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      Millions Danced Joyfully to Her Song. She Drew on Her Pain to Write It.

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      Nomcebo Zikode, the South African singer of the pandemic hit “Jerusalema” that inspired a global dance challenge, wrote the chorus while battling her own depression.It starts with a clap, and then the feet tap along to the beat: four times on each side, followed by a quick jump. As the melody rises, dancers dip low and twirl.It’s a dance easy enough for anyone to learn, and people all around the world have done so, with everyone from an urban dance crew in Angola to Franciscan nuns in Europe showing off their moves on social media.The “Jerusalema” dance, named for the South African hit song that inspired it, provided a moment of global joy during the lockdowns of the pandemic, a welcome distraction from the isolation and collective grief.But it was the chorus, a lamentation over a heavy bass beat, that was balm to millions. Sung in a low alto in isiZulu, one of the official languages of South Africa, audiences didn’t need to understand the song to be moved by it.The singer Nomcebo Nkwanyana, who goes by Nomcebo Zikode professionally, drew on her own intense pain when she wrote it.“Jerusalem is my home,” she sang. “Guard me. Walk with me. Do not leave me here.”After more than decade as an overlooked backing vocalist, and with her faith in music faltering, Ms. Zikode, 37, was in a dark place in 2019 when she wrote those words.Her manager, who is also her husband, insisted she write the lyrics to help her crowd out the voices in her head that were telling her to give up on music, and herself.Ms. Zikode, 37, was in a dark place when she wrote lyrics that would uplift millions.Alexia Webster for The New York Times“As if there’s a voice that says you must kill yourself,” she said, describing her depression at the time. “I remember talking to myself saying, ‘no, I can’t kill myself. I’ve got my kids to raise. I can’t, I can’t do that.’”She didn’t listen to the recording of the song until a day after it was made. As the bass began to reverberate through her car, everything went dark, she said, and she almost lost control of the vehicle. She pulled over, tears streaming down her face.“Even if you don’t believe it, this is my story,” she said. “I heard the voice saying to me, ‘Nomcebo, this is going to be a big song all over the world.’”And that prognostication soon proved true.In February 2020, a group of dancers in Angola uploaded a video showing off their choreography to the song, and challenging others to outdo them. As lockdowns were enforced just weeks later, the song was shared around the world.The global success of “Jerusalema” has taken Ms. Zikode on tour to Europe, the Caribbean and the United States. It also led to her being featured on the song “Bayethe,” which would win the Grammy award for Best Global Music Performance earlier this year.But while “Jerusalema” has brought her global renown, she has had to fight to earn any financial reward from it and to be recognized as part of its creative force.She sued her record label, and a settlement in December called for her to receive a percentage of the song’s royalties and to be allowed to audit the books of the label, Open Mic Productions, that owns the song.At least as important, the agreement also states that Ms. Zikode must be cited as the song’s “primary artist” alongside Kgaogelo Moagi, more commonly known as Master KG, the producer behind the instrumental track on “Jerusalema.”But even this victory in South Africa’s male-dominated music industry comes with significant caveats: For one, Master KG is receiving a higher percentage of royalties. And Ms. Zikode said she has yet to see payment. “I’m still waiting for my money,” she said.Open Mic did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but in a statement put out after her Grammy win, the label said: “She is a very talented artist and we welcome this agreement as a progressive resolution.”The global success of “Jerusalema” has taken Ms. Zikode on tour to Europe, the Caribbean and the United States.Alexia Webster for The New York TimesStruggles with money are nothing new to her.The youngest of four children born in a polygamous marriage, Ms. Zikode’s father died when she was young and her mother, the third wife, was left destitute. Desperate, her mother let a church outside Hammarsdale, a small town in South Africa’s eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, take her daughter in for four years.There, she slept on bunk beds among rows of other children. She sewed her own clothes and helped to clean the dormitories. The church choir was a solace, but she sorely missed home until she was able to return in the 10th grade.Her mother sold maize or bartered what vegetables she could grow for secondhand clothes. The neighbors who would ask the young Ms. Zikode to sing for them would feed her and take her in for a few nights as her mother struggled.When she was old enough, Ms. Zikode learned to braid other people’s hair to earn some money, but remembers self-consciously pressing her elbows to her side, for fear that her customers would smell that she could not afford deodorant.But what she really wanted was to sing, and she got her break at an open-call audition. She spent years singing backup for gospel stars, sharing crowded apartments with other backing vocalists. When gigs dried up, she took computer classes as a career backup plan.Ms Zikode’s first major South African hit came in 2017 when she sang vocals on the song “Emazulwini” for a well-known house music producer and D.J., Frederick Ganyani Tshabalala. But what had seemed like a long-awaited break turned into a letdown when DJ Ganyani, as he is known, did all he could, she said, to prevent her from performing the song live on her own.“They try by all means to suppress the singers,” Ms. Zikode said of the D.J.s and producers who hold most of the power in South Africa’s music industry.DJ Ganyani did not respond to requests for comment.Hoping a record label would better protect her rights, Ms. Zikode signed with Open Mic, but once the deal was inked, the label went quiet, she said, and she was left hustling to record her debut album.Feeling abandoned by the record company, her husband and manager, Selwyn Fraser, sent messages to other artists, masquerading as his wife on Instagram and Twitter, trying to get bigger names to work with her.This outreach campaign connected Ms. Zikode with Master KG and resulted in “Jerusalema.”It’s not only the song that has made her a household name in South Africa, but also her very public fight for her royalties and recognition, in the courts and on social media, said Kgopolo Mphela, a South African entertainment commentator.“She’s coming across as the hero, or the underdog, taking on Goliath,” Mr. Mphela said.For all her struggles with reaping the monetary benefits of “Jerusalema,” Ms. Zikode’s musical career has made her financially comfortable and she now has a music publishing deal with a division of Sony Music.Her 17-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son want for nothing, she said. She and her husband renovated their home, adding an in-house studio.Ms. Zikode can also bask in the accolades that have come with her Grammy win for “Bayethe.”Ms. Zikode won a Grammy for “Bayethe,” which she performed with two other South Africans, the flutist Wouter Kellerman and the performer-producer Zakes Bantwini.Alexia Webster for The New York TimesOn a chilly April night in Johannesburg, in the Grammy’s afterglow, Ms. Zikode stepped out of a borrowed Bentley at an event to celebrate South Africans who have achieved international success.As she walked the red carpet, determined to own the moment, she granted every interview request, whether from the national broadcaster or a TikTok influencer. Later that night, she accepted two checks, one for herself and one for a charity she founded that helps impoverished young women.When she took the stage to perform the song that made her famous, she hiked up her gown to dance the “Jerusalema.” More

