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      The Poignant Music of Melting Ice: Have a Listen

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      Listen to This ArticleAs soon as Martin Sharp opened the file, he knew the ice had been singing all summer.Several months earlier, Sharp — at that point, in 2009, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta for nearly two decades — had burrowed a cache of microphones into the Devon Ice Cap, a frozen mass in far northern Canada the size of Connecticut. Seven large microphones and GPS sensors monitored the rate of the melting ice atop the cap, while several seismic monitors sensed how the ice moved along the Earth, too. Almost as an afterthought, Sharp set up a little Sony hand-held recorder, hoping it might capture the essence of the frigid stillness where he often worked.The result teemed with surprises: A snow bunting perched on the rig and sang. Gulls circled above. And below, as deep ice gradually thawed, an unexpected symphony unspooled. Water trickled past the microphone, creating a vertiginous drone, while tiny bubbles — air trapped inside the ice, perhaps for centuries — exploded incessantly, creating an allegro of snaps and pops that conjured the electronic productions of Autechre and Aphex Twin. Sharp began playing a 20-minute tape during lectures. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asked for a copy, hoping to add sonic context to dry discussions about data and policy.“It gave people a different way into what I was talking about, other than just showing slides,” Sharp, 64, said with a chuckle by phone. “The sound conveyed what it was like to be there.”Between 1990 and 1993, Thomas Köner made a trilogy of lauded ambient albums that steadily evoked the awe and unease of being surrounded by ice that loomed, moved and cracked.Erinn SpringerIn recent years, the assorted and unexpected sounds of ice have periodically gone viral — the laserlike phenomenon of someone skating across thin ice, the shootout sensation of ice being dropped into a frozen hole, the meditative sighs of ice forming and popping inside a Swedish lake. But several scientists and musicians believe it all could have power beyond being mere online curios. Recordings of melting ice, splintering glaciers and cascading runoff could help predict the rate of climate change and sea-level rise; music made with such sounds, some hope, could lead listeners to rethink their relationship to nature. If more people can actually hear climate change through the once-unknown songs of failing ice, can they be inspired to help prevent it?“I’m privileged that I can go somewhere and study these glaciers, but what about people who have to use their imaginations?” asked Grant Deane, 61, a longtime researcher at the University of California‌‌, San Diego.Since 2009, he has plotted methods to use recordings of melting ice and calving glaciers — chunks splitting from the monolith’s edge above or below water — to document and predict the rate of loss and concomitant rise of sea levels. The planet is in a constant state of flux, of course, so melting ice and calving glaciers are natural processes, with changing seasons or epochs. But the glaciers Deane studies are receding at a rapid rate he attributes to greenhouse gases, and he believes it’s possible to hear that acceleration. He aims to build 12 substations along Greenland’s coast to chart the attrition of the island’s gargantuan ice sheet through sound.Such science, he warned, held only so much possible public sway. “When people like me start talking about melting ice, it seems so far-off and unconnected from our everyday lives,” continued Deane, who has contributed recordings to immersive installations by the Canadian artist Mia Feuer. “How can people care about that when they’re dealing with immediate problems? Music can make those connections.”“These recordings may not be scientifically sound,” said the Australian sound artist and researcher Philip Samartzis, “but it’s a whole other way of communicating knowledge, a different aperture of experience.”Erinn SpringerFOR NEARLY TWO decades, the Norwegian musician Jana Winderen has been at the forefront of transforming her straightforward recordings of glaciers and the land and water surrounding them into emotional records, poignant musical postcards from melting and cracking masses of ice. During a 2006 family vacation in Iceland, Winderen dipped a hydrophone — a sealed microphone that detects pressure changes underwater — under a glacier’s edge. She shushed her daughters, sloshing in nearby mud, so she could tease out the source of some plangent rumble.“It sounded like a loud engine, so I started looking for a tractor,” Winderen, 57, said recently, speaking by video in her studio from her family’s farm outside Oslo. “But I realized for the first time that the glacier is gliding — really, really slowly — on this water underneath sediments. And the sound has presence, like a creature. I totally fell in love.”A former aspiring marine biologist whose mother was an early member of the Norwegian environmental advocacy group Future in Our Hands, Winderen soon realized the transformative capabilities of such sounds. A photo of an iceberg, she recognized, was gorgeous; the brutal noise it made while breaking free from a glacier, however, could be harrowing. Even fusillades of tiny pops from escaping air proved evocative, as the frozen world gave way to heat. “People could close their eyes and be there with the ice, be present,” she said. “It wasn’t like I had just recorded something and brought it there.”Every time Winderen wields a microphone, the sounds surprise her. She can hear differences between ice that’s old and young, inland or seaside. But she has never hoped to be a mere stenographer, simply playing back what she heard while suspended precariously in glacial crevasses or trying not to capsize off the coast of Greenland after icebergs hit the water. She processes raw recordings, turning them into extended collages. Her albums — particularly “Energy Field” from 2010, which occasionally calls to mind drum-less heavy metal or an untuned violin — unfurl as tone poems, giving her changing surroundings a spiritual gravitas.“I am not archiving that sound or this sound — that’s not interesting to me,” Winderen said. “It’s more interesting to be out there and listen, to figure out what’s happening and have an awareness of how much we don’t know.”For the veteran Australian sound artist and researcher Philip Samartzis, it took an unprecedented Antarctic blizzard to accept the political potential of ice’s songs. Samartzis first visited the continent, through an arts fellowship in 2010, to map the acoustic environment of the Davis research station, one of Australia’s three outposts there. How, he wondered, did existence sound at this end of the earth?“I tried to render the experiences as authentically as possible,” Samartzis, 60, said by video during vacation in New Zealand. “So you have very detailed forensic recordings of the station — without wind, which I was very adept at removing.”But, as Samartzis admitted with a grin, bowdlerizing wind from the breeziest place in the world wasn’t very authentic. When he returned in February 2016, he intended to focus on wind itself, to log the ways it pulverized the place. He got his chance, during the strongest summertime blizzard ever witnessed there. As ice and snow pelted eight microphone stations through the 36-hour storm, the timbre of his work began shifting.Though Samartzis often talked with wonder about the way the Antarctic ice would “sing,” how dynamic and curious it always seemed, the roar he’d chronicled was terrifying, a bewildering testament to climate change’s ferocity. His “Atmospheres and Disturbances,” out in March, fastidiously presents the sounds of melting permafrost, contracting glaciers and human activity that seems to exacerbate both at a research outpost more than two miles above sea level in the Swiss Alps. Hearing the disappearance is haunting and hair-raising, like watching a television show about hunting ghosts.“When I talk to scientists about climate change, everyone’s all talked out. Essentially everyone knows, so it’s, ‘Why should I listen to you and your report?’” Samartzis said. “These recordings may not be scientifically sound, but it’s a whole other way of communicating knowledge, a different aperture of experience.”Still, at least one pioneer of portraying ice through music worries that all this work arrives too late — and that simply capturing these songs of surrender and playing them back through loudspeakers can never get to ice’s might or grandeur. More than three decades ago, the young German producer Thomas Köner sat at the foot of a Norwegian glacier and marveled as fog rose and fell above it, like enormous frozen lungs breathing deliberately.Between 1990 and 1993, Köner, who uses they/them pronouns, funneled such observations into a trilogy of lauded ambient albums that steadily evoked the awe and unease of being surrounded by ice that loomed, moved and cracked. But Köner believes that “Novaya Zemlya” — their 2012 album inspired in part by the glaciers of the Arctic archipelago of the same name — may be their final ice work. The Soviet Union tested the largest-ever atomic bomb there in 1961; for Köner, it represents humanity’s true relationship to nature.“This was the end of, if not the love affair, the loved object — the idea of this pristine world of ice,” Köner, 57, said by phone from an artist residency in Serbia. “It is very sad, like you lost somebody. But you keep going on.”Such presiding melancholy has motivated Eliza Bozek, 30, and a cadre of other young musicians to get to glaciers now, not later. An acolyte of the emotionally textured work of Winderen and Chris Watson (a prolific sound artist partly responsible for David Attenborough’s “Frozen Planet”), Bozek thinks that allowing people to hear ice creates an opportunity for awareness and, just maybe, altered behavior.“They’re beautiful, but there’s a slow violence to the sounds, too,” said Bozek, who makes music under the name moltamole, from her Copenhagen apartment. “The sounds are political statements that are not available to our ears unless they’re recorded. They create space for empathy.”Every time Jana Winderen wields a microphone, the sounds surprise her. She can hear differences between ice that’s old and young, inland or seaside.Erinn SpringerLATE LAST YEAR, Sharp’s 2009 recording atop the Devon Ice Cap, the one he played during lectures, enjoyed an unexpected reprise on an album called, simply, “Ice Records.” The London artist and filmmaker Susan Schuppli first encountered Sharp while making a documentary about the Canadian Ice Core Lab, where more than 1,300 samples pulled from glaciers shape a portrait of Earth’s climate history. He was the archive’s first director.Schuppli wove a portion of Sharp’s file into a 24-minute collage of ice recordings she and other researchers had made around the world by climbing into crevasses or sticking hydrophones beneath a glacier’s watery lips. The snippets are loud and vibrant, almost ecstatic, an atmosphere of ice offered with an exclamation mark. “I didn’t want to treat it as a mute witness,” Schuppli said by video from her home in London. “That sound gives us access to its change almost in real-time.”Toward the middle of “Ice Records,” as meltwater gurgles beneath India’s enormous Drang-Drung Glacier, several women laugh. In the village of Akshow, they’d depended on that water their entire lives; as the melting accelerates, however, they may be threatened by “outburst floods,” when the water overruns whatever reservoir previously held it. But these women had never visited Drang-Drung, let alone listened to it. Schuppli led them up the ice and handed them headphones, so they might hear it morph beneath their feet.“It was not about mourning this glacier but trying to understand what was going on,” Schuppli said. “How does science produce hospitality, so it’s not just scientists saying why their work is important? These women were enthralled. They didn’t want to stop listening.”Audio produced by More

