Area Airports, Stalled by Hurricane, Missed a Record in 2012

Carlo Allegri/Reuters Thanksgiving-week travelers at La Guardia Airport.

Before Hurricane Sandy struck, the major airports in the New York metropolitan area were on pace to handle more travelers than they had in any previous year. But after the storm shut them down and forced the cancellation of thousands of flights, 2012 landed just short of the record set in 2007, before the recession.

All told, more than 109 million passengers last year moved through the airports operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Port Authority reported on Thursday. That total was about 600,000 shy of the 2007 high - or about the number of people who pass through the airports in two days.

Though the raw count suggests that activity at the airports has returned to the level before the recession hit and put a damper on traveling, there have been significant shifts in the past five years. Most notable are the surge in international travel and the wane of business travel.

Last year, nearly 35 percent of the passengers - more than 33.5 million of them â€" were traveling internationally, up from about 30 percent in 2007, according to the Port Authority’s statistics. The trend of steadily increasing numbers of foreign visitors to New York City led to the highest annual use of John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2012.

Along with Kennedy, the Port Authority operates La Guardia Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport and Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, N.Y.

The number of domestic travelers had still not bounced back from prerecession levels: The airports served about 71.7 million domestic travelers in 2012, down almost 5 million! from 2007. Still, last year’s tally of domestic travelers was the highest since 2008.

While the number of international flights through the region’s airports has been rising, the number of domestic flights has declined. That helps to explain why so few middle seats go unfilled: the average flight to or from the region carried 94 passengers last year, up from 88 five years ago.

The vast majority of all of those passengers were at their leisure. Only about one of every six was traveling purely for business in 2012, down from more than one in four five years ago.

Pearl Theater Puts Out Emergency Fundraising Call

Jacob J. Goldberg A scene from the Pearl Theater Company’s production of “Figaro” with, from left, Joey Parsons, Robin Leslie Brown, Sean McNall and and Jolly Abraham.

The Pearl Theater Company is an Off Broadway troupe best known for mounting classic plays. But according to a letter sent to subscribers this week, the theater is experiencing a classic problem: a cash flow shortfall that threatens to endanger its current season and its overall financial health. In the letter, J. R. Sullivan, the company’s artistic director, writesthat the theater’s board has raised over $200,000 since it began focusing on the financial shortfall in December, and the company has undertaken “stringent cost-cutting measures.” But he said the the company still needs to raise an additional $250,000 to enable it to have an “immediate future.” Its budget for the current season is $2.1 million.

The company’s financial woes were compounded by its recent move to a new home. Last February the company signed a 20-year lease on a 160-seat venue at 555 West 42nd Street, formerly occupied by the Signature Theater Company. The Pearl is in the middle of a three-year, $3 million fundraising campaign. In the letter Mr. Sullivan blamed the theater’s financial problems mostly on “the expense of moving to the new theater, exacerbated by lower than expected fall ticket sales and the sluggish economy.” Mr. Sullivan also laid part of the blame on Hurricane Sandy. “We weren’t shut down like many of our brother and sister theaters were down! town,” he said in an interview. “But we were impacted by the transit shutdown, and that hurt our attendance.”

The Pearl, founded in 1984, produced shows for about 15 years at Theater 80 on St. Marks Place before moving its productions in 2009 to New York City Center Stage II, which seats about 150. The Pearl’s first production in its new home, Charles Morey’s adaptation of “The Marriage of Figaro,” received mostly positive reviews when it opened in November. Mr. Sullivan said there is “no danger of cutting the season short.” The company still plans to produce its final two shows of the season: “Henry IV Part 1,” now in previews, and Terrence McNally’s new play, “And Away We Go,” scheduled to begin previews in April.

Since the letter went out, the company has received about $50,000, a sign that Mr. Sullivan said gave him confidence that the company would reach its goal. If the money is not forthcoming, Mr. Sullivan said, it would “raise he possibility of cutting back” and giving the rest of the season “an extra look,” particularly at materials like props and sets. “At this point in the season there are not a lot of areas where you can cut except in the productions,” he said. “But we are focused on fundraising and delivering a full season.”

Seeking a Hollywood Audience for a Nollywood Film

Ángel Franco/The New York Times Tony Abulu, directing his film, “Doctor Bello,” last year in New York. Mr. Abulu, who is Nigerian, is considered a member of that country’s booming film industry and his movie will be shown in theaters in New York and across the country starting on Friday.

