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    Is TikTok Over?

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    The app once offered seemingly endless chances to be charmed by music, dances, personalities and products. But in only a few short years, its promise of kismet is evaporating.How much time do I spend on TikTok? I can tell you which chiropractor is demonstrating their technique without even seeing their face. I know which fashion content creator is partial to Rei Kawakubo, and who has a preposterous Carol Christian Poell collection. I know which New York City microinfluencers go on vacation together, and which creators are building a modest following joking about the music of a small scene of rappers who make Playboi Carti sound like Kendrick Lamar.Through endless hours of scrolling — an hour a day, at least, for several years now — I’ve been accumulating hyperniche expertise predicated on my interests, conscious and subconscious. The result has been a gathering of online characters that, at this point, shape my cultural consumption far more than any celebrity or news source.This is what TikTok intends to do, tapping into pure id, drilling down on what you know and what you might want to know in hopes that you never leave the app’s forever scroll. Of all the social media platforms, it holds the greatest promise of kismet. It’s the one that has seemed most in tune with individual taste and most capable of shaping emerging monoculture.But increasingly in recent months, scrolling the feed has come to resemble fumbling in the junk drawer: navigating a collection of abandoned desires, who-put-that-here fluff and things that take up awkward space in a way that blocks access to what you’re actually looking for.This has happened before, of course — the moment when Twitter turned from good-faith salon to sinister outrage derby, or when Instagram, and its army of influencers, learned to homogenize joy and beauty. (Some apps, like the TikTok precursor Vine, were shuttered before ever becoming truly tiresome.) Similarly, the malaise that has begun to suffuse TikTok feels systemic, market-driven and also potentially existential, suggesting the end of a flourishing era and the precipice of a wasteland period.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Cisco Swank Puts His Spin on Jazz-Rap on ‘More Better’

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      The 23-year-old pianist, drummer and rapper puts a pandemic-era spin on jazz-rap on his debut, “More Better,” and he always keeps the faith.At a recent Sunday afternoon performance in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood, the pianist Francisco Haye sat behind a piano at Emmanuel Baptist Church, leading his quintet through a number of recognizable jazz standards. Yet they weren’t straight-ahead: Songs like “All the Things You Are,” “Little Sunflower” and “My Favorite Things” each had wrinkles — a bouncy backbeat or a near-frenetic breakdown — that made them feel fresh.It was the kind of set that might rankle those who prefer to hear Ella Fitzgerald, Freddie Hubbard and John Coltrane without frills, yet these listeners — made up of elders who have known Haye since he was a child growing up in the congregation there — seemed to embrace what he was trying to do.The goal, he told them, was to take “cliché jazz tunes and not make them boring.”Haye’s artistry is informed by artists like Robert Glasper and Roy Hargrove, both classically trained jazz musicians who have blended the genre with hip-hop, R&B and rock, aligning the music with alternative rap and the neo-soul movement that emerged in the late 1990s. Haye, performing under the name Cisco Swank, plays melodic piano chords over lush soul and trap-inspired drums and raps in a manner that recalls the weary lethargy of Mike and Earl Sweatshirt, but with the polish of a Village Vanguard headliner.Jazz-rap hybrids aren’t new, of course, but Haye, 23, without pandering to any audience, is tapping into a subset who dig lo-fi underground rap.Haye’s earliest musical memories involve playing drums and piano at the church, when he was only 3 or 4 years old. Lindsay Perryman for The New York Times“He’s sitting right in the center of a lot of points,” said the noted trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire in a telephone interview. “And it doesn’t seem like he’s trying to. It’s just who he is. He is Black music. All of it. It’s in every note.”Haye runs through the tapestry of jazz, R&B and rap on his recently released debut album, “More Better,” which at times ruminates on the pandemic but without wallowing in despair.“Teary-eyed still thinkin’ ’bout 2020/Quarantined, bro, the streets eerie,” he raps on “If You’re Out There.” “City full of dreams, concrete, but I see it when I look in the sky.” On “What Came From Above,” over a melancholic piano loop and stuttering electronic drums, Haye admits he is “renewed” back at home with his family. (He returned to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, from the Berklee College of Music, where he studied piano performance and contemporary writing and production when the pandemic took hold.) On “Over Now,” he laments the end of a romantic relationship with keen self-awareness. “I try to smile through it,” Haye raps with an exhausted tone. “I don’t really like fast moving/I try not to commit, bro, I’m last to it.” Even the LP’s title — thought of randomly during a rehearsal — is meant to convey perseverance in dark times.Haye, tall and skinny with long dreads and a boyish charm, peppers his conversation with affirmations like “facts” and “fire,” and speaks easily and expertly about a wide range of musicians — Beethoven and Bach, Kirk Franklin and Richard Smallwood. While growing up in Flatbush, he was exposed to all of this music by his mother, Adriane, who directed the youth choir at Emmanuel, and his father, Frank, who was the director of music there.Haye’s earliest musical memories involve playing drums and piano at the church, when he was only 3 or 4 years old. Seeing his father in action in front of large congregations sparked a real interest in music. “I feel like it played an important role in how I see people present music and how you interact with people,” he said during a lunch interview. “The whole idea of just music being more than just notes and harmony. It’s serving a bigger purpose, whether it’s bringing someone out of a wack week or bringing them closer to God.”Music can serve “a bigger purpose,” Haye said, “whether it’s bringing someone out of a wack week or bringing them closer to God.”Lindsay Perryman for The New York TimesAt home, he said, there were “mad musical instruments everywhere,” which made being an artist seem like the coolest job ever. He absorbed Baroque music, Stevie Wonder and other Motown soul, as well as old-school rap. (His mother grew up in the Bronx at the beginning of hip-hop culture and used to rhyme under the name Micki Dee.)Haye started thinking about blending genres during his freshman year at LaGuardia High School: His favorite rapper, Kendrick Lamar, merged rap and psychedelic jazz on his 2015 album “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and Glasper’s song “Portrait of an Angel” doubled as his alarm clock. “That really was the point where I was like, ‘I’m trying to do something very much like this,’” Haye said.He formed a jazz fusion band and started playing around the city. He began rapping as a student at Berklee, tinkering with the conversational cadences heard on “More Better” while releasing music on SoundCloud. “I was like, ‘Oh, maybe we should just play this song with the band but put a trap groove over it,’” Haye recalled. “Slowly, it just started merging into what it is today.”He met the Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Luke Titus over social media at the start of lockdown in 2020 and started sharing audio files with him, which led to the collaborative album “Some Things Take Time,” released two years later. “The narrative was definitely about being patient during a time with so much uncertainty,” Titus said over the phone. “It was about not forcing things and allowing things to come when they come.” Those themes are also relayed on “More Better” in Haye’s singular voice.“He draws from so much influence of being from New York,” Titus added, pointing to the city’s renowned jazz and rap scenes. “He might have all these jazz chops, but he’ll pick the simple melody and play what needs to be there in a very lyrical way.” He added, “He’s one of those rare guys who doesn’t overthink things too much.”Haye noted that while his album was born of the pandemic, it’s rooted in a sense of uplift rather than resignation. “It’s just like seeing the clouds in the distance, like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “It’s being able to say, ‘Oh, I can make it as long as I have faith.’ Even if it’s not a spiritual faith, if it’s just faith that things will get better, it will work out.” More

