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      Claire Chase Is Changing How People Think of the Flute

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      She is marking her 24-year effort to expand the instrument’s repertoire with performances, including a Carnegie Hall series, as well as a box set and a new fellowship.Something unusual happens when people speak about the flutist Claire Chase. Seasoned musicians light up with gleeful optimism. They use superlatives that would seem reckless if they weren’t repeated so often. The most jaded among them appear incapable of negativity.“It’s so difficult to talk about Claire,” the composer Marcos Balter said. “She’s so much more than a virtuoso flutist or a pedagogue. She is a true catalyst for change. But also not only that. She makes you think that everything is possible.”Chase’s reputation is all the more remarkable for the level head she maintains as one of the most enterprising and imaginative musicians in her field — which is to say one of the busiest fund-raisers and devoted interpreters of new music, and the unconventional performances it often demands. This, on top of a life that involves shuttling among Cambridge, Mass., where she teaches at Harvard University; Brooklyn; and Princeton, N.J., where her partner, the author Kirstin Valdez Quade, works, and where they have been raising their 10-month-old daughter.This month is one of the biggest stress tests on her schedule yet. Earlier in May, she played Kaija Saariaho’s concerto “L’Aile du Songe” with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Next she is planning a marathon of 10 performances looking back on the past decade of her “Density 2036” project, a colossal initiative intended to last 24 years in which she has commissioned annual new works for the flute, leading up to the centennial of Edgar Varèse’s solo for her instrument “Density 21.5.”Her coming concerts will culminate in two premieres, on May 24 at the Kitchen and the next day at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. She is also releasing a box set of “Density” recordings and starting a fellowship to ensure that this music reaches the next generation of flutists.Chase performs with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, where she will return for a series of concerts.Chris LeeIn an interview at her Brooklyn apartment, Chase, who turns 45 on Wednesday, recalled being told that once you become a parent, everything else becomes “like miniature golf.” That has helped.“Two weeks into our daughter’s life, I was like, Oh, I get it,” she said. “I have these 10 ‘Density’ shows and things that are finally launching, and it really is miniature golf. And it’s such a gift because I can’t possibly take what I’m doing too seriously. The only truly important thing is feeding and caring for and learning from this little person.”Much has changed in Chase’s life since “Density” began, but her resting state of restlessness has been a constant. She was a founding artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble — arguably America’s leading performers of new work — which in 2001 had grown out of her time at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. With that group, she churned out commissions that put composers like Balter on the map.By the time “Density” got off the ground, though, Chase knew that she wouldn’t remain with the ensemble forever. Leaving, she said, “was always in the back of my mind. All artists — we have to be very honest about what we’re afraid of, and I was really afraid of holding this thing back.” It was one of the hardest things she’s ever done, she added, but also one of the best lessons she’s ever learned.As the years of “Density” went on, more developments came. She joined the Harvard faculty and was asked to become one of eight collaborative partners of the San Francisco Symphony under its music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. She met Quade and started a family. And since then, she has approached her work with a fresh sense of time.“My dream for all pieces, not just ‘Density’ pieces, but for everything I commission,” Chase said, “is that it can potentially work with me and a Bluetooth speaker on a granny cart in the subway.”Jamie Pearl for The New York Times“I only have so much time I can give each day, and so much energy,” Chase said. “If this month of ‘Density’ had happened in a different part of my life, I think I’d be practicing eight hours a day, and I would be living and eating and breaking and only seeing this material.”Even with what limited time she has, Chase is seen by fellow musicians as thoroughly committed — whether performing Felipe Lara’s Double Concerto on tour with Esperanza Spalding or revisiting the “Density” repertoire. Audiences can tell, too, from her animated but not overstated movement, dizzying technical facility across the flute family, and extended techniques that branch out into vocalization and dramatic text recitation.The composer and scholar George E. Lewis, who now serves as artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, said that her interpretation of his piece “Emergent,” from early in “Density,” has evolved so much that it sounds “like the difference between early and late Coltrane.” Susanna Mälkki, who has led Chase in performances of the Lara concerto, as well as the Saariaho at Carnegie, said that she stands out among contemporary music specialists because, while some might “be very scientific about it,” Chase doesn’t forget that, fundamentally, most composers just want to reach listeners.“If we approach this as an intellectual exercise, it won’t work,” Mälkki added. “We need to have a balance, and she is so generous and engaged, it’s mesmerizing. And from there, her aura just spreads.”It spreads not just to fellow performers but to colleagues in the broader classical music field. Lewis said that Chase has a gift for seeing “how things could be, not how they are now,” and that in the process, “she sweeps you up into the enthusiasm and makes you believe you can do anything.”Salonen recalled meeting her as part of a New York University project devoted to the future of classical music. When the inevitable subject of getting young people interested in and on the boards of institutions came up, he recalled, she said “that her problem with I.C.E. is that she would really want to see some older board and audience members.”“Jaws dropped,” he said. “You could hear it. Then I thought: This woman is doing something. She has her finger on something that we don’t.”Through the ensemble, Chase caught the attention of Matthew Lyons, a curator at the experimental-art nonprofit the Kitchen. When she introduced the idea of “Density,” before it had begun, he quickly got on board. “I have a weakness for long-form creative projects,” he said, “and Claire just kind of came in with this infectious energy and determination and courage to take it on.”Chase’s projects include a fellowship she started to ensure that the music she is commissioning reaches the next generation of flutists.Jamie Pearl for The New York TimesThe Kitchen has been the New York home for “Density,” a space where Chase has been given time to prepare theatrical, multimedia presentations for each edition. A program can contain just one, full-length piece — like the two premieres this month, Craig Taborn’s “Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms” and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ubique” — or it can be a batch of new works. Regardless, an installment typically adds up to roughly an hour, with the idea that the project can conclude with a 24-hour performance.The roster of composers has been diverse in nearly every sense of the word: age, race, gender identity, career stage. “It’s not uniform,” Balter said. “Claire is the glue, but there is not an aesthetic glue.”If there is a defining aesthetic, it’s virtuosity. Lewis said that a commission for her means that you are writing music for “someone who can do just about anything.” “Busy Griefs,” which premieres at the Kitchen on the 24th, calls for its performers to wander through the audience and navigate notated and improvised material; “Ubique,” at Carnegie Hall on the 25th, however, is fully notated, a journey of its own, but with nothing left to chance.Thorvaldsdottir said that she “always pictured Claire in everything I was writing,” but balanced her technique with more abstract ideas about density and ubiquity — “an exploration of colors and timbres and textural nuances between the instruments.” In composing specifically for Chase, Thorvaldsdottir is far from alone among the “Density” contributors; it can be difficult to picture anyone other than Chase performing this idiosyncratic, challenging and occasionally large-scale music.Chase is aware of how, as “Density” enters its second decade, she must ensure that the new repertoire doesn’t merely exist, but that it also spreads beyond her own concert calendar. She is already a teacher and mentor — young flutists “follow her around like little puppies,” Lewis said — and now she has also created a “Density” fellowship, whose first class was announced this month.Ten early-career flutists will take on one of the project’s pieces and devote a year to studying it with Chase, and often the composer, then performing and potentially recording it. Future concerts might not have the grand multimedia treatment of a Kitchen program, but, Claire said, that has always been the plan.“My dream for all pieces, not just ‘Density’ pieces, but for everything I commission,” she added, “is that it can potentially work with me and a Bluetooth speaker on a granny cart in the subway.”With that philosophy, “Density” begins to look a lot more like, well, the rest of classical music: endlessly interpreted, with endless possibilities for how it’s presented. All it takes for repertoire to survive is continued performance, generation after generation. Chase’s fellowship, she hopes, is a start.“One little thing at a time,” she said. “It’s such a gift to be thinking about 20 years from now, or even just 10 years from now, and then 13 when this is all over. Oh, then I’ll be so sad. What am I going to do?” More