The filmmaker was on his cellphone, his voice hoarse, his enthusiasm abounding. “It’s a Cinderella story!” he exclaimed. “Here’s a little guywho’s struggling!”

The little guy in question was himself, Tony Abulu. The story: the long, fraught arc of his latest project, “Doctor Bello,” a movie he wrote, directed and produced.

Shot last year on a shoestring budget in New York City and Nigeria, Mr. Abulu’s project has had a lot riding on it. It was the recipient of an inaugural loan made by a government-backed fund in Nigeria created to improve the quality of the movies churned out by that country’s booming film industry, known as Nollywood.

And now Mr. Abulu’s narrative was reaching its denouement. This week he finalized a deal with AMC Theatres to screen the movie at 20 theaters around the country, including the company’s multiplex on 42nd Street in Times Square. Mr. Abulu, who is from Nigeria and has lived in Manhattan ! for nearly three decades, said it was the first time a Nollywood production has secured a mainstream theatrical release in the United States.

The run begins Friday morning and is scheduled only through next Wednesday â€" unless box-office receipts warrant an extension.

“It’s the make-or-break weekend,” Mr. Abulu said. “This is where I become either Tyler Perry or just fade out into oblivion.”

To Mr. Abulu, oblivion means the wasteland of Nollywood DVDs, the one and only destination for nearly all of the more than 1,000 titles spewed out by that industry every year. Most are sloppy productions with weak writing and acting and low production values, though they are popular at home and among Nigerians and others throughout the African diaspora.

In 2010, Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, pledged to create a $200 million fund to help raise the production value of Nollywood movies with an eye toward capturing a wider international audience. Last spring, Mr. Abulu received$250,000 from the fund.

The film tells the story of an African-American cancer specialist in New York, Michael Durant, who seeks the assistance of an uncertified Nigerian doctor to save a young patient. The Nigerian doctor, an immigrant living in Brooklyn named Dr. Bello, administers the patient a secret African potion. But the unorthodox treatment leads to Dr. Durant’s suspension and Dr. Bello’s imprisonment for malpractice.

When Dr. Bello himself falls ill, Dr. Durant goes in search of a secret elixir, found only in the mountains of Nigeria, in a place called the “Garden of Life.”

Mr. Abulu hopes the film and its international story line would have special appeal for African-American audiences.

Alongside A-list Nollywood stars, including Genevieve Nnaji and Stephanie Okereke, he cast several Hollywood actors, including Isaiah Washington, best known for “Grey’s Anatomy”; Vivica A. Fox (“Kill Bill” and “Independence Day,” among others); and Jimmy Jean-Lou! is (the N! BC series “Heroes”).

He has spent about $500,000 to make and distribute the film, Mr. Abulu said â€" small by Hollywood standards but enormous for Nollywood â€" but was able to keep his expenditures relatively low because many cast members agreed to defer at least some of their payment on the promise of a share of profits.

“It’s been a struggle for, like, three years for me, nonstop,” Mr. Abulu sighed.

The movie had its premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington, in September, and was released in theaters in Nigeria, where it received a mixed reception from reviewers and made about $100,000 at the box offices, Mr. Abulu said.

For months, Mr. Abulu relentlessly lobbied American film executives for a distribution deal in the United States, finally getting traction with AMC.

“Having recognized Nollywood as a rapid growing industry, AMC is pleased to not only provide a platform for sharing more socially and culturally relevant stories, but to respond to the feedback rom our diverse guest base,” Nikkole Denson-Randolph, vice president of alternative and special content for AMC Theatres, said in a news release announcing the deal.

In addition to Times Square, the film will open at theaters in New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Jacksonville, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio.

Since the deal was finalized, Mr. Abulu has been scrambling to ensure an audience. This has mostly involved word o -mouth because, he confessed, he has run out of money and could not afford advertising.

“If I had a million dollars to advertise, I would predict that we would do $60 million the opening weekend,” he said.

Still, his confidence in the film’s future remained unflagging.

“It’s going to catch fire,” he predicted.