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      At 20, an Upstate Arts Haven Keeps Breaking New Ground

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      On a recent Saturday night, a group of young people were gathered in this bucolic hamlet in the Hudson Valley, building a campfire of sorts. There were no matches or flames, but there were lanterns, chirping crickets, fir trees swirled with haze and, at one point, a zombie attack.The ersatz campfire was onstage, at the final evening performance of “Illinois,” a dance-theater piece based on Sufjan Stevens’s beloved 2005 indie-pop concept album. Directed by the star choreographer Justin Peck, the show drew a sold-out crowd of arts-minded weekenders and curious Stevens fans to commune inside the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.Since opening 20 years ago, the center’s Frank Gehry building has emerged as a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary and sometimes hard to describe hits.It’s here that Daniel Fish’s radically reimagined “Oklahoma!” took shape before its unlikely run to Broadway (and a Tony Award for best musical revival), and here that the choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s “Four Quartets” (praised in The New York Times as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century”) was sparked by a random breakfast conversation.Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive. “Just approaching an artist and saying, ‘Let’s do something together,’ is the thing that excites me most in the world,” he said.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesGiven the personnel involved, “Illinois,” which will move to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater in January, would seem to have the makings of a popular hit. But for Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive, it furthers the same exploratory mission as everything else the center does.“All of these projects are research, which is why they belong in a college,” he said. “What these artists are doing is investigating something, experimenting, creating something in a new way.”These are tenuous times for the performing arts, including in the Hudson Valley, where several independent institutions have curtailed programming or shuttered entirely. But the Fisher Center, nestled in a college long known as a bastion of the humanities, is making big plans.In October, it will break ground on a $42 million studio building designed by Maya Lin. And it just received a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the work of Tania El Khoury, an artist in residence and director of the school’s recently founded Center for Human Rights and the Arts.Gehry’s building, with its explosion of stainless steel whorls, is something of a symbol of the center’s discipline-scrambling programming. Each year, the center is home to full-scale productions of rarely performed operas (like Saint-Saëns’s “Henry VIII,” which opens on July 21) and theatrical world premieres (like Elevator Repair Service’s “Ulysses,” coming in September).The center has also hosted a live-art biennial, development workshops for Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo’s “Only an Octave Apart” and, during the pandemic shutdown, a streaming serial production of “Chapter & Verse,” Meshell Ndegeocello’s musical performance inspired by James Baldwin.Justin Peck, left, in rehearsal with Ahmad Simmons, a dancer in “Illinois.” Peck’s dance-theater piece is based on the 2005 indie-pop album by Sufjan Stevens.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesFrom left, Simmons, Tilly Evans-Krueger and Jonathan Fahoury. “I wanted to build a spaceship for all these dance artists to blast off in,” Peck said of “Illinois.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesAs for “Illinois,” presented as part of the annual SummerScape festival, even those closest to it are hard-pressed to categorize it. Aaron Mattocks, the Fisher Center’s chief operating officer, called it a “genre blur.”For Peck, who came to the center with the idea about two years ago, it’s “a spaceship for all these dance astronauts to blast off in.”“I was looking for a place to go that felt somewhat quiet but also exciting, and a place that had felt willing to take risks on something like this,” Peck said.The Fisher Center opened in 2003 as a multifunctional performing arts center that would be home to the college’s teaching programs as well as the Bard Music Festival, allowing it to mount full-scale operas.The center has always presented theater and dance, too. But with Lester’s arrival in 2012, it has expanded its commissioning of original, contemporary-minded work.“What Gideon has done is brought to it a fantastic originality and an eye and ear for things that need doing, and then inspiring artists to do it,” Leon Botstein, Bard’s president, said.Jenny Gersten, a producer and the interim artistic director at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, credited the Fisher Center with fare that is “distinctively downtown-on-the-Hudson.”“Lots of theaters outside of New York City can develop work,” she said, “but Bard is one of the few who chooses to dig into experimentation of form and bold artistic dares.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesErik Tanner for The New York TimesLester, 50, grew up in London, in the period when the director Sam Mendes and the theater company Complicité were emerging. (He also admits to memorizing all the lyrics of “The Phantom of the Opera.”)But his own brief directorial career had a shaky start. At Oxford, he and another student persuaded the playwright Peter Shaffer to let them mount a production of Shaffer’s “Yonadab,” which hadn’t been performed since its disastrously reviewed 1985 premiere at the National Theater.About 15 minutes into the Oxford opening, there was a general power cut, and the play stopped. But the assembled London critics reviewed it anyway, noting, Lester recalled, that the play “hadn’t improved much.”