Category: people

Matthew Gardiner, associate artistic director at Arlington’s Signature Theatre, likes contrasts. “Gardiner’s current follow-up to the grim Really Really is the cotton-candy Xanadu, the theatrical version of the Olivia Newton-John-on-roller-skates musical with Electric Light Orchestra songs. Camp city. ‘Totally makes no sense,’ Gardiner acknowledges of this back-to-back effort, smiling broadly.”

Ella Frederickson, who preps more than 21,000 pages of music a season for the Florida Orchestra also plays the cello and the theremin, works as Marin Alsop’s personal music librarian – and now serves as the president of the Major Orchestra Librarians’ Association.

The furor is over whether Aishwarya Rai, “the woman routinely referred to as the most beautiful in the world, and who occupies a place in Indian popular culture akin to Kate Middleton or Victoria Beckham, has an obligation to her fans to lose weight” six months after giving birth. Until relatively recently, Bollywood stars generally had healthy curves and hourglass figures.

“Part of the secret of [James] Corden’s comic gift is that he combines innocence so naturally with mischief. Although he’s 33, his face is that of an adolescent boy who has just discovered beer, Internet porn and some new flavor of potato chip.”

“People tell me this Museum of Modern Art in Paris is a really big deal, and that it’s very prestigious to have a show there. I guess I should be impressed. I don’t know.”

Anne Midgette: “When in 2002 an offer to write a book with this character fell into my lap and I began sounding out people in the business about it, I started to get the impression that he was universally hated. But there was a lot more to Herbert’s story than that.”

Cui Jian, now 50, was trained as a classical trumpeter; he took up electric guitar and singing in the 1980s and became the People’s Republic’s first rock star. Awkwardly for his relations with the Communist Party, one of his biggest hits, “Nothing to My Name,” became the unnoficial anthem of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising.

“Falling into a lake aged six, when I was on holiday in the mountains. I went straight to the bottom and saw the most beautiful world I’d ever seen: fish, shafts of light, plants waving in the breeze. I thought I was in heaven. I’d have stayed there had my uncle not pulled me up. That’s why my art has so much to do with water – because I dream about going back to that place.”

“[She] is one of the most controversial women in English history; we argue over her, we pity and admire and revile her, we reinvent her in every generation. She takes on the colour of our fantasies and is shaped by our preoccupations: witch, bitch, feminist, sexual temptress, cold opportunist. … Much of what we think we know about Anne melts away on close inspection.”

“I am not influenced by other human beings. But I am inspired. If I see a great performance on television, onstage, in the movies, I go to work the next day with a renewed energy and less fear. These great artists take me out of my life and make me want to go there. But I never imitated anyone. I walk out onstage and I’m my own performer.”