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      The Cure Says Ticketmaster Will Issue Refunds After Fee Complaints

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      The band said it wanted to make its North American tour “affordable for all,” but after tickets went on sale this week, fans said that fees had ratcheted up the price.The Cure’s frontman, Robert Smith, said on Thursday that Ticketmaster will provide $5 and $10 refunds to fans who purchased tickets for the band’s North American tour after the band complained to the company about high fees.In recent months, Ticketmaster faced increased criticism from ticket buyers as well as from members of Congress who accused its owner, Live Nation Entertainment, of being a monopoly that hinders competition and harms fans.Mr. Smith said on Twitter that Ticketmaster would provide the refunds. “Ticketmaster have agreed with us that many of the fees being charged are unduly high,” he wrote.1 OF 2: AFTER FURTHER CONVERSATION, TICKETMASTER HAVE AGREED WITH US THAT MANY OF THE FEES BEING CHARGED ARE UNDULY HIGH, AND AS A GESTURE OF GOODWILL HAVE OFFERED A $10 PER TICKET REFUND TO ALL VERIFIED FAN ACCOUNTS FOR LOWEST TICKET PRICE (‘LTP’) TRANSACTIONS…— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 16, 2023
      Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Smith said that people who had purchased the lowest-priced tickets would automatically receive a $10 refund per ticket and that all other ticket buyers would get a $5 refund. He said that these refunds applied to people who had purchased tickets as a “verified fan,” a Ticketmaster system that requires people to register to gain early access to ticket sales.Fans who buy tickets during the general sale on Friday will “incur lower fees,” he said.This week on Twitter, Mr. Smith addressed questions and concerns from fans about buying tickets for the 30-show tour, which runs from May to July and includes three performances at Madison Square Garden in New York in June.The Cure had said in an earlier statement that it wanted tickets “to be affordable for all fans.” As part of this effort, Mr. Smith said that the Cure had refused to participate in Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing system, which adjusts ticket prices based on demand.The system was criticized last year after it drove up the cost for Bruce Springsteen tickets, some of which were selling for thousands of dollars.After tickets for the Cure’s tour went on sale on Wednesday, fans shared screenshots that showed tickets priced at $20 with added fees close to or above the $20 base price.Mr. Smith said on Twitter later that day that he was “sickened” by Ticketmaster’s fees.“I have been asking how they are justified,” he wrote in all capital letters, his usual Twitter writing style. “If I get anything coherent by way of an answer I will let you all know.”Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment have been under increased scrutiny since November, when the company botched its planned public sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour.In November, the Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation Entertainment focused on whether it had abused its power over the live music industry.In December, 26 of Ms. Swift’s fans filed a lawsuit accusing Live Nation Entertainment of anticompetitive conduct and fraud.In January, the company was the subject of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which senators from both parties criticized the company’s handling of ticket sales for Ms. Swift’s tour as well as its wider business practices.Last month, on the same day Live Nation Entertainment announced it had made $651.3 million in ticket revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022, the company responded to politicians in a statement.The company, which sold more than 550 million tickets last year, said it had submitted more than 35 pages of information to policymakers to provide context on the “realities of the industry” that it has dominated since Ticketmaster and Live Nation, an events promoter and venue operator, merged in 2010.“These include the fact that this industry is more competitive than ever: Ticketmaster has actually lost market share since the 2010 merger, not gained it; that venues set and keep most of the fees associated with tickets and are increasingly taking an ever-larger share; and Ticketmaster has for years been advocating for a federal all-in pricing requirement,” the statement said.Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment have for decades been criticized for their business practices. The Justice Department said in 2019 that Live Nation Entertainment had “repeatedly violated” the terms of the regulatory agreement that the government imposed as a condition of the merger.The Justice Department investigated complaints of anti-competitive practices by Ticketmaster in the 1990s, after a dispute with the Seattle grunge band Pearl Jam. More

