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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

'Born Yesterday' May Return to Broadway With a New Star

A Broadway revival of Garson Kanin’s play “Born Yesterday” is in the works for spring 2011, possibly with a relatively unknown actress in the lead role that Judy Holliday made famous more than 60 years ago, two theater executives familiar with the plans said on Tuesday.

Nina Arianda, who received rave reviews last spring and several acting awards for her first major Off Broadway performance, as Vanda in the dark comedy “Venus in Fur,” is in discussions to play Billie Dawn, the showgirl mistress of the corrupt businessman Harry Brock, according to the two executives who spoke on condition of anonymity because the revival was still in unofficial planning stages.

The actor Jim Belushi, best known from the ABC comedy “According to Jim,” is in discussions to play Brock; the two executives were not aware of who might play Paul Verrall, the good-guy journalist whose tutoring of Billie Dawn helps open her eyes to her boyfriend’s shady ways. The timing of the production depends in part on Mr. Belushi’s availability once his current television series, “The Defenders” on CBS, concludes taping this winter.

The original Broadway production of “Born Yesterday” opened in February 1946 with Ms. Holliday, Paul Douglas as Brock, and Gary Merrill as Verrall, and ran for nearly four years; Ms. Holliday went on to win an Academy Award for best actress as Billie Dawn in the 1950 film version, which included Broderick Crawford as Brock and William Holden as Verrall.

Doug Hughes is signed on to direct the revival; he most recently directed a revival of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” on Broadway, and won the Tony for best director of a play in 2005 for “Doubt.”

The producers are Philip Morgaman, Anne and Vincent Caruso, Frankie J. Grande and James P. MacGilvray. The show’s publicist, Richard Kornberg, declined to comment on Tuesday.

The play has been revived once on Broadway, in 1989, starring Madeline Kahn in a production that ran just five months.

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Cherry Lane Theater Artistic Director to Leave and Sell Building

December 21, 2010, 4:36 pm

By FELICIA R. LEE

Angelina Fiordellisi, the artistic director of the nonprofit Cherry Lane Theater, a Greenwich Village institution since 1924, will step down next year, she said on Tuesday. She said that she plans to sell the building, at 38 Commerce Street, and that constant financial struggles in recent years and the changing nature of the business had led to her decision.

In September, Ms. Fiordellisi announced that the Cherry Lane would not produce plays on its main stage for a year or longer to buy time to cope with a deficit that now stands at $250,000. Ms. Fiordellisi attributed the shortfall to a steep drop in income from government and foundation support, ticket sales and rental fees.

“It’s frightening to me, what’s happened to Off Broadway theater,” said Ms. Fiordellisi, who plans to step down between March and June. “I feel that we can longer do theater for the sake of the art form. We have to adhere to the formula of having a film star in our productions to sell tickets because it’s so financially prohibitive. I don’t want to do theater like that.”

Still, Ms. Fiordellisi said, her tenure at the theater has been “just glorious” because of the chance to “revive the spirit” of the theater and to produce work by playwrights of the caliber of Edward Albee. She has identified strong candidates to succeed her, she said, pending approval by the theater’s board.

Despite its fabled past — the theater was started by a group of artists who were colleagues of Edna St. Vincent Millay and has showcased work by Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard — it had not staged a play in two years when Ms. Fiordellisi bought it for $1.7 million in 1996 and renovated it for $3 million. She hopes to sell it for $12 million, Ms. Fiordellisi said, adding that she had some interested buyers. The price includes the 179-seat main stage and a 60-seat studio.

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Five-Million-Book Google Database Gets a Workout, and a Debate, in Its First Days

Ngram, Google’s new searchable dataset of words and phrases from 5.2 million published books, got quite a workout on its first day. Within 24 hours after its launching last Thursday afternoon, more than a million queries were run.

Various Web sites have had fun with the new technological toy since its unveiling, running idiosyncratic searches on topics of interest. For example, Tablet magazine focused on Jewish topics. The Atlantic compared “vampire” and “zombie,” and asked whether “pen” is mightier than “sword.” And Jezebel played with terminology about sex and relationships.

On an enormous scale, the database is the kind of resource that humanities scholars are increasingly using for their research, the subject of a New York Times series. And scholars and other interested observers have vigorously debated the reliability of this sort of data, pointing out previous problems with Google Books, including mistakes in dates, misattributed authors and errors in the actual texts as a result of misinterpretations by the automated scanning devices that copy the books.

Geoff Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been critical of Google Books data, still has his complaints, as he outlined in a Chronicle of Higher Education article. But he conceded that the error rate is much improved in this dataset.

Jean-Baptiste Michel, who designed the database with Google, said by e-mail this weekend that the team recognized that including information with errors was worse than not including it at all, so all books that did not pass strict standards for accurate labeling and scanning were filtered out.

“That is why we end up working with 5.2 million books and not the whole 15 million,” Mr. Michel wrote. (The 15 million figure refers to the number of published books that Google has digitally scanned so far.) “These filtering algorithms took us over a year to improve to our satisfaction. Indeed, if we hadn’t worked on them, we’d have published our very first version of the Ngrams, totally unfiltered, back in 2008.”

Their methodology is explained in detail in the supplemental materials attached to the paper by Mr. Michel and his collaborator, Erez Lieberman Aiden, published in the journal Science.

For their paper, Mr. Michel and Mr. Lieberman Aiden based their research on books published in English from 1800 to 2000. “We do not consider that trajectories outside of English 1800-2000 are scientifically validated,” Mr. Michel wrote. “In particular, before 1800 there are just too few books: one does not have enough statistical power.”

So while you can search back to 1500 on the Ngram database, don’t try using the information you might find to win tenure.

