Theater Talkback: The Season of the Sputtering Starlet

From left, Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images; Thibault Camus/Associated Press; Damon Winter/The New York Times From left: Katie Holmes, Jessica Chastain and Scarlett Johansson.

The geese who fly east from Hollywood on an annual basis, looking for a little Broadway luster to boost their showbiz stock, aren’t laying as many golden eggs as they normally do this season. As Patrick Healy noted recently, the box office at the Richard Rodgers Theater, where Scarlett Johansson is starring in a revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” has not exactly been inundated since the show opened to middling reviews in January. Nor did Katie Holmes’s ballyhooed return to Broadway after a tumultuous few years as constant tabloid fodder do much for “Dead Accounts,” the Theresa Rebeck play that closed quickly in the fall after opening to sour reviews and sluggish ticket sales.

Call it the season of the sputtering starlet. Jessica Chastain’s starring performance in the fall revival of “The Heiress” helped that show to achieve reasonable returns at the box office - it recouped its investment before closing â€" but her dismayingly nuance-free performance as the oppressed Catherine Sloper ranks as one of the most regrettable star turns I’ve seen on Broadway in years.

Or at least it did until I saw Emilia Clarke’s strained Holly Golightly in the numbing stage adaptation of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” the other night. Ms. Clarke was obviously cast because she’s a star of the hot HBO series “Game of Thrones.” But, like Ms. Chastain, she seemed sadly deficient in stage technique, and gave a performance so arch that she didn’t merely seem to be playing a little girl lost; she seemed truly to be at sea on stage, and was more or less swallowed up in the busy emptiness of Sean Mathias’s listless production.

It’s never fun to see talented actors losing their bearings when they are miscast or misdirected onstage. But might there be some sort of silver lining here An end to the cynical gold-digging that has producers recklessly shoehorning stars into any conceivable vehicle Maybe the lackluster returns for these star-driven production might awaken Broadway producers to the signal fact that merely signing up a celebrity does not qualify as an intelligent or profitable business strategy in the theater.

Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images Julia Roberts, center, with Paul Rudd, left, and Bradley Cooper during the opening night curtain call of the Broadway play “Three Days of Rain” in 2006.

For quite a while it seemed as if it did: although Nicole Kidman was more game than truly accomplished in “The Blue Room,” the David Hare play was one of the hotter tickets on Broadway that season. The Broadway debut of Julia Roberts, in a revival of Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain,” similarly caused a downpour at the box office, despite her own effortful but undistinguished performance. But it may be that celebrity visits to Broadway have now become so commonplace that ticket-buyers are no longer leaping to their phones (or computers) to snag tickets whenever they see a familiar name on a marquee.

Of course this micro-trend may soon be reversed, and it’s worth noting that a star of sufficient magnitude can ride out even scathing reviews and other bad press, as Al Pacino did this season in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”And at least three more shows headlining major stars are still to come: the Nora Ephron play “Lucky Guy,” with the ever-likable Tom Hanks; “Orphans,” starring Alec Baldwin; and “I’ll Eat You Last,” with Bette Midler portraying the voracious Hollywood agent Sue Mengers. Should these shows burn up the box office - “Lucky Guy” has already racked up a strong advance - there’s little chance that the steady stream of ill-conceived (or not) celebrity-driven production will abate any time soon.

In fact the Broadway landscape as it is currently constituted will probably continue to make way for any big name of sufficient wattage, no matter how mismatched role and actor may be. If Jennifer Lawrence, Hollywood’s Oscar-winning “it” girl of the moment, decided she wanted to make her stage debut as Lady Macbeth, or Hedda Gabler, or Anne Frank for that matter, producers would surely be elbowing each other out of the way to clamber aboard.

Still, I can dream, can’t I

Please share your thoughts on this starlet-spangled season, or whether star casting has become more reckless and indiscriminate lately.

Man Freed After Unjust Jailing

Michael Appleton for The New York Times David Ranta, 58, who has been in prison for
more than 20 years for a murder he did not commit, spoke to reporters in Brooklyn on Thursday after his release from custody. Mr. Ranta had been convicted of murdering a Hasidicrabbi.

Latin America Nations Object to Paris Antiquities Auction

Four Latin American nations have objected to an auction this weekend in Paris by Sotheby’s because they say some of the 300 items of pre-Columbian art to be sold were illegally exported.

