Tom Kirdahy is busy, and about to get busier.

Mr. Kirdahy, a Tony and Olivier Award-winning producer, has a slate of Broadway shows that includes “Gypsy” and “Hadestown.” His latest production, “Just in Time,” starring Jonathan Groff, opens this month.

Mr. Kirdahy, 61, lives alone in the Greenwich Village co-op apartment he shared with his late husband, the playwright Terrence McNally. In addition to his theater and film work — Mr. Kirdahy’s company, Tom Kirdahy Productions, is behind a new film adaptation of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” starring Jennifer Lopez — he runs the Terrence McNally Foundation, which supports early-career playwrights and L.G.B.T.Q. causes.

His Sundays are reserved for friends and family, including Jon Richardson, a composer and performer he is dating. When the two are not in Manhattan, they’re in Provincetown, Mass., where Mr. Richardson, 37, lives and Mr. Kirdahy has a weekend home.

NOT SO EARLY BIRD On a good Sunday morning I’ll get up at 8:30, which is later than the rest of the week. That’s my definition of sleeping in. The rest of the week I’m up before 7. If I wake up early, I force myself to go back to sleep.

FACING FACTS For several months now, I’ve been canceling my trainer at 9. I’ve discovered this is a pattern and I should just give up pretending. I hate to throw in the towel in print this way, but what this is telling me is that I need to get back to that routine. Spiritually, I go to the gym, but in actuality I lounge around.

MADMAN IN MANHATTAN One thing I do religiously is go to Madman Espresso for a triple skim cortado. It’s three shots of espresso and some steamed milk. It’s not nothing. Later in the day I’ll get a double espresso macchiato. But that’s only if I wake up in Manhattan. My home in Provincetown is my happy place. If I have 24 hours for myself on a weekend I’ll drive down at 10 at night and get there at 3 in the morning, just to spend the day.

FAMILY FIRST. NOT LITERALLY. I do a little work on Sunday mornings, just to catch up. It’s very specifically emailing, almost all of it tied to my productions. It can be weighing in on an advertising campaign or providing comments about a script or discussing fund-raising for a particular show. Then it’s family time, which could mean just having brunch with friends or Jon and I taking a walk through the city. My 94-year-old mother is still alive, and I try to call her every Sunday. She’s a snowbird — she’s either in St. Petersburg, Fla., or in Stony Brook, on Long Island.

CIVILIAN BESTIES I remain very close to people I went to high school and college with. I graduated high school on Long Island in 1981, and there’s a group of us that are still very tight. We text every day. None of them are in theater, but they love it and they come to every one of my openings. It’s nice having civilian besties. If we’re having brunch, I try to mix it up and not go to the same place all the time. I’ve lived in New York since 1981 and I’m still madly in love with it, with discovering new places.

TALKING POLITICS This sounds hokey, but the only thing I must have on Sundays is community. I need to see the people I love, and I like it when it’s people outside the industry. I have a deep interest in politics. I’ve been a bit of an activist my whole life. Before I became a Broadway producer, I was providing free legal services to people living with H.I.V. and AIDS. Terrence and I were marriage equality warriors. I try to nourish the political side of my soul on Sundays by talking with friends or seeing people from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center on 13th Street. We have a shared language.

SOBRIETY, SUSTENANCE I also try to get to an A.A. meeting on Sundays. That’s most often at the Center. They’re all different times. It’ll be 25 years in November that I’ve been sober. What I get out of meetings is the comfort of community. People share their wisdom. Hearing their stories sustains me and buoys me.

LIVING THE DREAM When “Just in Time” opens, I’ll have four shows running in New York. On Sundays, I might pop into a show and stand in the back of the theater and watch “Hadestown” and then go say hello to the cast. Same with “Gypsy” and “Little Shop of Horrors.” I love watching an audience take in a show. And I love the energy after a performance. The actors work so hard — I think it’s only fair that they see me with some frequency. I’m a cheerleader for both the industry and my own shows. I’m a kid from the suburbs who gets to go to work on Broadway. I take insane joy from that.

SET IN STONE On my building on Ninth Street there’s a plaque commemorating the fact that Terrence lived in the building. It’s a really great pleasure for me to watch people walk by and read about him. The doormen in my building just really loved him, and they love to report on stories of people reading it and looking at it. I often touch it when I walk in the building.

