“Booker Estee Adoram is still formidable, the bathrooms are still awkwardly placed, and the ‘family table’ is still terrifying. Even as much as the Comedy Cellar hasn’t changed over three decades, the talents who got their starts there have transformed the comedy world. Jon Stewart, Colin Quinn, Judy Gold, and more comedians share memories of the cramped basement venue that made their careers, and that they still call home.”
Tag: 03.14.16
Forty Under 40: Young Opera Singers To Watch – Part One: The Gentlemen
This list isn’t meant to name “the best” (which isn’t truly possible); it’s “bringing to wider attention singers who may or may not have been known. … Here are 15 male singers who merit your attention, whether or not you have already had the pleasure of hearing them.” (Next up: the ladies.)
Building Next Door To Bosch’s Original Studio Collapses, Shortly Before Bosch 500 Show Begins
“A medieval building that was supposed to serve as the canvas for Bosch by Night, a lightshow commissioned as part of the year-long celebrations to mark the quincentenary of Hieronymus Bosch’s death, collapsed on 27 February – days before the project’s launch in the artist’s hometown of Den Bosch in The Netherlands.”
Porters And Auctioneers From Paris’s Best-Known Auction House On Trial For Stealing 250 Tons Of Artworks
Forty of the famous “red collar” porters at the Hotel Drouot, along with four auctioneers, are accused of a mafia-style operation in which more than 6,000 items – from works by Courbet, Chagall and Matisse to Ming porcelain to Marcel Marceau’s costumes – were “lost” while in transit.
The Theater Of Violence And The Violence Of Theater (And Sports)
“The great virtue of ancient tragedy is that it allowed the Greeks to see their role in a history of violence and war that was to some extent of their own making. It also allowed them to imagine a suspension of that cycle of violence. … From the beginning to the end, Shakespeare’s drama is a meditation on political violence.”
English National Opera Chorus Explains How They Came To The Point Of Striking
“It seemed fair enough to ask some members of the chorus I met – who have to remain anonymous for contractual reasons – exactly how this whole horrible if not totally unfamiliar episode in ENO’s beleaguered recent history began, and how it developed.”
The Rise Of The Millennial Sitcom
“But in the last few years, a new kind of sitcom has emerged on cable and streaming networks, complete with its own tropes. We now have ‘the cell-phone emergency’, ‘the mid-afternoon brunch’, the ‘dating-app disaster’, the ‘wander-the-city walk-and-talk’. Classic network sitcoms traded in the ‘will they, won’t they’ sitcom staple; shows like Broad City and Girls have embraced the ‘are they or aren’t they’ [tension].”
Pakistan To Host Its First Art Biennale
“Pakistan will join the roster of countries hosting contemporary art fairs with the announcement of the inaugural Lahore Biennale, which is scheduled for November 2017.”
Messy Divorce And Damning Charges Against Top Canadian Arts Exec
“The filing alleges that Jeff Melanson repeatedly got his personal and professional lives tangled up.”
Even In The Era Of E-Books, We Have Shockingly Little Data On How People Actually Read Books
“While e-books retailers like Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble can collect troves of data on their customers’ reading behavior, publishers and writers are still in the dark about what actually happens when readers pick up a book. Do most people devour it in a single sitting, or do half of readers give up after Chapter 2? Are women over 50 more likely to finish the book than young men? Which passages do they highlight, and which do they skip?”