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    How Accurate Is the Science in ‘Twisters’?

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    Sean Waugh holds a laptop with green, red and yellow weather radar looping as his driver rumbles down an Oklahoma highway in their government-issued truck. The vehicle holds 50 gallons of fuel, so they can chase storms all day. A rectangular cage with metal mesh covers the truck in an attempt to protect the team from hail. Hanging off the front of the hail cage are weather instruments that look like the horn of a rhinoceros charging into a storm.The truck, called Probe One, points in one direction, and a companion, Probe Two, points in another. Tall grass flows like ocean waves, and the stop sign at a crossroads wobbles. The sky is dark gray with a hint of green. Lightning flashes on all sides.The radio cracks. “Probe One, you want us to go?”“Yes, go now,” says Dr. Waugh, a researcher with the National Severe Storms Laboratory.As they disappear into the mist, another storm chaser emerges: Reed Timmer, who has a large social media following, pulls in front in one of his tank-like trucks, called the Dominator.It’s just the scientist, the YouTube star and a lonely farmhouse.Sean Waugh’s job is to get close to storms. He’s lately become a Hollywood movie consultant in his spare time.Reto Sterchi for The New York TimesReto Sterchi for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jeremy Renner Is in Critical Condition After Snow-Plowing Accident

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      The actor, known for his role as Hawkeye in Marvel’s Avengers movies, was stable, his representative said.The actor Jeremy Renner was in critical but stable condition after being hospitalized with serious injuries from an accident while plowing snow in Nevada, his representative said in a statement.“His family is with him, and he is receiving excellent care,” the representative, Samantha Mast, said in a statement on Monday.The sheriff’s office in Washoe County, Nev., said Mr. Renner had suffered a “traumatic injury” in the Reno area on Sunday morning. He was the only person involved in the accident and was flown to a nearby hospital, the sheriff’s office said. Mr. Renner has a house in the Mount Rose-Ski Tahoe area, according to The Reno-Gazette Journal.Mr. Renner, 51, has played Hawkeye, a member of Marvel’s Avengers superheroes team, in several movies and a television series. He has also twice been nominated for an Oscar, for his roles in “The Hurt Locker” (2008) and “The Town” (2010).Mr. Renner has shared several updates on social media this winter as the area received large amounts of snow.“Nearly done With sledding hill For the kids,” said a caption on an Instagram video clip showing a snow plow last week.“Lake Tahoe snowfall is no joke,” he said in a tweet last month that showed a vehicle covered in snow.Mr. Renner stars in “Mayor of Kingstown,” a thriller whose second season is set to be released on the Paramount+ streaming service on Jan. 15. Another show, “Rennervations,” which follows Mr. Renner as he helps communities to reimagine purpose-built vehicles, is scheduled to air on Disney+ early this year.The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning over the weekend for the areas around Reno, in addition to a warning that was in place for the Lake Tahoe Basin. On Saturday and Sunday, the Tahoe Basin at lake level received between 20 and 24 inches of snow, the Weather Service in Reno said.The Weather Service on Sunday advised those with travel plans through the Sierra Nevada to prepare for winter weather driving conditions and warned of icy roads as additional storms arrive. About 22,000 customers in Nevada were without power early Monday after the storm, according to poweroutage.us, which aggregates data from utilities across the country. More

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      Climate Change Threatens Summer Stages and Outdoor Performances

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      ASHLAND, Ore. — Smoke from a raging wildfire in California prompted the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to cancel a recent performance of “The Tempest” at its open-air theater. Record flooding in St. Louis forced the cancellation of an outdoor performance of “Legally Blonde.” And after heat and smoke at an outdoor Pearl Jam concert in France damaged the throat of its lead singer, Eddie Vedder, the band canceled several shows.Around the world, rising temperatures, raging wildfires and extreme weather are imperiling whole communities. This summer, climate change is also endangering a treasured pastime: outdoor performance.Here in the Rogue Valley, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is seeing an existential threat from ever-more-common wildfires. In 2018 it canceled 25 performances because of wildfire smoke. In 2020, while the theater was shut down by the pandemic, a massive fire destroyed 2,600 local homes, including those of several staffers. When the festival reopened last year with a one-woman show about the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, wildfire smoke forced it to cancel almost every performance in August.