A Treat for Art Students: Leggy Models With Multicolor Coats and Fine Manes

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times A horse posed for a drawing class on Wednesday at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Jordan Judd did something on Wednesday that art students do not usually do: He walked away with one of the models.

Mr. Judd, 22, is a senior at Pratt Institute, the art and design school in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The model, who is 17, was one of two that students had been sketching on the lawn behind the library.

Mr. Judd said the conversation began innocently enough. He whispered hello. “Lucille” â€" he found out her name in no time at all â€" “was kind enough to say ‘hello’ back and say, ‘Let’s go for a stroll,’” he explained.

So he took hold of Lucille’s halter and led her off.

Lucille is a horse.

She and Mr. Judd did not go far â€" just a few steps, though he joked about riding off to Downtown Brooklyn. She and her stable mate, Gracie, spent the day on the Pratt campus so students could draw them from life, which some students said was a different experience from drawing from a photograph. “You can learn from pictures,” said Mae Armenante, 18, a freshman from Oradell, N.J., “but having the real thing is so much cooler.”

Like the return of the swallows to Mission San Juan Capistrano in California, the arrival of the horses is a much-anticipated moment, at least at Pratt. Unlike the swallows, though, the horses do not arrive under their own power. Lucille, a brown quarter-horse, and Gracie, an Andalusian Welsh cross, endured a four-hour trailer ride from Tyler Hill, Pa. Their trainer, Ben Goldberg, had a sour look and a single word to describe the traffic: “Unpleasant.”

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times The drawing of horses outdoors has been a spring tradition at Pratt for several years.

The horses got their first glimpse of the Pratt campus about the time some students were probably just rolling out of bed. They ate a midmorning meal from chewy bales of grass that Mr. Goldberg had stowed in the trailer. They were watered and groomed, and they were photographed by students like Ms. Armenante, who was taking a break from a class on light, color and design.

Then the portraiture got under way, as students with sketch pads settled onto the lawn opposite the landmark main building, a Romanesque Revival fortress that was heavily damaged in a fire in January. The students sat cross-legged in the sun, their backs to the 1887 building, squinting, staring and squinting again.

“When you look at a horse, you think, ‘Oh, a brown horse,’” said Caroline La Douce, 18, a freshman from Elmira, N.Y., as she sketched Lucille. “You don’t realize there are all these different colors, the way the light hits her coat.”

Mr. Goldberg said horses present a particular challenge. “Picasso mentioned â€" no, not Picasso, I’m not an artist â€" but some famous artist said horses are hard to draw,” he said.

So are other kinds of animals not often seen on the Pratt campus, according to some of the students. “My teacher said Disney, for ‘Bambi,’ they spent three months in a room with a deer, just straight drawing,” said Maggie Iapoce, 18, a freshman from Woodstock, N.Y.

But back to horses. Sarah van Ouwerkerk, the professor who arranged for Lucille and Gracie to visit the campus, published “Horse Beautiful” in 2006, a collection of her photographs of horses. She said she had inaugurated the once-a-year horse modeling in the mid-1990s and even brought her own horses one year.

“They said, ‘I want to go home,’” she said. “They weren’t too happy.”

Thomas F. Schutte, the president of Pratt, remembered the time an elephant from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus was brought in. He said that seeing animals up close teaches art students a number of important lessons.

“One is the anatomy,” he said. “Anatomy is extremely important and extremely complex. A second is using different drawing techniques. Their sketches will be reviewed by the faculty, and critiqued.”

Ms. Van Ouwerkerk said that less massive models had proved less successful. “We tried a miniature goat,” she said, “but the goat wouldn’t sit still for anyone to draw, and ran away. A panic-stricken country goat thrown into the art world of Brooklyn. Wouldn’t you be scared?”

Watch Live: Ken Burns on Justice and ‘The Central Park Five’

Follow a live discussion, above, on Wednesday evening about the issues raised by “The Central Park Five,” the award-winning documentary about a 1989 rape in Central Park, the rush to judgment and the lives of those wrongly convicted.

The live talk, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, will feature Ken Burns, the Emmy Award-winning producer, director and writer; Sarah Burns, the co-director and author; Jim Dwyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, who covered the case and is interviewed in the film; and the exonerated, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray and Korey Wise.

For Quinn, Weiner Is the Possible Candidate Who Must Not Be Named

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, is rarely reticent on the campaign trail, doling out rhetorical jabs and gibes and regularly earning laughter from crowds.

But Ms. Quinn, a Democratic candidate for mayor, has been notably subdued this week on the topic that everyone else is talking about: former Representative Anthony D. Weiner and his potential run for City Hall.

As other candidates rushed to offer ambiguously earnest invitations for Mr. Weiner to enter the race, Ms. Quinn issued a terse statement through her campaign, saying simply that the decision of the former congressman from Queens was between him and his family.