SHH… Late in the afternoon on my best Sundays I try to take a nap or at least create quiet time. I’ll listen to Bach or some classical music just to kind of rejuvenate. It’s not quite meditation, but it does involve a commitment to quiet. Bach reaches into my soul.

FRY AFICIONADO If Jon is in town he might cook, but I very often have dinner at the Knickerbocker, which is right nearby on University Place. The menu is pretty varied, but I often have steak and French fries. French fries are a key part of my life. If I had to choose the best ones, I might pick the Lambs Club on 44th Street. They’re cooked perfectly and salted perfectly. They’re what a French fry should be.

GOALS Every night before I go to bed I do at least an hour of work. On a Sunday night I’ll draft a bunch of emails I’ll send in the morning, because I don’t like to bother my employees on a Sunday night. The emails are about goals for the week. Prepping them helps me go to sleep, I think, because I’ll have done the work I’ve been obsessing about.

Robert S. Rifkind, who played a pivotal role in successfully defending Time magazine against a $50 million libel suit filed by Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli general, defense minister and later prime minister, died on March 12 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

The cause was complications of myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease, his daughter Amy Rifkind said.

Mr. Sharon’s suit was prompted by a single paragraph in the Feb. 21, 1983, issue of Time. It referred to an Israeli government report on the massacre months earlier by Christian Phalange militiamen of at least 800 and as many as 3,500 civilian refugees, mostly Palestinians, in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. The massacre happened after Israel invaded Lebanon and the country’s president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, the Phalange leader, was assassinated.

The article suggested that Mr. Sharon had personally discussed retribution with Mr. Gemayel’s family, and that the Israelis looked the other way when the Phalangists extracted their revenge.

A jury found in 1985 that Time had misrepresented Mr. Sharon’s role in the massacre. But the jury concluded that the magazine’s reporting did not meet the legal threshold for libel in the United States because it did not publish the article with actual malice or a reckless disregard for the facts.

An Israeli commission’s damning conclusions that Israeli forces did not stop the massacre led to Mr. Sharon’s resignation as defense minister. But the commission’s report did not say that Mr. Sharon himself had mentioned revenge to the Gemayel family.

“The case is really not about libel, but a political instrument in the plaintiff’s hands,” Mr. Rifkind, whose law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, represented Time, said while the suit was pending. “A pitched battle in which David, the Israeli war hero, smites Goliath, the American corporate giant, is good political fodder.”

Mr. Sharon, who later became the prime minister of Israel, declared victory, of sorts, because the jury found that Time had acted “negligently and carelessly” in publishing the disputed paragraph. The case cost the magazine millions in legal fees.

“Rifkind was a superb lawyer, who argued many of the motions, and did an admirable job,” U.S. District Court Judge Abraham D. Sofaer, who presided over the case, said this week in an email.

When the lead defense lawyer, Thomas D. Barr, was ill and the Time executive who was monitoring the case was out of the country, and with Mr. Sharon wanting to return to Israel to campaign for office, Mr. Rifkind negotiated a proposed settlement of the lawsuit on the basis of a prepared statement.

“The statement did not include any payment or even an apology,” Judge Sofaer recalled. “It simply said that Time did not intend to convey that Sharon had given permission for the murders. Rifkind had undoubtedly secured a highly favorable result in the case. Sharon was tired of the litigation and gave his political life a higher priority.”

Time, however, confident of a favorable verdict, rejected the proposal. The subsequent finding that the magazine had been negligent — though not malicious — bolstered Mr. Sharon’s case when he sued Time in Israel, where the malice standard did not apply, and won a settlement there.

The case caused a sensation in the United States and the Middle East for its political implications and its impact on the media industry.

Mr. Rifkind figured in several other major cases, including a successful defense of the 1964 Voting Rights Act when he was assistant to the U.S. solicitor general at the time, Thurgood Marshall, a post he held from 1965 to 1968.

Mr. Rifkind argued several cases before the Supreme Court. He was involved in Miranda v. Arizona, the 1966 case that established that police officers must inform suspects of their constitutional rights before questioning. He worked on South Carolina v. Katzenbach, in which the Supreme Court ruled in 1966 that federal intervention to let eligible residents of individual states register and vote was constitutional under the 15th Amendment. (Nicholas Katzenbach was the U.S. attorney general.) And he represented New York City voluntarily, or pro bono, in lawsuits in the 1980s and ’90s challenging the federal decennial census because of what the city said was an undercount.

