32 Reasons to Get Out & Off the Couch

Raymond J. Lee is overlooked when he wears his groundhog costume in rehearsals for “Groundhog Day,” a new musical based on the hit film that comes to Broadway this spring after a London run. Not because the design is demure; it stands about six-and-a-half-feet tall and would call for size 18s if groundhogs could wear sneakers. But at 5-foot-9, Mr. Lee has eyes sitting somewhere around the critter’s mouth. “Everyone looks up at the groundhog’s eyes,” he said. “I’m like, guys I’m right here.”

The groundhog pops up a few times during the musical, a time-warping romantic comedy about a frustrated weatherman, played by Andy Karl, who lives the same day over and over after reporting from Punxsutawney, Pa., on the weather-predicting groundhog Punxsutawney Phil.

Rob Howell, the show’s Tony Award-winning costume and set designer (“Matilda the Musical”) said he drew inspiration for the bushy suit during a trip to Punxsutawney. Mr. Howell was so taken with a man he saw dressed in a Phil get-up that he designed a homage of sorts, making sure not to make it look too jokey.

“He’s there for selfies, and he’s handing out leaflets, and he’s probably miserable inside this thing,” Mr. Howell said. “But you’ll never know because he’s got his happy face on.”

Mr. Lee’s costume, which is repurposed from the show’s London run, is made of faux fur from top to toe, with “fancy spats,” as Mr. Howell put it, that cover the actor’s sneakers to resemble a paw. The head was sculpted in clay and vacuum-formed. The groundhog’s face is made of an open-weave fabric that helps Mr. Lee breathe, yet appears opaque under stage lights.

Mr. Howell is still at work on how to best keep Mr. Lee cool when costumed. One way would be to install cold packs inside a body suit that fits snugly against Mr. Lee. Tiny air vents can also help an actor’s body breathe.

Along with his time on stage as the groundhog (he’s also an ensemble member), Mr. Lee is likely to put on the fur in promotional appearances for the show. At a recent photo shoot in Central Park, children ran to the actor to give him hugs.

“It’s automatic with this costume,” Mr. Lee said. “It just makes people happy.”

–ERIK PIEPENBURG

Fires are no joke. But it seemed like the theater gods might be playing some kind of prank when flames broke out on Feb. 10 inside Broadway’s venerable Lyceum.

The theater’s next show is a British import, “The Play That Goes Wrong,” which is, as the title suggests, about a play that goes horribly wrong. The fire — happily minor — wasn’t part of the plan, but it allowed the producers to add a new calamity to their marketing plan:

#BwayGoesWrong is setting the box office on fire, literally. Last night’s firefighting went right so that our play can go wrong. We ❤️ NYFD! pic.twitter.com/0WxU94N2FC
— Play That Goes Wrong (@BwayGoesWrong) February 11, 2017

But what makes “The Play That Goes Wrong” so funny that it has been running in London’s West End for more than two years, touring Britain, and produced in several other countries? So funny that one of America’s most successful film directors, J.J. Abrams, signed on as a co-producer to help bring it to Broadway?

The premise is simple — a troupe of actors (the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society) is performing a murder mystery. But the group’s extremely earnest efforts at drama are repeatedly derailed by dropped lines, dropped props and dropped bodies — the play is a fiasco from beginning to end, though the characters are not in on the joke. It’s a classic farce, with a slapstick sensibility honed through improv.

“For the material that gets the big laughs, the audience understands and knows fully what it would be if it goes right,” said Jonathan Sayer, who wrote the show with two college friends, Henry Lewis and Henry Shields. “It’s funny because tonally it cuts against what it should have been.”

– MICHAEL PAULSON

The most anticipated comedy show of the year is Chris Rock’s “Total Blackout” tour, his first in nearly a decade, which features a new, more confessional, even melancholy voice. Mr. Rock will travel to more than 30 cities.

–JASON ZINOMAN

ON RELATIONSHIPS

There is no equality in a relationship. You’re in a band. Someone sings lead and someone needs to plays the tambourine.

ON BULLYING

Bullies are the fertilizer to help good people grow.

ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE

You don’t want to be a black man in any court. Even a black judge brings his lawyer to court —just in case.

Two years ago, Father John Misty went viral by covering a Ryan Adams song, which was itself a cover of Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space.” This deadpan approach to irony imbues nearly every track on his new album, “Pure Comedy” (April 7).

When this singer, born Joshua Tillman, is feeling generous, he refers to our species as “the world’s most soulful predators.” Which is why it comes as a surprise when Mr. Tillman describes the record as “a love letter to humanity.” “Life for humans is sort of a comedy of errors,” he said by phone. “That’s the thing that I love about humanity: our absurdity.”

The songs, written in 2015, were meant to be funny, but now, as Mr. Tillman prepares to release them into a changed world, the big fear is that audiences for his spring tour will no longer be as willing to laugh: “People are really angry right now, and they’re more likely to take these songs maybe a little too literally.”

Then again, even though Father John Misty shows are known for their acerbic and self-aware, off-the-cuff stage banter, Mr. Tillman admits that when he finally returns to the stage, he may not be able to laugh much himself. “It’s going to be hard not to cry when I sing ‘Each other’s all we’ve got,’” he said, quoting the last line of the new album’s title track.

