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    Holiday Shows to See in N.Y.C.: ‘Elf,’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ and More

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    “Elf the Musical,” inventive spins on “A Christmas Carol” and classic family fare: Here are some of our favorite shows of the season.The end of the year marks the return of eggnog and latkes, gifting and regifting — and holiday-themed shows to bask in tradition, communal spirit and, yes, fun. In New York, we can always count on well-timed offerings on stages of all sizes.One of the biggest, the Marquis Theater, is hosting “Elf the Musical” (through Jan. 4) in which Grey Henson gets the title role “delightfully, entirely right,” according to Laura Collins-Hughes’s review for The New York Times. And then, at the cavernous Theater at Madison Square Garden, Whoopi Goldberg’s Miss Hannigan will do her darnedest to prevent the darling orphan girls of “Annie” from enjoying Christmas at Oliver Warbucks’s mansion (Dec. 4-Jan. 4, with Goldberg joining the cast on Dec. 11).In the middle is the Big Apple Circus, which once again pitched its tent in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center. The company members may come from all over the globe, but the new show, “Hometown Playground,” is about New York City (through Jan. 5). And don’t overlook the jewel box New Victory Theater, which is presenting “Yuletide Factory” (through Dec. 29) by Cirque Mechanics, a Las Vegas troupe with, as Alexis Soloski described it in her review, “a giddily steampunk aesthetic.”And there is more, so much more — with some selections from around the country because New York can’t have all the fun.From left, Una Clancy, Mary Beth Peil, Kate Baldwin and Christopher Innvar in Irish Rep’s immersive, site-specific production of “The Dead, 1904.”Carol RoseggWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Betty Buckley Is Not Wedded to the Same Old Songs

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      The actress is back in concert mode at 76, and doing new material. She’s also looking forward to a bold new take on “Sunset Boulevard.”On her 35-acre ranch in Texas, the actor-singer Betty Buckley has been dreaming of playing a Western heroine at last — ideally in something by Taylor Sheridan, the “Yellowstone” creator, who shoots nearby.“I have literally contemplated going to his ranch and just knocking on the door,” Buckley, 76, said the other afternoon, and laughed.This week, though, she is slated to perform in Manhattan, Thursday through Saturday at Joe’s Pub, with songs and arrangements new to her show. After a year and a half of physical challenges including long Covid and compression fractures in her spine, she has worked her way back into concert mode.A veteran of the 1976 movie “Carrie” and the musical adaptation — a cult favorite that was a Broadway flop in 1988 — she is also back on-screen as an unsettling neighbor in the horror movie “Imaginary,” released in March, and with an animated short that she wrote and narrates, “The Mayfly,” scheduled for the Tribeca Festival in June.The actress played Norma Desmond in both the West End and the Broadway productions of “Sunset Boulevard” in the mid-1990s.John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesSissy Spacek and Buckley in “Carrie,” which was Buckley’s big-screen debut in 1976. She later starred in a stage adaptation of the movie.United ArtistsA 1983 Tony Award winner for playing Grizabella in “Cats,” and famed for her trans-Atlantic 1990s turn as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” Buckley spoke from her ranch by video call. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Reports of Cabaret’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

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      The art form has faced challenges as nightlife norms shift — and as its audience ages — but it has also evolved. Five figures from the New York scene discuss.Cabaret has been integral to New York nightlife for more than a century, but every so often, reports of its death — however exaggerated — cause a stir. The singer and educator Natalie Douglas, who arrived from Los Angeles in 1988 and has performed steadily at the storied jazz club Birdland and other venues, figures the premature mourning started “at least 70 years ago — as soon as people moved from the cities to the suburbs and had room to entertain at home.”Douglas (age: “Not as young as I look”) is noted for her tributes to Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone and the great Stevies of pop (Wonder and Nicks). Recently on a brisk afternoon, she arrived at a loft in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, for a confab with four other veterans of the cabaret scene. Tammy Lang, 57 — who has earned a devoted following through her titular comedic persona as Tammy Faye Starlite, an evangelical country crooner, and through her homages to Marianne Faithfull and Nico — perched beside her on a sofa.Jennifer Ashley Tepper, 37, the creative and programming director of 54 Below — a Midtown hot spot known for showcasing Broadway stars, cult heroes and aspirants — joined, along with Lance Horne, 46, an Emmy-winning composer, arranger, singer and music director whose collaborators include Liza Minnelli and Kylie Minogue. Horne holds court Mondays at the East Village’s Club Cumming, playing piano for singalongs that stretch into the wee hours. Such late revelry is less common than it used to be, pointed out Sidney Myer, 73, who, as longtime booking manager of Don’t Tell Mama near Times Square, has nurtured careers for decades and is a performer himself.