Mr. Lieberman Aiden, who has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, also addressed the criticism that no humanists were on the research team. “I don’t think this is a very fair criticism,” he wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday. “I studied philosophy at Princeton as an undergrad, got a master’s degree in Jewish history, and actually took a leave of absence from a Ph.D. program in Jewish history when I went to grad school in the sciences (I did not return).

“Two of our other authors, Joseph Pickett (Ph.D., English language and literature, University of Michigan) and Dale Hoiberg (Ph.D., Chinese literature, University of Chicago), are the executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary and the editor in chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, respectively; although not academics, they are certainly humanists of profound influence whose expertise directly bears on the contents of the paper,” he added. “Furthermore, we spoke with dozens of other humanists throughout the development of the project, as can be seen in our acknowledgments.”

You can read more about the researchers’ work at www.culturomics.org.

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Sunday, December 19, 2010

The Week in Culture Pictures, Dec. 17

ArtsBeat is a Web site devoted to culture news and reviews, and to the work and interests of the reporters and critics of the culture department of The New York Times. Come here for breaking stories about the arts, coverage of live events, interviews with leading cultural figures, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more.

We welcome your input: Send your feedback and tips to artsbeat@nytimes.com and learn more about our commenting policy here.

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Another Legal Twist In Ansel Adams Case

December 17, 2010, 7:35 pm

By REYHAN HARMANCI

The legal dispute between a California man who says a box of glass-plate negatives he bought at a garage sale are the work of Ansel Adams and the famed photographer’s trust has entered a new phase.

On Thursday, the man, Rick Norsigian, and PRS Media Partners filed a counterclaim against the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust in federal court in San Francisco. The trust, which disputes that the images are Adams’s work, filed suit against Mr. Norsigian and others in August, asserting that their sale of prints made from the negatives was a trademark violation.

Now Mr. Norsigian argues in his countersuit that the trust slandered him and engaged in a civil conspiracy. The slander case arises from comments made by William Turnage, the managing trustee, who told CNN that the authentication effort was the work of “a bunch of crooks” and likened it to the “big lie” technique of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. The suit also contends that e-mails between Mr. Turnage and the Center for Creative Photography, the Adams photo archive at the University of Arizona, depict him as objecting to the center’s neutral stance in the dispute, which it eventually reversed with a statement.

Mr. Norsigian’s lawyer contends the statement by the center, which is not a defendant, “diminished the value” of the find. Bob Steinberg, a lawyer for the trust, told The Bay Citizen that he viewed the counterclaim as a sideshow. “We will show these statements by Bill Turnage did not influence the C.C.P.,” he said.

The Norsigian prints, priced at $1,500 and $7,500, were still being sold on Friday.

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War and Then Maybe Peace: Eric Braeden and Neil Patrick Harris on Twitter

The actors Eric Braeden and Neil Patrick Harris, a star of the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” seem to have called a truce in their Twitter war on Friday.

Mr. Braeden, a star of the daytime soap opera “The Young and the Restless,” had previously been featured on “Mother” as the father of a character played by Cobie Smulders. He was to have reprised that role in a shoot on Thursday night, but withdrew abruptly, prompting an angry Twitter message from Mr. Harris.

Mr. Harris, after referring to Mr. Braeden with a mildly obscene word, wrote on his Twitter account that Mr. Braeden “agreed to a cameo, then last night bailed, saying the part wasn’t ’substantial’ enough.”

Mr. Braeden shot back, saying on Friday that Mr. Harris “needs a little spanking, that one.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Braeden did not dispute Mr. Harris’s account of events, saying that he had been recovering from recent hip surgery and when he works, “it needs to be more than just two lines.”

Mr. Braeden said he wished the crew of “Mother” well. But of Mr. Harris, he said, “I don’t know this fellow, but he seems to be one of those young whippersnappers with a lot of hubris” who should “be a little more circumspect before he engages in character assassination.”

Mr. Braeden added: “I’ve been in this business 50 years. I have seen them all come and go. He should save his money.”

Mr. Harris wrote on his Twitter that Mr. Braeden’s role had been given to the actor Ray Wise, “a fantastic actor who makes any part ’substantial.’ ”

Then, in a subsequent post he stepped back from his earlier comments: “Now I feel bad,” for calling Mr. Braeden a name, he wrote. “Don’t know the guy personally. I’m just fiercely protective of our show.”

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Thursday, December 16, 2010

American Express Gives $100,000 to Help Ellis Island Group

December 15, 2010, 5:00 pm

By ROBIN POGREBIN

On the brink of extinction last spring, the nonprofit organization charged with restoring Ellis Island will benefit from a $100,000 gift from American Express, the credit card company is to announce on Thursday.

“It’s an enormous boost,” said Judith R. McAlpin, the president of the organization, Save Ellis Island. “American Express has long been associated with the very best in historic preservation. It’s like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.”

The donation, the company said, was prompted by an article in The New York Times about how Save Ellis Island was struggling to continue the restoration of 29 buildings on the 27.5 acre historic immigrant gateway to America. “We’re trying to help them help themselves so they’re able to raise more money not just for the restoration of the buildings — they need general operating support,” Timothy J. McClimon, president of the American Express Foundation, said. “People are in love with the buildings, they’re passionate about the buildings — that’s kind of the easy money. But how do you sustain yourself as an organization?”

What Save Ellis Island needs most, Mr. McClimon said, is to build its fund-raising capacity by strengthening its board and development staff. As a result, American Express will make its donation through the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which will provide expertise. The trust included Ellis Island on its list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places twice in the 1990s.

Mr. McClimon left open the possibility that American Express might contribute more in the future. “We’re very positive about Save Ellis Island,” he said. “We think they have great potential.”

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