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Rae Allen, Tony winner and TV mainstay, dies at 95
NEW YORK, NY.- Rae Allen, a Tony Award-winning actress who was seen in both the stage and film versions of the hit musical comedy Damn Yankees, and whose many television roles included a world-weary unemployment counselor to George Costanza on Seinfeld and Tony Sopranos aunt on The Sopranos, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 95. Her death, at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home, was confirmed by her niece Betty Cosgrove. Allen made her Broadway debut in 1948 and her big splash seven years later, when she was cast as sports reporter Gloria Thorpe in Damn Yankees," the story of a middle-aged Washington Senators fan who makes a Faustian bargain to become a slugger named Joe Hardy and help his team keep the hated Yankees from winning the pennant. She led a group ... More

Morphy's Automobilia, Petroliana & Railroadiana Auction rings up $2.4M
DENVER, PA.- Trains, planes and automobiles were on the minds of bidders who brought their A-game to Morphys big March 29-30 Automobilia, Petroliana & Railroadiana auction. The colorful 1,498-lot sale featured rare, fresh-to-the-market examples of signage, gas pumps, globes and other service station equipment from motorings golden era. The two-day grand total came to a hefty $2.4 million. Not surprisingly, the top lot of the sale was a Wesco Model 212 large-bodied gas pump with a clock face, brass nozzle and bevels; and three different Visiglas lenses at the top. With eye appeal to spare, the extremely rare pump had undergone a beautiful restoration, as evidenced in its vivid orange body and image of Hancock Gasolines strutting Cock O The Walk mascot. Possibly the first such pump ever to be offered at auction, it attracted ... More

Tiwani Contemporary opens a solo exhibition with Michaela Yearwood-Dan
LONDON.- Tiwani Contemporary is presenting The Sweetest Taboo, their second solo exhibition with Michaela Yearwood-Dan. Recently the artist has been thinking about the priorities for affirming spaces of self and collective actualisation, specifically Poc and queer space(s), community needs and desires, that include her own. Projected and inscribed upon the large-scale paintings, extracts of Yearwood-Dans experiences, influences, personal thoughts and questions commingle with abstracted and botanical gestures and marks that border, lead towards and give way to speculative clearings; spaces and gaps that have the capacity to be filled with utopic imaginings. The works remain vested in holding and debating the real-life politics and cultural demands of femme, black and queer individuals in the world coming together as communities, ... More

Women dominate shortlist for International Booker Prize
LONDON.- Olga Tokarczuk, the Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist, is among five female writers shortlisted for this years International Booker Prize, arguably the worlds most important award for fiction translated into English. Tokarczuk is nominated for The Books of Jacob, along with translator Jennifer Croft, just four years after the pair won the same prize for Flights. Other high-profile nominees on the six-strong shortlist, which was unveiled at the London Book Fair on Thursday, include Mieko Kawakami, the star Japanese author best known for Breasts and Eggs, and Claudia PiÃ±eiro, the Argentine crime writer. Tokarczuks The Books of Jacob tells the story of Jacob Frank, a self-proclaimed messiah who wanders around 18th-century Europe, acolytes in tow. When the Swedish Academy awarded Tokarczuk ... More

Joseph Kalichstein, pianist of subtlety and refinement, dies at 76
NEW YORK, NY.- Joseph Kalichstein, an Israeli American pianist whose subtle, refined approach made him an exemplary chamber musician, especially as a member of the esteemed Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, died March 31 in the New York City borough of Manhattan. He was 76. His son Avi said the cause was pancreatic cancer. Across his career of more than 50 years, critics agreed that Kalichstein had an uncommon naturalness, whether in his earliest solo recitals or his later appearances on the chamber music circuit with his piano trio, in which he was joined by violinist Jaime Laredo and cellist Sharon Robinson. Kalichstein had a sense of line and timing that set him apart even as a young virtuoso. His Carnegie Hall debut carried enough impact to remind one of Horowitz, and that is not a small thing ... More

A Trisha Brown masterpiece, 'reset' on an inclusive troupe
NEW YORK, NY.- Trisha Browns Set and Reset, one of postmodern dance's most treasured and durable works, thrillingly excavates the tension between freedom and form, spontaneity and detail. Its five central principles, which include a direction to act on instinct, have been interpreted and reinterpreted by different dancers with different instincts, since its premiere, in 1983, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This weekend, a reconstruction of the dance, Set and Reset/Reset, comes to the Brooklyn Academy when the London-based Candoco Dance Company makes its New York debut. Candoco, founded in 1991, is an inclusive, or integrated, troupe, with a mix of disabled and non-disabled dancers one of the oldest and most acclaimed of such companies. (Axis Dance Company in the Bay Area is perhaps the best ... More

