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      La Scala Woos a Younger Audience

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      Like so many cultural institutions, opera houses need to instill passion in the ticket holders of the future.Even an iconic opera house like La Scala must create programming to build the audience of tomorrow. One-third of today’s audience is under 55 years old. But Dominique Meyer, the artistic director and chief executive, is determined to make the house even younger.Since 2009, the theater has offered operagoers under 30 the possibility of attending previews of performances, which are usually reserved for private audiences, and a pass, which gives access to backstage tours, workshops and more. The subscription package, Under30, grants four performances for the price of one and the opportunity to meet artists at a happy hour.Mr. Meyer credited the efforts of his predecessors Stéphane Lissner and Alexander Pereira for their efforts, noting that the subscribers are “very faithful.” He wants to make sure, however, that they remain so: The house’s internal surveys have revealed that audience members between 30 and 40 are the hardest to retain.“It is not as if one’s salary suddenly becomes three times as big when you turn 30,” he explained. “All of a sudden, they have to pay full price, and the tickets are not as good as before.”As such, starting next season, the house will offer loges to those 35 and under at 50 percent of the normal price (370 euros to 920 euros, or $396 to $986, for a four-person loge). There will also be weekly performances offering half-priced tickets — including the opportunity to enjoy free drinks and socialize in specially reserved areas. (Tickets at normal price run up to €150 euros for ballet and €250 for opera.)“Every opera lover has made friends during a performance,” said Mr. Meyer. “We want to support this kind of communal environment.”He also hopes to “open the theater’s doors” to new potential audience members. Last July, the house orchestra, chorus and ballet toured different parts of the city as part of the initiative La Scala in Città (La Scala in the City), offering free tickets. On one occasion, in the Porta Romana District, dancers performed at Mysterious Baths, the swimming pool and cultural event center, in a program of excerpts from works by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Léo Delibes, Ólafur Arnalds and more.Dominique Meyer, La Scala’s artistic director and chief executive, in the theater next to a statue dedicated to the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesMr. Meyer recalled that the only problem were the mosquitoes, which pestered the dancers, especially when they had to hold still. La Scala in Città will be repeated this September on a larger scale, including the young singers of the opera house’s academy, ballet school and children’s choir.This season also saw the launch of the subscription package Un palco in famiglia (A loge for the family), for which adults pay full price and can bring their children for €10 to €15 a head. Materials designed especially for minors are distributed at performances.Meanwhile, since 2014, the theater has mounted productions made for children, welcoming more than 200,000 visitors. This season featured a children’s version of Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” (“Cinderella”), which was also streamed on La Scala’s website.Next season will, for the first time, feature a newly commissioned work, “Il Piccolo Principe” (“The Little Prince”), based on the classic French children’s novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. All productions are under one hour so that young visitors don’t grow bored, and they include child performers to further stimulate interest in the art form.The house has welcomed back most of another audience sector: tourists. They now make up 22 percent of total listeners, down from 30 percent before the pandemic.Mr. Meyer says that while visitors from Asia and Russia have not returned, the Europeans — and the Americans — are back. Of this group, the largest fraction (18 percent) is from Switzerland, followed by France (14 percent) and the United States (13 percent). The cities best represented are Vienna, Paris, London and New York.“If we are diligent and continue,” said Mr. Meyer, “we are certain to win a new audience.” More

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      Jim Seals, Half of a Popular 1970s Soft-Rock Duo, Dies at 79

