arts

LONDON -- An opera about Anna Nicole Smith --the American sex symbol, Playboy Playmate, hapless model, laughable actress and fortune-hunting wife of a billionaire 62 years her senior? Commissioned by, no less, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden? When the plans were announced it sounded like a dubious idea, a tawdry way for a major opera house to look
THIS is the last weekend to see the New York production of “The Merchant of Venice” starring an Academy Award winner in one of Shakespeare ’s greatest roles, Shylock the moneylender. That is, until next weekend. Al Pacino (who won the best-actor Oscar for “Scent of a Woman”) wraps up his four-month run as Shylock on
Theater Approximate running times are in parentheses. Theaters are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of current shows, additional listings, showtimes and tickets: nytimes.com/theater . Previews and Openings ‘The Book of Mormon’ Previews start on Thursday. Opens on March 24. The “South Park” creators Matt
It’s comedy night at the asylum, folks. And have we got some high-voltage vaudeville for you, the kind that curls your hair and turns your knees to rubber. So here he is, all the way from St. Petersburg, Russia, the man who put the madcap in madness. Put your hands together for the stand-up stylings of Aksentii Poprishchin. No such words of
Only a performer of monumental presence can withstand the theatrical typhoon that is Mandy Patinkin . So hats off to the frail-looking, child-size marionette who walks away with “Compulsion,” the straight-line bio-drama by Rinne Groff, starring Mr. Patinkin at gale force. Designed by Matt Acheson, this charismatic puppet — with
Strip away the uninspired mythology, and “I Am Number Four” is just your average high school movie with below-average drama. Fielding familiar classroom stereotypes — the bully, the science geek, the strutting alien female in the skintight cat suit — this turgid schedule filler is only marginally more fun than a week’s
“Putty Hill,” Matt Porterfield ’s moody, elliptical fusion of fiction and documentary, slips back and forth between the forms with a stealth that dissolves one into the other. The mostly nonprofessional actors in the film, set in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Baltimore, play versions of themselves in a fictional
Icíar Bollaín’s bluntly political film “Even the Rain” makes pertinent, if heavy-handed, comparisons between European imperialism five centuries ago and modern globalization. In particular it portrays high-end filming on location in poor countries as an offshoot of colonial exploitation. The movie is set in and
“We Are What We Are,” Jorge Michel Grau’s macabre fable of urban survival, follows the disintegration of a pod of people eaters when its diseased patriarch expires in a shopping mall. Swiftly removed by a wordless cleanup crew, the man’s remains are found to contain a single undigested finger. “It’s shocking how
The programmers for Film Comment Selects possess the refined tastes of practiced cine-mixologists, along with a yen for the outré. For the 11th edition of this two-week annual festival, which starts on Friday at the Walter Reade Theater, they have exhumed the old and rounded up the new, unearthing treasures and curiosities to put next to
Liam Neeson ’s latter-day renaissance as an unlikely action star should give hope to performers and viewers of a certain age (i.e., over 40) everywhere. While that irrepressible exhibitionist Helen Mirren , born in 1945, continues to inspire legions of AARP members, one discarded garment at a time, Mr. Neeson, a comparative pup born in 1952,
Movies Ratings and running times are in parentheses; foreign films have English subtitles. Full reviews of all current releases, movie trailers, showtimes and tickets: nytimes.com/movies . ★ ‘Another Year’ (PG-13, 2:09) An autumnal gem from Mike Leigh , by turns sweet and abrasive, gentle and sad, about the unequal distribution of
It’s fine to employ a plot device that’s been used repeatedly. But you run into trouble when you use a familiar plot and do only the familiar with it. “Immigration Tango,” a pale romantic comedy, has this problem. An immigrant couple (he’s from Colombia, she’s from Russia) in Florida strike a deal with their best
One of the most urgent and certainly among the most beautifully shot documentaries to hit the big screen in recent memory, “The Last Lions” isn’t just another cute and fuzzy encounter session with a different species. It’s a pulse-quickening, tear-duct milking and outrageously dramatized story about the threats —
Essentially a two-person play liberally sprinkled with gleaming, groovy, graphic sex, “Now & Later” exudes an amiably accessible vibe that softens the edges of its freewheeling explicitness. Lest we enjoy all this flesh without an ennobling context, the movie kicks off with Wilhelm Reich’s assertion of the link between sexual
As a group they give a new and truer meaning to the phrase “independent film.” In a country where all movies must obtain official approval to be exhibited commercially, the five Chinese directors whose work will be featured beginning on Friday in the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight are forced to operate in a peculiar