Then, in telling fashion, even this becomes a joke. “I’ll probably be bringing a lot more crying to my shows,” he continued. “And tear cannons. Just showering the audience with tears. It will be like going to see Shamu or something.” (It will probably still be very funny.)

–NICK MURRAY

“Is it now? I thought I had more time.” Those are the opening lines of “Wakey, Wakey,” Will Eno’s new play which invites us to commiserate with a wry everyman as he narrates his own passing. Yet like much of Mr. Eno’s work (“The Realistic Joneses”), the play promises to lace the sadness with unexpected flashes of joy. (“We’re not here to mope, right?” the man continues. “We’re here to listen to music and drink some grape juice, maybe get a free T-shirt.”)

So what makes Mr. Eno cry? Here are five things that came to his mind when recently asked:

Chad Batka for The New York Times

• 1. Recent photographs of children in war and refugee crises: Alan Kurdi, Omran Daqneesh, and others.

  These are different, in kind and degree, from anything else I could list. Most people were overwhelmed by the intensity of the violence compared to the smallness of the children in the pictures, their Snoopy sweatshirts and the little clothes. I’m sure we’re all still trying to convert our shock and sadness into action and care.

• 2. My grandmother dying, trying to tell us about this thing she kept seeing.

  She was 102 and kept telling everyone about these tiny little men who would march past her window with a brightly colored flag. I didn’t know then that dying people are often trying to tell us something very specific, but in a metaphorical way. After all her years of listening, to grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I wish I had listened better then, and had asked her more about what she saw, so that she might have felt heard and understood.

• 3. A young kid sings the national anthem at a minor-league baseball game.

  I love that feeling of everyone in the place wanting it to go well, but the whole responsibility, the lonely effort to put all that feeling and pride and hope into one song, rests with the kid at the mic, alone near home plate. Those final difficult notes sometimes come right when a person’s confidence is riding highest and it’s such a thrill, that feeling of something being close to ending and you can’t wait to clap for it. You want it to last, you want it to be over and have gone well, and it all means the game is about to start, so it’s a pretty moving moment.

• 4. The Red Sox winning the 2004 World Series

  That was just an amazing feeling, or end of pent-up feelings, for Sox fans. Incredibly personal and small at the same time it was grand and historical. I felt some version of it when the Cubs won in 2016, too.

• 5. The Monday Stominy Cub

  This is how our daughter, who’s two and a half, says “The Monday Astronomy Club,” which is what we called it when we went outside to look at the moon last Monday. Compared to all of the known astronomical science and to the immense mystery of the universe, the difference between what she knows and what I know is not that big. I can pronounce certain words, sure, but we stand beneath the deep, dark sky in roughly the same ignorance and awe.

–WILL ENO

April 21 is the anniversary of Prince’s death. There are many ways to celebrate his remarkable career: listening to his music on all major streaming services for the first time, visiting the museum at his Paisley Park compound in Minnesota. But there’s only one option if you want to shed purple tears while hearing the band Prince formed in 1979 play some of his most beloved songs: The Revolution is going on tour.

The Revolution backed Prince on several albums, including “Purple Rain,” and its current lineup — Lisa Coleman, Matt Fink (who’s called Dr.), Wendy Melvoin, Mark Brown (a.k.a. Brownmark) and Bobby Rivkin (known as Bobby Z) — played three memorial shows in September at the Minneapolis club First Avenue, where parts of the movie were filmed. Most of the group’s members (and a host of guests) took the mike at the memorials, which included songs likely to make the cut on tour: “Let’s Go Crazy,” “1999,” “Raspberry Beret” and, of course, “When Doves Cry.”

–NICK MURRAY

Irene Sankoff and David Hein had planned to get married in 2002. But the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made them reconsider their long engagement: What were they waiting for?

So on Oct. 12, 2001, they hopped on the subway and rode down to City Hall in Lower Manhattan; they passed the armed soldiers and the military jeeps and the words “Heroes Live Forever” written in dust on a storefront. And, with one cousin as their witness, they eloped.

Asserting love and community in the aftermath of horror was an impulse move. But now, 16 years later, it is the theme of their emotional musical, “Come From Away,” which tells the little-known (to Americans) story of a city in Newfoundland that in the days after the terrorist attacks sheltered thousands of air passengers whose flights had been grounded.

The musical is lively — powered by a Newfoundland folk rock score — and funny; the culture clashes are mined for all they’re worth. But invariably audiences cry, not only because of the persistent power of that day (which is not depicted in the show), but also, surprisingly, because watching human beings be generous to frightened strangers (and the show is largely about hospitality) seems to induce tears.

“We see it so rarely that it’s almost shocking,” Ms. Sankoff said. “We are so used to the appallingly shocking, the disturbingly shocking, that to see something that is refreshingly openhearted and good-natured and just done to make someone else’s life easier — you never see that, and I think people are shocked by that.”

The musical’s arrival on Broadway is somewhat remarkable — it is just the second show ever by Ms. Sankoff and Mr. Hein, who wrote the music, lyrics and book. Ms. Sankoff, raised on movie musicals in Toronto, wanted to be an actor and a dancer, while Mr. Hein, raised on folk festivals and roots rock in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, wanted to be a singer-songwriter. They decided to try writing shows so they could spend more time together, and their first collaboration, a musical about his family called “My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding,” became a Toronto fringe festival hit. (The couple not only wrote that show but also starred in it.)

