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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

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      Rafael Viñoly, From the Drawing Board to the Keyboard

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      There is something transcendent about the architect’s spaces: something unseeable that you experience when you enter. They are as fluid as music.The great trumpeter Wynton Marsalis once told a group of graduating college students, “Music is the art of the invisible. It gives shape and focus to our innermost inclinations and can clearly evidence our internal lives with shocking immediacy.”Marsalis’s creative home, of course, is Jazz at Lincoln Center, a collection of performance spaces tucked into the fifth floor of the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle in New York City. The complex’s crown jewel is the Appel Room, designed by Rafael Viñoly, who died on March 2. The space is intimate and sweeping, thanks largely to Rafael’s love of glass and the way it frames the adopted city to which he was endlessly devoted.Through the course of our intersecting lives, I spent countless rich and meaningful hours with Rafael. But to really understand him, I’d have to meet him twice: first as an architect and, many years later, as a musician.He opened his studio in New York City in 1983. I started mine the following year. Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, he and the architect Frederic Schwartz invited me to join the Think design team they assembled to create a new concept for the World Trade Center site. I was living in TriBeCa at the time, and Rafael’s studio, where we met to brainstorm, was a street-front space on Vandam Street in SoHo. We’d walk downtown in horror, engaged it now seems in an endless conversation about the future of cities, in particular New York.Rafael Viñoly in 2002 presenting plans by the Think team for the World Trade Center site, showing open latticework towers, and favoring civic use over office space.Librado Romero/The New York TimesThe plan for the site, a pair of twin towers that spiraled upward, a filigreed weave of steel and air, would transform the center for trade to one of civics and culture. There were many of us involved in the Think team, but the design, which won the competition but was rejected by then-Gov. George Pataki, was largely a combination of Fred’s relentless belief in the significance of urban life and Rafael’s love and belief in the power of beauty and culture.Rafael’s studio at the time seemed, like him, larger than life. The spaces were filled with amazing models, many of them large-scale studies. We would discuss the plans for the World Trade Center site, and how to create built environments that fostered a sense of civic purpose. My strongest memories of that process are feeling his hand leaning on my shoulder as he quizzically looked at what I was drawing and sat down, lowered his glasses and offered — sometimes graciously, sometimes not so much — an invariably whip-smart critique or suggestion.He was an obsessive architect, pencil in hand, always sketching and drawing, across countries and continents. But he was also a classically trained pianist. And what I would come to understand is that it wasn’t possible to truly know Rafael without appreciating the centrality of music and performance in his life.I knew that tucked away in the offices was a piano — actually two Steinway D concert pianos from Hamburg, I would later learn. (More recently, according to his son, Román, he kept one belonging to András Schiff, the British pianist.) The pianos were both well used, because Raphael would rely on music — often Bach — to relieve the pressure.His friend Bernard Goldberg, the art dealer and former hotelier, as passionate as he was about classical music, tells of the time Rafael was redesigning the Roger Williams Hotel, including a space for free chamber music performances. In the middle of one conversation, the architect suddenly popped out of his chair, walked over to a Steinway and started to play a Bach toccata. He finished playing, returned to Bernard, and said, “Now let’s get on with this stuff,” and continued the design conversation.I was just beginning to return to the piano myself, for the first time since childhood, with an extraordinary piano teacher, Seymour Bernstein. I had resumed my training in 2016 with a level of attention that I had thought impossible. It was then that I finally met Rafael as a musician.The Appel Room, part of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York, was designed by Rafael Viñoly and exhibits his love of glass.Brad Feinknopf It was at an event at Jazz at Lincoln Center. We were discussing the space — the adaptability of the rooms, allowing for intimate recitals and larger performances — and I mentioned that I was beginning to study piano again. From that moment on, our conversations were about music: how it filled his childhood, the pleasure of practice, the nature of the art form, and how it differed, he