Local
Idiotard 2008
On January 26, 2008, New York was raided by the crazy kids of Idiotarod, where people dressed up as anything from the gang from Scooby Doo to cops in bondage raced with their carts across New York City. Check out cartsofbrooklyn.com for more information.
—Nadia Chaudhury
Contributor
Michael Short
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7. January 7, 1955, the Metropolitan Opera House, New York
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The first African American to sing a leading role with the Metropolitan Opera is cast as Ulrike in Verdi’s Un ballo in mascara. A century earlier when the opera debuted in Italy, the composer was compelled by censors to repeatedly change the setting, first from Sweden to Poland, then from Poland to the United States, specifically to Boston.
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From the moment of entering David Zwirner’s expansive first floor galleries, Roma/New York, 1953–1964 compels. There are so many great works—drawn from museums, private collections, foundations, and estates—juxtaposed in revealing combinations, that for direct visual pleasure and intellectual provocation it could not be more engaging.
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Despite its Bumpy History, Merrily We Roll Along Glides Back to New York
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The first time I saw Merrily was at Fair Lawn High School in New Jersey in 2008; Stephen Sondheim apparently attended a performance and spoke to the cast. I remember being amazed by the score, confused by the story, but moved by the ending—in that amateur production’s final gesture, as the chorus refrains “me and you” during “Our Time,” antihero Franklin Shepard’s piano comes back on stage and he, alone, faces it. Maria Friedman’s production, now sold out at New York Theatre Workshop, concludes with a similar visual, and an idea clicked: music is the you to Franklin’s me, the thing he cares most about and what he has to lose when the people who make him sing fade away, dimming like distant stars.