Then Michael Rubinoff, a theater producer trying to jump-start Canadian musical theater, gave them an idea, which several more experienced writers had turned down: How about taking a look back at what had happened in Gander, Newfoundland?

The resultant show has had a circuitous (and buzz-building) path to Broadway — developmental stagings at Sheridan College near Toronto, festivals at Goodspeed Musicals in Connecticut and the National Alliance for Musical Theater in New York, and productions at the La Jolla Playhouse, Seattle Repertory Theater, Ford’s Theater in Washington, and the Royal Alexandra Theater in Toronto. The entire cast and crew even flew to Gander last fall to perform the songs in a hockey arena so Newfoundlanders would have a chance to see how they were being depicted.

The creative team has used the opportunity presented by having multiple pre-Broadway productions to fine-tune the emotional arc, and impact, of the story — making sure the pathos is balanced with laughter, and with hope.

“We’ve been very careful crafting it to make a safe space,” Mr. Hein said. “If you’re worried about this, don’t worry about it. Come to Newfoundland with us, where we’re going to tell a story.”

Theater, of course, is seen through the prism of the time in which it is staged. The onset of the Trump administration, with its skepticism about immigrants and refugees, is likely to shift the way “Come From Away” is perceived, making it feel less about the aftermath of a terrorism attack and more about the welcoming of foreigners.

“It is a story about Americans as refugees, which is an interesting thing that Americans don’t have to deal with very often,” said the show’s director, Christopher Ashley, who is also the artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse. “Everyone working on the show feels lucky at this moment to be telling a story about generosity.”

–MICHAEL PAULSON

The “Ode to Joy” at the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic will be playing in five performances in May, stirs you even when you listen to it at home, alone. But there is something about hearing it live, surrounded by a few thousand others, that takes it from hummable to heart-wrenching. Suddenly the “millions” that the text describes embracing are all around you; the “world” that the chorus addresses is right there in the hall.

Even if you’ve heard this famous melody dozens of times before, I dare you not to crumble. It could hardly be a more tense, divisive time, and no one expects Beethoven to solve anything. But his earnest vision of all people uniting is one that could, especially now, bring tears.

Mr. Gilbert is pairing it with Schoenberg’s raw, bristling “Survivor From Warsaw,” with a simmering orchestra over which a narrator gives an intense spoken account of suffering in the Holocaust. The work concludes with a passionate setting of “Sh’ma Yisrael,” the prayer at the center of Jewish belief. For this music to lead directly into the roiling darkness and gleaming light of Beethoven’s Ninth will be an experience of rare power.

– ZACHARY WOOLFE

Sometimes an actress and a role seem so fated to come together on Broadway that if they don’t, choirs of angels weep might-have-been tears. So delighted cries were heard that a match had been struck in heaven when it was learned that Bette Midler would be appearing as the American musical’s favorite matchmaker. That’s the singing steamroller Dolly Levi in Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart’s “Hello, Dolly!,” a show that has been a diva’s delight since Carol Channing created the part 53 years ago. Ms. Midler is fabled for the Dolly-ish virtues of chutzpah, warmth, vocal brass, stage-filling presence and a way with the boys. So bring on the dancing waiters. Bette’s back where she belongs.

–BEN BRANTLEY

It’s a sing-off that “The Voice” could only dream of: Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole going mano a mano (or rather, larynx a larynx) on the same stage. Ms. LuPone and Ms. Ebersole are great musical stars of roughly the same age and wattage, but their vocal styles are as different of those of Ethel Merman and Mary Martin (to summon their equivalents of an earlier generation). So imagine the sparks — and the decibels and the perfume bottles and the false eyelashes — that should fly when they play battling cosmetic titans in “War Paint,” the new bio-musical by Doug Wright, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie about Helena Rubinstein (Ms. LuPone) and Elizabeth Arden (Ms. Ebersole).

–BEN BRANTLEY

Diana Vishneva Oleg Zotov

Farewell performances can have a surreal side: How can we come to terms with a final bow? That sentiment is even more acute when considering the inimitable Diana Vishneva, 40, who will step down as a principal with American Ballet Theater on June 23. Ever since this sultry, stylish Russian ballerina, revered for her plasticity and daring, made her New York debut in 1997 at a gala celebrating Diaghilev — becoming a principal with Ballet Theater in 2005 — she has entranced audiences with her glamour and expressiveness. Movement just about melts off her body, so it’s fitting that she has chosen a passionate role that she can really sink her pointe shoes into: Tatiana in John Cranko’s stirring “Onegin.”

–GIA KOURLAS

Renee Fleming Damon Winter/The New York Times

Rarely has a singer, a role, an opera house and a moment come together as they will this spring, when the soprano Renée Fleming bids farewell to major roles at the Metropolitan Opera in a new production of one of her signature pieces: Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.” The Met has been Ms. Fleming’s home going back to 1988, when she was a winner of its National Council Auditions. Nearly 250 performances later — among them gorgeous evenings of Mozart, Verdi, Strauss and Tchaikovsky (an urgent, autumnal “Eugene Onegin”) — she is moving ever more into music administration and slowly leaving the stage behind. She says auf wiedersehen with a work tailor-made for the occasion: Witty and nostalgic, half-grinning and half-crying, “Rosenkavalier” is about an aristocrat whose younger lover falls for a girl his own age — and also about a star singer saying goodbye.

