The Vargas Blog

Last Saturday afternoon I tried, without much success, to get tickets to see Doubt . Unfortunately, all they had left were partial-view seat...

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was Edward Albee's first full-length play, his first play on Broadway, and surely the work for whic...

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang , one of the last big movie musicals written for the screen -- it opened in 1968!, is now the latest "film-turn...

I knew it was going to happen, and I called it at the end of my entry for April 8. As the winner of the Papal election, the former Cardinal ...

Finally, the awaited new Peter Sellars production of Tristan und Isolde premiered at the Bastille. The following is the New York Times revi...

The collaborative culmination between director Josef von Sternberg and superstar Marlene Dietrich ocurred in 1935 with the last film that th...

Thursday, April 7 was a long day's journey into night and beyond for me. I taught the entire day, and during the afternoon showed my Fil...

The production of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar , that is about to open at the Belasco, is a bloody and noisy reading of this vene...

Last Saturday, March 19, Symphony Space celebrated composer Stephen Sondheim's 75th birthday with a gigantic marathon of the composer...

On Saturday night, I went to the MET to hear my first Der Rosenkavalier . After almost thirty years of attending opera, I had never gone to ...

At the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the new production of Parsifal , which premiered on March 19, was greeted with roars of boos from...

The roster of works and performers for the Metropolitan Opera's 2005-2006 season has just been posted on the MET's new website . The...

The new production of Tristan und Isolde that is currently in preparation at the Bastille Opéra in Paris is the culmination of "The Tr...

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates" an installation that was in the works for two decades, and which captivated New York C...

While New York City suffers through an unbearable Wagner dearth, The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden is basking in the glory of its new pro...

Sad, sad news: if you currently Image Google the word Constantine , your first hit will be a still showing Keanu Reeves, as renegade occulti...

Does Chris Rock's rude and irreverent view of the world qualify him to host film's most prestigious gala event? Should his race-obse...

This weekend will be my final two performances of Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms with the New York City Ballet, at the New York ...

In a coincidental phenomenon, stemming from the lore of urban legend, and usually associated with show-business, the world lost three of its...