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      Lewis Spratlan, 82, Dies; Took Winding Route to Music Pulitzer

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      His opera sat unproduced for decades. Then a piece of it garnered one of the field’s top prizes. Then it sat some more.Lewis Spratlan won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in music for a chunk of an opera that he had completed in 1978 and that no one had ever staged.Then he waited another decade before someone actually put the full opera in front of an audience.“It was awful, not hearing this piece,” he told The New York Times in 2010, when his long wait was about to come to an end. “It’s like a woman being pregnant forever.”The opera, “Life Is a Dream,” with a libretto by James Maraniss, was finally staged by the Santa Fe Opera in July 2010, 35 years after Mr. Spratlan and Mr. Maraniss had begun writing it.Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the premiere in The Times, called it “an important opera, the rare philosophical work that holds the stage and gives singing actors real characters to grapple with.”Mr. Spratlan, whose long road to the Pulitzer and the premiere also included his self-financing the concert that led to the prize, died on Feb. 9 at a hospice center in Mount Laurel, N.J. He was 82. His wife, Melinda (Kessler) Spratlan, said the cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Spratlan, who taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts for 36 years, composed works for large ensembles and small ones, as well as solo pieces. He even invented an instrument, which he called the terpsiptomaton and which incorporated metal coils and rods, piano strings and ball bearings.“When a key is depressed, the ball bearings are released and fall, hitting the rods and the piano strings,” The Boston Globe explained in 1980. Amherst magazine described it as “a cross between a harpsichord and a pinball machine.”Both the instrument and a piece he composed for it, “Coils,” were given their world premiere in a concert in Amherst in 1980. The instrument seems not to have caught on, but the effort showed Mr. Spratlan’s penchant for whimsy in his works.In the chamber piece “When Crows Gather” (1986), which was inspired in part by the arrival of a throng of crows outside his studio window in Massachusetts, he had the musicians approximate wintry winds and end with, as Mr. Tommasini put it in The Times, “what could be called the ‘Crow Squawk Toccata.’” In 2002, Allan Kozinn of The Times described another chamber piece, “Zoom,” this way:“He begins by having the players alternate sharp, loud chordal bursts with all manner of breathy vocalizations, including sighs, heavy breathing, gasping and panting. Eventually the musical content sweeps away the sound effects, only to career between slidey modernist textures and fleeting hints of big-band jazz. A touch of what seems to be the influence of Frank Zappa streams through the last two movements as well, and from there it’s a short step to cartoonish sound effects.”Michael Theodore, a composer who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, studied under Mr. Spratlan at Amherst. “Composing music was always an adventure for Lew,” he said by email, “and he was restlessly and relentlessly inventive.“His compositions have a remarkable range,” he added, “filled with humor in one moment and heartbreaking tenderness in the next. Lew’s musical voice was entirely his own but often contained clever, subtle nods to the music of the past.”The Santa Fe Opera’s production of Mr. Spratlan’s “Life is a Dream.”Ken Howard, via Santa Fe OperaMeriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was born on Sept. 5, 1940, in Miami. His father was a salesman, and his mother, Wilma (Howell) Spratlan, taught piano.Mr. Spratlan was still a student at Coral Gables High School in Florida when his oboe playing on a piece by Handel at a 1955 recital caught the ear of Doris Reno of The Miami Herald.“Lewis Spratlan, teenaged oboist, distinguished himself in the Handel work,” she wrote, “which he performed with his teacher, Dominique deLerma, first oboe, and his mother, Wilma Spratlan, piano.”Mr. Spratlan earned a bachelor’s degree in music composition and theory at Yale in 1962 and a master’s in composition there in 1965. Before arriving at Amherst in 1970, he taught at Pennsylvania State University and conducted ensembles there, at Tanglewood and elsewhere.“Life Is a Dream” is based on a 17th-century play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca about a prince banished at birth by his father. The play was brought to his attention by Herta Glaz, a retired mezzo-soprano who was director of the New Haven Opera Theater in Connecticut. In 1975, that company commissioned him to write the opera, and he recruited Mr. Maraniss, a colleague at Amherst who died last year, as librettist. But by the time they finished the opera, the New Haven company had gone out of business, leaving Mr. Spratlan and his music publisher to shop it to opera companies in the United States and abroad, without success.“We blanket-bombed them,” Mr. Spratlan told The Albuquerque Journal in 2010. “I didn’t have a single response.”So he set it aside for some two decades. But then he scraped together $75,000 to have the second of its three acts performed, in Amherst and then at Harvard — and recorded. It was that recording that he submitted to the Pulitzer board. It is not uncommon for composers to nominate themselves for the music prize, but Mr. Spratlan didn’t have high expectations.“I couldn’t imagine awarding the prize to a fragment of an opera,” he told the Albuquerque newspaper. “So I was startled.”In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1966, Mr. Spratlan is survived by two sons, Jacob Young Man Spratlan and Daniel Meriwether Spratlan; a daughter, Lydia Ji Yung DeBona; and two granddaughters.“Lew Spratlan was an American original, a hands-on musician, and an inspiring teacher,” an Amherst colleague and fellow composer, Eric Sawyer, said by email. “His creativity only increased with age, with some of his finest work coming in the past few years.”Professor Theodore said that just last year Mr. Spratlan composed a piano and chamber ensemble work, “Invasion,” in response to the invasion of Ukraine. He recalled unusual Spratlan teaching moments from years before.“We’d be hiking through the woods in Amherst while talking about musical ideas, and Lew would begin improvising with his voice to demonstrate a particular concept,” Professor Theodore said. “Brilliant, intricate, and soulful music would come pouring out. Then he’d finish it off with a silly little flourish because he also had a playful, mischievous sense of humor and loved making people laugh.” More

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      The Unsinkable Marilyn Maye

