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The production will make its transfer unusually fast, with an opening set for April 24, just 29 days after it wraps up a sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory.“Illinoise,” a dance-driven, dialogue-free musical adapted from a much-loved 2005 album by Sufjan Stevens, will transfer to Broadway next month.The show, which is a collaboration between the celebrated choreographer Justin Peck and the Pulitzer-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, is to open on April 24 at the St. James Theater; the run is to be limited, with a scheduled closing date of Aug. 10.“Illinoise” depicts a group of young creative people gathered around a campfire to share stories about their lives; it ultimately focuses on the life of a man who is finding his way while confronting grief. “A lot of the show is really about the catharsis of opening up to the community around oneself,” Peck, who is directing and choreographing the show, said in an interview.“Illinoise” joins a crowded spring season on Broadway, which has a heavy concentration of openings in late April, posing significant economic challenges for producers because costs have risen and audience numbers have fallen since the coronavirus pandemic.But the creators and backers of “Illinoise” want to capitalize on their show’s momentum: It is just wrapping up a sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, and it also had successful runs earlier this year at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and last year at Bard College’s Fisher Center.The transfer will be unusually fast, with just 29 days between the end of the run at the Armory and the start of the run at the St. James. There will be a brief rehearsal period, but no previews; the first performance will also be the opening, which is uncommon for Broadway.“We have this kind of lightning in a bottle with this show that is not something that one can create intentionally,” Peck said. “We want to preserve the energy of the show, and the longer we wait between phases of this, the greater we risk losing what that energy is.”“Illinoise” is performed by a dozen acting dancers and a trio of vocalists, along with a live band.The show’s use of dance to drive a narrative is not unprecedented: The history of such so-called dansicals includes the Tony-winning “Contact,” which opened in 2000, as well as the 2002 production that most influenced Peck, “Movin’ Out,” which Twyla Tharp choreographed using the songs of Billy Joel.“The music and the story and the movement combine in your own mind, rather than being combined onstage in front of you,” Drury said in an interview. “And there’s something about that that feels really beautiful and exciting. It just allows the audience to really empathize and connect emotionally with what’s going on onstage.”The Broadway run is being produced by Orin Wolf, John Styles and David Binder, in association with Seaview. More

Gustavo Dudamel, who takes over as music and artistic director in 2026, is getting a head start with three weeks of concerts and more programs.Next season, the New York Philharmonic will be without a full-time maestro or a designate music director for the first time in decades.But Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar conductor who takes over as the ensemble’s music and artistic director in 2026, will help fill the gap, leading three weeks of concerts, the Philharmonic announced on Tuesday.Dudamel, who currently leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is steadily ramping up his commitments in New York. He is already helping to shape programming and tours. And next season he might begin to take part in auditions, though talks are still underway, said Gary Ginstling, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive. Dudamel will also lead the summer concert series in city parks.“This is how we’re going to introduce Gustavo to literally tens of thousands of New Yorkers across the boroughs,” Ginstling said. “When you look at the totality of that, it feels like we’re making huge strides toward his imminent arrival.”Ginstling described the coming 2024-25 season as one of “experimenting and exploring.” There will be five world premieres, including works by Nico Muhly, Jessie Montgomery and Kate Soper. The pianist Yuja Wang will serve as artist in residence, and the dancer Tiler Peck will organize a series of evening programs. The Philharmonic’s musicians will create a program focused on the orchestra’s legacy.Here are five highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics and editors for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZWe 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

In the vital swing state of Michigan, growing fractures among the Democratic base could spell trouble for Joe Biden in the November election. As party loyalists canvas in the run up to a primary vote, a protest movement against the president’s support for the war in Gaza gains momentum. Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone visit the state. More

Two local races in the Chicago area on Tuesday will gauge voters’ enthusiasm for progressive causes in an Illinois primary that lacks drama at the top of the ticket.Progressive Democrats, who have built political strength in Chicago over the last decade but received mixed reviews for their governance, are pushing for a change to the city’s real estate transfer tax that would raise rates on high-value properties to fund homelessness programs.Progressives are also trying to hold onto the Cook County prosecutor’s office as the incumbent, Kim Foxx, who overhauled systems but faced criticism, prepares to leave office after two terms.The contests have sparked debates about Chicago’s post-pandemic struggles with homelessness, crime and empty downtown office space, and the races will give voters a chance to weigh in on the direction of the city under Ms. Foxx and Mayor Brandon Johnson, a fellow progressive who was elected last year.With the major party presidential nominations already settled, the results in Chicago, which is dominated by Democrats, could come down to whether progressives or moderates have more success turning out voters.The proposed tax change, which opponents say would be a major blow to the struggling commercial real estate sector, calls for reducing the transfer rate on properties that sell for less than $1 million, and imposing higher rates on homes and commercial buildings that sell for more than $1 million.The extra money — supporters say it would be at least $100 million each year — would be put toward addressing homelessness, with the details of that spending to be finalized later. The City Council would still have to enact the new tax rates. Mr. Johnson, a former union organizer, supports the ballot measure and made it part of his campaign platform.Democratic voters in Chicago and its inner-ring suburbs will also choose between two candidates vying to succeed Ms. Foxx, who brought promised changes to the local justice system but also faced criticism for persistently high crime rates and her handling of a case involving the actor Jussie Smollett.Clayton Harris III, a university lecturer and former prosecutor, has consolidated support from progressive politicians. His opponent, Eileen O’Neill Burke, a retired appellate judge, is trying to win the nomination by appealing to moderate and conservative voters.The winner of the primary will face a Republican in November, but countywide partisan races are rarely competitive. More