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      Teamed with Dash Crofts, he hit it big with “Summer Breeze” in 1972. The two went on to have chart success with “Diamond Girl” and other songs.Jim Seals, half of Seals & Crofts, a soft-rock duo who had a string of hits in the 1970s, including the Top 10 singles “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl,” died on Monday evening at his home in Nashville. He was 79.His wife, Ruby Jean Seals, said the cause was an unspecified “chronic ongoing illness.”Mr. Seals and his musical partner, Dash Crofts, were still teenagers when they were asked to join an instrumental group, the Champs, which had had a No. 1 hit in 1958 with “Tequila.” By the mid-1960s they had tired of the band and of the loud, sometimes angry strains that were infusing the hard rock of the time.Adherents of the Baha’i faith, they sought to make a calmer brand of music, mixing folk, bluegrass, country and jazz influences and delivering their lyrics in close harmony.“Jim Seals plays acoustic guitar and fiddle,” Don Heckman wrote in The New York Times in 1970 in a brief review of their second album, “Down Home,” “and Dash Crofts plays electric mandolin and piano; together they sing coolly intertwined, and quite colorful, vocal harmony.”With the lilting, nostalgia-seeped single “Summer Breeze,” released in 1972, the two found international stardom. They had developed a modest following, but that song changed everything, as they found out when they arrived in Ohio to play a show.“There were kids waiting for us at the airport,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly in 2020. “That night we had a record crowd, maybe 40,000 people. And I remember people throwing their hats and coats in the air as far as you could see, against the moon.”The song, written jointly by the two men, featured the kind of chorus that sticks in the brain:“Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”The single reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a follow-up, “Hummingbird,” made the Top 20. “Diamond Girl” in 1973 reached No. 6. “Get Closer” in 1976 also reached No. 6.But the duo’s run of success basically ended when the decade did, and they called it quits for a time.“Around 1980, we were still drawing 10,000 to 12,000 people at concerts,” Mr. Seals told The Los Angeles Times in 1991, when the two revived the act. “But we could see, with this change coming where everybody wanted dance music, that those days were numbered.”Six years earlier, though, the pair had begun to fall out of favor with some listeners and critics because of their sixth album, “Unborn Child,” which was released in 1974 not long after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights. The title track urged women who were considering an abortion to “stop, turn around, go back, think it over.”Mr. Seals, in a 1978 interview with The Miami Herald, acknowledged that the record damaged the duo’s career.“It completely killed it for a while,” he said. Radio stations refused to play the record. Some Seals & Crofts concerts were picketed, although there were also hundreds of letters of support. In the 1991 Los Angeles Times interview, Mr. Seals said the pair never intended the song to be a lightning rod.“It was our ignorance that we didn’t know that kind of thing was seething and boiling as a social issue,” he said. “On one hand we had people sending us thousands of roses, but on the other people were literally throwing rocks at us.“If we’d known it was going to cause such disunity,” he continued, “we might have thought twice about doing it. At the time it overshadowed all the other things we were trying to say in our music.”James Eugene Seals was born on Oct. 17, 1942, in Sidney, Texas, to Wayland and Susan Seals. His father worked in the oil fields, and Jim spent much of his childhood in Iraan, a boomtown in southwest Texas.“There were oil rigs as far as you could see,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly. “And the stench was so bad you couldn’t breathe.”His father played a little guitar and his mother played the dobro, so informal jam sessions were a common way to pass the time in the household. When a fiddler came by one evening, young Jim was taken with the instrument, and his father ordered him one from a Sears catalog.Later he took up the saxophone, which led to an invitation to join a rockabilly band called the Crew Cats that played at dances and in local clubs. The band’s drummer quit right before a show at a junior college, and the drummer from another band on the bill sat in — Darrell Crofts, known as Dash.The two became friends and played with the Champs for several years out of Los Angeles. Both mastered other instruments, including the guitar. Once they hit it big as a duo, they knew the image they wanted to project and tried to stay true to it. In 1973, when they were about to tour England, Mr. Seals told a reporter that they had pulled out of a previous European engagement.“We were going to tour there earlier, but we had a last-minute change of mind when we found out that we’d be playing with Black Sabbath,” he said. “I’m sure they’re a fine band, but I’m not sure that the audience would be quite right for us.”Mr. Seals, left, and Mr. Crofts in an undated promotional photo.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Seals is survived by their two sons, Joshua and Sutherland; a daughter, Juliet Crossley; and three grandchildren. A sister, Renee Staley, and a half brother, Eddie Ray Seals, also survive him. His brother, Dan Seals, a singer who had success in the late 1970s as a member of another soft-rock duo, England Dan & John Ford Coley, died in 2009. The two brothers toured together for several years before Dan Seals’s death, with Jim Seals’s two sons sometimes playing with them.Maia Coleman More