“The problem is that in recent years there have been fires in British Columbia and in the mountains in Washington State and fires as far as Los Angeles,” said Nataki Garrett, the festival’s artistic director. “You have fire up and down the West Coast, and all of that is seeping into the valley.”Even before this year’s fire season began, the festival moved the nightly start time of its outdoor performances later because of extreme heat.Wildfires, which generate smoke that pollute air quality over long distances, have already begun burning this year in parts of Europe and the United States. In July, the Oak fire raged near Yosemite National Park.David McNew/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRecord rainfall in the St. Louis area caused flash flooding. Among the effects: The Muny, a major outdoor musical theater, had to cancel a performance of “Legally Blonde” because of flooding on its campus.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressAshland is not the only outdoor theater canceling performances because of wildfires. Smoke or fire conditions have also prompted cancellations in recent years at the Butterfly Effect Theater of Colorado; the California Shakespeare Theater, known as Cal Shakes; the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival in Nevada and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., among others.“We are one giant ecosystem, and what happens in one place affects everywhere,” said Robert K. Meya, the general director of the Santa Fe Opera, which stages open-air productions against a striking desert backdrop each summer, and which, in an era of massive wildfires near and far, has installed sensors to gauge whether it is safe to perform.The reports of worsening conditions come from wide swaths of the country. “Last summer was the hardest summer I’ve experienced out here, because fires came early, and coupled with that were pretty severe heat indexes,” said Kevin Asselin, executive artistic director of Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, which stages free performances in rural communities in five Rocky Mountain West states, and has increasingly been forced indoors. “And the hailstorms this year have been out of control.”Road signs in Ashland, Ore., guide drivers along wildfire evacuation routes.Kristina Barker for The New York TimesIn southern Ohio, a growing number of performances of an annual history play called “Tecumseh!” have been canceled because of heavy rain. In northwest Arkansas, rising heat is afflicting “The Great Passion Play,” an annual re-enactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In Texas, record heat forced the Austin Symphony Orchestra to cancel several outdoor chamber concerts. And in western Massachusetts, at Tanglewood, the bucolic summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, more shade trees have been planted on the sweeping lawn to provide relief on hot days.“Changing weather patterns with more frequent and severe storms have altered the Tanglewood landscape on a scale not previously experienced,” the orchestra said in a statement.On Sunday, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of the nation’s first major climate law, which, if enacted into law, would seek to bring about major reductions in greenhouse pollution. Arts presenters, meanwhile, are grappling with how to preserve outdoor productions, both short-term and long-term, as the planet warms.“We’re in a world that we have never been in as a species, and we’re going into a world that is completely foreign and new and will be challenging us in ways we can only dimly see right now,” said Kim Cobb, the director of the environment and society institute at Brown University.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is an important driver of the local economy, but smoke and heat associated with climate change have become a growing challenge.Kristina Barker for The New York TimesSome venues are taking elaborate precautions. The American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wis., now requires performers to wear wicking undergarments when the heat and humidity rise, encourages actors to consume second act sports drinks, and asks costume designers to eliminate wigs, jackets and other heavy outerwear on hot days.Many outdoor performing venues say that, even as they are bracing for the effects of climate change, they are also trying to limit the ways that they contribute to it. The Santa Fe Opera is investing in solar energy; the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is planting native meadows; and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is using electric vehicles.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which before the pandemic had been one of the largest nonprofit theaters in the country, is, in many ways, patient zero. The theater is central to the local economy — the downtown features establishments with names like the Bard’s Inn and Salon Juliet. But the theater’s location, in the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon, has repeatedly been subject to high levels of wildfire smoke in recent years.At the Santa Fe Opera, which offers majestic desert views at sunset, concern about wildfire smoke prompted officials to install air quality sensors. Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesThe theater, like many, has installed air quality monitors — there’s one in a niche in the wall that encircles the audience in the open-air Allen Elizabethan Theater, where this summer “The Tempest” is alternating with a new musical called “Revenge Song.” The device is visible only to the keenest of eyes: a small cylindrical white gadget with lasers that count particles in the passing breeze.The theater also has a smoke team that holds a daily meeting during fire season, assessing whether to cancel or proceed. The theater’s director of production, Alys E. Holden, said that, ever since the time she opposed canceling a performance mid-show and later learned a technician had thrown up because of the air pollution, she has replaced her “show must go on” ethos with “If it’s too unsafe to play, you don’t play.”This year the festival reduced the number of outdoor performances scheduled in August — generally, but not always, the smokiest month.Air quality monitors, now in use at many Western venues including the Santa Fe Opera, can help presenters protect not only audience members but also performers. The opera is particularly concerned about its singers.Ramsay de Give for The New York Times“Actors are breathing in huge amounts of air to project out for hours — it’s not a trivial event to breathe this stuff in, and their voices are blown the next day if we blow the call,” Holden said. “So we are canceling to preserve everyone’s health, and to preserve the next show.”Wildfire-related air quality has become an issue for venues throughout the West. “It’s constantly on our mind, especially as fire season seems to start earlier and earlier,” said Ralph Flores, the senior program manager for theater and performance at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which has a 500-seat outdoor theater at the Getty Villa.Air quality concerns sometimes surprise patrons on days when pollution is present, but can’t be readily smelled or seen.“The idea that outdoor performance would be affected or disrupted by what’s happening with the Air Quality Index is still a fairly new and forward concept to a lot of people,” said Stephen Weitz, the producing artistic director at the Butterfly Effect Theater of Colorado, which stages free shows in parks and parking lots. Last summer the theater had to cancel a performance because of poor air quality caused by a faraway fire.The coronavirus pandemic also remains a concern, prompting crew members in Santa Fe to wear masks as they met before a performance of Bizet’s “Carmen.”Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesAnother theater there, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, is now working with scientists at the affiliated University of Colorado Boulder on monitoring and health protocols after a fire more than a thousand miles away in Oregon polluted the local air badly enough to force a show cancellation last summer. Tim Orr, the festival’s producing artistic director, recalled breaking the news to the audience.“The looks on their faces were surprise, and shock, but a lot of people came up and said ‘Thank you for making the right choice,’” he said. “And when I stepped offstage, I thought, ‘Is this going to be a regular part of our future?’”Planning for the future, for venues that present out of doors, now invariably means thinking about climate change.The Santa Fe Opera’s stunning outdoor location is one of its great attributes, but also makes it vulnerable to climate change.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesOskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which produces Free Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park, said that the 2021 summer season, when the theater reopened after the pandemic shutdown, was the rainiest in his two decades there. “I could imagine performing more in the fall and spring, and less in the summer,” he said.In some places, theater leaders are already envisioning a future in which performances all move indoors.“We’re not going to have outdoor theater in Boise forever — I don’t think there’s a chance of that,” said Charles Fee, who is the producing artistic director of three collaborating nonprofits: the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland. Fee has asked the Idaho board to plan for an indoor theater in Boise.“Once it’s 110 degrees at 6 o’clock at night, and we have these occasionally already, people are sick,” he said. “You can’t do the big Shakespeare fight, you can’t do the dances in ‘Mamma Mia.’ And you can’t do that to an audience.” More

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      Willard Scott, Longtime 'Today' Weatherman, Dies at 87

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      Mr. Scott, who played both Bozo the Clown and the original Ronald McDonald on television, was a longtime weather forecaster on the “Today” show who emphasized showmanship over science.Willard Scott, the antic longtime weather forecaster on the “Today” show, whose work, by his own cheerful acknowledgment, made it clear that you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, died on Saturday at his farm in Delaplane, Va. He was 87.His death was confirmed by his wife, Paris Keena Scott. She did not specify a cause, saying only that he had died after a brief illness.Mr. Scott, who had earlier played both Bozo the Clown and the original Ronald McDonald on television, was among the first of a generation of television weathermen who stressed showmanship over science. Throughout the late 20th century, he was also a ubiquitous television pitchman.A garrulous, gaptoothed, boutonnière-wearing, funny-hatted, sometimes toupee-clad, larger-than-life