IHT.com: Arts & Leisure

Temperatures rise in 'Ghosts' ; and irony betrays 'Sweet Nothings,' as Andrew Lloyd Webber's production of 'Love Never Dies' (a follow to 'Phantom of the Opera') opens. ...

The vision of smart, eco-savvy cars free from the threat of congestion, crashes, pollution and parking spats could soon become reality, according to the authors of a new book, "Reinventing the Automobile." ...

“Bodymusic,” is a witty, imaginative new piece presented by the Argento Chamber Ensemble at the Miller Theater on Friday. ...

Jeanine Tesori, as part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series, was the host of an autobiographical extravaganza at the Allen Room. ...

The Red Bull Theater’s muddled production of John Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi” appears in the process of being explored rather than already discovered. ...

Andrew Bovell’s “When the Rain Stops Falling” is a fitfully moving but diagrammatic play about the long legacy of unnatural acts. ...

The Limón Dance Company gave three performances at the 92nd Street Y over the weekend. ...

“Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi” is as unsettling and complex as the country it traverses. ...

Both the concise and the verbose sides of Shostakovich were represented on Sunday afternoon at Avery Fisher Hall. ...

on Sunday the French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras made his New York recital debut at the Frick Collection, with Alexandre Tharaud accompanying him. ...

Charles Pellegrino, who wrote “The Last Train From Hiroshima,” admits being duped by a source, but says other sources that his publisher has questioned definitely exist. Digital media raises the question of what part the traditional book publisher will play in the future. ...

With “The Surrendered,” Chang-rae Lee has written the most ambitious and compelling novel of his already impressive career. ...

The Oscars telecast exposed an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in identity crisis: the ceremony was big and commercial; the winners were small and arty. ...

“Holy Russia,’' an exhibit at the Louvre through May 24, examines the impact of Western, Eastern and Middle Eastern culture on Russia since its conception. ...

The person who has been carefully nurturing many of China's top singers in the Western opera tradition for international careers is the 93-year-old Zhou Xiaoyan. ...

Works by artists from emerging regions - like Asia and Africa - are among those being showcased at the revamped Paris fair at the Grand Palais that runs from March 18 to 22. ...

The Bayerische Staatsoper is offering a devil opera for our time: "Die Tragödie des Teufels" ("The Tragedy of the Devil") by the Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos, which received its world premiere last week in Munich. ...

By lending their names to Broadway shows as investors, celebrities hope they can help them stand out. ...

A documentary looks at the legacy of the 1940 German film “Jew Süss,” perhaps the most notoriously anti-Semitic movie ever made. ...

Shot by shot, films have evolved to resemble the natural rhythms of the brain. ...

Mr. Bachrach was a prominent photographer best known for his portrait of a young senator named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. ...

Mr. Coutaz founded the respected independent classical record label Harmonia Mundi and ran it for five decades. ...

Prosecutors say the four made more than $25 million by illegally buying and then reselling tickets to popular shows. ...

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is putting off the A&E network’s plans for a production following city transit workers. ...

John Doyle’s impressive if problematic “Caucasian Chalk Circle,” at the the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, almost out-Brechts Brecht. ...

The new NBC shows “Parenthood,” beginning on Tuesday, and “The Marriage Ref,” which had its premiere on Sunday, rise above flimsy formats with good writing and exceptional casts. ...

Paul Taylor, more than any other living choreographer just now, seems to be so in love with his performers that he keeps needing to find and reveal fresh facets of them. ...

The Cuban singer Omara Portuondo, 79, is still impulsive onstage. ...

In “Being John Daly,” a reality show that has its debut Tuesday on the Golf Channel, the professional golfer lets a camera follow him around during a rocky comeback attempt. ...

Lar Lubovitch creates pleasant works that show off his deep ties to the modern tradition. ...

Last Tuesday the British actor John Standing opened a two-week engagement of songs and poems by Noël Coward at the Café Carlyle. ...

It took some degree of courage for the British baritone Simon Keenlyside to perform Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” in his recital at Alice Tully Hall on Sunday. ...

The publisher of a book about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima whose author relied on a fraudulent source has said it will stop printing and shipping copies. ...

“Southland,” the police drama canceled last year by NBC but picked up by TNT, returns for its second season on the cable channel on Tuesday night. ...

Peter Gabriel is releasing his first solo studio album in eight years in a multitasking career: technology projects, musical collaborations, humanitarian initiatives, parenthood. ...

Lionel Shriver’s new book creates a harrowing picture of the fallout that the current health care and insurance system can have upon regular, middle-class families. ...

A week before the Oscars, it's a time to celebrate a little-recognized category of moviemaking: the title sequences that mark the beginning and end of most films. ...

Exquisite works throw light on stretches of the country's history that even today remain mysterious. ...

Mr. Mason was a British sculptor whose teeming street scenes and narrative tableaux evoked an animated world of ordinary people caught up in the drama of daily life. ...

A delightful first act gives way to a muddled Act II in “Yank!,” a musical about a gay romance during World War II. ...

