Quarantine (Life and Culture)

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      in Television

      Are the Movies Back? Our Critics Weigh In.

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      Our chief film critics look at the new season in the new abnormal, while remembering the lessons of cinema history. Are we on the cusp of a new era or will this too pass?Movie theaters are open for business again. and the film world is abuzz with new release dates, in-person festivals, an accelerating Oscar race, an array of Covid-19 protocols and anxious prognostications. Is this the death of cinema (again) or its glorious rebirth? Or has it mutated into something new altogether, a two-headed Disney-Netflix monster with art somewhere in its genome? Our chief film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, have some thoughts on these matters. They also asked some industry veterans to weigh in.MANOHLA DARGIS Hello, friend — it’s been awhile. I recently returned from a book leave and having failed to win the lottery, I am back (happily!). I ignored most of the movie news while I was gone, though was sad to learn about the closure of my favorite theater here in Los Angeles, the ArcLight Hollywood, which was felled by the lockdowns. It felt like the beginning of the end of something, but here we are in a new season that looks more like 2019 than 2020 — even with requests to see our vax cards. What’d I miss?A.O. SCOTT You didn’t miss much, except for a few episodes in the continuing discourse — part soap opera, part séance, part tech seminar — about the Future of Movies. Judged solely from the slate of upcoming releases (some held back from 2020), that future looks a lot like the recent past. The fall will see new work from both Andersons, Wes and P.T. Jane Campion’s first feature in more than a decade. A new James Bond. The predominance of familiar directors and stars along with newly minted auteurs (like Chloé Zhao, following her best picture win for “Nomadland” with a Marvel spectacle) creates a reassuring sense of continuity. Cinema as we have known it seems to still exist.Richard Madden and Gemma Chan in Chloé Zhao’s new superhero movie, “Eternals.”Marvel/DisneyAt the same time — though not for the first time — it is widely feared to be in mortal peril. Some of that anxiety is Covid-specific. Nobody knows when or how this thing will end, and whether audiences will return to theaters in sufficient numbers to revive the old business models. The pandemic is not the only factor, and the future of movies and moviegoing may depend less on virus mutations or consumer preferences than on corporate strategy.If Covid stretches on, we will lose more art-house theaters, resulting in less box office revenue. At some point there won’t be enough theaters to generate sufficient revenue to justify releasing a movie theatrically. If you lay on how the past 18 months have changed viewing habits, it looks even worse: the art-house audience is more mature, and that demographic has so far not been eager to return to cinemas.— Richard Abramowitz, founder and chief executive of the distributor AbramoramaDARGIS That we’re social animals is what made me think that we’d get back into theaters, that and there’s too much money at stake. Moviegoing has been up and down forever. But for decades the major studios have been eroding exhibition — the moviegoing habit itself — with a business model that banks on a handful of youth-baiting tentpoles and some monster weekends. Their audience flocks to the theaters for a bit, and everyone else waits for home video (or not). I looked at the numbers for the last “Avengers” movie: it opened in American theaters in April 2019 and played through September, but it sucked up more than 90 percent of its domestic haul in 30 days.I imagine that a lot of people waited to see it, just as earlier generations waited for stuff to hit TV, cable, video — all once viewed as a threat to moviegoing. For a time, these different avenues seemed fairly complementary. But the habit of on-demand, whenever, wherever watching has proved overwhelming, which is bad for exhibition but good for the multinational companies that own the studios because they also own the companies which funnel stuff into homes. So, maybe these multinationals will shift exclusively to streaming. Maybe they’ll re-embrace theaters or buy them all up. In the end, I am far more worried about nonindustrial cinema and if its audience will return to theaters.Sure, there’s the occasional blockbuster they may want to see as an Imax experience and want to have that shared community experience, but like everything in the world, with the multitude of choices available and given time, effort and expense to go to the movies, most opt to see movies in the comfort of their homes.— Marcus Hu, co-founder of the distributor Strand ReleasingSCOTT The small screen is definitely getting bigger, whether we like it or not. Subscription revenue is unlikely ever to match blockbuster box-office numbers, but for a lot of independent-minded filmmakers, streaming offers money for projects the big studios don’t make anymore. For a long time, the big studios have been concentrating their resources on franchise, I.P.-driven entertainment at the expense of stand-alone features aimed at adult audiences. Streaming has picked up some of that slack.The upshot is that what you and I and others in our rapidly aging demographic understood by “going to the movies” may have been replaced by a different menu of choices and practices. What I mean is the idea of the movie theater as a destination, independent of a particular film that might be showing. A lot of the time, you’d just go and see whatever was there, and there was always something — art, trash or in between — worth the price of the ticket, which wasn’t all that much. A movie habit was easy enough to acquire, and a lot of us did.Kirsten Dunst in “The Power of the Dog,” Jane Campion’s new film.Kirsty Griffin/NetflixKids nowadays haven’t developed it in quite the same way. They have more screens, more options and different reasons for buying a ticket. I’m not lamenting, just observing. What I wonder about is the effect of these changes on the art form that we’re still calling by the anachronistic names cinema and film.The studios stopped making the kinds of movies I make around the time we were finishing “Moneyball” — I remember an exec telling me he would have passed on it if it had come to him then. In the years it took to get that movie made, the world for that kind of movie turned.— Rachel Horovitz, producerDARGIS Let’s check back in 50 years to see how streaming affected cinema, which is always a moving target. To be honest, while it’s interesting to see how the big companies are handling the newest normal, the work I tend to love has long had a separate ecology, with its own way of doing things, its own community and relations. In 1991, Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” needed a slow release, critical love and word of mouth to make a dent, and the same is true of most of the movies we care about now. As a friend asked the other day, would Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” be “Parasite” if it had only been streamed? We both think the answer is no — it would still be great, but not a cultural sensation.Movies, unlike branded entertainment, need to live in the world, not just on personal devices. This isn’t about the putative romance of moviegoing, but how people experience art and culture, because while we’re talking about infrastructure, we are also talking about pleasure — the pleasure of the cinematic object, and the pleasure of your company and conversation. It’s frustrating that people keep writing lazy obituaries for cinema, something they have no feeling for or interest in. I don’t love all that’s transpired in movie history — the shift from film to digital, the loss of technical competency — but I remain buoyed by the persistence of the art and how its ecologies adapt and persevere.Even so, and I think I’ve said this before, I do increasingly view the segment of the movie world that I most worry about as akin to jazz. It’s something usually appreciated by a niche audience but that needs new blood — the kids you mentioned — to truly sustain it.Theatrical films will have exclusive windows in theaters, but those windows will be shorter and more flexible. But movies that matter, that have cultural impact, will again play exclusively in movie theaters for some time, likely 45 days.— Tom Rothman, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures’ Motion Picture GroupSCOTT I guess I’m always optimistic about the tenacity of artists and the curiosity of audiences, and aware that the good work most often gets done against the grain of whatever the system is at a given moment. But it’s nonetheless important to be critical of that system, and reasonable to wonder how its current iteration might stymie some kinds of originality while encouraging others.Daniel Craig as James Bond in “No Time to Die,” set for the fall.Nicola Dove/MGMThere’s no going back to any previous golden age, and the gold rubs off pretty quickly when you take a close look. The old studios whose products earned the designation “classical” were built on exploitation and predation, and ruled by autocratic moguls. Things were not much better, from an ethical or political standpoint, in the New Hollywood ’70s or the indie ’90s.Still, great and weird movies were being made then, as they are now. But I fear that many of them will languish in the streaming algorithms or in the margins of micro-distribution, estranged from even the smallish publics that might have discovered them. One cause for alarm — which has nothing to do with streaming per se — is the mass extinction of the local newspapers and alt-weeklies that nourished local film scenes across the country. The health of movies is connected to the health of journalism.[I worry] that the economic challenges will force the art-house cinemas away from the smaller titles that add significantly to diversity and inclusion in our cinematic landscape. Additionally, that the downsizing of newspaper and media coverage for smaller films will force the theater owners’ hands in these decisions.— Dennis Doros, co-founder of Milestone FilmsDARGIS The pandemic has brought specific issues to the fore — at the least, maybe improved theater ventilation will put an end to watching multiplex fodder in a miasma of despair and stale popcorn. More to your last point, I think that mostly what the pandemic has done is underscore, again, that all of us are still navigating the world created by the internet, which changed how we labor, play, read, watch, think. The movie industry has a history of different production-distribution-exhibition models that work until they don’t, yet throughout these shifts, movies kept being made and people kept watching them, and I imagine they’ll keep getting made and we’ll keep watching and talking about all of it.SCOTT Let’s hope so! Otherwise we may both find ourselves on permanent book leave. More