On Wednesday, faced with a pack of reporters eager for her to expound on a potential Weiner candidacy, Ms. Quinn managed to answer several questions on the topic without once uttering Mr. Weiner’s name, or even directly acknowledging the fact that he could soon become a major force in her political life.

Instead, Ms. Quinn stuck to what sounded like a prepared, somewhat stilted response, saying she felt “incredibly confident” about her chances, “regardless of who I am running against.” Each question about Mr. Weiner was answered with remarks that were all about Ms. Quinn.

“I think people â€" women and men â€" will vote for me because they want to keep this city moving forward,” Ms. Quinn said, when asked if she believed Mr. Weiner’s personal troubles would pose a problem with female voters.

Finally, Ms. Quinn was asked if she had gleaned any sense of public opinion about Mr. Weiner during what she calls her walk-and-talk tours around the city.

The Council speaker let loose one of her signature explosive laughs.

“Typically, when I walk and talk, we talk about me,” she said, flashing a wide smile. She added: “And we talk about the New Yorker and whatever their issue is.”

Ms. Quinn was speaking with reporters in Riverside Park in Manhattan, where she was endorsed by several prominent New York City women, including Ruth W. Messinger, a Democrat who ran for mayor in 1997, and Liz Abzug, the daughter of Bella Abzug, who ran for mayor in 1977. Two other endorsers, the actress Whoopi Goldberg and the author Anna Quindlen, did not appear at the event.

Ms. Quinn’s campaign also distributed a list of “almost 1,000 women from all five boroughs” who are supporting the speaker in the mayor’s race. The list included many local activists and some boldface names, including the feminist Gloria Steinem and the Broadway producer Daryl Roth, and several of Ms. Quinn’s current and former staff members.

For Quinn, Weiner Is the Possible Candidate Who Must Not Be Named

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, is rarely reticent on the campaign trail, doling out rhetorical jabs and gibes and regularly earning laughter from crowds.

But Ms. Quinn, a Democratic candidate for mayor, has been notably subdued this week on the topic that everyone else is talking about: former Representative Anthony D. Weiner and his potential run for City Hall.

As other candidates rushed to offer ambiguously earnest invitations for Mr. Weiner to enter the race, Ms. Quinn issued a terse statement through her campaign, saying simply that the decision of the former congressman from Queens was between him and his family.

On Wednesday, faced with a pack of reporters eager for her to expound on a potential Weiner candidacy, Ms. Quinn managed to answer several questions on the topic without once uttering Mr. Weiner’s name, or even directly acknowledging the fact that he could soon become a major force in her political life.

Instead, Ms. Quinn stuck to what sounded like a prepared, somewhat stilted response, saying she felt “incredibly confident” about her chances, “regardless of who I am running against.” Each question about Mr. Weiner was answered with remarks that were all about Ms. Quinn.

“I think people â€" women and men â€" will vote for me because they want to keep this city moving forward,” Ms. Quinn said, when asked if she believed Mr. Weiner’s personal troubles would pose a problem with female voters.

Finally, Ms. Quinn was asked if she had gleaned any sense of public opinion about Mr. Weiner during what she calls her walk-and-talk tours around the city.

The Council speaker let loose one of her signature explosive laughs.

“Typically, when I walk and talk, we talk about me,” she said, flashing a wide smile. She added: “And we talk about the New Yorker and whatever their issue is.”

Ms. Quinn was speaking with reporters in Riverside Park in Manhattan, where she was endorsed by several prominent New York City women, including Ruth W. Messinger, a Democrat who ran for mayor in 1997, and Liz Abzug, the daughter of Bella Abzug, who ran for mayor in 1977. Two other endorsers, the actress Whoopi Goldberg and the author Anna Quindlen, did not appear at the event.

Ms. Quinn’s campaign also distributed a list of “almost 1,000 women from all five boroughs” who are supporting the speaker in the mayor’s race. The list included many local activists and some boldface names, including the feminist Gloria Steinem and the Broadway producer Daryl Roth, and several of Ms. Quinn’s current and former staff members.

‘Bravest Woman in Mexico’ Sees Her Story on a New York Stage

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Marisol Valles García

Until last week, Marisol Valles García, a petite, soft-spoken 23-year-old with rather severe rectangular glasses, had never visited New York, never ridden in an elevator, never dined in an Italian restaurant. And she had never seen a play.

But on Sunday, she attended “so go the ghosts of mexico, part one,” a drama by Matthew Paul Olmos at La MaMa E.T.C. and based on her life. In a program note, Mr. Olmos calls it “a poetic impression of what Marisol did for her country.”

In 2010, Ms. Valles, then just 20, accepted the position of police chief of Práxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, a small town in northern Mexico. Ms. Valles, a criminology student, had originally applied for a secretarial position in the department, but after the decapitation of the former police chief, no one volunteered for the top job, and she agreed to take it, earning the media sobriquet “the bravest woman in Mexico.”