Readers have been writing to me about ways that, despite all the tragedy, Covid brought something unexpectedly positive into their lives.An empty Santa Monica beach in March 2020, a day before Californians were ordered to stay home.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesIt was four years ago today that Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered all Californians to stay home to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. For many people, the drastic move was the moment when the pandemic became truly, horribly real.Covid has since killed more than 1.18 million people nationwide, and the virus continues to circulate. At the peak of the recent surge in January, 2,400 people were dying of the disease each week. For many Americans, the pandemic has permanently reshaped life, as my colleague Julie Bosman wrote recently.Not all of those changes have been for the worse. Readers have been writing to me recently about pandemic silver linings — ways that, despite all the tragedy, Covid brought something unexpectedly positive into their lives. Those stories of reconnecting with far-flung friends, picking up new hobbies or slowing down for the better were touching. Thanks to all who sent them in.Feel free to email me your own pandemic silver lining story at [email protected]. Please include your full name and the city where you live.Here are some, lightly edited:“My adult son, who lives in Los Angeles, gathered his remote-work tools and joined our family pod in Escondido. His sister, who had already been planning a temporary move-in during her home’s remodel, packed up her husband, two small children and two dogs and moved into our house. This is where we all rode out the early months of the pandemic. Three months. We never would have had that in the before times.” — Gretchen Pelletier, Escondido“I am an autistic adult living in a society not meant for me. It was nice that the world slowed down to a pace that I was comfortable with. I also loved teaching remotely with my adult E.S.L. [English as a second language] students. Even though I am required to teach in person again, the techniques I used to guide students made me a better blended-hybrid teacher now.” — Robert B. Gomez, SalinasWe 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

Former President Donald J. Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News on Monday, arguing that the anchor George Stephanopoulos had harmed his reputation by saying multiple times on-air that Mr. Trump had been found liable for raping the writer E. Jean Carroll.A jury in a Manhattan civil case last year found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Ms. Carroll, but did not find the former president liable for rape. The judge, however, later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of “rape,” the jury’s finding did not mean that Ms. Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”Mr. Stephanopoulos, who was named as a co-defendant, said Mr. Trump was found liable for rape during a contentious interview on March 10 with Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina. During the interview, Mr. Stephanopoulos asked Ms. Mace, who has spoken publicly about being raped as a teenager, why she continued to support Mr. Trump in light of the outcome of the civil case.Mr. Trump, who often galvanizes his supporters by attacking the press, has filed a string of unsuccessful defamation suits against major media organizations. Federal judges have dismissed his suits against CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.ABC News had no comment on Monday. Mr. Trump’s suit was filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida. More

The Opperman Foundation said it would “reconsider its mission” but did not say whether those selected, including Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch, would still receive the award.The organizer behind an honor named for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a lifelong champion of women’s rights and liberal causes, is canceling the award ceremony scheduled for April after facing blistering criticism from her family and friends over several of this year’s planned recipients.Justice Ginsburg helped establish the award in 2019, the year before she died. It was originally intended for “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility,” but four of the five intended recipients this year are men. Among them are Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who frequently lobs tirades at perceived critics; Rupert Murdoch, the tycoon whose empire helped give rise to conservative news media; and Michael R. Milken, the financier who was a face of corporate greed in the 1980s and served nearly two years in prison before becoming a philanthropist.“The last thing we intended was to offend the family and friends of R.B.G.,” Julie Opperman, the chairwoman of Dwight D. Opperman Foundation, which awards the prize every year, said in a statement on Monday. She added: “The foundation is not interested in creating controversy. It is not interested in generating a debate about whether particular honorees are worthy or not.”Ms. Opperman explained that the reason for including men as recipients this year was to reflect and uphold Justice Ginsburg’s “teachings regarding equality.” The foundation “did not consider politics” but focused on selecting leaders who “have made significant contributions to society,” she said.Before the foundation released the statement, the children of Justice Ginsburg had demanded that their mother’s name be removed from the prize, which until this year was called the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award.Her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront” to the values the justice stood for.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Lynn Lempel stares into the space between.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTUESDAY PUZZLE — To explain what makes Lynn Lempel’s crossword theme so clever, I’d like to take a brief detour from the crossword and talk about Spelling Bee; I hope you’ll forgive the digression. The Bee, for those unfamiliar, features a honeycomb grid with seven letters and challenges solvers to find the pangram, a word that uses every available letter in the grid.I can’t seem to solve compound pangrams. When faced with jumbled letters, my brain doesn’t want to conceive of two words as one. Airflow? Gumdrop? Windfall? All invisible to me. It’s only when someone else looks at the grid and identifies the term that I can see it plainly.In her puzzle, Ms. Lempel put words together so slyly that the theme acted on my brain in much the same way that those compound pangrams do. I couldn’t have conceived of what she was up to without the revealer, but now that I’ve figured it out I’m wondering how I didn’t see it.Today’s ThemeUnlike professional sports, crosswords have no built-in “Game break” (63A) — that is unless you happen to be solving Ms. Lempel’s latest puzzle, in which HALFTIME not only exists but also serves as “a hint to interpreting the first parts of 17-, 26-, 36-, and 52-Across.”The clue at 17-Across is “Parent dressed up at a pride parade, perhaps?” and the answer, at first, seems to be MAIN DRAG. But taking the first part of this answer and halving it turns it to MA IN DRAG. The “Choice between a haircut and manicure?” is not DOORNAILS, but DO OR NAILS. And so on. See what I meant about putting words together in sly ways?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More