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      What to See, Eat and Do in San Francisco

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      The city’s neighborhoods, from the Mission to Russian Hill and the Outer Sunset, are vibrant with packed restaurants and bars, and many are home to new parks and the return of in-person events.Lately, it seems like the news headlines from San Francisco have been negative, from the city’s homelessness crisis and highly publicized recall elections to the area’s astronomical cost-of-living and worsening fire seasons.But San Francisco is still San Francisco. The fog still rolls in from the Pacific to blanket the city’s jumbled hills, the sunset still flames crimson behind the Golden Gate Bridge and the smell of salt and eucalyptus still hits the moment you step outside of San Francisco International Airport. Always a city for lovers of the outdoors, pandemic restrictions led to the near-universal embrace of an indoor-outdoor city life. And at its core, the city’s spirit, a heady brew of creativity, progressivism and experimentation, remains unbreakable.San Francisco’s pandemic recovery has been slower than other major metropolitan areas in the United States; according to data from the San Francisco Travel Association, forecasts for 2022 estimate 80 percent of 2019’s visitor volume. While the Downtown and Union Square neighborhoods remain quieter than prepandemic times, the city’s singular neighborhoods, from the Mission to Russian Hill and the Outer Sunset, are vibrant with packed restaurants and bars, and many boast of new parks and in-person events. San Francisco no longer imposes a mask mandate, but some businesses will require or request masks; masks are recommended but not required on MUNI and BART, the city’s public transportation systems. Many indoor events, including concerts and theater productions, require proof of vaccination to enter.San Francisco has become more walkable and bikeable with the Slow Streets program, which limits or prohibits car traffic on streets and includes the Great Highway alongside Ocean Beach.Jason Henry for The New York TimesNew parks and slow streetsSan Francisco’s wealth of green spaces has increased thanks to a trio of new parks, including the Presidio Tunnel Tops, 14 acres of new national park land hugging the city’s north coast that opened this month. Boasting panoramic views of the Bay, the park was designed by the same group behind New York’s High Line and is home to a changing roster of food trucks, art installations and performances. For more views, check out Francisco Park in the city’s Russian Hill neighborhood, which opened in April on the site of San Francisco’s first reservoir. In the southeastern Mission Bay neighborhood, largely protected from the city’s frequent westerly winds, Crane Cove Park has become a warm, sunny destination for stand-up paddle-boarding, kayaking and lounging since it opened in 2020.Always a home for lovers of the outdoors, San Francisco during the pandemic saw a near-universal embrace of an indoor-outdoor city life. Francisco Park in the city’s Russian Hill neighborhood opened in April.Jason Henry for The New York TimesIn addition to new parks, San Francisco has become more walkable and bikeable with the pandemic-driven development of the Slow Streets program, which limits or prohibits car traffic on streets throughout the city. Destination-worthy ones include the Great Highway, which runs alongside Ocean Beach on the city’s western shore (it’s currently closed to car traffic on weekends and often, on windy days) and JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park, which could be made permanently car-free in November. The one-and-a-half-mile stretch of JFK takes you past destinations like the Conservatory of Flowers and the Rose Garden, plus the Skatin’ Place, where you’ll often find a rocking roller disco.A return to in-person music eventsGolden Gate Park is also playing host to a number of major in-person events this year, including Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a free, three-day music festival being held Sept. 30 to Oct. 2. This year’s lineup will feature Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and Buddy Miller, with more artists to be announced next week. The Outside Lands Music Festival is taking place Aug. 5 to 7 with artists including Green Day, Post Malone and Lil Uzi Vert (single-day tickets from $195; three-day passes from $409). Find even more music in the Sunset District at the Stern Grove Festival, now in its 85th year. The series of free weekly concerts, happening on Sundays through Aug. 14, has acts ranging from the San Francisco Symphony to Phil Lesh.The Portola Music Festival (single-day tickets from $200, two-day passes from $400), a new music festival is coming to San Francisco from the team behind Coachella, takes place on Sept. 24 to 25 at Pier 80, and will showcase electronic acts including Flume, James Blake, The Avalanches and M.I.A.Jonathan Carver Moore, director of donor relations, partnerships and programming, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, which will opens this fall.Jason Henry for The New York TimesA new destination for contemporary artWith its opening in October, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco aims to provide a fresh approach to the ways in which contemporary art should be showcased and shared. Tied to its core tenets of equity and accessibility, ICASF will have free admission and plans to showcase local artists and artists of color in an environment that is welcoming to all. Opening programming includes a solo exhibition from Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee painter and sculptor, a group exhibit curated by Tahirah Rasheed and Autumn Breon, Oakland-based members of the collective See Black Womxn, and work from the local artists Liz Hernández and Ryan Whelan.Sharing plates at Shuggie’s, a pop-art explosion which features “trash pizza” made from repurposed food waste.Jason Henry for The New York TimesEat and drinkSan Francisco’s restaurants have struggled from pandemic restrictions, but also the high operational costs and high costs of living limiting the workforce. Many storefronts remain empty, and a number of legacy businesses closed, including Alioto’s, an Italian seafood restaurant that held court in Fisherman’s Wharf for 97 years, and the Cliff House, an iconic destination hugging the jagged shoreline over the Pacific (a new restaurant may open there by the end of the year).While undoubtedly challenging, the past two years have had a silver lining: Outdoor dining and drinking cropped up everywhere, from long-established restaurants like Nopa to brand-new spots like Casements, a modern Irish bar in the Mission that opened in January 2020. The bar had originally planned to be a cozy, indoor-only affair, but instead it now serves stellar cocktails (from $12) on one of the best patios in the city, complete with an outdoor semi-private space, live music, D.J.s and colorful murals of Irish rock musicians including Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries and Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy.San Ho Won is a Korean barbecue spot with classic dishes and riffs on tradition.Jason Henry for The New York TimesWhile marquee openings