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      Review: Holding Hands With the Homeless, in ‘Love’

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      Alexander Zeldin’s heartbreaking play set in a temporary housing facility retunes our attention from the big picture to the small accommodations.Whether with a gun, a mastermind or a monster, most thrillers thrill by invoking the specter of death: Who’s going to die and how? But “Love,” which opened on Tuesday at the Park Avenue Armory, keeps the audience ears-up anxious for 90 minutes without recourse to any of that. Its most alarming prop is a coffee cup, accidentally purloined, and what passes for a mastermind is a housing bureaucracy that’s evil only in its inefficiency. No one dies, yet the emotional threat level is off the charts and peculiarly personal. Call it a moral thriller: The monster is us.And make no mistake, “Love,” written and directed by Alexander Zeldin, implicates its audience. Quite literally in some cases: About 75 of the 650 seats in the Armory’s vast Drill Hall are placed onstage with the set, which represents the dingy common room of a temporary housing facility. At times, the characters, who are residents of that facility, will glance suspiciously at us ticket holders, as if we too were unhoused residents, and might have stolen a sandwich. Other times they sit among us or, at one point, reach out for solace.Yet even though “Love” is the middle play in a trilogy called “the Inequalities,” there is very little preachy or overtly political about it. The characters certainly have no time for treatises; each is desperate, for different reasons that add up to the same one, to get out of the facility as soon as possible. Colin, an unemployed man in his 50s, and his mother, Barbara, teetering on the edge of senility, have lived in Room 4 for nearly a year, trying to fend off impending indignity. This even though, as a new resident named Emma insists, “it’s six weeks maximum by law.”Emma, too, has a deadline: Very pregnant, she does not want to give birth before finding a proper home. She is naïvely confident that her stay in Room 5 — along with her partner, Dean, and Dean’s two children from a previous relationship — is temporary.The arrangement seems fine for the girl, Paige, who is still young enough at 8 not to mind much her bleak and reduced surroundings; she’s more interested in rehearsing the school Christmas pageant. But for her 12-year-old brother, Jason, the sudden change of circumstances — the family could not afford a sudden rent hike where they’d been living — comes at a time when external disappointment finds too much fuel in the onset of garden-variety adolescent dismay.Naby Dakhli, left, and Hind Swareldahab in the play. They discover a common language in Arabic, and erupt in conversation, becoming real to themselves and thus to us, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat “Love” — first performed in London in 2016 and seen across Europe since then — is in fact set at Christmastime, with a few decorations and the promise of mince pies, is (aside from some unnecessarily scary sounds between scenes) the play’s only obvious heart-clutcher. Still, it’s apt: Dean is, after all, an out-of-work tradesman, and the promise of a late-December baby puts us in mind of injustice as old as the Bible.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.So do the other two residents we meet, both apparently refugees. Tharwa, from Sudan, and Adnan, from Syria — played by Hind Swareldahab and Naby Dakhli — are mostly silent in the presence of the native-born English characters, and are thus misunderstood or suspected of vague wrongdoing. Only when they discover a common language in Arabic and erupt in conversation that we get the joy of, if not the gist, do they become real to themselves and thus to us.Merely remaining real — surviving the deprivation of home and privacy that most of us take for granted — is here a kind of victory. But just as Zeldin isn’t interested in stripping the dignity from his characters any further than the system has done already, he also refuses to sanctify them.Yes, there are acts of kindness (Barbara offers Paige a gift), moments of unexpected diversion (Adnan watches “Billy Elliot”) and simply ordinary observations of family life (Paige is thrilled by Colin’s constant cursing). The play’s title is neither an irony nor a plea; it’s an emotion that survives as a lullaby sung over a cellphone or a casual nickname or a serious declaration of commitment.But if the system were not dehumanizing there would be no drama; without its broken trust, no betrayals. For Dean (Alex Austin), the betrayal is bureaucratic; to advance in line for housing he must get a new job, but waiting in lines is a full-time job itself. For Barbara (Amelda Brown), the betrayal is physical and mortifying. For endlessly practical and even-tempered Emma (Janet Etuk), it’s the constant scraping down of patience that finally results in a crushing act of unsympathy.Alex Austin and Janet Etuk as a couple who are new to the facility, and hoping to find a new home before their baby arrives.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat these expressions of systemic despair feel so specific and personal is no accident. Zeldin developed “Love” in a series of workshops that included families who had experienced homelessness. (Swareldahab had never been in a theater before joining one of them.) The set and costume design, both by Natasha Jenkins, have the same feeling of lived-in authenticity: Your eye notes the stray single sneaker, abandoned on the roof of the shared bathroom, and the barely translucent windows scrunched high up in the corners of the room as if they too are trying to escape.Yet despite this and Marc Williams’s aptly harsh lights, which remain lit above the audience when they’re lit above the stage, “Love” is shaped by the poetics of drama as opposed to the logic of documentary. The characters are too particular to be placards, filled by the cast with so much subtext you’d think they would burst. And perhaps they do; among the uniformly excellent actors, Brown, as Barbara, stands out for her devastating portrait of dementia, Queen Lear in a shelter instead of on a moor.But unlike Lear she is a mother; Colin, though often rough and gross, is in Nick Holder’s wonderful portrayal surprisingly babyish and dainty underneath. Tharwa is a mother, too, but for reasons we don’t quite know, she is, as the script says, “without her children.” And Emma will be a mother any day. Together, the three women give “Love” a spine that would keep it standing as drama even if the armature of enforced homelessness were one day, thankfully, dismantled.I say “enforced” because bureaucracies are man-made and, with sufficient political will, reformable. We can sit around and argue that. Meanwhile, about 274,000 people are without homes in England, and about twice as many in the United States.Though “Love” is a great piece of theater — funny, beautifully staged, and with the kind of excitement that retunes your attention to tiny heartbreaks instead of just huge ones — I couldn’t help but wonder why it was easier to engage the subject inside the Armory than on Park Avenue. (There were several homeless people on the subway I took home.) When one of the characters reaches for audience members’ hands, they freely give it. How freely outside?LoveThrough March 25 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes. More

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      Review: A ‘Seagull’ Airlifted to a World of Soy Milk and Prada Sneakers