Mr. Rifkind was also involved in Jewish affairs. He served as president of the American Jewish Committee from 1994 to 1998.

“Bob Rifkind was what all lawyers aspire to be,” said Evan R. Chesler, Cravath’s former presiding partner and chairman. “He was brilliant, had a majestic command of the language and was unfailingly courteous to all those who worked for, with and against him.”

Robert Singer Rifkind was born on Aug. 31, 1936, in Manhattan to Adele (Singer) and Simon H. Rifkind. His father was a federal judge and later a partner in the firm that became known as Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in 1950, four years after it was founded.

Bob Rifkind graduated from the Loomis School (now the Loomis Chaffee School) in Windsor, Conn., and earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale College in 1958 and a juris doctor degree from Harvard University Law School in 1961.

He joined Cravath the next year and, except for his stint with the solicitor general in Washington, remained with the firm until he retired in 2001. He had senior counsel status after retiring as a litigator.

In 1961, he married Arlene Brenner; she died in 2021. In addition to his daughter Amy, he is survived by another daughter, Nina Rifkind, and five grandchildren.

His daughters, both lawyers, invoked their grandfather this week in a letter to Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul, Weiss, in which they publicly criticized the firm’s decision to commit $40 million in pro bono legal services for causes President Trump championed if the White House rescinded an executive order that would have suspended Paul, Weiss’s security clearances and prohibited its lawyers from entering federal buildings.

Here is what to know about how the mayor’s decision could affect the mayoral primary.

Which Democrats are still running for mayor?

Nine Democrats are challenging Mr. Adams, though none are as close to unseating the mayor as Mr. Cuomo, whose ample name recognition and high-powered fund-raising have fueled his rise to the top of the primary field in nearly every survey of the race. Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman from Queens and a social-media-savvy democratic socialist who is building a base of new and younger voters, is the next highest-polling candidate. He is still well behind Mr. Cuomo.

Other Democrats running in the primary include the city comptroller, Brad Lander; the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams; the former comptroller, Scott Stringer, and the state senators Jessica Ramos and Zellnor Myrie.

How will ranked-choice voting factor into the race?

This is New York City’s second mayoral election under ranked-choice voting, a system in which voters can select up to five candidates in order of preference. The system is being used only for the primary, so Mr. Adams, once a critic of ranked-choice voting, will avoid it now that he is running as an independent and will be on the ballot only in the general election. In November, the candidate who wins a plurality of votes will be the next mayor.

Progressives, led by the Working Families Party, had encouraged their supporters not to rank Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Adams in the Democratic primary. Now that Mr. Adams is eschewing the primary altogether, the groups are recalibrating their approach. The D.R.E.A.M. movement — an acronym that once stood for Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor — is now focused solely on blocking Mr. Cuomo’s momentum, renaming itself Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor. The Working Families Party, too, has plans to coalesce behind a single candidate ahead of the general election.

Who will Mr. Adams run against in November?

The mayor will face the winner of the Democratic primary alongside Curtis Sliwa, the sole Republican candidate, and Jim Walden, a centrist lawyer also running as an independent.

The Working Families Party is also likely to run a candidate in the general election. The group is taking steps to run a place-holder candidate to preserve its ballot line until its leaders decide on a plan after the winner of the Democratic primary is confirmed.

Has something like this happened before?

This is not the first time that Mr. Adams has shifted political parties, even as he says he will remain a registered Democrat. The mayor was a registered Republican during the 1990s and considered running on that line earlier this year.

New York City politicians have a long track record of changing their party affiliation for political gain. In 1950, Vincent R. Impellitteri, who was serving as acting mayor, won an upset independent bid after failing to win the nomination of the Manhattan Democratic machine, known as Tammany Hall.

Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg left the Democratic Party in 2001 to run for mayor as a Republican and won. He changed his party affiliation to independent during his second mayoral term, running on the Republican and Independence party lines in 2009, before switching back to being a Democrat and running in the party’s 2020 presidential primary.

Earlier, John V. Lindsay, in 1971, changed from Republican to independent before switching to the Democratic Party. Mr. Adams, clearly aware of this legacy, claimed to quote Mr. Lindsay in his Thursday video, saying, “I have made mistakes.”

Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting.