Category: people

The Tony-winning actor says, “What I liked about doing [Yasmina Reza’s A Spanish Play last year] is that no one walked out happy. The audiences weren’t happy, we weren’t happy, and it was a great learning experience.” And on his favorite playwright: “In Chekhov everybody is flawed. Everybody is a pain in the ass. Which is great. You read Chekhov’s biography, everyone makes everyone else sick.”

“How can a conductor as obviously talented as [Grammy winner John McLaughlin Williams] remain hidden in plain sight? The answer has to do with his relatively late start and the circuitous path he took to the podium, the unusual repertoire he has chosen to champion and the vagaries of a business in which the best musicians don’t always get the best gigs.”

The pop celeb, née Maya Arulpragasam and an ethnic Tamil raised in Sri Lanka, is accused by some observers of using her music and videos to glorify the Tamil Tigers, which for 25 years has waged a grisly war against the Sri Lankan government. About the conflict, she has said publicly, “There’s a genocide going on.”

“She started her career in Broadway musicals in the 1940s as Carolyn George. She joined the San Francisco Ballet in the late 1940s, then the New York City Ballet in 1952. She met Jacques d’Amboise in the New York ballet company, and the two married on New Year’s Day 1956… After retiring from dance, Carolyn d’Amboise worked as a photographer, specializing in dance and traveling the world.”

“Ms. Keaton’s mother, Dorothy Keaton Hall, kept some 90 notebooks during her life, chronicling the upbringing of her children and her frustrating marriage. Ms. Keaton read those journals back to her mother during her final years, and began writing [the] memoir soon after her mother’s death in 2008.”

“Robert Anderson, the American playwright and screenwriter whose popular plays explored relationships between men and women and children and parents — in Tea and Sympathy, I Never Sang for My Father and You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running — died Feb. 9 at his Manhattan home.”

“[T]he pilot who safely ditched his jetliner in the Hudson River received a standing ovation Saturday from the audience at a Broadway performance of ‘South Pacific.’
At the end of the classic revival, the show’s stars introduced Capt. Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger as the pilot who set down the disabled plane within reach of rescue boats last month, saving the lives of all 155 people on US Airways Flight 1549.”

He liked to say that composition was the search for “the right wrong notes.” What Foss really wanted was to make the unexpected seem inevitable.

“A singer, pianist and songwriter with an independent spirit who zealously guarded her privacy, Ms. Dearie pursued a singular career that blurred the line between jazz and cabaret. An interpretive minimalist with caviar taste in songs and musicians, she was a genre unto herself.”

“He developed the original simple plastic figures – a knight, a construction worker and a Native American – partly as a reaction to the early 1970s oil crisis. Since plastic is made from oil, it became too expensive to make the large plastic toys that his employer, the Brandstatter Group, was known for.”