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      Turning the corner of 54th Street in a New York City taxi, the peerless nightclub singer Marilyn Maye is reminded of an early moment in her career. Sixty years ago, while performing on national television, she was also singing at a nightclub. “This was on Broadway,” she says, quickly adding, “on Broadway, I mean, in Kansas City.” (She still lives there. “The closets,” she explains.)But there was no advertising or publicity pointing tourists toward her show. So she found out from local hotel concierges which cabdrivers worked at the airport, and did a free concert for 20 of them. “I told them: When somebody gets off a plane and says, ‘Where is this Kansas City singer?’ — now you know!”“That was enterprising,” she twinkles.Still enterprising and still twinkling at nearly 95, Marilyn Maye is the last of a great generation of American Songbook singers. She is both the endurance runner and the mystical Sphinx, a “consummate master of the stage,” the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis says, on the brink of her birthday and her solo debut at Carnegie Hall, where she will perform with the New York Pops, conducted by Steven Reineke, on March 24.Maye is famous for many things: She made 76 television appearances (the most of any singer) on “The Tonight Show,” and was a friend and favorite of Ella Fitzgerald’s. She works nonstop all over the country, and has had hit runs with birthday concerts, including 10 sold-out nights at 54 Below in Manhattan called “94, Of Course, There’s More.”Michael Feinstein, the singer and founder of the Great American Songbook Foundation, calls her “more than an entertainer and a great musician — she is a life force that awakens something in other people.” For her fans, Carnegie Hall marks a long-awaited opportunity to see her celebrated in high style after eight decades of commitment to the strange, confounding world of cabaret singing, which has as many casualties as queens.Maye on the stage of Carnegie Hall, where she will perform with the New York Pops on March 24.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesWhat really astounds her colleagues, though, is not only that she has survived and remains committed, but that Maye’s humor, spirit and above all her voice are in the best shape of her career. Shining octogenarians in saloon singing, like the great Mabel Mercer, were seated and largely speaking their songs; Maye never sits down, and her delivery has never been as effortless.One secret may be her equanimity: Carnegie Hall will be the most important night of her life … and just another gig in a year, like all her years, jammed with travel, devoted audiences, parties, mentoring, master classes and a steady rush of concerts on any and all-sized stages. She is omnipresent: a photograph of last year’s edition of “Broadway Bares,” the annual midnight benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, reveals her smiling in the front row.Another secret might lie, perhaps, in her eclectic approach: Maye sings jazz, but she acts jazz too. She enters a song, her life experience coloring every phrase. One admirer, the actress Tyne Daly, calls Maye’s “an evolved technique” that is “emotionally smart.” “She’s totally in the room,” Daly says, “and to tell the story, she uses everything she knows, so far.”A typical Maye set list — she is famous for putting it together at the last moment — might begin with “Look for the Silver Lining,” a song introduced by the 1920s star Marilyn Miller, for whom Maye was named by her stage-struck mother. It will then often curve into a long set of medleys — she is known in the trade as “Medley Maye” — in which, say, six songs about smiling, from the 1928 “When You’re Smiling” to James Taylor’s “Your Smiling Face,” might intertwine.“It’s got to be happy, happy, happy in the beginning,” she says. “Don’t get into heavy ballads on your third tune.”The voice that stitches the set together has superb intonation (inspired by the singer Jo Stafford), with a velvet cushion at the bottom, elastic rhythm and bluesiness she can call on at will. In a set, she almost always sings two signature songs about adulterous love affairs, “Guess Who I Saw Today” and “Fifty Percent.” And she often climaxes with two hymns to survival, Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” and Jerry Herman’s “It’s Today,” punctuated with high kicks.Onstage, she favors a huge glittering brooch, shell-shaped curvaceous rhinestone earrings and trademark elastic cuff bracelets. She holds her microphone stand with ease or slides it behind her to stroll — “Never turn your back,” she insists — and knows exactly where her bass player, drummer and the pianist are.Even offstage, she seems ready for the spotlight. “She stayed in my house at different times,” says her frequent designer Bob Mackie, “and she gets out of bed in the morning, and you go, ‘Did you just have your hair done?’”Her many rules of the cabaret art form, which she proudly teaches any chance she gets, include these: wear big lashes, never sit and never close your eyes. (If you require water, take sparing sips from a wine glass: “It has to have a long stem.”)She describes her work philosophy this way: “They came to have fun. They’re giving up their evening, and their money, to be entertained. You’re not the star. They’re the star.”‘I Was Never a Child’Maye has long fascinated me as the most accomplished figure in our shared and perilous profession. I am not sure that cabaret singing is as dangerous as driving nitroglycerin trucks, but it is a demanding, often dispiriting vocation, leaving one at the mercy of nightclub owners and changing crowds and fickle pianists.Is Maye a jazz singer? A show-tunes singer? She doesn’t draw a firm distinction. “The lyric is the phrasing, see. It’s the story,” she says. Her current accompanist, Tedd Firth, has this answer: “Is she improvising? A little bit. But does she swing as hard as any singer I’ve ever worked with? Absolutely. The crucial thing is that her understanding of the music is a first-generation understanding. She was singing this music when it was still new.”Not long ago, Maye and I met at a rehearsal studio near Lincoln Center, where she was working with two protégés. Each stood at attention in a small practice room, accompanied by a quartet, facing Maye, who gestured to her sheet music like a doctor explaining the results of an MRI, pointing out shadings and shadows that might be significant.Maye carefully watching a student, Susie Clausen, perform for the first time at a New York club.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesWhen one student, Susie Clausen, practiced a spoken greeting — “I’m so glad you are enjoying the show” — Maye stopped her short. “Don’t say that! Just say you are glad they are here. Don’t assume they are enjoying it.” She added a classic Mayeism: “If you don’t take yourself seriously, others will.”For someone who began singing at age 3, Maye regards herself as a late bloomer. Born in Wichita, Kan., on April 10, 1928, she won an amateur talent contest in Topeka at age 9, for which she earned $3 and 13 weeks on the radio. When her parents divorced, she moved with her mother to Des Moines, Iowa, and at 13 was singing big band at dance ballrooms; her mother kept a little book “so we could remember what age we had said I was to different clubs and agents.”“I was never a child,” she says frankly. “That’s why I am one now.”Maye honed her craft in Kansas City, working five nights a week for 11 years at the Colony nightclub, the place on Broadway. Demos recorded at that time got the attention of Steve Allen, who put her on his prime-time television variety show.Maye with the television show host Steve Allen in 1961.ABC Photo Archives/Disney Entertainment, via Getty ImagesThis led to two career developments: the unfailing support of Johnny Carson and attention from RCA Records, for whom she recorded seven albums. As an RCA “commitment singer” introducing show tunes before their cast albums were released, Maye had her biggest radio hit with the title song of “Cabaret.”She received a 1966 Grammy nomination for best new artist; Tom Jones won. Music styles were changing: “I never got into rock ’n’ roll,” she says. “The Beatles hit when my first albums were released. That’s what went wrong with my career. Goddamn Beatles.”Maye has been married three times and had a fourth long-term partner. Her first marriage, to a hard drinker and a gambler, lasted a year. Her second (“I don’t know if he died or if I divorced him”) was to a dancer with whom she had a daughter. Her third husband, who adopted her child, was a genius pianist, she says, but “very abusive.”“I had to leave him, but I didn’t want to leave his fingers,” she recalls. Their daughter, Kristi Tucker, a singer herself, agrees that “it was a beautiful collaboration,” but often unhappy. “What she has been through in her life,” Tucker says, “she needed to be strong.”It is no accident that pianists and husbands flow together for her. “My pianist has always been the most important man in my life, above lovers, husbands, anybody,” she ruminates.Billy Stritch, her pianist of 40 years, accompanied her on her triumphant return to New York. She’d been doing musicals out of town, playing the leads in shows like “Mame” and “Hello, Dolly.” (Never appearing on Broadway in New York remains a regret.) But Stritch and her lawyer, Mark Sendroff, insisted that, after 14 years away, she perform at the now closed Metropolitan Room in 2006.She blew the roof off, winning a whole new audience at 78. “Once she sold out one time, she’d go back, eight shows, three times a year,” Stritch says. “There was no turning back. She was off and running. It began a fantastic third act.”‘Because It’s Fun’How has Maye kept on going, singing so well? I talked to voice teachers and doctors, and heard about “vocal folds” and “breath support” and “agility,” and the likelihood that she has a strict exercise and warm-up regimen.She doesn’t: “She loves to go out to dinner and have her one drink” — an apple martini — “after the show,” reports Mackie.Mackie credits her playfulness, how she once left behind her false eyelashes on the chandelier when staying at his home. I’ve seen it, too. She does little kicks walking down a staircase, not because it helps her avoid tripping, but, she brightly says, “because it’s fun.”A classic Mayeism: “If you don’t take yourself seriously, others will.”Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesPeople who love and admire Maye think she might have become a bigger star sooner. Put that question to her, however, and the playfulness — the twinkle — momentarily slips away.“I am 95 f-ing years old,” she tells me, confidently surveying Carnegie Hall from its stage. “I don’t have time to be a larger star. I don’t have time to be any more than this night.” She stares at the empty seats, soon to be full, and gently hums.Perhaps she became the kind of star she was fated to be. Or, maybe, she has become something better. There remains an unequaled intensity of intimacy when you are singing in a nightclub to a rapt audience. Carnegie Hall won’t make Marilyn Maye bigger; she’ll make Carnegie Hall smaller. More

