The masked man of Broadway is going out strong. “The Phantom of the Opera” — Broadway’s longest-running show — has postponed its final performance by eight weeks, pushing its closing curtain from February to April after at spike in ticket demand. Last week, the show raked in an eye-popping $2,2 million with a full house. The musical, a fixture on Broadway since 1988, weathering recessions, war and cultural shifts, will now play its final performance on Broadway on April 16. When it closes, it will have played 13,981 performances. Producers said there would be no more postponements. The closing of “Phantom” would mean the longest running show crown would go to “Chicago.”

Composer Ned Rorem has died at 99. Rorem was a Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award winner admired for his music and his barbed prose. Incredibly prolific, the handsome and energetic artist produced a thousand-work catalog ranging from symphonies and operas to solo instrumental music, chamber and vocal music, in addition to 16 books. Time magazine once called Rorem “the world’s best composer of art songs,” and he’s known for his hundreds of compositions for the solo human voice. He wrote several revealing and acerbic diaries touching on his lengthy sojourn in Paris and life in New York and elsewhere.