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

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      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

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      The Met Opera Races to Reopen After Months of Pandemic Silence

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      The company, which faced steep losses after the pandemic forced it to shut down on March 12, 2020, is working to lure operagoers back to its 3,800-seat theater. Tera Willis was backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, painstakingly adding strand after strand of salt-and-pepper hair to a half-finished wig — one of dozens she and her team were racing to finish in time for opening night later this month after the pandemic had kept performers from getting measured until mid-August.“I would love about six months,” Ms. Willis, the head of the company’s wig and makeup department, said. “We have six weeks.”The chorus was back at work, singing through masks.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesA performer warmed up at a rehearsal for Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which will open the season.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesIn the Met’s underground rehearsal rooms, chorus members were straining to project through the masks they must rehearse in, a few pulling the fabric a couple of inches from their face for a moment or two. Just outside its gilded auditorium, which has been empty since the pandemic forced the opera house to close a year and half ago, stagehands were reupholstering some worn red velvet seats. Beneath the arched entry to the opera house, an electrician was installing wiring to make some of the heavy front doors touchless.Reopening after the long shutdown was never going to be easy for the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts company in the nation. Unlike a Broadway theater, which must safely bring back one show, the Met, a $300-million-a-year operation, is planning to mount 196 performances of 22 different operas this season, typically changing what’s on its mammoth stage each night.The financial stakes are high: The Met, which lost $150 million in earned revenues during the pandemic, must now draw audiences back to its 3,800-seat opera house amid renewed concerns about the spread of the Delta variant. Will people return in force, after getting out of the habit of spending nights at the opera? Will the Met’s strict vaccine mandate — it will ban audience members under 12, who cannot yet be vaccinated — reassure operagoers, especially older ones? How much will travel bans hurt the box office, where international visitors made up as much as 20 percent of ticket buyers?The Met is warily watching sales. It has sold about $20 million worth of tickets for the season so far, the company said, down from $27 million at the same point in the season before the pandemic. Subscriptions, which have been steadily eroding at American symphony orchestras and opera companies in recent years, are down by about a quarter from before the pandemic, but officials expect more subscribers to renew when they feel safe about attending. Strong recent sales, and the speed with which the Met sold out an affordably priced performance of Verdi’s Requiem on Saturday to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, offered hope that audiences will come back.The financial uncertainty led the Met to seek concessions from its unions, some of which will be restored if and when the box office approaches prepandemic levels. The ensuing labor disputes further complicated the reopening: The company did not reach a deal with its stagehands until July, delaying summer technical rehearsals, and only settled another, with its orchestra, late last month, removing the last major barrier to reopening.Riyo Mitsui, one of the Met’s wigmakers, at work.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesSo now the company is gearing up quickly, preparing to marshal the forces of roughly 1,000 singers, orchestra players, conductors, dancers and actors scheduled to perform this season. It started with two free performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” outdoors at Lincoln Center last weekend; will perform Verdi’s Requiem on Saturday, its first performance back inside the opera house, a concert that will be broadcast on PBS; and it will finally open the opera season on Sept. 27 with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” its first opera by a Black composer. The company is hoping that “Fire” and another contemporary opera — “Eurydice,” by Matthew Aucoin — will draw new audiences. The whole organization is getting ready to reopen. Keith Narkon, a ticket seller, was with his colleagues behind the Met’s box-office windows, stuffing tickets into envelopes — and happy to be back after the virus had taken away their jobs for more than a year.In the box office, employees are getting the tickets ready for opening night.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“It was just this numbness,” Mr. Narkon, a self-described opera fanatic, said of the long shutdown. As the opera house buzzes with preseason anticipation, there are still bruised feelings from the labor battles, but there is also a palpable sense of relief to finally be back in the building together and working again after so many months of unemployment checks and uncertainty.“You don’t realize how much you respect the job until you don’t have it,” said Phillip D. Smith, a stagehand who has worked at the Met for over 20 years, as he ripped the worn velvet off a seat cushion.“You don’t realize how much you respect the job until you don’t have it,” Phillip D. Smith, a stagehand who has worked at the Met for over 20 years, said as he reupholstered a chair.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesThe doors to the auditorium got a fresh coat of paint.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesBut life backstage is still far from normal, as company officials keep a close eye on the Delta variant, and the steps they must take to keep the company and the audience safe..