The Vargas Blog

A strike at the Metropolitan Opera has been averted as the house management and various unions have agreed to new contract terms. For tho...

Louis Langrée put together an interesting concert to end the Mostly Mozart festival at Lincoln Center this weekend. He chose the 1973 pi...

We Are Not Ourselves the powerful first novel by my friend Matthew Thomas is due to hit bookstores all over America tomorrow.  I was luc...

Ever wonder what happens when a museum closes its doors to visitors after a long day of tours and tourists? According to Alvis Hermanis t...

The incomparable Licia Albanese , an Italian soprano, and a mainstay at the Metropolitan Opera for 26 seasons, died last night at her ho...

A sold-out event is happening at the Salzburg Festival on August 21 at the Grosses Festspielhaus .  Conductor Daniel Barenboim and his W...

  Medea by Euripides , written nearly two and a half millennia ago, is the archetypal revenge tragedy, and the ultimate portrait of the ...

You don't get too many celebrations when you are 201 years old.  But last year's Richard Wagner 's bicentennial celebrations...

  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes constantly poses the question whether Man and Ape can co-exist in a ravaged world where a virus has wip...

In August of 1857 Richard Wagner stepped away from the massive half-completed Ring of the Nibelung (he had already fully orchestrated Da...

Waiting for Godot , Samuel Beckett 's post-war absurdist play: bleak? Impenetrable? The abyss?  Not on your life!  This production, di...

In David O. Russell 's American Hustle , a recreation of the Abscam scandal: an F.B.I. sting operation that led to the arrest of sever...

In "Show Biz Bugs ," a 1957 Warner Brothers cartoon directed by Friz Freleng , Daffy Duck is furious that Bugs Bunny has gotten ...

No Man's Land is Harold Pinter 's 1975 play, first produced at the National Theatre of Great Britain, with a stellar cast featuri...

A 1960s Greenwich Village folk singer: a modern-day Ulysses on a circular odyssey that goes nowhere is the premise of Joel and Ethan Coen ...

Nebraska is Alexander Payne 's new film: a rumination on old age, the heartbrake of unfulfilled dreams, the eternal struggle between ...

Walter Mitty started life as the "hero" of a short story by James Thurber that first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker maga...

The New York Film Festival opened on Friday with Captain Phillips , the new film from director Paul Greengrass , which recounts the true-...

Opening Night of the MET almost turned into a circus last night as a group of protesters entered the house, and started shouting "Pu...

It seems rare, and even out of place, for the New York Film Festival to present a romantic comedy like Richard Curtis 's About Time ....