By Angela Barbuti In the lobby of WYNC’s offices on Varick Street, Michael Ian Black is chatting with Meghan McCain. It seems as though they are old friends catching up between sips of iced coffee. They’re not. Actually, they only met in person less than a year ago, but in this short time they have 
By Rebecca Harris On Monday, June 25, one West Side church will transform into a live theater for a week of never-before-seen plays performed in front of an audience. Monday marks the beginning of production week for The Puzzle Festival of New Work, a theater festival that will showcase the unfinished plays and musicals of 
Americano Out of Paris The son of the late French filmmaker Jacques Demy (Lola, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and his formerly estranged wife Agnes Varda (Far from Vietnam, The Gleaners and I), Mathieu Demy sees his first directorial feature Americano as a riposte to his mother’s 1981 film Documenteur: An Emotion Picture. One of Varda’s 
Bolshoi and Kirov vitality preserved Legendary Russian dancers show why they are legends in the new DVD Treasures of the Russian Ballet (ICA Classics/Naxos). It contains performances by Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet and (then) Leningrad’s Kirov filmed by the BBC in London from 1956 to 1963, some on stage, some in the television studio. The longest excerpt in 
Ellsworth Kelly’s plane beauty At the Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street subway station, I was recently reminded of Ellsworth Kelly’s excellence in the realm of public art. Even with stacks of newspapers piled against the left panel of a green/blue arc and Service Changes taped to companion panels, his work seemed oblivious to the intrusion 
Bestowing awards on what matters If you were to have walked into the Blue Note at 4 p.m. on June 20, you’d have heard guitar wiz Gabriel Marin improvising microtonal figures with a Middle Eastern tinge on double-necked guitar, electric bassist John Ferrara by his side. You could have grabbed a bottle of Brother Thelonious 
In tabloid parlance, Mathieu Demy is cinema royalty. Son of the late, great French new wave director Jacques Demy (Lola, Bay of Angels, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), he is also the son of Agnès Varda, the pioneering female director of the Left Bank who excels in fiction and nonfiction films (Vagabond, The Gleaners and I). 
By Mona Molarsky As celebrities trouped up the red carpet to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute gala on May 7th, it was hard to imagine anything subversive could be happening anywhere in the museum. Paparazzi clicked and video cameras live-streamed, while Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, led a parade of stars who showed off 