But Sotheby’s said in a statement that it believes all of the works were legally obtained by the collectors and the sale Friday and Saturday will go forward.

Peru, Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica have all objected to the auction, which features items from the private Barbier-Mueller collection. Peru has asked for the return of 67 objects, according to antiquities experts, while Mexico says 51 have suspect provenance and Guatemala has put claims on 13 items. It is not clear how many items Costa Rica has disputed. All four nations have cited cultural property laws in making their claims.

The Mexican complaint was earlier reported by the Associated Press.

In its statement, Sotheby’s said: “We have had dialogue with several nations and given careful consideration to their concerns about this sale, and we continue to welcome discussion regarding any new information on specific issues.

But, the statement continued: “Over the course of the past six months, Sotheby’s thoroughly researched the provenance of this collection and we are confident in offering these works for auction.

On its Website, Sotheby’s says the collection was started by Josef Mueller in 1920 and augmented by Mr. Mueller’s son-in-law, Jean-Paul Barbier-Mueller. Several items in the sale are valued at more than $2 million, but the bulk of the items have sale estimates between $10,000 to $50,000. The auction house estimates that the sale overall will bring in somewhere between $19 million and $24 million.

Eastwood and Aronofsky, Live at Tribeca

Clint Eastwood and Darren Aronofsky will engage in a public dialogue about the art of film directing at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, one of a score of panel discussions scheduled during the event, which runs from April 17 to April 28.

Mr. Aronofsky, the director of “Black Swan” and the coming “Noah,” will interview Mr. Eastwood on April 27 in front of an audience at Borough of Manhattan Community College after the premiere of “Eastwood Directs: The Untold Story,” a documentary.

In another panel discussion, the director Richard Linklater will talk with the actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy about “Before Midnight,” the third in a series that begin with their 1995 romantic film “Before Sunrise.” Other highlights include a conversation between the director Jay Roach (“Game Change”) and the actor Ben Stiller, and one between the director Mira Nair (“Monsoon Wedding”) and the actress Bryce Dallas Howard. A full schedule of the Tribeca Talks series can be found at the festival’s Web site.

Playwrights Horizons Season To Range from Simpsons to Kama Sutra

Playwrights Horizons is once again putting women front and center in the company’s 2013-2014 season, staging four plays by women, including two world premieres. Three of the first five plays the Off Broadway company announced on Thursday will also be directed by women.

The season will begin with “Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play,” a post-apocalyptic tale by Anne Washburn about a future in which the “Cape Feare” episode of the “The Simpsons” is all that remains of Western literature. The play was unveiled last year at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C., to good reviews. The New York production will have the same director, Steve Cosson, and previews start Aug. 23.

Playwrights will also host the premieres of “The Patron Saint of Sea Monsters,” by Marlane Meyer and directed by Lisa Peterson; and “The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence,” by Madeleine George and directed by Leigh Silverman.

“Patron Saint,” a comedy about a determined romantic who falls for a hard-drinking womanizer, will begin on Oct. 18. “Watson Intelligence” is a time-jumping meditation on man and machine, revolving around four characters named Watson â€" Sherlock’s Holmes sidekick, the engineer who built the first telephone, a supercomputer that won “Jeopardy!” and a present-day technology lover. It opens in November.

Beginning in May 2014, the company plans to stage “Fly By Night: A New Musical” by Kim Rosenstock, Will Connolly and Michael Mitnick, a darkly comic rock fable about a lowly sandwich-maker set against the blackout of 1965. The show had its premiere at TheaterWorks in Palo Alto, Calif., in July 2011, but has never been produced in New York.

Also on the schedule for next spring is “Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra,” a new play by the Texas playwright Kirk Lynn, directed by Anne Kauffman (“Belleville”). It is a comedy about a married couple who agree to re-enact their sexual histories for one another.

The current Playwrights Horizons season includes plays by Annie Baker, Amy Herzog, Tanya Barfield, and Lisa D’Amour, with Ms. Kauffman and Ms. Silverman among the directors.

An All-Female Band, Making Its Way in the World of Mariachi

One is German, another a New Yorker of Egyptian descent. Others are Cuban-American, Colombian, Dominican and Argentine.

These are the unlikely members of Mariachi Flor de Toloache, a New York mariachi band. Even more unlikely: all of the band’s nine members are women, the pioneers of what they believe is the city’s first all-female mariachi ensemble.