–ZACHARY WOOLFE

For months, the actor Bobby Cannavale has pestered the people in his life: What does belonging mean to them, and where do they feel they belong?

“Even the most misanthropic people, they’ll give you an answer,” he said one February afternoon from Miami, where he was visiting family.

What he’s been trying to put his finger on is what a person loses when his sense of belonging disappears — a key, he thinks, to unlocking his next role: Yank, the furious, disillusioned, coal-stoking laborer at the center of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape” (1922), beginning a limited run on March 25 at the Park Avenue Armory.

“Because when you lose something, what do you do?” Mr. Cannavale asked. “You do everything you can to try to reclaim it.”

Richard Jones, the production’s Olivier Award-winning director, said the show’s success is “all about the lead actor, really.” When Mr. Jones staged it at the Old Vic Theater in London in 2015, Bertie Carvel (“Matilda the Musical”) was his Yank. But for New York, who better to personify O’Neill’s wounded brute than Mr. Cannavale?

A Tony nominee for “The ____________ With the Hat” a few seasons back, and more recently the star of the HBO series “Vinyl,” he specializes in handsome, unpolished types. Though he first read “The Hairy Ape” in his 20s, Mr. Cannavale, 46, has never done an O’Neill play before. Yet O’Neill’s dense, phonetically written dialogue — packed with words like “youse” and “skoit” (skirt, that is: a woman) — feels natural to Mr. Cannavale. “It reads to me very much like music,” he said. “It’s quite gorgeous, I think.”

Yank is a tough guy among tough guys, and on the ocean liner where he feeds the furnace to keep the ship moving, he has a proud and romantic vision of the importance of his role. But when a wealthy young passenger comes across him on a visit to the stokehole, Yank recognizes her horror. “Oh, the filthy beast!” she says, and faints. Yet Yank is the one who reels, in an instant losing his sense of where he fits in the world. Convinced that she looked at him as if he were a hairy ape, he vows revenge.

At the Old Vic, Mr. Jones’s stylized production played out on a proscenium stage, but in the armory’s vast Drill Hall, the set will revolve around the audience on something like a giant conveyor belt. The cast is new, too, with just one holdover from London: Phil Hill, who plays the gorilla in the final scene. (“The costume was £5,000, and it only fits him,” Mr. Jones said.)

Mr. Cannavale doesn’t much need to concern himself with the play’s expressionism; the choreography will mostly occur around him. Mr. Jones has instructed him to approach the role realistically.

The setup is real enough to him, anyway. He has long traveled in glamorous circles — his ex-wife is the screenwriter Jenny Lumet, whose father was the director Sidney Lumet, and Mr. Cannavale is engaged to the actress Rose Byrne — but he grew up working class. It isn’t hard for him to note parallels between Yank’s situation and what he has known in his own family.

And it has not escaped him that Yank’s drama will unfold on the Upper East Side.

“It’s almost like the armory itself is the ship that he’s working on,” Mr. Cannavale said. “He says: ‘What do them slobs in the first cabin got to do with us? One of us guys could take the whole mob with one mitt. Put one of them down here for one watch in the stokehole, what’d happen? They’d carry him off on a stretcher.’ You could say the same thing about the people that are sitting in the audience.”

–LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES

There was a time when a Green Day concert was about screaming along to three-chord songs about being lazy and feeling crazy. Then came “American Idiot,” this California band’s ambitious 2004 volley against President George W. Bush and the Iraq war, and “21st Century Breakdown,” a second rock-opera-style album about post-Bush angst, five years later.

The group took a lengthy break from political punk, but returned in October with its 12th studio album, “Revolution Radio,” another ferocious batch of songs about anxious protagonists in an uncertain world. “It’s not that I’m Nostradamus or anything like that, but we knew something different was going to happen,” the band’s singer and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong said. “Our gigs almost feel like political rallies — plus the craziest party you’ve ever been to.”

Green Day, which played its first show in 1987, began this year with a brief tour through Europe, where Mr. Armstrong doubled down on the protest vibe by singing certain lyrics through a megaphone. The set list has been heavy on “American Idiot,” whose title track is recharged by audience reactions to Donald J. Trump’s presidency. “Playing that song has been pretty intense,” Mr. Armstrong said. “The way people react, you can see there’s a lot of anger brewing.”

–NICK MURRAY

Opera is always at least a little nostalgic. But the reveries will be more powerful than usual this spring when the Metropolitan Opera celebrates a milestone: the 50th anniversary of its red-carpeted, golden-chandeliered, dramatically staircased home at Lincoln Center.e

Plácido Domingo, Anna Netrebko, Renée Fleming and many others will perform at a gala concert on May 7, singing selections from great moments of the opera house’s past.

The “New Met” opened on Sept. 16, 1966, “a brightly lighted architectural toy,” the Times reported at the time. The audience included Lady Bird Johnson and “hundreds of formally dressed tycooons, aristocrats, nabobs, bankers, moguls, diplomats, potentates, fashion plates, grande dames and other assorted Great Society over-achievers.”