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      ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ and ‘Tina’ to End Their Broadway Runs

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      “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Tina,” two Broadway musicals that had been selling strongly before the coronavirus pandemic but never recovered following the lengthy theater closure, both announced Tuesday that they would close late this summer.“Dear Evan Hansen,” a heart-tugging musical about an awkward adolescent who tells a terrible lie, will end its run on Broadway on Sept. 18, five years after winning the Tony Award for best new musical.The show opened to enormous acclaim and has been a significant hit, but it suffered a double blow from the coronavirus pandemic and a poorly received film adaptation, and has in recent months been soft at the box office.“Tina,” a jukebox musical about the life and career of seminal rocker Tina Turner, will end its run on Aug. 14.Adrienne Warren as Tina Turner in the musical “Tina” in 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBoth shows will continue to play outside New York. “Dear Evan Hansen” is closing its London production in October, but a North American tour has been selling well and is continuing. “Tina” will begin a North American tour in September, and is also running in Britain, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.“Dear Evan Hansen” began its Broadway run on Nov. 14, 2016, and opened Dec. 4, 2016. At the time that it closes, it will have played 21 preview performances and 1,678 regular performances.The musical, produced by Stacey Mindich and directed by Michael Greif, began its life at Arena Stage in Washington, and then had an Off Broadway run at Second Stage before transferring to Broadway. It won six Tony Awards, including for the score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the book by Steven Levenson, and two of its performers: Ben Platt, who played the title character, and Rachel Bay Jones, who played his mother.Not only did the show win the best musical Tony, but the London production won the Olivier Award for best new musical, and the cast album won a Grammy.The show, which long ago recouped its capitalization costs and became profitable, was regularly grossing over $1 million a week before Broadway shut down in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, a film adaptation was released and was the subject of significant online derision; it’s not clear how that affected the stage version, but grosses have been unsteady and slipping since the show resumed performances last December. The show grossed $508,455 during the week that ended June 5.“Tina,” with music from the singer’s catalog and a book by Katori Hall, began its life in London and then transferred to Broadway, starting previews on Oct. 12, 2019, and opening on Nov. 7, 2019. The musical, produced by Stage Entertainment, which is a large European production company, is directed by Phyllida Lloyd; it won one Tony Award, for its lead actress, Adrienne Warren.“Tina,” which has a much larger cast and a more elaborate physical production than “Dear Evan Hansen,” which means it costs more to run each week, was generally grossing over $1.5 million a week before the pandemic; it was again selling strongly after resuming performances last fall, but its box office grosses plummeted with the arrival of the Omicron variant and never fully rebounded. The show grossed $747,931 during the week ending June 5. At the time of its closing, “Tina” will have played 27 preview performances and 482 regular performances. More

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      Wes Jackson to Be the Next President of the Brooklyn Nonprofit BRIC