For Winter’s Gloom, a Healing Dose of Light in a Garden

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Lynn Spevack led a tour of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this month. Ms. Spevack is a psychotherapist with a specialty in seasonal affective disorder. She believes sunlight is a good antidote.

One good measure of the effect winter weather has on New Yorkers can be found in the attendance numbers for the tours of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

On an unusually warm and bright Sunday in January, almost 100 people showed up to watch and listen to Lynne Spevack, a plant lover and a tour guide, offer her wisdom. On her next tour, on a Suday this month when the high temperature was 30 degrees and the sky was battleship gray, attendance was closer to 10.

That weather-based variation is typical, according to Ms. Spevack, but in her opinion it should not be.

Ms. Spevack, a volunteer at the Botanic Garden, is not a typical tour guide. She is a licensed psychotherapist and she has a specialty in helping people cope with the winter blahs, which is clinically known as seasonal affective disorder.

“People come see me with marital problems, office problems â€" they don’t realize they have it,” said Ms. Spivack, who said she believed that exercise and exposure to natural sunlight, even if it is cold, are good ways to ward off feelings of gloom. “They think, “This is just how I am, and this is just how life is.’”

For the past seven years, on the first Sunday of every winter month, Ms. Spevack has met dreary, sleepy-eyed visitors at the garden to give her free tour.

They s! how up at Magnolia Plaza, often late, dragging their feet, reluctant to do much else but stare at their cheery guide. Once the tour starts, Ms. Spevack walks at a clip that puts her a constant 10 paces in front of the group. She strains to be heard, wearing a tiny amplifier strapped to her hip. If the group is small enough, she uses just her voice.

Moving through the garden this month, past the magnolia trees and small flowers with white bulbs known as snowdrops that were covered in snow, she talked about plants, light, and the need for humans to reconnect with the natural world - or in the case of the Botanic Garden, a handmade approximation of it.

But she said it can be difficult to persuade cynical New Yorkers, prone to the comforts of artificial bulbs and accustomed to ignoring the cycles of the sun, that a simple walk outdoors can help.

“There’s not a pharmaceutical company behind natural light that’s funding advertising for it,” she said. “People don’t know about it.”

The idea that light can profoundly affect people’s mental states has gained traction in mainstream medical circles in recent years. Columbia University went so far as to open the Center for Environmental Therapeutics, which is dedicated to studying the effects of light and circadian rhythms on the mind.

Researchers have found that seasonal affective disorder is common, and more prevalent in places far from the Equator. The malady is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Michael Terman, the president of Columbia’s center, estimates that about 5 percent of New Yorkers experience serious depression during the winter and about half of all New Yorkers experience some symptoms, including a lack of motivation.

In some extreme cases, psychotherapy and antidepressants are needed to treat the disorder, but researchers at the center believe that the most effective treatment is the simplest one: light.

“We became detached from the idea that our! body and! our minds are connected to our environment,” said Dan Oren, an adviser at the center. “Science artificially created a divide between plants and people when thinking about light. We have never been taught that light is a fundamental factor in human and animal physiology.”

Ms. Spevack agrees, but her relation to the disorder is more personal than scientific. She said she had had it since she was a teenager.

“It feels like cotton in your brain, where you kind of have to push through,” she said. “That would all go away in the summertime.”

For decades, she would go to the Botanic Garden in the winter. Walking among the plants made her feel better. One day, she decided she could help others.

“I was walking around, and I saw rabbit tracks in the snow, and birds clamoring on the bushes with the berries, and it was so beautiful,” said Ms. Spevack, who will lead her last tour this winter on March 3. “I was like, ‘I’m here all alone. I should be giving a tour.’”

Devorah Tradburks has taken Ms. Spevack’s tour and is a believer in her philosophy.

“To me, it’s totally intuitive that sitting indoors, working 9 to 5, not seeing sunlight, not being active â€" that it would get people down,” Ms. Tradburks said. “It seems like the only normal thing to do is to spend some time outside, and be alive.”

For Winter’s Gloom, a Healing Dose of Light in a Garden

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Lynn Spevack led a tour of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this month. Ms. Spevack is a psychotherapist with a specialty in seasonal affective disorder. She believes sunlight is a good antidote.

