would include a jointly crafted statement that would create a false narrative that I was resigning as of June 30th.”The letter gave Woetzel 96 hours to respond. He decided not to resign.On Feb. 4, Kovner sent the results of the evaluation to the full board, saying the findings were concerning and would be discussed at the regularly scheduled board meeting four days later.Woetzel marshaled support from a number of prominent artists and colleagues, who sent letters to the board in advance of the meeting.“Damian has a record of excellence in his leadership of the school, especially during two pandemic years and these deeply troubling social, political and financial times that have changed the social landscape of America,” Marsalis wrote in his letter, obtained by The Times. “He has been engaged with students, faculty and board in attempting to create a modern institution that is nimble and able to address the very real concerns of students and alumni around the world.”“I feel how we are going about this brings our ethics into question,” Marsalis continued. “This attempt to remove him seems to be poorly thought out, poorly executed, and it will place a stain on our institution that even our love of resources and fragile spirit will not easily remove.”Juilliard has had successes, but also problems, since Woetzel took charge.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe trombone player Weston Sprott, who is the dean of Juilliard’s Preparatory Division, warned in an email to Ax, an influential faculty member, that “a decision to terminate Damian will be incredibly harmful to the institution.”“In the midst of managing the bumps and bruises that could be expected in navigating the national reckoning regarding racial injustice,” Sprott continued, “Damian has put together perhaps the most diverse, inclusive and successful leadership team in our industry — one that is respected by students and faculty and is the envy of its competitors.”Kovner and the executive committee expect Woetzel to address the problems raised in the evaluation with outside coaches and under the guidance of the trustee Reginald Van Lee, a former management consultant, according to the person familiar with the summary. But one trustee said no such course of action has been decided by the full board.Woetzel started out as an unconventional choice for Juilliard, having never worked in academic administration, let alone at one of the world’s leading performing arts schools, which at the time of his appointment had a $110 million annual budget, a $1 billion endowment, and more than 800 students.At Juilliard, Woetzel has made several noteworthy advances, securing a $50 million gift to expand the school’s weekend training program aimed largely at Black and Latino schoolchildren; filling several key positions; and guiding the school through the challenging two years of the pandemic.But he has also had bumps along the way. After a drama workshop at the school involving the re-enactment of a slave auction prompted an outcry, Woetzel issued a “heartfelt apology” in a note to the community.Last June, students protested a planned tuition increase, occupying parts of Juilliard’s Lincoln Center campus and holding street demonstrations. (Several other leading music and drama schools offer free tuition.)Kovner, who made his fortune as a hedge fund manager, has contributed extensively to conservative causes and has served on the boards of the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, both right-leaning think tanks. Last May, City Journal, which is published by the Manhattan Institute, criticized what it described as the school’s “growing cadre of diversity bureaucrats” in an article headlined “The Revolution Comes to Juilliard: Racial hysteria is consuming the school; unchecked, it will consume the arts.”Kovner has also supported left-leaning organizations, including the Innocence Project, which aims to free the wrongfully convicted; and Lambda Legal, devoted to civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.Now Juilliard is preparing for the next chapter. This week the school’s Duke Ellington Ensemble was scheduled to perform a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Juilliard Jazz at the Chelsea Factory, a new arts space. More

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    Cities and States Are Easing Covid Restrictions. Are Theaters and the Arts Next?

    Cultural institutions face tough decisions: Is it safe to drop mask and vaccine requirements, and would doing so be more likely to lure audiences back or keep them away?When music fans walked beneath the familiar piano-shaped awning and into the dark embrace of the Blue Note Jazz Club in Greenwich Village this week, a late-pandemic fixture was missing: No one was checking proof of vaccination and photo IDs.A special guest visited to herald the change. “Good to be back out,” Mayor Eric Adams of New York told the overwhelmingly maskless audience Monday, the day the city stopped requiring proof of vaccination at restaurants and entertainment venues. “I consider myself the nightlife mayor, so I’m going to assess the product every night.”It is a different story uptown, where Carnegie Hall continues to require masks and vaccines and the Metropolitan Opera goes even further, requiring that all eligible people show proof that they have received their booster shots — safety measures that always went beyond what the city required but which reassured many music lovers. “We want the audience to feel comfortable and safe,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.With cities and states across the country moving to scale back mask and vaccine requirements as coronavirus cases fall, leaders of cultural institutions find themselves confronted once again with difficult decisions: Is it safe to ease virus safety measures, and would doing so be more likely to lure audiences back or keep them away?Their responses have varied widely. Broadway will continue to require masks and proof of vaccination through at least the end of April. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington announced that it would drop its mask requirement for visitors to its museums and the National Zoo on Friday, following moves by major art museums in places like Chicago and Houston. Some comedy clubs in New York that ditched masking mandates months ago are weighing whether to continue to require proof of vaccination.“At the beginning of this, many arts organizations were having to develop their own policies before there were clear government guidelines,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “As we come out of this, again, you’re finding arts companies having to find their own way.”The Metropolitan Opera continues to require masks and proof of vaccination and booster shots, and to limit food and drink consumption to one part of the opera house.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesIn interviews, leaders of almost a dozen cultural groups across the country emphasized the need for caution and carefulness. But they noted that each of their situations are distinct. In museums, patrons can roam large galleries and opt for social distance as they please. In theaters and concert halls, audience members are seated close together, immobile for the duration of a performance. Opera houses and symphony orchestras tend to draw an older and more vulnerable audience than night clubs and comedy clubs.The feedback arts leaders say they are getting from visitors has differed: Some said that they had felt increasing pressure to ease their rules in recent weeks, while others said the vast majority of their audience members have told them that they were more likely to visit venues that continue to maintain strict health and safety requirements.“For every one person who complains about the mask requirement, we have probably about 10 people who express unsolicited gratitude for the fact we are choosing to still have masks in place,” said Meghan Pressman, the managing director and chief executive of the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles. She said she would be “surprised” if her organization changed its masking rules before Broadway does.On Broadway, which was shut down by the pandemic for more than a year, officials have said that theater operators would continue to require masks and proof of vaccination through at least April. “We do look forward to welcoming our theatergoers without masks one day soon, and in the meantime, want to ensure that we keep our cast, crew and theatergoers safe so that we can continue to bring the magic of Broadway to our audiences without interruption,” Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, said in a statement.The Metropolitan Opera, which was the first major arts institution to require people entering their opera house to be both vaccinated and boosted, never missed a performance during the height of the recent Omicron surge, and is in no rush to ease its safety measures. “For us, safety comes before Covid fatigue,” said Gelb, the general manager. “So we’re going to err on the side of caution.”But the company has eased some of its backstage protocols: Soloists were not required to wear masks during recent stage rehearsals of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” which helped some work on their diction as the company sang it in the original French for the first time.Like the Met, the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center are also maintaining their mask and vaccine mandates for the moment. Carnegie Hall continues to require masks and proof of vaccination, but recently dropped its policy of briefly requiring booster shots. Masking and vaccine rules also remain in place at the San Francisco Opera, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Opera and Center Theater Group.Two of New York’s premier art-house cinemas are taking different approaches — at least for now. Film Forum’s website says that proof of vaccination is no longer required and that masks are encouraged but not required. Film at Lincoln Center will continue to require proof of vaccination and masks through Sunday, but plans to relax its policy next week.The Metropolitan Museum of Art has stopped checking vaccine cards but is still requiring masks indoors.Seth Wenig/Associated PressA recent poll conducted by The Associated Press found that half of Americans approve of mask mandates, down from 55 percent who supported the mandates six months ago and 75 percent who supported them in December 2020.Choosing what to do is not easy.Christopher Koelsch, the president of the Los Angeles Opera, said that the surveys he has reviewed suggest that roughly a third of audience members would only come to performances if a mask mandate was in place — but that roughly a third would refuse to come if masks are required.