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      Wes Jackson, a music business entrepreneur, will lead the Brooklyn nonprofit arts organization beginning in July.Wes Jackson, a music business entrepreneur, will be the next president of BRIC, the nonprofit arts organization announced Tuesday. He will begin his new role July 18.He succeeds Kristina Newman-Scott, who led BRIC for three years, and guided it through the first year of the coronavirus pandemic before stepping down last August.BRIC presents cultural programming in Brooklyn. It is perhaps best known for its annual summer concert series, the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, at Prospect Park. This year, it includes free concerts by the reggae band Third World, the rapper Vic Mensa and the Nigerian Afropop artist Yemi Alade, as well as performances by the actor John Cameron Mitchell (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) and the comedian Bridget Everett (of HBO’s “Somebody Somewhere”).Jackson, 48, who serves as the director of a business program designed for professionals in the creative arts at Emerson College in Boston, began his career producing concerts for groups like the Dave Matthews Band and the Roots before starting his promotions company, Seven Heads Entertainment, which he later expanded into an independent record label and management company.In 2005, he founded the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival, which has hosted performances by Jay-Z, Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, and he has served as the event’s executive director for 15 years. “When you’re running a small shop, you’ve got your hands in everything,” Jackson said of leading the hip-hop festival. “Now I have people who can help, and I can dedicate my energy to thinking 10 to 20 years down the line, to turning Celebrate Brooklyn into something that rivals South by Southwest, Coachella.”BRIC, which has a 2022 budget of $16 million to $20 million, will present a bigger stage. Jackson’s predecessor, Newman-Scott, led the reimagining of the organization’s annual music festival as a virtual event in 2020, as well as the start of One Brooklyn TV, which broadcasts educational programming on weekdays during the school year in partnership with New York City’s Department of Education.Jackson said he wanted to continue to find ways to serve people in Brooklyn who may not be able to or want to gather in person, as well as those outside New York.“What we’ve learned through Covid is that now we’re national and international,” Jackson said. “There’s a tremendous upside to raising that level of educational play for an online audience.”Jackson, who grew up in the Bronx, earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Virginia and a master’s in Media Studies from the New School. He moved to Brooklyn about 25 years ago, where he has continued to live with his family while commuting to Boston. More

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      Paul Vance, Lyricist Behind an ‘Itsy Bitsy’ Bikini, Dies at 92

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      His daughter’s experience wearing a bikini on a beach in 1960 inspired him to write a novelty song that became a No. 1 hit.Paul Vance, who described the uncertain path of a girl in a risqué two-piece bathing suit as she advanced from a locker to the shore in the novelty hit song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” died on May 30 in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 92.His daughter Paula Vance confirmed the death, at a nursing facility.It was Paula, who at 2 years old, inspired the song. On a family trip to the beach in 1960, she wore one of the itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikinis that her Aunt Lena had made for her and two of her cousins. But her shyness made her retreat, at first, because of the reaction of two boys who exclaimed that she was wearing no clothes.When she re-emerged, she wrapped herself in a blanket before venturing into the water. While in the water, the bottom of her bikini fell off. Heading home, the lyrics to “Itsy Bitsy” started coming to Mr. Vance. He called Lee Pockriss, his songwriting partner on a number of hits.“I sang the lyric on the phone and by the time he got to my office a couple of hours later, he had 90 percent of the tune written,” Mr. Vance was quoted as saying in the obituary for Mr. Pockriss in The Los Angeles Times in 2011.The song was soon recorded by Brian Hyland, a 16-year-old heartthrob from Queens, and it spent 15 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including one week at No. 1. Before Mr. Hyland was introduced on “American Bandstand” — where a little girl would re-enact Paula Vance’s experience on a set with a bath house and mock waves — the host Dick Clark called “Itsy Bitsy” the “hottest or coolest record in the country, the biggest thing around.”