insisted, from design and architecture. He famously said that music and architecture were opposites, that music is completely about abstraction. “In a way,” he said, echoing Marsalis, “it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is.” Architecture, he would often insist, “is a fight against gravity. The musician’s job is to create beauty.”Several months later I showed up at a “playing class” Seymour had organized at his home on 79th Street. Seymour, who is now 95 and is still at the top of his game as an inspiring teacher, had asked a group of his long-term students to each play a new piece they had been working on, followed by a conversation. As I walked in, I was shocked to see Rafael off to the side. I asked him what he was playing and he said he had come to hear me. I was incredibly moved and equally terrified.Rafael and I would continue to work on various design projects, most recently the NEMA residential building in Chicago, where he did the structure and I did the interiors. But our communication was different. Music had become our shared language, as we talked — sketching on the same pad — about the rhythm and structure of the outdoor spaces that we both found so important.Carrasco International Airport in Montevideo, Uruguay, by the architect, features a monumental curved roof inspired by the rolling dunes along the coastline. Daniela Mac Adden I appreciate the distinction that Rafael is trying to make between architecture and music. But I’m not convinced that he fully believed it. In the same interview where he spoke about architecture and gravity and music and beauty, he paused to acknowledge exceptions — projects where the two were totally commingled. He cited the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. The architect Louis Kahn, who worked on the design with Jonas Salk, produced a campus where each building is unique but somehow united, notes connected almost invisibly. Rafael described stepping onto the plaza between the two long structures, saying, “You feel like you are touched by something that makes you feel good.”Rafael’s work — his design for the World Trade Center site; the Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center; his terminal at Carrasco Airport in Montevideo, Uruguay; the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and so many others — managed to merge tangible, real-world permanence with Marsalis’s “art of the invisible.” There’s something transcendent about them, something unseeable that you experience when you enter them. When you encounter them, “you are touched by something that makes you feel good.” In other words, his buildings don’t just exist; they perform. More

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      A Conductor’s Battle With a Classical Music Gender Barrier

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      Claire Gibault has spent a lifetime fighting sexism and forging a path in a male-dominated profession. Her next targets: pay gaps and age discrimination.This article is part of our Women and Leadership special report that profiles women leading the way on climate, politics, business and more.The baton-waving bully conductor played by Cate Blanchett in “Tár” has earned a series of Oscar nominations and captivated audiences worldwide. That may be, in part, because of her novelty: Until recently, conducting was almost exclusively a male profession.The French conductor Claire Gibault has spent a lifetime battling that gender barrier. In 2019, she co-founded La Maestra, a biennial international competition for female conductors in Paris that draws more than 200 contestants from some 50 countries.“Giving confidence and visibility to the talented women who are emerging as orchestral conductors is a cause La Maestra will continue to champion with commitment and passion,” said a news release inviting contestants for the next competition, in March 2024. The competition, founded with the Philharmonie de Paris, awards prizes of 5,000 to 20,000 euros ($5,300 to $21,400) to finalists who are provided numerous musical opportunities, too. Ms. Gibault also founded the Paris Mozart Orchestra in 2011, one of France’s few female-led orchestras.Born in 1945 and raised in Le Mans in northwestern France, where her father taught music theory at the conservatory, Ms. Gibault was studying violin when she discovered conducting and persuaded the conservatory to teach it.She went on to make classical music history by becoming the first woman to conduct a performance at La Scala in Milan (where she was an assistant to her mentor, the late conductor Claudio Abbado, who was then La Scala’s music director). She also was the first woman to conduct the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.Ms. Gibault, 77, has been busy and much in the news lately, especially with the Academy Awards on March 12. She discussed her career, her views on “Tár” and sexism in classical music in a phone interview from Paris. The conversation was translated from French, edited and condensed.Why did you decide to set up the La Maestra