One good measure of the effect winter weather has on New Yorkers can be found in the attendance numbers for the tours of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

On an unusually warm and bright Sunday in January, almost 100 people showed up to watch and listen to Lynne Spevack, a plant lover and a tour guide, offer her wisdom. On her next tour, on a Suday this month when the high temperature was 30 degrees and the sky was battleship gray, attendance was closer to 10.

That weather-based variation is typical, according to Ms. Spevack, but in her opinion it should not be.

Ms. Spevack, a volunteer at the Botanic Garden, is not a typical tour guide. She is a licensed psychotherapist and she has a specialty in helping people cope with the winter blahs, which is clinically known as seasonal affective disorder.

“People come see me with marital problems, office problems â€" they don’t realize they have it,” said Ms. Spivack, who said she believed that exercise and exposure to natural sunlight, even if it is cold, are good ways to ward off feelings of gloom. “They think, “This is just how I am, and this is just how life is.’”

For the past seven years, on the first Sunday of every winter month, Ms. Spevack has met dreary, sleepy-eyed visitors at the garden to give her free tour.

They s! how up at Magnolia Plaza, often late, dragging their feet, reluctant to do much else but stare at their cheery guide. Once the tour starts, Ms. Spevack walks at a clip that puts her a constant 10 paces in front of the group. She strains to be heard, wearing a tiny amplifier strapped to her hip. If the group is small enough, she uses just her voice.

Moving through the garden this month, past the magnolia trees and small flowers with white bulbs known as snowdrops that were covered in snow, she talked about plants, light, and the need for humans to reconnect with the natural world - or in the case of the Botanic Garden, a handmade approximation of it.

But she said it can be difficult to persuade cynical New Yorkers, prone to the comforts of artificial bulbs and accustomed to ignoring the cycles of the sun, that a simple walk outdoors can help.

“There’s not a pharmaceutical company behind natural light that’s funding advertising for it,” she said. “People don’t know about it.”

The idea that light can profoundly affect people’s mental states has gained traction in mainstream medical circles in recent years. Columbia University went so far as to open the Center for Environmental Therapeutics, which is dedicated to studying the effects of light and circadian rhythms on the mind.

Researchers have found that seasonal affective disorder is common, and more prevalent in places far from the Equator. The malady is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Michael Terman, the president of Columbia’s center, estimates that about 5 percent of New Yorkers experience serious depression during the winter and about half of all New Yorkers experience some symptoms, including a lack of motivation.

In some extreme cases, psychotherapy and antidepressants are needed to treat the disorder, but researchers at the center believe that the most effective treatment is the simplest one: light.

“We became detached from the idea that our! body and! our minds are connected to our environment,” said Dan Oren, an adviser at the center. “Science artificially created a divide between plants and people when thinking about light. We have never been taught that light is a fundamental factor in human and animal physiology.”

Ms. Spevack agrees, but her relation to the disorder is more personal than scientific. She said she had had it since she was a teenager.

“It feels like cotton in your brain, where you kind of have to push through,” she said. “That would all go away in the summertime.”

For decades, she would go to the Botanic Garden in the winter. Walking among the plants made her feel better. One day, she decided she could help others.

“I was walking around, and I saw rabbit tracks in the snow, and birds clamoring on the bushes with the berries, and it was so beautiful,” said Ms. Spevack, who will lead her last tour this winter on March 3. “I was like, ‘I’m here all alone. I should be giving a tour.’”

Devorah Tradburks has taken Ms. Spevack’s tour and is a believer in her philosophy.

“To me, it’s totally intuitive that sitting indoors, working 9 to 5, not seeing sunlight, not being active â€" that it would get people down,” Ms. Tradburks said. “It seems like the only normal thing to do is to spend some time outside, and be alive.”

Philharmonic Pours More of its Archives Onto the Web

Sheet music on music stands provide the roadmap for an orchestra’s performance, but scribbled annotations by the players impose a conductor’s ideas and serve as simple reminders to make an entrance or count right. Now, with more than half-million new digitized pages poured into the New York Philharmonic’s electronic archives, that world is open to inspection. It may prove interesting to concert-goers, and fascinating to musicians who will have to play those parts themselves.

The Philharmonic on Thursday said it had completed the first phase of an effort to put its vast archive on the Internet. Lasting three years so far, the project has made available public programs, scores and internal documents from 1943, when Leonard Bernstein made his debut with the orchestra, to 1970, the year after he left as music director.