But at a news conference on Monday morning at La MaMa, seated alongside her lawyer and her older sister, Ms. Valles appeared very shy. Speaking through a translator, she quietly described her experience watching the play:
“It was very difficult for me to relive and see enacted on the stage many of the situations that happened, many of the deaths.”

Mr. Olmos, a native of California who often visited Mexico as a child, said in an interview that he began researching a play about the Mexican drug wars in 2008, spurred by the reports of mass casualties and the seeming media indifference. “There are thousands and thousands of people dying right next to us, and we don’t talk about it,” he said. But even as he amassed material, a play refused to emerge. “I didn’t have a story,” he said.

Then a news feed led him to a series of articles on Ms. Valles, one of a number of women thrust into high-level law enforcement roles. Her nonviolent approach to the cartels â€" hiring unarmed women officers, repurposing the police to aid children and families â€" moved him and led him to create the first play in a planned trilogy. When Sam Shepard won the first Ellen Stewart Award and was invited to select a young playwright for La MaMa to produce, he chose Mr. Olmos, who offered this play, which continues there through April 28.

Mr. Olmos is not the only playwright to have taken inspiration from Ms. Valles. The Unga Klara Theater Company in Stockholm is currently  staging “Marisol,” another play based on her life.

Like “so go the ghosts of mexico,” Ms. Valles’s own story has an ambiguous ending. After four months as police chief, threats from the cartels provoked her and her family (a husband, an infant son, her parents and two sisters) to flee across the Texas border in March 2011 and request political asylum in the United States. (Some Mexican officials dispute this narrative.) Other women in similar positions have disappeared or been murdered.

Mr. Olmos’s play opens with the Marisol character attempting sex with her husband in a junked car and ends with his violent death by machete. The playwright described Sunday’s performance, with Ms. Valles in attendance, as “surreal.”

“I would often look toward her seat nervously to see any sort of reaction,” he said. “Afterward, while at the talkback with her, I felt this true fear.”

Ms. Valles admitted that she felt nervous, too. As she does not speak English, Mr. Olmos provided her with a synopsis in Spanish, but even so, she said she found much of the play, which relies on ample symbolism and abstraction, confusing. “I couldn’t understand very well what was going on,” she said. Still she observed that the play “exaggerated some things.”

“Some things were true to my story, and some just weren’t,” she said.

Ms. Valles noted several specific discrepancies between her own life and Mr. Olmos’s drama. “Those elements that deal with my conversations with my husband are not necessarily 100 percent accurate,” she said. “The fact that he is killed in the play is not true.” Speaking afterward, she said that she had found his onstage murder very frightening, though she declined to elaborate.

She also drew a distinction between herself and the character of Marisol, played by Laura Butler Rivera. “The character was more nervous than I was,” she said. “I was very firm in my convictions and my dedication to the job.”

Paramore Unseats Timberlake at No. 1

Amy Sussman/Invision, via Associated Press Paramore, from left, Taylor York, Hayley Williams and Jeremy Davis.

The rock band Paramore scored the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album chart this week with its first new release in four years, ending Justin Timberlake’s three-week run and beating out a new album by Brad Paisley.

Paramore’s self-titled album, released by the label Fueled by Ramen, sold 106,000 copies last week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, giving the group â€" down from a quintet to a trio â€" its first No. 1. Mr. Paisley’s album, “Wheelhouse” (Arista Nashville), has gotten a great deal of media attention for the single “Accidental Racist,” but that attention was not enough to take it to the top spot. With 100,000 sales, the album lands at No. 2.

Mr. Timberlake’s “20/20 Experience” (RCA) falls to No. 3 with 98,000 sales, bringing its four-week total to just more than 1.5 million. Albums by country singers Blake Shelton and Eric Church take the next two spots, each selling slightly more than 61,000 copies: Mr. Shelton’s “Based on a True Story” (Warner Brothers Nashville) holds at No. 4, and Mr. Church’s “Caught in the Act: Live” (EMI Nashville) is No. 5. (SoundScan’s publicly reported numbers are rounded.)

Another country act, the Band Perry, fell four spots to No. 6 with “Pioneer” (Republic Nashville) which sold 56,000 copies in its second week out, and the Los Angeles rapper Tyga bows at No. 7 with his new “Hotel California” (Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Republic), which sold 54,000.

Calling Super-Fans of ‘The Last Five Years’

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Adam Kantor and Betsy Wolfe in the Second Stage revival of “The Last Five Years.”

Say “cult musical” and what comes to mind is a notorious Broadway turkey like “Carrie”. But a two-character show about the failed relationship between a Jewish guy and a Gentile girl whose stories are told backwards (hers) and forwards (his), with a number called “Shiksa Goddess”?

That’s describes Jason Robert Brown’s “Last Five Years,” a modest musical with a big following. The original Off Broadway run in 2002 starred Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie René Scott, who went on to have successful stage careers. Since then the show has had hundreds of productions in the United States and around the world, and fans continue to sing its praises in online chat groups and on Facebook pages.