“Itsy Bitsy” endured longer than its time on the charts, though. It has been covered dozens of times by artists as diverse as Connie Francis, Kermit and Miss Piggy, and Devo and used in commercials for products like Yoplait Light and Special K cereal.Joseph Philip Florio was born on Nov. 4, 1929, in Brooklyn to Philip and Concetta Florio. His father delivered ice in a horse-drawn wagon. His mother was a homemaker.He began writing lyrics when he was 13 but had no clear path to being a composer. He described himself to The Palm Beach Post in 2015 as a “dese, dose and dem” guy who avoided falling in with the Mafia. Instead, he served in the Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., then opened a junkyard and auto salvage business. He was already in his mid-20s when he met Mr. Pockriss, a composer who had done graduate work with Aaron Copland.“It’s an ideal professional combination,” Mr. Pockriss told The Associated Press in 1960, adding: “He understands the public. I understand the profession.”Their 1957 song “Catch a Falling Star” was a hit for Perry Como in 1957 and the first record certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America.Paul Vance in an undated photo with one of his gold record awards. He had a long career collaborating on songs recorded by Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka, Patti Page and others.via Vance familyThe success of “Catch a Falling Star” let Mr. Vance focus on songwriting, and he changed his name to sound less ethnic. With various collaborators, including Mr. Pockriss, he wrote songs originally recorded by Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka, Tommy James and the Shondells, and Patti Page.Mr. Vance cajoled Clint Holmes into recording his and Mr. Pockriss’s song “Playground in My Mind” by following him into a men’s room to make his pitch, at a venue in the Bahamas, where Mr. Holmes was performing. Speaking to The Palm Beach Post, Mr. Holmes said of Mr. Vance, “His enthusiasm struck me more than the song.” The song, though, became Mr. Holmes’s only top 10 hit.While still writing songs, Mr. Vance owned and bred horses for harness racing.In addition to his daughter Paula, he is survived by another daughter, Connie Vance Cohen; a son, Joseph; a sister, Joanne Florio, a singer; nine grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. His wife, Margaret (Curte) Vance, died in 2012. His son Philip died in 2009.Mr. Vance was erroneously reported to have died in 2006 when the wife of a man named Paul Van Valkenburgh, who had indeed died, asserted that her husband had written “Itsy Bitsy” under the name Paul Vance. The obituary, by The Associated Press, was picked up by many news outlets, including The New York Times. (Corrections ensued, and The Times published a corrective article.)But the false report shook up Mr. Vance’s family and friends. His music publisher confirmed that Mr. Vance, not the deceased man, was the songwriter and that he was still collecting royalties.But as Mr. Vance told The Orlando Sentinel in 2006, some people still called thinking he was dead, and he would inform them: “This is Heaven. Who do you wish to speak to? Paul Vance? Oh, yeah, he just got up here.” More

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      Bill Walker, Nashville Force as Conductor and Arranger, Dies at 95

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      He scored chart-topping records for country stars and later served as the musical director of “The Johnny Cash Show.”NASHVILLE — Bill Walker, a conductor and arranger who became a musical force in Nashville, scoring popular recordings for country stars like Marty Robbins and Connie Smith and serving as musical director for Johnny Cash’s primetime television variety show, died on May 26 at a rehabilitation facility near here. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law Terri Walker, who said he had developed pneumonia after recent knee replacement surgery.A classically trained pianist, Mr. Walker orchestrated blockbuster hits like Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away” (1965) and Sammi Smith’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (1970). Both records reached No. 1 on the country chart and crossed over to the pop Top 10.He also served as arranger and conductor for, among many other recordings, Donna Fargo’s “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.,” a chart-topping country single that stalled just outside the pop Top 10 in 1972.In the process he had a hand in shaping both the lush, sophisticated Nashville Sound of the 1960s and the soulful “countrypolitan” sensibility that came after it.Mr. Walker, left, in an undated photograph with Earl Poole Ball and Johnny Cash. In addition to working on “The Johnny Cash Show,” he wrote and conducted the arrangement for Mr. Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”Joseph Cates via Earl Poole BallEmpathy and elegance were his calling cards, along with a knack for plumbing the emotional heart of a song, a gift that was nowhere more evident than in his work on “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”“Take the ribbon from my hair,” Ms. Smith implores her lover as Mr. Walker’s gossamer arrangement caresses the ache in her voice.His sympathetic strings likewise lent pathos to George Jones’s lovelorn “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” a No. 1 country hit in 1980.