“I don’t appear onstage with all-white bands anymore because I can’t be the only Black person onstage, especially since my shows are so political,” Douglas said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMyer mused that when he got his start in cabaret, some 50 years ago, “the whole culture was different” in a few key ways. “People didn’t have a thousand channels at home; they didn’t have the world in their hands in the form of a phone.” And, he added, “They weren’t as health-conscious; there was smoking in all the rooms, and people weren’t watching their alcohol intake as much, or thinking about getting up to jog.”Since originating in Europe, cabaret has accommodated both traditional and experimental artists; here it has encompassed comedy, drag and burlesque alongside curated American songbook compilations and more contemporary and quirkier musical fare. In New York, venues range from the tony Café Carlyle to downtown “alt-cabaret” spots such as Joe’s Pub and Pangea. At 54 Below, where Tepper programs some 700 shows a year, guests can catch rising composers and performers or the cast of a musical on its night off; Myer noted that award-winning stars were born at Don’t Tell Mama — “even a Pulitzer Prize winner.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Musical Force Behind the Communal, Queer ‘Bark of Millions’

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      Matt Ray is a prolific songwriter and the musical nexus of New York’s alt-cabaret scene. His next project: Taylor Mac’s latest marathon performance.“It’s the last hour, and I’m feeling the energy draining,” Taylor Mac, the performing arts polymath, announced near the end of a recent rehearsal at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.If the artists — an ensemble of a dozen singers, as well as several instrumentalists — were exhausted, it was because of the sheer scale of what they were working on: “Bark of Millions,” a show by Mac and the musician Matt Ray, which has its American premiere on Monday at BAM’s Harvey Theater. Essential to that scale is Ray’s score of 55 original songs that add up to four hours of performance.That would be enough to fill several albums by any recording artist, and yet it’s business as usual for Ray. He has been not only the musical core of Mac’s recent shows — the daylong marathon “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” for which he arranged over 240 songs with the purpose of queering the American canon, and “The Hang,” for which he wrote 26 — but he has also been the force behind much of New York’s alt-cabaret scene, with collaborators including Justin Vivian Bond, Joey Arias and Bridget Everett.“This is a community of risk-takers and rule-breakers,” Everett said in an interview. “It’s a really exciting, vital scene. And there’s one person who’s the musical nexus of that. It’s Matt. His heart is beating at the center of all of it.”The performer Justin Vivian Bond called Ray “such a sensitive artist,” and said, “for being a consummate Leo, he’s just great at letting other people shine.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRAY, 51, has had expansive taste in music since his childhood growing up on the East Coast. Whether as a player — he started learning the piano when he was 2 years old — or as a listener, he never limited himself to any one genre. “I really admire monochromatic types of work,” he said, “but I just don’t work that way.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Come for Me’ Review: Catherine Cohen’s T.M.I. Comedy Set

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      In her autobiographical new show with songs, Catherine Cohen delivers a heightened version of millennial oversharing and confidence run amok.Attending Catherine Cohen’s new show “Come for Me” is like being swept up by a tornado, or maybe watching “Fast & Furious: The Vaudeville Years.” The pace of her new comedy show is so unrelenting that by the time you catch your breath after a joke, three more have zipped by. Filming sex with her boyfriend? Listening to true-crime podcasts? Freezing her eggs? Entire acts have been built on less. But in “Come for Me,” the follow-up to last year’s “The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous,” Cohen spends just a few minutes on each, if that, and moves on.As for the musical numbers — for she is that modern rarity, a singing comedian — they pack more delicious hooks than most pop albums do.It’s a great tease: Cohen suggests that she has enough material to go on for days, but chooses to give us only an hour’s worth.Even Cohen’s trademark meta annotations, like announcing “bridge!” in the middle of a number, are delivered breathlessly. She holds dramatic poses — leaning seductively against a wall, for example — but only briefly. In the middle of songs at last Friday’s show at Joe’s Pub, she commanded members of the crowd to “uncross your arms!” but did not pause for a reaction, smoothly segueing from singing to demanding and back to singing. (In contrast, the loopy absurdism of Ikechukwu Ufomadu’s 30-minute opening set benefited from his slow, deliberate formality.)This is par for the course for Cohen, who taunts us only as a way to spice up her real subject: herself, or rather the act of revealing herself. She mocks the postures of our confessional era while reveling in them.The Catherine Cohen we meet onstage is a fabulous, relentlessly bouncy narcissist for whom too much information is never enough. The set includes gleeful accounts of her sex life with her boyfriend (and the people they have been inviting to partake) in which self-deprecation and gloating fuse into a heightened version — or is it? — of millennial oversharing and confidence run amok. “Dating me,” she crows, “is what critics and fans alike have described as an immersive experience.”“Come for Me” is simultaneously more graphic and sweeter than her previous show, but it also gives off floral notes of doubt and vulnerability. The first song, “The Void,” suggests, without being remotely maudlin, a fumbling need to fill an emptiness, while the closing number, “Good Not Bad,” playfully subverts its cheery melody. Happily, this slight expansion of Cohen’s emotional palette — echoed by her musical one, since she’s now backed by a three-piece band rather than just a pianist — has not hindered her sunny, gonzo vitality. More, here, is more.Come for MeThrough June 30 at Joe’s Pub, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Plays for the Plague Year,’ the Soundtrack of Our Lives

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      Suzan-Lori Parks wrote one play a day for 13 months during the pandemic. Those stories come to life onstage in the form of monologues, dialogues and songs at Joe’s Pub.Upon entering Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater for Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” audience members are handed a Playbill, a pencil and two yellow notecards, each with a question about the pandemic: “What would you like to remember?” “What would you like to forget?” The responses are placed in a basket from which they are picked and read during the show. At my performance, someone wrote that they’d like to forget “fear and worry, foreground and background.” People in the audience murmured in assent.We’d all probably like to forget our own experiences of fear and worry during that first year of zealous hand-washing and ever-changing mask mandates. Parks, however, made a project of remembering: For that first pandemic year, she resolved to write a play a day about “whatever happens,” including the mundane goings-on in her apartment, the deaths of friends and strangers, and the Black Lives Matter protests.Here, Parks performs a version of herself called the Writer, who creates plays each day while quarantining with her husband (played by Greg Keller) and their 8-year-old son (Leland Fowler) in their one-bedroom apartment.What unfolds is some configuration of those plays, though “play” is too restrictive a word for these micro-performances, which take the forms of monologues, dialogues and songs. Parks, who also plays the guitar here, is joined onstage by seven other cast members in various roles and a band (Ric Molina, guitar; Graham Kozak, bass; Ray Marchica, percussion).An accounting of each day — an electronic placard hanging above the stage flashes the date and title of each section, presented chronologically from March 19, 2020, to April 13, 2021 — provides the show with a built-in structure to link what often feels like a hodgepodge.Parks wisely uses a series of shorthands to quickly bring us back to specific moments in those early pandemic days — an actor, for example, gliding past Parks in an ornate doublet and Tudor-style cap to signal theater closures, the cast hollering and clapping for a brief moment to signal the daily 7 p.m. cheer for frontline workers.In the plays in which Parks isn’t writing or with her family, she’s talking to a dead Little Richard or negotiating with her Muse who, fed up with Covid, threatens to abandon her. In another, a character named Bob looks for a job. There’s one in which Earth, embodied by a woman wearing a crown of branches and holding a scepter, warns that the pandemic is only the beginning of the world’s disasters.From left: Orville Mendoza, Martín Solá, Danyel Fulton and Rona Figueroa in a short play about Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker who was shot and killed by police officers in Louisville, Ky.