Mr. Brown is active on Twitter, retweeting love notes from attendees of the new revival at Second Stage Theater, where Adam Kantor and Betsy Wolfe are playing Jamie and Cathy, the doomed couple. The show received mixed reviews when it opened earlier this month, but superfans are helping it stay strong at the box office; the run has been extended through May 18.

For a coming feature The New York Times is asking fans to tell us what it is about “The Last Five Years” that remains so appealing. We’re also looking for memorabilia of past productions â€" playbills, posters, postcards, photographs â€" that have meaning. In the comments section below tell us why you think the show works, what speaks to you emotionally and what mementos you have to share â€" including from your own experiences in the show. We may use your thoughts and photos in print.

Writers and the Women They Worship

These three delightfully deranging books offer alternatives to your staid biographies. They’re a bit dangerous, a bit rude â€" free from the tyranny of good taste. The authors, first-rate obsessives, riff on the women who’ve consumed them â€" bearing out Frank Bidart’s line, “What you love is your fate,” with mischief, feeling and a rare frankness. That’s the thing about obsession. It can’t be faked.

Wayne Koestenbaum has written frequently and fondly about his favorite heroines, but there’s a Wildean clip and glimmer that distinguishes “Jackie Under My Skin” (1995), his take on Jackie Kennedy. “Writing about Jackie, I enter a terrain of embarrassment, error, excess. When I speak about Jackie, who do I become? A weirdo? A stalker? A fan?” He concedes that “the quest for self-realization via Jackie contemplation isn’t a standard male route,” but when he thinks about her, he’s at his “most collective and communal.”

Mr. Koestenbaum zeroes in on his subject with an unhinged intensity, Humbert Humbert fresh from a course on semiotics. “I am so hermetically contained by the perimeters of Jackie contemplation that I can only point to Jackie, and interpret her, from within the circle of terms that originate with her,” he writes.

Everything she touched becomes swollen with significance. Her laddered stockings. Her pink maternity shift. He practically swoons when he notices “the faint blond hair along her arm” in a photo. He mines the many meanings of her unpolished fingernails, her eyebrows that never looked “effortfully plucked,” her slimness. We feel his shiver of pleasure at Jackie’s memo to her staff requesting the curtain braid in the Blue Room be turned lest it be further sunburned.

And who else could shake out such a wealth of interpretations from Jackie’s shellacked bouffant? “From the hairdo we learn that she is composed and contained; like an armadillo or a turtle, she carries built-in protection,” he writes. “Her hairdos remind me of the bubbletop over the presidential convertible â€" the bubbletop that should have been lowered in Dallas.”

As a young man in the 1970s, the novelist David Plante had a talent for ingratiating himself with famous older women. “Difficult Women” (1983), his account of squiring around Sonia Orwell (wife of George), Jean Rhys and Germaine Greer, makes for fascinating if squeamish reading. Scenes of an elderly Rhys falling drunkenly into a toilet and getting stuck, or Ms. Greer accidentally flashing the author, are so uncharitable they make Truman Capote’s “Answered Prayers” look like hagiography. But there’s tenderness here, too. Mr. Plante is frank about what drew him to these women â€" their fame excited him, yes â€" but it was their misery that he fed on. “I was in love with the unhappiness in her, and yet reassured that, no matter what I did, what I felt it my duty to do, to lessen that unhappiness, I couldn’t,” he writes of Orwell. “I had been drawn to her darkness because she, who commanded a place in the world, was justified in her darkness, and justified mine.”

“Difficult Women” is worth reading for Ms. Greer alone. The author of “The Female Eunuch” â€" who loathes Mr. Plante’s book, incidentally â€" proves to be the most difficult woman of all because she has no need of Mr. Plante. She isn’t helpless like Rhys or depressed like Orwell. She’s a jolly and vastly competent woman with a ribald sense of humor. She speaks a handful of languages, knows everything there is to know about shock absorbers, and takes great pride in her garden and her “long, long, violently fluttering orgasms.” In one scene, she remonstrates a baby for not using finger paints properly and instructs him on technique.

Hilton Als’s “The Women” (1996) is devoted not just to women, but to the “Negress” â€" the word his Barbadian-born mother used to describe herself. Mr. Als takes the term to indicate a stereotyped narrative of black womanhood, which his mother so determinedly fulfilled: a life of self-abnegation, silence and victimhood. He and the women he writes about â€" the downtown fixture Dorothy Dean, the poet Owen Dodson (who self-identified as a woman), Malcolm X’s mother â€" alternately buck against and embrace “Negressity.” For Mr. Als it is a powerful connection to his mother and sisters: “I buried myself in their clothes, their secrets, their desires, to find myself through them.”