“No matter what decision you make,” he said, “there are people who are going to be upset with you and believe that you are making the wrong decision.”Some museums are in an in-between moment. The Metropolitan Museum of Art stopped checking vaccine cards as of Monday but still requires masks. And the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City is likely to lift its mask mandate this month, said Julián Zugazagoitia, the museum’s director.As mask mandates fall in schools, restaurants and other settings, he said, he felt “almost forced” to follow suit. “What I’d like to see us do is keep this as a suggestion,” he said of wearing masks indoors.Other art venues have already changed their rules. Officials at the Art Institute of Chicago said the museum eliminated its requirements for masks and vaccines on Feb. 28 in line with new governmental policies. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — one of the first major American museums to reopen after the country went into lockdown in March 2020 — also relaxed its most recent mask mandate last week. As it did previously in the fall, the museum is now recommending — but not requiring — masks for visitors and staff.“We’ve had an increasing number of visitors and staff inquire about why we haven’t — or when are we going to — relax the mandatory mask requirement,” said Gary Tinterow, the museum’s director.At the Broadway Comedy Club in New York, patrons have been allowed inside maskless for some time. But Al Martin, the club’s president, said he has been debating whether to stop requiring that his guests be vaccinated.On one hand, he said, checking people at the door required him to add staff members, which costs money. And he estimated that he has lost roughly 30 percent of his audience because of the mandate. On the other, he said, he liked having a city vaccine mandate to fall back on. “It gave a degree of safety and assurance to people,” he said.He ultimately decided to do away with the vaccine mandate at his club as of Monday despite his personal concern that the city “might have been slightly premature” in rolling back the rules.He reserves the right to change his mind about his club’s policy, he said.“If I see my business drop 40 percent because people are not feeling safe in my venue,” he said, “we’re going back to the vaccine passport.” More

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    Tony Walton, Award-Winning Stage and Screen Designer, Dies at 87

    He worked with the directors Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse and Jerry Zaks, winning three Tony Awards and an Oscar for “All That Jazz.”Tony Walton, a production designer who brought a broad visual imagination to the creation of distinct onstage looks for Broadway shows over a half-century, earning him three Tony Awards, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.His daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, whose mother is Julie Andrews, said the cause was complications of a stroke.In more than 50 Broadway productions, Mr. Walton collaborated on designing the sets (and sometimes, the costumes) with directors like Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse and Jerry Zaks, winning Tonys for “Pippin,” “The House of Blue Leaves” and “Guys and Dolls.”He also worked in film, where he shared the Oscar for the art and set decoration of Mr. Fosse’s “All That Jazz” (1979); years earlier, Mr. Walton designed the interior sets and the costumes for “Mary Poppins” (1964), starring Ms. Andrews, to whom he was then married.Mr. Walton’s television work included “Death of Salesman” (1985), which starred Dustin Hoffman, Kate Reid and John Malkovich, for which he won an Emmy.Before the opening of his final Broadway show, “A Tale of Two Cities,” in 2008, Mr. Walton described his process of conceiving a production’s design.“These days, I try to read the script or listen to the score as if it were a radio show and not allow myself to have a rush of imagery,” he told Playbill. “Then, after meeting with the director — and, if I’m lucky, the writer — and whatever input they may want to give, I try to imagine what I see as if it were slowly being revealed by a pool of light.”Mr. Walton with Julie Andrews and their daughter, Emma, in 1963.Associated PressDonald Albrecht, the curator of an exhibition of Mr. Walton’s theater and film work at the Museum of the Moving Image in 1989, told The New York Times in 1992: “He never puts a Walton style on top of the material. He comes from within the work out.”Mr. Walton worked with Mr. Zaks on many Broadway shows, including “Guys and Dolls,” a revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “Anything Goes.”“I started directing because I liked working with actors,” Mr. Zaks said in a phone interview. “I had no appreciation for what a set could for a production. Tony pushed me to visualize the different possibilities that might be used to create a set.”For the 1986 revival of John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves,” about a family in Sunnyside, Queens, on the day Pope Paul VI visited New York City in 1965, Mr. Zaks recalled what Mr. Guare wrote in the actor’s edition of the play.“He referred to Manhattan as Oz to the people who lived in Queens,” Mr. Zaks said, “and out of that he came up with a set that always had Manhattan in the distance.”In his review in The New York Times, Frank Rich described the impact of Mr. Walton’s set as a “Stuart Davis-like collage in which the Shaughnessys’ vulgar domestic squalor is hemmed in by the urbanscape’s oppressive brand-name signs.”Four years later, Mr. Zaks added: “I said, ‘Tony, we could do ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ with two sofas and a Kandinsky.’ He said, ‘Trust that, believe that,’ and he made me a better director.”The double-sided Kandinsky hung over the two red sofas on the stage in the play by Mr. Guare, about a mysterious young Black con man.Anthony John Walton was born on Oct, 24, 1934, in Walton-on-Thames, England. His father, Lancelot, was an orthopedic surgeon. His mother, Hilda (Drew) Walton was a homemaker.Ann Reinking in the 1979 film “All That Jazz.” Mr. Walton shared the Oscar for art and set decoration on the film.Museum of Modern Art Film Stills ArchiveHe traced his love of theater to a night during World War II when he was 5 or 6. His parents had just seen the musical “Me and My Girl,” he said in the Playbill interview, and “they had paper hats and little hooters — and had obviously had a few bubbles to cheer them along the way — and they woke my sister and me up and taught us ‘The Lambeth Walk.’”His interest in the theater blossomed at Radley College, which is near Oxfordshire, where he acted, directed and put on marionette shows. After serving in the Royal Air Force in Canada, he studied art and design at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. While there, he was a part-time actor and stagehand at the Wimbledon Theater.After graduating in 1955, he moved to Manhattan where he got a job sketching caricatures for Playbill. His first significant theater project in the United States was an Off Broadway revival of the Noël Coward musical, “Conversation Piece” in 1957.Four years later, after commuting to London where he designed productions for various shows, he was hired for his first Broadway play, “Once There Was a Russian,” set in 18th-century Crimea; it closed on opening night.His next show, the original production of “A Funny Thing,” ran for more than two years, and used his idea to project various sky images onto a curved screen across the stage.For the next 47 years, he toggled between musicals, comedies and dramas like a 1973 Broadway revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” For one of its stars, Lillian Gish, he had designed an eggplant-colored dress that she rejected, telling him that “Russian peasants only wore beautiful pastel colors,” according to Ms. Walton Hamilton. “He said, ‘Of course, Miss Gish,’” she said, then he had it dyed one shade darker with each subsequent cleaning.On the set of “The House of Blue Leaves” at the Lincoln Center Theater in 1986. From left: Christine Baranski, Swoosie Kurtz and John Mahoney.Brigitte LacombeIn the 1990s, he began directing at the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan, the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn., and the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor in New York, which his daughter helped found. At Bay Street, he was also the production designer of a 2003 revival of “The Boy Friend,” which was Ms. Andrews’s directorial debut.Mr. Walton also illustrated the 12 children’s books about Dumpy the Dump Truck, and “The Great American Mousical,” that were written by Ms. Andrews and Ms. Walton Hamilton.“Tony was my dearest and oldest friend,” Ms. Andrews, who met Mr. Walton when she was 12 and he was 13, said in a statement. “He taught me to see the world with fresh eyes, and his talent was simply monumental.”In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Genevieve LeRoy-Walton; his stepdaughter, Bridget LeRoy; five grandchildren; his sisters, Jennifer Gosney and Carol Hall; and his brother, Richard.In 1989, Mr. Zaks recalled being uncertain about the type of hotel for the setting for the farce “Lend Me a Tenor.” Mr. Walton sketched one that had a Victorian style, then another, more compelling one, with an Art Deco design.“The beauty of the Art Deco sketch just blew me away,” he said, “and I knew right away that when things got amok onstage, when people started slamming doors within a beautiful piece of Art Deco architecture, it would be much funnier.” More

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    Russian Filmmakers and Other Artists Face Boycotts Over Ukraine