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      in Movies

      Matthew Barney, Back in the Game

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      The hit, 45 years ago, shook up the world of football. Then, just as quickly, people moved on. But not Darryl Stingley, the receiver for the New England Patriots who bore the head-on charge by Jack Tatum of the Oakland Raiders. Stingley was rendered quadriplegic. Tatum, a defender known as “The Assassin,” notoriously never apologized.The artist Matthew Barney was an 11-year-old in Idaho at the time and remembers the incident from constant slow-motion replays on television. He was just getting into the sport seriously himself, and the Tatum-Stingley collision, though shocking, didn’t stop him. Violence was inculcated in football training, he recalled. It was also addictive.“That was my gateway, feeling that blow to the head and what that feels like in your body,” Barney said in an interview in March while editing “Secondary,” his new five-channel video installation that takes that 1978 event as its point of departure. He relished practice drills where he and other boys were ordered to slam into each other at top speed, he said. “You’d walk away, and you’re seeing stars.”Barney became an elite high-school quarterback, but he changed course during his years at Yale University, emerging from there in 1989 into the New York art world, where he found near-instant success. Physical duress was immediately salient in his work, from the “Drawing Restraint” projects in which, for instance, he would harness himself and move along a gallery’s walls and ceiling, attempting to draw on the wall.Football served as a prompt in the “Jim Otto Suite,” which Barney made in 1991-92, one of the early works that established his distinctive approach to combining performance, video and sculpture. Its inspiration was Otto, a Raiders player whose numerous injuries led his body to be loaded with prosthetic materials. Otto’s story collapsed resilience and destruction, and artistically opened performance and sculpture horizons.Ted Johnson, left, and Wally Cardona in “Secondary.”via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesBut the sport itself would recede in Barney’s work, engulfed by countless other themes — sexual differentiation, reincarnation, cars, sewers and excrement, among many others — and the epic scale and baroque staging of his “Cremaster Cycle” (1994-2002) and “River of Fundament” (2014) films. (Metrograph, a movie theater in Manhattan, is showing the “Cremaster” films this month and next.)With “Secondary,” which is open through June 25, Barney is tugging at a loose end that goes back to his childhood. From a place of physical and intellectual maturity, he’s scrutinizing a sport — and a country, because football is quintessentially American — that may or may not have changed. Now 56, he is taking stock of himself and an uneasy nation.“There’s a way that the violence in our culture has become so exposed everywhere you look,” he said. “I think my relationship to that legacy is by way of my experience on the football field. I wanted to make a piece that looks at that, in more ways than one.”The new work is concise for Barney. It runs one hour, the clock time of a football game. Six performers, out of a principal cast of 11, enact the roles of players in the 1978 game, including Barney as Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. It was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, near the East River. And it is showing to the public now in that very venue — his final use of the space before he moves to a nearby facility.Last fall and winter, the studio served as a simulated football field, a movement lab and a film set. When I visited, the principal performers — including David Thomson, who plays Stingley and is the project’s movement director, and Raphael Xavier, as Tatum — were running through some of the episodes that tell the story abstractly, in an indirect sequence.“I’m not trying to be Stingley, a person I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a moment,” said David Thomson, left, who plays the former Patriots receiver in “Secondary,” while Barney, right, plays Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. Camila Falquez for The New York TimesThere were weird things going on, too. Additional performers around the sideline wore the all-black costumes of devoted Raiders fans, walking around like camp horror figures; some were actors, but others were members of the Raiders’ New York City fan club. Some were being filmed inside a trench that was dug into the studio floor, exposing pipes, dirt and water.An artist’s studio, Barney said, has traits of the stadium. “It’s kind of the organizing body for this story,” he said, adding: “I wanted my working space to be a character.”Digging the trench, he said, revealed decaying pipes and how the tide floods and recedes under the buildings. “I wanted that infrastructure to be exposed, both as a manifestation of the broken spine of Stingley, but also as crumbling infrastructure within my studio, within the city of New York,” he said.For all its allusions, “Secondary” — the title refers to the back line of defenders on the football field, cornerbacks and safeties whose job is to shadow the wide receivers and break up any passing play — holds to the Tatum-Stingley incident as its narrative and moral core.Stingley, right, was left paralyzed after Tatum hit him in a 1978 game.Ron Riesterer/Sporting News, via Getty ImagesIt is rich and also tragic material. Stingley died in 2007 at 55; Tatum, 61, died three years later. All his life after the hit, Stingley wanted an apology that never came. Tatum argued that the hit was just part of the job, even if he also boasted that his style of play pushed the line. Since then a flood of research has confirmed the sport’s toll. Stabler, whom Barney plays in “Secondary,” contributed to this knowledge posthumously when his brain was found to show advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E.I asked if Barney, the former quarterback, had come to worry about his own health. “Honestly, yeah,” he said. He was glad, he added, that he stopped playing when he did.“Secondary” has a staccato format, amplified by its staging: A jumbotron-like overhead device shows one video channel on three screens, while four other channels run on monitors around the studio. The hit is evoked early, but much of the subsequent action returns to buildup — players warming up, fans getting hyped. The play sequences make up roughly the final third.“Secondary” was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, and it is now on view to the public there.Camila Falquez for The New York TimesThe point was never a literal treatment, said Thomson, the movement director and Barney’s close collaborator on the project. “This isn’t a docudrama,” he said. “I’m not trying to be Stingley, a person I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a moment.”Still, Thomson said, from studying the real-life athletes, he distilled traits that informed how he worked with the actors who portray them. Stingley, he said, was earnest. Tatum, angry. Grogan, technical. Each trait, he said, became “a touchstone one goes back to without too many flourishes, and see what resonates from that place.”In their research, Barney and Thomson read Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of football highlights and practice reels. Video of the hit — which came in a preseason game, with no competitive stakes — is grainy and sparse. The camera follows the ball past Stingley’s outstretched arms, so that the hit takes place at the edge of the frame. There were not dozens of camera angles available like today.David Thomson holds Ted Johnson aloft in a scene from “Secondary.” Play sequences make up roughly the final third of the video.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesIn their research, Barney and David Thomson, the project’s movement director, read Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of football footage.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesThis opened space for improvisation, and for Barney to introduce sculptural props that the players negotiate. (Barney has always stated he is a sculptor first and plans for these works to be shown in future exhibitions.)Xavier, the dancer who plays Tatum, had to contend with a pile of wet clay dumbbells that distended and broke as he carried them. “I’ve worked with props before, but they were solid,” he said. “But the clay was alive.” It forced him, he said, to locate vulnerability, even tenderness, inside a character that he remembered from his own childhood as an aggressive, even mean, football player.Indeed, the core players in “Secondary” are middle-aged men negotiating the memory of the culture they grew up in — and of their own bodies. Even stylized, the football movements involved in the piece are not instinctive or easy ones for men in their 50s and 60s.Barney “particularly wanted older bodies, which I appreciated,” Thomson said. “What are the limitations that those bodies hold that may have a different resonance, a different visual narrative?”But “Secondary” enfolds other perspectives as it gestures toward a broader, contemporary American social landscape. The referees are a mixed-gender crew. Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a composer, experimental vocalist and member of the San Carlos Apache Nation, delivers an extremely deconstructed version of the national anthem.Jacquelyn Deshchidn, center, is featured in “Secondary,” flanked by, from left, Jeffrey Gavett, Kyoko Kitamura and Isabel Crespo Pardo, who play referees in the video.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta Cervantes“As an Indigenous person, it was something that I was excited to take on,” Deshchidn said. They became drawn, too, to the work’s environmental aspect, spending breaks on set staring into the damp trench. “It brought up imagery of bones and burial, and repatriation work — the way there are institutions truly built on top of our bones.”Barney is an art-world celebrity (whose fame only grew during his more than decade-long relationship with the Icelandic pop artist Björk), but he prefers a low profile. On set, he cut a workaday presence with his close-shaven look under a cap. Performers in “Secondary” said his work ethic was intense but his manner open. While some people on the project are his longtime collaborators, like the composer Jonathan Bepler, many are new to his world.There is a sense with “Secondary” that Barney is turning a page — certainly with the studio move, after some 15 years at that site, but in some private way, too. When I asked if he was feeling his age — our age, as we are contemporaries — he said yes.“Letting go of being a young person is a big relief,” Barney said.Camila Falquez for The New York Times“In a good way,” he added. “Letting go of being a young person is a big relief.”Compared with his earlier work, “Secondary” strikes a more concise and collaborative note. “It’s more connected to the world,” he said. “It’s a piece that’s thinking through the environment within which it was made. In my 20s, I was trying to figure out ways of assigning a material language for what was inside me. This piece is different that way.”“Secondary” may take its cue from 1978 and invite its players into a kind of memory work through their bodies — but the work’s structure, with its emphasis on the buildup to the bad thing everyone knows is coming, energizes it with premonition.It ends in an elegiac vein, the final shots widening to the city. “It felt crucial to pan away from the specific to the general,” Barney said. “As much as the studio is a kind of micro frame, there’s a larger one that is the city and country that we live in. I want there to be some kind of legibility to read those different scales — for them all to be in there.” More