are still a major part of the city’s food fabric — recent ones include the opulent Palm Court Restaurant in the new RH Gallery and a new Ghirardelli Chocolate Experience store — some of the most exciting developments center on low-key projects from high-end chefs. In the Mission, Corey Lee of three Michelin-starred Benu opened San Ho Won, a Korean barbecue spot with classic dishes and riffs on tradition, like a blood-sausage pancake and kimchi pozole (starters from $16, barbecue from $26). Matthew Kirk, a sous chef from Lazy Bear, opened Automat, a day-and-night destination in the Western Addition for baked goods, breakfast sandwiches and burgers (sandwiches from $9 to $16).Natural wine is nothing new in San Francisco, but low-intervention bottles — small-batch, often funky wines made utilizing organic ingredients, native yeast and usually, little to no sulfites — are dominating new restaurants and bars. Shuggie’s, a pop-art explosion with a lively bottle list from the West Coast and beyond, features two-dollar wine shots and a “trash pizza” made from repurposed food waste (wines from $15 for a glass or $51 for a bottle; pizzas from $19). Palm City Wines opened in the Outer Sunset in spring of 2020 as a takeaway-only natural wine bottle shop and deli; now, it also serves small plates, wines by the glass, Northern California beers and forearm-sized hoagies (starters from $8, sandwiches from $19). Upping the ante is Bar Part Time in the Mission, a natural wine-fueled disco with a rotating roster of D.J.s and wine producers.1 Hotel opened in San Francisco in June on the Embarcadero near the Ferry Building. The space features reclaimed wood and native greenery.Jason Henry for The New York TimesWhere to stay1 Hotel opened in San Francisco in June on the Embarcadero near the Ferry Building. The striking space features reclaimed wood and native greenery, recyclable key cards and hangers in the 186 guest rooms and 14 suites (from $500 per night), plus a rooftop spa, chef’s garden and beehives. Terrene, the hotel’s restaurant, features a farm-to-table inspired menu and a wide selection of mezcal and tequila.With 299 rooms and a rooftop lounge, LUMA is the first hotel development in the Mission Bay neighborhood. Jason Henry for The New York TimesLUMA, which also opened in June, is the first hotel development in the Mission Bay neighborhood. With 299 rooms (from $329 per night) and a rooftop lounge opening later this summer, the hotel is close to Oracle Park and the Chase Center. And on June 30, the longstanding Sir Francis Drake Hotel in Union Square reopened as Beacon Grand with 418 renovated guest rooms (from $249 per night), a lobby bar and in 2023, will reopen a redesign of the famed top-floor bar, the Starlite Room.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More

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      At the Met This Season, Opera Was Icing on the Cake

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      Amid a labor battle, the continuing pandemic and war in Ukraine, it often felt as though the real drama was in simply putting on a show.Has there ever been a Metropolitan Opera season like the one that just ended? In which the stuff onstage — the homicidal brides, mystical pharaohs and longing stepsons — felt so anticlimactic? Over the past eight months, amid a labor battle, a pandemic that surged again and again, and a war, it was as if the real drama was in simply getting the doors open. Once that was achieved, what followed was almost beside the point.Or, to put it more accurately, what followed was like icing on the cake. Rarely has it felt so sweet to be inside the gilded Met, has opera seemed — whatever you thought of a given work, singer or production — so much a gift. A groundswell of gratitude was palpable throughout the season, which finished on Saturday evening with Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”You felt it in the explosive ovation that greeted a virtuosic step-dance sequence in Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the season as a double milestone: the first production since the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, and the first work at the Met by a Black composer since its founding in 1883.You felt it in the cheers for Lise Davidsen’s vast, star-making Ariadne; Nadine Sierra’s sensual Lucia di Lammermoor; Matthew Polenzani’s earnestly agonized Don Carlos; Allan Clayton’s quivering Hamlet; and the chorus’s shimmering “Prayer for Ukraine” at a benefit concert in March.The soprano Lise Davidsen in the title role of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”Marty Sohl/Met OperaYou felt it in the roaring curtain calls at the revival of “Akhnaten,” which proved once again that Philip Glass’s idiom has been welcomed by the Met audience as wholeheartedly as those of Mozart or Puccini.Around this time a year ago, it seemed like the great battle would be returning after a canceled 2020-21 season. Bad blood was in the air: The Met’s unions were furious at the company’s general manager, Peter Gelb, for his insistence that unpaid furloughs were the only way it could survive the long lockdown. The situation grew so bitter that it seemed possible a strike or lockout would keep the Met closed past the planned opening night.But the promise of coming back after 18 months proved too strong to resist, and the unions and management came — warily — to terms. No one who was at the outdoor performances of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony over Labor Day weekend, or, especially, at the return indoors for Verdi’s Requiem on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, will forget the relief and joy of the Met once again making live music at Lincoln Center.The Met returned to indoor performance with a concert of Verdi’s Requiem for the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.Richard Termine/Met OperaThe opening months of the season had an air of triumph. There was the sold-out success of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”; a series of ambitious revivals, including the Met’s first performances of the brooding original version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” and Wagner’s six-hour “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” the longest opera in its repertory; and Matthew Aucoin’s recent “Eurydice,” in which a sprawling orchestra thrashed Sarah Ruhl’s winsome version of the Orpheus myth.Then the rise of the Omicron variant in late fall began to claim performances, festivals and concerts. The Vienna State Opera was closed for almost a week. But the Met buckled down, strengthening its already stringent health protocols and dipping into a broad pool of covers to fill in for sick artists. With luck on its side, it stayed open through the winter — and into yet another rise in cases this spring.Broadway shows kept canceling at the last minute or closing entirely, but the Met, America’s largest performing arts institution, never did. That will be Gelb’s legacy from this troubled period, along with the landmark “Fire” and the unrelenting position he took after the invasion of Ukraine, when he declared that the Met would sever ties with artists who supported President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. That ultimatum had one singer in mind: the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, the company’s leading diva, who criticized the war but remained silent about Putin. In a coup, Gelb replaced her as Puccini’s Turandot with the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, who drove the audience wild when she wrapped herself in a Ukrainian flag to take her bow.The Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska wrapped herself in her country’s flag to take her bow after “Turandot.