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      Micaela Diamond, From Broadway’s ‘Parade,’ Sings Her Favorite Joni Mitchell Song

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      The actor, who learned to love music at her local temple, has developed a different relationship to her Judaism onstage.Micaela Diamond once thought she might make a good cantor. The 23-year-old actor loved singing with the congregation at the conservative synagogue she attended as a child in Margate, N.J., just outside Atlantic City. Much has changed since then, notably that you can now hear Diamond’s powerful soprano on Broadway stages. But she’s still, in a way, performing Jewish music: the songs of Jason Robert Brown’s “Parade,” the Broadway revival of which opens March 16.The musical, which first premiered in 1998 with a book by Alfred Uhry, is based on the life of Leo Frank, an Atlanta Jew who in 1915, while imprisoned after the murder of a young girl he employed at a factory, was pulled from jail by a mob and lynched. Diamond was first cast for the revival’s brief run at New York City Center last fall; she stars opposite Ben Platt as Frank’s wife and fiercest advocate, Lucille.It’s an intense role vocally, with forceful numbers like “You Don’t Know This Man” and “Do It Alone,” sung by Carolee Carmello in the original Broadway production before Diamond was even born. But another difficulty is handling the emotional exhaustion that stems from the themes of violence and antisemitism coursing throughout the piece. “Being able to tell this story to other Jews, to non-Jews, to start nuanced discussions … about what it means to be a Jew and how hatred is inherited is what I want my life’s work to be,” Diamond says. “So much of my identity lives in this show.”Diamond grew up steeped in Margate’s large Jewish community, but stopped attending services when she moved to New York City with her mother while in middle school. She later found other ways to explore her religion, like joining fellow classmates in the Jewish community club at Manhattan’s LaGuardia High School, one of the country’s most prominent public training grounds for artists. “I just started asking more questions, which, in the end, is a very Jewish thing to do,” Diamond says. “I think my Judaism is Sarah Silverman and a bagel with schmear.”Diamond had planned to join the musical theater program at Carnegie Mellon University when she got her final callback (while jet-lagged after a Birthright trip to Israel, no less) for her first Broadway production, “The Cher Show,” in which she played a young version of the singer in 2018. That nearly yearlong run was an educational experience of its own — particularly, Diamond says, in learning how to take care of herself while doing eight shows a week. (“Like, does a leading lady have to go to Equinox … every single day?”)For “Parade,” perhaps unsurprisingly, Diamond is prioritizing “more care for my heart than my body” — in part by gathering with other Jewish cast members to pray together backstage before each performance. “It just feels like honoring Leo and Lucille and remembering how lucky we are to be Jews telling this story,” she says. “It does feel like this kind of centering, and a way to connect to them, before we go through some Jewish trauma onstage.”Ahead of opening night, T asked Diamond to sing and discuss one of her favorite songs, Joni Mitchell’s “Cactus Tree” (1968), above. More

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      ‘Phantom’ Ends. For Musicians, So Does the Gig of a Lifetime.