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      in Theater

      Moving to the Theater District and Finding His Community

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      A musical theater educator and audition coach discovers how great it can be to live across the street from “Wicked.”Peace and quiet don’t come easy in Midtown, but Alexander Tom has managed to find it across the street from the Gershwin Theater’s wicked witches.Mr. Tom, 29, is the associate program head of the musical theater program at Pace University in Manhattan; he also moonlights as an audition coach, working out of his apartment and local studios.Moving from his previous apartment in Harlem to one of the city’s busiest neighborhoods this May has, for him, meant surrounding himself not just with theater, but with his community: He’ll often leave his home and see a friend dipping into a theater for rehearsal. West 51st Street can feel, at times, less like a two-way thoroughfare and more like a small town. Moving before rental prices started to rebound from the pandemic slump turned out to be the right move for Mr. Tom.Mr. Tom prefers to decorate his apartment with abstract art, which gives him a “creative mind break” while he’s working at his desk or piano.  Katherine Marks for The New York Times“It’s quiet, but it feels like I can make it as loud as I want,” Mr. Tom said of his one-bedroom apartment. His biggest pandemic purchase was a Kawai piano, which he can play with gusto thanks to his building’s prewar walls. In fact, his next-door neighbor plays the piano too — they could duet, if only they could hear each other.“I don’t hear the hustle and bustle of Midtown,” he said, “but I can walk outside and be just where I want to be.”$2,025 | Midtown WestAlexander Tom, 29Occupation: Associate program head of the musical theater program at Pace University in Manhattan.Favorite local coffee shop: “Bibble and Sip is an AAPI-owned coffee shop, with a llama as their mascot,” Mr. Tom said. “They’ve got great cream puffs, the coffee is great — I love me my Bibble.”The show you need to see right now: Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over.” “The writer does an amazing job of having a conversation onstage, but also provoking the audience to have the conversation with themselves,” he said.Earlier this year, while living in a studio on 125th and Broadway, Mr. Tom found himself itching for more space. The studio was so small that it had taken him months to properly arrange all his furniture in a way that felt livable. He had plans to spend two months this summer in South Carolina, to work on a student production of “Hello, Dolly!” and he worried that rents would increase significantly by the time he returned to the city.Moving downtown was a top priority. The commute from Harlem to Pace’s campus in the financial district — which could take up to an hour and a half, depending on the whim of the M.T.A. — had begun to put a strain on Mr. Tom. Many of his workdays began with 9 a.m. classes and ended with rehearsals that went late into the night, meaning that he would arrive home after midnight and need to be up at 5 a.m. to start all over again. “I’m young and sprightly,” he said, “but I’m not that young, and I’m not that sprightly.”Mr. Tom is still waiting on the marble-topped kitchen island he has ordered, which will double as a dining table. “At a certain point I just said: Ikea is cute, Amazon is cute, but I do need to get real human furniture,” he said.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesThe commute would need to shorten. So he set his eyes on an apartment below 72nd Street and above 14th, looking primarily at apartments in Hell’s Kitchen and Midtown West, or near Lincoln Square. In Harlem, he had become accustomed to certain amenities that he knew he wouldn’t want to part with, namely a dishwasher and a gas stove, which helped narrow down his options. (He loves to bake and regularly makes fresh pasta by hand.)He ultimately found a one-bedroom apartment on 51st street in the heart of the Theater District, with laundry in the building and a small but well-appointed kitchen. The part-time doorman was a bonus, and he was thrilled to be across the street from the Gershwin, where he has plans to see “Wicked,” his favorite musical, for the eighteenth time. It’ll be a celebration of his birthday in early September, but also his first musical post-Covid, and a return to the second musical he ever saw as a child growing up in Arizona.His new living room is about the size of his old apartment, and filled with light despite the density of the neighborhood, which has allowed him to develop his plant-rearing skills. “I’m no longer an over-waterer,” he said with cautious pride. “Some of the plants are thriving, but with some of them, I’m unsure if they’re the angry middle child or just don’t want to exist.”The ample light in his apartment has allowed Mr. Tom to develop his skills as a plant owner. Next, he hopes to buy a larger tree or monstera for his living room.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesWith an influx of plants and an upgraded couch, Mr. Tom has been careful not to crowd his apartment with too many plants, given the importance of acoustics to both his personal piano practice and his work as a coach. When a room includes more things that sound can bounce off, the sound fades more quickly. In his relatively spare living room, he said, “I can play music, and I feel like I’m immersed in the music.”The one piece of art hanging in the room is a large abstract piece that Mr. Tom commissioned from the painter Ariel Messeca, who is a friend. A trio of abstract paintings from Joseph Dermody, a Connecticut-based artist, hang in his bedroom. Abstraction appeals to Mr. Tom: “I sit at my desk and my piano a lot,” he said, “and I like to look at something that doesn’t have a prescribed meaning to it, so I can give myself a creative mind break.”Beyond the ample space and saner commute, this new apartment has allowed Mr. Tom a better work-life balance even when he works in the neighborhood. The location has allowed him to take freelance coaching jobs he would have previously turned down for commuting reasons. Now, when he gets a break for lunch and dinner, he can go home to recharge.For those in the theater industry, “the pandemic forced us to ask: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if the industry was better to us?’ And I think part of that is making sure you can advocate for yourself, and take care of yourself,” Mr. Tom said. “Being around theater is great because I can step into it, but also step out of it for a moment when I need to.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Music

