Evan Vucci/AP/File

President Donald Trump and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas arrive in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, May 3, 2017. Palestinian officials say Mr. Abbas called Mr. Trump to congratulate him the day after the election.

A phone call to President-elect Donald Trump, an appeal to Saudi Arabia, checking in with Tiffany Trump’s Lebanese American in-laws, or just hoping for the best.

Palestinian officials are pursuing a hodgepodge of diplomatic overtures to secure a productive relationship with a new Trump administration, five years on from a falling-out with the last one.

Yet in the face of Israeli annexation threats and the prospect of a Trump Cabinet of settler sympathizers, this diplomacy is doing little to lessen a sense of disarray and despair setting in across the West Bank.

From the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership to individual political factions and civil society groups, there is a distinct lack of a plan should relations with Trump 2.0 sour or the Israeli government give in to settler demands.

“Eventually I think annexation is coming. After Gaza, there is no doubt among Palestinians in the West Bank, that we are next,” says Xavier Abu Eid, a political scientist and former adviser to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership. “The question is, What are you going to do? No one has that answer.”

Palestinian officials are quick to cite a phone call by PA President Mahmoud Abbas congratulating Mr. Trump the day after the election as a reset of fraught relations from his first presidency.

Ties were strained in 2018 when Palestinians objected both to Mr. Trump’s relocating of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and to his peace plan. What was billed as the “Deal of the Century” entailed Palestinians surrendering claims to East Jerusalem and 30% of the West Bank, and offered cantons with limited self-determination rather than statehood.

The spat saw Mr. Trump cut funding to the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA, the United Nations organization providing relief for 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon.

New beginning with Trump?

Mr. Abbas’ call “broke the ice and warmed relations,” and along with ongoing contacts with Ms. Trump’s Lebanese American father-in-law, Massad Boulos, “we might be in a new phase with President Trump,” says Ahmed Majdalani, a senior PLO official close to Mr. Abbas’ inner circle.

“This isn’t the old Trump – his political narrative is more realistic,” says Mr. Majdalani. “He understands he faces challenges in this region that threaten his political goals.

“We are acting out of goodwill that we can cooperate with the Trump administration to achieve our shared interests of regional peace and stability, and we look forward to this cooperation,” he says.

Taylor Luck

Shoppers browse socks and towels for sale in downtown Ramallah, West Bank, Nov. 17, 2024. There are rising concerns in the West Bank over how Palestinian leaders could deal with Israeli annexation threats under a new Trump administration.

Yet causing unease are the nominations by Mr. Trump of several prospective Cabinet members or other key officials who are vocal or financial supporters of Israeli settler groups that are violently driving Palestinian families off their lands.

Chief among these picks is Mike Huckabee – for ambassador to Israel – who refers to the West Bank by the biblical names Judea and Samaria and once said, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

In the wake of Mr. Trump’s win, seen by some settler groups as giving them a green light, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared 2025 as a year for annexation. Mr. Smotrich, who has ministerial responsibility for settlement construction, urged “professional work to prepare the necessary infrastructure to apply Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.”

Short of annexation, there are fears of the revival of the “Deal of the Century” – and the United States once again withdrawing funds to strongarm the PA, which cannot pay its salaries and is facing an imminent surge in demand for services due to Israel’s recent ban of UNRWA.

Also dampening Palestinians’ hopes: the stalling of multiple cases against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the war in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank.

The ICC has yet to issue arrest warrants for Israeli or Hamas officials as requested by its prosecutor in May, and an advisory opinion by the ICJ on the occupation has had little impact.

Palestinian officials who regarded international law as a trump card that could leverage a Gaza cease-fire and a day-after plan that would revive the two-state solution now describe it as “weak,” “slow,” and “ineffective.”

“International law is too slow and too literal when applied to Palestinians,” says Omar Awadallah, deputy foreign minister for multilateral relations, who coordinates the cases. “We must fight for our rights and for international law itself. We have to remain hopeful.”

“The Saudi card”

Despite the overtures to the U.S., Palestinians are pinning their hopes not on Washington, but on Riyadh.

“Saudi Arabia holding on to the two-state solution is our only hope left,” says Mounir al-Jaghoub, a senior Fatah official and aid to PLO Secretary-General Hussein al-Sheikh, a key leader in the Palestinian government. “We don’t have any other cards left. Our only card is the Saudi card.”

Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud speaks at a press conference, as Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit looks on, after a summit held to investigate Israel's conflicts with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 11, 2024.

The key, Palestinians believe, is the U.S. and Israeli desire for a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal – coveted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who described it in September as “a true pivot of history.”

Yet Saudi Arabia is conditioning such an agreement on an end to the war in Gaza and steps toward Palestinian statehood.

And in that way, Palestinians hope, Saudi Arabia can act as a bulwark against Israeli policies favoring annexation and against the more extreme members of the new Trump administration.

Saudi Arabia is currently chairing a committee comprising Arab and Islamic states and the Palestinians to coordinate diplomacy surrounding the war in Gaza and obstacles to Palestinian statehood. Palestinian and Arab diplomats say the committee has seen the closest high-level cooperation between Saudis and Palestinians in their history.

Saudi Arabia has resumed funding for the PA, sending some $10 million per month, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman used his strongest language yet this month when he condemned “genocide” in Gaza.

This marks a stark reversal from when the crown prince, during the first Trump administration, was eager to broker the Trump peace plan and pressed the Palestinians for concessions.

“This is not the same Mohammed bin Salman and not the same Saudi Arabia,” says one Palestinian diplomat. “They realize that the peace and stability in the region that they require cannot be achieved until the Palestinian issue is solved. Until then, everything can be ignited in an instant.”

Short on solutions

Yet should Saudi Arabia soften its position, or hard-line elements within either Israel or the U.S. win out, Palestinians have no backup plan to speak of.

Palestinian factions, parties, and civil society groups have yet to articulate a strategy should the West Bank deteriorate or the U.S. once again pressure the PA. When asked what they would do, none could answer.

Taylor Luck

The Bedouin settlement of Ras Al Ain in Al Auja, Jordan Valley, is located in a swath of West Bank territory previously eyed by Israel for annexation where residents face frequent settler attacks, Nov. 16, 2024.

The PLO, the umbrella organization representing Palestinian parties, with the exclusion of Hamas, warns that any unilateral Israeli action or American pressure to annex lands would lead them to scrap the 1993 Oslo Accords with Israel.

“If annexation happens, all international agreements and treaties are null and void. Oslo will be null and void,” Mr. Majdalani says. “We will not act as business as usual.”

The lack of official solutions weighs heavily on the Ras Al Ain Bedouin encampment in Al Auja. Nestled in the Jordan Valley, it is in the heart of a swath of territory Mr. Netanyahu entertained annexing in 2020 during the first Trump administration.

Residents in this community of 750 people in aluminum-sided shacks face waves of settler attacks and daily harassment, have had their U.N. aid cut, and are unable to access the nearby water spring. Mr. Trump and annexation threats offer more worries.

“On the ground, we are already annexed. We are living under Israeli military rule,” says Ayad Kaabneh. “What more can Trump and Netanyahu do?”

He pauses to reflect.

“But if the Palestinian Authority is finished, we are finished.”

Whenever a masked person approaches the hand-painted sign of his Cleveland Ave Barber Shop, Kobe Jones says he feels the tingle of his “spidey sense” – fictional superhero Spider-Man’s ability to detect trouble.

The Atlanta barber visually assesses clients quickly – a critical skill in this tough city corner, he says. But masks, especially ones covering the nose and mouth used during the COVID-19 pandemic, have taken on a new level of signaling and triggering in the United States and abroad.

This past weekend, armed neo-Nazis wearing all black with red face masks and carrying black flags with red swastikas marched in a Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood, using racial slurs toward people of color and shouting about Jewish people and white power. Just days before, two masked men assaulted Jewish protesters at DePaul University in Chicago. Images of masked assailants attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, recur in the news.

But masks have meanwhile become the target of new laws. North Carolina has now joined several other states allowing police to arrest those who wear a mask for anything other than medical reasons. Thousands of miles away, Switzerland announced a ban on full-face coverings like ski masks, bandanas, and burqas, worn by some Middle Eastern women, with few exceptions, beginning in January. Belgium and France have enacted similar measures, saying face coverings – unless approved for cultural or medical reasons – can negatively affect public safety.

Others, citing health concerns and cultural self-expression, have continued to lean into wearing masks in public.

In America, the arguments both for and against masking touch the roots of democracy: that people have freedom of expression, including wearing masks, but also that healthy debate requires speakers to know whom they are speaking with and listening to.