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The company’s vaccination mandate is so strict that an unvaccinated telecom worker who arrived for a job was turned away. A special patron’s entrance area has been turned into a testing center where people in rehearsals must get nasal-swab tests twice a week. And to keep audience members apart from the performers, the first two rows of seats in the auditorium will be blocked off through the end of the year.“On one hand, it’s frightening and frustrating to see the rate of infection,” said Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met. “But it’s so thrilling to see the possibility within grasp of actually opening performances.”Workers cleaned one of the stairways at the opera house.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesSome bitterness lingers over the labor disputes, which were resolved when the company’s three biggest unions agreed to new contracts that cut their pay modestly, saving the company money by moving some workers to a different health care plan and reducing the number of guaranteed full-time members of the orchestra and chorus.In the props department, where scenic artists were working to create corn on the cob and a pat of butter for a Thanksgiving dinner in the upcoming production of “Fire,” Ryan Hixenbaugh, an artist, lamented that some of the work had been finished in California, where Met management outsourced work after locking out its stagehands in December in the fight over pay cuts. “We had the capability of making all the scenery for all of these operas here,” Mr. Hixenbaugh said.With the opera house empty for more than a year, there was sprucing up to do: Keishla Nieves cleaned a brass railing.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesWith no audiences and no crowds for a year and a half, there was no need for stanchions to direct people to the Box Office. But they will soon be put in service again.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesSome stagehands made ends meet during the shutdown, and the lockout, by building outdoor shelters for the city’s new al fresco dining spots. Others got work in television production, which rebounded before live performance.When they returned to the Met in July, the stagehands found an enormous amount of work. For more than a year, the opera house had sat still, as if frozen in time. The decades-old machinery that makes the Met’s stage run was not built for such dormancy.Two scenic backdrops that had been hanging for months had fallen to the ground earlier in the year. The wheels on the Met’s wagon system — which is powerful enough to quickly shuttle its mammoth sets of Ancient Egypt, Imperial China or Fin-de-Siècle Paris on and offstage — were flattened by the weight of the sets that had been left on top of them. And parts of the fly system, made up of wire rope lines and riggings, had rusted.“To leave it sitting still for that length of time was terrifying,” said David Feheley, the Met’s technical director. “So many of these systems have lasted as long as they have because of constant attention.”Stagehands built sets backstage. When they returned to the opera house, they found that the stage machinery needed a great deal of maintenance work.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesTo accommodate all the urgent maintenance work, the Met’s technical rehearsals were pushed from the beginning of August to the end of the month. One opera, Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride,” was canceled.The orchestra saw 11 of its 96 regular full-time members retire or leave their jobs during the pandemic, according to the orchestra committee, which negotiates labor issues on behalf of the musicians. A number of veteran stagehands retired too.The company hopes the excitement of working together again will outweigh any residual resentment.“The Met is maybe slightly fractured,” Mr. Gelb said, “but it is a family.”The Met is planning 196 performances of 22 different operas this season, which means a lot of ironing.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesPaul Tazewell, the costume designer for “Fire,” said that it was odd not to be able to see the faces of performers, who have been staying largely masked.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesAt this stage of the pandemic, it’s a family that can’t have any members under the age of 12, and not just in the audience. The Met’s performers cannot be young, either. In “Boris Godunov,” which is scheduled to open on Sept. 28, a part that is often sung by a boy soprano will be given to an adult mezzo-soprano. And in “Fire” — which is based on a memoir by Charles Blow, an Opinion columnist for The New York Times — a 13-year-old, Walter Russell III, will play the role of young Charles, who is supposed to be 7.“I have been trying to get into the mind of a 7-year-old kid,” Mr. Russell said.In the props department, scenic artists prepared a Thanksgiving dinner for the upcoming production of “Fire.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesTo reopen smoothly, the Met’s staff members still have numerous battles to wage.Everything from fabrics for costumes to machinery for stage lights to basic materials like plywood and steel are proving difficult to obtain because of pandemic supply-chain problems. And booking the international performers opera relies on has become a mess of unpredictable red tape, between visa troubles and virus-related travel restrictions.One of the few times performers can take their masks off these days is when they are being fitted in the costume shop, for photos that are taken to help designers take in the effect of each costume.“If there’s an unspoken feeling, normally I would be able to see that on a performer’s face, but I can’t access that,” said Paul Tazewell, the Tony-winning costume designer for “Fire.”A model of the “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” set.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesBut, come Sept. 27 — if all goes as planned — the masks will come off, the Sputnik chandeliers will ascend, the curtain will go up and live opera will be back onstage.Zachary Woolfe contributed reporting. More

