Category: people

“I found that politicians are both intrigued by it and terrified by it. So much of politics has to do with using sexuality to manipulate their constituencies who are frightened or hostile to that aspect of human behavior … At Washington parties, you get a few drinks into these Republican right wingers, and they tried to get their hands all over you.”

“A champion of Canadian culture, and one of the country’s most experienced arts administrators, is gone. Jacques Bensimon died on Sunday at age 69 after a struggle with cancer.”

In a Q&A, the stage director/lighting designer talks about appearing onstage for the first time in a decade, in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at the new Enniskillen Beckett festival.

“No one deserves the spotlight more than Marcus Belgrave, the reigning patriarch of Detroit jazz. For nearly 50 years, his world-class trumpet playing, charisma, résumé and commitment to mentoring young musicians — many of whom have become more famous than their teacher — have made Detroit a hipper city than it would have been without him.”

“So unrelenting has been the attention focused on her less-than-professional brushstrokes that Cecilia Giménez, an 81-year-old grandmother, has reportedly suffered an anxiety attack and taken to her bed.”

The English author published 48 novels, including Circle of Deceit (a 1987 Booker Prize Finalist), Dear Austen, and the children’s novels Carrie’s War and The Peppermint Pig.

Jason Zinoman: “[She] was long seen as slightly old-fashioned, her self-deprecating one-liners out of step during the brash comedy revolution and boom of the 1970s and ’80s. Stand-up comedy, however, is about form as much as content. … She was not playing a retiring, apologetic wallflower. She dished out insults to her fictional husband, Fang, the same way that borscht belt comics mocked their wives.”

“Dame Janet Suzman, who has played an extensive range of leading parts in Shakespeare’s dramas, has launched an outspoken attack on her fellow Shakespearean actors Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance for giving succour to ‘conspiracy theories’ that the world’s most famous playwright was not the sole author of his works.”