      A Pandemic, Then a Hurricane, Brings New Orleans Musicians ‘to Their Knees’

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      When Hurricane Ida swept through New Orleans late last month, it took a piece of history with it. The Karnofsky Tailor Shop and Residence, a decrepit red brick building that had served as a kind of second home for Louis Armstrong during his boyhood in the early 1900s, was reduced to rubble.At the Little Gem Saloon next door, where some of the first jazz gigs were played, a three-story-tall mural paying homage to the pioneering cornetist Buddy Bolden was also ruined.Most of the city’s active music venues fared far better, suffering minor roof and water damage. But the storm was only the latest in a series of blows to the people and places that make up the jazz scene, in a city that stakes its identity on live music.“We’ve been without work for over 18 months now,” Big Sam Williams, a trombonist and bandleader, said in a phone interview from his home in the Gentilly neighborhood. “It’s a struggle and we’re just barely making it.”Doug Trager, who manages the Maple Leaf Bar in the Carrollton neighborhood, said that after 446 days of shutdown because of Covid-19, “we were just getting going” again before Ida hit. Now that the storm has created another setback, he said, “we’ll just try to keep waiting it out.”The Little Gem Saloon days after the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesLittle Gem Saloon and the Karnofsky Shop sit on the same block.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesIt has now been a year and a half since the pandemic first prompted a citywide moratorium on indoor performances. On Aug. 16, the city imposed a mandate requiring all patrons at bars and clubs to be vaccinated or recently tested for Covid-19, seeming to open the door to a new phase of reopening.But as the Delta variant surged, the city’s two major jazz festivals, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and French Quarter Fest, both already pushed back from their usual springtime schedule, were called off. That meant that, for the second year in a row, musicians would have to do without the most active period of their work year, when hordes of tourists arrive for the festivals and spillover gigs at clubs often provide enough work for area performers to pay the rent for months.A week and a half after the storm, many in the city’s live-music business say they will not be resting easy, even after things come back online.In interviews, local advocates said that zoning laws had long made small venue operators’ lives difficult, and that neighborhood clubs have run into needless red tape during the pandemic as the city has sometimes enforced strict permitting regulations around outdoor entertainment.“They’re counting on the continued presence of the culture bearers and the musicians, and they’re mistaken this time,” said Ashlye Keaton, a co-founder of the Ella Project, which provides legal assistance to and agitates on behalf of New Orleans artists. “The storm, coupled with Covid, has brought musicians to their knees.”While some venues have survived since March 2020 with substantial help from federal grants, including the $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, other small and vulnerable clubs, particularly those nestled in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, often lacked the capacity or the wherewithal to apply. Many have held on largely thanks to fund-raisers and whatever performances they can safely pull off without raising the hackles of regulators and neighbors.In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city will continue to enforce permitting for outdoor live entertainment events on a temporary basis, pointing out that the mayor had lifted its usual cap on those permits during the pandemic.“The Department of Safety & Permits fully supports and is actively working with partners in the City Council to enact legislation which balances the desire for outdoor entertainment, supports local artists and venues as well as preserves the quality of life for the neighbors and residents of each community,” the statement says.Preservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesTipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, will require some repairs to its roof.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMany of the city’s active venues were spared serious damage in the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesPreservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida, and is slated to reopen once power is restored. Tipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, located closer to the water, will require some repairs to its roof.The New Orleans Jazz Market, a stately performance center in Central City, appears to have held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming nonetheless — just days after what was supposed to have been a triumphant reopening for its fall 2021 season.“This is very reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, and what we went through during that time, and I know a lot of New Orleans musicians are displaced,” said the drummer Adonis Rose, the artistic director of the Jazz Market and leader of its resident big band, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. He called the storm a “tragedy, when we were just starting to see some glimmer of hope.”The New Orleans Jazz Market held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming after the hurricane.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, turned his club into a community gathering space during the pandemic.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a renowned trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, said in an interview on Monday that the electricity had just come back on at the popular neighborhood club, and he planned to get the place ready to rock.During the pandemic, Ruffins’s club served as a gathering spot and a kind of improvised community cafeteria. He moved concerts outside to the club’s patio, and cooked free meals of red beans and rice for residents of the surrounding Tremé neighborhood, and for musicians who were out of work.“I figured if I cooked for myself, I’d cook for the neighborhood,” Ruffins said.Howie Kaplan, the proprietor of the Howlin’ Wolf, a venue in downtown New Orleans, also began providing meals and other services to musicians in the early days of the pandemic. The program was subsumed into the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic earlier this year; he restarted it at the Howlin’ Wolf last month, in response to Hurricane Ida.“We’ve got a James Beard Award-winning chef on the grill right now, making these fantastic steaks that came from who knows where,” Kaplan said in a phone interview, adding that restaurants had come to donate food that they wouldn’t be able to prepare because of the power outage.Shortly after Hurricane Ida passed over the city, Jordan Hirsch — the editor of the online resource A Closer Walk, which provides detailed information on New Orleans’s heritage sites — set out to determine how the city’s most vulnerable music landmarks had held up.The program providing meals returned to the Howlin’ Wolf after Hurricane Ida.Jillian Marie PhotographyWhen he got to the Karnofsky shop, on South Rampart Street downtown, he saw that the building had become wreckage and the Bolden mural nearby had crumbled. But other equally old jazz landmarks along the block, the former Eagle Saloon and the Iroquois Theater, had miraculously pulled through. All four structures are on the national historic register; it’s safe to say that no single block in the United States today houses more early jazz history.A Cleveland-based developer, GBX Group, recently bought out most of the addresses on the street, and plans to rebuild it into a center of commerce that will also trumpet its role in jazz history. After the storm, GBX hired workers to collect the Karnofsky shop’s bricks, said its C.E.O., Drew Sparacia, hoping to at least partially rebuild the structure using the original materials.But Hirsch asked why the city had not done more to demand that the owners of these historic places, which to the outside observer appear to be mostly abandoned, keep them protected from the elements.“Tropical storms and hurricanes were sort of a constant threat for those buildings,” Hirsch said. “People have been sounding that alarm for 30 years.”Some other sites that made it through Hurricane Ida remain deeply endangered, according to preservationists. John McCusker, a jazz historian and photojournalist who has worked to preserve historic buildings in the city, said that Bolden’s former home in Central City and the old Dew Drop Inn — a midcentury music venue, hotel and community hub — were both in states of relative disrepair.McCusker lamented that the sites’ landlords hadn’t been compelled to restore and preserve the buildings.“We have this wealth of these buildings connected to the birth of this music, and the mechanisms of government have just proven maladroit at protecting them with the same vigor that they would enforce an inappropriate shutter in the French Quarter,” he said. More