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      Parker Posey stars in “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” as Chekhov comes to the Catskills.With so many Chekhov adaptations on the market, it’s fair to wonder whether the Dramatists Guild requires playwrights to crank them out as a condition of membership.If so, “The Seagull” is apparently the recommended source — appearing more often than “The Cherry Orchard,” “Three Sisters” and “Uncle Vanya” combined. The 1896 tragicomedy about the hopelessness of love and theater has set off a flock of homages and spoofs, often in one booby-trapped package.That most of the adaptations don’t stick doesn’t matter; since opening night, little has been heard from “Drowning Crow,” “Stupid ____ Bird,” “A Seagull in the Hamptons” or even “The Notebook of Trigorin,” Tennessee Williams’s 1981 stab. What counts, at least as far as selling the show is concerned, is the mash-up of a classic title with a modern sensibility, so that troikas and patronyms become sports cars and upspeak.The first question to ask in approaching these rehashes is: Do they make any sense if you don’t know the source? The second question is: Do they add any worth if you do?“The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” Thomas Bradshaw’s entry in the reincarnation sweepstakes, clears the first bar, with maybe a trailing foot, in a New Group production that opened on Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Airlifting the story from a 19th-century Russian estate to a 21st-century Catskills compound makes sense, and Chekhov’s artsy, spoiled, lovestruck characters are more or less at home in a world of soy milk, Prada sneakers and pans in The New York Times.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.These characters, mostly renamed with English soundalikes, constellate pretty much as the original 10 did. (Some workers on the estate have apparently been fired.) Their North Star, Irene, played by Parker Posey, is a moderately successful and immoderately self-involved actress who is “theater famous, not famous famous.” Posey, that former indie “it girl,” is perfectly cast as a woman who has won one Tony but can say with light sincerity, “I do need another one.”Along with her lover, the middlebrow novelist William (Ato Essandoh), Irene has returned from the city to visit her ailing friend, Samuel (David Cale), and her sensitive yet untalented son, Kevin (Nat Wolff). Kevin is in love with Nina (Aleyse Shannon), a neighbor’s daughter who stars in the play he plans to present to the assembled company. But Nina is in love with William, while another family adjunct, Sasha (Hari Nef), is in love with Kevin.There are yet more triangles and quadrilaterals of affection, not always clearly mapped in Bradshaw’s vigorous trimming of the text. (Even so, Scott Elliott’s production is a bit pokey, running 2 hours and 35 minutes.) But you do get the gist: Everyone wants someone they cannot have, and privilege breeds discontent.Whether Bradshaw’s “Seagull” also passes the second test for such adaptations — does the new version add any value beyond what the original offers? — may depend on whether you admire his work in the first place. His kind of theater, he has said, is about asking audiences to “question their own reactions” even if they are “outraged” as a result. This he has faithfully done in plays like “Fulfillment,” “Intimacy,” and “Burning,” which depict, often explicitly, incest, pornography, scatology and sadomasochism.Posey as the stage actress Irene with Nat Wolff, who plays her sensitive son, Kevin, in Thomas Bradshaw’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere’s a lot of that in his “Seagull” too. Kevin’s ridiculous play — in the Chekhov a gassy symbolist fantasy — is more literally gassy here, as Nina extols the virtues of public farting. Its climax comes when, having asked audience members to share their “most recent masturbation experience,” she rewards the best answer with the chance to watch hers. With unusual delicacy for a Bradshaw play, this is staged in a tub behind a curtain.But mostly he translates the bad behavior of Chekhov’s characters to snark instead of smut. Take the famous opening salvo of the original “Seagull,” in which Masha is asked by Medvedenko, the poor schoolteacher who loves her, why she dresses all in black. Her ruefully funny answer — “I’m in mourning for my life” — becomes something merely nasty when Sasha, as she is now called, tells the rechristened Mark (Patrick Foley), “at least I don’t buy my clothes at Walmart.”If the play, with all its cattiness and cruelty, at times feels like “Mean Girls Goes to Camp,” it’s not always clear where the meanness is coming from. When Sasha or Irene cut someone down, as they frequently do with generous heaps of obscenity, Nef and Posey subtly show us that they’re mostly self-medicating with insults.But other times it seems as if no one, or perhaps just the popular yet perennially panned Bradshaw, is behind the rancor. It’s no accident that the names of the holies casually sideswiped in the rush of dialogue are mostly theatrical: Arthur Miller, Tracy Letts, “How I Learned to Drive,” Terrence McNally, Nora Ephron and Janet McTeer in an “all-female ‘True West.’”Grinding axes can be funny, and several times I caught myself guffawing in public, then regretting it privately. Though that’s probably just where Bradshaw wants us, the easy laughs don’t really provide added value; over time, they’re more subtractive.But then two things happen.One is that the play opens a new line of inquiry as Nina (who is biracial) and William (who is multiracial) explore the way identity inflects their art and ambition. “Interracial children are the glue that will one day bond our sad, broken country,” William says. To which Nina responds flirtatiously, “I don’t know. I think Black people should stick together.”This is the kind of alteration that enhances the original, giving a familiar relationship a different dimension.And then in its second half, the play changes again. Instead of looting or even building on Chekhov, it is drawn into the immense depth of his writing and becomes, at least fitfully, “The Seagull” itself. The tender scene in which Irene redresses, in both senses, her son’s wounds — he’s tried to kill himself — works exactly as it always does, no matter that it involves a conversational detour to P.S. 122. And the play’s infallible final gesture, here involving rude Scrabble instead of bingo, once again doesn’t fail.Still, I’m left to wonder whether a few moments of enhanced relevance are worth the bother of a comprehensive and often counterproductive update. Couldn’t this cast have pulled off the standard edition? And pulled it off more smoothly, without the staging longueurs occasioned by the rough text and the stop-and-go direction? (But do keep the fabulous contemporary clothing by Qween Jean.)Short of fulfilling a union requirement, there’s no reason for playwrights to keep pickpocketing Chekhov. Though as I write that I realize: That’s what we all do anyway.The Seagull/Woodstock, NYThrough April 9 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      Rattlestick Theater Names Will Davis as Its Next Artistic Director

