Culture and the Arts - ArtsBeat Blog

Feb 2 7:00 am

PEN Announces Finalists for 2016 Literary Awards

The PEN American Center today announced the finalists for its 2016 PEN Literary Awards. Taken together, the prizes, fellowships and grants from the literary and human rights organization will confer $200,000 on writers, editors and translators this year.

The most lucrative award, and one of the organization’s most prestigious, is the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, which comes with $25,000. This year’s finalists are “In the Country: Stories,” by Mia Alvar; “The Turner House,” by Angela Flournoy; “Mr. and Mrs. Doctor,” by Julie Iromuanya; “The Sympathizer,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen; and “Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness,” by Jennifer Tseng.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a finalist for the $10,000 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for “Between the World and Me,” which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in November. Other finalists for that award are “After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction,” by Renata Adler; “The Quarry,” by Susan Howe; “The Givenness of Things: Essays,” by Marilynne Robinson; and “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles,” by David L. Ulin.

The winners of those honors, along with the recipients of the prize for Literary Science Writing; the PEN Open Book Award, given to an exceptional book-length work by “an author of color”; and the PEN/Fusion Prize, honoring a writer under the age of 35 for an unpublished work of nonfiction that addresses a global and/or multicultural issue, will be announced on April 11 at a ceremony at the New School Auditorium. The winners of several other awards, including those for career achievement and for works in progress, will be announced on March 1.

Theater Feb 1 6:06 pm

‘King Charles III’ Commands Its Strongest Broadway Week

Michael Paulson

“King Charles III,” the critically acclaimed future history play imagining the British monarchy after Queen Elizabeth II, enjoyed its strongest week on Broadway before ending its run on Sunday.

The new play, written by Mike Bartlett and starring Tim Pigott-Smith, grossed $732,328 for eight performances in the week ending Jan. 31, according to figures released Monday by the Broadway League. That was the most it made in any week since beginning previews on Oct. 10; in all, the show ran for 22 previews and 103 regular performances.

“China Doll,” a new play written by David Mamet and starring Al Pacino, also closed Sunday; critics were hostile, but the show started strongly at the box office, and recouped its investment costs despite a drop in grosses in January. In the play’s final week, it grossed $658,216 for seven performances. “China Doll,” which began previews on Oct. 21, ran for 40 previews and 54 regular performances.

Over all, Broadway largely bounced back last week, after the previous week was interrupted by a blizzard that prompted the cancellation of Saturday shows.

“Hamilton,” a new musical about Alexander Hamilton, continued to strengthen its already commanding position in the commercial theater market. For the third week in a row, the show was the highest grossing on Broadway, surpassing the long-running industry leaders, “The Lion King” and “Wicked.” The show, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, also had the highest average paid admission, of $161.21 (that’s what the theater sold the average ticket for — many audience members are paying much higher prices to buy resold tickets from brokers via a secondary market), the highest capacity audiences (as a percentage of total seating capacity), and the highest ratio of actual grosses to potential grosses.

The producers of “Hamilton” announced Monday that on Tuesday they would relaunch a digital lottery for $10 tickets, nearly a month after a first attempt to do so failed because so many people entered the lottery that its website crashed. The digital lottery will replace an in-person lottery that has been taking place outside the theater; the show said it planned to return to a live lottery in the spring.

Theater Feb 1 3:06 pm

Hal Prince Withdraws From ‘The Band’s Visit,’ and David Cromer Will Direct

Andrew R. Chow

Hal Prince has dropped out of directing the Off Broadway musical “The Band’s Visit,” coming to the Linda Gross Theater later this year. He will be replaced by David Cromer, who directed the acclaimed 2009 Off Broadway production of “Our Town.”

Mr. Prince, who has 21 Tony Awards, the most ever, signed on to direct this project by David Yazbek (music and lyrics) and Itamar Moses (book) last year, but has dropped out because of scheduling conflicts. It was unclear whether this has to do with “Prince of Broadway,” a musical retrospective on the many hits of Mr. Prince’s career, including “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Company” and “Cabaret”; the production opened in Japan last fall and has been seen as a Broadway possibility for this spring.

“The Band’s Visit,” which is being produced by the Atlantic Theater Company, will now be pushed back to the fall. The story follows a traveling police band from Egypt that finds itself in a remote Israeli desert town.

Mr. Cromer directed 2013’s “Women or Nothing,” written by Ethan Coen, for the Atlantic Theater Company.