In 21st-century New York City, it may not be surprising to see women popping up in what are traditionally men’s roles. But despite a few notable female performers, mariachi has always been, and continues to be, male-dominated, though a few all-female mariachi groups have begun to gain prominence on the West Coast and in the southwestern United States.

“It’s such a macho culture,” said Mireya Ramos, 31, Flor de Toloache’s co-founder and lead singer, who is half Dominican and half Mexican, but grew up in Puerto Rico listening to her Mexican father’s mariachi recordings and performances. She recalled giving voice lessons to Mexican women whose husbands would not permit them to sing in public. “Even in America, their husbands are really like, oh, you couldn’t do these kinds of things,” she said.

Marcus Yam for The New York Times Mariachi Flor de Toloache performing at El Museo del Barrio. Members believe they are the only all-women mariachi band in New York City.

Ms. Ramos founded the band about five years ago after joining another (male) mariachi band, then teaming up with a few female musicians she had met performing around the city. None had much, if any, experience in mariachi.

For some of the band’s members, performing mariachi for the first time required greater effort than simply learning new songs. Ms. Ramos’s co-founder, Shae Fiol, 34, a half-Cuban singer from Oregon whose pre-mariachi accomplishments included an original album of soul music, had to learn how to play the vihuela, a small guitar-like instrument. (Other mariachi instruments are more familiar, like the trumpet, flute and violin.)

Ms. Fiol could already play guitar, so the mechanics of the vihuela were not difficult to grasp, she said, but she is still getting used to the foreign rhythms of Latin-style music.

The learning curve had not deterred her from agreeing to join Ms. Ramos’s mariachi experiment: “I think I was feeling adventurous,” she said with a laugh.

With no formal vihuela training, she would ask every vihuela player she came across during the band’s early days for tips. They, and their bandmates, were all male.

While those mariachis were generous with help, Ms. Fiol and Ms. Ramos said, Flor de Toloache has had some skeptics, most recently when Ms. Fiol, Ms. Ramos and the band’s guitarron (bass) player, Veronica Medellin, filmed a ChapStick commercial with a short, catchy song about the lip balm. A few commenters on the YouTube video of the commercial decried their performance as inauthentic, with one commenter posting, in Spanish, “That’s not mariachi!” He said the commercial was “disrespectful.”

Most of the criticism focuses on the fact that they are not all Mexican, rather than on their gender. Ms. Medellin is the only full Mexican; Ms. Ramos is half. But the other players have quickly taken to mariachi: Eva Lou, the band’s German violinist, now writes original songs for the group despite having no background in Latin music.

“Most often people look at us and make an assumption because of the way we look, and maybe they project some of that onto what we’re about to play,” Ms. Fiol said. “But when they hear us playing it’s like, ‘Oh, they definitely sound legitimate.’”

Their performances - they are scheduled to perform on Saturday at Rockwood Music Hall â€" do hew to tradition in other ways. Alongside jazz standards, Brazilian songs, Outkast riffs, an Adele cover and other arrangements that nod to their diverse backgrounds, their repertoire includes Mexican classics like “La Negra,” “El Cascabel” and “El Rey,” and they play the same instruments as other mariachi groups. They say it is important to them that whatever they perform, be it a classic or an original song, they respect traditional rhythms and styles.

But Ms. Ramos founded the band to be innovative, and the musicians say their diversity, and the fact that they live in New York, gives them extra license to experiment. Ms. Fiol said she thought mariachi, like other musical genres that migrated north, was in the process of evolving.

“We’re surrounded by so many different cultures and so many different kinds of music, we just feel, culturally, like we can do it,” she said. “We’re a mix of backgrounds, musically and ethnically, nationally â€" we like to display all that. And why not”

And why not embrace their femininity, too, as with the name Ms. Ramos chose Toloache is a kind of poisonous night flower that, according to tradition, has been used in Central America for love potions for centuries. Appropriate, Ms. Ramos thought, since three of the band’s original members were recovering from painful breakups at the time of the band’s founding. A friend suggested she add “flor,” flower, for a further feminine touch.

When it came to their costumes, however, Ms. Ramos and Ms. Fiol made a counterintuitive choice: pants, the traditional male mariachi attire, black and ornamented with metallic hardware, which Ms. Ramos’s mother and the musicians sewed themselves. Their reasoning was not entirely what you might think: they said they found the men’s wear more flattering than the long skirts female mariachis normally wear.