But “The Women” is about choice as much as it is about constraint, about performing identities and shucking them off, sometimes with tragic results. Take Dodson, Mr. Als’s lover for a time (“my first woman,” he calls Dodson). Or Dean, “unofficial historian of New York’s mid-to late-20th-century gay world.” Harvard-educated and the first female fact-checker at The New Yorker, she worshipped whiteness. “Dean believed that intellectual life was a function of being European and male,” Mr. Als writes. She rejected the politics of oppression; instead she “chose her own oppression,” and started claiming to be a white gay man trapped in a black woman’s body. Mr. Als is superb on why gay men so took to Dean, how their mutual attraction was based on language of a particular kind, “language as a tool to obscure intimacy and enforce distance.” The language of this book does the opposite. It brings us closer and closer. Every page implicates us. Every page shimmers.

Parul Sehgal is a preview editor for the Book Review.

Still Going (Very) Strong at 75

Happy Birthday, Superman!

Action Comics No. 1 â€" in which Superman made his first appearance â€" was released on April 18, 1938, which makes the Man of Steel 75 years old on Thursday. In Cleveland, where Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel (the writer) and Joe Shuster (the artist) grew up, plans to celebrate the hero’s birth include a lighting ceremony at City Hall and a mayoral proclamation of Superman Day. There will also be birthday cake at the airport near a Superman display. A new trailer is also out for “Man of Steel,” starring Henry Cavill, which opens on June 14. (In comics lore June 18 is the day the Kents found the spacecraft from Krypton that contained baby Kal-El, whom they would adopt and raise as Clark Kent.)

Superman’s life in comics has been filled with change. His abilities have gone up and down: at the start, he could leap one-eighth of a mile; at his most powerful, he could move planets. The original version of the hero eventually became known as the “Earth-2” Superman, who would age, marry Lois Lane and retire.

The more modern Superman would continue to torment Lois Lane until he was revamped by John Byrne in the 1986 mini-series “Man of Steel,” which reset Superman’s continuity. This hero would more seriously romance Lois Lane, reveal his secret identity to her and they would eventually marry. This is the version of the hero that “died” in 1992 at the hands of Doomsday. He got better, but only until 2011, when DC reset the clock on all its heroes.

This latest version seemed interested in Lois Lane, but she has other prospects. No worries, however, as Superman has hooked up with Wonder Woman, a pairing that came to light in August last year but that is having ramifications for the Justice League now. In issue No. 19, which is to be released Wednesday, Superman and Wonder Woman publicly intercede in a country plagued by terrorism and civil war. “Government sanctions may prevent others from coming in here, but not us,” Wonder Woman says. “Nothing can stop us.”

Public Money Goes to School Toilets, Brooklyn Voters Decide

When City Councilman Brad Lander asked voters in his Brooklyn district to decide how to distribute $1 million to worthy community projects, he might have guessed that some of the money might end up in the potty.

It has. For the second straight year, a school bathroom renovation project was chosen by Mr. Lander’s constituents for funding through the program known as participatory budgeting. This one, a $110,000 makeover, is at Public School 58 in Carroll Gardens, home to some very old toilets.

Last year, a restroom overhaul at P.S. 124 in Park Slope was the top vote-getter in Mr. Lander’s district.

Mr. Lander, whose district runs from Cobble Hill to Kensington, was one of eight council members who took part in participatory budgeting this year. His constituents put forth more than 600 proposals including new school and library computers, strategic tree planting and sidewalk refurbishing. Twenty-four of them were up for balloting in the voting that ended this month.

The P.T.A. at the Carroll School, as P.S. 58 is known, bolstered the case for a bathroom face-lift by handing out fliers and making a video (see above).

According to the P.T.A., the school’s four girls’ rooms and four boys’ rooms have not been updated since 1954. The paper-towel dispensers are prone to broken handles, and some are too high for youngsters to reach.

But the biggest offenders are the Sputnik-age toilet flushers â€" flat metal buttons on the wall of the stalls and urinals.

“The flushing mechanisms are antiquated and a lot of the kids can’t use it, so the toilets don’t get flushed,” said Henry Carrier, a co-president of the P.T.A. “It almost invites kids to kick them.”

When the flushers don’t work, the children walk away from waste-filled toilets in frustration. That combined with old, dusty vents make for a less-than-desirable bathroom experience, according to the video, which depicts boys walking away from the bathroom stalls with pinched noses.

“Particularly towards the end of the day, the bathroom near the cafeteria where you get the entire student population â€" it wasn’t particularly pleasant,” Mr. Carrier said. “Adults are prohibited from going in there, so you can’t monitor what’s going on. So unless you see water flooding out of there, you don’t know.”

With funding secured, the P.T.A. will work with the Department of Education to install automated flushers, high-capacity toilet paper dispensers and fresh vent covers.

“I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations,” said Mr. Carrier. Assuming the school’s 900 students use the restrooms twice a day, and the new fixtures will last 20 to 25 years, the $110,000 cost will cover 8 million bathroom visits.

That, he said, seemed like a good deal.