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      Last fall, as show No. 13,781 of “The Phantom of the Opera” came to a close, the applause overpowered the thundering music. The members of the orchestra, packed into the pit under the stage, could not see the crowd, but they could hear and feel them.The standing ovation brought Kristen Blodgette, the show’s associate conductor, to tears. She held her red-nailed hands in prayer, in gratitude to the musicians.Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash hit — the longest-running musical in Broadway history — is scheduled to give its final performance at the Majestic Theater next month. These days, since the announcement of the closing last September, the musical “feels more like a rock concert,” said Kurt Coble, a violinist with the show.Mr. Coble is part of Broadway’s largest pit orchestra, which will disappear along with the show. It holds 27 full-time musicians, 11 of whom have been with “Phantom” since it opened in the late 1980s. The consistent work has allowed many of the longtime musicians, who have essentially grown up and older with the show, to build comfortable, even lucrative lives. And that is no small feat for any artist seeking stability in New York City.Crowds waiting to go into “The Phantom of the Opera” in 1988. The show has been on Broadway for 35 years.Jack Manning/The New York Times“Phantom” will end its run at the Majestic Theater in April, and its 27-member pit orchestra — the largest on Broadway — will vanish along with the show.Unlike the actors who have short-term contracts with “Phantom,” full-time musicians get a “run-of-show” agreement, which guarantees their jobs until the production closes. In 1988, when “Phantom” first opened, “there were some wide-eyed optimists who thought the show could run as long as five to six years,” recalled Lowell Hershey, a trumpeter who has been with the production since the beginning. “And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that would be really good.’”“Phantom,” of course, surpassed that prediction. During its 35-year-run, the musical has created more jobs and generated more income than any other show in Broadway history, according to Michael Borowksi, its press representative.The security of the “Phantom” paycheck has helped many of its musicians start families, send children to college, buy property, save for retirement. “Broadway was never meant to be a steady job, but for us, it was a steady job,” said concertmaster Joyce Hammann, who has been with “Phantom” since 1990. “I can’t overstress how unbelievably lucky we have all been for all these years.”“Broadway was never meant to be a steady job, but for us, it was a steady job.” Joyce Hammann, concertmaster“Phantom” maintains a traditional pit setup, a sunken open cave wedged between the audience and the stage. Although live music remains one of the essential elements of a Broadway musical, many producers have sacrificed pits to build bigger stages or increase seating. These days, it’s common to see musicians onstage with performers, or to not see them at all, as many of them work in distant rooms that pipe their music into the theaters.“Even if we want our musicians to be in the pit, the decision lies in how each production believes it will succeed,” said Tino Gagliardi, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. “Unfortunately, they are not always right — the shows that have had the longest runs have been the shows with large orchestras in the pit.”Many producers have given up on orchestra pits, but “Phantom” keeps a traditional setup.Mr. Coble knows how special the pit experience can be. “Sometimes I feel like I am a blacksmith in the early 20th century, people still had horses but not as many,” he said. “But you can never get rid of musicians. You’ll always need live music.”Pit musicians might not be able to see the show as it unfolds, but they have their tradecraft down pat. “Phantom” runs like a clock. The chandelier always swings over the pit, marking the beginning of the show, and then comes crashing down at the climax of Act 1. The patter of footsteps overhead marks the New Year’s Party in Act 2, which tells the musicians to make way for an actor who snakes his way through the pit and sits below the conductor, waiting to fire a shot into the auditorium. Then, when the shot sounds, they cover their ears and wait for the smell of powder, which signals that it is time for them to pick up their instruments again.“I don’t get terribly sentimental over it because it’s a job after all, it’s work, it’s not easy, it’s not a vacation.”Kurt Coble, violinistRegardless of whether they have a chair on Broadway (a full-time contract) or not, musicians are paid per show and are supported by Local 802, a strong union that provides them with health care and a pension, among other benefits. (When Broadway shows went dark during the pandemic, “Phantom” producers continued to pay the health insurance for their chair musicians.)Ed Matthew, a clarinetist, said that when he started playing on Broadway in 1994, he made about $140 a night. As of this month, the base wage for a musician at “Phantom” is about $291 per show.“We have to get along with each other because we are tucked in like sardines in a can.”Ed Matthew, clarinetistBefore getting hired by “Phantom,” many of its musicians juggled jobs. Peter Reit, a French horn player, made fur coats in the garment district, tended bar and sold vacuum cleaners before joining the orchestra in 1987, when rehearsals for the musical started.“I used to do my budget week to week with all my freelance work, and the first thing I noticed when I had this job was that I could now budget month to month, and that was an incredible stress relief,” said Mr. Reit, 63, who retired in 2021. He now teaches music at SUNY Purchase and Vassar College.The orchestra sits close together in the claustrophobic pit.The regular pay and benefits allowed members of the pit to concentrate on other aspects of their lives, like raising children. “Most of the support for my family was based upon what I could earn, and that took a lot of pressure off as a provider,” said Mr. Hershey, the trumpeter.Ms. Hammann, the concertmaster, has an 18-year-old son who grew up in the theater. When he was a baby, he sat with the stagehands while she played the show. “To have had the flexibility when I needed to be home with him, that’s not something one is able to do in many work environments, so it’s been tremendous,” she said.