“I was completely freaked out and thought, ‘This is too much pressure, I don’t think I can direct,’” he said.Instead, he enrolled in the dramaturgy program at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., even if — like many in theater — he was a bit hazy on what exactly dramaturgy was.A rendering of a planned new studio building designed by Maya Lin.Maya Lin Studio with Bialosky + Partners“Basically, I just learned what dramaturgy was by sitting in the room with directors,” he said, by “making mistakes and giving notes and being told to shut up.”Lester became the theater’s resident dramaturg under Robert Brustein and later, under Robert Woodruff, its associate artistic director. Asked about highlights, he mentioned working with artists like the Dutch-Syrian director Ola Mafaalani (“Wings of Desire”) and the Polish director Krystian Lupa, whom he approached after seeing his 11-hour production of “Sleepwalkers” at the Edinburgh Festival.Lupa’s “Three Sisters” at the A.R.T. was “amazing,” if not “particularly liked,” Lester recalled with a wry laugh. “But I got to be in rehearsal with him and see how he worked.”At Bard, Lester has shepherded an impressive series of audience pleasers. But when talking about him — and Caleb Hammons, the director of artistic planning and producing — collaborators use words like “artist centered” and “artist forward.”“They’re unusually good at being adaptive to what different artists need,” said Daniel Fish, whose “Most Happy in Concert” also originated at Bard.Tanowitz, the choreographer, first met Lester in 2015, when he invited her to do a repertory show. Afterward, over breakfast, he asked about the title of one dance, which included a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”Damon Daunno and Amber Gray in Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” in 2015. The production went to Broadway, where it won a Tony Award for best revival.Cory WeaverDancers in the 2018 premiere of Pam Tanowitz’s “Four Quartets,” which grew out of a conversation Tanowitz and Lester had over breakfast.Maria BaranovaThey talked about the poem for a while, and then she went to the bathroom. When she got back, he asked, “Why don’t you make a dance of ‘Four Quartets’?”“That’s classic Gideon,” Tanowitz said. “He thinks big. He has chutzpah. Part of it was a dare, so I said yes, thinking in my mind, ‘This will never happen.’”He introduced her to collaborators including the actor Kathleen Chalfant, who narrated the piece; the painter Brice Marden, whose paintings inspired the scenic design; and the composer Kaija Saariaho. (The Fisher Center has also taken over the administration of Tanowitz’s company.)But for all Lester’s skills as a connector, Tanowitz said, mostly he “dares you to be yourself.”El Khoury, who is Lebanese, first met Lester in 2017, at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, where he invited her to breakfast. “In classic Gideon fashion, he proposed all these things,” she recalled.She wasn’t sure how seriously to take any of them. But then he popped up again a few months later, at the CounterCurrent Festival in Houston.She came to Bard in 2019, as guest curator of the third Fisher Center biennial. During a long drive to New Hampshire, she and Lester had a rambling conversation that led to the creation a year later of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, which is part of the Open Society University Network.“It’s a huge responsibility to bring in an artist from a totally different environment and give her a lot of space and funding and trust,” El Khoury said.The most recent biennial addressed the politics of land and food. It culminated in May with a four-day festival that included El Khoury’s “Memory of Birds,” an interactive sound installation that invited visitors to lie in cocoon-like structures at the base of a row of maple trees.“I love it that the last piece we commissioned was Tania’s, which could be experienced by seven people at a time,” Lester said. “And now we’re doing ‘Illinois’ for almost 900.”The Fisher Center, nestled in a college known for the humanities, is expanding at a time when many performing arts institutions are struggling.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesPeck, the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet, said he had been thinking for almost a decade about creating something based on Stevens’s album, which he fell in love with as a teenager.“It’s a real full-circle moment, getting to engage with this album of a generation,” he said.“Illinois,” which came to the Fisher Center with commercial producers attached, is the most expensive non-opera production it has done, with a budget of about $1.2 million. (“Oklahoma!,” Lester said, cost about $450,000.)The show, whose narrative was developed by Peck and the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”), has no dialogue, just the lyrics of the songs, which are orchestrated by Timo Andres and performed and sung by a 13-piece band.The 12 dancers include some who Peck worked with on the 2018 Broadway revival of “Carousel” and Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.”“I wanted to create a vehicle for today’s generation of dance artists who are working in theater and storytelling,” he said, “to tell a story using their language, which is their movement.”Critics were not invited — they will be at the show’s Chicago run — but at the final evening performance, the audience whooped and applauded after most songs. After the tap-inflected “Jacksonville,” featuring a rapturously received turn by Jennifer Florentino, Lester and Drury fist-bumped.The show, Lester said, is “full of joy.” And part of that feeling, for him, is the white-knuckle uncertainty that comes with every project.“The joy of it,” he said, “is not knowing whether something’s going to work.” More