Music Feb 1 9:57 am

A Trove of Rarities in ‘Jazz Singers’ Exhibition at Library of Congress

Andrew R. Chow

Video clips and artifacts connected to Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan will be showcased at the Library of Congress this month as part of a new “Jazz Singers” exhibition, opening Feb. 11. The exhibition will pull from the library’s extensive archives and include rarely seen documents like Chet Baker’s suicide note, as well as contributions from the current singers Cecile McLorin Salvant and Esperanza Spalding, the bass player.

The exhibition will start from the blues and Tin Pan Alley eras and continue to the present day. The curator, Larry Appelbaum, said items had been chosen for their rarity, historical significance and aesthetic value. “For every image or item in the exhibit, there were at least three or four others I would have loved to include,” Mr. Appelbaum wrote in an email.

Some of the findings include an early letter from Jelly Roll Morton to the folklorist Alan Lomax; photographs by William P. Gottlieb, a prominent jazz photographer during the 1930s and ‘40s ; and artwork by Romare Bearden, as well as by Ms. Salvant.

The exhibition remains on view until July 23. More information is at loc.gov/exhibits.

Theater Jan 31 6:53 pm

Theater Flashback: ‘Grease’ on Broadway

Michael Paulson

A television commercial for the original Broadway production of “Grease.”

That hair! Their gum! Those songs!

Even when “Grease” was new, it was old — an intentionally nostalgic look back at the late 1950s. And Fox is counting on nostalgia for the musical, as well as for the era it depicts, to drive audience to its live musical version of the show, airing Sunday night at 7 Eastern time.

But how was the show marketed after it first opened on Broadway in 1972? Above is a television ad for the original production, which ran for eight years. (The show was also adapted into a movie in 1978, was revived on Broadway in 1994 and 2007 is frequently performed by school and local theater companies.)

The commercial was posted to YouTube by Serino/Coyne, an advertising agency that has represented “Grease” on Broadway. (The show was originally represented by the agency Blaine Thompson, where Nancy Coyne and Matthew Serino worked before forming their own company and taking the “Grease” account with them.)

Books Jan 29 1:27 pm

A David Bowie Biography Coming From Paul Morley

Joe Coscarelli

After the death of David Bowie on Jan. 10 it’s time to start defining his posthumous legacy. The Simon & Schuster imprint Gallery Books has announced a new biography, “The Age of Bowie,” to be written by the rock journalist Paul Morley. Mr. Morley most recently worked as a writer on Grace Jones’s 2015 book, “I’ll Never Write My Memoirs.”

“On the day it was announced that David Bowie had died, before there was any time to think, I was asked a hundred times what I thought,” Mr. Morley said in a statement. “What I really thought was that it would take a book to help fully process what Bowie meant to me, to music and popular culture, and to the world out there that changed because of him. Then I thought, I need to write that book.”

The biography is expected to be released later this year. In addition to chronicling the prime of the rock legend’s career, the biography will also detail the final year of his life, in which he kept his illness from public view while completing the album “Blackstar,” which was released days before his death.

Mr. Morley contributed his knowledge of Mr. Bowie to the 2013 exhibition “David Bowie Is…” at the Victoria & Albert Museum. “He was the human equivalent of a Google search, a portal through which you could step into an amazing, very different wider world,” Mr. Morley wrote at the time. “He flooded plain everyday reality with extraordinary, unexpected information, processing the details through a buoyant, mobile mind, and made intellectual discovery seem incredibly glamorous.”

Jan 29 11:10 am

La Tour d’Argent, Paris Dining Temple, to Auction Furnishings and More

Claudia Barbieri

PARIS — La Tour d’Argent, a Parisian shrine to the art of fine dining that traces its roots to the 16th century, is selling off tableware, furnishings and cooking implements as it seeks to reinvent itself for the 21st century.

The French auction house Artcurial will hold a sale on May 9 of goods from the restaurant, which has one Michelin star (after holding three stars for decades). Among the lots on offer are 2,700 Riedel wine glasses ; a silver lidded chalice that was a gift from a satisfied diner, the former king of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk; and a 16th-century Aubusson carpet that covered the first-floor ceiling of the restaurant’s building on the left bank of the Seine.

“I guess in the 1960s that seemed like a good idea,” the restaurant’s owner, André Terrail, whose family took over the restaurant in 1911, said of the carpeted ceiling. “But it no longer fits in,” he said in an interview this week.

Other objects up for auction include a six-panel screen depicting the Cathedral of Notre-Dame as seen from the restaurant, by the postwar artist Bernard Cathelin, with an estimate of $2,200 to $3,300; and a silvered duck press, emblematic of the restaurant’s signature dish.

“We never actually used this one,” Mr. Terrail said of the press, which carries an estimate of $4,300 to $6,500. “We had it as a presentational piece. We have three other presses, two that we use and one in reserve.”