competition?In 2018, I was the only female jury member of a conducting competition in Mexico. There were such sexist attitudes on the part of certain jurors that I was shocked. One man on the jury even said that women were biologically incapable of being conductors, because their arms were naturally turned outward to hold babies. Whenever a female contestant came up in the competition, this man would cover his face with his jacket, close his eyes and plug his ears. One female finalist who was very musical and very talented received as many votes as a young man to whom the jury gave the first prize. I found that very unfair.The competition in Mexico was a trigger for me. I was furious. When I got back to Paris, I met with a patron, Dominique Senequier, [founder and] president of the private investment company Ardian. I told her that a lot of female talents were invisible, and that it would be interesting to do something for them. She encouraged me to set up a prestigious competition for female conductors and said she would finance it.The International Conductors Competition La Maestra, at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2022. The three finalists, with bouquets from left, are Beatriz Fernández Aucejo (3rd Prize, ARTE Prize), Joanna Natalia Ślusarczyk (2nd Prize, French Concert Halls and Orchestras Prize, ECHO Prize) and Anna Sułkowska-Migoń (1st Prize, Generation Opera Prize).Maria Mosconi/Hans LucasWhat impact has the competition had?The impact has been extraordinary. Female conductors are now viewed as a very modern phenomenon. Yet we have to be careful and very vigilant: make sure that it’s not just the young and attractive conductors who are being recruited. There is a flagrant degree of age discrimination in the world of classical music. For that to change, we need more women in management positions.What was your own experience as a young female conductor in a profession with almost no women?Audiences took it very well. The problem was the condescension of colleagues — of certain male conductors and of the male managers and directors of orchestras and cultural institutions. For them it was fine to hire women as long as they were assistant conductors, especially if they were very good assistants. I worked on pieces that the men didn’t want to work on, such as new compositions. I knew that this was a battle I had to wage with a smile, never complaining, never whining. That’s the way it worked.Why did you set up the Paris Mozart Orchestra?In my career, I experienced aggressive behavior on the part of musicians who made my job very hard, orchestras that didn’t want to play at my tempo. It was sometimes very difficult. I wanted to be able to choose the program. And I didn’t want to wait to be chosen.What did you think of the movie “Tár”?I found it disturbing, yet fascinating. What I like about the movie is that it’s a fable about power: how power can transform human beings, be they men or women. It’s like a Greek tragedy.Ms. Gibault co-founded La Maestra, a biennial international competition for female conductors in Paris that draws more than 200 contestants from some 50 countries.Maria Mosconi/Hans LucasDid you feel that it was about you?I don’t think we should be egocentric about it. It’s not because I’m a woman conductor that I felt directly concerned. It’s true that when you’re fighting for the cause of female conductors, it’s disturbing to see a woman who accumulates so many reasons to be hated: who takes advantage of her power, who takes drugs, who flirts with the young women in the orchestra. Of course, if a man behaved in that way, it would be a lot less shocking because we’re used to it.That kind of male behavior in classical music is now being called out. I think it’s high time for that behavior to stop. Not only is there abuse of power and sexual misconduct, but male conductors are also overpaid. That’s unacceptable given the economic crisis that the world of culture is going through.You mean the pay gap between male and female orchestra conductors?Yes, but also the pay gap with the musicians in the orchestra. And this incredible disdain that some male conductors have for the musicians that they’re conducting. We need to revolutionize this world from the inside. We need a different set of values.What do you need to revolutionize?The economics of culture. And the fact that careers are being built on notoriety, so the focus is on boosting people’s fame. There are people who are very famous and who are extraordinary artists, and others who are a little less so. I know extraordinary artists who are not famous at all.So there’s a cult of personality?Yes — for purely economic reasons. More

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      Gary Rossington, Lynyrd Skynyrd Guitarist, Dies at 71

