Category: people

“[He was] a force of nature, a whirlwind, an ambulant torrent of surreal invention, physical and verbal, whose Liverpudlian cheek masked the melancholy of an authentic clown. ‘This isn’t television, missus,’ he’d say to the front stalls, ‘you can’t turn me off.’ And then he would embark on an odyssey of gag-spinning that, over five hours, would beat an audience into submission, often literally, banging a huge drum and declaring that if we did not like the jokes he would follow us home and shout them through the letter-box.”

“[He] started building his career in the 1950s Soviet Union, gradually becoming one of the best known and beloved actors of his generation. He received multiple awards for his film and stage work, including the 1980 Boston International Film Festival award for his portrayal of a 19th century Russian nobleman in Oblomov. In his later years, he taught acting in Moscow and served as director of several large theaters, including the legendary Chekhov Moscow Art Theater. … In addition to theater and movie roles, Tabakov was also popular for his voiceover work in children’s cartoons.”

The Met did not release the specific findings of its investigation, which it said had included interviews with 70 people. The statement also said that the investigation had “uncovered credible evidence that Mr. Levine engaged in sexually abusive and harassing conduct toward vulnerable artists in the early stages of their careers, over whom Mr. Levine had authority,” adding that he was also being fired as the artistic director of the Met’s young artists program.

The woman who wrote the “Overlooked” New York Times obit for Plath says, “The obituary I was going to write would be very different from the obituary we would have written when Plath died. In some ways, I think, it turned out to be more true to who she really was.”

The poet won praise everywhere. “Stanley Kunitz once praised her ‘brilliant nervosity’ and ‘taste for the fantastic.’ Tracy K. Smith, the current United States poet laureate, who was a student of Ms. Brock-Broido’s at Columbia University, said in a telephone interview, ‘She was just a full-force, wonderful presence of creativity, magic, belief and reverence for poetry.’ Ms. Brock-Broido called her style something simpler: ‘feral.'”

“Mattel has worked in close partnership with the Frida Kahlo Corporation, the owner of all rights related to the name and identity of Frida Kahlo, on the creation of this doll,” a spokesperson said. “In addition to the Frida Kahlo Corporation being an important part of the doll development process, we have their permission and a legally binding agreement to make a doll in the likeness of the great Frida Kahlo.”

The former chief conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France and the Opéra-Bastille in Paris has been forced to withdraw from performances next week of La Bohème at La Fenice in Venice after his car was hit by a truck.

It seems an apt time to weave together a few of the threads that made Bob Capanna who he was — the Bobness of Bob, if you will. Capanna embodied a set of high ideals that arts institutions might aim for as the sector struggles with questions of identity versus survival, art versus entertainment, flavor-of-the-month programming ideas to please funders versus core mission, and the endless strain of working harder for an ever-smaller slice of the attention pie.

Jamie is the Bernstein child we usually hear from, but in this interview, Alexander talks about life with his father (and his mother) as well as Lenny’s music-making, social activism, and dealing with the demands of his work. “[As] he started conducting more abroad, the entourage around him grew larger and larger, and he became more and more of an industry. That was hard for him to handle. One day I remember him shouting, ‘I hate Leonard Bernstein!'”

Thanks to the skillful portraits and drawings he made for guards, officers, and commandants, he survived seven different concentration camps, and ultimately received a scholarship to study at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts – after which he emigrated to Los Angeles and went on to a very successful career as a painter and portraitist.