    A Russian moviemaker with Ukrainian roots and relatives in Kyiv denounced the war. The Glasgow Film Festival dropped his film anyway.The Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov has spent the past week distraught at the horror unfolding in Ukraine. Half his family is Ukrainian, he said in a telephone interview, and as a child he spent summers there, staying with his grandparents.His maternal grandmother was still living in Kyiv, he said, “hiding from bombs in a bunker.”Since Russia’s invasion began, Mr. Sokolov said he had signed two online petitions calling for an end to the war, an act that carries a risk in Russia, where thousands have been arrested for protesting the conflict, and some have reportedly lost their jobs.Yet despite his antiwar stance, Mr. Sokolov on Monday learned that the Glasgow Film Festival in Scotland had dropped his latest movie, “No Looking Back.”A spokeswoman for the festival said in an email that Mr. Sokolov’s film — a comedy about a mother and daughter trying to kill each other — had received Russian state funding. The decision to exclude the movie was not a reflection on the filmmaker himself, she said, but it would be “inappropriate to proceed as normal with the screenings while the assault on the Ukrainian people continues.”As the war in Ukraine enters its second week, cultural institutions worldwide are grappling with the question of whether to boycott Russian artists, in debates reminiscent of those around South Africa during the apartheid era, and calls by musicians, writers and artists to shun Israel in support of the Palestinian people.Kirill Sokolov at a 2021 Moscow event for Russian filmmakers seeking state funding for their projects.Mikhail Tereshchenko/TASS, via Getty ImagesMost attention has so far focused on figures close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including the conductor Valery Gergiev and the diva Anna Netrebko, both of whom lost engagements at concert halls and opera houses this week. On Tuesday, the Munich Philharmonic fired Mr. Gergiev as its chief conductor.But measures are also being taken against Russians with no apparent ties to their leader. In Britain — where a government minister this week published an opinion essay calling culture “the third front in the Ukrainian war” — a Russian state ballet company from Siberia and an opera troupe had multiple performances canceled.On Monday, the Glasgow Film Festival also dropped “The Execution,” by Lado Kvataniya, a Russian director whose work has been censored in Russia and who last week posted online about his opposition to both the war and Mr. Putin. (A representative for Mr. Kvataniya declined to comment for this article.)Festival organizers and movie executives have been considering protest actions since shortly after Russia’s invasion last week, when the Ukrainian Film Academy launched an online petition calling “for a boycott of Russian cinematography.”The petition, which had over 8,200 signatures on Friday, says screenings of Russian movies at festivals create “the illusion of Russia’s involvement in the values of the civilized world.” It also urged distributors not to work in Russia. Several Hollywood studios, including Disney, have paused releases there, and a Netflix spokeswoman said Friday that the streaming service had halted all future projects in Russia, including acquisitions.Mr. Sokolov, the Russian director, said he accepted the Glasgow festival’s decision, though he found it “really strange.” Many Russian filmmakers are critical of Russian society and politics, he said; if festivals outside Russia stop showing their work, “it’s like they shut our voice down,” he added.“Probably 99 percent of Russian movies” receive funding from the Russian state, Mr. Sokolov said. “It’s very difficult to make a movie here without government sponsorship.” That includes many that are veiled — or even unveiled — critiques of life under Mr. Putin.Several small film festivals have acted on the Ukraine Film Academy’s call, including the Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia and the Vilnius International Film Festival in Lithuania, which on Monday dropped five movies from its program. One of them is the award-winning “Compartment No. 6,” by the Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, which also received Russian funding. Mr. Kuosmanen said in a telephone interview that he accepted state investment in his Russia-set movie to ease bureaucratic difficulties. He understood the festival’s decision, and said he was “happy if my movie can be used in this fight.”The Cannes Film Festival said it would ban official Russian delegations, but would accept movies from Russian filmmakers.Pool photo by Kate GreenThe world’s largest film festivals are taking a different tack. On Tuesday, the Cannes Film Festival in France said in a statement that it would no longer “welcome official Russian delegations, nor accept the presence of anyone linked to the Russian government.” This would mean Russia’s film agency could no longer have a pavilion at the event in which to host parties and receptions. A Cannes spokeswoman said in an email that this would not mean a ban on Russian filmmakers.On Wednesday, the Venice Film Festival followed, saying it would not accept “persons tied in any capacity to the Russian government” at its events. It added that it would welcome “those who oppose the current regime in Russia.”Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4A humanitarian crisis. More

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    Too Close to Putin? Institutions Vet Artists, Uncomfortably.

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led arts organizations to reconsider who performs, forcing them to confront questions about free speech and policing political views.In Canada, an acclaimed 20-year-old Russian pianist’s concert was canceled amid concerns about his silence on the invasion of Ukraine. The music director of an orchestra in Toulouse, France — who is also the chief conductor at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow — was instructed to clarify his position on the war before his next appearance. In New York, Anna Netrebko, one of opera’s biggest stars, saw her reign at the Metropolitan Opera end after she declined to denounce President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.As global condemnation of Russia’s attack on Ukraine grows, cultural institutions have moved with surprising speed to put pressure on Russian artists to distance themselves from Mr. Putin, a collision of art and politics that is forcing organizations to confront questions about free speech and whether they should be policing artists’ views.Institutions are demanding that artists who have supported Mr. Putin in the past issue clear condemnations of the Russian president and his invasion as a prerequisite for performing. Others are checking their rosters and poring over social media posts to ensure Russian performers have not made contentious statements about the war. The Polish National Opera has gone so far as to drop a production of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” one of the greatest Russian operas, to express “solidarity with the people of Ukraine.”The tensions pose a dilemma for cultural institutions and those who support them. Many have long tried to stay above the fray of current events, and have a deep belief in the role the arts can play in bridging divides. Now arts administrators, who have scant geopolitical expertise, find themselves in the midst of one of the most politically charged issues in recent decades, with little in the way of experience to draw on.“We’re facing a totally new situation,” Andreas Homoki, the artistic director of the Zurich Opera, said. “Politics was never on our mind like this before.”The new scrutiny of Russian artists threatens to upend decades of cultural exchange that endured even during the depths of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the West sent artists back and forth amid fears of nuclear war. The Russian maestro Valery Gergiev, who has long been close to Mr. Putin, was fired as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic and saw his international engagements dry up. The Hermitage Amsterdam, an art museum, broke ties with the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The Bolshoi Ballet lost engagements in London and Madrid.Citing that Cold War tradition, the Cliburn — a foundation in Fort Worth named for the American pianist Van Cliburn, whose victory at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 was seen as a sign that art could transcend political differences — announced that it would welcome 15 Russian-born pianists to audition next week for the 2022 Cliburn Competition, noting that they are not officials of their government.Jacques Marquis, the president and chief executive of the Cliburn, said the organization felt it was important to speak out as it watched Russian artists come under scrutiny. “We can help the world by standing our ground and focusing on the music and on the artists,” he said.The American pianist Van Cliburn’s victory at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 was seen as a sign, at the height of the Cold War, that art could transcend political differences.The Van Cliburn FoundationEven as many institutions are eager to show support for Ukraine, and to distance themselves from artists who embrace Mr. Putin, they are uncomfortable with trying to vet the views of performers — and worry that Russian artists, who must often rely on the support of the state for their careers to thrive at home, could face reprisals if forced to publicly disavow the Kremlin.“You can’t just put everybody under general suspicion now,” said Alexander Neef, the director of the Paris Opera. “You can’t demand declarations of allegiance or condemnations of what’s going on.”The situation is tense and fast moving. Leaders of organizations are facing pressure from donors, board members and audiences, not to mention waves of anger on social media, where campaigns to cancel several Russian artists have rapidly gained traction.Institutions are also grappling with what to do about the Russians who are among their most important donors. On Wednesday the Guggenheim Museum announced that Vladimir O. Potanin, one of Russia’s richest men and a major benefactor, was stepping down as one of its trustees.Leila Getz, the founder and artistic director of a recital series in Vancouver, Canada, canceled an appearance by the Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev planned for August. Mr. Malofeev, 20, had not made any statements on the war, nor did he have any known ties to Mr. Putin. But Ms. Getz issued a statement saying she could not “in good conscience present a concert by any Russian artist at this moment in time unless they are prepared to speak out publicly against this war.”Soon she received dozens of messages. Some accused her of overstepping and demanded that Mr. Malofeev be allowed to perform.In an interview, Ms. Getz defended her decision, saying she was worried about the potential for protests. She said she had not asked Mr. Malofeev to condemn the war and that she was concerned for his safety.“The first things that came to my mind were, why would I want to bring a 20-year-old Russian pianist to Vancouver and have him faced with protests and people misbehaving inside the concert hall and hooting and screaming and hollering?” she said.Mr. Malofeev declined to comment. In a statement posted on Facebook, he said, “The truth is that every Russian will feel guilty for decades because of the terrible and bloody decision that none of us could influence and predict.”On Friday the Annapolis Symphony in Maryland announced that it would replace the Russian violinist Vadim Repin, who had been scheduled to play a Shostakovich concerto in upcoming concerts, “out of respect to Repin’s apolitical stance and concerns for the safety of himself and his family.”