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The play ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ plots its Broadway return

NEW YORK (AP) — “The Lehman Trilogy” was able to make only four preview performances on Broadway before the pandemic shut its doors. Now it plans to return to tell the story of an American financial giant’s downfall with a new cast member.

Stefano Massini’s play about what led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers — adapted by Ben Power and directed by Sam Mendes — will add Adrian Lester, replacing Ben Miles, and joining Simon Russell Beale and Adam Godley. Producers are aiming for a Sept. 25 reopening at the Nederlander Theatre. Tickets go on sale June 9.

“The antenna of the New York audience is just heaven. They’ve lived that story. They know it better than anybody,” said producer Caro Newling, who oversees theater projects at Neal Street Production. “Audiences were just so alive to every twist and turn and so knowledgeable, of course. And so I hope they’ll come again.”

Spanning 150 years and running three and a half hours, “The Lehman Trilogy” illustrates the trajectory of western capitalism by following the fortunes of a single family into the financial crash of 2008, when their Wall Street institution filed for bankruptcy.

“As we watch the play unfold, we see the family grow in wealth and status, but we have to ask, when does ‘enough’ become ‘too much,’” said Lester. “Their capitalism is at first driven by fear and insecurity, until — years later — it is driven simply by the need to have more. I am really looking forward getting to work.”

For Lester, it’s a full-circle moment. He was originally asked to be part of the trio of actors when the play first arrived at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton Theatre in 2018. But his schedule never fit. The play went on to have an off-Broadway run and then a West End bow. The English-language version is a marathon: Three actors doing 185 roles.

“I’ll be going into this with one of the best directors in the game, with actors I truly admire, in a play that asks us to tell a story of family that will challenge us physically and intellectually. There is literally nowhere to hide on that stage. In every moment of every show we have to be at our best,” said Lester, who starred in Mike Nichol’s movie “Primary Colors” and earned an Olivier Award in the 1995 London revival of “Company.”

Newling, speaking by phone from London, said she hopes to get productions into San Francisco and Los Angeles next year.

“It’s a story that I think will be endlessly fascinating around the world. Of course, it’s your story. But we all lived with the fallout of it. We understand it differently, but we know how central it is in so many ways to what we’re still trying to understand now.”

For now, she can’t wait to get back into the theater and see the set again.

“We left it there. It’s locked up like Sleeping Beauty. And as long as the mice haven’t chewed through the wires, we’ll be able to walk in and switch the lights on,” she said.

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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Track cycling world championships pulled from Turkmenistan

AIGLE, Switzerland (AP) — The track cycling world championships have been pulled out of Turkmenistan because of the coronavirus pandemic, the International Cycling Union said.

The UCI said in a statement late Thursday that the championships “have been canceled in their initial format, at the request of their organizers, as the health constraints and restrictions linked to the COVID-19 pandemic make it impossible to stage the event in the country.”

The championships had been set for Oct. 13-17, more than two months after the track cycling competitions at the Tokyo Olympics.

The UCI said it was in talks with “several” potential hosts to replace the Central Asian nation.

Turkmenistan’s authoritarian president, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, often promotes cycling and other sports. He received an award from the UCI last year.

Turkmenistan has not officially confirmed any cases of coronavirus infections in the country.

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The Latest: Taiwan receives 1.2M vaccine doses from Japan

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A flight carrying 1.24 million doses of AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine from Japan has touched down in Taiwan.

The donation underscores how geopolitics have come to impact the global vaccination rollout, as countries scramble to secure enough vaccines for their populations. Taiwan, a self-governing island, has struggled to get its own vaccines, blaming China for interfering in a deal.

Now the island is more than doubling its vaccine supply thanks to Tokyo. Japan is playing a greater role in global vaccination distribution while pushing to accelerate its own slow vaccine rollout ahead of the Olympics on July 23.

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Stocks rise on Wall Street as jobs report calms Fed fears

Stocks are pushing higher on Wall Street Friday after a lukewarm report on the job market raised hopes the Federal Reserve will keep the accelerator floored on its support for the economy.

U.S. employers added 559,000 jobs in May, according to the Labor Department. It’s an improvement from April’s sluggish gain, though it still fell short of economists forecasts.

The report also showed that companies are still struggling to find enough workers as the economy rapidly recovers from the pandemic recession. People are either looking for better jobs than they had before the pandemic, retiring early, worried about child care or otherwise taking time on the sidelines from the job market.

The S&P 500 rose 0.7% as of 10:57 a.m. Eastern. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 142 points, or 0.4%, to 34,719 and the Nasdaq rose 1.3%.

The early gains put the benchmark S&P 500 index back on track for a weekly gain after several choppy days of trading. Technology stocks were biggest gainers and doing the most to push the broader market higher. Microsoft rose 1.9% and Oracle rose 3.1%.

Communications companies and health care companies also made solid gains. Banks lagged the market as bond yields edged lower.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 1.57% from 1.62% late Thursday. The dip weighed on banks, but helped push tech stocks higher. Lower interest rates help stocks generally because they can steer some investors away from bonds that are paying little in interest toward riskier investments. Stocks that look the most expensive based on their earnings, such as technology companies, can be among the biggest beneficiaries.

The latest jobs report is another sign that the economy continues recovering, but employment is relatively shaky and struggling to get back to pre-pandemic levels. It may have also opened the door for the Fed to keep up its efforts, which include monthly bond purchases to keep interest rates low.

Investors have been worried about rising inflation becoming a long-term issue, rather than the temporary effect from the recovering economy. They are also worried that The Fed could consider pulling its support for the economy if inflation runs too hot.

Inflation has already burst higher across the economy, with prices rising for everything from used automobiles to restaurant meals. Employers are also finding it harder to attract employees, which could force them to raise wages, also adding to inflation.