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      7 Events in New York Honoring 9/11

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      On Saturday, performances and memorials around the city and online will mark the 20th anniversary of the attacks. Here’s how to find them.Twenty years after four coordinated terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda killed 2,977 people — 2,753 of them at ground zero in New York City — the nation and the city remember. They remember through dance, music, museums, TV specials and light beamed into the sky.And especially now, after a war in Afghanistan, the ways we remember move beyond commemoration. They start to connect the dots between the attacks themselves and the larger historical era that followed, and continues to unfold.History echoes and reverberates in Lower Manhattan, where businesses have shuttered once more, this time because of the pandemic. There, from the rooftop of the Battery Parking Garage, two 48-foot squares of light will recreate the ghostly images of the twin towers this Saturday night.Here’s a selection of events — both in-person and virtual — for New Yorkers to remember and reflect this year. Check websites for Covid-19 protocols.Verdi’s Requiem in MemoriamThe Metropolitan Opera plays Verdi’s Requiem in commemoration often. The last time it was performed there, the piece was in honor of the beloved Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky.Before that, the music was presented as a memorial to Luciano Pavarotti (2008), President Kennedy (1964) and Verdi himself (1901). Now, in its first indoor performance for an audience since March 2020, the Met Opera will perform the Requiem on Sept. 11 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the attacks.Five hundred free tickets will be made available to the families of victims, and the remaining tickets will be $25. The event will also be broadcast live on PBS, hosted by the ballet star Misty Copeland from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan. From $25; metopera.org.‘Remembering 9/11’ at New York’s Oldest MuseumImages from “Here is New York,” a photographic archive of ground zero, at the New-York Historical Society. Hiroko Masuike for The New York TimesIn the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the New-York Historical Society collected materials — pieces of debris, parts of memorials — as rescues and memorials unfolded. And so began the History Responds initiative, which has since continued to document major events like the Black Lives Matter protests and the Climate Strike.Now, 20 years later, two ongoing exhibits — “Remembering 9/11” and “Objects Tell Stories: 9/11” — at the museum on Central Park West are showcasing that history. On Saturday, images from the photographic archive “Here is New York,” which documented ground zero in the moment, will be projected on digital displays in the Smith Gallery. $22 for an adult ticket; nyhistory.org.A National TV SpecialIn 2001, the rubble of the World Trade Center South Tower buried Will Jimeno — a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officer — for 13 hours. He survived, as did his partner, John McLoughlin.Their experiences will comprise part of “Shine A Light,” a one-hour national television special airing on CNN at 7 p.m. on Saturday. The nonprofit 9/11 Day, co-founded by David Paine, announced that the special will be hosted by Jake Tapper and feature performances by H.E.R., Brad Paisley and Common.“We hope to demonstrate that even in the face of great tragedy, good things can arise,” Paine said in a statement. “That’s an essential and powerful reminder for all of us now, 20 years later, as we continue to deal with other tragic events.” 911day.org.‘Table of Silence’Daniel Bernard Roumain, center on violin, performing “Table of Silence” at Lincoln Center last year.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEvery Sept. 11 morning since the 10th anniversary of the attacks, Buglisi Dance Theatre has presented its “Table of Silence” — a free “public performance ritual for peace” — at Lincoln Center. The pandemic hasn’t changed that: Last year, 28 dancers draped in white fabric reached their outstretched arms toward the sky.Although that event marked the first large-scale performance at Lincoln Center since March 2020, it was closed to the public, available only as a livestream. This year, however, the 8 a.m. performance will feature both live and virtual elements. Limited standing capacity will be available on Josie Robertson Plaza, on a first-come, first-served basis. Free; tableofsilence.org.‘Memory Ground’Inside Green-Wood Cemetery, the top of Battle Hill — the highest point in Brooklyn and the setting of the largest Revolutionary battle — affords sweeping views of Lower Manhattan, including the World Trade Center. The musical performance “Memory Ground” will take place there on Saturday. The Mississippi-born and New York City-based composer Buck McDaniel will present original compositions. (Previously, his work “Detroit Cycles” premiered with the radio program The Moth.)Saxophonist Noa Even — whose solo commissioning project, “Atomic,” has toured across the country — will perform, as will the New York City-based string ensemble Desdemona. Each performance is 45 minutes, and will run at noon, 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. $10 recommended donation; green-wood.com.The Crossing’s ‘Returning’The Crossing, a new-music choir, will perform in Philadelphia on Saturday.  Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesLatvian composer Eriks Esenvalds’s song “Earth Teach Me Quiet” begins with the line “Earth teach me quiet — as the grasses are still with light.”The Crossing, a new-music choir, will perform pieces by Esenvalds, Ayanna Woods, Michael Gilbertson and James Primosch on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia.While the event, “Returning” may not explicitly address the terrorist attacks, its themes — isolation, grief, confusion, hope and returning — are more than fitting. This “coming home to song” marks the opening of the Crossing’s back-to-live-performance season, in the spirit of return and renewal. $35 for general admission; thecrossing.ticketleap.com.A ‘Tribute in Light’ Across the CityAt sunset on Saturday, 88 7,000-watt light bulbs will reach four miles into the sky from the roof of the Battery Parking Garage, mirroring the shapes of the twin towers.This Tribute in Light, organized by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, was first presented six months after the attack. Each year after that, the ghostly echoes of the towers have lighted up Lower Manhattan from dusk until dawn on the evening of Sept. 11.Buildings throughout the city, including the Empire State Building, One World Trade Center, the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center Plaza and the New-York Historical Society will join in the memorial by lighting up their facades and rooftops in sky blue. More