Still, Ms. Ramos said she got a small, subversive thrill from donning a costume like the one her father used to wear.

“Wearing the suit, it’s kind of empowering,” she said. “You’re like, ‘I can wear this suit, too.’”

Spend Sunday Online With Pink Floyd

Back in the 1970s, fans of Pink Floyd were known to gather in small groups around their stereos, often in darkened living rooms, imbibe their drug of choice and listen to “The Dark Side of the Moon” in its entirety.

How times have changed. As the album turns 40 on Sunday, the band has turned that stoner ritual into an online interactive activity. Starting after midnight in England (or 8:00 p.m. Saturday Eastern), fans are being invited to stream the album on PinkFloyd.com and to send their memories, photos and comments about the album over Twitter with the hashtag #DarkSide40. The Web site will monitor the tweets and slowly darken an image of the moon as they flood in, EMI Music announced on Wednesday.

One of the best-selling albums of all time, “Dark Side” was Pink Floyd’s first No. 1 album in the United States and remained on the American chart for 741 weeks between 1973 and 1988. The prism on the cover has become an icon of 1970s progressive rock. The original designer, Storm Thorgerson, has created 14 variations on the prism that will be unveiled over time on the band’s site in honor of the anniversary.

Ai Weiwei to Let 1,000 Tents Bloom in Germany

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei plans to create a major installation at a festival in Germany this summer consisting of 1,000 tents set up along the Emscher River, the BBC reported.

The artist, a dissident whose travel has been restricted by the Chinese government, will oversee the project from his studio in Beijing. An outspoken critic of China’s authoritarian government, Mr. Ai was jailed for 81 days in 2011 without being charged and the government has since denied him a passport.

The installation will be part of the Emscherkunst triennial arts festival in the Ruhr region, running from June 22 to Oct. 6. Mr. Ai plans to give each tent unusual features, and two or three people will be invited to stay in them for a low, symbolic price. “The idea is to let normal people participate” in the work, the curator, Florian Matzner said.

Mr. Ai also announced recently that he is making a foray into music, recording a heavy metal album. He said he became interested in composing new rock music while in jail, after his guards asked him to sing and he realized he knew only Chinese revolutionary songs.

Marvel’s ‘Age of Ultron’ Features Controversial Angel

The appearance of Angela in a Marvel comic was kept under wraps for a remarkably long time.

Mexican New Yorkers Are More Likely to Live in Poor Households

People of Mexican descent in New York City are far more likely to be living in poor or near-poor households than other Latinos, blacks, whites or Asians, according to a study to be released on Thursday.

Nearly two-thirds of the city’s Mexican residents, including immigrants and the native-born, are living in low-income households, compared with 55 percent of all Latinos; 42 percent of blacks and Asians; and 25 percent of whites, said the report by the Community Service Society, a research and advocacy group in New York City that focuses on poverty.

The rates are even more pronounced for children: About 79 percent of all Mexicans under age 16 in New York City live in low-income households, with about 45 percent living below the poverty line â€" significantly higher percentages than any other major Latino group as well as the broader population.

While the Mexican immigrants enjoy exceptionally high rates of employment, their salaries are not sufficient to support young families, the study’s authors said.

“Immigrant Mexicans appear to be having great difficulty making ends meet as they start families here,” said the study, which sought to assess socio-economic trends among young people of Mexican origin in New York City. “Incomes that might support one individual on their own or in a shared household are not enough to support a family.”

“The result could be a cycle of poverty that will pass down from generation to generation,” the authors warned.

The study defined low-income households as those making below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is equivalent to about $38,000 for a family of three.

The study was commissioned by the Deutsche Bank Foundation following the publication of an article in The New York Times in 2011 about extraordinarily low educational achievement among Mexican immigrants in New York City. The foundation has also started an initiative intended to improve the educational and economic achievement of the Mexican population in New York City, with an emphasis on children and their families.

The study reaffirmed The Times’s statistical and anecdotal findings about low educational achievement among first-generation Mexican immigrants. Based largely on data from the American Community Survey, the report did not try to analyze the legal status of its focus populations.

The researchers identified what they called “a promising sign” for the city’s growing Mexican population: about 67 percent of all native-born Mexicans between 16 and 24 living in the city were enrolled in school, a higher percentage than Puerto Ricans (54 percent) as well as native-born Dominicans (64 percent), native-born blacks (60 percent) and native-born whites (64 percent), though lower than native-born Asians (78 percent).