“We don’t want to put him in an uncomfortable, even impossible position,” the orchestra’s executive director, Edgar Herrera, said in a statement. In an interview, Mr. Herrera said that there had been threats to disrupt Mr. Repin’s performances and that the symphony was concerned that hosting a Russian artist could hurt its image and alienate donors.Deciding which artists are too close to Mr. Putin is not easy. Mr. Gergiev, the longtime general and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, has a relationship with Mr. Putin that goes back decades, and he has often supported the government’s policies. Mr. Gergiev led concerts in 2008 in South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia that was aided by Russian troops, and at the Syrian site of Palmyra in 2016 after it was retaken by Syrian and Russian forces.Ms. Netrebko, the star soprano, issued a statement opposing the war in Ukraine but withdrew from performing after declining to distance herself from Mr. Putin, whom she has expressed support for in the past. The war brought renewed attention to a photograph from 2014 of her holding a flag used by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine.The pianist Evgeny Kissin, who was born in Moscow, said he believed that “supporters of a criminal war waged by a dictator and a mass murderer should have no place on the concert stages of the civilized world.”Milan Bures for The New York TimesThe eminent pianist Evgeny Kissin, who was born in Moscow and is now based in Prague, said that while many artists in Russia needed to support Mr. Putin to some degree because their institutions relied on state aid, others went too far. He said he believed that “supporters of a criminal war waged by a dictator and a mass murderer should have no place on the concert stages of the civilized world.”He added that while he thought it was natural for Western institutions to ask Mr. Putin’s most prominent supporters to speak out against the war, he did not think it should be required of artists who had not been particularly political in the past.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 5Anna Netrebko. More

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    Ned Eisenberg, New York Actor Known for ‘Law & Order,’ Dies at 65

    Eisenberg performed in several Broadway productions between appearances as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler on NBC’s long-running police drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Ned Eisenberg, a character actor known for his work on popular shows including “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Mare of Easttown,” died at his home in the Jackson Heights section of Queens on Sunday. He was 65.The cause was cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile duct, and ocular melanoma, according to a statement from his agent, Jeanne Nicolosi, issued on his family’s behalf.Eisenberg was a New York character actor whose roles in film, theater and television spanned the past four decades on Broadway and in Hollywood.Fans of the NBC police procedural “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” may best remember him as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler, a recurring character on the long-running drama. From 1999 to 2019, he appeared in two dozen episodes of the show — mostly as Kressler, but twice early on in other roles, according to IMDb. He also appeared in other series in the “Law & Order” franchise, playing different roles.Ned Eisenberg was born on Jan. 13, 1957, in the Bronx. He grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he attended Riverdale Junior High School.In 1975, he graduated from what is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, in Manhattan, where he studied acting.He began his professional theater career in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and appeared on Broadway as Truffaldino in Julie Taymor’s “The Green Bird” (2000) and as Uncle Morty in Bartlett Sher’s “Awake and Sing!” (2006), according to Nicolosi.In a New York Times review of “The Green Bird,” Eisenberg and other cast members were credited with bringing “a balletic grace” and “antic shtick” to the performance, in which he and Didi Conn played “a Punch-and-Judy pair of sausage makers.”He performed in lead roles in theaters around the Northeast including the Theater for a New Audience, New York City Center and the Williamstown Theater Festival.He was an early member of the Naked Angels Theater Company along with Kenneth Lonergan, Frank Pugliese and Joe Mantello. The actors Rob Morrow, Mary Stuart Masterson, Nancy Travis and Gina Gershon were also among the founding members of the group, which was started in 1986 to serve as a “creative home for new voices.”In 2009, he played Iago in a Theater for a New Audience production of “Othello.” In a review for The Times, Charles Isherwood wrote that Eisenberg’s performance was “decked out in small, witty flourishes,” noting that “the bitter half-smile with which Iago looks on at the waste he has wrought in the final scene says everything about his shriveled soul.”In supporting roles throughout his career, Eisenberg worked with Academy Award-winning directors and filmmakers.In 2004, he played the boxing manager Sally Mendoza in Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby,” which starred Hilary Swank and won the Oscar for best picture. Eisenberg played the photographer, Joe Rosenthal, in “Flags of Our Fathers,” another film by Eastwood, about the six men who raised the flag at the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.Eisenberg also acted in “World Trade Center,” a 2006 Oliver Stone drama about police officers who responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the 2011 thriller “Limitless,” starring Bradley Cooper.Last year, he appeared in the Emmy Award-winning HBO drama “Mare of Easttown” as Detective Hauser.He is expected to return as the manager Lou Rabinowitz in a coming episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” on Amazon Prime.He is survived by his wife, the actress Patricia Dunnock, and a son, Lino Eisenberg. More

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    What to See and Experience Live in New York This Spring

    ‘Funny Girl’ and ‘A Strangle Loop’ on Broadway, Ashwini Ramaswamy’s dances, Olivia Rodrigo’s pop takeover: what our critics and writers are looking forward to this season.Broadway‘TAKE ME OUT’ Peanuts and crackerjacks may not be available at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater, but anyone who thinks that live theater is the ultimate spectator sport should root for the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s comedy. Set in the locker room of a professional baseball team, the play stars Jesse Williams (“Grey’s Anatomy”) as a big-shot player who wants to come out as gay. Openly queer athletes are somewhat more common than when Greenberg wrote the play, which debuted at the Public Theater in 2002 and later won three Tony Awards. But they remain a rarity in team sports. So the play’s conversations around excellence, sexuality and the boundaries between public and private lives, should still make it around the bases. Scott Ellis directs, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson (“Modern Family”) and Patrick Adams (“Suits”) co-star. ALEXIS SOLOSKIPreviews begin March 10; opens April 4 at the Hayes Theater, Manhattan.‘FUNNY GIRL’ It’s hard to think of another Golden Age megahit that hasn’t had a Broadway revival. Surely it’s not the fault of the terrific songs, by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, including “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and “People.” And though the original book isn’t top-notch, it gets the job done, telling the story of the comedian Fanny Brice from teenage years to stardom by way of romantic catastrophe. No, the reason is simple: Barbra Streisand. Nearly 60 years after creating the role, she essentially still owns it. So let’s just say for now that the delightful Beanie Feldstein, who heads this revival, is borrowing it. Whether she can make the production, directed by Michael Mayer and with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein, as memorable as the first — well, check back in 60 years. JESSE GREENPreviews begin March 26; opens April 24 at the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan.Daniel Craig will star as Macbeth in Sam Gold’s production at the Longacre Theater.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesRuth Negga will be his Lady Macbeth. Previews begin March 29.Chantal Anderson for The New York Times‘MACBETH’ Is it ever not “Macbeth” time? “The Scottish Play,” as superstitious theater folk call it, has had nearly 50 Broadway productions since 1768, each age no doubt finding in it an echo of its own. In ours, the toxic brew of ambition and credulousness seems to resound most clearly. Will the director Sam Gold, whose takes on “King Lear” and “The Glass Menagerie” were so divisive, draw the modern parallels? All I can say for sure is that with Daniel Craig (a memorably blasé Iago in Gold’s downtown “Othello” in 2016) and Ruth Negga (a riveting Hamlet in 2020) as the suggestible Macbeth and his suggestive Lady, this revival should be a deep dive into cold water. JESSE GREENPreviews begin March 29; opens April 28 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan.‘FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF’ The year before her death in 2018, the playwright Ntozake Shange went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington to see a program by the choreographer Camille A. Brown. It was the first time they met, but they soon saw each other again — and Brown found herself in the startling position of hearing Shange, the revered author of the landmark choreopoem “For Colored Girls,” ask to interview her about her work, because she so enjoyed Brown’s movement language. Dance is elemental to “For Colored Girls,” which first opened on Broadway in 1976 and ran for nearly two years, with Shange herself as the Lady in Orange, one of the rainbow of women of color who tell their stories in the play. Revived at the Public Theater in 2019 with Brown (“Once on This Island”) as choreographer, it comes to Broadway this spring with Brown both directing and choreographing. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESPreviews begin April 1; opens April 20 at the Booth Theater, Manhattan.From left, Jeff Still as Mr. Assalone, Tracy Letts as Mayor Superba and Cliff Chamberlain as Mr. Breeding in the play “The Minutes” at the Cort Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘THE MINUTES’ Tracy Letts kills with laughs. In his 2007 breakthrough, “August: Osage County,” the victim was the American family. In “Linda Vista,” which hit Broadway in 2019, men took the blade of his scythe. In those plays, and in many others, he gets you rooting for the worst people until you realize you are then complicit in their destructiveness. “The Minutes,” directed by Letts’s frequent collaborator Anna D. Shapiro, is a 90-minute comedy satirizing the workings of a self-satisfied bureaucracy in a fictional Midwestern city called Big Cherry. It features a cast of Letts experts, including Ian Barford, Blair Brown, K. Todd Freeman, Sally Murphy and, as Mayor Superba, Letts himself. But if it looks like he’s wielding his usual weapons, the target is even bigger than before: America’s idea of its own goodness. JESSE GREENPreviews begin April 2; opens April 17 at Studio 54, Manhattan.‘A STRANGE LOOP’ Since it premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, Michael R. Jackson’s searingly funny and heartbreakingly frank musical “A Strange Loop,” in which he reflected on his experience as a young, queer Black man, has gone on to earn critical raves and a slew of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. Now, Page 73, Playwrights Horizons and Woolly Mammoth are bringing the acclaimed production to Broadway, with Jaquel Spivey in the central role of a musical theater writer working as an usher at “The Lion King” and whose thoughts come to blistering life as a sort of Greek chorus. Jackson dismantles orthodoxies with verve and bite, and reserves some of his most pointed barbs for such institutions as church and Tyler Perry. You may never think of that Atlanta mogul the same way again. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin April 6; opens April 26 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan.Martin McDonagh’s play “Hangmen” will return to the Golden Theater after being canceled at the start of the pandemic. Performances begin April 8.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘HANGMEN’ After Martin McDonagh’s slow-burn thriller was forced to close with the rest of Broadway in March 2020, its producers declared that it couldn’t come back. But McDonagh (“The Pillowman,” “The Lieutenant of Inishmore”) has a way with a plot twist. So here is one more: This 1960s-set work of psychological suspense will return to the same theater, with a somewhat altered cast. Gone is Dan Stevens (“Downton Abbey”) as a magnetic London lowlife; in his place is Alfie Allen (“Game of Thrones”). Mark Addy, who played an executioner turned pub owner in the North of England, has also been replaced, by David Threlfall. What remains in this production, which originated at the Royal Court in London, are McDonagh’s shocking gifts: for taut plotting, sharp dialogue and a theatrical style that balances each play on a knife’s edge of comedy and terror. Matthew Dunster directs. ALEXIS SOLOSKIPreviews begin April 8; opens April 21 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan.Off Broadway‘CONFEDERATES’ Dominique Morisseau, one of the most exciting playwrights working today, is best known for her Detroit cycle, which feels like the magnificent progeny of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. She makes magic with language: Her characters are real, her metaphors are sharp, and her dialogue reads like poetry. Morisseau’s work was on Broadway earlier this season with “Skeleton Crew,” and she follows that with the New York premiere of “Confederates,” which tackles institutional racism as it’s experienced by two Black women who live over a century apart. Stori Ayers directs. MAYA PHILLIPSPreviews begin March 8; opens March 27 at the Signature Theater, Manhattan.‘SUFFS’ There’s a scene in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s film adaptation of the Jonathan Larson musical “Tick, Tick … Boom!” in which the camera pans a silent assembly of musical theater writers: essential composers and lyricists of the 21st-century New York stage. Blink and you miss her, but Shaina Taub is in there. So don’t blink, and definitely don’t miss her work. The subject of her latest musical, “Suffs,” is the fight, just over a century ago, for American women’s right to vote. The topic might sound potentially dry as dust, or doctrinaire to a fatal degree. But Taub, a musical magpie with a wholly distinctive voice, has a genius for storytelling that’s smart and political but also playful and funny; for proof, see her tuneful adaptations of “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It.” And while she’s lately teamed up with Elton John to write the Broadway-bound musical “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Suffs” is all hers. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESPreviews begin March 10; opens April 6 at the Public Theater, Manhattan.Puppetry is featured in Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s “Book of Mountains & Seas,” a choral theater piece based on Chinese myths. It will have a short run in March at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Olafur Gestsson‘BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS’ The composer-librettist Huang Ruo and the director-designer Basil Twist are calling their new work choral theater, but it’s also puppetry on an operatic scale — bold, elegant, monumental. Adapted from Chinese myths and delayed from its American premiere when the Omicron variant shut down the Prototype Festival in January, “Book of Mountains & Seas” arrives for its brief run at St. Ann’s Warehouse with 12 singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, two percussionists and a half dozen nimble puppeteers. First performed last year in Copenhagen, it’s a sensory immersion of sound, light and movement that feels sometimes as if elements of Twist’s most famous puppet piece, “Symphonie Fantastique,” had escaped the water tank to soar majestically in the open air. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESMarch 15-20 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn.‘HARMONY’ Back in 2019, The New York Times trumpeted that after taking off at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1997 and spending more than two decades circling the runway, Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s labor-of-love musical “Harmony” — about the German vocal sextet the Comedian Harmonists, which was immensely popular between the two world wars — was going to have its Off Broadway premiere. In the spring of 2020. Now, the show is finally arriving, with the choreographer-director Warren Carlyle overseeing a cast led by Chip Zien and Sierra Boggess. If nothing else, this is another sign that after its Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof” and its recent collaboration with New York City Opera on “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” the producing National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene has become a force on the New York musical landscape. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin March 23; opens April 13 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Manhattan.‘CYRANO DE BERGERAC’ There is no shortage of variations on Edmond Rostand’s 19th-century play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” in which the brilliant but big-nosed Cyrano writes beautiful love poems that his handsome but — let’s say, less brilliant — comrade Christian passes off for his own to impress Roxane, a woman whom Cyrano himself loves. Next up is the Jamie Lloyd Company’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” adapted by Martin Crimp and directed by Lloyd, which will come to Brooklyn from a critically acclaimed run in London. It’s a slick, modern version, with Cyrano using rap and spoken word as his means of seduction. Starring as Cyrano is James McAvoy, who often seems to alter his very foundations — his voice and mannerisms, his energy, his whole physical presence — for a role. MAYA PHILLIPSPreviews begin April 5; opens April 14 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music.‘A CASE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD’ Samuel D. Hunter has built a rich oeuvre from fertile ground: the Idaho landscapes of his youth. His deceptively quiet plays (“Lewiston/ Clarkston,” “A Bright New Boise,” “Greater Clements”) explore faith, desire, sex and loss, in dialogue attuned to the rhythms of ordinary speech. The MacArthur Foundation acknowledged his ability to create “dramas that explore the human capacity for empathy and confront the socially isolating aspects of contemporary life across the American landscape.” This new play, directed by David Cromer, is again set in Idaho — and is perhaps the most intimate he has written. It has just two characters, men working to understand what the world does and doesn’t owe them. Though Hunter often prefers characters on what he calls “the losing end of American life,” he has promised that this new play is hopeful. ALEXIS SOLOSKIPreviews begin April 12; opens May 2 at Signature Theater, Manhattan.‘WISH YOU WERE HERE’ The vagaries of postponements and rescheduling now give us two nearly simultaneous opportunities to discover the world of Sanaz Toossi, a young first-generation Iranian American playwright from Orange County, Calif. Hot on the heels of “English” (at the Atlantic Theater Company), which looks at a small group of Iranians preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, “Wish You Were Here” follows five young women in Karaj, a suburb of Tehran. (The actress Marjan Neshat appears in both shows.) They are about 20 when the play begins, in 1978, and we stay with them until 1991 as they navigate not only their friendship, but also their sense of home and belonging. A revolution is unfolding, followed by war with Iraq; life-changing decisions must be made. Toossi reunites with Gaye Taylor Upchurch, who directed last year’s audio version from the Williamsburg Theater Festival and Audible. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin April 13; opens May 2 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan.‘WEDDING BAND’ Alice Childress was a force to be reckoned with in the theater, even if she didn’t always get her due. After all, she would have been the first Black female playwright on Broadway if she hadn’t refused to compromise on her work. That would-be first was her play “Trouble in Mind,” which finally premiered on Broadway last fall. How fortunate we are to get her follow-up to “Trouble,” “Wedding Band,” a rarely produced play about an illicit interracial relationship in the South during World War I. Awoye Timpo directs this, only the second New York production, with modern race politics — including the Black Lives Matter movement — as the trouble in mind. MAYA PHILLIPSPreviews begin April 23; opens May 1 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn.‘THE BEDWETTER’ Sorry, “Urinetown,” you’re not the only musical about a certain bodily function anymore. Subtitled “Stories of Redemption, Courage, and Pee” Sarah Silverman’s 2010 memoir is frank, vulnerable and, of course, brutally funny. Chances are good these qualities will be present in this musical adaptation, since Silverman herself wrote the book with the playwright Joshua Harmon (“Prayer for the French Republic”), as well as the lyrics, with the composer Adam Schlesinger. The show is bound to be bittersweet: Schlesinger, who is best known for his scores for Broadway’s “Cry-Baby” and the TV series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” died of coronavirus complications in April 2020, around the time “The Bedwetter” was originally scheduled to premiere. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin April 30; opens May 23 at the Linda Gross Theater, Atlantic Theater Company.Édouard Louis in “Who Killed My Father,” which will arrive at St. Ann’s Warehouse in May.Jean-Louis Fernandez‘WHO KILLED MY FATHER’ At the intersection of memoir, sociological study and call to arms, the French writer Édouard Louis’s books, which often dissect his working-class upbringing, have become an unlikely inspiration for successful plays. Two of them, “The End of Eddy” and “History of Violence,” even opened in New York the same week in 2019. Now, Louis is even more directly involved in the theatricalization of his own life: He is starring in a stage version of “Who Killed My Father,” in which he intermingled a look at the destructive impact of physical work on his father’s body with a takedown of France’s class structure. The production reunites Louis with the brilliant German director Thomas Ostermeier, who also staged “History of Violence.” ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin May 18; opens May 22 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn.PopBURNA BOY Nigerian Afrobeats has gathered a worldwide audience through sleek understatement: an insinuating basic beat that’s equal parts syncopation and silence, productions that conjure bassy depths and open spaces, singers who offer calm confidence rather than histrionics. The pandemic derailed international touring for Afrobeats stars, postponing their chances to claim their ever-expanding American audience. It’s fitting that Burna Boy, the songwriter who won the 2021 Grammy Award for best global music album with “Twice as Tall,” will be the first Nigerian musician to headline Madison Square Garden, with a show billed as “One Night in Space.” With his amiable, husky baritone and the assistance of some of Africa’s most innovative producers, Burna Boy has delivered a steady flow of international hits like “Question,” “Kilometre” and “Want It All” from 2021, and his catalog features cultural messages along with party tunes. He has already headlined arenas in Africa, Europe and England; the United States can soon catch up. JON PARELESApril 28 at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.Burna Boy performs at the Outside Lands Music Festival at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in October 2021.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressALABASTER DEPLUME Performing as Alabaster dePlume, the U.K.-based saxophonist, vocalist and activist Gus Fairbairn draws equally, and a bit cautiously, upon Indian raga, western New Age music, Hailu Mergia’s late-70s recordings with the Dahlak Band and the psych-folk appropriations of the Incredible String Band. He knows that most of the ideas in his music — musically, lyrically, critically — originated somewhere else; they’re a historical inheritance, and they’re here through colonial encounter.But just knowing doesn’t count for much, and dePlume’s real appeal (as an auteur, a philosopher, a saxophonist) comes from listening to him push through the anxieties of influence into sincerity. More and more, the music wears humane intentions on its sleeve: On “Don’t Forget You’re Precious,” from his latest album, “Gold,” due April 1, he admonishes a listener in a purring first-person: “​​I remember my pin number/I remember my ex’s email address/But I forget I’m precious.”Those intentions come through strongly in performance, where dePlume encourages his side musicians to “bring your whole self,” as he said in an interview with The Quietus. He avoids playing consistently with the same group so that every show is guided by intuition. When he arrives in Brooklyn, he’ll be joined by the violist Marta Sofia Honer and the electronic musician Jeremiah Chiu, in a band he pulled together with help from Jaimie Branch, a trumpeter and his International Anthem label mate. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMarch 19 at Public Records in Brooklyn.DUA LIPA Released in the surreal and cursed March 2020, Dua Lipa’s nimble, disco-sleek second record, “Future Nostalgia,” was one of the first blockbuster pop albums put out during the Covid-19 pandemic. That it has taken her nearly two years to tour it, though, does not mean its sound has become a distant, early lockdown memory: “Future Nostalgia” has had such a long tail in the usually mercurial pop world that you’d still be hard pressed to scan the radio dial and not come across one of its many smash hits. (Its fifth single, “Levitating,” has been on the Billboard Hot 100 for 66 weeks and counting.)This also means that Lipa’s star wattage has increased considerably since she last toured the United States, for her 2017 self-titled debut album. Consider that the last venue she headlined in New York was the 2,500-seat Hammerstein Ballroom; the Future Nostalgia Tour will come to two local arenas. If her effervescent, impressively calisthenic performance at last year’s Grammys was any indication, Lipa will have no trouble commanding such a huge stage. And given the fact that Lipa’s buoyant tunes were the soundtrack of so many people dancing on their own during those long, lonely months of lockdown, the prospect of grooving to them in a communal setting promises to be extra cathartic. LINDSAY ZOLADZMarch 1 at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan; March 4 at Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.Dua Lipa earlier this month at FTX Arena.Jason Koerner/Getty Images for Permanent Press MediaOLIVIA RODRIGO Most musicians — even the ones who appear to be overnight sensations — have to pay their dues on small stages first. Olivia Rodrigo’s breakout year happened while the pandemic paused live music, so while she’s a front-runner for a best new artist Grammy, she’s still barely played in front of live audiences at all, save for a few performances on late night TV and at award shows. And so the sold-out Sour Tour will be a proving ground for Rodrigo, whose alternately punky and wrenching debut album, “Sour,” was one of the best and most talked about of last year. Rodrigo’s recent eight-song appearance at “Austin City Limits,” taped for a crowd of giddy fans, was a better showcase for the quieter, more introspective side of her songwriting, like the world-stopping ballad “Drivers License” or the scorched post-breakup note “Traitor.” But her tour will likely provide an opportunity for pop-punk anthems like “Good 4 U” and “Brutal” to connect with a more kinetic audience — plenty of people have been waiting far too long to scream along with Rodrigo’s every word. ZOLADZApril 26-27 at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan.Olivia Rodrigo performing at the American Music Awards last fall in Los Angeles.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressWILCO Vindication doesn’t get much purer, or better deserved, than the fate of Wilco’s 2002 album, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” After making three albums of rootsy indie-rock, full of 1960s and 1970s echoes, Jeff Tweedy steered Wilco toward studio experimentation, incorporating unexpected instruments, random noises and surreal mixes. Its opening song, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” was a frontal assault on naturalism, savoring loops, glitches and distortion. Wilco’s label, Reprise, told Tweedy the album was horrible and “career-ending,” refused to release it and dropped the band. But Wilco then streamed the songs online to a hugely enthusiastic response. Nonesuch (part of the Warner Music Group along with Reprise) picked up “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”; it reached the Top 20 and sold more than half a million copies. Wilco has endured as a shape-shifting band, with songs that can be transformed onstage. It will mark the 20th anniversary of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” by performing the whole album for five nights in New York City and three in Chicago. The sonic palette may seem slightly less radical two decades later, but the songs remain sturdy, full of private yearnings and insights about America. PARELESApril 15-17 and April 19-20 at the United Palace Theater in Manhattan; April 22-24 at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago.Classical‘LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR’ There have been all kinds of updatings at the Metropolitan Opera in recent years. “Rigoletto,” set in the Renaissance, has been moved to Rat Pack-era Las Vegas, then Weimar Germany. “Carmen,” which the libretto places in the early 19th century, was pulled forward to the time of the Spanish Civil War.But rarer — particularly in a core repertory still dominated by Italian-language classics — are Met productions set in a realistic present day. That can be a step too far for conservative opera aficionados who have grudgingly dealt with (and sometimes booed) the company’s mildly modernized takes on some of their favorites.The Met’s new staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” is therefore a likely flash point. The Australian director Simon Stone (“Yerma” at the Park Avenue Armory and “Medea” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) is setting the work not in its original 18th-century Scottish Highlands, but in a struggling Rust Belt town today.For Stone, both of those milieus are ones in which society’s denial of the power and prosperity that men had assumed was theirs translates to the abuse of women. Living in what he calls a “wasteland of free-market capitalism,” pockmarked by pawn shops, liquor stores and boarded-up houses, Stone’s title character — forced, with tragic results, into marrying against her will — is an opioid addict who meets her secret lover at a motel.The 2007 Mary Zimmerman staging being replaced by this one was also updated, to the Victorian era, but retained a sumptuousness that satisfied traditionalists. Abandoning that, Stone is under pressure to render his fresh vision through his cast, led by Nadine Sierra as Lucia, Javier Camarena as her beloved Edgardo, and Artur Rucinski as her cruel brother. Riccardo Frizza conducts what promises to be a very