Gooding, Williams, Rashad Join \'Trip to Bountiful\' Cast

The Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr., and the Tony nominees Vanessa Williams and Condola Rashad will join Cicely Tyson in “The Trip To Bountiful” on Broadway, the producers said on Thursday.

The producers had earlier said that Ms. Tyson would make her first Broadway appearance since 1983 as Carrie Watts, an elderly Texan who, despite the objections of her family, wants to visit her hometown one last time. Geraldine Page won an Academy Award for the role in the 1985 film adaptation of Horton Foote's play.

Mr. Gooding, who won the best supporting actor Oscar for “Jerry Maguire,” will play Ludie, Carrie's son, who thinks she's too frail to travel. Ms. Williams (“Into the Woods”) will play his bossy wife, who thinks the trip is too expensive; Ms. Rashad (a Tony nominee for “Stick Fly” last year) will play a young woman whom Carrie befriends on the bus.

“The Trip to Bountiful” began as a 1953 teleplay and moved to Broadway later that year with Lillian Gish in the lead role. In 2005 Lois Smith revived the part to great acclaim Off Broadway. The new Broadway production, directed by Michael Wilson, begins previews March 31 for a 14-week run at the Stephen Sondheim Theater.

Nearly 30,000 Jobs Lost Because of Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy wiped out nearly 30,000 jobs in and around New York City last month, the New York State Labor Department said on Thursday.

The impact of the storm on small businesses and larger companies whose offices could not reopen for weeks afterward left New York City and the state with fewer jobs in November than in October. But the Labor Department also reported that the unemployment rates, which are calculated from a separate survey of employers, fell significantly last month.

New York City's unemployment rate dropped to 8.8 percent from 9.2 percent in October, and the statewide unemployment rate declined to 8.3 percent from 8.7 percent. Both are still higher than the national unemployment rate, which was 7.7 percent in November.

In New York City, restaurants and food-service operations in Lower Manhattan were hit particularly hard, said James Brown, principal economist for the Labor Department. He said the leisure an d hospitality sector lost about 8,500 jobs in November, a month when those businesses would normally be adding workers.

“Restaurant closings and layoffs were widespread in impacted neighborhoods, and the relocation of workers from damaged downtown office buildings is hurting holiday catering and corporate cafeterias,” Mr. Brown said.

He said that construction also suffered as many work sites were shut down. The shuttering of office buildings caused some companies to let go temporary workers, he added.

Still, over the past year, New York City has added about 67,100 private-sector jobs. That gain represents a growth rate of 2 percent, slightly higher than the national job gain of 1.8 percent in the past year, he said.

In Performance: Tracee Chimo of \'Bad Jews\'

In Joshua Harmon's comedy “Bad Jews,” Tracee Chimo plays Daphna Feygenbaum, a Vassar senior who is less than thrilled to be staying with relatives on the Upper West Side when in town for her grandfather's funeral. In this scene Daphna complains to her cousin about another cousin who ate a cookie during Passover. The show runs through Dec. 30 at the Roundabout Underground's Black Box Theater.

Recent videos include Shuler Hensley in a scene from Samuel D. Hunter's play “The Whale,” and Jackie Hoffman in her holiday show “A Chanukah Charol.”

Coming soon: videos from Baba Brinkman (“Ingenious Nature”), Will Chase (“The Mystery of Edwin Drood”), Alice Ripley (“A Civil War Christmas”) and others.

\'Newsies\' Recoups Initial Investment

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

The Broadway musical “Newsies,” a David-vs.-Goliath story about the 1899 strike of New York City newsboys, has recouped its $5 million capitalization, becoming the fastest of any Disney musical on Broadway to turn a profit, the show's producers said on Thursday.

Based on a 1992 Disney movie that was a box-office dud, Disney Theatrical Productions first developed the stage version of “Newsies” with an eye toward licensing the musical to regional and school productions as a revenue generator. But a try-out production of the show in fall 2011, at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., proved so popular with audiences and critics t hat Disney, in a relatively unusual move for the company, quickly transferred “Newsies” to Broadway.

Performances began in March. The show opened to generally positive reviews, and went on to be nominated for eight Tony Awards, including best musical and best actor for its then-star, Jeremy Jordan. The production won two Tonys: score for Alan Menken and Jack Feldman and choreography for Christopher Gattelli. Mr. Jordan departed in late summer to star in the NBC series “Smash,” but ticket sales for “Newsies” have held up relatively well with his replacement, Corey Cott, a Broadway newcomer.