Still, even this finding was cast in shadow by more bleak data: Mexican youth who have left school â€" native-born and foreign-born alike â€" have considerably lower levels of educational attainment than their peers, with more than half lacking a high school diploma.

“The fact that native-born Mexican young people are less likely than other Latinos (and other racial/ethnic groups) to attain high school diplomas and enroll in college is extremely troubling,” the report said.

The authors concluded their study by recommending policy initiatives that would provide more educational and social support for Mexican children, families and low-wage workers, including increasing access to job training and English-language programs and raising the minimum wage, something that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and state lawmakers are hoping to achieve.

Ken Levine Talks About His New Video Game

Irrational Games A character called the Motorized Patriot.

Through a combination of obsessive hard work, an affable personality and marketing savvy, Ken Levine has become one of the most beloved creators of narratively fulfilling, big-budget video games. Not only do his BioShock games sell well (the first sold over five million copies), but they are also taught in colleges and parsed in the same way as, say, David Lynch’s film “Mulholland Drive” was analyzed by critics.

Gore Verbinski tried to bring the horror-themed BioShock (2007) to the big screen. But either because of budgetary constraints or creative disputes, the film was never made. It would not have been an easy movie to make. Within the 15 hours of BioShock story are layers of plot with twists and turns in a tale influenced by Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Though the game is its own movie, Mr. Levine would like to tackle the film script. He did, after all, begin his career as a screenwriter.

With the release this week of BioShock Infinite â€" among the most anticipated new games of 2013 â€" Mr. Levine spoke from the offices of his studio in Quincy, Mass., about his influences and the game. Following are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q.

So what is a BioShock game

A.

The most important thing is that it takes place in a world that is in a fantastical, exaggerated setting. It’s incredibly detailed, but also feels familiar and believable even though it’s crazy â€" a city in the ocean or a city in the sky.

Q.

But unlike traditional narrative, there’s something exclusive to video games.

A.

The sense of player agency. You have this tool set. A player can express himself in the game in a way that’s different than another player can. You can solve the problems in the game in your own way.

Ken Levine brought his interest in pop culture and American history to BioShock Infinite.

Q.

You’ve overseen the making of a stunning, floating world called Columbia. Do you want people to stand back and check things out as opposed to rushing through and shooting

A.

You want them to check it out. But we work really hard to wear down the audience’s ability to even process. If players are immersed enough, they stop treating it as a piece of artifice and just start experiencing it.

Q.

Playing makes you feel as if you’re in an amusement park’s haunted house or at the midway.

A.

I was always fascinated by amusement parks. The highlight of my year was when the fair came to town. I thought the guys who ran the rides had the best jobs imaginable, that they must be important figures in the fabric of society to be able to do this awesome thing.

Q.

Fans might find it hard to imagine that your Mature-rated games are influenced by Disney’s G-rated rides.

A.

The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean tell you an experiential but unspecific story. It’s crude and rough, but there’s amazing artistry there, especially the Haunted Mansion. Those rides serve as prototypes for what we do. They were semi-interactive in the sense that you had control over where you looked. And your experience might be different from that of the person sitting next to you. There’s more to see than you could possibly take in.

Q.

Your character Elizabeth is a young woman kidnapped and trapped in a tower. She’s like an excited child after she’s freed by the somewhat cynical Booker. As seen through her eyes, Columbia is so bright and new. You need to give people a distinct, precise feeling about who Elizabeth and Booker are.

A.

And if we don’t do that, we really fail. Unlike a lot of video games and even our games, it’s not a story of events; it’s about characters, and if you don’t buy into their stories, there is no game.

Q.

You’ve done voluminous research. Where does “The Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson come in

A.

“The Devil in the White City” was a starting point for getting into the period. Our game starts about 20 years before that book begins. The bookends to that period to me are the World’s Fair and World War I.
It’s also an idealized environment, all built at one time. The World’s Fair was all fake, right But it allowed us to see a pure city. Both Rapture (the underwater city in BioShock) and Columbia were built in a very short period of time with a similar controlled aesthetic.

Q.

You have a cult of personality surrounding Comstock, a controlling, racist, religious fanatic. When you see a video of Comstock on a screen that must be stories tall, it’s so imposing like a â€"

A.