interesting premiere. Opens April 23. ZACHARY WOOLFEThe Metropolitan Opera is transposing “Lucia Lammermoor” from its original 19th-century Scottish setting to a 21st-century American Rust Belt town.Met OperaJOHNNY GANDELSMAN The violinist Johnny Gandelsman doesn’t take on projects lightly. In addition to his work with the quartet Brooklyn Rider, and with the Silkroad Ensemble, he maintains a robust solo career that has unfolded with one ambitious undertaking after another.With feather-light and fiddling bow strokes, he recorded a novel account of Bach’s six sonatas and partitas for solo violin, which he programmed as a breathless marathon instead of the usual assortment of selections. Then he transcribed Bach’s six cello suites for his instrument, again presenting them all together, and justified what might have seemed like a gimmick with an illuminating re-evaluation of music that could hardly be better known.His latest project, “This Is America,” is a swerve from the Baroque, but no less daunting and even more enterprising.In the spirit of another restless violinist, Jennifer Koh, Gandelsman has gone on a commissioning spree, ordering more than 20 new pieces from a group of composers who collectively demonstrate the possibilities of truly diverse programming. What emerges, he hopes, is an argument for the impossibility of capturing the United States in any straightforward or reductive way, as well as for the benefit in aspiring instead to a prismatic portrait of place.He has started rolling out the premieres in a tour whose stops include two evenings at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Both programs open with Bach cello suite transcriptions, but spread between them are also 10 “This Is America” works. On the roster are excellent known quantities, such as Tyshawn Sorey (“For Courtney Bryan”), Rhiannon Giddens (“New to the Session”) and Angélica Negrón (“A través del manto Luminoso”); as well as Olivia Davis, Nick Dunston, Christina Courtin, Marika Hughes, Adele Faizullina, and Rhea Fowler and Micaela Tobin. March 16 and 17. JOSHUA BARONEThe violinist Johnny Gandelsman performing last spring at Barge Music in Brooklyn.Mary Inhea Kang for The New York TimesCARNEGIE HALL Scan the schedule at Carnegie Hall, and it’s painfully apparent that it’s still impossible for major overseas orchestras to appear on these shores as they once could — at least unless they are led by the conductor Valery Gergiev, who brings his Mariinsky Orchestra to town (May 3, May 4) after an initial visit with the Vienna Philharmonic at the end of February.One of the few to cross the ocean is the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, whose concert with the immaculate pianist Mitsuko Uchida (March 25) would be a highlight of any season, let alone this necessarily sparse one. Together, they will play two Mozart concertos, the repertoire in which Uchida has for so long excelled: the genial, graceful No. 23 in A, and the No. 24 in C minor, one of the composer’s darkest pieces.But if the Mahler ensemble’s appearance is the exception that proves the rule, Uchida’s is something like the opposite: Pianists dominate at Carnegie this spring. Uchida herself will preface her Mozart by appearing with the tenor Mark Padmore, an ideally penetrating pairing for Schubert’s troubled “Schwanengesang” (March 13).Daniil Trifonov (March 3), Beatrice Rana (March 9), Gabriela Montero (March 18) and Andras Schiff (March 31) all arrive in March, with Montero offering an intriguing Carnegie debut putting Schumann, Shostakovich and Chick Corea suggestively together with her own pieces and improvisations. Yuja Wang (April 12), Emanuel Ax (April 28) and Evgeny Kissin (May 20) take their place on the piano bench later; if their programs look a little same-old, Yefim Bronfman (April 18) adds to his repertory with a sonata by the uncompromising Galina Ustvolskaya. And if that’s not enough, Igor Levit returns after his January recital to perform Brahms with the New York Philharmonic (May 6). DAVID ALLENANTHONY DAVIS The composer and pianist Anthony Davis’s operas have been absurdly difficult to seek out this century. But that’s about to change.Portland Opera will present “The Central Park Five” — which earned Davis the 2020 Pulitzer Prize — in March. And Michigan Opera Theater in Detroit will bring Davis’s first operatic triumph, “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” from 1986, to its stage in May, in a new production by the Tony Award nominee Robert O’Hara.New Yorkers may want to keep an eye on this “X,” which is bound for the Metropolitan Opera in the fall of 2023. A concert presentation will also be on offer from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in June. In both Boston and Detroit, the title role will be sung by the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, whose fleet, complex characterizations have proved dazzling in New York — including his lead appearance in Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón.” (The baritone Will Liverman is scheduled to take the part at the Met.)Even if the production weren’t headed to New York, Davis’s score would make “X” a destination opera. Just as in his orchestral music and compositions for smaller jazz ensembles, his approach in this opera merges modernism with a wide-angle appreciation of swing and the blues. Although “X” made a strong impression on a 1992 recording, now out of print, Davis is taking this opportunity to revise the score. This spring will be our first opportunity to hear his latest vision of it. SETH COLTER WALLSDanceMOVEMENT RESEARCH AT JUDSON CHURCH This weekly series, which dates to 1991, is an ever-shifting bill of experimental dance. Each program, free on Monday nights, is a stand-alone adventure — the chance to see an imagination blossom on a bare-bones stage. Where is dance going? How is the art form developing in a new generation, and how have choreographers continued to work through the pandemic? Now, more than ever, Judson is critical to the ecosystem of downtown dance.When Movement Research, dedicated to the investigation of dance and movement-based forms, resumed its Judson performances last fall, the idea was to celebrate the series’ 30th anniversary, but cancellations were unavoidable; the same thing happened in early winter as yet another wave of the pandemic hit. When, finally, the show did go on one night in February, it felt like a beam of light.This spring, Judson gets another shot at celebrating its anniversary beginning with Lai Yi Ohlsen and Brendan Drake on March 21 and continuing with Benjamin Akio Kimitch and the mesmerizing duo of Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith the following week.The season wrap-up is organized by Maria Hupfield, through Movement Research’s Artists of Color Council, a group addressing issues of equity and cultural diversity. The lineup features Indigenous Kinship Collective NYC (KIN), Emily Johnson and Rosy Simas, dance artists very much in tune with the urgency of our time. Dance may have been put on hold, but it has a future. Movement Research proves it. GIA KOURLASThrough May 23 at Judson Church, Manhattan.SARA MEARNS The ballet dancer is just one part of the dancer that is Sara Mearns. In this Joyce Theater production, she explores other sides of her artistry in a collection of collaborations, including a crucial one with the choreographer and dance artist Jodi Melnick. It is through Melnick that Mearns, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet, delved into a new way of moving, a new way of thinking about dance and about the intricacies of the body.Together, their contrasts and similarities create, strange as it may sound, a minimalism of excess rooted in delicate, powerfully subtle, liquid dancing. They have spent hours in the studio together; it shows. A highlight will be Melnick’s “Opulence,” a duet that was originally part of a program at Jacob’s Pillow in 2019.The program also includes a short film — shot in Long Island City in March 2020, just before the pandemic shutdown — directed and choreographed by Austin Goodwin for Mearns and Paul Zivkovich, as well as new duets by Vinson Fraley, a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Guillaume Côté, of National Ballet of Canada.In other words, this isn’t another ballerina-in-the-spotlight kind of situation. Not only will Mearns debut a solo by the esteemed choreographer Beth Gill — so curious to see this! — but she has also programmed a Cunningham MinEvent, staged by Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, featuring live music by John King. Cunningham isn’t new to Mearns; she performed in “Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event,” which celebrated that choreographer’s legacy in 2019. She’s assembled a stellar cast: She will be joined by Taylor Stanley, Jacquelin Harris, Chalvar Monteiro, Burr Johnson and Melnick. It’s star power done right. KOURLASMarch 8-13 at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan.STORYBOARD P Storyboard P is an incredible dancer in the most literal sense, the kind who makes it hard to believe your eyes. His name alludes to film, and many people (including him) have likened his style to stop-motion animation and special effects. Gliding and floating in liquid relation to music or flickering to register noise in the signal, he’s a master of illusion whose sophistication and subtlety reward the closest attention. But even more astonishing than his skill is the freedom of his improvisatory imagination. It follows unpredictable twists into deep and strange channels, the territory of dreams.In the Crown Heights neighborhood where he grew up and in the community that developed the street dance known as flex, he was recognized as exceptional at least by the mid-2000s, when he started winning competition after competition, even if he never quite fit in. Around 10 years ago, news began to spread more widely. Appearing in his own clips, in short films by Khalil Joseph and Arthur Jafa and in music videos for the likes of Jay-Z, he became a YouTube star. In profiles — in The New Yorker, The Guardian and The Wire — he talked about forging a new kind of career for a dancer, as “a visual recording artist.”Instead, apart from a cameo in another Jay-Z video (the Arthur Jafa-directed “4:44”), he largely disappeared from the public eye. But he’s resurfacing at Performance Space New York for two freestyle performances called “No Diving 2.” Who knows what might happen. BRIAN SEIBERTApril 7-8 at Performance Space New York, Manhattan.Kouadio Davis, left, and Alexandra Hutchinson of Dance Theater of Harlem in Robert Garland’s “Higher Ground.”Theik SmithROBERT GARLAND AT DANCE THEATER OF HARLEM Dance Theater of Harlem was founded in 1969 with two braided missions: to create a place for Black dancers in ballet and to extend the tradition