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      A Shorter Next Wave Festival Planned at BAM

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      The lineup for the artistic director’s final season will feature an interactive food theater performance and several dance programs.An intimate dinner-party performance, a fire-and-brimstone immersive show and a slew of dance performances are on tap for the coming Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the performing arts center announced on Friday.The festival will be the last to be programmed under David Binder, the artistic director, who announced earlier this year that he would step down and transition to an artistic advisory role on July 2. An interim artistic director will be announced in the coming weeks.This year’s edition of the storied festival will be scaled back, featuring seven programs — nearly half the last slate — from Oct. 19 through Jan. 13. The festival’s offerings have been steadily declining in recent years. In 2019, Next Wave featured 16 programs, down from 31 in 2017.“We prefer to think of it as dense and not necessarily shrinking,” said Amy Cassello, the festival’s associate director of programming. “I don’t think it’s any secret that arts institutions are pressed for funding.”The program is “an incredibly intentional effort,” she said.First on the schedule is the U.S. premiere of “Broken Chord” (Oct. 19-21), a retelling of South Africa’s first Black choir by the South African dancer and choreographer Gregory Maqoma and the composer Thuthuka Sibisi. Using atmospheric soundscapes and traditional Xhosa movement, the performance will feature a single dancer, four vocal soloists and a live local choir.Also on the lineup is the theater maker Geoff Sobelle’s surreal interactive dinner performance, “Food” (Nov. 2-18), in which audience members gather around an colossal banquet table. The show, which debuted at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2022, and which the New York Times critic Alexis Soloski called “a meditation on what and how and why we eat,” is the third in a trilogy of Sobelle’s performance works at BAM, following “The Object Lesson” in 2014 and “Home” in 2017.The artist and filmmaker Lynette Wallworth’s “How to Live (After You Die)” (Dec. 7-9) is a personal monologue on the seduction of cults and the extreme edges of organized religion. The choreographer Trajal Harrell’s “The Köln Concert” (Nov. 2-4), a dance work inspired by Keith Jarrett’s genre-hopping piano recording of the same name, will be performed by Harrell’s Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble. And the choreographer Rachid Ouramdane’s “Corps Extrêmes” (Oct. 27-29), an aerial dance work, contemplates the space between earth and sky, set against the backdrop of a climbing wall and a suspended high rope.The season will conclude with Huang Ruo’s “Angel Island” (Jan. 11-13), an opera-theater work about the plight of Chinese migrants who were detained under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1883. In collaboration with the Del Sol Quartet, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street and the archival filmmaker Bill Morrison, Ruo’s BAM debut will present a multimedia requiem based on poetry engraved on the detention center’s walls.“BAM has always said that we follow the artist,” Cassello said. “The work in this festival is very much attuned to present-day issues. We don’t take for granted that people are wanting to come back to theater.” More

