“Five years after it closed for a two-year renovation, Paris’s [Musée Picasso] – which houses one of the world’s most extensive collections of the Spanish master’s work – will finally reopen its doors in September, the culture ministry announced Sunday.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
‘Too Much Johnson’: Watching Orson Welles’s No-Longer-Lost Early Film
Jordan Riefe reports from the first modern screening of the 66 minutes of rediscovered footage, which Welles created as entr’actes for his mixed-media staging of the 1894 William Gillette comedy.
How On Earth Did Christian Rizzo Become A Choreographer?
“One day in 1991, this French rock band member, fashion designer, visual artist and serious clubber went to a dance audition with a friend. Like the character Leroy in the movie Fame, Mr. Rizzo was hired before he realized he had participated in the audition.”
Vladimir Putin’s Four Dirty Words
David Remnick looks at ‘the four pillars’ of Russian profanity – хуй, пизда, ебать, and бляд – and the many, many works that might run afoul of Russia’s new legislation outlawing those words in all public performances.
Why ‘Wicked’ Keeps Bewitching The Crowds
Evan as all too many well-reviewed musicals close early, Stephen Schwartz’s Wizard of Oz prequel keeps going and going and going. Mark Lawson tries to suss out the show’s secret.
Revisiting James Joyce’s Dublin 100 Years Later
“If you’re a person whose perception of the world is shaped by literature, Dublin can feel less like a place that James Joyce wrote about than a place that is about James Joyce’s writing. The city of his fiction exists in ghostly superimposition over the actual city … Joyce will not be escaped. He inheres in the city’s bones.”
Met Opera’s Union Contract Talks Have Messy Start
“The [initial] meeting almost did not happen. The union took the extremely unusual step of inviting reporters to the negotiating session, which led the Met to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board arguing that having reporters present ‘would stifle the atmosphere of free and open discussion that is needed for good-faith collective bargaining’.”
Lost Song By Mendelssohn Discovered
“Mendelssohn wrote the privately commissioned piece, titled ‘The Heart of Man is Like a Mine’, in 1842. It was never published but the original manuscript has now emerged in a private collection in the US.” (includes video performance of song)
Assi Dayan, 68, Giant Of Israel’s Film Industry
“The son of the late defense minister and general, Moshe Dayan, Assi starred in dozens of movies, directed a handful of classic films, and was the lead, playing a psychologist, in one of the most successful Israeli television series of all time, BeTipul, which was adapted by HBO into the American show In Treatment.”
Six Ways Of Looking At Death
Dean Olsher talks with a maker of build-your-own-casket kits, a mortician on his way to pick up a body, a paleontologist with the long view (the extra-extra-long view) of mortality, a historian who thinks we look at death the ways Victorians looked at sex, a retired surgeon who’d never want to go back to life before his cancer diagnosis, and an author who argues we should have our funerals while we’re around to enjoy them, (audio)