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesGelb’s Netrebko decision wasn’t universally praised, and other major opera houses now seem to be inclined to welcome her back, classifying her as merely a prominent Russian, not a hardcore Putinist. But within the Met, the moral clarity of the war proved a unifying force: At the benefit concert for Ukraine, some players in the orchestra even applauded Gelb, their nemesis during the grueling furlough, as he declared from the stage that they were “soldiers of music.”Somewhere in the midst of politics and the virus was opera. Under the focused baton of Sebastian Weigle, “Boris Godunov” was memorably grim in the concentrated form Mussorgsky gave it before a hodgepodge of revisions; “Meistersinger,” expansive enough that it really does seem to convey a whole world, was relaxed and sunny, and gently comic as led by Antonio Pappano.Simon Stone’s technically savvy staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia,” set amid the malaise of a contemporary postindustrial American town, didn’t translate its bold concept into a convincing portrayal of its pathetically suffering title character. The Met’s de facto house director these days, David McVicar, offered a grayly old-fashioned production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.”Simon Stone’s new staging of “Lucia di Lammermoor” had a bold concept but little grasp of its title character.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavidsen, in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” a mythic creation of flooding tone, also lavished her soaring soprano on Eva in “Meistersinger” and Chrysothemis in Strauss’s “Elektra,” her voice almost palpable against your skin. The mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard brought silvery elegance to Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” and the Composer in “Ariadne.”There were sympathetic soprano star turns from Ailyn Pérez as a fiery soloist in the Sept. 11 Requiem and a girlish Tatiana in “Eugene Onegin,” Eleonora Buratto as a reserved Madama Butterfly and Elena Stikhina as a kindly Tosca — as well as from Sonya Yoncheva, in a solo recital of shadowy sensitivity.While Blanchard’s score moved comfortably between bars, college parties and fraught, tender nocturnes, “Fire” was fairly turgid as drama, its individual sequences clear but the broader conflicts driving its characters obscure. (It was telling that the most dazzling sequences in this opera were Camille A. Brown’s dances.)Perhaps most remarkable about the offerings this season were the three — count ’em — works from the past five years: “Fire,” “Eurydice” and Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” which set to seething music Matthew Jocelyn’s moodily distilled version of Shakespeare. The Met has not had so many recent operas on a single year’s lineup since the early 1930s, even if that number is notable only in the context of the stubbornly backward-looking world of opera.Not long ago, the idea of three contemporary operas in a Met season would have been preposterous. This was largely because the company’s longtime music director, James Levine — while he expanded the repertory significantly and presided over a handful of premieres — didn’t prioritize newer work.Among the Met’s contemporary offerings this season was “Hamlet,” featuring, from left at front, Allan Clayton in the title role and Brenda Rae as Ophelia.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut his successor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, agrees with Gelb that contemporary operas are crucial, both artistically and for expanding the company’s audience. And Nézet-Séguin is putting his money where his mouth is: He conducted both “Fire” and “Eurydice,” and leads Kevin Puts’s “The Hours” in the fall and Blanchard’s “Champion” next spring. (The early months of this season, though, were an exhausting workload when coupled with his duties as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra: He dropped out of a run of “Le Nozze di Figaro” to take a four-week sabbatical around the new year.)The continuing transition out of the Levine era has been obvious not just in the repertory, but also in the orchestra’s sound — which was noticeably lighter and lither in three works closely associated with Levine: “Meistersinger”; Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” led by Susanna Mälkki; and “Don Carlos,” which Nézet-Séguin brought to the Met for the first time in its original French.This change is for better and worse. The ensemble played these pieces with brisker transparency and perhaps more varied colors; Nézet-Séguin’s textures in “Don Carlos,” airier than Levine’s, felt of a piece with the elegant nasality of French. In “Hamlet,” conducted by Nicholas Carter, the orchestra was ferocious. But a certain grandeur is now missing, more often than not: the weight of Levine’s “Meistersinger” prelude, for one thing, and the gleefully straight-faced bombast of Baba the Turk’s entrance in his performances of “The Rake’s Progress.”Even a frequent operagoer or critic can’t see everything or everyone. I missed a new, family-friendly abridgment of Massenet’s fairy-dust “Cendrillon.” And after opening a new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” on New Year’s Eve, the baritone Quinn Kelsey — acclaimed in the title role — came down with Covid-19 and missed a few performances, including the one I attended. But I got to see his credible replacement: the baritone Michael Chioldi, finally getting his first big role at the Met after years as a stalwart of the New York opera scene.That was one of four performances at the opera house that I watched in a single weekend in early January, during the first Omicron wave. Such a marathon was an extraordinary exclamation point on the Met’s achievement in merely keeping the lights on.It wasn’t enough to taste opera after a year-and-a-half fast. I wanted to gorge. More

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      Chekhov Two Ways, With a Robot and Baryshnikov Along for the Ride

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      When the director Igor Golyak began working on a staging of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” he had an idea in mind. “There was a concept,” he said, then interrupted himself. “I’d rather not talk about what it used to be, if that’s OK. The war started, me being from Kyiv and having this affinity for the Russian culture. …”Golyak’s voice trailed off. He was speaking in a coffee shop a block from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, in Midtown Manhattan, where his show, now titled “The Orchard,” is set to begin previews June 7 with a cast headed by the busy stage and screen actress Jessica Hecht as the estate owner Lyubov Ranevskaya. Also onboard is the center’s namesake, Mikhail Baryshnikov, as the old servant Firs.Golyak was born in Kyiv and his family landed in the United States in 1990, part of a wave of Jewish refugees. He finished high school in Boston then studied theater in Moscow — you might say Chekhov is in his bones. But although he felt he had a handle on the Russian writer’s work, the war in Ukraine made him reconsider his approach.Mikhail Baryshnikov, center, on the set of “The Orchard,” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “The miracle of Chekhov’s writing is that, no matter where it’s performed, it feels local,” Baryshnikov said.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“How do you do theater and Chekhov when there’s bombings and killings?” he said. “I keep asking ‘How and why and why is it important?’ But not on the theoretical level — on the level that really touches me. For me, every show is very personal. The idea in ‘The Cherry Orchard’ is the loss of a world, loss of connection, loss of each other, loss of this family. It’s a story where a human being is forgotten — Firs is forgotten,” he added. “And right now human being is forgotten.”In the play, a family in financial straits must decide whether it should sell its beloved orchard. In “The Orchard” this will be starkly visualized in a parallel virtual version that complements rather than merely captures the physical one — though streaming viewers get to watch parts of the version being performed live. (Audience members can attend either or both.)The virtual world is a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which the Baryshnikov Arts Center stands in for the orchard. There, the building, now a husk of its former self, is for sale, and virtual audience members can tour it as if they were doing a walk-through of a home on a real estate website.