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      Review: The Met Opera Reunites, With Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’

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      After a year and a half, the company’s forces came together for an outdoor performance of the sprawling, ecstatic symphony.The Metropolitan Opera hardly ever plays concerts at home at Lincoln Center. But before Saturday evening, the company had opened its season with Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the “Resurrection,” once before.In 1980, a bitter labor battle kept the Met closed more than two months into the fall. When peace was re-established, Mahler’s sprawling journey of a soul, ending in ecstatic renewal, seemed just the thing — and the symphony, with its enormous orchestral and choral forces working in intricate lock step, is nothing if not a paean to cohesion.“The ‘Resurrection’ Symphony almost chose itself,” James Levine, then the Met’s music director, said at the time. It was, he added, “a way for the company to get in touch with itself again.”If there has ever been another time this company needed to get in touch with itself, it is now. That two-month hiatus four decades ago seems like child’s play compared with the situation today.Twenty twenty-one has, like 1980, brought contentious labor struggles — on top of a pandemic that has threatened the core conditions of live performance and kept the Met closed for an almost unthinkable 18 months. Its orchestra and chorus, as good as any in the world, were furloughed in March 2020 and went unpaid for nearly a year as the financially wounded company and its unions warred over how deep and lasting any pay cuts should be.The “Resurrection” Symphony brought the full company and its audience back together in grand style: 90 minutes; an orchestra of 116; a chorus of 100; and 2,500 attending in the park.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesJeenah Moon for The New York TimesJeenah Moon for The New York TimesJeenah Moon for The New York TimesInstituting a vaccine mandate and gradually coming to terms with the unions, the Met inched closer to reopening as the summer dragged on. And on Aug. 24, it removed the final barrier by striking a deal with the orchestra, paving the way for a resurrection — and a “Resurrection.”The company scheduled a pair of free Mahler performances outdoors at Damrosch Park, in the shadow of its theater, on Labor Day weekend, at the start of what has become an opening month. On Saturday, the Met will return indoors for Verdi’s Requiem, in honor of the 20th anniversary of 9/11. And on Sept. 27 the opera season begins in earnest with the company premiere of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” its first work by a Black composer, and, the following evening, a revival of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”Led by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the “Resurrection” Symphony brought the full company and its audience back together in grand style: 90 minutes; an orchestra of 116; a chorus of 100; and 2,500 attending in the park, as well as hundreds more listening from the street. The mood was a blend of parks concert — one woman tried to muffle the crinkling of her bag of potato chips — and serious focus; a man sitting on the aisle followed along with the score, brightly lit on his tablet.With so much to celebrate, this was indeed a celebratory, smiling reading: Punchy and taut at the start, yes, but without the neurotic, feverish quality that some conductors sustain throughout. There was an overall sense of gentleness and soft-grained textures. The second movement was more sly than sardonic; the climactic burst of dissonance in the third movement was beautiful, not brutal. The chorus, facing the audience in front of the stage and getting its cues from screens, sang with mellow sweetness.It goes without saying that outdoor classical performance is never ideal. (Speaking from the stage, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, claimed, tongue perhaps in cheek, that Lincoln Center’s president had promised no helicopters in the area for the duration of the symphony. Well. …)Ying Fang, the soprano soloist, is a symbol of the company’s present and future.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAmplified violin sections are inevitably harsh; woodwinds tend to get swamped by the strings and brasses, even more than usual in Mahler’s dense orchestration. And so much of this and every symphony’s power depends on musicians massed in a room together with their audience. Under the open sky, even on a gorgeous, mild evening like Saturday, the visceral and emotional impact of the music is diffused.But the offstage percussion and brasses finally sounded like they were coming from a real distance, as they rarely do in a concert hall. And there is special resonance in a great opera company performing this score, so redolent of the music-theater repertory, especially Mahler’s beloved Wagner. The stormy start of “Die Walküre”; the motif of the sleeping Brünnhilde from the end of that work; the mystically stentorian choruses of “Parsifal”; the sighing winds as Verdi’s Otello dies — all echo through the visionary excess of the “Resurrection.”It was moving to see Denyce Graves, a classic Carmen and Dalila at the Met 20 or 25 years ago, onstage and dignified in the great alto solos, even if her voice is a shadow of its former plush velvet. The soprano soloist, Ying Fang, a radiant Mozartian, was a symbol of the company’s present and future.While no one is ever hoping for distractions during Mahler, there was something heartwarming about the siren wailing down 62nd Street and tearing into the symphony’s majestic final minutes. What would a New York homecoming be without noise, and more noise? More

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      Review: Mostly Mozart Returns to Lincoln Center, Quietly