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      American Ballet Theater Chief Resigns Suddenly

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      Janet Rollé, who had helped lead the company through the turmoil of the pandemic, stepped down a week before its summer season begins.Janet Rollé, the chief executive and executive director of American Ballet Theater, resigned a week before the start of the company’s summer season after 17 months on the job, the company announced Wednesday.Rollé, who helped lead the company through the turmoil of the pandemic, did not offer an explanation for her departure, saying only that she would turn her focus to service on corporate and nonprofit boards.“It has been a privilege to lead such a storied company during such a crucial period of time, and I am grateful for this experience,” Rollé, a former leader of Beyoncé’s business empire, said in a statement. “I would like to extend my sincerest best wishes to A.B.T. as they embark on this new chapter.”Susan Jaffe, Ballet Theater’s artistic director, will serve as interim executive director until a successor to Rollé is found, the company said. “I am humbled by the board’s confidence in me and excited to lead A.B.T. during this transition,” Jaffe, a former Ballet Theater ballerina who took office in December, said in a statement.The announcement jarred the dance world, coming just before Ballet Theater begins its season at the Metropolitan Opera House on June 22 with an expensive New York premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s “Like Water for Chocolate.” Ballet Theater’s leaders are set to host a gala that night to celebrate the start of the season, a high-profile event that draws donors, cultural executives, celebrities and artists.Rollé’s hiring was announced with much fanfare: She had made a name in the entertainment industry, having served as the general manager of Parkwood Entertainment, Beyoncé’s media and management company. Rollé, who is Black, was the first person of color to lead the company.Ballet Theater’s executives expressed gratitude to Rollé but offered no details about the circumstances surrounding her resignation. Rollé will advise the search for a successor, the company said.“Janet joined A.B.T. at a critical time, and we are appreciative of her leadership and contributions,” Andrew F. Barth, chairman of Ballet Theater’s board, said in a statement. “We thank her for her continued counsel during this transition period and wish her the very best.”Ballet Theater said that Rollé, Jaffe and Barth were not available for interviews. Rollé did not immediately respond to calls and messages seeking further comment.When Rollé started, in January 2022, she faced several immediate challenges, including helping Ballet Theater recover from the pandemic, which resulted in the cancellation of two seasons and cost the company millions of dollars in anticipated ticket revenue and touring fees.In a rare interview with Sports Illustrated last year, she said that she hoped to find new audiences for Ballet Theater.“What I think about is how to make that definition of being America’s national ballet company real and true for all Americans,” she said in the interview.The company endured some artistic struggles under her tenure. In December, the renowned choreographer Alexei Ratmansky said he was leaving after 13 years as artist in residence, a significant blow to the company. Soon after, New York City Ballet announced he would join that company as artist in residence beginning in August. More

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      The North to Shore Festival Comes to New Jersey

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      A new arts festival featuring local and marquee-name talent is coming to the Garden State.Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, along with the first lady, Tammy Murphy, had a vision: A new performance festival in their home state that could rival South by Southwest in Texas or Bonnaroo in Tennessee. And they had a plan to distinguish it.“Austin and Nashville are great towns,” the governor said, referring to two famous arts hubs that are connected to notable festivals. “But if you stop to consider the cultural priorities of the states that govern them, you say, ‘Wait a minute.’ You’re hoodwinked if you get taken by the coolness.”A festival in New Jersey, they argued, would be produced in a state whose values align with issues like gun safety and reproductive rights, a bragging right difficult to come by in the south. But what organizers are really touting with the event, which is being produced for the first time this summer, is the mix of homegrown talent and national acts (Halsey, Santana, Jazmine Sullivan) performing across three different cities, from the state’s largest city to the coast.The North to Shore Festival will roam from Atlantic City to Asbury Park to Newark throughout the month. Its inaugural run will feature more than 220 acts — including music, comedy, dance and film — in 115 venues. “When you combine all the talent we have in New Jersey with the fact that our values are on the right side of history, we thought, there’s no reason we couldn’t give this a shot,” Mr. Murphy said.In May, the festival doubled in size, in part because of a commitment to local talent. Grants of up to $5,000 were handed out to 58 New Jersey-based artists.“What I love about it is that it’s a combination of the biggest names in entertainment and comedy and film,” said John Schreiber, president and chief executive of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, which is producing the festival, “but it’s also a chance to turn up the volume on the local folks I call the local heroes — the artists, the creators, the presenters, the producers — who work in these cities 365 days a year.”One example of this kind of artistic convergence is “You Got VERRRSED: NJ Poets vs. New York Poets,” which will take place in Newark on June 24, the day after Marisa Monte, a Grammy Award winner, performs there.In each host city, venues stretch beyond the familiar. Newark, for example, will host “Jersey Club 101,” a combination dance lesson and party, at Ariya Plaza Hall, a local dance club known for hosting private events and the occasional concert, on June 24.On June 9 in Atlantic City, a brewery, The Seed: A Living Beer Project, will host a multidisciplinary event, “From Earth to Cup,” with live music, pottery making and samples of its craft beers. The following afternoon at Sovereign Avenue Field, a popular skatepark, local hardcore and punk bands will play free shows in the “Back Sov Bullies Concert.”While Asbury Park’s famous rock club, the Stone Pony, will see its share of action — with Eric B. & Rakim, Brian Fallon, Demi Lovato and the B-52’s all scheduled to perform — stages at the lesser-known Watermark, down the street, will also be in heavy rotation and can expect to see more traffic than usual.Alexander Simone and his seven-piece band, the Whodat? Live Crew, will play there on June 14. Mr. Simone, 34, who is from the area and the grandson of Nina Simone, won a grant to take part in North to Shore with the band, which leans toward funk and R&B, after being nominated by local fans. The recognition confirmed something he already knew: “I am definitely one of the most known bands in this community,” he said.Now he hopes that other parts of the country will pay more attention to his music. “Artists are coming this way, to Jersey, and bringing people with them the way South by Southwest brings people to Texas,” he said. “They’re coming to see what we have to offer on this end.”Billboards along the Garden State Parkway and the New Jersey Turnpike are promoting the festival. Mr. Schreiber said he expects more than 350,000 people to attend. The overall windfall for New Jersey’s economy, he added, could be $100 million. “We’re betting the economic impact in all three of these communities will far outweigh any of the investment we have to make,” Mr. Murphy said.Amanda Towers, a founder of the Seed, a Living Beer Project, which will host a multidisciplinary event with music, pottery and beer in Atlantic City.Jennifer Pottheiser for The New York TimesNatalie Merchant, accompanied by New York City’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s, will perform in Newark on June 25. “I think it’s really ambitious and impressive,” she said of the idea behind the festival.But her decision to participate did not have much to do with performing in a liberal-leaning state, Ms. Merchant said. “I tend to not penalize my fans in states with political conditions like abortion restrictions.” Instead, “I talk about them onstage.”The North to Shore Festival will take place June 4-11 in Atlantic City, June 14-18 in Asbury Park and June 21-25 in Newark. More

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      Coming to City Center: ‘Pal Joey,’ ‘Titanic’ and the 20th Fall for Dance