“You are there to make the artist sound good, not to show how clever you can be,” Mr. Walker said of his philosophy of recording in a 2015 interview at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.“That’s how I used to do it,” he continued. “It didn’t matter if the artist was a hillbilly singer from back in the woods somewhere or Perry Como. You give them the same attention no matter what.”Mr. Walker in the early 1970s with Loretta Lynn and Ray Charles as they rehearsed for an NBC television special.Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumWilliam Alfred Walker was born on April 28, 1927, in Sydney, Australia, the eldest of three children of Alfred and Beryl (Gabb) Walker. His father was a dairy farmer, his mother a homemaker.William began playing the piano at age 5 and soon started taking private lessons. While in high school and college he performed in clubs and taught himself the rudiments of arranging by listening to popular recordings on the radio. He received his formal training at Sydney University’s Conservatorium of Music, graduating in 1955.In 1957 he moved to South Africa to become the musical director of the Johannesburg division of RCA Records, where he released 23 largely instrumental albums of pop and Latin music that featured him on piano backed by large and small ensembles.He also produced sessions for the country superstar Jim Reeves, who encouraged him to move to Nashville; Mr. Walker arrived the weekend Mr. Reeves died at 39 in a fatal plane crash, in July 1964.He started working with Mr. Arnold and helped revive the singer’s career at a time when ballad singers were being eclipsed on the country chart by artists like Buck Owens and Roger Miller, who were more attuned to up-tempo rock ’n’ roll.Mr. Walker later turned down a chance to succeed Chet Atkins as head of the Nashville office of RCA before becoming the musical director of “The Johnny Cash Show” on ABC-TV in 1969. There, he helped bring Southern culture to living rooms and dens across the country by collaborating with Mahalia Jackson, Roy Acuff, Louis Armstrong and an array of other guests.He also wrote and conducted the arrangement for Mr. Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” a live recording from the show that went to No. 1 on the country chart in 1970. Mr. Cash typically signed off each episode of his program with the salutation, “Goodnight, Mr. Walker!”After The Johnny Cash Show ended its run in 1971, Mr. Walker spent the next two decades working as an independent producer for singers like Ferlin Husky and Wanda Jackson and managing his own label, Con Brio Records. In the early ’70s he worked with Ray Charles and Loretta Lynn for an NBC television special. Mr. Walker worked with ensembles on at least four continents, including studio professionals on the East and West Coasts of the United States.via Marco MusicFrom 1991 to 1998 he was the musical director for “The Statler Brothers Show,” a popular musical variety show on the Nashville Network. He remained active as a producer and arranger into the 2000s, writing scores for TV specials and movies at a time when session musicians relied primarily on improvised, or “head,” arrangements.Mr. Walker is survived by his wife of 51 years, Jeanine (Ogletree) Walker, a former Nashville session singer; a daughter, Beth Walker; a son, Colin, from a previous marriage; his sister, Julianne Smith; his brother, Robert; and 13 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren. Two sons, Jeff and Peter, and a daughter, Lisa Gibson, all from previous marriages, died.Mr. Walker worked with ensembles on at least four continents, including studio professionals on the East and West Coasts of the United States. For the arrangements that he composed, though, he preferred the intuitive, less-is-more approach of the session musicians he first encountered in Nashville in the 1960s.“That’s the thing with Nashville players,” he said in his interview at the Country Music Hall of Fame. “They all listen to each other and they join in the licks. It’s the stuff you can’t write. You can only give them the idea and let them go with it.” More

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      Broadway’s Beloved Basement Club, Feinstein’s/54 Below, Turns 10