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      The last surviving original member of the classic Southern rock group, he played the soaring slide guitar solo on “Free Bird” and co-wrote “Sweet Home Alabama.”Gary Rossington, an original member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the quintessential Southern rock band, whose guitar helped define its sound and who was a key figure in the group’s eventual rebirth after a plane crash in 1977 killed three of its members, died on Sunday. He was 71.The band posted news of his death on its Facebook page but did not say where he died. No cause was given, although Mr. Rossington had had heart problems for years. He was the last surviving member of the original band.Growing up in the Jacksonville, Fla., area, Mr. Rossington got the rock-star bug when a friend, Bob Burns, was given a drum kit in the summer of 1964. The two teenagers decided they would become rock drummers.“The practical limitations of forming a band with only two drummers soon became apparent,” Mr. Rossington’s biography on the band’s website notes, “and Gary gravitated toward playing the guitar.”That same summer, according to a portrait of the band written for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted the group in 2006, another teenager, Ronnie Van Zant, was playing in a baseball game when he hit a foul ball that struck a spectator, Mr. Burns. Mr. Van Zant, too, had rock-star aspirations, and the three began playing together, adding other members and trying out group names — the Wildcats and Sons of Satan were among those considered.Eventually they settled on Lynyrd Skynyrd, a bastardization of Leonard Skinner, a gym teacher who had hassled them in high school because of their long hair.The band, playing countless bar dates around Florida and eventually beyond, evolved into a seven-piece with three guitars — Mr. Rossington, Allen Collins and Ed King (later replaced by Steve Gaines) — backing Mr. Van Zant’s vocals. The guitarists would alternate as lead, sometimes in the same song. Mr. Rossington was adept as a lead and also had a knack for adjusting his style to support the other guitarists when one of them was front and center.“Back in the day, we had three guitars and a keyboard, so that’s all strings,” he told the website Premier Guitar in 2017. “It’s hard to get all those strings together, and the hardest part is not playing. Growing up, we learned where not to play. Even though you could play, you leave the space and room.”The band’s breakthrough came in 1973, when the musician and producer Al Kooper caught a show in Atlanta, liked what he heard and signed the group to his Sounds of the South label. Mr. Kooper produced the band’s first album, “Lynyrd Skynyrd (pronounced ‘lĕh-’nérd ‘skin-’nérd),” which was released in 1973 and included “Gimme Three Steps,” “Simple Man” and what became one of rock’s most famous songs, “Free Bird,” with Mr. Rossington’s evocative slide guitar solos.By the fall of 1977, the group had released four more albums, had hits with “Sweet Home Alabama” (which Mr. Rossington wrote with Mr. Van Zant and Mr. King) and other songs, and was one of the best-known bands of the day. Then, on Oct. 20, the band’s chartered plane ran out of fuel and crashed in a thicket in Mississippi, killing Mr. Van Zant; Mr. Gaines; Cassie Gaines, Mr. Gaines’s sister and a backup vocalist; the band’s road manager; the pilot; and the co-pilot. The 20 other passengers were injured, including Mr. Rossington, who sustained numerous broken bones.The crash was the end of Lynyrd Skynyrd, for a time. After a few years to recover physically and psychologically, Mr. Rossington and Mr. Collins formed the Rossington Collins Band, which strove to distinguish itself from Lynyrd Skynyrd, in part by hiring a female vocalist, Dale Krantz, whom Mr. Rossington would later marry.But the new band did play “Free Bird” at its shows.“We do it now as an instrumental,” Mr. Rossington told The Orlando Sentinel in 1980. “We don’t do the vocal on it because that was Ronnie’s. It still gets heavy when we play it. I can hear him singing.”In 1987, the 10th anniversary of the crash, Mr. Rossington helped bring about a tribute tour, reuniting surviving members, with Mr. Van Zant’s younger brother, Johnny, taking over as vocalist.Mr. Rossington, right, duets with Rickey Medlocke in the reconstituted Lynyrd Skynyrd in Fort Hood, Tex., in 2004.Steve Traynor/The Killeen Daily Herald, via Associated Press“We were just going to do a one-show thing,” he told The Los Angeles Times that year, “but it turned into a tribute tour because, 10 years later, the music’s still being played on the radio, and it’s still requested, and it’s still selling real good.”The reconstituted group stuck, and it has been touring as Lynyrd Skynyrd, with various lineups, ever since, as well as releasing albums. Later this year the band is scheduled to tour with ZZ Top. Mr. Rossington, though, had cut back his participation to only occasional appearances, for health reasons.Mr. Rossington was born on Dec. 4, 1951, in Jacksonville. His father died when he was a boy, and his mother was an important force in his life, so much so, he said, that he named his first serious guitar, a Les Paul, “Berniece” after her.In a 1993 interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Rossington recalled some early validation for the fledgling group: winning a battle of the bands in Jacksonville in 1968.