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      in Theater

      Robert Patrick, Early, and Prolific, Playwright of Gay Life, Dies at 85

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      He got his start at Caffe Cino, the birthplace of Off Off Broadway. His first of many, many plays, performed there in 1964, is a milestone of gay theater.Robert Patrick, a wildly prolific playwright who rendered gay (and straight) life with caustic wit, an open heart and fizzy camp, and whose 1964 play, “The Haunted Host,” became a touchstone of early gay theater, died on April 23 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.The cause was atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, said Jason Jenn, a friend.Mr. Patrick’s story is intertwined with that of Caffe Cino, the West Village coffee shop that was the accidental birthplace of Off Off Broadway theater. One day in 1961, a 24-year-old Mr. Patrick followed a cute boy with long hair into the place, where the playwrights John Guare, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson and, soon, Mr. Patrick, all got their starts; the cute boy was John P. Dodd, who went on to be a well-known lighting designer and die of AIDS in 1991.The cafe, run by a former dancer named Joe Cino, was scrappy, original and unpretentious, decorated with tinsel and silver stars that hung from the ceiling. Actors performed among the tables and chairs until they built a small stage. No one was paid, except the cops, because Mr. Cino was not just running an unlicensed cabaret but also a gay hangout, which was illegal in the early 1960s. Its young playwrights, particularly Mr. Patrick, churned out plays, playlets and monologues akin to TikToks, Don Shewey, the author and theater critic, said in a phone interview. As Mr. Patrick told Broadway World in 2004: “We wrote for each other, and it turned out there was an audience that, without knowing it, had been dying for personal, political, philosophical theater. And a few years after the Cino began doing original plays, there were over 300 Off Off Broadway theaters.”Actors performing at Caffe Cino in 1961. Mr. Patrick’s story is intertwined with that of that West Village coffee shop, the accidental birthplace of Off Off Broadway theater.Ben Martin/Getty ImagesMr. Patrick worked at the cafe as a doorman, a dishwasher and a waiter before writing his first play, “The Haunted Host.” It features Jay, a gay playwright who is haunted by the ghost of his lover, who died by suicide. Frank, a hustler who happens to be straight, wants help with a play and needs a place to spend the night.The dialogue is tart and snappy, as Jay rebuffs the young man and his work, razzes him about his sexuality — “Tell me, Frank, how long have you been heterosexual? Started as a kid, huh? Tsk-tsk” — and finally throws him out in the morning and in so doing exorcises the ghost.Early in the play, when Frank asks Jay how his lover died, Jay answers curtly, “Alone.”“Oh. Suicide?” Frank asks, to which Jay replies, “No, thanks, I just had one.”The play was not exactly a runaway hit in 1964, but it found new life in 1976, when it was revived in Boston with a very young Harvey Fierstein in the lead role. Mr. Fierstein reprised it again in 1991, at La MaMa in the East Village.“All these years later,” Howard Kissel wrote in his review for The Daily News, “‘Host’ has taken on a certain poignancy. It predates the gay rights movement and AIDS. It radiates an innocence no longer attainable.”Its significance was recognized in hindsight as an early example of a work with a gay person as the hero, and with themes that were universal: love, grief, self-respect.“It was so much before its time,” Mr. Fierstein said in a phone interview. “Here you have a play where the strange person, the bizarre person, the person who was the antagonist, was the heterosexual. The normal person, the one with real emotion and real love, was the gay character. We forget our history, and now we have people who want to erase our history. This is why Robert’s work is so important.”Harvey Fierstein, right, and Jason Workman in La MaMa’s 1991 revival of “The Haunted Host,” Mr. Patrick’s 1964 play that became a touchstone of gay theater. La MaMa archivesMr. Cino died by suicide in 1967, and Caffe Cino limped along for a year afterward. Mr. Patrick kept writing, and writing. Over the decades he wrote hundreds of plays as well as countless songs, poems and short stories, a memoir and at least one novel.“They just poured out of him,” Mr. Fierstein said.One work, many years in the making, was “Kennedy’s Children,” an affecting drama set in a bar on the Bowery one Valentine’s Day in the early 1970s. Five characters, including a disillusioned actor who was a proxy for Mr. Patrick, declaim their isolation and anomie in monologues that ruminate on the legacy of the ’60s — its failed promise and heartbreak.Mr. Patrick began working on the play in 1968. It was first produced in 1973 at Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan, but, as Mr. Patrick said, nobody came and nobody reviewed it. It then made its way to a tiny theater in London and had runs in similar small theaters around the world before returning to London and opening to great acclaim in the West End, followed by a Broadway production in 1975, for which the actress Shirley Knight won a Tony.“The wit is as hard as nails and as sharp,” Clive Barnes of The New York Times wrote in his review. “Mr. Patrick hears well and writes so colloquially, so idiomatically, that you could actually be eavesdropping on the drunken but revealing, paranoid but illuminating meanderings of the barstool set of bad cafe society.”Later work included “T-Shirts” (1980), which Mr. Shewey, in his review for The Soho News, described as a comic romp about the gay generation gap as well as “a schematic attack on the values of the gay male world, charging that money, youth and beauty have become as interchangeable as, well, T-shirts.”“Blue Is for Boys” (1987) is a nutty farce about an apartment converted into a dorm for gay male college students. “Camera Obscura,” a playlet about a boy and a girl who struggle to communicate, was first performed at Caffe Cino in 1966 and became a staple of high school drama festivals and regional theaters.For a while, Mr. Patrick was known, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as the world’s most produced playwright, with his work performed at small theaters in Minneapolis, Toronto, Vienna, Brazil and New Zealand, often all at the same time. In 1978, The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported, “Certain works, such as ‘Kennedy’s Children’ and ‘Camera Obscura,’ are quite probably being done somewhere every day of the year.”For a while, Mr. Patrick was known, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as the world’s most produced playwright. Becket LoganRobert Patrick O’Connor was born on Sept. 27, 1937, in Kilgore, in eastern Texas. His parents, Robert and Jo Adelle (Goodson) O’Conner, were itinerant workers who moved constantly throughout the Southwest. The family lived in tents, Mr. Patrick said, until he was 6. He recalled attending 12 schools in one year.He spent two years in college before joining the Air Force because he had fallen in love with a “flyboy,” he said. He was kicked out during basic training, however, when a love poem he had written to the airman was found in the man’s wallet. As Mr. Patrick told it, it was discovered during an Air Force sting operation in the restroom of a local hotel that gay servicemen were using as a rendezvous spot. Mr. Patrick’s love poem was for naught anyway; the man had already ditched him, he wrote, for a captain with a Cadillac.Mr. Patrick never stopped writing plays, but in later years he paid the rent by working as a ghost writer and as an usher for the Ford Theater in Los Angeles, where he moved in the 1990s; he also wrote reviews of pornographic movies. For the last decade or so, he performed a cabaret act at Planet Queer, a riotous variety show held weekly at a bar in Los Angeles.He is survived by his sister, Angela Patrice Musick.In 2014, Henrik Eger of The Seattle Gay News asked Mr. Patrick if there was anything he hadn’t yet done but wished he had.“True love,” he said. “And I would like to have the money to build or buy a theater in L.A. with enough ground space that I could call it Robert Patrick’s Free Parking Theater, because in L.A. the theater would fill up for every performance no matter what show was on, just because of the magic words ‘Free Parking.’ Then I could do whatever plays I liked.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Oliver!’ Returns, With Darker Twists Intact