American Everyman (in his prime, he stood 6-foot-3 and weighed nearly 300 pounds), Mr. Scott was hired in 1980 to help NBC’s “Today” compete with its chief rival, ABC’s “Good Morning America.”Joining “Today” that March, Mr. Scott went on to sport a string of outré outfits, spout a cornucopia of cornpone humor and wish happy birthday to a spate of American centenarians, all while talking about the forecast every so often, until his retirement in 2015.Though he was meant to represent the new, late-model television weatherman, Mr. Scott brought to the job a brand of shtick that harked back to earlier times. He seemed simultaneously to embody the jovial, backslapping Rotarian of the mid-20th century, the midway barker of the 19th and, in the opinion of at least some critics, the court jester of the Middle Ages.There was the time, for instance, that he delivered the forecast dressed as Boy George. There was the time he did so dressed as Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian bombshell” of an earlier era, dancing before the weather map in high heels, ruffled pink gown, copious jewelry and vast fruited hat. There was the time, reporting from an outdoor event, that he kissed a pig on camera.The pig did not take kindly to being kissed and squealed mightily.Mr. Scott, who began his career in radio before becoming a weatherman at WRC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Washington, had no background in meteorology or any allied science. But as he readily acknowledged, the weatherman’s job as reconstructed for the postmodern age did not require any.“A trained gorilla could do it,” Mr. Scott said in 1975, while he was at WRC.The only scientific asset one actually needed, he pointed out, was the telephone number of the National Weather Service.In more than three decades with “Today,” Mr. Scott traversed the country, delivering the weather on location at county fairs, town parades and quaint byways across America, as well as from NBC’s studios in New York.A frequent guest on late-night TV, he was a spokesman for a range of charitable causes and a commercial pitchman with wide television exposure — too wide, some critics maintained.The concerns he endorsed included Howard Johnson Motor Lodges, True Value Hardware, Burger King, Lipton tea, Maxwell House coffee, the American Dairy Association, the Florida Citrus Commission, Diet Coke, USA Today and many others.“A huckster for all seasons,” The New York Times called him in 1987.Mr. Scott’s onscreen persona — by his own account little different from his offscreen persona — divided viewers. Some adored him, inundating him with gifts, which he might display on the air. (Among them, the 1987 article in The Times reported, was “an airplane built out of Diet Coke cans.”)In January 1989, the country’s new first lady, Barbara Bush, broke ranks from the inaugural parade for her husband, George H.W. Bush, to dart over to Mr. Scott, broadcasting from the sidelines, and plant an impromptu kiss on his cheek.“I don’t know Willard Scott,” Mrs. Bush explained afterward. “I just love that face.”Then again, as The Boston Globe reported in 1975, there was this incident, from Mr. Scott’s days at WRC: “He was pushing a shopping cart in a Virginia supermarket recently when a little old lady charged by and smacked him with her umbrella. ‘I can’t stand you,’ she said.”The son of Willard Herman Scott, an insurance salesman, and Thelma (Phillips) Scott, a telephone operator, Willard Herman Scott Jr. was born on March 7, 1934, in Alexandria, Va.He was smitten with broadcasting from the time he was a boy, and at 16 he became a $12-a-week page at WRC-TV. After he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religion from American University, Mr. Scott and a classmate, Ed Walker, took to the Washington airwaves with a comic radio show, “The Joy Boys.”With time out from 1956 to 1958 for Mr. Scott’s Navy service, “The Joy Boys” was broadcast on WRC-AM from 1955 to 1972 and on WWDC-AM in Washington from 1972 to 1974. Featuring humorous improvisation and topical satire, it won a large following.From 1952 to 1962, Mr. Scott also played the title character on “Bozo the Clown,” the WRC-TV version of a syndicated children’s show. In the early ’60s, on the strength of his Bozo, McDonald’s asked him to develop a clown character to be used in its advertising.As Ronald McDonald, Mr. Scott did several local TV commercials for the franchise but was passed over — in consequence of his corpulence, he later said — as its national representative.In 1967, he started doing the weather on WRC-TV. There, his exploits included emerging from a manhole one Groundhog Day dressed as an astoundingly large groundhog.When Mr. Scott was hired by “Today,” he supplanted the meteorologist Bob Ryan, who was fired to make way for him. Mr. Ryan, who held a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in atmospheric science, had previously worked as a cloud physicist.Mr. Scott’s early weeks at “Today,” he later recalled, were “touch and go.”But by 1987, The Times reported, “his tenure there” was “credited with helping to catapult the show past ‘Good Morning America’ into first place in the breakfast-time sweepstakes.”Not all of Mr. Scott’s colleagues approved of his modus operandi. In 1988, Bryant Gumbel, a co-host of “Today,” wrote a confidential memorandum to an NBC executive in which he castigated the work of several colleagues, notably