Alanat News

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For the casts and crews of Broadway, no night of the week brings quite the relief of a Sunday, when most productions go dark, and the companies of artists look forward to Monday off.
Yet the prospect of darkness and days off came with a different meaning this past Sunday night, as nine Broadway productions — including “Hairspray,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Boeing-Boeing,” “13″ and “Grease” — closed for good, some as scheduled, and some as a result …

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: Actor Rip Torn has pleaded not guilty to drunken driving charges in Connecticut, nearly two years after being fined and losing his license for similar charges in New York.
The 77-year-old Salisbury resident appeared in Bantam Superior Court on Monday. He pleaded not guilty to illegal operation of a motor vehicle while under the influence and failure to drive in the proper lane.
State police say a trooper stopped Torn on Dec. 14 on Route 44 shortly …

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The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death By Charlie Huston 319 pages. Ballantine Books. $25.
In a single tight, smart three-sentence paragraph from his smoking-hot new crime novel, Charlie Huston encapsulates his highly evolved wiseguy methodology. The first sentence sounds tough: “I fingered my knife and thought about sticking it in his ear.” The second introduces a note of reason: “But it was plastic and would probably break before it went deep enough …

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One of the enduring traditions of the Academy Awards is that the Oscar for best picture almost invariably goes to a film that isn't. This will not be news to anyone who has sat through some genuine groaners from Oscars past: pictures like Frank Lloyd's 1933 “Cavalcade,” Robert Z. Leonard's 1936 “Great Ziegfeld” and Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 “Greatest Show on Earth.”
But even when good movies win, the other nominees are usually of equal …

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: Bill Condon's father was a New York City police detective, the scrupulous kind who mostly kept an eye on other cops. His mother, meanwhile, was a Queens housewife who loved movies and took her son, then 11, to see “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” because her husband wouldn't go.
Laurence Mark is the son of a New York talent agent who helped inspire those street-smart, deli-eating show business types in Woody Allen's “Broadway Danny …

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There are seven weeks to go before the Academy Awards ceremony, and for those who claim to follow such things — would-be experts who pontificate about which movie will win best picture or who seems like a lock for best supporting actor — peer pressure is mounting to have seen all the movies that could be in contention. But Hollywood and the people who show its films to the world seem to be doing everything in their power to make sure that it&#039

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One of the enduring traditions of the Academy Awards is that the Oscar for best picture almost invariably goes to a film that isn't. This will not be news to anyone who has sat through some genuine groaners from Oscars past: pictures like Frank Lloyd's 1933 “Cavalcade,” Robert Z. Leonard's 1936 “Great Ziegfeld” and Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 “Greatest Show on Earth.”
But even when good movies win, the other nominees are usually of equal …

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Few of the arts benefited from the late economic boom more than design. After all, when the wealth is flowing, people don't covet the concerts you see or the books you read. They covet the couch you bought, and then they buy a cooler one.
In the recent giddy years, signature architects and designers came to be known by their first names — Rem, Philippe, Zaha — and they were photographed as prolifically as Bono in new design hotbeds like …

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The French actress Isabelle Huppert will head the jury at the Cannes Film Festival this year, the organizers said. Huppert has become something of a fixture at France's premiere film event, appearing there 25 times in various roles, including as a jury member and master of ceremonies. She has won the festival's best actress award twice, the last time in 2001 for her part in “La Pianiste” (2001) by the Austrian director Michael Haneke. It will be the second year running that the

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Strategically, chess may not be the most complicated game, but it can be daunting to learn. Part of the reason is the vast literature about how to play - particularly about the opening phase, the first 15 moves or so.
There are more than 1,300 openings. Most tournament players focus on a small number suited to their style.
Thirty years ago, the top players would also concentrate on a few openings, but today's stars are more flexible. The Internet, the widespread use of computers …

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Revolutionary Road Directed by Sam Mendes There is a lot of jittery cigarette smoking and sloshed-down booze in “Revolutionary Road,” a waxworks edition of the corrosive, furiously unsentimental novel by Richard Yates about an unhappy marriage. Set in the lonely-crowd milieu of 1955, although published in 1961, the novel tracks the unraveling of Frank and April Wheeler, a handsome young couple who have been trying and failing to keep disappointment at bay by

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: In just over nine months the New York City Opera is supposed to open its 2009-10 season. Exactly how that will happen is hard to imagine. The scrappy 65-year-old company has seldom faced such a dire crisis.
First off, there is a $15 million deficit to manage, made more onerous by the board's inexplicable and costly decision to forgo staged productions in the current season while the David H. Koch Theater (formerly the New York State Theater) is being …

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Somebody The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando By Stefan Kanfer Illustrated. 350 pages. Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95; Faber and Faber, £20.
On the night “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened on Broadway, Tennessee Williams sent his young leading man a rapturous telegram: “From the greasy Polack you will someday arrive at the gloomy Dane for you have something that makes the theater a world of great possibilities.” Looking back now, you might describe that as, word for word, …

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The director of the art-rich yet cash-poor National Academy Museum in New York expected a backlash when its board decided to sell two Hudson River School paintings for around $15 million.
The director, Carmine Branagan, had already approached leaders of two groups to which the academy belonged about the prospect. She knew that both the American Association of Museums and Association of Art Museum Directors had firm policies against museums' selling …

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Hitler's Private Library The Books That Shaped His Life. By Timothy W. Ryback. Illustrated. 278 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.
In November 1915, a German corporal in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment left his billet in a two-story farmhouse near Fournes, not far behind the front lines in northern France, and walked into town. Instead of enjoying the traditional soldiers' comforts of visiting a brothel or purchasing cigarettes and schnapps, he spent four marks to buy …

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There are seven weeks to go before the Academy Awards ceremony, and for those who claim to follow such things — would-be experts who pontificate about which movie will win best picture or who seems like a lock for best supporting actor — peer pressure is mounting to have seen all the movies that could be in contention. But Hollywood and the people who show its films to the world seem to be doing everything in their power to make sure that it&#039

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Directed by David Fincher “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which occupies about 25 pages in the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a slender piece of whimsy, a charming fantasy about a man who ages in reverse, descending through the years from newborn senescence to terminal infancy. As Fitzgerald unravels it, Benjamin's story serves as the pretext for some amusing, fairly superficial observations about child rearing, undergraduate behavior …

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Paul Hofmann, a Viennese who resisted the rise of Nazism in his homeland, acted as an informer for the Allies while serving on the staff of the German commandants of occupied Rome during World War II and later became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and a prolific author of travel books, died Tuesday in Rome. He was 96.
His death was announced by his son Alexander Hofmann-Lord.
A diminutive, dapper man who spoke German, Italian, French …

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: It's tempting, of course, to think of the London stage awash in singular men and women of the theater: Derek Jacobi, Ralph Fiennes, and Michael Gambon, to name but a few from the year just gone, with the promise of Jude Law, Judi Dench, and Helen Mirren to come during 2009.
But to reflect on the traffic both on and off the West End over the last 12 months was to be reawakened to the strength of the ensemble work one regularly finds in London. Chicago's …

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: Like most prominent and publicly financed institutions here, the National Gallery of Canada does not escape controversy.
Usually the fuss is over art. In 1990, several politicians derided the museum in Parliament for acquiring “Voice of Fire” (1967), a huge minimalist painting with three vertical stripes by Barnett Newman, for $1.45 million. (The disturbance eventually died down, and the painting's value has risen considerably.)
Now as Pierre Théberge prepares to end …