The last chunk of Phase I focused on theindividual parts that entered the Philharmonic’s library in mainly that period and even before, encompassing nearly 1,200 works by a few more than 300 composers. The orchestra said many of the markings reflect the directions of conductors like Bernstein and Andre Kostelanetz. A few reflect those of Toscanini.

The archives, led by Barbara Haws, will now move to digitizing materials from the period between the orchestra’s founding in 1842 to 1908. Phase 3 will cover 1908 to 1943.

The recent images show sometimes worn and browned parts held together by bits of tape. The universal symbol to Watch! â€" a sketch of eyeglasses â€" abounds, along with added dynamic markings and reminders at the top left of a page of how many measures rest were noted at the bottom of a previous page, a sign of how the human brain needs to be reminded to concentrate over the time it takes to turn a leaf.

Many of the parts are signed by the principal players, with the dates of performances. It is quaint to! see small lines marking out the beats of the oboe cadenza that interrupts the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, probably marked by the orchestra’s principal oboist, Harold Gomberg.

“It’s going to be the most used part of the collection right now,” Ms. Haws said of the scanned sheet music. “Musicians are always looking for how other musicians dealt with challenges in a part.”

Patrol Car Kills Pedestrian While Responding to Emergency Call

A patrol car heading to the scene of a 911 call about a domestic assault in progress fatally struck a man in Long Island City, Queens, around 12:45 a.m. Thursday, the police said.

The officers were driving east on 40th Avenue toward a building in the Queensbridge public housing complex where a 911 call had reported a domestic dispute with a knife, a police spokesman said. Their car hit a man crossing 40th Avenue, mid-block between 10th and 11th Streets, the police said.

The man was pronounced dead at the scene; his name has not yet been released, nor have the names of the two officers in the patrol car. The spokesman also did not disclose whether they were injured. Another spokesman said their emergency lights had been activated, but he did not know if their siren was on.

The crash remains under investigation.

The emergency call on the domestic assault was eventually answered by officers from another sector who did not find any assault with a knife in progress, the first spokesmansaid. “They marked the job ‘unfounded,’” he said.

Ben Foster Will Replace Shia LaBeouf in ‘Orphans’

The actor Ben Foster, who played a cold-blooded killer in the movie “3:10 to Yuma” and vulnerable young men in “The Messenger” and the HBO series “Six Feet Under,” will join the cast of the Broadway play “Orphans,” replacing Shia LaBeouf, the producers announced on Thursday. Mr. LaBeouf left the production a day earlier after backstage disagreements and an apparent lack of compatibility with the play’s star, Alec Baldwin.

Mr. Foster, who had previously auditioned for the role - the malevolent and emotionally unstable Treat - has never been in a play as a professional actor before, nor has he worked with Mr. Baldwin. Mr. Foster will start rehearsals on Friday.

He will be walking into a work environment that became fraught after “Orphans” rehearsals began on Feb. 11, as the divergent acting styles of Mr. Baldwin and Mr. LaBeouf becme clear to the play’s director, Tony Award winner Daniel Sullivan, and its lead producers, Frederick Zollo and Robert Cole. Those three men decided on Tuesday to replace Mr. LaBeouf; a public announcement was made on Wednesday, simply citing “creative differences.” But soon after Mr. LaBeouf began publishing email exchanges on his Twitter account that shed more light on the situation.

In one e-mail from Mr. Sullivan to Mr. LaBeouf on Tuesday night, Mr. Sullivan wrote: “I’m too old for disagreeable situations. You’re one hell of a great actor. Alec is who he is. You are who you are. You two are incompatible. I should have known it.

“This one will haunt me,” Mr. Sullivan continued. “You tried to warn me. You said you were a different breed. I didn’t get it.”

Mr. Sullivan declined an interview request on Thursday. Mr. Baldwin, reached by telephone on Thursday, declined to discuss compatibility issues with Mr. LaBe! ouf, only saying: “You realize in the process, theater is not for everyone.”

One incident that occurred early in rehearsals involved Mr. LaBeouf, a film actor who had never been on Broadway before, punching his hand through a door to the surprise of his “Orphans” collaborators, according to two theater executives familiar with the moment. Mr. LaBeouf apologized by email to the “Orphans” playwright, Lyle Kessler, saying, ‘im a child” - a copy of which he published on Twitter. The two theater executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private rehearsal process, said Mr. LaBeouf punched the door while in character as Treat.

