Category: people

“I knew where Fred Astaire stayed and I used to hang around his hotel like a stalker. We were incredibly polite, me and my friend, calling everyone mister and miss. I met Astaire a few times and he got to know me a little bit, as in, ‘Oh, there’s that boy again.'”

“Broadway was a little surprised that Stephen Sondheim didn’t show up Sunday night to claim his Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. Setting aside the fact that the award is a nice capper to a legendary career, two of Sondheim’s musicals – “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Gypsy” – were nominated for Best Revival.”

The slimmed-down soprano returns to Covent Garden this week. “I’m hoping that we don’t go so far as to put microphones on soubrette sopranos and have them singing Isolde. I don’t think that would be the case. Nonetheless, I think it would be foolish to think that singers don’t have to be more concerned about their physique than in decades past.”

“Being Big Bird is sweaty, physical work. But Caroll Spinney, who has worked on “Sesame Street” for nearly four decades playing both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, has no wish to be anywhere else.”

As she approaches her 70th birthday in September, Tower is one of the deans of American composers. “Would that be dean-ess?” she says, laughing again. “I feel great to get to this age and have my music being played. I like the fact that my career has been one of slow growth. I feel sorry for composers who get major attention when they’re in their early 20s. It’s hard to go up from that.”

Mark Rylance’s “speech as Best Actor left some thinking that his Broadway debut in a very different role — as a virginal Midwesterner in the 1960s sex farce Boeing-Boeing — had somehow gone to his head. However, backstage, the actor explained that his words came from a prose poem, Back Country, by the Midwestern writer Louis Jenkins.”

“Working with such directors as Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Tim Burton in a career spanning four decades, Winston created some of the most memorable visual effects in cinematic history. He helped bring the dinosaurs from “Jurassic Park,” the extraterrestrials from “Aliens, the robots from “Terminator” and even “Edward Scissorhands” to the big screen, and was a pioneer in merging real-world effects with computer imaging.”

“Recent research has shed new light on Fuller’s inner life and what really drove him. In particular, it now appears that the suicide story may have been yet another invention, an elaborate myth that served to cover up a formative period that was far more tumultuous and unstable, for far longer, than Fuller ever revealed.”

“Renowned Canadian guitarist Laurice Milton “Red” Shea, who helped define the groundbreaking musical styles of legendary Canadian folk artists Gordon Lightfoot and Ian and Sylvia Tyson and others, died Tuesday morning after being diagnosed two weeks ago with pancreatic cancer. He was 70.”

“Albert Herbert, who has died aged 82, was probably the greatest of contemporary religious artists. [He] was a maverick, liked but seldom taken seriously by art establishments… His subject matter was looked upon with suspicion by those holding the public art purse-strings, and there is no Albert Herbert in the Tate.”