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      in Television

      For a Tony Nominee, an Apartment With a Sense of Drama

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      Kathryn Gallagher’s Upper West Side home ‘was never supposed to be a one-bedroom apartment.’ But that’s why she likes it.When Kathryn Gallagher was 11, the career demands of her father, the actor Peter Gallagher, forced the family to leave the Upper West Side of Manhattan for Los Angeles. A decade or so later, the demands of her own burgeoning career — specifically, a role in the 2015 Broadway revival of “Spring Awakening” — meant a move back to Manhattan. And she knew precisely where she wanted to land.“I was like, ‘If I’m going to live in New York, it has to be the Upper West Side, which is home, and which is where the best bagels are to be found,’” said Ms. Gallagher, now 28, a current Tony nominee for her performance in the musical “Jagged Little Pill” and a Season 2 cast member of the Amazon series “Modern Love,” based on the New York Times column. “This is my neighborhood.”Initially, she rented a studio apartment on the fourth floor of a walk-up building near Central Park West, the fulfillment of every “young-woman-in-the-big-city” dream she ever had. There were tall windows, exposed brick, crown molding and just the right degree of scruffiness. But what with the three or four (or more) daily walks required by her dog, Willie Nelson, the trips up and down the stairs became burdensome.Kathryn Gallagher, 28, who is nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the musical “Jagged Little Pill,” lives in a one-bedroom rental in a townhouse near Riverside Park.James GallagherKathryn Gallagher, 28Occupation: Actor and songwriterDesign for living: “It’s very helpful for have a mother who’s an interior decorator. I inherited my mom’s sense of style, but added 50 points for zany wackiness.”Ms. Gallagher is an avid student of life. Her conversation is studded with phrases like “lessons hard learned,” “a journey of learning” and “learning curve.” So it will come as no surprise that when she went hunting for a new apartment two and a half years ago, she had absorbed enough wisdom to hold out for something that was close to ground level but with the raffish charm of the walk-up.She found such a place — a one-bedroom with high ceilings and period detail on the parlor floor of a townhouse near Riverside Park — at the end of a long, rainy day of searching with her mother, Paula Harwood, an interior designer.“The moment I walked in, I was like, ‘When this was a single-family home, this was where they gathered after work to smoke a pipe and have a whiskey, and there were books lining the walls.’ I created a whole fantasy for the life that was lived in here before,” Ms. Gallagher said.“This is a one-bedroom apartment that was never supposed to be a one-bedroom apartment,” she added. “I think of it as a library and a lounge. I love it.”It’s true that there’s more vertical than horizontal space, and Ms. Gallagher, an eager cook, has “a criminally small” kitchen. But, really, what’s a dearth of counter space when measured against the vintage mirror over the fireplace, the fireplace itself, the Tiffany-style ceiling pendant, the French doors separating the living room from the bedroom, and the massive wood front door?“I’m obsessed with the door,” Ms. Gallagher said. “No one is messing with this door. This door has seen many things.”“I love having meteorites and beautiful stones all around the apartment,” she said. “And I like having things around, like my tarot cards, that make me happy and connect me to something.” James GallagherIn pulling the apartment together, Ms. Gallagher came to an important realization: Mom really does know best. It was Ms. Harwood, after all, who inveighed against the folly of trying, as she put it, to move in overnight. “She was like, ‘You won’t know what you need for six months. Don’t buy everything at the beginning,’” Ms. Gallagher said.Only recently, for example, did she have radiator covers made. “I was like, ‘Of course I need them.’ But it took me a long time to realize they were even an option,” she said, noting that she’s using the newly available flat surfaces to hold books. “I’m really excited about that.”The one thing she did insist on soon after signing the lease was a red velvet sofa. “And my mother was like, ‘Are you sure?’” Ms. Gallagher said. “‘Because if you get a red velvet couch, everything else has to be chill. You can’t get an orange chair and a purple rug.’”As if. The red velvet, tufted, Tuxedo-style sectional makes its strong statement, while a leaf-patterned rug in shades of sage, cream and blue provides appropriately quiet support. “It’s the kind of couch that, if this were the 1920s, someone with curls in a long silk robe would be sitting on it smoking a skinny cigarette and drinking a martini,” she said.In the interest of filling out the scene she has so earnestly conjured, an Art Deco bar cart with mirrored shelves is just a few feet away.In moments of uncertainty in life and in work, Ms. Gallagher’s first instinct is to nest. “I never imagined spending so much time in the apartment,” she said. “But since the pandemic, I’m finding I just love it more and more, and have found little ways to personalize it, by putting things that make me happy in every corner.”The list includes tarot cards, guitars and journals. Atop and around the fireplace are large quantities of crystals and candles, as well as vases that once contained congratulatory opening-night bouquets, then candy canes during Christmas season, and now dried flowers.Nick Cordero, an actor known primarily for his theater work, died last year of Covid-19. Friends, including Ms. Gallagher, poured the contents of a whiskey bottle into the Hudson River in tribute to him. The empty bottle now sits on the mantel of Ms. Gallagher’s fireplace. James GallagherOn the wall behind the sofa hangs a photo of Ms. Gallagher’s maternal grandmother, who was a member of the now-defunct ballet company at Radio City Music Hall; an original piece by Erté, a gift from that same grandmother; and a needlepoint likeness of the four principal female “Jagged Little Pill” cast members, stitched by Ms. Gallagher’s dresser, Dyanna Hallick.On a wall in the bedroom is a handwritten card from Alanis Morissette, whose music forms the basis of “Pill”: “Kathryn: thanks for your courage and willingness and grace and power and vulnerability. Love Alanis.”Peter Gallagher, who is “super handy,” according to his daughter, took on the role of picture-hanger and also installed a clothes rod in an armoire from the family’s old apartment, to turn it into a coat closet for Ms. Gallagher.“I had my dad on FaceTime when I was re-caulking the bathtub and when I was putting in an air-conditioner,” she said. “I think he was prouder of me for installing the A/C than he was of my Tony nomination.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Together’ Bears Witness to Britain’s Lockdowns