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      Davis will be the rare transgender theater artist to lead an Off Broadway nonprofit.Rattlestick Theater, a well-regarded Off Broadway company in the West Village, has decided to name Will Davis, a freelance director and choreographer, as its next artistic director.Davis will succeed Daniella Topol, the artistic director since 2016, who has decided to leave theater administration to pursue a career as a nurse. Davis, 40, is transgender, a distinction that he views as noteworthy.“One of the most important things I can do, as a very intentionally, very visible trans person, is offer a mirror to other emerging artists in all disciplines who may not feel like there is a space for them,” he said. “I’m very excited to be part of the group of people who can push this door open and leave it open.”Davis, who is particularly interested in developing new plays, previously served as artistic director of the American Theater Company in Chicago. He programmed experimental work there and box office revenue declined; his tenure ended with the shuttering of the theater company.Jeff Thamkittikasem, the chairman of the Rattlestick board, said the nonprofit had considered Davis’s experience in Chicago and was confident that the situation in New York was different.In Chicago, Thamkittikasem said, Davis “did what he could and produced great art.” In New York, Thamkittikasem said, “We are in a safer and stronger position that will allow him to flourish.”“Will is just an amazing artist with a beautiful eye, and we’re so excited for that aesthetic to be used for developing the culture of Rattlestick,” Thamkittikasem said.Davis said he was proud of the work he did in Chicago, and looking forward to the opportunity to lead in New York. “Rattlestick has always been a home for experimentation, and that has definitely been a part of what my work has been about,” he said. “There’s every possibility for us to make work that is exciting, that pushes the form, and that also feeds and sustains the theater.”Rattlestick, founded in 1994, is a small company with a penchant for adventurous work by emerging writers. This past week, the Obie Awards said it would honor a show the theater staged in 2021, “Ni Mi Madre,” by giving a prize for performance to the show’s creator and star, Arturo Luís Soria.The company has an annual budget of about $1.5 million, with five full-time and five part-time staffers. The company operates out of a theater, rented from a church, with about 93 seats; a $4 million renovation project is scheduled to begin at the end of this summer, and the company plans to stage its next season at locations around the city.Davis will start working alongside Topol in the coming weeks, and will assume the artistic director position full-time on May 1. More

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      Alexander Zeldin Brings ‘Love’ to the Park Avenue Armory

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      Because his shows are based on research and interviews, and are grounded in pressing social issues, the British writer and director Alexander Zeldin is often said to practice docu-theater.The first part of his “Inequalities” trilogy, “Beyond Caring” (2014), is about zero-hour contracts (a British term for when an employer does not have to offer a minimum number of hours), while “Faith, Hope and Charity” (2019) is set at a community center for the poor and the homeless. Zeldin’s “Love,” which starts previews at the Park Avenue Armory on Saturday, and opened in 2016 at the National Theater in London, takes place in a temporary-housing facility. “The whole project is to write the tragic knot of our time,” Zeldin said.Yet he grimaced when that docu-theater label came up in a video conversation from London, where he was rehearsing “Love” — so popular across the Atlantic that it has traveled to eight European countries since its premiere, including France, Austria and Serbia, and was filmed by the BBC in 2018 — before its American debut.“I don’t see what I do as docu-theater at all,” he said, adding, “My script is about music. It’s about rhythm. Very modestly, that’s the ambition.”For Zeldin, 37, subject and form are inextricably linked. In “Love,” for example, the house lights remain on and the actors portraying the people at the shelter often sit amid‌ or walk around audience members, as if to say they are us and we are them, separated only by circumstance. Meanwhile, the narrative is carefully built in a tragic arc.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.“The structure is very classical and that’s very, very deliberate,” Zeldin said. “It’s rooted in life with an ambition to be judged or experienced as theater, not as testimony.”Amelda Brown during rehearsals. Her character in “Love” is losing control over her mind and body.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesZeldin grew up in Britain as the son of an Australian mother and a Jewish refugee father who was born in Haifa, Israel. His death when Zeldin was 15 created instant turmoil.“I was in trouble at school and all sorts of things that made me find theater, a place where I could have a real concentration of life,” Zeldin said. “I was very drawn to how it was making me feel life with the intensity that I felt in the most intense moments in my own life, which were quite a few at that time.”He started exploring theater at 17; his first play was an adaptation of the Marguerite Duras novel “Moderato Cantabile.” After studying at Oxford, Zeldin roamed the world, soaking up theater cultures and making works in countries like Georgia, Egypt, South Korea and Russia. In 2012 he became an assistant to the revered director Peter Brook and his longtime collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and started teaching at the London acting school East 15, where he began developing the hyper-real style of the “Inequalities” trilogy.“My script is about music,” Alexander Zeldin said. “It’s about rhythm. Very modestly, that’s the ambition.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesA big preoccupation was the austerity programs implemented by Prime Minister David Cameron, so Zeldin hit the pavement and conducted extensive research. For “Love,” he went to shelters and reached out to organizations like the housing and homelessness charity Shelter. He was put in touch with Louise Walker, now 47, who inspired the characters of Emma and Dean, a young couple marooned at the shelter with Dean’s children.After Walker lost her home, Zeldin learned, she and her children ended up in housing that was meant to be temporary but lasted for months. She faced Kafka-esque bureaucratic labyrinths and had to juggle contradictory administrative demands, which we discover with horror in the play. “I do think that the whole system is designed to make you feel extremely uncomfortable and unworthy and just to stay in the squalor that this society put you in,” Walker said in a video chat.“In every part of the process, Alex was like, ‘You’ll be involved and tell me if I’m relaying correctly the things that you’re saying to me,’” she said. “He allowed us to very much tell our story.” (She and her daughter Renée are in the BBC film.)Zeldin wrote sketches of scenes, which he refined into an outline through a series of workshops. “We bring in 30 or 40 people, we pay them to be involved, and then we go out into the world working with families in their homes, understanding their situation,” he said. “Because I was doing so much work with community groups anyway, it felt natural to me that that should be part of the artistic process, that there should be a room, a great radical mix of people in the room.”This is represented onstage as well. While some people in the cast have theater experience — like Amelda Brown, who joined the cast in 2021 and whose character, Barbara, is losing control over her mind and body — some don’t. It’s an important semantic distinction that Zeldin prefers to “professional” versus “amateur.”Hind Swareldahab and Naby Dakhli during a break from rehearsals.Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times“Hind’s a big professional,” he said, referring to Hind Swareldahab, who plays Tharwa, a Sudanese refugee like herself. “She’s performed at the Odéon twice, she’s performed at the Vienna festival, Geneva, the National Theater. She’s got a great C.V. and she’s a brilliant actor, but she’d never been in a theater before she worked with me. She didn’t know there was a front of house, she didn’t know there was a stage. And so that brings you face to face with the question of, What is the theater for? And unless we ask this question, if we rely on habit, we will die.”Swareldahab, 46, who works as a pharmacist, heard about one of the “Love” workshops in an email from the Refugee Council, a charity and advocacy group. She has done the play many times now, and still marvels at its emotional toll. “Every second, every line, we feel it,” she said. “It’s not easy to watch. Every country, people cry. Everything is real. It’s hard to watch.”At the same time, it should be clear that the show is not a huge downer but is about resilience and our shared humanity — and it pulses with the power of a good yarn.“I want theater to be useful to the world, and I passionately don’t think that that is against poetics, against great storytelling, against entertainment, against accessibility,” Zeldin said. “I’m very lucky that ‘Love’ sells out. It’s a show that people want to see, and that’s very important to me.” More