And the opera? Leontyne Pryce starred in the premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” Justino Díaz and Rosalind Elias performed with the grand dame, and in these edited interviews, they talked about that night.

Leontyne Price starred in Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra” at the Metropolitan Opera. Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

JUSTINO DÍAZ I have never stopped thinking about that night. The glamour, the glitz. The opera house was the showcase; the opera was secondary. But Leontyne was one of the five or six vocal miracles that I have ever heard in my life. To be on stage with her, two feet away, and feeling those vibrations touch you, time stopped for me.

The acoustics were wonderful. I love that the voice came back to you, that you had feedback, which makes it easier to sing piano, or mezzo forte, even if at the Met you never see the back wall. At La Scala, it’s like singing into a pillowcase.

The day of the opening, I was focused on my routine, getting up and getting breakfast. Having lunch, because then I wouldn’t eat until after the performance in those days. I was concentrating on my lines and going over the music. After it was over, there was a supper in the lobby, and there were so many people that I couldn’t get close enough to see the dignitaries. Maybe they didn’t even come.

ROSALIND ELIAS It does seem like yesterday. Every name was in the audience — the Kennedys, Rockefellers, everyone was there.

The technology of the new theater was phenomenal, and of course, it didn’t work in any of the rehearsals. We would get stuck, Leontyne and I, in the pyramid. The mechanics were so new that they weren’t working, up to and including the dress rehearsal. But somehow, everything went smoothly opening night.

There was a big party, as usual. Everybody had a good time, got a little high; there was lots of champagne. The theater is lovely, of course, and it was even lovelier then because we’d not seen an entrance like that. And people were on the staircase having photos taken, and it was such an honor to be a part of it.

Those days were just wonderful. The house was like a family. The cast was together, helping each other. It was like when I first came to New York and wanted to make a career in music: It was brand new.

–ZACHARY WOOLFE

In 1987, an Irish band was grappling with its ballooning fame while keeping an eye on the global effect of the politics of Margaret Thatcher and contemplating the big idea of what America could be. Thirty years later, pausing to reflect on how newly relevant its fifth album is in the era of Brexit and the Trump presidency, U2 booked its first-ever trip to the past: a stadium tour featuring “The Joshua Tree” performed in full. The tour starts on May 12 in Vancouver and comes to MetLife Stadium on June 28 and 29. The Edge, above left, and Bono performing in 1987.

— CARYN GANZ

Children who have stopped sucking their thumbs can start biting their nails when the circus artist Nacho Flores brings his gravity-flouting act to the Tilt Kids Festival, produced by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Institute Alliance Française. Mr. Flores, a shambolic figure in a man bun, is a particularly brainy acrobat. A former computer programmer, he’s named this show in honor of a fourth-dimensional representation of a cube. He’ll be risking those brains in this new routine — ascending stacks of wooden cubes held together by luck and his own body weight. That ought to be enough to excite the younger set. Parents can experience extra thrills when their enterprising kids try some of the more sensational stunts at home.

–ALEXIS SOLOSKI

Julia Jarcho’s “The Terrifying” will be at the Abrons Arts Center. Heather Phelps-Lipton

“We’ll see a kid walking home through the woods at night. We’ll hear breathing behind him. We’ll hear the voice of someone who’s dead, and we’ll see him react to that. Then we will hear more and more the sounds of something approaching, and then it will black out just as we see the kid being snatched up. We’ll hear the sounds of an attack, and we’ll hear the kid screaming and maybe we’ll hear some eating and then lights will come up and the kid won’t be there. But we’ll see a pool of blood.” — The playwright Julia Jarcho on an early scene from her new play “The Terrifying.”

–ERIK PIEPENBURG

Injuries happen. But David Hallberg, the illustrious principal at American Ballet Theater, has been haunted by an injury to a deltoid ligament in his ankle since 2014, when he was forced to pull out of performances with Ballet Theater and the Bolshoi Ballet, where he became the first American principal in 2011. He would probably rather be haunted by the ghost of Giselle. After more than a year spent rehabilitating with the Australian Ballet, though, he’s coming back.

What shape will his dancing take? For his fans, there was a question not just of when he would return, but if he would at all. Before Ballet Theater’s spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House, which begins May 15, he is scheduled to perform the role of Prince Coffee in Alexei Ratmansky’s new “Whipped Cream,” which has its California premiere in March. Mr. Hallberg, 34, made his official return to the stage in December as Franz in “Coppélia” with the Australian Ballet. After what he called an “existential shakeup,” he’s ready for Act II.

Mr. Hallberg spoke by telephone from Australia. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

What’s your comeback approach?

My approach is step by step, performance by performance. I am just not going to get ahead of myself. It’s not a flash-in-the-pan kind of comeback, all guns blazing. I’ll take each performance as it comes.

What was your rehab like?

It was 14 months at the Australian Ballet. More or less, they just gave me a complete education of how to maintain my instrument and an education that the majority of dancers in the dance world aren’t given, sadly. We are not the Federers, we’re not the Williamses — we don’t have teams of people traveling with us. We are left to our own devices a lot, and my device was ignorant. [Laughs]

Are you excited to be back in the ballet world?

Yeah. In a way, I stopped trying to control my life. With this injury I never, in my worst nightmare, would have thought that it would have gone the way it went, but coming face to face with either ending a career or continuing to fight is really this Act II of me as an artist. I feel different.