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      The venue beneath what was once Studio 54 will pick up a Tony Award for excellence in the theater as it marks its anniversary with a pair of concerts.On June 5, 2012, shortly after noon, a bevy of cabaret and theater artists and insiders gathered in a space beneath what had been the storied West 54th Street nightclub Studio 54. The occasion was a dress rehearsal for a show that evening that would open a new venue called, reasonably enough, 54 Below. Patti LuPone was the featured act, with other Broadway and nightlife luminaries, including Ben Vereen and Justin Vivian Bond, slated to appear soon afterward.Joe Iconis, a young composer, lyricist and performer who was part of that initial lineup, recalled the event as “a coming out for the room itself.” The bar was separated from the stage and dining tables by a curtain, which was later opened, “so there was this dramatic reveal of the room, to the people who would soon be playing it.”It was a fittingly theatrical debut for a spot that, 10 years later, still bills itself as “Broadway’s living room.” (The venue is now known as Feinstein’s/54 Below, acknowledging a creative partnership with the veteran performer and American songbook champion Michael Feinstein that began in 2015.) On June 12, it will receive an honor at the Tony Awards for excellence in the theater.“To me, Feinstein’s is not only about the American songbook; in some ways it’s become a sensibility, a lifestyle brand,” Michael Feinstein said.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesAt the time of 54 Below’s start, the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room, one of New York’s most established cabaret venues, had just announced its closure; Feinstein’s own namesake at the Regency Hotel shut down not long after. Don’t Tell Mama and the West Bank Cafe’s Laurie Beechman Theater still offered show tunes and standards, as did the jazz club Birdland. But as Richard Frankel, one of the four Broadway producers who started and still own 54 Below, remembered, “There was nothing geared towards the huge resource of the Broadway talent pool, and the continual renewal of new music that Broadway provided.”Today, 54 Below occupies a rare perch as a free-standing club offering just that. But it faces more competition. In 2017, the Green Room 42 arrived, which, like 54 Below, features name acts, rising stars and cult favorites alongside theme shows and special events. The following year, Birdland unveiled Birdland Theater, a space that has accommodated longer runs by Broadway performers and emerging jazz artists as well as freewheeling variety shows. Other venues have continued to pop up downtown, like the East Village spots Pangea and Club Cumming, where artists generally less associated with Broadway can wax theatrical in their own fashion.But Don’t Tell Mama’s longtime booking manager, the cabaret doyen Sidney Myer, conceded that 54 Below still “draws the best and the brightest” and called its team “creative and proactive.”The 2022 Tony AwardsThis year’s awards, the first to recognize shows that opened after a long Broadway shutdown during the pandemic, will be given out on June 12.Lifetime Achievement: Angela Lansbury, an acclaimed and beloved star of stage, film and television, will be honored with a special award during this year’s ceremony.Hugh Jackman: The actor may potentially win his third Tony Award for his role in “The Music Man.” He shared some thoughts on his life between film and theater.A New Star: Myles Frost is drawing ovations nightly on Broadway with his performance in “MJ,” a musical about Michael Jackson’s creative process.Frankel and fellow owners Steven Baruch, Marc Routh and Tom Viertel — who have produced “The Producers,” “Hairspray” and the 2018 revival of “Angels in America” — recruited the Broadway mainstays John Lee Beatty, Ken Billington and Peter Hylenski to design the restaurant and its lighting and sound. Beatty even requested a story for inspiration; Viertel spun one about Jewish hustlers who, as Frankel relayed it, sold stolen car parts during World War I, “then started bootlegging when Prohibition came, and invited showgirls and opened a speakeasy. John said, ‘Fine—I’m good.’”On June 12, the venue will receive an honor at the Tony Awards for excellence in the theater.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesFor a pair of anniversary concerts on Sunday and Thursday, the club will spotlight young and emerging performers, composers and playwrights — among them the “Dear Evan Hansen” and “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” alumnus Andrew Barth Feldman, 20, who grew up “binging YouTube videos of people at 54 Below” before starting to visit the club in his early teens. (Minors are welcome but aren’t permitted at the bar without parental supervision.)When the coronavirus pandemic shut down live performances in March 2020, there was no guarantee the venue would make it to this milestone. Two rounds of government loans “really saved us from the abyss,” Frankel said, though he estimated that business was still down between 20 and 25 percent from 2019.54 Below inherited its first director of programming, Phil Geoffrey Bond, from the Beechman. When Jennifer Ashley Tepper joined the venue as creative and programming director