None of the email exchanges provides details about specific compatibility problems between Mr. LaBeouf and Mr. Baldwin, a theater veteran and an Emmy Award-winning actor on the NBC series “30 Rock.” Both men have been known for having hot temperaments: Mr. LaBeouf has made tabloid headlines in the past for bar fights and arrests, while Mr.Baldwin got into a shouting match outside his apartment this week with a New York Post photographer.

In Mr. Baldwin’s previous outing in New York theater, the 2006 Off Broadway production of “Entertaining Mr. Sloane,” the actress Jan Maxwell quit the play after performances began because she and Mr. Baldwin did not get along.

In an e-mail exchange on Wednesday after Mr. LaBeouf’s departure, Mr. Baldwin told him, “I’ve been through this before” and counseled the younger actor that “what we all do now is critical. Perhaps especially for you.”

“When the change comes, how do we handle it, whether it be good or bad What do we learn I don’t have an unkind word to say about you. You have my word,” wrote Mr. Baldwin, who plays a rich businessman, Harold, who is kidnapped by Treat.

Mr. LaBeouf replied! : “same! . be well. good luck on the play. you’ll be great.”

Mr. Baldwin, speaking briefly by telephone on Thursday, said he and everyone involved with “Orphans” were “very disappointed” that Mr. LaBeouf was publishing email exchanges that they considered private. “Regarding of what people feel about the events that happened, you expect communications to be private, because everyone wants this process to be as collegial as possible. Everyone is very sad about what’s happened.”

In addition to Mr. Sullivan, the play’s two producers also declined an interview request on Thursday about Mr. LaBeouf and whether they have asked him to stop publishing private email. The actor’s spokeswoman, asked if anyone had asked the actor to stop tweeting the private email, did not immediately reply on Thursday.

Tom Sturridge remains in the role of Philip, Treat’s younger brother; he wrote Mr. LaBeouf an email on Wednesday, also published on Twitter, that complimented the actor and said, “I thnk you lifted the play to a place higher than maybe it even deserved to be.”

“Orphans” is still scheduled to begin previews at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on March 19 and open on April 7.

Caught on Camera, Two Bald Eagles Rebuild After the Storm

HILLSBOROUGH, N.J. - The national bird has proved itself Jersey Strong.

Among those displaced by the havoc of Hurricane Sandy was a pair of bald eagles who had nested since 2005 in the curve of a sycamore tree at Duke Farms, the park and environmental learning center on the estate of Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress.

Like Doris Duke herself, the eagles had become something of a sensation: more than 7.6 million people had watched them on a webcam.

After the storm toppled the nest, state wildlife officials suggested putting up a dummy one tolure the eagles back.

But within a week of the storm, the eagles started the rebuilding themselves, in another tree within 100 feet of their prior home. Now, after a little trimming of branches in the sight line last month, the Duke Farms eagles are live on webcam again â€" and this week, two eggs, or probable eggs, were spotted in the nest.

“Not only did they defy the odds initially and nest here, but they came back,” said Nora Wagner, director of programs at Duke Farms.

Eagles, their eggs once weakened by the pesticide DDT, are no longer on the federal government’s list of endangered species. But New Jersey still considers them endangered during nesting season (January to August) and “threatened” the rest of the year. There are 121 nesting pairs statewide, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection, up from just one in the 1980s.

This pair was the first documented on the banks of the Raritan River, and one of two to! lose their home in the storm. (The other nest, in West Deptford, near Camden, was not on webcam.)

One day last week, the camera caught the eagles courting, which consists, quaintly, of bringing each other sticks and grasses to help build their nest. They flew out and returned a few hours later to share a fish for lunch.

Hurricane Sandy knocked down about 2,000 trees in the central 600 acres of Duke Farms. The saving grace was that the storm hit with plenty of time before nesting season, allowing the birds, who have already fledged 14 bald eagles in the last five years, to get a jump on rebuilding before the next babies arrive.

Thom Almendinger, the director of stewardship at Duke Farms, said the nest that was knocked down was 12 feet wide, and the new one is already about 5 feet around.