The something wicked that comes creeping like night in “Vanishing on 7th Street,” turning down the sun and seemingly sucking people right out of their homes, offices, cars and clothes, arrives without warning. One minute moviegoers are yukking it up at a multiplex in this generally nifty little horror flick, and the next minute
“Loveless” is an aimless film about an aimless fellow, but it’s not without its charms. It may be without a point, but hey, you can’t have everything in a no-budget film like this. Andrew (Andrew Von Urtz) is a nearing-middle-age New Yorker who’s still behaving like a self- and sex-centered 25-year-old, trolling for
It’s too bad that Paul Levesque is so, well, large. Mr. Levesque — a professional wrestler whose ring name is Triple H — is a perfectly tolerable actor, as he shows in “The Chaperone,” a lightweight comedy aimed, presumably, at tweeners and fans of World Wrestling Entertainment, whose film division generated this
Around Town Museums and Sites American Museum of Natural History (Saturday and Wednesday) “Saluting Our Jazz Elders,” an afternoon of music and discussions on Saturday in celebration of Black History Month, will include performances by the percussionist Sekou Alaje (12:30 p.m.); the New Amsterdam Music Association (1:15 p.m.); the
‘CIRCUS INCOGNITUS’ Jamie Adkins, an old-style vaudeville performer, won’t mind if you throw things at him during his show. He wants you to throw. He invites you to throw. He’ll even provide the things. That Mr. Adkins behaves this way in front of children at the New Victory Theater attests to his bravery. The elementary
Poised and whispery, Vanessa Paradis played her New York City debut as a headliner at Town Hall on Wednesday night. In France, Ms. Paradis has been a pop star since she was 14, when her single “Joe le Taxi” was a No. 1 hit in 1987, and where she won the Victoires de la Musique award, the equivalent of a Grammy , for album of the year
LONDON — The English National Opera introduced the German director Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production of Wagner’s “Parsifal” in 1999, and since then this influential modern staging, which presents the Knights of the Grail as a spiritually decaying brotherhood in a bleakly gray, postapocalyptic and timeless setting, has
Jazz Full reviews of recent jazz concerts: nytimes.com/music . Uri Caine, Theo Bleckmann, Todd Sickafoose, Jenny Scheinman (Friday) This latest show in the weekly Spontaneous Constructions series, which aims to foster new collaborations, features Mr. Caine, a keyboardist of spectacularly diverse tastes; Mr. Bleckmann, a vocalist of ethereal
Pop Prices may not include ticketing service charges. Full reviews of recent concerts: nytimes.com/music . Trey Anastasio (Tuesday) Although Phish , the jam band that made him a star to the noodle-dancing set, has since regrouped, Mr. Anastasio has yet to abandon his solo career. Last summer he released “Time Becomes Elastic” (Rubber
The Tune-In festival at the Park Avenue Armory promises to explore musical connections between past and present, as well as a few philosophical notions, like whether music has the power to express anything. (Stravinsky said that it does not; others have disagreed.) Most of the series, which runs through Sunday, was assembled by the enterprising
Classical Full reviews of recent music performances: nytimes.com/music . Opera ★ ‘Armida’ (Friday and Wednesday) This infrequently heard 1817 Rossini opera finally made it to the Met last spring as a vehicle for Renée Fleming in a handsome and fanciful, if rather safe, production by Mary Zimmerman . “Armida” is
Len Lesser, a character actor for more than half a century whose hawklike profile and Noo Yawk accent finally gained him popular recognition when he played Jerry Seinfeld ’s annoying Uncle Leo on “Seinfeld,” died on Wednesday in Burbank Calif. He was 88. The cause was pneumonia, said his son, David, adding that his father had been
There’s a holdup in the Bronx, Brooklyn’s broken out in fights. There’s a traffic jam in Harlem That’s backed up to Jackson Heights. There’s a scout troop short a child, Khrushchev’s due at Idlewild. Car 54, where are you? Ask almost anyone over 50, and the song pours buoyantly forth, evoking one of
Although a two-hour “Hollywood week” episode of Fox’s “American Idol” topped the ratings on Wednesday, CBS’s new series “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior,” with Janeane Garofalo and Forest Whitaker , delivered a strong debut at 10 p.m. According to Nielsen’s estimates 12.9 million viewers tuned
Kate Werble Gallery 83 Vandam Street SoHo Through March 12 Flokati rugs, those fluffy white coverings traditionally handmade in the Pindus Mountains in Europe and prized by contemporary designers, become wild-and-woolly wall reliefs in Anna Betbeze’s first New York solo. Ms. Betbeze dyes, scorches, shreds, shaves and otherwise attacks these
Winkleman Gallery 621 West 27th Street Chelsea Through March 12 The three short, related videos that make up Janet Biggs’s debut show at Winkleman were filmed on glacial islands between the top of Norway and the North Pole. Playing on separate screens and in overlapping sequence, the pieces can be viewed in any order, though a gallery news