Those conflicting norms are not as straightforward as they might seem, and they complicate public health policy as well as the role of government in protecting – or monitoring – its citizens.

“Look anywhere, and you see a camera,” says Mr. Jones. “It’s a surveillance state. That’s why [mask bans] are about more than masks.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Atlanta barber Kobe Jones stands outside the Cleveland Ave Barber Shop Aug. 22, 2024, as a customer checks his phone. He says that he has mixed feelings about laws that ban mask wearing on the grounds of public safety.

After mask-wearing became both ubiquitous and contentious during the pandemic, U.S. lawmakers have begun increasingly addressing what shape masking can take.

“The drive to pass prohibitions has to do with pandemic mask mandates and the legacy of forcing people to wear masks,” says Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. “Most mask wearing is about ... prevention and protection, and to many people, that makes you weak and cowardly, so they don’t care if they take that right away.”

Before the 2020 pandemic, 15 states and the District of Columbia had antimask laws. Now North Carolina, New York, and a host of cities and towns are narrowing mask exceptions and criminalizing adult masks except for specific health or religious reasons. In North Carolina, a new law also increases penalties if someone commits a crime while masked.

Marta Lavandier/AP/File

Students sit in an algebra class at Barbara Goleman Senior High School on the first day of school in Miami Lakes, Florida, Aug. 23, 2021. Gov. Ron DeSantis opposed mask mandates by school districts during the pandemic.

“Masking in public always has to do with your choice as a human being to decide whether you want to be identifiable, because you might have a good reason not to be,” says Andreas Beer, an American studies scholar at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, in Germany. “That’s a right you really have to think very hard about if you want to give that away, or have a lawmaker take that away from you.”

Masks: courageous or cowardly?

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1995 upheld anonymous advocacy of “political causes” as protected by the First Amendment. After all, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison all hid behind the pen name Publius to write “The Federalist Papers.” But the court found that narrow limits can be imposed to serve overriding state interests.

Some lawmakers claim that the threshold has now been met. Unlike the pandemic-era masking fights that fell along partisan lines, support for mask bans now spans the political spectrum. 

Other crackdowns have followed.

Two pro-Palestinian protesters in Ohio, for example, were charged earlier this year with “conspiracy while wearing a disguise.”

North Carolina lawmakers have now passed an all-out mask ban, including sentencing enhancements if a mask was used while committing a crime. That came after the state university system said masked protests “run counter to our campus norms.”

In New York, police arrested two people after Nassau County passed a mask ban this summer. And in September, in the town of Cedarhurst, a protester was arrested and charged with wearing a kaffiyeh, a traditional Arab headdress. (State law now says police can require people to remove masks if there is “reasonable suspicion” of intent to commit a crime.)

Riley Robinson/Staff

Protesters, many in kaffiyeh, a head-and-face covering worn as traditional garb by some Arabs but also by those supporting Palestinians, demonstrate near the White House, Nov. 5, 2024.

In late April in Florida, students protesting against Israel were arrested and charged with violating a state masking ban. In September those students pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges that carried no jail time. In mid-October, the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee held a hearing on a proposed mask ban bill, though it has not yet been formally introduced. Evidence exists that some people use masks to intimidate and sow disorder.

The Washington Post reported Sept. 3 that Chinese dissidents in San Francisco have been attacked at protests against Chinese leader Xi Jinping by masked men suspected to be Chinese agents. A 21-year-old man wearing a ski mask and packing a concealed gun without a permit was arrested near the Republican convention this summer. And a masked man threatening Jews on a New York subway train drew a reproach from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has said she supports restrictions on mask-wearing.

When masked people protest

But critics say crackdowns only prove that using law and order as a pretext for banning masks is at least partly about chilling unpopular speech.

Protest isn’t a face-to-face debate but a show of people’s will – an inherently brave act, even in a democracy, says Professor Beer. One problem, he says, is how to define a mask. Another is the growing use of face recognition technology. While cameras are nearly ubiquitous in Europe, police there have to meet high thresholds to query the database. U.S. protections are not as strong.

Makiya Seminera/AP

Simone Hetherington urges North Carolina lawmakers not to pass a bill that she says could affect her ability to wear a mask for health reasons, in Raleigh, May 15, 2024. The law passed as Republican lawmakers overrode a veto by the state’s Democratic governor.