Duke Farms officials won’t tell visitors where exactly the nest is; the law prohibits anyone getting within about 1,000 feet during nesting season, and given that it’s 80 feet up a tree, it’s esier to see from the webcam.

After this year’s nesting season, Mr. Almendinger said, staff members will add sound to the camera and adjust it so viewers can see the nest from above, rather than the side. But look for coming attractions even before then: any eggs in the nest should hatch within the next month.

Reunited, the Rascals Bring Their Act to Broadway

Chad Batka for The New York Times The Rascals performing at the Capitol Theater in December.

Having recently reunited for a series of shows in Port Chester, N.Y., the 1960s blue-eyed soul band the Rascals are bringing their act to Broadway for a limited engagement in April at the Richard Rodgers Theater, the producers said on Thursday.

First staged at the Capitol Theater in December, the extravagant show, “Once Upon a Dream,” not only marked the first time the Rascals had played publicly in four decades, but featured videotaped segments and re-enactments by ctors aimed at tracing the history of the band, whose hits included “Good Lovin’,” “Groovin’” and “People Got to Be Free.”

The show has been variously described as a “BioConcert” or “a hybrid of a rock’n'roll concert and a Broadway show.” It was written and produced by Steven Van Zandt, the actor, producer and longtime guitarist for the E Street Band.

Now Mr. Van Zandt, in partnership with the concert promoter Larry Magid and with BASE Entertainment, is bringing the show to Broadway for a 15-night run, starting with previews on April 15, with an official opening on April 18.

Marc Brickman, a lighting designer most known for his work with Pink Floyd, crafted a psychedelic light show and Op-art explosions to go with the quartet’s stomping R&B-inflected songs. At times during the show, a big video screen presents band members as they reminisce about their history and the turbulent 1960s.

The Rascals â€" the singer Eddie Br! igati, the keyboardist Felix Cavaliere, the drummer Dino Danelli and the guitarist Gene Cornish â€" got their start in the mid-’60s in New York and New Jersey bars doing covers of soul hits, but soon developed their own style. From 1966 to 1968 they were regularly in the Top 10, as their music changed from garage-soul covers like “Good Lovin’” in 1966 to jazz-tinged songs like “Groovin’” in 1967, and finally to idealistic anthems like “People Got to Be Free,” in 1968, released after the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Rascals’ songs were largely written by Mr. Cavaliere and Mr. Brigati, and they presented a hopeful outlook, praising love and freedom without delving into some of the era’s more ugly undercurrents. Still, they earned a reputation for being principled on civil rights issues by demanding that black bands always appear with them in concert, even at the expense of losing gigs in the South.

Mr. Brigati and Mr. Cornishhad left the group by 1972, ending its original lineup, though Mr. Cavaliere continued to a version of Rascals a little longer. The original lineup played together at its 1997 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and for a private 2010 benefit organized by Mr. Van Zandt and his wife, Maureen, who also a producer of “Once Upon a Dream.”

Tickets go on sale to the general public on Feb. 22.

Theater Talkback: Old Works, Born Anew

Michael J. Lutch Zachary Quinto in “The Glass Menagerie” at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.

They just keep coming, as regular and usually as travel-worn as buses on a high street. Reviving old brand-name plays with brand-name stars (of various vintage) has become Broadway’s default production mode, and, oh, what a weary formula it is. Another “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” Another “Glengarry Glen Ross” Another “Heiress”

A theater-addicted friend of mine and I regularly call each other to report breathlessly on the latest example of such rote producing plans. Some are real (Denzel Washington in “A Raisin in the Sun”), some fabricated (Pamela Anderson in “A Streetcar Named Desire”), and the game is trying to tell when the other person is lying. These days, it ain’t easy.

In fairness, some of these shows aren’t too bad. But more often than not, they embody a dismal failure of the imagination, telling you absolutely nothing you don’t know already about the work being revived. In the most unfortunate cas! es (like the recent “Glengarry” with Al Pacino), they even manage to make a great play look small.

But to borrow a favorite line from Tennessee Williams, one of the most manhandled of great dramatists in recent years, sometimes there is God so quickly. You go to see a play you’ve seen a dozen times before â€" thinking “Not you again, you old warhorse”- and it’s as if you’re a witness to a rebirth. It’s like looking at your ancient grandmother and seeing the glowing girl she was 50 years earlier, before she was encrusted by time and habit.