of George Balanchine and New York City Ballet, where Arthur Mitchell, Dance Theater’s mastermind, got his start. These missions have been carried into the present in the work of the company’s resident choreographer, Robert Garland.In “Return” (1999), set to recordings by James Brown and Aretha Franklin, and “New Bach” (2002), Garland found a way to combine neoclassical ballet with Black vernacular dance and what he has called “Harlem swag.” His “Gloria” (2013), set to Poulenc and incorporating students, movingly encapsuled the troupe’s phoenixlike rebirth after a nine-year hiatus. In their excellence, these pieces to old music showed how values from the past still had relevance.In 2020, when the pandemic shut down theaters, Garland was about to debut “Higher Ground,” set to some of the more politically sharp tracks from Stevie Wonder’s genius streak of the 1970s. The work finally gets its New York premiere in April, as part of the City Center Dance Festival. The music comes from Garland’s youth but is freshly topical in the age of Black Lives Matter. Even more significant, the dance is an intensely affecting response to that music that could be done only by a ballet company — this ballet company. It feels like the kind of work that Dance Theater of Harlem was made to do. SEIBERT.April 5, 8-10, at New York City Center, Manhattan.Ashwini Ramaswamy in her “Let the Crows Come.”Jake ArmourASHWINI RAMASWAMY Two years after its originally scheduled New York premiere, Ashwini Ramaswamy’s “Let the Crows Come” finally lands at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Ramaswamy, who lives in Minneapolis, grew up steeped in the tradition of the South Indian classical dance form Bharatanatyam, and her work often explores the in-betweenness of her cultural identity, the experience of being from both India and the United States.In “Let the Crows Come,” she is joined by two other Minneapolis dancers with different areas of expertise: Alanna Morris, who has a background in contemporary and Afro-Caribbean forms, and Berit Ahlgren, a practitioner and teacher of Gaga, the movement language developed by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. Each dancer offers an interpretation of the same Bharatanatyam solo, refracting its rhythmic footwork, sculptural postures and intricate gestures through her own lens. Ramaswamy likens the structure to “a memory that’s experienced differently from person to person.” In the live music, along similar lines, the composers Jace Clayton (also known as DJ Rupture) and Brent Arnold take inspiration from an original Carnatic score by Prema Ramamurthy.New York audiences might know Ramaswamy, a dancer of vibrant clarity and warmth, from the Ragamala Dance Company, the Bharatanatyam troupe led by her mother and sister, with whom she still trains and performs. In a phone interview, she said her work remains intimately tied to theirs.“I wouldn’t say I’m branching out on my own,” she said, “but figuring out my method and my voice within that aesthetic and that lineage.”The title “Let the Crows Come” alludes to a flow between past and present, referring to a Hindu ritual of honoring ancestors through offerings of rice. When crows come to eat the rice, Ramaswamy said, “it means your ancestors are telling you, ‘I’m OK. Keep living your life, but I’m always there with you.’” SIOBHAN BURKEApril 13-15 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Manhattan.OKINAWAN DANCE AND MUSIC It’s not often that dance from Okinawa makes its way to New York; when it does, you want to clear your calendar. That’s one lesson I learned from the Japan Society’s exquisite presentation, back in 2015, of Okinawan dance and music. As part of a five-city American tour, a new program, “Waves Across Time: Traditional Dance and Music of Okinawa,” comes to the Japan Society in March. The tour — also stopping at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.; the Kennedy Center in Washington; Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.; and the University of Chicago — marks the 50th anniversary of the return of Okinawa to Japan, following the American occupation of the islands after World War II.Assembled by Michihiko Kakazu, the artistic director of the National Theater Okinawa, the two-part evening includes court dances from the classical repertory of kumiodori, a kind of Noh-inspired theater, dating to Okinawa’s era as an independent kingdom, Ryukyu, from the 15th to 19th centuries. Stately, slow and lavishly costumed, these contrast with the program’s other half: more recent, upbeat popular and folk dances, zo-odori. A lecture on the histories of these forms precedes each performance, and interactive workshops invite a closer look at their rhythmic and physical structures. BURKEMarch 18-20 at the Japan Society, Manhattan. More

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    Can New Yorkers Be Lured Back to the Arts by a Good Deal?

    With two-for-one cocktails at the Met museum and two-for-one Broadway tickets, New York arts institutions are trying to lure back locals after a long, tough winter.The sounds of a small jazz combo filled the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art last Saturday evening. Warm candles lit the space. Over at the museum’s American Wing Café, Christa Chiao and Anna Lee Hirschi were sipping prosecco.It was the first weekend of “Date Night” at the Met, an initiative to lure local visitors back to the museum on Friday and Saturday evenings with two-for-one cocktails, gallery chats and free live music featuring New Orleans jazz bands, Renaissance ensembles and string quartets.The museum’s efforts to woo back visitors from the region comes as many New York cultural organizations worry not only about the pandemic-era decline in tourism, but also the continuing struggle to bring back local crowds. The Met is currently attracting 62 percent of the local visitors it did before the coronavirus pandemic, a change it attributes in part to the continuing prevalence of remote work.“In this new reality, where many outer borough residents are working virtually and do not have to come to Manhattan, it’s on us, on the cultural institutions, to be creative and proactive in finding ways to encourage local visitorship,” said Ken Weine, a spokesman for the museum.“The challenge that the Met faces,” he said, “is really no different than a midtown small business.”Anna Lee Hirschi, left, and Christa Chiao toasted each other with their two-for-one proseccos.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Met is far from the only arts institution trying to entice local visitors back with deals as the Omicron surge fades and the coronavirus outlook seems to be improving.Lincoln Center recently announced a new “Choose What You Pay” ticketing program for its American Songbook series at the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, with a minimum ticket price of $5.00, and a suggested price of $35, in an effort to make its programing more accessible.The Museum of Modern Art announced this week that it would restart a program offering free admission to New York City residents on the first Friday of every month between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.And this year NYC & Company, the city’s tourism agency, extended NYC Broadway Week — during which theatergoers can get two-for-one tickets to most Broadway shows — for an additional two weeks, through February 27.Chris Heywood, a spokesman for NYC & Company, said that the move to extend Broadway Week deals was proving popular: As of mid-February, he said, the program’s website had already received more traffic than it did in 2020, before the pandemic closed Broadway.Learn More About the Metropolitan Museum of Art$125 Million Donation: The largest capital gift in the Met’s history will help reinvigorate a long-delayed rebuild of the Modern wing.Recent Exhibits: Our critics reviewed exhibits featuring the drawings of the French Revolution’s chief propagandist and new work by the sculptor Charles Ray.Behind the Scenes: A documentary goes inside the Met to chronicle one of the most challenging years of its history.A Guide to the Met: From the must-see galleries to the lesser-known treasures, here’s how to make the most of your visit.Winter is traditionally a down period for museums and the performing arts, arts officials note, and this season was made even tougher by lagging tourism and the disruption caused by the Omicron variant, which forced some arts institutions to retrench at the very moment the city was seeking to triumphantly bounce back.Now, with spring on the horizon, some arts groups say they hope to essentially restart the reopening that began in the fall. Deals, they hope, will help.The Met hopes that deals will lure back locals. It is currently attracting 62 percent of the local visitors it did before the pandemic.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Met, which already allows New York State residents to pay what they wish for admission, is trying to sweeten the deal. As it began its second “Date Night” last Saturday, the museum was busy and bustling, with a line out the door late into evening.As they sipped their proseccos and shared a box of dips and veggies that had been classified as a date-night special, Chiao, 28, of Harlem, and Hirschi, 29, of Washington, said it was their first time back inside a museum since before the pandemic began. They had not known about the “Date Night” promotion, but they were on a date and were happy to partake.“It feels like it’s time,” Chiao said. “It’s your own risk assessment. I think more about what I’m going to do — is this thing going to be worth it? I do think I’m going to try to go out and do more stuff.”Patrick Driscoll, 34, and Kathryn Savasuk, 33, of the Upper West Side, were also on a date at the Met, and said they were feeling increasingly at ease about going out. They had already taken advantage of the two-for-one Broadway tickets, having snagged tickets to “Company,” the revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical.“We’d be comfortable either way, but it’s definitely an enticement to go out, be active and get into the flow of going to these types of events again,” Driscoll said of the deals. And they plan to keep going to the theater even for those shows that do not offer the two-for-one deals: They already have tickets to see Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga in the upcoming Broadway production of “Macbeth.”Back inside the Great Hall, Allan Shikh, 21, had his arms wrapped warmly around Ami Kulishov, 21, as the jazz band finished its first set. They, too, were unaware that their romantic evening had fallen on an official “Date Night.” They would have been there anyway.“We consider ourselves pretty artsy people,” Shikh said. “I don’t really need much enticing.” More