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRuth Bader Ginsburg appears, on the day of her death, as a triumphant Lady Liberty, and the virus, personified as a horror movie villainess named Corona, wheezes and stalks the stage in a black-gray-white ombré dress and virion headpiece with red “spikes.” The costume design, by Rodrigo Muñoz, is as imaginative and visually stunning as runway couture, especially the layered fabrics of the Muse’s handkerchief hem skirt, made to resemble scraps of paper with scribbled writings, and the 3-D elements, like the butterflies on Earth’s chiffon dress.But not all days are created equal, and this three-hour production does feel as if we’re reliving a year’s worth of material. At least the variety in Parks’s script keeps things unpredictable enough to hold our attention.The direction, by Niegel Smith, occasionally gets too darling, like the first scene, when the family members introduce themselves (“I am the writer. I am the hubby. I am the son.”) while passing a red paper heart to one another. But Smith, who also choreographed the show, does make organized chaos in the intimate space (design by Peter Nigrini), rotating characters on a tiny stage adorned with a few pieces of low-sitting furniture — table, armchair, dresser, lamp, rack covered in books.The show’s music is as eclectic as the storytelling; the songs are short, plucky, with hints of folk, jazz and R&B. The surprising mash-up of genres include the doo-wop style of “Bob Needs a Job,” and the bluesy “Praying Now” soon picks up tempo, turning into an upbeat clap-and-stomp. Most aren’t particularly memorable, but the strongest songs — “RIP the King” and “Whichaway the World” — build with an alternating mix of spoken word/rap and soulful crooning from two performers in particular, Fowler and Danyel Fulton.Sometimes it seems as if Parks is overreaching, as when she speaks to her former mentor, James Baldwin (perfectly embodied by Fowler, who replicates his posture and cadence of speech), so he can muse about American history. Or in a long ceremony during which the cast hands flowers to the audience at the end of a section about Breonna Taylor, played by Fulton; but Fulton’s performance is poignant enough on its own.The playwright’s conversations with the dead, however, many of whom begin their scenes unaware or in denial of their demise, is the show’s most compelling motif. She speaks to several who are Black, especially those lost to Covid and those to police brutality. Through these post-mortems, Parks is asking trenchant questions about how we memorialize Black bodies. What would the dead say? How would they want to be remembered, if at all? So the Brooklyn educator Dez-Ann Romain, who died from complications of the coronavirus, snapping “Don’t make me speak of myself in the past tense,” and George Floyd asking, “Would I be safe if Harriet Tubman was on the 20?” become tragic self-written elegies. We’re watching the dead mourn themselves.Then there’s Parks, who, even playing this version of herself, always feels earnest, as when she listens to the speeches of her characters, while sitting off to one side of the stage, leaning forward attentively. You can easily imagine this being the way Parks sees the world refracted back to her, conversing with the dead, building abstractions.Unfortunately, her own domestic narrative feels flat by comparison. So “What’s the takeaway? What’s the concept? What’s the tone,” as the Writer’s TV producer asks her at one point during a conversation about the Writer’s plays project.“Plague Year” never answers these questions; the Writer ultimately discovers that the plays “didn’t save us.” But this isn’t Parks renouncing her ambitious undertaking. She’s offering another way to think about the production, which isn’t always a cohesive work of theater: Perhaps it doesn’t have to.Theater doesn’t save us, the Writer says, “but it does preserve us somehow,” so this piece still is a record. This is catharsis. It’s preservation.Plays for the Plague YearThrough April 30 at Joe’s Pub, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      Under the Radar Festival Returns, Smaller but Still Funky

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      The experimental festival at the Public Theater will return in person with fewer shows and, for the first time, performances outside New York City.The Under the Radar festival, the Public Theater’s annual showcase for experimental theater, will return in person next year, Jan. 12-30. The event, now in its 18th year, will feature nearly two dozen artists, with performances held at the Public and Mabou Mines in Manhattan as well as a venue in upstate New York.Those who’ve attended in past years will notice a few differences: The festival will run for three weeks instead of two and include only 15 productions at the Public — all 90 minutes or less — down from the 22 at the 2020 festival.“I’m happy we have a smaller festival this year so we can really concentrate on these pieces and give them the attention they deserve,” Mark Russell, the festival director, said in a phone conversation, adding that he hadn’t yet determined whether the change would be permanent.One of the pieces that Russell said he was most excited to land was Jasmine Lee-Jones’s “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” (Jan. 12-16, 18-23, 25-29). Staged to critical acclaim at London’s Royal Court Theater last summer, the 90-minute two-hander explores cultural appropriation, queerness, friendship and the ownership of Black bodies online and in real life.A cultural re-examination is also what Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff have planned for the New York premiere of their hourlong show “Our Country,” a meeting of mythic and modern America set in California’s marijuana country and inspired by Sophocles’ “Antigone” (Jan. 12-16, 21-23).A pair of solo shows also highlight the schedule: The playwright Inua Ellams (“Barber Shop