“There were 10 bands playing soul music,” he said. “We came in and did Yardbirds and Stones. We were a little over the audience’s heads. Except that the judges went, ‘These cats are cool.’”Mr. Rossington, right, with Lynyrd Skynyrd in 2019. He cut back his participation in the band in recent years because of health problems.Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Rossington and other band members were known for a wild lifestyle. In 1976 Mr. Rossington smashed his car, with alcohol and drugs contributing to the accident. The crash inspired the band’s song “That Smell,” a track on its 1977 album, “Street Survivors.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Rossington’s survivors include two daughters.When Mr. Rossington and the others in the tribute group of 1987 gave their first concert, in Nashville, they played “Free Bird” as an instrumental, as Mr. Rossington had in his earlier group. The audience filled in for the absent Ronnie Van Zant.“You could hear 16,000 people singing,” Mr. Rossington said, “and it sounded like a million.” More

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      For Two Broadway Stars, a Love Story Blossoms in a Honky-Tonk Bar

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      The new musical “The Lonely Few,” starring Lauren Patten and Ciara Renée, puts a romance between two women at its very heart.LOS ANGELES — During a rehearsal of “The Lonely Few” at the Geffen Playhouse, Lauren Patten, a Tony winner for her performance in “Jagged Little Pill,” was sharing a stage with Ciara Renée, whose Broadway credits include “Waitress” and “Frozen.” The performances were mesmerizing, and loud (drumsticks were broken; earplugs were provided), with Patten steam-rolling her way through a pair of headbangers about the joys of rock ’n’ roll and the desire to escape, and Renée filling the room with a heartbreaking ballad about unrequited love.“I would go see that band,” Zoe Sarnak, the show’s composer and lyricist, said during a break.The setting was about as far from a Broadway stage as one could imagine: a small rehearsal space in the Westwood neighborhood. And the actual performance space for the show, the Geffen’s Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, isn’t that much larger. The 114-seat theater has been reconfigured to resemble a dive bar in backwoods Kentucky, so audience members, sitting at tables and bar stools amid the players, will feel as if they’re at a neighborhood watering hole.“The minute you walk into the theater, you’re going to feel like you’re not at the Geffen,” said Ellenore Scott, who is sharing directing duties with Trip Cullman. “Performers will be walking right by you, or using your table, or doing an entire scene next to you.”For venues this size, Patten said, vocal adjustments need to be made. You’re still playing to the guy in the back row, she said, but with a care for the audience member sitting a few feet away. “I also think that with a show like this, with music like this,” she said, “it’s got to smack you in the face.”After five years of development, which included pandemic-related breaks, “The Lonely Few” is now having its world premiere, with preview performances scheduled to start Thursday and opening night set for March 9. In the musical, Patten plays Lila, a Save-A-Lot clerk who leads the Lonely Few, a preternaturally gifted band that plays Friday nights at Paul’s Joint, the local honky-tonk. Rounding out the band is Damon Daunno (“Oklahoma”), Helen J Shen (“Man of God”) and Thomas Silcott (“Birthday Candles”); Joshua Close (a star of the 2022 film “Monica”) portrays Lila’s brother Adam, the loving but troubled albatross around her neck.When Amy (Renée), an established musician, enters the club and offers Lila a chance to come on the road with her and open for her band, choices must be made, both practical and romantic.The new show has provided the two leads with a rare opportunity to create roles from the ground up. It’s a welcome change for Renée, who took over but didn’t originate the roles of Jenna in “Waitress” and Elsa in “Frozen,” both on Broadway.A recent rehearsal in Los Angeles. The show’s vibe is honky-tonk dive bar.JJ Geiger for The New York Times“I’ve done a lot in my career where I’ve been the Black woman who steps into a white role,” she said. “But this play doesn’t exist anywhere. It’s totally new. And there’s so much beauty in that.”“The Lonely Few” is also that rarest of shows: a musical that puts a love story between two women at its very heart.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.“Fun Home,” the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s award-winning graphic novel, features the coming out narrative of an adolescent girl, as does “The Prom,” which opened on Broadway in 2018. But the romantic relationships in both of those musicals — though crucial to the stories — are largely secondary.