Risks to students are significant. At Harvard, what protesters called “doxxing trucks” circulated near pro-Palestinian encampments, showing demonstrators’ pictures and names.

That makes mask-wearing an “important anonymity safeguard,” says Amanda Reid, who teaches communications law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Still, the legacy of mask-wearing is complicated.

“We can think of lots of situations where wearing a mask to conceal identity can lead to some antisocial results,” says Sarah Ludington, a First Amendment scholar at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

But, she adds, “There are real reasons why students who are peacefully protesting want to conceal their identities – for the sake of their future.” Sentencing enhancements for mask-wearing “could be a deterrent to showing up to protest at all.”

Shadow of Stone Mountain

The Ku Klux Klan was re-formed just a few miles outside Atlanta, on top of Stone Mountain, in 1915. In 2020, during the pandemic, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp joined other governors in waiving the antimask bans that originated in the 1950s to weaken the klan’s power.

Today, not far from the mountain’s shadow sits the Cleveland Ave Barber Shop, where Mr. Jones works and politicians often congregate. It was here, along one of Atlanta’s most heavily policed and crime-ridden corners, that a mask ban proposal was born.

“I get calls from parents, sisters, and brothers who have lost loved ones from people who had on ski masks, and we could stop it ‘cause it was on camera,” City Councilor Antonio Lewis, who holds court at the barber shop and who sponsored the proposal, said at a hearing.

But Mr. Lewis’ proposal met opposition that, for now, tabled it. That masked citizens in a majority-Black city could be seen as threats underscored for many that anonymity may be worth protecting.

Indeed, some racial minorities who feel targeted by police have a lingering fear that mask bans could lead to selective law enforcement.

And Duke’s Professor Ludington characterizes the tension over the issue this way: “None of us want to live in a crime-ridden society, but as a law-abiding citizen ... I should have freedom from surveillance,” she says. “I shouldn’t be on anyone’s radar.”

Matthew Chattle/Cover Images/Reuters

Chagossians protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London, demanding a bigger say in their future.

The bingo was about to begin, but Lucienne Sagaie and Lucie Tiatous were struggling to keep their minds on the game.

As they sat in a community center in this town near London, the octogenarian sisters’ thoughts kept drifting to the other side of the world, to the white sands of home.

Over five decades ago, they were among the 1,500 people whom the British forcibly evicted from the Chagos Islands, a string of about 60 islands in the Indian Ocean, to make way for an American military base.

Last month, after a lengthy court battle, the United Kingdom handed the archipelago over to the African island nation of Mauritius, which said the islands had been stolen from it at independence.

This means Chagossians will finally be allowed to return home. But for many, it is not a clear-cut victory. Mauritius and the U.K. are hammering out the details of the handover behind closed doors. And for islanders like Ms. Sagaie and Ms. Tiatous, it feels like they are once again being sidelined in discussions about their own future.

“What do they know about Chagossians?” says Ms. Sagaie of the British and Mauritians. “Do they know what it was like to leave everything behind?”

Lorraine Mallinder

Sisters Lucienne Sagaie and Lucie Tiatous, both born in the Chagos Islands, were expelled from their homeland over five decades ago and now live near London.

Taken kuma esklav

Modeste Alexis had just finished a shift as a cook at a restaurant in Gatwick Airport last month when he found out the U.K. had finally ceded control of his homeland.

But as much as he dreamed of taking the next flight home, his first thought was more cynical: It’s a trap.

Like many Chagossians, Mr. Alexis saw no reason he should trust either Mauritius or the U.K. To him, it seemed the pair had always conspired in bann zafer lus – “shady dealings” in his native Creole – when it came to the islands.

He had good reason to be suspicious of foreign powers’ intentions. Mr. Alexis was only a year old in 1967, when he traveled with his parents to Mauritius so his father could have a medical procedure there. But when they tried to buy boat tickets home, they were told shocking news: The islands had been sold.

Over the next six years, the U.K. expelled every resident of the Chagos Islands. It claimed they were temporary “contract workers,” though many families had been there since the late 18th century. Residents were forced onto ships, herded into the cargo holds kuma esklav – “like slaves,” as many Chagossians recall – and then dumped more than 1,000 miles away in Mauritius and Seychelles. There, they faced destitution and brutal discrimination. Human Rights Watch has called their expulsion a crime against humanity.