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      Also among next season’s highlights: Encores! revivals of “Once Upon a Mattress” and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” and dance works from Pam Tanowitz and Lyon Opera Ballet.Concert re-stagings of “Titanic,” “Once Upon a Mattress” and “Jelly’s Last Jam”; the unveiling of a previously announced rewrite of the Rodgers and Hart musical “Pal Joey”; and dance works by Lyon Opera Ballet and Pam Tanowitz: New York City Center has announced plans for an ambitious 2023-24 season, one in which it will celebrate its 30th Encores! series and the 20th Fall for Dance festival.“It’s a season that’s equal parts hilarity, innovation and operatic scale,” Lear deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores!, a concert series that revives classic and rare musicals, said on Wednesday in a news release.A highlight will be City Center’s gala presentation: an adaptation of the 1940 musical “Pal Joey” (Nov. 1-5), now set in a Black community — the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s — starring Ephraim Sykes as Joey Evans, a jazz singer who refuses to compromise his craft in the face of racism, and Jennifer Holliday (a Tony winner for “Dreamgirls”) as a nightclub owner. The production, directed by Tony Goldwyn and Savion Glover with a new book by Richard LaGravenese and Daniel Beaty, will also feature Aisha Jackson (“Once Upon a One More Time”) and Elizabeth Stanley (“Jagged Little Pill”).Frank Sinatra with Rita Hayworth, left, and Kim Novak in the 1957 film adaptation of “Pal Joey.”Columbia Pictures, via AlamyThis is a new direction for “Pal Joey,” which originally featured white characters; in 2021, the producer Jeffrey Richards said he would bring this re-conceived version to Broadway during the 2022-23 season, which just ended without the show. Now the delayed production will have a City Center run instead — and after that, who knows? Two of this season’s Tony-nominated musical revivals, “Into the Woods” and “Parade,” started at City Center.City Center’s season will kick off with its 20th Fall for Dance festival (Sept. 27-Oct. 8), which will include a collaboration between Sara Mearns of City Ballet, the choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, co‐presented with Vail Dance Festival; as well as the premiere of an original work by the street dance artist Ephrat Asherie and the tap dancer Michelle Dorrance. The two-week festival will also include performances by Birmingham Royal Ballet, led by the director Carlos Acosta, and by Bijayini Satpathy, an interpreter of the classical Indian dance form Odissi.In January, the main Encores! series begins with “Once Upon a Mattress,” the 1959 musical comedy adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” with music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer, and a book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and Barer. Sutton Foster (“Anything Goes,” “The Music Man”) stars as the brassy, lovable Princess Winnifred the Woebegone, the part that made Carol Burnett a star in 1959. DeBessonet will direct a new concert adaptation (Jan. 24-28) by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of the television series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”It will be followed by “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the 1992 Broadway musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, with a book by George C. Wolfe, lyrics by Susan Birkenhead and music by Morton and Luther Henderson (Feb. 21-25). The original production won three Tony Awards, including best lead actor for Gregory Hines and best featured actress for Tonya Pinkins. It will be directed by Robert O’Hara, with casting to be announced.The series will conclude with a revival of Peter Stone and Maury Yeston’s 1997 musical “Titanic,” which recounts the 20th century’s most famous maritime disaster (June 12-16). The original production (no connection to James Cameron’s epic film) won five Tony Awards, including best musical, but has never received a Broadway revival. It will be directed by Anne Kauffman, with casting to be announced.City Center’s 2023-24 lineup also includes over a dozen dance offerings, among them Lyon Opera Ballet in “Dance,” the choreographer Lucinda Childs’s 1979 collaboration with the composer Philip Glass and the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (Oct. 19-21); as well as the choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s “Song of Songs,” which fuses David Lang’s choral settings of the biblical poem with movement inspired by Jewish folk dance (Nov. 9-11).To close out the year, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the center’s resident dance company, will celebrate its 65th anniversary with a season (Nov. 29-Dec. 31) that includes Ronald K. Brown’s “Dancing Spirit,” a 2009 work that mixes African diaspora and American modern dance styles. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Dancin’’ to Close on Broadway, a Casualty of Tony Nominations

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      The production, a revue celebrating the choreography of Bob Fosse, received no Tony nominations on Tuesday. Its last show will be May 14.This season’s Broadway revival of “Dancin’,” a revue celebrating the choreography of Bob Fosse, will end its short run on Sunday, May 14, the show’s producers announced on Tuesday evening, just hours after receiving zero Tony nominations.The show, with little narrative but virtuosic dance, opened on March 19. At the time of its closing it will have played 17 preview performances and 65 regular performances.The original production, which opened in 1978, fared far better, running for a total of 1,787 performances. The original was nominated for seven Tony Awards and won two, including for best choreography; among the nominees was the dancer Wayne Cilento, who is directing the current revival.The New York Times’s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, called the current production “often-thrilling, often-frustrating,” and other reviews were mixed.The production was one of 11 that received no Tony nominations on Tuesday. The revival had a pre-Broadway production last year at the Old Globe in San Diego.The revival’s lead producer is Joey Parnes, and Fosse’s daughter, Nicole, was also involved with the production. It was capitalized for up to $15 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped. More

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      in Music

      When La Scala Is Sold Out, You Can Still Get In (Online)