“It’s almost as if you’re inside this building and you find these magical rooms, and in each room, it’s like you’re finding a lost world,” the producer Sara Stackhouse said. “You’re discovering a letter or a memory, then you discover this theater where a play is in progress and you join it.”Jessica Hecht, center, with Nael Nacer during a rehearsal.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThis grounds the show in a historical reality — Baryshnikov portrays the playwright in the digital version, and Hecht pops up as Chekhov’s wife and his mistress — while nodding to our troubled current circumstances.“The miracle of Chekhov’s writing is that, no matter where it’s performed, it feels local to the culture,” Baryshnikov wrote in an email. “How that translates in Igor’s version remains to be seen. Obviously he speaks the language the play was written in, but he’s taking a lot of risks — technical and artistic — and avoiding clichés.”Something that definitely can’t be called a Chekhov cliché is a 12-foot robotic arm, which sits in the middle of the physical stage — it is part of the family and tries to understand humans — and was painstakingly programmed to execute such tasks as serving coffee or sweeping the floor. (The production process has demanded many hours of Zoom calls with a technical team spread all over the world.)The juxtaposition of past and future (typically, Oana Botez’s costumes for the physical version are a hybrid of period and modern), human and robot feels like yet another leap for Golyak’s Arlekin Players Theater, which is based in Needham, Mass., and has been the rare company to use the pandemic as a creative spur.Until then, it had been a bit of a tough slog. As Golyak, now 43, learned the hard way, a young Russia-trained director was not a hot commodity in the American theater scene of the early 2000s.“Nobody wanted me,” he said. “For an immigrant, it’s very difficult: Where do you go? How do you start? I had an accent — and I still do, of course. I would send résumés but nobody would call me back. At some point I decided that I’m going to stop doing theater because it’s just not possible to make a living.” His day jobs included selling ads for the Yellow Pages.Eventually Golyak befriended a small group of other immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who asked him to help them work on scenes, guide them through what worked or not. He requested a nine-month commitment, and they agreed. Arlekin Players Theater emerged from that initiative, in 2009, and the troupe, which then mostly performed in Russian, developed an esprit de corps.From left: Nacer, Elise Kibler, Mark Nelson, Hecht, John McGinty, Juliet Brett and Baryshnikov during a recent rehearsal.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“We are like a family,” said Darya Denisova, 32, an actor with Arlekin and Golyak’s wife. “We celebrate holidays together, we support each other when there are emergencies. Now that there’s this awful war going on between Russia and Ukraine, we are all trying our best to support people in Ukraine. We’re looking for ways to send more money, to support, to organize more and more help.”The company quickly earned plaudits on the community-theater circuit, but it took the pandemic to give the company a decisive push into greater recognition.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Power consolidation. More

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      Melissa Gilbert and Tim Busfield, on Their Upstate Escape

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      The ‘Little House on the Prairie’ star, who has a new memoir out, and her husband, the actor and director, collaborated happily on their Sullivan County retreat. Just don’t ask about the pleather recliner.Almost immediately after Melissa Gilbert and Tim Busfield married in 2013 — the third time for both of them — they swapped the glitter and hustle of Los Angeles for the low-key charms of small-town life in Mr. Busfield’s native Michigan.The experience was a tonic, for sure, but a five-year dose was sufficient. In 2018, Ms. Gilbert, who became a household name at the age of 10 as a star of the long-running series “Little House on the Prairie,” and Mr. Busfield, who is best known for his role on “The West Wing” and his Emmy-winning turn on “Thirtysomething,” relocated to Manhattan’s Upper West Side.Ms. Gilbert, now 58, was quickly cast in “The Dead, 1904,” an immersive theater adaptation of the James Joyce novella. Mr. Busfield, now 64, who is also a director, found work on TV shows like “Law & Order: SVU.”Gainful employment was all well and good, but Mr. Busfield, in particular, felt a lack in the fresh-air department. As Ms. Gilbert writes in her new memoir, “Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered,” “It became important for us to have a place where we could escape.”A Zillow search led them to Highland Lake, N.Y., a dot on the map in Sullivan County.The actor and former child star Melissa Gilbert, and her husband, the actor and director Tim Busfield, bought a house in Sullivan County in 2019. They call it “the cabbage,” an amalgam of “cabin” and “cottage.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMelissa Gilbert, 58, and Tim Busfield, 64Occupations: She is an actor and writer; he is an actor and director.Big leap of faith on the prairie: “This is one of those places that most people would say, ‘Are you nuts?’ if you expressed interest in buying it,” Ms. Gilbert said. “But Tim and I are the best kind of nuts. We’re hopeful visionaries. We knew this house would shelter us well and serve us well.”What the couple found in their price range — a small structure with halfhearted half-timbering, peeling stucco and an interior crammed with the detritus of the previous owner — wasn’t pretty. But despite the mice and the mold and the mildew (and that awful smell), there was potential.The dropped ceiling in the kitchen hid a cathedral ceiling. The loft would prove to be an ideal music room. The living room had pine paneling and a fireplace. And the 14 bosky acres that came with the ramshackle house were ravishing.“As I stared up at one of the rotting deer heads on the wall, a lifetime of therapy kicked in and I thought I could do something here,” Ms. Gilbert writes in “Back to the Prairie.” “I just had to look past the crap.”Ms. Gilbert, a DIY-er of no mean talent, upholstered the sofa and love seat.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe couple closed on the property in January of 2019, dubbed it “the cabbage,” an amalgam of “cabin” and “cottage,” and began mapping out plans for renovation and design.Money was an issue. A can-do spirit was — and is — the currency. “You see that she has overalls on,” Mr. Busfield said with an affectionate look at his wife. “She’ll have a hammer hanging out of one of those pockets in half an hour.”Just one example (or maybe two): After a protracted search, the couple found a sofa that was perfect in every way except color (an unfortunate shade of asphalt gray), so Ms. Gilbert took a chance on some burgundy slipcovers that she found online and then added other fabrics and cushions to create a whole new piece of furniture. She refreshed a love seat in similar fashion, in that case with a burgundy floral pattern and a checkered dust ruffle. For the record, she has also assembled a windmill ceiling fan and a table saw.But the couple called in the pros when necessary — as in the kitchen, where demolition, plumbing and rewiring were involved. They made a virtue out of the tight budget, conjuring a space that looks, delightfully, like a retro diner.The floating shelves were built with recycled bowling-alley wood and painted bright red, a look the couple loved. Ms. Gilbert added interest to the prefab cabinets by decoupaging their sides with recipes from old magazines. A large slice of corrugated tin roofing was sprayed with vinegar to give it a nicely raddled look, then mounted on a wall to hold the couple’s collection of cast-iron cookware. Chrome-and-red-vinyl chairs ring the farm table. Atop the cabinetry are Donald Duck and Olive Oyl figurines, an old set of Lincoln Logs and a vintage Coca-Cola syrup bottle, among other knickknacks.This is the first time, Ms. Gilbert said, that she has decorated a house with full partner participation. Her default in previous houses and previous marriages was “to do everything myself and go, ‘Ta-da! Here it is.’”If you come to visit, it’s likely that your picture will be snapped and added to the photo wall in the living room.