Lorraine Mallinder

Modeste Alexis, born on Diego Garcia, one of the Chagos Islands, works as a cook at Gatwick Airport near London.

In Mauritius, Mr. Alexis did not go to school, instead working in a furniture workshop. His mother, Charlesia, became an activist, braving hunger strikes and beatings to fight for compensation from the British for the removals. These payments, when they finally came in the 1970s and early ’80s, were meager – around $4,000 per person.

To receive the payout, Chagossians were obliged to sign away their right to return. Many couldn’t even read the document, and marked it with a thumbprint.

Today, there are an estimated 10,000 native-born Chagossians and their descendants worldwide. Around 3,500 of them live in Crawley, in southeastern England, taking advantage of the British citizenship that the U.K. government has offered to them.

The question of their return resurfaced in 2019, when Mauritius won sovereignty over the territory from the U.K. at the International Court of Justice. Under the terms of a bilateral handover deal between the two nations announced Oct. 3, Chagossians will be granted resettlement on the Chagos Islands, except on Diego Garcia, where the American military base is located.

But many Chagossians, including Mr. Alexis, who was born on Diego Garcia, remain suspicious. They weren’t included in the negotiations, and with the U.K. and Mauritius now deciding the fine print, it felt to them that their future was once again being decided without their say.

“They’re doing a deal that will stifle our identity,” Mr. Alexis says.

A blank space

Diego Garcia was frequently a sticking point throughout negotiations, given the strategic importance of the military base. In a compromise, Mauritius agreed that the U.K. could continue to control it for the next 99 years. But Mauritius would charge rent.

Lorraine Mallinder

Members of Chagos Asylum People, an activist group, hold their weekly meeting in Roche Bois, Mauritius, August 2023.

That potential windfall has already prompted celebrations in Mauritius, with politicians alluding to “billions of rupees” in profit and opportunities to build hotels on the other Chagos Islands.

Comments like this have left many Chagossians skeptical that the Mauritians have their best interests at heart. “For them, it will be like manna from the sky,” says Frankie Bontemps, a second-generation islander in the U.K. who leads an advocacy group called Chagossian Voices.

The U.K. government also announced that it would be setting up a trust fund for the welfare of the islanders that Mauritius would manage. That sounded alarm bells for Chagossians who remembered the paltry payouts a half-century ago.

“We’re not babies,” says Claudette Pauline Lefade, a Peros Banhos native who leads an advocacy group in Mauritius called Chagos Asylum People. Outsiders “can’t be the ones deciding for us, we who know our islands better than anyone.”

Still, some Chagossians strongly back Mauritian sovereignty. “We can just take it ... instead of refusing, instead of nothing,” argues activist Olivier Bancoult, leader of the Mauritius-based Chagos Refugees Group. He is working closely with the Mauritian government and says plans are underway to resettle about 800 people on two of the Chagos Islands, Salomon and Peros Banhos.

Back in Crawley, Ms. Sagaie and Ms. Tiatous tuck in to plates of rice and chicken. After more than five decades of struggle, neither trusts Mauritius. Explaining why not, Ms. Tiatous’ daughter, Mylène Augustin, shows a Monitor reporter two copies of her mother’s birth certificate, both issued in Mauritius.

The first, dated 2004, clearly states her mother was born on Peros Banhos. But the second, dated 2015, features an empty space next to “Place of Birth.”

“They’re trying to erase our history,” Ms. Augustin says. “So why should we believe them?”

The Upper West Side of New York City isn’t exactly a bastion of country music. Yet a Little Nashville has sprung up here. On West 86th Avenue, where every apartment building has a uniformed doorman, an off-Broadway theater has mounted a new musical with a twangy score. “Music City” is about an aspiring country star, T.J., who falls in love with a songwriter who’s just moved to Nashville, Tennessee. The show kicks off with T.J. and his brother singing a song called “Y’allsome.”

“Y’all some freakin’ good lookin’ country music lovers,” the actors sing to the audience. In truth, the theatergoers don’t look like regulars at a honky-tonk hootenanny. But the setting is convincing. The entire West End Theatre has been transformed to resemble a rustic Nashville bar that hosts open mic nights. Its walls are papered with Kenny Rogers album covers, posters of Johnny Cash, and flyers for Lainey Wilson. The audience, seated at circular bar tables, claps along to the tunes. There’s even an occasional whoop.