“Those pieces are incredibly important to the canon, and I’m so thankful for them,” said Sarnak, whose previous shows include “A Crossing” for Barrington Stage Company. “But I can’t think of a show where the narrative center is a love story between two women who are out.”The first seeds of the show were planted in 2018, when Sarnak was talking with Rachel Bonds, who wrote the show’s book, about working together. They wanted to do a piece about two women with music in it, telling a story that could pull from their own experiences.For years, Sarnak had written songs about her life and past loves. “There are several relationships in my life that find their way into the show,” she said. “The first woman I ever dated, who I was with for four years, and then my marriage and divorce, and then relationships after that. It’s not any one relationship. There are pieces of anyone I’ve ever been with or been in love with.”For the play’s setting and people, Bonds drew from her childhood growing up in Sewanee, Tenn., home of the esteemed University of the South. “Sewanee is up on a mountain, and when you go down into the valley, it’s a whole different world,” she said. “There’s a real separation,” she added, “and I grew up very aware of that.”“Southerners are often portrayed as stupid or ignorant, and small-town folks are often portrayed as people without dreams or meaning in their lives,” Bonds continued. “I really wanted to fight against that.”Over time, the project morphed from “a play with music” to a full-blown book musical, a first for Bonds, whose plays include “Goodnight Nobody” and “Michael & Edie.” Many of Sarnak’s songs shaped the show’s plot about the star-crossed lovers Lila and Amy. “I think we both felt that these songs wanted to be a love story, this play had to be a love story,” Bonds said.Not long after, the two began considering possible leads. Sarnak had worked with Patten on readings and workshops, but never anything that had been produced.“We both felt that these songs wanted to be a love story, this play had to be a love story,” said Rachel Bonds, right, with Zoe Sarnak.JJ Geiger for The New York TimesGrowing up in Downers Grove, Ill., Patten was an early bloomer, staging home concerts in her living room when she was 3. “Apparently, the first song I sang was a Hank Williams song, ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues,’ where he talks about drowning himself in a river because his woman left him,” she said. Commercials and theater roles soon followed.Patten made her Broadway debut in “Fun Home.” In 2021, she received a Tony for her role in “Jagged Little Pill,” but the show was criticized for changing Patten’s character, Jo, from seemingly nonbinary to gay and cisgender when the production moved from Boston to Broadway. In 2021, Patten released a mea culpa, in the form of a video conversation with the trans writer and activist Shakina Nayfack. “There’s a lot I wish was handled differently,” Patten said, looking back. “But I do feel grateful that even with something that was obviously a painful moment, I think it has a potential to move things forward in the industry.”Like Patten, Renée also began performing at an early age, winning singing competitions by the time she was 12. “I thought I was going to be a Christian music artist,” she said. In high school, however, she fell in love with the theater, and at 22, within three months of arriving in New York, she was offered roles in three Broadway shows. “I picked the flop,” she said of “Big Fish.”Then came a starring role in “Frozen,” though her run was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic. “Every night I’d see these little girls, Black girls, girls of color, wearing Elsa, Anna, Olaf,” she said. “They were just so excited about their favorite characters, and about getting to see the leads of a show being played by women of color. I know how impactful that is, because I know that, growing up, I never saw it.”AS INITIALLY WRITTEN, the character of Amy in “The Lonely Few” was racially nonspecific, but that soon changed, even more so after Renée came aboard. “This whole piece could be open casting,” Bonds said. “But then when we started to place it in the South, we were interested in the tensions they’re in, and we really started to nail down who these women were.”So was Amy created for Renée? “I think it’s certainly being heavily shifted by my presence,” Renée said with a laugh.“It’s a testament to Rachel and Zoe really caring about my story as a Black woman,” she added, “and about this Black character in the South being queer, that there are things that complicate that in a way that’s different than if this character were white.”The show’s creators made a point of the care they are taking with the love story, and they have hired an intimacy director to help. “I feel a lot of trust in the room with Ciara,” Patten said. “We’re both doing very intense, emotional, vulnerable things in the show, and I feel very safe to do that with her.”During a break in rehearsal, the directors gave notes. In Lila’s line about chewing gum, Cullman told Patten it sounded like she was saying “gun.”“Oh my god,” Patten said. “Gum. Guuum.”