Thank you for giving me more excruciatingly dull evenings in the theatre than any other playwright. (Many more indifferent evenings than exciting ones, I’m afraid. And not just in New York but in London.) In your honor, here’s an interactive game for LW readers. Could Richard III handle Hamlet in a punch-up? Is Benedick more fanciable than Beatrice? Is Falstaff craftier than Cleopatra?
When People magazine says someone is the most beautiful person alive, they usually mean someone white (Gwyneth) or American (Beyonce). So imagine my shock when I heard the news that this year the celebrity rag decided to bestow the beautiful designation on Lupita. (Let’s just drop her last name, k? She’s a screen goddess now.) Now that Loopy has her big beauty-products contract and her People cover she can finally tell us what her next acting project will be.
Lykke Li’s new album “I Never Learn” hits shelves May 5 internationally (May 6 in North America), via LL/Atlantic. Now, in anticipation of the forthcoming LP, the Swedish pop singer has shared a remix for “No Rest for the Wicked” which features several verses from A$AP Rocky. In addition to pulling off a creative rhyme scheme (“wiki me,” “Lykke Li,” “Eazy-E”), the rapper offers some sound (if pessimistic) love advice: “If love don’t work, it just gon’ hurt/It all goes bad, it just get worse.”
“Inherent Vice,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie based on the Pynchon novel, won’t be shown until one of the early-autumn film festivals, but it’s already inspiring all kinds of fan adulation online. Latest example: this poster created by Alex Fellows, inspired by the book’s plot. Michiko Kakucrazy said: ‘It’s a simple shaggy-dog detective story that pits likable dopers against the Los Angeles Police Department and its ‘countersubversive’ agents, a novel in which paranoia is less a political or metaphysical state than a byproduct of smoking too much weed.’
Just another day for Justin Bieber. He blundered his way into one of the world’s great geopolitical hotspots this week, paying tribute to some of Japan’s most notorious WWII war criminals while visiting Tokyo. According to the popstar’s Twitter and Instagram accounts, he dropped in on the city’s notorious Yasukuni Shrine, a religious site that has been a constant source of high-level diplomatic dispute between China and Japan. Former military leaders from Japan’s imperial army — including 14 class-A war criminals — who orchestrated mass atrocities in China and other areas of Asia during the Pacific War are believed to have their souls enshrined there. Maybe it’s time for Bieber to avoid anything to do with World War II: when he visited the Anne Frank House he said he hoped she would have been “a bilieber.”
The Financial Times has published my review of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” now in revival on Broadway starring Neil Patrick Harris (pictured). Bottom line: “A veteran not only of sitcoms but also of gender-bending stage shows such as ‘Rent’ and ‘Cabaret,’ Harris is ideally experienced to deliver Hedwig’s low jokes as well as its rock ’n’ roll kick-outs.”
Milo Moiré gives birth to her PlopEgg paintings naked. It’s a long way from the groundbreaking power of performance art pioneers…and gives those who satirize the art world yet another target.
