lemonwade

Marilyn Monroe is on offer at the Shed, the new, $475 million arts center of Hudson Yards, where Anne Carson’s “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” opened on Tuesday night. “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” — which is less a play than a staged poem — is the premiere production at the 500-seat Griffin Theater. Carson is the esteemed Canadian poet, classicist, professor and translator, known, as Ben Brantley puts it, “for playfully finding serious links between the ancient past and the evanescent present.” Renee Fleming and Ben Whishaw (pictured) are the performers, and they are marvelous. But the evening is exasperating.

Jeff Wells writes: ‘Compare these color portraits of Audrey Hepburn — the first taken sometime in the mid ’40s in Holland, when Hepburn was in her mid teens, and the second during the making of William Wyler‘s Roman Holiday(’53), or sometime in ’52 when Hepburn was 23. Seven or eight years, the right kind of hair length and style, and especially the right kind of makeup and photographic lighting can make for a world of difference If you didn’t know Hepburn or her films, the Holland shot wouldn’t necessarily scream “glamorous Hollywood movie star to be.” It’s a portrait of a plain, pleasant-looking teenager but no drop-dead beauty queen in the making.’

Two teenagers were charged Monday with setting the January fire that destroyed the Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Conn., a 1,500-seat venue that once featured performances by Oscar-winning actors. The theater, which opened in 1955 and closed about three decades later, was modeled after the Globe Theater in England, which burned down in the 17th century. The Connecticut theater once featured performances by Katharine Hepburn, Helen Hayes and Christopher Walken.