Chronicles”) will perform his 90-minute, music- and poetry-filled piece “An Evening with an Immigrant,” which chronicles his journey from Nigeria to England (Jan. 18-20). Roger Guenveur Smith, an actor known for his roles in Spike Lee films, will return to the festival with his hourlong solo show “Otto Frank,” a historical account of the father of Anne Frank, who was the only immediate member of his family to survive the Holocaust (Jan. 13-16, 20-23).Rounding out the slate is a double bill of “Mud/Drowning,” two intimate works by María Irene Fornés, a Cuban American playwright and director who died in 2018, which, following a sold-out run last year, will return to the experimental theater company Mabou Mines (Jan. 12-16, 18-23, 25-30). “Mud,” a play by Fornés, is a grim consideration of ignorance, poverty and desperation, while “Drowning,” a half-hour “pocket” opera by the composer Philip Glass, is adapted from Fornés’s five-page surreal play based on a short story by Anton Chekhov.A new initiative, “Under the Radar: On the Road,” will also bring a pair of Pascal Rambert monologues, “The Art of Theater” and “With My Own Hands,” to a venue called PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century in Chatham, N.Y., which sits on 100 acres of orchards, meadows and woodlands (Jan. 14-15, 22-23).Following the Under the Radar Festival, “An Evening with an Immigrant” will also be performed at Oklahoma City Repertory Theater (Jan. 22-23) and at Stanford University (Jan. 29-30), and “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” will transfer to Washington, D.C., for a three-week run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Feb. 14-March 6).“We’re acknowledging that small-scale work needs touring to survive and reach the widest audience,” Russell said.The festival will also include eight works in the “Incoming!” works-in-process series and the return of concerts by artists including Migguel Anggelo, Salty Brine and Alicia Hall Moran at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan.A full lineup is available at publictheater.org. More

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      New Work by Suzan-Lori Parks to Be Part of Public Theater Season

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      “The Visitor” and “cullud wattah,” two shows postponed by the pandemic, will get their premieres alongside works by James Ijames, Shaina Taub and Lloyd Suh.The Public Theater’s 2021-22 season will feature a mix of projects postponed because of the pandemic and new works, including “Plays for the Plague Year” by Suzan-Lori Parks.Behind the scenes, the Off Broadway nonprofit — responding to renewed calls for racial equity in the theater industry — said it will include over 50 percent representation by people of color in artistic leadership roles, from the directors and writers to the choreographers and the designers.“This last year and a half, in addition to Covid, has been about a call for racial justice and equity that we take profoundly seriously,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, said in an interview. “The Public obviously has always been, we felt, progressive on racial issues. And what became clear to us is we weren’t progressive enough.”The season begins with a musical that was about to have its world premiere in March 2020, before theaters were shuttered because of the pandemic: “The Visitor,” by Tom Kitt, Brian Yorkey and Kwame Kwei-Armah. Directed by Daniel Sullivan and based on the film about a college professor and two undocumented immigrants, it will feature David Hyde Pierce and Ari’el Stachel, both Tony Award winners. Performances will begin Oct. 7.The pandemic also led to the postponement of the debut of Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s play, “cullud wattah.” In the interim, she received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, which honors work by women and nonbinary playwrights. The play is about the effects of the water crisis in Flint, Mich., on three generations of women. Candis C. Jones will direct the play, which begins performances in November.Another delayed work, Mona Mansour’s “The Vagrant Trilogy,” about Palestinians’ displacement, will be directed by Mark Wing-Davey and will now open in April 2022.And Shaina Taub’s anticipated musical about the American women’s suffrage movement will take the stage in March 2022. “Suffs,” described as an epic show about some of the unsung heroines of the movement, will be directed by Leigh Silverman and feature the choreography of Raja Feather Kelly.In addition to Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright wrote a play a day since the beginning of the pandemic, the season will also include “Out of Time,” a collection of monologues by five award-winning Asian American playwrights; “The Chinese Lady,” Lloyd Suh’s portrait of the first Chinese woman to step foot in America in 1834; and “Fat Ham,” James Ijames’s “hilarious yet profound new ‘Hamlet’-inspired play” set at a Southern barbecue, Jesse Green wrote in his review of a streaming production. (Some of these are co-productions with Barrington Stage Company, Ma-Yi Theater Company, NAATCO and National Black Theater.)The theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones’ digital album, “Altar No. 1 — Aten,” will unfold through a series of weekly installments beginning Sept. 22. And Joe’s Pub will be back, too: The performance space tucked inside the Public will have live music starting Oct. 5.The lineup of shows reflects the current moment well, Eustis said, for a few reasons. There’s the representation of artists of color and the partnerships with theater companies hit harder by the past year than the Public. And then there’s what he called Parks’s “astonishing” new work, “Plays for the Plague Year.”