“What more can we ask for than to have had this show for 35 years?”Kristen Blodgette, associate conductorIn the late ’80s, when Ms. Blodgette, the associate conductor, was eight months pregnant with “the first ‘Phantom’ baby,” as she calls her daughter, the show’s conductors, who were all men, wore tuxedos, she said. She opted for a dress. Thirty-four years later and now a grandmother, Ms. Blodgette wears a thick velvet black gown with black socks (and no shoes) because she likes “to feel grounded” while conducting.Broadway chairs may play up to eight shows a week and are required to attend at least 50 percent of the shows per quarter, according to union rules. This allows some musicians to work side gigs for extra money and to pursue passion projects. When Mr. Matthew, the clarinetist, joined the company in the early aughts, he was able to hold onto his job at G. Schirmer, a classical music publishing company. The combined paychecks allowed him and his wife to buy a co-op apartment in Long Island City, Queens, and to save for retirement, he said.“There were some wide-eyed optimists who thought the show could run as long as five to six years. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that would be really good.’”Lowell Hershey, trumpeterMr. Coble, the violinist, joined the pit 25 years ago. Though grateful for the stability, he still yearns for more creative outlets. “I think of myself more like an artisan than an artist because I have very little freedom when it comes to playing music by someone else,” he said.But the flexibility of his work schedule has allowed him to write scores for horror films and to play, as his mother likes to call it, “unpopular music.” When he is not working at the Majestic, he spends his time with the PAM Band (Partially Artificial Musicians), a robotic orchestra that he built to play whatever songs he wants. Now that “Phantom” is coming to an end, he said, “I’ll spend a lot more time on my own project, but it’s certainly not as well-paying as the show.”“You don’t want to take up too much space and you also want to fit in,” said Mr. Matthew, a clarinetist, about the orchestra pit.There are five substitute musicians on call for each Broadway chair. Although substitutes receive the same union benefits as full-time chairs, they lack the consistency of an eight-show week. “Being a sub is hard because you are constantly waiting for the next call, you have no control in your life,” said Nick Jemo, a trumpeter who started subbing at “Phantom” in 2009 before joining the pit full-time five years later. Some subs have been filling in at “Phantom” for more than 10 years, and they keep coming back.“You want to bring your entire being into that show — it’s got everything you’d ever want to express in an instrument,” said Brad Bosenbeck, who started subbing for one of the two viola chairs at “Phantom” when he was 26. Mr. Bosenbeck, now 31 and still a substitute, said he doesn’t take the job for granted. “I feel like the luckiest guy in the world that I get to do what I love and get paid for it.”“Being a sub is hard because you are constantly waiting for the next call, you have no control in your life.”Nick Jemo, trumpeterWith the show’s closing, many of its musicians are thinking about their next chapters. Some believe that “Phantom” might return to Broadway in a few years with a reduced orchestra, like the production in London. A few veteran musicians, including Mr. Hershey, will retire. Ms. Hammann looks forward to teaching, which she started doing when the pandemic kept her away from the pit. Ms. Blodgette will conduct at “Bad Cinderella,” Mr. Lloyd Webber’s new musical. Most say they will try to sub at other shows.“The show closing feels liberating,” said Mr. Coble, who admitted to fantasizing about being a strolling violinist in a fancy restaurant, dressed up as the phantom and playing variations of the score. “I’ll play my last performance like I’ve tried to play every other show, and when it’s over I’ll just move on to something else. I don’t get terribly sentimental over it because it’s a job after all, it’s work, it’s not easy, it’s not a vacation.”“You want to bring your entire being into that show — it’s got everything you’d ever want to express in an instrument.”Brad Bosenbeck, violistThe musicians won’t miss some aspects of the show, like the claustrophobic pit, where they sit so close to each other that if one of them opens a candy bar the rest can smell it. “We have to get along with each other because we are tucked in like sardines in a can,” Mr. Matthew said. “You don’t want to take up too much space and you also want to fit in.” The radio program “This American Life” produced a segment a few years ago about some of these frustrations.Despite the intimate, tense energy of the “Phantom” pit — “it is its own magical elixir,” Mr. Bosenbeck said — most musicians said they didn’t have many opportunities to connect with each other outside the theater. “One of the things that makes this ending bittersweet is that everyone has been in my life for so long and I’ve been in theirs for so long, and yet we didn’t get an opportunity outside of waiting in the bathroom line or arriving early to really speak to everybody,” Ms. Hammann said.The musicians have few opportunities to connect outside the theater, but they have fixed routines while they are working.During these final weeks, as audience members watch the tortured love story onstage, the pit musicians will continue their routine underneath it. A ghostly image of Ms. Blodgette will appear on four small screens scattered throughout the orchestra so musicians can follow her lead. Mr. Jemo, after a temporary stint with “Bad Cinderella,” will return, repositioning his chair to catch a glimpse of his girlfriend, a dancer in the show. One music stand will continue to showcase a collection of miniature toys — a smiling crocodile, a head-shaking turtle, a deer’s face and a tiny plastic hand holding fresh radishes.“I may be the only musician in the world who has radishes in their music stand,” said Karl Bennion, a cellist who accidentally took the vegetable to a show in 2017 and since then has made it a tradition.“I may be the only musician in the world who has radishes in their music stand.”Karl Bennion, cellistThe music stand of cellist Karl Bennion, who has done it up with tchotchkes.In between songs, some musicians will play Sudoku and crossword puzzles; others will read. “A good book can really make going to work even more joyful,” Mr. Jemo said. He and Mr. Hershey, his trumpet partner, had a big French dictionary that sat between them, and often they reached for it at the same time.At the end of every show, musicians will continue to interact with audience members, some of whom like to peek into the pit to thank them as they pack their instruments.“What more can we ask for than to have had this show for 35 years?” Ms. Blodgette asked. “When I started doing this, I was single, I did not have a child, my parents were alive,” she said. “Through all of the chaos of life, this was here.”The security of the “Phantom” paycheck has helped many of the show’s musicians start families, send children to college, buy property, save for retirement. More