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      The center’s summertime music series has a limited outdoor run this week.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the headliner ensemble of Lincoln Center’s summertime music series, is the latest group to return to live performance in New York. But unlike some organizations, it sneaked back into action quietly.Early Monday evening, Louis Langrée, the orchestra’s music director, led 13 players in a Mozart masterpiece, the “Gran Partita” Serenade for Winds in B flat. The informal performance — a surprise pop-up, produced with little promotion — took place on the inviting artificial lawn with which Lincoln Center has covered its plaza.Louis Langrée, the orchestra’s music director, led the performance.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesThe concert, and other offerings in the center’s Restart Stages venture this summer, was conceived at a time when arts institutions were being especially careful to avoid attracting oversize crowds because of fears of the virus spreading. Those concerns, of course, linger.But I wish the revival, however modest, of Mostly Mozart had been more touted. In addition to crowd control, the center’s reticence might have to do with the questionable fate of the venerable festival: As my colleague Javier C. Hernández reported Tuesday in announcing the news of the center’s new artistic leader, officials there say they are still working out Mostly Mozart’s future. That’s not reassuring, especially since it was only four years ago that the center, grappling with budget woes, dissolved the Lincoln Center Festival to focus on reinventing Mostly Mozart.Despite the limited publicity, a couple hundred people, including children scampering up and sliding down the curved artificial turf walls, were already on the lawn before the performance began. As the players took their seats and started warming up with Langrée, the crowd grew even larger.On a balmy evening, a crowd gathered on the artificial turf lawn that has covered the plaza since the spring.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesLangrée spoke to the audience about how special the occasion was for the musicians — the “first time in two years that Mostly Mozart gets together again.” He announced a schedule of performances for the rest of the week, including two more pop-ups, both at 6 p.m.: On Tuesday, a performance of a Mozart duo for violin and viola accompanying two dancers from the New York City Ballet, and on Wednesday, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and Mozart’s Divertimento in D (K. 136). On Friday in Damrosch Park, at 8 p.m., the full orchestra will play Mozart’s first and final symphonies.Monday’s performance was wonderful; hearing the music in that space amid grateful New Yorkers was inspiring. The musicians, who played splendidly, were visibly moved.In the “Gran Partita” Serenade, Mozart achieves an uncanny blend of breeziness and grandeur. The music seems genial and sunny, yet is also intricate and complex, almost epic: The piece has seven movements and lasts some 45 minutes. The scoring is heftier than was typical of wind serenades at the time. Along with the standard two bassoons and two oboes, two clarinets are fortified by two basset horns (a deeper alto clarinet); two French horns are doubled to four; and a string bass brings added depth.The ensemble will give a series of performances this week at the center.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesSubtle amplification allowed intricate details to come through beautifully. Langrée and the players — determined, it seemed, to draw in listeners — played whole stretches with mellow sound and soft-spoken grace, especially in the sublime slow movement. Yet the feistier episodes were full-bodied and exciting. The concluding rondo was exceptionally rousing.It was gratifying to see how many people who might not have anticipated hearing this performance wound up standing near the players or sitting on the lawn, listening closely, including mothers swaying to the music with babies in their arms. Mostly Mozart is back, for the time being, even if many music lovers in New York didn’t know it.Mostly Mozart Festival OrchestraEvents this week listed at mostlymozartmusicians.com. More

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      Lincoln Center Names Shanta Thake as its New Artistic Leader