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThat didn’t sit well with Mr. Busfield: “I would just go into whatever house we were in and start to do things, and he would go, ‘Wait a minute. Hello, I’m here.’”They were on the same page about the creation and outfitting of what they call the Woodstock bedroom — the house is a 20-minute drive from the site of the legendary 1969 rock concert. A lava lamp sits on a bureau in the corner, and the wall décor includes a 1960s-themed jigsaw puzzle that the couple assembled, sealed and framed, as well as a poster heralding a concert by The Who.“The room was designed with Pete Townshend in mind,” Mr. Busfield said, referring to the group’s co-founder. “We keep hoping he’ll come by one day and hang out.”The couple were also in agreement about a photo wall of family and friends in the living room. “We have a Polaroid camera that we keep here, and when someone comes to visit or stays over, we take pictures and add them to the wall,” Ms. Gilbert said.Seeing eye to eye is so very satisfying. Marital harmony is such a fine thing. So maybe now isn’t the time to bring up the brown-pleather recliner. Mr. Busfield wanted it and got it. Ms. Gilbert was horrified, she said, and didn’t mince words. She told her husband the chair was horrible, that it was “a grandpa chair.” The long and the short of it: She didn’t want the chair in the house.Mr. Busfield bought the recliner. At first, Ms. Gilbert hated it. Then she co-opted it.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesSo guess who won’t budge from the chair now?“I fell in love with it,” Ms. Gilbert said, shamefacedly. “I knit in it. I sleep in it.”“I’ve sat in it maybe twice in the last year and a half,” Mr. Busfield said.Raised beds for an herb-and-vegetable garden and a chicken coop were added during the Covid lockdown in 2020. Seven hens are currently in residence.Last summer, the couple put in new windows and painted the exterior of the house a soft yellow. Shutters were installed earlier this spring, and climbing roses were planted. There are plans for homemade window boxes this summer.A second bathroom would also be nice (although there is a functioning outhouse, and a couple of bathrooms in the RV that the couple bought to billet guests).“In my opinion, a house is never finished,” Ms. Gilbert said. “It’s always a work in progress.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      In Bid to Boost Peacock, Universal Sending 3 Movies Straight to Streaming

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      The move is not only an attempt to attract subscribers but an acknowledgment that releasing some films theatrically has become more of a gamble.Donna Langley, the head of Universal’s Motion Picture Entertainment Group, stepped on the stage at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas last week and reaffirmed her commitment to movie theaters.“Theatrical will always be the cornerstone of our business,” she told the crowd of theater owners gathered for the annual CinemaCon industry convention, adding, “Cheers to that.”It was not just lip service. With more than 25 films set for release in 2022, Universal has at least 10 more than any other major Hollywood studio. It will release a combination of blockbusters (“Jurassic World Dominion”), family fare (“Minions: The Rise of Gru”) and original bets (Jordan Peele’s “Nope” and “Beast,” starring Idris Elba), operating on the premise that a movie’s value begins with its debut in theaters.Yet on Monday, as part of a presentation for advertisers, Kelly Campbell, the president of NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock, will announce that three new movies produced by Universal Pictures will head straight to the streaming service when they debut in 2023.They include a biopic about LeBron James based on his memoir, “Shooting Stars”; a remake of John Woo’s 1989 crime drama “The Killer,” starring Omar Sy; and “Praise This,” a music-competition feature set in the world of youth choir.For Peacock, which last week announced that it ended the first quarter of the year with more than 13 million paid subscribers and 28 million monthly active accounts in the United States, representing a growth of 4 million users, the additional film content is crucial to its strategy. It needs to find a way to compete with the bigger services like Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max, at a time when streaming subscriber numbers seem to be plateauing.Ms. Langley greenlit all three pictures, and had to make the calls to tell the filmmakers about the change in distribution strategy.“I think everybody sort of woke up and smelled the coffee during the pandemic and recognized that not all movies are created equal,” Ms. Langley said in an interview, adding that the filmmakers were still interested in partnering with the studio, even if it meant going straight to Peacock. “It’s a big deal for Peacock to have these movies. They are events for them. And we got yeses, so I think it was a satisfying rationale.”“Theatrical will always be the cornerstone of our business,” Donna Langley, the head of Universal’s Motion Picture Entertainment Group, told theater owners last week.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe three movies also reflect the type of audience Peacock seems to be attracting so far: younger and more diverse than those who gravitate toward the other legacy businesses run by Comcast, Peacock’s parent company.“What you’ll see with these films is that they are broadly appealing, but also track towards that young, diverse audience that represents the streaming audience of today, the generation of consumers who are choosing streaming as their primary source of entertainment,” Ms. Campbell said in an interview.Despite lagging behind some of its streaming competitors, Peacock has experienced success this year. February was a high point, when viewers could see the 2022 Winter Olympics, the Super Bowl, the simultaneous release of the Jennifer Lopez-starring film “Marry Me” in theaters and on the service, and the debut of “Bel-Air,” a dramatic reimagining of the 1990s hit television series “The Prince of Bel-Air” that starred Will Smith. (Season two is in development.)“Retention on our service after airing all of this special content in such a concentrated period of time was well above our expectation,” Brian Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast, said in an earnings call last week. “We have seen a 25 percent increase in hours of engagement year-over-year.”When the pandemic upended the theater business, Universal Pictures experimented with a variety of distribution methods for its movies. There was the purely theatrical like “Fast 9: The Fast Saga,” which earned $173 million when it was released last summer when coronavirus cases were lower. And there was “Sing 2,” which earned over $160 million domestically after being released in December, before going to premium video-on-demand just 17 days after its debut in theaters. The company has also experimented with simultaneous release, debuting “Halloween Kills” and the sequel to “Boss Baby” in theaters and on Peacock during the height of the pandemic. The company will do so again in two weeks with the remake of the Stephen King horror film “Firestarter.”