Wizard of Oz kind of thing. Comstock believes he has all the answers. He believes he’s receiving God’s prophecies, and you can tell from the game that there’s a poster of a false shepherd coming to the city with a brand on his hand. And he’s right. That’s you and there you come! The question is, is he a prophetic figure and what does that mean for you in the context of this game

Q.

I don’t want this to sound too simplistic. But how is Columbia like what we are in the United States today

A.

We’re not polemicizing about particular political scenes. I had some relatives who were upset. They thought the game was sort of an attack on the Tea Party. If you look at the Tea Party and you go back in history, you can see extreme versions like the John Birch Society and the No-Nothings, the Nativist Movement. And leftist movements are not new, either. They’re old as the hills â€" because the conflict is ancient: “I have it. You don’t. I want to keep it. And you want it.” Or “I earned it. No, you didn’t.”

That conflict is to some degree more salient than the Randian one in Rapture. That’s a moral argument rather than a natural rights argument. There is a good for society in selfishness and I use the term as she used it, as a positive thing.

Q.

You spent over four years on the game. What was cut

A.

The cutting-room floor is deep. It’s full of lots of strips of film, so to speak. We generally find our way by making mistakes.

Q.

As an artist, do you feel it’s finished

A.

Trust me, I can work on this game for a hundred years and still be tweaking. You have to let it go. You can’t hide behind the idea that it’s not done.

A Cross-Dresser on the M4

Dear Diary:

My 12-year-old son, Jordan, was talking with a friend outside our apartment after school the other day:

Friend: “I saw a cross-dresser on the M4 bus.”

Jordan: “Really You take the M4”

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

A Cross-Dresser on the M4

Dear Diary:

My 12-year-old son, Jordan, was talking with a friend outside our apartment after school the other day:

Friend: “I saw a cross-dresser on the M4 bus.”

Jordan: “Really You take the M4”

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Library of Congress Makes Room for Simon & Garfunkel, Van Cliburn and the Ramones

Whatever Simon & Garfunkel meant by “Sounds of Silence,” those sounds will now reverberate in perpetuity â€" whether silently or otherwise â€" along with works by Van Cliburn, Pink Floyd, the Ramones and many other artists whose musical creations will be added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

The library is to announce on Thursday that it has added to its audio registry 25 new recordings, which were selected for preservation because of “their cultural, artistic and historic importance to the nation’s aural legacy,” according to a news release.

Among the recordings that have been placed in the registry this year are “Sounds of Silence,” the 1966 Simon & Garfunkel album that yielded music for Dustin Hoffman to brood to in “The Graduate.” The registry will also add a recording from April 1958 of Van Cliburn, then 23 years old, performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 for the finals of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow, as he went on to win the contest and the hearts of listeners worldwide.

Other recordings selected for preservation include the self-titled debut album by the pioneering New York punk rockers the Ramones; the original Broadway cast recording of “South Pacific”; Ornette Coleman’s album “The Shape of Jazz to Come”; Chubby Checker’s pop hit “The Twist”; Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s opera “Einstein on the Beach”; and “The Dark Side of the Moon,” the best-selling Pink Floyd album (and unofficial accompaniment to “The Wizard of Oz”).

Library of Congress Makes Room for Simon & Garfunkel, Van Cliburn and the Ramones

Whatever Simon & Garfunkel meant by “Sounds of Silence,” those sounds will now reverberate in perpetuity â€" whether silently or otherwise â€" along with works by Van Cliburn, Pink Floyd, the Ramones and many other artists whose musical creations will be added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

The library is to announce on Thursday that it has added to its audio registry 25 new recordings, which were selected for preservation because of “their cultural, artistic and historic importance to the nation’s aural legacy,” according to a news release.

Among the recordings that have been placed in the registry this year are “Sounds of Silence,” the 1966 Simon & Garfunkel album that yielded music for Dustin Hoffman to brood to in “The Graduate.” The registry will also add a recording from April 1958 of Van Cliburn, then 23 years old, performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 for the finals of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow, as he went on to win the contest and the hearts of listeners worldwide.

Other recordings selected for preservation include the self-titled debut album by the pioneering New York punk rockers the Ramones; the original Broadway cast recording of “South Pacific”; Ornette Coleman’s album “The Shape of Jazz to Come”; Chubby Checker’s pop hit “The Twist”; Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s opera “Einstein on the Beach”; and “The Dark Side of the Moon,” the best-selling Pink Floyd album (and unofficial accompaniment to “The Wizard of Oz”).