Mr. Scott.The memo, leaked to New York Newsday the next year, charged that Mr. Scott “holds the show hostage to his assortment of whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste.”Though Mr. Scott publicly forgave Mr. Gumbel, giving him a conciliatory kiss on the cheek on a “Today” segment soon afterward, he said elsewhere that the memo had “cut like a knife.”With NBC colleagues, Mr. Scott shared three Daytime Emmys in the 1990s for coverage of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He went into semiretirement in 1996, ceding regular forecasting to Al Roker while continuing to deliver birthday tributes.Mr. Scott’s first wife, Mary (Dwyer) Scott, whom he married in 1959, died in 2002. He married Paris Keena Scott, his second wife, in 2014. In addition to her, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Sally Scott Swiatek and Mare Scott, and two grandchildren, Sally Marie Swiatek and John Willard Swiatek.Mr. Scott was the author of several books, including “Willard Scott’s Down Home Stories” (1984) and “Willard Scott’s All-American Cookbook” (1986).For all its burlesque jocularity, Mr. Scott asserted, his job was no less taxing as a result.“Everything I do looks like it just falls into place,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “Part of what I do is make it fall into place. You have to work at being a buffoon.”Michael Levenson More

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      This Summer’s Dance MVP: The Weatherman

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      At Jacob’s Pillow, with all shows outdoors, a new uncontrollable element emerged: weather. That’s where Paul Caiano comes in.BECKET, Mass. — A week after the Jacob’s Pillow season opened here, five dancers were rehearsing in the vegetable garden for a site-specific work, “Tillers of the Soil.” They tied up tomato plants, practiced wielding a machete and learned about the Native planting practice known as three sisters — growing corn, beans and squash together. The sky was clear.“Paul said it’s going to rain at 3:30 p.m.,” said the choreographer Adam Weinert — and at almost exactly that moment, a balmy afternoon erupted into showers. The dancers fled the garden, laughing, wheelbarrow in tow.Paul is Paul Caiano, an affable Albany, N.Y., weatherman who this summer took on the role of first-ever resident meteorologist for the Pillow.Ching Ching Wong and Cynthia Koppe in “Tillers of the Soil” at Jacob’s Pillow.Christopher DugganAfter last year’s festival was canceled because of the pandemic, Jacob’s Pillow moved its summer dance festival totally outdoors this year. But that has posed a new set of worries from an uncontrollable factor, namely the weather.Even festivals and theaters that have had outdoor performances for years have found this summer singular thanks to extreme weather paired with Covid-19 precautions. Events outside in the elements have proliferated alongside record-breaking heat waves, sudden storms and flash floods.At Jacob’s Pillow, that’s where Caiano, 50, comes in. He’s been a weatherman for almost three decades, delivering spirited daily reports for NewsChannel 13 and WAMC public radio. “I thrive from trying to give people the information they need to make decisions,” he said, “whether it be just to go golfing, or a bigger thing like having 10,000 people at their performance.”Before this summer at Jacob’s Pillow, Vinny Vigilante, director of technical production, made weather calls on his own. It was lower stakes because there were fewer outdoor productions and less equipment involved. “This year, because we moved outside, I definitely was like, ‘I need help,’” he said. He’d heard that the Tanglewood Music Center nearby worked with a meteorologist. “And that turned out to be Paul,” he said.“I thrive from trying to give people the information they need to make decisions,” Caiano said.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesIn 2012, Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, invested in state-of-the-art weather-tracking software. It even installed a Thor Guard device, which the Coast Guard and NASA use to measure electrostatic energy in the atmosphere and to predict when lightning is likely to strike. Still, help was needed to interpret the complicated data, so the facilities manager Bobby Lahart began searching for a meteorologist. When Lahart cold-called WAMC, Caiano picked up. He’s been forecasting severe weather for Tanglewood’s outdoor stages since then.Becket, the Western Massachusetts town that Jacob’s Pillow calls home, is a microclimate that’s difficult to accurately forecast. The grounds are surrounded by mountains, valleys and ocean winds. Caiano says the landscape is like a moisture-trapping bowl that wind blows right over, leaving foggy, wet conditions within. The grounds might be experiencing sudden showers, as on the day Weinert and his dancers had to cut their rehearsal short, while just 20 minutes away, the town of Lee is sunny, dry and clear.That variability is an enjoyable challenge to Caiano, a lifelong weather nerd who idolized the meteorologists on the Weather Channel when young. But it’s been tough for the festival, which has had a 44 percent cancellation rate of performances so far this summer. (The festival continues through Aug. 29.) When there’s a rainout, ticket holders can either receive a full refund, rebook for another show or donate the ticket amount.Every morning, Caiano checks his computer models first thing. He evaluates whether the predictions he made before going to sleep the night before have panned out and makes any necessary adjustments to his forecast. He then writes a detailed synopsis of the day’s weather for both Jacob’s Pillow and Tanglewood, including precise information about jet streams and wind shear. He also boils it down into layman’s terms: “If it comes right down to it, there’s only a 30 percent chance” of rain, reads one. “Let’s do this.”A sunny day at Tanglewood in July for the Boston Symphony’s first in-person concert since March 2020. Caiano gives a detailed description of the weather each day to Jacob’s Pillow and Tanglewood.