Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about an opera that will be performed on a storied basketball court in Harlem. And, with the forecast calling for temperatures in the mid-90s on Tuesday, we’ll get details on early voting for Primary Day. It won’t be that hot tomorrow or over the weekend.
Holcombe Rucker Park is famous for basketball. It’s where stars like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Julius Erving once put their reputations on the line, playing street legends. It’s where Jay-Z and Fat Joe put together teams for a game that was never played. (It had been scheduled for the night of the blackout in 2003.) Rucker, as it is known, has been the setting for films and documentaries, including one that won a Sports Emmy Award. Now Rucker, wedged between the Harlem River Drive and Frederick Douglass Boulevard at West 155th Street, is about to become the setting for something different — an opera. But the work that will be performed on Saturday and again on June 28 seems to belong there. It’s about basketball, and the performers play as well as sing. “We actually play basketball 12 times” in the opera, said Grethe Barrett Holby, who had the idea that led to “Bounce: The Basketball Opera” more than 20 years ago and who is the creative director of the production. “A lot of the actual drama happens in the games. I know enough that I’m not going to stage the games, but I make sure we can see what is going on between the characters.” There is even an announcer whose voice will be familiar to Barclays Center fans — Olivier Sedra, the public address announcer for the Brooklyn Nets. “A real game, there’s no script,” he said. “The players write the script as they go along. The same thing here.” But there is more to “Bounce.” “It’s taking the game of basketball and using it as a tool to spread a message about gun violence,” Sedra said. “As we all know, we have way too much gun violence in this country. Anything we can do to teach the next generation, it’s our responsibility to do so.” Holby came up with the idea for the opera in the early 2000s, when reading young adult novels to her son Warren. She enlisted the novelist Charles R. Smith Jr. as the librettist and the Emmy-winning composer Glen Roven. After Roven’s death at 61 in 2018, additional music for “Bounce” was added by the guitarist Tomás Doncker, whose career has taken him from the “no wave” rock movement of the early 1980s to what he calls “global soul.” But this weekend, the place is the thing. “It was our fantasy to perform in Rucker Park,” said Cohen, the executive and artistic director of Ardea Arts, the organization behind “Bounce.” Holby “envisioned ‘Bounce’ being played on every iconic court,” Cohen said. The opera was workshopped several years ago at the University of Kentucky, which has both a powerhouse team and an opera department. “That was wonderful, a great experience,” Cohen said. So was a staging in Memphis, she said. “But we’re serious New Yorkers,” she said. “These places pale in comparison to Rucker Park. Where else do you go when you know that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Julius Erving played on this court, right? Pro basketball players knew that if they wanted a game, they had to go to Rucker.” It was named for Holcombe Rucker, who was credited with using basketball as a way to point more than 700 children to scholarships, college and a better future, starting in the 1950s. He was the playground director at several city parks before his death from cancer at the age of 38 in 1965. By then he had run tournaments in Harlem for more than a decade. After his death, Bob McCullough, a Rucker acolyte who had been drafted by the Cincinnati Royals, the N.B.A. franchise that became the Sacramento Kings, continued the tournaments. McCullough said the park was long known simply as “the schoolyard,” because it was next to what was then Public School 156. But when Mayor John Lindsay arranged to visit the park after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, “he asked me, what did we want?” McCullough recalled. “I asked him to name the park Holcombe Rucker Park.” The name became official in 1974. McCullough, 84, said the producers of “Bounce” “keep asking me, ‘Bob, are you going to be here?’” for the performance on Saturday. “I have to,” he said. “I have to take a cab and be there early.” WEATHER Today, temperatures are expected to pass 90, with showers and potentially severe thunderstorms. In the evening, the rain is likely to continue as the temperatures dip to the high 60s. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING Suspended today (Juneteenth.) The latest New York news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Another reason to vote early: Hot weather is coming
It is going to be hot on Tuesday, Primary Day in New York, according to the National Weather Service. The temperature is expected to climb to the mid-90s. Waiting to cast a ballot could be steamy, sticky and sweaty. That is all the more reason to vote early, said Ester Fuchs, the director of the “Who’s on the Ballot” project, which works to provide voters with tools for making informed choices at the polls. “Early voting has been a gift everyone should take advantage of and not wait to see how hot it’s going to be, and then stay home,” she said. “This election is too important for anyone who’s eligible to stay home.” Early voting runs through Sunday. The polls will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. today and on Saturday and Sunday; tomorrow, the hours will be 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Where you can vote early may be different from where you would vote on Primary Day or in the general election in November. Click here to find your early-voting polling place. It’s too late to register to vote in the primary and too late to apply for a mail-in ballot. And you must be registered with a political party to vote in that party’s primary, meaning that registered Republicans and unaffiliated voters cannot vote in the Democratic primary. There is no Republican primary for mayor this year. Who’s on the ballot? Eleven candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor. Mayor Eric Adams is not one of them. (He is skipping the primary and will run as an independent in November.) There are also primaries for comptroller, the public advocate and borough president posts in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan. There is a primary for district attorney in Manhattan. METROPOLITAN DIARY Bananas
Dear Diary: I was on the M4 bus headed crosstown toward Columbia on a dreary February morning. The bus was crowded but quiet. Most people had headphones in and were staring blankly out the windows. An older woman flagged down the bus as we approached the stop before mine. She was carrying several bags of groceries. As she got on, she seemed to be searching her pockets before reaching into one of her shopping bags. She pulled out a bunch of bananas, ripped off two, handed them to the bus driver and took the nearest seat. “Hey,” the man next to me said, “did that lady just pay for the bus with bananas?” Other riders laughed, and the banana lady smiled along. I was on the M4 two weeks later when the same woman got on at the same stop. She paid in bananas again. — Grace Manning Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Davaughnia Wilson, Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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