What Big Ears!

The stories about Francis Albert Sinatra are endless. Two decades before Beatlemania hit the States, thousands of girls queued around the block so they could see the short, skinny kid from Hoboken sing while they cried, screamed and fainted. He had a thick New Jersey accent and a thin skin, punching one critic in the back of the head and physically threatening other members of the press. His friendship with mob members and their goons supposedly helped him out of a recording contract and for decades the FBI kept a file on him running to thousands of pages. He was close friends with Marilyn Monroe and gifted her a dog; she named it “Maf”, short for Mafia Honey, just to wind him up. At the age of 48, he dated a teenage Mia Farrow and the two eventually married in 1966.

BWW Reviewer Peter Nason chooses the 101 greatest scenes in cinema from 1901 to 2020. See if your favorite movie moments made the list!

Russia's profound and far-reaching impact on 20th-century culture will be explored at the 2013 annual Bard SummerScape festival, which once again offers an extraordinary summer of music, opera, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, keyed to the theme of the 24th annual Bard Music Festival, Stravinsky and His World. Presented in the striking Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College's bucolic Hudson River campus, the seven-week festival opens on July 6 with the first of two performances of A Rite (2013) by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company, and closes on August 18 with a party in Bard's beloved Spiegeltent, which returns for the full seven weeks. Complementing the Bard Music Festival's exploration of “Stravinsky and His World,” some of the great Russian-born composer's most captivating compatriots provide key SummerScape highlights. These include the first fully-staged American production of Sergey Taneyev's opera Oresteia; the world premiere of an original stage adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's seminal novel The Master and Margarita; and a film festival titled “Between Traditions: Stravinsky's Legacy and Russian Emigré Cinema.” Together, SummerScape's offerings will continue Bard's yearlong tenth-anniversary celebrations for the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center, which commence with a month of special performances in April.

Opening this week at the Marriott Theatre in Chicago's far north suburban collar community of Lincolnshire is one of the first post-Broadway productions of "Hairspray," one of this decade's biggest hits and longest running Broadway shows, based on a hit movie and the basis for yet another....