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      Obie Awards Honor ‘English’ as Best New Play

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      A ceremony for the awards, celebrating work Off and Off Off Broadway, will be held Monday, but organizers decided to announce the winners in advance.The Obie Awards, back on track after a lengthy pandemic hiatus, are naming “English,” an acclaimed comedic drama set in an Iranian test-prep classroom, the best new American play staged Off Broadway over a two-year period.The play, written by the Iranian American playwright Sanaz Toossi, depicts four students, each at different stages of life and with different motivations, struggling to master English well enough to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language. The play was staged in New York early last year as a coproduction of the Atlantic and Roundabout theater companies. In The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green wrote, “Both contemplative and comic, it nails every opportunity for big laughs as its English-learning characters struggle with accents and idioms. But the laughter provides cover for the deeper idea that their struggle is not just linguistic.”Strong reviews have led to subsequent productions that are currently running in Washington and Toronto; another production is scheduled to begin performances next month in Berkeley, Calif.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The Obie Awards, founded by the Village Voice and now presented by the American Theater Wing, honor theater staged Off and Off Off Broadway. This year’s ceremony will be held Monday night at Terminal 5 and will recognize work presented in person or online between July 1, 2020, and Aug. 31, 2022. The Wing decided to announce the award recipients in advance to allow the evening to focus on a celebration of theater’s resilience. Acceptance speeches are being posted on the Wing’s YouTube channel.The Obies, by tradition, do not have established categories; instead, the judges each year give out awards as they see fit. This year the judging panel, headed by the director David Mendizábal and the critic Melissa Rose Bernardo, is giving 37 awards.Among the winners: Martyna Majok, already a Pulitzer winner for “Cost of Living,” is being granted an Obie for playwriting in recognition of “Sanctuary City,” an immigration drama. Presented by New York Theater Workshop, the show got through a week of previews before being forced to close by the pandemic and then resumed performances 18 months later.Performance awards will go to Stephanie Berry and Lizan Mitchell for “On Sugarland” at New York Theater Workshop; Brittany Bradford for “Wedding Band” at Theater for a New Audience; Kara Young for “Twelfth Night” at the Classical Theater of Harlem; and Arturo Luís Soria for “Ni Mi Madre” at Rattlestick Theater. Also, sustained achievement in performance awards will be given to Billy Eugene Jones for “Fat Ham” at the Public Theater and “On Sugarland”; and to Andrea Patterson for “Cullud Wattah” at the Public, “Confederates” at Signature Theater and “Seize the King” at the Classical Theater of Harlem.The Obies are bestowing multiple special citations, including for members of the teams that created “English” and “Fat Ham” as well as “Oratorio for Living Things” at Ars Nova; a musical adaptation of “As You Like It” for Free Shakespeare in the Park; “The Nosebleed” at Lincoln Center Theater and the Japan Society; and a trio of digital, virtual or hybrid productions: “Circle Jerk,” “Russian Troll Farm” and “Taxilandia.” Also getting citations: the comedian Alex Edelman, for “Just for Us”; the playwright Richard Nelson, for his series of 12 plays set in Rhinebeck; and the costume designer Qween Jean, for work on seven shows.A full list of winners is here. More

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      Review: Rude T-Shirts and Rude Awakenings in ‘A Bright New Boise’

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      An early play by Samuel D. Hunter finds the author developing his voice by lending it to the lost souls working at an Idaho Hobby Lobby.For most who attempt it professionally, playwriting is a hopeless job, with few opportunities to break in and fewer to advance. So it’s a pleasing irony that the playwright Samuel D. Hunter, the reigning bard of American economic dead-endism, has managed such a vibrant career.His trophy case is crowded with prizes: Obie, Whiting, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, MacArthur. The film adaptation of his 2012 play “The Whale” is up for three Academy Awards at next month’s ceremony. Even more impressive is that, at just 41, he’s had 11 New York City stage premieres in 12 years, from the jumbly satire of “Jack’s Precious Moment,” his local debut in 2010, to the sublime heartbreak of “A Case for the Existence of God” in 2022.“A Bright New Boise,” also from 2010, was the first of Hunter’s plays to achieve widespread notice, and with good reason. It introduced the radical sympathy of his voice and the quietly despairing people who evoked it. These were characters that few playwrights paid attention to: low-wage earners, many working at local branches of national chains, mostly in Hunter’s native Idaho. They struggle with the fallout of economic devastation and the emotional kind so tied up with it. Searching for faith, they must face its insufficiency.So interpret with caution the title of “A Bright New Boise,” which opened on Tuesday in a taut Signature Theater revival directed by Oliver Butler. It takes place in the break room of a local Hobby Lobby, on a deadly accurate set by Wilson Chin featuring a malfunctioning microwave on the counter and soporific motivational programming on the closed-circuit television. That the programming is occasionally interrupted by surgery-cam videos — a scalpel probing an ear is how this production begins — baldly warns us that we are in for something deeper and more upsetting than mere corporate uplift can obscure.The focus of that upset, we understand at once, is Will (Peter Mark Kendall), a man nearing 40 who is interviewing for a cashier’s position at $7.50 an hour. In 2010, when the play is set, that’s just 25 cents above the federal minimum wage, yet he accepts it willingly. Why?More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The proud, efficient and bilious store manager, Pauline (Eva Kaminsky), is all business; her upswept hair is a pincushion of pens. But Will is clearly in some kind of trouble. He answers her questions haltingly, the holes in his speech and his résumé suggesting the damaged places in his soul. When asked for an emergency contact, even one that “doesn’t have to be local,” he has none to provide.Peter Mark Kendall as Will, and Anna Baryshnikov as Anna, spend evenings reading and writing in the break room after hours.