| Once Upon a Time There Was Romance Do you ever wonder how choreographers choose their titles? After seeing James Whiteside’s New American Romance on the last day of American Ballet Theatre’s fall season at the former New York State Theater, I spent some time pondering that. – Deborah Jowitt
Picasso Fiasco: Jarring Juxtapositions & Missed Connections at the New MoMA The aggressively transgressive new MoMA, trying to combat museum-ennui by shaking up its displays, has aimed its cannon at the canon. Its disruptive installation strategy audaciously breaches traditional geographic, temporal and art-historical boundaries, arranging shotgun marriages among strange (and strained) bedfellows and sundering longtime soulmates. – Lee Rosenbaum
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (13) Forty-nine years after the fact, I can’t remember how or why I first got interested in Miles Davis. Not that you would have needed a reason to be interested in Miles in 1970. – Terry Teachout
Propwatch: the only types of prop in the world in ‘The Antipodes’ Dave says there are seven types of stories in the world (starting with ‘rags to riches’). Josh says there are ten types of stories in the world (starting with ‘a threshold crossing’). One of the Dannies says there are 36 types of stories in the world (starting with ‘supplication’). But what is quite clear, by the end of The Antipodes by Annie Baker at the National Theatre, is that there are just seven types of props in the world. – David Jays
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (12) This was one of the first jazz albums to be widely owned by people who didn’t usually buy jazz albums, my father among them. I found a mint-condition copy in his record cabinet that looked as if it hadn’t been played for a decade. It suited me right down to the ground. – Terry Teachout
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