“It’s fun that country music is having its moment,” says audience member Jasmine Jourdain. “It didn’t many, many years ago when I was a kid. And it’s fun to see it kind of revitalize here in New York City.”

For the most part, show tunes on Broadway still sound more influenced by Andrew Lloyd Webber than by, say, Morgan Wallen. But country music is making inroads. The comedic “Shucked,” set in a Midwestern corn-farming town, features songs by Shane McAnally and country star Brandy Clark. Its accolades include a Tony Award for best featured actor as well as a Drama Desk Award for outstanding music. An adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s novel “The Outsiders,” set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, incorporates country into its songs. It won this year’s Tony for best musical. Elton John’s score for the newly opened “Tammy Faye: The Musical” boasts a country twang.

These musicals aren’t just responding to country music’s growing cultural reach. They’re also telling stories from beyond Manhattan. The productions are broadening the outlook of musical theater to reflect different aspects of America.

“Post 2016, there was a shock wave for liberal America,” says Joanna Dee Das, an associate professor in the performing arts department at Washington University in St. Louis. “There was a huge increase in awareness and thinking about giant segments of the American population that places like New York hadn’t really considered, or thought about, or taken seriously. And there was a sense that people who identified in theater circles in New York, or liberals in general, needed to really understand [those places].”

It’s not as if there haven’t been past attempts at country musicals. “Urban Cowboy,” a 2003 adaptation of the John Travolta movie, flopped. So did “Hands on a Hardbody,” a 2013 musical about a competition to win a pickup truck in a Texas town. In 1982, “Pump Boys and Dinettes” fared better. The show about Southern gas station attendants and diner waitresses ran for a year, and then refueled to go out on tour. New York Times critic Frank Rich panned it.

“The apparently all-white South they celebrate is so relentlessly congenial it makes Rodgers and Hammerstein’s romanticized Oklahoma seem like Las Vegas by comparison,” he wrote.

Ashley Garrett

Casey Shuler (left) and Andrew Rothenberg perform in “Music City,” which debuted at New York’s West End Theatre in November.

“What does Middle America really mean?”

Today’s Broadway shows are built differently. When “Oklahoma!” returned in 2019, it wasn’t so much a revival as it was a deconstruction of the original. The musical centered on a mixed-race relationship and amplified sexual tensions and violence. It also swapped out playing the original lush orchestration in favor of reinterpreting standards such as “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” with pedal steel guitar, banjo, and fiddles. “The Outsiders,” too, boasts an Americana flavor with country tunes such as the rollicking “Friday at the Drive-in” and the plaintive “Far Away From Tulsa.” Though it’s set in the 1960s, Ms. Das says it cautiously examines white, working-class Southern identity politics. At least Broadway is starting to ask pertinent questions, she says.

“What does Middle America really mean? What does the heartland mean? Who’s included in that?” says the professor, whose upcoming book, “Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America,” is about Missouri’s popular vacation spot. “All of these spaces in the United States in the 21st century are racially diverse, ethnically diverse.”

Musical Writers, a Dallas-based online academy designed to nurture budding talents, points out that great shows can originate anywhere in the U.S.

“All the cool kids are writing about 20-somethings in New York,” says Amanda Dills, an Oklahoma City-based content writer for
MusicalWriters.com. “I grew up on a farm in the middle of Nebraska. My dad was a farmer. My mom was a teacher. I think the part of growing up and when you accept where you’re from and learn to embrace it is realizing that their stories are worth telling in those places, too.”

Ms. Dills’ musicals include “The Singing Shepherd” and “Fat Girlfriend,” winner of the 2009 Omaha Theater Arts Guild Award for best new script. They show that “You can write stories about the middle of the country without it having to be country,” she says.

Welcoming country in the Big Apple

Besides, country music doesn’t usually equate with commercial success in the theater. But “Shucked,” which was developed in Salt Lake City, broke through in 2022. It’s about a con man who swindles a town of corn farmers. (Picture an agricultural “Music Man.”) The multiracial cast included a nonbinary actor playing a nonbinary character. The occasionally ribald comedy leans into, ahem, corny jokes. Publicity materials for “Shucked,” which has moved from Broadway to a recently launched nationwide tour, tout Reba McEntire as the show’s official “stalks-person.”

These days, Broadway isn’t so much a finish line for musicals as it is an important pit stop along a cross-country route, says Elizabeth Wollman, author of “The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from ‘Hair’ to ‘Hedwig.’”