Meredith Ward Fine Art 44 East 74th Street Manhattan Through March 12 Working in oil on small pieces of canvas board near the waters and harbors of Manhattan, John Marin (1870-1953) was possibly the first American artist to make abstract paintings. There are other candidates — among them Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe — but
Rembrandt ’s jowly, battered face glows like a night light in the great late self-portrait from 1658 at the Frick Collection . And it glows more brightly than ever now that layers of old varnish have been cleaned away. Colors — the gold of the artist’s shirt, the wine-red of his Middle Easternish sash, the pink of the chafe mark
BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — “This was the most contaminated room,” Kathleen Maher said, pointing to powdery debris, paint flakes and glass shards on shelves and carpeting in a dimly lighted ground-floor gallery at her work space. She is curator and executive director at the Barnum Museum here, where last June a tornado struck its 1890s
Art Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art . Museums American Folk Art Museum : ‘Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: Freelance Artist — Poet and Sculptor — Inovator — Arrow maker and Plant man — Bone artifacts constructor — Photographer and Architect
Perhaps because her work so frequently appears in exhibitions, art fairs and auctions, it seems as though Cindy Sherman’s photographs are often with us. Think of images of her as a clown, a Renaissance Madonna, a sex kitten or even a half-pig, half-human creature. But in the United States it has been nearly 14 years since the public has had a
Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects 24 East 73rd Street Manhattan Through Feb. 28 The companionship and inspiration that artists gain from other artists and their work is pinpointed in this sweet and unusual show. Its main focus is the friendship between Gandy Brodie (1925-1975) and Bob Thompson (1937-1966), who met in Provincetown, Mass., in the
Many human beings evidently share with the magpie a gene causing an irrational attraction to bright and shiny objects. If you suffer from this disorder, you will love “Cloisonné: Chinese Enamels From the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties,” a ravishing exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center. Displaying more than 160 items ranging from
Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte 541 West 23rd Street Chelsea Through March 19 Vincent Szarek’s sleek, four-piece exhibition offers a poetic meditation on modern decadence. The first item, on the floor, is a long, narrow, geometric solid painted in glossy, metal-flake gold. It looks like a parody of Minimalist sculpture, but it is also readily
The New Museum has become a busy place this year, and it is not yet even March. In January it opened a popular tribute to the market-hardy paintings of George Condo. Now it is offering a startlingly excellent resurrection of the prescient Post-Minimalist renegade Lynda Benglis and her gaudy, multidexterous and often gender-bending segues among
Dance Full reviews of recent performances: nytimes.com/dance . Aspen Santa Fe Ballet (Tuesday through Thursday) This handsome company returns with a trio of contemporary works: Jorma Elo’s “Red Sweet,” Jiri Kylian’s “Stamping Ground” and the East Coast premiere of “Uneven,” by the Spanish
Walter Dundervill is just fine with letting his imagination run wild, and that’s evident in “Aesthetic Destiny 1: Candy Mountain,” performed at Dance Theater Workshop on Wednesday night, where the terrain of the stage is decorated with colorful polygons of varying sizes. Some are propped up like jagged mountains with strangely
New York’s flamencophiles are deprived of their annual Flamenco Festival this year, thanks to financial cutbacks in Spain. (The hope is to continue it biennially instead.) In its place, however, is a weeklong season of the filmmaker Carlos Saura ’s “Flamenco Hoy” (“Flamenco Today”) at City Center. Tuesday’s
The British travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin (1940-89) had blond hair, flinty blue eyes and delicately firm features — he looked like a bookish member of the Police, Sting’s band, circa 1983 — and the kind of narcissism that can be a byproduct of talent mixed with charisma. Both men and women were drawn to him, and he to
JACKSON, Miss. THERE is “The Help,” and then there is the help. And she is not happy. Ablene Cooper, a 60-year-old woman who has long worked as a maid here, has filed a lawsuit against Kathryn Stockett, the author of the best-selling novel “The Help,” about black maids working for white families in Jackson in the 1960s. In
Geoffrey Rush stars in the production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Geoffrey Rush stars in the production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Geoffrey Rush stars in the production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Geoffrey Rush stars in the production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.