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      The new film, starring Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy, is a tensely funny relationship drama, as well as a chronicle of the first year of the pandemic.LONDON — In “Together,” Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy play a couple in meltdown. And then the pandemic begins.Ten minutes into the film, which debuts in theaters in the United States on Aug. 27, the unnamed female protagonist (Horgan) tells her partner (McAvoy) that he is the worst human alive.“You’ve got the same level of charm as diarrhea in a pint glass,” she says.“Lockdown’s going to be hard then,” he responds.The drama, written by Dennis Kelly and directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”), begins on 24 March 2020, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Britain’s first coronavirus lockdown. It unfolds, claustrophobically, over the course of a year in the couple’s home, which they share with their young son.As well as taking a wide view of the virus’s deadly impact — captions mark the rising death toll in Britain, from 422 in the first scene to 126,284 in the last — “Together” also zooms in on the disintegration and tentative rebuilding of a relationship. It’s sad, but also scabrously funny — “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” with added hand sanitizer. There’s shouting and crying, reminiscing and makeup sex, panic buying, jostling for vaccines and shocking, visceral grief.Stephen Daldry, top left, directed the film, which was shot over 10 days in London.Peter Mountain/Bleecker StreetHorgan said in a phone interview that the film was, on one level, an exercise in bearing witness, in particular to the “hidden trauma” of those families who lost loved ones in nursing homes. More than 39,000 nursing home residents in England died with the virus between April 2020 and March 2021, according to a study by the Care Quality Commission, a government agency. For many of those people, because of visiting restrictions and staff shortages, it was a lonely death.In “Together,” the mother of Horgan’s character moves into a nursing home at the start of the pandemic. “She’ll be safe there, right?” the daughter says. In the following scene, her mother is on a ventilator.Horgan said she felt “an enormous responsibility” in telling the story of what happened in Britain’s nursing homes. “We were incredibly shocked by it as a country, but the specific experience that families were having — of not being able to say goodbye, of watching loved ones die on FaceTime — people felt like they weren’t seen,” she said. “We wanted people to feel the pain of it.”The drama was filmed in London over 10 days in April this year, and was broadcast here by the BBC in June, in the same week that the government delayed the lifting of restrictions because of a surge in the Delta variant of the virus. As it premieres in the United States, just over half of Americans are fully vaccinated, but the long-term effects of the pandemic — physical, psychological and financial — are still being felt.“I’ve never written anything as immediate as this,” Kelly said in a phone interview. The script required little research, beyond observing day-to-day events, he added: “It’s the one event we’ve all been through.”Perhaps that’s why a number of recent films have tackled the strains of life in a pandemic. “Locked Down,” starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, throws an improbable heist into its story of a bored, bickering couple. “Lock Down Love” and “The End of Us” play out as more straightforward romantic comedies, in which being forced apart or together makes couples reassess. If “Together” stands apart, it is because fury and horror at what is happening in the wider world run in parallel to the central love story.Writing the movie was a cathartic experience, Kelly said. “There are a lot of people out there who are really angry. They lost people, and they know they died alone,” he said. “We still haven’t got anywhere near processing what we’ve been through.”Before Kelly approached Horgan about starring in “Together,” she had little interest in making a lockdown film: She had already turned down scripts based on the pandemic, she said. In the shows she was working on, including the BBC comedy “Motherland” and the second series of Aisling Bea’s “This Way Up,” the current circumstances were more or less glossed over, she added. Then she read “Together.”“I could see it was really important,” Horgan said of the script. “Of course, it’s rooted in Covid. But it transcends that, as a voyeuristic, in-depth X-ray of a relationship.” For that reason, Horgan doesn’t think people will feel fatigued by the events of last year and a half while watching it. “If it was just related to the pandemic, you couldn’t watch an hour-and-a-half of it,” she said.It helped that Horgan and Kelly are old friends. Horgan grew up on a turkey farm in Ireland, but has lived in London since the early 1990s, when she and Kelly met performing in a youth theater production. Years later, they bumped into each other in a pub. Horgan was in her late 20s and working at a job center; Kelly mentioned he’d written a play, called “Brendan’s Visit.” The next day, Horgan called and convinced him to put it on.“She was unbelievably driven,” said Kelly, who went on to win the Tony Award for Best Book with “Matilda the Musical” in 2013. “If it weren’t for Sharon, there’s no way I’d have been a writer.”From left: Tanya Franks, Rebekah Staton and Sharon Horgan in “Pulling.”HuluThe pair started writing together and created “Pulling,” a cult comedy about three 20-something female housemates, which debuted on the BBC in 2006. Watching it now, Horgan’s character, Donna, seems like a godmother to Fleabag from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s 2016 TV hit, as well as the many chaotic, honest portrayals of womanhood that have followed, but at the time there was no one like her on television.If “Pulling” was based on Horgan’s 20s, “Catastrophe,” the dramedy she co-wrote and starred in with Rob Delaney about a couple who get pregnant after a one-week stand, was based on her 30s: She and her now ex-husband Jeremy Rainbird had been together for six months when she found out she was expecting a daughter.Now, she is working on the third part of her loose trilogy based, as she described it, on the “life cycle of a woman.” It will encompass turning 50, divorce and watching her children grow up, she said.Horgan spent lockdown in London, with her two teenage daughters, who were “like caged animals,” she said. “So as a separated family we had to negotiate that, and make that work,” Horgan said. “It was intense.”The boundaries between her life and work have always been porous, Horgan said. “I don’t think I give too much of myself to my work; my work gives an awful lot to me, if I’m honest,” she said. “I’ve never really given away something incredibly personal that I haven’t felt better for having got it off my chest,” she added.When it came to rehearsing “Together,” in April, Horgan’s own experiences came pouring out.“Everyone was sharing stories, not just about Covid, or lockdown, but about relationships,” she said. “The emotion of it felt within arm’s reach.” More