“[‘Shucked’] poked a lot of holes in what a country music audience is and what would run well on Broadway,” says Ms. Wollman. “It matters a lot that the creators are openly queer and are established in Nashville.”

The team behind “Music City” is hoping that “Shucked” signals that New York audiences are open to country sounds. Its songs are by Nashville songwriter J.T. Harding, including a 2014 hit he co-wrote with Keith Urban that the country star recently performed on NBC’s “Today” show.

“Someone texted me and said, ‘I just walked by Rockefeller Center. ... Keith Urban is standing on a taxi cab. The roof of it is dented. His band is playing “Somewhere In My Car” and people are going crazy,’” says the songwriter, whose hits for Blake Shelton and Kenny Chesney also appear in the show. Mr. Harding took it as a sign that the city is embracing Nashville sounds. The book for “Music City,” written by Peter Zinn, is a gritty love story about two struggling songwriters living on the poverty line.

“The boy and girl are forming this relationship,” explains award-winning director Eric Tucker. “But he’s delivering drugs to her mother. She’s trying to keep her mother off of the drugs.”

It’s a very American story, says Mr. Tucker. He believes the musical’s authenticity and relatability – not to mention its rousing ending – will draw audiences during its run through Dec. 22. One of its investors is a Broadway producer who believes it has the potential to be developed further.

Ms. Jourdain, who tries to see a show every week, singles out the “beautifully written” production’s warm humor as a highlight. Unexpectedly, she loved the music, too. “People are realizing that good music and good lyrics transcend cultures and backgrounds,” she says. “And what a better city than New York City for it to be introduced to?”

Reuters

People arrested during a protest following a disputed presidential election reunite with relatives after being released from prison in Tocuyito, Venezuela, Nov. 16.

Back in August, a few weeks after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in a bid for reelection, his critics stirred a global outcry. Opposition leaders posted polling station results on social media suggesting the unpopular autocrat had lost in a drubbing. In cities around the world and within the South American country itself, people marched.

They called it the “Great Protest for the Truth.”

That push for election integrity received new nudges this week. On Tuesday, the Biden administration recognized Venezuela’s main opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, as “president-elect.” Simultaneously, in neighboring Colombia, President Gustavo Petro called the July 28 election “a mistake.” He had already declared the vote not “free.”

Those gestures follow recognition by the European Parliament in September of Mr. González “as the country’s legitimate and democratically elected president.” Several international election observer missions, including The Carter Center, have supported that verdict.

Venezuela has been here before. Five years ago, another opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, claimed victory. Fifty-seven countries ultimately recognized him as interim president. That failed to force change. Yet this time may be different.

Many of Venezuela’s closest regional allies have rejected Mr. Maduro’s claims and are demanding publication of ballot tallies. In September, a federal court in Argentina ordered the arrest of Mr. Maduro and several close associates for crimes against humanity. In Chile, President Gabriel Boric condemned Venezuela’s Supreme Court, packed with Maduro loyalists, and accused it of “consolidating the fraud.”

The force behind this shift may be coming from ordinary citizens. Across the region, Latin Americans have toppled one incumbent government after another, demanding honesty and equality.

“Latin America may be at a crossroads,” noted David Recondo, editor of an annual regional survey conducted by the Center for International Studies at Science Po, a French university. “There is a lot of dissatisfaction with the governing elites and the ruling classes, which are seen as corrupt and inefficient.” High voter turnout, he said in an interview on the center’s website in March, reflects popular demands for “respect for the results of the ballot box and fundamental rights.”

Recognition of his apparent victory by the United States and Europe may not be enough to put Mr. González, who has fled to Spain, in power in January when Mr. Maduro’s current term ends. The autocrat still has strong backing from China, Russia, Iran, and a handful of regional tyrants. But sweeping postelection crackdowns against his critics show that Mr. Maduro may be feeling his isolation. “He desperately needs international recognition and legitimacy,” Moisés Naím, a Venezuelan former trade minister, told The Guardian.

The country’s charismatic opposition leader, María Corina Machado, senses an opening. Banned by Mr. Maduro from running in the election, she rallied support behind Mr. González. She has now gone underground. Undaunted in her quest to restore democracy, she wields a powerful tool.

“I am willing to do what has to be done,” she told The New York Times this week from an undisclosed location, “for as long as it takes to assert the truth and popular sovereignty.”