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesA cancellation is not something Caiano takes lightly. Every show the weather disrupts means lost revenue, disappointed ticket holders and artists who don’t get to perform. It’s a difficult balance to strike. Be overcautious and a perfectly clear day goes to waste; be too bold and put the performers, audience and equipment at risk.The final decision about whether a performance will proceed must be made four hours before showtime, to give ticket holders fair warning if it’s canceled. Once that call is made, Vigilante tells patron services, which emails ticket holders three hours in advance.“They send you a nice email during the day,” said Enid Hoffman, who had tickets to see a performance by the Latin dance group Contra-Tiempo that was canceled because of rain. “They handled it beautifully, but we were looking forward to it. It’s like, you look forward to Christmas and then somebody stole Christmas.”At Shakespeare & Company in neighboring Lenox, where outdoor performances have long been the summer norm, the artistic director Allyn Burrows and his colleagues consult weather apps and pore over the minutiae themselves. They huddle in the box office watching weather patterns on Burrows’s computer, or argue via group text about whether to cancel a show. “We’re as animated about the weather discussions as we are about Shakespeare’s text, so the debates are vociferous,” he said.More than half of Shakespeare & Company’s shows this year have been postponed or moved indoors because of weather, and Burrows said that the concern isn’t just rainstorms, but extreme heat, exacerbated by climate change. Recently, he and his team fashioned a makeshift shade out of black mesh cloth on the fly on a particularly sweltering day.“I’ve been performing outdoors for 30-odd years now and this year feels different than any other year,” he said. “Part of me likes to think of it as an aberration, but my better self is saying, continue to make plans.”Grace McLean in “Row,” at the Clark Art Institute’s reflecting pool, a Williamstown Theater Festival production that lost nearly 60 percent of its rehearsal time because of weather conditions.Joseph OMalley and R. Masseo DavisFurther north, Williamstown Theater Festival in Williamstown, Mass., is also hosting its first fully outdoor season this year, on found stages, including the Clark Art Institute’s reflecting pool, where Grace McLean stars in “Row.” The musical lost nearly 60 percent of outdoor rehearsal time because of the weather, and six of the first seven scheduled performances were canceled. “It’s just been kind of disappointing and frustrating, because we’re not getting to do our job,” she said.The sky was dreary, gray and damp the day before “Tillers of the Soil” — Weinert’s adaptation of a dance originally choreographed by Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis in 1916 — had its premiere at Jacob’s Garden. The dancers spread straw on the soft, wet ground before the performance, but their feet still grew muddy and soaked as they danced. “We were able to still be in the moment with everything that was happening,” Brandon Washington, a dancer, said. “It ended up being super sunny and beautiful.”For dancers, weather, especially rain, has meant being ready to be frustrated — or ready for the show to go on in tough circumstances. On July 3 at Little Island, a new park on the Hudson River in Manhattan, Hee Seo, a principal for American Ballet Theater, did not know until showtime whether her “Dying Swan” solo would happen. Even then, the rehearsal and show were both delayed, and when Seo started dancing, she could feel raindrops. “But we didn’t stop,” she said. “I carried on. I finished my piece.”Artists and audiences have been hungry for performances, even as the cancellations pile up. The Trisha Brown Dance Company canceled performances on June 8 and 9 at Wave Hill in the Bronx because of rain. The company’s director, Carolyn Lucas, said the dancers rehearsed amid the drizzles until they couldn’t. “After this year of Covid, I think everybody is missing dancing and performing so much,” she said. “They were very flexible to sort of do something a bit more extreme just to get the show on the road.”It’s unlikely there will be another summer with quite this particular mix of circumstances. And at Jacob’s Pillow, the hope is that there won’t need to be another outdoor-only season. But ever adaptable, dancers will continue to make the most of what’s thrown at them. As Washington said of his performance in the garden, “With everything that was happening leading up to the performance, the wet ground was kind of the least of our concerns.” More