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      36 Hours in Nashville: Things to Do and See

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      1 p.m.
      Stroll the strip, then kick off your shoes
      Roughly a mile south of downtown is the 12South neighborhood, which includes a walkable corridor of shops, restaurants and cafes; it’s an easy excursion to grab a quick gift, a latte or lunch. Plunder the vintage goods at Savant, at the north end of the strip, and then swing by Draper James — the actor Reese Witherspoon’s brick-and-mortar salute to all that is Southern and genteel — which sells clothes, home goods and Ms. Witherspoon’s book club picks. For lunch, grab a few of Bartaco’s light-yet-satisfying roasted-cauliflower tacos ($3.25 each). At the corridor’s south end, White’s Mercantile sells everything from books to organic dog treats to candlewick trimmers. Finally, Sevier Park, next door, is where you can kick off your shoes and lie on the grass, but be wary of cold noses: This park is dog-friendly. More

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      Who Needs a Shave? ‘Sweeney Todd’ Is Back.

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      “Less is more” was famously one of the composer Stephen Sondheim’s aesthetic credos. But in the case of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” the bloody, quasi-operatic 1979 revenge tragedy that many consider his masterpiece, Sondheim went big in a way he seldom had before and never did again: in the size of the orchestra and performing ensemble, in the sheer quantity of music written for the score, and in the dramatic freight (and body count) borne by the tale of a murderous Victorian-era barber.“Sweeney Todd” has accordingly joined the repertoire of many opera companies, where it holds its own with such 20th-century titans as the Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess” and Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw.” But in the theater, “Sweeney” has found notable success by getting a haircut. Since the original Broadway production closed in 1980 — an artistic success, winning the Tony Award for best musical, but a financial disappointment, recouping just shy of 60 percent of its costs — its two Broadway revivals were trimmed-down renditions. The first, staged in the round at Circle in the Square in 1989, earned the nickname “Teeny Todd” for its small ensemble and two-piano reduction of the score, while John Doyle’s 2005 production memorably stripped the show down to a 10-member company of actor-musicians.The property’s biggest commercial success was Off Broadway: The Tooting Arts Club’s immersive pie-shop staging at the 133-seat Barrow Street Theater in 2017 became the longest-running “Sweeney,” recouping its investment in 24 weeks, then continuing for a year after that.So the stakes are high for the new Broadway revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, now in previews at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where it is scheduled to open on March 26. With a capitalization of $13.5 million, a company of 25 actors and an orchestra of 26 players, this is “Sweeney” as it hasn’t been seen or heard in New York for 43 years. We’re used to “Sweeney Todd” deconstructed. Can it be reconstructed?And is there a plentiful paying audience, not only for the show’s stars, who include Gaten Matarazzo and Jordan Fisher, but also for Sondheim himself? His death in 2021 led to fresh encomiums for his unparalleled legacy, but that season’s “Company” revival lost money, and last year’s popular “Into the Woods,” now on a national tour, has not announced whether it has recouped.Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Sweeney” (and “Hamilton”), recently acknowledged that the revival constituted a “large risk,” adding that he’s encouraged by strong ticket sales. He did initially wonder, he said, “Does New York need or want another ‘Sweeney Todd,’ only four or five years after the pie shop? And the answer was: Maybe, if we give them something they haven’t seen in 40 years, a full-scale production with a full ensemble and a full orchestra.”Rehearsals of the show at Open Jar Studios in Manhattan. The new production’s larger scale also means the return of the trick barber’s chair and blood packs. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesGaten Matarazzo during rehearsals.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe idea of the revival germinated with Groban, a pop-classical singer who made his Broadway debut in 2016 in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” He approached Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton,” about tackling “Sweeney” with a full orchestra, and Kail enlisted Alex Lacamoire, the “Hamilton” music director, and the choreographer Steven Hoggett (“A Beautiful Noise”).During a phone interview two days before previews began, Groban said Sweeney had been on his wish list since he was in junior high and first saw a mid-1990s production by Los Angeles’s East West Players, with Orville Mendoza in the lead. It was also his introduction to the work of Sondheim, who teamed with Hugh Wheeler, the show’s writer.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.“It was a kind of secret language that I just got,” Groban recalled of his early explorations of Sondheim’s musicals. “Even at a young age, when I still needed to grow into so many of the themes he was writing about, I just seemed to understand it on a weird unspoken level.”While Groban’s lush baritone is undoubtedly a good fit for the music, does he perhaps seem a bit too genial and easygoing to play a serial killer whose quest for revenge swells into a sociopathic death wish?“That’s actually one of the reasons I was attracted to doing it,” Groban insisted. He said he figured that “the way to earn a connection with the audience that’s frightening on a deeper level than, ‘Hey, that’s the monster in the room,’ is to find whatever humanity there is between that guy and whoever’s sitting in the audience.”For his part, Kail said he’s leaning into the show’s strains of longing, not only those of the embittered Sweeney but also from his helpmate and desultory romantic partner, the pie-shop proprietor Mrs. Lovett, played by Ashford.“What we’re really keen to explore,” said Kail, “is can you make something thrilling, something entertaining, something hilarious, something scary — and can we also break your heart?”Ashford, who played Dot in the 2017 revival of Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George” (which did recoup its investment), is on a similar wavelength.“I’ve always thought of it as a great love story, though maybe one-sided,” she said. Without ignoring Lovett’s depravity — it is she, after all, who suggests grinding Sweeney’s victims into meat pies, in the tour de force duet “A Little Priest” — Ashford said she is keying in on Mrs. Lovett’s unrequited passion for Sweeney as well as her maternal affection for the orphan Toby (Matarazzo).Not to mention finding connections to the role’s originator, Angela Lansbury. “You feel her breath and her warmth and her humor all over the piece,” Ashford said.The production aims to “find beauty in the underbelly and in the grotesque,” said Kail, above right, with Ashford and Groban.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIndeed, the imprint of the original production, memorialized in a telefilm recording of a 1980 tour stop in Los Angeles, is unavoidable. That’s particularly the case for a production that’s returning to Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations, and boasts a towering set by Mimi Lien that, like Eugene Lee’s original set, employs a working crane and moving pieces ringed with cast-iron staircases.But Kail, who was friendly with Harold Prince, the director of the show’s original production, is intent on marking out his own territory.“That production was influenced by Brecht; it was about alienation, distancing,” Kail said. “That approach was enormously effective for them, and it is quite different from what we’re going to try to do.”Whereas Prince found his hook in the grime and tumult of the Industrial Revolution, Kail and his team, which also includes the costume designer Emilio Sosa and the lighting designer Natasha Katz, are looking to “find beauty in the underbelly and in the grotesque,” Kail said. Inspired by the play’s stark dichotomy between “those above” and “those below,” they are trying to embody its levels and hierarchies.Lien, whose scenic designs for shows like “Great Comet” and “An Octoroon” are typically characterized by surprising use of three-dimensional space, was struck by the show’s references to “the great black pit, the hole in the ground, the vermin — this kind of characterization of that underclass population of Victorian London as being like sewer rats, living underground.”In addition to the gantry crane and mechanized set pieces, Lien’s set is framed by a brick archway and an iron bridge that could serve in a production of “Oliver!”Sosa’s costumes, too, are stressing both beauty and division.“If you look historically at the clothing, the cuts and silhouettes are very similar between those of less means and more affluent people,” Sosa noted. “Everyone has a top hat. It’s the condition of your hat that’s variable, that sets where you stand in the scheme of economics.”The new production’s larger scale also means the return of the trick chair and blood packs. (Some past revivals artfully stylized the show’s onstage murders and finessed the mechanics of Sweeney’s purpose-built chair.) Its blood effects are being created by Jeremy Chernick, who helped Elsa’s world transform to ice in “Frozen” and stocked the blood cannons for “American Psycho.”And when I spoke to Hoggett about the show’s movements and transitions he told me, “I spent all day yesterday being slid down the chair into a pit, so I could show all the actors how not to bang your chin and where the floor is. It was great; we were offering $5 rides.”Atop the table, from left, Gaten Matarazzo and Annaleigh Ashford in the revival of “Sweeney Todd” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGroban as the murderous barber Sweeney Todd and Ashford as the pie-shop proprietor Mrs. Lovett in the new production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe extent to which “Sweeney Todd” is itself a kind of thrill ride, a brilliant machine for delivering scares and laughs, remains a question. Sondheim was clear about his inspiration: When he saw Christopher Bond’s blank-verse play in London in 1973, itself adapted from a hoary English legend, the composer saw an opportunity to indulge his intersecting affinities for Gothic horror, melodrama and Grand Guignol. And in later years he was on record as savoring intimate versions of “Sweeney,” not least because they hewed closer to his original vision.But there’s something else in the show’s DNA that may account for its endurance, and may explain why, despite Sondheim’s expressed preference for smaller stagings, he was apparently eager to see Kail’s production. (He died just days before he had been scheduled to attend a reading of the show.)When Sondheim enlisted Prince — who was initially ambivalent about the show’s melodrama and horror until he sparked to its larger social themes — the composer was inexorably drawn into writing something with more epic heft than he might have originally imagined.As Ashford put it: “Every time you work on a great piece, you are exploring an author’s work from that moment in their life. I always thought ‘Sunday in the Park’ was an extension of Steve at a time in his life when he was really examining himself as an artist and what art meant to him.“In this piece, where he was in his life — I can’t speak for him, but it feels like he and Hal Prince were setting the world on fire. And he was like, ‘Here’s everything I got, I can’t wait to show it to you.’”There may be something even more personal at the show’s bloody core that speaks to its emotional size, if not its physical scale. When Sondheim played a bit of the score for Judy Prince, Hal’s wife, she was startled, and told him, “Steve, it’s the story of your life.”I once asked Sondheim what she might have meant, and he replied by drawing an analogy between Sweeney’s vengeful murders and works of art inspired by a sense of having been wronged as a young man. (Sondheim had an infamously stormy childhood.)The clues can be read in the music. The harmonic palette of the “Sweeney” score was influenced by the film music of Bernard Herrmann, a German neo-Romantic who brought utter emotional conviction to his work, whether he was accompanying dueling skeletons or the capering psychodramas of Alfred Hitchcock. The yearning and anguish Sondheim poured into the music of “Sweeney Todd” may finally be as telling as any of the bloody action in the script.Tunick, who said his original orchestrations “leaned on the film music masters heavily,” knew Sondheim well. Whether “Sweeney Todd” expressed something darkly personal about his colleague, Tunick couldn’t say. But he did note significantly: “All of his other shows were brought to him by somebody else, whether it was Hal Prince or James Lapine or whoever. This is the only one of Sondheim’s shows that was his idea.” More