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA bit too methodically, Hunter introduces three of Will’s new co-workers, and here the play, though slightly revised since 2010, begins to betray some early-career awkwardness. One co-worker is Anna (Anna Baryshnikov), a skittery young woman drawn to Will in part because most of the men she meets “are pretty much terrible.” In Will she thinks she recognizes a kindred spirit; they both hide out at closing time — she among the silk flowers; he in scrapbooking — so they can spend evenings reading and writing in the break room.But even though Anna has real grit and sadness to her, she feels peripheral to the deepest currents of the story: a shore bird, not a fish. So, too, is Leroy (Angus O’Brien), a bro-y M.F.A. candidate at Boise State who makes T-shirts featuring aggressive phrases like “You will eat your children” and wears them to work as performance art. (The costumes are by April M. Hickman.) Though it’s Leroy who precipitates the play’s crisis by uncovering Will’s past, the comic and tensioning purposes to which he’s put don’t blend, making him more of a convenience than a character.Only the third co-worker, Alex (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio), is as central to Will’s story as he is to his own. To say how would be to spoil the plot, but Alex is quite a creation: a sullen high school student who has panic attacks, listens to Villa-Lobos on his iPod and is looking for something — in life as in himself — that isn’t a lie or a letdown. When we learn that Will is suffering a terrible disappointment of his own, a disastrous evangelical past he’s trying to shed, we see the crash coming.It’s a mark of Hunter’s patient construction that these Big Issues are usually rooted deeply in the plot, not sprinkled on top of it. In one of the play’s best scenes, Alex, freaking out over a $187 discrepancy Pauline has discovered in his register receipts from the previous day, allows Will to help him search the receipt rolls for the error. There’s no obvious reason that such a dull project — it takes several minutes — should make dangerous, believable, feelingful theater but it does.Actually, the believable part is no mystery; Hunter’s first job was at a Walmart in Moscow, Idaho. Nor is the dangerous part really so surprising: As a teenager Hunter attended an evangelical school for more than four years. He writes about the intensity of fellowship offered by charismatic leaders as vividly as he does the threat to individuality that comes with it. For Will, who came of age in that world, mainstream churches are little more than Hobby Lobbys — national chains selling discount goods.That he engages your sympathy instead of (or along with) your repulsion is the essence of Hunter’s gift. It’s a gift not just of human connection, but of theatrical compaction, a nuclear pressure he applies to people in distress. In that, “A Bright New Boise” anticipates the more sophisticated dramaturgy of his more recent plays, which less and less require extra characters. “A Case for the Existence of God” has only two until its coda.But “A Bright New Boise” sprawls. Despite Butler’s swift and confident staging and the fine work of the cast — and the hilariously corporate lighting, sound and video design — the play sometimes seems like a game of marbles, its five characters, each energized by trouble, banging up against one another in patterns that seem both random and overdetermined.It’s still a compelling play, worth seeing in itself and as a map of what would follow. Also as a map of what didn’t. When Leroy, explaining the philosophy behind his T-shirts, says he’s “forcing people to confront words and images they normally avoid,” you hear him ventriloquizing for Hunter. In a short time, though, the confrontations became invitations, and the T-shirts great theater.A Bright New BoiseThrough March 12 at Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      What to See This Spring in NYC: Broadway Shows, Concerts and More

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      “Life of Pi” and Laura Linney on Broadway, Lise Davidsen at the Met Opera, SZA on tour: Here’s what we’re looking forward to this season.Broadway | Off Broadway | Dance | Classical | PopBroadway‘PARADE’ It doesn’t exactly scream out for the big splashy Broadway musical treatment, does it, this disturbing tale of Leo Frank, accused of the rape and murder of a teenage girl and lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915? And yet, the original 1998 production grabbed Tony Awards for the book, by Alfred Uhry, and the score, by Jason Robert Brown. Almost 25 years later, Michael Arden directed a well-received Encores! production, starring Ben Platt, that had a blink-and-you-miss-it short run. Thankfully the production is headed to Broadway, again featuring Platt as Frank and Micaela Diamond as his wife, Lucille.In previews; opens March 16 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan.‘SHUCKED’ When the crop starts to fail in the small town of Cob County, an expert “corn doctor” arrives to help, but is he really a huckster? That’s the kernel of this cornpone musical comedy, anyway. Well-received in a premiere run at the Pioneer Theater Company, it promises earworm songs and many laughs — sounds amaizing. The book is by the Tony Award winning “Tootsie” writer Robert Horn, with songs by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. The ubiquitous Jack O’Brien directs.Previews begin March 8; opens April 4 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan.‘LIFE OF PI’ The long, tense standoff between a 16-year-old boy and a Bengal tiger stuck on a lifeboat is a tale of hope and survival first told in Yann Martel’s award-winning 2002 novel. A decade later, it became an Oscar-winning film directed by Ang Lee, and most recently has been adapted for the stage by Lolita Chakrabarti — the 2021 West End production won five Olivier Awards. The kid keeps surviving, so a stop on Broadway seems like a good next step. Hiran Abeysekera, who starred in London, will reprise the role of Pi, with Max Webster directing. No, no actual tigers will be among the cast; the puppetry and movement direction is by Finn Caldwell, with puppet design by Caldwell and Nick Barnes.Previews begin March 9; opens March 30 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, Manhattan.Hiran Abeysekera, left, with puppeteers operating the Bengal tiger in “Life of Pi.”Johan Persson‘PETER PAN GOES WRONG’ What’s the worst that could happen? When the Mischief Theater Company, which staged “The Play That Goes Wrong,” takes on the J.M. Barrie classic about a boy who won’t grow up, a few flying mishaps are sure to happen. This farce, which premiered in the West End in 2015, arrives to Broadway this spring, with Adam Meggido directing the chaos.Previews begin March 17; opens April 19 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan.‘THE THANKSGIVING PLAY’ You can’t please everyone … but you can try! A troupe of super progressive artists creates a culturally sensitive elementary school pageant that embraces both Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage month (without the participation of any actual Native Americans) in this satirical comedy by Larissa FastHorse. After a well-received premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2018, the show arrives on Broadway, with Rachel Chavkin (“Hadestown”) directing.Previews begin March 25; opens April 20 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan.Jennifer Bareilles, left, and Margo Seibert in “The Thanksgiving Play.”Jenny Anderson for The New York Times‘NEW YORK, NEW YORK’ What’s old is new when Broadway hosts a new musical inspired by a 1977 film about young artists with big dreams in the big city after World War II. It ain’t easy, but if they can make it here, they can make it anywhere (or so we’re told). The musical includes classics like the title number, as well as new songs — and a huge cast. The score is by Kander and Ebb, with an original story by David Thompson with  Sharon Washington and additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Susan Stroman directs.Previews begin March 24; opens April 26 at the St. James Theater, Manhattan.‘ROOM’ Like “Life of Pi,” also opening this spring, “Room” has gone from best-selling novel to award-winning film and now to a Broadway production. The play, adapted by Emma Donoghue from her 2010 novel about a mother and son held captive in a shed for years, has songs and some theatricalized aspects, like an older alter ego for young Jack. The essence of the story, though, about hope, imagination and resilience, remains the same. The songs are by the Scottish artists Kathryn Joseph and Cora Bissett, and Bissett (“Roadkill”) directs.Previews begin April 3; opens April 17 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan.‘SUMMER, 1976’ The casting alone, with Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht, ought to get you to the box office. Set in Ohio in the year of the bicentennial, David Auburn’s latest is about the budding friendship between Diana (Linney), an artist and single mother, and Alice (Hecht), a naïve housewife. As the nation celebrates independence, the women grapple with motherhood, ambition and intimacy and aim for their own sense of freedom. Daniel Sullivan directs.Previews begin April 4; opens April 25 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan.‘GOOD NIGHT, OSCAR’ Sean Hayes plays the impossible-to-describe pianist, performer and incomparable wit Oscar Levant in this new play by Doug Wright. Levant famously did a number of television interviews with Jack Paar when Levant talked openly and perhaps a bit scandalously about his battles with depression and mental illness. The play premiered last year at the Goodman Theater in Chicago to raves like this one from The Chicago Tribune: “It’s a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.” Anticipation is in the air. Lisa Peterson directs.Previews begin April 7; opens April 24 at the Belasco Theater, Manhattan.Sean Hayes in “Good Night, Oscar.”Liz Lauren‘PRIMA FACIE’ On “Killing Eve,” Jodie Comer proved to be transfixing, so this riveting solo show will certainly be a highlight of the spring season. The play comes with trigger warnings — Comer plays a lawyer who ruthlessly defends men accused of sexual assault, but then she suddenly finds herself on the witness stand. Comer won the 2022 Evening Standard Award for best actress for her West End performance in the role. The play, by Suzie Miller, is directed by Justin Martin. STEVEN McELROYPreviews begin April 11; opens April 23 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan.Jodie Comer in “Prima Facie.”Helen MurrayOff BroadwayBEDLAM THEATER Those of us who grew up in New England all thought Lizzie Borden did it — she gave her mother 40 whacks with an ax, and when that was done, she gave her father 41. Or so went the story of the infamous Borden, who was actually acquitted in the murder trial of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Mass., in 1893. Bedlam Theater takes an irreverent look at the story in “Fall River Fishing,” an absurdist dark comedy about unrequited love, self-loathing and disappointment.In previews; opens Feb. 26 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan.Following that play, Bedlam will stage “The Good John Proctor,” by Talene Monahon, a sequel of sorts to Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” focusing on the young Salem women in the time leading up to the infamous witch trials.Opens March 11 at the Connelly Theater.‘BLACK ODYSSEY’ The playwright Marcus Gardley knows his classics and has created imaginative riffs on Molière’s “Tartuffe,” and Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba.” Now he’s going back a wee bit further to Homer’s Odysseus saga, about a warrior who faces daunting challenges in finding his way home. Gardley places us in contemporary Harlem, where the soldier Ulysses Lincoln relies on his ancestors and family history to help him on his journey to reunite with his family. Stevie Walker-Webb (“Ain’t No Mo’”) directs.In previews; opens Feb. 26 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan.James T. Alfred, at right, in “Black Odyssey.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times‘HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF’ After a sorority sister is raped, some college students start their own self-defense class. And as they create a space to release their pent-up rage, they struggle with how best to respond — seek systemic change, or learn to land a palm strike? Or both? The play by Liliana Padilla was developed at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and won the 2019 Yale Drama Series Prize. The Off Broadway production will be directed by Padilla, Rachel Chavkin and Steph Paul.In previews; opens March 13 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan.‘THE COAST STARLIGHT’ This title refers to the Amtrak daily route that runs between Los Angeles and Seattle, with unbelievable scenery along the way. Keith Bunin’s play — which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 2019 — ponders what might be going on inside the minds of several people traveling solo on this train and fantasizes the encounters they might have with one another in a different reality. At least one of them holds a dangerous secret. Tyne Rafaeli directs.In previews; opens March 13 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan.‘THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART’ It’s hard to believe it’s been 12 years since I was first captivated by this National Theater of Scotland production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This wild tale of a stuffy academic who attends a conference in a Scottish border town and somehow, surrealistically, finds herself dancing with the devil is told with an immersive approach that can be intoxicating for an audience member. You can take that literally — the show is being presented at the McKittrick Hotel in a pub environment, as it was in Edinburgh and at the hotel in 2016-17. The writer, David Greig (“The Events”), has a knack for yearning and fantasy, and “Prudencia” is unlikely to get old anytime soon.Previews begin March 8; opens March 13 at the McKittrick Hotel, Manhattan.‘WHITE GIRL IN DANGER’ Tired of being a “Blackground player” in the soap opera town of Allwhite, Keesha Gibbs is determined to take center stage in this new musical comedy with book, music and lyrics by the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson (“A Strange Loop”). And as you might surmise from the title, there is indeed a killer on the loose in Jackson’s mash-up of soaps and melodramatic movies. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs.Previews begin March 15; opens April 10 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan.From left, Liz Lark Brown, Latoya Edwards and NaTasha Yvette Williams at a reading of “White Girl in Danger.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times‘DÍA Y NOCHE’ This coming-of-age story, set in El Paso, Texas, in 1984, is about racism and class struggle experienced through the unlikely friendship between a Chicano punk-rock kid and a Black upper-middle-class nerd who is gay and closeted. Carlos Armesto directs the LAByrinth Theater Company production, written by LAB actor/playwright David Anzuelo.Previews begin March 18; opens March 26 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan.RED BULL THEATER Even we Elizabethan geeks might not be familiar with “Arden of Faversham,” a 16th-century thriller from the quill of an anonymous playwright (Shakespeare? Marlowe? Thomas Kyd?). A wife is having an affair and, with her lover, plots the murder of her wealthy husband; naturally, things get complicated. Jesse Berger directs the adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat for Red Bull Theater.Previews begin March 6; opens March 16 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan.For 20 years, Red Bull has, thankfully, continued to keep many great classic plays alive for contemporary audiences — they’ll also stage Francis Beaumont’s hilarious comedy “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” directed by Noah Brody and Emily Young this spring.Previews begin April 17; opens April 27 at the Lucille Lortel Theater.