“I feel a lot of trust in the room with Ciara,” Patten said. “We’re both doing very intense, emotional, vulnerable things in the show, and I feel very safe to do that with her.”JJ Geiger for The New York TimesBoth directors offered suggestions to Renée and Patten about their first scene together, when the two lock eyes in Paul’s Joint and the rest of the world (and the rest of the band) fades away.Many of the tweaks made over the past days and months are intended to ensure the show is as truthful to the place and its people as possible. The creators are quick to point out that the love story is the focus, not any sort of hatred or violence a lesbian relationship might provoke in the community. “I’m just not interested in seeing women get brutalized anymore,” Bonds said.In many ways, the musical toys with several possible expectations theatergoers might have coming into the show. How will this interracial love story between two women play out in a Kentucky dive bar? And just what is a band this good doing in a Kentucky dive bar in the first place?“This setting, this little bar, has become a bit of an enclave for folks who might feel like outsiders or weirdos or misfits,” Bonds said. “I think the community where Lila comes from actually surprises you in the end.”Despite the show’s specificity, the creators believe “The Lonely Few” will have broad appeal. “In my heart of hearts, I hope we have an Off Broadway run in New York,” Bonds said. “And then I hope we have a Broadway run.”“This is a queer love story,” she continued. “It’s a love story between two women. But my hope is that anybody could watch it, and be moved by it, and see themselves in it.” More

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      An Unlikely Fiddler’s Dream

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      Michael Cleveland was born blind and mostly deaf. That was only the beginning of his journey to become one of modern bluegrass’s most compelling musicians.Michael Cleveland had been 13 for five days the first time he picked with the bluegrass demigod Doc Watson — in a backstage bathroom, no less, at an awards show in Kentucky.It was September 1993. Peter Wernick, the first president of the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), had assembled a band of young hotshots to provide a pointed rebuttal to a Washington Post feature that argued kids didn’t care about antiquated mountain music. The teenage quintet electrified its audience, sprinting through a Bill Monroe standard with verve that suggested these sounds were vital to fresh generations.After the triumphant ceremony, John Cleveland ushered his son — born blind, with one eye; almost deaf in his left ear and partly deaf in his right — to the bathroom. They found Watson, Wernick and a cadre of other genre giants laughing and jamming there, as though the lavatory were a back porch, and the teenage Michael joined for an hour.“I had no shame, no fear, nothing,” Cleveland, 42, remembered with a hoot by phone from the Indiana home he shares with his father. “I thought, ‘This may be the only opportunity I ever have to hear this person play, to be near them.’ That was pretty much all I wanted to do — raw, high-energy bluegrass.”The nascent teenager didn’t consider how Watson, who had lost his eyesight seven decades earlier at the age of 1, was the counterargument he needed: Teachers had warned Cleveland for years that career prospects for a blind bluegrass fiddler were grim, but he played on.In the three decades since, Cleveland has become a bluegrass star himself, winning 29 IBMA awards and becoming the organization’s most decorated fiddler. He is one of the world’s most in-demand and distinctive players, with collaborators that include Béla Fleck, Billy Strings and Vince Gill. “He plays with such ferocity,” Gill said by phone. “But the amount of emotion he pulls out of that instrument is way more appealing than the amount of notes.”Cleveland has only just begun to funnel his full story into records, documenting the hardships and joys of a difficult life devoted to bluegrass. Alternately woebegone and hopeful, his star-studded “Lovin’ of the Game,” out Friday, is an ecstatic document of what the fiddle has meant to his story — and what he hopes to mean to its history.“For a long time, Michael didn’t want to talk about being blind. He never wanted to be the little blind boy that played fiddle, for people to like his music because he was handicapped,” his father said. “He’s past that, and I’m glad — he might open up this music for somebody, to inspire them.”Cleveland was a boyhood bluegrass zealot, not a prodigy. When he was six weeks old, his parents began toting him to bimonthly Saturday concerts his grandparents hosted at an American Legion in Henryville, Ind. In his stroller, friends remembered, he would bounce to the music in perfect time. As a toddler, he became so obsessed with the staple “Rocky Top” that his parents drove him to Tennessee to meet the couple who had written it; even now, he keeps the cassette they gave him, an hourlong