Slow to start, China now vaccinating at a staggering pace

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — In the span of just five days last month, China gave out 100 million shots of its COVID-19 vaccines.

After a slow start, China is now doing what virtually no other country in the world can: leveraging the power and all-encompassing reach of its one-party system and a maturing domestic vaccine industry to administer shots at a staggering pace. The rollout is far from perfect, including uneven distribution, but Chinese public health leaders now say they’re hoping to inoculate 80% of the population of 1.4 billion by the end of the year.

As of Wednesday, China had given out more than 704 million doses — with nearly half of those in May alone. China’s total is roughly a third of the 1.9 billion shots distributed globally, according to Our World in Data, an online research site.

The call to get vaccinated comes from every corner of society. Companies offer shots to their employees, schools urge their students and staffers, and local government workers check on their residents.

That pressure underscores both the system’s strength, which makes it possible to even consider vaccinating more than a billion people this year, but also the risks to civil liberties — a concern the world over but one that is particularly acute in China, where there are few protections.

“The Communist Party has people all the way down to every village, every neighborhood,” said Ray Yip, former country director for the Gates Foundation in China and a public health expert. “That’s the draconian part of the system, but it also gives very powerful mobilization.”

China is now averaging about 19 million shots per day, according to Our World in Data’s rolling seven-day average. That would mean a dose for everyone in Italy about every three days. The United States, with about one-quarter of China’s population, reached around 3.4 million shots per day in April when its drive was at full tilt.

It’s still unclear how many people in China are fully vaccinated — which can mean anywhere from one to three doses of the vaccines in use — as the government does not publicly release that data.

Zhong Nanshan, the head of a group of experts attached to the National Health Commission and a prominent government doctor, said on Sunday that 40% of the population has received at least one dose, and the aim was to get that percentage fully vaccinated by the end of the month.

In Beijing, the capital, 87% of the population has received at least one dose. Getting a shot is as easy as walking into one of hundreds of vaccination points found all across the city. Vaccination buses are parked in high foot-traffic areas, including in the city center and at malls.

But Beijing’s abundance is not shared with the rest of the country, and local media reports and complaints on social media show the difficulty of getting an appointment elsewhere.

“I started lining up that day at 9 in the morning, until 6 p.m., only then did I get the shot. It was exhausting,” Zhou Hongxia, a resident of Lanzhou, in northwestern Gansu province, explained recently. “When I left, there were still people waiting.”

Zhou’s husband hasn’t been so lucky and has yet to get a shot. When they call the local hotlines, they are told simply to wait.

Central government officials on Monday said they’re working to ensure supply is more evenly distributed.

China has even focused on vaccinating its citizens abroad, donating vaccine s to Thailand, some of which were used to inoculate its nationals before most Thais received their doses. Globally, it has vaccinated more than 500,000 overseas citizens under what it calls the “Spring Sprout” program.

Before the domestic campaign ramped up in recent weeks, many people were not in a rush to get vaccinated as China has kept the virus, which first flared in the country, at bay in the past year with strict border controls and mandatory quarantines. It has faced small clusters of infections from time to time, and is currently managing one in the southern city of Guangzhou.

Although there are distribution issues, it is unlikely that Chinese manufacturers will have problems with scale, according to analysts and those who have worked in the industry.

Sinovac and Sinopharm, which make the majority of the vaccines being distributed in China, have both aggressively ramped up production, building brand new factories and repurposing existing ones for COVID-19. Sinovac’s vaccine and one of the two Sinpharm makes have received an emergency authorization for use from the World Health Organization, but the companies, particularly Sinopharm, have faced criticism for their lack of transparency in sharing their data.

“What place in the world can compare with China on construction? How long did it take our temporary hospitals to be built?” asked Li Mengyuan, who leads pharmaceutical research at Western Securities, a financial firm. China built field hospitals at the beginning of the pandemic in just days.

Sinovac has said it has doubled its production capacity to 2 billion doses a year, while Sinopharm has said it can make up to 3 billion doses a year. But Sinopharm has not disclosed recent numbers of how many doses it actually has made, and a spokesman for the company did not respond to a request for comment. Sinovac has produced 540 million doses this year as of late May, the company said on Friday.

Government support has been crucial for vaccine developers every step of the way — as it has in other countries — but, as with everything, the scope and scale in China is different.

Yang Xiaoming, chairman of Sinopharm’s China National Biotec Group, recounted to state media recently how the company initially needed to borrow lab space from a government research center while it was working on a vaccine.

“We sent our samples over, there was no need to discuss money, we just did it,” he said.

Chinese vaccine companies also largely do not rely on imported products in the manufacturing process. That’s an enormous benefit at a time when many countries are scrambling for the same materials and means China can likely avoid what happened to the Serum Institute of India, whose production was hobbled because of dependence on imports from the U.S. for certain ingredients.

But as the availability of the vaccine increases so, too, can the pressure to take it.

In Beijing, one researcher at a university said the school’s Communist Party cell calls him once a month to ask him if he has gotten vaccinated yet, and offers to help him make an appointment.

He has so far declined to get a shot because he would prefer the Pfizer vaccine, saying he trusts its data. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns he could face repercussions at his job at a government university for publicly questioning the Chinese vaccines.

China has not yet approved Pfizer for use, and the researcher is not sure how long he can hold out — although the government has, for now, cautioned against making vaccines mandatory outright.

“They don’t have to say it is mandatory,” Yip, the public health expert, said. “They’re not going to announce that it’s required to have the vaccine, but they can put pressure on you.”

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Associated Press video producer Olivia Zhang in Beijing and researcher Chen Si in Shanghai contributed to this report.

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