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      Shanta Thake, a theater executive, faces challenges that include helping the center embrace new genres and attract virus-wary audiences.Feeling the pressure to attract new audiences and rethink its offerings even before being upended by the coronavirus pandemic, Lincoln Center announced on Tuesday that it had chosen a theater executive with a reputation for working across disciplines as its next artistic leader.Shanta Thake, most recently an associate artistic director at the Public Theater, will assume the role of chief artistic officer at the center, the nation’s largest performing arts complex, as it works to broaden its appeal beyond classical music and ballet into genres such as hip-hop, poetry and songwriting.Thake — who at the Public spent a decade managing Joe’s Pub, a cabaret-style venue, and more recently began overseeing Under the Radar, Public Works and other programs there — said she was eager to bring more popular and world music to Lincoln Center.“The goal is expansive reach,” Thake, 41, said in an interview. “What’s missing? What have we left out? What stories aren’t we telling that feel like they’re demanding to be told in this moment?”Lincoln Center is the landlord of the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet and other independent institutions, which are responsible for their own programming. But it is also a presenting organization in its own right, putting on hundreds of events each year and running the Mostly Mozart and White Light festivals, which have been primarily devoted to the classical arts. The center and its constituent organizations have competed, sometimes tensely, for rehearsal and performance space, ticket sales and donations.Thake will oversee the work Lincoln Center presents, and said in the interview that its robust classical offerings would be maintained. “We’re not looking to erase history here,” she said.But center officials say they are still working out the future of Mostly Mozart, which was put on hold amid the pandemic, other than a few small events this week. In 2017, as it grappled with budgetary constraints, the center dissolved the Lincoln Center Festival to focus on reinventing Mostly Mozart, its summertime sibling.Thake, who starts next month, replaces Jane Moss, who played a key role in programming for nearly three decades and stepped down as artistic director last year — and who also came from a theater background. (The chief artistic officer title is a new one.) Thake joins the center at one of the most challenging moments since it opened in 1962. Its woes predate the coronavirus: It struggled for years from leadership churn and money problems.Then the pandemic wiped away tens of millions in revenue and forced the cancellation of hundreds of events. About half of Lincoln Center’s staff of 400 was furloughed or laid off, and its top leaders took pay cuts.While many workers have been rehired and indoor performances are set to resume in the fall, the center will likely be grappling with the financial fallout for years. It remains to be seen whether audiences will return at prepandemic levels, especially given the recent spread of the Delta variant of the virus.Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, said the organization had turned to Thake for her experience programming creatively across genres. “We wanted someone who could kind of help us think about some new territory,” he said.Timms said the virus would continue to pose a challenge for the center’s artistic ambitions, but added that he believed audiences were eager to return. “There will be a great deal of demand for what we do and there will be a great deal of re-imagination,” he said.As infections have eased in recent months and vaccines have become widely available, Lincoln Center has started to come back to life, building several outdoor stages and transforming its plaza into a summer gathering place by covering it in a synthetic lawn. When indoor performances resume, the center plans to require vaccines for audience members, production staff and artists. Children under 12 will not be permitted to attend performances since they are currently not eligible for vaccines.Thake said she saw her mission as, in part, to “lift up the city that is still reeling from the ongoing trauma” of the pandemic. She said Lincoln Center could play a role in helping smaller arts organizations, for example by sharing best practices for reopening venues.“Hopefully we can make it to the other side all together,” she said.Thake, whose mother is Indian and whose father is white, said she was committed to presenting artists who represent a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Cultural institutions have in general been slow to respond to demands for a reckoning over racial justice in the United States. But Lincoln Center is one of the few arts organizations to show substantial progress in bringing more diversity to its upper ranks. People of color now make up about half of its leadership team. More

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      At a Queer Theater Festival, the Plays Are Brazenly Personal