That was my experience when I went to the current production of Williams’s “Glass Menagerie” at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. Reading about it in advance, I had deemed it a dicey proposition. A collaboration between two Brits (JohnTiffany and Steven Hoggett) best known for their work on the whimsical musical “Once” The robust Cherry Jones as the faded, genteel Amanda A staging that included stylized gestures and tanks of black viscous liquid

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Kevin Anderson, left, and Brian Dennehy in the 1999 Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman.”

But my doubts fell away almost as soon as the show began. I’ve written at length about this production already and hope to have the chance to again, if it moves t! o Broadwa! y, as is rumored. So I’ll confine myself to saying that this was a “Menagerie” that gave full, vibrant life to Williams’s notion of a play shaped by memoryâ€"and specifically, the memory of Williams’s alter-ego, Tom Wingfield (a superb Zachary Quinto). It was as if the script were being created, in a backward-looking present tense, as we watched.

I’ve had the good fortune to feel this way before during my years as a theater critic, though it’s a rare and blessed experience. Robert Falls’s darkness-shrouded 1999 production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” starring Brian Dennehy, gave a similar sense of a world summoned from the recesses of one man’s mind (in this case, atruly depressive mind).

Sometimes a single performance, and the effect it produces on the others in the cast, can startle into you a new awareness of a classic. I think of Janet McTeer in Anthony Page’s 1996 version of Ibsen’s “Doll’s House.” As the infantile Nora, Ms. McTeer would appear to have been oddly cast. Her physique is that of a strapping Artemis, and she was taller than Owen Teale, who played her domineering husband.

Yet this physical incongruity lent a new resonance to the notion of Nora trapped in a role to which she was not naturally suited. It helps, of course, that Ms. McTeer is an actress of uncommon emotional transparency. Nora’s captivity had never before felt so viscerally real to me, nor her marriage so doomed. I was shaking with emotion by the end, which had certainly not been my usual reaction to “A Doll’s House.”

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Janet McTeer in the 1997 Broadway production of “A Doll’s House.”

Other examples that come to mind: Cate Blanchett in Williams’s “Streetcar,” making me see Blanche DuBois as not just a crushed butterfly but a canny, ever-struggling survivor, who has finally reached the end of her tether; Simon Russell Beale in “Hamlet,” finding the gentle, wounded but still brilliant innocent within the angry, frustrated prince; Mark Rylance as Olivia in“Twelfth Night,” presenting that bereaved countess as a young noblewoman (not unlike Queen Elizabeth I) upon whom power has suddenly been thrust.

I’ve mentioned only plays. But I have known vintage musicals to blossom in similar ways: Walter Bobbie’s stripped-down 1996 revival of “Chicago” (still running on Broadway) and Bartlett Sher’s younger-than-springtime “South Pacific,” for starters. And while I admired the original 1994 Broadway staging of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Passion,” I didnâ! €™t fully! grasp what it was about until I saw Eric Schaeffer’s 2002 version at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

This was a production that righted an imbalance in the love triangle that is the focus of “Passion,” putting the man, Giorgio (played by the wonderful Michael Cerveris) at its center and making it clearly the story of his sentimental education. (In that sense, it’s like restoring Tom to the center of “Menagerie.”) I’ve seen, oh, a half-dozen or so productions of “Passion” during the past two decades, and I’ll be seeing another this weekend (at the Classic Stage Company). To my surprise, I’m kind of excited, willing to be born again, once more.

What are your experiences of revivals that made you see plays or musicals in new ways When were you born again by a fresh interpretation of a familiar show

After the Snowstorm, an Unexpected Lift

Dear Diary:

It was the morning after the February blizzard and I decided that I had to have a New York adventure, so I walked up the block to my local coffee shop.

All was well except the crosswalk in front had not been shoveled. I was a bit stymied by the heap of snow before me when all of a sudden I was surrounded by a gaggle of rugged construction guys.

They looked at me and at one another and suddenly lifted me over the snow bank! I couldn’t believe it. I’m not young nor light but for a moment I felt like a feather, like a ballerina floating in the air. I bought them all coffee and we left together, and with one final lift I was on my way home.

What a gift they gave an aging, not so light, die-hard New Yawker who hasn’t lost her spirit of adventure. Thank you guys!

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