The poet John Milton and the filmmaker Douglas Sirk are the main sources of inspiration for the latest act of cultural deconstruction from the rowdy theater company Radiohole. ...

The Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda performed at Europa in Brooklyn, on Tuesday night, its first public show since coming to the United States in late 2008. ...

On Friday at Carnegie Hall, Tibet House will present its 20th benefit. ...

The lineup of the CareFusion Jazz Festival, a major new event to be produced this summer by George Wein, reflects the renowned promoter’s new ways of thinking about jazz. ...

On Tuesday, Valery Gergiev and the Maryinsky Orchestra and Chorus landed at Carnegie Hall for the first of three concerts. ...

A letter by René Descartes stolen from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s has turned up at Haverford College in eastern Pennsylvania. ...

A five-day series will present the entire output of Bong Joon-ho, a Korean writer-director who is one of the most seriously entertaining film artists around. ...

“Socrates,” a beautiful new work by the choreographer Mark Morris, had its world premiere on Tuesday as part of a triple bill at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. ...

In Joe Hill’s new novel, a man who finds himself turning into a demon, with horns sprouting from his head, struggles to stay pure of heart. ...

The Metropolitan Opera’s “Attila,” conducted by Riccardo Muti and directed by Pierre Audi, came across as a vibrant and engrossing music drama. ...

The “Elvis Presley: Fashion King” exhibition is the first show at the Presley estate that will try to illustrate the everyday side of Elvis style. ...

The Amy Bishop case frames the role of women in bloodshed in a way that is new to our culture. ...

Have 48 years ever before separated the same actress stepping up to the theatrical plate with a single role? Judi Dench does it in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," directed by Peter Hall. ...

Exploring the Braun Oral-B Sonic Complete electric toothbrush. ...

Old masters did not leave notes telling us what they really saw in the world, but the drawings that preceded their paintings say it all, notably in the case of the artist Bronzino. ...

To mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Giorgione, the town of his birth, Castelfranco, is hosting an exhibition devoted to the artist. ...

One of the pleasures of “Lourdes” is that it takes place in the space between the inexplicable (no explanation is possible) and the unexplained. ...

Ms. Clifton was a distinguished American poet whose work trained lenses wide and narrow on the experience of being black and female in the 20th century. ...

As theaters large and small struggle with issues of relevance and financing, the Huntington Theater Company has taken a new approach. ...

With so much of the garment industry moving overseas, theater and arts groups have been filling vacancies in the garment district. ...

Prominent critics want a new History channel mini-series about John F. Kennedy’s presidency halted. ...

Elif Batuman’s odd and oddly profound study of her favorite Russian authors is also an exploration of the question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books? ...

Paavo Jarvi conducted the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Monday. ...

Charles L. Mee’s montage of a play is a trip to France that could have been dreamed up by an American recluse. ...

Viola Frey’s giant ceramic sculptures of men and women are among the underappreciated wonders of late-20th-century art. ...

You don’t need to be an expert in Sanskrit aesthetics to enjoy the Magis Theater Company’s imaginatively staged production of “Shakuntala and the Ring of Recognition.” ...

On Monday night Axiom opened its final pairing of its current season with a concert devoted to works by Finnish composers. ...

The Pearl Theater Company’s excellent production of “Hard Times” is an ensemble triumph. ...

The Flying Karamazov Brothers’ current show is as close to a sure thing as can be found onstage, 100 minutes of cleverness and comedy that go by in a flash. ...

Alan Gilbert’s second season will continue the orchestra’s effort to add boldface names to its programming beyond mere solo appearances. ...

“The Pride” is a heartfelt work, with some thought-provoking observations about repression and openness. But it often feels as awkward and self-conscious as its closeted 1950s lovers. ...

A new color laboratory adds to the design company's allure as a destination. A variety of architects at Vitra help it attract about 100,000 visitors to the Weil am Rhein site every year. ...

Auctions of contemporary art at Sotheby’s and Christie’s last week, particularly of works of the post-World War II Zero movement, provoked intense bidding, and a surprising number of records were set. ...

The Lenz collection of avant-garde art from the Zero movement sold with a rare 96 percent success rate at Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday night. ...

Two plays — “Really Old, Like Forty Five” and a revival of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” — have mixed success in relaying prickly problems of everyday life. ...

Ms. Dessay sings the melodies ravishingly, with beguiling tone, supple phrasing and lovely vocal colors. ...

If designing a boat for a voyage from San Francisco to Sydney isn't daunting enough, this one also has to be environmentally irreproachable. ...

Two other rare mishaps at the Met in recent years have provided hard lessons about the difficulty of making broken masterpieces whole again. ...

A group of television writers can finally claim victory in a class-action age discrimination lawsuit, but there are indications that Hollywood’s bias against older writers is now less pervasive. ...

An ingeniously Borgesian series of jazzy, post-modernist variations on “The Odyssey” that are witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive. ...

CBS’s “Live for the Moment” is the latest spin on the bucket-list idea. The twist is that unlike with other, similar projects, the person checking off things to do before he dies is actually dying. ...