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      The emphasis Encores! puts on words and music rather than spectacle allows the cruel realities of Dickensian London to stand out amid the bouncy tunes.It was 10 a.m. on a recent morning in a rehearsal room at New York City Center, and nine boys scurried around the space, clutching parasols of red and white lace, tin cups and jaunty pocket squares.“OK, everyone!” said Lorin Latarro, the choreographer of the show, a new staging of “Oliver!,” the Lionel Bart musical opening at City Center on Wednesday for a two-week run as part of the Encores! series. “Today we’re going to work on ‘I’d Do Anything.’”The boys gathered around Raúl Esparza, who is playing Fagin, the lovable London crime lord, in a battered brown hat with a buckle, tan overcoat and black fingerless gloves.“Would you risk the ‘drop’?” he sang, his eyes bugging as he grabbed his scarf and mimed a noose tightening around his neck. (Translation: Are you willing to go out and commit robbery and possibly face the gallows if you’re caught?) All nine pickpockets in training nodded enthusiastically.“Oliver!,” based on the Charles Dickens novel “Oliver Twist,” is the story of an orphan’s search for belonging in that band of young pickpockets in 1830s London. It mixes fun, candy-coated musical theater crowd-pleasers like “Food, Glorious Food” and “Consider Yourself” with darker Dickensian themes including poverty and domestic violence.“The show has these really harrowing lyrics even in songs that are upbeat,” said the production’s director, Lear deBessonet. “And I think that in some productions, you may just be bobbing along with the rhythm of the song, and you might not really hear those words.”But that’s generally not the case in the concert-like stagings that Encores! is known for. Although there is an orchestra onstage, props and sets are minimal.“Because you strip away some of those other production elements, it really puts a new focus on the lyric,” deBessonet said. “It’s meaty work for me as a director to figure out how to tell the story with so few elements.”When deBessonet, now in her third year as the artistic director of Encores!, was setting the season lineup in late 2021, just before the Omicron surge of Covid-19, she was struck by the parallels between the uncertain present and the perilous world of Dickens’s day.“It’s interesting that ‘Oliver!’ is generally thought of as a family musical,” she said in a recent conversation in her office at City Center. “It certainly has these very winsome tunes, and the cast of children is delightful beyond measure, but there are dark edges of the story that we’re very much leaning into and exploring in this production.”Lilli Cooper, left, as Nancy, and Angelica Beliard, right, dancing with Benjamin Pajak, who plays Oliver in the musical.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesMANY OF THE SONGS FROM ‘OLIVER!’ have become well known, thanks to the popular 1968 film adaptation, which starred Ron Moody as Fagin. This crowd-pleasing musical is a staple of school stages across Britain, where it debuted in London’s West End in 1960, and the United States, where it opened on Broadway in 1963 and won three Tony Awards, including one for the score. But “Oliver!,” like many of the shows staged by Encores!, whose mission is to offer revivals of seldom-seen work, is rarely produced in full.It hasn’t been professionally staged in its entirety on a New York City stage in nearly 40 years, since the short-lived 1984 Broadway revival that starred Patti LuPone as Nancy. In fact, neither deBessonet, nor any of the five main cast members except for Benjamin Pajak (“The Music Man”), who plays Oliver, had ever seen a live performance of the show.David Jones as the Artful Dodger (in top hat) and Georgia Brown, beside him, in a number from the musical “Oliver!” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesIn addition to Esparza (“Company”), the show also stars Lilli Cooper as Nancy, the romantic partner of the brutal Bill Sikes (Tam Mutu, recently of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”), and Julian Lerner, who plays the Artful Dodger, the leader of the gang that takes Oliver in.Underscoring the musical’s darker bits, deBessonet said, like the fear and loneliness the orphaned Oliver experiences, was a matter of subtraction rather than addition. Without elaborate sets or showstopping production numbers there are fewer elements competing to divert the audience’s attention from the words of the actors.But neither did the production need to amp up the grim with foreboding lighting or a fog machine, she said — the darkness is already inherent in Dickens’s text, and in Bart’s book, score and lyrics.“We’re trying to have those words be heard with the belief that the complexity is in the lyric itself,” she said.One example, she said, is the titular tune “Oliver!,” a song familiar to many, even those who haven’t seen the show, for its high-spirited chorus.“It’s this really bouncy song,” deBessonet said, “but the actual lyrics are:There’s a dark, thin, winding stairwayWithout any banisterWhich we’ll throw him down and feed him on cockroachesServed in a canister.The show does preserve many of the musical’s more lighthearted elements. Every song from the original Broadway production remains, including bouncy numbers like “I’d Do Anything” and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.” The dreamlike sequence “Food, Glorious Food,” with its visions of sausages and mustards, jelly and custard. And 20 additional performers, all New York City public school students, will join the company onstage for “Consider Yourself,” the boys’ full-voiced embrace of Oliver into their ranks — the first true family he has known.“The show is incredibly challenging — the domestic violence, the treatment of children at that time in general is truly harrowing,” deBessonet said. “And yet there’s this buoyant joy about these numbers.”And the emotional core is still the camaraderie that springs up between the striving, working-class characters.“The whole narrative question of the show is ‘Where is the love?’ and Fagin is one answer,” deBessonet said. “But it’s complicated.”Even though the Fagin of the Bart musical is more of a lovable curmudgeon than the child-exploiting criminal in the Dickens novel, deBessonet and Esparza said that they wanted the audience to remain cognizant of the less-savory context of his mentorship.“I fully believe Fagin loves those children, and he is exploiting them,” deBessonet said. “He’s sending them out to rob for him, to keep him alive, and he knows that every time he sends them out, there’s a possibility that they could get caught or killed.”Less complex is Bill Sikes, who is objectively the show’s most loathsome character.“Bill Sikes is a sociopath, and there is no end to his cruelty,” deBessonet said of Nancy’s abusive boyfriend. “The show ends with him murdering her brutally in front of us and in front of a kid.”A model of the stage set of “Oliver!”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut Mutu knew he didn’t want to play a one-note villain. Instead he searched for the humanity within the character, to add nuances to his portrayal without offering redemption.“People aren’t black and white,” he said. “There are levels to each of us. Yes, I am playing a sociopath who has violent tendencies —”“— but he has redeeming qualities,” Esparza interjected. “Which are?”They both laughed.“The love between Nancy and Bill is genuine,” Mutu said, referring to their codependency as fascinating. “I’m trying to find the sense of the complexity of our relationship, which I think gets brushed under the carpet.”Normally, deBessonet said, she would have no interest in doing a production that includes violence toward a woman — “I’ve already seen enough of that for a lifetime” — but she was impressed by Nancy’s bravery, how she risked everything to save the life of Oliver.And Cooper and deBessonet said they wanted to make sure Nancy’s murder was not the final word on her story. “Her life is about her heroism and choosing to lay down her life to save this child who not too long ago was a stranger to her,” deBessonet said.Though Nancy allows others to see her as a passive player in her own life, Cooper wanted her performance to underscore the power Nancy wields in moments like the “Oom-Pah-Pah” number, in which her lively and somewhat risqué dance is actually a means of distracting Bill Sikes and Fagin so she can help Oliver escape.“She has this innate maternal nature to her,” Cooper said, “especially with all the boys in Fagin’s den and wanting to protect them. Even with Bill, the man that she loves, she feels needed by those who are wounded and fragile and need help.”“She herself was a child thief, and she’s managed to grab hold of life with this force,” deBessonet said. “In the face of all that difficulty, she’s been able to say, ‘I’m still going to love life.”BACK IN THE REHEARSAL ROOM, the boys continued their run-through of “I’d Do Anything.” Two stood on either side at the front, wielding red parasols, while two with white ones flanked them from behind. As the boys spun the parasols to imitate wheels, Nancy and the Artful Dodger walked to center.“Would you climb a hill?” she sang, as the human “carriage” began to roll.“Anything!” he responded.“Wear a daffodil?”He nodded. “Anything!”“Leave me all your will?”He nodded more vigorously. “Anything!”“Even fight my Bill?” she asked pointedly.He recoiled slightly.“Stop!” Latarro called. She walked over to Lerner. “Bill Sikes is really tall and really scary — he’s like a boxer,” she said. “So you all jump back like ‘No way!’”They tried again.This time when Nancy asked, all nine pickpockets sprung back as though they had just realized they were standing on the third rail. Their eyes hardened.“Anything!” More