“There’s no one size fits all,” Ms. Langley said. “It really is about looking at the individual movies on the one hand and then also at our growth engine Peacock, and doing what’s best in any given moment, depending on what’s going on in the marketplace. I’m hopeful that this stabilizes over time as the theatrical landscape stabilizes. But until then, we do have this optionality.”Like every other studio executive, Ms. Langley is involved in the complicated calculus of determining what movies fit where in a world where the theatrical box office is down 45 percent from what it was in 2019. It is “a box office that is in decline,” Ms. Langley said, with theatergoing expected to still be down at least 15 percent from its prepandemic level in 2023.In speaking specifically to the three films she chose to put straight on Peacock, she described them as “movies we love that a decade ago would have been no-brainers” to make and release in theaters.But audiences have more choice now about when and where they watch films, and it can be more difficult to convince them that a film is worth seeing in a theater.“We still want to make these movies because we believe in the stories, we believe in the storytellers and we think that these are great pieces of entertainment,” she said. “We have the ability to be able to avail ourselves of our streaming platform. And we think that they are events, actually, to be released into the home, very specifically for the Peacock audience.”Peacock is buying the films from Universal Pictures, a portion of the $3 billion it intends to spend on content in 2022, ramping up to $5 billion in the next couple of years.Ms. Langley says that while 2023 will feature three straight-to-Peacock films, she hopes release seven to 10 films that way in the coming years, films that will all be developed and produced by the same Universal creative team that is behind the “Jurassic Park” and “Fast and Furious” franchises.“Peacock’s future depends on having good content and our future depends on having flexibility in our distribution models,” Ms. Langley said. “So our agendas, ultimately, are aligned. So, yes, there’s debate about any one particular title or something they might want that we can’t deliver or vice versa but that’s the stuff of working inside a big corporation.” More

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      Sarah Silverman on Her Family Show About Divorce and Depression

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      “Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable,” the comic said of “The Bedwetter,” her new musical comedy.When the comedian Sarah Silverman was maybe 8, her father gave her a joke book. This was no childhood compendium of riddles and rhymes. It was a collection of “tasteless” humor, and on the very first page, she recalled, it contained a zinger about Little Red Riding Hood getting it on with the Big Bad Wolf.As a child, Silverman was mystified by these punch lines. As an adult, she said, “I went, oh my God, what is wrong with my father?” And then she wrote the whole bit into “The Bedwetter,” the new Off Broadway musical based on her memoir of the same name. It’s one of many R-rated episodes that were inspired by her beloved dad, who taught her to swear when she was 3, unwittingly setting her on the path to becoming a comic.The family life she has memorialized onstage was short on boundaries and weighted with despair. “The Bedwetter,” which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater, centers on a 10-year-old Silverman, who suffered from the embarrassing condition of the title. It deals frankly with divorce and depression — but it’s a raucous comedy.“Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable, and sad,” she said. “I really hope people bring their kids.”Silverman and cast members in their Times Square rehearsal studio, preparing the show (again) after a two-year pandemic delay.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAn Atlantic Theater Company production originally scheduled for the spring of 2020, the show lost one of its original creators, the musician and Emmy-winning TV and stage composer Adam Schlesinger, who died from complications of the coronavirus on April 1, 2020. His death and the two-year pandemic delay deepened the meaning of the production, its creators said, even as it sharpened the jokes. Seeing the show through became a mission for some of his collaborators.And it arrives as Silverman, 51, has reached an unexpectedly beneficent phase of her career, and a new level of maturity in her personal life. As the cultural lines around “appropriate” humor are repeatedly redrawn, she is one of the few performers who has, seemingly genuinely, all but renounced the early work that put her on the map.For decades a convulsive and taboo-busting top comic, she has transformed into a still bitingly funny and progressive feminist voice who advocates for earnest connection (even with Republicans). With a huge, cross-generational network of comedy friends and a pandemic-era podcast that doles out gentle advice, she’s become an unlikely moral center of the comedy community: a Gen X Mr. Rogers, with a topknot ponytail and a profane streak.“Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of her 2017 Hulu series “I Love You, America.” Erin Simkin/Hulu“She’s able to take audiences into shadowy, tricky places because we all trust her and know she’s a force for good,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of “I Love You, America,” the 2017 Hulu series that showcased her efforts at bridge-building humor. “Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart.”The confluence of darkness, dark humor and love is the key to “The Bedwetter,” which began when Schlesinger, the witty Fountains of Wayne power pop bassist, read Silverman’s 2010 best-selling memoir, and decided that chapter headings like “My Nana Was Great but Now She’s Dead” and “Hymen, Goodbyemen,” were the seeds of great comic songs. Silverman and Schlesinger began working on the project a decade ago, becoming friends in the process. “We started going to this piano bar karaoke every other Friday,” she said, noting that she still can’t strike the standing get-together from her calendar.Some of the reference materials for the show in the rehearsal space.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesPhotographs of Silverman and her family from the ’70s and ’80s.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesShe was speaking over lunch recently at a bustling restaurant near Union Square. She’d arrived on foot and alone, looking not AARP age but like the early ’90s N.Y.U. student she once was, in jeans, a Santana ringer tee and a backpack. (“I always say, you should live well below your means — you don’t need a purse, get a backpack.”) Her conversation was generously detailed and inquisitive; she acted out her stories, but not enough to draw much attention in the room. Almost no personal detail was too embarrassing to share, anyway. “I learned disassociation at a very young age, as a bedwetter who had to go to sleepover camp,” she said.Having known that abject social terror — she wet the bed well into her teens — Silverman leans into compassion. She even had empathy for a guy at Comic-Con who, years back, suddenly punched her in the face while wearing a Hulk fist. “I could tell he just didn’t know what to do with all his feelings.”But she also knows how to cackle her way out of the depths. She mentioned a friend’s death. “Suicide, I think, is sometimes so — ” Silverman began, when she clocked the waitress dropping by our table.“So whimsical!” she concluded, in purposeful earshot. “I don’t know, it’s the one thing you really should put off till tomorrow, every time.”When the pandemic cut off her stand-up tours, she started a weekly podcast, and professed surprise about the number of callers in real need, with problems both personal (depression) and cultural. “Are we Jewish?” asked one woman, befuddled by her family history. “Being Jewish is a state of mind!” Silverman replied. (One of her three sisters is a rabbi, but Silverman herself is not religious.)Silverman in the Times Square rehearsal space. “Sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it was a formative example for me,” the actress Ilana Glazer said of Silverman’s work.