When Benito Garozzo and I played online with juniors on Dec. 30 at bridgebase.com, Garozzo’s first partner, Jan Novotny from the Czech Republic, made a great play on the diagramed deal. ...

“Venus in Fur,” David Ives’s tasty new comedy-drama, is 90 minutes of good, kinky fun. ...

The Mexican songwriter Natalia Lafourcade performed solo at S.O.B.’s on Tuesday night, playing guitar or piano and stripping away the multifarious arrangements of her songs. ...

The indie pop duo Beach House performed at the Bell House in Gowanus, Brooklyn on Tuesday night to celebrate the release of its third album, “Teen Dream.” ...

The Ashton-Ratmansky-Tharp program at the Kennedy Center, with which American Ballet Theater began its new year, proves a lavish display of the art of ballet itself. ...

Announcing its 2010-11 season on Wednesday, Carnegie said it had assigned a high-profile Perspectives series to each performer. ...

David Sarkisyan, the center of Moscow’s architectural world until he died on Jan. 7, was willing to stand up to the city’s corrupt politicians and powerful developers. ...

The Gyor National Ballet from Hungary performed at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday night. ...

Footage by the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren screened at Anthology Film Archives on Tuesday documented Haitian voodoo dances from the middle of the last century. ...

The Da Capo Chamber Players performed four works by the composer at Merkin Concert Hall on Tuesday evening, just days after the anniversary of his death. ...

Mr. Auchincloss was one of America’s pre-eminent novelists of manners and a portraitist of wealthy, white Manhattanites. ...

“Six Degrees of Separation,’' which exactly captured the mood of a city and a culture in its time, has come back in an altogether different form at the Old Vic Theater. ...

The creative legacy of the impresario Serge Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, with its stunning synthesis of music, dance, costumes and visually arresting theatrical design, is the focus of a blockbuster exhibition in Moscow. ...

Many “innovations” in design today are spurious and over-complicated. There’s no excuse for this. ...

Industry executives credit a combination of incentives for music fans to switch, including tougher action on illegal file-sharing and the spread of legal services. ...

Two auctions held at Drouot in Paris at the end of the 2009 season showed the sophistication of some of the most interesting photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries. ...

"The Merchants of Bollywood," a musical about the Hindi film industry, is set for its first worldwide tour this year. ...

An exhibition of more than 150 letters, manuscripts and other artifacts from the James S. Copley Library at Sotheby’s grounds American and literary history in their human origins. ...

The talk show host could get more than $30 million in a settlement. Other details are also being hammered out. ...

If you play duplicate, at the end of a session check your scorecard and see how often the opponents went down two or more undoubled. ...

Disaster is both one of the hardest and easiest sights to watch on television; the medium feeds on paradox, presenting extraordinary images that horrify and also comfort. ...

George Clooney, Wyclef Jean and Anderson Cooper will host the televised two-hour benefit for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti at 8 p.m. on Jan. 22. ...

The recollections of Mrs. McBride Jordan by her son, James McBride, became the basis of a best selling novel. ...

On Thursday a sell-out crowd assembled in one of the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s studios for the first New York showing of the documentary “Simone Forti: An Evening of Dance Constructions.” ...

Julian Casablancas seemed genuinely surprised that he was still a rock star when he brought his band to Terminal 5 on Thursday night, starting a two-night stand. ...

Prosecutors say the life-size statue known as the Getty Bronze, likely fashioned in ancient Greece, was smuggled out of Italy. ...

For his current recital tour the singer Philippe Jaroussky is venturing outside typical countertenor territory and exploring French mélodie. ...

The New York indie-rock band Vampire Weekend, which just released its second album, “Contra,” blends styles with a natty nonchalance that is off-putting to some but thrilling to others. ...

John Adams’s “The Wound-Dresser,” from 1988, was the central work of the New York Philharmonic’s concert on Thursday night at Avery Fisher Hall. ...

Completists, which comprise a tiny but exceptionally devoted subset of theater fans, make it their mission to see every single work by their favorite writer. ...

Call it layoff lit. Several writers have memoirs and novels forthcoming that describe the fallout of losing a job, a house or an investment account. ...

The SF Sketchfest comedy festival, which opened on Thursday, demonstrates that there are many paths to humor beyond the traditional setup-and-punch-line-centric patter. ...

Populist parties in Europe mobilize posters as weapons in their culture wars. ...

Mr. Stock was a photographer whose intimate and evocative portraits captured the essence of jazz performance and helped shape James Dean’s moody public persona. ...

Anyone who has seen clips from the Met's old closed-circuit telecasts will realize that improved technology is the reason opera is a hot commodity in movie houses now but wasn't back then. ...

A funny thing has happened imperceptibly yet unmistakably to the British theater of late: an entire generation of stage actor has pretty well passed from view. ...

Pixels operate differently on screen than they do as blobs of ink on paper, so a new typeface for the Web needed different qualities. ...

Nature, tradition and innovation are the key themes of "Japan: Power and Splendor 1568-1868," an exhibition both enchanting and enlightening, replete with treasures from that country's great public museums, foundations and private collections. ...