How so?

At this age, I thought that I’d be thinking about moving on, maybe taking more leadership positions. But that’s not what life had in store for me. I’ve realized there’s so much for me to give as an artist and not necessarily as the technician that you are in your 20s.

Do you see now that it was necessary to take off so much time?

I needed it. I didn’t know I needed it. Everything in my life was reconsidered, and I had to face it. I couldn’t just push it under the rug and run off and dance somewhere and ignore it.

Do you mean the physical aspect of your injury or more?

Oh, no, I mean everything. Physical, emotional, mental — it became all-consuming. It was the crazy high to the crazy low.

–GIA KOURLAS

The classic suspense-film trick is the one that makes a viewer want to scream: “Don’t open that door!” Well, Bartok’s creepy one-act opera “Bluebeard’s Castle” does that again, and again, and again — seven times in all.

The libretto of the psychologically charged, symbolically loaded work, which the gleaming Philadelphia Orchestra will perform on Tuesday, March 7, at Carnegie Hall under Yannick Nézet-Séguin (the Metropolitan Opera’s next music director), calls for a Gothic space with seven great doors. This is the hall of Bluebeard (John Relyea), who has brought home his new bride, Judith (Michelle DeYoung). He tells her not to disturb the doors; naturally, she wants to open them. One by one, they reveal horrors: endless gold, dripping with blood; a lake of tears; and, at last, the three previous wives Bluebeard has murdered, who guide Judith back inside with them.

While this is a concert performance, Bartok’s music to accompany each door’s opening is vivid enough that no sets or costumes are necessary: trumpet fanfares for the armory behind the second door; sparkling harps and celesta for the jewels of the third; a stunning C-major blast for the fifth, as Judith takes in the full vista of Bluebeard’s domain. Opera gets no eerier.

–ZACHARY WOOLFE

In “We’re Watching,” a performance festival at Live Arts Bard, writers, directors, theorists and theater groups will explore the ubiquity of surveillance in everyday life. Highlights include a multimedia work from the video and performance artist Alexandro Segade imagining a queer police state, and a collaboration among the academic Homi K. Bhabha, the poet Claudia Rankine, the filmmaker John Lucas and the choreographer Will Rawls.

–ALEXIS SOLOSKI

Three plays opening on Broadway explore economic dislocation, the Middle East peace process, and the shock and outrage that accompany a lesbian romance in the 1920s. Here are excerpts.

‘Oslo’ by J.T. Rogers

A scene from “Oslo.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Yes, it’s three hours. And yes, it’s about the 1993 Oslo Accords. But even if you don’t dont’ have much interest in relations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the play focuses on one Norwegian couple — Mona Juul and Terje Rod-Larsen — who played a crucial behind -the -scenes role. In its the telling, the play says a lot abouttells us much how human folly and hope can change the course of history.

LARSEN: And here we are all friends. While we are together, this will be our one unbreakable rule.

(He points to a shut door.)

In that room, when that door is closed, you will converse. Disagree. Worse. But out here we will share our meals, talk of our families, and light the fire.

(To them all.)

My friends, I must insist upon this rule. For it is only through the sharing of the personal that we can see each other for who we truly are.

(Larsen gestures to the closed door.)

(Silence.)

‘Sweat’ By Lynn Nottage

A scene from “Sweat.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

In “Sweat,” a Pennsylvania factory is closing its doors, which jostles the security of a its workers, who are friends and family members. In this early scene, a group is hanging out at a bar, and Stan, the bartender, remembers his time at the plant, before an plant accident there took his leg. Tracey and Cynthia still work at the plant.

STAN: Now, the old man, he used to be on the floor every single day. I didn’t like him, but I respected him for it. You know why?

TRACEY: He was a prick and a perv —

STAN: Because he knew what was going on, and you can only know that by being there. A machine was broken, he knew. A worker was having trouble, he knew. You don’t see the young guys out there. They find it offensive to be on the floor with their Wharton MBA’s. And the problem is they don’t wanna get their feet dirty, their diplomas soiled with sweat … or understand the real cost, the human cost.... of making their shitty product. — oy!!!

CYNTHIA: Amen to that.

‘Indecent’ By Paula Vogel

A scene from “Indecent.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“Indecent,” a drama play with music, explores the controversy surrounding the 1923 Broadway play “God of Vengeance,” which was shut down after the police charged the cast members with obscenity, in part because it depicted a lesbian relationship. Here, Rabbi Joseph Silverman gives a sermon at Temple Emanu-El.

RABBI JOSEPH SILVERMAN: We go perhaps to the theater for a little relief —

And what is in the theater?

THE GOD OF VENGEANCE! By Sholem Asch!

I expect scurrilous lies to my face from the crackpots who call themselves Christian —

But to be hit by a stone in my back by a fellow Jew!

I know you have heard me denounce this play before. I acted on my words. I registered the complaint. And I am happy to tell you that as of last night, the play has been closed down by the Vice Squad, and all cast members have been arrested for obscenity.

Perhaps, decades from now, prostitution will be legalized in this country, and we will encounter ladies of the evening as we take our nightly constitutional with our wives.

Perhaps, decades from now, two Jewish women will be able to exchange vows, and who knows? Stand under the huppah together …

Perhaps, perhaps pigs will fly, and we will dine on flying pig as we do on the feathered birds of the air….

It is now in the hands of an American jury. We pray that they defend our good name.

Leave it to Justin Vivian Bond, the transgender artist who has curated the latest edition of the Live Ideas festival, to envision what it might be like to live in a nonbinary world. As part of his “Mx’d Messages” theme — Bond uses the prefix “Mx.” as a gender-neutral alternative to “Mr.” or “Ms.” — the choreographer Richard Move is presenting a double bill. Known for his engrossing impersonations of Martha Graham, Mr. Move is unveiling “XXYY,” which explores transgender and gender nonconformists. He’s intrigued by the idea of a “two-spirited” person, as defined by the acronym L.G.B.T.Q.2. “I feel that speaks to my own gender identity,” he said, “and directly to my body of work.”

In “XXYY,” which features costumes by Alba Clemente, Mr. Move takes inspiration from the lives of Alessandro Moreschi, the only castrato singer to make solo recordings, and Ralph Werther, who wrote “Autobiography of an Androgyne” (1918), in which he chronicled his experiences as transgender. Mr. Move sees them as connected spirits. “It feels like a long time ago because the perception is we’ve come so far,” Mr. Move said. “But in this current culture and political climate, these lives are under siege in a real way.”

He will also revisit Graham in “Martha@20.” “It’s always been a very comfortable skin to be in,” he said. “I’m not me, but I’m not not me.”

–GIA KOURLAS

A new reimagined “Sweeney Todd,” the Stephen Sondheim musical about a “demon barber” on a vengeance-fueled murder spree in 19th-century London, never smelled or tasted so good.

The Barrow Street Theater in Greenwich Village has been transformed, top-to-bottom, into a butter-and-herb scented British pie-and-mash shopwith real pies on the menu. That’s pie as in a flaky rectangle of crust with a savory chicken or vegetarian filling, and mash as in mashed potatoes. The British concoction “liquor,” a parsley sauce, comes on the side. The pies are made from an original recipe by Bill Yosses, a former White House executive pastry chef under Barack Obama and George W. Bush and the owner of the Perfect Pie company.

Audience members can pay extra to have a pie dinner. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Audience members are encouraged to arrive up to 90 minutes before the show to sit at long communal tables for a pie dinner in the compact cantina-style dining room that doubles as an immersive stage. The space was crafted by Simon Kenny, the show’s set and costume designer, to resemble Harrington’s, the tiny south London pie shop where this production originated in 2014 by the Tooting Arts Club, a London theater company, for an audience of just 35. The show received glowing reviews and became such a hot ticket — Mr. Sondheim himself was a huge fan — that it moved to the West End, where the producer Cameron Mackintosh mounted it at a former nightclub that Mr. Kenny turned into a replica of Harrington’s, with seats for 70.

In New York the audience has grown to 130, but the setting remains all Harrington’s, down to the errant spelling (“likkor”) on the shop’s original menu. Mr. Kenny said he deliberately avoided ironing out some of the design kinks he faced at the Barrow Street.

“We could have very easily moved a doorway and or made things a bit bigger or a bit more comfortable,” he said. “But we’ve always felt that one of the exciting bits and the charm of the show originally was that it worked brilliantly in this slightly inconvenient space. We wanted to make it a comfortable experience for the audience but keep as many of the quirks in it as we can.”

The tables and service counter double as the play space for the cast, which for the beginning of the run includes Jeremy Secomb and Siobhán McCarthy reprising their London roles as Sweeney and his deranged human meat pie-making sidekick, Mrs. Lovett. (Bill Buckhurst again directs.) Beginning April 11 the Tony Award nominees Norm Lewis and Carolee Carmello will take over.

Before a recent performance, Paula Hearle, who grew up eating handheld pies in England, was a few bites into her dinner when she declared her pie to be “delicious.” She wasn’t exactly sure what was in it, but her fingers were crossed that Mr. Kenny’s dedication to authenticity didn’t extend to her plate.

“I’m hoping it’s non-people,” she said.

–ERIK PIEPENBURG

Ever longed to lose yourself in the airstrikes of the Coral Sea or the battle on Iwo Jima? Or maybe just a pub from the early 1940s?

An interactive theater piece that may have audiences ducking for cover, “Seeing You” promises to transport viewers to the Pacific Theater of World War II.

A creation of the immersive impresario Randy Weiner, a producer of “Sleep No More,” and the choreographer and director Ryan Heffington, “Seeing You” is named for the misty, swinging Frank Sinatra song that promises “I’ll be seeing you in all the old, familiar places.”

But don’t expect a historically faithful trip. What immersive theater often does best is to take audiences to unfamiliar places or to make the familiar ones strange. (You’ll have felt this if you’ve wandered from blasted heath to candy shop in “Sleep No More.”)

In a former industrial site, built under and around the High Line and now decorated by by David Gallo, performers will propel audiences into a cozy pub, out to a field of battle and through other locales.

It remains to be seen how Mr. Heffington’s previous work, which includes witty, wild choreographic collaborations with the singer Sia and the director Spike Jonze, will inform the show. As a producer and a director, Mr. Weiner (“Queen of the Night,” “Caligula”) has favored a grand and lavish style, sometimes at the expense of substance. Speaking by telephone, he wouldn’t disclose the specifics of “Seeing You,” but he did pledge a “high-fashion meets punk” sensibility. With naval artillery?