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      Lincoln Center Revives Summer for the City, Hoping to Draw New Fans

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      The festival will include hip-hop, Korean arts, Mostly Mozart and a flock of 200 flamingo lawn ornaments.Lincoln Center will bring back its Summer for the City festival this year, the organization announced on Monday, continuing its efforts to attract new audiences by embracing a wide variety of genres, including pop and classical music, social dance and comedy.There will be a weeklong celebration of hip-hop, performances by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and a Korean cultural festival. A flock of 200 neon-pink flamingo lawn ornaments will adorn a pool near David Geffen Hall, part of a reimagining of the center’s outdoor spaces by the Broadway costume and set designer Clint Ramos.“The hope is to transform the campus — to upend people’s expectations of what Lincoln Center is,” Shanta Thake, the center’s chief artistic officer, said in an interview. “To allow people to just come and play and understand that this isn’t a precious palace on a hill, but a place to inspire joy.”Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the organization has worked in recent years to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd. Its efforts have led to some grumbling among fans of more traditional genres, who say the center is not doing enough to promote classical music. Some elements of the Mostly Mozart rubric have been reduced in recent years, including guest ensembles, intimate recitals and performances of new music that flows out of the classical tradition.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will perform 13 concerts over three weeks, beginning with a program on July 22 that features Mozart’s Concerto No. 2 for Flute, with the soloist Jasmine Choi, as well as the Korean folk song “Arirang” and Soo Yeon Lyuh’s “Dudurim.” The performance is also part of Korean Arts Week, which includes K-pop bands, DJs and a film festival.It will be Mostly Mozart’s last season with Louis Langrée, who has been the ensemble’s music director since 2002. His contract expires this year.Thake said that Mostly Mozart would maintain a presence after Langrée’s exit. She said that the center was in talks with the orchestra about future seasons, and that they were discussing how Mostly Mozart “fits within the values of Lincoln Center,” including efforts to reach new audiences and promote inclusivity.“There’s no doubt that the orchestra will maintain a central place in our programming going forward,” she said.Hip-hop will be front and center as part of a celebration of its 50th anniversary, with performances by J.Period, Rakim and Big Daddy Kane.An opera based on Octavia E. Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower,” by the folk and blues musician Toshi Reagon and the composer Bernice Johnson Reagon, will get its New York City premiere at Geffen Hall on July 14.Social dance returns on June 14 with a performance of Cuban music by the singer Lucrecia and the salsa band 8 Y Más. The giant disco ball that hung over the main plaza last year, also designed by Ramos, will be back too.More than 300,000 people attended last year’s festival, which aimed at helping New York City heal after the upheaval brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. More than three-quarters of them had never before bought a ticket to a Lincoln Center offering, according to the center.Thake said she was not overly concerned about skeptics who worry that the center’s identity has changed too much.“To those people I say, It’s wonderful that you have found a home at Lincoln Center and what a gift it has been that Lincoln Center has been a home for so many for so long,” she said. “All that we are doing right now is opening up that invitation. And really having many, many more New Yorkers be able to say the exact same thing. That’s a real gift, and something that not only we can do, but something that we really have to do.” More

