Category: people

“Mr. Liggett’s idiosyncratic scrap-metal gallery – conceived, shaped and welded in his shop nearby – stood on farmland in tiny Mullinville [Kansas], where a stiff prairie wind kept the whirligigs spinning, lending kinetic energy to his hodgepodge of installations. His clownish, abstract, cartoonish and grotesque works reflected his bent for provocation.”

“Abercrombie was a confident but unassuming artist, whose abundant gifts did not include the knack for self-promotion. He emerged in the immediate wake of electric-guitar trailblazers like Sonny Sharrock and John McLaughlin but, at least temperamentally, he belonged more to the generation a decade or so his junior: cheerful omnivores like Pat Metheny, John Scofield and Bill Frisell.”

“As bad as things are right now in Venezuela, a failed coup before the presidential election next year might lead to martial law. Maduro takes care of the police and army, so despite a few defections, they continue to support him for their own well-being. Against this background, Dudamel may deserve more credit for not speaking out.”

He is the only creative to have written the books for three shows that ran more than 2,000 performances on Broadway: the aforementioned Annie (2,377 performances), The Producers in 2001 alongside Mel Brooks (2,502 performances), and Hairspray in 2002, which he wrote with the late Mark O’Donnell (2,642 performances). He earned Tonys for all three shows.

“We both get to the stoplight at Sixth Avenue. It’s like 2, 3 o’clock in the morning. I knew what was going to happen: As soon as the light turns green, we’d floored it, right! So we drove several blocks before the next red light. I got to the light shortly before Miles, and I smoked Marlboros in those days. I grabbed one, lit it, rolled down the window as Miles drives up.”

The director, Kirill S. Serebrennikov, leads the Gogol Center, one of the most prominent and progressive artistic venues in Moscow. He is accused of working with accomplices to misappropriate 68 million rubles, or $1.1 million at current exchange rates, that had been awarded to Studio Seven, a theater production company he led.

These are painful days for Dale Chihuly, as he winds down a long career facing a challenge that stabs at the heart of any artist: his originality. Mr. Chihuly emblazoned his signature on the world by working and rethinking the vocabulary of glass as art. Physical challenges and scars compounded the difficulty of that path.

Jones on making fun of getting hacked by racist, sexist haters after Ghostbusters came out: “That’s what comics do. You’re not a good comic if you don’t face your pain right off. That’s like the No. 1 rule on a comic’s list. You help a lot of people when you do that. You can’t ignore the elephant — you’ve got to make the elephant laugh. Me and the elephant are friends.”

Yu Xiuhua lived an isolated life for many years. “Most days she would limp down a dirt lane to a pond to feed the fish. She cut grass, grasping a sickle with hands that did not always obey her, to feed her rabbits. In the shade near the house she wrote at a low table, struggling to control her shaking body — a symptom of the cerebral palsy that she has lived with since she was born in this village in the central province of Hubei. Then, in 2014, her life changed.”