–ALEXIS SOLOSKI

The unknown Arab killed in Albert Camus’s 1942 existentialist novel gets a name, a resurrection and plenty of company in this immersive play inspired by “The Stranger” and produced by the Semitic Root. Written by Betty Shamieh (“The Black Eyed”) and directed by May Adrales (“Vietgone”), “The Strangest” will plunk audiences into a traditional Arab storytelling cafe in sunstruck French Algeria, then turn those cafe tables on Camus. Now it’s the Frenchman with a borrowed gun who goes unnamed and the Arab characters — three brothers in love with the same woman — who are at the tale’s center.

— ALEXIS SOLOSKI

In the Weeknd’s early days — just after he had emerged from his cloak of anonymity — he became famous fast, and his first big tours were like grand gothic theater, rendering his viscous, provocative soul music as part of a sexually charged visual thrillscape, equal parts pornographic and shocking.

Things have changed, though. The Weeknd is one of the most reliable hitmakers in pop music now, having remade himself as someone who peddles ecstatic fantasy with a seamy underbelly, nodding to the lean, muscular singing of Michael Jackson. “Starboy,” which was released in November and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, is his smoothest album to date, especially on “I Feel It Coming,” a slinky duet with Daft Punk, and probably the most tender song the Weeknd has ever recorded.

He performed that song earlier this month at the Grammys, the former lord of darkness fully thrust out into the light. And now that hiding is no longer part of his strategy, his concerts are focused more on bliss, sometimes dangerous but just as often sweet. What was once about narcotic lust now holds promise for love.

–JON CARAMANICA

Sarah Ruhl and Joshua Harmon met cute — in a Times Square candy emporium on Valentine’s Day.

The encounter was tentative at first. She sat quietly, eating soup, while he took a cursory look at the mountains of sweets, deemed a Britney Spears-branded lollipop expensive at $26 “for one use,” and settled on a cappuccino.

But the conversation loosened up once these playwrights realized their respective new shows have quite a lot in common.

Ms. Ruhl’s “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage” and Mr. Harmon’s “Significant Other” both tackle love, albeit at different stages in people’s lives. Mr. Harmon’s dramedy, which transferred to Broadway after a successful Off Broadway run in 2015, centers on a gay man in his late 20s whose quest for romance gains increasing urgency as he watches his best friends marry off in quick succession. Ms. Ruhl, whose previous works include “Stage Kiss,” looks at “two fairly settled bourgeois couples,” as she put it, who reconsider their relationships after meeting a free-spirited younger woman prone to killing her own meat.

“I just wanted to write something that I couldn’t bring my kids to,” the soft-spoken Ms. Ruhl, 43, said. “I’m sure my mother will come. She’ll be fine with polyamory and animal slaughter, but I think my children — this one’s not for them.”

Mr. Harmon and Ms. Ruhl are in different phases in their careers and lives. She has been married for 11 years and has three children; a couple of years ago, he admitted in an interview that he did not even own a plant. Asked about his current plant status, Mr. Harmon, 33, said: “I don’t love to talk about it. I always think it’s better for the show for there to be this mystery for the audience.”

“She made you blush!” Ms. Ruhl interjected, referring to this reporter. “I applaud your drawing the line. I was reading [Elena] Ferrante’s letters to her publicists and her editors about whether or not she’ll do interviews. It’s hilarious and charming and devastating what she says about why she protects her privacy so fiercely.”

While Jordan, the lead of “Significant Other,” struggles with dating and feelings of abandonment, the couples in “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage” are restless without being entirely aware of it. If Mr. Harmon’s show is about navigating the beginning of romance, Ms. Ruhl’s is about what happens 10 or 20 years down the line.

“If you don’t keep mystery alive in a marriage over time, it’s tricky to sustain it,” Ms. Ruhl said. “I think marriage is actually a huge act of imagination and creativity all the time.”

To research her play, she looked into polyamory groupings — Mr. Harmon, an avowed fan of reality television, brought up an “amazing” episode of the MTV series “True Life” on that subject — and was intrigued by their semantic resourcefulness. “There’s really amazing language in the polyamory movement,” Ms. Ruhl said. “Like, if you add one person who has sex with everybody, that’s called a ‘comet.’ An ‘adult buffet’ is when you have a party, and everyone has sex with everybody. It’s interesting to me because the new configurations really invite the language.”

In his play, Mr. Harmon puts a spin on a big pop-culture genre tackling love.

“Usually in romantic comedies there is a gay-sidekick character who comes on and has these sassy quips, and then goes offscreen,” he said. “So the idea was to say, ‘What happens when you put that character in the center of the frame and follow him after he makes his sassy quip?’”

“I love that you’re writing about friendship because I feel it’s so under-talked about, underwritten about,” Ms. Ruhl said, “and it’s something that we would all die without, but it’s not intrinsically dramatic in the way that romantic love is. We’ve elevated so much romantic love, we’ve elevated this myth so much to the exclusion of other forms of love.”

“Our culture doesn’t have many words for love the way that the Greeks would have ‘philia’ or ‘eros,’’’ she added. “They even have a word for the love of your student. Isn’t that beautiful?”

–ELISABETH VINCENTELLI