“They give a sort of map,” Eustis said, “and a day by day examination of what this year has been, like no other work of art I’ve seen. I think it’s an incredibly important and powerful work.”Parks began writing “Plays for the Plague Year” on March 12, 2020, and it covers at least a year. Among the snapshots she captured were those “almost like a small domestic adjustment drama,” Eustis said, in April, and the murder of George Floyd in May, as well as the racial reckoning that followed.The past year has sparked dialogue and rocked foundations, and the theater is no exception. Much of the conversation at the Public has been in the gap between “we need to be more thoughtful” and “the show must go on,” Eustis said.“Because the show must go on; it really must,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t figure out a way to be more thoughtful about how we work, and more mindful about and contemplative about the ways we treat each other while the show goes on.” More

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      With Venues Reopening Across New York, Life Is a Cabaret Once Again

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      “Thank you all for risking your lives by coming out tonight,” Joe Iconis quipped, welcoming a socially distanced crowd to the June reopening of the cabaret venue Feinstein’s/54 Below in Manhattan.Iconis, a composer, lyricist and performer beloved among young musical theater fans, was joking, but before diving into an alternately goofy and poignant set with the actor and singer George Salazar — a star of Iconis’s first Broadway production, “Be More Chill” — he added, earnestly, “It’s the most incredible thing to be able to do this show for real human beings, not computer screens.”Moist-eyed reunions between artists and fans have been taking place across the city as Covid-19 restrictions are gradually relaxing. “I hope you’re prepared for how emotional it will be when you’re onstage, because it will be emotional for us, supporting artists we love again,” a fan told the band Betty. In the intimate spaces that house these shows, interaction between artists and those who love them is integral to what the downtown fixture Sandra Bernhard called “the in-the-moment, visceral experience.”Storied establishments like the jazz clubs Birdland and Blue Note, newer spots such as the Green Room 42 and City Winery at Hudson River Park (which both reopened in April), along with the East Village alt-cabaret oases Pangea and Club Cumming are once again offering food, drink and in-the-flesh entertainment, as cabaret veterans — along with other jazz and pop acts, and drag performers — return to the work that is their bread and butter.Fans at Feinstein’s/54 Below snap a selfie before Joe Iconis and George Salazar took the stage.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesAn emotional Salazar onstage at Feinstein’s/54 Below.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSalazar mingles with fans after the June show.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“To see people physiologically responding to music again — toes tapping, heads bopping — that’s almost better than applause,” said the pianist and singer Michael Garin, one of many who used social media to stay connected with fans during the pandemic, and among the first to resume performances for live audiences.But, Garin noted, “It’s not like we’re flipping a switch and bringing everything back to normal.” Particularly in the spring, not everyone was ready to pick up where they left off. “There were some musicians who were ready to book as soon as possible, and others who said, ‘Let me see — I don’t know if I want to be in an indoor space right now,’” said Steven Bensusan, the president of Blue Note Entertainment Group.The producer and host Scott Siegel, creator of the virtual “Scott Siegel’s Nightclub New York,” said that trepidation is still shared by some patrons: “Everybody’s hopeful, but I hear people say they’re nervous. There are also many who come in from outside the tristate area, and it’s more of an effort to get in.”Iconis rehearsing for his return to the live stage.