‘KING JAMES’ The timing could hardly be better for this show, arriving onstage just a few months after LeBron James broke the all time NBA scoring record. This play by Rajiv Joseph (“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), which follows two LeBron super fans who forge an unlikely bond during the basketball player’s days with the Cleveland Cavaliers, is a study of the important place sports can hold in some of our lives. I don’t even like basketball (I’m too short), and I still can’t wait! Glenn Davis and Chris Perfetti will revisit the roles they played at Steppenwolf Theater Company, where the play had its world premiere last year. Kenny Leon directs.Previews begin May 2; opens May 16 at Manhattan Theater Club.‘DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES’ This world premiere musical brings together the composer and lyricist Adam Guettel (“Floyd Collins”) and the playwright Craig Lucas (“An American in Paris”) for the first time since their musical “The Light in the Piazza.” Adapted from J.P. Miller’s 1962 film and 1958 teleplay, the story about a couple’s yearslong battle with alcoholism doesn’t sound super uplifting, but the creative team has quite a track record. Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen”) directs the Atlantic Theater Company production. STEVEN McELROYOpens May 5 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan.Dance‘COPPELIA’ In “Coppelia” (1870) the old toymaker Dr. Coppelius is obsessed with creating a female doll so realistic that she can be — and is — mistaken for a human girl. But that’s not enough: Through magic spells, he tries to bring her to life. In 2023, our magic is artificial intelligence, and in Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jessica Wright’s ingenious “Coppelia,” which Scottish Ballet brings to Sadler’s Wells theater in London, Dr. Coppelius is a charismatic Steve Jobs figure in a black turtleneck, dominating technicians and androids as he attempts to create the perfect woman. The heroine, Swanhilda, is a journalist investigating Coppelius’s NuLife laboratory; her boyfriend Franz comes along and, just as in the 19th-century original, falls for the nonhuman Coppelia. The ballet won rave reviews after its debut at the Edinburgh Festival last year. ROSLYN SULCASMarch 2-5, Sadler’s Wells, London.JORDAN DEMETRIUS LLOYD Like so many dance artists, the choreographer and dancer Jordan Demetrius Lloyd has spent the past few years resourcefully creating work outside of theaters. In 2020, he directed the stirring, contemplative short film “The Last Moon in Mellowland,” a poem in images. Last summer, his site-specific “Jerome” drew crowds of dance lovers and curious passers-by to a schoolyard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. With his latest project — his first evening-length commission — Lloyd returns to the theater, both embracing its familiarity and testing out new directions, as he finds himself “on not the other side but another side of the pandemic,” he said in a phone interview. In “Blackbare in the Basement,” at Danspace Project, he and seven dancers extend on ideas from “JEROME” while considering the particularities of this hallowed downtown performance space and the history of the artists who have moved through it. SIOBHAN BURKEMarch 9-11, Danspace Project, Manhattan.From left, Paul Hamilton, Keely Garfield and Angie Pittman.Whitney BrowneKEELY GARFIELD As a choreographer and performer, Keely Garfield has long blurred the lines between irony and sincerity, the absurd and the profound. Her unpredictable works, unafraid of kitsch, are costume pageants with room for prayer, feats of endurance and bravery that don’t disguise awkwardness and vulnerability. Garfield is also a yoga teacher, an urban Zen integrated therapist and a hospital chaplain. Her newest piece, “The Invisible Project,” is her first to explore explicitly the crossover between her work as a choreographer and her work in wellness, experimenting with how endurance, patience, healing and catharsis can be danced. If compassionate presence is an aim, the cast is ideal: Opal Ingle, Angie Pittman, Paul Hamilton and Molly Lieber. BRIAN SEIBERTMarch 10-12 at N.Y.U. Skirball, Manhattan.TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY The question of how to stay current, relevant, haunts every dance company built on the vision of a single choreographer. What happens when that person is no longer here? Six years after the death of the postmodern trailblazer Trisha Brown, her company has, for the first time, commissioned a new dance from another artist: the Cuban-born Judith Sánchez Ruíz, a member of the Brown company from 2006 to 2009. Now living in Berlin, Ruíz combines a visceral understanding of Brown’s work with her own daring, intensely physical approach to movement invention. In addition to Ruíz’s “Let’s talk about bleeding,” with a score by the Cuban composer Adonis Gonzalez, the company’s Joyce Theater season features two of Brown’s collaborations with the sound artist Alvin Curran, “For M.G.: The Movie” (1991) and “Rogues” (2011). And Ruíz is not the only fresh voice on the program: Five of the troupe’s eight dancers are new. BURKEMay 2-7, Joyce Theater, Manhattan.Thaji Dias and Amandi Gomez from Nrityagram Dance Ensemble.Ravi ShankarNRITYAGRAM DANCE ENSEMBLE About a decade ago, Nrityagram — unsurpassed exponents of the Indian classical form Odissi — came to the Joyce Theater with surprise guests. They were members of Chitrasena Dance Company from Sri Lanka, experts in that nation’s Kandyan tradition. A collaboration among the dancers, all female, brought out both the shared ancient roots of the two styles and their differences: the more sinuous refinement of Odissi, the folksier verve of Kandyan. They danced to different drummers and found a new harmony. The two companies return together to the Joyce with a new program, “Ahuti,” or “Offering.” One change is the presence of men, who come from the Chitrasena side — bare-chested, virile, spinning end-over-end through the air. They are a novelty in Nrityagram performance, introducing a complementary energy and adding to a larger-than-usual cast, a more populous party. SEIBERTMay 9-14, Joyce Theater, Manhattan.ClassicalCARNEGIE HALL Last year, the Vienna Philharmonic’s Carnegie visit was upturned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the last-minute dumping of its guest conductor, the Putin-affiliated Valery Gergiev. Things should be much calmer when the orchestra returns for three days of works by Schoenberg, Strauss, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Bruckner — all led by Christian Thielemann, a master of this repertoire (March 3-5). Another Carnegie staple, the English Concert, brings Handel’s oratorio “Solomon” (March 12); later, its fellow period ensemble Les Arts Florissants, led by the essential William Christie, comes with an all-Charpentier program for Holy Week (April 26).Among visiting pianists are the gracefully intelligent Alexandre Tharaud, playing works including his transcription of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (March 26); Seong-Jin Cho, who heroically flew in to salvage those Vienna concerts last February (April 12); and the mighty Beatrice Rana, taking on Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata (April 20). Other recitals include the cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s multimedia Bach show “Fragments” (April 1); the continuation of the Danish String Quartet’s Schubert-inspired “Doppelgänger” project, with a premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir (April 20), who has also written the latest installment of the flutist Claire Chase’s sprawling, multi-decade initiative “Density 2036” (May 25). Chase appears as well as the soloist in Kaija Saariaho’s “Aile du songe,” with Susanna Mälkki and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra (May 9).Other ensembles are bringing local premieres to Carnegie: the Philadelphia Orchestra, presenting John Luther Adams’s “Vespers of the Blessed Earth” with the vocal group the Crossing (March 31); and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which over two evenings is performing Thierry Escaich’s Cello Concerto, with Gautier Capuçon, and Thomas Adès “Air,” for violin and orchestra, with Anne-Sophie Mutter (April 24 and 25). The