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      The Phantom of the Opera Is Here, Inside The Times

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      As Broadway’s longest-running show headed to a close on Sunday after more than 35 years, New York Times employees shared their memories.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.I turned to the internet a week before heading to London for the first time in the summer of 2016:“Must-dos in London,” I intrepidly typed into the search box. Alongside going to Buckingham Palace and drinking tea was “See ‘Phantom of the Opera’ in the West End.”Intrigued, I found a music video of the actors who originated the lead roles, Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman, singing “The Music of the Night” — and proceeded to play it at least 50 times a day for a week straight. (Three days in, I managed to tear myself away for long enough to watch a bootleg recording of the full production online.)My obsession only deepened when I saw the show live for the first time at Her Majesty’s Theater in London that summer, where the show had its world premiere in 1986. After a night spent dreaming of papier-mâché musical boxes in the shape of barrel organs, I returned to the box office the next day to get tickets to see the show again a few weeks later. I’ve since seen it three more times in New York, including the 35th anniversary celebration last year, as well as hundreds of other shows — a theatrical obsession for which I have “Phantom” to thank.But there will be no 40th anniversary party — at least, not in New York. The show, the longest-running in Broadway history, announced last September that it would close, citing high costs and a drop-off in audiences since the pandemic. The last Broadway performance is Sunday.Michael Paulson, the theater reporter for The New York Times, recently spent time with six devoted “Phans,” among them a man who said he had seen the show 140 times, a woman who has the address of the Majestic Theater tattooed on her midriff and a man who regularly attends shows in a mask and fedora. They shared what the show has meant to them.As it turns out, a number of Times staff members also have connections to the musical. In the accounts below, Times theater lovers reflect on their bonds with “Phantom,” including backstage tours, a post-9/11 viewing and knowing the show’s female lead. Their stories have been edited.Jordan Cohen, executive director, corporate communications“Phantom” was the first Broadway show my family and I saw after 9/11. I was 12, and I remember feeling anxious to be in Times Square. But seeing the show made me hopeful and reminded me that New York is the greatest city in the world where a production like “Phantom” can happen eight times a week, even after a tragedy. It was also one of the first shows I saw when Broadway reopened after the pandemic. The audience clapped and gave a standing ovation when the chandelier was raised.Peter Blair, editor, Flexible Editing deskWhen I was a copy editor with hours that revolved around print deadlines, I commuted to and from work in the evenings alongside people who also worked odd hours (think custodians, bartenders, nurses). One fellow commuter I got to know happened to be a stagehand for “Phantom.” Six years ago, when I told him I was taking one of my daughters to see the show for the first time, he invited the two of us backstage for a private tour before the performance. It was an experience we’ll never forget.Sherry Gao, senior engineering manager“Phantom” was the first Broadway show I saw, when a group of friends and I made a trip to New York during my freshman year at M.I.T. We didn’t have a lot of money and had to cram five of us in a hotel room, but we hit the TKTS ticket booth and ended up getting tickets to “Phantom.” Now I live in Boston, but I make sure to see a show every time I’m in New York.Robbie Magat, event and sponsorship managerIn the summer of 2016, a family friend, Ali Ewoldt, made history as the first actress of color to play Christine on Broadway. We were especially proud to see a Filipina mark this milestone. Ali took us backstage to her dressing room and gave us a full tour of the iconic set. I was surprised at how heavy her dresses were on the rack!Christine Zhang, visual editing resident, GraphicsI’m almost certain my parents named me after the female protagonist of “The Phantom of the Opera.” Like many immigrants, we adopted Americanized first names in the mid-1990s shortly after settling in the United States. My dad told me that he and my mom chose their own names out of a list of American names for “no special reason.” They had a list for me, too, and for a long time I never thought twice about my name being Christine. Until I remembered my parents’ love for the music of “Phantom.”They had gotten a tape of the “Phantom” cast recording in China. Long before we watched the Broadway show, we memorized the songs on long car rides, where we did our best to interpret the plot (mostly correctly) and took part in family karaoke sessions belting out “The Music of the Night.” When they decided to find a name for me, Christine — the name featured most prominently in the lyrics of the show — rose to the top of the list. The musical was “one of the things that put this name in our minds,” my dad said.Debra Kamin, reporter, Real EstateI saw “Phantom” for the first time when I was in the second grade, during a trip to Toronto with my parents and my sister. At the close of the first act, as the chandelier fell, I was so terrified that I dove under the seat in front of me. After the show, hoping to prevent nightmares, my father took me to the stage door and requested to see the Phantom himself, Colm Wilkinson.My father, a major Broadway buff, had seen Mr. Wilkinson play Jean Valjean in “Les Misérables,” and so he slipped him a note that said, “Mr. Wilkinson, if you keep up this ‘Phantom’ act, Javert will never find you!” Mr. Wilkinson was charmed, invited us backstage and showed me how all the props and costumes created make-believe on the stage. That night, not only did I not have a single nightmare, but my love of the theater was born. More

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      John Kander’s Major Chord, Undiminished

