Category: people

Zahi Hawass, whose energy, media savvy and telegenic personality made him the modern face of Egyptian antiquities, had a difficult few years as Egypt’s political turmoil unfolded. But he’s at work once again, telling the world, “With all this, I have to tell you that Egypt is safe.”

Esther Bejarano “is one of the last surviving members of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, the only all-female ensemble among the many Nazi-run prisoner musical groups in the camp system.”

“Poetry is the only place in the arts where all the money in the world can’t do anything — it can’t make a better book, it can’t make a better poet; poets keep writing regardless of money. It’s utopia. Money has no value in poetry.”

“As the daughter of a famous musical theatre composer (Richard Rodgers), a musical theatre successful composer herself (Once Upon a Mattress) and the mother of a musical theatre composer (Adam Guettel), [she] held a singular place in the history of the American theatre.”

“The former star of the Transformers movie franchise was smoking and yelling during the performance, the police said. Officers escorted him out of the show during intermission. … [He was seen] handcuffed and in tears as six officers surrounded him outside the theater.”

“Mr. Rudel was the maestro and the impresario, the principal conductor and the director of City Opera for 22 years (1957-79), working in the orchestra pit while running the company on shoestring budgets, signing contracts, casting productions and nurturing young singers like José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Sherrill Milnes and Beverly Sills.”

“He made strong-selling recordings of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; worked with Dave Brubeck, Joe Williams and other jazz artists; recorded Peter, Paul and Mary; and helped engineer the string parts for Pink Floyd’s … The Wall. But he made his biggest mark in the classical world, … [where] helped shape some of the most celebrated classical recordings of the 20th century, including acclaimed sessions with Bruno Walter, Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein.”

With a 1961 fan letter, the WASP mandarin poet began a famous three-year correspondence with the wisecracking Jewish comedian. Re-reading the letters while researching a book, Lee Siegel found some significant and complicated tensions beneath the mutual admiration.

No matter the part, he always seemed at ease and in control, whether playing a Mexican bandit in the 1960 western “The Magnificent Seven,” a bumbling clerk in Ionesco’s allegorical play “Rhinoceros,” a henpecked French general in Jean Anouilh’s “Waltz of the Toreadors,” Clark Gable’s sidekick in “The Misfits” or a Mafia don in “The Godfather: Part III.”

The first biography of the short-lived novelist, published in 1923, seems to have been largely made-up. What scholars have put together since “enables us to piece together a new Stephen Crane: a figure as driven to prove his manhood as Jack London; as plaintive about his broken faith as Herman Melville; and as ironic about his personal self, and as recklessly disinclined to take conventional sexual morals seriously, as Oscar Wilde.”