Met Orchestra continues its tradition of postseason Carnegie appearances, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in Brahms’s “Ein deutsches Requiem” and a program that includes Renée Fleming and Russell Thomas in Act IV of Verdi’s “Otello,” as well as the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s “Lear Sketches” (June 15 and 22).Susanna Mälkki conducting at Carnegie Hall.Chris LeeNEW YORK PHILHARMONIC The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, whose career continues to thrive in the face of a terminal brain cancer diagnosis, returns to the Philharmonic podium to lead the local premiere of his “Meditations on Rilke” and Schubert’s “Great” Symphony (March 9-12). Then, the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, leads Messiaen’s immense “Turangalîla-symphonie,” featuring Jean-Yves Thibaudet as the piano soloist (March 17-19), followed by Bach’s similarly expansive “St. Matthew Passion,” with vocalists including Nicholas Phan, Davóne Tines, Paul Appleby, Tamara Mumford and Philippe Sly (March 23-25).More firsts come in the New York premiere of Felipe Lara’s Double Concerto, featuring Claire Chase on flute and Esperanza Spalding on bass and led by Susanna Mälkki (March 29-31); the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition winner Yunchan Lim’s Philharmonic debut in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with James Gaffigan (May 10-12); the U.S. premiere of Chick Corea’s Trombone Concerto, led by Marin Alsop and featuring the orchestra’s principal trombone, Joseph Alessi (May 25-27); the world premiere of Julia Wolfe’s large-scale “unEarth” (June 1-3); and the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert” (June 8-10).METROPOLITAN OPERA Earlier this season, the Met announced that it would devote more resources and calendar time to contemporary works and, inevitably, new productions. But revivals are still the bread and butter of a repertory house, and many this spring have something to look forward to. When Robert Carsen’s elegant production of “Falstaff” returns (March 12-April 1), it will feature as the decadent title character the German baritone Michael Volle — a solemn presence known for embodying Wagner heroes like Wotan and Hans Sachs — in his first Verdi role. Carsen’s similarly clean, and sobering, “Der Rosenkavalier” (March 27-April 20) will be a vehicle for the soprano Lise Davidsen, the Met’s reigning diva, who is making her role debut as the Marschallin.Lise Davidsen, at right, in “Ariadne auf Naxos.” This season she will make her role debut as the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.”Marty Sohl/Met OperaYannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, has been largely absent so far this season, but will take the podium for Puccini’s “La Bohème” (April 21-28, then May 2-14). And the conductor Thomas Guggeis, turning 30 this year and on a rapid rise abroad, as the general music director of Frankfurt Opera and a substitute for Daniel Barenboim in a high-profile Berlin “Ring” cycle last fall, makes his Met debut leading another Wagner work: “Der Fliegende Holländer,” in the first revival of François Girard’s obtuse 2020 staging (May 30-June 10).PARK AVENUE ARMORY Recital spaces are preciously rare in New York, and few can compare with the Armory’s intimate and acoustically rich Board of Officers Room. There, the French baritone Stéphane Degout, with the pianist Cédric Tiberghien, will present an evening of art songs from composers including Fauré, Schubert, Debussy and Lili Boulanger (April 3 and 5). The tenor Allan Clayton — revered abroad and recently celebrated locally in the title roles of “Hamlet” and “Peter Grimes” at the Metropolitan Opera — comes next with the pianist James Baillieu for a program of works by Schumann and Nico Muhly, as well as Clayton’s countrymen Henry Purcell, Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten (April 27 and 29). Later, the young pianist Pavel Kolesnikov brings his account of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, which he has performed alongside the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, as well as an eclectic mix of works inspired by Joseph Cornell’s “Celestial Navigation” (May 22 and 24). JOSHUA BARONEPopWEYES BLOOD The clarion-voiced Natalie Mering, under the name Weyes Blood, makes intricately wrought Laurel Canyon folk-pop updated for an era of millennial unease. She wrote many of the songs on her stirring 2022 album “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,” as hymns to the collective epidemic of loneliness brought on by the pandemic. Mering’s music is intimate but sweeping; she uses her own personal experiences to access larger and more generalized undercurrents of emotion. It will be heartening to hear a song like the anthemic single “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” performed live, with a venue full of voices proving the communal sentiment of its title. LINDSAY ZOLADZMarch 3 and 4 at Brooklyn Steel.Weyes Blood performs at Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona, Spain, in 2022.Jordi Vidal/Redferns, Getty ImagesSZA In the details of a song and in the shape of her career, SZA’s timing has been utterly her own. To sing about relationships and ambitions that unfold as messily as everyday life, SZA — Solana Imani Rowe — writes melodies and lyrics that seem to be spilling out spontaneously: crooning, pausing, suddenly racing, then curling neatly into a hook. Her recordings have arrived with the same kind of unpredictability. She released her debut album, “CTRL” in 2017; five years later, in 2022, she expanded it to a deluxe version that was half again as long, then went on to release an entire new album, “SOS.” In the meantime, an ever-expanding audience found their own lives in her songs: in their desires, jealousy, doubts, seductions, setbacks and triumphs, and in their leisurely grooves. SZA is touring arenas this year, and singalongs will likely join her, phrase for eccentric phrase. JON PARELESMarch 4 and 5 at Madison Square Garden, Manhattan.YO LA TENGO Since forming nearly four decades ago, the Hoboken indie-rock legends Yo La Tengo have been staggeringly consistent: The trio of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew never seems to tire in its search of eclectic new elements to bring into its ever-expanding sonic universe. Still, the band sounds particularly inspired on its latest (and 17th!) album, the richly enveloping “This Stupid World,” which flickers from despair to hard-won hope and moves fluidly between jammy abstractions (“Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) and succinctly rendered indie-pop (“Fallout,” “Aselestine”). Both of those sides of “This Stupid World” are likely to translate well live, but the new album probably won’t be the set list’s only focus — naturally, their back catalog runs pretty deep. ZOLADZMarch 18 at Brooklyn Steel.SOLANGE Futuristic R&B, righteous jazz, gospel, performance art, poetry, sculpture, film and opera are all part of a generation-spanning seven-event series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music curated by Solange Knowles for Saint Heron, her project to preserve and celebrate Black culture. Named “Eldorado Ballroom” after a historic Black music hall in Houston, the series begins March 30 with a concert headlined by the ambitious, electronics-loving songwriter Kelela, along with the adventurous R&B songwriters Res and KeiyaA. On April 7, the long-running gospel group Twinkie Clark and the Clark Sisters are paired with a program of spiritual choral compositions by Mary Lou Williams. And on April 8, the pioneering free-jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp shares a bill with the poet Claudia Rankine and the avant-garde vocalist Linda Sharrock, in her first New York City concert since the 1970s. The whole series offers deep, promising connections. PARELESBegins March 30 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. More