a little less than nine years ago, she took a cue from Bond’s popular “Sondheim Unplugged” series. One of her first projects was “New Musicals at 54,” which has delivered concert versions of shows such as Iconis and Joe Tracz’s “Be More Chill” and Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize winner “A Strange Loop,” now up for 11 Tony Awards, both showcased before they were produced in New York. An eclectic assortment of additional series have come to include “New Writers at 54!” and “54 Sings …,” which mostly celebrates pop music. “A lot of these shows are done on the fly,” noted the composer Stephen Flaherty, whose musicals “My Favorite Year” and “Seussical” have been showcased at the club, which also features cast reunions and concerts of classic and underappreciated works. “You’ll have people dropping out and others replacing them, so you never know what you’re going to get, which is part of the excitement.”Slotting such vehicles and novelty acts alongside headliners like Chita Rivera, Ariana DeBose and Charles Busch into at least two shows per night, seven nights a week, can pose a challenge, Tepper says: “A big part of my job is making sure that the crowd is different at different performances.” 54 Below has drawn what the jazz singer Nicole Henry, one of several artists brought on board by Feinstein, calls “an informed, intelligent audience. They often know more about the music than I do.”Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      Review: Beatrice Rana Plays Tchaikovsky at Human Scale

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      The pianist made her New York Philharmonic debut with the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 1, on a program with Shostakovich.The New York Philharmonic’s season isn’t quite over. There are a couple of chamber concerts coming up, and, next Friday, a one-off at Carnegie Hall, as well as the traditional parks programs in mid-June.But this weekend does mark a farewell. After its last events at Alice Tully Hall three weeks ago, the Philharmonic is now saying goodbye to the Rose Theater, its other main host during this wandering season while David Geffen Hall has been closed for renovations.Tully, built for chamber music, was a sonic adjustment for the orchestra. Though it’s not much bigger in capacity, the Rose, part of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s home on Columbus Circle, has been a better fit. On Thursday, its acoustics admirably bore the grand onslaught of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 — with Beatrice Rana making her Philharmonic debut as soloist — and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, conducted by the ensemble’s music director, Jaap van Zweden.Not that Rana’s Tchaikovsky ever felt like an onslaught. Her take on this war horse is more of an embrace. Even when she’s muscular, she’s lyrical.From early on, the stylish use of rubato gave a sense of dreaminess to her performance. The sprawling first movement never felt lost, but it wandered: assertive; then suddenly reflective, translucent; then once again roiling. In the finale, her playing danced with appealing, almost sticky heaviness, but then the next line would take off with sparkling freshness.All this changeability never evoked anxiety, as it has in the hands of other artists. Rana projects an underlying calm command, a grounded quality, with the concerto’s different moods on human scale. Small corners were intimate communication: the notes touched, with perfect clarity, by her right pinkie as punctuation to her mellow left hand; her trills, lucid yet silky, a little melty.The orchestra played with panache in the third movement — and van Zweden supported artful details, like the double basses seeming to take up the resonance of the piano near the end. But it was hard to focus on anything but the central player. Even during a big flute solo in the first movement, you couldn’t take your ears off Rana. It was a truly memorable debut.Shostakovich is van Zweden country, the kind of repertory in which his characteristic clenched grip on the music helps rather than hinders it. This was a punchy, tightly played Fifth, an angrily grinning take on a work whose politics will always be ambiguous. (Its composer was desperately attempting to get in Stalin’s good graces, but as far as the score’s meaning, who knows?)The Philharmonic played well, with an almost choked grotesquerie in the march in the first movement, an eerie danse macabre of the second and bristling unsentimentality in the third. Van Zweden began the finale very fast, and the orchestra responded with clean ferocity. The progression to the climactic major-key explosion was grim, and its achievement, as Shostakovich may well have intended, was the very definition of an empty victory.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More