“Newsies” becomes the fifth Disney musical on Broadway to turn a profit; the others are “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King,” “Aida” and “Mary Poppins.” The company's two other Broadway musicals, “Tarzan” and “The Little Mermaid,” were critical and commercial disappointments. While “Newsies” is the fastest of the successful shows to recoup, in just over nine months, it was also the one with the smallest capitalization.

Shorter Stairway to Heaven: Rock Stars Die Young, Study Finds

Chad Batka for The New York Times For European stars, a study found, an increase in mortality narrowed and disappeared entirely after a couple of decades of fame.

A new study confirms what music fans have long suspected: rock and pop musicians die prematurely more often than the general population.

The study also found that an early death is twice as likely for musicians with solo careers and that stars who die from substance abuse tend to have troubled childhoods. In addition, the survey found that musicians who reached stardom after 1980 hav e better survival rates. The same was true of older rock stars in Europe. In that group, musicians who survive for 25 years after becoming famous have the same death rate as the general population.

Researchers from Liverpool John Moores University studied the lives of 1,489 rock and pop stars who became famous between 1956 and 2006, of whom 137 had died. Overall, they discovered musicians suffered “higher levels of mortality than demographically matched individuals in the general population.”

The results suggest that, over time, fame can hazardous to a popular musician's health, especially in North America. The researchers found the survival rate for rock and pop stars in North America was far below the general population's rate and that gap became greater with each passing year. In Europe, the difference was significant but narrowed and disappeared entirely a fter a couple of decades of fame. Solo artists from North America had the worst survival rates.

But the authors of the study, led by Mark A. Bellis, said fame and hedonistic high living may not be the only factors in premature deaths of popular musicians. They found nearly half of the musicians whose deaths were linked to drug or alcohol use also had “adverse childhood experiences,” like sexual abuse, or violent or alcoholic parents.

The authors said these childhood experiences are often overlooked in discussions about musicians who abuse drugs or alcohol, or who commit suicide, as journalists and researchers tend to focus instead on excess and indulgence in the music industry and the pressures of celebrity as causes.

Another explanation, the authors said, is that popular music attracts a large number of people from troubled homes, who start life with a higher chance of dying pr ematurely.

“Pursuing a career as a rock or pop musician may itself be a risky strategy and one attractive to those escaping from abusive, dysfunctional or deprived childhoods,” the authors wrote. “Consequently, an industry with a concentration of individuals having acute and long-term health risks is perhaps not unexpected.”

The research was published Wednesday in the online journal BMJ Open.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 20, 2012

An earlier version of this post misstated the date that a mortality study was published. It was Wednesday, Dec. 19, not Thursday, Dec. 20.

It May Not Be the End of the World, but It\'s Bad News for Transit Riders

Optimism being our default position, let's begin with the good news:

If doomsday prophesies based on the ancient Mayans' Long Count calendar prove to be correct, and thus the world comes to an end on Friday, the higher transit fares just approved by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will not go into effect.

There, don't you feel better now?

Not only that, but if the world is kaput, Joseph J. Lhota doesn't have to resign as the authority's chairman, as he said on Thursday that he would so he could d evote his energies to contemplating a race for mayor. He could stay right where he is, basking in praise or dodging arrows.

Of course, things could always go wrong. Maybe the end is not nigh. Many governments have issued statements insisting that it isn't. Even the Vatican weighed in. Its leading astronomer, the Rev. Jose Funes, said the other day that the doomsday scenarios were “not even worth discussing.”

At the risk of seeming unkind, it must be said that the Vatican is not always the most reliable source when it comes to the rhythms of the cosmos. Remember, it waited 359 years, until 1992, to acknowledge that perhaps Galileo had a point and the church was wrong to have condemned him in 1633 for proving that t he Earth moved around the sun.

But the Holy See might have it right this time, in which case the Earth will keep spinning beyond Friday. That's bad news for New York's mass-transit riders because there is no other visible way to head off fare increases that the transportation authority's board voted on Thursday, to take effect in March. You can read here how your wallet will be damaged.

Apparently, most New Yorkers had assumed the worst about the world surviving. Their resignation to higher fares was palpable.

In November, relatively few people turned out for the authority's public hearings on the proposed increases. It was the same on Thursday, with only 15 or so people seizing an opportunity to tell the board what they thought before it voted. Many were regulars at these meetings, their opinions a given before they even said a word.

Fare raises , everyone knew, were as unstoppable as the Earth's rotation.

So was Mr. Lhota's decision to leave the authority a mere 14 months after becoming its chairman. Whoever replaces him â€" at least provisionally, it might be Fernando Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president and mayoral candidate - would be the fourth chairman in a little over five years. Some might well wonder if this rapid turnover at the top is any way to run a railroad.