Pressed duck — on the menu for 160 euros, or about $174 — remains a linchpin of the Tour d’Argent’s updated menu under the chef Laurent Delarbre.

The restaurant’s patrons have included Paul McCartney; the film stars Romy Schneider, Lauren Bacall and Anita Ekberg; and heads of state including Queen Elizabeth II and Emperor Hirohito of Japan.

For romantics, the auction is a chance to buy into a fabled past. For Mr. Terrail, it is a clearance sale, making space for a future that, in fact, may not look so very different from that past.

The Riedel glassware being sold will be replaced by new Riedel glasses, Mr Terrail said; and 120 silver-plated bronze goblets emblazoned with the Tour d’Argent logo that are in the sale will be replaced by ones with a simplified but still recognizable reinterpretation of the design.

Jan 29 10:50 am

What’s on This Week Around the World

Christopher D. Shea

Stockholm

Klee/Aguéli
Moderna Museet
Through April 24

As young men, the painters Ivan Aguéli (1869-1917) and Paul Klee (1879-1940), both from northern Europe, traveled to northern Africa, where they found their voices as artists and made crucial steps in the development of their distinctive styles (Aguéli made artwork directly inspired by Egypt’s architecture; Klee, whose work was generally quite abstract, began to paint after his visit to the region). This exhibition places their works inspired by the region side by side. Over 80 works are on view in all.

Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jane Birkin and the Possibility of a Serge Gainsbourg Museum

Gia Kourlas

As part of “Jane and Charlotte Forever,” a Film Society of Lincoln Center series starting Friday featuring the work of the mother-and-daughter actresses Jane Birkin and Charlotte Gainsbourg, the pair spoke about Charlotte’s father and Jane’s onetime lover, Serge Gainsbourg. The singer-songwriter, actor and director, who died in 1991, is still a subject of fascination, especially in Paris, where Ms. Gainsbourg, for a time, considered turning his house into a museum. Ultimately, she said no. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation with Ms. Birkin and Ms. Gainsbourg.

Why did you decide not to turn your father’s home into a museum?

Charlotte Gainsbourg I can’t let go of his house, but I haven’t found a way of being comfortable myself with the fact that you share that much intimacy. I was close. I have had moments where it was going to be possible, and then I took a step back each time. But it’s true also that the place is so small — it needs a lot of money to make it maybe the way he could have made it or to make it as classy as what I imagined he would have liked. In the end, just imagining people going in his bedroom and looking around — I didn’t like it. And I wanted to keep just one thing for myself. You share everything. People know more about him than I do, but this is something intimate that I just need to keep for myself a little bit longer.

Is he still fresh in both of your minds?

Gainsbourg Yes, I went to his house when I was in Paris, and I can still see him in his house. That’s why I’m keeping it. I can see the details of his skin, his nose, his ears that were a little bit oily. He’d put me on his shoulders. I was very little, but I used to pull on his ears.

Jane Birkin I might say his words are [still fresh]. Just the texts of his songs without the music. In that way, I’ve been very lucky because it’s such wonderful material. It was about 20 years of material: 1968 to 1991. He decided that he wanted to go on writing for me in spite of the fact that we weren’t together.

Gainsbourg And to write the most beautiful things.

Birkin And make me sing the songs that were about him, in fact. There’s a mixture of sadness, because I now know how he feels. And pride in wanting to do them really well. Because you know in 10 years’ time, someone else will be singing them. So I’ve taken him a very long way to my pleasure. I’ve taken him to South Korea and to just about the end of the world, and that’s been great fun, and he’s given me another lease of life. But it’s always tinged with a little sadness.

Theater Jan 28 4:00 pm

Sandy Duncan Returns to Lunt-Fontanne Theater in ‘Finding Neverland’ Role

Michael Paulson

Sandy Duncan performs “I’m Flyin'” from the Broadway revival of “Peter Pan” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.

Sandy Duncan is flying back to Neverland, but this time as a grandmother.

The actress, who beginning in 1979 played the title character in a Broadway revival of the musical “Peter Pan,” has agreed to spend about seven weeks in the cast of “Finding Neverland,” a musical about the making of “Peter Pan.”

Ms. Duncan, now 69, will play Madame du Maurier, who is the grandmother of Peter Llewelyn Davies, the boy whose grief, and imagination, helps inspire J.M. Barrie to write the play, “Peter Pan.” The role is a relatively modest one in the musical, but has nostalgic value: “Neverland” is playing in the same theater, the Lunt-Fontanne, where Ms. Duncan performed as Peter Pan. That performance was nominated for a Tony Award in 1980.

Ms. Duncan will appear in the cast from Feb. 9 through March 27.