Category: people

“A ubiquitous stage, film and television actor best known for his role as Ellen DeGeneres’s sweet, befuddled father on the TV sitcom Ellen in the 1990s,” Gilborn also played Shakespearean leads at Washington’s Folger Theater and “appeared in scores of other television shows, including The Wonder Years, Law & Order, The West Wing and NYPD Blue.”

“Lebanese composer Mansour Rahbani, well-known in the Arab world along with his brother Assi for their role in musical and theatrical revival, died on Tuesday following a bout of pneumonia… Assi Rahbani was married to legendary Lebanese singing diva Fairuz, for whom the two men composed many songs and plays… Mansour and Assi, who became known as the Rahbani Brothers, also wrote several acclaimed musicals.”

Says the MacArthur-award-winning pianist of his new blog series, “Rooms I have dressed in”: “I do spend over a hundred hours a year in these surprisingly small, surprisingly stuffy, surprisingly unglamorous chambers, and I thought it might be interesting to have a series of candid photographs of them from across the globe.”

“Tom O’Horgan, a famously innovative director who brought a Downtown, countercultural sensibility to Uptown theater, most exuberantly in the 1968 hippie-celebration-cum-musical ‘Hair,’ one of four shows he had on Broadway at the same time in 1971, died Sunday at his home in Venice, Fla.”

“Coosje van Bruggen — an art historian, writer and curator whose professional partnership with her husband, artist Claes Oldenburg, turned ordinary objects into startling monuments around the world — died Saturday at her Los Angeles residence. She was 66 and was battling metastatic breast cancer.”

“Claude Berri, the French producer- director whose rural saga ‘Jean de Florette’ won him international acclaim, died today at age 74, his art gallery said. During his five-decade film career, Berri directed more than 20 movies.”

“Until he came up with his Obama image and went on to be named ‘Icon Maker’ of the year by Time magazine, 38-year-old Shepard Fairey was best known for his rock-music album covers and an advertising campaign that featured a wrestler named Andre the Giant.”

“Often, as a younger conductor, the more you speak and rehearse, the more you lose credibility. The players start getting bored, they stop listening, and maybe they decide to test you. I had only one rehearsal with overtime, we basically read everything through once, and I didn’t get to say much. So there wasn’t really a chance for me to dig myself into a hole.

“[She] was a schoolteacher before successfully auditioning for a place in the Australian Opera chorus in 1983. Her career included many of the great parts in the repertoire, including Violetta in La Traviata, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and Tosca… at such leading theatres as the Bastille in Paris, the Metropolitan in New York and the Vienna State Opera.”

“Shaheen’s patterns generally featured three to five colors applied by hand to silk screens by professional artists who had more than 1,000 colors to work with. Seamstresses then stitched the cotton, rayon or silk fabrics into final products… Such Shaheen originals now fetch $1,000 or more.”