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      ‘The Opposite of Airlines’: When Larger Audiences Require Fewer Seats

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      Yes, the comfy chair. The War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco put in roomier seats just in time to try to lure audiences back from the couches they got used to during the shutdown.SAN FRANCISCO — Wagner was the worst. Five hours — sometimes more — of squirming in 1932-era seats at the War Memorial Opera House here, sinking into lumpy, dusty cushions, suffering the bulge of the springs and the pinch of the wide armrests, craning for a glimpse of the stage around the head of the tall person one row ahead.“Particularly on a long opera — oh my God,” said Tapan Bhat, a tech executive and a season-ticket holder at the San Francisco Opera since 1996.When the San Francisco Opera opens Saturday, starting its scaled-back 99th season with Puccini’s “Tosca” after a shutdown of more than a year, those punishing seats will be gone. The opera has used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace all 3,128 seats with more comfortable, roomier ones. The opera used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace its 3,128 seats. Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesAnd San Francisco is not alone. Theaters, concert halls and sports arenas around the country have been increasingly investing in comfort in recent years — with wider and plusher seats — to try to accommodate audiences that have grown in breadth, if not in numbers. In the early 1960s, when the War Memorial Opera House was only a few decades old, the average weight of adult men in the United States was 168 pounds, according to federal data; it is now 199.8 pounds.Since the pandemic struck, the owners of theaters and live venues have come to see such investments as more urgent than ever. As coronavirus restrictions are dropped, presenters face the challenge of luring back patrons who, during more than a year without theaters, have grown accustomed to consuming home entertainment from the sprawling comfort of their own couches and recliners.“The entire patron experience has really been under a lot of scrutiny,” said Gary F. Martinez, a partner with OTJ Architects, a Washington-based firm. “Venues are working diligently to improve that experience. We’ve never spent so much time on seats.”The Lyric Opera of Chicago put in wider seats in the summer of 2020, following the example of the Music Hall in Cincinnati and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. On Broadway, where older theaters have been notorious for cramped quarters, the Hudson Theater added wider seats during a recent renovation. The seats in the new Yankee Stadium are wider than those in the old one, and venues including the Daytona Speedway and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore added wider seats during recent renovations.The old seats were thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, and had wide armrests that made them feel narrower.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesEven before the shutdown, audience members of all sizes were growing accustomed to ever-larger, ever-sharper television screens with an ever-broader array of streaming options. And when people did go out, many had seen the what-could-be potential in movie theaters that had installed wide, comfortable stadium-style seats, which recline and have slots for drinks and, sometimes, trays for snacks. Why pay as much as 20 times the cost of a movie — tickets at the San Francisco Opera go for up to $398 a seat — to be scrunched up in a cramped holdover from the last century?“I think anything we can do to break down barriers and improve the experience we should be doing,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “If someone is having an uncomfortable evening at the opera that is an experience they should not be having.”“The seats have historically been patrons’ No. 1 concern for the building,” he said. “Letters to me. Letters to the box office. Letters to the city. And with some justification. We had springs coming through some of the seats.”San Francisco put in its new seats just in time for the reopening of the opera and the San Francisco Ballet, which share the stage of the War Memorial. The new seats have wooden backs, which could improve the acoustics, and cup holders. (No clinky ice cubes will be allowed, though.)Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesThe new, ergonomically tuned chairs are slightly higher, roomier and firmer than the old ones. There is 2.5 inches more leg room, and the chairs have been staggered to improve sightlines, giving even the shortest operagoers and balletomanes a better shot at seeing what is taking place onstage. The seat widths are about the same as before, ranging from 19 inches to 23 inches, but the new armrests are narrower, making seats feel roomier. And there are cup holders for those who want to bring a drink to their seat. (Ice, though, with all its clinking distractions, is not permitted).Comfort comes at a cost: This will mean a loss of 114 seats, and the revenue they bring.The situation in Chicago was not quite as dire as in San Francisco — its seats were at least renovated in 1993 — but they were decidedly in need of replacement. The widths of Lyric seats ranged from 18 to 22 inches before the renovation; now they range from 19 to 23 inches. The number of seats there was reduced from 2,564 to 2,274.“We are doing the opposite of airlines,” said Michael Smallwood, the technical director at the Lyric Opera, referring to the practice of cramming more narrow seats onto planes. “Now you can sit at home and watch Netflix. People want to be comfortable. Operas want to be long. People expect different things.”“To put it bluntly, it takes a lot more effort to sell a ticket these days,” Smallwood said. “You want it to be comfortable so they’ll be here again.”Many of the seats in the New York Philharmonic’s Lincoln Center home, David Geffen Hall, will be a bit wider as well when its current renovation is complete. While most of the seats in its old hall were 20 inches wide or less, more than three-quarters of the new seats will be 21 inches wide or wider.The San Francisco Opera will return to the opera house on Saturday with “Tosca.” Alfred Walker, left, and Michael Fabiano sang at a recent rehearsal.Cory WeaverThe seat backs in San Francisco were once covered with cushioning. The back of each seat is now wood; doing away with that cushioning means more leg room for those sitting behind. “I am 6-foot-1 without shoes,” said Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the interim executive director of the San Francisco Ballet. “And I have very long legs. They were the type of seats that when I sat in them, my knees came up to my belly button.”The old seats at the War Memorial had become vintage relics, thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, a particular concern to the opera crowd, which tends to skew older.“Like those seats you saw when you went to your grandma’s,” said Jennifer E. Norris, the assistant managing director of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, who oversaw the project. “You know, when your grandma had her favorite chair and it sits a little too low, and was a little too worn.”With uncushioned seat backs, the sound in the hall should be crisper. “Applause won’t die in the room, so you’ll have a great sense of enthusiasm around you,” Norris said. “It’s also possible the lady with the candy wrapper will annoy us more. I am hoping that peer pressure will remind her to unwrap her candy before the performance begins.”The renovation began in 2013 with replacement of seats on the box level, and it includes 12 bariatric seats, designed to hold weights of up to 300 pounds, that will be 28 inches wide, as well as 38 spaces for wheelchairs, an increase of six from before the renovation. The project was funded by a ticket fee ranging from $1 to $3.The new seats were designed by Ducharme Seating of Montreal, which also installed seats at the renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, as well as halls in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Toronto. The historical nature of the Beaux-Arts building near San Francisco City Hall — it opened in 1932 — and the exacting demands of its high-end opera house and ballet made this project particularly complicated.“This is the most extensive design we have ever done on a seat,” said Eric Rocheleau, the president of Ducharme Seating. “The opera houses are always the most stringent customers.”Germain-Gordon said that theaters probably have little choice but to invest this kind of money as the world slowly returns to normal after the pandemic. “People can have in their home a beautiful media room,” she said. “Back in the olden days, if you wanted to see something you had to go see it. Nobody had TVs the size of movie screens, or La-Z-Boys. But people are investing in their comfort and they want to see it when they go out.”Bhat, the tech executive, said anything would be better than the seats he had suffered over 25 years of long nights at the opera.“They were creaky,” he said. “The upholstery would be fraying. So if you’re sitting in an opera in less than comfortable seats, something that’s going on for four and a half hours, or the first act of ‘Götterdämmerung,’ which is like 90 minutes long — it’s torture.” More