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      The opera house’s new streaming service provides live and on-demand performances, as well as extras like backstage glimpses and educational programs.La Scala’s audience can now be anywhere.The opera house in Milan is sharing select performances online through LaScalaTv, a platform that started streaming in February. Its first live offering was a broadcast of Verdi’s opera “I Vespri siciliani,” conducted by Fabio Luisi and featuring such soloists as Marina Rebeka and Luca Micheletti.The program also includes concerts and ballets. On May 11, Alberto Malazzi conducts “Petite Messe Solennelle” by Rossini, to commemorate the anniversary of La Scala’s restoration and reopening after World War II. The ballet “Romeo and Juliet” by Sergei Prokofiev takes the screen to choreography by Kenneth MacMillan on June 28.The on-demand library also includes performances for children, starting with a staged concert based on carnival celebrations called “Lalla & Skali and … the Enchanted Mask.”The platform is part of a wider effort to modernize La Scala’s infrastructure, including an extensive educational outreach program using the technology and plans for subtitles on seat backs.Mirjam Schiavello, left, and Matteo Sala in a performance of “Lalla and Skali and … the Enchanted Mask” at La Scala, part of the house’s on-demand offerings for children.Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla ScalaDominique Meyer, the theater’s current artistic director and chief executive, said that technological advances in recent years had made it easier for an opera house to widen its reach.“It is a real leap,” he said, recalling the difficulties he faced in 2013 when starting a platform for the Vienna State Opera during his tenure there. “Most people have a faster internet connection, which is extremely important when viewers want to watch a stream in 4K.”The equipment available for in-house operations has also advanced rapidly. Small, robotic cameras can capture performances in the dark without necessitating changes of light, leaving on-site viewers undisturbed. And microphones can easily transmit quality sound.Performances on LaScalaTv are available in either ultra high definition or high definition. The most expensive offering, a live program at the highest resolution, costs 11.90 euros (about $13), while a children’s program at the lower resolution costs €2.90. The audio track is uniformly transmitted in AAC, a compression format of a higher grade than MP3.Mr. Meyer has prioritized a wide view of the stage. “It was important to me to respect a certain distance,” he said. “One doesn’t need close-ups that show the sweat on the face of Gilda at the end of ‘Rigoletto.’”He also wants to capture dance performances at a healthy distance. “If you come too close, it looks like the dancer’s head is about to hit the top of the screen,” he said. “A principle of the whole project was that there would not be too many cuts, and that the viewer would have the liberty to focus where he or she pleases.”Cameras at La Scala can capture performances for online audiences without disturbing viewers in the opera house itself. Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla ScallaIntermissions provide glimpses backstage and facts about La Scala’s history. Recent offerings have included a tour of the theater’s museum, home to such treasures as a manuscript page from Verdi’s “Nabucco” and a portrait of the soprano Maria Callas.Mr. Meyer said that the house had just scratched the surface of the possibilities and that “there was a lot to tell,” citing “the rehearsals, what happens behind the scenes, the [costume and set] workshops.”Of central importance is bringing some of these stories to younger viewers. The theater has started by creating a network of 200 schools in Italy to bring students into contact with opera.For example, a live rehearsal of Puccini’s “La Bohème” was recently followed by a livestream of the performance itself. A documentary about Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi” was combined with an on-demand viewing of the opera itself. This September will bring the first ballet program, revolving around Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.”The house is also teaming up with RAI, Italy’s state broadcaster, to share footage from the 1970s and ’80s, including performances under the conductors Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti. The main sponsor of LaScalaTv is the bank Intesa Sanpaolo, and the Cariplo Foundation is supporting the dissemination of content to schools.A scene from “La Bohème” at La Scala. A recent stream of a rehearsal for that opera was followed by a livestream of the performance itself.Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla Scalla“We brought in about €40.5 million in sponsorship revenue last season,” Mr. Meyer said. “That is huge in Europe. All these projects are being financed.”In the theater, subtitles will be installed this summer on the backs of chairs with translations in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish, using the same software as the streaming platform (eventually there will be eight languages). On May 29, La Scala unveils its new website — which includes a digital magazine — coinciding with its presentation of the 2023-24 season.Italian viewers thus far make up half the streaming service’s audience. Another fourth comes from other European countries. Outside Europe, the highest numbers are currently in the United States and Russia.In-house, Mr. Meyer said, La Scala has regularly sold out this season. “We of course can’t create more seats,” he said. “This technology allows us to expand our audience, also to children.” More