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“It’s the most incredible thing to be able to do this show for real human beings, not computer screens,” Iconis said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesWith regulations still in flux, both vigilance and adaptability are key. Before Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s mid-June announcement that the state could almost fully reopen, Birdland had planned to return at just 50 percent capacity on July 1. Instead, all 150 of its seats have been accessible from the start, with returning variety-show hosts Jim Caruso and Susie Mosher featuring theater and cabaret luminaries such as Chita Rivera and Natalie Douglas in the first week back. (The club’s downstairs space, Birdland Theater, will remain closed until September.) The Blue Note, which reopened in mid-June at roughly two-thirds capacity, has since made all of its 250 seats available. Proof of vaccination against the coronavirus is not required at either club, though masks are recommended for the unvaccinated at Birdland.By contrast, at 54 Below, where the plan is to build gradually back to a full crowd of about 150, proof of vaccination is necessary, as it is in the 60-seat cabaret room at Pangea, still limited to 80 percent capacity. Both venues were among those that developed streaming series while shuttered. “We originally got into it to remain active, but it became a way to pay staff, and expand the audience,” said Richard Frankel, one of the owners of 54 Below, which will kick off the new series “Live From Feinstein’s/54 Below,” offering live streams direct from the venue, on July 11. “Right now we’re focused on reopening live, but it’s definitely something to continue exploring after the dust settles.”Streaming a performance “broadens the spectrum of who’s able to see things, and that’s so important,” said the singer and actress Lilli Cooper.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesRyan Paternite, director of programming at Birdland, has been similarly encouraged by the response to “Radio Free Birdland,” though he added, “My feeling is that people are pretty burned out on watching shows on their computer or phone — especially if they have to pay for tickets.”Artists generally remain bullish on the opportunities posed by technology. “I’m very pro-streaming,” said the Tony Award-nominated singer and actress Lilli Cooper, who is set to appear at 54 Below on July 28 and August 15. “It broadens the spectrum of who’s able to see things, and that’s so important.” Caruso plans to continue streaming his “Pajama Cast Party” weekly; he noted that the virtual program has allowed him to diversify both his audience (“It has become more colorful, literally and figuratively”) and his talent pool (“I’ve delved into TikTok and Instagram and discovered some thrilling new artists”).Many are hopeful that diversity and inclusivity will be further emphasized in an art form that counts artists of color like Mabel Mercer and Bobby Short as historical icons. “My art is often based on what I’ve gone through, and being a Black man is part of that,” said the Broadway veteran Derrick Baskin, who packed R&B classics into his set list for recent dates at 54 Below.Garin, seen from above performing at the piano at the Roxy Hotel.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“It’s not like we’re flipping a switch and bringing everything back to normal,” Garin added.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesJustin Vivian Bond, scheduled to reopen Joe’s Pub in October, said, “The brilliant thing about cabaret is that you can react, if you’re capable, to what’s going on in the world.” For Bond, the pandemic posed challenges as sobering, albeit in a different way, as those faced by the L.G.B.T.Q. community during another plague: “When AIDS was happening, even when people were dying, you could be with them. What we’ve just been through was a very isolating trauma. I don’t know if I’ll have any brilliant insights about it, but hopefully what I’ll say will resonate with the audience.”Bernhard, who will return to Joe’s Pub in December for the annual holiday engagement she had to skip in 2020, still isn’t sure what insights she’ll be offering. “The head space that I’m in, I don’t even know what the next two months are going to bring,” she said. “I just want to perform, like everybody else does right now.”“My art is often based on what I’ve gone through, and being a Black man is part of that,” Derrick Baskin said.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“I cannot imagine any artist now taking any moment of what we do for granted,” Michael Feinstein said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesPerformers and fans will be greeted with renovations at certain venues, and other enticements. Birdland has reduced its ticket price to 99 cents in July, the fee when the club originally opened in 1949. 54 Below is offering a new menu, created by the “Top Chef” winner Harold Dieterle. The West Bank Café’s Laurie Beechman Theater is getting a “face lift,” said its owner, Steve Olsen — fresh paint, new carpet and bar equipment, upgraded sound and lighting — in preparation for a reopening after Labor Day. The Triad Theater also used its forced downtime to “improve the furnishings, repaint and get new equipment,” said the booking director Bernie Furshpan.But it is the love of performing itself, and the perspective gained after a year of lost shows, that is driving many artists’ emotional responses to returning to the stage. Michael Feinstein, the multitasking American songbook champion and namesake for clubs in San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as New York, believes “that anyone who is a performer is coming out of this in a very different place, with a deeper sense of connection and joy and gratitude.”“I cannot imagine any artist now taking any moment of what we do for granted,” he added. More