Category: people

In her new film, actor/writer/director Sarah Polley “plays cinematic strip poker with her family’s history, peeling back layers of long-held assumptions to expose new truths, some of which seem tabloid-ready. But Polley didn’t spend the last five of her 33 years making this film just to give us facts. She made it to tell us a story.”

The 81-year-old novelist is working on a new book – about a (fictional) intellectual African-American president.

“I was 19 years old when I moved to New York forever. I was quite resented by the dance community of Seattle. I don’t know why. Maybe because I moved to New York and got famous and good. People resent excellence.”

“What set Mr. Heim apart from many prominent translators was the wide array of languages with which he worked. Conversant with a dozen tongues, he translated from eight of them … He was known in particular for his translations of [Milan] Kundera’s novels,” as well as two major volumes by Günter Grass; he won a top award for his translation of Mann’s Death in Venice.

He achieved worldwide renown during his 46 years at the helm of Moscow’s Taganka Theater, which he founded in 1964. He now works at the city’s Vakhtangov Theater, where his adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Demons is running this week in honor of his birthday. His next project: Borodin’s opera Prince Igor at the Bolshoi.

As a principal in Balanchine’s New York City Ballet in its early years, Mounsey danced key roles in works by Tudor and Robbins as well as Mr. B.; she is best remembered as the Siren in Prodigal Son. After retiring from the stage, she first founded a ballet company in Johannesburg and later, in Los Angeles, the Westside School of Ballet, one of the West Coast’s top training grounds.

“John Major is renowned as the man who ran away from the circus to become an accountant, and that quip is partly true. His father, Thomas Ball, was an accomplished singer, sketch actor, acrobat and baton twirler … [and with] his first wife Kitty he formed a double act called Drum & Major.”

“Alberto Vilar and Gary Tanaka, the technology investors convicted of stealing from clients in 2008, were ordered released from prison on bail while a federal court considers their appeal.” Vilar was known for his very high-profile financial support of opera as well as other causes, though many of his pledged donations during the ’00s went unfulfilled.

“Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., has apologized for cussing out the head of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts over the phone in mid-September, in response to a demand to stop overlooking Latinos in the annual Kennedy Center Honors awards.”