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Review: In 'Plays for the Plague Year,' the soundtrack of our lives
NEW YORK, NY.- Upon entering Joes Pub at the Public Theater for Suzan-Lori Parks Plays for the Plague Year, audience members are handed a Playbill, a pencil and two yellow notecards, each with a question about the pandemic: What would you like to remember? What would you like to forget? The responses are placed in a basket from which they are picked and read during the show. At my performance, someone wrote that theyd like to forget fear and worry, foreground and background. People in the audience murmured in assent. Wed all probably like to forget our own experiences of fear and worry during that first year of zealous hand-washing and ever-changing mask mandates. Parks, however, made a project of remembering: For that first pandemic year, she resolved to write a play ... More

Gloria Dea, magician rediscovered late in life, dies at 100
NEW YORK, NY.- Seven-year-old Gloria Metzner, 3607 Park Boulevard, is the youngest working magician in the world, The Oakland Tribune of California declared in a November 1929 article about her. An accompanying photograph showed Gloria holding three balls between the fingers of her right hand, a moment from a trick in which she would make the balls appear and disappear like, well, magic. Anything with sleight-of-hand and billiard balls I liked, she said almost a century later, in a 2022 interview with KVVU-TV of Las Vegas on the occasion of her 100th birthday. That was my favorite trick. In between those two splashes of publicity, Gloria Metzner adopted the stage name Gloria Dea, made history in Las Vegas, had a few tabloid-ish moments in a brief film career, faded into obscurity for a half-c ... More

Virginia Johnson steps down from Dance Theater of Harlem. For keeps.
NEW YORK, NY.- The realization hit her during a performance. Virginia Johnson, the artistic director of Dance Theater of Harlem, was watching the company in the fall of 2019 when she knew it was time to step down. I was like, Wait theres a company up there, she said in an interview in her Dance Theater office. There they are. Thats it. This mission accomplished moment came after close to a decade of work. When she took over the artistic reins of Dance Theater in 2010, Arthur Mitchell, one of its founders and for many years her boss, told her, Your job is to revive the company, she said. Watching the dancers in the company she had rebuilt, she was impressed by their technique, by the way they had melded into a group. I said, OK, well here they are. But she knew they were ready for the next s ... More

Cabaret mainstay 54 Below enters a new era: As a nonprofit
NEW YORK, NY.- After nearly 11 years in operation, one of New York Citys most high-profile cabaret venues has decided to transition from a commercial entity to a nonprofit. The owners of 54 Below, a popular forum for both Broadway stars and rising performers and composers, say they intend to raise close to 20% of an annual budget approaching $10 million from supporters, with sponsorships, multiyear donations and naming opportunities figuring into the new model. Richard Frankel, one of the owners, described the move as motivated by both economic challenges and artistic ambitions. Theres no doubt its been a struggle, financially, combining the restaurant and theater businesses, he said, adding that the club, which occupies the space below the 1970s nightlife fixture-turn ... More

Parrish Art Museum announces Corinne Erni as Chief Curator
WATER MILL, NY.- Parrish Art Museum Executive Director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Ph.D., announced the appointment of Corinne Erni as the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator of Art and Education, effective April 15, 2023. Since joining the Museum in 2016, Erni has been organizing major, critically acclaimed group and solo exhibitions, off-site exhibitions, and special commissions with contemporary artistsas well as overseeing the Museums robust public program schedule. Erni is the first new Chief Curator at the Museum in nearly four decades, taking up the mantle held by Alicia G. Longwell, who retired in October, 2022 after 38 years. I am thrilled to step into this new role at the Parrish to advance the Museum's artistic vision, continuing and renewing the dialogue between the E ... More

California philanthropist Jim Copeland's vaunted vinyl collection makes some noise at Heritage
DALLAS, TX.- Sandy Copeland says her husband Jim was a quiet man. Everywhere except in the music room. There, for himself and special guests only, the sporting-goods magnate would spin the records that filled his sprawling collection artists spanning John Coltrane to Black Sabbath, Etta James to the Velvet Underground, Rodriguez to The Stooges. Sandy, Jims wife of nearly 60 years, says her husband especially loved Talking Heads Stop Making Sense, the concert film, most of all. Their grown grandchildren remember dancing to it as 5-year-olds. Jims collection ranged from the popular to the esoteric, the influential to the unheralded from A to Z, or at least double bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik to a test-pressing Led Zeppelin and every shake, rattle and roll in between. And he collected only the best ve ... More

Slotin Auction celebrates 30 years with spring Self-Taught masterpiece sale
BUFORD, GA.- After 30 years of putting folk art and sundry other forms of untrained expression on the block, Steve Slotin approaches Slotin Auctions Spring Self-Taught Art Masterpiece Sale with the same fervent enthusiasm he exhibited in the beginning. Even if hes claimed previously that this or that auction held the best art hed ever assembled, Slotin is persuasive in proclaiming the April 22-23 sale as Slotin Folk Arts best grouping yet. Piece for piece, this is the best auction in our 30 years of doing it, he says, motioning around the packed auction hall, a funky former neighborhood grocery north of Atlanta. There may have been greater pieces here and there, but as a collection, I think this is the best grouping Ive ever seen. If you were to put this into a museum show, there would be rave reviews. P ... More