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      The Criminal Queerness Festival offers three works that address subjects including addiction, fluid identity and social change.Dima Mikhayel Matta has written about her home city before with language like “In Beirut, the streets smell of jasmine and coffee, and the morning call to prayer mingles with church bells.”Was it lyrical? Yes, Matta, a queer playwright from Lebanon, said during a recent video interview. Was it also rosy? Yes.“In the past, I was writing short stories that romanticized Beirut,” she said, “because it’s ‘poetic,’ right?”Matta’s autobiographical play, “This is not a memorized script, this is a well-rehearsed story,” is one of three making its New York premiere this week as part of the National Queer Theater’s Criminal Queerness Festival, which presents innovative new stories by L.G.B.T.Q. artists from countries that restrict L.G.B.T.Q. rights.And with that project, she made a decision: no more romanticizing.With Beirut, she wanted “to face how I feel about it, and how so many of us feel about it,” she said of the city that in the past year has endured crises including a massive explosion in its port, economic collapse, political instability and the pandemic. “Because it’s difficult to live there, and it’s becoming more difficult.”The festival runs Tuesday through Saturday outdoors at Lincoln Center and near the United Nations, and is part of Lincoln Center’s Pride programming, which also includes a concert on Friday by the multi-hyphenate artist Taylor Mac.Adam Odsess-Rubin, the National Queer Theater’s artistic director, founded the festival in 2018 with the Egyptian playwright Adam Ashraf Elsayigh, who had recently immigrated to the United States.“There was really no space for the kinds of stories I was trying to tell,” said Elsayigh, who now serves as the festival’s co-producer. “I wanted to create a space for stories about queer people outside of the United States and outside of a Western context.”This year’s plays — which also include the Mexican playwright Victor I. Cazares’s “﹤﹤when we write with ashes﹥﹥,” and a staged reading of the Iraqi playwright Martin Yousif Zebari’s “Layalina” — address subjects including addiction, fluid identity, and global and social change.In other words, they are not, Zebari said, works that he could present in his home country, where same-sex marriage is illegal and queer people do not have any protection against discrimination.“It’s really risky for the writers to share these plays,” Odsess-Rubin said. “They might fear persecution even emailing in the script.”But in interviews, the playwrights underscored that their works, while sourced from their specific life experiences in countries that criminalize queerness, contain themes anyone can relate to.For Matta, it was her complicated relationship with Beirut — a feeling that, she said, people who have lived in the same place for most of their lives can relate to.“The people who’ve attended my rehearsals have said they feel the same way about New York,” she said.Cazares, a Tow playwright in residence at New York Theater Workshop, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns they and them, said that they had felt pressure in the past to produce work that glossed over the less idyllic aspects of life on the border.“As a queer Latinx playwright coming up in 2013, I was encountering a lot of resistance from other Latinx producers that did not want to produce work that was about drugs, guns or gangs,” Cazares said. “But that was my work, and it was also my lived experience of the border. I lived through a very violent drug war. You’re suffering through nights where you’re worried about your family.”Jose Useche, left, and Noor Hamdi rehearsing Victor I. Cazares’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCazares’s play, a love story set in Mexico, draws from their experiences as an addict and as someone whose family withdrew them from high school and shipped them off to a rural Illinois town to “go find Jesus Christ again” when they came out. (Cazares and their parents have since reconciled.)“It was a very personal story for me,” they said. “But it’s not something I’m reluctant to share. I want to destigmatize addiction and being H.I.V. positive. I want people who have had these lived experiences to walk away not feeling alone.”For Zebari, who is making his playwriting debut with “Layalina,” it was important to tell a nuanced story of the community he refers to as SWANA — Southwest Asian and North African.“As an actor, I never spoke up when I felt like my voice was filler,” he said. “But now, as a playwright, I can tell my story.”Odsess-Rubin and Elsayigh said that, in an ideal world, the festival would not exist because its plays would be produced elsewhere in New York. A recent study by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition found that at 18 major nonprofit theaters in the city, 81 percent of writers and directors were white.Cazares said that they have had opportunities in which “if I would’ve written the happy story, or the more marketable, let’s-all-sing-about-conchas-and-abuelita take, it would’ve been produced.”The festival’s audiences, the three playwrights acknowledged, likely will be mostly white. But they did have their dreams for who would be there on opening night. Cazares said their past self. Zebari said his father, though having him there would amount to coming out — something he hasn’t done, and isn’t ready for, with his family.Matta said, “I would take great pleasure if a homophobic, racist person ends up in the audience and is too embarrassed to leave, and has to stay for an hour of me basically sharing things that go against everything that person believes in.”“I’d find that very amusing,” she added. “My goal is not to make you comfortable. I am not here to explain why it’s OK for me to exist. I am here to transport you somewhere for an hour, and leave you with more questions than answers.”Criminal Queerness FestivalTuesday through Saturday; nationalqueertheater.org. More