compendium of assorted versions.Still, Cleveland couldn’t play. A nearby fiddler struggled to show his first blind student how to hold the bow or the instrument. Teachers at the Kentucky School for the Blind fared better with a contraption that kept the bow at the proper position, but they were more interested in the Suzuki method and classical music than Flatt & Scruggs. “On the first day, they asked me what I knew about violin,” Cleveland said, catching his breath from laughter before offering his reply. “‘Well, I don’t know much about the violin,’ I said, ‘but I know a lot about the fiddle.’”Those first few years remained a struggle. One night, though, Cleveland dreamed about playing “Soldier’s Joy,” a mirthful fiddle number about payday he’d heard countless times. When he reached for his instrument the next morning, the tune was there.Though he balked his first fiddle contest, he kept trying, even joining Monroe, the bluegrass fountainhead, onstage at age 9. Soon after he delighted that awards-show crowd in Kentucky, he made his Grand Ole Opry debut with Alison Krauss. But it wasn’t Cleveland’s back story that people found compelling, like some cloying “American Idol” package.“You can feel his timing and pulse so well, like the drive of a banjo player,” the multi-instrumentalist Sam Bush said in an interview, listing Cleveland as one of perhaps three bluegrass fiddlers ever to have that quality. (The others? Benny Martin and Paul Warren.) “Then he adds finesse, and he will surprise you.”As a child, Cleveland was obsessed with fiddle music.Andrew Cenci for The New York TimesAs Cleveland’s fiddle prowess ballooned, the rest of his life deflated. Though the young musician felt welcome and encouraged in bluegrass, he understood he was different. By 12, he’d endured 30 separate surgeries to correct a cleft palate and lip, to insert a prosthetic eye and to reroute a blood vessel in his brain. He suffered serial bouts of spinal meningitis, and his eardrums were permanently perforated. His parents were then in the middle of an acrimonious divorce that would alienate him from his mother for decades.“Bill Monroe lost his mother at 10, his father at 16. There are similarities there with Michael you can feel,” said Ronnie McCoury, who began playing with his own father, the bluegrass pizazz magnate Del, at 14. “Michael’s life has been hard. Those feelings come out on his fiddle.”Cleveland forwent college, hitting the road soon after his high school graduation in 1999, and emerged as an exciting sideman, passionate about bluegrass’s history and quick-witted, too — “a good hang,” as Gill put it. He made several solo records and assembled a band, Flamekeeper. The group kindled unapologetic traditionalism, its intensity making it a fast favorite within staunch bluegrass circles.But six years ago, while enjoying one of Sam Bush’s freewheeling shows, Cleveland considered how bluegrass crowds were aging and shrinking, and how he might do well to adapt, like Bush or Fleck. His subsequent album, “Tall Fiddler” from 2019, flirted with spirited jazz and hardscrabble balladry. With Bush singing about running from the law, he even dipped into rockabilly.“Lovin’ of the Game” reinforces that openness. There’s a playful romp about high-stakes love alongside Billy Strings, and a country lamentation for small-town settling with Charlie Starr, of the Southern rock band Blackberry Smoke. The most vulnerable moment in Cleveland’s catalog comes with “Temperance Reel,” a centuries-old tune updated with lyrics about a musician struggling with alcoholism, as Cleveland did for many years. His strings sing with unbridled joy, as if animated by possibility.“There’s no mistaking I’m a bluegrass player. That’s the biggest part of what I do,” Cleveland said. “But these are ways to push the envelope that, 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have been into.”After 40 years of bluegrass fixation, Cleveland has become a de facto archivist. Not long before his parents split, an area aficionado handed him a box of 20 mixtapes of great fiddle performances — each dutifully labeled in Braille, with introductory listening instructions. They form the core of his vast basement tape trove. Cleveland has a recording of that bathroom jam with Watson, too, though he will never listen. He was, as he likes to say, “wearing it out,” playing every lick he knew as hard as he could to prove his worth. The youngest inductee into the National Fiddler Hall of Fame, he’s done that.He’s now focused on what’s next. He tracks fiddle parts for most anyone who asks through the online service AirGigs; John will often hear him alone in the basement, playing through dinner for 10 hours at a time, dabbling in pop and jazz. And, at Fleck’s request, he’s even learning some Bach for their first duo record.“Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in C major,” he sighed, chuckling at the irony of how being the best bluegrass fiddler brought him back to the classical violin he’d quit. “I know just enough to be dangerous. But yeah, I thought, I can do that.” More