It is a quiet evening in Place des Vosges, Paris, when, all at once from every direction, crowds of men and women, hundreds of them, descend upon the square. The people, dressed elegantly in all white—the men in clean, crisp trousers and jackets and the women in summer dresses or light pantsuits—quickly set small tables and chairs in perfect straight lines and lay out elaborate picnics, along with excellent bottles of French wine, of course. Read More
In the 31st-floor offices of SWW Creative, the walls are beige, the carpet is gray and the cabinets are standard-issue wood-grain. There’s no Eames armchair, no runway stills splashed across the walls, not even a lucite coffee table with a copy of Grace Coddington’s memoir. There’s not a flower in sight.
While fashion professionals are known to obsess over the color of their pens, SWW Creative’s offices are about as splashy as an insurance agency’s. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff is not concerned. Read More
Katie Holmes will have the night of December 17 off from her Broadway play, Dead Accounts–maybe she can head a bit uptown and check out the nostalgic films that made her ex-husband, Tom Cruise, so beloved for a time. Read More
Last year, the New York Film Festival threw galas in honor of two great cinema auteurs, David Cronenberg and Pedro Almodóvar, on the occasion of screenings of their respective new films, A Dangerous Method and The Skin I Live In. This year, the festival is throwing a similar fete in honor of the Southern-noir pulp Read More
The Lincoln Center production of War Horse is to close in January 2013, its producers have announced, after a run that received the Best Play Tony and was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film. Theatrical productions at Lincoln Center have little turnover and tend to do well at the Tonys; prior to War Horse getting imported from the Read More
As we quietly chanted a self-affirming (however desperate) “you can do this” to ourselves while rocking back and forth in the fetal position, The Observer’s phone lit up with a surprise last minute invite to something a little off the beaten path: A two-hour reserved-seating Q&A session with screen legend Gary Oldman. The invite washed over us like an awesome wave.
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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
If you worked anywhere along NYC’s longest street, you may have seen a familiar sight yesterday evening: the Occupy Wall Street protesters! They were back! Read More
While Stephen Spielberg is busy promoting his adaptation of the Tony-Award winning War Horse (you know, the one with the life-size horse marionette…which unfortunately will be played by an actual horse in the movie), the Broadway show has gained a new–and terribly attractive–lead actor. Read More
As concertgoers funneled out of Avery Fisher Hall on Monday night, a middle-aged couple kissed passionately on the first-tier balcony, earning hoots of approval from below. Earlier in the evening, a seemingly inebriated mink-wrapped woman sitting next to The Observer spoke to her husband at full-volume before unceremoniously slumping asleep in her plush seat.
Perhaps something had been slipped into the wine served at the preceding gala dinner, or perhaps the audience was simply overstimulated from the evening’s orchestral excitement. Whatever the cause, the classical crowd was in strange form, which only served to highlight the magnificence of the Lincoln Center’s “Great Performers” concert that took place.
As the members of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra stormed the stage, an older woman in front of us clapped in slow motion, her hands extended over her head, picking up the pace as Met maestro of the moment, Signore Fabio Luisi, made his entrance. Greeting the audience with a smile, the 52-year-old planted himself curtly on the podium, his greying hair neatly combed and his round spectacles perfectly adjusted. Read More