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      It’s not that John Kander wasn’t touched by John Kander Day. The composer of the song “New York, New York” — played at every Yankees home game and known worldwide from its first five notes — was obviously moved when the city’s mayor handed him a framed proclamation in front of the St. James Theater in Midtown Manhattan. Nor was he jaded, he later said, about having that block of West 44th Street, from Broadway to Eighth Avenue, christened Kander & Ebb Way in recognition of his work and that of Fred Ebb, his longtime lyricist, who died in 2004.Still, of Kander’s thousands of songs, seven movie scores and 20 major musicals, including “Chicago” and “Cabaret,” not one bar was written with the idea of getting a piece of pavement named for him. If Ebb, with his brasher, needier personality, would have eaten up the honor, Kander seems at best to withstand it, embarrassed by too much attention or praise. He is so militantly unassuming that the highest compliment he will pay himself is the one his mother used to offer: “A horse can’t do any better.”So on March 24, as a choir sang and a crowd cheered and his friend Lin-Manuel Miranda read Ebb’s beautiful lyric for the song “First You Dream,” Kander, who had turned 96 days earlier, was thinking less about what was going on outside the St. James than what was going on inside it. There, a few hours after the ceremony, his 16th new Broadway musical, “New York, New York” — named for “that song,” which he doesn’t even like — would offer its first public preview. Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, it is set to open on April 26.Anna Uzele, center, as a singer whose troubled romance with a musician is one of the many stories told in the musical “New York, New York,” at the St. James Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThough the plot is only tangentially related to that of the 1977 Martin Scorsese film starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, the stage musical, with a book by David Thompson and Sharon Washington, naturally includes its big numbers. Others are from the Kander and Ebb trunk, some never previously performed onstage. But much of the score is new. Six songs are collaborations with Miranda, who said the problem with writing lyrics for Kander is “just keeping up” as the melodies pour out, sometimes via voice memo at 3 in the morning. The rest, whether swingy or Schuberty or uncategorizable, are by Kander alone.At an age when most artists are resting on their laurels, or beneath them, Kander, the last of the great Golden Age composers, just keeps going. Other than arthritis in his hands, he is unimpaired physically; he trots up and down the three-story spiral staircase to his studio faster than I dared when I spent a few hours there with him. To the annoyance of his husband, Albert Stephenson, and everyone around him, he eats dessert regularly and generously, with no ill effect. “I do my chores, too,” he said: washing the dishes and making the bed, tight as a drum, as he was taught at Camp Nebagamon when he was 10.Well, lots of people remain spry seemingly forever. What worries artists, and especially composers, is the possibility of drying up creatively. Even musical theater titans like Rodgers and Berlin succumbed to harmonic meekness and rhythmic sclerosis as they approached their 70s. Certainly after Ebb’s death, and after fulfilling a promise to shepherd as many of the team’s unfinished musicals to Broadway as he could — “Curtains” in 2007, “The Scottsboro Boys” in 2010 and “The Visit” in 2015 — Kander might have been expected to coast into retirement on tributes and revivals.But no: Even before that job was finished, he’d jumped back into the water. In 2013 came “The Landing,” in 2017, “Kid Victory,” and in 2018 a dance play based on the Henry James novella “The Beast in the Jungle.” All three pieces, produced Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater, were experimental in a way you might expect from someone at the start of a career, not seven decades into it. And now, even as “New York, New York” opens, another show is aborning.Kander and the lyricist Fred Ebb in 1987. Their 45-year partnership yielded works like “Cabaret” and “Chicago,” and was more intense and monogamous than many marriages.So it seems almost Sisyphean that while a music assistant is busy digitizing Kander’s archive and preparing the paper assets for eventual donation to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the man himself is sitting nearby at a keyboard, cranking out more every day.That’s not the right phrase, though. Even if he were in fact profoundly lazy, as Ebb insisted and Kander does not deny, composing is hardly drudgery for him. It’s more of a geological process, water rising from an aquifer, desperate to be tapped. If he doesn’t let the music out through his hands — or block it by listening to somebody else’s — it might drown him.Which means he is always listening: Music plays in his head, he said, “like a radio you can’t turn off.” It began, he believes, some 35,000 John Kander Days ago, when, as a baby in Kansas City, Mo., he contracted tuberculosis. Isolated on a sleeping porch and able to sense his family only when they approached the screen door, he learned to associate the sound of footsteps coming toward him with the imminence of loved ones. “I think I began to organize sound in my head then, out of necessity.”FOOTSTEPS GO BOTH WAYS though. If, as he said, a “residue of loneliness” remains from that experience, it’s a loneliness for which “the most fortunate antidote” has been companionship and collaboration. Though many people assumed that Kander and Ebb were a couple — their 45-year partnership was more intense and monogamous than many marriages — the men were not socially close. But he and Stephenson, a dancer in Kander and Ebb’s “The Act,” have been together since 1977, married since 2008. Some of Kander’s loveliest songs were written not for any show but for him.As for collaboration, it’s no accident that Kander surrounds himself with a rotating roster of familiar names. “Next to the greatest sex you can imagine, making art with your friends is as good as it gets,” he said. He’s worked with Stroman six times, Thompson eight times and Washington, a featured performer in “The Scottsboro Boys,” twice. Half the music team are old Kander hands too, making the March 14 sitzprobe — the first rehearsal with the cast and the orchestra — a reunion and, as it happened, a party. You haven’t really heard “Happy Birthday” until a Broadway chorus of 37, accompanied by 19 crack musicians, sings it in a crowded, reverberant room.“There are a lot of really gorgeous places to be on this earth,” Kander told them, “but none as gorgeous as this.”Kander in his apartment with a 1963 painting by Camille Norman. The painting, depicting a scene from “Cabaret,” was given to him as a gift on the show’s opening night in 1966.Photograph by Vincent Tullo for The New York Times; painting by Camille NormanThat a love parade attends him wherever he goes — I’m part of it, having worked for him 40 years ago, sleuthing for a lost score — doesn’t mean he’s a pushover. At the sitzprobe he spoke rarely but made his points. Wanting a song called “A Simple Thing Like That” to be “less waltzy,” he suggested removing the triangle from the downbeats. For “Light,” one of the new Kander-Miranda songs, painting in ethereal music a portrait of Manhattanhenge, he asked for a more unpredictable spacing of the dissonant chords that bring it to such a startling close. And “Gold,” a flamboyant conga sequence, needed more schmaltz. “Lower your standards,” he instructed the orchestra.As that sampling of song types attests, “New York, New York” tells many stories, about people from many backgrounds. The main one is the troubled romance between a Black singer (Anna Uzele) and an Irish musician (Colton Ryan). Secondary ones concern a Polish refugee and his violin teacher; a Cuban drummer and his mother; and a Black trumpet-playing GI. Most have come to New York after World War II to make art or save their souls — or both at once. As a new song called “Major Chord” puts it, they seek the trifecta of “music, money, love.”“Maybe you get one, maybe you get two,” Stroman said. “But it’s hard to get three.”Still, Kander adds, summing up the theme, “New York is where you have the best chance of being who you see yourself as.”He would know, having come here for just that reason, in 1951, after college and military service. The banners welcoming his transport ship from the Pacific — “Welcome Home! Well Done!” — immediately made sense: This was where he was meant to be.The “well done” part he does not take as seriously; his service was mostly spent playing piano for officers and at one point running $400,000 worth of Canadian Club whisky to Manila — along with 11 cows.Yet “well done” surely applies to him now. “He lives his life correctly,” Stroman observed. Perhaps that’s why no one speaks invidiously of him, even though few major chords are as undiminished as his. Music, he has abundantly; money, in spades — “Chicago” alone, the longest-running American musical ever on Broadway, has grossed more than $1.6 billion worldwide. And love, absolutely, even if it had to wait until his 50s. “Happiness is one of the last things you learn, if you ever do,” he said.Joel Grey, center, atop a platform, as the master of ceremonies of the Kit Kat Club in the original Broadway production of “Cabaret.”PhotofestChita Rivera as the film star Aurora in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” which debuted on Broadway in 1993.Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle, via Getty ImagesCharlotte D’Amboise as Roxie Hart in the Broadway revival of “Chicago,” which has been running since 1996.THAT HE IS ADORED by younger colleagues is partly because he serves as a beacon of the possibility of lifelong growth. (Taking them to lunch when they are barely known, as he took Miranda, doesn’t hurt either.) Stroman marvels at the muscle of his musical storytelling, built up by decades of doing it. “If I say to him ‘I imagine a girl walking down the beach and she meets the love of her life,’” she said, “he can leap up to the piano and that is exactly the story you hear in his melody.”But for Kander, aging as an artist is less about the expansion than the concentration of skill. “By the time Verdi wrote ‘Falstaff,’ when he was almost 80,” he said, “he had learned to do in 16 measures what in ‘Nabucco’” — 50 years earlier — “would have taken him a big aria and a cabaletta and all that. There’s nothing wasted, no decoration, just the thing itself. I’m not lucky enough to have had that experience a lot, but I recognize it when I see it and it almost makes me laugh.”There’s that modesty again, reflexive but also pragmatic. Stroman summarizes the two biggest things she’s learned about collaboration from Kander as “no bad ideas” — which actually means plenty of them, freely offered and freely rejected — and “leave egos at the door.” Kander wants his drama onstage only.“What we do is a craft,” he insisted. “I mean you can have a great inner talent, and a lot of people do, but without craft it’s very hard for the talent to emerge. Also the reverse is true. You may not feel particularly inspired by a commitment you’ve made, or a moment you’re supposed to create, but you still have to write those 12 bars to cover someone crossing the stage.”Even worse, you might have to write a second version of “New York, New York.” When De Niro complained that the first was too “light,” Kander and Ebb, in a snit, tossed off the famous one in 45 minutes. “Which does the job and audiences like it and De Niro was right and it’s a great piece of luck,” Kander said ruefully. “But I just don’t get it.”At the sitzprobe, they got it. When the brass and saxes swung in big at the top of the tune, the cast reared back, as if hit by a tornado. Tears of something like joy flew from their eyes, if not from Kander’s. When I later forced him to name some songs he’s actually proud of, he admitted only to ballads, not Ebb’s beloved “screamers.” “I Miss the Music” from “Curtains.” “I Don’t Care Much,” written as a dinner boast between coffee and dessert. And a new one, set in the Whispering Gallery at Grand Central Station, perhaps inevitably called “Can You Hear Me?”Off the top of my head, I could name 30 others he ought to include.“I appreciate that, but it’s independent of me. My fingers find something, as if they have little brains of their own. The keyboard is my friend, since I was 4. Being an artist is much more like being a carpenter than like being God: Something will happen. Or you tear it up. And start again.”A horse can’t do any better. More