Other winning projects in Mr. Lander’s district included $300,000 for safety improvements on Church Avenue and $170,000 for new trees and tree pits on Third Avenue, as well as Smartboard interactive whiteboards for two schools ($180,000 and $115,000).

The councilman’s press secretary, Alex Moore, said that proposals for school improvements tended to fall into two categories: “Fixing the grossest thing in the school versus making a tangible, educational investment.”

Mr. Lander, he said, “thinks it’s great that the community is using participatory budgeting to show their priories for funding.”

A Degas Sculpture Inspires a New Musical

“Dressed Ballet Dancer (Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans).”

The songwriting team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, Tony Award winners for “Ragtime,” will collaborate with the Tony-winning director Susan Stroman (“The Producers”) on the world premiere of the new musical “Little Dancer” in October 2014 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, the center announced Wednesday.

The show, a blend of fact and fiction set in the backstage world of the Paris Opera Ballet, is inspired by the sculpture of a young French ballerina that Edgar Degas made in the late 19th century. According to the Kennedy Center press notes, the musical is the story of the ballerina Marie, on the cusp of womanhood, as she is “torn by her family’s poverty, her debt to the artist, and the lure of wealthy men.”

The music is by Mr. Flaherty and the lyrics and book are by Ms. Ahrens; their most recent collaboration was on the new musical adaption of “Rocky,” which has been running in Hamburg, Germany, since the fall. Ms. Stroman is now directing the Chicago tryout of the Broadway-bound musical “Big Fish.” The Kennedy Center worked with Ms. Ahrens and Mr. Flaherty in 2009 on its revival of “Ragtime,” which subsequently transferred to Broadway for a short-lived run of three months.

The songwriters had been working on the musical before the Kennedy Center became involved; its president, Michael M. Kaiser, decided to produce it after a closed-door workshop of “Little Dancer” last summer.

The original sculpture is part of the Degas collection on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

A Degas Sculpture Inspires a New Musical

“Dressed Ballet Dancer (Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans).”

The songwriting team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, Tony Award winners for “Ragtime,” will collaborate with the Tony-winning director Susan Stroman (“The Producers”) on the world premiere of the new musical “Little Dancer” in October 2014 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, the center announced Wednesday.

The show, a blend of fact and fiction set in the backstage world of the Paris Opera Ballet, is inspired by the sculpture of a young French ballerina that Edgar Degas made in the late 19th century. According to the Kennedy Center press notes, the musical is the story of the ballerina Marie, on the cusp of womanhood, as she is “torn by her family’s poverty, her debt to the artist, and the lure of wealthy men.”

The music is by Mr. Flaherty and the lyrics and book are by Ms. Ahrens; their most recent collaboration was on the new musical adaption of “Rocky,” which has been running in Hamburg, Germany, since the fall. Ms. Stroman is now directing the Chicago tryout of the Broadway-bound musical “Big Fish.” The Kennedy Center worked with Ms. Ahrens and Mr. Flaherty in 2009 on its revival of “Ragtime,” which subsequently transferred to Broadway for a short-lived run of three months.

The songwriters had been working on the musical before the Kennedy Center became involved; its president, Michael M. Kaiser, decided to produce it after a closed-door workshop of “Little Dancer” last summer.

The original sculpture is part of the Degas collection on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

A Degas Sculpture Inspires a New Musical

“Dressed Ballet Dancer (Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans).”

The songwriting team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, Tony Award winners for “Ragtime,” will collaborate with the Tony-winning director Susan Stroman (“The Producers”) on the world premiere of the new musical “Little Dancer” in October 2014 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, the center announced Wednesday.

The show, a blend of fact and fiction set in the backstage world of the Paris Opera Ballet, is inspired by the sculpture of a young French ballerina that Edgar Degas made in the late 19th century. According to the Kennedy Center press notes, the musical is the story of the ballerina Marie, on the cusp of womanhood, as she is “torn by her family’s poverty, her debt to the artist, and the lure of wealthy men.”

The music is by Mr. Flaherty and the lyrics and book are by Ms. Ahrens; their most recent collaboration was on the new musical adaption of “Rocky,” which has been running in Hamburg, Germany, since the fall. Ms. Stroman is now directing the Chicago tryout of the Broadway-bound musical “Big Fish.” The Kennedy Center worked with Ms. Ahrens and Mr. Flaherty in 2009 on its revival of “Ragtime,” which subsequently transferred to Broadway for a short-lived run of three months.

The songwriters had been working on the musical before the Kennedy Center became involved; its president, Michael M. Kaiser, decided to produce it after a closed-door workshop of “Little Dancer” last summer.

The original sculpture is part of the Degas collection on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

DirecTV Orders New Series From Neil LaBute

Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times Neil LaBute

Grab your remote control and get ready to find new things about yourself to despise: Neil LaBute is coming to television.

