Luisa Miller at Glyndebourne delivers everything a summer music festival can offer: a perfectly rehearsed ensemble, a purpose-built theatre, young but top-of-form artists, a great orchestra, and a willingness to experiment with less-well-known works. This season is being celebrated as a triumph over Covid, after two years of empty seats.
The trailing spouse has been a perennial subject of memoirs and novels, usually involving women who find their way after some ups and downs. Marcie Maxfield centers her new novel, Em’s Awful Good Fortune, on what she calls the tagalong wife, addressing this topic—one with which she apparently has considerable personal experience—with a combination of humor and frustration.
At a time when the Notre Dame and the Cathedral at Pisa were yet to be constructed, Southern India, ruled by the Chola dynasty, produced great works of sacred art. The bronzes from the era are now housed—as symbols of human creativity at its best—in the museums such as the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Asia Society Museum in New York.
It’s a cliche to call North Korea the most isolated country in the world. Those of us living outside the country often have very little idea of what life there is like, often only seeing what its government would like us to see: military parades, missile launches, and joyous crowds.
Putting 5,000 years of history on display is a challenge that Epic Iran’s organizers confronted head on. Juxtaposing a clay cylinder seal from the 2nd millennium and an abstract painting from the 21st century might leave visitors struggling to see the connection. Nevertheless, the strong thread that winds through this show is the excellence of craftsmanship, Persian honar, that appears in display after display. Iran’s tradition of craft, of masters and apprentices, of admiring past achievements in art, explains the surprising moments of recognition as one moves from one era to another in this chronologically-organized show.
It’s a summer night in 2006 on Gerrard Street, the main artery of London’s Chinatown. A lone gunman walks into a drinking den, JoJoBar, and shoots one of the customers as he embraces a female companion. The gunman escapes and none of the witnesses will speak to the police. The inexplicable murder of Donald Quek, a cocky young tourist from Malaysia, is set to remain unsolved unless his former girlfriend, Molly, can crack the case.
“The Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” was published in The New Yorker in early 2020, generating great interest for Anthony Veasna So’s forthcoming collection of stories, Afterparties. But months before his book came out, So died suddenly from an overdose. “The Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” kicks off this collection and tries to answer a question that runs throughout the book, namely “what does it mean to be Khmer, anyway?”