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      Polito Vega, Salsa ‘King’ of New York Radio, Dies at 84

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      In a career that began in 1960, the Puerto Rico-born Mr. Vega became, one admirer said, “the architect of Hispanic radio at a global level.”Polito Vega, an exuberant announcer with a booming bass voice and a finely attuned ear whose Spanish-language shows popularized salsa music in New York in the mid-1960s, died on March 9 in North Bergen, N.J. He was 84.His death was announced by his family. No cause was given.After abandoning his dreams of becoming a singer, Mr. Vega began his broadcasting career in 1960, shortly after transplanting himself from Puerto Rico to New York. He quickly distinguished himself on air with his signature voice, his perky epigrams like “Andando, andando, andando” (“Keep going”) and his adventurous playlists. He also distinguished himself in person, at concerts and dances, with his ubiquitous Yankees cap, starched white guayabera shirt, white goatee and fuzzy sideburns.The disc jockey and recording artist Alex Sensation described Mr. Vega on Instagram as “the architect of Hispanic radio at a global level.”In an obituary in Billboard magazine, Leila Cobo, the author of “Decoding ‘Despacito’: An Oral History of Latin Music” (2020), wrote: “Vega’s importance to Latin music cannot be overstated. He was the most influential tastemaker in the country’s top market, dating back to when tropical music first became popular in the city in the 1960s and 1970s and stretching all the way to the 21st century.”He was heard on two New York AM stations, first WEVD and then WBNX, and finally on WSKQ (Mega 97.9 FM) — which began broadcasting as a full-time Spanish-language format in 1989 and has often been rated No. 1 in that market. He also became the station’s program director.When Mr. Vega began broadcasting, he recalled, he was struck by the disconnect between the comparatively temperate bolero music that dominated Latin broadcasting and the feverish salsa he was encountering in nightclubs. He was among the first radio personalities to recognize the market for salsa, identifying promising talent and mentoring gifted musicians.“It was two different worlds in those early days,” Mr. Vega said told The New York Times in 2009. “At the dance halls and up in the Catskills you would hear the Tito Puente and Machito orchestras tearing things up, but on the radio the kind of thing you heard was romantic trios, unless you were tuning in to Symphony Sid” — the prominent jazz D.J. who began playing Afro-Cuban music in the 1960s — “late at night.”The trombonist Willie Colón, who became one of salsa’s biggest stars, recalled that the first time he heard Yomo Toro, the maestro of the 10-string guitar known as the cuatro, with whom he would later collaborate on several recordings, “was on Polito’s show, playing along with listeners who would call in and sing over the telephone.”In the late 1960s, Mr. Colón got a break when he was invited to appear on “Club de la Juventud,” an “American Bandstand”-inspired TV show that Mr. Vega hosted on the Telemundo network from 1967 to 1970.Among the other musicians whose careers Mr. Vega helped promote were Celia Cruz, Tito Puente and Ismael Miranda.Mr. Vega in a photo-booth picture taken in 1957, shortly after he arrived in New York.Tim Knox for The New York TimesHipólito Vega Torres was born on Aug. 3, 1938, in Ponce, on the southern coast of Puerto Rico. His father was a bus driver, and the young Hipólito sold newspapers on the beach to supplement his family’s income.He began calling himself Polito as a teenager after winning an amateur singing competition, only to be told by the contest’s master of ceremonies that he would never become a celebrity with a name like Hipólito.In 1957 he moved to New York City, where he lived with an uncle near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and worked as a shipping clerk while trying to get a break in the music business.“I came to New York as a skinny little kid with a wisp of a mustache, hoping to make it as a singer,” he said in 2009.Johnny Pacheco, the Dominican-born flutist, bandleader, songwriter and producer, knew Mr. Vega in those days. “Even before Polito got a job, he was already an announcer,” Mr. Pacheco, who died in 2021, told The Times. “He used to go to a barbershop owned by a compadre of mine, and I remember how he was always joking and kidding around there, imitating announcers and singers and talking as if he were already on the air.”One night in 1960 he was helping a friend who was hosting “Fiesta Time,” a half-hour show on WEVD; as his friend’s sidekick, he read listeners’ names and record requests on the air. The station’s owner heard his voice and hired him as an announcer.“Radio fever got into my head,” Mr. Vega recalled.When WEVD expanded to 24-hour programming not long after that, he was offered the midnight-to-6 a.m. slot.“The show,” he later said, “was so successful and I felt that liberty to express myself that I’ve maintained to this day.”Mr. Pacheco, who co-founded Fania Records in 1964 as New York was supplanting Cuba as a center for emerging Latin music, described Mr. Vega in 2009 as “part of the whole salsa movement, one of its pillars.”“As we were building the company,” he added, “he was there with us. I’d bring him the LPs, he’d listen and say, ‘I like this song, I’m going to push it,’ and he’d play the hell out of it.”Mr. Vega later moved to WBNX, where he became known as “El Rey de la Radio” — the King of Radio — and where he met Raúl Alarcón, the senior program director. Mr. Alarcón went on to become head of the Spanish Broadcasting System, where Mr. Vega was for many years executive vice president in charge of programming.In 2009, Mr. Vega was honored at two all-star 50th-anniversary concerts at Madison Square Garden. Three years later he was celebrated at Citi Field in Queens by a lineup that included Gloria Estefan and Daddy Yankee.Mr. Vega’s wife, Judith, died last year. His survivors include two sons and a daughter. Two other sons died before him.In a statement, his family asked that his fans not mourn but “celebrate his legacy,” adding: “Polito continues to live in the music that he loved and shared, as well as the impact he left in the Latin community. Polito lived happiness, smiles and love. We would like for all his fans to live life to the fullest, as he did.” More