DirecTV, the satellite television service, said on Wednesday that it had ordered a new series created by Mr. LaBute, the author and filmmaker of provocative works like “In the Company of Men,” “The Shape of Things” and “reasons to be pretty.” The new series, called “Full Circle,” will examine “the human condition and relationships through a series of conversations between 11 people whose lives, unbeknownst to them, are intertwined,” DirecTV said in a news release, likening “Full Circle” to the film “My Dinner With Andre” and the Arthur Schnitzler play “La Ronde” and adding that it was  “a new foray into alternative television production, harkening back to the prolific days of independent filmmaking.”

Mr. LaBute, who is a writer and co-executive producer on “Full Circle,” said in a statement that he was “always interested in pushing the boundaries of entertainment,” adding that the series would feature “an unconventional structure and a revolving cast of characters.”

No casting for “Full Circle” was immediately announced, but DirecTV said that production would begin in this summer in Los Angeles, and that the series would be shown on its Audience network in the fall. (So plan your therapy sessions accordingly.)

Nine Massive Humans Move Into Rockefeller Center

Michael Nagle for The New York Times Workers installed one of nine statues by the artist Ugo Rondinone at Rockefeller Center on Monday morning. Each statue weighs 17½ tons.

It is double-take time for the blasé New York types who do not pay much attention to what is in front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza the rest of the year â€" that is, the 10 or so months between when one tree comes down and the next one goes up.

The streetscape has changed drastically in the last few days with the arrival of massive stone statues by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. They are part of an art installation called “Human Nature” that had to be maneuvered into place by cranes in the middle of the night. Each statue weighs 17½ tons, which is 7½ tons more than the tree.

But there is only one tree. There are nine statues.

“It’s the ultimate combination of art and engineering,” said Keith M. Douglas, the managing director for Rockefeller Center at Tishman Speyer, the real estate firm that controls Rockefeller Center.

He said the plaza could hold 300 pounds per square foot, and the installation brought the load to only about 250 pounds per square foot, even with several layers of concrete that are being poured to anchor the statues, with their towering legs, massive torsos and block-shaped heads.

Over the years, Rockefeller Center has been the setting for other large art displays: Jeff Koons’s giant terrier, fashioned from 70,000 flowering plants; Louise Bourgeois’s nine-ton bronze spider; and Takashi Murakami’s 30-foot Buddha-like figure with multiple arms. “Human Nature” is the first since 2008, when the recession was closing in. It is also the first to be spread out in front of the G.E. Building.

“Seventy-six hundred square feet of sculpture,” said Nicholas Baume, director of the Public Art Fund, which assisted with the project.

Mr. Douglas said he remembered the moment when Mr. Rondinone first described what he had in mind: A large-scale transformation of the plaza.

“My first thought was how big,” Mr. Douglas said. “He was saying ‘huge colossal sculptures,’ and I’m thinking, ‘In comparison to what?’ and multiplying times nine.” He said that when Mr. Rondinone delivered renderings, the scale and shape were “exactly right.”

Mr. Rondinone made the sculptures of bluestone from a quarry in Pennsylvania and left the stone surfaces rough and then cut them into slabs and blocks, forming primitive-looking figures that proved unexpectedly sturdy: “Ugo had one standing at the quarry during Sandy,” Mr. Douglas said, referring to Hurricane Sandy last fall. “Didn’t move a muscle.”

Mr. Baume said that Mr. Rondinone has a country house “five minutes away” from the quarry, “but until this, had never worked with bluestone.” He said Mr. Rondinone was “gifted at coming up with site-specific designs,” and Mr. Rondinone said he went to the plaza every day for a couple of weeks last November. “Before the tree,” he said.

He said the huge, coarse figures stand in contrast to the 70-floor building. “This is the most highly developed part of America, Midtown,” Mr. Rondinone said. “To bring in something so basic is very powerful.”

He said he made 50 miniature statues and named them before deciding which to choose for the full-scale treatment. He said the statue closest to 50th Street was “Joy,” and he pointed to “Excitement,” “Glad” and “Uplifting.”

“I don’t remember them all,” he said. “But it’s not an intellectual work. It’s a work you have to feel.”

A Lasting Memory From the First Days in New York

Dear Diary:
I first moved to the city in the summer of 1983. I had never lived in a city before; I had never worked in an office; I knew virtually no one, and I was overwhelmed by it all.

I recently moved away from New York, but during my last weeks, I found myself at La Guardia Place and West Third Street in Greenwich Village, and remembered an important experience from my first week in New York.

After my first day of work, I stopped at the grocery store located on that corner, a few blocks from my apartment on Mercer Street. I was carrying a briefcase, and I made that rookie mistake of buying more than I could reasonably carry home. The checkout resulted in two overstuffed bags in one hand, my briefcase and another overstuffed bag in the other.

A hundred feet out the door, and one bag broke, spilling groceries at my feet. People walked by, mostly ignoring me, and I was mortified. I couldn’t even get grocery shopping right! As I said, overwhelmed.

And then a young woman, carrying two half-filled grocery bags, paused in front of me. Without a word, she put her own grocery bags down, quickly consolidated her groceries into one bag and handed me one now-empty bag, I said thanks; she nodded and went on her way.