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      in Theater

      Digital Be Damned! Welcome to Shows You Can Touch and Feel.

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      Fuzzy puppet sheep. A light cutting through the haze. Hand-designed dreamscapes. There’s plenty to savor in the slow return of pixel-free theater.Striding across the plaza at Lincoln Center on a Saturday afternoon, past the bronze Henry Moore figure reclining in the reflecting pool, a man and a woman debated the sheep on the hill. Up ahead, off to their left, a small woolly flock had gathered.He was sure that they were actual animals, these five grown sheep and one darling lamb, each with its own shepherd in head-to-toe black. She argued the opposite, and was correct: These were life-size puppets, their shepherds puppeteers, and this was a pop-up performance. Under one of those broad-brimmed hats, maneuvering a long-lashed, tan-faced sheep named the Shredder, was the puppeteer Basil Twist.Yet with theater beginning its cautious tiptoe back from the sterility of the screen to the vitality (or so we hope) of in-person performance, these puppet sheep had a kind of realness that I’ve craved. As they gamboled about a fenced-off oasis of genuine grass that covers the sloping roof of a darkened upscale restaurant, their casual, nameless show was some of the truest theater I’d seen in many months.Because they were there, and so was I, and there wasn’t a pixel in sight.Theater, real theater, is an art form that we’re meant to show up for, meeting it in physical space with our physical selves. We take in the sights and scents and sounds as they happen; we note the feel of the air and the ground beneath our feet. Theater is a dialogue between artists and audience that’s also a ritual for the senses — which, after such a surfeit of digital drama, are primed to tingle.Admittedly, I had fallen in love with Twist’s charming creatures online, streaming his pandemic production of “Titon et l’Aurore,” which he had directed and designed for the Opéra Comique in Paris — a show so resplendent with puppet sheep that some were stacked into towers, and others floated through the sky.The Shredder and the rest of the gang at Lincoln Center — Splinter, Machete, Bertha, Fang and the baby, Mower — were modeled on their Parisian counterparts, with rattan skeletons and woolen coats made from wigs, whose white curls fluttered in the breeze.While a critic grew fond of the sheep puppets in an online performance, that was no match for getting close to them in person.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOn their patch of pasture, otherwise known as the Illumination Lawn (not to be confused with Mimi Lien’s nearby synthetic lawn installation, “The Green,” which is essentially set design as public art), they were like an apparition reflected in the vast glass front of Lincoln Center Theater.Toddlers were enchanted, determined to stroke Mower’s face, which the lamb’s playful puppeteer, Juanita Cardenas, warmly allowed. Spying the flock, passing dogs barked, jumped back or, if they were terribly brave, strained close to investigate.There was no plot to the performance, and barely any choreography, but it was chance-encounter magic nonetheless: puppets made by human hands and operated by artists exchanging energy — and even eye contact — with their audience.Which didn’t stop some adults who filtered through the plaza from wondering what was going on, and whether there was some deep meaning that eluded them.“Just a little herd of sheep on the hill, for the sweetness of it,” Twist said afterward, standing at one end of the reflecting pool with the Shredder in his arms.Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting design proves to be an emotional highlight of “Blindness.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTHE FIRST LIVE SHOW I saw when theater started returning this spring was “Blindness,” which is arguably neither live nor a show. The only actor’s voice is recorded — Juliet Stevenson, whisper-close through our headphones.But we, the audience, are live: distanced yet gathered nonetheless at the Daryl Roth Theater, off Union Square, to experience a work of art together. The thing that most moved me about it could never have happened on a screen.I’d wondered since the start of the shutdown how lighting designers would ever use haze again without freaking the audience out, since the nature of haze is to make the air visible, which makes us think about what we’re breathing, which in the past year-plus has been a very scary thing. I’d worried a little about whether it might freak me out.But there came a point in “Blindness” when the lighting designer, Jessica Hung Han Yun, broke the pitch-blackness with a soft and gorgeous beam of illumination angling through the air. As I gazed at it, I realized that the theater had been filling with haze while we were submerged in darkness, that through our masks we’d already been breathing it.And so I sat there, headphones clapped to my ears, and felt tears trickle down my cheeks — because it hadn’t unsettled me, because it felt safe and because, wow, had I missed great lighting design.IT’S SO EASY, gazing into a screen, to lose awareness of your own body. In-person theater doesn’t let that happen — and this early in the industry restart, that is double-edged.To go to a small show called “Persou” — directed by Ellpetha Tsivicos at the Cell, a performance space in Chelsea — I signed a lengthy Covid liability waiver “on behalf of myself and all of my heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns,” whoever those might be.Once there, I realized that even masked and fully vaccinated, in a well-ventilated room, I am not wild about the idea of standing close to strangers for a long stretch of time. Also, I will actively resist if you try to get me to dance as part of your show — though that was true even before the pandemic.I don’t regret going, though. A four-piece band played music from Cyprus and Greece that I could have listened to all night, and we spent a brief but lovely part of the performance in the incense-scented back garden, under the moon and a tall, spreading tree.And I’m pretty sure I will remember for a long time the stroller-pushing woman who walked by with her little boy as the audience waited outside, preshow, on West 23rd Street. Swearing, she muttered that we were taking up the whole sidewalk, which was a valid gripe. We are out of practice at sharing collective space.THERE ARE SENSATIONS you don’t realize you miss until you encounter them again. Like the paint-wood-adhesive smell of a freshly made set, which is part of what I loved about “A Dozen Dreams,” the En Garde Arts production at the downtown mall Brookfield Place. It’s a show that can feel, with its lack of actors, pleasingly like a walk-through of an installation.“You are the actor,” each audience member is told through headphones, at the start of a trek through 12 disparate sets belonging to 12 short plays by women, each of whom speaks her own text on the recording.Solo or in pairs, we find ourselves in Ellen McLaughlin’s “The First Line,” with its maquette scale and cracked theatricality; in Martyna Majok’s “Pandemic Dreams,” which is eerily and unambiguously a nightmare; in Rehana Lew Mirza’s “The Death of Dreams,” whose color-saturated intensity and interlocking pieces reminded me of the imagery in my own pandemic dreams.A couple of sets include video of the playwrights speaking their text, and I wish they didn’t. When I see an on-screen performance in an in-person show now, a part of me just shuts down — a reaction to online theater, but probably I have always been like this. In art museums, I look for the signature on a canvas, because to me that’s proof that a human was there. Similarly, I want my theater handmade.To a gratifying extent, “A Dozen Dreams” provides that. Irina Kruzhilina, who did the visual and environment design, and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, who did the lighting, offer us something we haven’t had much of lately. We are bodily immersed in this show, and very, very far from the lonely, make-do experience of streaming theater.FIVE DAYS after I watched Twist and his band of puppeteers frolic with their sheep, I was sitting under the trees at Lincoln Center, looking out over the reflecting pool. It was early evening, and chilly shadows had crept over most of the plaza. But up at the top of the Illumination Lawn, a slice of sunlight beckoned, and I went toward it.As I stepped onto the grass, I noticed something curious on the stairs, where the flock had milled about to meet the public: a fuzzy white curl, caught on some blades of green.This remnant of puppet sheep — surely that’s what it was — filled me with disproportionate joy. Off I paced across the lawn, scanning the ground like Mare of Easttown searching for forensic evidence. The grass was scattered with it: tiny puffs of puppet wool, physical artifacts of a performance that had happened live, in 3-D, in front of an audience that was close enough to touch.Call me a traditionalist if you like, but no digital trail will ever compete with that. More