Glass Works Auctions announces highlights included in the Premier Auction #157
EAST GREENVILLE, PA.- Glass Works Auctions Premier Auction #157 will be a two-part, timed closing affair, with Part 1 slated for Monday, April 25th and Part 2 to follow the next day, Tuesday, April 26th. The online-only sale is packed with 263 lots of flasks, bitters, inks, target balls, fire grenades and black glass. Online bidding will be through www.glswrk-auction.com. Expected top lots include an Old Sachem Bitters and Wigwam Tonic bottle, estimated to change hands for $20,000-$30,000; a General Frank Cheatams Bitters bottle (Nashville, Tenn.) (est. $6,000-$8,000); a Travellers Bitters bottle (circa 1834-1870), with motif of a walking man (est. $8,000-$12,000); and an eagle New London Anchor Glassworks bottle (est. $8,000-$12,000). The General Frank Cheathams bitters and the Travellers bitters (with the likeness of General ... More

Nan Melville, whose photography captured dance in many forms, dies at 72
NEW YORK, NY.- Nan Melville, a photographer who was known for elegant, fluid images of prominent dancers and dance companies, died March 18 in Manhattan. She was 72. Her sister, Gill Kenyon, announced the death. The cause was not specified. Melvilles dance photography, which appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, as well as in various books on dance, spanned four decades. She photographed the Bolshoi Ballet, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, the Royal Ballet of Britain, American Ballet Theater and numerous other well-known troupes, capturing dancers like Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alvin Ailey star Dwana Smallwood in gravity-defying leaps or amid swirling costumes. But she was just as much at home photographing traditional Venda ... More

'Not understanding is really satisfying': A director keeps you thinking
NEW YORK, NY.- The first thing that gets you is the laugh. It can pop up like a jack-in-the-box or tumble out in waves in the midst of conversation with director Lileana Blain-Cruz, who is making her Broadway directing debut with an ambitious revival of Thornton Wilders The Skin of Our Teeth at Lincoln Centers Vivian Beaumont Theater. The distinctive Blain-Cruz guffaw doesnt always punctuate obvious jokes. It can also lighten a heavy thought or prune a thorny moment, as when she refers to the existential crisis I go through on each production, or talks about her advocacy for the underappreciated role of the director in the American theater, a cause shes well positioned to advance as a resident director at LCT. Then there are the voices she slips into, as if shes starring in a perpetual one-person show: the pretentious ... More

Kunstmuseum Den Haag presents an exhibition of work by Anton Heyboer
THE HAGUE.- Kunstmuseum Den Haag has owned a sizeable collection of work by Anton Heyboer (1924 2005) since the 1960s. The collection has grown over the years, and recent additions have included a bequest and a donation from a private collection. Following our major retrospective of his work five years ago, Kunstmuseum Den Haag is now showing the newly acquired works that have further enriched our collection in a small presentation in our Berlage Room entitled Anton Heyboer Significant Space. In the mid-1960s Hans Locher, who was then head of the print collection and later became museum director, visited Heyboer regularly to discuss his work, and bought a large number of etchings for the museum. Unlike others in the art world, he managed to maintain a long-lasting connection with Heyboer, allowing ... More

An Afrofuturism festival brings an energy shift to Carnegie Hall
NEW YORK, NY.- The first time Sun Ra and his Arkestra played Carnegie Hall, in April 1968, they were shrouded in darkness for most of the show. The critic John S. Wilson, reviewing for The New York Times, was flummoxed. Wilson considered himself a Sun Ra fan, but he couldnt fathom why, on the countrys most prestigious stage, the cosmic keyboardist, bandleader and philosopher was keeping his ensembles wondrous array of odd instruments and colorful costumes out of view. The messages in Ras music, and his riddle-like public statements, could have helped Wilson understand. On this planet, it seems, it has been very difficult for me to do and be of the possible things, Ra said in an interview for DownBeat magazine in 1970. As I look at the world today and its events and the harvest of possible things, I like the idea ... More