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Sarah Hucal

By Harry Huan 9/18/12 4:53pm

theater

Glover in a 2002 rehearsal for 'The Exonerated.' (Courtesy Tannen Maury/AFP/Getty Images)

From Glamour to Slammer: Two Actors and a Broadway Press Agent Are Keeping It Real

The funny thing about eureka moments is the way they sneak up on us unawares and radically rearrange our lives. The front-runners—maybe the only-runners—in the meager field of cell-block confessionals exist because of such moments.

On Sept. 15, after some time off, the Culture Project, under the leadership of founder and artistic director Allan Buchman, reclaims its theater at 49 Bleecker with a 10th anniversary edition of its most acclaimed presentation, The Exonerated, a harrowing docudrama based on court records and talks with six unjustly incarcerated, finally freed individuals. Read More

By Harry Huan 8/08/12 9:30am

theater

Paul, left, and Pasek.

The Youngest Old Souls on Broadway: Dogfight Songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul Hit the Big Time

The morning after their official arrival on the New York theater scene—true to the showbiz edict that George Abbott passed down to Harold Prince—Benj Pasek and Justin Paul scheduled a meeting for a new show. This is the established, industry-wide Rx for warding off any hangovers caused by booze or bad reviews, and these two newbie songwriters, both 27, happily hark back to old rules. Read More

By Desiree Browne 7/13/12 1:34pm

Film

(Courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)

On a Hot Night in New York, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ Turns 60

Last night, moviegoers took a break from big-budget popcorn flicks for 60th-anniversary screenings of Singin’ in the Rain all around town that were presented by Turner Classic Movies and hosted by NCM Fathom Events. The Observer attended a screening in Union Square, where longtime fans, old and young, arrived early with their children and uninitiated friends to get good seats. Read More

By Desiree Browne 7/10/12 8:58pm

theater

Wade McCollum, Shelley Thomas, Lindsay Nicole Chambers, Claire Neumann and Brandon Ezpinoza in 'Triassic Parq: The Musical.'

Gender Confusion in the Mesozoic Era: Marshall Pailet on Bringing ‘Jurassic Park’ Back as a Musical

Several years ago, when Marshall Pailet was an undergrad at Yale studying intellectual history, an acquaintance planted it in his head that Jurassic Park would make a great ballet. When he graduated, in 2009, the idea of dancing dinosaurs was still with him. Today he is more than happy to admit that Triassic Parq: The Musical, which opened June 27 at the SoHo Playhouse, “started with a stupid idea.” Read More

By Alex Fankuchen 4/17/12 5:27pm

books

'Farther Away.' (Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Between Novels: Jonathan Franzen’s Essays Meditate on Birdwatching, Solitude, Mourning

In his 2008 essay “The Chinese Puffin,” reprinted in his second essay collection, Farther Away (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $26.00), Jonathan Franzen contemplates the apparently limitless carpet of lights unfurling from the center of Shanghai, and asks, “Does anybody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?” In a rare moment in these essays, he answers “yes,” but is unwilling to drag us there. In fact, steering clear of the really deep shit—certain kinds of hard truths—is Mr. Franzen’s m.o. throughout this collection. Read More

By Hannah Gersen 3/13/12 6:03pm

books

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Life After ‘Monsters’: Lauren Groff’s Latest Novel, Arcadia, Takes Place in a Utopian Commune

Three-year-old Beckett Kallman has just figured out that his mother, Lauren Groff, writes books for a living.

“It’s a very strange feeling for him,” Ms. Groff said, in a telephone interview from her home in Gainesville, Fla. “When I put him to bed, he asks, ‘Can I read one of your books?’ And I say, ‘Not yet.’”

Undoubtedly, it will be even stranger for Beckett when he discovers that his mother’s second novel, Arcadia (Voice, 304 pages, $25.99), the story of a boy growing up in a Utopian commune, is dedicated to him. And perhaps even stranger when he learns that the little boy in question was inspired by his birth. Read More

By Michael Robbins 3/13/12 5:52pm

books

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Keeping Faith: In ‘When I Was a Child I Read Books,’ Marilynne Robinson Criticizes American Politics

Marilynne Robinson is not amused. “We now live,” she writes at the outset of her new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $26.00), “in a political environment characterized by wolfishness and filled with blather.” One of our political parties has descended into outright lunacy while the other responds to widespread financial calamity by proposing lower corporate tax rates. In that passage, Ms. Robinson invokes Walt Whitman, to remind us that the country has been here before, or at least found itself in circumstances equally dire, but also to confront the self-appointed defenders of “traditional values” with the actual spirit of our best traditions:

It is not unusual now to hear that we have lost our values, that we have lost our way. In the desperations of the moment, justified or not, certain among us have turned on our heritage, the country that has emerged out of generations of attention to public education, public health, public safety, access to suffrage, equality under law. It turns out, by their reckoning, that the country they call the greatest on earth has spent most of its history acting against its own (great) nature, and that the enhancements of life it has provided for the generality of its people, or to phrase it more democratically, that the people have provided for themselves, have made its citizens weak and dependent. Read More

By James Miller 3/06/12 4:32pm

books

(Photo by Michael Lionstar)

The Others: Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men Has UFOs, Peace and Love, Drugs and Despair, Indian Legends and Derivative Trading Systems

At the start of Hari Kunzru’s sprawling and ambitious fourth novel, Gods Without Men (Knopf, 374 pages, $26.95), we are introduced to an aircraft engineer called Schmidt, a man obsessed with how to “connect the mysteries of technology with those of the spirit.” Taking refuge in the desert, Schmidt builds an airstrip in order to “summon the only force powerful enough to transcend communism and capitalism.” This force is not political but extraterrestrial and it doesn’t take long before a UFO lands at his amateur airport. Mr. Kunzru describes first contact between Schmidt and the extraterrestrials rather like a colonial encounter between glittering conquistadors and awe-struck, adoring natives. These Aryan aliens, all “blond hair,” translucently pale skin and “noble faces,” seem to transport Schmidt into a world of light. From this point, Gods Without Men jumps backward and forward from 1775 to the present and features (among other things) psychedelic reworkings of the Indian coyote myth, a disappearing child and a simulacrum of the war in Iraq. Unifying these disparate events are “the three pinnacles,” an unusual rock formation that acts as the organizing symbol of the novel, drawing together a compelling aggregate of dysfunctional characters and clashing belief systems. Read More

By Sarah Hucal 12/16/11 4:12pm

Classical Music

Josh Bell (Photo courtesy of Chris Lee)

Violin Virtuoso Josh Bell Sparkles in Philharmonic's Pagan Program

When Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in May of 1913, its thorny polyrhythms and pagan-inspired choreography completely unnerved the audience, whose booing and catcalls eventually erupted into a full-blown riot. Even after the police intervened, chaos reigned for the remainder of the performance as bar-room-style brawls broke out in the Parisian aisles, sending the evening into the annals of music history. Read More

By Sarah Hucal 12/15/11 2:16pm

Opera

La Boheme image

La Bohème at the Met

It was the evening after Christmas in 1900 when the Metropolitan Opera Company, on tour in Los Angeles, premiered La Bohème. It was years before Giacomo Puccini’s opera became widely acknowledged as the masterpiece it is, and, just four years old at the time, it was by no means an immediate success, still requiring the star power of soprano Nellie Melba. Ms. Melba, encouraged by the applause, as well as the box office, would return after the final curtain call to sing the grueling “Mad Scene” from Lucia di Lammermoore. These days, La Bohème remains one of the only operas that doesn’t require such gimmicks to keep the house full, as proved by its triumphant return to the Met this fall. Read More