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      When Theater Installations Aim to Make Room for Drama

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      These worthy and adventurous lockdown experiments too often give short shrift to the relationship between a script and how an audience takes it in.For the last year and a half, I’ve imagined shuttered theaters as shrines to live performance — the empty seats, the leftover sets, the lone ghost lights lit like memorial candles.While performances eventually moved online and outside, and in the last few months, thanks to mask mandates and vaccines, back inside, some companies and artists have chosen a different route: offering theater-adjacent installations that allow audiences to engage more directly with the spaces.In these shows, we are often asked to walk through the venues and explore, freely or with the help of a guide, not merely sit and watch. And with small clusters of bodies in motion, they may be (or at least feel) safer than the typical experience of being locked down in your seat.Unfortunately, most of the theatrical installations I’ve seen — which include “A Dozen Dreams,” “Seven Deadly Sins,” “The Watering Hole,” and, most recently, “Definition” and “Semblance” — have struggled to successfully integrate content and location. Most of these works, which, with the exception of “Seven Deadly Sins,” did not use any live actors, were an inventive approach to theater in a time when it was unsafe to sit and gather in these spaces. But they have yet to realize the full potential of these hybrid forms as more than a stopgap on the way back to pre-pandemic theater.“Semblance,” written and directed by Whitney White for New York Theater Workshop, is a set of lyrical monologues about how Black women are perceived and stereotyped. Socially distant groupings of white director’s chairs situated on an Astroturf floor in front of two colossal TV screens set side by side.On them we see Nikiya Mathis, playing Black women of different classes, from a bus driver to a politician. Her image often confronts itself, emphasizing the tension already present in the writing. And Mathis makes a feast out of these monologues, transforming her intonation and inflections. But the ultimate experience is far from immersive; in fact, it is little more than a dressed-up screening of a short film. The space is forgettable.Audience members watched videos at their own pace at Whitney White’s other recent installation, entitled “Definition.”Maya SharpeAnother White installation, “Definition,” presented by the Bushwick Starr at the performance space Mercury Store in July, had a clear understanding of its space but couldn’t make it cohere with the piece’s myriad elements. The first portion was designed like a museum; the stark white walls and starkly modern architecture of the space lent themselves to the curated selection of paintings and photographs that hung on the walls.Likewise, a selection of short videos by a handful of artists, which played on a projection screen on a mezzanine level that opened up to a bleacher-like flight of stairs, were comfortably showcased. This part of the production had a free-floating style; the audience members were left to wander at will, and were free to sit and watch the videos but could also stand or continue to browse.Guides then appeared, leading us to a room where we were given headphones. The rest of the experience, an audio-only musical with each act taking place in a separate designated space, lacked clarity. Gauzy curtains divided up the theater, but there was little to distinguish each subspace beyond the different seating arrangements.To lead an audience through a space should be to create a new narrative out of that movement: How do we change in moving from one room to another? How does our understanding of the text change? What do we see differently in one room that another couldn’t offer?One of the structures created for “A Dozen Dreams” at Brookfield Place.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe beauty of En Garde Arts’s “A Dozen Dreams,” a sumptuously designed installation of 12 rooms that served as stages for audio monologues by female playwrights, was that each location had its own identity. The labyrinthine setup at Brookfield Place, with interlinked rooms divided by curtains, recalled the odd way we move through dreams — stories bleed into one another, scenes change suddenly. The experience of venturing from one piece to the next was essential.But even with such a luscious experience, I questioned the installation’s awkward relationship with Brookfield, a high-end mall. Mundanely expensive shops were juxtaposed with a uniquely surreal visual journey — art placed in a home for consumerism. Surely there’s a disconnect there?Similarly, “Seven Deadly Sins,” performed in empty storefronts in the meatpacking district, was an eye-catching spectacle but didn’t fully connect the text to the environs.The neighborhood’s history (slaughterhouses and sex clubs, and now pricey shops) was ostensibly reflected in seven short plays that focused on the vices of its title. But mostly we got guides mentioning tidbits about the neighborhood in passing, as they led the audience from one storefront to another.Audience members write notes as part of the Signature Theater’s “The Watering Hole.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA lost sense of communal gathering was one of the themes of the installation “The Watering Hole,” a mixed-media project created and conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon that ran at the Pershing Square Signature Center last month. Seventeen artists collaborated with Nottage and Haymon on the installation, which lacked coherency. Piles of sand and deflated beach balls in one corner, handwritten signs on the walls: this disjointed odyssey did no justice to the space as a watering hole for thought or a beloved home for several theaters. Even with talented creators, the magic of a theater can be flattened by a misuse of space.The irony is that I fondly remember the Signature Center as a safe haven. In my busy pre-pandemic days I knew I could take a break in the second floor cafe. I’ve waited there between a Saturday matinee and an evening show. I’ve ducked in to get out of the rain.These moments — along with what appeared on the Signature’s stages — were stolen away by the pandemic.Installations have offered reasonable ways to keep theater going during the pandemic. But they can’t just be backdrops. Real theater needs a space to breathe.SemblanceThrough Aug. 29 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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      As Venues Reopen, Will Streamed Theater Still Have a Place?

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      The shutdown allowed increased access and artistic experimentation. But how much sticks is an open, and contested, question.If you were marshaling evidence that streaming theater can pay off, look no further than the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, which sold 35,000 tickets and grossed over $3 million during the pandemic from magic shows and other performances that could be watched at home.As quickly as you could say “Pick a card, any card,” that’s changed, reports Matt Shakman, the company’s artistic director. “The ticket desire started to drop precipitously as the country was opening up,” he said recently of the digital initiative. “It was absolutely born of a moment that I hope we don’t find ourselves back in. So I don’t know how relatable it is as we move forward.”Sean Patrick Flahaven, the chief theatricals executive for Concord, which licenses plays for production, has observed a similar shift.“In the last few months, the requests for either virtual or digital performances from streaming have really dropped off dramatically,” he said. “They’re still happening, but it’s maybe 10 percent of the requests that we get.”But theater is not beating a full retreat to the Before Days. And those who believe that streaming increased geographic and economic access to an art form often seen as exclusive and remote vociferously contend that it shouldn’t. Spirited arguments have erupted over the relationship between theater and screens — down to an ongoing debate about what to call the new hybrid forms, if not theater.In fact, the live theater shutdown underscores that streaming itself is not as monolithic as it once was.A live show conceived for the digital realm is very different from, say, a fully staged performance filmed in an empty theater. Definitions shift: Through Aug. 31, for example, the streaming platform Broadway On Demand is presenting a festival of shorts that “highlight the combination of theater and film — i.e., theatrical content, films based on scripts, or content filmed in a theater.”And then there are the means of distribution, and the fees and stipulations that go with them: The Music Theater International licensing agency distinguishes between livestream, scheduled content and on-demand when granting the right to put on a show.At first, the actor and playwright John Cariani wanted to allow only livestreaming for his plays, which include the popular “Almost, Maine,” because, as he said in an email, “livestreamed events keep the live element of theater intact.”Then he realized that might be tricky in parts of the country with spotty broadband coverage. “I changed my position and asked people who wanted to do my plays to make every effort to livestream,” he said, “but to record and stream at a later date and time if that was the better option.”Reflecting this diversity, many companies are trying different approaches. While the Geffen is putting on an in-person season, it’s not entirely retreating from the online realm and is working with the digital maven Jared Mezzocchi, with whom it created the show “Someone Else’s House,” on a site-specific project involving NASA.Several companies in the United States and in Britain are unrolling hybrid seasons that integrate digital and in-person shows. One reason is sadly pragmatic: “If things start to get worse and the Delta variant starts to become more prevalent and the numbers start going up, I think people are going to have to use streaming,” said John Prignano, the chief operating officer and director of education and development at Music Theater International.But many theaters also want to incorporate online strategies into a new way of working.“Would we want to just be a streaming theater?” asked Martin Miller, executive director of TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Ark. “No. But it did start to feel additive to us when we started having performances in person again this April, because we were still having people streaming the shows. So it was no longer a question about what was lost but what was gained.”The company certainly earned national recognition when such online productions as “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy” were reviewed by outlets all over the country, including The New York Times.From left: Belén Moyano, Jennifer Ledesma, Michelle Jasso and Sara Ornelas in the TheaterSquared production of “American Mariachi,” which audiences can see online or at the theater’s Arkansas home.Philip ThomasTheaterSquared’s current offering, José Cruz González’s “American Mariachi,” is available both in person and online, and the company expects to do the same for its premiere of the Linda Bloodworth-Thomason play “Designing Women” in September. Theaterworks Hartford and Baltimore Center Stage are following suit for their coming seasons.Broadway performances are still off the streaming table, but in New York, the prestigious Second Stage Theater is introducing a pilot program in which select performances of this fall’s Off Broadway production of Rajiv Joseph’s “Letters of Suresh” can be streamed by subscribers who can’t attend the show in person.Hybrid plans are in place at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and at the family-friendly New Victory Theater, which is building up its successful online New Victory Arts Breaks, a series of free interactive artistic activities for kids that was picked up by PBS’s Camp TV.“In a given year, we see 100,000 people live; in a year where we’re remote, we’re going to have served a million people,” said Russell Granet, president and chief executive of the theater’s parent organization, New 42. The New Victory is planning to make all of the new season’s shows available on-demand for $25.“Our business model is forever changed in a good way as a result of this past year,” Granet added.Also pursuing a dual model are such major British institutions as the Young Vic, Shakespeare’s Globe and the Chichester Festival Theater, which announced six performances for which audiences around the world could watch its current production of “South Pacific.”The Chichester Festival is making several performances of its production of “South Pacific” available on-demand.Johan PerssonDaniel Evans, Chichester’s artistic director, mentioned another reason for capturing productions, even if they don’t end up livestreamed: “We want to build up our library in case there comes a point where we are able to have our own platform, so we have a bank of work ready to share,” he said, mentioning the National Theater’s hugely popular At Home program.Having a stash of digital shows can be very handy, as Lincoln Center Theater demonstrated when it started streaming newly edited captures of some of its Off Broadway hits like “The Wolves.”This reflects the fact that whereas productions used to have a clear-cut beginning and end — opening, closing and then gone forever — they can now move through various stages. For Marc Kirschner, co-founder of the Marquee TV platform, the relationship between in-person, livestreaming and on-demand will be similar to that of movies’ old trajectory, when they went from theaters to premium cable to broadcast.“The live-ticket purchase is the ultimate purchase,” Kirschner said. “Eventually we’re going to start seeing a ticketed premiere window, and then move those programs whenever possible or whenever worthwhile into our subscription service.”Similarly, the long-held belief that filming a show cannibalizes its potential live audience seems to have been put to rest, with hit productions now becoming available onscreen while they are still running.The musical “Come From Away” was filmed in May at its regular home, the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, and premieres Sept. 10 on Apple TV+. Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over” is on Broadway, even though Spike Lee’s capture of the 2017 Steppenwolf Theater production has been streaming on Amazon for the past couple of years.Digital theater’s greatest asset remains access — the one word which came up in every conversation on the subject of streaming.“Historically there are building-based companies that exclude audiences, and digital theater is a space where many are finding more hospitable and affordable ways of interacting with art,” the playwright Caridad Svich, who has embraced new technologies, wrote in an email.Jennifer Wang and Mariam Albishah in Caridad Svich’s “The Book of Magdalene.” In her review, Laura Collins-Hughes said the “spare and immediate” drama, shot at Main Street Theater in Houston, felt “every inch a play.”via Main Street TheaterExpanded access also applies to theatermakers, for whom online can mean lower overheads. Ultimately, whether online theater endures ultimately depends on the X factor: creativity. There, too, signs are encouraging: We have come such a long way since those Spring 2020 days of glitchy Zoom readings that just a year later, the digital production “Circle Jerk” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama.“As a playwright, I find live cinema, digital-only and hybrid digital performance to be a thrilling space for exploration and innovation,” Svich said. “There is also a new generation of theatermakers on TikTok, YouTube and other platforms perfectly at ease with the fluidity of digitally native performances that are challenging the field with their inventiveness and skill.”Now we just need to figure out what to call all this new stuff. More