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“I thought it would be silly and dumb, and then I’d talk politics,” she said of the podcast. “Then I get people so earnest, and — I’m my mother — I think I can help. But so much of the time I’m talking out of my ass; just the classic someone-who-does-a-lot-of-therapy thinking they’re a therapist.”Still, she added, there “are just things I’ve learned, because I’ve lived a long time, and I’m curious.”HER INFLUENCE IS WIDELY FELT. “I look up to Sarah,” the actress and writer Ilana Glazer (“Broad City”) wrote in an email. “She can hold the nuances of the big picture, socially, historically, personally — and process those complexities spontaneously” in her work. Silverman is not the only comic to reveal her struggles, but she may be the most honest. “The idea of sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it,” Glazer wrote, “was a formative example for me.”Silverman has dipped into dramatic roles (she played a lesbian who died in childbirth on the Showtime series “Masters of Sex”) but mostly has a side career as the funny, smart friend in movies; she’ll next host “Stupid Pet Tricks,” a takeoff on the old Letterman bit, as a variety series for TBS. And after a decade of condo-tower living in Los Angeles, she just bought her first home, to the relief of friends like Chelsea Handler.“I ran over to take a look at it, concerned she bought a one-bedroom bungalow tucked underneath the Griffith Observatory,” Handler, the comedian and author, wrote in an email. “When I saw she had bought herself a big-girl house, I thought, well, there we go, she’s accepted adulthood.” Silverman’s boyfriend of nearly two years, Rory Albanese, the showrunner for Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” has moved in; the first time she’s cohabitated with a partner in over a decade, and the very first time on her own turf.For a musical about a bedwetter, you need a bed. It’s a central piece of the set for the show, which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSilverman, who said she has been on Zoloft since 1994, is open about her mental health. She was clinically depressed as a kid and, back when doctor’s orders were rarely questioned, was prescribed a dosage of Xanax that would hobble a SoundCloud rapper. Also, her first psychiatrist hanged himself. It’s all in the musical, along with her mother’s debilitating depression which, in the show, leaves her largely bed-bound. (But remember, it’s a comedy!)The Covid shutdown and Schlesinger’s death came as the musical’s creators were in New York, ready to start rehearsals for their imminent run. Instead they began gathering on Zoom to check in. Eventually, they brought in as a creative consultant the musician and composer David Yazbek, a Tony winner for best original score for “The Band’s Visit” and a nominee for “Tootsie.”At that point, there was a surreal and palpable sense that someone was missing, Yazbek said. “Being able to laugh was not just sort of healing and important, but actually kind of vital — for us, I’m not even talking about any audiences.”That sentiment did go in the show, buoyed by Silverman’s own experience with loss. Her mother, Beth Ann, who recovered from depression and went on to become a successful theater director in New Hampshire, died in 2015; as did the 30-year-old writer Harris Wittels, who worked on “The Sarah Silverman Program,” her Comedy Central series; and Garry Shandling, the comedian and a mentor, in 2016.That year, Silverman suffered a near miss of her own, when she had a rare case of epiglottitis, a swollen abscess around her windpipe, and was rushed into emergency surgery. After her discharge, in withdrawal from pain meds, “I was chemically suicidal,” she said; she had not been given her anti-depressants during the hospital stay.“It will be familiar to so many people,” Silverman said about how the musical explores the emotions raised by divorce.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesGoing through these traumas and emerging laughing, “I don’t think a lot of people do that with such finesse,” said Anne Kauffman, the director of “The Bedwetter.”IN THEIR TIMES SQUARE rehearsal studio, there were inspo pictures of the Silverman family circa the ’70s and ’80s; Sarah inherited her eyebrows from her dad, Donald, who owned a discount clothing store. The cast, which includes Darren Goldstein and Caissie Levy as the Silvermans and Bebe Neuwirth as Nana, cycled through a kaleidoscope of anger, anxiety and silliness. It was very funny. Ganged up on by some fifth-grade mean girls, who taunt her with “You’re short and dark and strange and ooey,” Zoe Glick, who plays Silverman, is enthusiastically self-deprecating: “I couldn’t agree more!” she sings cheerfully. “I’m the type of kid that’s too Jewy to ignore.”The music is as sticky as the best pop song — Schlesinger’s touch. Both Yazbek and Henry Aronson, the musical director, said they tried to channel him as they finished the project. He worked in a Beatles pop tradition, Aronson said, “a certain deceptive simplicity, harmonically.”Silverman, taking notes at a table, popped up to sub for an absent actor, sweetly singing a jingle for “Crazy Donny’s Warehouse (for Your Messy Divorce).” If it was initially bizarre to watch her family’s emotional upheaval recreated — her parents split when she was around 7 — “I’m also so thrilled, because I feel like it will be familiar to so many people,” she said.Kauffman, the director, said Silverman has illuminated her history — “What was your mom like in this moment? Would your dad have cracked a joke?” — with what works dramaturgically. “She just has this incredible memory and ability to articulate exactly what she was experiencing, which is like a director’s dream. Her as a 10 year old is very viscerally present.”And she punches up the jokes. When Glick was doing a scene that involved making fart noises, Silverman advised her: “Point to your mouth, to really focus” on the body part it’s standing in for, she told her, in less PG language. “It will be funny.”Silverman has moved on from the incendiary language she used at the beginning of her career. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesA word — OK, a paragraph — about farts (and also a sentence I never expected to write in The New York Times). If you thought Silverman might’ve outgrown her affinity for juvenile, scatological humor after a half-century, you’d be wrong. “She has an inability not to laugh if you fart,” Yazbek said. During rehearsal, I caught her giving Joshua Harmon (“Bad Jews,” “Prayer for the French Republic”), who wrote the book with her, a demo in fart noise technique, her hands cupped around her mouth.She has never not wanted to be a performer, said her sister Laura Silverman, who recalled that when she had friends over as a kid, Sarah would pop out of a closet, doing costumed characters, to entertain them.And her family was supportive in creative ways. “I would pick up the phone and call the operator and have her sing ‘Tomorrow,’ from ‘Annie,’” said Laura, an actor and writer. “I would say, I didn’t want her to be scared to sing or perform in front of anyone, at any time.” When Silverman, as a very young child, unleashed the string of curse words that her father taught her — a cherub with inky curtain bangs, working blue — “I would get this wild approval from adults, despite themselves,” she said. “It felt so good, made my arms itch with glee, and I became addicted to that.”Only when she wrote her memoir did she connect the dots between that feeling and her comedy: “So much of my standup, especially early on, was shock, shock, shock,” she said, “and totally trash.” She used racist epithets, misguidedly, to prove a point, which she now says she regrets — she’s gladly left that language behind. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.The only word that Silverman whispered, in our three hour lunch, was “menopause.”When pressed — no, pleaded with — she said she would write about that topic, though she’s still working out the terms. (“There is not a female word for emasculating, but that’s what menopause is.”) But talking about her body and her needs, is “how I learned to be vulnerable and honest,” she said. “It’s an incredible revelation some people don’t even realize they can do. The truth! It’s really wild.” More