That simple act of kindness has always stayed with me. I felt very alone and invisible that first week. But at that moment, I began to understand that although New York generally expects you to stand on your own, it isn’t a blind expectation. New York and New Yorkers will often provide what you need, when you need it, usually with a minimum of fuss.

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 Lasting Memory From the First Days in New York

Dear Diary:
I first moved to the city in the summer of 1983. I had never lived in a city before; I had never worked in an office; I knew virtually no one, and I was overwhelmed by it all.

I recently moved away from New York, but during my last weeks, I found myself at La Guardia Place and West Third Street in Greenwich Village, and remembered an important experience from my first week in New York.

After my first day of work, I stopped at the grocery store located on that corner, a few blocks from my apartment on Mercer Street. I was carrying a briefcase, and I made that rookie mistake of buying more than I could reasonably carry home. The checkout resulted in two overstuffed bags in one hand, my briefcase and another overstuffed bag in the other.

A hundred feet out the door, and one bag broke, spilling groceries at my feet. People walked by, mostly ignoring me, and I was mortified. I couldn’t even get grocery shopping right! As I said, overwhelmed.

And then a young woman, carrying two half-filled grocery bags, paused in front of me. Without a word, she put her own grocery bags down, quickly consolidated her groceries into one bag and handed me one now-empty bag, I said thanks; she nodded and went on her way.

That simple act of kindness has always stayed with me. I felt very alone and invisible that first week. But at that moment, I began to understand that although New York generally expects you to stand on your own, it isn’t a blind expectation. New York and New Yorkers will often provide what you need, when you need it, usually with a minimum of fuss.

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 Lasting Memory From the First Days in New York

Dear Diary:
I first moved to the city in the summer of 1983. I had never lived in a city before; I had never worked in an office; I knew virtually no one, and I was overwhelmed by it all.

I recently moved away from New York, but during my last weeks, I found myself at La Guardia Place and West Third Street in Greenwich Village, and remembered an important experience from my first week in New York.

After my first day of work, I stopped at the grocery store located on that corner, a few blocks from my apartment on Mercer Street. I was carrying a briefcase, and I made that rookie mistake of buying more than I could reasonably carry home. The checkout resulted in two overstuffed bags in one hand, my briefcase and another overstuffed bag in the other.

A hundred feet out the door, and one bag broke, spilling groceries at my feet. People walked by, mostly ignoring me, and I was mortified. I couldn’t even get grocery shopping right! As I said, overwhelmed.

And then a young woman, carrying two half-filled grocery bags, paused in front of me. Without a word, she put her own grocery bags down, quickly consolidated her groceries into one bag and handed me one now-empty bag, I said thanks; she nodded and went on her way.

That simple act of kindness has always stayed with me. I felt very alone and invisible that first week. But at that moment, I began to understand that although New York generally expects you to stand on your own, it isn’t a blind expectation. New York and New Yorkers will often provide what you need, when you need it, usually with a minimum of fuss.

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.

Corruption Is Seen as a Major Problem in New York State, Poll Shows

ALBANY - New York State voters think government corruption is a major problem in the state capital, and many say that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has done a lackluster job of fighting it, according to a poll released Wednesday.

The poll, by Quinnipiac University, found that voters had an overwhelmingly negative view of the State Legislature, and nearly 9 in 10 voters said government corruption was a serious problem in New York State. The survey was conducted from April 9 to 14, shortly after two state legislators were charged by federal prosecutors in unrelated corruption schemes.

Many voters suggested that Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who ran for governor on a platform of cleaning up Albany, had fallen short of his goal. Fifty-seven percent approved of his overall job performance, an increase of two percentage points from last month. But voters were more critical when it came to Mr. Cuomo’s efforts at reducing corruption: 52 percent rated his work as not so good or poor, compared with 37 percent who described it as excellent or good.

Voters were even more negative about legislative leaders; three quarters rated their efforts at cleaning up corruption as not so good or poor.

Some also appeared to have soured on an unusual arrangement in which control of the State Senate is being shared between Republicans and an independent faction of Democrats.

Fifty percent of voters described the power-sharing deal as a power grab, compared with 35 percent who thought it was an effective form of government, a reversal from when Quinnipiac asked voters about the arrangement just after it was announced in December. The group of Democrats had included one of the charged legislators, Senator Malcolm A. Smith of Queens, who was accused of trying to bribe his way onto the ballot for mayor of New York City; on Monday, the majority coalition removed Mr. Smith from its ranks.

Voters were skeptical about the installation of a system of public financing for state elections, which is the centerpiece of a package of reform measures that government watchdog groups and many Democratic officeholders hope to pass during this year’s legislative session. Only 37 percent of voters said they supported public financing for state elections, and just 35 percent said they believed such a system would reduce government corruption.

The poll, conducted by telephone of 1,404 registered voters, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.