Despite Mr. Lhota's insistence that he still has serious thinking to do, it is hard to grasp why he would walk away so soon from such a vital position unless he had pretty much made up his mind to run for mayor.

Received wisdom is that the odds against him are long: He is a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, he has never held elective office and he is (choose one) admirably forthright or heedlessly abra sive. Then again, these were all characteristics of the two men who have run City Hall for the past 19 years, Michael R. Bloomberg and Rudolph W. Giuliani (a political patron to Mr. Lhota). Who knows? Maybe lightning can strike thrice.

A leading Democratic contender, the City Council speaker Christine C. Quinn, has already taken the possibility of a Lhota candidacy seriously enough to fire a shot across his bow. Her campaign left little doubt on Thursday that it would keep reminding New Yorkers of “the Lhota fare hike” they will soon endure.

But what if Mr. Lhota forgoes a race? Or what if he does run, and fizzles. He himself said there was a good argument against his candidacy. “It concerns me,” he acknowledged on Thursday, “that I'll be leaving in the middle of what should be a campaign on behalf of the entire M.T.A. system.”

That would be a fine legacy should he fail: to be known as the man who left mass-transit riders in the lurch so that he could embark on a lost cause. Like the world, only this time in T.S. Eliot's vision, his pursuit of glory would end not with a bang but a whimper.

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com

The Ultimate Threat

Dear Diary:

In early November my granddaughter, Louisa, and I were at the Ancient Playground at 85th Street, by the Met. The northeaster that followed Hurricane Sandy had just passed through. The playground had reopened only the afternoon before; small piles of snow were everywhere. Children were running around; grateful parents and nannies were engaged with their cellphones.

As I watched Louisa running from pillar to post, I overheard the following:

Father: “Lucy, put your coat back on!”

Lucy: “No, I'm hot!”

Father: “Lucy, look at the other children. They ALL have their coats on!”

Lucy: “I don't want to. I'm hot!”

Father: “Lucy, if you don't put your coat on, all the parents at this playground will lose respect for you.”

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

An Apology for the Oxford English Dictionary\'s Ill-Timed Word of the Day

Oli Scarff/Getty Images Oxford University

Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has apologized for what it called “a coincidence of the worst kind” after the dictionary's Web site named “bloodbath” as its word of the day on Tuesday, after last week's deadly shootings in Newtown, Conn.

The Guardian reported that a word of the day entry that ran on the OED.com site, defining bloodbath as “a battle or fight at which much blood is spilt; a wholesale slaughter, a massacre,” drew rapid criticism from readers on Twitter, who called it “Tasteless and gross” and said it was “in very , very poor taste in light of recent events.”

The post at OED.com said that “we apologize for any distress and upset caused by what might seem to be a highly insensitive choice” and that the word of the day is “selected months in advance by an editorial committee, and is distributed automatically each day.”

The post said that the timing of the word was “a coincidence of the worst kind.” It added: “What we hope to show with our words of the day is that even seemingly commonplace words can have interesting etymologies; however we have taken today's word down from the OED Online homepage and are now taking immediate steps to review our scheduling and selection policy.”

Joke About Child Murder Remains in \'This Is 40\'

Judd Apatow's child-murder joke will remain in “This Is 40” when it arrives in theaters on Friday.

Despite Hollywood's scramble to be sensitive after the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., - crude television comedies pulled, red carpets for premieres of violent movies canceled - there is a difference between reacting sensibly and overreacting, according to Mr. Apatow, who has declined to remove an unfortunately timed scene from his new Universal Pictures comedy, “This Is 40.”

In the scene a character played by Albert Brooks sprays his triplets with a garden hose. “Line up! Line up for murder! Come on! Who wants to be killed?” he jokes, before one child shouts, “I do!” Then another wants to join in the fun, “Murder me!” In the end, Mr. Brooks says: “All right. The kids are murdered. That will save us some mo ney.”

Mr. Apatow said in a statement on Wednesday: “I wrote this script two years ago. That line is spoken by a sarcastic father kidding with his children. In light of recent events, I understand if some people might make an unfortunate association or put it in a context in which it was not intended.”

Musical Moments, Part VIII: Mozart

Several readers wrote in to say that one of their favorite moments in music comes near the end of the fourth and final act of Mozart's “Marriage of Figaro,” when the philandering Count Almaviva, having been caught and humiliated, asks his wife for forgiveness. But that melody is hinted at in Act III, during the count's seductive duet with Susanna, his wife's maid, as I point out in this video.